Welcome to Keith's night, don't tread on anyone and the
libertarian Institute. Today I am honored to have Matt
Ridley. He is a British journalist, a
member of the House of Lords in author of books that have sold
over a million copies that have been translated into 31
languages. What an accomplishment?
I mean 31 languages, I'm still trying to nail down English, and
he's at 31 languages, unbelievable find a mat
mattress. Late .co.uk Links, of course,
will be in the description below.
We're going to go over three books today, the rational
Optimist how Innovation Works and the evolution of everything
mr. Ridley, thank you so much for
your time today. Thank you, Keith for having me
on the show. Now, before we get into these
three, you have committed a number of thought crimes.
With a new book, you have titled viral the search for the origin
of covid-19. EU co-authored this with a
scientist Alina Chun from Harvard and MIT s broad
Institute. What is your thesis behind this
book? These is behind that book is
very simple that it's extremely important.
That the world finds out how this pandemic began, so that we
can prevent the next one that unlike the case of SARS and a
lot of other recent outbreaks. We don't know, we haven't got a
Smoking Gun to tell us the answer.
It looks were not. Full cooperation and
transparency from the Chinese government, that would enable us
to solve this problem, but the evidence we have seen suggests
that the favored explanation at the start that it was the result
of someone buying an animal in the market that had somehow been
in contact with a bat and picked up the virus.
That way doesn't seem to make sense.
We've not been able to find an infected animal, despite 80,000
animals being tested by the Chinese etc etc.
And it's looking more and more like likely that it is not a
coincidence that Wuhan is the one city in the world.
With the biggest collection of bat born size like coronavirus,
he's in the world by some distance and has been
manipulating as well as collecting those viruses on a
huge scale but only in the last 10 or 15 years.
So that does seem to indicate and the more we found out about
the experiments they were doing in Wuhan These viruses the more
we think it's important to properly investigate the
possibility that this came from a laboratory.
So we think it's an open question.
It could have come through the market.
It could have come through the laboratory, it's pretty shocking
that we don't know that. The Chinese are not being
particularly helpful in letting us find out.
And the evidence is very intriguing and deserves a book.
A detective story, a whodunit if you like in its own right
already, Yeah. That's our thesis and it's been
an extraordinary experience writing that book one of the
most fascinating but also rather alarming things that I've done
and I had the great privilege of collaborating with a brilliant
young scientist Alina Chan at the broad Institute as you
mentioned when it comes to the first cases.
Where did the first cases occur where they, in this wet market
area where the close to this Institute of virology, can you
give us a Geographical area of where the started.
Well, not entirely, no because we're dealing with partial bits
of information, but what we do know is that it started in work
on the evidence that it was anywhere else.
But were hand before November or December of 2019 is very, very
thin indeed. And the first cases were
detected sometime around the middle of November.
We think we've seen one leaked document from the Chinese
authorities. Giving a case of the 17th of
November is the earliest they then denied that and said that,
the first case was the first of December that later they said,
maybe it was the 8th of December.
Nobody believes it bullet began that late.
I mean everybody thinks if you look at the genetics if you look
at the case numbers Etc it was probably the first human being
was probably infected in either late October or mid-november
2019 some time in that period and Where was it?
Well, we don't know the wasn't outbreak in the market very
early on about half the cases in December, were people connected
directly to the market but the problem with that is that the
Chinese authorities very early on.
In the first part of January were saying if you have
pneumonia in Wuhan and you had a connection to the market, then
we will Isolate. You and investigate because he
probably got this new disease if you didn't have a connection
with the market. If you've not been there or you
don't live near it, then we will assume you don't, we will assume
you've got some other kind of pneumonia so there's what's
called an ass attainment bias whereby the market cases were
spotted earlier because you had to be a market case to be
defined as a source Covey, to Case covid Case.
So that's our problem. But we can't be sure but We
think it was circulating in Wuhan in early, sorry, in late,
2019, in November and we badly need more collaboration.
And cooperation for the Chinese to trace, the early cases.
Us intelligence says there were three workers from that lab from
the Wuhan Institute of archaeology, who went to
hospital with pneumonia, like illness and symptoms vary like
covid in November of 2019. Now, I don't have sufficient
security. A clearance to be able to check
that information, but we are told that with significant
Assurance by the intelligence authorities.
So that might be important information, but we can't check
it. You wrote a blog post titled.
Why did scientists suppress lab leak, Theory?
Do you have a theory as to why this was suppressed as opposed
to openly discussed? Yes, there was a coordinated
attempt to shut down all discussion of the lab leak as a
possibility in January, and February of 2020.
We know this because we've seen the emails in which they discuss
devising, an article that they can then publish.
And point to saying, case closed, this is the market not
the lab and we can assure everyone of that.
At the same time, those very scientists who wrote that
article, Was saying to each other in private, you know what,
this looks awfully like, it might have come out the lab.
We don't know some of the features of a genome look, like
it's been manipulated in the lab, not just, not just kept in
a lab. And so the extraordinary
disconnect between what they were saying in private.
