 Matt Ridley is one of the best-selling and best-regarded science writers on the planet. He wrote recently that in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, we are about to find out how robust civilization is and that the hardships ahead will be like nothing we have ever known. I spoke with Ridley from his home in Northern England. His next book, How Innovation Works and Why it Flourishes and Freedom, will be published in May. We discussed why the coronavirus caught him by surprise, when he thinks we'll be able to reopen the world economy, why Brexit is good for Europe and whether he believes that sustained innovation and progress can take place in authoritarian countries such as China. Matt Ridley, thank you so much for speaking with me. Nick, it's really great to be able to talk to you and new technology enables us to do this really quite easily. Yes, and the coronavirus, if nothing else, has been kind of a kick in the pants to actually start doing more of this type of stuff. I've been writing about how since at least the mid-90s, when the internet and the worldwide web really emerged, we've been talking about this kind of thing, but we never really got around to it. Now we're doing a lot of things that we can do from the sanctity and the sanctum of our own home. Let me start. One of the things that was interesting, when the coronavirus really hit the West, when it hit North America and Western Europe or Europe, you wrote a couple of pieces that were striking because you are the rational optimist. One of the things that I think was striking to me and to many of your readers was there was a pessimism involved. You talked about how you thought we would never be faced with something like this. Can you explain a little bit about what that was and how the emergence of this pandemic has really shaken some of your core sentiments or beliefs about progress? Well, the first thing I should say is that I've never believed that the world is the best possible world and can't be improved, that we've already reached nirvana. One of the things I'm very clear about in the rational optimist is there are still problems to be solved, there are still threats, there are still risks. I personally think we've been worrying about the wrong risks and this is a reminder that we have been doing that. I'll hold my hands up and say I was not out there saying, watch it, there's a pandemic coming. I wish I had been because then I could claim to be Nostradamus. I was going to say but it's not like you would be any richer, right? I mean you might have that. People would buy you pints at the pub or something, but it's cold comfort to be right. Even that's not allowed, of course. Well, sometime in the future. But back in 1999, I was asked to write a short book about the future of disease and I did say in that if we do have a pandemic that goes crazy and it's not completely impossible, that combines high contagiousness with high lethality or relatively high lethality, then it will be a virus, not a protozoan or a bacterium. We're on top of those enemies pretty well. It's not going to be like the plague or like malaria because we're too good at beating those big organisms. It's the tiny ones, the viruses, that were still pretty bad. It's going to be a respiratory virus. Why? Because just look around you. People are coughing and spluttering all the time. There are up to 200 different kinds of respiratory viruses that we give each other every winter. We call them the common cold or flu, but some of them are rhinoviruses, some of them are coronaviruses, some of them are adenoviruses. There's clearly something pretty irresistible to the virus tribe about the urban human population in terms of ones that can infect the respiratory tract. The third thing I said was that it might come out of bats. I said that because a whole bunch of relatively new diseases have come out of bats in recent decades. In fact, that's been even more true since I said that because SARS was after I made that remark. The reason for that is because bats are mammals like us and it's relatively easy for a virus to jump from a mammal to a mammal. It's harder to jump from a bird to a mammal, but it can be done. It's harder. But more to the point, bats are animals that live in huge crowds. They live in huge densities. There's a cave in Texas that has a famous bat roost in it. It has roughly the population of Mexico City living in that cave. Respiratory viruses are going to enjoy bats and they're going to enjoy humans, and there's going to be a crossover between them. When I look back on the lessons we didn't learn from SARS, which was a really good canary in the coal mine, a very clear warning that these wet wildlife markets in China were a dangerous place for crossover between species because the animals are alive in the markets. The problem is not bringing meat to markets. The problem is bringing live animals to markets that are coughing and spluttering now on to other species and so on. We had a dry run with a dangerous virus that wasn't very contagious, but it was very dangerous, SARS. We should have said, look, this is a real threat. Now, I had also taken some comfort from the degree of improvement in molecular biological knowledge. The fact that we sequenced SARS in three months or something, that felt like electric fast because 20 years ago we hadn't sequenced a single virus. We'd read its recipe, we knew its defects, we knew how to attack it in theory, and I had vaguely, in the back of my mind, assumed that vaccine production had speeded up as well. We sequined this one in days. I mean, it was sequencing. That was almost instantaneous. But it turns out, as I now realize reading up, that vaccine development is about as slow as it was 20 years ago. In fact, I wrote a thing recently about how the Hupinkoff vaccine was developed in four years flat in the 1930s by two very remarkable American women. Four years is not that much longer than it's probably going to take us to find a vaccine to this. We have left the door unguarded in one respect, or rather, we've let obstacles get in the way of the development of vaccines, I suspect, and