TRIGGERnometry - "The WHO is Corrupt" - Matt Ridley

Episode Date: July 29, 2020

Matt Ridley is the author of provocative books on evolution, genetics and society. 'How Innovation Works' is his latest title. Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/trigger... https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@failinghuman) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you fly with Hawaiian Airlines, the whole family enjoys free access to Starlink, the fastest Wi-Fi in the sky, thanks to T-Mobile. Stream, scroll, message, and game while sipping a passion orange guava juice. Everyone stays entertained and your vacation gets a head start. Enjoy every moment of your trip, even before you land. Hawaii starts here. When you fly with Hawaiian Airlines, it's hard to tell where your flight ends and vacation begins. Relax with Free Starlink, the fastest Wi-Fi in the sky thanks to T-Mobile.

Go ahead, stream your movie. Book the couple's massage. Make a dinner reservation while we bring you to our island home. Hawaii starts here. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin. And this is the show for you, if you want, honest conversations with fascinating people.

And a fascinating guest we have for you today. He is the author of How Innovation Works. Matt Ridley, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks, Constantine. Great to be on the show. It is great to have you here. I love the way you've ignored Francis. It's fantastic stuff. We love that.

Did I ignore it? You just said hello, Constantine. or thank you, because you said hello to me. It doesn't matter. Hello, Francis. Too light, mate. I'm just using you to make fun of Francis. That's all that happened there, Matt.

Very warm, welcome to you. So good to have you on the show. You've written an absolutely fantastic book. We're so excited to talk to you. It's called How Innovation Works. So why don't you just start us off by telling us how does innovation work? What are the things that you wanted to focus on and write in the book? Well, the reason I wrote the book,

was because I think innovation is the most important fact about the modern world. It's what gives us all our prosperity and all the gadgets we use and so on. And yet it's a surprisingly mysterious process. Nobody really knows why it happens to us and not to rabbits or rocks or why it happens where and when it does happen. And you certainly can't turn it on or off like a tap. So I tried to get under the skin by telling a ton of stories about innovation, trying to distinguish it from invention first, because I think, I think, you know, we have this view that the brilliant genius think dreams up a scheme and then the world beats a path to his door. You know, what's that phrase? Make a new mousetrap and the world will beat a path to his door. Whereas that's not the case. You've got to do a hell of a lot of work to turn an idea into something practical, reliable and affordable that people actually want. There's a nice story I like telling at this stage, which is in the book about a beaver and a rabbit looking at the Hoover Dam. And the beaver is saying, no, I didn't build it. but it is based on an idea of mine.

That is a very, very lovely story, Matt. And we talk about innovation. Isn't part of the problem that we don't truly understand it, and our education systems don't really encourage it? Well, I think it is surprising how much resistance there is to innovation. In theory, we're all in favor of it. If you ask people, are you in favor of innovation? They all say yes, and we all buy the new iPhone or whatever.

But actually, if you know what happens, people think of every reason to throw obstacles in the way. I have a chapter about resistance to innovation. And it's really interesting how, you know, even coffee ran into huge obstacles when it was first introduced in the 15 and 1600s. Two reasons. One, because the wine and beer industry didn't want a competitor. And two, because kings didn't like people gathering in coffee shops talking about whether kings were doing a good job, which they often weren't. So there's an enormous amount of resistance. But as you say, there's also a complacency about this that, you know, we sort of take it for granted that innovation will happen.

But then we say, oh, the only people who can do it are geniuses who are quite different from you and me. And they have something called creativity, which other people don't. And I think that's a myth. I think if you look at the great innovators from Thomas Edison to Jeff Bezos, they're just people who work a bit harder, try a bit more, fail more often. things like that. So one of the messages I'm trying to get across to young people in particular is we can all join in. We can all do innovation if we want. In fact, there's a lot of consumer-led innovation these days.

There's a beautiful example in my book of something called Night Scout, which is a way of monitoring your kids' sugar levels if they're diabetic on the, through the internet. And this was basically invented by a bunch of parents of diabetic kids rather than, as it were by a pharmaceutical company. And you mentioned the coffee shops, and it kind of brings to mind the question that I had about it, which is how important is it for people to be able to gather together and communicate with each other, share ideas, throw stuff around,

talk, you're nodding vigorously, people won't be able to see it, but you are. And it seems like, you know, at the moment, that's certainly become a much more difficult thing to do. Do you think that will have some sort of impact on our ability to create new things, come up with new ideas and so on. Yeah, I think, I mean, we may not measure it if lockdown only lasts for a month or two, but, well, it's already lasted long than that. But to the, well, and the other point is, of course, today, through the internet, we can share ideas still.

So ideas are meeting and mating and having baby ideas as we speak, without people having to run into each other in coffee shops. But there is no doubt that there is. is a huge advantage in people who are able to talk to each other and people are able to consult with each other. One of the themes I try and get across in the book is that innovation doesn't come from geniuses in ivory towers. It comes from people who are socially connected. The story that best exemplifies this is two people try and invent an airplane in the early 1900s at the same time. One's called Samuel Langley. He's a grandee, well-connected

sort of astronomer with a huge government grant. But he says, the way I'm going to do it is I'm going to shut myself away. I'm not going to tell anyone what I'm up to, and I'm eventually going to emerge with a perfectly designed airplane, which is going to be huge. I'm going to put a pilot in it and launch it off the top of a houseboat on the Potomac River. This is in December 1903.

