Wealth & Money Quote by Frank Dane

Frank Dane takes a stale piece of Protestant work ethic and sharpens it into a jab at modern monetized attention. "Time is money" is the kind of maxim that usually pretends to be neutral wisdom; Dane makes it suddenly specific, even petty, by adding "especially" and naming two transactions everyone recognizes as mildly predatory: legal counsel and advertising.

The line works because it turns an abstract metaphor into a felt experience. With lawyers, the subtext is billing-by-the-minute: time doesn’t just equal money, it actively converts into money in real time, often while you’re anxious, confused, or cornered. Dane isn’t arguing that lawyers are bad; he’s pointing at the structural incentive. The clock becomes a silent negotiator in the room, pressuring you to speak faster, decide sooner, and accept ambiguity because clarity costs.

Buying a commercial flips the lens. Now the lawyer’s meter becomes the market’s meter: attention is purchased, packaged, and sold. The "time" in question isn’t even yours; it’s the audience’s. Dane slyly suggests that capitalism has gotten so efficient it charges for time twice - once to produce persuasion, once to rent the seconds in which persuasion can land.

Contextually, it’s a writer’s quip rooted in late-20th/early-21st-century life: the service economy, the attention economy, the way professional expertise and mass media both turn minutes into invoices. The joke lands because it’s true enough to sting, and cynical enough to feel like a coping mechanism.