that's one of the lessons we're going to have to learn. We assume that this all started at a wet market in China. China started dealing with it. It was clear to observers as well as health officials and whatnot, both in China and observers in other parts of the world that something was going on here. We all discount information that we get from the Chinese government because they're going to lie about how great they are in certain ways and how safe they are in others. Where is the failure, say, in North America and in Europe to deal with this? Because we're never going to be able to control all parts of the world, all of that kind of stuff. What do you think were the fundamental missteps in the United States and the United Kingdom, say, in containing this? Right. Well, I think one of the lessons is that countries like South Korea were better prepared for this, and that was partly because of SARS. They got more of a fright from SARS in Asia than we did in the West, and they set up this system of contact tracing based on extensive testing that they were geared up for in a way that we weren't in the West. Both in the UK and the US, we were very slow to ramp up testing for the virus, and testing turned out to be crucial. That's out of Taiwan and Japan and Korea and Singapore and others. Singapore actually opened a pandemic hospital and kept it mothballed after SARS, so that was remarkable preparedness. So I think that's the one lesson. The other lesson is we relied too much on the World Health Organization, and I think it has very serious questions to answer after this. If you look at what it was saying in January, it was repeating untrue Chinese claims that this virus was not transmissible human to human, and it was praising China to the skies, and it was ignoring whistleblowers in Taiwan and elsewhere. And of course, in recent days, there's been a spectacular piece of embarrassing footage where a World Health Organization official sort of pretends not to hear the question when the word Taiwan is used. So the reliance of the World Health Organization on China, the close relationship between its director general is the former Ethiopian health and foreign minister who developed very close links with China and was himself a leader of the T-grade liberation front, which had Chinese backing. These are questions that need to be looked into, because I think if the World Health Organization had run the flag up in January, we all might have reacted a bit quicker. Would you say that South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, although I guess there's some questions about the extent of infection in Japan, but are they exemplary in their response to the coronavirus? On the whole, yes. I mean, what South Korea did was it it tracked, it tested lots of people, found out who they'd been in contact with, issued each of them with an app so that it can go back through their records and find out who they came close to, which is pretty remarkable. And that turned out to be one super spreader who'd gone to a church and met a huge number of people, tracking down his contacts, proved vital, et cetera. So yes, I do think that track and trace is the technique that's going to work in the absence of antivirals and vaccines and so on, because what's particularly dangerous about this virus, as I read it, is that it is highly contagious in the very first few days of infection. So whereas in SARS, it's about eight days before you infect someone else. In COVID-19, it's about four days. And quite a lot of this transmission is happening from people who are symptom free, particularly young people. Children seem to get very, very mild version. They don't even think there's anything wrong with them, and they go about their normal lives and infect people. And that is a very dangerous feature. I'll add one other way in which my country in particular was not ready for this or I myself was not ready for this. And that is in January, we were obsessed with Brexit. We were coming up to the end of January, which was the day Brexit was going to happen. None of us could pay attention to anything else. And so, I mean, that doesn't excuse us being called out in February, but it does excuse us perhaps not being aware of things in January. And of course, that's true of every country. I mean, America was obsessed with the presidential campaigns and impeachment before that. Yeah, and impeachment before that. Do you think, is there, I mean, you are on the one hand, you're interested in questions of public health and of science and things like that. The other, you're a big defender and promoter of freedom, of individual freedom as, you know, I mean, it's in the subtitle of your forthcoming book, Innovation Flourishes and Freedom. Is there a necessary kind of tension between public health as it was practiced saying a country like South Korea, we're not talking about China where, you know, who knows what's going on there, nailing people who are infected into their apartments, things like that. But say a country like South Korea, a country like Taiwan, and the freedom that we take for granted in kind of, you know, they always, well, they're both in the OECD, but in the developed world. Yes, there is. I mean, we're seeing that very clearly, not just in terms of what you might call the technology of tracing people, but also in terms of the police state that we are now living in, you know, where we've got policemen arresting people for going on unnecessary walks. And they look like they're enjoying it. That's one of the worrying things about it. But what I would say to that is if you want to preserve freedom and not have this kind of draconian police state brought down on you, and yes, I'm afraid it is necessary to be pretty draconian when you're in the middle of a pandemic as it was during a plague in centuries past, if you want to avoid that, then you need to unleash the freedom to innovate to solve the problem in good times. And where I think we've been mistaken is we've made it very hard for people to bring forward medical devices, vaccines, drugs, et cetera, partly because of safety regulations, but partly because