Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey that everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking,
Speaker 1: the podcast that looks at the future and says, at
Speaker 1: once I awoke to a futuristic world that were flying
Speaker 1: cars and gigantic metal bugs on Jonathan Strickland and I'm
Speaker 1: Lauren volc obam Our third co host, Joe McCormick is
Speaker 1: out today, so we are we are forging bravely ahead
Speaker 1: into the future alone. I have a feeling he's going
Speaker 1: to be very upset with us when he comes back
Speaker 1: and finds out what this topic is, because I'm sure
Speaker 1: he would have wanted to have been a part of this,
Speaker 1: actually that that had occurred to me. He's going to
Speaker 1: be touts unhappy. But maybe that just means that we
Speaker 1: can do a sequel episode. There's there's no shortage of
Speaker 1: what we're about to talk about, which is bad predictions
Speaker 1: about the future. See, this show is all about talking
Speaker 1: about the future and kind of extrapolating from what we
Speaker 1: know out and guessing what is going to come in
Speaker 1: the future. But as it turns out, that's really tough
Speaker 1: to do, and history is filled with examples of people
Speaker 1: making bold, unfounded predictions that they're they're beautiful in their
Speaker 1: scope and ridiculousness. Yeah, now we've got we've got a
Speaker 1: bunch of those listed that we're going to talk about.
Speaker 1: Some of them actually either come close to the truth
Speaker 1: or you can understand why they were wrong at the
Speaker 1: time that the prediction was made, because the conditions were
Speaker 1: so very different at that time and you could not
Speaker 1: have necessarily anticipated the changes that would make our reality
Speaker 1: as we know it possible. Sure, and some of them
Speaker 1: are founded in a pure misunderstanding of things like physics.
Speaker 1: That's true. So first, before we even start off, I
Speaker 1: want to give a huge shout out. There's an amazing
Speaker 1: blog called Paleo Future, which researches, collects, and presents a
Speaker 1: rich assortment of predictions, both accurate and hilariously off target.
Speaker 1: So you can just go to paleo future dot com
Speaker 1: and they have the blogs there. That was incredibly helpful
Speaker 1: because it's all divided up by decade if you really
Speaker 1: want to go decade by decade. Most of the ones
Speaker 1: that I have for the early predictions came from there,
Speaker 1: not all of them, but a lot of them. Uh,
Speaker 1: the later predictions came from multiple places, because you'll discover
Speaker 1: that inaccurate predictions about the future are not limited to say,
Speaker 1: the late nineteenth century. We're still doing them today, Lauren
Speaker 1: and I actually do them annually because on our other
Speaker 1: show Tex stuff we make at the beginning of the year,
Speaker 1: we make a predictions episode where we predict what will
Speaker 1: happen in the following twelve months, and then at the
Speaker 1: very end of the year we come back and rate ourselves.
Speaker 1: This this it's always a sliding scale. This past year
Speaker 1: was squid basses last year. But you never know. I
Speaker 1: mean it's look, I just I just follow the instructions
Speaker 1: that get slid under my door along with some weird
Speaker 1: sticky smoke stuff. I don't I don't question it. So yeah,
Speaker 1: every every year we're pretty wrong. We liked make that
Speaker 1: annual tradition, so more in good company we are. We
Speaker 1: are in such good companies. Starting back in eighteen seventy six. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so this is a prediction from Sir William Priest, who
Speaker 1: was of the British Post Office, who said the Americans
Speaker 1: have need of the telephone, but we do not. We
Speaker 1: have plenty of messenger boys. How's that working out for
Speaker 1: you England? Yeah, good job. I bet those messenger boys
Speaker 1: are awful busy swimming across the Atlantic to deliver the
Speaker 1: missives over here for people who want to make those
Speaker 1: long distance messenger boy calls. Oh yeah, Um, one of
Speaker 1: those moments where someone saw a technology and saw no
Speaker 1: practical use for it whatsoever and just snootily lifted his, well,
Speaker 1: his his noble English proboscis into the air. Also, being
Speaker 1: that he was, you know, affiliated with the post office,
Speaker 1: it could be that there was a little bit of
Speaker 1: a you know, a little a little little bit of
Speaker 1: a bias. Share absolutely and next one also from eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy six, and also with a little bit of a bias.
Speaker 1: The quote is this telephone has too many shortcomings to
Speaker 1: be seriously considered as a means of communication. Um. That
Speaker 1: was from a memo within Western Union. Yeah, also a
Speaker 1: little conflict there. Western Union definitely didn't really care if
Speaker 1: the telephone. In fact did not want the telephone to
Speaker 1: to succeed. Uh. Spoiler alert for those who had not
Speaker 1: been keeping up with news, the telephones wildly popular. One
Speaker 1: could say Western Unions send it's less telegram back in
Speaker 1: two thousand and six, so just saying eighty nine a
Speaker 1: Cornhill University professor named Dr Thurston said that steam engines
Speaker 1: would remain the most important technology for centuries, and the
Speaker 1: gas engines and electricity would only be used for small industries,
Speaker 1: not great ones, and that steam would even drive the
Speaker 1: engines of quote flying trains end quote that could cross
Speaker 1: the continent in two days. And that's one of those
Speaker 1: basic misunderstandings of physics. I think, I I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't think that that's how steamed. Well. I think Cornell
Speaker 1: University professor he might have had a good grip on
Speaker 1: on physics, but just thought that you would be able
Speaker 1: to constantly scale up steam power, which is not the truth.
Speaker 1: You can't constantly scale it up unless you were able
Speaker 1: to generate incredible amounts of heat that would melt anything
Speaker 1: closely resembling a steam engine. And I suppose to be fair,
Speaker 1: most forms of electricity are are still based around steam power.
Speaker 1: It's all. It's all turbines burning stuff to make steam
Speaker 1: to turn turbines. Yeah. So I guess, if you want
Speaker 1: to be really um, I guess technical, it's kind of
Speaker 1: steam ish, But yeah, it's not steam engines the way
Speaker 1: that he was he was envisioning now to be fair. Also,
Speaker 1: at the time, gas engines were not terribly safe or
Speaker 1: productive there. This was right around the time that the
Speaker 1: carburetor was being designed, and before the carburetor had really
Speaker 1: taken form. Gasoline engines were more dangerous than useful. So
Speaker 1: when you spark really flammable liquid, yeah, stuff burns, as
Speaker 1: it turns out, So unless you've got the right mix
Speaker 1: of air and fuel, you stand the chance of burning
Speaker 1: down whatever it is you're trying to power. So it's understandable,
Speaker 1: but it still was a very wrong prediction. In fact,
Speaker 1: steam power would fade from prominence rapidly after the the
Speaker 1: late nineteenth century and gasoline would take over. Um, So yeah,
Speaker 1: that was that one was pretty wrong. Eighte we have
Speaker 1: the Newark Daily Advocate, which had four journalists make predictions
Speaker 1: for what the year n three would look like, and
Speaker 1: one of the highlights was saying that Chicago would be
Speaker 1: the greatest city in the United States, that out of
Speaker 1: all the cities, Chicago would be number one, and that
Speaker 1: if you were to go out west, there would be
Speaker 1: many grand cities, but none so grand as Salt Lake City,
Speaker 1: which would be the most beautiful and extensive city in
Speaker 1: all of the West and that Denver would end up
Speaker 1: being as large as New York City. I pulled the
Speaker 1: census from the nineteen nineties and by Chicago was down
Speaker 1: to being the third largest city in the US, having
Speaker 1: fallen behind Los Angeles, and Denver was in twenty sixth place,
Speaker 1: with six point four percent of the population of New
Speaker 1: York City. So at the end of the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: I think the idea was that there was going to
Speaker 1: be this explosion of population growth in the West, not
Speaker 1: the West coast, but as far as Denver, that that
Speaker 1: was just an area of opportunity that was going to
Speaker 1: really catch on. And it just, uh, you know, it grew.
