Nigerian musician Seun Kuti has been speaking about how people often misunderstand the size of very large sums of money, especially when it comes to billions of dollars.
In a recent interview, he said that figures like that are usually mentioned casually, without a real sense of what they actually represent.
“You cannot finish one billion dollars,” he said.
He added that the way people talk about money sometimes ignores how the human mind naturally works.
“I say, what I’m telling you people, because they call all this price, 13 billion, 12 billion, 10 billion. You people don’t know your brain, and it’s not your fault.”
According to him, the limitation is not personal but biological, as the brain was not built to easily process numbers of that size.
“biologically speaking, the human brain did not evolve to understand such huge numbers.”
To explain the idea more clearly, he referred to a common illustration used to show the difference in scale between large numbers and time.
“So there’s a very popular experiment to help people understand how big a billion is. So I’ll show you to understand the concept. So one million seconds is 11 days. How long do you think one billion seconds?… 37 years.
That’s like 11,000 days, right? That’s the difference between million, which is 11 days, and 11,000 days, which is 37 years.”
He also gave a spending example, pointing out how even luxury purchases barely reduce a billion-dollar amount.
“You have a billion dollars, for example.What do want to buy with it. Private jets that’s 30 million you have 970 left you buy buy 4 private jets you still have 880 left.”
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