of just bureaucratic growth. I mean, if you take, I have this statistic in my book, how long does it take to get permission, sorry, to get, what's the word, to license for use a medical device on average. And it's something like 20 months in America, and it's something like 70 months in Germany. That's a black mark against Europe, but it's pretty black mark against America. I mean, how can it possibly take too long, two, two months to decide whether a new hip joint or a new ventilator or a new personal protective equipment in hospital is safe within that time. And the result of that, of course, is that what is invisible because what you're achieving is you're deterring people from going into these fields. You're deterring people from inventing and innovating in this area. And so you can't point to it and say, well, show me the product that we could have licensed a bit quicker. Well, the point was he never brought it forward because he looked at how dysfunctional this market was and stayed away, and so it never got developed. So I think that's one of the issues we have to learn is freedom to innovate, but there is attention. I'm not the perfect libertarian. I'm not someone who says that in the middle of a dangerous pandemic, the state should have no power to shut down society. On the other hand, we can have an argument about whether we are to some extent over reacting and whether had we got the track and trace system, the stuff we were all worried about, about tech freedom, the tech lash, if we'd not been panicking about that so much, then we might have developed the tracing system that would have enabled us not to shut down schools and hospitals and, I mean, not hospitals, but schools and playgrounds and things like that. So what is the role of dissent in a pandemic? I think everybody, with the exception of very doctrinaire anarchists, are going to say, you know what, when there is an emergency that is widely understood, different rules apply and things like that, but when you talk about dissent and things like that, I guess I have two questions. One, should we be maximizing the ability of people to say whatever they want to say? Some people, when you were starting to talk about China and bats, I was just reading a story that I, it was at a major news outlet today about how, you know, this is actually coming out of a Chinese lab that was testing bats, etc. So there's a lot of conspiracy theories that, you know, this disease has actually was grown in a Chinese government lab as some kind of bio-terror weapon. People like Donald Trump, people like Boris Johnson early on were kind of poo-pooing, you know, the extent of this or that it wouldn't be dangerous to begin with. We still have people who are skeptical. I was reading something by Toby Young, the British writer who works at Quilet and he was publishing elsewhere talking about how, you know, we're simply wrong to shut down the economy because when you look at it from a strictly economic point of view, it's better to have more economic activity because the depression or the recession we're causing is actually going to kill more people. You know, again, I'm not arguing in favor of any of these things, but having that robust sense of debate as well as of different authorities, I mean, in the United States, and I'm not sure if it's happening in the United, in the UK, but in the United States, the FDA and the CDC keep going back and forth about whether or not, you know, is it a good idea for people to wear masks when they go outside? The FDA is refusing to allow at-home testing, even though, I mean, you take the swab at home, you send it on. They've shown that they failed as an authority, and now they're refusing to allow other people to kind of act on their own. What is the role of that kind of dissent and kind of pushback against authority in a moment like this? Well, I personally think there's no reason to shut down debate at a moment like this, quite the reverse actually. I think that what this is showing us is there is no monopoly on wisdom. Nobody knows exactly what the right answer is. It's possible that we were ever reacting at the beginning. I mean, I thought we probably were because I'd seen so many busted flushes, so many wolves had come along and we'd cried wolf and it wasn't a wolf, you know, bird flu, swine flu, SARS, MERS, Ebola. No, Ebola was a wolf for people in Africa, but it wasn't for the rest of the world. So it's right to have that debate about whether or not this is a real threat. And it's also right to have a debate about what the prognoses are, because there's been a dangerous tendency in this country, and I don't know whether it's true to the same extent in the US, to believe the models, to put them on a pedestal. Imperial College came out with a model saying that up to half a million people might be going to die unless we brought in much more draconian restrictions on people's freedoms. And that was used to not to do a U-turn in government, but to cause them to bring forward the the lockdown of the economy that they thought might be necessary at some point. Now, that model is not unchallengeable, it's got some very unhappy assumptions in it, and it was immediately challenged by another model from Oxford University, which I think they went far too far in the other direction and put some crazy assumptions in about how quickly we'd get this under control. But that has reminded us that models are just that. They are models. They're not scripture. They're not the territory, right? They're a map. Exactly. And that, by the way, is a lesson for the climate change debate where models have been, again, deified to a much too greater degree. But we'll leave that on one side for the moment. So while I don't want to stop anybody coming out with an article saying, here's my evidence why the Chinese invented it, or here's my evidence why it's easily cured with this quack cure that I've got made out of dandelions brood at midnight under the full moon or whatever it might be, let a thousand flowers bloom in this. Let everybody say what they want, but let them produce their evidence and let them put up with a bit of