Speaker 1: It just didn't grow exponentially the way they had anticipated.
Speaker 1: Sure in other cities. I mean I don't think that
Speaker 1: anyone really anticipated that suburbs of San Francisco We're going
Speaker 1: to grow the way that they did. Well yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: before Silicon Valley, no one would have imagined that San
Speaker 1: Francisco would have been what it is today. I mean,
Speaker 1: today it's one of the most expensive areas in the
Speaker 1: world to live in, if not the most to do.
Speaker 1: Like San Francisco Paris, like they're there are a couple
Speaker 1: of cities that are that are rivaling each other for
Speaker 1: a most expensive city ever. Uh. Meanwhile, right around the
Speaker 1: year nineteen hundred UM exactly when is somewhat of a
Speaker 1: mystery because we don't have the actual dates on the illustrations.
Speaker 1: A French illustrated by the name Albert Robida created a
Speaker 1: lithograph depicting what it would be like to travel to
Speaker 1: the opera in the year two thousand, because clearly traveling
Speaker 1: to the opera is still going to be at the
Speaker 1: top of everyone's list of things to do. You know,
Speaker 1: the Atlanta Opera Company wonderful organization, but I don't make
Speaker 1: it out there nearly as frequently as I think Albert
Speaker 1: would prefer. But in this lithograph you see the well
Speaker 1: to do all wearing late nineteenth century French clothing because
Speaker 1: clothing apparently doesn't change in a hundred years. Although to
Speaker 1: be fair, if I had the option to, I would
Speaker 1: wear late nineteenth century French clothing everywhere. I'd go for
Speaker 1: late uh, late probably eighteenth century, because that like the
Speaker 1: really tall weeks. But then after that they board flying
Speaker 1: busses and personal vehicles, flying personal vehicles that looked like
Speaker 1: something out of uh the Jewels Vernish tomorrow Land stuff.
Speaker 1: So if you've been to Disneyland and seeing like the
Speaker 1: the rockets that look like they came straight off a
Speaker 1: Jewels Verne novel, that's kind of what these things look like.
Speaker 1: They were pretty infatuated with with flying vehicles right around
Speaker 1: that time. Yeah, I've got another one I can't wait
Speaker 1: to talk about a little bit later, but I'm not
Speaker 1: going to spoil it. So also around nineteen hundred, this
Speaker 1: is a big one. So there's a civil engineer named
Speaker 1: John Watkins, and he wrote an article for the Ladies
Speaker 1: Home Journal that had a host of predictions in it.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a huge, huge article and I will
Speaker 1: link it when we we put this podcast out because
Speaker 1: it's worth the read. There there's some predictions that were
Speaker 1: pretty good. There are other predictions that were completely wrong.
Speaker 1: For example, he thought that within a hundred years this
Speaker 1: this was supposed to be by the year two thousand,
Speaker 1: we with a limit the letters C, X, and Q
Speaker 1: from the alphabet can just get rid of them. They're
Speaker 1: not doing anyone any good. He clearly underestimated the impact
Speaker 1: that low cats would happen. The letter X Yeah, text speak.
Speaker 1: As it turns out, really needs that X letter there
Speaker 1: so C and Q al right, yeah, sure, who needs them?
Speaker 1: But that X you can you can do you can
Speaker 1: do that with a k people. Yeah. So he also
Speaker 1: predicted that all animals everywhere, with the possible exception of Menagerie's,
Speaker 1: would go extinct, would be eradicated in fact, like including bugs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he said that flies and mosquitoes are unnecessary. Therefore we
Speaker 1: would actually take the take the end cockroaches, we'd take
Speaker 1: the effort to completely extinguish all forms of them. We
Speaker 1: would kill all of them. But this if you think
Speaker 1: this is a crazy idea that mankind would just get
Speaker 1: rid of all animals, it was incredibly prevalent at this time.
Speaker 1: Actually I didn't include every instance of it because it
Speaker 1: just one it got depressing, and two and two it
Speaker 1: was just you know, you really only have to mentioned
Speaker 1: at once. But he was not the only person to say, oh,
Speaker 1: in the future, we're not even gonna have animals, because
Speaker 1: what use are animals? They don't have any useful purpose.
Speaker 1: Therefore we could just we don't even need to They're
Speaker 1: they're not even a consideration. I'm just ever here cringing,
Speaker 1: which I'm which is playing really well. On radio, I'm sure,
Speaker 1: but ye, yeah, it's it was pretty pretty rough. He
Speaker 1: also said all cities would be free of noise because
Speaker 1: vehicles would move on cushioned wheels, street cars would not
Speaker 1: exist in major cities, and trains would either be high
Speaker 1: above ground or below it as a subway. That is
Speaker 1: a beautiful dream. Yeah. Yeah, anyone who's listened very carefully
Speaker 1: to our podcasts knows that that dream has not become
Speaker 1: a reality. Our our podcast room is on the eleventh
Speaker 1: floor of a building and faces out towards a busy street. Uh,
Speaker 1: you could say the busy street in Atlanta, because it
Speaker 1: is Peachtree and occasionally you might hear some some noises
Speaker 1: from there. So not so not so free of noise
Speaker 1: after But some of the predictions that he did get right, Okay,
Speaker 1: So he predicted that we would have climate controls for homes,
Speaker 1: which was not something that was common back in the
Speaker 1: but it's pretty common these days. Yeah. He he thought
Speaker 1: of it as spigots that would have either hot air
Speaker 1: or cold air delivered to your home, So you would
Speaker 1: actually turn the spigot on and would fill your home
Speaker 1: either with cool air or hot air. Now, obviously that's
Speaker 1: not accurate to how climate control like h VAC units
Speaker 1: work today. But that but the concept is there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he saw a technology that would allow us to be
Speaker 1: more comfortable inside, and in fact, that has happened. He
Speaker 1: also predicted that we'd be able to buy ready cooked
Speaker 1: meals at establishments without a problem to be reheated at home,
Speaker 1: so you could go to He he thought of it
Speaker 1: as like a bakery where you would go and pick
Speaker 1: up something that had already been cooked and you would
Speaker 1: just you would take it home and that would save
Speaker 1: you the trouble of having to cook a meal yourself. Honestly,
Speaker 1: if this didn't exist, I would only eat about one
Speaker 1: out of seven days. If it didn't exist, college students
Speaker 1: would be extinct, is really what it comes down to.
