The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 153. Rational Optimism | Matt Ridley

Episode Date: January 31, 2021

This episode was recorded on January 11, 2021.Matt Ridley and I discuss, among other topics, economic optimism, trade through the reciprocity of nations, enlightened self-interest, virtues relation to trade, feeding nine billion people, the triumphs of cities, escape of Malthusian population trap, and more.Matt Ridley is a British best-selling author (The Origins of Virtue, The Rational Optimist, How Innovation Works, and many more) who is best known for his writings on science, the environment, and economics. He is also a well-respected journalist, businessman, and member of The House of Lords in the United Kingdom.-Thank you to our sponsors:Headspace - for a free one-month trial, visit: headspace.com/jbpThe Great Courses (Plus) - for a free month of unlimited access, visit: thegreatcoursesplus.com/peterson-For advertising inquiries, please email [e-mail] 

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. This is season four, episode four. I'm Michaela Peterson. This episode was recorded with Matt Ridley on January 11th, 2021. Matt Ridley is a British best-selling author, the origins of virtue, the rational optimist, how innovation works, and many more, whose best known for his writings on science, the environment, and economics. He's also a well-respected journalist businessman and a member of the House of Lords in the UK. Matt and Jordan spoke about economic optimism, trade through the reciprocity of nations,

enlightened self-interest, feeding 9 billion people, the triumphs of cities and much more. This episode is brought to you in part by Headspace. Did you know, according to the people who sent over a copy for this ad, that 34% of Americans made a resolution to be less stressed? I've been using headspace an app for a guided meditation since 2018. It's an app, and it's easy to use, and it's great for getting into meditation because you don't really have to think about it. You turn it on, you select how long you want to meditate for, and it talks you through it in some soothing voice. I choose the Australian man. Headspace is backed by 25 published studies

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Enjoy. I have the good fortune today of speaking with author Matt Ridley, who's written a number of books. We'll list them in the description of the video. The ones I reviewed this week in preparation for this interview, include this one published in 1996, the Origins of Virtue, which is a lovely investigation into the biological origins of morality, essentially, a very thought-provoking book, and a very straightforward read for such a complex subject. The Rational Optimist, which was published, I believe, in 2010, and which I think probably serves as a pretty good description

of Matt Ridley himself. That was my impression after going through his work. And then more recent work, how innovation works, and why it requires freedom to flourish, sorry, and why it flourishes in freedom. So it's, I wanted to talk to Matt primarily because I've been struck in my career as a university professor and also on my tours, talking to thousands of people, many of whom are desperate, especially young people, because

they're fed a never-ending diet of gloom and doom. It seems to be an armageddon-like cultural predisposition to assume, without to only look at evidence that suggests that the future is going to be much worse than the past, despite the fact that the present is much better than the past. And that's been the case for many decades, I would say. And Matt's books, they're lovely read during the COVID crisis, I would say,

because of course it's a very rough time for everyone, I would say, with the lockdowns and the uncertainty that reigns as a consequence of that. And he very carefully documents the improvements that have been made all around the world over the world, especially over the last 400 years, this incredible explosion of technological intelligence that's produced an unparalleled increase in human living standards by virtually any measure across virtually all dimensions.

And so, well, that's my rationale for talking to Matt. He's a very straightforward author, and despite the complexity of the ideas, and so I'm really happy to be speaking with him today. Well, Jordan, thank you very much. It's a real honor to be speaking with you, and I'm someone who enormously admires your courage and intellectual, what's the word, gravitas that you bring to discussions. And I think it's just fantastic to be able to meet you albeit online. And just on that question of optimism, it's a bit of a evangelical cause for me this because I was steeped in pessimism as a young man as a boy at school at university.

I believed that the population was unstoppable, that famine was inevitable, that the oil was going to run out, that the rainforests were going to disappear, that cancer was going to shorten my lifespan, that pesticides were going to make life on level, you know, all that kind of stuff. And it came as quite a shock when I found that the world was getting better, not worse during my life, dramatically. So, and so I want to tell today's young people that there is another possibility to the, you know, extinction rebellion kind of stuff that they're being fed by everybody, not just the education system, but the media and their parents, you know, the grownups. I think it's quite important to have some optimism. Why is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we're to expect nothing but deterioration before us? That's a great quote, and it's not me.

It's Thomas Babington McCauley, Lord McCauley writing in 1830. So already then he was fed up with the doomsters saying it can't get better. It's been getting better in the past, but it's going to get worse in the future. And that's what every generation says. And I think so far, they've been wrong. And I think there's a good chance they're wrong now. Well, it might be a consequence of our of the human tendency to overweight negative information. Right.

We're wired to be more sensitive to threat and to pain than we are to hope and pleasure. And I suppose that's because you can be 100% dead, but you can only be so happy. And so it's better in some sense to err on the side of caution. And maybe when that's played out on the field of future prognostications, everything that indicates decline strikes us

harder than everything that indicates that things are going to get better. I mean, it's a real mystery, right? Because the news tells itself very hard towards the catastrophic. And I can't think of any explanation for that given that news purveyors seek attention. I can't come up with a more intelligent explanation

than our proclivity for negative emotion. But we do have to overcome that to some degree if it's not in accordance with the facts. Yeah, there's an interesting angle there that I think might be a clue to what's going on. Several people have observed that we are less pessimistic about our own lives than we are about larger units. So we're not very pessimistic about our village, we're not very pessimistic about our town, but we're very pessimistic about our country and we're extremely pessimistic about the planet. The bigger the unit you look at, the more pessimistic people are.

And of course, so people on the whole think their own life is going to work out, it's going to be fine, they're going to stay married, they're going to earn a lot of money, you know, they're okay when they talk about themselves. And I think what that's telling you is that your information about your own life comes from your own experience, your information about the planet comes from the media. And that implies to me that it's not just our inbuilt biases that are doing this, that there is a top down effect from what the culture chooses to tell us. Do you have any sense of the motivation for that? I mean, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume

that much of what drives the production of the news is the search for attention, the search for eyes. And you'd expect the news to evolve towards the maximally attention grabbing form, right? And so, apart from the ability to grab attention, can you think of any reason why pessimism is the sales item of the day? From the perspective of the news companies? Exactly, and this is where my argument breaks down a bit because it becomes circular, because I say, yeah, you're right, the reason they're telling us bad news is because they know they know we're interested in bad news, so that on the whole, we don't look at good news stories to anything like the same degree. So we're avid consumers of pessimism and that, and they play to that.

But there's another phenomenon too, which is that good news tends to be gradual and bad news tends to be sudden. That's not always true, of course, but it's surprisingly often is true. 168,000 people were lifted out of extreme poverty yesterday and the day before and the day before and the day before. It's never newsworthy, whereas 3,000 people were killed when an airliner flew into a skyscraper. That is newsworthy, because it's so sudden, so unexpected, so new.

Well, it's funny when I ran across statistics like the one that you just quoted, which I think is worth repeating over and over, 170,000 people lifted out of poverty today, could be three-inch headlines every day, because it's an unparalleled event in human history, although it's occurring every day right now. But maybe it's also because you have to prepare for the worst, but you don't really have to prepare for the best. You know, if the best is happening, then you can just keep on doing what you're doing. But if there's a flaw somewhere or an error, then maybe you have to make some changes in your behavior. And that might be another reason why we're prone to seek out negative information.

And does that explain why we're loss of verse to the extent we are? Well, I think so. I think it's the same phenomenon. So anyways, the point is that one of the points is that despite the potential adaptive utility of being more sensitive to negative information, it can really get out of hand, right, because it can precipitate, say, a nihilistic attitude with regards to the future or depression or high levels of anxiety or resentment or even hatred of humanity for that matter, if for the destructive species that were always made out to be.

And so it still seems to me that work that concentrates on demonstrating from a historical perspective how much better things are getting is very much worth putting forward. So, and there's a deeper element of optimism in your work as well, which is in a sense a kind of non naïve, rousseauianism. I mean, rousseau, of course, famously believed that people were good

and that human institutions made them as malevolent and evil as they might become. So we're naturally good and corrupted by culture. And I think that's half the story because we're also naturally bad and ennobled by culture. But despite that, you make a really good case in the origins of virtue. That virtue itself, the morality itself, has a biological basis and that it's grounded in our evolutionary history. And I'll let you, if you would, I'd

ask you to expound on that a little bit. you talk about the discovery of the future and the necessity of reciprocity as driving agents in that evolution. And that's, it's a wonderful idea. And it's a profound idea because it does hint at a non-arbitrary base for moral thinking. And that's a, I think, that's been something I've been pursuing my entire life, I would say, but. Well, what I set out to do in that book, and it is admittedly 26 years ago, or something that I finished writing it. So I may have changed my mind, I'll want to do things. But what I said out to do was to persuade the reader that our good instincts are as animal

as our bad instincts, or our good behavior is as natural, is as instinctive, if you like, as our bad behavior. We tend to get, I think from Christianity, mainly, a view that there's a deep sort of animal side of us which is bad, but we can teach each other to be good. And I don't think that's right. I think there's just as much of an animal instinct to be good in us as there is bad. Because if you look at, you know, we are a social species. Lots of species are very social.

And what they tend to do is they express various forms of kindness and generosity and self-sacrifice towards other members of their species. The most obvious example is that we're nice to our children as our most creatures. And the reason we're nice to our children is obviously because we share their genes, people who were nice to their children, tended to leave more children behind than people who weren't nice to their children. And so the genes for being nice to children

thrived at the expense of genes that did the opposite. But obviously it goes further than that. There are social species that collaborate with other ones and they do so often with a form of special species that collaborate with other ones. And they do so often with a form of, that collaborate with strangers, as it were. And they do so often with a form of reciprocity, you know, you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. I'll be nice to you today. You'll be nice to me tomorrow. You know, when a fish visits a cleaner station on the reef and allows small fish to clean the parasites off it, it's resisting the temptation to eat the cleaner fish. And so there's a mutual gain, gained from trade. Yeah, that's a remarkable example that these cleaning stations are set up on coral reefs, where small fish congregate, often brightly colored, and large fish line up like cars at a gas station to have their scales and even their teeth denuded of parasites

and and and dime tissue. And and some of those cleaning stations are apparently tens of thousands of years old. So yes, that's that's what and of course, that's a cross species collaboration. You know, this is this is, you know, two different species collaborating. But I don't know whether it's in that book or later. I, in the end, come down on to the view that, that kind of reciprocity, use scratch my back, I scratch yours, is surprisingly rare, actually, that actually you can't find that many examples.

There's a wonderful example of vampire bats doing it, vampire bats that didn't get a blood meal beg for one from their neighbor, the neighbor then return the favor to the neighbor next time that he doesn't get a blood meal. And that way you're both better off. Actually it turned out that they were closely related. These were, this was to some degree a family thing as well. So actually, and in human beings, it isn't very common for me to say, look, you did me a favor yesterday, so I'm going to do you the same favor today. What are the circumstances under which that's going to happen? I mean, I'm going to have too much food today and you're going to have too much food tomorrow. It's kind of, it doesn't happen very often. But we human beings have developed another form of exchange, which is far more powerful, which is, I've got more food than I need, you've got more water than you need.

