#107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/6b7b1d3d0970d25d

I deliberately
Talk about innovation rather than invention, because I think we've talked a lot about inventors.
About brilliant people who come up with bright ideas.
That changed the world.
I want to talk about innovation, which is the process by which a bright idea is turned into something practical, reliable, and available.
But affordable.
For ordinary people.
And that's a long slog.
And it's a a lot of hard work and it's often more important, more difficult.
Then the process of
Coming up with a good idea in the first place.
Yeah.
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Today I'm speaking with Matt Ridley.
Matt's the author of How Innovation Works, The Rational Optimist, The Red Queen, and several other books related to science and human progress.
He's also a biologist, newspaper columnist, and member of the House of Lords in the UK.
This episode touches on how Matt came to write books about science, the age-old battle between viruses and humans, rational optimism, the difference between innovation and invention.
The myth of great people.
The role of trial and error.
Why pockets of innovation happen in geographic concentration, and the effect of social media on seeing other people's point of view. It's time.
to listen and learn.
Can you tell us in your own words how you came to write about science?
I uh
Did a PhD in biology in the
nineteen eighties.
And while I enjoyed it.
didn't have quite the same
stamina for going deep into small subjects that my colleagues did, and I spotted this.
But at the same time I had more
Enjoyment out of writing.
up my thesis than my colleagues did.
And it just
It it a sort of switch went in my head and I thought
You know what my
My skill, my talent, my interest might lie in writing about science rather than doing science but
Um
Uh so I gave up
thoughts of getting a Nobel Prize.
And uh set my heart on a Pulitzer instead. I haven't haven't got a Pulitzer, but you know. Not yet. Not yet, exactly. I'm glad you set your your sights on writing. You're an amazing writer.
Uh, before we get to innovation, the subject of your latest book, I wanted to briefly touch on some of your early work that left more
I guess really formative impressions on me.
Um, the Red Queen, which laid out the age old competition between viruses and humans. I mean, it sounds like trench warfare where advantages are slight and short lived. I'm curious
as to what you see is the biggest lesson from that book and what role it should play in creating policy.
So the Red Queen is a character in Alice Through the Looking Glass who runs but never gets anywhere. The faster she runs, the more she stays in the same place.
And that's a very good description of a lot of what happens in evolutionary processes.
That is to say the
Arms race between
uh parasites and their hosts.
one side changing their genes, the other side trying to unlock those genes and so on.
But it's also quite a good description of all sorts of aspects of
human life and and how the world works. And
I found it very, very interesting writing that book'cause I was mainly trying to explain sex, the evolution of sex, which is
In the first place something that seems to have evolved to foil parasites.
But later on in the form of
Brightly colored.
male peacocks and things seems to be all about a sort of
arms race between males to seduce females and things like that.
So it's it's a general theme that runs through sexual evolution.
But it also, of course, describes quite a lot about how our own human world works, how society works.
How sexual politics works as well.
It's a theme that has
cropped up again and again in the back of my mind ever since I wrote about it. It was a fascinating experience.
Digging deep into the origins of those ideas.
historically, at least when it comes to viruses and sort of uh our approach to them.
It it is very trench warfare. There's short lived advantages even when we get antibiotics or something.
But the way out of that
In the past has always been a symmetry of weaponry. Is that possible when it comes to viruses and bacteria and our
Human.
Yes, I think
On the whole, we will win.
our battles against most
Pathogens.
Because we have so much possibility of ingenuity.
now of human ingenuity to help us defeat them.
We've only
totally extinguished one major human disease, and that's smallpox.
But boy is that an important one. It's probably
maybe the biggest killer of all, um
Uh certainly when you think that it was responsible for
um killing the vast majority of the people who lived in the Americas when smallpox arrived with European contact.
But we've reduced polio to
Almost extinction.
We've done the same with a lot of other
Diseases.
Well.
pretty well wiped them out. We're getting on top of malaria and HIV, et cetera.
No.
You're absolutely right that we
We gain
A hundred yards and then we lose fifty yards because the disease mutates or it finds a way around the issue, et cetera.
But
Quite a lot of diseases, particularly those
carried by insects or through water
Have kind of given up on
Western civilization they can't get a toe hold in our populations. They're still around in
Poor countries, but um, you know, cholera, typhoid
uh all these terrible killers from the past um
yellow fever, malaria in the in the Western world.
are not able to
uh to mount to mount offensives uh anymore.
Um and that's because we've cut off we know, we've broken the cycle. We've cut off the way that we got infected.
The one way that
Pathogens do get into us.
That we haven't been able to cope with so far.
Is through the nose.
There's something like two hundred different
types of virus that cause the common cold.
The average child gets seven seven to ten colds a winter. We are just a very tempting target for respiratory viruses.
as we are discovering this year.
On the whole they stay mild, but
Because they want us going around
Going to parties, going to work.
They don't want us sitting at home'cause we're not going to infect anyone if we stay at home.
Th there's a sort of common interest there in not hurting us too much.
So that
It it's this sort of game theory way of seeing the battle between viruses and people that I think is really interesting.
I appreciate that view.
The rational optimist helped many, including myself, see the rationality of optimism. I mean, it seems like a lot of our beliefs are self-fulfilling if we define
A cynic as someone who is smart and has lost hope, that becomes how we see the world. And not only do cynics and pessimists
Not create.
which is the topic of this interview, but they often prevent others from creating because attitudes and beliefs are often contagious.
inventing and innovating require us to be rationally optimistic. How do you see the role of social media
Which collectively does an amazing job of exposing us to cynics and pestimists.
For your increasing lack of optimism since you wrote the book.

Well
I am worried about the effect social media is having on society.
It
Clearly has
Polarized us. It's clearly
uh accentuated the effect whereby
Uh good news is no news and bad news is news.
But it's not that's not new.
We've always
been like that. We've always stressed the negative, not the positive.
