 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burrus. And joining us today is Matt Ridley. He's a journalist, businessman, and author of the best-selling book, The Rational Optimist, How Prosperity Evolves, which I should point out has a proud place on Libertarianism.org's short list of books you should read to understand libertarianism. He's also the author of the new book, The Evolution of Everything, How New Ideas Emerge. Welcome to Free Thoughts. Thank you for having me on the show. So let's maybe start by talking about the connection between Rational Optimist and this new book. Rational Optimist was a book in which I surprised myself by writing a book about progress and deciding that actually it had been far better than I ever even dreamed, that in my lifetime the average income of the average person on the planet had trebled in real terms. Their lifespan was up by 30% and the amount of child mortality was down by two-thirds. And then on the whole, despite what we all thought and how gloomy we all were about the world, we were healthier, wealthier, happier, cleverer, cleaner, kinder, freer, more peaceful and more equal than we thought, sorry, than we had been 50 years before. So I cataloged these extraordinary improvements, but I didn't just stop there. I also tried to explain where they'd come from and how they arose. And of course in a word, they came from innovation. They came from innovation in technology, but also innovation in habits, so tools and rules, if you like. And trying to understand why innovation happens to human beings and not to rabbits or to rocks was part of the motivation of that book. And it's one that I carry on in the current book, as it were. And particularly the idea that came out of Rational Optimist was that basically it's about recombining ideas, that you take two ideas, meld them together and make a third idea or rather they meet and mate and have a baby idea, perhaps. And that's where most ideas come from, is the cross-fertilization of thoughts between different people. And that's a sort of equivalent to a biological process called sexual reproduction, which is a key ingredient of evolution. So I then got interested in how evolution is actually a very good description of how society changes, as well as how biology changes. Now for you personally, because I had been familiar with your work with Red Queen and things like this beforehand, when you're doing straight up evolution stuff, when you started doing Rational Optimist, was this, did you surprise what you found surprise you and where you went on this journey to like how big evolution can be from where you started originally? Yes I did. I certainly, you know, a long while ago wouldn't have thought that evolution was an apt way of describing how human society changes because I thought human society changed because clever people told it how to change. It was commanded and controlled, it was top down, it was ordered, it was planned, etc. As I grew up I became less sure of that, shall we say, and I began to notice that actually an awful lot of change in society consisted of emergent, gradual, incremental, unnoticed, unplanned change and that actually all the good things were like that and all the important things were like that too. And sure it was possible to plan something, to command something in the way of change but actually the really interesting things like the change in the birth rate or the change in living standards were not the results of deliberate policy. And then I realised that the Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek view of the human world, that is to say that spontaneous order emerges from the interactions of individuals, is exactly the same point as the Charles Darwin view of the biological world that sophisticated fit between form and function and complex design emerges from an interaction among individual creatures and individual genes without a designer. Now you described the Darwin theory then if we broaden our view of evolution as the special theory of evolution, sort of paralleling relativity and so that there's a general really theory of relative or evolution, sorry. So how does that break down? Yeah, this was an idea that a friend of mine suggested to me when I was preparing the book, Richard Webb, that was I proposing a general theory of evolution as opposed to a special theory of evolution and I like the concept so I've used it in the book. And what I mean by that is that we used to think that evolution, in fact a lot of people still do think that evolution is confined to genetic systems, that you have to have genes in order to be an evolutionary system, that that's the characteristic feature of things with genes and it's also the characteristic feature of evolutionary systems that they have genes. I don't think that's true. I think any information system, because genes are particles of information, any information system is capable of evolutionary change if there is an element of randomness in the way it changes, an element of trial and error if you like, and if there's an element of selection. And clearly both are true of human society, that we try things. We don't come up with a single solution. Different people come up with different solutions and we get the opportunity to pick through the market or through choice or even through democracy. We get the opportunity to pick the ones we like and reject the ones we don't like. And so in that sense, evolution by natural selection is going on among ideas, among thoughts, among habits, among technologies, among morals, among gods, among businesses. Businesses exactly. So there's