 Welcome everybody to your on Brook show on on this. I think it's a it's a Wednesday afternoon And while this is show is taped. We'll be putting it up. I think tonight. So you'll you'll get it on Wednesday I'm really excited about today's show because I'm interviewing I think one of the more important intellectuals of our time somebody who I Agree on a lot of things with which I can't really say about a lot of intellectuals in the world today And mainly what we agree on is the value of human life and the value of progress the value of human flourishing and and and success and prosperity and and a possibility for that and So we're talking today to To Matt Ridley welcome at Hi, everyone. Great to be on the show. Thanks. Those of you who don't know who Matt is and I'm sure there Not many of you out there. He is a who's been a newspaper columnist What for the economist for a long time? Peach Dean biology so a scientist the author of World famous rational optimist Which is how I first discovered I discovered Matt and and really really enjoyed that work and and often use in my talks I use the graph, you know the the graph right over the book and and it's wonderful and And and what we're gonna talk about today really and and I could go on that the biography is long Matt has published many books Including Red Queen and Genome and and many others and Has one of the most watched I guess Ted videos Ted Ted talks ever But I'm gonna skip all the bio. You can find it online It's easy to get what's really important is that he is about to publish a new book how innovation works I understand it's a little delay in publishing it in the UK But that it's coming out in the US next in May and the middle of May correct It comes out on the 14th of May in the US and the UK publisher has Decided to delay publication in order to hopefully get the other side of the coronavirus epidemic And and to give time for me to add a short Afterword about the epidemic good and we'll talk a little bit about that so If you enjoy this interview go out there and pre-order the book there's huge value in pre-orders So don't wait for the book to come out Amazon is there And and I know most of you have lots of time on your hands right now because because you're all hunkered down at home So please go and pre-order the book. So I'm hoping that actually you know This year might be a good good year for book sales because it's one of the few things that we're gonna have time to do Well, I'm a little mixed on that because I hope this Ends quickly, but it but you're probably right because I Dotted in quickly. I think you're right. I think we're gonna be hunkered out for a while Although I'm finding that I'm busy and now You know, I'm busy and now that I then I usually am there's more going on and me too. Actually. Yeah, no It's non-stop, isn't it and you know, and it's a very worrying situation for a lot of people So so I was gonna start off with the question of you know, obviously the rational optimist was this very Positive book about the future of mankind about the present about about how much we have progressed From the past but also how much potential there is in the future how much more there is to be done and to achieve And given what's going on in the world right now. Are you still a rational optimist? Yes, I am and the reason I say that it's 10 years since the rational optimist came out in 2010 and every year since then people have said to me Well, are you still a rational optimist in view of what's going on? whether it's a war in Ukraine or a war in Syria or Eurozone crisis or whatever it might be and Of course this particular crisis the coronavirus pandemic is a lot worse than most of those and is a real shock to the World economy and potentially a horrific episode in terms of its death rate and the effect it has on society through that very very frightening for a lot of people and And yet You know, I've argued that a lot of the threats that face us are Defeatable are beatable and I think this is too it so happens that The world of viruses has come up with a Devastatingly clever combination of contagiousness and lethality among old people certainly Which the contagiousness enables the virus to spread among people who are not showing symptoms and then the lethality among older people Is sustained by that spread so this is a very very dangerous virus are not minimizing the effect of it and it comes after a series of What you might call reassuringly disappointing Potential pandemic so things like SARS and bird flu and swine flu and even Ebola, which was Lethal to a lot of people but could not apparently escape from relatively small areas Perhaps gave us too much comfort that this Idea of a pandemic virus was not a huge threat But if you look at back at HIV in the 1980s, we clearly are a sitting duck as a very large population For these viruses and we should have spent a lot more time preparing for it But we will get through this. We have modern medicine We sequence the genome of this very quickly and I suspect that we will work out how to prevent people dying I don't know how to prevent people spreading the virus and so on So when we come out of the other side of this, we will be able to resume civilization This is not going to be the end of the world and just to say why I'm still a rational optimist In the ten years since I wrote that book and I wrote it in the middle of a very deep recession In the ten years since There has been Spectacular progress in the retreat of poverty now less than eight less than eight percent of the world lives in extreme poverty That number was something like 60 percent when I was born. That's incredible child mortality almost any measure you can think of has been getting better and What really excites me is that those numbers have been getting getting better For the poorer people of the world much faster than for the richer people of the world So global inequality is being going down just to give you an idea of that The income of the average Ethiopian has doubled in the last ten years The income of the average Italian has gone slightly backwards in that time So Ethiopians are much poorer than Italians, but they're catching up with Italians And that's a good thing as far as the world is concerned It would be nice if Italians were getting richer faster, too But that isn't the case and of course Italy is now at the epicenter of a particularly vicious pandemic And and but even even in the West where maybe incomes are now rising fast or not at all in some cases I'd say standard of living in quality of life is increased partially because of the kind of innovations you talk about in the book the technology the iPhone the Availability the fact that we can hunker down today and we have access to every movie ever made Through a through Netflix and things like that access to music access to all these things access to books Which we don't have to go to bookstore to buy because we can just download them off from Amazon Which is just stunning in terms of what you thought 20 or 20 