Uh I mean I was fascinated when I wrote that book to go back
No, a hundred years, two hundred years, and find that the best sell of the day was nearly always
A pessimistic tract.
You know, whether it's Thomas Robert Malthus in seventeen ninety eight or
the decline of the West in uh at the turn of the
Twentieth century.
Uh you know, books saying
Yes.
uh things have got better on the whole, but they cannot possibly go on getting better.
um we're the generation that sees the deterioration setting in. So there's nothing new about our generation saying that.
There's nothing new about uh
The dominance of pessimism in our everyday discourse about the world. We're not so pessimistic about our individual lives, interestingly, as we are about.
People on the planet generally.
Certainly social media seems to have
Focused
Amplified that to some degree.
And that is, I think, a an uncomfortable thing.
Media technologies tend to do that. I mean, I think printing
And the role Martin Luther.
I mean he's
The greatest
entrepreneur of printing. He was the best selling author by a mile.
of his day.
And on the whole he's going around telling everyone that they're gonna go to hell because they're all corrupt and sinful and so on.
Uh he's not selling a good news message.
And then radio played a big role in the rise rise of the dictators, playing on our pessimisms in the nineteen twenties.
I have a feeling that
Media technologies
can be dangerous in that respect.
But
Would I give up social media? Would I give up the chance to have
Rampant social contact with my chums all over the world and
share jokes and find out how their family is? No, I wouldn't. I think
you know, for a lot of young people in particular, it's it's a it's a godsend, it's a boon.
So we've got to learn to live with these technologies and not let them overwhelm us, I suspect.
Imagine the world right now without
all the social tools we have available to us to stay in touch with people as we physicist and we sort of hibernate in our houses. Well, of course you could turn that around and you can say
If we
Didn't have.
uh all these social
Uh
Contact tools.
then maybe we'd never have locked down, you know, we just couldn't do it.
Which case cost the
Epidemic would have been worse.
But
To some extent, as it were.
um the the existence of the you know of video conferencing and social media and
Uh telephones and
Email and all that kind of stuff makes it possible
for government to say, right, we're going to lock down the entire society, healthy people and all, which has never really been done before.
I'm gonna switch gears and talk a little bit about innovation.
And one of the topics of your book is the difference between innovation and invention. Can you expand on that?

Yes, I
I deliberately
Talk about innovation rather than invention, because I think we've talked a lot about inventors.
About brilliant people who come up with bright ideas.
And that changed the world.
I want to talk about innovation, which is the process by which a bright idea is turned into something practical, reliable, and available.
But affordable.
For ordinary people.
And that's a long slog.
And it's a a lot of hard work and it's often more important, more difficult.
Then the process of
Coming up with a good idea in the first place.
And they're all.
Innovations that change the world dramatically, which don't actually depend on any invention.
uh things like container shipping, which had an enormous impact on
Global trade.
d drastically cutting the cost of
shipping goods overseas.
Which didn't involve any
invention of a technol of a new technology at all. It just involved
Uh uh a sort of
Changing the way we organise our ships.
And uh a guy called Malcolm McClain gets most of the credit for that in the nineteen sixties in the US.
The emphasis on the more collaborative
Trial and error slog of innovation.
Rather than the
Lonely genius idea of invention was something I was trying to get at.
It's quite a nice.
uh funny story that I tell in the book. Um
Which illustrates the point, which is a beaver and a rabbit looking at the Hoover Dam.
And the beaver says to the rabbit, No, I didn't build it.
But it is based on an idea of mine.
Yeah.
And of course getting from, you know, a simple Beaver Dam to the Hoover Dam requires a lot of innovation.
uh that isn't invention.
We we tend to believe that there was this golden age where individuals invented things and now we have teams, but your book I mean, it clearly dispels that notion. It's always been people standing on the shoulders of others and going just a little bit farther with their ideas or
even executing on the ideas and the combination of those two things, you need
You need good ideas, but they're necessary and not sufficient.
How do you see the role of individuals?
versus teams.

Yeah, well
To some extent I'm trying to
uh debunk the idea that lonely geniuses
Are what counts.
in the world of innovation.
We tend to hear people say things like, the you know, the reason a big population can be more innovative is because there's more chance of there being a genius.
I don't think that's the way it works. I think what happens is that people
share their ideas, exchange their ideas, collaborate.
And what really counts is how well people are communicating with each other, not how clever they are as individuals.
And it to some extent I'm trying to get away from the
This word creativity, which tends to imply that a special sort of juice runs in the vein of
Yeah, inventors that doesn't run in the vein of ordinary people.
But if you you know, if you look at the careers of people like Thomas Edison or Jeff Bezos
Uh or talk to it.
Any great innovators.
Today they all emphasize the importance of trial and error, failure, of of getting things wrong and starting again.
And they also
emphasise the importance of collaboration.
For me, the nicest story that illustrates this is the contrast between Samuel Langley and the and the Wright brothers, two two different teams trying to create the first.
Power.
airplane in nineteen oh three, and
Langley is very well connected, head of the Smithsonian Institution, an astronomer.
um gets a huge government grant to build an airplane, goes off and does it in secret.
Because he's so clever.
doesn't want other people to steal his ideas.
Uh and his airplane goes flop into the Potomac after twenty feet.
Ten days later on an island off the North Carolina coast.
Two humble bicycle mechanics from Ohio
with no university education.
uh succeed where Langley failed.
And they did so because they were prepared to be collaborative and do a lot of trial and error. They'd been doing
Hundreds of experiments with gliders and kites for years at this point.
They'd used wind tunnels.
They'd communicated with people all around the world.
Particularly a guy called Octave Chanute in
Chicago, who was a a sort of node in a network of people thinking about flight.
And he
had been drawing on the ideas of a guy called Lawrence Hargrave in Australia, who had invented the
The box kite, which is uh basically the sort of principle that that helps you
build a biplane in effect.