I'm thirsty, you're hungry, we'll come to a deal, we'll swap. So we'll swap different things at the same time, rather than the same things at different times. And for me, that's the real insight into how human sociality and cooperation evolved. Now, I'm only here repeating what Adam Smith said in the wealth of nations about the butcher and the baker are not giving you bread and beer because they want to be kind to you, they're doing it to make a living, but they end up being kind to you and you end up being kind to them by giving them money, which is what they want to take. Well, I also thought that in some sense, you made a deeper case than not to talking about the human capacity to understand and envision the future. Resiprocity requires the ability to view transactions

across time. And so as soon as the creature becomes aware of the future, like we have, we can even engage in reciprocal behavior with our future selves. And that makes our self-interest a much more complex phenomenon. So I might define self-interest as the impulsive pursuit of pleasure. And I think that's a perfectly reasonable definition, perhaps when you're

talking about animals. But the question immediately arises pleasure over what time span and at what cost. And I'm compelled by my knowledge of the future to act in a way that doesn't betray my future self. And that's very much like acting, you know, it's so then I'm a collective that stretches across time as an individual. And I have to act in the best interests of that collective. And I don't think that's very different than acting in the best interests of other people. You know, if I'm in my last book, I wrote about the morality that emerges from games. There's a neuroscientist who you might be familiar with, Yacht Panks'ep, who studied rat behavior in games. And he showed that if you pair two male juvenile rats together,

the one with a 10% body weight advantage will pin the other almost 100% of the time. And you might say, well, what that demonstrates is that might makes right the stronger animal wins. But if you pair them together repeatedly, after the first bout, the defeated rat, Juvenile, has to be the Inviter of play in the next match. So he'll invite the bigger route to play. But over-paired, over-repeated pairings, unless the big route lets the little route win about 30% of the time, the little route will stop inviting him to play. So what happens is that you get an emergent morality, which is not the ability to win any given game, but the ability to repeatedly play a multitude of games. And there's something in that that's very much like what you

were wrote about in the origin of virtue and something very much like a complex reciprocity. Right. So where you store your good behavior in your reputation, essentially. And that's a great advantage. Yeah, and there is this very, very simple thing that was happening in the 1990s when I wrote that, but which was the people were playing the Prison of Stolema game on computers and finding out which strategy worked. And the Prison of Stolema game is simply a game in which if both players agree to remain silent, then they benefit each other, but you can make a bigger game by betraying the other one, but then if he betrays you as well, you both end up with nothing. So you've got to find a way of trusting each other enough to cooperate. You're being held in separate cells and interrogated separately is the sort of story that's being told. And it turned out that the best strategy in a repeated business

dilemma game is tip for tat. That is to say, be nice first time around, cooperate on the first play, and then simply do whatever the other guy did on the previous play. So as to punish or reward the other guy for behaving badly or well. Absolutely, not a sucker. Using that strategy, you're cooperative, but you're not a sucker. Exactly. Yeah.

And in a sense, we are engaged in iterative repeated prison dilemma games all the time. You know, you don't say, well, I'm not going to bother paying for this loaf of bread. I'm just going to grab it and run because then I'm better off because then you can't go back to the shop the next day. Yeah, you'll be recognized by the police. if it's morality as the shadow of the future

in some sense. Right. And again, this all comes back to Adam Smith, I think, because his previous book is book in 1759, not the wealth of nations, but the theory of moral sentiments, seems to me to have a very profound insight in me. And it's taken a long time for me to understand it. And that is that morality isn't, as it were taught to us by priests and other people, it's essentially a calculation by us as to what works in the society we're in. And you kind of calibrate your behavior to find out what is moral, what is ethical, and so on.

And, you know, 500 years ago, the right ethical thing to do when somebody snubbed you was to you know challenge them to a duel and run them through with a sword. Well, that doesn't get you very far today. So you we've learned that actually you you we've we've we've evolved a higher form of morality sort of gradually by standing back and saying, in this society, what's gonna get me the best rewards,

given how other people are behaving, because of course everything's a moving target. It seems to me too that that's deep enough now. So imagine that the landscape that human beings occupy is a social landscape, but it's a social landscape that extends across time. And we've been conscious of that for a long time, at least 150,000 years. So that's about when we changed into the genetic, we changed genetically into the subspecies that we are now.

And so you can imagine that given the utility of perceiving the future and the clear benefits of reciprocal action, that that's altered as enough neurologically so that even conscience speaks to us internally in terms of reciprocity. So that goes along with the idea that this isn't something taught by priests. It might be something that priests and other ethicists remind us of. So we can have an inbuilt moral sense that's got a biological basis that still requires cultural activation and modification. And the analog to that would be our instinct for language. You can't teach chimpanzees language because they don't have the biological capacity for it or not to the degree that we do, although some parrots

can perform remarkable stunts in that regard. But we still have to be taught language or we have to be at least put in an environment where it's happening. So. have to be at least put in an environment where it's happening. So, um, exactly. And yeah, so, um, uh, yeah, it just because, you know, there's a language instinct, but that doesn't mean that every child is born speaking Hebrew as, as James, the second king of England supposed to have, uh, James, the first is supposed to have thought was going to be the case. Um, so, um, you know, I would say that I've studied archetypal representations of moral behavior, because I think that dramatic stories represent various, they represent various pathways

through life, like pathways writ large, right? This drama is life with all the boring bits edited out. And what drama is trying to present to us are different modes of behavior. Some of them unsatisfactory. Those would be the bad guys and some of them highly satisfactory. And I would say the central hero in in dramatic representations is someone who's as fully reciprocal as possible. That's that's what the drama is aiming at. And I think that's also what you're doing with your children when you teach them to be good sports when they're playing

a game. You basically say to them something like, although you don't know this, you say something like, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, it matters how you play the game. And the reason that matters, and this is the part you don't say, because you don't know it, is that life is a never-ending series of diverse games, and your goal, as if you want to be a winner, is to be invited to play as many games as possible. And what that means is that you have to have a morality that works across the set of all possible games, and it has to trump the morality that drives you to win a single game. Yeah, and the phrase for that is Enlightened Self-Interest as opposed to short-term self-interests. And I think it's a very important insight. For me, the interesting one is that that connects with economic optimism. That connects with how we got to be so much better off, because it brought us the division of labor. It essentially enabled us to say, look, I'll make the spears, you make the axes and we'll both be better off, because we're both be good at what we're doing.

And even if I'm better at making both spears and axes than you are, it still pays me, because I'm slightly better making spheres than axes. For me to make the spheres and get you to make the axes. That's the basis of trade. That's David Riccardo's theory in one stone age story. Yes, when we started to be intelligent enough and sophisticated enough so that a debt could be repaid in currency other than that in which it was accrued. Correct. a debt could be repaid in currency other than that in which it was accrued. And so what that meant, must have meant was that we developed the abstract representation of a reciprocal debt. Not only did we reciprocate like chimpanzees do, do, for example, with grooming, but we could conceptualize the fact that we owed or

were owed and were, and then we're able to, to be repaid in all sorts of different and then we're able to be repaid in all sorts of different manners. So... And by the way, it wasn't in this book, but it was in the rational optimist that I did quite a diversion into the history of trade. And it's very persuasive that trade is far, far older than agriculture. That pre-agricultural people were trading probably 100,000 years ago. The oldest evidence we've got is seashells moving long distances inland from the coast of North Africa around 100,000 years ago. And they're moving these long distances not because some of these walking hundreds of miles to the sea shore picking up some seashells and walking back, but because they're going hand to hand from tribes. And we can find, I think I do tell the story in the origins of virtue of the year you're on to were a Aboriginal tribe living in northern Australia, who were getting stingray

barbs as many stingray barbs as they wanted on the coast by catching stingrays, but what they really wanted was stone axes. And several hundred miles inland there was a quarry that produced stone axes, and the tribe that owned that traded with the year, you run via several other traits, and you can actually see the exchange rate of stingray bulbs for stone axes along that trail. So that's people being nice to each other when they could be fighting each other. Right. Well, I think it was in the origins of virtue too, that you chased the idea of trade down into the past, even further relating it to the strange human propensity to share food

and dissociated that as well with hunting. And I believe you use the example of mammoths, which is also an example that I've found fascinating because obviously you can't store a whole mammoth, but you can store it in the form of your reputation by sharing it. And if you store it in the form of your reputation as a generous hunter, then you can be repaid back indefinitely in a currency that doesn't spoil. So maybe it's, then you do outline it in this manner. Human beings share food in a very egalitarian manner within families. So men and women share food, men mostly meet,

historically speaking, and women mostly what they gather. And that makes for a balanced diet. And that ability to exchange food seems to me to be perhaps the biological platform on which the idea of trade per se was able to evolve. So once you can share food and trade and enter into a reciprocal arrangement with regards to food, then it isn't that much of a leap to start do that with other commodities, especially those that might be related to the provision of food like stone axes or arrows or any implement of that sort.

I'm rather fascinated by the fact that a sexual division of Labour over food is very, very universal and ancient that men hunted women gather essentially in hunter-gatherer societies. Now, in some societies, gatherings are much more importanter societies. Now in some societies gatherings much more important than hunting and in some societies hunting is much more important than gathering like the Inuit for example is the latter case and there are sort of odd types of foraging that are neither gathering nor hunting so honey tends to be something that men get but because it tends to be something that men get, but because it tends to be that you get it from hunting, it's like hunting, as it were, and digging up reptiles and rats tends to be something that women do, because it's like digging up roots. Now, some people think this is a sexist view, you know, that I'm saying, you know, a woman's place is digging a man's place is

out hunting. But I think it's just that unlike other species, we really did invent this really useful distinction whereby you got the best of both worlds. You got the protein from hunting, but you got the reliability of food from gathering. So on the whole, you didn't go hungry, but on the whole, you did get access to protein, which was difficult thing for women to do when they had small dependent kids and things like that. And you can sort of see an echo in it today that far more vegetarians are women or other far more women of vegetarians, if you like, that may, you know, men just like me more than the women do. So I think there is a deep thing going on here, but I've got to be very careful talking about it because people are quick to get upset and think that you're in some

sense saying something very, very prejudicial. Well, people get upset now if you accept that there are sex differences and if you deny that there are sex differences. So they're going to get upset no matter what you think. So you might as well just think what you think. You know, the advantage to that sexual division of labor in part is that it provides additional utility for long-term relationships because they're actually more, because of the union of specialization there, the gathering in the hunting, you're deriving your food for more than one source, it means it's more reliable across time. And that's a prerequisite for the origin of long-term pair bonds.