Speaker 1: There would not be such a creature as the college
Speaker 1: student were it not for pre cooked meals. Um. I
Speaker 1: say that as a former college student. I remember. So.
Speaker 1: He also predicted that photographs will be telegraphed, so that
Speaker 1: if something happens in China, you'd see the photos of
Speaker 1: it an hour later in the United States. He says
Speaker 1: this by two thousand, so he does. He foresees a
Speaker 1: time where we are able to transmit information as in
Speaker 1: the information and a photograph over radio lines essentially, and
Speaker 1: so that was a very good prediction, and in fact,
Speaker 1: that's exactly what we can do now, but because telegraphs
Speaker 1: pretty quickly. But it's pretty cool. Yeah, So anyway, I'll,
Speaker 1: like I said, I'll include a list of all his predictions,
Speaker 1: because trust me, there are a ton more, and I
Speaker 1: wanted to include lots of them, but I knew that
Speaker 1: if I did that, it would just be a podcast
Speaker 1: about his predictions, which I guess we could have done,
Speaker 1: but it would have been better if we had been
Speaker 1: able to do that back in two thousand, the year
Speaker 1: when those predictions would have either been true or false
Speaker 1: for the first time, because it was one years. Hence, well,
Speaker 1: in the next fifty years, when we actually create that
Speaker 1: way back machine, well then we can go back and
Speaker 1: our next episode will actually be recorded years before how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works was really a thing in our lives. So
Speaker 1: that'll be exciting. Nineteen o one, we have a French
Speaker 1: illustrator apparently named Monier based upon the Ormonier, I should say,
Speaker 1: based upon the signature on the art. However, the only illustrator,
Speaker 1: French illustrator I know whose name is Monier is Henree
Speaker 1: Monier who passed away about three decades before nineteen o one,
Speaker 1: so it's clearly not him. But anyway, there's some sketches
Speaker 1: of people using personal flying devices, you know, like jet packs,
Speaker 1: except they're not jet packs. They were wings and propellers.
Speaker 1: Like imagine a gentleman in a suit coat, a long
Speaker 1: suit coat, obvious he's got he's got wings on his back,
Speaker 1: and a propeller is sticking out of the bottom of
Speaker 1: the suit coat allowing him to fly through the air,
Speaker 1: so it looks like he's got a propeller coming out
Speaker 1: of his posterior. Same thing with ladies, except out of
Speaker 1: the bottom of their dresses. Their dresses also outfitted with
Speaker 1: very stylish Edison style lightbulbs to light the way, because
Speaker 1: you don't want to fly in the dark. Um and
Speaker 1: uh yeah, they because they're French illustrations. One of them
Speaker 1: shows a lady flying off and a gentleman flying right
Speaker 1: behind her, his hand over his heart. Clearly he's infatuated
Speaker 1: with her, and it essentially the little message underneath says
Speaker 1: how a man will follow a lady in the future.
Speaker 1: We have a New Zealand Star article that was called
Speaker 1: the morning Tub a hundred years hence, which I thought
Speaker 1: was a truly charming title for an article. It predicted
Speaker 1: that by two thousand six, we would all be so
Speaker 1: eager to spend our leisure moments pursuing various activities that
Speaker 1: we would invent a tub that would get us clean
Speaker 1: much faster than the traditional bathtub. So it would use
Speaker 1: oxygenated water propelled against us to replace scrubbing. Um. You
Speaker 1: wouldn't have to do any kind of physical scrubb because
Speaker 1: the water does it for you. There'd be a drying cabinet.
Speaker 1: You'd step into the drying cabinet and it would mechanically
Speaker 1: use little soft brushes to dry the skin, and then
Speaker 1: it would invigorate your skin, possibly using electricity, so that
Speaker 1: you were full of them and vigor in the morning. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I figured nothing. Nothing really gets the blood going like
Speaker 1: electroshock therapy. Also, another thing I didn't really include with
Speaker 1: these predictions, but is very true of this particular time,
Speaker 1: the early early twentieth century, was that a lot of
Speaker 1: people held magical beliefs about electricity. They thought electricity could
Speaker 1: cure everything from mental disease to obesity. Uh. They thought that,
Speaker 1: you know, they saw that electricity could have power over
Speaker 1: where things like it can make a dead muscle contract.
Speaker 1: They also knew that there were some electrical impulses going
Speaker 1: on with the brain, and that if you were to
Speaker 1: encounter electrical impulses that could totally short circuit you. So
Speaker 1: some of their beliefs were understandable because it was based
Speaker 1: upon a lack of information. But yeah, this is just
Speaker 1: one example of an idea of using electricity for quote
Speaker 1: unquote magical purposes. So after you get all that, you know,
Speaker 1: showering done or bathing done and drying and electricity through
Speaker 1: your skin, then you could take an elevator down to breakfast, right,
Speaker 1: because no one in the future has time for stairs. No,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of moving sidewalks in these predictions too,
Speaker 1: but I skipped those because come on anyway, and then
Speaker 1: you know, take your news. You either read a newspaper
Speaker 1: or perhaps even use a device that talks to you
Speaker 1: and speaks the day's news into your ear. That's that's wild. Actually,
Speaker 1: at the time, that was pretty wild. I was relatively wild. Um.
Speaker 1: The for news radio broadcast is believed to not have
Speaker 1: happened until in Detroit. Public broadcasting itself began as early
Speaker 1: as just four years after this prediction in nineteen ten,
Speaker 1: when tenor Enrico Caruso sang from the Metropolitan Opera House
Speaker 1: in New York to various receivers throughout the city, and
Speaker 1: in fact, a lot of other interesting uh predictions said
Speaker 1: that radio would allow in an unparalleled era of culture
Speaker 1: because you would be able to listen to the world's
Speaker 1: most famous artists performing music, singing opera, this sort of
Speaker 1: stuff by going to a place that has a radio
Speaker 1: and being able to hear it, and it would be
Speaker 1: just as good as if you were there. The idea
Speaker 1: being that the technology itself would improve to the point
Speaker 1: where you would listen to it from a radio and
Speaker 1: it would be as if you were standing in the
Speaker 1: venue itself. That was and again another way that people
Speaker 1: were kind of projecting forward based upon the technology of
Speaker 1: the time, How could this improve? What would it be
Speaker 1: like in the future, And a lot of them were saying, well,
Speaker 1: in a hundred years, you'll be able to listen to
Speaker 1: anybody anywhere doing whatever it is you want to hear
Speaker 1: through the radio, because again that their minds were limited
Speaker 1: by what they already Sure, sure, no one back then
Speaker 1: was really imagining YouTube right. No, not even even the
Speaker 1: YouTube founder, as we'll find out, had his doubts much
Speaker 1: much later than New York Tribune included a sobering warning
Speaker 1: about all those flying machines that are going to be everywhere,
Speaker 1: pointing out that burglars would soon find a way to
Speaker 1: fly aircraft silently and thus land on rooftops to rob
Speaker 1: people blind. Nineteen eleven. Okay, so, Thomas Edison was asked
Speaker 1: to write a little bit about what he thought the
Speaker 1: future would be like, what the world would be like
Speaker 1: a hundred years from nineteen eleven. Yeah, and uh yeah
Speaker 1: he he had a lot of interesting predictions, some of
Speaker 1: which were a little off the mark. For example, he
Speaker 1: said that bars of gold would become as cheap and
Speaker 1: plentiful as bars of iron or steel by because he
Speaker 1: thought we were on the brink of discovering the secret
Speaker 1: of transmutation like alchemy. Yeah, we're talking, you know, sixteenth
Speaker 1: century ideas of being able to transform one material into
Speaker 1: another through some form physical or chemical process. How is Edison?