The point is that the Wright brothers were standing on the shoulders of people, but they were also
um collaborating with people and they were doing experiments. They they did innovation right in a way that Samuel Langley did it wrong.
I would argue. The nice footnote to that story is that the Smithsonian Institution
didn't want to give the Wright brothers credit for being the first people in the air for decades afterwards.
And they they had on display um
Langley's plane was
Which had been modified so that it would work after the event.
But they were finally.
eventually persuaded to put the Wright Brothers plane in the Smithsonian instead.
Do you think that delusion's helpful that people uh this way people grow up thinking that they individually can make a difference? Like they can solve cancer, they can come up with a vaccine.
And it is a delusion about individuals versus team, but I wonder if it's helpful.
Yes, but I think the the the delusion that's unhelpful is that you need to be specially
Uh you need to be a special person to do this.
Again, going back to the Wright brothers, there's a wonderful quote from the guy who took the photograph on that the day they took off.
He said they were the workingest boys I ever knew.
Um so
Getting across this point that
Actually, all you really need is an open mind.
uh being prepared to do a lot of hard work.
Not minding if you fail.
The first
Ten or
Ten thousand times.
And these are characteristics we could all have.
So one of the
One of the things I I hope to to
To get people to think.
Is that
Innovation is incredibly important, it's incredibly rewarding
Uh it'd be wonderful if
uh i for any of us if we were able to achieve a significant innovation
It's it's something that um
uh that is actually available to to all of us. It is not something that that is the
special preserve of certain people. I was actually just recently told by an Italian friend a wonderful story about a
a a garage mechanic in Argentina who very recently
uh invented a
uh device for safely delivering
babies that have got stuck in the
The birth canal.
And it's a very simple, very clever device.
Uh this is a guy with no medical knowledge uh of any kind.
It's just a a nice story to remind us that
You know
You don't have to be special to contribute.
Yeah, I like that a lot. And one of the things I wanna come back to is you sort of said that um it involves a lot of failure.
which is trial and error. And that's akin, I guess when it comes to humans to artificial selection, more so than natural selection, which is just random variations. We're choosing variations and we try them and
If you do what everybody else does, you're gonna get the same results as everybody else. And that means a lot of failure, specifically in our day.
an age of sort of public failure. So you you have to be, I think increasingly you have to be able to fail in public if you want to innovate. Can you take that further and expand on the implications of failure?
Yeah, Jeff Bezos is
Interesting on this,'cause he talks about
uh the importance of swinging and missing. And if you're not swinging
hard enough and missing, then you
uh won't succeed in a big way. And the story of Amazon is
You can tell it. I tried to do this in the book. You can tell the story of Amazon as a series of disastrous failures.
Yeah, they
They got all sorts of stuff wrong in the early days. They
Then they bought companies in the dot com boom, which turned out to be flops, um and all went bust.
uh they tried to get into the toy business and it didn't work. Um
They made mistake after mistake.
But every time they were just doing enough experiments so that one or two things would work and they were able to continue. And of course eventually they became the biggest company in the world.
It is vital.
to fail. Thomas Edison
I haven't
Failed. I've just found ten thousand ways that don't work.
the difference between him and the twenty other people who invented the light bulb around the same time.
Is that he was prepared to put in the slog of tr testing six thousand different types of plant material.
before settling on Japanese bamboo for the filament of his light bulb.
Which would last a long time.
Whereas the others.
Uh
Failure, as it were.
So um
That doesn't mean, of course, that every failure
is simply a step towards success.
Uh and I write in the book about
Failures and fakes and frauds that
do happen in the world of innovation.
Uh
And
charlatans get away with them for a while and then eventually
uh discovered.
You know, we have to keep our wits about us here. We can't
um expect.
that just because we're failing we're eventually going to succeed.
One of the great things that America
brought to the world of innovation, in my view, is a relative tolerance of failure.
Compared with
most European countries.
The
the fact that you've started a business and it went wrong was actually quite often a good thing in
the eyes of venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.
Um
As long as it hadn't gone wrong too spectacularly or or too often.
Um
At least it showed you you were trying.
And you had learnt something from the failure.
It's a it's a it's a lesson that

But we need to get across to to
Check
to kids uh these days,'cause quite often they're brought up to think that
uh you know that that we must protect them from failure at all costs and uh
I'm not sure that's a that's a wise thing to do.
How do you think parents should instill that lessons in their kid?
Like how do we as parents try to bring up our kids in a world where
uh failure is somewhat inevitable and
you have to have you you build up these muscles for it too as you go along, right? It's not the end of the world if you fail or you fall down.
Yeah, it it
It's not easy.
And
It's quite a quite often a trope in a movie or something, you know.
Pick yourself up and carry on.
I is a feature that we all have to learn at some point.
I've certainly tried to tell my own kids.
Yeah, you did hopelessly badly at that thing, but that doesn't mean you're a bad person. It it means
uh all the more reason to try again at something else or in a different way.
Uh and you might well be much more successful.
If everybody's trying different ideas, to what extent are
Insight's inevitable.
Well I'm
fascinated by the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. Um I write about it in the book, I
drawn upon the ideas of Kevin Kelly, who wrote a book called What Technology Wants, about how technology seems to
decide what's going to be invented next by somebody
The as I said, there were twenty one different people who came up with the idea of the light bulb in the
eighteen seventies. There's
even more people who came up with the idea of the search engine in the early nineteen nineties.
You rerun the tape.
uh without Sergey Brin meeting Larry Page.
Without Thomas Edison.
And you still get light bulbs, you still get search engines.
That makes it sound like
Innovation is
Totally inevitable.
Yeah.
People are totally dispensable.
And of course that can't entirely be true because
We'd have had light bulbs hundreds of years before.
Uh or something like that.
But
It does appear that there comes a moment when technologies are ripe.
Uh when the
The the combining
uh technologies that um
come together to make a new technology, have reached the point where it's
sort of inevitable that people will do so.