It went 20 feet before it crashed, okay? Whereas 10 days later, on an island off North Carolina, two bicycle mechanics from Ohio called Orville and Wilbur Wright, who had spent years communicating, writing, talking to everybody who'd ever built a glider or who had studied bird flight or whatever. They just, they, you know, they harvested every nugget of information they could. And then they did a ton of experiments with gliders before they ever went near trying a power plane.

They did it right and Samuel Langley did it wrong. And one of the things that I find most interesting in your book, Matt, was how you were saying that actually China has become a hub of innovation as opposed to the West. Now, why is it that China have become so, so successful when it comes to innovating? Yeah, I think it's true that China is not just a smart copier of the West, which you could argue that it was 20, 30 years ago. It is now forging ahead of us. If you look at what, Chinese consumers do in terms of their use of electronics and things like that. They don't even use credit cards, let alone paper money anymore. They're way ahead of what we're doing. So some of the stuff that's going on in China, also in genomics and biotechnology, but also in nuclear and other things, is now pathbreaking. How did China become such an innovative country? Paradoxically, I argue, because it's been quite free for most of the last 40 years. Now, that may seem a bit strange,

because it's not free. It's an authoritarian communist regime. But that's only politically, economically, under the sort of compromise that Deng Xiaoping came up with, actually, entrepreneurs are very free in China. That is to say, if you want to start a business, invent something, or do an experiment, there's none of the petty officialdom that would get in your way in this country, you know, the newt surveys and all that sort of stuff that you'd have do before you built your factory. So actually, you're free to just do it as quickly as you can. The one thing you can't do, of course, as an innovator in China, is start a new political party. That's off the grounds. Now, I think that's coming to an end. I think if you look at what

Xi is doing, he's crushing the economic freedom as well as the political freedom. And I think he will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs if he goes on down this path. And this happened, there's a rather beautiful parallel with Chinese history, which is that there was a period when China was by far the most innovative part of the world, around a thousand years ago. It's in the 10 hundreds, roughly, and it's under the Song Dynasty. And this is when they invent, you know, gunpowder and the compass and the printing press and paper money and several other things. And what was key about the Song Dynasty? It was the most devolved empire that China ever had. It was the one with the most devolution down to the local level of economic decision making.

So basically merchants were in charge in city states. And then along comes the Ming Empire and does the opposite. And basically every Mandarin is in charge and every merchant has to submit a permit, you know, a request for a permit if he wants to leave his home village or invent something, that ain't the way to do it. And China descends into poverty and, stagnation as far as innovation is concerned for several centuries. So I think Xi may be recreating the transition from Song to Ming. I've left out the Mongols who came between the Song and the Ming,

but you get the point. Minor detail, minor detail there. But it's interesting that one of the things you highlight as important to innovation is actually perspiration. You talk about how really it's not so much the work of a single genius, yes, but it's also not just a process of having an idea. You have to be in the space in which you have ideas, which is at work and in China from nine till nine, six days a week. Is that the crucial factor here that perhaps in the West, we're starting to become a little bit more concerned

with our quality of life, let's say, which may be a good thing, but the more kind of hungry countries like China that are looking at, you know, breaking through at any cost. Is that really the dividing factor here? I think what Constantine is trying to say, Matt, is have we become wimps? Yeah, and idle buggers. So you will never hear that on another Matt Ridley interview again.

So this is the beauty of trigonometry. We get the guests to reveal their true nature. We're lazy. This is the Guardian headline tomorrow, Matt. Matt Ridley says British people are idle buggers. Oh, no. Oh, God. I didn't say British. I said the West. Even worse. Rowing back fast.

The British were fantastically hardworking when they were incredibly innovative in the Victorian times. Notariously said people from other countries would come here and say so. People said the same thing about Californians 50 years ago. You know, it's unbelievable how many hours they put in, etc. And as you say, they say the same about the Chinese today. So yeah, there really is a secret source to innovation, which is to put in the elbow grease, to put in the hard work and do the experiments,

do the trial and error stuff. Again, there's a lovely phrase about the Wright brothers that the guy who took a photograph of them taking off for the first time used, which was he says they were the workingsest boys I ever saw. And then I think you were allergic, with the word perspiration, you're referring to Thomas Edison's famous remark

that invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, although in the book I point out that he originally said 98%. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world, so let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality, the kind where you wake up and feel like a human being, rather than someone who's been thrown down a staircase. Most mattresses are just layers of synthetic foam and crossed fingers.

You're spending a third of your life on the thing, and most people have no idea what's actually in it. Avocado green mattress is different. Their mattresses are certified organic, built from natural materials, designed to actually support your body properly rather than just hold you in one position until morning. The craftsmanship is real. These aren't mass-produced objects.

Someone has put thought into them. I'll be honest. I'm not the person who thinks carefully about where he sleeps. My dating history will tell you that. I'm the person who's been on the same mattress for eight years and called it fine. But the older I get, the more I notice that fine isn't actually fine. Your body tells you, if you're going to invest in anything for your home, your bed is the one that pays you back every single night.