Speaker 1: I'm disappointed in you. He had to take a break
Speaker 1: between electrocuting elephants to death to come up with some
Speaker 1: other ideas so you know, we all know that was
Speaker 1: an Edison who literally did that. No, he just condoned it. Uh.
Speaker 1: Also that elephant was a killer, but still I think
Speaker 1: deserved a full trial and not just a summary execution.
Speaker 1: He also predicted that the material of home furnishings and
Speaker 1: construction would be primarily steel. We would move away from
Speaker 1: wood home furnishing steel. Yeah, like your table would be
Speaker 1: made out of steel, your chairs would be made out
Speaker 1: of steel. Cradle, baby cradle totally made out of steel.
Speaker 1: And that steel itself would become lighter and stronger over time,
Speaker 1: so that you could have a sideboard, was his example.
Speaker 1: You could have a sideboard made up of steel that
Speaker 1: would be lighter and easier to move and more rugged
Speaker 1: than a wooden sideboard. So when you have to move
Speaker 1: the sideboard, as I'm sure we're all familiar with, I
Speaker 1: I don't even know why I bother putting a sideboard in.
Speaker 1: All I do is move it, um. But you would
Speaker 1: be able to do so much more easily with a
Speaker 1: steel one than woulden one. So he really thought we
Speaker 1: were going to move away from that. He also thought
Speaker 1: that books would move away from paper pages. He thought
Speaker 1: that we would start making books using leaves of nickel,
Speaker 1: and those leaves and nickel would be thinner, more flexible,
Speaker 1: and more durable than paper. So you could have a
Speaker 1: book that's more durable than a traditional one. A two
Speaker 1: inch thick book with these leaves of nickel pages would
Speaker 1: have enough pages in it to hold a hundred volumes
Speaker 1: in one two inch book. So because very thin metal
Speaker 1: in in congregate is obviously lighter than would pulp, well
Speaker 1: might not be lighter, but it would be more compact,
Speaker 1: is his argument. Um, yeah, it was. It was kind
Speaker 1: of an interesting idea, the idea of being able to
Speaker 1: carry a library around with you, which in fact has happened,
Speaker 1: although it's happened digitally, not physically. So his all of
Speaker 1: these top few revealed to me a kind of basic
Speaker 1: misunderstanding of materials. Yeah, yeah, well, you know again, Basing,
Speaker 1: he was making predictions based upon the world around him,
Speaker 1: and he was probably grouchy that day. Tesla man have
Speaker 1: said something that really ticked him off, you know, But
Speaker 1: but he did get he did get some things right.
Speaker 1: He did. He said that steam engines would fade into obscurity.
Speaker 1: He disagreed with our our Cornell professor from earlier He
Speaker 1: said that they would fade into obscurity and that we
Speaker 1: rely nearly exclusively on electricity, which granted Thomas Edison, he's
Speaker 1: got he's got a stake in that whole electricity thing.
Speaker 1: I don't I don't mean to say he's going in
Speaker 1: it without bias, but he was right. He also predicted
Speaker 1: that we'd use large aircraft to fly at incredible speeds. Now,
Speaker 1: his version of incredible speed was two hundred miles per
Speaker 1: which is slow for a coramcial aircraft. However, he was
Speaker 1: thinking of, you know, think about it, like, at this time,
Speaker 1: the idea of a large flying aircraft that could move
Speaker 1: at these speeds was not a very common idea. The
Speaker 1: idea of a heavier than air uh aircraft was was
Speaker 1: still very much in this kind of weird experimental phase. Right.
Speaker 1: It had been less than a decade before that that
Speaker 1: the Wright brothers had taken their first flight. So yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's it's pretty impressive for him to go on this. UH.
Speaker 1: That was a that was a pretty bold prediction that
Speaker 1: ended up being more or less true. Actually ended up
Speaker 1: being a little modest because we can fly it much
Speaker 1: faster than two under three. We get a really official
Speaker 1: prediction from the Surgeon General Hugh S. Cummings, who predicted
Speaker 1: that in the future all food would be in pill form.
Speaker 1: I've always heard this action I did not realize. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not certain that Cummings was the first person to
Speaker 1: suggest this, but I didn't realize how far back this
Speaker 1: idea of in the future all food will be in
Speaker 1: pill I think it has a nineteen fifties so. But yeah,
Speaker 1: he had, and he had talked about how people had
Speaker 1: already started creating dehydrated food that reduced food down to
Speaker 1: seventy of its original volume, and so that it's just
Speaker 1: a matter of time before we get this to a
Speaker 1: point where you know, we no longer bothered by the
Speaker 1: drudgery of eating a meal. Yeah, people had some as
Speaker 1: Joe and I went into in our three D Printed
Speaker 1: Food episode, we people had some really interesting ideas about
Speaker 1: the bothersomeness of acquiring nutrition, which, which to be fair,
Speaker 1: is totally bothersome. I mean, that's having to eat three
Speaker 1: times a day things. It doesn't make me think that
Speaker 1: Cummings needed to go to a couple of the restaurants
Speaker 1: I like, because once you once you experience like I
Speaker 1: don't know, yeah burger, and you get one of those
Speaker 1: yeah burgers, you would not want to replace that with
Speaker 1: a pill. You would not know. All right, here's here's
Speaker 1: where one of the guys have a very controversial person
Speaker 1: in film history, uh, very influential and also made one
Speaker 1: of the films that was possibly the most hateful movie
Speaker 1: I've ever seen. D W. Griffith, pioneer filmmaker. He directed
Speaker 1: The Birth of a Nation, which that's the that's the movie.
Speaker 1: Incredibly influential. It established a lot of editing techniques and
Speaker 1: filmmaking techniques that people still use today. Also dealt with
Speaker 1: the the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, so not
Speaker 1: exactly a charming story. Anyway. He predicted that there wouldn't
Speaker 1: be any way to transmit moving pictures to Holmes, and
Speaker 1: that the cinema would become more important, eventually replacing libraries.
Speaker 1: You could go to a library and request a film,
Speaker 1: the idea being that kind of like you go to
Speaker 1: or you could go to a cinema and request a film,
Speaker 1: like you could go to a library and request a book.
