Something You Should Know - Why We Are Wired to Do Everything Wrong With Money & The Meaning of Time

Episode Date: January 18, 2021

Have you ever asked yourself, “Is it ever too late?” If you don’t set your social and professional course early in life, will you miss out? Parents often worry that if their kids don’t get on the right track early on, they will have trouble later on. This episode begins with some interesting and optimistic research on why this worry may be unfounded. Source: Susan Krauss Whitbourne author of “The Search for Fulfillment” (https://amzn.to/3bXWqTF) We all mistakes with our money - we can’t help it, we are wired that way. That’s according to research conducted by my first guest today - Brad Klontz. Brad is a financial psychologist, a certified financial planner, an associate professor at Creighton University's Heider College of Business in Nebraska and author of the book Money Mammoth: Unlocking the Secrets of Financial Psychology to Break from the Herd and Avoid Extinction (https://amzn.to/2LHWU5h). Listen as he discusses why people have such trouble with money, why we don’t save enough and how to get on a path that will make you feel good about your financial life. You’ll find his advice is pretty easy and painless. Where does all the lost and unclaimed luggage from airplanes go? Not only is this an interesting story, it turns out you can shop online and buy things left on airplanes and some of it is really amazing. https://www.unclaimedbaggage.com/ I find it so interesting that no one can really define time, yet we know intuitively what time is and we can measure it very precisely. It wasn’t always that way though. For most of history, it wasn’t really important to know EXACTLY what time it was - until the railroads came along. Listen to my discussion on the fascinating history of time with Joseph Mazur professor emeritus of mathematics at Marlboro College and author of the book, The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time (https://amzn.to/3oJ8qvI). PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! You deserve to know what’s in your multivitamin. That’s why Ritual is offering my listeners 10% off during your first 3 months. Visit https://ritual.com/something to start your Ritual today. Right now, when you purchase a 3-month Babbel subscription, you’ll get an additional 3 months for FREE. That’s 6 months, for the price of 3! Just go to https://babbel.com and use promo code: SOMETHING https://www.geico.com Bundle your policies and save! It's Geico easy! M1 Is the finance Super App, where you can invest, borrow, save and spend all in one place! Visit https://m1finance.com/something to sign up and get $30 to invest! The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of our favorite podcasts! Listen at https://jordanharbinger.com/subscribe , Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you enjoy podcasts. Tru Niagen helps us age better by supporting the energy-generating engines that exist in our bodies, helping us restore youthful energy. Go to https://truniagen.com and enter promo code: SOMETHING at checkout to save twenty dollars on your first three-month supply!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Today on Something You Should Know, is it ever too late to take a different path in life or career? Then, most of us make a lot of mistakes with our money, and it seems we can't help it. When they do studies on lottery winners, what is so interesting about this is your neighbors, if you win the lottery, are at higher risk of going bankrupt because you won the lottery.

It is actually human nature to do everything wrong when it comes to money. Also, the interesting story of what happens to lost luggage and how you can buy what's in it. And keeping track of time. We're very good at it now, but we didn't used to be. If you had noon in Washington, D.C., you would think New York should be noon too, but no, it wasn't.

It was 12, 12. You could work with that, except for the railroads, because nobody really knows where the train is going to be at any particular time. All this today on Something You Should Know. From the kitchen to the laundry room, your home deserves the best.

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Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi. Welcome to Something You Should Know. You know, a question I think people, all of us, often ask in life is, is it ever too late? You know, people who haven't, they just haven't found the right career yet or the right person yet to spend their life with, and they worry, is it ever too late? Or parents who are concerned that if their kids don't get a good start early in life on a career path, will it ever be too late? Will they have trouble later on as adults? Well, here's some really good news if you've ever asked any of those questions. Back in 1966, 350 students signed up for a psychological survey on personal development and happiness,

and they've been followed by researchers ever since. And the results of the study are fascinating and encouraging. It turns out that people can and do make big changes in life at any age. We have a belief in our culture that you have to set your course in life when you're young, but many of the participants in this survey made drastic life changes for the better long after they became adults. In fact, many people who were considered slackers in their youth really caught up to their peers later in life, both socially and professionally. The point is, it's never too late to take a different path to a more fulfilling life.