So it's a really good thing. And no one loses in that trade. And that's Adam Smith's point. And the point of optimist, it's funny because economists tend to be optimistic. And biologists tend to be pessimistic on how long, when discussing questions like this. But if you make

virtue, well, we're on that. This is perhaps a digression, but I've also been fascinated, but it's quite nice to challenge people and say, how about the reproductive division of labor? We're happy with all sorts of divisions of labor. You know, you hunt, I gather, you hunt, I gather you, you work one kind of job, I work another kind of job, we're prepared to share out absolutely everything. But the one we never do is the reproductive division of labor. We, Lance and bees do, they say, well, we're going to leave the queen to do the reproducing and we're all going to be the workers. Imagine, you know, not even in England, but the queen, do we expect to do that? It's the one thing we try and do for ourselves

and hang on to. And that's for me, Rob's home drives home the message of just how universal this division of labor concept is, otherwise in our life, because it's so shocking to try and think of a reproductive division of labor. It's just something we don't aspire to. Okay, so your optimism manifests itself at least in part in your writing career with this notion that there's a biological origin of virtue and so it's a fundamental instinct and there's a universality about it which I think is very optimistic because if there is a universal basis for morality,

despite its obvious cultural differences, it means that we can potentially understand each other well enough to engage in reciprocal action across even tribal boundaries, which we're obviously capable of doing. And it implies that we might understand each other enough so that we could establish something like a long-term piece. That would be the hope. But so that's very fundamentally optimistic viewpoint. And then when you move into analysis of innovation and trade, you start doing that with the rational optimist, you're documenting transformations that have made life better.

And I could list a couple of those, and maybe we can talk about them. So in the rational optimist, for example, you talk about the fact, well, you start by talking about ideas having sex. And so that's a form of reciprocity, I would say. That's the exchange of information rather than good. But information is exchangeable for goods. And so in some sense, it's the abstract equivalent of the exchange of goods.

Yeah, but in a sense, I'm being much more literal even than that because sex is the process by which genes get shuffled. And you recombine genes in new combinations. So you've got a gene for fur in one reptile, and you've got a gene for milk in another reptile, and you bring them together and you've got a mammal that has both fur and milk. And that couldn't happen without sex

because they'd stay in separate lineages. So sex is the process that enables genetic novelties to find each other and combine. It's what makes evolution cumulative, in effect. And I'm saying that exchange has exactly the same role in innovation, that one tribe can invent one gadget and another tribe can invent, you know, one gadget and another tribe can invent another gadget and you can't bring them together unless they're trading. And the trading is what enables you to make culture cumulative to start to say, well hang on, I'll have that I'll have that invention that was made in California and I'll have that invention that was made in China and and I'll have that invention that was made in China, and I'll actually be able to benefit from both of them. So it's a very explicit metaphor. I mean,

it's a flippant attention-grabbing phrase, ideas having sex, and I used it for the title of a TED talk, and it rather caught on. And the next TED meeting I went to, they were giving out badges saying, whose ideas have you had sex with recently? It's a bit weird. Who of your, anyway, whatever, you get the point. Well, we do talk about a fertile conversation. We do. And we talk about cross fertilization. Yes, yes, yes. Yes. Well, you hope that someone who specialized in one area can talk to someone who specialized

in another and that at the border where there aren't specialists, new ideas can be generated. And I mean, I've seen that over and over when talking to, well, when looking for scientific innovation, it's one of the things that's happened in the field of psychology over the last hundred years is that a lot of our radical innovations, especially on the methodological front, have been a consequence of engineers being trained as psychologists and bringing what they knew as engineers into the field. So a lot of fertile intellectual activity happens where two fields rub together, so to speak. That's right. And some of the great breakthroughs in biology came from physicists moving into biology. You move from when ideas have sex to the idea of a better today. And I was actually going to read

something if you don't mind from your book from page 12, which I liked quite a bit, I suppose it's funny in a black-hearted sort of way. So, there are people today who think life was better in the past. They argue that there was not only a simplicity, tranquility, sociability, and spirituality about life in the distant past that is being lost, but a virtue too. This rose-tended nostalgia, please note, is generally confined to the wealthy. It is easier to wax aligay for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long drop toilet.

Imagine that it is 1800, somewhere in Western Europe or Eastern North America. The family is gathering around the hearth in the simple timber-framed house. Father reads aloud from the Bible, while Mother prepares to dish out a stew of beef and onions. The baby boy is being comforted by one of his sisters, and the eldest lad is pouring water from a pitcher into the earth and wear mugs on the table. His elder sister is feeding the horse in the stable. Outside, there is no noise of traffic, there are no drug dealers, and neither dioxins, nor radioactive, followed have been found in the cow's milk. All is tranquil. A bird sings outside the window. I'm going to read the next section too, but this is, it's a very interesting paragraph because it speaks to something that I think has a dramatic

origin to a mythological or archetypal origin, which is the idea of this simple life where everyone is living in harmony with nature and the depredations of culture have not yet manifested themselves. And it's a... It's Rousseauian. It's Rousseauian, but it's deeper than that as well, because it actually reflects the truth.

Is it there is a purity about individual individuals that can be corrupted by society, but you have to take the reverse position as well if you're going to get things balanced. Well, then you add a corrective to this, which is quite comical. Oh, please, though this is one of the better off families in the village, Father's Scripture reading is interrupted by a bronchidic cough that pre-sages the pneumonia that will kill him at 53, not helped by the wood smoke of the fire, right? An indoor pollution is still a leading cause of mortality worldwide, often from the romantic hearth. He is lucky, life expectancy even in England

was less than 40 in 1800. The baby will die of the smallpox that is now causing him to cry. His sister will soon be the chattel of a drunken husband. The water the son is pouring tastes of the cows that drink from the brook. And that would be if the water was good, I would say. Two-thake tortures. Welcome to the Jordan B Peterson podcast. This is season four, episode four. I'm Michaela Peterson.

This episode was recorded with Matt Ridley on January 11th, 2021. Matt Ridley is a British best-selling author, the origins of virtue, the rational optimist, how innovation works, and many more, whose best known for his writings on science, the environment, and economics. He's also a well-respected journalist, businessman, and a member of the House of Lords in the UK. journalist, businessman, and a member of the House of Lords in the UK. Matt and Jordan spoke about economic optimism, trade through the reciprocity of nations, in light and self-interest, feeding 9 billion people, the triumphs of cities and much more. This episode is brought to you in part by Headspace.

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I have the good fortune today of speaking with author Matt Ridley, who's written a number of books, we'll list them in the description of the video. The ones I reviewed this week in preparation for this interview include this one published in 1996, The Origins of Virtue, which is a lovely investigation into the biological origins of morality, essentially, a very thought-provoking book and a very straightforward read for such a complex subject. The Rational Optimist, which was published, I believe, in 2010, and which I think probably serves as a pretty good description of Matt Ridley himself. That was my impression after going through his work. And then more recent work, how innovation works, and why it requires freedom to flourish. Sorry. And why it flourishes in freedom. So I wanted to talk to Matt primarily because I've been struck in my career as a university

professor and also on my tours, talking to thousands of people, many of whom are desperate, especially young people, because they're fed a never-ending diet of gloom and doom. It seems to be an armageddon like cultural predisposition to assume, without to only look at evidence that suggests that the future is going to be much worse than the past, despite the fact that the present is much better than the past. And that's been the case for many decades, I would say. And Matt's books, they're lovely read during the COVID crisis, I would say, because, of course, it's a very rough time for everyone, I would say, with the lockdowns and the uncertainty that reigns as a consequence of that. And he very carefully documents the improvements that have

been made in all around the world, especially over the last 400 years, this incredible explosion of technological intelligence that's produced on an unparalleled increase in human living standards by virtually any measure across virtually all dimensions. And so, well, that's my rationale for talking to Matt. He's a very straightforward author and despite the complexity of the ideas. So I'm really happy to be speaking with him today. Well, Jordan, thank you very much.

It's a real honor to be speaking with you. I'm someone who enormously admires your courage and intellectual, what's the word, gravitas that you bring to discussions? And I think it's just fantastic to be able to meet you. I'll be it online. And just on that question of optimism, it's a bit of a evangelical cause for me this, because I was steeped in pessimism as a young man, as a boy at school at university.

I believed that the population was unstoppable, that famine was inevitable, that the oil was going to run out, that the rainforests were going to disappear, that cancer was going to shorten my lifespan, that pesticides were going to make life undivided. You know, all that kind of stuff. And it came as quite a shock when I found that the world was getting better, not worse during my life, dramatically so. And so I want to tell today's young people that there is another possibility to the, you know, extinction rebellion kind of stuff that they're being fed by everybody, not just

the education system, but the media and their parents, you know, the grownups. I think it's quite important to have some optimism. Why is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we're too expect nothing but deterioration before us? That's a great quote and it's not me, it's Thomas Babington McAuley, Lord McAuley writing in 1830. So already then he was fed up with the doomsday saying it can't get better. It's been getting better in the past but but it's going to get worse in the future. And that's what every generation says. And I think so far they've been wrong, and I think there's a good chance they're wrong now.

Well, it might be a consequence of the human tendency to overweight negative information. We're wired to be more sensitive to threat and to pain then we are to hope and pleasure. And I suppose that's because you can be 100% dead, but you can only be so happy. And so it's better, it's better in some sense to err on the side of caution. And maybe when that's played out on the field of future prognostications, everything that indicates decline strikes us more harder than everything that indicates that things are going to get better. I mean, it's a real mystery, right? Because the news tells itself very hard towards the catastrophic.

And I can't think of any explanation for that, given that news purveyors seek attention. I can't come up with a more intelligent explanation than our proclivity for negative emotion. But we do have to overcome that to some degree if it's not in accordance with the facts. Yeah, there's an interesting angle there that I think might be a clue to what's going on. Several people have observed that we are less pessimistic about our own lives than we are about larger units. So we're not very pessimistic about our village, we're not very pessimistic about our town, but we're very pessimistic about our country, and we're

extremely pessimistic about the planet. The bigger the unit you look at, the more pessimistic people are. And of course, so people on the whole think their own life's going to work out, it's going to be fine, they're going to stay married, they're going to earn a lot of money, you know, they're okay when they talk about themselves. And I think what that's telling you is that your information about your own life comes from your own experience, your information about the planet comes from the media. And that implies to me that it's not just our inbuilt biases that are doing this, that there is a top-down effect from what the culture chooses to tell us. Do you have any sense of the motivation for that?

I mean, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that much of what drives the production of the news is the search for attention, the search for eyes, and you'd expect the news to evolve towards the maximally attention grabbing form. So apart from the ability to grab attention, can you think of any reason why pessimism is the sales item of the day, from the perspective of the news companies. Exactly, and this is where my argument breaks down a bit because it becomes circular, because I say, yeah, you're right, the reason they're telling us bad news is because they know that they know we're interested in bad news, so that on the whole, we don't look at good news

stories to anything like the same degree. So we're avid consumers of pessimism and that and they play to that. But there's another phenomenon too, which is that good news tends to be gradual and bad news tends to be sudden. That's not always true, of course, but it's surprisingly often is true. You know, 168,000 people were lifted out of extreme poverty yesterday and the day before and the day before and the day before. It's never newsworthy whereas 3,000 people were killed when an airliner flew into a skyscraper. That is newsworthy because it's so sudden, so unexpected, so new. Well, it's funny when I ran across statistics like the one that you just quoted, which I

think is worth repeating over and over 170,000 people lifted out of poverty today, could be three-inch headlines every day because it's an unparalleled event in human history, although it's occurring every day right now. But maybe it's also because you have to prepare for the worst, but you don't really have to prepare for the best. You know, if the best is happening, then you can just keep on doing what you're doing. But if there's a flaw somewhere or an error, then maybe you have to make some changes in your behavior. And that might be another reason why we're prone to seek out negative information. And does that explain why we're loss of verse to the extent we are?