And what they're saying in public, came to light, as a
result of a number of emails, surrounding a key meeting on the
first of February, 20, 2008 between some us and UK,
virologists the motor Ation was clearly not to get science into
trouble and not to endorse Donald Trump's ideas about what
was going on and to support Chinese colleagues who were you
know furious at the idea that they might be accused of
starting this pandemic. So there's actually no one with
a vested interest in saying actually this might have come
from a lab. There's no one who has part of
their paid day job thinks who I really wanted to be from a lab.
You know, the the scientists didn't want that.
Chinese authorities didn't want that.
The politicians in the west particularly didn't want that.
Because I didn't want to rock the boat in diplomatic relations
with China. The environmentalist didn't want
that because they wanted this to be a cautionary tale about
destruction of the rainforests and so on.
So so actually, you know, not vested interests and everything
people can go against their best interest.
And I is a big fan of Science and a huge supporter of
biotechnology in particular, do not have a vested interest in
this being a lab story, it will do damage to some of the science
that I admire and value if that turns out to be the case but I
have to follow the truth wherever it takes us and a
leaner and I started are very open-minded lie and by the time
we'd finished writing the book. We were convinced that it was
probably oddly more likely that it came out of the laboratory
and we've clearly laid out some of the information we would need
to solve the problem. That's the information was still
waiting for. You mentioned in another blog
post. I think it was titled.
I was duped by lab leak. Deniers where you would mention,
there was a previous lab leak in.
I think Britain during the foot and mouth and get, can you
discuss previous lab leaks? I think it was 2007.
Yes. Well there's a number of cases.
I mean, lab labs have leaked smallpox in Britain in the 70s
flew in China in the 70s brucellosis in China and 2019,
Anthrax in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s, a leak that was
denied for many years and then eventually when the Soviet Union
collapsed was confirmed to have happened.
So outbreaks that have killed people have happened frequently,
SARS itself lie. Like six times from labs in
Beijing, Singapore, and Taiwan the first starts.
That was and actually killed people on one of those
occasions. But the one you're referring to
is a really interesting case and it's an animal disease.
So didn't kill anybody, but it's called foot and mouth disease,
it affects cattle. It broke out in 2007, on a farm
in Surrey in England, which was 13 miles from the world's
leading Reference Laboratory for foot and mouth.
This virus now that turned out not to be a coincidence, you
will not be surprised to hear it.
Turned out there was a leaking pipe at the lab and a contractor
had been called in to mend it and the contractor had then gone
straight to a farm. Nobody realized that the leaking
pipe was actually leaking live virus and he had infected cattle
on the farm. So the problem was solved quite
quickly and it was contained and not many animals had to be
killed but The point is, it wasn't a geographical
coincidence. Now, this outbreak began within
eight miles of the world's leading laboratory Force as
like, coronavirus is from bats. In an area where they aren't
found, naturally in bats, thousands of miles from where
they're normally collected in southern China and Southeast
Asia. So it may be a coincidence but
it doesn't look like it. It Like we should take very
seriously the possibility that the geographical coincidence,
maybe telling us something as Humphrey Bogart, put it in, as a
blanket of all the Gin joints in all the towns in all the world,
she should walk into mine. You wrote a book, The Evolution
of everything. How new ideas emerge?
Mr. Ridley. How do new ideas emerge?
Well, my argument there was that we tend to think think of the
world and top-down terms. We say somebody decides in
government or inside a big company that we must invent X
and we invent X or somebody decides that the that we're
going to solve such and such a philosophical or political
problem or something. And actually the world doesn't
work that way, the world is a much more bottom-up place, much
more emergent Place. Many of the new things that
happen in the world. Arise without Direction without
planning without authorship. An awful.
Lot of them come from ordinary people.
Interacting and developing new ideas among themselves.
So for example if you think about language, the English
language or any other language is a man-made thing, it is not a
natural phenomenon but it is not the product of a committee.
A few Geniuses or some kind of planning operation within a
government or anything else, it devolves it changes from year to
year. New words come in Old words, go
out, new linguistic, habits new syntax new grammar.
All this kind of thing happens. Not because anyone's in charge,
but because Ordinary People Do a form of natural selection.
Good old-fashioned Evolution they say, We know to just take a
simple example when we use words frequently, they're nearly
always short. So, if there's a new word
floating around like covid-19, right?
We shortened it within a few weeks were saying covid and even
that's a shorter from the coronavirus, you know.
So so who decides that? I mean, who do you know, where
did that come from? Who's the person who said, let's
shorten Words when we use them a lot because it makes life
easier. Well, nobody did.
And everybody did it's the same with the internet interestingly.
You know who invented the Internet?
Well it wasn't al Ghul but it wasn't event, Vince surf or one
of these other brilliant people, either they made important
contributions, but we all invented the internet and we're
all Reinventing it all the time so that my purpose in that book
was to get people to stop thinking in terms of solving the
world's problems. In a top-down dirige East
directive. Way and think about solving
them, through Evolution, through allowing people to interact, and
find Solutions in a sort of collective way, but not in a way
in which the someone in charging them of the collective.
You wrote a book, the rational Optimist, where you highly
praised Adam Smith, a book written in 1776, I believe
titled an inquiry into the causes of The Wealth of Nations.
