 Coca-Cola was going to cure morphine addiction. Bubble Wrap was supposed to be a trendy new textured wallpaper, and YouTube was going to be the premier video dating app. More often, failed products don't lead to accidental successes, but they're nevertheless an essential feature of capitalism. It was Karl Marx who set out to bring production under conscious control, correcting for the anarchic forces of the free market. But it turned out that anarchy, risk-taking, and the freedom to try out wild ideas is the only process that leads to successful innovation, because nobody can predict consumer tastes. A doll that grows breasts? A hula chair for office workers? A virtual reality glove that hit the market in 1989? These and other commercial flops are on display at the Museum of Failure in Washington, D.C. We are very much trying to have fun with this exhibit, so people like to make fun of the fact that we are on the site of a failed gym. Joanna Gutman is one of the organizers of the exhibit. It's the brainchild of Dr. Samuel West. He is the curator of the show, and he realized that the most successful companies were those that had a high failure rate. So he started to explore this concept of failure because everyone loves to talk about success. No one likes to talk about failure, when in fact failure is a much better teacher than success is. The segway is actually a perfect example, because some people will say, well, why would you call the segway a failure? The expectation with the segway was that entire city infrastructures would be built around segways, and people would use it as a mode of transportation. But today, we really use segways. I mean, we all think of that movie Molkoff, right? And those tourist tours, that's essentially where they've been relegated to. Meet new growing-up skipper. She's two dolls and one. Because when you turn her arm, you can make her change instantly from a little girl to a tall, slender teenage doll, which is something you can't do. It's such a creepy thing that she develops breasts. You get two dolls and one. There could not have been any women at that table, right? I think that and the pregnant Barbie came out around the same time. So it was like, who was thinking about this? Right, right, I know. It's bizarre. So there definitely is a tone deafness sometimes in marketing. There are quite a few products in here that are quote-unquote before their time. You have something very similar that looks like VR goggles, but it's obviously not virtual reality or AI. Right. Sometimes there are marketing reasons why something is marketed poorly and that leads to the product's failure. Guys, how many times has this happened to you? Come on, you know you can't hold it in that long. Don't worry, I've got the perfect gift for you. Sometimes it's just a timing issue. But those things kind of paved the way for how we see our products today. Exactly. So we actually have Google Glass, which is great because nobody would consider Google a failure as a company, even though not every product sort of hit them hard. But people are now saying, number one, a new Google Glass is coming out. We actually had it posted at the New York show where somebody said, stay tuned, they work at Google and a new one is coming out. And it was anonymous. So we have so many big issues to deal with. If we're only going to go with safe choices or things that we know that absolutely will work, we probably are going to end up with nothing. So we want to solve big problems. We're going to have to try. And sometimes the technology, like with the Nintendo glove, which was very... People were super excited about it when it came out, but it had all these buttons that really didn't do anything. But the same technology was used for the Wii, which was a very big commercial success. So sometimes the same technology is used also for a following product. But tech companies in general are really good at sort of learning from their mistakes. And I don't want to really even call it mistakes, but learning from through trial and error and taking in that feedback. We are trying to provoke a conversation about failure, about success, about innovation. The museum also has a section devoted to Elon Musk, who, love him or hate him, from PayPal to SpaceX, from Tesla to Starlink, is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time. But that has a lot to do with his willingness to take wild risks. Failure must be an option. If failure is not an option, it's going to result in extremely conservative choices. And for me, I get something even worse than lack of innovation. Things may go backwards. He's just really pushing that envelope all the time and he makes us think he's provocative, which we are trying to be. And we definitely want to encourage people to take meaningful risks. I also think that we live in a time where social media amplifies everything. And I think young people have this real fear of failing because it's going to follow me forever or it's going to seem maybe bigger than it is because it is on social media. So we're trying to really sort of make people more comfortable with this idea that not everything is going to work out the way we planned or the way we had wanted. If we're always going to be safe and take the safe route so that we almost can guarantee success, then we're not going to solve big problems and address situations because we're not taking any risks and then we don't innovate and we don't progress. There are catastrophic failures happening all around us. And we're so much richer because of it.