criticism if their evidence is bad. That's the thing. So I don't mind the claims as long as the counterclaims are out there. And in the case of the idea that it's a Chinese bio weapon, I've seen very good molecular biological evidence. So that is extremely implausible. It's also extremely implausible that it came out of a Chinese lab for various, again, molecular biology reasons. So I don't object to the theory being advanced, but I don't think anyone should object to being severely criticized too. So I defend with my life the right for you to say what you want, but I also defend my right to criticize you for saying it. I think part of the role of skepticism, my girlfriend was saying that when relative of hers read your take on it, he finds you to be credible. That skepticism or the ability of you to publicly discuss what you're thinking and how it changes your mind, that helped him take things more seriously. So that's another role of skepticism. Certainly, as somebody who has poo-pooed alarmism about many different things, from the population explosion through to climate change, I've cataloged how my life was nearly ruined as a youngster by people scaring me about the future of the world. And I feel therefore very strongly that Greater Thunberg's life is being ruined by people today and likewise. And so I'm all for debunking scares. So for me, as someone who's almost a professional debunker of scares, to come out and say, this one is quite scary and we just need to take it seriously, has made some of my friends stop and think. You know, how far or long are we? How do we start to figure out, are we in the middle of things or are the cases cresting or is the pandemic cresting? Or are we in the first, we don't even realize where we haven't even gotten our boots on yet and this stuff is going to be around for a very long time. What are the markers that go into figuring out where we are and whether or not what we're doing is working and when do we kind of reopen things? Yeah. Short answer, I don't know. And I haven't got a model and even if I did, I wouldn't believe it because it'll depend on assumptions. But the longer answer is that I see evidence that the most of the countries that have brought in lockdowns three weeks ago, like Italy and Spain, are beginning to see the numbers crest. They're not, you know, they're probably going to go on going up for a while, but they're not going up as fast. And so the worst is not over yet, but the worst may be over within some weeks. Now it would be amazing if the lockdowns weren't having some effect. I mean, you know, I haven't been within two meters of anyone except my wife for two weeks now. That means that I can't have got it in that time. And I can't have given it in that time, except to her, obviously. She likewise hasn't been. So in that sense, we must be having an effect. What we don't really know, in my view, is which measures are working best, you know, is it, you know, was closing the schools a good idea or a bad idea because it sent kids back to stay with their grandparents and grandparents at all risk. The way I see it developing is that we will get better at curing people who get it, you know, some of these things hydroxychloroquine and things like that may be helpful the way in which you just simply lying patients on their front, not their backs when you're ventilating them apparently is helping, you know, so we're going to get a little better at saving lives. We're going to ramp up the capacity for hospitalization for ventilators and so on. We're going to improve the testing over the next few weeks so that we're going to get better at contact tracing. And once we've done that, we can start to lift these restrictions because we can start to say when it does flare up, we can quickly track down who's at risk and put them under lock and key rather than the whole of society. And eventually get to the point where the only people who have got to be really careful are the very vulnerable and the rest of us can get on with a relatively normal life. Now, will that happen in April? I doubt it. Will it happen in May? I hope so. Will it happen in June? Jolly well think so because I don't think we, I mean, I think that's the point where we start to take Toby Young's arithmetic very seriously and say, sorry, we're killing more people by leaving them, you know, locked up with abusive partners alone and in danger of committing suicide, workless and unable to, you know, feed themselves properly, more prone to take drugs and alcohol, whatever it might be. You know, there's a whole bunch of things that'll be going wrong with society because of this lockdown. And at some point, that's a bigger problem than the coronavirus because there are good things about this. Sorry, that's not the right word. There are no good things about it, but there are less bad things. Namely, the big one is that it does not kill children. I mean, imagine every other plague, including influenza, was quite good at killing kids. You know, smallpox was lethal among children. Plague was lethal to children. We're incredibly lucky in that respect that this is not not killing children. But of course, that has contributed to the young feeling somewhat invulnerable. And that's made it harder for them to take seriously the restrictions on movements. What are the kinds of, you know, we've been talking mostly about the public health interventions and kind of fallout from all of this. What about the economic, you know, responses? In the United States, the federal government just passed the single largest spending bill in history. I was talking to a congressman yesterday who said, you know, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, we didn't pass a spending bill. We declared war on our enemies. You know, is there, from an economic point of view, what are the types of responses that, again, are consistent with limited government that are likely to work? And what are the ones that are likely to do more damage? I mean, we're still digging out of the kind of add-on effects of the bailouts during the financial crisis 12 years ago. Yeah. I think the UK paid off its last debt