What is the most important thing you learned from The Works of
Adam Smith? I think Adam Smith is a towering
figure. I hadn't read him until I was an
adult. I wasn't taught economics, I
came to him later in life. I but the more I go through
life, the more I keep coming back to some of the insights
that he had into into the world. I mean, the first point, which
actually is, in some ways emerges from his earlier book,
the theory of moral sentiments in 1759 Is that the world is a
bottom-up place that things emerged, that morality is
something that emerges from the way we interact with each other
rather than is taught by priests as it were particularly.
And so, for example, that's one of the points he makes.
But in The Wealth of Nations, he invents economics.
And what he does is he points out the enormous significance of
the division of labor and the importance of Of specialization
and exchange but actually, if you and I are both living in the
Stone Age and we need a spear and an Axe and you could make
your own Spear and your own Acts.
Or I and I could make my own Spear of my own acts.
But if we say Keith, you make both Spears, I'll make both axes
and then we'll swap then. Actually it's going to take us
less time because you're going to get good at making Spears.
I'm going to get good at making axes.
We're both going to, you know, by specialization and then
exchanging we're going to be better off.
And that in the end is the great insight about human beings as
opposed to other species about how we operate and why we
operate the way we do, it's an enormously significant inside
and you know, just just think about this for a moment as the
world modernizes, as we move forward into the 21st century.
What I think has been happening for several hundred years is
that people become more and more specialized in what they
produce, but more and more Diversified in what they
consume. So, you know, if you are self
sufficient, if you had to make your own clothing, make your own
food, make your own lighting, make our own shelter, you
wouldn't live a very high quality of life and you wouldn't
have any Leisure Time to consume movies or anything like that.
You'd spend your whole day trying to make a candle or
makeup. Catch an animal to eat or
something like that. So self-sufficiency is really
another word for poverty. And yet what we've done is we've
said I'm going to do something called a job which is added and
making podcasts or something like that.
And I'm going to supply the product of my job to everyone
else in the world in exchange for all the things they can
produce. And so actually we shouldn't be
afraid of specialization. Because it specialization, you
know, people often lamento jobs are very boring.
You know, you get stuck in your job and it's very tedious
etcetera, etcetera. Yeah.
But the point of the job is so that you can spend the other
eight hours of the day consuming movies and going to restaurants
consuming the product of other people's work.
And so the great inside of Adam Smith, I think is how we all
worked out how to work for each other.
That by increase living standard.
Mmm, I love that answer. It's almost like he's taken the
individual self-interest and harmonized it with the
collective self interest through the concept of fish, through the
concept of specialization because what appears to be a
contradiction. It's like so John Maynard Keynes
was like, okay, so everyone selfish yet.
Everyone is helping each other. This Makes no sense at all.
That this is a total contradiction, but he didn't
read the book published 200 years before his terrible book,
which actually explains it as you do in the rational Optimist.
That's a cane. She probably did read Adam Smith
I would do to you if not ready but you read it but I guess he
didn't appreciate it to the extent.
I guess anyone else did when it comes to the modern day.
If you Talk to say a millennial did just uh things are horrible,
the environments bad. We have inflation, we have all
of these bubbles, we have this inequality, there's poverty in
the world. What are some of the bullet
points that you list to the average person who says things
are. So horrible today, how dare you
write a book titled? The rational Optimist?
Yeah, well, part of my motivation, and part of that
with the, where I came from to write this book, was I remember
people saying exactly, Actly the same thing.
When I was young, I mean, I was young in the 1970s.
I was told that the population explosion was Unstoppable.
Famine was inevitable. Pollution pollution was going to
shorten the lifespan through, through cancer.
The rainforest was disappearing. The deserts were advancing the
oil was running out. There was a Litany of gloom and
doom, which I believed I fell for it.
I was a genuinely pessimistic young person in the 1970s.
Oh my God. There's no future for my
country, my species. The world's going to be Grim in
the future. No.
But getting a decent job or trying to be ambitious.
You were just going to see whether we can survive this
horrible thing because the grown-ups told me that the
future was Dreadful, and they never said anything about how,
it might not be Dreadful. Now, 40 years later the world is
wonderful. Compared with when I was a
teenager poverty in the World has collapsed.
It disappeared. That's not quite true.
Of course, there is still poverty.
But you know, when I was born about half the world lived on
less less than two dollars a day in today's money, that's the
sort of definition of extreme, absolute poverty, today, weigh
less than 10%, does that that's incredible.
Nobody has ever lived through a transformation as great as that
child mortality is down. Lifespan is up by five hours.
Day of my life. Life span, most infectious
diseases of disappeared. That cancer rates are falling.
If you adjust for age where healthier wealthier clever, a
Keener kind of Freer more, peaceful more equal.
Equality is improved globally dramatically.
People in poor countries, have been getting rich much faster
than people in rich countries. So the catalog of improvements
During the period when we were Supposed to be having a really
miserable time. Is something that I just, I feel
Evangelical but telling young people.
So when the adults tell you today, you're doomed, climate
change, etc, etc. Take it with a pinch of salt,
look at the data, make your own mind up and consider the
possibility that they might be wrong because they have a huge
vested interest in selling Gloom and do it sells newspapers.