Well, I think so. I think it's the same phenomenon. So anyways, the point is that one of the points is that despite the potential adaptive utility of being more sensitive to negative information, It can really get out of hand, right? Because it can precipitate, say, a nihilistic attitude with regards to the future or depression or high levels of anxiety or resentment or even hatred of humanity for that matter, for the destructive species that were always made out to be. And so it still seems to me that work that concentrates on demonstrating from a historical perspective

how much better things are getting is very much worth putting forward. So there's a deeper element of optimism in your work as well, which is in a sense a kind of non naïve Rousseauianism. I mean, Rousseau, of course, famously believed that people were good and that human institutions made them as malevolent and evil as they might become. So we're naturally good and corrupted by culture.

And I think that's half the story because we're also naturally bad and ennobled by culture. But despite that, you make a really good case in the origins of virtue, that virtue itself, that morality itself has a biological basis and that it's grounded in our evolutionary history. And I'll let you, if you would, ask you to expound on that a little bit. You talk about the discovery of the future and the necessity of reciprocity as driving agents in that evolution. And that's, it's a wonderful idea. And it's a profound idea because it does hint at a non arbitrary base for moral thinking. And that's a, I think, that that's been something I've been pursuing my entire life, I would say.

But, well, what I set out to do in that book, and it is admittedly 26 years ago, something that I finished writing it so I may have changed my mind, I want to do things, but what I set out to do was to persuade the reader that our good instincts are as animal as our bad instincts, or our good behaviour is as natural, is as instinctive, if you like, as our bad behaviour. We tend to get, I think from Christianity, mainly, a view that there's a deep sort of animal side of us which is bad, but we can teach each other to be good. And I don't think that's right. I think there's just as much of an animal instinct to be good in us as there is bad.

Because if you look at, you know, we are a social species. Lots of species are very social. And what they tend to do is they express various forms of kindness and generosity and self-sacrifice towards other members of their species. The most obvious example is that we're nice to our children, as are most creatures. And the reason we're nice to our children is obviously because we share their genes, people who were nice to their children, tended to leave more children behind than people who weren't nice to their children. And so the genes for being nice to children thrived at the expense of genes that did the opposite.

But obviously it goes further than that. There are social species that collaborate with other ones. And they do so often with a form of, that collaborate with strangers as it were. And they do so often with a form of reciprocity, you know, you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. I'll be nice to you today. You'll be nice to me tomorrow. You know, when a fish visit visits a cleaner station on the reef and allows small fish to clean the parasites off it, it's resisting the temptation to eat

the cleaner fish. And so there's a mutual gain from trade. Yeah, that's a remarkable example that these cleaning stations are set up on coral reefs where small fish congregate, often brightly colored and large fish line up like cars at a gas station to have their scales and even their teeth denuded of parasites and d dying tissue. And some of those cleaning stations are apparently tens of thousands of years old. So... Yes, that's... Of course, that's a cross-species collaboration. You know, this is, you know, two different species collaborating. But I don't know whether it's in that book or later. I in the end come down on to the view that that kind of reciprocity, you scratch my back, I scratch yours, is surprisingly rare actually, that actually you can't find that many examples. There's a wonderful example of vampire bats doing it, vampire bats that didn't get a blood meal beg for one from their neighbor, the neighbor then, you then return the favor to the neighbor next time that he doesn't

get a blood meal. And that way you're both better off. Actually, it turned out that they were closely related. These were, this was to some degree a family thing as well. So actually, and in human beings, it, it isn't very common very common for me to say, look, you did me a favor yesterday, so I'm going to do you the same favor today. What are the circumstances under which that's going to happen? I mean, I'm going to have too much food today and you're going to have too much food tomorrow. It's kind of doesn't happen very often. But we human beings have developed another form of exchange, which is far more powerful,

which is, I've got more food than I need, you've got more water than you need, I'm thirsty, you're hungry, we'll come to a deal, we'll swap. So we'll swap different things at the same time, rather than the same things at different times. And for me, that's the real insight into how human sociality and cooperation evolved. Now, I'm only here repeating what Adam Smith said in the wealth of nations about the butcher and the baker are not giving you bread and beer because they want to be kind to you, they're doing it to make a living, but they end up being kind to you, and you end up being kind to them by giving them money, which is what they want to be.

Well, I also thought that in some sense, you made a deeper case than that too, talking about the human capacity to understand and envision the future. I mean, reciprocity requires the ability to view transactions across time. And so as soon as the creature becomes aware of the future, like we have, we can even engage in reciprocal behavior with our future selves. And that makes our self-interest a much more complex phenomenon. So I might define self-interest as the impulsive pursuit of pleasure. And I think that's a perfectly reasonable

definition, perhaps, when you're talking about animals. But the question immediately arises, pleasure over what time span and at what cost. And I'm compelled by my knowledge of the future to act in a way that doesn't betray my future self. And that's very much like acting, you know, it's so that I'm a collective that stretches across time as an individual. And I have to act in the best interests of that collective. And I don't think that's very different than acting in the best interests of other people. You know, if I'm in my last book, I wrote about the morality that emerges from games. There's a neuroscientist who you might be familiar with, Yacht Panks'ep, who studied rat behavior in games.

He showed that if you pair two male juvenile rats together, the one with a 10% body weight advantage will pin the other almost 100% of the time. You might say, well, what that demonstrates is that might makes right the stronger animal wins, but if you pair say, well, what that demonstrates is that might makes right the stronger animal wins. But if you pair them together repeatedly, after the first bout, the defeated rat, Juvenile, has to be the Inviter of Play in the next match. So he'll invite the bigger rat to play. But over parr, over repeated parrings, unless the big rat lets the little rat win about 30%

of the time, the little rat will stop inviting him to play. So what happens is that you get an emergent morality, which is not the ability to win any given game, but the ability to repeatedly play a multitude of games. And there's something in that that's very much like what you were wrote about in the origin of Virtue, and something very much like a complex reciprocity, right? So where you store your good behavior in your reputation, essentially, and that's of great advantage. Yeah, and there is this very, very simple thing that was happening in the 1990s when I wrote that book, which was the people were playing the Prisoner's Dilemma game on computers

and finding out which strategy worked. And the Prisoner's Dilemma game is simply a game in which if both players agree to remain silent, then they benefit each other, but you can make a big again by betraying the other one. But then if he betrays you as well, you both end up with nothing. So you've got to find a way of trusting each other enough to cooperate. You're being held in separate cells and interrogated separately is the sort of story that's being told. And it turned out that the best strategy in a repeated business dilemma game

is tip for tat. That is to say, be nice first time around, cooperate on the first play, and then simply do whatever the other guy did on the previous play. So as to punish or reward the other guy for behaving badly or well. Right. So you're not a sucker using that strategy. You're cooperative, but you're not a sucker. Yeah. And in a sense, we are engaged in iterative repeated prison's dilemma games all the time. You know, you don't say, well, I'm not going to bother paying for this loaf of bread. I'm just going to grab it and run because then I'm better off because then you can't go back to the shop the next day. Yeah, you'll be recognized by the police if you don't know. Yeah, so it's morality as the shadow

of the future in some sense. Right. And again, this all comes back to Adam Smith, I think, because his previous book is book in 1759, not the wealth of nations, but the theory of moral sentiments, seems to me to have a very profound insight in me. And it's taken a long time for me to understand it. And that is that morality isn't, as it were, taught to us by priests and other people. It's essentially a calculation by us

as to what works in the society we're in. And you kind of calibrate your behavior to find out what is moral, what is ethical, and so on. And, you know, 500 years ago, the right ethical thing to do when somebody snubbed you was to challenge them and do it to a duel and run them through with a sword. Well, that doesn't get you very far today. So we've learned that actually

we've evolved a higher form of morality, sort of gradually by standing back and saying, in this society, what's going to get me the best rewards given how other people are behaving? Because, of course, everything is moving target. It seems to me too that that's deep enough now. So, imagine that the landscape that human beings occupy is a social landscape, but it's a social landscape that extends across time. And we've been conscious of that for a long time, at least 150,000 years. So that's about when we changed into the genetic, we changed genetically into the subspecies

that we are now. And so you can imagine that given the utility of perceiving the future and the clear benefits of reciprocal action, that that's altered as enough neurologically so that even conscience speaks to us internally in terms of reciprocity. So that goes along with the idea that this isn't something taught by priests. It might be something that priests and other ethicists remind us of. So we can have an inbuilt moral sense that's got a biological basis that still requires cultural activation and modification.

And the analog to that would be our instinct for language. You can't teach chimpanzees language because they don't have the biological capacity for it or not to the degree that we do, although some parrots can perform remarkable stunts in that regard, but we still have to be taught language or we have to be at least put in an environment where it's happening. So, um, exactly. And yeah, so, um, yeah, it just just because you know, there's a language instinct, but that doesn't mean that every child is born speaking Hebrew as James II King of England, supposed to have, James I is supposed to have thought was going to be the case. So, you know, I would say that I've studied archetypal representations of moral behavior because I think that dramatic

stories represent various, they represent various pathways through life, like pathways writ large, right? This drama is life with all the boring bits edited out. And what drama is trying to present to us are different modes of behavior. Some of them unsatisfactory. And those would be the bad guys and some of them highly satisfactory. And I would say the central hero in dramatic representations is someone who's as fully reciprocal as possible. That's what the drama is aiming at. And I think that's also what you're doing with your children when you teach them to be good sports when they're playing a game.

You basically say to them something like, although you don't know this, you say something like, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose. It matters how you play the game. And the reason that matters, and this is the part you don't say, because you don't know it, is that life is a never ending series of diverse games. And your goal, as if you want to be a winner, is to be invited to play as many games as possible. And what that means is that you have to have a morality that works across the set of all possible games. And it has to trump the morality that drives

you to win a single game. Yeah. And the phrase for that is enlightened self-interest as opposed to short term self-interest. And I think it's a very important insight. For me, the interesting one is that that connects with economic optimism. That connects with how we got to be so much better off because it brought us the division of labor. It essentially enabled us to say, look, I'll make the spears, you make the axes and we'll both be better off because we'll both be good at what we're doing. And even if I'm better at making both spears and axes than you are,

it still pays me because I'm slightly better at making spears than axes. For me to make the spears and get you to make the axes, that's the basis of trade. That's David Riccardo's theory in one Stone Age story. Yes. When we started to be intelligent enough and sophisticated enough so that a debt could be repaid in currency other than that in which it was accrued. So what that meant, must have meant was that we developed the abstract representation of a reciprocal debt. Not only did we reciprocate like chimpanzees do, for example, with grooming, but we could conceptualize the fact that we owed or were owed and were, and then we're able to be

repaid in all sorts of different manners. So. And by the way, it wasn't in this book, but it was in the rational otth mist that I did quite a diversion into the history of trade. And it's very persuasive that the trade is far, far older than agriculture. That pre-agricultural people were trading probably 100, thousand years ago. The oldest evidence we've got is seashells moving long distances inland from the coast of North Africa around a hundred thousand years ago.

