The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish - #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation

Episode Date: March 23, 2021

Matt Ridley is the author of several books related to science and human progress, biologist, newspaper columnist and member of the House of Lords in the UK. Matt and Shane discuss writing books about science, the age-old battle between viruses and humans, rational optimism, the difference between innovation and invention, the role of trial and error and the effects of social media on seeing others’ points of view. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/   Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/   Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I deliberately talk about innovation rather than invention because I think we've talked a lot about inventors, about brilliant people who come up with bright ideas that change the world. I want to talk about innovation, which is the process by which a bright idea is turned into something practical, reliable and available and affordable for ordinary people. And that's a long slog and it's a lot of hard work and it's often more important, more difficult then the process of coming up with a good idea in the first place. Welcome to the Knowledge Project podcast. I'm your host, Shane Parrish.

This podcast sharpens your mind by helping you master the best what other people have already figured out. If you're listening to this, you're not currently a supporting member. If you'd like special member-only episodes, access before anyone else, transcripts, and other member-only content, you can join at fs.blog slash podcast. Check out the show notes for a link. Today I'm speaking with Matt Ridley. Matt's the author of How Innovation Works, the Rational Optimist, the Red Queen, and several

other books related to science and human progress. He's also a biologist, newspaper columnist, and member of the House of Lords in the UK. This episode touches on how Matt came to write books about science, the age-old battle between viruses and humans, rational optimism, the difference between innovation and invention, the myth of great people, the role of trial and error, why pockets of innovation happen in geographic concentration, and the effect of social media on seeing other people's point of view. It's time to listen and learn. Can you tell us in your own words how you came to write about science?

I did a PhD in biology. the 1980s and while I enjoyed it I didn't have quite the same stamina for going deep into small subjects that my colleagues did and I spotted this but at the same time I had more enjoyment out of writing up my thesis than my colleagues did and it just it sort of switch went in my head and I thought you know what my my skill my talent my interest might lie in writing about science rather than doing science. So I gave up thought of getting a Nobel Prize and set my heart on a Pulitzer instead. I haven't got a Pulitzer, but you know.

Not yet. Not yet, exactly. I'm glad you set your sights on writing. You're an amazing writer. Before we get to innovation, the subject of your latest book, I wanted to briefly touch on some of your early work that left more, I guess, really formative impressions on me. the Red Queen, which laid out the age-old competition between viruses and humans. I mean, it sounds like trench warfare where advantages are slight and short-lived.

I'm curious as to what you see is the biggest lesson from that book and what role it should play in creating policy. So the Red Queen is a character in Alice through the looking glass who runs but never gets anywhere. The faster she runs, the more she stays in the same place. And that's a very good description of a lot of what happens in evolutionary processes. that is to say the arms race between parasites and their hosts, one side changing their genes, the other side trying to unlock those genes and so on.

But it's also quite a good description of all sorts of aspects of human life and how the world works. And I found it's very, very interesting writing that, because I was mainly trying to explain sex, the evolution of sex, which is in the first place something that seems to have evolved to foil parasites. But later on in the form of brightly. colored male peacocks and things seems to be all about a sort of arms race between males to seduce females and things like that so it's a general theme that runs through sexual evolution

but it also of course describes quite a lot about how our own human world works how society works how sexual politics works as well it's a theme that has cropped up again and again in the back of my mind ever since i wrote about it it was a fascinating experience digging deep in to the origins of those ideas. Historically, at least when it comes to viruses and sort of our approach to them, it is very trench warfare. They're short-lived advantages, even when we get antibiotics or something. But the way out of that in the past has always been asymmetry of weaponry.

Is that possible when it comes to viruses and bacteria and are humans? Yes, I think on the whole, we will win our battle. against most pathogens, because we have so much possibility of ingenuity now, of human ingenuity to help us defeat them. We've only totally extinguished one major human disease, and that's smallpox. But boy, is that an important one. It's probably maybe the biggest killer of all. Certainly when you think that it was responsible for killing the vast majority of the people who lived in the Americas when smallpox arrived with European contact. But we've reduced polio to almost extinction.

We've done the same with a lot of other diseases. We've pretty well wiped them out. We're getting on top of malaria and HIV, etc. Now, you're absolutely right that we gain 100 yards and then we lose 50 yards because the disease mutates or it finds a way around the issue, et cetera. But quite a lot of diseases, particularly those carried by insects or through water have kind of given up on Western civilization.

They can't get a toehold in our populations. They're still around in poor countries. But, you know, cholera, typhoid, all these terrible killers from the past, yellow fever, malaria in the Western world, are not able to mount offensives anymore. and that's because we've cut off, you know, we've broken the cycle, we've cut off the way that we got infected. The one way that pathogens do get into us that we haven't been able to cope with so far is through the nose. There's something like 200 different types of virus that cause the common cold. The average child gets seven to 10 colds are winter.