Speaker 1: So he thought that this this, uh, this concept of
Speaker 1: something like television was completely baseless. Of course, filmmaker so
Speaker 1: again you have that that bias you come from the
Speaker 1: worldview from a certain perspective. We have Eddie Rickenbacker, who
Speaker 1: is a pilot, who said within the next two decades
Speaker 1: autos will be made with folding wings. He foresaw a
Speaker 1: time where the motorists would become a pilot. Okay, to
Speaker 1: be fair, people had already been designing flying cars and
Speaker 1: or roadable airplanes since nineteen seventeen um, which for the
Speaker 1: record is just fourteen years after the Right Brothers took
Speaker 1: that first flight of theirs Um. But of course we
Speaker 1: are still waiting to see a widespread version. And as
Speaker 1: we have talked about on the show before and and
Speaker 1: those early early car flying car thingies all either had
Speaker 1: fixed wings, which meant that they were you know, roadable planes,
Speaker 1: like they couldn't really drive on the road either because
Speaker 1: they were too wide, or they had detachable wings. But
Speaker 1: not these weird kind of folding wings that could unfold
Speaker 1: from a car and turn your car into a plane.
Speaker 1: We're still waiting on those. I mean, we all know that,
Speaker 1: we've done episodes about it. So but yeah, he he
Speaker 1: said that by nineteen four they would be commonplace. So
Speaker 1: that didn't happen personally, I blame World War two. Hugo
Speaker 1: Gernsback wrote some predictions about what the world would be
Speaker 1: like within fifty years, so that would make it nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy five. So here are his predictions for nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 1: First of all, he correctly predicted that broadcast television would
Speaker 1: become a thing that essentially he was saying moving pictures
Speaker 1: by radio, which is more or less broadcast television. But
Speaker 1: he was really really excited by radio, like kind of
Speaker 1: the way some of those other people were excited about electricity.
Speaker 1: He thought that we would be able to teleport physical
Speaker 1: objects using radio waves. So yeah, so you could take
Speaker 1: you can mind coal and then you could teleport the
Speaker 1: coal directly to the power plant without having to transport
Speaker 1: it from one place to another, using this kind of
Speaker 1: miraculous technology. And his point was saying that if you
Speaker 1: look back, like the predictions I'm going to give are
Speaker 1: going to sound crazy to you. But if you went
Speaker 1: back fifty years and tried to tell someone about X rays,
Speaker 1: they would think you were crazy. That was his his justification.
Speaker 1: He also said that we would all wear electric skates
Speaker 1: to get around instead of walking, and that these electric
Speaker 1: skates would less travel eight or ten miles per hour
Speaker 1: and would be powered by radio waves. Would actually have
Speaker 1: a wire going up from the skates all the way
Speaker 1: up our bodies to us say, a hat, which would
Speaker 1: an antenna hat that would gather energy through radio waves.
Speaker 1: I want I want this feature. I want it right now.
Speaker 1: It's like being Dazzler, except with with a really cool hat.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure we can get you a hat with
Speaker 1: an antenna sticking out of it, and maybe some of
Speaker 1: those sneakers that have the skate the little skates worked
Speaker 1: into them, and you could at least pretend that's I'd
Speaker 1: take it. All right, This as close as I think
Speaker 1: I can get you. We have our first possibly apocryphal prediction,
Speaker 1: This one from Thomas Watson, who was chairman of IBM,
Speaker 1: who who allegedly said, I think there is a world
Speaker 1: market for maybe five computers. This this one is is
Speaker 1: in really quite heavy dispute. No one can find the
Speaker 1: source of it outside of some Usenet posts, and Watson
Speaker 1: was not active one no and and newspaper columns dating
Speaker 1: from the nineteen eighties or later. Um. Some think it
Speaker 1: might be a corruption or misattribution of a quote from someone,
Speaker 1: and and sources on who that someone is very pretty
Speaker 1: widely from the nineteen fifties or so about the UK
Speaker 1: only needing three to five computers ever, either way at
Speaker 1: any rate shortsighted prediction. Well, you know, at the time,
Speaker 1: computers were these vacuum tube house sized kind of things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that could that could do very limited work, like very specific,
Speaker 1: very limited work. And so I can see I can
Speaker 1: see that the world market only needing five of those. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't have a need for a house sized computer
Speaker 1: that I have to program physically through punch cards or
Speaker 1: plugs and switches. That would be ridiculous. You know, need
Speaker 1: is a strong word. I'm not saying I wouldn't take one.
Speaker 1: I mean, if they made Hunt the Wumpus for such
Speaker 1: a computer, I guess i'd try it anyway. In yes,
Speaker 1: this one it comes from Darrel's Zenoch, who is of
Speaker 1: twentieth century Fox and says television won't be able to
Speaker 1: hold onto any market it captures after the first six months.
Speaker 1: People will soon get tired of staring at Plywood box
Speaker 1: every night. Yeah. So this is a guy who had
Speaker 1: already produced over a hundred films by the stage. So
Speaker 1: he's one of those people who had some steaks. D W. Griffith.
Speaker 1: It's funny though there are other filmmakers. Um uh, I
Speaker 1: think Cecil will be the mill. Actually predicted that cameras
Speaker 1: and film would become cheap enough for people to be
Speaker 1: able to produce movies out of their own homes, and
Speaker 1: that lenses and film production techniques would improve to the
Speaker 1: point where you wouldn't need super expensive lighting to in
Speaker 1: order to get a good picture. His point was saying
Speaker 1: that one of the limiting factors was that only movie
Speaker 1: studios at the time could produce pictures because you had
Speaker 1: to have such incredible amounts of lighting in order to
Speaker 1: even capture the images on film. He predicted, now within
Speaker 1: a hundred years, we're going to have these movies done
Speaker 1: in the home and they're gonna look better than what
Speaker 1: we can do in the studio right now, which was
Speaker 1: pretty amazing. I think that that is the difference in thought.
Speaker 1: And forgive me Hollywood types who are listening to this
Speaker 1: between a a director, you know, a kind of creative force,
Speaker 1: and a producer who is a money making force. Any
Speaker 1: producers out there who would like to make some money
Speaker 1: on my ideas, just give me a call. Lauren clearly
Speaker 1: doesn't understand your importance, but I do. I'm certainly not
Speaker 1: saying that producers cannot also be a creative force. But
Speaker 1: but this guy, this guy does not sound like and
Speaker 1: again he also had a steak like you said, he
Speaker 1: had a steak in. This was one of those things
Speaker 1: that if you were to say, give credence to what
Speaker 1: could potentially be a really disruptive technology to your business,
Speaker 1: then that's considered a bad idea. You know, you don't
Speaker 1: want to tell everyone that the other guy has got
Speaker 1: a legitimate fight on their hands, that that's not you
Speaker 1: want to dismiss it and try and hold SOE Mechanics
Speaker 1: Illustrated published an article that claimed that helicopters would replace
Speaker 1: cars and we would fly everywhere, because giving average drivers
Speaker 1: a flying license is a really good plan. Not to
Speaker 1: mention a flying license for a helicopter one of the
Speaker 1: most difficult types of aircraft to fly. UH. This was
Speaker 1: based off a single person aircraft design that had reached
Speaker 1: some popularity a few years earlier. UH. It was somewhat
Speaker 1: of a dangerous design because the landing gear for this
Speaker 1: personal helicopter was the pilot's legs. Oh I don't want that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: where you have to land and you have and it's
Speaker 1: like a flint stone car. That's no, that's a terrible plan.