years ago just 20 years ago The idea would have been stunning. So absolutely just look at us I mean, I'm sitting in a closet in my house in northern England You're sitting in Puerto Rico in your house and we're talking on an extremely high quality line and without much fear of being interrupted or of the signal being corrupted and That wouldn't have been true five years ago, let alone 10 by video I mean you and I still remember long-distance phone calls, right? Well, and which we didn't make because they were too expensive I remember when I first moved to the US I would never call my parents because they who in Israel because it was too expensive You couldn't afford it and today nobody thinks twice about video coming across the world essentially Costless, I mean that is extraordinary It's the plummeting cost of things that really drives home the price LED lighting would be another example of something that's come in within the last 10 years Unpredicted unheralded the results of an innovation by a Japanese professor 20 30 years ago But now we can get white light or tunable light out of LEDs uses far less electricity than the preceding technologies and Is an is yet another step in the incredible decline of the cost of lighting? I mean that's my favorite example National optimism is is that you basically have to work for a third of a second these days on the average wage to earn an hour of light Well back in 1800 you had to work for six hours to earn that much light from a candle on the average wage That's the the sort of improvement. We've seen in technologies over the last couple of centuries And and of course as you point out what that light provides to all of us from the poorest to the wealthiest is the ability to actually Have a life after it's dark actually read books actually have leisure time after dark I mean, it's it's just that little improvement in human life is Immeasurable really yeah, and of course, I'm not saying everything's getting better or that everything will necessarily go on getting better in fact, I think one of the Important things to say is that people sometimes say that this is a Panglossian attitude But that's completely wrong. Dr. Pangloss was somebody who said the world was perfect and could not be improved I'm saying exactly the opposite that good as this world is. There's no reason. We can't make it a heck of a lot better For not just some people but for everybody So it's it's about Staring up people to be ambitious about improving the world Rather than staring up people to be complacent about how the world has improved and about the conditions that make it possible For the world to get better In those conditions they point and we'll talk about a little bit about that when we talk I talk about the book So let's turn to the book how innovation works as the title. It's again available for pre-order on Amazon right now You make a distinction between Invention and innovation and and I'd like you to a little bit explain what that is and and what differentiates invention and inventors from innovation in an innovators well a Lot of the people who who transformed our lives people like Thomas Edison or Jeff Bezos to choose people from two different eras We're not actually inventors of anything new I Mean in Edison was to some degree, but not really I mean that lots of other people invented the light bulb Edison perfected it and model a point He made it reliable. He made it affordable. He made it Work well He made it reach lots of people and Bezos was the same with online retail if you like and so my point is that What really changes the world is not coming up with a new device But making that device available to everybody and that's a much harder job often than coming up with a new device in the first place And yet we often don't recognize that we don't reward it In fact, if you look at the patent system or the Nobel Prize system or anything like that It rewards the guy in the ivory tire who comes up with the original idea Much more than it rewards the person who puts in the the perspiration. I mean Edison had this famous quote Invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration So what I mean by innovation is taking a new idea and turning it into something that actually changes people's lives rolling it out and the The focus of my book is very much on that and I show that the stories we tell about inventions are often Kind of misleading because they try to pull out one hero at the start of the story as the Inventor and in fact when you look more closely he was already reliant on the work of other people before him or she and Then a lawful lot of work had to be done after them and it's that it's the whole process of Gradually turning an invention into an innovation that changes the world. So for example, the Wright brothers Invented flight. I think they are inventors But if you look at them closely what they did was Incremental inch by inch solving each of the problems by drawing on the work of other people By studying the by doing a lot of trial and error trial and error is absolutely crucial to this process a lot of error And eventually they got airborne and then the whole Technology was taken up by other people and gradually improved until we had reliable Flight of the kind that we're all used to today. So it may it's a mistake I think to think of invention as the key aspect of Change in the world Innovation is is really the thing To what extent You differentiate between the innovators Businessmen entrepreneurs are those are those are those concepts related or those ideas? I mean the innovators typically businessman. Are they typically entrepreneurs? Yes, on the whole the innovators that I'm writing about are people who are working Running their own businesses and changing the world that way. Yeah, but there are exceptions Yeah, so Let me give you an example One of my favorite stories in the book is the insecticide treated bed net for defeating malaria in Africa and I actually tried to track down the origin of this very simple technology because Estimates show that this technology alone is responsible for about 70% of the decline in malaria And it was the adoption of this technology particularly by the Gates Foundation around the year 2003 That turned the curve on malaria malaria was going up until that point malaria mortality. It's been going down since So I wanted to know Where did this technology come from and I tracked it back to one very good experiment done in Burkina Faso in 1983 by two French scientists and some Burkina Faso scientists, which was very systematic and they they they just They very cleverly Set it up so that they could measure every they could count every single mosquito that came into a series of 36 huts and How many of them got a blood meal and how many of them didn't how many left the hut? How many died, you know that kind of thing and they found that a mosquito net was helpful a Mosquito net with insecticide on it was even more helpful and a mosquito net with insecticide on it But tears in it