Nigerian musician Seun Kuti has been speaking about how people often misunderstand the true scale of extremely large sums of money, especially when figures like billions of dollars are mentioned.
In a recent interview, he argued that such amounts are usually thrown around casually, without people really grasping what they actually mean in real-life terms.
“You cannot finish one billion dollars,” he said.
He added that the way people discuss money often ignores how the human mind naturally processes numbers.
“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, explaining that the human brain was not designed to easily comprehend such massive figures.
“biologically speaking, the human brain did not evolve to understand such huge numbers.”
To illustrate his point, he referenced a common comparison used to show the gap 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 an example involving spending, noting that even luxury purchases barely make a dent in a billion-dollar fortune.
“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.”