Unless you think it's too late. And if you think it's too late, then it's too late. And that is something you should know. It is hard to imagine there are too many people who look at their financial life and go, yeah, yeah, I've done everything right with my money. If I had to do it over again, there's nothing I would change. Instead, I think most of us wish we had done at least some of our financial dealings differently. And I know some people who really just claim to be no good with money. Well, why is that?

Is it a lack of financial education? Are we wired wrong? Why is taking care of your personal finances so difficult and, for many people, full of regret? How do we fix this? Here with some answers to all of this is Brad Klontz. Brad is a financial psychologist, a certified financial planner, associate professor of practice in financial psychology and behavioral finance

at Creighton University's Heider College of Business in Nebraska, and he is co-author of the book Money Mammoth, Unlocking the Secrets of Financial Psychology to Break from the Herd and Avoid Extinction. Hey, Brad, welcome. I'm very excited to be here. Thanks. So what is your sense? Why is money so problematic? And just how problematic is it? Yeah, so I mean, money happens to be the number one source of stress in the lives of eight out of 10 Americans. And what I know from my experience is people seem to kind of know what

they should do. Like the biggest problems in the United States are people not saving for the future and spending more than they make. And I've yet to find somebody who is, when I tell them is, oh, I had no idea. I had no idea I was supposed to do that. So for me, it's all about your psychology. It's all about your beliefs around money, your upbringing around money, and how these beliefs impact your life and your financial outcomes. And that's really been the bulk of my research and my work. And so when people say, I know I'm supposed to do that. I know I'm supposed to save for the future. I know I'm supposed to do those things that you just talked about. And they don't. They don't because why? Multiple factors. I think it's a mental block. It's a mental block. And a lot of it has to do

with the beliefs you have around money. And so we've done a lot of studies on this now. The beliefs you have about money, in our research, we call them money scripts. And these are typically inherited by our parents, our grandparents, and our studies have shown these beliefs predict our financial outcomes. And so most of us are unaware of these beliefs, you know, money happens to be a taboo topic. So we don't really get to dive into it and really think about, okay, where did I get my psychology around money? But all the studies show that your psychology around money predicts things like your income, your net worth, and a whole host of financial behavior. So it's really, really important. When you get to adulthood and you haven't done those things, it probably becomes even more of a block because now it's a bigger problem. It would have been nice to fix this when

you're 18 and kind of get on the right path. But now that you're 30 or 40 or 50 and you haven't, well, there's no, you can't go back. Right. And I think it's a modern problem too. Like even two or three decades ago, you didn't really have to worry about personal finance, right? So typically back then, companies had pension plans, which essentially means, Mike, you don't need to worry about saving for the future because we're going to take care of it for you. We are going to set aside a pension for you. We're going to fund you the rest of your life. Whatever the pension doesn't cover, Social Security is going to cover. Well, these things are in threat. Like you really can't

count on Social security. There's a lot of threats to social security. Companies have gotten rid of pensions, most companies. And so all of a sudden in the last couple of decades, this financial security that you need later on in life has been outsourced from a company and from potentially the government, and it's been laid square on your shoulders. And most of us in school, we don't get training in financial literacy. We don't get the basics on investing. So essentially, your retirement is going to be dependent on your understanding of investments. And have you taken a class in investments? I mean, most Americans haven't. And so what's someone to do? What do you do if

you're in the middle of your life or later and you haven't done this? And now what? Thankfully, it's actually pretty simple. What you actually need to do mechanically is pretty simple. The big hump is psychological. It's understanding that this is something I need to tackle, looking at your blocks around it. So for example, in our studies, and we've done this with tens of thousands of people at this point, we have found distinct belief patterns around money that sabotage you. So for example, this is a classic, the keeping up with the Joneses thing. This thing actually exists. And a lot of Americans suffer from this. We call it money status beliefs. These are things like, I'm not going to buy something unless it's new. If you asked me how much money I made, I would say I make more than I do. I'm connecting my net worth with my self-worth. And that money script pattern is associated with overspending. Probably not a big surprise there.