was just as good as one without holes in it and this was a crucial breakthrough because it was Really the insight was that you know, you can't keep a mosquito net intact in normal conditions in African life for very long, but that doesn't matter if it's got Interst if it's got insecticide on it and so these guys never made a penny out of it They didn't set up a business. They weren't entrepreneurs. They were working for the public good But I think of them as innovators Absolutely, and What's interesting is you mentioned that people don't always respect the innovators and indeed if they're businessman If they make money at it, they're often denounced for for the yes, and that is a That's very frustrating is that you know somehow it's seen as as kind of a bad thing If someone makes a fortune out of making the world better, but a lot of the people who drove down the price of something You know the price of steel was driven down by Carnegie and he was vilified as a robber baron We can be just today. Oh Yes, the way he ran Microsoft Yeah, yeah So in terms of what makes great innovators I thought so first, I mean the stories are fantastic the way the book is structured is you have Several chapters early on in the book that just tell the stories in a number of different major industries And then you kind of summarize the conclusions or what what what we can learn from those stories Which I think is a terrific way to structure a book the stories are amazing and And but certain characteristics of these people start coming out when you read story after story after story There's something about innovators. There's different than people who don't innovate and and so I'm curious what you think some of those are I mean, it struck me that I mean, I love the story about lady mary And and maybe you can tell that story briefly and what an independent woman she was at an era where It must have been very difficult to be an independent woman in the sense of the social The social pressure. I mean she was independent in every aspect of her life. It seems yes This is lady mary workley montague in the early 18th century in england who was the daughter of a duke and She married another lord and you know, so she's she's not a Humble person at all But she is the Key person in the story of the innovation that is inoculation that is effectively what we now call vaccination And she went with her husband to constant in opal who he was the ambassador there And while she was there, she got to know Turkish women in harems and things and she discovered that they had this way of dealing with smallpox And she had seen her brother die of smallpox. She had seen Many famous people in the uk dive smallpox It was a terrifying disease at the time and she didn't want her children to die And it had scored her as well, right? And and she had survived smallpox herself and come out scarred and lost a lot of her beauty And so she comes back to the uk and says look, please please please try this thing. It works really well in turkey in istanbul And she was denounced she was uh attacked for this Terrible pseudo scientific idea that you actually give people Deliberately a small dose of smallpox from someone who survived the disease And that way, um, they become immune. I mean come on. Can you think of anything more dangerous? But she proselytized this so she's not the inventor We don't actually know who the inventor was it probably wasn't even in turkey. It probably came there from china But um, uh, the she but she does spread that spread the word And then later in the century edward jenna picks it picks it up and turns it into vaccination Which is really the use of a of a different virus a cowpox to protect you against smallpox And you know, not not quite so dangerous as it were And of course, this is a very germane story right now when we're thinking about how to develop a vaccine for um Corona virus And it's surprising in a way how slow we still are at developing viruses That work against these diseases. That has been a bit of a shock. I think to those of us in the last Few weeks discovering how despite all our incredible advances in molecular biology and genetics We haven't been able to speed up the process of vaccine development nearly as much as we would like Which is a reminder that we need more innovation in the world not less Yep, absolutely. Absolutely more freedom to innovate more freedom to innovate more emphasis on the real threats And this one is a is obviously a real threat. I mean what struck me about that story is is that She elopes She she uh, she she's hanging around with with women in a harem She is she goes to london and she stands up to the authorities at the world society And and and she prostitizes. I mean, this is an independent. She's an awkward woman. You know, I mean, she's not an easy person She's she's a sort of literary figure too. She's and she You know, and she can be maddening people say she's infuriating She quite quickly gets very bored of the husband. She eloped with he's a dull diplomat So, oh, you know, it's a wonderful story But but what what what seems to go through all of them is they're all they all independent thinkers They have to think differently. They they they and they stand up against naysayers because every innovator Has the naysayers and they're always there in every one of the stories Yes, I found this wonderful quote from William Petty, who's almost the founder of economics. He's a six 17th century polymath extraordinary man, actually um one-time professor of anatomy inventor of economics land speculator um, all sorts of things and and He he tried to be an inventor and didn't really succeed. He was very angry about this people didn't take up his He's rather second-rate inventions And he said every man who comes up with something new has to run the gaunt loop of all petulant wits Who try and drag down his idea and it is incredibly true? I mean all the stories I tell, you know You had to be strong If you'd come up with a new idea that you wanted to change the world with Everybody was going to tell you why it doesn't work and not many people were going to Let you get away with uh arguing that it was going to work. So you had to be awkward that said Later in the book I tell the story of somebody who is the very opposite of awkward but is a great great Uh innovator and that's gordon moore the person behind moore's law Who is a key part of the whole story of the transistor? And he's just a nice guy and he never leaves his home state of california and he doesn't Really rock the boat? He just gets on with it. So it's you don't have to be awkward. You can be a nice guy too. Yeah and all of all of these people are I mean the thinkers and their learners because you mentioned you always build on other people's knowledge I mean that's all human knowledge is like that in any field and They're they're constantly trying to learn they're constantly incredibly curious that the people who are always looking out there out You know outside to discover new knowledge and