Savor a PB and J-Witch with me, Bryan, as we embark on an auditory adventure through the essence of time, tinged with the flavors of nostalgia and anticipation. This episode is a tapestry of tastes and thoughts, where I, alongside my friend Nick, venture from a childhood classic snack into the realm of time travel and sentiment. I even take my first sip of Cheerwine, a fizzy reminder that our simplest delights can serve as anchors to the present and portals to the past.
Our dialogue meanders through the subjectivity of time, examining how emotions and physical experiences mold its perception. Imagine watching a live event unfold, yet it feels different depending on your time zone—the relativity of time at play. We share stories; I tell you about approaching the age my father was when he passed and how it shapes my daily countdown. Our conversation unearths the profound impact of psychological constructs on the way we navigate life's routines and the distortion of time during heightened states like driving.
As our cup overflows with curiosity, we probe the connection between fear and the stretching of time, inspired by scientific studies and the philosophies of authors like Eckhart Tolle. We dissect how the pursuit of new experiences can synchronize our subjective time with the vibrancy of life, making the case for embracing change and self-improvement. And, as a parting gift, we tease the brain-tickling topic of our next bonus episode on time travel. Prepare to have your thoughts on PB and J—and time itself—forever altered.
Savor a PB and J-Witch with me, Bryan, as we embark on an auditory adventure through the essence of time, tinged with the flavors of nostalgia and anticipation. This episode is a tapestry of tastes and thoughts, where I, alongside my friend Nick, venture from a childhood classic snack into the realm of time travel and sentiment. I even take my first sip of Cheerwine, a fizzy reminder that our simplest delights can serve as anchors to the present and portals to the past.
Our dialogue meanders through the subjectivity of time, examining how emotions and physical experiences mold its perception. Imagine watching a live event unfold, yet it feels different depending on your time zone—the relativity of time at play. We share stories; I tell you about approaching the age my father was when he passed and how it shapes my daily countdown. Our conversation unearths the profound impact of psychological constructs on the way we navigate life's routines and the distortion of time during heightened states like driving.
As our cup overflows with curiosity, we probe the connection between fear and the stretching of time, inspired by scientific studies and the philosophies of authors like Eckhart Tolle. We dissect how the pursuit of new experiences can synchronize our subjective time with the vibrancy of life, making the case for embracing change and self-improvement. And, as a parting gift, we tease the brain-tickling topic of our next bonus episode on time travel. Prepare to have your thoughts on PB and J—and time itself—forever altered.
Welcome to Help Yourself. Food and Philosophy with Brian and Nick. I'm Nick and I'm Brian. Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future. What's you eating, brian?
Speaker 2:I suppose so yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's how I see it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that sometimes it's a little bit scary when music lyrics are spoken.
Speaker 1:It's like yeah, anyway, it's like we all live in a yellow submarine.
Speaker 2:Yes, I don't, I can't. Anyway, all right, what am I eating? Please eat. Don't break my brain this early in the podcast. What am I eating? I am. I'm actually having a snack for lunch just because I'm going to on this redacted day of the week. I'm going to go eat some other stuff later, so I was trying to not eat so much in the morning and I think I may have talked about these in the past, but there's a local company here in Middle Tennessee called Reds and they for a long time they do frozen burritos, but the ingredients are really good.
Speaker 2:They're a little bit more yeah, a little bit more pricey than like the average frozen burrito. So maybe like $2.50, something like that for a burrito, and which isn't terrible if you're talking about a quick way to eat a breakfast or lunch. But they apparently have been expanding and they expanded into a these little frozen almost like uncrustables. So it's a PB and J-Witch and it comes on a little bun and it's frozen and you basically just take it out of the freezer and you just let it sit there until it thaws and then you eat it, and so you don't have to heat it up or do anything and it's really really, really small, though it's like I feel like I'm eating like a child's meal and even though the calories are pretty good, it's like 210 calories for this little tiny sandwich, because of the peanut butter, I'm sure.
Speaker 2:But they turn out really well, the peanut butter is very very calorie dense.
Speaker 2:The jelly is not super calorie dense, but the peanut butter. Like a tablespoon of peanut butter is like 50 or 60 calories. Yeah, no, it's a lot, I mean for two tablespoons. It's usually 100 plus calories for just the peanut butter. But they do these. They basically try to keep the ingredients good in terms of like no artificial flavors or colors they have in here and so ultimately, like I said, it tastes really good and it's also really really easy. That's the big thing is I'm also I'm crinkling the wrapper, so if you can hear that, that's me doing that. But they're really good. And the weird thing is for before I bought this, I bought a pack of like four of them and then I went back and bought another pack. These ones, this one's strawberry jam, but they have grape jam as well, or grape jelly and or it's a jam. So I went back and bought another box of the grape, which I haven't tried yet, but I forgot how much I like PB and J.
Speaker 2:Like PB and J is like a. It's a good little, like it does take you I would say most people. It probably takes you back to childhood on some level. So like it's a kid, it's like a kid, it feels like you're a kid, you know, like it's like its own form of time travel. It really does, because you're and to some extent you hear people all the time like I know there are adults who like PB and J sandwiches, but then if you hear somebody who eats PB and J sandwiches all the time as an adult, you're like what's, why are you always eating PB and J?
Speaker 2:You know, I'm not trying to judge. Are you trying to live in the past? No, I'm not trying to judge. I'm fine with it, but I'm just saying that there is an aspect of that. There's an aspect of like. I feel like almost to the extent of like I'm not sharing with a bunch of people. Well, now that I'm saying on the podcast, I guess I'm sharing with, like you know, at least another 10 or 12 people that listened. So but but you know, I'm not sharing with like I wouldn't be like what'd you have for lunch? Oh man, I had this awesome peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It was so good, dude, it was whoo like. You know, you just wouldn't be like. It'd just be like yeah, I had peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Speaker 1:Please don't judge me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly yeah.