But just an example of something that can be extremely detrimental. When they do studies on lottery winners, what is so interesting about this is the neighbors, your neighbors, if you win the lottery, are at higher risk of going bankrupt because you won the lottery. And that's because you've won the lottery and now your neighbors feel the pressure to keep up with you. Exactly. And it really is subconscious. And so that's a lot of my recent writing has been really looking at. Essentially, we have a tribal cave person brain. That's the brain we have. It's been designed to survive in that type of environment historically.

It has not been designed to have this higher order thinking around planning for the future, around how I should save, around being aware of the fact that my neighbor buying a new car is going to have this psychological impact on me. I'm going to start to feel bad about myself, quite frankly, when I look at my car, because I have this psychological need. And it really comes down to our survival, where I'm very aware of my status, and I don't want to drop too low in status. And historically, think about it, you're in a tribe of 150 people. Everybody knows everybody. Your status within that tribe was a matter of life or death. And so essentially, it's almost like an iceberg where we're above, we have part of us above the water that should be thinking logically, but there's this huge, enormous part of our psychology that is really making a lot of our

financial decisions for us. And inevitably, a lot of those decisions are not good for us. But it also seems to be human nature. Or maybe it isn't human nature. Maybe it's what you're talking about, that we want to progress. If we have a two-bedroom house, we don't want our next house to be a one-bedroom house. We want it to be a four-bedroom house, that we want things to get better, not go back. You are absolutely correct. It is human nature. It is actually human nature to do everything wrong when it comes to money. Money is a new thing in terms of our evolution.

And so you're absolutely right. So we call it lifestyle creep. It's this natural tendency you're going to have. If you start to make more money, you're automatically going to want to start to spend more money. That's the logical thing to do. And you have to overcome that logical impulse if you actually want to increase your net worth. So you have to actually do the opposite of your impulses and what you're wired to do if, for example, you wanted to climb the socioeconomic ladder.

So if you do that, if you go from a two-bedroom house to a one-bedroom house, if you reverse that or at least stop that desire to do better, to have a bigger, better, newer thing, what's the benefit of that? Other than having a higher net worth at the bottom of the financial statement, what does that do for you? Well, the downsizing is really, really tough. And you're bringing that up. And it's like, everyone listening is like, oh, gosh, if I had to go to a smaller place, how terrible would that be? And it's really, really tough. But the benefit of... Essentially, the benefit is financial freedom. Essentially,

if you can save enough money, invest enough money so that that money actually pays your salary. So that is your pension. Essentially, that is your social security that opens up the door to lots of freedom. And so some of that might be downsizing. Some of it might be just being aware of this natural tendency for lifestyle creep, because this is how we're naturally wired to do it. And if by chance you wanted to be able to stop working at some point and you wanted to maintain your current standard of living, you're going to have to have this savings mindset, investing mindset. You're going to have to start taking action in that direction if that's one of your goals. Well, you just said that, you know, if you want freedom, you need to start doing that. But that's freedom later. That's not freedom now. That sounds like prison now where you can't spend because you, oh, you got to be so worried about the future. Well that is the actual way that most of us feel.

And it makes sense, right? And so it's not that dramatic though. Essentially, for example, if you saved $5 a day for 42 years and got a 10% return, you'd have a million dollars at the end of that time period. So a millionaire by saving $5 a day invested at that return. So I mean, how much of your lifestyle is going to take a hit with that? Now, obviously the 42 years is the issue. So if you, the younger you are to really capture this concept of how I become financially free, the much better your result, of course, but it has to override that natural. We are wired to consume. We are wired to not delay gratification. This is how we survived as a species. Like a couple thousand years ago, 10,000 years ago, 20,000 years ago, you couldn't save. The rest of the

tribe would look at you as selfish and you might be expelled or you might be killed. So we are actually wired to not save and we are wired to actually consume as much as we can right now. Well, it almost sounds like we're doomed because as you say, it's just not, it's just not in our wiring to want to save for the future. I mean, as I listened to you talk, I'm thinking, well, God, if I'm always worried about the future, how do I enjoy my life now? Essentially, we have to figure out that this is something we need to do. It's a shift in mindset. It's a shift in psychology. And it's challenging that notion that I can't enjoy my life right now. Of course, you can enjoy your life right now. We're talking about just saving

a percentage of every dollar you make, just a percentage, whatever that percentage is for you. It's having that mindset that I'm going to need to take care of myself in the future. I can't count on my company because literally you can't count on your companies anymore. And maybe the government's not going to be there to support me. And so that's the situation we are at in the United States. And so if you want to have that financial freedom, if you want to be able to retire, it's starting with that mindset. And obviously, the earlier, the better. We are talking about money, specifically your money and what you do with it. And we're talking with

Brad Klontz. He is a financial psychologist, certified financial planner, and author of the book Money Mammoth. This is an ad for better help. Welcome to the world. Please read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat.