figure out how to apply it Which is which is fast, but but I think They're also open to trial and error. Oh, of course I use this phrase again and again in the book because it seems because because if you ask them You know, if you ask Jeff Bezos or or anyone else, what's the secret? Try lots of things fail often fail fast, you know Um, it doesn't matter failure is not is not a is just an incentive to go on to greater success Um, uh, henry forward said something like that Um, uh, it's it's very interesting how important this whole process of being prepared to experiment is Um, uh, you're not going to solve this problem by thinking it through And coming up with a perfect design at the first attempt. There's a wonderful, uh, sort of Contra, uh, you know, sort of counterpoint of this which is uh a man named samuel langley Who was an absolutely brilliant astronomer who decided that he could invent the first airplane and he, uh He insisted on keeping all his ideas secret. He Designed everything from scratch. He got a huge government grant for it from the united states he was head of the spesonian institution and he, uh, um Finally set it all up for the first demonstration of this thing that was definitely going to work Um, uh in december 1903, which is a key date you'll notice in a minute and it leapt up to the air Stalled crashed and fell into the water pretty well right next to where to taken off And destroyed his reputation overnight whereas 10 days later And a few hundred miles away in north carolina the right brothers were doing it very differently They were trial and error. They tried things They didn't work. They tried them again and they didn't work. They they used they knew how to develop theories too You know, they use wind tunnels and so on but experiment after experiment Yeah, and it's important not to I mean trial and error doesn't is not anti thinking. It's the contrary. It's the try you learn from it Correct you because I know a lot of people who do trial and error never learn and therefore and that's true Politicians for example, you know, they try the same thing over and over again, and they never learn from the You must try a different thing every time. I mean I I quote this fact many times in the book because it's just so startling to me Edison was trying to find the perfect plant material to make a filament of a light bulb out of And he eventually hit on japanese bamboo, which turns out to be perfect He tried six thousand different plant materials before he got to that That's amazing So so so it's it's kind of trial thing Trial error think trial error think trial. I mean that's the way that's I think the way any any innovation ultimately works um And they work really hard and they're really really committed or at least almost all of them, right? I mean it doesn't happen easily uh It in the end a common theme is these people are obsessives. They they work all night. They work all day They they work for months on end. They forget to eat, you know um People who change the world often have that characteristic and it towards the end of the book I ask why is china doing so much more innovation than the rest of the world at the moment And I say well, they have this 996 philosophy 9 a.m. To 9 p.m. Six days a week Nobody does that in the west anymore And they did used to I mean edison demanded inhuman hours of work from his employees, you know, that they Dropped exhausted some of them because he made them work ridiculous hours And uh, you know, it's the same with uh, you know, one of my heroes from my part of the world George Stevens and the man who invented the railways and the steam engine steam locomotive um Just ridiculously diligent. Um, he and his son were just non-stop trying things and trying things and and never giving up So uh, the the lesson There is that we do depend on these people. They're extraordinary in one way But they're not extraordinary in another because all they have to do is prepare to work hard and try lots of things and be open-minded. These aren't These aren't Genius, you know, you don't have to be super clever. You just have to Put in the elbow grease I think they have to be clever in a particular way. So they're not clever and maybe in the traditional way we measure clever, but You know, you make the point that that if Jeff Bezos doesn't do it somebody else would do it but Even if somebody else would have to have very similar characteristics to a Jeff Bezos Different people than than many of us I I think they have a they have a different way of looking at the world in a commitment that most people just don't have Yes, but but I do want to just stress this Inevitability point of some innovations because I think it is important If you think about the early 1990s, the most important innovation is probably the search engine Sergei brinn and uh larry page come up with a very good search engine. They call it google They sweep the the pool and end up becoming extremely rich and successful Uh, if they hadn't done that would we have no search engines? No, of course not We would have them there were search engines before them. Yahoo is a good, you know, it was a very good I remember the old There were a bunch of it during google. There were probably a thousand or thousand nobody actually thought google would be the winner No, indeed. And and so if Sergei brinn never meets larry page We don't end up in a different world. We don't use the word google probably, but we don't end up in a different world So and and you know, and I when I think of how often I use search engines today It's pretty well every day. I think so they they are an incredibly important innovation and they're kind of the obvious way to make money out of the internet is to Advertise a long side search. Okay So did anyone see that coming? No Nobody you you search in vain in the 1980s Or 1970s or 60s for anybody in the entire world of computers to saying, you know, once we network these computers The really interesting thing is going to be set to set up set up software programs that searched every everybody's computer to find things Nobody nobody comes up with this. So why is Innovation so blindingly obvious in retrospect and yet so very difficult to see in prospect In fact brinn and and page didn't even think they were inventing a search engine They thought they were cataloging the internet. Yep. Yep as most search engines at the time it was about cataloging It's about cataloging but you see You know, some people would do the cataloging and then not pick up on there's a business opportunity here But not but some people see it. They see once once it becomes obvious to them They run with it. Not everybody does that. I I still think there's a unique genius to the innovators And and I'm not saying they wouldn't be others who would do it I'm just saying there's a there's a group among us who can do that and most people just can't It's not that if some It's not if I worked harder I would be able to to do what some of these guys do. It's not that's not the issue They