We are just a very tempting target for respiratory viruses, as we are discovering this year. on the whole they stay mild because they want us going around going to parties going to work they don't want us sitting at home because we're not going to infect anyone if we stay at home there's a sort of common interest there in not hurting us too much so that it's this sort of game theory way of seeing the battle between viruses and people that I think is really interesting I appreciate that view the rational optimist helped many including myself see the rationality of optimism. I mean, it seems like a lot of our beliefs are self-fulfilling. If we define a cynic as someone who is smart and has lost hope, that becomes how we see the world. And not

only does cynics and pessimists not create, which is the topic of this interview, but they often prevent others from creating because attitudes and beliefs are often contagious. Inventing and innovating require us to be rationally optimistic. How do you see the role of social media, which collectively does an amazing job of exposing us to cynics and pessimists for your increasing lack of optimism since you wrote the book. Well, I am worried about the effect social media is having on society. It clearly has polarized us. It's clearly accentuated the effect whereby good news is no news and bad news is news.

But that's not new. we've always been like that. We've always stressed the negative, not the positive. I mean, I was fascinated when I wrote that book, to go back 100 years, 200 years and find that the bestseller of the day was nearly always a pessimistic tract, whether it's Thomas Robert Malthus in 1798

or the decline of the West at the turn of the 20th century, books saying, yes, things have got better on the whole, but they cannot possibly go. on getting better, were the generation that sees the deterioration setting in. So there's nothing new about our generation saying that. There's nothing new about the dominance of pessimism in our everyday discourse about the world. We're not so pessimistic about our individual lives, interestingly, as we are about people and the planet generally. Certainly social media seems to

have focused, amplified that to some degree. And that is, I think, an uncomfortable thing. Media technologies tend to do that. I mean, I think printing and the role Martin Luther played, I mean, he's the greatest entrepreneur of printing. He was the best-selling author by a mile of his day. And on the whole, he's going around telling everyone that they're going to go to hell because they're all corrupt and sinful and so on. He's not selling a good news message.

And then radio played a big role in the rise of the dictators, playing on our pessimisms in the 1920s. I have a feeling that media technologies can be dangerous in that respect. But would I give up social media? Would I give up the chance to have rampant social contact with my chums all over the world and shared jokes and find out how their family is? No, I wouldn't. I think, you know, for a lot of young people in particular, it's a godsend, it's a boon.

So we've got to learn to live with these technologies and not let them overwhelm us, I suspect. Imagine the world right now without all the social tools we have available to us to stay in touch with people as we physically distance and we sort of hibernate in our houses. Well, of course, you can turn that round and you can say if we didn't have all these social contact tools, then maybe we'd never have locked down. You know, we just couldn't do it, in which case, of course, the epidemic would have been worse. but to some extent, as it were, the existence of the video conferencing and social media and telephones and email and all that kind of stuff makes it possible for governments to say, right, we're going to lock down the entire society, healthy people and all, which has never really been done before.

I want to switch gears and talk a little bit about innovation. And one of the topics of your book is the difference between innovation and invention. Can you expand on that? Yes, I deliberately talk about innovation rather than invention, because I think we've talked a lot about inventors, about brilliant people who come up with bright ideas that change the world. I want to talk about innovation, which is the process by which a bright idea is turned into something practical, reliable and available and affordable for ordinary people. And that's a long slog, and it's a lot of hard work, and it's often more important, more difficult, than the process of... coming up with a good idea in the first place. And there are innovations that change the world dramatically,

which don't actually depend on any invention. Things like container shipping, which had an enormous impact on global trade by drastically cutting the cost of shipping goods overseas, which didn't involve any invention of a new technology at all. It just involved a sort of change in the way we organize our ships. And a guy called Malcolm McLean gets most of the credit. it for that in the 1960s in the US.

The emphasis on the more collaborative trial and error slog of innovation rather than the lonely genius idea of invention was something I was trying to get at. It was quite a nice funny story that I tell in the book, which illustrates the point, which is a beaver and a rabbit looking at the Hoover Dam. And the beaver says to the rabbit, no, I didn't build it. But it is based on an idea of mine. And of course, getting from, you know, simple beaver dam to the Hoover Dam requires a lot of innovation that isn't invention.

We tend to believe that there was this golden age where individuals invented things and now we have teams, but your book, I mean, it clearly dispels that notion. It's always been people standing on the shoulders of others and going just a little bit farther with their ideas or even executing on the ideas. And the combination of those two things, you need good ideas, but they're necessary and not sufficient. How do you see the role of individuals versus teams? Yeah, well, to some extent I'm trying to debunk the idea that lonely geniuses are what count in the world of innovation. We tend to hear people say things like the reason a big population can be more innovative is because

there's more chance of there being a genius. I don't think that's the way it works. I think what happens is that people share their ideas, exchange their ideas, collaborate, and what really counts is how well people are communicating with each other, not how clever they are as individuals. And to some extent, I'm trying to get away from this word creativity, which tends to imply that a special sort of juice runs in the vein of inventors that doesn't run in the vein of ordinary people. But if you look at the careers of people like Thomas Edison or Jeff Bezos

or talk to any great innovators today, they all emphasise the importance of trial and error, failure, of getting things wrong and starting again. And they also emphasise the importance of collaboration. For me, the nicest story that illustrates this is the contrast between Samuel Langley and the Wright brothers, two different teams trying to create the first powered airplane in 1903. And Langley is very well connected, head of the Smithsonian Institution, an astronomer, gets a huge government grant to build an airplane, often does it in secret because he's so clever and doesn't want other people to steal his ideas and his airplane goes flop into the Potomac after 20 feet 10 days later on an island of the North

