Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The World's Worst Predictions

Starting point is 00:00:00 Throughout history, experts, executives, scientists, and journalists have tried to predict what the future will look like. Some of these predictions were insightful, and others were so spectacularly wrong that they became famous in their own right. They dismissed revolutionary inventions, underestimated new technologies, and confidently predicted the exact opposite of what happened. Learn more about some of the world's worst predictions on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. blend wellness into your coffee routine with the coffee plus range infused with functional benefits. Choose the coffee you love with added B vitamins, like coffee plus B12 to help support immune function, and coffee plus B6 to keep your day moving.

Starting point is 00:00:57 Or go with the flow and choose ginseng delight. Our new double espresso with ginseng extract. Whatever lies ahead, don't change your morning. Let your morning change you. Discover coffee plus on espresso.com. Okay. When I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids, and I want to give back to the community.

Starting point is 00:01:19 Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my out of office has a forever setting. An IG Private Wealth Advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IGPrivatewealth.com. Predicting the future is difficult. Some people have pulled off incredibly prescient guesses about what the future would hold.

Starting point is 00:01:52 And others haven't just been wrong. They have been spectacularly wrong. They may have overrested or underestimated technologies or trends or completely missed what was obvious to everyone else. To be fair, predicting the future isn't easy. If it were, everyone would do it. But there's a difference between being wrong and being spectacularly wrong. and that is the focus of this episode. And we'll start with one of the worst predictions by someone who was otherwise quite talented,

Starting point is 00:02:23 Irving Fisher. Irving Fisher was an American economist, statistician, and Yale professor born in 1867. He became one of the most influential economists of the early 20th century, especially for his work on interest rates, inflation, capital theory, and the relationship between money and prices. His ideas helped shape what later became, modern monetary economics. Many economists, including Joseph Schumpeter, Milton Friedman, and James Tobin considered him to be one of the greatest economists the United States has ever produced.

Starting point is 00:02:55 However, his reputation was tainted by one enormously wrong statement. On October 15, 1929, just days before the stock market crashed, he said, quote, stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau. He was speaking to the Purchasing Agents Association, at its monthly dinner meeting. He also said at that meeting, quote, Largely through the influence of the investment trust movement, the public has been waking up to the superior attraction of stocks over bonds, and I believe the operation of investment trusts as a whole have acted to stabilize the stock market rather than to make its fluctuations more violent, end quote. Needless to say, the stock market wasn't more stable, and it wasn't sitting at a permanently high

Starting point is 00:03:41 plateau. It wasn't just that he was wrong, it's that he was wrong just days before everything fell apart. And speaking of bad timing, another horribly time prediction appeared in a New York Times editorial on November 9, 1903. The editorial, titled Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly, responded to Samuel Langley's attempt to test a flying machine just days earlier. The editorial wrote, quote, it might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years. No doubt the problem has attractions for those at interest, but to the ordinary man it would seem as if effort might be employed more profitably. It turned out that they didn't need to wait 10 million years or even 1 million years. Just 69 days later, the Wright brothers conducted their first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Starting point is 00:04:45 So they were only off by a factor of several million. Lord Kelvin, who was one of the discoverers of the laws of thermodynamics, was wrong about a whole host of things. He was invited to join the Aeronautical Society, which he declined, saying, quote, I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning or of the expectation of good results from any of the trials we hear of. I would not care to be a member of the aeronautical society." When x-rays were discovered that could penetrate the human body, Lord Calvin said, quote, X-rays will prove to be a hoax.

Starting point is 00:05:25 And not to be outdone, when radio was invented, he said, quote, radio has no future. And, quote, wireless telegraphy is a joke. is all very well, but I'd rather send a message by a pony or a boy. It should be noted that he later recanted his views on radio after actually using it after a transatlantic voyage. Skepticism about flying is somewhat understandable for the period, but it wasn't the only transportation technology that people doubted.

Starting point is 00:05:54 According to a 1922 biography of Henry Ford, a banker advised prospective Ford investor, Horace Rackham, quote, the horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad, end quote. Rackham thankfully ignored that advice, invested $5,000 into Ford Motor Company, which he later sold for $12 million. Someone who did pass up a world-changing investment was William Orton, president of the Western Union Telegraph Company. Before he founded Bell Telephone, Alexander Graham Bell offered Orton the chance of the chance of to buy the telephone patent for $100,000. Orton turned him down and wrote about the telephone in an internal corporate memo, saying, quote, the idea of installing telephones in every city

Starting point is 00:06:46 is idiotic. Why would any person want to use this ungangly and impractical device when he can send a messenger to the telegraph office and have a clearly written message sent to any large city in the U.S. This telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." End quote. Bell Telephone would go on to become the largest company in the United States. Darrell F. Zannock, the powerful head of 20th century Fox Studios, was massively wrong when predicting the future of television. He said in 1951, quote, television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.