show you're in a particular way. Are you sure? I am I actually am And and I I did want to pick up on a point you made earlier. I was I mean, you know about trial and error I think one of the things about failure one of the things that makes silicon value unique one of the things that makes That culture unique is their willingness to fail And and you know race the embracing of failure and the willing to learn from failure not failure for the sake of learning but You know, Steve Jobs gets fired from apple starts a computer company. Nobody's ever heard of And then lands up at apple learns takes everything he's learned from his past failures and creates one of the most successful businesses in human history But that takes failure in order to to achieve You can write the history of amazon as a as a story of Repetitive failure. I mean they got a lot wrong Um, they got the they invested in a bunch of companies in the dot-com boom nearly all of which went bust They they lost a ton of money on toy retailing. They they you know again and again They made tremendous mistakes and bezos is the first to admit that Um, uh, he's always there's people to do it. He encourages you have to keep swinging and eventually you hit one out the park And uh, so I think that the the really smart people are the ones like bezos who realize that That that that's that that failure is only another word for to try again as it And and yet You know the danger of course then is that you get a theranos You know theranos is a is a company that that modeled itself on apple Elizabeth Holmes saw herself as steve jobs She emulated in many all sorts of ways and she believed in fake it till you make it which is a traditional silicon valley Sort of idea that that you know, even if you haven't quite been able to make a product yet announce it and then And then you've got to produce it And it didn't work. I mean it turns out microfluidics cannot benefit from miniaturization to the same degree that Uh transistors do you know transistors have this amazing property that the smaller you make them More reliable they get as well as cheaper That's not true of blood samples the smaller the blood sample you take the harder it is to to diagnose the disease um and so theranos got deeper and deeper into um Covering up their errors and their failures and eventually were exposed as having Really been making it up all along And the company failed and and you know there was a lot of hype around that so Just because somebody's failing doesn't mean they're going to succeed. Absolutely Absolutely So I learned of a new law when I read your book, you know called amma amma amma's law About hype and and it reminded me a lot of what happens in silicon valley regularly kind of the the cycle of Of adoption and and hype around so tell us what what the law is and how it applies to kind of the the Maybe the dot-com or or some of the other innovations in in recent times Yeah, I'm rather proud of digging this out because the the the the the wording is We underestimate the impact of innovation in the long run, but we overestimate it in the short run We expect too much of an innovation in the first 10 years We don't see nearly as big a deal as it's going to be in the next 10 years and uh That phrase has been around a lot and a lot of people have been saying it for years And it often got Attributed to Arthur C. Clarke And I tried to track down who did actually first say that and it became clear that it's a guy called roy amara who was a futurologist and computer scientist in silicon valley in the 1960s And I got in touch with some of his colleagues to find out when he first said it and nobody quite knows They just know he was saying it by the mid 60s Um, so I'm not the the person to to discover that he said it But I think I have rescued his reputation because on the whole he was going to get lost to history without somebody calling the law Amara's law after him And I think it's a very important insight because when you think about it This cycle this hype cycle as I call it Characterizes a lot of technologies so the internet In in the late 1990s, it's possible to argue that the internet is disappointing That we've been promised more than we're getting That where is e-commerce that you know There's not that much people want to do on the what's the point of this rather ridiculous thing You know that a lot of people have tried to start online businesses has been a dot-com bust Um, you know the first 10 years can be said to be a failure 10 years after that Would you say that no quite the opposite so there's a sort of There's a sort of concave curve here that things Just disappointing to start with and then they they shoot upwards Did that happen with things like you know mix? I mean think did that happen with things like automobiles and railroads? Oh very much so Probably on a different time scale, but the Liverpool to Manchester railroad in 18 28 I think was it 1830 anyway, it's thereabouts Is an extraordinary moment and everybody's going you know the prime minister's there for the opening It's a big deal and this is the it's a it's a you know Whatever it is a 35 mile rail rail road between two cities and and trains are going to go 20 30 miles an hour This is ridiculous and everyone's incredibly excited about it. And what happens not very much actually Yeah, and then in the 1840s you get a railway share boom And suddenly there is an enormous Stock market explosion of people investing in railway shares just like the dot-com boom of the 1990s And an awful lot of people go bust a lot of it fails But you end up with an enormous network of railways being built all over the world as well as all over britain So I think you can see the same phenomenon and In the early 1900s, you know, you've got all these experiments with internal combustion engine vehicles Which are all kind of disappointing and you know, they Sort of work, but they don't make anyone much much money and you know diesel kills himself because he Because of his debts and you know that kind of thing and and yet Henry Ford and people like that come along and say You know what? We can make this thing cheap enough so ordinary people can buy it and that's when it really takes off. Yeah So you make a point in the book about also differentiating science from innovation and or the relationship between the two So most people think in a linear fashion. There's science Then there's evasion and you you're arguing that there's much more of a back and forth that that the knowledge Transmission goes in both direction. Can you give some examples of that? Yes, um I think in in fact, if you look at the history of people who've discussed this Almost everybody agrees that it's a mutual relationship. It's not a linear relationship and yet politicians and journalists and Commentators are all assuming that the point of science is to produce technology which produces applications And we fund science in this boring way We say look the any reason you're allowed to be a scientist is because you might come up