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Wealthsimple. Built for possibilities. Visit wealthsimple.com slash possibilities. So Brad, what often happens, and speaking from experience too, is even with the best of intentions, if you start to save and you get a nice little chunk of money stashed away somewhere, life happens. You need a new car, the brakes go out. Oh, there's Christmas, we got to buy presents. That when you have money, and there it is, you're going to spend it. I think that's what happens for most of us. You're describing what is afflicting most of us,

because life does happen. And so essentially, it's having this mindset that that money that is for my financial freedom, for my whatever that goal is for you, that it's almost sacred in the sense that you're not going to touch it and you're going to organize your life differently around it. What's so fascinating is that during times of plenty, when everything's going great in the stock market, everything's going great in the stock market, everything's going great in the economy, this is really fascinating. We tend to save less than we do in the middle of a pandemic or in the middle of some major financial catastrophe. It's really, really fascinating. So you would think it would go the opposite, right? You would

think that when times are great and we're making money and the economy is booming, that Americans would save more. It's actually the opposite. But so here's maybe an example of what I mean by when life happens. And so let's say, you know, I listen to you and other financial people say, you know, don't go into credit card debt. It is just horrible. Okay, so you've got this little stash of money. Your brakes go out.

You need $500, $600 to fix your brakes. You could put it on a credit card, but you told me not to do that. And now you're saying, and don't touch your money either. Well, so what do I do? Yeah, and so obviously it's real easy to armchair quarterback that situation. But what you want to do is sort of back up and have this mindset that, you know, that isn't a big surprise. By the way, your breaks are going to go out at some point. And so that's why you will see a lot of financial experts suggest that you have an emergency fund. You

have a three to six month emergency fund. It's set aside as a savings account because what we do know is that you are going to have financial emergencies. And so that's the best practice is to have that money set aside there. So you don't have to do something like put it on a credit card and that revolving credit on credit cards can be extremely destructive to somebody's financial health. And you also don't wanna go steal

from your child's educational fund or that vacation fund that you've set aside because those things are really, really important to you. So it's having that emergency fund, which as I said, is not very comforting advice if you don't have one and you're in the midst of a crisis. But it's something that I wish we were teaching kids at a very young age so that we could enter into adulthood with this mindset. Because a lot of people would think, okay, so first you said that you're just taking a little piece of every dollar to save for the future, but now you also need six months savings, uh, earnings in a savings account. You're taking

all my money. That's right. I am. Um, and it's, it's really adjusting your lifestyle at an early age to that because it's actually really easy when you start with, when you start entering into the workforce with that mentality. Because, um, I remember when I got out of school, I finally got my doctorate. I'm 29 years old. All of a sudden, I'm making like 10 times more money in that first year than I ever made as a student, because as a student, I made almost nothing. And so that is the opportunity at that point to just start to automate these savings things, because your life is going to improve. You're going to be feeling great. You're going to be feeling flush. And so you're not even going to notice that money that is going to improve. You're going to be feeling great. You're going to be feeling flush. And so you're not even going to notice that money that's going to the side.