It sells books. I would have sold far more
copies, you were kind enough to mention that I've sold a lot of
copies of my books but over so far more copies have had written
a pessimistic but then an optimistic book I know that for
sure just to give you a little thought experiment to realize
what's how adrift people are from the realities of the world?
If you say to people as Hans rosling, did then a brilliant
experiment to a thousand people in a pole.
He said has the the percentage of the world that lives in
extreme poverty doubled have door stayed the same in the last
20 years. Mmm, but 65% of people in
America, similar percentage in Britain said it's doubled.
The percentage of people in the world who live in extreme
poverty as has doubled. In 20 years about 30% said, it
had stayed the same and only five percent said it had haft.
The 5% were Right? The 65% of the 30% were wrong,
okay? So any 5% of us, know that but
hang on said rosling. If I had asked that question of
a chimpanzee by writing those three answers on three,
different bananas and throwing them into a cage and seeing
which banana it picked up first, it would answer that question,
right? 33% of the time not 5% of the
time so it would do 6 times as well.
As people and answering a question about human society
that people can just look up on the Internet.
How can that be? And the answer, of course, as to
how that can be is that as Josh Billings a 19th century, Sage
put it, it ain't what, you don't know, that gets you into
trouble. It's what, you know, for sure
that ain't so. So it's no, we're convinced we
know things about the world that Not to be wrong.
And so one of the things we have to do in the words of Abraham
Lincoln is disenthrall young people about the things that
they've imbibed which are simply wrong about the world.
And one of them is that it's going to hell in a handcart,
it's not Yeah, the concept of humility is is so important.
Just asking people today, though, things are horrible.
I mean, does it look at what's going on in Ukraine?
Things were so much better when I was a kid.
I said, look Grandma, I love you.
But when you were a kid there was literally Stalin going into
Ukraine, killing far more people than have died today, you're
just not right about this. Also you live through the second
world war and Korea and Vietnam. You gotta stop this.
Yes, it's bad but please stop pretending.
It's, it's the end of the world. Yes.
But I'm also very careful not to turn pangloss Ian if you
remember dr. Pangloss said the things are for
the best in the best of all possible.
Worlds. You can't improve on this world
because God made it and it therefore must be perfect.
And if people are dying they must be bad people.
So that's a good thing that you do and Volterra is mocking this
theodicy. His philosophy and and I'm not
here to say the world's perfect, I'm saying the world is a lot
better than it was for most people 50 years ago.
But that means it can be a lot better still in 50 years.
You know. It's a Vale of Tears today
compared with what it could be in in a few decades time.
And yes I mean every year since that book the rational Optimist
came out, I've given talks about it and every year people have
said well you can't still surely be an optimist.
I mean come on. Have you seen what's happening
with the Euro crisis? Have you seen what's happening
with Ebola? Have you seen what's happening
with Syria? Have you seen what's happening
with Ukraine, you know, Etc? There's always an excuse to
think. Well, hang on.
This is as bad as it ever gets. And, and my answer was, yes,
Ukraine is terrible. Yes, Syria is terrible.
Yes, Ebola, is a nasty disease, but that doesn't mean that
everything is going wrong. Look at all the countries that
haven't got Wars, but did have them 10 years.
Is ago or something like that. So, you know, try and see the
whole if something has dropped out of the news.
If some country has dropped out of the news, chances are it's
quite peaceful. What is prosperity and how can
it be measured. Well, in the end for me,
Prosperity is the ability to fulfill needs and wants.
So to be able to supply yourself with enough food enough shelter
enough, lighting lighting is one of my favorite examples of this
if you want to read a book by artificial light for an hour,
with an ordinary lamp it costs, It's you about a third of a
second of work to achieve that. Okay.
On the average u.s. wage back in 1880 with a kerosene lamp.
It would have taken you 15 minutes of work on the average
age on the average wage to afford that and back in 1800
with a Tallow candle. It would have cost you about six
hours, work to one hour of light, so that for me is the
great measure. How much time do you have to
work to fulfill a need? To fulfill a want to supply
yourself with lighting and shelter, and food and
entertainment, and all these other things you want.
And if you take less, and less time to fulfill more and more
needs and desires, then you're becoming more prosperous.
Interesting. So instead of this GDP measure
which is I mean easily manipulated, whether it's the
Federal Reserve increasing the money supply, it's almost
impossible to measure you're saying that it's the amount of
time. It takes individuals to achieve
something to achieve their and compared to what it would have
been 10. 20, 30, 50 years ago, is that correct?
Yes, I think the labor cost of fulfilling a need is a really
good measure of how well off you are and on the whole the labor
cost of most things has gone down and down and down most
consumer goods, but the labor cost of how long you have to
work to be able to buy, you know, education at a good
University or to buy a house that's gone up for a lot of
people. So not everything's going in the
right direction. Action.
But, you know, most of the things supplied by government or
in some sense by a heavily regulated World tend to have
gone up in price in labor cost. But most things supplied by the
market, tend to have gone down in cost that must be telling us
something about the efficiency of supply.
What does it mean to say the world improves when ideas have
sex? This was a phrase that I came up
with, and it enabled me to have some sort of cheap
sensationalism to spread my ideas when ideas have sex.
I actually mean it in a really quite literal way.