with a tool at the end of it Well, that's a bit unfair. What about black holes? What about, uh, you know, um, the geological time, you know Can't we study those we don't have to come up with a technology as a result of them? I think science is is a fantastic flourishing of human Creativity and it shouldn't be At demanded of it that it produces technologies because very often technology comes before science The science of thermodynamics came out of the steam engine rather than vice versa And indeed even something like dna Which you think of as pure science But actually what funded that x-ray crystallography of biological molecules that led to the discovery of the structure of the dna The first work was done by that was funded really by the textile industry Because it wanted to understand the structure of wool which meant looking at proteins And then they got to look at dna instead and the first brilliant photograph of the structure of dna We now know it was taken in leads um In a institute funded by the textile industry so and then much more recently just in the last, um 10 years or so, um We've had the discovery of crisper gene editing, which is this extraordinary new technology in very precise editing of genomics and That comes partly out of the yogurt industry because it turns out that The yogurt industry has a problem which is that the bugs it relies on sometimes get sick And the reason they get sick is they catch viruses and these viruses Some of the bugs are better at at resisting the virus is than others And some of the scientists working for some of the yogurt companies are investigating why the bugs get sick sometimes The bacteria gets sick more than others some bacteria gets sick more than others And they investigate this strange Genomic Sequences that have been found palindromic sequences that spell it spell the same message backwards um They find these in bacteria which have been suggested as possibly part of the immune system of the bacterium And then they realize That these sequences can be used because these are these are homing on in on particular sequences in the virus to try and Chop up the virus these can be used to home in on sequences in human dna or plant dna In order to do precise editing techniques. So the the technology of crisper doesn't come out of Pure research there's pure research along the way But it comes out of surprisingly practical applied research So often science is the daughter rather than the mother of technology and that's not to downplay it I think that's a very important role Yeah, you you've mentioned now, you know a number of times kind of the the government has funded this or the government funded that and This idea that that industry can fund science is is unpopular today And you have a section in the book where you talk about government funding of science and and the idea that You know, I hear this a lot when I give talks and I'm talking about the wonders of capitalism and the wonders of markets And people say and I use my iPhone a lot as an illustration of the progress we've made and this beautiful I I usually show the iPhone I'll do now and I say what do you think this would look like if the government produced it and everybody laughs But then somebody somebody will stand up and say yeah, but all the technology in that iPhone All the technology was actually funded by the government, right? um, and you have a wonderful little section about Uh, is it true that we wouldn't have an internet without the government and we wouldn't have all these things without government funding of science Yeah, and and I don't think it is true. I mean, I think I think this misreads it hugely sure there is government does fund a lot of science it funds a lot of technology to And uh, given that it takes 40 percent of our income and spends it on something I'm glad it spends some of it on innovation. It would be a shame if it didn't But does it get more bang for the buck than the private sector? No, I don't think it does And if you think about the iPhone, yes, there are important Insights that came out of government funded laboratories, including the internet itself, which came out of DARPA funding But DARPA was a program that used private sector contractors as well. So it's not exactly a pure status thing And you know the plasma screen came out of a PhD somewhere, but other things came out of private Research too. It's very much and also this idea that that it goes back to the to an original public sector funded project right at the beginning is is once again Confusing the inventor with the innovator, I think and it is saying that it's the person at the top of the chain who counts Actually, no, it's the people halfway down who make it something affordable and reliable and and and available And if government was so great at funding At causing innovation. Why is government itself? So uninnovative, you know, why does why does congress look exactly the same as it did 250 years ago or parliament where I sometimes work You know actually on the whole Most of these things happen In you know, it is a bit of both. So for example fracking the shale gas revolution There's an argument out there that this came about as a result of Public research and there was a lot of publicly funded labs got involved But they got involved at the behest of industry which said we've got these problems. Can you help solve them for us? And and you know, so I and actually it misreads it to think of that as as a public funded thing So it's important not to Get this out of proportion. There seems to be a tendency out there to sort of want To credit government with more than it deserves in this area And you know back to Samuel Langley the Failed inventor of flight versus the Wright brothers the private sector Successful inventors of the flight in the UK. There was an extraordinary Controlled experiment if you like with airships in the 1920s It was decided at that time that heavier than Aeroplanes were never going to be able to carry enough passengers across oceans And so what was needed was big airships that could could transport people across the oceans And so the UK government which obviously because there was a very big empire wanted to develop long distance travel Decided that it would put a lot of money into developing airships for transcontinental Flights or transit trans oceanic flights. I should say and they hatched their bets They did a private project and a public project the private project came in early Under budget and flew to Canada and back. It was called the r100 without mishap The r101 which was the public project was late over budget over engineered And crashed After flying across the channel on its way to India. It still hadn't got beyond northern France killing 48 people So you couldn't have a great, I mean, you know, if you've got to if you're praising government for being better at it, you've Explained stories like that. Yeah, I mean one of the things I learned was interesting One of the things I learned from that story in the book Was that