Avocado products are made, not manufactured, and thoughtfully crafted with real materials to deliver lasting comfort and support. Go to avocado green mattress.com slash trigger to check out their mattress and furniture sale. That's avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. But Matt, doesn't it also need when it comes to these types of innovations, don't you need time to sit and ruminate and play and let the mind wander? It can't just be work, work, work.

Otherwise, you've got no time to let the mind wander, problems, solve, pontificate, all the rest of it? Well, the one thing that's certainly true is there's a lot of serendipity in innovation. That's to say a lot of surprising changes of direction by innovators. They start out trying to invent one thing and they end up inventing another. Teflon, Kevlar, the Post-it Note. These were all invented by people who were looking for something completely different. I mean, the Post-it Note story is quite nice at 3M.

They're looking for a permanent glue that works with paper. And they keep coming up with this temporary glue that doesn't work. and they think what a waste of time. And then this guy called Art Frye goes off to his choir practice. And he thinks, hang on, I could use this to keep my place in the hymn book. And it happened to be yellow, the paper they were using. So post-it notes have been yellow ever since. So serendipity is important.

And there's a really nice recent study. There's a website called Innocentive, where companies or other organizations can post problems that are getting in the way of their development of an innovation and say, can anyone think of a solution to this problem? And if you do, we'll reward you. And this has worked quite well. Quite a lot of people have solved their problems in this sort of open source way. But nearly always, it's someone from completely outside that particular field of engineering or whatever.

it is that does it. So it really helps to have people coming together from different disciplines. My favourite example, which I've used for years, about ideas having sex, as I put it, is the example of the pill camera, which you swallow and it takes a picture of your insides on the way through. I don't think it's a terribly successful technology, but, you know, there you go. It was an idea. it came about after a conversation over a garden fence between a gastroenterologist and a guided missile designer. Fascinating. So one thing that I really wanted to touch with you, Matt,

is the fact that our society seems to become ever more binary. And that means that we tend to associate with people who think like ourselves more and more, whether it be socially, culturally or politically. Doesn't that therefore mean that our opportunities to create, diminish as a result of that because we work best, I think, with people who think differently from ourselves

as the example you've just given. Yeah, I think that's a really important point. And, you know, 20 years ago, I was utopian about the internet. This is going to be a fantastic technology for bringing people together from all parts of the world so they see each other's point of view and have each other's...

I didn't work out quite like that, did it? But that set, you know, you can't think of anything more isolating or conformist than, you know, a slightly religious, rural community in 19th century New England or whatever. So that's why it's cities and city states where this stuff has happened best. Fibonacci is one of my favorite characters in the book. He goes from 11th, 12th century Pisa to North Africa. and comes back with this idea of counting from one to ten and having a number called naught, which turns out to be a really good innovation and makes mathematics much better.

So it has all, you know, we do still have cities where people meet other people, and we do still have an internet where you can come across other people. I saw a tweet by Constantine this morning saying that he likes Twitter. despite everything. And I'm the same. You know, I do come across stuff on that that I probably wouldn't if I was just reading the Times or the Telegraph every day.

Do you see what I mean? No, I do. I do see what you mean, but on the hand, I suppose, what Francis is really getting at, are we moving down because of political polarization, particularly down the route of companies that only hire people to think politically a certain way

and organizations that think, you know, only hire people with a certain mindset. Will that actually preclude us from being more creative? Well, it's been true in the past that, you know, IBM became too dominant, hired people who wore white shirts and black ties and short hair and, you know, and therefore missed out on the sort of, you know, what Bill Gates achieved. So again and again, you see the dominant industry, the dominant company in an industry, being having an end run around it from a new entrant.

And that process has got to be allowed to continue in the corporate world. And there is a real worry in my view in that if you look at the rate of turnover of businesses, it's slowing right down, actually. There hasn't been a new entry into the top 40 companies in Europe for something like 30 years. That's weird. You know, you'd thought in this day and age, you know, where's, where's the top 40 companies in Europe? You know, where's the European Amazon or Google or Facebook? It's just not happening.

And so I do think that the world is becoming increasingly easy for conformists and complacent types to raise barriers to entry. And if that's, if group think is part of that, it's only going to make the problem worse. So, yeah, we do need to shake things up every now and then, and we need outsiders coming in and shaking up industries. Every now and then, you come across quite a big business that's still quite good at innovating. And I asked Jeff Bezos once, you know, how do you stop Amazon becoming big and bureaucratic and anti-novelty? And he gave quite a nice example of one of the management tricks that he does because he's aware of this. problem, which was something called a reverse veto, where somebody junior in the organization comes up with a new idea. And he goes to his boss and the committee sits around and discusses this

idea and nine of the ten of them think it's a bad idea. So normally that would rule it out. But as long as one person champions it, then it has to go up to the next level of management. And that way he at the top will hear about some very unpopular ideas within his organization. that's the kind of thing that I mean it doesn't happen in government bureaucracies it doesn't happen in universities much anymore it doesn't happen in big companies much it's the kind of thing that if I were any good at being a management guru which I'm not I would teach and do you think the problem and we've touched upon this but I want to explore this more is you know that old cliche necessity is the mother of invention is the simple fact that right now in the west although things might change with COVID we're simply too comfortable. We don't have that desire, that drive to really change, to really try and shake things up because our lives are easier than they've ever been.