What fascinates me is how few of those transitions we can see coming in advance. So again, take search engines.
It looks
When you're looking backwards from here, it looks unbelievably obvious.
that search was gonna be a really important part of the internet.
Um that whoever cracked it and got us the best search engine would make the most money.
I think the search engine is probably the most useful innovation of my lifetime.
I use it every day.
But
In the eighties?
Were people writing about the
Coming roll of search.
In the
Nassant internet.
Actually no. Very few people see it coming, and even the people who invented the search engines didn't really think of it in those terms. I mean Larry
Page and Sergey Brin who invented Google.
thought they were cataloguing the internet. They didn't think they were inventing a search engine to start with.
So there's a strange asymmetry here between
the inevitability of certain innovations when you get to a certain point.
And yet their extraordinary unpredictability.
Um
as you're moving forward.
Um and of course
If it's inevitable that something's gonna get invented.
e let's say in the next few years it's inevitable that something's gonna be invented. I can't tell you what because it's unpredictable, but
Uh it will
in retrospect be inevitable.
Then
all the more credit to the person who actually goes out there and gets there because they're in a race.
You know, Beethoven didn't have to worry about somebody else writing the ninth symphony uh at the same time as him.
So the there's a there's a curious thing about inventors, and indeed
Scientists.
I mean I wrote a biography of Francis Crick.
And he once said this, he said if
If Jim Watson had been killed by a tennis ball, I don't think I'd have discovered the double helix of DNA.
But somebody would.
Within a year or two.
Uh and that makes him all the more impressive,'cause he and Watson
were clever enough to see that
This
Discovery was ripe and ready to go and grasp the opportunity when it came.
Can you expand a little bit on the we talked about this a bit earlier on the
idea versus execution phase.
And to what extent they're
They're valuable to society and which is more valuable.
Well I
Tend to take the view.
that we overvalue the idea and undervalue the execution, the the
The turning of the idea into a practical innovation.
Because we put you know, we put statues up to
The people who discover the basic
Principle the first.
Prototype.
But we then don't put statues up to the people who
Build a business around
making that device cheap. You know, d can you can you think of a
o of of a sort of monument to to somebody just because they reduced the cost of something.
Whereas in fact if you look at say the history of
Electric lighting.
It's come down spectacularly. So it's
ludicrously cheap to light your house now, compared with
A hundred years ago or two hundred years ago.
And that's
an innovation that
Is
Extraordinarily valuable. I mean the the L E D light that we all use now, which is both
long lasting and very low energy, but produces very good reliable light.
Is the result of
A lot of people, some in Japan, some in
Um
Europe, some in America.
Um
Working
incrementally over many years to to perfect white LED lighting.
And
Oh
Basically we don't any of us know any of their names.
But they have
had an enormous impact.
On our lives.

Make a fetish out of talking about the p person who invented the first light bulb.
Um more than a hundred years ago. I've already talked about Thomas Edison.
But actually the innovators still working on a technology like that are just as important.
Yeah, I think that's definitely true. And they're sort of like the unsung heroes of the
Right.
Yes.
I think that's true.
To give an example of
My favorite example of an unsung hero in the book
I
Right about the
Insecticide treated
Mosquito net.
The bed net that
keeps mosquitoes away from you while you're asleep.
Uh and
Which is far, far more effective if it's been treated with insecticide.
And this is the technology that reversed the increase in malaria. Malaria was going up until two thousand and three. It's now going down as a cause of mortality in the world.
Going down pretty steeply.
And it's entirely due to this but not entirely, but it's nearly all due to this technology. It's more effective than anti malarial drugs.
um more effective than draining swamps or
Spraying mosquitoes.
So I
Said to myself.
This is a really good technology. It's quite low tech, it's quite simple, it's quite cheap.
It's very effective.
Who invented it?
You know, where'd it come from?
I I traced the story back to a sort of
Type.
Written
document from nineteen eighty three.
in Bacchino Faso.
uh describing a very well designed experiment that a Frenchman named Frederick Dariet and his colleagues did.
And I got in touch with Darriot in retirement and said, Can you
Remind you know, tell me how this came about and
What?
what happened. The experiment was um had unbelievably strong results. It showed that a
A mosquito net is quite good at keeping
you from being bitten, uh an insect such mosquito.
treated mosquito net is very good.
And an insecticide treated.
net with tears in it, with holes in it, which in practice they often will have.
is also very good.
So it doesn't actually matter if the thing gets a little bit damaged over the weeks and months.
Which was a really important discovery.
Nobody's heard of Darriot.
He'd never got the Nobel Prize, should have done, in my view.
Don't think he ever became rich. The whole thing was done for on a non profit basis.
Yeah.
You know
if if I achieve one thing, I'll I put his name on the map.
You mentioned in the book that innovation allows us to work with each other. Can you expand on what you meant by that?
Well, I think the great theme of human history
Over
Millennia.
is that we become more specialized in what we produce and
More diversified in what we consume.
So
Compared with a
Self sufficient.
A farmer trying to
you know, grow all his own food.
And
make all his own
Machines and so on.
Someone like that has to work
huge number of hours to produce not a very high standard of living.
Because they're only consuming what they produce.
Where is
Today most people work
Whatever it might be, eight hours of the day at something terribly specialised.
You know, they're not making everything they need. They're just doing one thing. They're making a podcast or whatever it might be.
Then
by selling that to other people
they then supply all their needs and they then go off and spend the rest of the day consuming what other people
of created for them.
Whether it be a movie or a meal or
Whatever.
So
Actually
We're setting up this network where we all work for each other.
An a tiny tiny fraction.
Of
Your effort ends up
Making a big contribution to other people's
Yeah.
Wellness.
Um
Th there's a lovely essay that I
often go back to called I Pencil, written by
uh an economist named Leonard Reid in nineteen fifty eight.
It's written by a pencil.
And the pencil is trying to understand its own origins.
