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
The answer to the first question was that there was a new way to compress digital music, the MP3, and ever cheaper hard drives.
The combination of the two might allow a digital music player that could make portable cassette and CD players obsolete.
The answer to the second question, it's January 2001 and we're going to ship something by Christmas.
The company that Tony Fadell had joined was Apple.
And the product that he shepherded to market on time just a few weeks before Christmas was the iPod.
It was a device that did one thing beautifully and a huge success.
And that restraint paved the way for Tony Fadell's next project, something much more ambitious.
It was the pocket crystal itself made real.
The iPhone.
Tony's colleague at General Magic, Andy Rubin, founded Android.
Other general magicians went on to co-found LinkedIn, to take charge of search at Google, to run Apple projects such as AI, Safari, and the Apple Watch, and to become chief technology officer of the United States.
But not Mark Peratt.
The evangelical prophet of the information age really did envision the technology that's in everyone's pockets today.
But there was no second act for him in the tech industry.
He moved into sustainable building materials and capturing energy from recycling.
Nothing wrong with that, of course.
But from a man who dreamed of the information society and wanted to share that dream with all of us, it's surprisingly rooted in the industrial age.
When Peratt told you that you could fly, you believed it.
And he believed it too.
But gravity is real.
Showing 601–620 of 636 · page 31 of 32
← Previous
Next →