from the Napoleonic Wars just a few years ago. So, I mean, there is no doubt when you hugely increase the scope of government, it tends not to retreat as fast as you would like. Britain didn't end food rationing till something like 1954. And the argument was always, well, you know, there are some people at the bottom of society who might not be able to afford food. Well, it turned out the reason they couldn't afford food was because food was being rationed. So the supply wasn't responding to demand in the same way. And so the price wasn't coming down. Do you see what I mean? Yes, absolutely. So it was a sort of circular argument. So, and there is a real danger that what we've done is nationalise huge swathes of the economy. We'll find it very hard to undo it. The moment you start to say, right, we can relax this again and we can no longer subsidise you for the fact that your business is struggling. A lot of people will say, hang on, I'm going to get busted if that happens. And so you will see that. On the other hand, the idea that the government steps in and makes it possible for businesses to take over during this period, because we think it's temporary, might be quite a reasonable one. I mean, in other words, if everyone was just to sort of say, right, I'm closing down my business overnight, it would be harder to start the economy up again. On the other hand again, there's got to be a degree of rethinking of how we run the economy in the wake of this. There's a whole bunch of things that we can take a bit of a blank slate approach. Things that we've said for years, well, you can't do that because there's huge vested interests. Well, maybe when we restart, we can give an example of some of the workforce rules or the regulations that have kind of been shown to be less essential than maybe we thought. Yeah. Well, for a start, the ones around product safety, and not all of them, obviously, we've got to have some, but it's clear that if we suddenly say, right, let's tear up some of these regulations in order to respond quickly, well, then we shouldn't be doing that anyway. I mean, if some of these regulations were unnecessary, a lot of reporting requirements, an awful lot of what's come in in recent years is about sending bits of paper from one person to another. And this is now being said, well, we don't need to do that. We don't need to get that bit of paper from you. We'll just get the grant out to you straight away. A lot of the complication around tax, it turns out to be much simpler to run a tax system than we thought. So I think we need to have a real drains up look at what we don't need to do. And likewise, we need to have a look at how we as individuals, not just as government, run society. And that's things like video conferencing, things like what you and I are doing right now. I'm going to try and insist that I have an awful lot of fewer face-to-face meetings and an awful lot more meetings of this kind, because they're jolly efficient to time use. And it turns out the technology is really advanced. Five or 10 years ago, if you did this, we'd have dropouts, we'd have freeze ups, there'd be all sorts of stuff that wouldn't quite work. I remember trying to do a lecture to Texas down the line about eight years ago, and there was a 10-minute delay, or no, I don't know, maybe a two-minute delay or something, but it was, you know, paralytically difficult to recognize in those conditions. And I do want to point out that you are in a makeshift recording booth because you were doing the audio version. So this is, you know, this is your makeshift sound booth. You're like, it's like the Abbey Road, you know, studios or something out there. Well, it was due to record the audio version of my book last week and the week before. I had four days blocked out in the diary for doing that in the studio in London. It became clear I wasn't going to be in London. I was going to be at home in the north of England, and nobody else was going to be in the studio either because of social distancing. So we set it up in such a way that I put some padding in a closet, which doesn't have an outside window. So there's very little extraneous noise, and I shut the door on the corridor so that nobody walks past, etc. And it turns out I've got beautiful acoustics. I've got a ready-made studio here. And all you do is press record on QuickTime and then send the file to the producer at the other end and somebody edits it. And it's just beautiful. So, you know, we're discovering things. I'm the number of people I've spoken to who say, you know what, a regular weekly meeting is happening at half the time now. Let's talk about the new book, Innovation Works and Wide Flourishes and Freedom. We've got nothing but time, because we're not going anywhere. But give me the elevator pitch. Give me, and of course, we're going to be out of elevators for a long time to come, at least if anyone else is in them. But what is the basis of how innovation works and why it flourishes in freedom? Well, it starts from the point that innovation is probably the most important thing that happens in the world. I mean, the fact that people invent new ways of reorganizing the atoms and molecules of the world to be convenient to us is what's made us prosperous and it's what's made us interesting in the last 200 years, etc. It's the big theme of the last couple hundred years. And yet it's a mysterious process. And I start from the point that actually nobody really knows why innovation happens in one place, not another, why it happens to us and not to other animals, why it happens at some times and in some technologies and not at other times and in other technologies. Why did my grandparents experience incredible changes in transport, but very little in computers and communication, whereas I've had exactly the opposite experience, very little change in transport in my lifetime, very big changes in computers and communication. We don't know the answer to most of these questions. So it's a mysterious process, but it's not entirely mysterious. Of course, we know some things about it. And what I do in the book is I tell stories. I tell the