Speaker 2:That's exactly what I'm saying. Don't judge me, but I just had a PB and J, you know. But that's okay. If you're out there, you have PB and J sandwiches. I'm on board with it now. So, so a good, a good little, like I said, good little sort of snack. Not a full meal, obviously, but it's something that I can digest and it's easy. Now, what am I drinking? My typical water bottle. I've got that with some water in it. Actually, it's a little bit light on the water. I hope I don't run out. But the other thing I did is I decided to try something that I've been, I've heard about in the past and I believe that it is local to our area, or at least the south. Maybe I'm going to have to do a quick Google search while I'm talking, because it doesn't say it on the bottle. But basically, that's what I'm, that's what I'm, so yeah you're not multitasking.
Speaker 2:well, I'm terrible at multitasking, anyway, so it's called cheer wine. Have you heard of cheer wine? Oh yeah, and I've heard of other people talking about it, but I've never tried it before and I decided to grab. They have like four packs in the glass bottles. Now this is the cheer wine zero sugar, so this is no calories, which is good, because I got to hopefully sample the flavor of it without having to drink down a bottle full of sugar. But as I look it up, it says it's, I believe, out of North Carolina. Yeah, it's headquartered in North, their headquarters is in North Carolina, and so, yeah, so it was created in North Carolina.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it was sugar shortage, sugar shortage. To the same, I guess to the same thing that we have in Tennessee. Wasn't RC Cola Tennessee? Is that is RC Cola Tennessee? Am I wrong in that? All right, Nick's going to go, I know there's RC.
Speaker 1:Cola at Moon Pies? Yeah, I'll do it.
Speaker 2:I know Moon Pies is, but anyway. So similar to wherever RC Cola is from, we have cheer wine.
Speaker 1:I'm going to miss Georgia.
Speaker 2:Georgia.
Speaker 1:And Nashville just claims everything from the South, doesn't?
Speaker 2:it. Try to, we try to say oh, that's from middle Tennessee, no, but cheer wine. We're like the uncle that makes up stories about stuff, just random stuff.
Speaker 1:It looks like everyone thinks it's his idea.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I invented the Post-it note. Did I tell you that? No? So anyway, it's a cherry flavored beverage. It's not cola flavored at all, so it's not cherry like Pepsi or cherry Coke. You know, it's actually a cherry flavored beverage and and it's actually pretty good. It's like let me take another sip and I'll see like it was. Like I mean, it has a good, not like it has a good, actual, real cherry flavor. Like, meaning like what a cherry would actually not. It doesn't taste as artificial I know it is, but it tastes like they maybe put cherry juice in it.
Speaker 2:It doesn't have like cough syrup, right exactly. Or like a maraschino cherry or some kind of like manufactured fake cherry flavoring. It's a cherry. Yeah, it tastes actually like they took some, maybe used some cherry juice in it or something like that. I'm sure that they did not. There's no, probably zero fruit juice at all in this thing, but, but it's, it's good, and I'm actually looking at the ingredients now to make sure that I'm not like not you know, defaming them. Yeah, I don't see any juice in here, so, but it's really good actually.
Speaker 1:It wasn't reading the label. He was looking really closely at the contents of the bottle Right, exactly I'm like. I don't see any.
Speaker 2:I don't see any juice, Weird, Okay. So no, so it tastes really good and I mean I'm not like a huge, like a huge soda drinker or anything like that, but I do every once in a while will like different things. I try not to drink the sugar version of it, you know.
Speaker 1:But Brian, that's not a fair comparison. You're not a huge soda drinker because you've lost weight, so you're sort of like a medium sized, you know medium sized soda drinker, I suppose you know I will say that it has a distinct, let me put it.
Speaker 2:Let me put it this way it has a distinct flavor that I've never tasted in any other kind of cherry flavored drink. So at least for that aspect it's pretty cool because it's like its own thing. It's not like a oh yeah, it's just cherry flavoring or whatever I'm sure it is. But but it says since 19, was it say. On the bottle it says 1917. So apparently it's been around for a while. Another podcast I listened to. I'm pretty sure they're in Florida, but every single time he opens the podcast he talks about that he's got his cup full of cheer wine and so I think he drinks the full sugar, full sugar version of it. But he's got his cheer wine ready and he's. He's had to explain to many times on the podcast that he's not drinking actual wine, that it's just a soft drink, because other people are like what is this cheer wine thing?
Speaker 2:So, yeah, so that's all. That's all. I have a small slight Brian's beverage corner. I know everyone's disappointed, especially you, Nick, but who's who's unique. Especially all the Unix that we have in our audience. They're all no, okay, double phase palm, okay. So what? What do you? What are you eating and drinking?
Speaker 1:Dory made some excellent chicken breasts for me. It was made seasoned with Tony Chauceries. I know it's really. His name is Proun, I'm pretty sure I'm like two thirds right there Tony Chauceries or Chauceries, I think it's Chauceries.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know what you're talking about.
Speaker 1:It's the no salt version of their famous blend. You know the Creole cuisine seasoning. Yeah. Paired with some additional paprika, as Dory likes to call it. I think most of us say paprika, though, so hopefully she hears me make fun of her and she can hurt me later. The, the. The two chicken breasts were paired with some additional Southern comfort food turnip greens cooked in classic butter and we use, like the grass fed Irish butter.
Speaker 2:Yeah, carry gold, and yes, that's it. Yeah, yeah, and if you're, if you're going to eat butter, eat some carry gold, man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and then also I had some blueberries on the side. On the side side like a little bowl on a separate plate.
