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Hi Everyone, It's Tim Denning from Medium and LinkedIn. Here is my most shared article this week: I Used to Be Impressed by People Who Had a Lot of Money — But Now I’m Impressed by People Who Have a Lot of Free Time A Porsche used to scream “be friends with me!” In my 20s, luxury and entrepreneur bullsh*t defined me. I chased success like a dog follows a shank bone. In my 30s, money became kind of ridiculous. A dramatic shift has occurred. The title of this story, which comes from a quote by entrepreneur Anthony Pompliano, helps to explain it. Let’s dissect the real meaning of money so you don’t fall in love with it and accidentally discover a world of broken dreams. The Idea of True Wealth Is Broken True wealth isn’t luxury, millions of followers, or a fake ass Dan Blazerian life holding guns like Rambo and collecting exotic animals that are pleading to be released to their natural homes and take a break from phone cameras. This is what true wealth looks like: A book a week Books connect you to humanity. They take you out of your head and place you in the author’s head. Most of us get zero time to read. Books are long. Time outside of work is short. Impressive people have bought their time back so they can read a book a week if they choose. A good night’s sleep Ever met angry people at work? It’s either a lack of sleep or poor diet that throws their energy down the drain. Buying your freedom back gives you the opportunity to sleep more. Eight hours is recommended. Nine hours on some days is a real luxury. Add in afternoon naps and you start to feel like a different person. Energy is a better form of wealth than money. No work on weekends Your mind needs decompression time. Time to join the dots between all of the inputs for the week so you can grow as a person. When you’re a slave to money, work tends to creep into the weekend. Your mind can’t fully disconnect, so proximity to your goals starts to fade. Weekends are for play. A clear conscience I don’t know how certain people make it through the day. I’ve worked with some businesses that simply do evil so they can make a buck. They know what they’re doing is wrong. They know they’re wrecking society for future generations. But they simply flick a switch. Prioritizing time over money has helped me gain a clear conscience. It makes day-to-day life less stressful. Less stress equals wealth. A walk with no destination Walking is better than a rushed workout at a packed gym next to your workplace, where the loud techno drowns out the potential for peace and quiet. Since I got a hearing condition called tinnitus, I’ve begun walking more. Placing one step in front of the other acts like meditation. It’s why many entrepreneurs love walking meetings. You can walk along tracks that people from hundreds of years ago set foot on. You can ponder what life was like for them. Walking is true wealth. A family who knows you Those busy startup worshippers and those high-flying executives that all chase money hide the truth: their families barely know them. They’re never there. A birthday party for their kid is an option, not a priority. They spend more time with “the business” than their family. So their business booms but their family drifts further apart. Often it ends in divorce or raising out-of-control kids. Time with family is wealth. “I’m not money obsessed. I’m freedom obsessed.” — Josh George, entrepreneur Entrepreneurs or leaders who sit in back-to-back meetings all day just aren’t cool anymore. That’s so early 2000s. The new status symbol isn’t a Lambo or a Gucci handbag. Nope. The new status is freedom. Freedom equals free time. A few months ago I cut the chain of my cubicle job. No more drama. No more politics. No more wondering who the next moron would be to throw some poor sucker under the bus and get a promotion. It’s scary at first. A day full of zero commitments. A daily routine where you actually have time to goof off and do whatever you want. Now that I’ve had a taste of a calendar with zero meetings, I’m addicted. I don’t ever want this to stop. That’s why I use whatever entrepreneurial skills I have to ensure my tiny side business stays alive. If my business dies it’s not a 9–5 job with a bad boss that scares me. No. I’m scared I’ll have to hand over the keys to my calendar again and let corporate bros in pinstripe suits waste my day because they refuse to accept what the internet has done to business — and what blockchain is about to do to traditional businesses with their heads in the clouds. Forget luxury status, “founder” and “C-level” titles, and throwing cash into the air on an Instagram Reel. Become obsessed with freedom. It will change how you work forever. You’ll stop chasing money. Anthony Pompliano is right. Time is the ultimate measure of wealth. All that impresses me now is freedom. The rest is bullsh*t. ​ – Tim Denning

Time

Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion

Getting human feeling to match the math is an ultimate goal in physics.

Nautilus

• Michael Segal

In his book Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, Max Tegmark writes that “time is not an illusion, but the flow of time is.” In this month’s issue of Nautilus, which looks at the concept of flow through various portals in science, we revisited our 2014 video interview with Tegmark (transcribed below for the first time), in which the professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explains why the feeling of time is one thing and the math quite another. That Tegmark, also the author of 2017’s Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, takes the keenest pleasure from peering into the world through the kaleidoscope of his physics toolbox is amply clear. During our interview, leaning out of his chair, waving his arms, pouring his water bottle onto the carpeted hotel floor to drive home a point, he was in a constant state of animation, much like the objects (both microscopic and gargantuan) that he studies. 

Words of Wisdom: “I love talking with philosophers—they’re so annoying!” Max Tegmark says. “That’s what’s so great about them. They force us to confront assumptions we haven’t tested, and often help new physics theories be born.”

You say time doesn’t flow, but our subjective perception is that it does. Where do we go wrong?

It certainly feels to us like time is flowing. Yet that’s not the only way of looking at this reality. I could say that 10 to the power of 29 particles constitute me, and they are moving around in some very complicated patterns. Einstein pointed out that the most elegant way of describing this mathematically is to say, Let’s look at where each particle is in the three-dimensional space at each time, and draw this in a four-dimensional spacetime, where time is the fourth dimension.

