Forget Everything You Know About Time

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 11:00:00 +0300

M itch Hedberg had a bit about late-night television:

“I saw a commercial on late-night TV, it said, ‘Forget everything you know about slipcovers.’ So I did, and it was a load off my mind. Then the commercial tried to sell me slipcovers, but I didn’t know what the hell they were.”

So here is my pitch: forget everything you know about time.

I mean it. Put the intuition down and step away from it. You learned clocks and calendars before you could read, you have used them every single day since, and that fluency is precisely the problem — it is conversational fluency. It survives on ambiguity, because a human listener quietly patches the gaps for you. A computer will not. It takes your assumption, applies it with total consistency, and hands you back something wrong in a way you never thought to check.

Time on Mike Mwita

Forget Everything You Know About Time