And they're moving these long distances not because some of these walking hundreds of miles to the seashell, picking up some seashells and walking back, but because they're going hand-to-hand from tribes. And we can find, I think I do tell the story in the origins of Urdu of the year you're on, who were a Aboriginal tribe living in northern Australia, who were getting stingray barbs, as many stingray barbs as they wanted on the coast by catching stingrays, but what they really wanted was stone axes. And several hundred miles inland there was a quarry that produced stone axes and the tribe that owned that traded

with the year year on via several other traits. And you can actually see the exchange rate of stingray bulbs for stone axes along that trail. So that's, I think that's people being nice to each other when they could be fighting each other. Right. Right. Well, I think it was in the origins of virtue too, that you you chased the idea of trade down into the past, even further relating it to the strange human propensity to share food and associated that as well with hunting. And I believe you use the example of mammoths, which is also an example that I've found fascinating, because obviously you can't store a whole mammoth, but you can store it in the form of your reputation

by sharing it. And if you store it in the form of your reputation as a generous hunter, then you can be repaid back indefinitely in a currency that doesn't spoil. So maybe it's, and then you do outline it in this manner. Human beings share food very, in a very egalitarian manner within families. So men and women share food, men mostly meet historically speaking and women mostly

what they gather. And that makes for a balanced diet. And that ability to exchange food seems to me to be perhaps the biological platform on which the idea of trade per se was able to evolve. So, once you can share food and trade and enter into a reciprocal arrangement with regards to food, then it isn't that much of a leap to start do that with other commodities, especially those that might be related to the provision of food like stone axes or arrows or any implement of that sort. That sort, I'm rather fascinated by the fact that a sexual division of labor over food is very, very universal and ancient, that men hunted women gather, essentially, in hunter

gatherer societies. Now, in some societies, gatherings are much more important than hunting, and in some societies hunting is much more important than gathering, like the Inuit, for example, is the latter case. And there are sort of odd types of foraging that are neither gathering nor hunting. So, honey tends to be something that men get, but because it tends to be that you get it from hunting, it's like hunting, as it were. And digging up reptiles and rats tends to be something that women do, because it's like hunting, as it were, and digging up reptiles and rats tends to be something that women do because it's like digging up roots. Now, some people think this is a sexist view that I'm saying, a woman's place is digging

a man's place is out hunting. But I think it's just that unlike other species, we really did invent this really useful distinction whereby you've got the best of both worlds. You've got the protein from hunting, but you've got the reliability of food from gathering. So on the whole, you didn't go hungry, but on the whole, you did get access to protein, which was difficult thing for women to do

when they had small dependent kids and things like that. And you can sort of see an echo in it today that far more vegetarians are women or other far more women are vegetarians if you like, that may, and you know, men just like me more than the women do. So I think there is a deep thing going on here, but I've got to be very careful talking about it because people are quick to get upset and think that you're in some sense saying something very very prejudicial. Well, people get upset now if you accept that there are sex differences and if you deny that there are sex differences, so they're going to get upset no matter what you think. So you might as well just think what you think. You know, the advantage to that sexual division of labor in part is that it provides

additional utility for long-term relationships because they're actually more because of the union of specialization there that gathering in the hunting. You're deriving your food for more than one source. It means it's more reliable across time. That's a prerequisite for the origin of long-term pair bonds. So it's a really good thing. And no one loses in that trade,

and that's Adam Smith's point, and the point of optimist. It's funny, because economists tend to be optimistic, and biologists tend to be pessimistic on how long, when discussing questions like this. But if you make virtually... Well, we're on that. It's just that this is perhaps a digression,

but I've also been fascinated, but it's quite nice to challenge people and say, how about the reproductive division of labor? We're happy with all sorts of divisions of labor. You hunt, I gather, you work one kind of job, I work another kind of job. We're prepared to share out absolutely everything. But the one we never do is the reproductive division of labor.

Lance and bees do, they say, well, we're going to leave the queen to do the reproducing. And we're all going to be the workers. Imagine, you know, not even in England, with the queen, do we expect to do that? It's the one thing we try and do for ourselves is hang on to. And that's for me, Rob's home drives home the message of just how universal this division of labor concept is, otherwise in our life, because it's so shocking to try and think of a reproductive division of

labor. It's just something we don't aspire to. Okay, so your optimism manifests itself at least in part in your writing career with this notion that there's a biological origin of virtue, and so it's a fundamental instinct, and there's a universality about it, which I think is very optimistic because if there is a universal basis for morality, despite its obvious cultural differences, it means that we can potentially understand each other well enough to engage in reciprocal action across even tribal boundaries, which we're obviously capable of doing. And it implies that we might understand each other enough so that we could establish something like a long-term peace. That would be the hope. But so that's that's a very fundamentally optimistic viewpoint.

And then when you move into analysis of innovation and trade, you start doing that with the rational optimist, you're documenting transformations that have made life better. And I could list a couple of those, and maybe we can talk about them. So in the rational optimism, optimist, for example, you talk about the fact, well, you start by talking about ideas having sex. And so that's a form of reciprocity, I would say. That's the exchange of information rather than, than, than goods. But information is exchangeable for goods. And so in some sense, it's the abstract equivalent of the exchange of goods.

Yeah, but I'm in a sense, I'm being much more literal, even than that, because sex is the process by which genes get shuffled. And you recombine genes in new combinations. So you've got a gene for fur in one reptile, and you've got a gene for milk in another reptile, and you bring them together and you've got a mammal that has both fur and milk. And that couldn't happen without sex, because they'd stay in separate lineages. So sex is the process that enables genetic novelties

to find each other and combine. It's what makes evolution cumulative, in effect. And I'm saying that exchange has exactly the same role in innovation that one tribe can invent, you know, one gadget and another tribe can invent another gadget and you can't bring them together unless they're trading and the trading is what enables you to to make culture cumulative to start to say well hang on I'll have that I'll have that invention that was made in California and I'll have that invention that was made in China and I'll I'll actually be able to benefit from both of them. So it's a very explicit metaphor. I mean, it's a flippant attention-grabbing phrase, ideas having sex, and I used it for the title of a TED talk, and it rather caught on. And the next TED meeting, I went to, they were giving out badges saying, whose ideas have you had sex with recently?

It's a bit weird. Who of your, anyway, whatever you get the point. Well, we do talk about a fertile conversation. We do. Have we talked about cross fertilization? Yes, yes. Yes. Well, you hope that someone who specialized in one area can talk to someone who specialized

in another and that at the border where there aren't specialists, new ideas can be generated. And I mean, I've seen that over and over when talking to, well, when looking for scientific innovation, it's one of the things that's happened in the field of psychology over the last hundred years is that a lot of our radical innovations, especially on the methodological front, have been a consequence of engineers being trained as psychologists and bringing what they knew as engineers into the field. So a lot of fertile intellectual activity happens where two fields rub together, so to speak. That's right.

And some of the great breakthroughs in biology came from physicists moving into biology. You move from when ideas have sex to the idea of a better today. And I was actually going to read something if you don't mind from your book from page 12, which I liked quite a bit. I suppose it's funny in a black-hearted sort of way. So there are people today who think life was better in the past. They argue that there was not only a simplicity, tranquility, sociability, and spirituality about life in the distant past that is being lost, but a virtue, too. This rose-tended nostalgia, please note, is generally confined to the wealthy. It is easier to wax aligayak for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long-drop toilet.

Imagine that it is 1800, somewhere in Western Europe or Eastern North America. The family is gathering around the hearth in the simple Timber-Framed House. Father reads aloud from the Bible, while mother prepares to dish out a stew of beef and onions. The baby boy is being comforted by one of his sisters, and the eldest lad is pouring water from a pitcher into the earth and wear mugs on the table. His elder sister is feeding the horse in the stable.

Outside, there is no noise of traffic. There are no drug dealers, and neither dioxins nor radioactive fallout have been found in the cow's milk. All is tranquil. A bird sings outside the window. I'm going to read the next section too, but this is a very interesting paragraph because it speaks to something that I think has a dramatic origin to, a mythological or archetypal

origin, which is the idea of the simple life where everyone is living in harmony with nature and the depredations of culture have not yet manifested themselves. And it's a... It's Rousseauian. It's Rousseauian, but it's deeper than that as well because it actually reflects the truth. Is it there is a purity about individual individuals that can be corrupted by society, but you have to take the reverse position as well if you're going to get things balanced. Well, then you add a corrective to this, which is quite comical. Oh, please. Though this is one of the better off families in the village, Father's Scripture reading is interrupted by a bronchitic cough that presages

the pneumonia that will kill him at 53, not helped by the wood smoke of the fire, right? An indoor pollution is still a leading cause of mortality worldwide, often from the romantic hearth. He is lucky, life expectancy even in England was less than 40 in 1800. The baby will die of the smallpox that is now causing him to cry. His sister will soon be the chattel of a drunken husband. The water the sun is pouring tastes of the cows that drink from the brook, and that would be if the water was good, I would say. Toothache tortures the mother. The neighbor's lodger is getting the other girl pregnant in the hayshed, even now, and her child will be sent to an orphanage. The stew is gray

and grisly, yet meat is a rare change from gruel. There is no fruit or salad at this season. It is even with a wooden spoon from a wooden bowl. Candles cost too much, so firelight is all there is to see by. Nobody in the family has ever seen a play painted a picture or heard a piano. School is a few years of dull, Latin taught by a bigoted martinette at the Vicarage. Father visited the city once, but the travel cost him a week's wages, and the others have never traveled more than 15 miles from home. Each daughter owns two wool dresses, two linen shirts, and one pair of shoes. Father's jacket cost him a month's wages, but is now infested by lice.

The children sleep too to a bed on straw mattresses on the floor. As for the bird outside the window, tomorrow it would be trapped and eaten by the boy. Well, that's, I love that, that section. It's quite comical in a dark and tongue-in-cheek sort of way, but it's a great corrective to the foolish romanticism that characterizes people's longing for even the near past. You know, that characterizes people's longing for even the near past. You know, it's not unreasonable to say that the typical middle-class person, I could say, in North America or Europe, and increasingly, anywhere in the world, is wealthier by almost every measure than a billionaire was in 1920. Right. Absolutely.

And, you know, particularly, I mean, I can't remember who it was who said, just take dentistry. You know, it's the, it doesn't matter how rich you were in 1800, it was no fun having a rotten tooth. And, you know, and that's a relatively basic thing that we all can have access to today. So there's no question that in material ways our lives are so much better than those of our ancestors. And we tend to regenostin and think, well, wouldn't that have been fun, you know, but actually those are books about an incredibly small elite who were rich enough to have candles and go to go to dances. Yes, and even in those circumstances, their social lives were restricted enough so that a single dance could be the social event of an entire year.