If you look at evolution by natural selection biological
evolution, sexual reproduction plays a critical role, because
what it does is it Brings together Innovations in one
lineage sin. Combines them with Innovations
in another lineage. So you might inherit from your
mother, you know, some extraordinary skill that nobody
else has got and you might inherit from your father, some
different skill that nobody else has got but you've got both of
them. So that's what sex is sex
enables innovation in evolution to be cumulative to mean that
you don't have to choose between.
Do you know different traits and say well one of the lineage is
got fur and the other lineages got fast for the runs fast or
something. You say let's have a furry
animal that runs fast, you know, let's put them both together.
So that's what sex does is it brings together.
The width of the technical term is recombination.
It recombines genes so that you end up with new combinations of
genes. Well, I think a very similar
process happens in human Innovation, whether it's
innovation in Dues or innovation in machines because the more you
study Innovation the more you see that it happens when people
bring their ideas together and combine them and most of the new
things in the world are actually not new in the sense that
they're they're just new combinations of existing things.
You know that the iPhone is basically, you know the you
know, a telephone and a diary and a torch and Compass and a
calculator, all sort of combined together.
So what I mean by, when ideas have sex, I mean when a new idea
meets another new idea and comes together through a through
through the process of exchange. What's critical is that human
beings have this habit of exchange saying, I've got lots
of these things, you've got lots of those things.
Let's come together or I've got this idea.
You've got that idea that's very unusual.
Most animals don't do that. It's Because we did that that
our ideas were able to have sex and produce new baby ideas.
My favorite example, by the way of ideas, having sex is a thing
called the pill camera, which is a device that you swallow, and
it takes a picture of your insides for medical reasons.
And it came about after a conversation over, a garden
fence between a gastroenterologist and a guided
missile designer. That's very nice example of
ideas, having sex I love this quote from page 46, the
cumulative acceleration of knowledge by Specialists that
allows us each to consume more and more different things by
each producing fewer. And fewer is I submit the
central story of humanity. So many great insights from this
book. The rational Optimist, what is
your general thesis in the book? How Innovation Works and why it
flourishes in Freedom? Well, I realized I've been
writing about innovation in one way or another number of books,
but I've never taken it head-on. I've never taken away.
What is this phenomenon of innovation?
Why does it happen to us and not to rabbits or rocks?
What does it happen more in Silicon Valley than in Zimbabwe?
You know, what is it about? Innovation that how do you and
you turn it on? How do you turn it off Etc and
it's some ways, it's a pretty mysterious process.
If you talk to politicians about how to do you get a lot of hand?
Waving you got a lot of people say, well you have to fund
science. You have to make sure that
there's plenty of Finance available for innovators.
No no. Come on, you tell me what is it?
You know, what's the secret? What's the Silver Bullet that
will make Innovation happen in your country and they can't
answer that question. Nobody really knows why Silicon
Valley suddenly did this extraordinary burst of
innovation in the second half of the twentieth century.
Yes you can talk about defense spending and good universities
and Venture capitalists going there and plenty of immigrants
and all that kind of thing. But it's it's a pretty wooly
recipe really. And you can say the same about
Victorian Britain or in a sense, Italy or song China, you know,
periods when there was bushfires of innovation bursting out baby,
bushfires isn't a great metaphor for California at the moment,
but you get the point. And so that's what I set out in
this book to do was to decide to analyze too.
Tell stories of Innovations, you know, airplanes computers,
toilets, you know, anything that was that's been invented in the
last few hundred years and try and see what themes emerged and
the big theme was Freedom. If people have the freedom to
experiment, freedom, to collaborate, freedom, to fail,
freedom to move, and try somewhere else, where there's a
more congenial environment, freedom to 25, Follow their
ideas to invest behind their ideas.
These are the things that really make it happen.
But the, the first point I made in that book is that Innovation
is more than invention. Invention is only a small part
of it, coming up with a bright idea.
A prototype of something is a very small part of making that
thing into a usable affordable available and reliable tool.
And the unsung heroes are the people who turn a bright idea
into something that actually you can buy on Amazon for a very
small amount of money, you know, to see what I mean.
You know, that seems to me to be the the aspect of innovation.
We tend to neglect. We talk about the inventors a
lot. We make we give them patents, we
make statues do them, but actually it's the innovators.
It's the people who work out how to manufacture this thing in a
reliable way and get it. People when they need it in a
form that they want and attractive formal if you're
Steve Jobs or someone like that, these are the guys.
So you know Jeff Bezos is a great innovator in the sense of
e-commerce being very much something that he's pioneered
but he's not an inventor and he wouldn't claim to be but he's
done a lot of good to the world. You can argue that you don't
approve of some of the things. He's done etcetera, you know?
But that's a different debate but he has changed the world.
As an innovator, rather than an inventor.
On Page 6, you say Serendipity plays a big part in Innovation
which is why liberal economies with their free roving
experimental opportunities do so.
Well they give luck a chance Innovation happens when people
are afraid to think experiment and speculate what else.
It's so scary to say, let's trust a process instead of a
result. So instead of embracing the
process of Freedom, well, Things can go to heck in a hand basket,
what we need is a leader to design something that'll really
make it happen. Why should we, how would you
sell people on the process of freedom, of experimentation,
being the way you want to achieve Innovation?
