Welcome to Keith's night, don't tread on anyone and the libertarian Institute. Today I am honored to have Matt Ridley. He is a British journalist, a member of the House of Lords in author of books that have sold over a million copies that have been translated into 31 languages. What an accomplishment? I mean 31 languages, I'm still trying to nail down English, and he's at 31 languages, unbelievable find a mat mattress. Late .co.uk Links, of course, will be in the description below.
We're going to go over three books today, the rational Optimist how Innovation Works and the evolution of everything mr. Ridley, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you, Keith for having me on the show. Now, before we get into these three, you have committed a number of thought crimes. With a new book, you have titled viral the search for the origin
of covid-19. EU co-authored this with a scientist Alina Chun from Harvard and MIT s broad Institute. What is your thesis behind this book? These is behind that book is very simple that it's extremely important. That the world finds out how this pandemic began, so that we can prevent the next one that unlike the case of SARS and a lot of other recent outbreaks. We don't know, we haven't got a Smoking Gun to tell us the answer.
It looks were not. Full cooperation and transparency from the Chinese government, that would enable us to solve this problem, but the evidence we have seen suggests that the favored explanation at the start that it was the result of someone buying an animal in the market that had somehow been in contact with a bat and picked up the virus. That way doesn't seem to make sense.
We've not been able to find an infected animal, despite 80,000 animals being tested by the Chinese etc etc. And it's looking more and more like likely that it is not a coincidence that Wuhan is the one city in the world. With the biggest collection of bat born size like coronavirus, he's in the world by some distance and has been manipulating as well as collecting those viruses on a huge scale but only in the last 10 or 15 years.
So that does seem to indicate and the more we found out about the experiments they were doing in Wuhan These viruses the more we think it's important to properly investigate the possibility that this came from a laboratory. So we think it's an open question. It could have come through the market. It could have come through the laboratory, it's pretty shocking that we don't know that. The Chinese are not being particularly helpful in letting us find out.
And the evidence is very intriguing and deserves a book. A detective story, a whodunit if you like in its own right already, Yeah. That's our thesis and it's been an extraordinary experience writing that book one of the most fascinating but also rather alarming things that I've done and I had the great privilege of collaborating with a brilliant young scientist Alina Chan at the broad Institute as you mentioned when it comes to the first cases.
Where did the first cases occur where they, in this wet market area where the close to this Institute of virology, can you give us a Geographical area of where the started. Well, not entirely, no because we're dealing with partial bits of information, but what we do know is that it started in work on the evidence that it was anywhere else. But were hand before November or December of 2019 is very, very thin indeed. And the first cases were detected sometime around the middle of November.
We think we've seen one leaked document from the Chinese authorities. Giving a case of the 17th of November is the earliest they then denied that and said that, the first case was the first of December that later they said, maybe it was the 8th of December. Nobody believes it bullet began that late.
I mean everybody thinks if you look at the genetics if you look at the case numbers Etc it was probably the first human being was probably infected in either late October or mid-november 2019 some time in that period and Where was it? Well, we don't know the wasn't outbreak in the market very early on about half the cases in December, were people connected directly to the market but the problem with that is that the Chinese authorities very early on.
In the first part of January were saying if you have pneumonia in Wuhan and you had a connection to the market, then we will Isolate. You and investigate because he probably got this new disease if you didn't have a connection
with the market. If you've not been there or you don't live near it, then we will assume you don't, we will assume you've got some other kind of pneumonia so there's what's called an ass attainment bias whereby the market cases were spotted earlier because you had to be a market case to be defined as a source Covey, to Case covid Case.
So that's our problem. But we can't be sure but We think it was circulating in Wuhan in early, sorry, in late, 2019, in November and we badly need more collaboration. And cooperation for the Chinese to trace, the early cases. Us intelligence says there were three workers from that lab from the Wuhan Institute of archaeology, who went to hospital with pneumonia, like illness and symptoms vary like covid in November of 2019. Now, I don't have sufficient
security. A clearance to be able to check that information, but we are told that with significant Assurance by the intelligence authorities. So that might be important information, but we can't check it. You wrote a blog post titled. Why did scientists suppress lab leak, Theory? Do you have a theory as to why this was suppressed as opposed
to openly discussed? Yes, there was a coordinated attempt to shut down all discussion of the lab leak as a possibility in January, and February of 2020. We know this because we've seen the emails in which they discuss devising, an article that they can then publish. And point to saying, case closed, this is the market not the lab and we can assure everyone of that.
