Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…Let’s say we take curious Marc, put him in a backwards time machine, give him all the languages he needs and immunities against all disease. Where in history do you wish to spend a month? Yes. There are a couple of big, obvious tempting ones. Athens, the trial of Socrates would have been exciting to see. Socrates had it coming. It would have been fascinating to see that play out, the first modern cancellation. I think the era of de’ Medici. A month in the court of Lorenzo would have been fascinating. I think that the Second Industrial Revolution, Edison’s lab, J. Pierpont Morgan. The original J.P. Morgan was a banker, and he operated primarily with that. He financed large-scale industrial enterprises, like the railroads, but he actually was also a venture capitalist in his spare time. He financed Edison’s efforts in a significant way. In fact, he was the first customer of Edison’s light bulb system for the house. Edison came and installed the first indoor lighting in the world in J.P. Morgan’s library. Then it caught on fire and burnt the library down, and then J.P. Morgan, to his enormous credit, rebuilt the library and hired Edison to do it all over again. That moment, extending through the 1920s, was in a lot of ways, in my view, the most relevant origin of what we’re living through today. To be in that 1880-to-1925 period, I think, would have been really great. What’s your favorite tech product that no longer exists?…

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