How did it come into the world?
And it's researched it and it's discovered that it's made of wood and it's made of graphite.
And it's got.
You know, paint on the outside and uh
A razor in the end, and so on.
And so it traces the origin of these materials and it discovers that the
The wood came from a tree that was cut down in
Oregon by a lumberjack who was drinking.
Uh
Coffee at the time and using it.
chainsaw which was made by somebody else and the
Man who was
uh who farm the coffee was contributing and so on.
There's an enormous network of people went into manufacturing this one pencil.
And yet not one of them knows how to make a pencil.
Not even the person
Working in the pencil factory.
Uh, they just'cause they don't know how to cut down a tree or grow coffee.
So when you start to see the world in this way
It makes it clear what a fantastic collaboration is going on.
Um the whole time.
between us through the medium of exchange, through me
Doing what I'm good at.
And you doing what you're good at.
And us sharing the results on a massive scale.
It it's a magnificent piece of
collaborative
distributed intelligence that we've achieved this way.
It's a remarkable feat of humanity in a lot of ways.
Yes, and
Uh just to to
To make the story even
Funnier in a way.
When I first started
Thinking.
about this, about um
the us getting more specialised.
in what we produce so that we can be more diversified in what we consume.
I the the penny dropped when I was reading a wonderful book called Second Nature by a guy named Heim Offek, who was a uh an academic.
And I wrote to him and said.
This is absolutely fantastic, this idea.
Can you tell me if you've written anything else about it or where you got the idea?

And he wrote back.
Do you know what?
I think I got the idea from reading your book, The Origins of Virtue.

And I said, Well, I don't think it's in that book.
And he said, Well no, I suppose it's not really and
You know, my point is
We were collaborating.
to produce the idea which was greater than the sum of our
Contributions.
Um, and I'm I I dare say other people have had the idea. I'm not trying to claim
uh sole ownership of it.
But but it was quite a nice example of exactly the point we were making.
I I think in a way that's true, right? And when you communicate something to somebody else, it's almost like you're trying to copy
uh DNA and there's copying errors, which is the error in how you understand what the other person is saying. And sometimes those are positive and sometimes those are negative. But in that case it sounds like
that copying error, the receptivity error in
um changed how he thought about the idea and he got something out of your book that you didn't explicitly write, but it was because of your book that it was
It was there.
Absolutely. And and actually that's probably a better answer to your question about failure. You know, it it's not a failure, but it is an error.
And there has to be as long as there's a degree of randomness in the errors.
Then natural selection will go to work.
Uh I mean m one of my favorite.
quotes which I got from Dan Dennett is from a French philosopher
By the name of Allah.
Hmm.
um said in the early twentieth century
When you think about it.
A boat evolves in a Darwinian fashion, because boats that don't work sink to the bottom of the ocean.
And boats that are well designed don't.
And so
People who make boats copy the designs that didn't sink to the bottom.
So you know, next time you get on an airplane.
You think that unlike a biological organism, this aeroplane is being built by an engineer, right? By an intelligent designer.
Well, has it? Because that engineer was copying a design that someone else did with a few modifications and improvements.
And he was copying a design.
that was made by somebody else, and so on back to the Wright brothers.
In that sense, they really you know, the airplane and the boat really have evolved.
It's not a metaphor, it's what's actually happening to them.
It's out of digital, I mean there seems to be a lack of
A visible lack of innovation anyways. Why does innovation seem to regularly work in some fields like digital and my phone and not on others like say testing for a virus?

Yeah, I'm very intrigued by this. Uh we we've lived through a period of
Extraordinary innovation in uh digital.
in software, in uh computers and communications.
But we've actually lived through a period of stagnation with respect to innovation in, say, transport.
Our grandparents had the opposite experience. Uh you know, my grandparents were born
uh the turn of the twentieth century.
Um that was well after the telephone. They had the telephone throughout their lives.
But they had almost no other
communications and computing improvements that reach them.
Before they died in
But in the nineteen sixties.
I've had the opposite experience. Uh but sorry, but they also had extraordinary changes in transport. You know, they were born before the motor car and the airplane.
Uh and they died with the man on the moon and
Rockets in the air and supersonic.
uh jet fighters and all sorts of
Weird stuff. Helicopters, you know.
Everything.
In my lifetime
Well, the seven four seven was invented when I was eleven years old.
It was still in service until a few months ago.
We've not got flying cars, jet packs.
routine space travel, all the things that we were promised in the nineteen fifties.
But we have got
Incredible changes in computing and communications.
Now why is that?
Obviously
a technological possibility, you know, the invention of the silicon transistor.
has had
Yeah.
enormous consequences in one field, but not in the other.
And the technologies of transport, the internal combustion engine and
things like that have come up against certain diminishing return limits that
By the way, we're expecting to break in the next ten years, and I'm a little sceptical about whether we will.
The you know, the contrast between the two is is is quite striking.
I don't fully understand why it is. To some extent we have
made it difficult for innovators to work in other fields. We've put too many regulations in the way, too many obstacles, too many
Um
uh costs
So for example, you know, we've been unable to come up with new designs for nuclear power stations for several decades.
That's because
licensing a new design for nuclear power station would cost billions under the present licensing system. So nobody bothers to even try.
Uh, in the end it's just regulation that gets in the way, there.
Um and there are other reasons, but if you think
You know, I was thinking the other day, if somebody had come up with a
Uh an idea for a
Point of care bedside diagnostic device of a portable kind to use.
Um
for detecting viruses.
Ten years ago.
Then we could have had it by now.
But just imagine if that person had said, Oh, I can't face three, maybe four, five years trying to get it licensed.
uh and going through enormously expensive trials to prove that it's safe and so on and effective.
I think I'll go off and invent a video game instead.
I suspect
One or two people did that.
You know, that to some extent the the digital world is
sort of sucked people away from other
areas of innovation.