Exactly. And if you didn't fall in love with a journalist officer who took your arm, you might be a widow for the rest of your life. So, you know, it was not much fun compared with today. We are so lucky. Everything is so good. And for me, and I think I make this, well, actually, there's an interesting story about this point. I like to talk about how the big theme of human history is becoming more and more specialized as in the things we produce and more and more diversified in the things we consume. So you actually, but your jobs get narrower and narrower, more and more specialized, but your life gets richer and richer, you know, because you can consume, you narrower, more and more specialized, but your life gets richer and richer,

you know, because you consume, you know, movies and exotic foods and all these different things. That's a great antithesis to the Marxist notion of alienation in labor, right? Because one of the things that's attractive about Marxism and it's understandably attractive, there's two things, I think one is the emphasis on the unpleasantness of inequality. But the other is the idea of alienation from the created product. But if you make the case that, well, you might be alienated from the created product with regards to the workplace because of specialization. But in the two-thirds of the hours that you're spending of your life when you're not working, your life is much more

diverse than it would otherwise be. And I think that COVID is probably taught everyone that again because we're so isolated now and stuck at home and facing the restriction of all these things that we took for granted, the wonderful restaurants. And by the way, we do sort of go backwards with respect to specialization in exchange during bad recessions. So in the depression, a lot of American families, you know, found they were keeping a chicken and growing their own vegetables. Again, you know, you start to do more for yourself and have less to consume overall. Because if you only could consume what you produce, it would be a pretty miserable life. You had to make your own food, your own lighting, your own heat, everything like that. But by the way, there's a really nice story about this concept, because I read

it in a book called Second Nature by Haim Ofek. It's a beautiful book that I read around 20 years ago and it's laid out this point very nicely that we've become more and more specialized in how we produce but more and more diversified in how we consume. And I wrote to him and said, look this is a fantastic idea. Can you tell me how you came up with the idea and where you've got it from and how it developed and he wrote back and said, I got it from your book. That's a good compliment. That's a good compliment.

The best for my own. I said, but I don't think it's in my book. And he said, I guess maybe it's not. I just, you know, but I thought I got it from your book. So that's a lovely example of the division of labor in the production of ideas, if you like. Well, and ideas can be implicit as well as explicit, so it's not always obvious what ideas are in your book.

You know, it isn't, you can't put a boundary around the ideas, even the ideas that you write because they have tendrils that reach beyond your understanding. And so you never know. Which is why I'm something of a skeptic about intellectual property. By the way, I think copyright is vastly overdone. I think we should be much more prepared to share the stuff that we produce. But there we go. That's another story. Well, I wonder if that anecdote that you just related is an indication of the sexual behavior of ideas. I don't know if the metaphor works, but you know, every book, each book is different for

every reader. And the meaning of the book is actually a complex consequence of the knowledge that's held by the reader and the knowledge that's implicit in the book. And so what that means is no book is the same for any two readers. Now, postmodernists figured that out a while back, but they seem to read it to indicate that there was no canonical meaning whatsoever in a text as a consequence and then slipped into the idea that perhaps there was no meaning at all, which I think was a major mistake. But is that a sexual, is that a sexual, is that process akin to sexuality as well?

The fact that you have a reader on one part and something to be read on the other part and a third thing emerges as a consequence. It seems like it. You need two things to produce something new. Yes, I think I think that is equivalent. I mean, we're talking books here, but if we were talking gadgets, it would be much more explicit. I love telling the story about how the the pill camera was invented. It's something you swallow and it takes a picture of film of your insights as it goes through. And it came about ultra-conversation over a garden fence in Boston between a gastroenterologist and a guided missile designer. That's a very good example of the generation of ideas at the

border between two specializations. And you wouldn't necessarily expand. And you wonder too if there's a particularly robust ideas emerge as a consequence of people from very disparate disciplines talking. You know, that would be... Well, there's a... In my latest book, I talk about a website called Inocentive where you can post your problems if you're a company that's that's got a technological problem you can't solve, you can post the problem and say, look, does anyone have a solution to this? And you, there are ways of rewarding

people who answer, yes, I've got the answer for you. It's quite well set up. And a study of the successful solutions that have been provided on this website found that most of them had come from people completely outside the field. So it really was a case that you needed a fresh mind with a fresh, with a different training to look at the problem from a different direction. So all this goes to show that we are more than the sum of our parts.

We operate in the cloud. Our ideas are, again, that lovely thing that Leonard Reed said that if you take a pencil, there are millions of people who contribute to making it because somebody had to cut down a tree and somebody had to grow coffee for the man who was cutting down the tree and the wood had to go to the factory and so on. There's an incredible number of people involved in making the pencil. Not one of them knows how to make a pencil. There isn't a human being on the planet who knows how to make a pencil because the person who knows how to work in a factory doesn't know how to cut down a tree and so on. So the knowledge of how to run the human world sits in a cloud and has done since long before

the internet cloud was invented. It sits between brains, not within brains. Why do you think then? Look, I mean, we've been talking, we've been batting back and forth the idea that virtue itself is tightly associated with trade. Then in some sense, they may not be distinguishable from one another. Fair trade in some manner is virtue, especially fair trade across long spans of time, and maybe fair trade across long spans of times with diverse communities. So why do you think that the idea of trade itself has also become contaminated with this terrible pessimism? I mean, one of the things that characterizes, if it's trade that constitutes virtue and if it's trade as well that's lifted people

out of poverty, then why is it that people who engage in novel trade, entrepreneurs say, or even capitalists for that matter? Why is it that that form of trade has so easily associated with so easily despised and so frequently met with contempt. I find it baffling because Voltaire made the point that commerce tends to make people nicer. If two people are trading, then they suddenly stop fighting. But... Well, they're worth more to each other if they're alive then. Well, exactly.

Then that seems to be a good thing. Like, it's a good thing to have everyone worth more alive than dead. Right. And actually, Steve Pinker talks about this too, but the the the the peace that breaks out at various times in human history, he tends to be more associated with whether countries are trading with each other than whether they happen to be democracies or in any other relationship with their political system. So, the degree of trade really does make a difference to how peaceful things are. It doesn't stop war breaking out between countries that are trading with each other,

but it's now axed in the 20th century. You get a period of huge protectionism that precedes the Second World War and to some extent sparks it. You know, Japan is saying, well, if you're not going to trade with me, I'm going to bloody well invade Asia and take stuff for myself. Well, I thought it was a dubious, entering into trade with communist China was a big risk on the part of the West. And when that first started to happen, it was something that, while I was interested in, and also concerned about, but mostly curious about, because on the one hand, you could say, well, it's, why would you trade with a totalitarian state, a cruel totalitarian state, a murderous totalitarian state for that matter? But on the other hand, you could say, well, maybe it would be better off for

everyone if the Chinese weren't dirt poor and starving. And if they depended on us in a mutually beneficial manner. I would have to say that despite the fact that the Chinese Communist Party still rules with an iron fist, that it's probably being better for everyone all concerned that extensive trade with China has taken place. I know the North American and European working class has taken a major hit because of that, although they've benefited from cheap manufactured items for sure. But you've got to think a Chinese population where no one is starving and that's completely engaged in trade with the West is a more reliable long-term partner than one that's isolated

and pursuing its own destiny. Yeah, I certainly thought that until recently. I thought that our best chance of turning them into a liberal democracy was to trade with them. And after all, it was a great deal for us. We gave them, as Don Boudre once, we gave them pictures of presidents

and they gave us goods and services. In other words, money. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. But I have to say, in the last couple of years, under Xi Jinping, China has become something very different from what it was five or even or ten years ago, I think. And I think we are reaching the point where it is a problem that we are buying goods off

a regime that is doing terrible things to Hong Kong, to the Uighurs and others. There's a moral, there's a moral quandary there, but it still seems to me even that a China that holds a substantial amount of Western debt is much less likely to upset the apple cart than a China that doesn't, you know. It's not such a big thing to have a desk today. They have an interest in the dollar not collapsing, for example. But go back to your original question there there why are people so cynical and unhappy about trade and think it's such an evil thing?

And I think in the end, it's that we are zero-sum thinkers. We find it hard to believe that somebody isn't winning in a relationship. And I suppose that's because crooked people, crooked foolish people do try to win. Yeah, and for 99% of our four billion years of history, it was true that if someone won, it was at the expense of someone losing. But you can see very clearly in the rhetoric of Donald Trump, the view that trade is a zero sum game is a is a win lose equation.

And it's quite hard, even for you and me to get our head around the idea that, that actually, um, uh, I, you know, yes, I've driven a good bargain in buying a car or a house, but maybe I've been ripped off. Who knows? You know, well, I guess, okay. So part of the problem is that fair trade can revert to a crooked zero sum game quite rapidly. And so we're on edge because of that.

But I mean, people still pursue long-term relationships and they still pursue friendships. They still make the assumption that reciprocal interactions are not only possible, but also part of what makes life worth living, a really important part. And it doesn't seem that complicated to ex... I guess it's the difficulty of extending that outward towards non-can or even strangers. But it's a remarkable thing that that's possible. And it'd be nice if we were more grateful for it than we are. Right. The remarkable thing about human beings is that we do treat complete strangers as honorary brothers and sisters.

And how do we do that partly by building up these, these levels of trust through reciprocity of a long period. Well, eBay, eBay is a great example of that, because when eBay first emerged, the cynics said, well, you know, I'll put something up for sale that's junk and send it to you and it won't work and you'll send me a check that bounces and that'll be the end of eBay.

And that's not what happened is that right off the bat, almost all the trades were fair and equitable. And then it evolved a reputation tracking system. But even before the reputation tracking system, the default transaction was precisely what it claimed to be on face value. Our reputation is very precarious. It's very easy to lose your reputation. Even in quite a mobile society, it will track you down. Well, that's even maybe more true in society now, because you can lose your reputation very easily with one misstep on Twitter. That's certainly true.

Yes. Well, it's also interesting to see how sensitive people are to reputation maintenance because I've watched this intently over the last four or five years. You see people who post something, for example, on Twitter and then a small mob generates itself around them and might not be more than 20 people who are complaining about this particular post. And almost inevitably, the person will back down with profuse apologies and show every sign of severe emotional distress. And I suppose I've thought about it a lot. I suppose it's akin to, in some sense, it's the electronic equivalent to having 20 neighbors show up on your doorstep.

You'd assume if you were a reasonable person that you might have done something wrong, even though the analogy doesn't really hold true, if you're communicating with 150,000 people and you upset 15 of them, it's really difficult to say exactly what that means. This is back to the loss of of version point because we're all, we know this very well as authors, you read 10 good reviews of your books and you think, well, I'm embarrassed about that, I don't really deserve it or it's nice, nice good review. And then one bad review and it prays on your mind and you get furious and you get upset and you write it letter to the editor saying the reviews unfair and things that we've all done at least

I don't know. Well, the same thing happens with regards to comments on social media. You know, like I'm fortunate with regards to what I've produced on YouTube, for example, because most of it garners far more positive commentary than negative commentary. You know, when the ratios are usually something like 50 to 1, but it's not the case that when I read through the comments that my mood is reliably void, and that is because the outlier, the negative comment strikes me, strikes a pang into my heart. And I don't want to make too much of that because overall, I think this is like the bad news story being most alien.