Speaker 1: Funny because the video I saw this in specifically made
Speaker 1: that comparison. So yes, it is like a flintstones car. Um.
Speaker 1: Nineteen fifty five, we have Alex Loot of the Loot
Speaker 1: Vacuum Company who said nuclear powered vacuum cleaners will probably
Speaker 1: be a reality within ten years. Hey, you remember in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty five when all those nuclear powered vacuum cleaners
Speaker 1: hit the market and then the market exploded. Literally Yeah, no, this, Um,
Speaker 1: this was right in the middle nine. That was the
Speaker 1: atomic age. Yeah, that's when you have everyone's like automic
Speaker 1: power will solve everything. This was before we really had
Speaker 1: a full appreciation of the dangers of radiation, of the
Speaker 1: other dangers of of of of nuclear power. I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously we knew some of it because the Manhattan Project
Speaker 1: had been over for a decade. We had already seen
Speaker 1: the proof of the atomic bomb. Yeah, but we were
Speaker 1: still like painting glow in the dark things with radium
Speaker 1: to make them glow in the dark. So so yeah,
Speaker 1: so we had not quite learned our lesson yet Yeah,
Speaker 1: kind of interesting. Ninety eight, NASA predicts that we would
Speaker 1: have a permanent moon base by two thousand seven. Where's
Speaker 1: my moon base, NASA, We're holding you personally accountable. I
Speaker 1: understand that you might have had a couple of budget
Speaker 1: cuts over the past couple of decades, but really, no excuse, no,
Speaker 1: no note at all. Uh. Nineteen fifty nine, IBM sent
Speaker 1: a message to Xerox saying the world potential market for
Speaker 1: copying machines is five thousand at most right up there
Speaker 1: to that three to five computers that the world needs.
Speaker 1: Right again, it was one of those things where the
Speaker 1: business case was something that was not obvious to one
Speaker 1: party turned out to be incredibly important. Sure well, also
Speaker 1: at the time, that's another scalability issue of people not realizing.
Speaker 1: I'm assuming those people at IBM didn't realize that copying
Speaker 1: machines would come down from the near two car sized
Speaker 1: kind of thing that they were at the time to
Speaker 1: the merely half a car size drink cart sized. That's
Speaker 1: also true. Um. Yeah, nineteen sixty one, we have T. A. M. Craven,
Speaker 1: the FCC commissioner at the time, who said there's practically
Speaker 1: no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide
Speaker 1: better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States. Wow,
Speaker 1: that's that's really wrong. That's quite wrong. I mean they
Speaker 1: depend upon satellites now, Like without the satellites, we would
Speaker 1: not have these these services the way that we do
Speaker 1: right now. It's yeah, no, that's needless to say. Um
Speaker 1: did not stay FCC commissioner for forever. No. No. In
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty six. Another another gem of one. Uh.
Speaker 1: This quote is from Time magazine. Remote shopping, while entirely feasible,
Speaker 1: will flop. And again, at the time the prediction was made,
Speaker 1: you can understand why they would say that. I mean,
Speaker 1: think about it. In nineteen sixties six, remote shopping essentially
Speaker 1: meant that you've got us years Roebuck catalogue and you
Speaker 1: placed a telephone call. Yeah, and then you would wait
Speaker 1: for something to get delivered to you. You know, all
Speaker 1: this kind of stuff. You might have C O D
Speaker 1: cash on delivery. That world. At the time, I assume
Speaker 1: they were still using like monkeys or impovertis children, mostly
Speaker 1: flying monkeys. Yeah, so, but they refused to fly when
Speaker 1: non delivery. They said, that's just for fun Time. So yeah,
Speaker 1: the No Time magazine. The article goes on to say that, uh,
Speaker 1: I want to apologize to Lauren before I even go
Speaker 1: into this. I did not write the article, but that
Speaker 1: women really want to go to stores and try lots
Speaker 1: of stuff on and feel it with their hands, and
Speaker 1: they don't trust anything that they can't actually see or
Speaker 1: touch or hold, and therefore they would absolutely refuse out
Speaker 1: of hand any kind of remote purchasing option for anything. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: that's that's almost half true, because it is pretty true
Speaker 1: that I want to try clothes on before I buy them,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't necessarily I mean, I mean, I have
Speaker 1: tape measures. And also that you would want to try
Speaker 1: things like hold a pot before you buy it, or
Speaker 1: rolling pin or all the other womanly things. Machine would
Speaker 1: be a big one. Now, I'm I mean, clearly, female
Speaker 1: brains are so tactile as opposed to male brains. There's
Speaker 1: so many hard, hardwired differences between the genders. Being really sarcastic,
Speaker 1: your domesticity leanings are leave a lot to be desired learn.
Speaker 1: We gotta work on this. But yeah, no, it was.
Speaker 1: It was one of those where said that this this
Speaker 1: idea just wasn't going to take off now. Granted again,
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty six different world from today, but of course
Speaker 1: today online shopping, this remote shopping idea is enormous, so
Speaker 1: much so that we're talking about flying drones delivering packages
Speaker 1: and impossible near future and all kinds of brick and
Speaker 1: mortar stores are being closed down right now they are
Speaker 1: like today. So nineteen sixty six we've got a reader's
Speaker 1: Digest story where the writers predicted that we'd have jet
Speaker 1: packs by nine and cities would be climate controlled domes.
Speaker 1: I don't generally take a lot of stock and readers digest, um.
Speaker 1: I guess that this is probably one of those things
Speaker 1: where no one there had really thought about the possibility
Speaker 1: of a jet pack and how mostly you're just setting
Speaker 1: yourself on fire constantly. Yeah, I like, uh, I always
Speaker 1: like comedy routines where they show what a jet pack
Speaker 1: would really be like, and it almost someone's just careening
Speaker 1: out of control and smashing into things at high speed
Speaker 1: and you know, there's no sense of direction. Yeah, their
Speaker 1: pants are on fire. Yeah, that's pretty accurate. Also, the
Speaker 1: idea of cities in in climate controlled domes, I mean
Speaker 1: that would be well, we did have biodome. Yeah, a
Speaker 1: little a little more modest than a city sized dome,
Speaker 1: but yes, I'll allow it. Nineteen sixty six, we also
Speaker 1: had Arthur C. Clark making some predictions, including that by
Speaker 1: the year two thousand one, we'd have flying homes. We'd
Speaker 1: free ourselves from the grid, and our homes would be
Speaker 1: able to produce everything necess terry like water and electricity
Speaker 1: using some sort of compact power source which he had
Speaker 1: not quite defined. But that wasn't he was saying, that
Speaker 1: wasn't the point. By then we will have that, and
Speaker 1: then we'll have these flying homes. Uh. No, we don't
Speaker 1: have flying homes. Unless your name happens to be Dorothy
Speaker 1: and there was a big storm passing through Kansas. You
Speaker 1: don't have a flying home. We also don't have that
Speaker 1: kind of power source. No. No, we have Ken Olson
Speaker 1: of Digital Equipment Corps saying there is no reason anyone
Speaker 1: would want a computer in their home. Now, this is seven,
Speaker 1: This is after hobbyists have already started building things like
Speaker 1: the Altaire that was the first first hobbyist computer. The
Speaker 1: first kits were already out, I mean people one had
Speaker 1: been out and now the Apple two was coming out
Speaker 1: in seventy seven, so it's it. But yeah, it was
Speaker 1: one of those things where, I mean they were really
Speaker 1: expensive when they first came out. Computers were incredibly expensive
Speaker 1: and had really limited functionality. But still it was one
Speaker 1: of those things that caught on quick lee and never
Speaker 1: let go. So that was a very wrong prediction. One.