a lot of unconscious incremental change driven by evolution in human society. Is it fair though to think of like a spectrum of from outright creationism to outright like algorithmic evolution where on the one end, on the biological, we've got, you know, this is random choice, random selection, there's random mutations and they're checked against things in the world as the organism died, as it lived long enough to breed and so on. But cultural evolution seems like a weird halfway point perhaps because it's not entirely random. It does have agency. Like there are intelligent designers making design choices like I am going to try doing this thing instead of what we were doing yesterday. And then there's a selection process but the selection process is also being done by intelligent selectors who are themselves intelligent designers. So does this, does it look just like biological evolution because I can imagine it being weirder? It's certainly true that we are trying to improve the world in a way that Darwinism isn't, I mean biological Darwinism isn't trying. And you know that we can plan something and our plan might be a good plan and it gets selected. So in that sense, there is consciousness, there is purpose, there is aim in the human world. It would be foolish to deny that. What I'm saying is that to a surprising extent, that's a bad description of how we do change the world because yes, people come up with ideas for how to improve it but what really matters is having competition between those ideas and some of them surviving and some of them failing. Let me give you a very nice example that was given to me by Dan Dennett, the evolutionary philosopher and it's a quote from an early 20th century French philosopher by the name of Allah, he went by one name. And he, looking at the designs of boats in the Pacific Islands, he says, he thinks about it and he says, the badly designed one sank and disappeared, the well designed ones were copied. It was the sea that fashioned the boats. Yeah, sure, each person, when he built a new design of boat, was trying to make it a better one but it was the sea that decided whether it was a better design or not. And then some of them come along and say, isn't it amazing that we all only have good boats? There must be some principle of design by this. It's like, no, they're just not here anymore, like an anthropic principle kind of thing. That's right. As Douglas Adams said, the puddle says, isn't it amazing that this whole fits me so well? We see that in, I mean that would seem to explain to some extent the constant culture and arts decline attitude of art and music and whatever else used to be good, so much better way back when and that's largely because right now we're watching that process in action. We're watching the bad novels and the bad novels being written but in the past all we have left from that are the ones that were pretty good. That's a very interesting point and I think that's spot on. In other words, the second rate Victorian novels don't get read so we think, my goodness they were at good novels in Victorian times whereas today we have to labor through some dross in order to find the good ones and the filter of history is one of the reasons I like classical music is because it's been well filtered for me if you like and of course that's partly why we have rose tinted nostalgia about the past is because we've only bothered to remember the good stuff and to preserve the good stuff and we compare it with the present and we think, things went much better in those days. We've left out the bad bits and what I rather like about golden age nostalgia is that if you go back to the golden age what the Greeks described as the golden age because they were already nostalgic for time and you go back to the time of Hesiod, eight centuries before Christ you find that Hesiod was grumbling about how things aren't like what they used to be. Maybe that is something that ties in in some way to something you talk about in the book the sort of bias to purpose and the bias to design which I think that we have when it comes to say creationism and biological evolution especially here in America where creationism is still pretty popular but just in terms of human institutions in general. It's certainly I think true that we have a tendency to look for to think things are more top down than they are. It's a common mistake as it were a reflex we have and it manifests itself in the way we think inanimate objects are vindictive and think thunderstorms are revenge of the gods and that sort of thing. What dandenic calls the intentional stance is a big part of the way we view the world. I wouldn't see it necessarily so much as coming out of that golden age nostalgia thing that we were talking about as coming out of an evolutionary psychology would likely build in a hair trigger for intentionality because if your friend bumps you and you're walking along a narrow path next to a big cliff drop and you almost go over and he says oh sorry that was an accident it probably makes sense to say oh well it was an accident I mean not to say it was an accident but to say hang on a minute you were trying to kill me weren't you? Or to preserve on to err on that side. Or the noise in the bushes is someone coming to get you rather than the wind you had to err on the. That's an even better example. It's actually more plausible. I suppose your friends killing you but perhaps another question that strikes me before we get into some of the details of your chapters is they're called the evolution of education the evolution of money a bunch of these things but does it