Carolina coast two humble bicycle mechanics from Ohio with no university education succeed where Langley failed and they did so because they were prepared to be collaborative and do a lot of trial and error. They'd been doing hundreds of experiments with gliders and kites for years at this point. They'd used wind tunnels. They'd communicated with people all around the world, particularly a guy called Octave Shanoot in Chicago, who was a sort of node in a network of people thinking about flight. And he had been drawing on the ideas of a guy called Lawrence Hargrave in Australia, who had invented the box kite, which is basically the sort of principle that helps you build a by-play. in effect. The point is that the Wright brothers were standing on the shoulders of people,

but they were also collaborating with people and they were doing experiments. They did innovation right in a way that Samuel Langley did it wrong, I would argue. The nice footnote to that story is that the Smithsonian Institution didn't want to give the Wright brothers credit for being the first people in the air for decades afterwards. And they had on display Langley's plane which had been modified so that it would work after the event. but they were finally, eventually persuaded to put the Wright Brothers plane in the Smithsonian instead. Do you think that delusion is helpful that people, this way people grow up thinking that they individually can make a difference, like they can self-cancer, they can come up with a vaccine,

and it is a delusion about individuals versus team, but I wonder if it's helpful. Yes, but I think the delusion that's unhelpful is that you need to be a special person to do this. again going back to the Wright brothers there's a wonderful quote from the guy who took the photograph on the day they took off he said they were the workingest boys I ever knew so getting across this point that actually all you really need is an open mind being prepared to do a lot of hard work not minding if you fail the first 10 or 10,000 times and these are characteristics we could all have so one of the one of the things I hoped it to get people to think, is that innovation is incredibly important, it's incredibly rewarding.

It'd be wonderful for any of us if we were able to achieve a significant innovation. It's something that is actually available to all of us. It's not something that is the special preserve of certain people. I was actually just recently told by an Italian friend, a wonderful story about a garage mechanic in Argentina who very recently invented a device for safely delivering babies that have got stuck in the birth canal. And it's a very simple, very clever device. This is a guy with no medical knowledge of any kind. It's just a nice story to remind us that, you know,

you don't have to be special to contribute. Yeah, I like that a lot. And one of the things I want to come back to is you sort of said that it involves a lot of failure, which is trial and error, and that's akin, I guess when it comes to humans to artificial selection, more so than natural selection, which is just random variations. We're choosing variations and we try them. And if you do what everybody else does, you're going to get the same results as everybody else. And that means a lot of failures, specifically in our day and age of sort of public failure. So you have to be, I think increasingly you have to be able to fail in public if you want to innovate.

Can you take that further and expand on the implications? of failure. Yeah, Jeff Bezos is interesting on this because he talks about the importance of swinging and missing. And if you're not swinging hard enough and missing, then you won't succeed in a big way. And the story of Amazon is, you can tell it. I tried to do this in the book. You can tell the story of Amazon as a series of disastrous failures.

They got all sorts of stuff wrong in the early days. Then they bought companies in the dot-com boom, which turned out to be. flops and all went bust. They tried to get into the toy business and it didn't work. They made mistake after mistake. But every time they were just doing enough experiments so that one or two things would work and they were able to continue. And of course, eventually they became the biggest company in the world. It is vital to fail. Thomas Edison said, I haven't failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work. The difference between him and the 20 other people who invented the light bulb around the same time is that he was prepared to put in

the slog of testing 6,000 different types of plant material before settling on Japanese bamboo for the filament of his light bulb, which would last a long time, whereas the others weren't prepared to do quite so much failure, as it were. So that doesn't mean, of course, that every failure is simply a step towards success. And I write in the book about failures and fakes and frauds that do happen in the world of innovation and charlatans get away with them for a while and are then eventually discovered. You know, we have to keep our wits about us here. We can't expect that just because we're failing, we're eventually going to succeed.

one of the great things that America brought to the world of innovation in my view is a relative tolerance of failure compared with most European countries the fact that you've started a business and it went wrong was actually quite often a good thing in the eyes of venture capitalists in Silicon Valley as long as it hadn't got wrong too spectacularly or too often at least it showed you you were trying and you had learned something from the failure. It's a lesson that we need to get across to kids these days because quite often they're brought up to think that, you know, that we must protect them from failure at all costs.

And I'm not sure that's a wise thing to do. How do you think parents should instill that lesson in their kid? Like how do we as parents try to bring up our kids in a world where, failure is somewhat inevitable and you have to have you build up these muscles for it too as you go along right to something to the world if you fail or you fall down yeah it's not easy and it's quite quite often a trope in a movie or something you know pick yourself up and carry on is a feature that we all have to learn at some point i've certainly tried to tell my own kids yeah you did hopelessly badly at that thing but that doesn't mean you're a bad person it means

all the more reason to try again at something else or in a different way and you might well be much more successful. If everybody's trying different ideas, to what extent are insights inevitable? Well, I'm fascinated by the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. I write about it in the book.