Speaker 2:Blueberries are really, really good for you, healthy, wise, and I was just looking at a thing it's anti-aging food, mmm Ah. Antioxidants it's got. I think it has some of those. I think it has some of those red Reservatrol or whatever the red wine stuff, I think, I don't know, maybe, maybe.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm also adding oxidants and I'm enjoying some dark chocolate flips, dark chocolate covered pretzels, so I'm getting plenty of sugar.
Speaker 2:So I just looked up pronunciation. And it's Sash Sash, Sachery, Sachery, Tony, Sachery Sachery that's Tony Sachery.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the green green bottle. I've got one at my house. Our green shaker of it, right. Mm-hmm yep. Yeah, cajun seasoning. It's really really good. Creole, creole seasoning Is it Creole seasoning? Why do I do that?
Speaker 1:every time yeah, you don't get the mix stuff, creole seasoning.
Speaker 2:either way, it's really good. Also, don't use too much of it because it does get pretty spicy. It can get pretty spicy if you eat too much of it. I mean, if you, you know, yeah.
Speaker 1:Isn't that anything that you get too much of?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm saying that in particular because it's it seems like you can just put it on and you're sort of using it like salt, but then you know, you put that, like you put that on, and then all of a sudden you're like whew, man, that got a little spicy on me. So if you don't, if you don't intend to, then don't do it, got it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, pay attention. Yeah. So, yeah, I think that's that checks out In terms of beverage. I've got my I want to say rusty, trusty, but it's not rusty at all, thankfully. Bottle glass, bottle of water.
Speaker 2:That'd be weird if it was rusty, rusty glass.
Speaker 1:Yeah, crystal clear, classy glass of bottled water, rasty, glassy water, and that's it in terms of beverage, I think I've got. Yeah, that's it.
Speaker 2:Just water.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just water yeah.
Speaker 2:All right, hydration is important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, especially if you're going to talk out of your, out of your butt.
Speaker 2:I don't think so.
Speaker 1:You can get chapped down there. Yeah, need to hydrate.
Speaker 2:I suppose so, and that has nothing to do with our topic at all.
Speaker 1:No, yeah, that's true, we should, we should, we should look forward to our topic.
Speaker 2:Yes, well, yeah, and in our last so long as we have time in the last episode. I mean I mean I mean some people would say we have all the time in the world, other people would say not, it just depends.
Speaker 1:I might have. Well, even the time in the world is finite.
Speaker 2:Is it? I don't know Well, so yeah, the topic today, building off of what we talked about in our last episode, which is, which was sort of the you know physics of time, like you know, the the physics, a little bit of philosophy of time. A little bit, a little bit of everything a little bit of French fries, a little bit of. You know everything.
Speaker 1:The fries like a banana. I think that's that's what we said, right? Yeah, that's a good summation.
Speaker 2:Also.
Speaker 1:The time flies like an arrow of French fries like a banana. French French fries like a banana.
Speaker 2:French fries.
Speaker 2:So the yeah, so the basic you know basic thing is sort of leaning more towards into the psychology of time, meaning our perception of time, and we did talk about this a little bit in the last episode, where you know, we were talking about, in essence, like our perception and our, you know, feeling of like time as a construct, right Time as something that was set up, and how do we measure it, and everything else, and there's a there's a couple of different aspects to this part of the discussion, but I think that's sort of the you know the summation of it is like how do we as humans have a you know what's our relationship with time?
Speaker 2:Like what is our you know unhealthy? Yeah Well, it's amazing to me that something that is this is already just jumping into the pool, but that something that is just something we've made up, as you mentioned in the last episode, is, to some extent, we made up the system so that we could have some way of communicating between each other. Like you and I, we decided that we were going to record this podcast today and we said, hey, what time do you want to be there?
Speaker 1:So we had, you know what time do you want to be there? Oh wait, never mind. Go on, go on.
Speaker 2:So what time? Yeah, what time? I mean, what time are we going to start? How long is that? You know all these things, right? So, same thing as right now. There's some, you know, there's sporting events that are going on today. Those are all like, hey, they're happening at a certain time, right, it's a different time if you live in on the West coast of the United States versus the East coast of the United States. That's a different, it's a different time. But the game isn't starting at a different time, or is it? I mean, the game is starting at the time that it starts, right, so you know. So, basically, how, how do we get started? How, all of that stuff, how does that? You know? How are we? How are we dealing with that? As well? As I think we talked a little bit about the aging process, and that plays into time too, because your, your actual physical body, is finite, right there, at least, we haven't found a way to make it so that your organs and everything else can continue to work into eternity, forever, you know, in perpetuity.
Speaker 1:So well, there's even some of that kind of another aspect. You talk about sporting events and the thing happens, when it happens and our perception of it. You could be at a baseball game like in person and be, watching the game, but also have a handheld radio of an announcer giving the game verbally. Yep. And it's always delayed right. Yep.
Speaker 1:Like, if you're listening to, if you're watching a football game live quote on TV, it's always delayed either because of just the broadcast signal having to reach you through the internet or cable or radio, whatever antenna, but then also because of like for censoring purposes yeah processing like a throwing in ads and things graphics and you know yeah. Yeah, yeah, you're not, you're not getting it in true real time.
Speaker 2:Right, but again, so it's. So you're experienced. You know you're experiencing that like a few seconds after it actually happens in real life. But unless you have that experience, like you said, you're listening to the audio broadcast on the radio while you're sitting in the stadium. You never know that. You never know that it's different. If you're watching it at, you know you're watching a game in Tennessee and it's going on in California. You don't know if that's actually happened or not. You don't know. The only thing you do know is that it's always happening in the past, unless you have some kind of special.