Um
And
We may want to rebalance that. By the way.
the message of my
argument that we had transport innovations in the twentieth century and then
commun in the first half of the twentieth century and communications inven innovations in the second half.
is that the first half of the twenty first century may not be all about computers and communications, may not be all about AI.
Um it may be about biotechnology, for example.
Uh and I suspect it will be.
Yeah, I'm optimistic that a whole bunch of people after this um grow up and want want to get into this field. I mean we we've seen
A lot of innovation in in
financial industry, which also is highly regulated. So makes me a bit skeptical as to the
the role of regulation and how that plays into things. Uh obviously it does. You also want
the winners to come away winners and increasingly we seem to
want people to win, but not too much. I'm curious as to
What policy implications that you see government should be thinking about to foster
um innovation within their societies.
This is a very difficult question, and and I I I don't think anyone's found the magic bullet in terms of
uh government policies that will
Deliver innovation to it.
growing society.
The
main thing is to
get the obstacles out of the way, whether it's regulatory obstacles or
um or other obstacles to innovation just to to to clear the pitch for for the innovations to have a a free run.
Um
Uh that feels to me the most important thing governments can do.

Picking winners and saying I want this technology to be developed by such such and such a date.
has a pretty awful track record.
Um and is likely to end up by the losers picking the governments.
Uh in other words, you know, the wrong people
end up getting the grants and the subsidies'cause they're very well politically connected rather than because they have
The best plans.
I think the way to solve that problem.
is to dangle a prize in front of entrepreneurs.
And say if you invent
a a solution to this problem.
You will get a reward.
The reward needn't be a a
Cash lump sum.
Um
It
could be uh, for example, an advanced market commitment. The Gates Foundation did this with a vaccine for pneumococcus.
saying if the pharmacy industry could come up with a
vaccine for this disease which kills children in
poor countries.
Then
Uh
Don't worry, although it looks unprofitable to invent such a thing, we will make sure you get properly rewarded.
By topping up the price you can charge, effectively.
Mm.
And that worked very well.
And essentially we've done something similar with vaccines in this epidemic.
Uh, I mean we've you know, governments all around the world have said look, if if someone can come up with a vaccine for uh COVID nineteen, we will buy
you know, forty million doses, fifty million doses, whatever it is.
Uh, that has worked to produce a huge race among different
uh companies.
And the great thing about that
Is that the
The governments.
are not picking the winners. They are saying we will
I I mean they're picking some winners, but then th they don't have to decide in advance.
Which of these
Technologies for producing a vaccine will work.
And as a result, it's very interesting, it has
incentivised a new technology to come of age, that is to say, messenger RNA vaccines of the kind that
Moderna and
BioNTech uh were exploring before this
And had you know, they they they'd tried very hard and they'd raised a lot of money and they were
Working on this and they
hit a lot of dead ends and fails and tried again and
Find a work around for some of their problems and so on.
But there was no guarantee they would ever
make their shareholders money or solve the problems or produce solutions to
um cancer or
Infectious disease.
And then along comes this pandemic and
suddenly the prize of these contracts from government
has been just what they needed to
To break through.
So
I think the prize approach is is to be uh
uh explored in in the future as a way of incentivising innovation
It starts with the longitude prize in seven in eighteenth century England.
When the
The government said uh
We really don't want
our ships being wrecked.
all the time on the Sealy Isles'cause they think they're in the middle of the Atlantic. If somebody can work out a way to measure longitude,
As well as latitude.
Um, then we'll give them a lot of money.
And the
Problem was solved unexpectedly.
By a humble clockmaker from Yorkshire by the name of John Harrison, who said all you need is a good clock so you can know what time it is in London.
Uh and
You don't need to
Look at the stars or
do complicated mathematical calculations.
Um, and they were very reluctant to give him the prize, but actually they did in the end.
I'm curious as to what other variables you see um governments have levers on that would foster innovation other than sort of prizes and setting direction.
Obviously the the the main stuff is to make sure there's plenty of R and D happening.
uh to some extent to fund it,'cause after all government takes a big chunk of
of our money offers, so it'd be a shame if none of that money went back into
Things that encourage innovation.
uh to uh make sure that there is good educational opportunity
Um and to foster openness and
Freedom.
You know, in the end it all boils down to freedom, the freedom to
exchange ideas, the freedom to fail and start again, the freedom to change your mind, the freedom to invest where you think
It's right to invest
um the freedom as a consumer to express your preference for one new technology rather than another.
You know, for example
Google set up this
company called Google X that
Tries wacky ideas to see if they will make exciting new products.
Uh and some of them have
been dismal failures.
Which is fine.
And others.
have been successes technologically
I'm thinking of Google Glass, the
The technology whereby you can see
Inside your spectacles.
I don't know what the stock market's doing or what the weather forecast is or something like that.
It was a brilliant piece of technology and it worked really well and they put it on the market and nobody wanted to buy it.
Just turns out it's not.
It's not what people want, not for two and a half thousand dollars anyway.
Yeah, a lot of a lot of that could be just timing.
Right. And at the end of the book, I think you had this great line that summarized this, which was um I think it's innovation is the child of freedom and the parent of prosperity.
That's right. That's what I say. It innovation explains all prosperity over the last three hundred years, really.
Nearly all, anyway.
And
It's clear that it is.
the consequence of letting people free to exchange their ideas.
The it's not the only thing that matters, but it is an important feature.
One of the curious things for me is that
Um it seems to be that innovation is geographically concentrated.
I mean, for the last fifty years it's been, say, Silicon Valley in California.
And that seems to be coming to an end right now. And before that it was Victorian Britain, and then you know, before that it was Renaissance Italy.
Um, and at some point it was probably ancient Greece and China. Uh why does it
seem to happen only in one place at a time.
This bushfire that breaks out for
number of decades in one place and then breaks out somewhere else.
It really baffles me actually, because
It's not immediately obvious what's going on here.