As opposed to say something that's very written in stone?
That allows us all to look at the same thing and follow a
single path. Well, the history of inventions
is that again and again, people set out to invent one thing and
end up, inventing, something else, you know, are trying.
But Post-It note when he was by accident at 3M, Stephanie kwolek
invented Kevlar by accident. When looking for something else,
there's tons of examples of this but I think the best example of
the importance of experimentation is actually a
very old one and that is the Wright brothers.
And there was a man named Samuel Langley Who was a brilliant
astrophysicist and probably the cleverest man in America and he
was head of the Smithsonian institution and he said to the
US government give me twenty five thousand dollars and I will
invent a powered airplane. I know how to do it now so they
gave him the money. He said no, I don't need to talk
to anyone. It's all in here I'm going to do
it in secret in case anyone tries to steal my ideas and then
I'll Unveil it when it's ready and he unveiled it on top of a
houseboat on the Potomac. In December 1903, launched it
into the air and it went straight into the water and it
was a complete disaster. 10 days later on a Barrier island of
North Carolina. Two bicycle mechanics, without a
degree between them succeeded where Langley had failed and
they got a powered plane into the air.
They were just bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio.
There was no Crowd watching, it had no money from the
government, anything. But what they had done is they
had picked the brains of anyone and everyone who's thinking
about flight anywhere in the world, in Australia, Europe, in
other parts of the US and they had picked the brains of people
doing balloons, doing kites doing gliders, doing Wind Tunnel
experiments studying Birds, they're drawn upon everyone, and
anyone they had Decided they were the cleverest person and
they knew how to do it inside their own head.
And then they had done a ton of experiments they done for years
of experiments with gliders before they even tried to put an
engine on this thing and they had by trial and error.
They had worked out how you steer a glider in the air, you
know. I mean, it's not a trivial
point, you know, if you're in the middle of, if you're flying
through the air, how do you turn right turn left?
It's, it's not obvious to start. Out with.
And so all these things came together and so they're a very
good example of how you should do Innovation.
And Langley was a good, very good example of how not to do it
with a government grant and knowing exactly how you're going
to get there in the first place. In this book, you tell a number
of stories of how Innovation comes to fruition.
Do you have any favorite stories in this book?
That really illustrates your thesis here and actually, my
favorite one is inside the old one, and it's the insecticide
treated bed. Net to solve malaria, something
that's been championed by The Gates Foundation as a mechanism
of solving malaria. Larry was increasing in the
1990s globally, killing more people every year.
Now it's been decreasing since 2003.
Why in 2003? The insecticide treated bed nets
started to be distributed, it turns out to be a brilliant
solution, it deters mosquitoes, instead of as well as killing
them, it works, even if it's got a hole in it and I thought this
is a really interesting example. It's very low Tech Innovation.
It could have been done decades before it.
Those who did it, how was it discovered?
And I it's not a well-known Story.
I mean nobody had written it up. So I tracked down the two French
scientists, who'd worked with colleagues.
In Burkina Faso in the 1980s and set up a system in some
experimental Huts which were designed for these experiments
where they'd made 36 people sleeping these, Cuts night after
night with different designs of mosquito, net.
And then measured how many mosquitoes would come into the
Hut. How many had gone out?
How many died? I mean he's got a blood meal and
so on. And did her just a beautiful
experiment that showed that mosquito Nets were quite good at
stopping, you getting bitten by mosquito Nets with insecticide
on them were much better even if they had holes in them.
Even if you know, in the course of wear and tear, you know,
mosquito Nets, tend to get torn. You think that's useless, the
mosquito fund a whole but but if it's got insecticide on it, it's
such a deterrent that the mosquitoes don't find a whole
and this showed that, you know, 95% reduction in your chances of
being bitten by a mosquito. If you've got one of these
things over your neck of your bit, a very simple experiment,
beautifully designed done in Africa by some other humble
scientists, I tracked down the French scientist talk to him and
you know, he didn't speak. English.
So I my French isn't very good so it wasn't very easy but, you
know, so that ended up being my favorite because I think
millions of lives have been saved by this low Tech
development, and I like that for that example.
Imagine Boris Johnson steps down tomorrow.
Everyone else steps down in the English Parliament and a new
state arises. What advice would you give them
on? Some simple rules?
They could Embrace if they want to say, have a much more
Innovative society that can compete with places like China,
Japan, all and every other country in the world.
Well I think starting from a blank.
Slate is just sort of to utopian.
I can hardly imagine it. I mean yeah, sure.
I would I would have a lot of fun doing that, but I think more
important is to say, what advice can you give from here to
governments to try and improve their Innovative capacity?
And I've actually been giving that advice to Boris and others
in a very lowly way. I'm not a, I'm not a trusted
advisor or anything, but I've been banging the drum for it.
Vacation and there are some really quite simple things like
get government to take faster decisions.
The, if you talk to entrepreneurs they go on and on
about the extraordinary waste of time, getting a government
agency to give a decision about something and you'd much rather
they just said, no, you can't do that.
Then that they take three years to say yes by which time your
competitors, have stolen a march on UI detail.
In the book how it took eight years for the European Union to
approve a genetically modified Potato, by which time the
inventor, it said we'll get lost.