story of the invention of the steam engine, the invention of the search engine, the invention of vaccines, the invention of vaping, the invention of airplanes, the invention of cars. I just tell lots of relatively short stories about how people came up with this. And from these, I draw some general points. The first is that innovation is different from invention, that coming up with the first prototype or the first idea is not the end of the story. There's a huge amount of effort goes into turning that into something practical, something affordable, something reliable that people can actually use. And that's the process of innovation that is necessary after the process of invention, if you like. And it's not quite that simple anyway. And the inventor likes to get the credit and often comes up with a completely fake story. And this is another point I make that these stories are always made up about how an apple fell on his head or he jumped out of the bath with an insight or the light bulb went on above his head. And actually, it's a much more gradual process. It's a more incremental process. It's a more collaborative process. Virtually every discovery and invention has rival discoverers saying, hang on, I thought of that too. 21 different people came up with the idea of the light bulb around the same time. If Thomas Edison had been run over by a tram, we'd still have light bulbs. But what Edison did brilliantly, and this is another theme of my book, is that he realized that innovation is a product. Innovation is something you can set out to produce. You can set up an innovation factory. And what you've got to do in that factory is trial and error. That's the big theme that comes out again and again from all the innovators, is you try different things, you experiment and you reinforce the things that work and you discard the things that don't work. Apart from the people who are kind of creating those factors, and I guess what Edison was called the wizard of Menlo Park, right? He had a big factory of factories, essentially. Are there larger kind of social, cultural, economic, political arrangements or institutions that lend themselves to more innovation rather than less? Definitely. I mean, obviously, liberty is a big part of this. It helps to have people free to do things. It's amazing how much resistance there is to innovation from society, but also from rulers. I mean, I tell the story of coffee as an innovation. Coffee comes into Western Europe around 1500 and everywhere rulers try to ban it. The coffee wars go on for a couple of hundred years. Now, why are they doing this? Two reasons. One, because the wine industry is lobbying them to ban it. Okay. And two, because coffee tends to be drunk in coffee houses. And the trouble with coffee houses is that people sit in them and they chat about the people running society and they're rude about them. And King spotted this and said, hang on, we can't have coffee houses. People might talk about me. So a huge amount of resistance to innovation. And so somehow you've got to set up society so you can get around that resistance. And that means giving people a certain amount of liberty. And one way to do that, it emerges, is to have fragmented governance. So to be a federal structure or a fragmented continent. So Europe's great advantage when it got going was that it had lots of different small countries and lots of inventors and innovators moved from one country to another to find a more congenial regime. And that couldn't happen in China. It had happened in China, interestingly, 500 years before when China was incredibly innovative, because China was at that stage fragmented into about five kingdoms and they were rivalrous with each other. But by the time the 1500s come along, the Ming empires are in charge, and that has a very top-down structure in which nothing can be done unless it's got a license from the Mandarin's. No merchant can move because he might bring a bad idea from one place to another. You literally have to stay where you're born unless you go to license to travel. It couldn't be worse as a system for suppressing innovation. So freedom to exchange ideas, because there is no innovation that is a single idea. Every innovation is a recombinant phenomenon. So are you predicting now with the arrival, let's forget about coronavirus with Brexit, then that means that the UK is ready to retake its leading role as an innovative place because it's now not going to be governed by Brussels or I'm being facetious. But is the breakup of the EU then a good? Is it good for innovation, or should it be? Yes, is the short answer. I mean, there are other problems with the breakup of the EU, and it's not going to happen overnight, although I think coronavirus may accelerate the breakup of the eurozone. But I give several examples in the book of how the European Union is particularly inimical to innovation, how on the whole it is a system that is designed to stop innovation. So three quick examples. One is the utter failure to produce a digital giant to rival Amazon, Google, etc., in Europe, despite having lots of tech companies, lots of digital industry. And that's largely down to a regulatory phenomenon once you drill down into it. The second is biotechnology and gene editing, where Europe decided to have a one-size-fits-all policy that was essentially antithetical to both technologies. It did it by delay rather than banning, but it takes so long to get approval for a genetically modified crop in Europe that nobody even tries anymore. So that's coming down. And the third is a beautiful little example of a Sir James Dyson, who's a very good British innovator, who came up with the bagless vacuum cleaner. And the European regulations said that vacuum, unlike international regulations, followed by every other country, European regulations said that vacuum cleaners must be tested without dust. And he said, this is ridiculous. Well, point of a vacuum cleaner is to be tested with dust. Well, it turned out they've been lobbied by the big German bagged vacuum cleaner manufacturers who said, who had to ramp up the power of their vacuums in order