I mean you can
You can come up with explanations for why California was so extraordinarily innovative.
uh the you know the the the way you could
um float companies and
retain control, the
Amount of defence spending at Stanford University that
freedom, the sunshine, you know, the number of immigrants, you know, there's all sorts of
Explanations.
The general point you can make and this applies to Renaissance Italy and
Um
Ancient Arabia and
ancient China and so on as well.
Uh is that
City states.
tend to be innovative.
The the the
Independent, relatively small.
Political units.
That are
very vigorous traders with other places.
tend to be places where a lot of innovation happens. You know, Britain's Moment in the Sun was because it was
part of an enormous network of free trade.
Um
And
Uh that's because people will meet each other for the first time.
Ideas will therefore meet each other.
Profits will be made to be invested in things.
Um incentives will be available.
And a freedom to decide what to do. You know, most of humanity has spent most of the last free few hundred years.
Living under regimes that told them what they can do and can't do most of the time. You know, whether it was in an empire or
a military state or whatever.
Or a feudal state before that.
Uh it's extraordinarily rare for people to have the freedom
to to act as merchants and
investors and
um entrepreneurs.
Anywhere that
allows that to happen.
We'll get results.
I mean I was looking the other day at a at a sort of index of
prosperity and the countries that came top in their continents.
for the last ten years in terms of the measures of prosperity.
We're all open free trading countries, but quite small ones. You know, Mauritius is the most
prosperous economy in Africa, for example. Botswana is second.
Um Israel in its part of the world.
Denmark in Europe.

you know, Chile in in South America and so on. So
It's part of all that, I think.
Basically the city states.
Why does it come to an end?
If you look at what happened in Holland
The Netherlands.
after the golden age in the
sixteen hundreds when they were by far the richest, most prosperous, most successful.
Part of the world.
Um
Eventually they
Spent more and more money.
Kind of on
on on themselves and on debt and
If this is beginning to sound familiar, then
It's meant to.
Huh.
I think
civilizations get
get get sort of greedy and self indulgent in some sense.
Uh and start
investing their money and their expertise and their interest.
uh not in
the kinds of things that led to entrepreneurial innovation.
But the kinds of things that that lead to
Um
Overspending and over borrowing.
Uh and uh then for a while you can keep going on financial
Engineering for a while.
But it seems to run out eventually.
Uh the the other way it comes to an end is when uh
Some dictator comes along and says, Right now I'm in charge and I'm gonna tell everyone what to do and I'm gonna
uh not let you trade. So for example in in China
thousand years ago, the Song dynasty was a time of
Very devolved, decentralized.
economy with merchants relatively free to
decide what they wanted to do, what they wanted to invent.
uh extraordinarily innovative time.
And then it's followed after a
Mongol interregnum by the
Ming Empire, which has the opposite approach. Basically the Mandarins
Tell the merchants.
um whether they can leave town or not, w how much stock they must hold in their warehouses.
whether they can trade abroad or not, um, that's not a recipe for prosperity.
Yeah, that that's definitely not. And we can't predict these sort of like pockets of geographical concentration in advance. I think that that's probably a fool's errand, but when they pop up we can definitely foster them and encourage them.
You know, for example, China has been relatively free economically, but relative but very unfree politically in the last few decades.
I think that's now changing. I don't think it's very free in either respect.
Uh and so I don't see it.
Um
leading the world in prosperity.
Uh
For an awful lot longer.
I I I wonder, interestingly, how that changes if
hypothetically you can steal the innovations of other people with impunity
You don't necessarily need to be the creator of the innovation to benefit from it. Well, there's always this problem that
The the the the country that's
most innovative gets very angry about other countries nicking their stuff.
There's a fascinating uh period in history soon after the American Revolution when
Americans were
Uh engaged in
rampant industrial espionage to try and steal
secrets of
Britain's industry and they sent all sorts of people over to
Yeah, prowl around pretending to be
Preachers when in fact they were
making drawings of the insides of factories and things.
Of course we have a similar
Experience with
uh uh Chinese attitude to intellectual property more recently.
My view on the whole
Is that
You shouldn't worry about it.
You should
If necessary.
uh sell the the stuff to them.
Because if you can keep ahead, if you can
Use your advantage to be smarter.
There's no reason you can't just
uh maintain your advantage indefinitely. You know,
When other countries are playing catch up.
That's fine. That that's just creating a market for you.
Yeah, in a in a way it's good, right? Because um, if you're starting out, you want to copy the best of what other people have and start from there and then not recreate all the wheel from scratch and innovate on top of that. Yeah, catch up growth is a is a well recognized phenomenon. A lot of the East Asian economies, you know, in my youth, Japan was famous for making cheap
copies of stuff that Europeans made.
Well that didn't last long. Soon it was making by far the best stuff.
Exactly. And it's to the world's benefit that they they start from a higher starting position or a higher baseline, if you will, in some ways, uh, even though economically that could have consequences. Well, I d you know, we have to get away from zero sum thinking here.
Uh everybody
uh you know, the prosperity of another country is not a problem for you. It just means that there's some rich consumers out there prepared to buy whatever you're good at selling.
Um and the whole point of the Ricardo
principle, the the principle of comparative advantage.
A brilliant concept i is that um you know, it doesn't matter if you're
I if somebody else is better at you making everything, then they're still gonna find it easier to make the things they're best at.
And buy the rest from you.
Um, so there there's always gonna be something you can you can sell to another country, however prosperous they become.
I'm curious as to why you think that we default often to uh zero sum thinking instead of growing the pie and a an abundance.
Well, I think it's because
biologically, zero sum thinking did make sense in many cases.
That's to say
You know
Ten thousand years ago.
There's one woman.
uh available to marry in the in the
Encampment.
Uh you've got
twice as many cattle as I have.
She you get the woman, I don't. That's a zero sum game.
Um and
So in that sense.
We've spent millions of years.
Thinking that your gain is my loss.
It's only in the last
A hundred thousand.