At the same time, those very scientists who wrote that article, Was saying to each other in private, you know what, this looks awfully like, it might have come out the lab. We don't know some of the features of a genome look, like it's been manipulated in the lab, not just, not just kept in a lab. And so the extraordinary disconnect between what they were saying in private.
And what they're saying in public, came to light, as a result of a number of emails, surrounding a key meeting on the first of February, 20, 2008 between some us and UK, virologists the motor Ation was clearly not to get science into trouble and not to endorse Donald Trump's ideas about what was going on and to support Chinese colleagues who were you know furious at the idea that they might be accused of
starting this pandemic. So there's actually no one with a vested interest in saying actually this might have come from a lab. There's no one who has part of their paid day job thinks who I really wanted to be from a lab. You know, the the scientists didn't want that. Chinese authorities didn't want that. The politicians in the west particularly didn't want that.
Because I didn't want to rock the boat in diplomatic relations with China. The environmentalist didn't want that because they wanted this to be a cautionary tale about destruction of the rainforests and so on. So so actually, you know, not vested interests and everything people can go against their best interest.
And I is a big fan of Science and a huge supporter of biotechnology in particular, do not have a vested interest in this being a lab story, it will do damage to some of the science that I admire and value if that turns out to be the case but I have to follow the truth wherever it takes us and a leaner and I started are very open-minded lie and by the time
we'd finished writing the book. We were convinced that it was probably oddly more likely that it came out of the laboratory and we've clearly laid out some of the information we would need to solve the problem. That's the information was still waiting for. You mentioned in another blog post. I think it was titled. I was duped by lab leak. Deniers where you would mention, there was a previous lab leak in. I think Britain during the foot and mouth and get, can you
discuss previous lab leaks? I think it was 2007. Yes. Well there's a number of cases. I mean, lab labs have leaked smallpox in Britain in the 70s flew in China in the 70s brucellosis in China and 2019, Anthrax in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s, a leak that was denied for many years and then eventually when the Soviet Union collapsed was confirmed to have happened. So outbreaks that have killed people have happened frequently,
SARS itself lie. Like six times from labs in Beijing, Singapore, and Taiwan the first starts. That was and actually killed people on one of those occasions. But the one you're referring to is a really interesting case and it's an animal disease. So didn't kill anybody, but it's called foot and mouth disease, it affects cattle. It broke out in 2007, on a farm in Surrey in England, which was 13 miles from the world's leading Reference Laboratory for foot and mouth.
This virus now that turned out not to be a coincidence, you will not be surprised to hear it. Turned out there was a leaking pipe at the lab and a contractor had been called in to mend it and the contractor had then gone straight to a farm. Nobody realized that the leaking pipe was actually leaking live virus and he had infected cattle on the farm. So the problem was solved quite quickly and it was contained and not many animals had to be killed but The point is, it wasn't a geographical
coincidence. Now, this outbreak began within eight miles of the world's leading laboratory Force as
like, coronavirus is from bats. In an area where they aren't found, naturally in bats, thousands of miles from where they're normally collected in southern China and Southeast Asia. So it may be a coincidence but it doesn't look like it. It Like we should take very seriously the possibility that the geographical coincidence, maybe telling us something as Humphrey Bogart, put it in, as a blanket of all the Gin joints in all the towns in all the world,
she should walk into mine. You wrote a book, The Evolution of everything. How new ideas emerge? Mr. Ridley. How do new ideas emerge? Well, my argument there was that we tend to think think of the world and top-down terms. We say somebody decides in government or inside a big company that we must invent X and we invent X or somebody decides that the that we're going to solve such and such a philosophical or political
problem or something. And actually the world doesn't work that way, the world is a much more bottom-up place, much more emergent Place. Many of the new things that happen in the world. Arise without Direction without planning without authorship. An awful. Lot of them come from ordinary people. Interacting and developing new ideas among themselves.
