Tim Harford
speaker
636 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 6d ago
Tim Harford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford · Talent, Time and Money: The Curse of General Magic · 11 Sep 2026
podcast
General Magic.
One part vague, one part impossible.
In hindsight, it was the perfect name.
David Epstein argues that General Magic's ultimate problem was that they had too much freedom.
It's so much harder to create something good, argues Epstein, if you have no constraints at all.
I think he's right, although I'd add something.
General Magic's problem wasn't that they actually had no constraints.
They did have constraints.
Every person and every organisation does.
Their problem was subtly different.
They didn't think they had any constraints.
In his book, 4,000 Weeks, the writer Oliver Berkman urges us all to face up to the fact that none of us really have much time.
With luck, we can expect about 4,000 weeks on this earth.
For Berkman, this isn't depressing.
It's liberating.
We can stop making impossible lists of the novels we're going to write, skills we're going to master, countries we're going to visit, languages we're going to learn.
There's an infinite number of things we might want to do, and there's only a finite life in which to do them.
We might as well face up to that, and make some deliberate choices.
The alternative is to fritter away our time, pretending we'll live forever, and eventually smacking into the painful realisation that we won't.
For General Magic, that painful realisation dawned when their alliance partners lost patience and started demanding a product urgently.
Showing 561–580 of 636 · page 29 of 32
← Previous
Next →