Yes, it is the same thing. Well, I cannot see how people who are accumulating more negative comments in a social media platform than positive comments, I don't see how they can survive it. I couldn't survive it. So, and that sensitivity to reputation. I took a decision some years ago to stop looking at the replies to my tweets altogether, and I've never done it since, and it's been very good for my sleeping and other things. So I'm not missing out on some interesting feedback. And every now and then, I will look at something specific where I've asked someone a question or something like that. But actually, I talked to a British politician who's a friend who

But actually, and I talked to a British politician who's a friend who's a conservative party leader and was hugely criticized at the time. He never came prime minister. And I said, you know, how do you develop a thick skin here? Because you're still in politics 20 years later and you're still yeah, you know, you've been a successful cabinet minister, but you've been the subject of the triolic cartoons and all sorts of stuff. And he says, nobody develops a thick skin. You just learn to ignore the stuff. And the politicians who decide not to ignore it, but to answer back to strive themselves. It helps to be blessed with a favorable nervous system too, and to be low in trading

eroticism. So you're not as sensitive to negative information as you might be. So I think so the thick skin might be partly a biological phenomena where you know people differ in their degree of loss of version. And I suspect that public figures who manage to maintain themselves over long periods of time in the face of criticism are relatively robust when it comes to their physiological response to threat. Well, something I greatly admire about you is your ability to remain cool under pressure, you know, when Kathy Newman is trying to rile you on Channel 4 News or something.

You're, you're, you're, you're, you're remain logical. I would get my heart rate would go up. I would start to bluster. I would stop thinking and I would say sort of stupid things that I would get my heart rate would go up, I would start to bluster, I would stop thinking, and I would say sort of stupid things that I would regret. Is that something you learned or do you have it in you? Because I just hate it. It's so stressful. I find that so unbelievably stressful. But fortunately, I think it's probably a consequence of being trained as a clinical psychologist.

Right. Is that I can detach myself and watch. But that doesn't mean the physiology isn't racing. Like it's racing. And it's definitely the case that it's very strange thing because the negative interviews that I've conducted, interviews where people were attacking me, let's say, have garnered far more views than the positive

interviews. So, in terms of impact on my reputation, the negative interviews have been more beneficial than the positive ones. Yeah, but that's partly because you've performed well in them. Anyone can perform well when they're being interviewed nicely as you are interviewing me nicely now. It's the sheep from the goat, so the people who can remain cool under pressure as you do. I think it is a consequence of clinical training.

I mean, because I can snap into an observer mode and, and, and detach myself in some sense from what's going on. Partly because I know as well that it isn't clear what's happening. Like it might be a battle, but it's not necessarily the war. And so being under attack doesn't necessarily mean that you're being defeated. It's it's something like that. But that's a rationalization of the ability to detach. But I do think it's the clinician in me that allows for that.

Well, the old bomber pilots remark that if you're taking flack, you know, you're over the target is some comfort in this. Yeah, well, at least there's a possibility that that's true. So I want to ask you some more specific questions or not precisely that. I would like you to discuss more specifically if you wouldn't mind some of the things that you've outlined as so intensely positive. And I can throw out some reminders.

These are chapter titles from the Russian optimist and then maybe we'll move to how innovation works. You talk about feeding nine billion, for example, which is that that's a remarkable story. And I've read it in various sources, but we have biologists in particular in the 1960s, we're absolutely certain, Paul Ehrlich, for example, that we were all going to perish of starvation, if starvation combined with an absolute dearth of raw materials by the year 2000.

And that hasn't happened. It's dissout now. The biologists might say, the Malthusians might say, yeah, yeah, well, we got the time frame wrong by a couple of Decades, but you know the other shoe is still going to drop, but nonetheless When you make a prediction you have to include a time frame or it's not a prediction Well, no, but they can't even really make that claim because during that period not only have we I mean since the early 60s We've doubled the human population

But we've slightly shrunk the amount of land we put under the plow every year. There's been a 68% reduction over 50 years in the amount of land needed to produce a given quantity of food. That's the most extraordinary phenomenon. It's basically the story of the green revolution. You make the case there too, that without that occurring, and then that is a concept we should go into the green revolution to some degree, because lots of viewers won't know about that unbelievably, even though it might, it's arguably the biggest story of the last 50 years, in some sense, you know, you make the case

that had the green revolution not taken place. And so that was partly a consequence of careful breeding of new foodstuffs like dwarf wheat. And the manufacture of nitrogen fixing fertilizers, we would have already used up land space equivalent to more than the entire Amazonian rainforest. We would have converted virtually all arable land on earth into food producing well into food production and we haven't done that. And in fact, I believe now there are more trees in the northern hemisphere than there were a hundred years ago. Oh yes, definitely. I mean, the whole world is now reforisting fairly rapidly. When I

say the whole world, the world is net reforisting. Some places are still losing forests, but on the whole, it is like China are gaining, gaining woodland at an extraordinary rate. Yeah. Well, China has more woodland now than it did 30 years ago, despite the fact that well, they just declared this week or last week, the Chinese government just declared the eradication of extreme poverty in China. And, you know, you can be cynical about that and claim that it's a totalitarian, it's totalitarian. What would you call posturing, but it's certainly the case that even by UN standards, we've almost, we're on track to eradicate extreme poverty by, according to the UN definition of extreme poverty by 2030. And we've halved it since from the year 2000, I believe, to the year 2010, it was cut in half, but it's absolutely phenomenal.

60% of the world was lived in extreme poverty when I was born. Today, it's less than 10%. That's the greatest achievement of any human generation ever. It's nobody's lived through anything like that in the past. Yes, and that despite the fact that the population what tripled? Yes, well, yes, one or half times. And nobody saw it coming. And it wasn't planned even.

Most of it came about because of, you know, relatively local innovation to make farming more efficient and things like that. And the amount of calories available per head have gone up on every continent, including Africa. There is still extreme poverty and extreme hunger and malnutrition and nutrient shortages and so on. But the thing I always say to environmentalists is, why do you think it would motivate people to tell them that this problem is insoluble? Why not say, look

how well we've done in the past. Why don't we try and do just as well in the future? Well, it's especially the case. This is something that really confuses me to because I generated partly generated a UN report, contributed to a UN report about six or seven years ago on sustainable development. And I had the same sort of realization that you described was that on all these dimensions where we were supposed to be, you know, careening towards catastrophe, we were in fact doing better and better with the possible exception, I think, of oceanic management, but we don't have to get into that. Yeah, it's a geoscientic management is a catastrophe, but it could still be rectified. And it seems to be a tragedy of the Coleman's catastrophe.

In any case, everywhere I looked at the actual statistics, the evidence was that things were getting better fast and really fast, fast in an unparalleled manner. But what really got me was that the evidence as far as I can tell is clear that as soon as you make people rich enough so that they're not living hand-to-mouth, then they start to become concerned with environmental degradation. And so the biggest contributor to pollution, you could make a case, a strong case, the biggest contributor to pollution isn't wealth, but poverty. And then if you raise people out of poverty, then they start to manage

their environment's property, because they can afford to look at the long run. And so you'd think that for the radical types who are hyper-concerned according to their own self-description, with poverty and oppression, as well as environmental degradation, that they would look at the facts and say, oh my god, we can have our cake and eat it too. The faster we make people rich, the better off the planet is going to be. Completely, this is so clear to me, and it's so hard to get across to a lot of the environmentalists. And by the way, there's a word I want to introduce to the conversation at this point, which is Panglossian.

People sometimes accuse me of being Panglossian. Dr Pangloss, as you remember, in Indeed, in Voltaire's novel, is someone who says he's a caricature of Leibniz, and he says that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. And yes, Lisbon has been destroyed by an earthquake, but that must have been because they were evil people because God wouldn't do a bad thing. And it's a very silly argument and it's being lampooned by a whole tear. But actually, the people who say that now are not you and me. We're saying good as this world is compared with what it was, it's a veil of tears compared with what it could be if we press on.

We're not saying we've got to the best possible world. We're saying let's keep going. But the people who are saying that, who are saying, oh, we mustn't do any more development, oh, we must make sure that people still live in mudhuts. You outline data indicating that one of the responses by the data indicating that one of the responses by the catastrophists, let's say, of the 1960s, was to write off places like India and proclaim that even aid was futile because all you were doing was encouraging increasing starvation in the future. When I was writing the rational optimist in 2010, 2010. It was quite fashionable still to write off Africa, to say, yes, Asia has seen extraordinary improvements in living standards, but it is very unrealistic to assume that that could ever happen in Africa. People would say that kind of thing quite often. And in my book I said, look, even in Africa, we are seeing incredible improvements. Well, the fastest car in the world. So I got criticized in my reviewer in The New York Times

for using the phrase even in Africa. That showed I was a racist apparently. You know, you can't win. I was saying the opposite. But now, 10 years on, Africa's had an incredible decade, actually, much better than the West, which has had a rather grim decade of low productivity and the overhang of the Great Recession and so on. But countries like Ethiopia have doubled their income per capita in real terms in a decade. You've seen malaria mortality collapse. You've seen HIV mortality falling fast. You've seen warfare disappearing from much of the continent. You've seen an emerging middle class. You've seen far less hunger and malnutrition. Actually Africa is just doing roughly what Asia did a generation ago and it will soon be where Asia is now, which is a middle-class middle-income continent.

That's an incredible thing. And it... Well, in Africa... Africa has unparalleled potential. I read in the analysis probably 15 years ago, I believe it was by the former CEO of Elkoa, the aluminum company, who was working for a Republican government as a cabinet member at that point.

Frater can't remember his name, but he visited Uganda and was very curious about its potential with regards to agriculture and calculated, first of all, Uganda apparently sits on a water table that's only about 200 feet down and it's very fertile. He calculated, and maybe this wasn't his calculation, but he reported that Uganda alone could feed all of Africa. And so there's no reason to assume that despite the fact, for example, I think it's Nigeria is on course to be the world's most populist country by the year 2100.

I think the demographic projections are that it will surpass China by that point. Yes, I believe that's true. That's quite an interesting thought, isn't it? Just to cast your mind forward to the 2100, I think we will be producing food, an awful lot of it from factories by that. And by factories, I mean vertical farms, you know, indoor LED lit, multi-story operations that don't need. Why LED lit? Why LED lit? Because LEDs are so cheap, they use so little electricity and produce so little heat that you can actually start to make indoor farming, make sense, because the light was the big problem

for farming. You had to be outdoors for the light, because the plants don't grow except in sunlight, but the LED revolution has made a big difference there. And I can imagine us having, basically, some indoor farms, the size of Uganda that feed the world. And the rest of the planet, yes, we'll have hobby farming and we'll have grass-fed beef in here and there and so on. But an awful lot of the rest of it will be one giant national park in which we will allow nature to thrive. And by the way, I think to people to to operate as tourists, I mean, increasingly ecologically pristine areas pay for themselves with tourism. And so that brings them into the economy, which is a normal certain way of preserving them. Yeah. So, and I suspect we'll bring back some

extinct species by then as well. So, you talk about, you talk as well about, I'm going to list a few things here. So we talked about feeding 9 billion and that's become a possibility. You talk about the triumph of cities and the escape from Malthus. So maybe we could talk about that briefly. And the end of slavery as well, which, that's a lovely one because that's unharmed it I would say, partly because I think people don't really understand how universal slavery or near slavery was across civilizations for the entirety of human history. So triumph of cities.