So for example if you think about language, the English language or any other language is a man-made thing, it is not a natural phenomenon but it is not the product of a committee. A few Geniuses or some kind of planning operation within a government or anything else, it devolves it changes from year to year. New words come in Old words, go out, new linguistic, habits new syntax new grammar.
All this kind of thing happens. Not because anyone's in charge, but because Ordinary People Do a form of natural selection. Good old-fashioned Evolution they say, We know to just take a simple example when we use words frequently, they're nearly always short. So, if there's a new word floating around like covid-19, right? We shortened it within a few weeks were saying covid and even that's a shorter from the coronavirus, you know. So so who decides that? I mean, who do you know, where
did that come from? Who's the person who said, let's shorten Words when we use them a lot because it makes life easier. Well, nobody did. And everybody did it's the same with the internet interestingly. You know who invented the Internet?
Well it wasn't al Ghul but it wasn't event, Vince surf or one of these other brilliant people, either they made important contributions, but we all invented the internet and we're all Reinventing it all the time so that my purpose in that book was to get people to stop thinking in terms of solving the world's problems. In a top-down dirige East
directive. Way and think about solving them, through Evolution, through allowing people to interact, and find Solutions in a sort of collective way, but not in a way in which the someone in charging them of the collective. You wrote a book, the rational Optimist, where you highly praised Adam Smith, a book written in 1776, I believe titled an inquiry into the causes of The Wealth of Nations. What is the most important thing you learned from The Works of
Adam Smith? I think Adam Smith is a towering figure. I hadn't read him until I was an adult. I wasn't taught economics, I came to him later in life. I but the more I go through life, the more I keep coming back to some of the insights
that he had into into the world. I mean, the first point, which actually is, in some ways emerges from his earlier book, the theory of moral sentiments in 1759 Is that the world is a bottom-up place that things emerged, that morality is something that emerges from the way we interact with each other rather than is taught by priests as it were particularly. And so, for example, that's one of the points he makes. But in The Wealth of Nations, he invents economics.
And what he does is he points out the enormous significance of the division of labor and the importance of Of specialization and exchange but actually, if you and I are both living in the Stone Age and we need a spear and an Axe and you could make your own Spear and your own Acts. Or I and I could make my own Spear of my own acts. But if we say Keith, you make both Spears, I'll make both axes
and then we'll swap then. Actually it's going to take us less time because you're going to get good at making Spears. I'm going to get good at making axes. We're both going to, you know, by specialization and then exchanging we're going to be better off.
And that in the end is the great insight about human beings as opposed to other species about how we operate and why we operate the way we do, it's an enormously significant inside and you know, just just think about this for a moment as the world modernizes, as we move forward into the 21st century. What I think has been happening for several hundred years is that people become more and more specialized in what they produce, but more and more Diversified in what they
consume. So, you know, if you are self sufficient, if you had to make your own clothing, make your own food, make your own lighting, make our own shelter, you wouldn't live a very high quality of life and you wouldn't have any Leisure Time to consume movies or anything like that. You'd spend your whole day trying to make a candle or makeup. Catch an animal to eat or something like that. So self-sufficiency is really
another word for poverty. And yet what we've done is we've said I'm going to do something called a job which is added and making podcasts or something like that. And I'm going to supply the product of my job to everyone else in the world in exchange for all the things they can produce. And so actually we shouldn't be afraid of specialization. Because it specialization, you know, people often lamento jobs are very boring. You know, you get stuck in your job and it's very tedious
etcetera, etcetera. Yeah. But the point of the job is so that you can spend the other eight hours of the day consuming movies and going to restaurants consuming the product of other people's work. And so the great inside of Adam Smith, I think is how we all worked out how to work for each other. That by increase living standard.
Mmm, I love that answer. It's almost like he's taken the individual self-interest and harmonized it with the collective self interest through the concept of fish, through the concept of specialization because what appears to be a contradiction. It's like so John Maynard Keynes was like, okay, so everyone selfish yet. Everyone is helping each other. This Makes no sense at all.
