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A Million Dollars vs A Billion Dollars, Visualized: A Road Trip

Tom Scott · 8.3M views · 2020-07-13 · 1:19:08

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Overview

Tom Scott makes the difference between a million and a billion dollars tangible by using distance on a road trip instead of volume. The drive makes the scale of a billion intuitively felt.

On Hacker News

HN points to it whenever discussion turns to billionaire wealth or the human difficulty of grasping very large numbers.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2021–2026

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What people said

dijit · 2023-01 · Recommendation

It's hard to actually visualise large numbers; a common problem actually Tom Scott has a great video on it: [VIDEO] EDIT: Decide to swap the examples to British cities, inkeeping with what you said about apples/oranges; which people may be less familiar with; but hopefully it gives the sense of scale.

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murm · 2021-12 · Recommendation

I don't know the answer to your question, but I think this[0] video might help to visualize the mind-boggling scale of the world (in the video you can substitute dollars with human beings). And it's only one billion visualized so in order to go through the entire human population you would have to watch it 7.9 times which would take something over 10 hours. As the dollar meter keeps running relentlessly you can imagine yourself being one split of a second somewhere there, and then you can imagine the sea of people working hard at compilers, optimizers, math etc. blasting you all at once with their brilliant observations. It's only natural to get overwhelmed if you expose yourself to the aggregate of the most brilliant and productive humans, because as rare as they might be, the human population is so staggeringly big that there are LOTS of them. You might not be doing so bad compared to the rest of the humanity though ;) [0] [VIDEO] (A Million Dollars vs A Billion Dollars, Visualized: A Road Trip)

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yreg · 2021-08 · Recommendation

I find these scrolling websites unergonomic and not at all that good at getting the point across (other than "yeah, it's a lot"). Also, with the text-length budget of that site I think it's a shame it doesn't explain what wealth, profit, liquidity and cash-on-hand is. Better visualisations imo: - Tom Scott: A Million Dollars vs A Billion Dollars, Visualized: A Road Trip [VIDEO] - How rich are Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in Minecraft terms [LINK]

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Sources

Video by Tom Scott, played through YouTube.

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