also maybe require something I think about in libertarianism in general that you have to have some sort of faith in the quality and goodness of people which which in your prior work on evolution you've written about virtue and things like this that you know you might not be full or bottom up explanations if you think that people are just bad because bad people would create evolutionary things too they would create the thunder dome and mad maxed or something like this so you have to actually believe that people are fundamentally good kind of the walkie inverse the Hobbesian paradigm that people are actually pretty good so that was maybe an important part of this that some people who don't believe in bottom up solutions maybe the one reason they don't endorse them. That's a very interesting point and the way in which this argument intersects with the slightly older or parallel argument about the perfect ability of man etc. is I think is in it which is kind of I wrestled with in my book the origins virtue is a really interesting question and you're quite right. The view that people only behave morally because they've been told to by priests or teachers is not really compatible with the view that people should be free to live their lives as they want if you genuinely think that we would all kill each other were it not for government being told as children that that's bad then of course you think that we must have benevolent dictators in charge of the world because the opposite is very dangerous anarchy and I think most people go around with a view that anarchy that lack of rules leads to top down rules like lack of top down rules exactly as opposed to bottom up emergent ones leads to really bad outcomes in which horrible things happen and on the whole the evidence doesn't bear that out I mean the one of the things I like to do is ask people can you name a country which you think has too little government and some people say Haiti Somalia maybe yeah well Haiti is not a good example because actually if you go to Haiti you find it's extremely difficult to start a business because the regulations are so tight even in a sort of badly governed country like that Somalia well actually it's got rather too much government it's just that it's not a monopolistic government it's several different warlords I asked you to me I asked students when I teach these kind of emergent rule things if whether or not before Hammurabi's code if they think that ancient Somalia was just complete chaos with everyone just running around kicking everyone and until he came down and carved this in that's what everyone okay well let's stop well no no one actually believes that exactly we're pretty good at behaving themselves let's talk let's talk about some of these actually Aaron did you have I was wanted to start I mean there's the the paradigmatic case of what we think of as a totally planned going back to the Hobbes and Locke totally planned institution is government you know we we got together and we created this thing in some distant past in order to protect our rights or do whatever and then we kept planning it and kept planning it until we got to today and but you say no like even government is often the product of an evolutionary process how does that work yes government is the emergence of monopoly on violence that that's pretty clear from both myth and history and and also what we see around the world is that the characteristic of a government is that it's managed to monopolize violence and so and therefore doesn't need to use it keeps it in the background and what I think is rather interesting is that you can see this arrangement emerging ab initio from nothing in certain institutions today and the example I give in the book is prison gangs prisons prisoners operate on a sort of you know the various kind of rules emerge among prisoners about what's good and what's bad behavior and it turns out that at a certain level a certain size of prisoners certain turnover of prisoners these rules start to break down and so what happens is that instead you see you see gangs emerging within the prison and the gang says you know we're in charge we decide what happens we punish transgressors and often this is very welcome to the prison authorities because they they find that what's happening is that order is being brought in but some quite powerful gang masters are emerging within the prison who are able to bribe the prison authorities etc so it's very parallel I think to and and but the point is it's not planned you know it it it appeared spontaneously David scarbeck has a very interesting book about this but doesn't that cut against the the general idea that what's unplanned is good and what is planned is bad if I mean if you're example of like look here's an unplanned thing prison gangs that doesn't sound all that encouraging well prison gangs are better than complete anarchy I mean you know complete chaos in prison which is the point there are a response to a much more dangerous and chaotic situation that they are a form of order emerging within within a prison sure these are bad guys we're talking about because they're in prison so you know we're talking about a problem of violence that is being solved now another one of your chapters you talk about the evolution of education which which is one of my favorite subjects it wasn't the case that the before the state came along and said we're going to have schools that there that there were no schools I mean as I would seem people might think but the story the real story is different indeed and and the literacy rates shot up in the 19th century in