I know what you mean, but I don't on the whole think that's true because if necessity was the mother of invention, then Zimbabwe would be better at Tothra than California. You know, there's a huge, desperate necessity for innovation. in the really poor parts of the world. But actually, innovation tends to happen in the richest parts of the world.

So California recently. Well, China's not the richest part of the world, but it's heading that way. You know, Victorian Britain was the richest place on earth at the time, but it was the most innovative. Renaissance Italy was way richer than anywhere else in Europe, and it was doing all this innovation in the 1500s. So in that sense, I don't think necessity is the mother of invention.

But I think where you might be onto something is that that bushfire of innovation doesn't seem to last for terribly long in any one place. You know, Italy passes the buck to the Netherlands, which passes the buck to Britain, which passes the buck to California, which passes the buck to China. And the reason for that may be because those hungry, immigrant, hardworking, workingist kids who start new companies and develop new ideas have children who go off and become, you know, lecturers in cultural theory or something. I'm being a bit rude there, but you get the point.

You know, the second generation is often, often wants to be an artist rather than an engineer. You see this problem again and again. You see it in Victorian Britain. You see it in California today. So it doesn't last. And, you know, the question I wanted to ask you was actually about the potential downsides of some of the innovation. that we've seen. One of the huge issues that we're all going to become aware if we're not

already, that was something that Andrew Yang highlighted, which is the impact of automation on jobs in the West, particularly, but everywhere, you know, the likely disappearance over the next 20 years of the vast majority of trucking jobs, of, you know, supermarket assistance, all of that shopping assistance, all of that stuff. The closing. down as a result of that of shopping malls that's likely to happen all the place, leading to very significant societal impact. Is there a danger that some of the innovations that we create, we talked about it earlier with the internet, the downsides that we didn't think about can be hugely significant and impactful on the world and actually moving so fast and breaking things isn't

always a good thing? Well, I would say that we, We worry too much about the downsides. You know, we've fretted, for example, since the 1960s that any reproductive technology in vitro fertilization test tube babies, whatever, would lead to eugenics, would lead to people going off to sperm banks and getting Nobel Prize winner's sperm because they didn't want, you know, because they wanted hyper-intelligent children. Designer babies has been a worry for about 50 years. It's never happened.

Why? Because people want their own kids. They don't want clever kids. they want kids like themselves. If they're clever, they want clever kids. If they're stupid, they want stupid kids. I mean, seriously, this is what people want. People have used test you babies to have their own children, to cure infertility,

not to have special children. To everyone's surprise, you know, everyone predicted otherwise. So that's an example of us worrying too much about a misuse of a technology. And as for the automation issue, we've been fretting, about that for over 200 years since the Luddites, and it's not come anything like true. In the early 1960s, there was a huge panic in America under the Lyndon Johnson administration because unemployment started to creep up. And they said this is because of automation. Computers are now going to be used in factories. This is terrifying. This means nobody's going to have a job.

What are we going to have to do? We're going to have to give everybody more welfare and leisure and work out how we reorganized society. Well, unemployment went down again. And at the moment, we have higher employment, or rather we did before COVID started, in most Western societies than ever. It's true that each of us has to work a smaller proportion of our time on the planet in order to have a good life. So the average person today, if they're in school and university until their early 20s and they're retired from their mid-60s, but lived to their mid-80s and they work a 38-hour week, they'll spend less than 10% of their life at work, whereas 150 years ago you'd have to spend, you know, 30% of your life at work to achieve the same lifestyle.

So we have achieved leisure, but we've shared it out quite equitably between us. And there's a whole bunch of new jobs that, you know, a Victorian wouldn't understand. He wouldn't know what a software engineer was and he wouldn't know what a flight attendant was, for example. So innovation creates new jobs as well as destroying them. There are issues of dislocation of adjustment when new technologies come in, but I really don't think we need to worry about the idea that the robots are going to take all our jobs. One of the reasons people are more worried about that at the moment is because the robots are suddenly taking upper middle class professional jobs. It's fine when they take agricultural laborers jobs or whatever. But now

they're starting to replace lawyers. My God, we can't have that. Funny, you mentioned that a Victorian wouldn't understand. It would be quite funny experiment to go back in time and try and explain to a Victorian that you're now a podcaster. I'm not sure they'd have a lot of time for that. Quite rightly so, actually. But we were talking. talking, Matt, you know, sort of about the China and the West. I really want to delve into that. Do you believe that what we're seeing with the slow death of innovation in the West is the gradual decline of our society at the very beginning, or do you think that is hyperbole and a lot of nonsense? Well, as long as somebody does the innovation, we can still have access to it. So if the

Chinese invent vaccines and new forms of nuclear power, they'll sell them to us. So, you know, it's not as if we'll be cut off completely if we don't do it ourselves. But it does seem to me a pity that, for example, if you invent a new medical diagnostic device in Britain, it takes between three and four years to get it approved. And as a result, you don't do that. You go off and invent a computer game instead because you can get that approved instantly.