I'm off to America and I can't wait years for decision.
So, you know, that's a very simple thing, just get faster
decisions out of God, because government agencies have no
incentive to take a fast decision.
For them, taking no decision is much safer.
Bet you don't lose your job. If you take no decision, if you
just punt it down the road into the long grass.
Whereas if you take the wrong decision you might lose your
job. So there's a real problem of
incentives here and regulation is a huge problem for
innovators. It's often, you know,
regulations that aren't really anything to do with the in if I
mean, if you think about nuclear power, nuclear power is a
perfectly good technology. Incredibly Safe incredibly
effective. It kills far fewer people than
renewable. Energy actually per unit of
energy it produces and yet it's stuck in a hugely high cost non
Innovative for. We're basically using the same
designs as we used in the 1960s. Why?
Because the regulations over what you must do to get a new
design? Approved are so expensive.
And so time-consuming that nobody bothers He says, let's do
trial and error. Let's see what we can do.
And also, once you get a design approved, you can't change it.
You can't halfway through the construction process.
Say actually, there's a better way of doing this.
We want to do it slightly differently, which is what
innovators do the whole time, you know, in cars or in Silicon
chips or something, you know, they they change direction they
learn as they're going along and say, actually there's a better
way of doing this, you can't do that in nuclear, you have to
have the whole thing approved before you even Start and that
means you only you only try something safe that you already
know what safe is fine. But you cut, that means you
can't get safer things. You get old fashion designs,
that cost him some amounts of money that are over, engineered
etc. Etc.
So, there's lots of things you can do to just free up,
innovators to, to have more opportunity to try things and
just, you know, open up trial and error.
Is, it would be the theme that I Bang into the heads of my
ministers, every five minutes when I was dictator, which thank
God. I'm not going to be Let's take
the thesis of these books, evolution of everything how
Innovation Works, the rational Optimist and apply them to the
today. That the only case I'm really
familiar with is America there is a new organization designed
by the Department of Homeland Security, terribly orwellian
term but that's what they're called where they have a new
organization called the government governing board of
disinformation run by Woman named Nina jankowitz.
Now, they're saying that what we need things are so terrible in
this Marketplace of ideas, you might get false information and
this false information could lead to terribly bad things.
That's why we need to regulate the space of ideas.
How do you talk to someone with that mindset where they say
instead of having a society, where bad ideas can come to
fruition? We need to regulate them.
This way the correct ideas come to the Forefront and we can be
in educated population. Yeah.
Well as you allude the problem is top-down thinking it goes
right back to my evolution of everything theme which is that
we constantly see the world in top down for through top-down
lens. We think in terms of there's a
problem. So let's put someone in charge.
Let's make a czar who can solve it.
There's a problem in social media, there's no question about
it. There's a problem of Greater
extremism, greater polarization. Lots of Information, etc.
Etc. And it's driving us apart in a
most terrifying way as Jonathan haidt and others are documenting
in an interesting way, but the solution is not to put one
commissar in charge. However, brilliant, she or he
may be because she or he will have axes to grind.
And I think what has emerged would need a yank of its
immediately within minutes of her being appointed was that
everyone said, well, hang on. This woman has very strong views
about things which of course she does.
So have I but I shouldn't be put in charge either, you know, it's
not the matter of choosing. The right person, it's a matter
of choosing the collective wisdom of humankind to solve
these problems. Now you know, so Jonathan haidt
has this suggestion that the way to solve the horrible nature of
social media where loud-voiced extremists are drowning,
Moderates and beating up moderates a lot of the time and
is to for example just a very simple rule when you log on to
Twitter for the first time or other organizations, you should
have a setting that automatically blocks anyone
who's really rude and nasty and you know, does things in an ad
hominem way and you can have that setting anything up to 125.
I've and let's say, you know, you start off with a four and
you can lower it. You can you can say actually I I
don't want to hear anybody who's even remotely.
Rude. I just want to hear polite
people and I can lower it or you can raise it and say, actually a
cool going to hear what these people who really screaming at
each other. But that way, I think we would
just we've got to find a way of taming this medium and the way
is not to put in charge of disinformation Minister because
a lot of things get labeled this The turn out to be true.
I mean the lab leak is a classic example.
Lab leak may be true. The US government says, it's a
definite possibility. The World Health Organization
says, it's a definite possibility, but four months in
2020. You were called by the New York
Times by Facebook by anyone a conspiracy theorist for even
considering it. And that's a disgrace, you know,
I'm sorry, but that was, you know, that was playing into the
hands of Chinese propaganda. Under we now know, and that's
partly where it was coming from, and that's what'll happen if you
get one person in charge of this kind of thing.
And they'll, they'll be a cushion.
They'll bear the imprint of the last person who sat on them.
And the Expressions you Brits have are so funny.
The last person who sat on the phone, I forget where I was even
going with though. The the point is, is that all of
these shortcomings that we say, apply to people that apply in a
state of Freedom where people are free to engage in.
Voluntary exchanges also applies to Human Things once they're put
in these positions of power Nina, Janka vets obviously fell
for this ridiculous scam. That said, Hunter Biden's
laptop, with all of his pictures on it.