America but also in Britain and other parts of Europe and indeed in India in places like that long before there was any education public education policy or compulsory education or anything like that why because there's an out there was an once people you know ordinary working people got sufficiently well off that they could afford to worry about these kind of things there was an appetite to to come to arrangements whereby their kids got in got educated and so you see a huge progress evolutionary progress you know emergence of education systems and then government comes along and says look it's disgraceful that we haven't got enough education we're going to impose a system from top down and it's it's not always clear that that was an improvement in fact it seems in many cases to have slowed down the evolution of education sure it's improved education in the 20th century and so on but it's bound to because the resources were much more available the wealth of the society was much greater it would also have improved under a much more free system so you're also seeing that now coming back to haunt the the public sector education because of the ways in which people can can use new technology to develop new forms of education and I think self-organized learning is an example of that so go to Mitra's experiments showing that kids with computers attached to the internet as long as they're working in groups and as long as they're given certain well-posed questions by teachers will teach themselves surprisingly well and I think that's you know that some reminder that that that there are new forms of education that are much more bottom up that are going to emerge and of course the Kahn Academy and things like that in terms of using the internet to teach people you know the idea that that you should have a medieval structure well actually it's not a medieval it's an 18th century Prussian structure where you have one guy standing at the front of the class and we're all sitting at desks you know that's not the only way to learn it's just I hope not there has to be something different out there exactly that seems to raise it another way of arguing that the other side of coming at the problem with the planned systems is so we can you know one hand say like look if we begin with emergent processes then we've got this selection process going on and it's going to weed out the things that don't work and the things that will work and that was better than hoping that one guy or one group of experts can get us to the right thing but then on the flip side and we can see this with public education is even if the planners let's say get it right at the time like they come up with sitting in you know early 20th century we're going to come up with a system of education that will work for all Americans the world changes a lot and the problem with these planned things is the planners like to keep them the way they are and we tend to be stuck with them well I think what that's teaching you is that monopoly is very bad at change and that's because change comes from trial and error in an evolutionary system and so letting a thousand flowers bloom and seeing which one is best adapted to the new technology the new situation the new background is the best way of making sure that you don't get stuck in a rut and do the same thing over and over again or maybe the way of talking about it could be that or another way of talking about it could be that the government if you think about it as an ecosystem and you and you saw something in the ecosystem an animal with an adaptation that seemed to be counterproductive or made no sense you'd wonder what would like a peacocks tail for example you'd wonder what was the thing that allowed it to exist and the government has this unique adaptation called the ability to use force which is the ability that which is why it can have things continue to exist that no one even wants perhaps or a prussian model of education 150 years after it's out of date because it has its own adaptation to thrive in this world which is the ability to use force in this in this specific way well back to the point about what government is it's a it's a monopoly on force as as we said and the the keyword there is monopoly I think you know that that it only government only pacifies a country because it's a monopoly I mean if you had two rival monopolies on force within a country by definition you've got a civil war so so in it has to solve that problem government has to be on monopoly but that produces another problem which is that it can't evolve it can't change fast enough it it's not responsive enough to new environments and it doesn't experiment enough it it doesn't try new things and so for example political systems tend to be surprisingly long-lived they they change with revolutions but they don't change much in between and political reform is notoriously difficult to achieve I make the point in the book that if you brought Daniel Defoe who you know wrote about riding around England describing it in the early 18th century if you brought him back today 300 years later he would find everything completely changed except government which would be horribly familiar there's there's a constitutional monarch there's a bicameral parliament there's an unelected house of laws you know etc etc there's nothing depressing about that is there a way though to introduce evolutionary pressures into government because I mean we have a system right now where we you know at the global level there is not a monopoly there's no state that controls all of it and they are competing but the history of humanity is