You don't need permission. This is a point Peter Thiel makes, that permissionless innovation has, in digital, has diverted a lot of energy into that and away from inventing things that really solve our problems. I mean, I think it's really shocking that we are faced with, you know, years to develop a new vaccine. We should have been on the case 10 years ago saying there's going to be a pandemic. When it is, let's have a new vaccine development platform ready to go that means we can be much faster in solving this problem.

Why haven't we? Well, there's not much money in vaccines for pharmaceutical companies because if they work, they do themselves out of business. And, you know, the World Health Organization and other big bodies like that have sort of said we'd rather fret about climate change or obesity. We're not interested in infectious diseases anymore. I exaggerate, but only a bit. So I think that there is a real concern that we are complacent about the need to keep innovating within our own societies and doing not nearly enough to encourage it. And the single thing, the best thing we could do is speed up decision making by government bureaucrats. Because it's not that government bureaucrats say no. They never said no to fracking. They never said no to genetically modified organisms in Europe.

They just took such a long time to say yes that everybody gave up and went home. Well, Matt, you talk about the vaccine. Isn't that a bit of a contradiction in that it seems at least at this point that the vaccines are being developed predominantly in the West, the way ahead of everybody else on that? That's a good point, actually. Good old Oxford seems to be ahead in the vaccine race. and this is partly because the Welcome Trust and the Gates Foundation have thrown a lot

at vaccines in the last few years. So my point is really they should have done that 10 years before, or rather someone should have done that 10 years before. Because I think actually, you know, the Gates Foundation are heroes actually in this. What they did with insecticide impregnated mosquito nets, which is the technology has made the most difference to malaria in the world, what they did with the Numer caucus vaccine, where they designed a clever scheme to encourage pharmaceutical companies to develop an unprofitable vaccine that saved three quarters of a million lives already.

You know, there is some good stuff happening in the West. You're right. But it could have, we could have done this a lot sooner. We could have been a lot faster with it if we were as a society more interested in innovation. And there's something that I wanted to touch on, view. So I can't remember the exact stat, but essentially the China makes over 90% of the antibiotics for the United States. They're made and they're patented in China. Doesn't that fundamentally put the United States as a society at a disastrous weakness, doesn't it? Surely?

Well, yes and no. I mean, sure, it's possible for the, you know, the Chinese to decide to cut America off to punish it for something, cut off its antibiotic supply. But then that's true of every trading relationship. You know, for years after the war, the UK had a policy of encouraging homegrown food in case the U-boats came back. Well, you know, even if the U-Birds did come back now, we don't make any combine harvesters in Britain. So we couldn't do anything about all this homegrown food that we'd be. growing. We don't make many laptops in the UK. Pretty well every technology, the world has become

integrated and dependent on each other. And if the Chinese are selling antibiotics to the Americans, then the Chinese need the Americans just as much as vice versa. And the great lesson of free trade is that it creates interdependence and it creates mutual interest really well. And I think most Chinese business people understand that, even if Xi and Trump don't. It's an interesting point you make. And actually, I remember when I was studying political science at university, the stat that people love to talk about is that there'd never been a war between two countries which had a McDonald's.

An illustration of the importance of free trade since actually been, I mean, you could arguably say that Russia invading eastern Ukraine was the first time that that rule had been broken. But I think, Francis. Was there a McDonald's in Baghdad? I don't know, actually. Good question. Good question. I'm sure we'll get a researcher on it, Matt.

We'll get back to you on that one. And by research, we mean a man angrily tweeting us from his basement. Exactly. We get plenty of that. But very upset about a lack of accuracy on that issue. But just coming back to the serious point that Francis was making, sure, yes, the world is interdependent, sure, the Chinese need us and we need them. But there's a difference, isn't there, between needing money and needing life-saving medicine, number one? Another point

I would make to you on the political side of things is that it limits our options. So right now, for example, we're talking about the Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs. And if you are dependent on that country for 90% of your essential medical supplies, you can, you can, you can, you, can't really go around saying, well, this is genocide, this is mass murder, this is like Nazi Germany, even if that's what you believe, and I'm not saying I know that that's what's happening, but if that's what you believe, it limits your options, doesn't it? And politically, the ramifications of this sort of arrangement are significant. Yeah, but we didn't have many options when the Soviet Union was behaving badly towards its own people. We had no trading relationship with them,

and that didn't give us better leverage, if you see what I mean, the fact that they were exporting nothing to us. I mean, it's certainly true. But my point, Matt, sorry to interrupt, but my point is, could Donald Trump go out and call China the evil empire now? Well, I mean, Donald Trump probably could and would. He probably did that yesterday, let's be fair. You probably will do that in the time between now and the time we release this interview.

But could Boris Johnson, I guess, is my question. Well, I think you're putting your finger on quite an important point, which is that the cozying up to China that George Osborne was pushing five or six years ago, and which led to some pretty unpleasant sort of veiled threats from Chinese interests saying, if you want your nuclear bar stations to work, then you better not be nasty about us. or whatever, is an issue. And I don't suppose Britain ever behaved like that, did it? I think it probably did when it was top nation.