to cope with dust as their bags got clogged. So they had this software that caused the vacuum to increase its power usage. And this was running into problems with the regulations for trying to reduce the power hunger of household goods. So he goes to court, and the court rules against him on the grounds that it's impractical to test them with dust. And so he does a freedom of information thing to find out why the court thought this. And he discovers a huge ream of correspondence from the German industry to the German members of the court, asking them to intervene on their behalf. So he appeals, and he appeals to the European Court of Justice, and he wins. And the European Court of Justice hands the decision back down to the court, to the general court saying, right, now please reverse your decision. And the general court reverses its decision. Five years have passed during this process by which time he's lost his first mover advantage, the Chinese have moved into the market, et cetera, et cetera. And it's no surprise that James Dyson became a strong advocate of the UK leaving the European Union. And we want to be the kind of country that behaves like Singapore and Hong Kong, but on a bigger scale, free trading, open to competition, and trying to be competitive with others. Now, there's a bunch of us that want that, and there are others that don't and wish we'd never left the European Union. But for me, the big reason for Brexit was because the European Union places obstacles in the way of innovation on behalf of incumbent vested interests. Do you think globally, are we in an era now where there are multiple power centers around the world? I mean, there's China, there's the United States, there's the EU, the breakaway republic of the United Kingdom now. But other parts of the world are growing in leaps and bounds in terms of wealth and distribution of power and knowledge. Are we in a good phase for innovation, or are we constantly moving towards more and more centralization? I'm a little worried about that, because America has been the leader, the driver, the engine of innovation for most of the last century, and particularly California, and it's been terrific. I mean, it's kept the flame alive when others wanted to snuff it out. Obviously, the fascist and communist dictatorships wanted to shut it down effectively. That wouldn't have been what they had said they were doing, but they were extremely bad at innovation. And without America, we would be really struggling for innovative products. And America, to some extent, has lost its edge in that respect. So has Europe. Now, China is picking up the ball, and China is innovating in a way that America did a century ago. It's fast, it's nimble, it's without much in the way of regulations and rules. And this is a case where it's not necessarily inventive per se, but it is taking other people's inventions and bringing them to scale. To some extent, but I think China's gone beyond catch-up myself. If you look at what they're doing with consumer practices in the market, in terms of how you pay for a meal, how you pay for tax, all this kind of thing, they've left credit cards behind. If you look at what they're doing with social media, with online retail, online finance, things like that, they're exploring new possibilities. The worry is, does this work if an authoritarian regime is running? If the world leader on innovation is an authoritarian regime, I say innovation, flourishes in freedom. How do I square that with China being the most innovative part of the world now? Well, the answer is quite easy, actually. If you look at the life of an entrepreneur in China, he's pretty free as long as he doesn't annoy the Communist Party. In other words, once you drill below the top level, there's very little of the petty bureaucracy and regulations that get in the way. Are you saying China is, and I'm talking to you from New York City, this is certainly an example of this. I suspect London is where you have these metropolises or Paris, where there is this vast artifice of rules and regulation. There's a lot of government, a lot of controls, but then if you're in the city, you can pretty much live however you want without ever talking to anybody in a position of authority. Are you saying China is kind of like that? Yes, I think I am. If you want to set up an innovative political party in China, good luck, but if you want to invent a new widget, you're probably off to the races. It worries me that for me, political and intellectual and ideological liberty goes alongside technological liberty. Without the former, you're going to struggle to produce enough of the latter in Duke eventually. Either China has got to liberalise eventually, or other parts of the world have got to pick up the torch. India will play a big part in the 21st century. It's a pretty libertarian place. It's always had a lot of what you might call spontaneous order. It's effectively ungovernable, right? It's very big and too encouraged and all that. A lot of its innovative brains have left India for California and other places in recent decades, and I think that's happening less and less. I would say between them, those two will be big engines, but look at countries like Brazil and Indonesia, I think there's a lot happening. What's very exciting about the last decade, since I wrote The Rational Optimist, is how wealthy Africa is becoming. Well, wealth is the wrong word. It's not yet wealthy, but how much less poor it's becoming. The growth of economies in Africa is now on a scale of what the Asian tigers were doing 20 years before, and a lot of people said that couldn't happen. Ethiopia has doubled its average income in 10 years. That's extraordinary. Do you think that's something to bring it back to coronavirus? The way that the Chinese government has handled the coronavirus is that potentially, I guess I'm going back to decades ago, Milton Friedman said that economic freedom happens, people get wealthier. When they have more money, they start to demand political freedom. He seemed to predict the rise of the Tiananmen Square movement or the Liberty movement in China in the 