filled with destructive competition among states it tends not to go well when two states compete with each other is there a way to get them more into an evolutionary process without it just being a series of wars well David Hume made the point and a lot of people have continued to make this point since that the reason Europe stole a march on China in the from the sort of 18th century on well from the 17th century onwards was because it was fragmented politically and that meant that during the reformation and the renaissance and the enlightenment an individual inventor or or talent of some kind could get up and leave if he didn't like the regime he was living in and this happens all the time I mean if you go and look you know Gutenberg or the man who invented mice and china or whatever you know they often move from one country to another to find a regime that's more congenial for them to live under so it's very favorable to innovation to having a fragmented continent and the reason Europe is always fragmented is because of its peninsulas and its mountain ranges it's very hard to unify a lot of people tried Julius Caesar Hitler Napoleon Charles V none of them pulled it off for very long whereas China which is a much more sort of concentric country with great big rivers running through it and and without very much in the way of peninsulas was very easy to unify and although it's occasionally fragmented and it's its golden age was when it was a bit more fragmented nonetheless when it it usually ends up being turned into an empire and very clearly when it gets turned into an empire it tends to stand still and be actually anti-innovative because it gets a regime that's that's too monopolistic so war is the price that Europe pre paid for being fragmented but innovation was the reward it got for being fragmented on that on that point dovetailing off that is there a top-down bias in or what would be the purpose oh sorry can I come back on one post script to that because it's it's an interesting thought so where does America fit into that in many ways it looks like China it's easy to to to unify as as a North America I'm talking about and but of course the answer is the federal structure gives you just about the best of both worlds a single monolithic country but with an ability to have experimental governments within it theoretically at least there is right and at its best yeah with of course the risk that that turns into a civil war over states rights which it does at one point but you know the the the states as laboratories is a huge advantage of your system that most countries don't have so yeah the the question I was asking was about about history in terms because we were bringing up history and you write in the book about sort of the bot the same sort of bias that we have when we think of history the top-down view of history as opposed to thinking about it as more organic it kind of reminds you of some of the wig view of history that this mesis and to discuss the history is directed by people and has a purpose and it's going towards something usually you know centralization and nice classy buildings but but yeah how is there a bias infecting our view of history well I think we believe in the great man theory of history too much we tend to to say you know brilliant George Washington he won he won the war he created the nation yeah and of course he deserves some credit but if you go back and look at the surrender Yorktown of the British forces and this isn't a Brit complaining I was just gonna come back on that yeah you got sour grapes here it's way to pass and I'm very glad you won that one it was inevitable you were gonna win that war but that's kind of the point but if you go back and look at what actually happened the malaria parasite played a huge role in the surrender of the that particular British army because the Cornwallis had been ordered to to to stay in the low ground around the Chesapeake Bay and all these three-quarters of his army was debilitated when the battle happened and that's true of wars historically so yeah often death in the camps and it's either economical biological or parasitic or something the reason why a war gets won but nonetheless we say I mean Napoleonic Wars you know Wellington wins not because he was a better tactician than Napoleon but because Britain had the most money and you know the allies did as it were and you know in the end they were able to throttle Napoleon for that reason so the the the the great man theory of history is that great men take history and turn it in one direction or another and obviously that can happen I don't think anyone would deny that Hitler was a great man in the wrong sense of the word obviously you know effecting a lot of things do not mean to imply that he was a good man of course but on the whole we overemphasize that we don't take into account the inexorable inevitable emergent forces and the degree to which your ordinary people are what's deciding the outcome in the way they're behaving and trading and and and so on so I think you know we give too much credit to the people on top of history rather than the people at the bottom of history what about the role of innovators that we have I mean so much of the the really wonderful stuff that's improved our lives today came from smart individuals making discoveries whether that was Newton and I guess Leibniz for calculus or you know the invention of whatever these things happen to be all are from a single vaccine's vaccine food the iPhone I have in front of me well there again I think we overemphasize the great man and by the way and you know I'm not