And of course, but the answer is not for Britain to become more self-sufficient. It's for Britain to become more prosperous and stronger. And often you'll do that with trade. So again, I still come back to the point that we do need each other, you know, that there is a mutual interest here. And I think we have to sort of fasten our safety belts and get through the Xi period and hope to get to a more reasonable regime running China after that. Because, you know, China's got huge problems too.

I mean, it's got an aging society and a big welfare issue. and also it's trade surpluses of the last. Here's the way my friend Don Boudreau, the economist, puts it. So you mean they've sent us antibiotics and washing machines, and we've sent them pictures of American presidents. Sounds like a good deal to me. You know, they've got that money. If they've got our money, they need that money to be worth some.

something and it's not worth something if they destroy us. And what we've seen right now is our relationship, and in fact the world's relationship, fundamentally changed with China due to COVID. And we were talking beforehand about you were doing some research into the origins of COVID. Would you be able to enlighten us? Because there's lots of different thoughts as to how the virus was created,

did it hop from pangling to another animal to back to pangolin and then spread in a wet market? Was it something that escaped from a laboratory? What are your thoughts on? Yeah, great question, Francis. I wasn't expecting this video to be monetized in the first place. Thanks, mate. Well, when this first happened, I thought it was very likely

that this was going to be a wildlife market issue, that somewhere in a market, a bat and a pangolin had come together in such a way that a virus recombined between the two and then infected people. We now know that is definitely not what happened. By the way, that is what happened with SARS in 2002, with Civitcats. This did not happen in this case. We know that for pretty well certain now,

because the samples that were taken from that wet market were all negative. They never found a positive sample. And moreover, the people in the market who caught it caught a very well adapted to human beings form of the virus. So the market was a super spreader event, not a zoonotic event, to use the technical terminology. This wasn't where it jumped. We now know that, pretty well certain. And the other weird thing is that in SARS or MERS or any of these other things, we quite

soon identify the source of the virus, the animal that has this virus in it. In this case, we have still not done so. Now, you may have heard of this bat sample, RATG-13, but that doesn't have the virus that infects us. That is a very similar virus, but it's not nearly similar enough. It's 40 years divergent if you use normal evolutionary timescales. And in particular, its spike protein, which is the bit that it uses to get inside the cells, is very different. It's really not close enough at all. Now, the pangolins have another virus.

That's less close than the bat one, but its spike protein is more close than the bat one. So neither of these viruses can be the one that somebody caught in October, November last year in Wuhan. Okay. Somebody there caught a different virus. Now, was it caught from a village in Yunnan where these two viruses had come together at some point and recombined, possibly? Or was it caught from a lab where experiments were being done to combine the spike protein of one virus with the backbone of another virus? those were exactly the experiments that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing with coronaviruses. They were making so-called chimeric pseudo-viruses with the backbone of one virus and the spike protein of another.

Now, they won't say whether they were experimenting with this particular virus with the bat version. In fact, they say the bat sample. They found it in their files and it had already dissoned. integrated so we can't go back and look at it again, which is a bit weird. But actually, we now know that actually when they found it in their files, they didn't admit that it's actually something they'd called by a different name, 4991, back in 2012 when they isolated it from a 2013, sorry, from a bunch of miners who died going into a copper mine in southern Yunnan. Three of them died, and they died with pneumonia and had a tested positive for an unknown coronavirus.

So it's looking very like someone is covering up something about work that was done on this virus over the last five or six years, either because they fear that it might be the source or they know that it might be the source. Now that's the wrong way to go about it, because it's still very likely that it's not the source, that it wasn't a lab leak. And the way to prove that is to come out and give us absolute open transparency about every experiment that was done in that institute. And that way, and, you know, make Xi Zheng Li and Tianjun Juan, these people who are working on Batvirus, make them available for interviews. If China would do that, then we could rule out the lab leak hypothesis. but at the moment we can't.

Far from becoming less plausible, it is becoming more plausible the more we find out. And you have just made every weed smoker on the internet incredibly happy, Matt. I want you to know that. They're sitting at their computers going, I knew it, I knew it.

Well, I know. That is the danger. And of course, you know, there is a fate worse than death on the internet, and that is to adopt a position that is also adopted by Donald Trump. Well, I was going to say you would have upset a few David Ike fans earlier in the interview, but now you've made some of them happy, so it comes out.

But just sticking with that, I mean, obviously, as you talked earlier about the kind of regime that China has, Xi Jinping wouldn't be the sort of person that would allow that sort of information to be properly ventilated outside of China if there was a risk that China had been responsible or this laboratory had been responsible. And I guess it comes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is, you know, the negative sides of innovation. I mean, actually, for most people, an interesting question might be is why would a laboratory be doing these sort of experiments? What is, are they trying to develop biological weapons or are there legitimate reasons to try and? No, there are legitimate reasons, and they were quite open about this a few years ago, because there's two labs in a sort of friendly rivalry doing this. One is in North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the other is in Wuhan. These are the two leading chimera viruses labs in the world. And they published a joint paper in 2015 in which they say, you know what, maybe these experiments are a little too dangerous, because we now realize that because what,