80s. That's gone away, and a lot of people are saying, well, he's been disproven with the rise of the current Chinese government. Actually, you can have continued economic prosperity and increasingly authoritarian state practices. Do you think that the coronavirus by kind of showing the hand of the government, of the Chinese government, as well as being competent, might that bring back a kind of sense of the need for lived freedom in China or political freedom? I rather hope so. I think this is an epochal moment, and it could go very well in the way you're describing, or it could go very badly, because I think there's going to be a big rethink about the relation between the West and China and economic relations as well as everything else in the wake of this. For example, just before all this happened, Britain was having a big row with America about the use of Huawei products in our 5G rollout. We were insisting that, no, we did want China to have a roll. Don't worry, they won't be able to be in the core of it and use it to spy or shut us down. America was saying you're being naive. I think the people who agree with America on that in the UK will now have the upper hand, and I suspect there will be a rolling back of that issue. I think there's going to be a lot of people saying we don't want supply chains to be as reliant on China as they were. Now, that could lead, and of course this is against a background of an economic trade war between the Trump administration and China anyway, that could lead to the sort of trade disputes that Japan got into with the rest of the world in the 1930s, and that didn't end well. Japan said, well, if you're not going to let us have rubber, then we'll have to go and invade Southeast Asia and get our own rubber. Or that's a crude cartoon version of what happened, but there's some truth in it. So I can see this ending badly, and of course it's at a time when, for whatever reason, strong men have emerged as leaders all over the world. Whether you're called Donald Trump, a strong man, I don't know, but there's an element of that about him, and Modi and Bolsonaro, and Xi Jinping, and Orban, etc., and I personally think there's an element of technological determinism here that I think social media and the disintermediation of the media, getting rid of the middleman, getting rid of broadcast networks and things like that, has played a large role in this, just as the invention of radio played a large role in the rise of the dictators in the 1920s and 1930s, and just as the invention of print played a role in the Reformation in the 1500s. So I think technologies do have an influence on this, and I have to say I was naively optimistic about what the internet would do to human conversation. We would all see each other's point of view. We did, and we realize we've really disliked each other's point of view. Well, this is the most bizarre thing is that even as we have more distributed conversations and more point-to-point conversations, we are so down on whatever we want to call social media. It's a little bit odd, because there's no question places like the BBC and even the Chinese Communist Party in many ways has less power, less univocal power than it's ever had. That's a very good thing, because there was a tremendously condescending and patronizing view among the intelligentsia that they should tell you what the news was until very recently, and we were rebelling against that. Just the last two weeks have shown us how much we can communicate means with our friends. I don't know about you, but I'm inundated with funny videos. The funny ones, I don't mind, it's the unfuddy ones. I don't know how to filter quite yet for those. So, just as a final note, is there a single marker in the coronavirus pandemic that we can look for and we say, okay, when this bat signal goes up, that's a bad choice of words, when this flare lights up the sky, we know that we're getting closer to the end rather than stuck at the beginning. Well, it's going to be in the statistics of how many cases. I think that's what you're looking for. But it might also be in treatment or prophylaxis. I don't rule out that with the ferment of innovation we're about to unleash, that we will come upon something that really is a preventive action or a preventive, for example, we might find out that it's not door handles, it's something else, which is 90% of the spread, if you see what I mean. It's unlikely to be everything that it's spreading by, and if we can really identify these, I think they will change it. I don't give up hope of a rapid vaccine. The problem with vaccines and the reason they take so long is because you've got to test them in animals, you've got to develop an animal model, you've got to check where they work. Well, this is someplace where innovation needs to happen. We can't be using 100-year-old medical practices right now. Quite right. One of the things I've been strongly saying is that this crisis reminds us that innovation is not an optional extra, that we can decide whether we want or not. It's a very, very important thing, and we have neglected it at our peril. We've experienced an innovation famine in recent years. We've done plenty of digital innovation, as Peter Thiel has often said, but if you look at the amount of innovation in drugs and vaccines, it's been pathetic in the last 20 years, and we're now paying the price for that. This shows us we need more innovation, not less, and we need to be prepared to not take silly risks, but prepared to run some reasonable hazards in order to achieve great goods. We've been far too precautionary about the cures, and ironically, we haven't been precautionary enough about the risk of a pandemic itself. Well, we're going to leave it there, and just for a final word for innovation, I do want to remind people that we are talking to Matt Ridley from his closet somewhere in the north of England, so something right is happening. We'll be beaming this out to the far planets. Matt Ridley, author of the forthcoming book, How Innovation Works and Why It Flourishes and Freedom. Thanks so much for talking to me. Thank you, Nick, very much.