That this is a total contradiction, but he didn't read the book published 200 years before his terrible book, which actually explains it as you do in the rational Optimist. That's a cane. She probably did read Adam Smith I would do to you if not ready but you read it but I guess he didn't appreciate it to the extent. I guess anyone else did when it comes to the modern day. If you Talk to say a millennial did just uh things are horrible,
the environments bad. We have inflation, we have all of these bubbles, we have this inequality, there's poverty in the world. What are some of the bullet points that you list to the average person who says things are. So horrible today, how dare you write a book titled? The rational Optimist? Yeah, well, part of my motivation, and part of that with the, where I came from to write this book, was I remember people saying exactly, Actly the same thing.
When I was young, I mean, I was young in the 1970s. I was told that the population explosion was Unstoppable. Famine was inevitable. Pollution pollution was going to shorten the lifespan through, through cancer. The rainforest was disappearing. The deserts were advancing the oil was running out. There was a Litany of gloom and doom, which I believed I fell for it. I was a genuinely pessimistic young person in the 1970s. Oh my God. There's no future for my
country, my species. The world's going to be Grim in the future. No. But getting a decent job or trying to be ambitious. You were just going to see whether we can survive this horrible thing because the grown-ups told me that the future was Dreadful, and they never said anything about how, it might not be Dreadful. Now, 40 years later the world is wonderful. Compared with when I was a teenager poverty in the World has collapsed. It disappeared. That's not quite true.
Of course, there is still poverty. But you know, when I was born about half the world lived on less less than two dollars a day in today's money, that's the sort of definition of extreme, absolute poverty, today, weigh less than 10%, does that that's incredible. Nobody has ever lived through a transformation as great as that child mortality is down. Lifespan is up by five hours. Day of my life. Life span, most infectious diseases of disappeared. That cancer rates are falling.
If you adjust for age where healthier wealthier clever, a Keener kind of Freer more, peaceful more equal. Equality is improved globally dramatically. People in poor countries, have been getting rich much faster than people in rich countries. So the catalog of improvements During the period when we were Supposed to be having a really miserable time. Is something that I just, I feel Evangelical but telling young people.
So when the adults tell you today, you're doomed, climate change, etc, etc. Take it with a pinch of salt, look at the data, make your own mind up and consider the possibility that they might be wrong because they have a huge vested interest in selling Gloom and do it sells newspapers.
It sells books. I would have sold far more copies, you were kind enough to mention that I've sold a lot of copies of my books but over so far more copies have had written a pessimistic but then an optimistic book I know that for sure just to give you a little thought experiment to realize what's how adrift people are from the realities of the world? If you say to people as Hans rosling, did then a brilliant experiment to a thousand people in a pole.
He said has the the percentage of the world that lives in extreme poverty doubled have door stayed the same in the last 20 years. Mmm, but 65% of people in America, similar percentage in Britain said it's doubled. The percentage of people in the world who live in extreme poverty as has doubled. In 20 years about 30% said, it had stayed the same and only five percent said it had haft. The 5% were Right? The 65% of the 30% were wrong, okay? So any 5% of us, know that but
hang on said rosling. If I had asked that question of a chimpanzee by writing those three answers on three, different bananas and throwing them into a cage and seeing which banana it picked up first, it would answer that question, right? 33% of the time not 5% of the time so it would do 6 times as well. As people and answering a question about human society that people can just look up on the Internet.
How can that be? And the answer, of course, as to how that can be is that as Josh Billings a 19th century, Sage put it, it ain't what, you don't know, that gets you into trouble. It's what, you know, for sure that ain't so. So it's no, we're convinced we know things about the world that Not to be wrong. And so one of the things we have to do in the words of Abraham Lincoln is disenthrall young people about the things that they've imbibed which are simply wrong about the world.
And one of them is that it's going to hell in a handcart, it's not Yeah, the concept of humility is is so important. Just asking people today, though, things are horrible. I mean, does it look at what's going on in Ukraine? Things were so much better when I was a kid. I said, look Grandma, I love you. But when you were a kid there was literally Stalin going into Ukraine, killing far more people than have died today, you're
just not right about this. Also you live through the second world war and Korea and Vietnam. You gotta stop this. Yes, it's bad but please stop pretending. It's, it's the end of the world. Yes. But I'm also very careful not to turn pangloss Ian if you remember dr. Pangloss said the things are for the best in the best of all possible. Worlds. You can't improve on this world because God made it and it therefore must be perfect. And if people are dying they must be bad people.