never should one of my actually one of my favorite authors that I really enjoy his books Works on that project and walked on the private side of it and he of course had Veneration in his book for innovators and engineers and yes, I mean it It was one of his novels have heroes were engineers, which is a lot of fun. That's where it comes from. Yeah So So yes, I mean, I I think one of the points you make in the book Which I which I loved was look innovation was happening in the 19th century when government wasn't spending any money on science Any money on this stuff? They were basically doing what I believe government should do and limit themselves to it protecting us and And maybe we're covering from wars or or fighting Particularly true in in Britain and America Because in Germany and France government started spending money on science quite early but Which countries have the best progress in innovation before that it's actually Britain and America And America in particular very little funding of Academic research before the Second World War Yep, and yet one could argue more innovation back then Higher economic growth certainly back then and then even we have today Also related kind of the politics of innovation You make the point of That you need a a political structure that's fragmented to allow for innovation How much do you think it's the fragmentation per se? Versus, you know, what you really need is freedom freedom to fail or freedom to Invest in crazy ideas freedom to come up with ideas and not get be put under house arrest like LAO Or an authority tell you it's it's just not theirs. Is it really just freedom on whatever scale? Yes, I think that's probably right because One of the points I make is how bad empires always are at innovation Look at the Ottoman Empire or the Roman Empire or most of the Chinese dynasties Actually, they produce very little in the way of innovation China's fertile period of innovation comes in when it's fragmented politically Europe's likewise when it's city-states rather than one big empire And America of course is the exception which Confirms this rule if you like because although it's a great big Unified country it's also a series of laboratory states So in that sense fragmentation seems to be important But the point about fragmentation is freedom That innovators like Gutenberg who invents printing in Europe Which is banned in the Ottoman Empire for another 300 years or something Gutenberg moves around between these little statelets until he finds one That is prepared to let him do his experiments And develop his technologies. So what fragmentation gives you is somewhere freedom It keeps the torture freedom alive somewhere Because freedom to move from one Uncongenial regime to another and you know most regimes Put a lot of their energy into preventing innovation. Yep, we forget this but You know it it It it's so obvious when you think about it That most businessmen or whatever you might call them in in previous eras Have a vested interest in the status quo and do not like disruptive innovators coming in and changing things And i'm sorry to say that that's exactly what the european union has become Which under the european commission in in recent years and i show this very clearly with a number of examples in my book A very very good place for crony capitalists to lobby to get rules in to prevent the emergence of new disruptive innovators Yeah, and and so really regulations and i mean you talked about the right brothers and Edison I mean they couldn't do what they did Under kind of the regulatory environment in which we live today. I mean there's so many Restrictions and you know you mentioned hard work. They couldn't demand they workers work this hard That's why it has to happen in china because of a variety of labor laws that exist today where Where you can't you have to pay overtime or double time triple time Uh, you have to have certain, you know, everybody has to weigh goggles and everywhere has to Has to behave in particular regimen away now some of that Make sense for businesses and they adopt it anyway, but the more govern regulates Does that harm regulation? I mean that harm innovation? I mean you give the example of nuclear energy and you talk about sometimes safety regulations make us less safe Which I thought was yes. No, no that this is a really good point. Which is if you know, why does nuclear power stall in the 1980s and and and and basically go nowhere after that And the answer is not really because people are that scared of it. Um, it's because in response to uh activists protesting against it It has brought in so much in the way of safety regulation that it has become incredibly laborious to build a nuclear power station and so much pre-approval of regulatory Authorities has got to take place that you can't then change the design halfway through And that means that you can't do trial and error and that means you can't find ways of Reducing the cost and so the cost just goes up and up and up And actually there's quite a nice sort of calculation that the amount of material that goes into a nuclear power station per kilowatt of output Has gone up vastly and the amount the material that's gone up most is paper Which is not of course making it safer. It's just effectively giving people Income out of this process So nuclear power has been cut off from the source of Cost reduction, which is trial and error now admittedly you don't want error in nuclear power stations But if you if you then look at what happens What happens is that because you can't build new designs people stop building new plants and they keep old ones open longer And Fukushima was a very old design which should have gone offline before it did And it had a really stupid design flaw in it, which is the pumps to um Pump any seawater or rainwater out we're in a basement where they got flooded, you know This is this is not clever And and I thought it was interesting that section where you also talk about the fact that Big part of the problem was that governments incentivize the building of the early nuclear power plants They in a sense for got us to build them earlier than we would have If we just let the market work and the market innovate and use the trial and error. Yeah, this is my speculation We were in such a hurry to get nuclear power up and running and we basically did it as an offshoot of the military project Yeah, um that in the 50s and 60s we we settled on one design the light water reactor Which isn't a great design really because it's got some inherent Risks basically the coolant um Or you know water can turn to steam and then its properties are very different It's not so good at cooling things and it's liable to explode and uh, so um You know had the had there been Less of a sort of rush to get this out there in the 50s and more of a sort of Let a thousand flowers bloom and see which designs then we've probably have ended up with much more inherently safe molten salt reactors that would have needed much less in the way of extra