- If I were a time-traveler,
I wouldn't go to his party
just to spite him, just to say, "Yeah.
"I'm not tellin' you
about time travel, bro."
All right, so today I'm going to talk
about why Stephen Hawking
would be a terrible business person
and a even more terrible marketer.
(crashing)
(zipping)
Stephen Hawking, world-renowned physicist,
God rest his soul, may
his memory be eternal,
did a lot for physics, and did a lot
for just humanity.
If he was running a business,
I don't think he'd be
that good at it.
And here's why.
He threw a party, and
did not invite anybody
until after it happened.
His idea was, he wanted to
prove if time-travel backwards
in time was possible.
And here's how that relates to business.
You've gotta make an
offer that's compelling
for people to take action.
Why do they owe you anything?
The answer is, they don't.
They don't owe you jack.
So let me read some of these clips.
Maybe someday, someone in the future
will find the invitation
and use the wormhole
time-travel machine to come back
to my party, proving that
time-travel one day be possible.
Hawking said this during
this clip which was featured
in this documentary miniseries
called Into the Universe.
So he threw a champagne
party for time-travelers,
again, I'm still reading
some of this account,
complete with hors d'oeuvres in 2009,
and did not release the
invitation 'til after the party
had taken place.
If people had showed up, he hypothesized,
it would be proof that
time-travel is real.
So what the invitation said
was, You're Cordially Invited
to a Reception for Time-Travelers, hosted
by Professor Stephen Hawking,
to be held in the past
at the University of Cambridge,
Gonville & Caius College,
Trinity Street, Cambridge.
Now let's just first take the obvious.
If you know how to travel
in time, why would you go
to his party?
Uh, if I could time-travel,
I'd be goin' to a billion
places, not in Cambridge College.
I mean sorry, Professor
Hawking, I'm not doin' that.
Like, why would you think
people would even want
to show up just to prove you right?
But when you think about making an offer,
you've got to consider every other option
that that human being has
that's not your offer.
If you're a restaurant,
there's a bunch of businesses around.
There's grocery stores.
They can go and buy food
and make it themselves.
They could order it from
somewhere way further
than they'd ever drive to.
There's a lot of options that people have
for that one thing.
So how do you have an offer,
if you're a restaurant
in this example, to bring somebody in,
to bring someone in, for them to say,
"This is the option that I'm taking.
"And I'm going to exclude
every other possibility.
"I'm going to do this.
"I'm going to walk in."
And that can be applied to anything.
If you think about if you're a gym,
or offer some kind of fitness,
someone's gotta consider,
one, do they want to lose
weight, two, are they going
to choose a gym or are
they going to choose
to just run around outside?
The outside world is your
competition if you're a gym.
Are they gonna buy a
Peloton or a treadmill?
So once they make a decision
on what route they're going
to go, then they're
gonna stack that option
onto every other option that
they have within that category.
So if they choose, let's
say, the treadmill route,
they're gonna look at all the treadmills,
all the stationary bikes,
all the other types
of machinery that's
possible to lose weight.
They choose a gym, they're
going to look at your gym.
They're going to look at competitors.
They're going to look at cheap versions.
They're going to look
at the boutique ones.
And then when they decide,
"Okay, I'm going to go a boutique route,"
then they're going to choose between you
and all of your boutique
competitors in the area.
So it's this whole kind
of cascading decision tree
that people go on.
So imagine you're a time-traveler.
You can go anywhere you
want, any time you want.
Again, money is no issue.
Obviously traveling is no issue.
You can travel through time.
I don't think getting
from Richmond, Virginia
to Athens, Greece is
gonna be that difficult.
And if it is, you've got a lot of money,
because you can play the
stock market very well.
So why am I gonna go to
Stephen Hawking's party,
just for some hors d'oeuvres,
just 'cause he invited me?
(laughing)
Maybe if I'm a time-traveler,
I wouldn't go to his party
just to spite him (laughs), just to say,
"Yeah, I'm not tellin' you
about time-travel, bro."
Consider your offer.
Consider what's gonna prompt
somebody to take an action.
Is your offer good enough
for them to take an action
or are they gonna choose something else?
And so just because you're
Professor Stephen Hawking,
this time-traveler's like,
they could literally go back
to any point in time.
Why are they gonna go to your party?
It's at a university, cool, I guess?
There's hors d'oeuvres, yum.
Consider all the parties you've
ever gone to in your life.
Maybe you want to relive them.
Maybe you don't.
Maybe you wanna go to all the
parties that you missed out on
and check those out.
Maybe you wanna go and
hang out with Mark Cuban
and the Dallas Mavericks
when they won the MBA Finals,
or literally any party that exists.
I'm tryin' to imagine just the biggest,
most extravagant parties
that I can think of.
And that's where I'd be
goin' if I could time-travel,
because I would have to
assume that I'm also mega-rich
because I know the future.
Stephen Hawking did not
make a compelling offer
for his party, for a time-traveler to want
to come to his party.
Now, I'm imagining another scenario where,
had he thrown the most decadent,
out-of-this-world party.
Imagine whatever your ideal
party is, amp that up ten times.
And if Hawking had done that,
maybe the time-travelers
would go to his party not
to someone else's party,
because at that point he's competing
for time-travelers' time.
He's competing with every other party
in the history of mankind
for them to show up to.
So yeah.
I don't think that proves
that time-travel's real.
And obviously, what he did
was a little tongue-in-cheek.
I don't think that was his only evidence
against that backwards
time-travel is not possible.
It was meant to be funny.
But I think the idea that he
did that, maybe he was doing it
to kind of mock other
scientists, and if so,
I love savage moments like that.
So next week, we're gonna
talk about why Stephen Hawking
would be an amazing businessman.
See you then.