So that's a good thing that you do and Volterra is mocking this theodicy. His philosophy and and I'm not here to say the world's perfect, I'm saying the world is a lot better than it was for most people 50 years ago. But that means it can be a lot better still in 50 years. You know. It's a Vale of Tears today compared with what it could be in in a few decades time.
And yes I mean every year since that book the rational Optimist came out, I've given talks about it and every year people have said well you can't still surely be an optimist. I mean come on. Have you seen what's happening with the Euro crisis? Have you seen what's happening with Ebola? Have you seen what's happening with Syria? Have you seen what's happening with Ukraine, you know, Etc? There's always an excuse to think. Well, hang on.
This is as bad as it ever gets. And, and my answer was, yes, Ukraine is terrible. Yes, Syria is terrible. Yes, Ebola, is a nasty disease, but that doesn't mean that everything is going wrong. Look at all the countries that haven't got Wars, but did have them 10 years. Is ago or something like that. So, you know, try and see the whole if something has dropped out of the news. If some country has dropped out of the news, chances are it's quite peaceful. What is prosperity and how can
it be measured. Well, in the end for me, Prosperity is the ability to fulfill needs and wants. So to be able to supply yourself with enough food enough shelter enough, lighting lighting is one of my favorite examples of this if you want to read a book by artificial light for an hour, with an ordinary lamp it costs, It's you about a third of a second of work to achieve that. Okay. On the average u.s. wage back in 1880 with a kerosene lamp.
It would have taken you 15 minutes of work on the average age on the average wage to afford that and back in 1800 with a Tallow candle. It would have cost you about six hours, work to one hour of light, so that for me is the great measure. How much time do you have to work to fulfill a need? To fulfill a want to supply yourself with lighting and shelter, and food and entertainment, and all these other things you want.
And if you take less, and less time to fulfill more and more needs and desires, then you're becoming more prosperous. Interesting. So instead of this GDP measure which is I mean easily manipulated, whether it's the Federal Reserve increasing the money supply, it's almost impossible to measure you're saying that it's the amount of time. It takes individuals to achieve something to achieve their and compared to what it would have been 10. 20, 30, 50 years ago, is that correct?
Yes, I think the labor cost of fulfilling a need is a really good measure of how well off you are and on the whole the labor cost of most things has gone down and down and down most consumer goods, but the labor cost of how long you have to work to be able to buy, you know, education at a good University or to buy a house that's gone up for a lot of people. So not everything's going in the right direction. Action.
But, you know, most of the things supplied by government or in some sense by a heavily regulated World tend to have gone up in price in labor cost. But most things supplied by the market, tend to have gone down in cost that must be telling us something about the efficiency of supply. What does it mean to say the world improves when ideas have sex? This was a phrase that I came up with, and it enabled me to have some sort of cheap sensationalism to spread my ideas when ideas have sex.
I actually mean it in a really quite literal way. If you look at evolution by natural selection biological evolution, sexual reproduction plays a critical role, because what it does is it Brings together Innovations in one lineage sin. Combines them with Innovations
in another lineage. So you might inherit from your mother, you know, some extraordinary skill that nobody else has got and you might inherit from your father, some different skill that nobody else has got but you've got both of them. So that's what sex is sex enables innovation in evolution to be cumulative to mean that you don't have to choose between. Do you know different traits and say well one of the lineage is got fur and the other lineages got fast for the runs fast or
something. You say let's have a furry animal that runs fast, you know, let's put them both together. So that's what sex does is it brings together. The width of the technical term is recombination. It recombines genes so that you end up with new combinations of
genes. Well, I think a very similar process happens in human Innovation, whether it's innovation in Dues or innovation in machines because the more you study Innovation the more you see that it happens when people bring their ideas together and combine them and most of the new things in the world are actually not new in the sense that they're they're just new combinations of existing things.
You know that the iPhone is basically, you know the you know, a telephone and a diary and a torch and Compass and a calculator, all sort of combined together. So what I mean by, when ideas have sex, I mean when a new idea meets another new idea and comes together through a through through the process of exchange. What's critical is that human beings have this habit of exchange saying, I've got lots of these things, you've got lots of those things. Let's come together or I've got this idea.