Speaker 1:But we never see it that way. Right Like it feels live.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yeah your perception of it, and so you know I don't know exactly which way to like, which direction to go with this to start, but you know I feel like, oh, go ahead.
Speaker 1:I think one way to kind of make bridge the gap is that, yeah, from a physics standpoint, there's in time, there's the theory of relativity. But I think even in our brain there's relativity right Because, depending on our emotional state or our state of consciousness, our perception of time differs. Right. Like time moves more slowly or more quickly. You know, in states of stress, like your life could flash before your eyes and suddenly you're doing like this rapid replay of your entire life. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or time slows down and even people's perception, not only of time, their perception of space changes. Like people in car accidents will talk about in the moment, they somehow see themselves from outside the car and see it flipping outside, not only outside their body but outside the vehicle. Or then there's also, like the out of body experience, where people have definitely a change in state of consciousness and not only is time stopped or seems to be going slowly, but they're having an out of body experience watching themselves on the operating table.
Speaker 1:Whether it's real or imagined is sort of the big debate, and because of the difference in those accounts, there's often so many details that are missed or lost. We suspect that it's a meta illusion, right? Our concept of time, our perception of time, is itself an illusion, because of things like if the speed of light you know the speed of light is faster than the speed of sound. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But our brains sync it up in its post-processing, assuming that there's not too great a distance. So there's already kind of like this illusion of synchronicity in terms of all the different inputs.
Speaker 1:But then on top of that, when you're stressed and things, and the overload of emotions and chemicals, you end up perceiving things even more illusory, where your memory is an overdrive and you're reliving it what you've seen as best as you can. But it's all a blur and slow-mo, so you can maybe catch details you might have missed, but it's all kind of like slow-mo, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, and I made the assertion in the last episode that when you take away some of the constructs of time and my example was like you go on vacation, so you, typically you go on vacation, you're there to relax, you're taken out of your normal routines, so you're not maybe going to the gym in the morning, you don't have to be at work or on something at a certain time in the morning and you're sort of not, you don't have your day planned. Basically, it's just, hey, we're here to have some R&R, rest and relaxation and basically, you know, time seems to move a little faster. You're like man, is it already two o'clock in the afternoon? Oh gosh, what happened? Like time didn't move faster. It's just you took away some of the construct that you normally have and also I think you're you made you talked about in the last one is like time is the measure of change, right, and that's the same thing.
Speaker 2:It's like you aren't noticing the change very much because you're not, you're just not in tune to it. You're in tune to hey, I don't care what time it is, right now I'm going to read my book, I'm going to sit by the pool, I'm going to whatever your, your activity of choice is, and so you're not paying attention to the time.
Speaker 1:You get lost in the present moment.
Speaker 2:Yes, You're just kind of riding on the stream which is which is interesting that so many self-help things talk about doing that exact thing in your everyday life of just hey, you need to live in the present moment. You need to. In fact, I'm right now rereading one of my favorite books, the how to Stop Worrying and Start Living, and the very first part of that is Dale Carnegie. But one of the very first parts of that book talks about living in day-tight compartments, like don't worry about what happened, excuse me, don't regret or think about what happened yesterday. Don't worry or anticipate about what's going to happen tomorrow. Do whatever you can. And he comes up with a bunch of in fact, I think I would love to do an episode at some point on that book.
Speaker 2:I think I've told you that before but he comes up with really, really practical ways that, in essence, if you really boil it down, are all ways to somewhat manipulate time.
Speaker 2:There's some way to sort of say, like you know, because some of the worry comes with I got to get this thing done by this time, by this point, by this, some of the worry comes from that, and so a lot of them are yeah, you need to get yourself out of that. You need to. Just what can you do right now, like right now, not what bad things are going to happen tomorrow, but what can you do right now to make sure that bad thing doesn't happen. So I think we talked about that last month too and our last episodes and last month's episodes is just sort of talking about you know, basically, like I said, what can you do right now to fix a problem, like, except the worst case scenario that's going to happen? And then what can you do to fix a problem so which is taking your, it's taking yourself out of you know the mind of I don't know what he's doing. I wasn't supposed to comment on that.
Speaker 2:Taking a picture of me. No, okay, well, it's okay.
Speaker 1:Tell you to see what I see.
Speaker 2:You're fine, you're good. So, anyway, I find that that's interesting because Because to me, it doesn't matter to like the time on the clock or the time in your life or anything like that. What matters is how are you dealing with that? How do you process that and that's what we're talking about here is the psychological. How are you processing the time that seems to be going by if you think of it in a linear way.
Speaker 2:And some people are processing it like and I fall into this trap too is, like I've said before, like my father passed away really young, and my attitude is always like, wow, I'm like hurling towards the time when my father passed away, the age at which my father died, right, and so in my head I'm almost like on a clock of like, well, that's like at that age I'm gonna basically be, you know, that's it, like that's the end of it right.
Speaker 2:And that's just something that I have made up in my head. It's a psychological, you know, issue that I have of a perception, because am I gonna die at exactly the same age my dad died at? I don't know. I might, but I also might not.
Speaker 1:So Well, you lived a different life with different genes. Yes, similar genes, perhaps a similar life, but you're making different choices, in part informed by the choices you observed him making. Right. So you have a different hand. You were dealt. Please, please, don't create a self fulfilling prophecy in your head that your dreams to die young, you know.
Speaker 2:Well, that's what I mean.
Speaker 1:That's Because psychosomatic stuff is real, of course. Just by Like you don't have to take a sugar pill, you can make the gesture of popping a pill in your mouth and your headache will go away for a little while. Because you've got, because of anticipation and so forth, you can. Another illusion of the brain right Is the rubber hand experiment. Oh gosh.