What most Americans do, though, is they get that first job and they're like, finally, OK, great. So I'm going to go lease that car. I'm going to get the most expensive apartment I can get. I'm going to upgrade my wardrobe. And then they're at a certain lifestyle. And that's when it's really, really hard to cut back. I mean, that's when it becomes extremely painful when you have to start downsizing because you realize

you're living above your means. Anyone who's done it knows to some extent the magic of automatic savings that, well, and the government figured it out when they started taking money out of paychecks. If you never see it, you don't miss it. And there is something very magical about that. It's absolutely true. Automating is one of the most powerful financial techniques you can ever employ. And if you've ever been a member of a gym where they automatically take money out of your account each month for your payment, you realize how sticky that is and how the money's gone. You don't have to think about paying it. And to override that, you literally have to sit down and say, I guess working out isn't important to me anymore. So I'm going to go cancel that

membership. And there's all sorts of cognitive blocks to doing that. Same thing is true. It's sort of harnessing that mental accounting, that automation for your benefit. If you could automate savings moving into that emergency fund or that retirement account so it's automatic into your child's educational fund, chances are you're going to keep it there because you'd really have to mentally say, okay, fine, I don't want to retire or I don't want to take that vacation in order to interrupt that process. What other tools are available to people to do this that they may not have thought of or have never tried? Well, we did a study and this was really amazing. So we did a randomized double

blind control study, which essentially just means it was a good study. And we put half the people in a room where they got financial education. They're like, hey, this is how much you should be saving. This is the different ways to save. The other half we put in a room where we didn't do any of that. And this answers your earlier question, Mike, around why would I want to like suffer now for this amorphous future? What we did is for that group, we had them create vision boards, get really excited about their goals. Like, no, specifically, what are these savings goals? Draw a picture of it. How would it feel? How does this connect with your values? And then we encouraged them to

automate. So they got super, super excited about those goals. What we saw in that group, and we did this for about an hour with them, a 73% increase in savings. So they went on average from saving about 10% to 17%. And they got really, really excited about it. So you need to actually have very, very thrilling, exciting, specific goals to override that natural tendency we all have to consume as much as we can right now and to not delay gratification. It's hard to do that. And so I would just encourage, if you haven't done it already, all of your listeners to actually get really specific. So whether that's creating a piece of art, whether it's taking pictures of what this goal is, is it a house? Is it a car? Is it a vacation?

Is it your retirement? And get really, really specific of why that matters. Carry those pictures around, use them as a screensaver, put pictures up in your office, whatever, anything you can do to override that animal brain that wants to consume, that wants to eat things right now, that wants to spend it right now. And the only way to do that, brain that wants to consume, that wants to eat things right now, that wants to spend it right now. And the only way to do that, I think that's incredibly powerful. It's by having a super exciting vision of why you would wanna do this.

Another incredible hack is to name accounts after those things that you value the most. So for example, my son's name is Ethan. If I had a college savings account for Ethan and that's what I named it, there's a very small chance that I'm going to go rob from that fund to buy a bass boat or to upgrade my life in some way.

Because I would literally have to sit there and go, okay, so this purchase right now is more important to me than my son's education. And so that's another really powerful hack because most of our decisions are being made. I call it the animal brain. It's being made on this deep emotional level. And so if we can really connect our savings goals to what matters the most to us, it becomes really, really effective because we're much more likely to stay on track. The thing you don't want to do

is actually sit down with your partner and do what we call a budget, which feels like a diet, you know, and when you start talking to yourself about a diet, you start craving all this food, your metabolism, like literally starts to slow down and everything in your body works against you. And I think a really powerful way to get a handle on your finances is to actually have that spending plan where you sit down perhaps with your partner and you think what matters most to us like seriously what matters most to us and then then you start paying those things first and you automate savings towards those and then you just spend the rest on whatever you want yeah well it's interesting as you were talking about that i mean imagine if your goal

is you want to someday have a house on the beach you You want a beach house. And so you actually have an account called the beach house, which you have an account for the beach house. You might as well go get your beach house. Absolutely. And the chances are, if it's just this amorphous savings account that doesn't have any name or attachment to it, those are the accounts it's really easy to rob from. It's like, I want a new TV, or maybe I want a new car. It's really easy to rob from. You know, it's like, I want a new TV or maybe I want a new car. It's really easy to do that. But if you have that beach house account and not only that, but you can picture yourself there. You can picture your family there.

You can picture all that joy, that excitement. And maybe you have pictures around your house. It's really, really challenging to go rob from that. You know, it's interesting to listen to you talk about all the problems that people have with money. And I bet so many people think, well, I thought it was just me. I thought I think everybody else has their financial act together. And I'm the one that can't get it right. The other thing we know from research is that people feel really, really ashamed about their financial lives.

