And today I want to begin with a question, how different would the world be, or how

different would your world be if you knew the future?

We saw in back to the future, it really did impact to know if you could go back and

you could go forward differently, and it didn't always work out very well, right, because

then you ended up, like, why is my mom married to Biff?

That didn't work out so well.

But the reality is that knowing the future, of course, would, the obvious answers, it would

change what you do in the present.

I love to collect stories of bone-headed decisions that people in business made, that, of

course, they wouldn't have if they could have known how things would have played out.

Like, get this, in 1876, the company Western Union turned down the offer to buy the patent

on the telephone for $100,000, saying, and I quote, the telephone is just an electrical

toy with no commercial value.

Hello?

No, they said, everyone's going to hang on to the telegram.

They're going to love in that telegram forever, and when was the last time anybody sent

anything Western Union?

I realize you have to support that deposed Nigerian prince who's going to be blessing you

down the road.

But then if we flash forward to 1975, Kodak created the first ever digital camera, but kept

it quiet, and did nothing with it fearing, it would hurt their control of the film market.

They wanted to keep everybody on film, so they missed their chance to really get big into

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