Speaker 1: Here's another possibly apocryphal quote, because the person who supposedly
Speaker 1: made it denies that he ever made it. That person
Speaker 1: is Bill Gates. This is one of those ones that
Speaker 1: you see quoted all over the place, which was boils
Speaker 1: down to sixty k ought to be enough for anybody
Speaker 1: that's six of memory. Memory, yeah, which, uh, you know
Speaker 1: our phones dwarf now, so our thumb drives dwarf that, yeah,
Speaker 1: yea for storage space certainly. Yeah, yeah, you're talking about
Speaker 1: a world of difference. But again, possibly apocryphal. Bill Gates
Speaker 1: that he never said it, So it's very possible that
Speaker 1: that's a misquote or was misattributed to Bill Gates. So
Speaker 1: one that we're pretty sure of the accuracy of one.
Speaker 1: Cellular phones will absolutely not replace local wire systems. That
Speaker 1: was Marty Cooper, who was the father of the cell phone.
Speaker 1: If you ever heard the story worry. He worked for
Speaker 1: one company and then he made the very first cell
Speaker 1: phone call to the to the head of his opponent company.
Speaker 1: We're talking too big telecommunications companies and saying, guess where
Speaker 1: I'm calling from. I'm on the street outside your office. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but he did not foresee cell phones becoming a replacement
Speaker 1: for the local wires service. And at the time, you
Speaker 1: can understand why. I mean, the cell phones were enormous.
Speaker 1: They had very limited range, they had limited power. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: it was at least suitcase sized, I mean on the
Speaker 1: on the low end. Yeah, and you're talking about an
Speaker 1: infrastructure that didn't exist yet. You know, you didn't really
Speaker 1: have an infrastructure to tap into for the longest time
Speaker 1: with cell phone service. If you can also listen to
Speaker 1: tech stuff, we have an UH podcast about mobile telephones
Speaker 1: and things like the radio service where radio telephones, which
Speaker 1: predates cell telephones, you would only be able to operate
Speaker 1: a few in a city at any given time because
Speaker 1: there just wasn't enough capacity to allow more than maybe
Speaker 1: four or five conversations going. Won't handle it, so I
Speaker 1: can kind of understand it. But obviously that one turned
Speaker 1: out to be wrong. So scientists from the science and
Speaker 1: Technology Agency in Tokyo predicted that we'd have orbiting factories
Speaker 1: and laboratories surrounding Earth by so well, I mean we
Speaker 1: got the s S. Yeah, that's one, and some satellites
Speaker 1: and some telescopes, and in a way they do surround
Speaker 1: the Earth because they orbit it. That's a very loose
Speaker 1: definition of surround. I think they were thinking of having
Speaker 1: large manufacturing facilities out there in space where you're not
Speaker 1: bound by the problems of gravity, which we are thinking
Speaker 1: about doing that. That that holds some promise for the future,
Speaker 1: as we have talked about, but just none of those
Speaker 1: things that's not in the near future, let alone. Todd
Speaker 1: Mill predicted that we would soon quote unquote be living
Speaker 1: in underwater cities powered by fusion and reactors with lasers.
Speaker 1: I only wish we haven't figured out how to make
Speaker 1: the fusion work efficiently yet, although recent news have been
Speaker 1: very promising about the idea of actually producing more energy
Speaker 1: that it took to initiate the fusion reaction that was
Speaker 1: the first. But we're still waiting on making that practical
Speaker 1: so that we can actually use it as a true
Speaker 1: nuclear power source. As for underwater cities, I mean there
Speaker 1: are a ton of problems to work out. If you
Speaker 1: listen to our underwater Hotels episode, you know that we
Speaker 1: aren't close to that yet. Yeah. There there are basically
Speaker 1: any number of land based places on Earth that are
Speaker 1: much easier and cheaper to build cities. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: maybe the view isn't as pretty if you if you
Speaker 1: haven't like fishies. Robert Metcalf, who was the founder of
Speaker 1: the company three Colm and also coinvented ethernet right, says,
Speaker 1: I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and
Speaker 1: did catastrophically collapse. Yeah, so he was looking at the
Speaker 1: Internet itself as being a bubble. Uh. If you don't,
Speaker 1: If you weren't around in the early nineties, early to
Speaker 1: mid nineties, you probably don't remember the incredible amount of
Speaker 1: hype and excitement around the Internet. It was this new tool.
Speaker 1: People weren't sure exactly how to use it. They had
Speaker 1: no idea what the the limitations or the possible applications
Speaker 1: could be. That it was really a sky's the limit
Speaker 1: wild West frontier. Everyone try everything at once. Let's make
Speaker 1: sure you have a website that says under construction and
Speaker 1: a looping midi that you can't turn Off included on there,
Speaker 1: you know, everything looks like geo cities websites. You had
Speaker 1: people on the news having discussions about how does this
Speaker 1: email thing work? What does this? What is it? What's
Speaker 1: this weird symbol? It looks like an a in a circle?
Speaker 1: Why is that? They're like? These were all things that
Speaker 1: were happening at this time, and so what Metcalf was
Speaker 1: saying was that all this excitement was not something that
Speaker 1: could be sustainable. Yeah, you would eventually he have a collapse.