Speaker 1:Right. People will Like you can set up mirrors and sensations such that some will smash a rubber hand with a mallet and somebody will like jerk back because they think it's their hand Right. But anyway, back to what you're saying. How much time do I have left thinking about your time on this mortal realm as limited Right and you don't really know when it ends? Right.
Speaker 1:Is a valid point. There's like a. There's a comedian I like a lot I forget his name right now. I'll have to look him up for this but he's short and people will hurt his feelings without even realizing it because he's like how short are you? And he's like you measure things by how much. There is not, how much is left, or how. You don't say you ask someone how old they are, you don't ask them how much time you got left.
Speaker 2:How much?
Speaker 1:time, do you? So yeah, it's like yeah, well yeah. I want to hear more.
Speaker 2:No, I just was thinking too that it's interesting. So the fact that in certain instances, like you were talking about the life flashing before your eyes or and I'm sure everyone's had those experiences of Usually it's something like that, like, oh my gosh, I'm about to break my arm. You know, it's like I fell off my motorcycle or whatever in, and so it's. You know, everything sort of time slows down, but does time really slow down? Like somebody perceiving that from the outside, like if you see a race car crash into the wall, you just see the race car drive and it crashes into the wall, but I'm sure the perception of that driver in the race car is different than yours. So, which is crazy, I mean.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's subjective. Well, when time going faster in its own way feels slower, yeah. Yeah, you lose time. You blink and it's gone. It's like you froze and the world kept going, or you fell asleep and you just woke up. You blink and it's gone. You know like. Yeah. There was that one gap and that lapse. I think they said that if you're traveling at typical speeds and while you're driving you blink, you lost five meters. Yes, I saw a thing recently.
Speaker 2:That's crazy.
Speaker 2:I saw a thing recently that was it was actually talking about Because blinking would be a normal thing you have to blink when you're driving but one of the things it did is it was a. So the video. If you look at it, the picture is through the windshield. And then it was every time someone looked at their phone it went black. So it literally blacked the video out of the thing and then it came back on and it blacked the video out and it came back on.
Speaker 2:So they were saying, like the average person might pick up their phone, look at it for two to three seconds, right, like read a text message, do whatever, change the song, and it was showing you how, at a certain speeds, how much distance your car is traveling. In three seconds, basically Right, and you don't think of it because in your car you think, hey, you're insulated from it to some extent. And I will say even the perception of time, like when I got my more recent car, it feels different driving in a car that's higher up than it does a car that's lower to the ground. So you have, like a Lamborghini or some kind of, you know, very sporty car. Your perception of that speed, like driving 60 miles an hour in a Lamborghini feels a lot different than driving 60 miles an hour in a big rig truck.
Speaker 1:Well, because you're lower to the ground, Right.
Speaker 2:So your perception you know, is that I'm going faster, but you're going the same speed.
Speaker 1:I think that might have something to do with the general relativity we talked about before as well as our psychology Right. Right, but it's true.
Speaker 2:You're right, but it's also like I said going back to it, the craziest thing to me is the fact that we're all trying to have some kind of consistent measure of time by like having clocks and I mentioned atomic clocks and you blew my mind by saying atomic clocks don't, aren't even accurate and all these other things Right. But we have this thing that we're like trying to keep consistent and we all are also, at the same time, agreeing that it's inconsistent, depending upon things, because of the perception.
Speaker 1:And that's all the more reason why we had to have it, create an objective measure, because I mean, I've, I've, I hope not because I hate people, but I think it's just an important skill and an important experience for all humans. I hope everyone has a chance to get into some kind of customer service, because there's invariably that moment that everybody who's at least once when you're working customer service, where it's like I haven't been waiting 37 minutes to get off of hold and talk to somebody, I've waited three weeks for my order to come in and you go and look at the documentation and it's been seven days, or it's been two hours, or you know. And it's because of that dichotomy, that dilution of perception of time, it's like if you're, if you're actively waiting, time feels like it more is happening than it is.
Speaker 1:And the opposite is true, right? The reason that there's hold music when you're on hold is because it's something to keep your mind occupied.
Speaker 3:It makes the time pass Not overestimating how much time is passing.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Similarly, there's a lot of ills that we could talk about. This might be a whole other subject of you know, the prevalence of smartphone use. One of the things the silver lining is that people are extraordinarily more patient now in drive-thrus and checkout lines or any kind of queuing, because they can just sit in the waiting room and doom, scroll Facebook feeds or whatever you know, catch up on YouTube videos or whatever it is they want to do. They're occupied. Yeah. And now 12 minutes feels like two minutes. I believe that yeah.
Speaker 1:Hold on, let me finish this video. Yeah. Before they go to the doc, get up from the waiting room.
Speaker 2:No, and I believe that. I believe that that's one of the reasons why airplanes, airlines now are like. That's why they provide, or why they want you to have Wi-Fi on there, because they know if you're on a five hour flight and you get and you can, who could? They don't care if you're doom schooling, you're just. That means you're entertained. It's treating you like a little baby, yeah basically, it's literally hey.
Speaker 2:I have this baby, this group of babies that I'm going to shove into a metal tube and we're going to fly for six hours and if they don't have something to entertain themselves and pass the time, then they're going to get whiny. And they're going to be whiny babies about it. Right, and I'm not. Hey, I'm not excluding myself from that. It literally, if I had nothing to do in a plane for five hours, I probably would get whiny like hey, give me something to eat. Hey, do you have something I can drink? Hey, maybe I'm going to get up and go to the bathroom, because I have to go to the bathroom, because it's something that I can do to pass like three minutes of this flight or whatever.