bells and whistles to make them safe and would then have spooked people much less and it would have become a reliable and ubiquitous technology That's a little bit spec speculative on my part, but I think there's some arguments now It makes sense. Uh, so I got two final questions. I've already taken up almost an hour of your time. Um One is let's connect to rational optimists to to uh, how innovation works um, I mean to some extent I you're optimistic about the future because innovators Can innovate the innovators are making the world a better place for all of us So how optimistic are you that? We we maintain and create political systems that allow For that innovation to flourish and and lead to a better world Well, I'm not quite as optimistic because I would like to be but it like that uh, my rational optimism expressed in the book the rational optimist 10 years ago um Is based on what's happened till now But when I survey the world now as I do in last chapter of how innovation works I come to the conclusion that we're in an innovation famine today And that may seem strange at a time when your iPhone is being replaced by a new model every two years or whatever it is But actually if you think about things like transport, they're not changing at all fast these days not compared with what our grandparents experience when they you know, they saw in the invention of motor cars and airplanes and things like that and um uh, and and then if you look at You know, what big companies are doing they're turning over less frequently. They get they're dying less frequently There's you know, they're more stable now they they're um They're sitting on huge piles of cash because they can't think what to spend it on They're not being disrupted as often by Incomers They're better at lobbying governments to get themselves privileges to keep rivals out And big big companies are really bad at innovation. I mean that's been shown again and again um And so I look at a world and I think with various things like The way we've tightened up intellectual property to make it a hindrance rather than a help to innovators the way we've used um Occupational licensing the way we've used The tax system etc. We aren't encouraging innovation enough Now luckily China has kept the flame burning But China is an authoritarian regime. You know, this is this is a state owned country and That's not a comfortable one to rely on when we Know as we do that freedom is crucial to innovation So I'm a little bit worried that we may be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs Yeah, we definitely share that worry So to kind of close the circle we're in this crisis today. The corona virus is Is out there. It's you know, we're all shut down right now In what ways do you think that innovation is going to be the way out of this? and You know, what what is going to be necessary from from the perspective of innovation and technology to to solve this problem Well, I think the first thing to say is that This crisis reminds us dramatically that we haven't done enough innovation. Yes If anybody says, you know, this is a crisis because we've done too much innovation. They've You know, they're they're barking mad, you know, we haven't Pushed vaccine development fast enough. We haven't pushed some of the Technologies we need for diagnostic testing. It's quite hard to get licenses to do diagnostic tests It's it's really tough to develop some of these technologies the rules and regulations have got in the way um And you know, we've sat and watched as as these pandemics have given us fair warning You know sars really was a warning that out of these wet markets in china It's possible for very dangerous viruses to emerge and to go Global very quickly. Um, and we've developed incredible internet capability But we now look at south korea and we see that all you need Is really good data and really good contact tracing and really good testing And you can get ahead of a virus like this and we don't seem to have that in my country or in the united states so, um, uh, I'm afraid the main lesson for me out of this And by the way, sorry just to mention it. We haven't developed any antivirals We have some we've developed some ones that work, you know, we've solved the problem of hiv to a large extent But um generic antivirals like we have antimicrobials No, we haven't done enough innovation there. We haven't done enough innovation in antimicrobials to where resistance isn't a growing problem So it's a strong reminder That the way to to solve this problem is to innovate and I when we will get a burst of innovation out of this We will find cures for this disease And we will find preventions for this disease and there are going to be really so just to take an example um messenger RNA vaccines Okay, is a really smart idea that's out there and that is being accelerated to try and Get a vaccine for this virus. Well, we should have been on that years ago Now the gates foundation in the u.s. And the welcome trust in the uk and the norwegian and indian governments got together four years ago and said Hang on. Let's create something called the coalition for epidemic preparedness innovation And they were dead right and they funded some of this key work that is going to lead to a vaccine But they only started three or four years ago If they'd started 10 years ago, we might be in a much better position than we are today Yeah, oh, I mean this was making real how much our lives depend on innovation not just progress but literally our lives Yeah, and on on on on success of science and success of innovators to make that science into Something we all can use and can enhance our lives Uh, I've just been talking to matt ridley. Thank you for for joining me today. We've uh, we've been talking about this book My pleasure. How innovation works. So, uh, I I've read I haven't read the whole book I got it just a few days ago But I've read enough of it a significant portion of it to highly recommend it to anybody who's listening This mad is an exceptional storyteller, but he doesn't just tell stories I think you have to tell stories. That's one way People remember ideas But you also have to then integrate them into some principles and matt does both of those in the in the book So a powerful book an important book an important book Particularly now I think as we enter some political uncertainty about whether we Allow the innovators to thrive or not and and all of us all of us who care about human progress I think need to unite in in fighting for freedom and fighting for the ability of innovators to Improve our lives so that we can all be rational optimists Yeah, and the subtitle of my book in the us is and why it flourishes in freedom Why innovation flourishes in freedom? Well, thank you matt Uh, I hope your time hunkering down is as pleasant as this can be and uh, look forward to Shining again sometime in the future and good luck with the book. I've really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for having me on the show Thank you, man