Tim Harford

speaker

411 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 6d ago

Tim Harford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford · Talent, Time and Money: The Curse of General Magic · 11 Sep 2026 podcast

And it would be called... What would it be called?

Arthur C. Clarke, the influential science fiction writer, had once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

That was the name then.

General Magic.

As David Epstein explains in his new book, Inside the Box, General Magic took off fast.

Here's David's description.

Scully introduced the founding trio to Sony.

They made their pitch and within days, Sony was on board with a stake and a licensing deal.

Next came Motorola, and then AT&T.

Philips was next.

And then Sony's bitter rival, Panasonic.

Then Toshiba, then France Telecom, and on and on.

Everyone in the communications industry wanted a piece of general magic.

So much so, they needed an antitrust lawyer in their meetings to make sure their discussions weren't falling foul of competition law.

It was, says Epstein, the biggest consortium of global companies that had ever existed in American business.

Each partner in the alliance put in millions of dollars.

General Magic was swimming in money, but still felt they needed more.

It's not cheap to invent the future, after all.

Peratt and the team decided they would raise money from regular investors by giving them the chance to buy shares in General Magic, pouring more cash into the company in exchange for a slice of any future profits.

It's not unusual to seek money from regular mom-and-pop investors, but this case was unprecedented.

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