Why does it take so long for ideas to develop? l mentioned insurance, it goes back to ancient Rome. Why is it that we didn't have any real insurance, l mean in the sense of an insurance company with actuarial tables and the like, until the 1600s? And why did fire insurance on homes become important? Most people didn't own fire insurance until after the reformations in the Great Depression. So the funny thing about invention to me, is that ideas that seem simple and natural, somehow don't get established, I'll give you some examples. These are from my book, The New Financial Order. Wheeled toys okay, well archaeologists in Mexico find that there were children's toys, that had wheels on them. Little toy cars, and you could roll them along the floor all right, so they knew about wheels. But you know what, nowhere in the Americas, did they ever find a wheeled wagon, or anything used. A wheelbarrow, nothing, they only had toys, strange. Now this brings up another example of wheeled suitcases. So I wrote this book in 2003, 13 years ago, and you have a suitcase with wheels on it, right? Does anyone not have wheels on their suitcase? Well it seems like this is so obvious, suitcases should have wheels. But you know they didn't until 1972? That's not long ago, and in fact, I was doing research for my book, and I had an undergraduate research assistant. And I was intrigued by these wheeled suitcases. So I asked my student go find the inventor, is he still alive? So he tracked him down, it was Bernard Sadow in 1972. And called him up on the phone, again inventors don't tend to be famous. You didn't know his name, right? It's changed your life. [LAUGH] You don't know what is like carrying a heavy suitcase when there are no wheels on it. So my student asked him what was it like inventing the wheeled suitcase? And he said, I had a lot of resistance, I showed my wheeled suitcases, I went to department stores. Remember department stores? They used to have those instead of online shopping. And I told them, this is a great idea, and they said, no it isn't, nobody's going to buy that. It looks ridiculous, wheels on suitcases. They said look, if you want help with your luggage, every train station, every hotel has porters who will be ready to help you, you don't need these things. That's what they told him, but he did get some of them to sell. The problem with his wheeled suitcase, however now he didn't get it right either. He had a suitcase, a big suitcase like this, and there were four little tiny wheels on the bottom, and there was a strap, right? So you would pull on the strap like a leather strap, and it would trail behind you. You might still have one in your parents' attic. They flop over, that's the problem, you start pulling and it falls over sideways. But you can do it, you can figure out eventually how to pull it. It wasn't until Robert Plath in 1991, invented something he called the Rollaboard, which you now have, right? And actually, it improved again. But in 1991, he had a suitcase with just two wheels on the bottom, and a rigid handle, not this leather strap. And the handle collapsed into the suitcase, and you could pull it out, and then would tilt, and it would be very stable. That was 1991, and that just completely took over. He called it a Rollerboard, because he was an airline pilot, and he made it narrow enough so you could roll the suitcase down the aisle of the airplane, and it wouldn't bump into anyone. It was under control. You know what the latest thing is? It's like a Rollaboard, I'm going on too long about this. The latest thing is now they have four wheels again. And you can either do it like a Rollaboard, or you can stand it up, and people like that. Every one of these inventions took ten years. You'd think Bernard Sadow would've figured the whole thing out in 91, but that's not the way it works. Movie subtitles were invented in 1920, but never really used in silent movies, I think this is amazing. They had this whole silent movie era, they'd already invented subtitles, and they didn't put them on movies. They had these intertitles, you remember silent movies? They would stop the whole movie and they'd show you this intertitle. But it's so much better, and I'm really used to it now. You can watch a movie with, it doesn't matter what language it's in anymore. So obvious. And desks over exercise bikes, I have this in my basement. I put a desk over my exercise bike, and I'm preparing my lecture. Mayo Clinic is selling them now, but it's a slow thing. Eventually you ought to get one, so that you can exercise and do scholarly work at the same time. I think that we're moving ahead. Another way of putting it is, financial theory and practice are good areas for young people to go into, because I think it has been transforming and will continue to be transforming. And I think that the nature of our financial markets in 10, 20, 30, 50 years, which matters for young people today, will be amazingly different and better. And you have to join the financial community to make that happen, you don't have to, I'm just saying. >> [LAUGH] >> Do you have in your mind, an ideal of what future looks like? >> See there are people who proposed like Karl Marx for example. >> Right. >> Robert Owen who's the guy who coined the term socialism. They had ideals which they sold on the public as simple and obvious. >> Right. >> But I think it's not quite so simple and obvious. The human species is the product of evolution, that gave us a number of different mental quirks that served us well as cavemen. [LAUGH] But now they don't really fit into the modern world, we're just seeing new opportunities. So we might be excessively fearful or unwilling to change. We might be too focused on our own personal lives. And we have to invent something different, and it won't be a perfect world, just like it's never been a perfect world, but it's exciting and it's getting better.