In some ways, that's how old trade seems to be.
on a on a massive scale with the division of labour and the collaborative system I
Described earlier.
It's more like the last ten thousand years.
It's only then that
We've had to get our heads around intellectually around.
The idea that someone else's gain can also be your gain.
It's not on the whole very common otherwise. There are examples, biological examples of mutual gain. For example, mating, you know, I mean
Um
two people mating to produce a baby is is um
You know, is not a zero sum game.
Yeah, I like that. I mean one of the defining features of humanity is that we can overrule our sort of evolutionary instincts in some of these ways through thought, and where a lot of other animals don't seem to be able to do that. Actually I don't think any other animal can do that. Yeah, Stephen Pink has said I can tell my genes to go jump in the lake.
Exactly. And it it seems to me that we we live in a culture of abundance and it it would be great for society if we started to shift to growing the pie instead of dividing the pie or
Um
I I think that that would be a huge advantage for people. Yeah.
I agree.
You thought the invention of the internet would sort of
lead to social media and lead us to sort of all seeing each other's point of view because we'd have access to all these diversity
uh different points of view and different apertures and different lenses into the world.
And that we would somehow see the world more clearly or see through the eyes of other people. It hasn't turned out that way. Why do you think that is?
You're right. I was pretty utopian about this. Um
Uh
Twenty years ago.
Uh I thought
uh you know, now it's you don't have you don't just read one newspaper, you
Uh you go online and you find all sorts of people saying lots of things and you think, Oh, that's got a point. I hadn't thought of it like that.
And that does happen.
Yeah, I mean I
Try and make a point of doing that.
uh not just reading the people I agree with, but I have to say it's a relatively rare experience and I'm I'm more and more struck by how people are inside echo chambers now.
Uh and
You know, they they don't even know your you know, if if you're not in their bubble, they don't even know what you're saying. You know, it's uh there was a very interesting remark by
journalist I read this morning, who who said, You know, when I left
One newspaper went to work for the others. People assumed I died.
'Cause I never read that on the newspaper.

S
But of course that's you know, newspapers are old media.
Why is social media making that
a a stronger phenomenon.
I don't fully understand it. It's something to do with the fact that it's interactive.
The the
That you
You look for
um retweets.
Likes.
Responses.
And you get them by reinforcing your own prejudices, not by
Stepping outside your bubble.
uh and saying unpopular things, or indeed saying moderate things. You know, one of the problems with social media is that that the stronger the view you express, the more
likely it is that it will
B.
Amplified.
Um if you say
I don't know, I think there are two sides to this question on Twitter.
On the whole, everybody ignores you.
Yeah, no nobody wants to hear that. I think one of the interesting things about this is that we're
enable to find people just like us that feed on our sort of subtle thoughts and
show us that we're not alone and eventually they become extreme as we surround ourselves with
With people who
Feel and think the same thing. Well, I think there's a definite tribalism here.
You know that we're we're
it this is this is part of an instinct that goes back to
To the rainforest.
Are there ways that we can counter that, do you think?
Yeah, so I think
Yeah, something similar happened with radio.
Um
In the nineteen
twenties, as I mentioned, radio played a big role in the rise of the dictators.
And yet people had invested just as much utopian hope in it. I mean some of the things written about radio
when it was first invented are extraordinary, you know, saying this is gonna result in world peace'cause everyone's gonna hear each other's point of view.
Um we're never gonna have a war again. Well
That didn't work out.
Uh and and people like Hitler and Mussolini
Yeah.
Radio.
very extensively to to reinforce the prejudices of their of their followers.
And yet w you and I don't think of radio as a
source of for evil in the world.
Today.
So it is possible
to tame these technologies, to work out ways of living with them, to
To come up with cultural norms that
Undo.
The bad stuff.
And I have a feeling we're already doing it. I mean if you j you just look at the sort of
The the way that the really nasty trolls
I don't think get the same
Mm.
Traction.
Today as they um
Uh
Dude.
Ten years ago. I might be wrong.
Do you think that's because we're learning to adapt as individuals?
Yes, I think

negotiate
mutually acceptable
Norms and rules.
guidelines as to how to behave.
I mean Stephen Pink is very interesting in his book
uh the better angels of our nature talking about how we
became less violent.
And
You know, in the end it all boils down to this this sort of model proposed by Norbert Elias that
in in uh medieval society
uh killing someone'cause they offended you, um, was a sort of rather admirable thing to do, rather. And then
Five hundred years later it's nothing like as admirable, it's despised, and you pick that up quite quickly as you're growing up and you think, Oh, well then I won't kill people.
because otherwise I'll get despised. I want people to like me.
Adam Smith makes this point actually in his theory of moral sentiments, you know, that in the end we're the impartial spectator
who is looking at us from the outside, who we're thinking of all the time, and and we we calibrate our behavior to what we know works or doesn't work in our society.
I think that's a really interesting place to sort of wrap up this interview.
Uh one question I I do have though is if you could give everybody a message about innovation
Um, what would it be? What would you tell the world?

I would tell the world that innovation is
Unbelievably important. It's by far the
Biggest story of the last
Five hundred years.
It's the reason for optimism about the next five hundred years.
It's infinite.
I think this is probably what I'd tell people.
That there's no reason we can't
Innovate.
indefinitely, if not infinitely. And people say, Well how can that be? We'll run out of resources.
And I'll say no, because
Half the time these days we're innovating to use fewer resources. You know, the L E D light bulb.
It uses
one quarter as much electricity as as the
compact fluorescence that replaces. Um so actually
I don't see why.
We can't.
Go on.
Innovating.
to advance each other's welfare.
Infinitely and
If you think how far we've come in the last two hundred years, imagine what the world will be like in the next two hundred.
Thank you so much, Matt. That's a phenomenal point to leave this on. I really appreciate you taking the time today. Thank you. I really enjoyed it.
Mm.
Um
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