I drawn upon the ideas of Kevin Kelly who wrote a book called What Technology Wants about how technology seems to decide what's going to be invented next by somebody. As I said, there were 21, different people who came up with the idea of the light bulb in the 1870s, there's even more people who came up with the idea of the search engine in the early 1990s. You rerun the tape without Sergei Bryn meeting Larry Page or without Thomas Edison, and you still get light bulbs,

you still get search engines. That makes it sound like innovation is totally inevitable. You know, people are totally dispensable. And of course, that can't. entirely be true because we'd have had light bulbs hundreds of years before or something like that. But it does appear that there comes a moment when technologies are ripe, when the combining technologies that come together to make a new technology have reached the point where it's sort of inevitable that people will do so. What fascinates me is how few of those transitions we can see coming in advance. So again, take search engines. It looks, when you're looking backwards from here, it looks unbelievably obvious that search was going to be a really important part of

the internet, that whoever cracked it and got us the best search engine would make the most money. I think the search engine is probably the most useful innovation of my lifetime. I use it every day. But in the 80s, were people writing about the coming role of search in the nascent internet? Actually, no. Very few people see it coming. And even the people who invented the search engines didn't really think of it in those terms. I mean, Larry Page and Sergey Bryn, who invented Google, thought they were cataloging the internet. They didn't think they were inventing a search engine to start with. So there's a strange asymmetry here between the inevitability of certain innovations when you get to a certain point, and yet their extraordinary

unpredictability as you're moving forward and of course if it's inevitable that something's going to get invented let's say in the next few years it's inevitable that something's going to be invented I can't tell you what because it's unpredictable but it will in retrospect be inevitable then all the more credit to the person who actually goes out there and gets there because they're in a race you know Beethoven didn't have to worry about somebody else writing the 9th symphony at the same time as him so there's a curious thing about inventors and indeed scientists i mean i wrote a biography of francis crick and he once said this he said if if jim watson had been killed by a tennis ball i don't think i'd have discovered the double

helix of dna but somebody would within a year or two and that makes him all the more impressive because he and Watson were clever enough to see that this discovery was ripe and ready to go and grasp the opportunity when it came. Can you expand a little bit on the, we talked about this a bit earlier on the idea versus execution phase and to what extent they're valuable to society and which is more valuable? Well, I tend to take the view that we overvalue the idea and undervalue the execution, the turning of the idea into a practical innovation. Because we put, you know, we put statues up to the people who discover the basic principle or the first prototype, but we then don't put statues up to the people who build a business

around making that device cheap. You know, can you think of a sort of monument to somebody just because they reduced the cost of something. Whereas in fact, if you look at, say, the history of electric lighting, it's come down spectacularly. So it's ludicrously cheap to light your house now compared with 100 years ago or 200 years ago. And that's an innovation that is extraordinarily valuable. I mean, the LED light that we all use now, which is both long-lasting and very low energy, but produces very good reliable light is the result of a lot of people, some in Japan, some in Europe, some in America, working incrementally over many years to perfect white LED lighting.

And basically we don't any of us know any of their names, but they have had an enormous impact on our lives. we make a fetish out of talking about the person who invented the first light bulb more than a hundred years ago. I've already talked about Thomas Edison. But actually the innovators still working on a technology like that are just as important. Yeah, I think that's definitely true. And they're sort of like the unsung heroes of the world, right? Yes, I think that's true.

To give an example of, my favorite example of an unsung hero in the book, I write about the insecticide-treated mosquito net, the bed net that keeps mosquitoes away from you while you're asleep, and which is far, far more effective if it's been treated with insecticide. And this is the technology that reversed the increase in malaria. Malaria was going up until 2003. It's now going down as a cause of mortality in the world, going down pretty steeply. And it's entirely due to this, not entirely, but it's nearly all due to this technology. It's more effective than anti-malarial drugs, more effective than draining swamps or spraying mosquitoes.

So I said to myself, this is a really good technology. It's quite low tech. It's quite simple. It's quite cheap. It's very effective. Who invented it? You know, where did it come from? I traced the story back to a sort of typewritten document from 19.

83 in Burkino Faso describing a very well-designed experiment that a Frenchman named Dariot and his colleagues did. And I got in touch with Dariot in retirement and said, can you tell me how this came about and what happened? The experiment had unbelievably strong results. It showed that a mosquito net is quite good at keeping you from being bitten. An insecticide-treated-treated mosquito net is very good. and an insecticide treated net with tears in it, with holes in it, which in practice they often will have, is also very good.

So it doesn't actually matter if the thing gets a little bit damaged over the weeks and months, which was a really important discovery. Nobody's heard of Dariot. He'd never got the Nobel Prize, should have done, in my view. I don't think he ever became rich. The whole thing was done on a non-profit basis. You know, if I achieve one thing, I put his name on the map. You mentioned in the book that innovation allows us to work with each other. Can you expand on what you meant by that?