If I have a particle that is part of my knee, which hasn’t moved, that particle corresponds to a line. At all times, it’s at the same place. If I look at a particle that’s part of a red blood cell, which has been constantly orbiting around my circulatory system, it’s making a super fascinating shape in spacetime. If I look at all my red blood cells together, they would make a braid pattern, making this incredible tangle in spacetime. If you look at the electron in my brain while I’m thinking, it’s even more complicated. But it’s still just a four-dimensional pattern. So I can either say that reality is a complicated pattern of four dimensions, or I could say it’s this stuff that feels like it’s changing and moving around. Which is more fundamental? Which is more correct? These are just two different ways of describing the same thing.

It’s funny how physics, like any field, has a small number of hot-button issues that people get very emotional about.

Is it part of the scientist’s job to explain why things feel the way they do?

We’ve seen a lot of examples of how things feel very different from the way they look in the equations. I would argue that almost all of the big breakthroughs in physics have this as their most difficult element. If you rewind to when Einstein came up with special relativity, you would find people like Lorentz and Minkowski had already written down a lot of the math. But Einstein was the guy who managed to figure out what it was going to feel like. He said if these are the equations, the way it’s going to feel is if you go near the speed of light, you’re going to feel time slowing down. And people said, Whoa, that’s really weird! Then they did the experiment and it’s correct. I had a fun conversation with physicist David Wineland. He told me that he’d built two atomic clocks that are super precise, and put one of them one foot below the other, and was able to measure that it runs slower! 

Then quantum mechanics came along. It’s so complicated people still argue about it 100 years later! The math, though, is beautiful and clean. Randomness is fundamentally an illusion because there is no randomness in the math, even though it might feel random. I’m saying the same thing about time. Even though the flow of time is fundamentally an illusion, there is nothing flowing about the math, the equations aren’t changing, there is just a single four-dimensional pattern, albeit a very complicated and beautiful one, in spacetime. If you study it carefully, you’ll realize it’s going to feel like a flow of time. As physicists, that’s ultimately what we need to explain: Why does everything feel the way it does? We shouldn’t be so naive as to think that things will always feel the way they actually are, because the history of physics is a long sequence of examples of where we realize that the ultimate nature of things is very different from how they feel.

If time doesn’t flow, how do we understand the second law of thermodynamics, which says that time flows in the direction of increasing entropy?

It’s funny how physics, just like any field, has a small number of hot-button issues that people get very emotional about. Time and specifically the so-called second law of thermodynamics is one of them. It’s a simple statement that on average things keep getting messier. That lets you define the direction of time. But there has been a lot of controversy about it. On the one hand, there are people like Arthur Eddington, who tend to view this as almost a holy principle. It’s sacred and shouldn’t ever be questioned. He has this famous line where he says, Well, all sorts of things might turn out to be wrong, but if some theorist ever challenges the second law of thermodynamics, then too bad for that theorist, because there’s no hope for him other than the utmost humiliation! On the other hand, a lot of other people say, Look, we shouldn’t have any holy cows in physics, everything must be questioned, including the second law of thermodynamics.

It’s like the ending of Life of Brian, where they say, “You come from nothing, you’re going back to nothing. What have you lost?”

What’s questionable about the second law of thermodynamics?

It’s turned out you can derive the second law of thermodynamics from more fundamental things. Let’s say I did something clumsy like spill water on the carpet. If I played a video of it backward, and you saw the water come off the carpet and go into the bottle, it would look totally wrong. But if you just zoom in and look at the motion of the particles flying through the other particles of the air, it would look perfectly reasonable backward, just like a bunch of bowling balls bouncing the other way. After 100 years of thinking about this, we’ve come to realize the explanation is surprising. It has to do with what happened 13.8 billion years ago. The reason our universe keeps getting messier is because it started in a tidy state yesterday, which was even tidier the day before, and even tidier 13.8 billion years ago. 

Why did the universe start in such a tidy state?

What I think that means is there is no holy era of time. It emerged. If, in the distant future, we find ourselves in a universe where all the stars have burned out, and all the black holes have evaporated, and all the radiation has been diluted by the dark energy that expanded our universe, and all we have is some very cold bath of photons here and there—basically thermal equilibrium; de Sitter space, as we call it—there will be no sense of time anymore. There will nothing you can do to determine whether time is going one way or the other. Time will then have un-emerged again. It will be like the poem, This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper. 

What if I looked at my wristwatch then? Would it tick forward?

There wouldn’t be a wristwatch because all the atoms, or all the protons in your wristwatch, would’ve decayed. All the particles that had decayed would’ve left the cosmic horizon. If there were a wristwatch, and it’s functioning, there will be a sense of time and change. But just like there hasn’t always been a wristwatch, there will not necessarily always be one. 

How is measuring time related to the existence of time?

It sounds crass to say that time is what we measure with a clock. But it is a very deep fact that if there are no clocks—bearing in mind that every atom is a clock, in the sense that something is going around something else, which you can think of as a clock—then it’s not change which has gone but the whole ability to define time, and the whole ability to perceive time will also be gone. So in that way, time could’ve emerged from nothing, and might also go back to nothing. It’s like the ending of one of my favorite movies, Life of Brian, with Monty Python, where they say, “You come from nothing, you’re going back to nothing. What have you lost? Nothing!” Well, we’ll see!

Michael Segal is the editor at large of Nautilus.

Time

We hear so often that people complain that they have not enough time. And for women this is even more true than for men. Women are multitaskers and achieve an awful lot with running a home, often working full time and helping in the Community. Time Management Courses have been offered at great expense. Yet, time cannot be managed. Time can be organised to schedule tasks at a given moment but time itself cannot be managed.

Once we realise this, all we have to do is get organised, delegate and it is surprising how we can have more time. I've tried it and it works.