We're actually a plant by Putin and the Kremlin and then four
years earlier Hillary, Clinton said 17, intelligence agencies
said that the emails that trumps referring to are from Vladimir
Putin and this is Russian disinformation on.
On both attempts, they were totally wrong.
They said, hey, a nuclear power, violated our government, our
governing Independence, and they were wrong.
No apologies or anything. So, not only do they not have an
incentive. If they were the most
well-meaning people on the planet Earth, they still would
fall short and that's why the evolution of everything and how
Innovation Works. I think are so vitally
important. Because you say, yeah, there are
this Thomas Edison guy and Nikola Tesla.
These people had a lot of shortcomings.
Make sure that they don't have a position of power where they
wear their shortcomings don't face any consequences because
then that then they won't be in this process of learning how to
innovate. I absolutely love these books.
I'm so appreciative that you wrote them.
Do you have any favorite authors of yourself?
Whether it's economists historians philosophers.
Oh well, a lot, I mean, I lots of people are enormously admire,
you know, Steven Pinker is a friend, and a just brilliant
writer and thinker Deirdre McCloskey.
What a wonderful user of the english-language books are
probably far too long but they're just a tremendous ride
while you're reading them in. And she, you know, she's an
economic historian. So she's talking about the
history of the world history of ideas, rich, Dawkins, the
British Evolution biologist taught me and he's a friend and
he's just a superb writer and has some as I think contributed
great things to the, to the world of ideas.
Actually, I wrote a book about Francis Crick and I'm lucky
enough to know James Watson who's still alive and Watson and
Crick, you know, they, it's extraordinary to me that I met
both those people because I think they made the most
Important scientific discovery of all time, I think it beats
gravity and relativity and all that kind of thing into a cocked
hat, to have discovered, one day, 28th of February 1953, to
have suddenly realized that there is a linear digital code
at the heart of all living things.
And not a non-living things, you know, that double helix of DNA
is what I'm referring to is just a remarkable thing and Jim
Watson much-maligned These days in his old age because of
various in cautious things he said, but he did write an
extraordinarily good nonfiction novel about that experience
called the double helix, which I recommend to any science writer
to read. It's a, it's a, it's a
remarkable and strange book. So, these are some of my heroes
in the world of writing. But I just love people who
write. Well, I think it's a fabulous
skill. And, you know, there's nothing
better than than following. Someone's ideas in prose, I
think the McCloskey series of books is titled bhujbal dignity
something in this area. Could you explain the general
thesis that McCluskey attempt to explain in this span of human
history? We see significant amount of
increase in innovation in this. In this time.
It's as a result of an ethic that people embraced can.
You explain this thesis Yeah, well, she takes three books of
600, pages long age to explain them.
So I may not do a very good job in two minutes but I will, I
will have a crack at it essentially.
What she's saying is that for most of human history, we valued
and admired some rather dodgy virtues, things like courage,
and honor, and things like this. And that actually led to us on a
world in which we killed our enemies and took her In general,
this kind of thing. And then there are the, the
Bourgeois values things like prudence.
And, you know, making sure that two plus two equals five in your
work etc, etc, that we despise and literature still despises
them, you know that the movies you know they're all about
superheroes going around doing superhero things.
Instead of people who go to work and make things for other people
and and So she's saying that, you know, when we came to Value,
you know, buying low and selling high and being in the market and
supplying people with what, you know, with bread for their lunch
as a baker. You know, these kind of there
was a moment in history, when we sort of, came to Value this,
this kind of stuff and the result was the extraordinary
enrichment of the human race. The great enrichment is the
phrase she uses. So that's a sort of very very
sketchy summary of at least one of one of the thoughts in those
books. We have two minutes left.
Sir, thank you so much for your time today.
Do you have any advice on how people can sort of see through,
guess you could call propaganda, what we can assume that let's
say that the people in the media are very well intended.
Do you have any advice on how people can see through
propaganda or actual misinformation and maybe how
they can differentiate truth from falsehood?
Yeah, I think in the end, it bows down to always asking
yourself. Is it true?
You hear something on the media or you see something on the news
and you can choose to believe it or not, believe it, you can
choose to move on and do something else in your life, but
if you're going to If it matters to you, if you think it's an
important bit of news, just check it it's very easy these
days to check the facts behind things.
I mean I'm Amazed by how people never go and look, you know, if
there's something about a scientific discovery, just just
go and look up the original papers.
Some? You may not understand all of
it, but you can Jolly. Well, check that a new that you
find. Hang on a minute, this reporters
got the wrong end of the stick or he's greatly exaggerating.
What these people are saying about?
Climate change or something like that, you know?
So let's let's just check stuff and the because of the internet,
that's easier than it. You don't have to go to a
library, you know, when I was young, if I read, you know, Paul
Ehrlich saying, the whole world is going to starve to death in
the next 20 years. I would have had to go to a
library, to look up the data, Etc.
Now, you know, you just click of the switch, you're onto the
internet and you can check stuff so.
So check The facts behind the claims, it's very easy to do and
it's actually a lot of fun. Thank you to everyone for
watching the libertarian Institute and the Keith and I
don't try to on anyone podcast, mr.
Ridley. Thanks so much for your time
sir. Thank you very much, indeed for
having me on the show.