What we're trying to do is create a virus in the lab that has the characteristics of SARS or something like it, but can definitely infect human cells, not just bat cells, so that we can study it so that we can then develop therapies and vaccines to defeat it. But we realize that in the process, we are creating viruses that are more dangerous to human beings. So they said that. And they said, you know, some of these experiments are, you know, ones that we're. perhaps shouldn't be doing. After that, the US government put a moratorium on such experiments,

but it only lasted for a couple of years. It lifted it again. And the Chinese government didn't put a moratorium on these experiments. So the motive was definitely good. Let's study the heck out of coronaviruses so that when a pandemic does start, we know what to do about them. But it didn't work in the sense that it didn't put us in a position to have a quick vaccine or therapy and it may indeed have made the pandemic more likely. And what responsibility do you think China have to take for this pandemic? Do they have any responsibility? Did they do enough?

Or were they being circumspect with the truth? Well, obviously you can't be responsible for a natural accident that happens within your own borders. but when I thought it was a wildlife wet market issue, as it probably was, I thought they had considerable responsibility. Because after SARS, which did happen in a wildlife market, there were plenty of warnings. You know, there's a Hong Kong scientist who used the word time bomb, ticking time bomb about wildlife markets. And you would think, and after SARS, they did shut down a lot of these markets. they've then reopened them progressively in the last few years.

And indeed, Xi Jinping has been particularly espousing traditional Chinese medicine. And the only reason you buy pangolins is not because they're good to eat, but because you think they're a medical help for health reasons, not for nutritious reasons. So in that sense, the Chinese authorities do have culpability for not doing more to control the wildlife trade. And let's face it, there's another reason for that, which is that we don't want pangolins to go extinct. And Chinese demand is what is driving pangolin smuggling from Malaysia.

But I have to now admit that argument has got weaker now that we know the wildlife market wasn't responsible in this case. So attention then turns to the question of the lab and was the lab doing something for which China should be held accountable? And the answer there is we simply don't yet know, but we need to know more. And are we ever going to get that information, do you think? I don't know. I have such faith in human nature that I'm pretty sure there are scientists. within the labs who will want to get the information out and will eventually find a way. But the longer this goes on and the more tracks are covered.

I mean, the only reason we know about these copper miners who got ill in 2012 in Yunnan is because while a lot of stuff was taken offline over the last few months, a master's thesis that discussed this case was not. They missed it. So, you know, that's quite a nice example of how hard it is for them to censor all this and shut all this down. And they have got some good reasons for censoring it, which is that nutters in the West are going to make absolute hay with anything that comes out. You can include me in that phrase if you wish. So you self-identifies a nutter, do you? Definitely, yeah, don't you?

Absolutely. But Matt, let me ask you this, because I think just for people who don't have the scientific understanding of what you're talking about, as I don't, as Francis doesn't, if you're saying it's highly unlikely now that this happened at a web market, other than some kind of problem that occurred in a lab, is there another way that this could have happened? Yes. Yes. the other hypothesis which is still very plausible is that somewhere in Yunnan, in the far south of China,

which is where these viruses seem to exist in bats or similar viruses seem to exist in bats. Somewhere there, a chap going into a cave to dig bat guano for use on his fields picked up two different coronaviruses, probably from one species or possibly from two species of horseshoe bat. And inside his own body, those two recombined to produce a brand new virus. And we know this can happen. And this coronavirus is a particularly good at this natural recombination. And he then gave it to a couple of people in his village,

who gave it to a couple of people, but it never really took off. But over a number of months, it became better and better at infecting human. beings until the point where it actually somebody traveled to Wuhan and started coughing in a restaurant or on a crowded train or something like that and then it exploded. So that is, you know, as it were, just as plausible a hypothesis. And those are the two hypotheses that I think we need to to put up against each other. And you know, in that scenario, the chance. have got nothing to blame themselves with it. They couldn't have foreseen it and there was nothing they could have done. And Matt, Donald Trump has been famously very, very critical of the

WHO. Where do you stand on this? Do you think his criticisms are justified and, or do you think they've been unfairly blamed for their handling of this particular crisis? I think the WHO has behave very poorly indeed in this crisis. Their refusal to talk to Taiwan, even when the Taiwanese scientists were saying there is human-to-human transmission. They, as late as the middle of January, the WHOHA put out a statement saying, this virus does not transmit from humans to humans. That's naughty. I mean, by then there was plenty of good evidence. They were ignoring it. They were taking Chinese assurances at face value. And also, in a more general way, I think the World Health Organization has not been doing its day job,

which is to keep us safe from pandemic infectious threats. The WHO was spending a huge amount of energy trying to suppress e-cigarettes and vaping over the last few years. Five years ago, it put out a statement saying the greatest threat to human health in the 21st century is climate change. This doesn't suggest an organization that was focusing on its day job. And in the Ebola outbreak of 2014-15, the WHO eventually produced a hugely self-critical report saying that it had, for political reasons, so as not to offend people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, it had, long after it shouldn't have done, it had reassured people that the the situation was under control, when Medesinsins-Saint-Frontiers and other charities were saying

it's not under control. So I think the World Health Organization is an organization that is corrupt with a small C, not fit for mission and has performed badly. Whether the right thing to do is to cut off its funds, I don't know, but as one of the largest funders, the UK has some responsibility. I think to push for some pretty serious reforms here. That is really stinging criticism there, I would say, of the organisation. Do we know why the WHO behaved in this way with this virus?