Speaker 1:Sure, but you, yeah, and you talking about past the time latches on to my I guess brief fascination with how we talk about time and how it has spatial elements to it. Right, like, how do you? You don't pass the time like you pass a football right. Right or or skip it. We're basically kind of like skipping the time you know, but then there's like time got away from me.
Speaker 1:Yes, Like are you holding on to it, or you lost track of time, like so it's on, it's on a trajectory, like it's on a track at a given speed. Yeah, looking forward to it, like it's it's in front of you, literally, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, and so that's a big potential.
Speaker 1:But coming back of passing the time, as you said, we can get back to the passing time. Well, and so?
Speaker 2:this is probably another deeper thing. This goes not deeper, but it goes more into our self-help aspect of it.
Speaker 2:It's funny to me that we spend a lot of time during our lifetime trying to figure out a way to pass time, like make things that go faster. Just, to some extent, make time go faster. When you're doing something that's a task that is boring, you're like gosh, I just want to get through this, I just want to get through this. And you just like something. So like when I'm mowing the lawn, I listen to a podcast or I listen to music, because it's like I'm doing this thing I don't really want to do and we've talked about that like pairing something that you don't like to do with something you do like to do, or at least a pleasurable with a non-pleasurable thing, right. But it's funny to me that we spend time and I just looked it up like so, average days in a lifetime, if you live till you're 79, is 28,835 days, right. And we spend some portion of that time trying to like speed time along, like trying to like, in essence, like I don't want to say waste time, but many people would say waste. You're literally, you have a finite amount of time on this plane, whatever this plane is to you, and you're, and then many times you're like, yeah, just get through this part, just get through it. It's like we have a fast forward button and going back to the like babies on a plane thing, it's like we have a fast forward button. We're like fast forward through this part. It's boring, just fast forward. Can we just fast forward through this part? Okay, oh, play that part. That part sounds good. Yeah, I like that. You know it's, it's a. Conceptually it's just very interesting to me just because it's it doesn't seem to go to get like. It doesn't seem to. You know, it seems like if you knew that, like it seems like if you were, and there have been concepts like that. There are books that are written like hey, how do you make the most out of every day? How do you, you know, considering that you don't know, if you have 79 years that's just sort of the average of what we're talking about you could live considerably longer than that. I have more days. Or you could consider really live considerably less than that, just like I was talking about. My father, you know, lived way less than that. So, knowing that you don't know how much you time, how much time you have, it's funny that you're like, on some level, throw this time away, like this is all throw away time.
Speaker 2:It's just sort of like, eh, you know and I don't know what point I'm trying to make with that, just that it's an interesting concept to know that. Well, I guess the point I'm trying to make is with regard to, like, self-help and with regard to that aspect of it, maybe you should try not to do that, you know, maybe you should try to, and again, and ultimately, what this means is going back to what we go back to all the time, in this subject at least, is it has an aspect of living in the present moment is because fast forwarding time is let me just not pay attention to this time right now, like, let me do something to distract me from this time so that it goes faster. So you're literally like not living in the present moment for a set, for a little while, like you're, you're trying to not pay attention to what's happening right now, and many, many self-help things and spiritual people are like no, you need to like, always pay attention to the like, always, take it in.
Speaker 1:You're always and yeah, and some of the best, most fascinating conversations I've had. Most memorable conversations I've had have been on a plane. Yes. It's just the strangers sitting next to me, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Learning about different. You know advancements or ways of living and being or jobs and just things I wouldn't ever hear about before or seek out, or even know to seek out right. And I think too that you talk about distracting and you know trying to skip it and not be in the present moment. Or you know wasting time, not knowing which time we have. I think some of that has to do with what our objectives are. Yes.
Speaker 1:Like, if our goal is to get through our watch later list on YouTube, then it's not a waste of time to turn on Wi-Fi in the plane. You know that's what we really want to accomplish, and then again, like there's you covered so much. I don't know that I can remember.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm sorry I went. I went on a tear there for a second.
Speaker 1:You're good though it's, you get to speak to Brian. This is your podcast too, so it's okay it's, but yeah, I think whether something's a waste of time or not has a lot to do with your objectives, and what do? You achieve. I think, too, there are other states of consciousness that affect our perception of time that we do seek out. I'm thinking of, like the flow state, where it's like time seems to stand still. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You're in sort of the zone the zen and things just sort of happen effortlessly. You're right, yeah, that between place of familiarity and foreign. It's like you know. I know I know how to do most of this, but some of this is new and interesting and I think I can do it. I'm going to see, I want to, I want to learn, I want to try. Right.
Speaker 1:And it's working. You know it's like you're getting to the next level and you can feel it, but is it is in that moment? Is time? Is time going faster? Is it slowing down? Right. Like, if you lose track of time, is it? How do you? I think it's more. Time has passed.
Speaker 2:That's the stupid part about it. I think it's both.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Because objectively more time has passed than you've perceived, right? So time flew by. Yeah. Like you. You didn't see, like it's like a ball going by really fast, yeah, and so by. I think another thing that's related to a perception of time and it's all animals is, generally speaking, the larger an animal is, the slower the perception of time, and the smaller an animal is, the faster.
Speaker 2:Really.
Speaker 1:Or the faster they can process time Got it. Okay, there's also the aspect of predation, which is also related to their size. So like elephants see time really slowly, like they'll see a leopard.
Speaker 2:When you say predation, are you talking about, like, having predators? Is that, am I?
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, be whether how, where they are on the food train, yeah.
Speaker 2:Food train yeah. Food train. I'm in the caboose.
Speaker 1:I'm in the caboose of the food train, eating it all. Oh, oh, oh oh, that's shitty Okay.
Speaker 2:All right Explicit explicit notification.
Speaker 1:I'll put the.