Well, I think the great theme of human history over millennia is that we become more specialized in what we produce and more diversified in what we consume. So compared with a self-sufficient farmer trying to grow all his own food and make all his own machines, and so on, someone like that has to work a huge number of hours to produce not a very high standard of living because they're only consuming what they produce. Whereas today, most people work, whatever it might be, eight hours of the day at something

terribly specialized. You know, they're not making everything they need. They're just doing one thing. They're making a podcast or whatever it might be. then by selling that to other people, they then supply all their needs and they then go off and spend the rest of the day consuming what other people have created for them, whether it be a movie or a meal or whatever. So actually, we're setting up this network where we all work for each other, and a tiny, tiny fraction of your effort ends up making a big contribution to other people's wellness. There's a lovely essay that I often go back to called I-Pensile, written by an economist named Leonard Reed in 1958. It's written by a pencil.

and the pencil is trying to understand its own origins. How did it come into the world? And it's researched it and it's discovered that it's made of wood and it's made of graphite and it's got paint on the outside and a razor in the end and so on. And so it traces the origin of these materials and it discovers that the wood came from a tree that was cut down in Oregon by a lumberjack who was drinking coffee at the time and using a chainsaw which was made by somebody else and the man who was who farmed the coffee, was contributing, and so on, there's an enormous network

of people went into manufacturing this one pencil. And yet not one of them knows how to make a pencil. Not even the person working in the pencil factory. They just, because they don't know how to cut down a tree or grow coffee. So when you start to see the world in this way, it makes it clear what a fantastic collaboration is going on. the whole time between us, through the medium of exchange, through me doing what I'm good at and you doing what you're good at and us sharing the results on a massive scale. It's a magnificent piece of collaborative, distributed intelligence

that we've achieved this way. It's remarkable feat of humanity in a lot of ways. Yes, and just to make the story, even funnier in a way, when I first started thinking about this, about us getting more specialised in what we produce so that we could be more diversified in what we consume. The penny dropped when I was reading a wonderful book called Second Nature by a guy named Heim Ofek, who was an academic.

And I wrote to him and said, this is absolutely fantastic, this idea. Can you tell me if you've written anything else about it or where you got the idea. And he wrote back, do you know what? I think I got the idea from reading your book, The Origins of Virtue. And I said, well, I don't think it's in that book. And he said, well, I suppose it's not really.

And, you know, my point is we were collaborating to produce the idea, which was greater than the sum of our contributions. And I dare say other people have had the idea. I'm not trying to claim sole ownership of it. But it was quite a nice example. of exactly the point we were making. I think in a way that's true, right?

And when you communicate something to somebody else, it's almost like you're trying to copy DNA. And there's copying errors, which is the error in how you understand what the other person is saying. And sometimes those are positive and sometimes those are negative. But in that case, it sounds like that copying error,

the receptivity error, and changed how he thought about the idea. And he got something out of your book that you didn't explicitly write, but it was because of your book that it was there. Absolutely. And actually, that's probably a better answer to your question about failure. You know, it's not a failure, but it is an error.

And as long as there's a degree of randomness in the errors, then natural selection will go to work. I mean, one of my favorite quotes, which I got from Dan Dennett, is from a French philosopher by the name of Alain, who said in the early 20th century, when you think about it, a boat evolves in a Darwinian fashion. because boats that don't work sink to the bottom of the ocean and boats that are well designed don't. And so people who make boats copy the designs that didn't sink to the bottom. So next time you get on an airplane, you think that unlike a biological organism, this airplane has been built by an engineer, right?

By an intelligent designer. Well, has it? Because that engineer was copying a design that someone else did with a few modifications and improvements. And he was copying a design that was made by somebody else. And so on, back to the Wright brothers. In that sense, the airplane and the boat really have evolved. It's not a metaphor.

It's what's actually happening to them. It's out of digital. I mean, there seems to be a lack of, a visible lack of innovation anyways. Why does innovation seem to regularly work in some fields like digital and my phone and not on others, like say, for a virus. Yeah, I'm very intrigued by this. We've lived through a period of extraordinary innovation in digital, in software, in computers and communications. But we've actually lived

through a period of stagnation with respect to innovation in, say, transport. Our grandparents had the opposite experience. My grandparents were born at the turn of the 20th century. That was well after the telephone, they had the telephone throughout their lives, but they had almost no other communications and computing improvements that reached them before they died in the 1960s. I've had the opposite experience, sorry, but they also had extraordinary changes in transport. You know, they were born before the motorcar and the airplane, and they died with a man on the moon and rockets in the air and supersonic jet fighters and all sorts of weird stuff, helicopters, you know, everything.

in my lifetime well the 747 was invented when I was 11 years old it was still in service until a few months ago we've not got flying cars jet packs routine space travel all the things we were promised in the 1950s but we have got incredible changes in computing and communications now why is that in some sense it's it's obviously a technological possibility you know the invention of the silicon transistor has had enormous consequences in one field, but not in the other. And the technologies of transport, the internal combustion engine and things like that, have come up against certain diminishing return limits that, by the way, we're expecting to break in the next 10 years, and I'm a little skeptical about whether we will.

The contrast between the two is quite striking. I don't fully understand why it is. To some extent, we have made it difficult for innovators to work in other fields. We've put too many regulations in the way, too many obstacles, too many costs. So, for example, we've been unable to come up with new designs for nuclear power stations for several decades. That's because licensing a new design for nuclear power station would cost billions under the present licensing system. So nobody bothers to even try. In the end, it's just regulation that gets in the world.

the way there. And there are other reasons. But if you think, you know, I was thinking the other day, if somebody had come up with an idea for a point of care bedside diagnostic device of a portable kind to use for detecting viruses 10 years ago, then we could have had it by now. But just imagine if that person had said, oh, I can't face three, maybe four, five years trying to get it licensed. and going through enormously expensive trials to prove that it's safe and so on and effective. I think I'll go off and invent a video game instead. I suspect one or two people did that. You know, that to some extent the digital world has sort of sucked people away from other areas of innovation.