You've got that idea that's very unusual. Most animals don't do that. It's Because we did that that our ideas were able to have sex and produce new baby ideas. My favorite example, by the way of ideas, having sex is a thing called the pill camera, which is a device that you swallow, and it takes a picture of your insides for medical reasons. And it came about after a conversation over, a garden fence between a gastroenterologist and a guided
missile designer. That's very nice example of ideas, having sex I love this quote from page 46, the cumulative acceleration of knowledge by Specialists that allows us each to consume more and more different things by each producing fewer. And fewer is I submit the central story of humanity. So many great insights from this book. The rational Optimist, what is your general thesis in the book? How Innovation Works and why it
flourishes in Freedom? Well, I realized I've been writing about innovation in one way or another number of books, but I've never taken it head-on. I've never taken away. What is this phenomenon of innovation? Why does it happen to us and not to rabbits or rocks? What does it happen more in Silicon Valley than in Zimbabwe? You know, what is it about? Innovation that how do you and you turn it on? How do you turn it off Etc and it's some ways, it's a pretty mysterious process.
If you talk to politicians about how to do you get a lot of hand? Waving you got a lot of people say, well you have to fund science. You have to make sure that there's plenty of Finance available for innovators. No no. Come on, you tell me what is it? You know, what's the secret? What's the Silver Bullet that will make Innovation happen in your country and they can't
answer that question. Nobody really knows why Silicon Valley suddenly did this extraordinary burst of innovation in the second half of the twentieth century. Yes you can talk about defense spending and good universities and Venture capitalists going there and plenty of immigrants and all that kind of thing. But it's it's a pretty wooly
recipe really. And you can say the same about Victorian Britain or in a sense, Italy or song China, you know, periods when there was bushfires of innovation bursting out baby, bushfires isn't a great metaphor for California at the moment, but you get the point. And so that's what I set out in this book to do was to decide to analyze too.
Tell stories of Innovations, you know, airplanes computers, toilets, you know, anything that was that's been invented in the last few hundred years and try and see what themes emerged and the big theme was Freedom. If people have the freedom to experiment, freedom, to collaborate, freedom, to fail, freedom to move, and try somewhere else, where there's a more congenial environment, freedom to 25, Follow their ideas to invest behind their ideas.
These are the things that really make it happen. But the, the first point I made in that book is that Innovation is more than invention. Invention is only a small part of it, coming up with a bright idea. A prototype of something is a very small part of making that thing into a usable affordable available and reliable tool.
And the unsung heroes are the people who turn a bright idea into something that actually you can buy on Amazon for a very small amount of money, you know, to see what I mean. You know, that seems to me to be the the aspect of innovation. We tend to neglect. We talk about the inventors a lot. We make we give them patents, we make statues do them, but actually it's the innovators.
It's the people who work out how to manufacture this thing in a reliable way and get it. People when they need it in a form that they want and attractive formal if you're Steve Jobs or someone like that, these are the guys. So you know Jeff Bezos is a great innovator in the sense of e-commerce being very much something that he's pioneered but he's not an inventor and he wouldn't claim to be but he's done a lot of good to the world. You can argue that you don't
approve of some of the things. He's done etcetera, you know? But that's a different debate but he has changed the world. As an innovator, rather than an inventor. On Page 6, you say Serendipity plays a big part in Innovation which is why liberal economies with their free roving experimental opportunities do so. Well they give luck a chance Innovation happens when people are afraid to think experiment and speculate what else. It's so scary to say, let's trust a process instead of a
result. So instead of embracing the process of Freedom, well, Things can go to heck in a hand basket, what we need is a leader to design something that'll really make it happen. Why should we, how would you sell people on the process of freedom, of experimentation, being the way you want to achieve Innovation? As opposed to say something that's very written in stone? That allows us all to look at the same thing and follow a
single path. Well, the history of inventions is that again and again, people set out to invent one thing and end up, inventing, something else, you know, are trying. But Post-It note when he was by accident at 3M, Stephanie kwolek invented Kevlar by accident. When looking for something else, there's tons of examples of this but I think the best example of the importance of experimentation is actually a very old one and that is the Wright brothers.
