Frontline:

I’d like to cover some history, since you’ve covered some history yourself. You’ve seen a lot of things go by. Let’s just start with the mutual fund industry. Why do we have mutual funds in the first place? Who came up with the idea, and why?

… The first actual mutual fund, Mass[achusetts] Investors Trust, was started in 1924. What makes the industry go is the common sense behind it: I would say, number one, diversification — very underrated benefit; number two, efficiency; and number three, for those days, relatively low cost; and number four — I always put this last — management, because management cannot add value, but people somehow feel more comfortable with management looking over their investments.

In those days, by the way, the typical mutual fund was very much like an index fund. They were managed, but they tracked the market for years and years. …

… The first mutual funds were essentially index funds that allowed an investor that didn’t have a lot of money to buy into a fund and therefore diversify, because these were baskets of mini-stocks.

Right. And it was fairly efficient, and it was fairly long term, and it’s focused, the original mutual fund. So they weren’t doing all the trading like they’re doing today. They bought, basically, a basket of blue-chip stocks. …

It began also as a business of trusteeship. Many of the original mutual funds had nothing to do with the marketing of their shares. Firms were out there that sold mutual fund shares and made a commission on it, but they did the buying and selling. We didn’t even think about marketing.

You started a fund, middle-of-the-road fund. They all were in those days, in the late ’20s and early ’30s and into the ’40s and really up to the ’50s. And so they were run by trustees who felt a certain sense, I think, of fiduciary duty to their investors. Marketing was not in the middle of the picture. Marketing [was] peripheral, even if the manager controlled the marketer.

Park Ji Woo:

One day, my sister and I had so much fun riding the sled that I didn’t realize my shoes fell off! I looked for them for a long time, but I couldn’t find them. I was freaked out because I knew my mother would be really mad at me. I walked home on bare feet in the snow. When my mother saw me, she said nothing and just wiped my feet because my left heel was bleeding. She put my feet into a container with cold water. That was a well known remedy for frostbite in North Korea because it made your feet warm up fast even though it was really painful. I screamed as the cold water became red with my blood. My mother cried. The next day, she gave me her winter shoes and she wore her flats, which were thin shoes meant for the summer. She didn’t have money to buy new winter shoes for me. That winter, her feet were frostbitten, too.

Since the summer of 1996, the famine went worse than expected. The government still didn’t give us any food. I vividly remember that many people died in the street because of hunger. I saw many children, who were my age, begging for food in Jang-ma-dang (North Korean Market), even stealing food. We only had one meal a day for three months. Even my 6-year-old younger sister, the youngest person in my family, wasn’t spared starvation. One morning, somebody knocked on our door quietly, when my younger sister and I were eating our only meal of the day. I thought that it was my mother, who went to the farm to look for food. I opened the door happily, but who I faced was a short, skinny girl. She looked about 8 years old, same as me. She had a pale and fearful face. Behind her, a little boy was smiling at me. He looked about five years old and had a red, dirty face. They wore ragged clothes. The girl finally said “Would you please lend us some food? We haven’t had anything to eat since two days ago. My parents went to Cheng-jin to get food and said they would be back in 3 days, but they haven’t come back yet. When they come back, we will have food to eat and I can give you back your food. I swear.”

I looked at her earnest face and said “I am hungry, too. I have no food to give you.” I closed the door coldly and locked it quickly. Even though the girl kept knocking the door desperately for a while, we ate all the corn porridge, which was all we had for the whole day. Now I feel sorry for them. Sometimes it makes me cry. I don’t know where they went and if anyone gave them food or not. I hope they met good people who were willing to give them food. However, at that time, sharing food was a crazy behavior for me, and for most North Koreans because everyone clearly knew that one day we would die in the street because of hunger if we didn’t look for and save food as much as we can. We had to compete for getting one more ear of corn. Sympathy was an extravagance for us.

Smithsonian:

In the 1930s journalists from publications like the New York Times and Time magazine would regularly visit Nikola Tesla at his home on the 20th floor of the Hotel Governor Clinton in Manhattan. There the elderly Tesla would regale them with stories of his early days as an inventor and often opined about what was in store for the future.

Last year we looked at Tesla’s prediction that eugenics and the forced sterilization of criminals and other supposed undesirables would somehow purify the human race by the year 2100. Today we have more from that particular article which appeared in the February 9, 1935, issue of Liberty magazine. The article is unique because it wasn’t conducted as a simple interview like so many of Tesla’s other media appearances from this time, but rather is credited as “by Nikola Tesla, as told to George Sylvester Viereck.”

It’s not clear where this particular article was written, but Tesla’s friendly relationship with Viereck leads me to believe it may not have been at his Manhattan hotel home. Interviews with Tesla at this time would usually occur at the Hotel, but Tesla would sometimes dine with Viereck and his family at Viereck’s home on Riverside Drive, meaning that it’s possible they could have written it there.