People feel ashamed that they don't have enough money, that they've made mistakes, that if people found out how they're living their life around money, that they would be judged harshly. Because again, we all kind of know what we should be doing, but most of us aren't doing it. And so there's an incredible amount of shame. And so I think there's a lot of power in just understanding that we are wired to do this all wrong. And if you add that wiring onto what you were taught growing up, which has another huge, profound impact on your relationship with money. It's like, what did your parents do?

And how did they live their life? And your larger social circle, those things have a profound impact. And if you come from a family where that sort of saving, investing mindset has been around for generations, it's really easy to do that. If you come from a family who's just been sort of living paycheck to paycheck,

you might not know who to trust. You might have a lot of anxiety about investing. I mean, it's much, much harder to get ahead when you're coming from those environments. But there are people, you're probably one of them, that does do the right thing, that does follow your, I assume you follow your own advice. I do try to, yes. And a lot of what that's been for me is researching, and I've done a lot of studies on this, on, you know, how do people become wealthy and challenging some of those stereotypes, because we have a lot of really twisted stereotypes. How do they become wealthy? There's been studies done on the average millionaire. So 70% of millionaires are

actually employees. So think about that. If you're on social media even for five seconds, you realize, oh my goodness, I'm never going to be able to get ahead unless I'm, quote, an entrepreneur. And I just think it's fascinating to know that, well, actually, 70% of self-made millionaires are employees. They're people who are just saving and investing a percentage of their money. And they've done that for decades. Boom. Now they're millionaires.

Well, it is on one hand rather discouraging to hear that we're wired all wrong to do the right thing with money. But it is good news to know that it isn't that hard to be very deliberate about doing the right thing with money and there are ways to get it done brad klontz has been my guest he is a financial psychologist a certified financial planner and his book is money mammoth unlocking the secrets of financial psychology to break from the herd and avoid extinction there's a link to his book at amazon in the show notes. Thank you, Brad. Thanks for being here. Yes, thank you. My pleasure. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast.

And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back,

and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out the Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology.

That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. For reasons I'm not really sure I understand, I've always been fascinated with the topic of time. Time is relentless.

And sometimes time is our friend. Sometimes time is the enemy. Sometimes it goes by really fast. Other times it goes by really slow. And probably the thing that I find so particularly fascinating about time is that science can't define it. We can measure it, but we don't really know what it is. There is no real scientific definition of time or now. And here with some insight into this, what I find to be a fascinating topic, is Joseph

Mazur. He is a professor emeritus of mathematics at Marlboro College, and he's author of the book The Clock Mirage, Our Myth of Measured Time. Hi, Joseph. Hi, thank you very much. So I think everybody has their own experience of time. They have a sense of what time is and how it relates to their life. But how do you look at it? What is time to you? Well, that's a tricky thing, time, because it goes back for a couple of thousand years when people have asked that same question, what is time? And it's one of those things that you really can't get a good handle on.

The physicists don't really define it. And the philosophers have been working on this for a couple of thousand years now. And, you know, I think time's only appearance is as a ghost of memories and anticipations. Time is a mirage. Without the clock tuned to the moves of our planet, it has no real other existence beyond the, oh, I would say the biochemical necessities of keeping us alive and its personal effects on memory and destiny. So that would be what I would say time is.

But then again, it's such a mirage that you really can't put a handle on it. It's just difficult. Well, it's a mirage, but the way we measure it and the way we work with it seems to work pretty well. Yes. You can measure lots of things without actually knowing what they are. So, yes, we measure by clocks. So we had figured out that there is a way to tell how fast the day is going and what we think time might be.