Is it a political issue? Is it an issue of incompetence? Is it an issue of something else? I think a lot of these big international organizations end up being very bureaucratic, very political it's in the nature of the beast. The particular appointment of Dr. Tedros from Ethiopia as a director general of the WHO in competition with a Brit called David Nabarro a few years ago, I think was a mistake. He was the former Ethiopian Foreign Minister and Health Minister.

and as such he had been very, very close to China, and Ethiopia is China's sort of favorite country in Africa. So there is a very close relationship there. And just for example, the business that Taiwan is not allowed to be part of the WHO or even attend its meetings, that is something China has only recently begun to insist on and the WHO has just gone along with it. It hasn't protested. Before that, the previous Chinese regimes were being more reasonable about Taiwan. So essentially, they're a very weak organization with no real power.

And instead of standing up to China and being honest, they kowtow to them, and they sort of, well, they helped us get to where we are. Well, we'll have to see what happens with their investigation into the origin of the virus, which they recently announced. But it has also announced that it, it won't be visiting the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which does seem to me a pity. A pity? I mean, that's like not going to the potential murder scene, isn't it, if you're investigating a murder?

Wouldn't that be a good analogy? I think so, yeah. Right. Okay. I'm slightly lost for words here. So why wouldn't they do that? I don't know. You'll have to ask them.

Yeah, I'm sure Tedros is coming. It will be very happy to come and Trigonometer. We'll find out. But then that begs the question, what's the point of having this investigation? Well, they will presumably talk to lots of people in the Chinese Academy of Sciences and in the Centers for Disease Control and in the Wuhan government as well as the national government. And they will hope to get direct answers. The way you've described that gives me no confidence whatsoever, I have to say.

And you're nodding again, people won't be able to see it. But okay, guys, well, I don't really know where to go from here, Matt. It doesn't sound like we're really going to get to the moment. Have I got you into terrible trouble and myself? No, probably yourself. We are going to be fine. I mean, we've already been tried to have been cancelled about eight times. We've lost the studio three times.

I'm more lost for words because, I mean, that does not sound like a good way to be dealing with this situation, Matt. And it sounds to me, we joke about it, we laugh about it. But from what you're telling us, we've had a serious problem, which may have been manmade. And the investigation into this problem is not going to look at what may well have been the source of the problem. And rely solely on evidence from people who have a political reason not to give straight. answers. Is that a knacket summary? Yeah, I think it is. And I would repeat the point that if it's not manmade, if it didn't come out of the lab, then the only way you're going to persuade us that that's the case is by being completely open up what was going on in the lab. And that's not

what we're getting at the moment. Well, ladies and gentlemen, there we go. I don't know where to go from here. This is crazy. You're basically saying to, I don't, Francis, help me out here, man. what he's saying is there's no point in the report. The WHO is at the behest of China and we're fucked. Anyway, so. Great. Fantastic stuff. All right. Well, Matt, the last question we always ask is what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be. But that sounds to me like what we should be talking about, doesn't it? Yeah, that's quite a good answer. But the other thing that I think is a terribly important thing. And I'm a biologist, really originally. And I'm a keen naturalist. We don't talk nearly enough about invasive species. I just seen a gray squirrel go past

my window. This is a species that's wiping out the red squirrel. There's all sorts of, wherever you go in the world, you know, ash die back killing things. This is the big conservation issue, and we neglect it in favor of climate change or other issues or air pollution or something. But I think invasive species are a terribly important issue. But that's for another day. I'm not sure that's going to be what we lead with in publishing this episode, Mike, given some of the stuff we just talked about. But listen, thank you so much for talking to us. The book is absolutely fantastic and beautifully written as well.

It's very easy to read lots of interesting stories to illustrate the points that you're making. How innovation works. I recommend everybody gets it. This is the first time I'm lost for words in doing trigonometry. I don't know what to say. get the book, but also wear a mask. Should we wear masks even? Let's talk about that before we go.

Oh, yeah. Well, I'm not sure. I mean, it seems crazy to be making masks compulsory at this stage. You know, we should have done so back in March if we were serious about it. But I do, I'm not an anti-mask fanatic because I do think they, to some extent, A, they signal that you're trying, and B, they do make some sort of difference. I personally can't stand the ordinary masks because they fog up my spectacles. So I've gone and got one of these, you know, what are they called, visor things,

you know, like you're a knight in shining armor except it's made of plastic. And you can see through them. And they're great. I mean, I find that much easiest way. So when I was at an airport recently, I was wearing that instead. And you can even eat under them. You have to sort of do this. All right, well, there we go.

Buy the book, wear a visor and don't eat bad. So maybe we'll end on that. Matt Ridley, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure. And yeah, we're all going to look into the WHA now. Absolutely. Thank you very much, Matt. And if you want to follow us, please remember that all our episodes come out.

and live streams come out six nights a week and they are always at 7pm UK time. That's 7pm UK time.