And we may want to rebalance that. By the way, the message of my argument that we had transport innovations in the 20, century and then in the first half of the 20th century and communications, innovations in the second half, is that the first half of the 21st century may not be all about computers and communications, may not be all about AI. It may be about biotechnology, for example, and I suspect it will be. Yeah, I'm optimistic that a whole bunch of people after this grow up and want to get into this field. I mean, we've seen a lot of innovation in financial industry, which also is highly regulated. So it makes me a bit skeptical as to the role of regulation and how that plays

into things. Obviously, it does. You also want the winners to come away winners. And increasingly, we seem to want people to win, but not too much. I'm curious as to what policy implications that you see government should be thinking about to foster innovation within their societies. This is a very difficult question. And I don't think anyone's found the magic bullet. in terms of government policies that will deliver innovation to a growing society. The main thing is to get the obstacles out the way, whether it's regulatory obstacles or other obstacles to innovation, just to clear the pitch for the innovations to have a free run. That feels to me the most important thing governments can do.

Picking winners and saying, I want this technology. to be developed by such and such a date has a pretty awful track record and is likely to end up by the losers picking the governments. In other words, you know, the wrong people end up getting the grants and the subsidies because they're very well politically connected rather than because they have the best plans. I think the way to solve that problem is to dangle a prize in front of entrepreneurs and say if you invent a solution to this problem, you will get a reward. The reward needn't be a cash lump sum. It could be, for example, an advanced market commitment. The Gates Foundation did this with a vaccine for pneumococcus, saying if the pharmaceutical industry could come up

with a vaccine for this disease which kills children in poor countries, then don't worry, although it looks unprofitable to invent such a thing, we will make sure you get properly rewarded by topping up the price you can charge effectively. And that worked very well. And essentially, we've done something similar with vaccines in this epidemic. I mean, we've, you know, governments all around the world have said, look, if someone can come up with a vaccine for COVID-19, we will buy, you know, 40 million doses, 50 million doses, whatever it is. That has worked to produce a huge race among different companies. And the great thing about that is that the governments are not picking the winners. They are saying we will,

I mean, they're picking some winners, but then they don't have to decide in advance which of these technologies for producing a vaccine will work. And as a result, it's very interesting, it has incentivized a new technology to come of age, that is to say, messenger RNA vaccines of the kind that Moderna and Bio-NTech were exploring before this. And they'd tried very hard and they'd raised a lot of money and they were working on this and they'd hit a lot of dead ends and failed and tried again and found a work around for some of their problems and so on.

but there was no guarantee they would ever make their shareholders money or solve the problems or produce solutions to cancer or infectious disease. And then along comes this pandemic and suddenly the prize of these contracts from government has been just what they needed to break through. So I think the prize approach is to be explored in the future as a way of incentivizing innovation. it starts with the longitude prize in 18th century England when the government said we really don't want our ships being wrecked all the time on the sili aisles because they think they're in the middle of the Atlantic.

If somebody can work out a way to measure longitude as well as latitude, then we'll give them a lot of money. And the problem was solved unexpectedly by a humble clockmaker from Yorkshire by the name of John Harrison, who said all you need is a good clock so you can know what time it is. in London. And you don't need to look at the stars or do complicated mathematical calculations. And they were very reluctant to give in the prize, but actually they did in the end. I'm curious as to what other variables you see governments have levers on that would

foster innovation other than sort of prizes and setting direction. Obviously, the main stuff is to make sure there's plenty of R&D happening, to some extent to fund it, because after all, government takes a big chunk of. of our money offers. So it'd be a shame if none of that money went back into things that encourage innovation, to make sure that there is good educational opportunity and to foster openness and freedom. In the end, it all boils down to freedom, the freedom to exchange ideas, the freedom to fail and start again, the freedom to change your mind, the freedom to invest where you think it's right to invest the freedom as a consumer to express your preference

for one new technology rather than another. You know, for example, Google set up this company called Google X that tries wacky ideas to see if they will make exciting new products, and some of them have been dismal failures, which is fine, and others have been successes technologically. I'm thinking of Google Glass, the technology whereby you can see inside your spectacles. I don't know what the stock market's doing or what the weather forecast is or something like that. It was a brilliant piece of technology and it worked really well and they put it on the market and nobody wanted to buy it. It just turns out it's not what people want, not for $2,000 and a half thousand dollars anyway.

Yeah, a lot of that could be just timing, right? And at the end of the book, I think you had this great line that summarized this, which was, I think it's interesting. innovation is the child of freedom and the parent of prosperity. That's right. That's what I say. Innovation explains all prosperity of the last 300 years, really, nearly all anyway. And it's clear that it is the consequence of letting people free to exchange their ideas. It's not the only thing that matters, but it is an important feature.