Starting point is 00:07:37 End quote. Not to be outdone, Oran E. Dunlap Jr., a writer for the New York Times, published in 1939, quote, The problem with television is that the people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen. The average American family hasn't time for it. Therefore, the showmen are convinced that for this reason, if for no other, television will never be a serious competitor of broadcasting." End quote.

Starting point is 00:08:03 Being wrong isn't just about inventions and technology. Some people have really whiffed on cultural trends. The Beatles manager, Brian Epstein, and his 1965 memoir, recounted what happened when the Beatles tried to get signed by Decker Records. As Epstein later recalled, quote, We had coffee, and Mr. Rowe, a short plump man, said to me, Not to mince words, Mr. Epstein, we don't like your boys' sound. Groups of four guitarists are on the way out, end quote.

Starting point is 00:08:35 Likewise, in 1911, the New York Times published a review of an exhibition by the painter Pablo Picasso in Paris. They wrote, quote, It is to be regretted that this unquestionably talented artist should now make his debut with a series of childish, not to say, imbecile scribbles, that are no interest either as independent works of art or a steps towards achieving the complete work. They have neither material beauty nor that spiritual significance nor merit of any other sort, end quote. However, without a doubt, the worst predictions have been in the area of computers. Throughout the history of computing, there are example after example of people

Starting point is 00:09:16 underestimating exactly what computers could do. In 1949, Popular Mechanics Magazine made a very tame prediction. At the time, the ENIAC computer used 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighed 30 tons. They predicted, quote, computers in the future may only have 1,000 vacuum tubes, and perhaps weigh 1 and a half tons. The computing pioneer John von Neumann not only made a horribly wrong prediction in 1949, but he predicted that his own prediction would be wrong. He said, quote,

Starting point is 00:09:52 it would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements as they tend to sound pretty silly in five years, end quote. One of the oddest predictions regarding the internet came from someone who played a pivotal role in the creation of computer networking. Robert Metcalfe was the co-inventor of Ethernet and also founded the company Threecom. In the mid-1990s, he was convinced that the growth of the Internet would cause it to collapse in a spectacular fashion. He said, quote,

Starting point is 00:10:30 Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the Internet's continuing exponential growth. But I predict the Internet, which only just recently got this section here on InfoWorld, will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse. End quote. Of course, the collapse of the Internet did not occur in 1996, nor in any year thereafter. Metcalf was a good sport about being wrong. In 1997, he made a video of himself blending a piece of paper with his prediction on it and drinking it, so he literally ate his words.

Starting point is 00:11:09 Many people back in the 90s were skeptical of the Internet. Perhaps the most famous wrong prediction came from the Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman, who said, quote, the growth of the internet will slow drastically as the flaw in Medcaf's law, which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants, becomes apparent. Most people have nothing to say to each other. By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machines, end quote. Needless to say, the impact of the Internet has been a bit greater than that of the fax machine. One of the best-selling tech products of all time has been the iPhone, but there was a time when no one was even sure if Apple could or would release such a device.

Starting point is 00:11:58 In 2006, the New York Times tech writer David Pogue wrote, quote, Everyone's always asking me when Apple will come out with a cell phone. My answer is, probably never. I cannot imagine Apple giving veto power to anyone over its software design. It just ain't going to happen. End quote. Less than one year later, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. Even after the iPhone was announced, many people thought it would fail.

Starting point is 00:12:26 In particular, Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer thought that the iPhone would fall on its face. In April 2007, before it actually went on sale, he said, quote, Right now we're selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year. Apple is selling zero phones a year. In six months, they'll have the most expensive phone by far in the marketplace, and let's see how they do. But there's no chance the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.

Starting point is 00:12:53 End quote. Well, as we know, the iPhone ended up becoming the best-selling phone of all time. Of course, Apple isn't immune to getting things wrong either. In 2003, Steve Jobs explained that the streaming music business model would never work. He noted, quote, The subscription model of buying music is bankrupt. I think you could make available the second coming in a subscription model, and it might not be successful. If it costs you $10 a month or over $100 a year for a subscription fee to rent that song,

Starting point is 00:13:26 that means for me to listen to my favorite song in 10 years, I paid over $1,000 in subscription fees to listen to my favorite song 10 years from now. And that just doesn't fly with consumers. They don't want subscriptions, end quote. Spotify became a multi-billion dollar business, proving, Steve Jobs wrong. Bad predictions are usually less interesting because somebody was wrong than because they reveal how difficult it is to imagine a future that breaks sharply from the present. Experts tend to project existing technologies, habits, and markets forward, while revolutions

Starting point is 00:14:02 often come from changes that make those assumptions obsolete. The telephone, airplane, computer, internet, and smartphone all looked limited or unnecessary to people who understood the world as it already existed. History's worst predictions are reminders that expertise can explain the present very well while still offering no guarantee of seeing what comes next. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily

Starting point is 00:14:33 is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast.

Starting point is 00:14:50 And links to those are available in the show notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you two can have it read in the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The World's Worst Predictions

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.