And there was a man named Samuel Langley Who was a brilliant astrophysicist and probably the cleverest man in America and he was head of the Smithsonian institution and he said to the US government give me twenty five thousand dollars and I will invent a powered airplane. I know how to do it now so they gave him the money. He said no, I don't need to talk
to anyone. It's all in here I'm going to do it in secret in case anyone tries to steal my ideas and then I'll Unveil it when it's ready and he unveiled it on top of a houseboat on the Potomac. In December 1903, launched it into the air and it went straight into the water and it was a complete disaster. 10 days later on a Barrier island of North Carolina. Two bicycle mechanics, without a degree between them succeeded where Langley had failed and they got a powered plane into the air.
They were just bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio. There was no Crowd watching, it had no money from the
government, anything. But what they had done is they had picked the brains of anyone and everyone who's thinking about flight anywhere in the world, in Australia, Europe, in other parts of the US and they had picked the brains of people doing balloons, doing kites doing gliders, doing Wind Tunnel experiments studying Birds, they're drawn upon everyone, and anyone they had Decided they were the cleverest person and they knew how to do it inside their own head.
And then they had done a ton of experiments they done for years of experiments with gliders before they even tried to put an engine on this thing and they had by trial and error. They had worked out how you steer a glider in the air, you know. I mean, it's not a trivial point, you know, if you're in the middle of, if you're flying through the air, how do you turn right turn left? It's, it's not obvious to start. Out with.
And so all these things came together and so they're a very good example of how you should do Innovation. And Langley was a good, very good example of how not to do it with a government grant and knowing exactly how you're going to get there in the first place. In this book, you tell a number of stories of how Innovation comes to fruition. Do you have any favorite stories in this book?
That really illustrates your thesis here and actually, my favorite one is inside the old one, and it's the insecticide treated bed. Net to solve malaria, something that's been championed by The Gates Foundation as a mechanism of solving malaria. Larry was increasing in the 1990s globally, killing more people every year. Now it's been decreasing since 2003.
Why in 2003? The insecticide treated bed nets started to be distributed, it turns out to be a brilliant solution, it deters mosquitoes, instead of as well as killing them, it works, even if it's got a hole in it and I thought this is a really interesting example. It's very low Tech Innovation. It could have been done decades before it. Those who did it, how was it discovered? And I it's not a well-known Story.
I mean nobody had written it up. So I tracked down the two French scientists, who'd worked with colleagues. In Burkina Faso in the 1980s and set up a system in some experimental Huts which were designed for these experiments where they'd made 36 people sleeping these, Cuts night after night with different designs of mosquito, net. And then measured how many mosquitoes would come into the Hut. How many had gone out?
How many died? I mean he's got a blood meal and so on. And did her just a beautiful experiment that showed that mosquito Nets were quite good at stopping, you getting bitten by mosquito Nets with insecticide on them were much better even if they had holes in them. Even if you know, in the course of wear and tear, you know,
mosquito Nets, tend to get torn. You think that's useless, the mosquito fund a whole but but if it's got insecticide on it, it's such a deterrent that the mosquitoes don't find a whole and this showed that, you know, 95% reduction in your chances of being bitten by a mosquito. If you've got one of these things over your neck of your bit, a very simple experiment, beautifully designed done in Africa by some other humble scientists, I tracked down the French scientist talk to him and
you know, he didn't speak. English. So I my French isn't very good so it wasn't very easy but, you know, so that ended up being my favorite because I think millions of lives have been saved by this low Tech development, and I like that for that example. Imagine Boris Johnson steps down tomorrow. Everyone else steps down in the English Parliament and a new state arises. What advice would you give them on? Some simple rules?
They could Embrace if they want to say, have a much more Innovative society that can compete with places like China, Japan, all and every other country in the world. Well I think starting from a blank. Slate is just sort of to utopian. I can hardly imagine it. I mean yeah, sure. I would I would have a lot of fun doing that, but I think more important is to say, what advice can you give from here to governments to try and improve their Innovative capacity?
And I've actually been giving that advice to Boris and others in a very lowly way. I'm not a, I'm not a trusted advisor or anything, but I've been banging the drum for it. Vacation and there are some really quite simple things like get government to take faster decisions. The, if you talk to entrepreneurs they go on and on about the extraordinary waste of time, getting a government agency to give a decision about something and you'd much rather they just said, no, you can't do that.