Speaker 2:R and no. No, we get like one of those. We get like one. Yeah, it's, there'd be a PG 13.
Speaker 1:You can. They've moved the goalpost there. I think you can use the F bomb now and still be PG 13. Yeah, at any rate, though, like elephants, they might see a leopard on the right side of their field of vision, and then they, without even blinking, they'll just see it on the left side of their field of vision. Yeah. Because they don't care. Like the leopard isn't going to go for them. Right. So they never really had to adapt or develop a faster refresh rate.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:But, like you know, squirrels and what is it? Bunnies have a much higher, faster refresh rate. Yeah. You know, flies have a shorter lifespan, but they they have really quick reflexes. Yes.
Speaker 2:Well, it's interesting to me because one of the things I just was reading, actually while we were going through this, is one of the articles part of one of the articles that I had talked about, and it talks about the aspect of fear and it says fear is the most intensively examined in studies of time judgment. So there's two things with that. One is going back to my sort of discussion about self-help. Many of the self-help things are saying hey, you need to eliminate. Look, worry the stop. Worrying is the same thing. It's fear, worries just fear. Right, it's just, it's different.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's slightly different but you're you're scared or something Like I'm worried, this is going to happen, I'm fearful this is going to happen, right, and so it was interesting. The reason I was going to bring it up is because this because I always am fascinated by how scientists measure things like this, where it's like yeah, but how do you just? How can you measure, like, what is the actual experiment? Just tell me what the actual. And that's always fascinating to me because I would never have thought about how to do it. And then you think, oh, it's so simple and clever. So this person did a speech where they I mean a speech, excuse me a an experiment where they strapped a they call it a chronometric device to the to each of the participants' wrists and then they had them ride an amusement park ride that had a 15 story drop in it.
Speaker 2:Okay, and when asked afterwards, you know cause that could actually measure the time of the drop. When asked afterwards, most of the individuals overestimated the duration of the fall, which means what time is slowing down right, so it's stretching out right. And they are saying, yeah, this is because it's a fear, like your body is biologically fearful of falling right, cause you're going to die or could die, and and so that's. I think that gets to something sort of powerful with time. The perception of time is maybe if you can eliminate some of your fears, eliminate some of your worries, then your perception of time becomes more in line with what the actual passing of time is, not your perception of it, because that's what this is saying. It's basically saying the real time, the actual time of the drop. They said no, they overestimated it.
Speaker 2:So if you're sad, if you're depressed, if you're fearful, if you have negative emotions I will say I'll just broaden it out to negative emotions the passage of time is perceived like oh my gosh, I'm in this living hell, like you've heard people say. Oh man, I'm just like in this living hell where I got a good up and I got to go to work every day and I got to do this and I got out of the. So it's sick of all this and it's going so slow and I just like, is this all there is, and midlife crisis and all this stuff? And in terms of self-help, you can use that to your advantage and say, okay, how do I, how do I make it so that?
Speaker 1:it's like like Groundhog Day, right, you can use the monotony to your advantage.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, and sometimes I wish that that's one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes is the guy who has the stopwatch and he can stop. He clicks the stopwatch and the rest of the world stops. He's the only person that can keep going, so he gets to stop time for the rest of the world. His perception of time is his. His time keeps going, but everyone else is on pause, right, and I think they probably I think I think Adam Sandler did a movie that remote control later.
Speaker 1:that was similar to that Right Like yeah, click, that's right, and some of that is too Fast forwarding like it. I meant to mention that earlier when you were talking about trying to skip it, and we keep looking at things as a distraction and stuff and there's some pretty good implied morals to that story. It's a little hokey, but it's got Christopher walking in it, so it's great.
Speaker 2:Well. So my point is I guess what's really interesting about that is I'm always looking for the. What's the common thread, what flows through all of these things we're talking about? And that's one of those things is connecting yourself with the. I mean, let me stop. And I'll say, sometimes when you read a book and it's like, hey, you should be more in the present, and I think I'm trying to remember who the person was that wrote the. Was it Deepak Chopra that wrote the book of like the here and the now, or something like that?
Speaker 1:It was within the last 15, 20 years.
Speaker 2:Eckhart Tolle. Eckhart Tolle yeah, I'm pretty sure. And so sometimes when you hear a concept like that, you're like, oh okay, yeah, that sounds good. And you read about it and you're like, but then practically like you know how can we boil that down? So it's like something I can understand and I can understand. Try to take away, you know, try to control your emotions, because your emotions play into the passage of time, and one of those emotions is fear or worry or negativity, kind of things. And then also, if you go and look on the other side of that is you know what we were talking about a minute ago it's like you go on vacation and theoretically you have, you're having more positive emotions, you're having more like to some extent hedonistic, like pleasurable experiences. Right, the time seems to you know, the time seems to go faster than you thought. You know where. It's like man, it's already my last day of vacation and I'm already and I can't believe it went that fast you know.
Speaker 2:So you know, I just think boiling it down like that helps people sometimes, at least it helps me.
Speaker 1:Well, I think there's overlap to coming to the self-help aspect in personal psychology and stuff would be. There's sort of this own relativity. We talked in the previous episode how if the closer someone's moving to the at the speed of light, the, and they make like a quarter year long voyage, or they only age a year, but by the time they get back to earth, when else is age hundreds of years right or basically died and there's a whole new generation and so on and so forth. I think there's a parallel there to personal development, where the faster you're moving, the faster you're growing. You are changing with the change, you're moving with the world, with the times. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And the more stuck you are in fear, the more stable you are. Yeah. The more just aging, you're just decaying. You know, like in Shawshank Redemption, you can either get busy living or you can get busy dying.