But to put a definition on it, like, you know, to define something like weight, that's much easier. You know, there's a gravitational pull, we know all about what is causing it. There's really very little evidence in knowing what time actually is, except for putting it in the situation of memory as being history, or personal history, or anything that has happened in the past, or destiny, which are things that will happen in the future. So, you know, we have constructed it. It's a man-made thing. On the other hand, that said, our bodies really do know what time is. I mean, we do, you know, every cell of the body is connected in one way or another to the planetary movements in our solar system. So yeah, so there is some kind of an almost instinctual understanding, but it's not,

we don't really, we can't put a handle on what it actually is. And so what? I mean, philosophers may have been struggling with this for centuries, and we can't define it, but on a practical basis, we've got a pretty good handle on it. So is this just an academic exercise to try to figure it out, or is there something a little more to this? Well, I would say maybe 50 or 100 years ago, it would have been an academic exercise. But now we know a lot more about what the body is doing and that the body's sense of time is fairly accurate.

I mean, there's a clock in there, and it knows how to keep us healthy. So, you know, the daylight and the nighttime and all these shifts that go on in terms of circadian rhythms is already part of the protein building within the cells of the body. So if we don't really quite understand what time is, we really should be understanding, not academically, but really practically, at least, what time is for health reasons, for our bodies. And at what point, if we know, I don't know if history goes back this far, but when did people sort of get a handle on it in the sense that,

well, you know, today is a lot like yesterday, and the sun's in the same place, you know, kind of a couple hours after I woke up. And so let's start to measure this a little more accurately. When did that start? Well, it goes back quite a long way. I think Babylonian times, you know, we had measures by water clocks and sand dials, you know, yeah, so sundials and sand clocks and that sort of thing. But those were so inaccurate. Sundials were pretty accurate as long as the sun was up.

But, you know, we didn't have anything close to mechanical clocks until about the 13th, 14th century. So, you know, and those were pretty, they still, what did they do? They just really called people to church, got them to wake up, got them to work. And that was the only need for time at that time. So this would have been back in,'s say the 14th century and then when you get a little bit further on especially if you actually get to something like the Industrial Revolution you have all sorts of needs for a real time that is getting very very precise of a time and so and then of course you know when there's public transportation like railroads,

that's even more so. You have to make sure that trains don't collide, for example, and people get to work on time and people actually get to their trains, their commuter rails on time. So that happens actually quite late. In fact, that's surprisingly, it's the late 19th century. Really? Yeah. That is pretty late. Clocks got better and better.

Only in the 19th century did we have things like more precise clocks that really had second hands, whatever. Whoever needed second hands. Anyhow, we don't even need them now. But they were putting in, you know, early clocks only had hour hands. So up until about the 15th century, 16th century even, most clocks only had hour hands. Then minute hands came in. And then second hands. So it got more and more precise because of the way we work, you know, the way we live. So when work habits and industrial societies came about,

they had to be much more precise because time was now becoming money, money talks. So the clockmakers decided to get more precise. And as these clocks got more precise, and here I'm talking about only as precise as the early 18th century, when all these clocks had to be hand-wound, re-synchronized with a clock at the center of town, for example. None of this was really electronic until the 19th century. So these clocks were all measured to a time that was actually solar time. We didn't have anything like Greenwich Mean Time or anything like that, or Eastern Standard Time. solar time not we didn't have anything like great meantime or anything like that or eastern standard time uh... those things came out and came about by

a uh... an agreement uh... in the eighteen eighties there was a standardization of time globally if you go back before that then if you had something like uh... noon in washington dc then you would think that new York should be noon, too. But no, it wasn't. It was 12, 12 p.m. And Boston would be 12, 24 p.m.

And things like that. So if you walked from one street to another, the time would change. So your clock would advance as you walked because it was really connected to what sun time was, what noon was. Noon meaning how straight above you was the sun. So you could work with that. There's no problem with that, except for the railroads. Because if you have that kind of system, then nobody really knows where the train is going to be at any particular time because the train is moving.

So the standardization of time is really because of the railroads? Yes, absolutely. Part of people's experience with time really interests me. For example, when I go someplace, it seems to take longer to get there than it does to get home for some reason. And as I get older, I mean, time just seems to be going by so fast now compared to when I was, say, in high school. These kind of things, I guess, are just my perception, but they seem to be perceptions that lots of people have.