Well, people are moving into cities. Cities are where innovation happens on the whole. They're disproportionately innovative. The bigger they are, the more efficient they are in some sense. They have fewer gas stations, fewer miles of road per person in bigger cities. If you see what I mean, they become more concentrated. More than half the world now lives in cities. That leaves the rest of the landscape untrampalled. Cities only occupy about 3% of the world's land surface, I believe. So actually, it's a good thing because, yes, some of us like to live in rural areas rather than in cities.

But those of us who want to can do that. Cities are where people come together and they mix and they have ideas and they produce baby ideas, you know. So it was the city states of ancient Greece or the city states of Renaissance Italy that really drove the world economy in their day. Likewise in Britain and Victorian times, or California today. California is two great big city states, Los Angeles and San Francisco, effectively. And so I think the fact that the world is becoming more urbanized, or was until the last year,

I mean, it'll be interesting to see whether city centers really do lose their allure after the pandemic because a lot of businesses have discovered that they don't need to pay for expensive real estate. They can let people work from home. I suspect it'll lead to a lot more hot-desking, you know, people coming into the office two or three days a week, working from home two or three days a week, which will cut down on commuting, make some of the city's problems less bad, and cut the cost of real estate in the middle of cities. So I suspect we're in that we could have quite a soft landing for some of the problems that cities have these days. But it won't all be plain sailing. I mean, things are going to go wrong in that respect.

Escape from Malthus? Well, the Malthusian trap was Robert Malthus' notion was that the if you kept people alive, they would simply, if you gave them more food, they would simply have more babies. So, they'd end up just as poor and just as hungry. It was something like that happened in Ireland when potatoes became the dominant crop and then failed, right? So, you outlined this in your book. It's not an idea that originates with me. When the Irish started to farm potatoes, their population exploded and then a blight came in

and wiped out the potato crop and blew out the Irish population. And that's a classic Malthusian example. He started the else most pessimistic biologists. Yeah, and he wasn't entirely wrong in that respect, but the thing he did get wrong Yeah, and he wasn't entirely wrong in that respect, but the thing he did get wrong is that technology might change it. And we then moved to a world in which food became more and more productive. Babies stopped dying.

We got better at keeping them alive. And weirdly, once they stopped dying, people started having fewer of them. And this is a phenomenon called the demographic transition that took us really by surprise. You know, if you stop baby rabbits dying, they have more babies. But if you stop baby human beings dying,

people say, right, I'm not gonna try and have as many kids as possible in the hope that a few survive. I'm gonna have two. And try to get that through a couple of things. That's another thing that's occurred very, very rapidly in the last few generations. That no one predicted is that the rate of reproduction is plummeted and increasingly across the world.

It looks like as soon as you educate women, open up the marketplace to them and provide a modicum of birth control as well as these other improvements in living standards that you described that the birth rate plummets to below replacement. Yeah, no, in all of the other countries, I'm going to have problems with below replacement fertility in this coming century, which means that you've got a very aging workforce,

which won't be able to afford retirement because there's not enough working people and so on here. So that's another problem you've got, but it's it's better than a population explosion continuing to the point where there's 20 billion people trying to live on a planet, which is what we were worried about 40 years ago. I think the projections now are there. We're in a peak out at about 11 11 billion something like that. That's the UN median projection, but a lot of people think it's overblown, actually, that the numbers, if you run the numbers with sensible, you know, a lot depends on how fast the Nigerian birth rate comes down, as you said earlier. Right.

But with a sensible assumption, we might not even get much past 10 billion. Well, it'd be really quite remarkable if an emergent problem for the latter half of the 20th century was that there was too many goods and not enough people. And that could easily be the case, that could easily be the case, especially not enough young people. So maybe the answer to Malthus is sort of hidden in some sense inside the presumptions you made in your book. So maybe we could pause it as a journal biological rule is if the rate of sexual reproduction of ideas exceeds the rate of sexual reproduction of human beings, then there's no melthusian

catastrophe. That's a very nice way of putting it. I think that is exactly the point I like to make. Yeah. Well, it's possible. It certainly seems to me to be possible, given that we are clearly able to make more and more using less and less. And there's lots of things that we're not doing that we could do that you also touch on. One of the things that strikes me as somewhat catastrophic is the tragic underdevelopment of nuclear power. I've spoken with a number of people about the possibilities of nuclear power, and you point out, and I think it's in how innovation

works, actually, that there are no shortage of plans for much smaller nuclear reactors that don't use water as the primary coolant that use salt or some other substance like that, certain salts, and that if they fail, they actually shut down rather than melting down. And so that's another example, I think, of where the environmentalists, which are broad brush, but the environmentalists got things seriously wrong and are still doing so, because as far as I can tell, if you wanted, the question is, what do you want? If you want cheap power of the sort that would make people rich enough to start caring about the environment, it seems to me that you would be a nuclear power supporter rather than a supporter of solar or wind power, which I think only still accounts for about 3% of total energy needs.

That's true. People say, oh no, no, that's wrong. It's more than 10%. You find that referring to electricity, but electricity is only about 25% of energy at the moment. So it's around 3% comes from solar and wind. But the real problem with solar and wind versus nuclear, nuclear is still horribly expensive because of the way we've regulated it and driven up its price. So our problem is how to get the price down. But the real problem is the amount of land that solar and wind use because they're very low density sources of energy. So you have to have a lot of land and you need more land than there is. You know, I mean, even Canada has hardly gone enough land to produce renewable energy for its population.

Frankly, that's going back to a medieval economy where you had to use the landscape to produce energy. You had to dam the rivers and grow the crops that you then cut down the forests to burn the water. It's not obvious either that wind farms aren't a blight on the landscape. I'm afraid they are. They're terrible for birds. I'm a keen bird watcher.

I don't like the idea of these birds being devastated by onshore and offshore wind. And wind farm spends the first seven, eight years of its life earning back the energy that went into building the wind turbine. And only after that is it net positive. And even then, it's a huge investment of capital that could be doing something else. The point about energy is that it's the master resource.

It's the thing that everybody else needs to use. So you want to make it as cheap and as reliable as possible. Yes, exactly. That should be said over and over that if you were, it seems to me that if you were truly concerned about the planetary fate, let's say, or even more precisely the fate of the people on the planet, that you would do everything you could to drive the cost of energy, including the externalized costs, to something as low as possible, because it's the prerequisite for everything else. And starving people aren't, we already talked about this, but starving people aren't good planetary stewards. So even if you,

you'll notice, Jordan, you and I have now slipped into a slightly pessimistic mood in that we're finding the energy policies of our countries rather stupid. Yeah, it's probably because we're old enough so that the 90 minute discussion starts to become tiring. Well, there's that, but also, you know, the identity politics stuff, the anti-initement mood of our times, I can make a case that we might just be about to kill the goose that has been laying these golden eggs. Well, I think we should, I truly think we should avoid going there. I've thought about this a lot,

watching people respond, for example, to some of the things that I've been talking about over the last few years. There's a huge population of young and not-so-young people out there who are literally starving. They're metaphorically starving. They're psychologically starving for a positive but believable story. And I think that, as you pointed out, we could decry the state of modern politics and concern ourselves with the fact that counterproductive, economic and social policies might be put in place

for all sorts of ideological reasons. But I actually think a much better use of our time is in the kind of enterprise that you've already pursued, which is to produce a robust counter-narrative that's thoroughly grounded in, to the degree that that's possible, thoroughly grounded in the facts, we can say, look, forget about that, forget about the pessimism, forget about the policies that that pessimism was drive. We could make the assumption that we can have our cake and eat it too. We can eradicate poverty.

We can constrain relative inequality to the point where societies are stable. And we can produce a massive increment in environmental quality. And all that's within our grasp if that's what we want within the next 100 years. And, ah, absolutely. And I mean, you've devoted the last last 30 years of your life at least to exactly

that message. And I think that's a much more powerful solution than being pessimistic about the counter positions. You got it. People need a better story. You're dead right. Thank you for reminding me. So that's what I think. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, it's easy. It's easy to get tangled up, because you didn't politics, especially moment-to-moment politics, can tangle you up badly and knock you off your central axis. And, you know, your work, this is probably a good place to end, too. Your work is refreshing in that regard. There's other people who are doing this sort of thing too, like Bjorn Lomburg, for example, and Hans Rosling, who are, and Marian Tupi, who are informed optimists. Yeah, both Bjorn and Hans were huge influences on me, and very sadly, Hans Rosling is no longer

with us, but it was a true, it was a pure, but it was a true I, to me. It was about the same time I was starting to think along the same lines. And and I opened her to him too. Exactly. Yeah, so let's, I think that would be a good place to leave it. And we could say, look, you know, to the people who are listening to this, there's no reason for a counterproductive and anti-human pessimism. We could have a planet where there was enough for everyone and where there was enough for the non-human inhabitants to contribute to making life rich. And there's no reason not to aim for that. And there's absolutely no reason not to aim for that. And there's absolutely no reason not to assume that it's within our grasp. So we want to aim properly. And we can have what

everyone seems to want, whether they're on the right or the left when they're thinking properly, which is in eradication of absolute poverty. So no one is forced into pennery and starvation, and no children fail to develop. We can reduce the impact of relative poverty, which is an intransigent problem, but not unaddressable. And we could restore to a large degree or maintain a sustainable ecology around us. And we don't want to forget that and drown in our threat sensitivity. Yeah, but we do it by development, not by anti-development. Yeah, we do that by faith in human beings, fundamentally. And I think that faith, I don't think there's any reason for that faith to be unwarranted.

We're not a plague on the planet. There's no reason to assume that. So anyways, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today and for talking to me. And also for your books, which they're uplifting in the proper manner. You can read them and you can think, good for us, man, we're incrementally making the proper sacrifices to lift everyone's standard of living everywhere. And more power to us and hopefully we'll continue. Well, look, thank you very, very much, Jordan.

It's been an honor and a pleasure and something I've always wanted to do to meet you and have a conversation with you. And let's hope we can have a drink in the real world when the pandemic's over. Yes, God willing, wouldn't that be nice? All right, so I was speaking with Matt Ridley today, the author of a variety of books we discuss today. We discuss the origins of virtue, which is we discussed today, we discussed the origins of virtue, which is a lovely description, at least in part of the biological origins of morality and an optimistic book. The rational optimist, which contains an extended argument for why we could, why reasonable people could sustain an optimistic and positive view of a future in which everyone has more of what they need and want, and finally, how

innovation works, which is Matt's most recent book, which is also a book I would really recommend during COVID times because it's a sequence of narratives about the triumph of human ingenuity in small ways and in great ways. And it's a reminder, I would say, it's a reminder for gratitude. There's all these people who came before us, worked diligently, and with no shortage of self-sacrifice frequently to produce all these improvements that we now take for granted. And it'll improve your view of humanity to read the book. And since you're a human being, it's quite good for you psychologically to improve your view of humanity. So thank you all for listening. Thanks, Matt. It was a pleasure. Thanks, Jordan. you