Speaker 1:And what keeps you know? What do they say about you know? Staying young, you know, and keeping brain activity. It's giving yourself new puzzles, new challenges, just trying different things. Right, yeah, being a near constant state of development as opposed to a near constant state of atrophy. Stability is just waiting for crumbling to happen, waiting for entropy and decay, which is the opposite of life. Living is the art of change and adapting to change.
Speaker 2:That's the title, by the way, of your book that you're going to write is Change with the Change, oh, and then either that or it's going to be speed up to slow down.
Speaker 1:I might have to first write speed or slow down to speed up. But yeah, yeah, both are true.
Speaker 2:Well, hey, it's, hey, you know what Good for you thinking about the. You know the second book that you're going to write before you've written you've talked about the first. You're like, when I do this, my sixth book is going to be called Revenge of the Sixth. Well, so well, and there was, yeah, the only other thing I was going to talk about in this, just really briefly, because I know we're running up on our time is biological aspects of time, and I think I talked about a little bit. Like you're, you know you're aging and everything else, but it's interesting that your body keeps time. You know your actual you know, and some and it's different for each person, you know, you ever see the people that are. They don't look their age, so they're you know, hey, that person's 80 years old. It's like man, that person does not look 80 years old. And then you see somebody who's 65 and you're like, oh, they're probably in their 90s and they're like, no, they're 65, you know, they smoked a lot. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and but either way, I mean even that, like there are certain biological things that happen, as I mentioned before, we were recording, like you know, like women go through menopause and that just happens, it doesn't. At a certain time their body reduces and expands and does different hormones that create, you know, menopause, that happens right and there's there's, that's the cyclical aspect of time, biologically, where it's, like, you know, everyone goes through quote puberty, everyone goes through. Yeah. But, your, but your body.
Speaker 2:I guess my point is, at least in my mind your body is perceiving time, biologically is perceiving time, but you're not thinking about that, you're not. It's it has some internal clock that is going and at a certain time it's like yeah, this is, these are the things that cause these biological aspects to happen, and again. That's why you can't say at age 50, everyone goes through menopause is like no, some women go through early menopause, some some women are later. You know things like that. Well, yeah cause it's.
Speaker 1:It's not. It's not a process that goes by the clock it goes. It's a process that goes by reactions and the rate of decay and how you can accelerate or slow down that rate. Yeah Right, like yeah. Well and so it's more of a reaction to events than it is to a clock.
Speaker 2:So one other experiment that I'll bring up because in my, in the same thing as I just said, I'm fascinated by different types of experiments Cause somebody was trying to and this does plays a little bit into our time thing but they were trying to figure out if bees could tell time, and so they did an experiment where they put out, like a certain kind of food or something that the boot, the bees, would come to, and they did it at the same time every day and the bees would come, and then they stopped putting it out and the bees came out at the same time, and then people are like well, wait, how do you know? They're not just like reading the sunlight or the. You know, like the, you know that it's not that they actually know what time it is.
Speaker 1:Well, that's how we tell time.
Speaker 2:Right? No, I know Right.
Speaker 1:Like we have some kind of measure, like we're like oh you know, food comes out at noon every day. Sure, we look at her watch and that noon is based off of where the sun was. Sure, sun is.
Speaker 2:Oh, but so, but then, they were like yeah, but they're but they're actually. They were asking that they could actually tell time Like they actually knew.
Speaker 1:Like they had an internal clock Right, exactly, not that.
Speaker 2:So they were saying, oh, they're just reading that, they're giving an explanation. They're saying, hey, they were reading the sun, that's how they're telling that. That's how they're telling that the food's going to be out there, not that they know that it's 10 am, right. So then they did it. So then they did it in the dark, without any time aspect, and the bees came out at the same time, and they so. Then people said, yeah, but how do you know that there's not some kind of like they understand? You know the gravitational pull or some kind of thing that we don't know. You know just some kind of perception that we don't know that they did.
Speaker 2:So then, what they did was they? They flew the bees from Europe to the United States, and the bees came out at the time that it would be 10 am in Europe, not 10 am in the United States, because, basically they, they knew that that was the same exact time, that and I'm probably like butchering it, but basically the way that the experiment, you know went. Is that they? You know they basically. So basically the bees were like jet lagged, you know the bees.
Speaker 2:The bees were like yeah it's time to eat, you know, and so anyway, look it up if you want to see whether I was wrong, and right in my in the way that I summarize that experiment. Anyway, okay, but.
Speaker 1:I think. I think jet lag is a good example, though, of how we have an internal clock. Yes. Right, like biologically, we have a sense of time. Yeah, I think it's. Even our concept of time is at the neurological level, the neurons.
Speaker 2:So would we get jet lag if we didn't have, if we didn't have clocks, like if we just said, hey, we never made that discovery, and we just said, hey, we're going to fly from New York to Paris, would we still get jet lag?
Speaker 1:I think so. I don't know. I think that plays into quote relativity too, and, like it turns, it's almost like a weird cognitive dissonance, right, because we feel, like parts of us feel like it's the time of day, it would be, wherever we came from, we're also receiving the signals that it's later in the day because the sun is at a different place or whatever, and so there's that disconnect and we have to sort of recalibrate and get everything realigned.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd like to see if there's experiments like with. Like I said, it's just for me, I don't know, it's weird. Anyway, by no means am I a scientist. So there's that. By no means at all. No means no, and so all right, we've killed the subject somewhat, and come back with us on the next episode. We're going to be talking about time travel Bonus episode.
Speaker 2:So bonus? Oh yeah, that is bonus. Happy Valentine's Day to everyone for the bonus episode. See you guys, talk to you guys later. See you and talk to you guys later. I won't see you later, I'll talk to you later, bye, bye.