I'm not dissing these wonderful inventors and I am a huge fan of science I'm a huge fan of technological invention but look at you know do you really think that if if Google hadn't invented the search engine we'd have no search engines if Thomas Edison had invented the light bulb we'd have no light bulbs if if Newton hadn't discovered gravity we would never discover gravity if Darwin hadn't discovered natural selection you know it's inevitable I mean the the double helix of DNA was bound to be discovered in the 1950s the technology had reached the point where it was inevitable so in that sense every single scientist and inventor is dispensable you can do without them you can even run over Einstein and before he discovers special relativity and you still get special relativity because Hendrik Lorenz was on the trail and would have got that do you see what I mean so I mean this sounds like I'm being very rude about these guys and and but I'm not really meaning to I'm just saying that that let's hear it for the ordinary technologists and and grunts who are sort of putting together the pieces that mean that actually this thing is ripe and someone's gonna find it and you know let's celebrate the chap who find it but let's not overdo it the Nobel Prize tends to be in that sense very unfair because it selects the person who happened to be in the place to put the keystone in the arch or whatever it is but can we can we advocate for say government funding of these institutions understanding that there's a lot of does an evolutionary bottom up stuff so say the Manhattan project we had to get a bunch of people in there to share ideas but have the funding for them so they can share ideas that they come up with this and so many different false starts and we need to figure out how to do this but the end of it we have nuclear weapons which bad thing but probably going to come anyway but nuclear power and all these things so so maybe government has a role in trying to direct this towards some sort of path well certainly whoever's in charge of society or whoever's taking the decisions should do their best to create an ecosystem in which innovation happens absolutely and what does that require it requires you know plentiful movement of people movement of ideas trade so that things are coming into contact with each other it requires resources it requires stable infrastructure etc now does it require government pump priming yes obviously in some cases it does but would it get other kinds of pump priming yes that's true too you know in the first half of the 20th century Britain and America were conspicuous by not spending any public money on science whereas France and Germany did spend money on science which would were more successful arguably Britain and America were more successful in discoveries in that period so I think the where the money comes from doesn't necessarily matter so much as how you make sure that the money and the people and the and the opportunities and the resources and the infrastructure are in place and that usually these days is a role for government but it doesn't sort of have to be well that that they sort of the fall question I had on here was was kind of based on that if you kind of think so we wouldn't advocate for emergent evolutionary stuff if say an asteroid is going to hit the earth I mean we'd want people to come in and plan and organize people and say let's get the asteroid I assume or build the laser or whatever well it depends are you suggesting that we we know which technology we're going to use to head off the asteroid we want to make a Manhattan project we just need to well yeah but exactly but what are you going to do you need some experimentation to find out what technology to use to head off the asteroid and that I think you know this climate change is the thing here should we be spending our money on r and d to come up with cheap and abundant low carbon energy or should we be spending it on top down targets and plans well I think we should spend it on r and d you know I think that's more likely to to produce the results so so yes if we know it's just a matter of putting together a 10 billion pounds to to solve the problem then obviously we've got to club together and do that but if we don't know what's going to solve the problem then we should let a thousand flowers bloom so one of the objections that I get when I make the thousand flowers bloom sort of argument whether it's you know let's not centrally plan this but leave it up to the market or let emergent processes handle it is the sense that evolution seems to work pretty well and we can see that with biological evolution but a tremendous cost you know all of those mutations that failed along the way all of those organisms that died out and when you're talking about people's lives in the real world you know so we say like a free market and healthcare will lead to all of these terrific innovations and lower costs and provide access to more people and it will be better but we can't tell you the specifics because you can't tell the specifics about a market process and the response is well okay but what do I say to the person who needs the healthcare right now you know and the process hasn't provided something for him yet but if we centrally plan it maybe it won't be as good in the long run but we can help this guy right now it seems a lot to ask these people to be the cost for a evolutionary process yeah but I think that's a false dichotomy because I don't think we're saying to the person with polio in 1950 we won't give you an iron lung because we're going to spend all our money on a