One of the curious things for me is that it seems to be that innovation is geographically concentrated. I mean, for the last 50 years, it's been, say, Silicon Valley in California, and that seems to be coming to an end right now. Before that, it was Victorian Britain, and then, you know, before that it was Renaissance, Italy. And at some point, it was probably ancient Greece and China. Why does it seem to happen only in one place at a time? This bushfire that breaks out for a number of decades in one place and then breaks out somewhere else, it really baffles me actually because it's not immediately obvious what's going on here

I mean you can you can come up with explanations for why California was so extraordinarily innovative the you know the the way you could float companies and retain control the amount of defense spending in Stanford University the freedom the sunshine you know the number of immigrants you know there's all sorts of explanations the general point you can make, and this applies to Renaissance Italy and ancient Arabia and ancient China and so on as well, is that city states tend to be innovative, that independent, relatively small political units that are very vigorous traders with other places tend to be places where a lot of innovation happens. You know, Britain's moment in the sun was because it was part of an enormous

network of free trade. And that's because people will meet each other for the first time, ideas will therefore meet each other, profits will be made to be invested in things, incentives will be available, and a freedom to decide what to do. You know, most of humanity has spent most of the last few hundred years living under regimes that told them what they can do and can't do most of the time, you know, whether it was in an empire or a, military state or whatever, or a feudal state before that. It's extraordinarily rare for people to have the freedom to act as merchants and investors and entrepreneurs. Anywhere that allows that to happen will get results. I mean, I was looking the other day at a sort of index of

prosperity and the countries that came top in their continents for the last 10 years in terms of the measures of prosperity, we're all open, free trading countries, but quite small ones. You know, Mauritius is the most prosperous economy in Africa, for example. Botswana is second. Israel, in its part of the world. Denmark, in Europe, you know, Chile in South America, and so on. So it's part of all that, I think, basically the city-states. Why does it come to an end?

If you look at what happened in Holland, the Netherlands, after their golden age in the 1600s when they were by far the richest, the most prosperous, most successful part of the world. Eventually, they spent more and more money kind of on themselves and on debt. And if this is beginning to sound familiar, then it's meant to.

I think civilizations get sort of greedy and self-indulgent. in some sense, and start investing their money and their expertise and their interest, not in the kinds of things that led to entrepreneurial innovation, but the kinds of things that lead to overspending and over borrowing. And then for a while you can keep going on financial engineering for a while, but it seems to run out eventually. The other way it comes to an end is when,

some dictator comes along and says, right, now I'm in charge and I'm going to tell everyone what to do and I'm going to not let you trade. So, for example, in China, a thousand years ago, the Song Dynasty was a time of very devolved decentralized economy with merchants relatively free to decide what they wanted to do and what they wanted to invent extraordinarily innovative time. And then it's followed after a Mongol interregnum by the Ming Empire, which has the opposite approach. It basically the mandarin's tell the merchants, whether they can leave town or not, how much stock they must hold in their warehouses, whether they can trade abroad or not. That's not a recipe for prosperity. Yeah, that's definitely not. And we can't predict these sort of like pockets of geographical

concentration in advance. I think that that's probably a fool's errand, but when they pop up, we can definitely foster them and encourage them. Let's hope somebody does pick up the ball and run with it because, you know, for example, China has been relatively free economically but relative but very unfree politically in the last few decades. I think that's now changing. I don't think it's very free in either respect. And so I don't see it leading the world in prosperity for an awful lot longer. I wonder interestingly how that changes if hypothetically you can steal the innovations of other people with impunity. You don't necessarily need to be the creator of the innovation to benefit from it well there's always this problem that the the

country that's most innovative gets very angry about other countries nicking their stuff there's a fascinating period in history soon after the american revolution when americans were engaged in rampant industrial espionage to try and steal secrets of britain's industry and they sent all sorts of people over to prowl around pretending to be preachers, and in fact they were making drawings of the insides of factories and things. Of course, we have a similar experience with Chinese attitude to intellectual property more recently. My view on the whole is that you shouldn't worry about it. You should, if necessary, sell the stuff to them. Because if you can keep ahead, if you can use your advantage to be smarter,

there's no reason you can't just maintain your advantage indefinitely. You know, when other countries are playing catch-up, that's fine. That's just creating a market for you. Yeah, in a way, it's good, right? Because if you're starting out, you want to copy the best of what other people have and start from there and then not recreate the wheel from scratch and innovate on top of that. Yeah, catch-up growth is a well-recognized phenomenon.

A lot of the East Asian economies, you know, in my youth, Japan was famous for making cheap copies of stuff that Europeans made. Well, that didn't last long. Soon it was making by far the best stuff. Exactly. And it's to the world's benefit that they start from a higher starting position or a higher baseline, if you will, in some ways, even though economically that could have consequences. Well, you know, we have to get away from zero-sum thinking here. everybody you know the prosperity of another country is not a problem for you it just means that there's some rich consumers out there prepared to buy whatever you're good at selling and the whole point of the ricardo principle the principle of comparative advantage is a brilliant concept is that you know it doesn't matter if you're if somebody else is better at you're making everything

then they're still going to find it easier to make the things they're best at and buy the rest from you. So there's always going to be something you can you can sell to another country however prosperous they become. I'm curious as to why you think that we default often to zero-sum thinking instead of growing the pie and abundance. Well, I think it's because biologically zero-sum thinking did make sense in many cases. That's to say, you know, 10,000 years ago, there's one woman available to marry in the encampment you've got twice as many cattle as I have she you get the woman I don't that's a zero-sum game and so in that sense we've spent millions of years thinking that your gain is my loss it's only in the last 100,000 in some ways that's how old

trade seems to be on a massive scale with the division of labour and the collaborative system I described earlier, it's more like the last 10,000 years. It's only then that we've had to get our heads around intellectually around the idea that someone else's gain can also be your gain. It's not on the whole very common otherwise. There are examples, biological examples of mutual gain. For example, mating. You know, I mean, two people mating to produce. a baby is a, you know, is not a zero-sum game. Yeah, I like that. I mean, one of the defining features of humanity is that we can overrule our sort of evolutionary instincts in some of these ways through thought and where a lot of other animals don't seem to be able to do that. Actually,

