Gary Stevenson
speaker
5,834 appearances
16 recordings
3 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 26 Jul
Gary Stevenson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 16 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 6.
Appearances
We've had this long running problem in explaining inequality with the fact that like a billion dollars is like so much money that it's like impossible to conceptualize.
And people don't understand the difference between a million, which is like quite a lot of money, but like amount that
Nowadays a lot of ordinary people will accumulate especially in countries like the UK the US and a billion which is like Oh my god, like it's insane so much money I think the best the best example we've had to explain the difference between a million and a billion up till now is a million minutes
is just under two years and a billion minutes is just under 2000 years.
So a million minutes ago was a couple of years ago.
A billion minutes ago was like Roman Empire.
The problem you have is if you try to extend that to a trillion, then you say like a trillion minutes is just under two million years.
And then once again, you're back with the problem of this number is so big that the human brain can't comprehend it.
So we probably have to go down to seconds.
A million seconds is a week and a half.
A billion seconds is 32 years, and a trillion seconds is 32,000 years.
Basically, a trillion is just an unbelievably stupidly enormous number, and it's really hard to just understand how big it is.
I think one of the best ways to understand the wealth of the super rich is to look at the passive income that they receive from the ownership of that wealth.
So we often use the statistic that if you look at somebody who's worth a billion dollars or a billion pounds at a rate of 5%, they will make something like a million dollars or a million pounds a week.
If we extend that to a trillion, then we see if somebody's worth a trillion dollars, then they will make every year $50 billion.
They'll make a billion dollars a week.
I think probably the one that's maybe easiest to understand is that a trillionaire making passive income at a rate of 5% will make $137 million every day, $5.7 million every hour.
It's about $100,000 a minute, $1,600 a second.
So that is the passive income that Elon Musk will be making every single day, every single second.
He'll be making about $1,600 every single minute.
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