Speaker 1: It would be similar to what we saw with the
Speaker 1: idea of virtual reality. This idea where we get a
Speaker 1: concept in our heads what virtual reality is going to
Speaker 1: be like, and when it pans out that it's not
Speaker 1: up to the same level as what our expectation was,
Speaker 1: then it falls apart. And it wasn't that the Internet
Speaker 1: was a bad tool. It was just that once we
Speaker 1: all woke up from this hype dream, we would be
Speaker 1: disappointed and we would just walk away, never to invest
Speaker 1: again in the Internet now. He also famously said that
Speaker 1: he would eat his words if he were proven wrong.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen Metcalf delivered a speech to the WWW
Speaker 1: Conference and he brought out a printed copy of this
Speaker 1: article and a blender, and he put the article article
Speaker 1: in the blender with some liquid. He said it on puree,
Speaker 1: poured it in a glass and drank it him. He's
Speaker 1: a man of his word. We have a quote from
Speaker 1: Clifford Stall, who was who's an astronomer, who said, well,
Speaker 1: soon buy books and newspapers straight over the internet. Sure,
Speaker 1: dismissing it. He wrote an entire book called Silicon Snake
Speaker 1: Oil where he dismissed the whole idea of the World
Speaker 1: Wide Web as a passing fad and that we would
Speaker 1: never ever get to a point where we would be
Speaker 1: buying stuff straight off the internet. That was just ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean just like Time magazine said back in the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, clearly, and this entire remote shopping thing is
Speaker 1: that it's untenable. Uh he was wrong. So two thousand
Speaker 1: three spoiler at three Steve Jobs. One of the great
Speaker 1: quotes from Steve Jobs, and I could have included a
Speaker 1: ton of these. Two One was the subscription model of
Speaker 1: buying music is bankrupt. Now in two thousand three, you're
Speaker 1: talking about an earraw when iTunes is starting to really
Speaker 1: catch on, and the idea of purchasing music on a
Speaker 1: per song basis was very popular, and so Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: was saying things like Rhapsody, where you would subscribe ride
Speaker 1: to a service and get music that way. People don't
Speaker 1: want that, They're not going to pay for it. But
Speaker 1: now we have companies like Pandora, Spotify, r d O
Speaker 1: things that have subscription based services where you can either
Speaker 1: get something for free but you get advertising so it's
Speaker 1: ad supported, or you can opt in to purchase a
Speaker 1: an account and then get add free broadcast of whatever
Speaker 1: it is that you want. It proves that, in fact,
Speaker 1: that subscription model is not dead, it's not bankrupt. It
Speaker 1: still works. You just have to be creative in the
Speaker 1: way that you implement it. Two thousand four, we have
Speaker 1: Bill Gates with another quote, this one not apocryphal, where
Speaker 1: he said, two years from now, spam will be solved.
Speaker 1: Thanks Bill. Yeah, man, do you remember that last time
Speaker 1: you got a spam message way back in two thousand
Speaker 1: and six? Gosh, sure is nice that I don't have
Speaker 1: a hitt and box full of them every single morning
Speaker 1: when I log on first thing. I mean, I even
Speaker 1: have I even have notifications from my spam filter letting
Speaker 1: me know how many spam emails it caught on top
Speaker 1: of the ones that it did not, but it did not. Yeah. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: Then two thousand five, Steve Chen, the co founder of YouTube, said,
Speaker 1: there's just not that many videos I want to watch. Yeah. Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: I mean YouTube clearly doesn't have any place. I mean,
Speaker 1: he co founded YouTube, but he was saying, you know,
Speaker 1: I just don't this thing that I built. I don't
Speaker 1: know that it's really that useful because I mean, who
Speaker 1: wants to watch a little short videos all day? Yeah,
Speaker 1: he thought the service was probably going to fade away
Speaker 1: in the next couple of years. Then Google would come
Speaker 1: in two thousand and six and buy it for a
Speaker 1: cool one point six five billion dollars. So yeah, that
Speaker 1: that whole idea. And of course now we got to
Speaker 1: a point where every single minute that passes, more than
Speaker 1: a hundred hours of footage get uploaded to YouTube. Also,
Speaker 1: we're we're on YouTube. We're on YouTube. That's true. You
Speaker 1: can watch forward thinking on YouTube. You can watch brain
Speaker 1: stuff on YouTube. We have we have shows. What are
Speaker 1: other stuff shows that are also on YouTube? So go
Speaker 1: check us out on YouTube. Hit that like button, subscribe,
Speaker 1: share it with your friends. You know the drill. So
Speaker 1: then we have two thousand six. We have David Pogue
Speaker 1: of the New York Times who said, everyone's always asking
Speaker 1: me when Apple will come out with a cell phone.
Speaker 1: My answer is probably never. Apple came out with a
Speaker 1: cellphone the next year. Also related to that is our
Speaker 1: our final quote. This is from two thousand seven. Yes,
Speaker 1: now this is another one where you might say that
Speaker 1: bias played a role. Here's the quote, there's no chance
Speaker 1: that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.
Speaker 1: That was Steve Balmer of Microsoft, former CEO of Microsoft
Speaker 1: at the time. He was the CEO of Microsoft. Now, again,
Speaker 1: this might have been very wishful thinking. Yeah, you if
Speaker 1: you are the head of a company that is in
Speaker 1: competition either directly or indirectly with Apple, and again you
Speaker 1: don't want to give too much credence to your competitors products.
Speaker 1: So there may have been some posturing there. It may
Speaker 1: have been that, or maybe the bomber really did believe
Speaker 1: that the iPhone just was not going to get any
Speaker 1: kind of market share and that Windows Mobile at the
Speaker 1: time was fine. Um, it was not. Windows Mobile never
Speaker 1: really cut on to the level. It never cut onto
Speaker 1: the level of the iPhone UM. Throughout numerous overhauls of
Speaker 1: the mobile operating system strategy that Microsoft had, none of
Speaker 1: them came close to the popularity of the iPhone. I'm
Speaker 1: not talking about the usability. If you're a Windows phone
Speaker 1: fan like you, you you love that usability, that's great. Uh
Speaker 1: you know, I I don't. I don't own an iPhone,
Speaker 1: so I don't have a dog in this fight. But
Speaker 1: you have to admit it's nowhere near as popular as
Speaker 1: the iPhone. Uh No, yeah, yeah, the the the iPhone
Speaker 1: the last time I checked, was somewhere around yeah market.
Speaker 1: When you look at it and you think this is
Speaker 1: one line of phones, even if you divide it up
Speaker 1: into the various moderations, Yeah, it's still one line of phones.
Speaker 1: Whereas andre wid you could say, yeah, but Android's got
Speaker 1: a majority share. Yeah, but no one Android phone has
Speaker 1: majority that's spread out over manufacturer, let alone models exactly.
Speaker 1: So yeah, interesting stuff. Well, obviously there are way more predictions.
Speaker 1: I mean, people say dumb stuff all the time, listen
Speaker 1: to our podcast for example. But yeah, there's so many
Speaker 1: other predictions we could have included on this. We hope
Speaker 1: that Joe when he comes back will not be too
Speaker 1: upset that we've done this one. We'll just make sure
Speaker 1: that we've marked these particular predictions down as ones we've
Speaker 1: already covered, and maybe in a future episode will look
Speaker 1: at some others. So if you have any thoughts of
Speaker 1: things we should cover on this show, maybe you want
Speaker 1: us to talk about really prescient predictions, things that actually
Speaker 1: came true, things that people could not possibly have anticipated
Speaker 1: and yet predicted. Let us know. We'll do an episode
Speaker 1: about that too. That'd be a lot of fun. You
Speaker 1: can let drop us a line. Our email address is
Speaker 1: FW thinking at discovery dot com, or let us know
Speaker 1: on social media. We're on Facebook, we're on the Twitter,
Speaker 1: We're on the Google Plus. Our handle is FW thinking
Speaker 1: and we will talk to you again really soon. For
Speaker 1: more on this topic and the future of technology, visit
Speaker 1: forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's
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