I don't think any other animal can do that. Yeah, Stephen Pinker said, I can tell my genes to go jump in the lake. Exactly. And it seems to me that we live in a culture of abundance and it would be great for society if we started to shift to growing the pie instead of dividing the pie or I think that that would be a huge advantage for people. Yep, I agree. You thought the invention of the internet would sort of lead to social media and lead us to sort of all seeing each other's point of view because we'd have access to all these diversity, different points of view and different apertures and different lenses into the

world and that we would somehow see the world more clearly or see through the eyes of other people. It hasn't turned out that way. Why do you think that is? You're right. I was pretty utopian about this. 20 years ago, I thought, you know, now it's, you don't have, you don't just read one newspaper. You go online and you find all sorts of people saying lots of things and you think, oh, that's got a point. I hadn't thought of it like that. And that does happen. You know, I mean, I try and make a point of doing that, not just reading the people I agree with. But I have to say, it's a relatively rare experience and I'm more and more struck

by how people are inside echo chambers now and they don't even know your if you're not in their bubble they didn't even know what you're saying there was a very interesting remark by a journalist I read this morning who said you know when I left one newspaper and went to work for the others

people assumed I died because they never read that other newspaper so but of course that's newspapers are old media Why is social media making that a stronger phenomenon? I don't fully understand it. It's something to do with the fact that it's interactive, that you look for retweets, likes, responses,

and you get them by reinforcing your own prejudices, not by stepping outside your bubble and saying unpopular things, or indeed saying moderate things. You know, one of the problems with social media is that the stronger the view you express, the more likely it is that it will be amplified. If you say, I don't know, I think there are two sides to this question on Twitter. On the whole, everybody ignores you. Yeah, nobody wants to hear that.

I think one of the interesting things about this is that we're unable to find people just like us that feed on our sort of subtle thoughts and show us that we're. or not alone, and eventually they become extreme as we surround ourselves with people who feel and think the same thing. Well, I think there's a definite tribalism here, you know, that we're, this is part of an instinct that goes back to the rainforest. Are there ways that we can counter that, do you think? Yes, I think something similar happened with radio in the 1920s.

As I mentioned, radio played a big role in the rise of the dictators, and yet people had invested just as much utopian hope in it. I mean, some of the things written about radio when it was first invented are extraordinary, you know, saying this is going to result in world peace because everyone's going to hear each other's point of view. We're never going to have a war again. Well, that didn't work out.

And people like Hitler and Mussolini use radio very extensively to reinforce the prejudices of their followers. And yet, you and I don't think of radio as a source of evil in the world today. So it is possible to tame these technologies, to work out ways of living with them, to come up with cultural norms that undo the bad stuff. And I have a feeling we're already doing it.

I mean, if you just look at the sort of the way that the really nasty trolls, I don't think get the same traction. today as they did 10 years ago. I might be wrong. Do you think that's because we're learning to adapt as individuals? Yes, I think we adapt as individuals, but we also negotiate mutually acceptable norms and rules and guidelines as to how to behave. I mean, Stephen Pinker's very interesting in his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, talking about how we became less violent. And, you know, in the end, it all boils down to this sort of model proposed by Norbert Elias that in a medieval society, killing someone because they offended you, was a sort of

rather admirable thing to do, rather. And then 500 years later, it's nothing like as admirable. It's despised. And you pick that up quite quickly as you're growing up. And you think, oh, well, then I won't kill people because otherwise I'll get despised. I want people to like me. Adam Smith makes this point actually in his theory of moral sentiments, you know, that in the end, it's the impartial spectator who is looking at us from the outside who we're thinking of all the time. And we calibrate our behavior to what we know works or doesn't work in our society. I think that's a really interesting place to sort of wrap up this interview. One question I do have, though, is if you could give everybody a message about innovation, what would it be? What would you tell the world?

I would tell the world that innovation is unbelievably important. It's by far the biggest story of the last 500 years. It's the reason for optimism about the next 500 years. It's infinite. I think this is probably what I'd tell people, that there's no reason we can't innovate indefinitely if not infinitely. And people say, well, how can that be? We'll run out of resources. And I'll say no, because half the time these days, we're innovating to use fewer resources.

You know, the LED light bulb uses one quarter as much electricity as the compact fluorescence it replaces. So actually, I don't see why we can't go on innovating to advance each other's welfare infinitely. And if you think how far we've come in the last 200 years, imagine what the world will be like in the next 200. Thank you so much, Matt. That's a phenomenal point to leave this on.

I really appreciate you taking the time today. Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Hey, one more thing before we say goodbye. The Knowledge Project is produced by the team at Furnum Street. I want to make this the best podcast you listen to, and I'd love to get your feedback. If you have comments, ideas for future shows, or topics, or just feedback in general, you can email me at Shanefs.blog or follow me on Twitter at Shane A. Parrish.

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