vaccine but we are we are saying let's see if there's a better way out there than simply designing a better iron lung and it turned out there was it was a vaccine so I think you can run both horses at once as it were and yes evolution is wasteful and a lot of bad ideas fall by the wayside but better bad ideas fall by the wayside than people fall by the wayside which is often the results if you if you try and do it by planning you know it's hard to argue that centrally planned systems have not been wasteful I mean look at often they're very wasteful of human lives whereas at least the the experimentation is wasteful of ideas if you like you know look at the economy of South Korea you know sorry North Korea well let's look at them both South Korea is an experimental place that tries lots of different things and no doubt wastes a lot of electricity on advertising hoardings or something futile which North Korea doesn't but North Korea certainly wastes human lives and human potential and human happiness and so I don't think that that's a that's a fair argument because you can solve a problem pretty quickly with evolution often and get a better result and the fact that it's disruptive often means that the people who are suffering the people who feel this pain and this waste are the inefficient ones who should be got out of the way anyway not not the people but the organizations I mean in in that sense should be got out of the way anyway so you know the vested interests are the ones who who are on the whole making that argument well that that that something Aaron I have talked about for a very long time is that maybe at the end the best argument for freedom and also the evolution that comes with freedom is that it minimizes the damage of being wrong and this is opposed to governments will maximize the damage of being wrong because we're all wrong often I mean if we're all humans in government or markets we have a bad idea and we we run with it it doesn't work but that and that would be a dead end in the evolutionary change if you if you let the evolution go but if you have government with this unique ability wrongness can go on for a very long time at very high cost yeah let me let me tell you a story about a really rather inspirational guy who's just left the UK government but has been there for five years it was brought in from the IT industry called Mike Bracken and he was given the problem five years ago of these gigantic IT projects that where hundreds of billions of dollars are spent that and then you end up trashing the whole thing at the end because it doesn't work government projects exactly yeah exactly the same sort of thing and and and he has basically kind of stopped that in the UK and we haven't had any of those in recent years and and I've asked him how did he achieve this and it's all about saying instead of designing the whole system you've got to fail fast get it get a little bit about there test it in the real world get another little bit out there try keep trying it on a small scale not just piloting you know that's piloting the whole thing he's saying do it in stages and test it at every stage evolve it essentially but I was very struck by his use of the word failure you know I want you to fail you know I want you to discover what's wrong with this you know don't say it's not ready to be used yet go out there and test it and fail fast fail fail cheaply and fail fast was his motto and I think he's had pretty big impact on it I mean he may be one of many examples but you know his his his model is now of interest to other countries around the world I know that you know etc so so I think there are ways of of doing it even within monolithic structures do you fear that the more the government grows with this this unique power of force that it will constrain the evolutionary growth of society when there are a lot of more there are more entities out there that have this granted power and therefore are not going to be easy to get rid of and so maybe we won't be evolving as fast as we might as we could have there's certainly an arms ranks between monopolistic and bureaucratic and anti-innovation tendencies and the opposite as it were I think the good guys will stay one step out of the bad guys because as you've seen with the internet you know it was it was out of the blocks and three quarters of the way down the track before government even realized it existed thank god thank god and couldn't catch up and and regulate it but then you take examples like genetically modified crops in Europe or electronic cigarettes and you see how vested interests working through monopolistic governments are managing to stifle innovation almost completely and keep keep new products out of certain markets almost completely and and and yes I do worry that the the power of the the political power that not necessarily government but you know corporations can achieve through lobbying government often is sometimes sufficient to stop this process happening and when you then look at the history of innovation and the history of progress it's a pretty rare flower it's it's you know it's in America in the 20th century it's in Renaissance Italy in the 15th century it's in Arabia it's in China it's not everywhere you know it's in Holland in the 17th century etc but you know you can imagine an asteroid landing on the wrong part of the world and and and suddenly there's no word doing this thing and everybody is is is run by very neophobic governments as well free thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel to learn more about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org