Yes, and there's some good reason for that, actually. The old model for understanding that is that time is passing in relation to the amount of time you've already lived. So, you know, if you go from one birthday to another, when you're 70 years old, it's going to be a very small fraction of that time of life. Then if you were seven years old, you know, it's 170th on one on the one hand, and one seventh on the other hand, I think there is something to that. But I think there's something more deeper that deep that's going on there because as you said before it's the activity that we have you know as we age we're not as quite as active as we used to be but that's a kind of a strange thing because activity should speed time up not slow it down if you're

very active and you're excited about something and you're really doing it, you know, let's say skiing down a mountain or bungee jumping or something like that, something really exciting, time really, really speeds up. You think it was only three minutes and it was really an hour and a half, you know. So those things actually contribute, but they all work together, I think. Well, it seems as kind of a general rule that the more you watch the time, the more you're aware of it passing, the slower it goes.

I remember in high school, you know, watching the clock on the wall waiting for the bell to ring or, you know, sitting in the dentist's chair wondering how long is this going to go on. When you're really conscious of time, it slows down. And when you're involved in something else, in an activity that's really exciting and you're not paying attention to time, it goes faster. All of the old philosophers, if you go back a few hundred years even, they had already known that time is connected in some way to change. In other words, when something changes, time moves. Something doesn't change, time doesn't move. You know, I'm reminded of this old science fiction movie where time is stopped for about a half an hour, even though it's stopped for a half an hour because everything is stopped for about a half an hour, even though it's stopped for a half an hour because

everything is stopped. Nothing in the universe or nothing on Earth actually moves for about a half an hour. Well, if that happens, time also stops. If you pay attention to time, it likes that, and it holds on to you. I've always been fascinated by the topic of time, just because, as you point out, nobody really knows what it is. We can measure it pretty well, and we can use those means of measurement to make life easier and make the trains run so they don't crash into each other. But, you know, time is relentless. It never slows down. It never speeds up. It goes as fast as it goes. And yet our perceptions of time are so interesting. So it's a really fascinating

topic. Well, what's interesting is that we can use it in many ways. So we can, you can use whatever we can get out of time. What I did was I separated time into personal time and scientific time, that is, subjective time and objective time. If you do that, you get much further than just saying that time is one thing. It's not one thing. Let the physicists have their notion of time, and let personal people have their notion of time. That is what the body thinks a time is.

That's why I started interviewing astronauts living on the International Space Station, prisoners on death row, and that sort of thing. So I separate those. I say, even though there's physics in my book, we should actually have a different word for what we're talking about when we're talking about time. That's the gist of what I'm trying to get at. And of all of the things that you have looked at, is there any little quirky thing about time that sticks out to you that people find interesting, or that you find particularly interesting that people might not know? People have told me that they had not understood that, in fact, the physicists, for example, never really defined time. There's no definition of time for

physicists. They use it as you're supposed to know it because you know what velocity is, and you know what speed is, you know what movement is, you know all sorts of things that happen. In other words, you know about change. What I find interesting is that I'm trying to make it something that is much more in tune to this world and this planet that we live on. And one of the interesting things is if you say, well, okay, suppose I go to another planet, and will that change the way I look at this planet? In other words, when I'm looking back at this planet, and I see the Earth running around the sun, and it goes around once, and in my year, my measure of time, I'm on an exoplanet very far away,

I see it, but I see my year has only gone, let's say, half a year. So what is that about? And that is also personal time, because you're looking at something, and you're saying, wait a second, there's that guy on Earth who's having one year go by, and I'm having only half a year go by. Why don't I go back? What if I go to Earth and live there? So is my health going to be any different? Is my feeling of body time going to be any different?

What's going to happen? Is music going to be any different to me? Because music is all about timing. Well, that saying that timing is everything, it really is. And I think you've given some interesting understanding as to how time works, even if we don't really know what time is. Joseph Mazur has been my guest. He is a professor emeritus of mathematics at Marlboro College, and he's author of the book, The Clock Mirage, Our Myth of Measured Time.

And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Have you ever been at the airport and seen one of the baggage carousels going round and round with like one bag on it. And it just goes round and round and nobody claims it. And maybe you've wondered, well, whatever happens to that? What if nobody claims that bag? Where does it go? Well, where it goes is the unclaimed baggage center in Scottsboro, Alabama. This started as a private business back in 1970, where this guy started the business partnering with airlines, and there's now a store, it's a block long, and they've got just about everything you can think of there,

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