Then that they take three years to say yes by which time your competitors, have stolen a march on UI detail. In the book how it took eight years for the European Union to approve a genetically modified Potato, by which time the inventor, it said we'll get lost. I'm off to America and I can't wait years for decision. So, you know, that's a very simple thing, just get faster decisions out of God, because government agencies have no incentive to take a fast decision.
For them, taking no decision is much safer. Bet you don't lose your job. If you take no decision, if you just punt it down the road into the long grass. Whereas if you take the wrong decision you might lose your job. So there's a real problem of incentives here and regulation is a huge problem for innovators. It's often, you know, regulations that aren't really anything to do with the in if I mean, if you think about nuclear power, nuclear power is a
perfectly good technology. Incredibly Safe incredibly effective. It kills far fewer people than renewable. Energy actually per unit of energy it produces and yet it's stuck in a hugely high cost non Innovative for. We're basically using the same designs as we used in the 1960s. Why? Because the regulations over what you must do to get a new design? Approved are so expensive. And so time-consuming that nobody bothers He says, let's do trial and error. Let's see what we can do.
And also, once you get a design approved, you can't change it. You can't halfway through the construction process. Say actually, there's a better way of doing this.
We want to do it slightly differently, which is what innovators do the whole time, you know, in cars or in Silicon chips or something, you know, they they change direction they learn as they're going along and say, actually there's a better way of doing this, you can't do that in nuclear, you have to have the whole thing approved before you even Start and that means you only you only try something safe that you already know what safe is fine. But you cut, that means you
can't get safer things. You get old fashion designs, that cost him some amounts of money that are over, engineered etc. Etc. So, there's lots of things you can do to just free up, innovators to, to have more opportunity to try things and just, you know, open up trial and error.
Is, it would be the theme that I Bang into the heads of my ministers, every five minutes when I was dictator, which thank God. I'm not going to be Let's take the thesis of these books, evolution of everything how Innovation Works, the rational Optimist and apply them to the
today. That the only case I'm really familiar with is America there is a new organization designed by the Department of Homeland Security, terribly orwellian term but that's what they're called where they have a new organization called the government governing board of disinformation run by Woman named Nina jankowitz.
Now, they're saying that what we need things are so terrible in this Marketplace of ideas, you might get false information and this false information could lead to terribly bad things. That's why we need to regulate the space of ideas. How do you talk to someone with that mindset where they say instead of having a society, where bad ideas can come to fruition? We need to regulate them. This way the correct ideas come to the Forefront and we can be
in educated population. Yeah. Well as you allude the problem is top-down thinking it goes right back to my evolution of everything theme which is that we constantly see the world in top down for through top-down lens. We think in terms of there's a problem. So let's put someone in charge. Let's make a czar who can solve it. There's a problem in social media, there's no question about it. There's a problem of Greater
extremism, greater polarization. Lots of Information, etc. Etc. And it's driving us apart in a most terrifying way as Jonathan haidt and others are documenting in an interesting way, but the solution is not to put one commissar in charge. However, brilliant, she or he may be because she or he will have axes to grind.
And I think what has emerged would need a yank of its immediately within minutes of her being appointed was that everyone said, well, hang on. This woman has very strong views about things which of course she does. So have I but I shouldn't be put in charge either, you know, it's not the matter of choosing. The right person, it's a matter of choosing the collective wisdom of humankind to solve
these problems. Now you know, so Jonathan haidt has this suggestion that the way to solve the horrible nature of social media where loud-voiced extremists are drowning, Moderates and beating up moderates a lot of the time and is to for example just a very simple rule when you log on to Twitter for the first time or other organizations, you should have a setting that automatically blocks anyone who's really rude and nasty and you know, does things in an ad
hominem way and you can have that setting anything up to 125. I've and let's say, you know, you start off with a four and you can lower it. You can you can say actually I I don't want to hear anybody who's even remotely. Rude. I just want to hear polite people and I can lower it or you can raise it and say, actually a cool going to hear what these people who really screaming at
each other. But that way, I think we would just we've got to find a way of taming this medium and the way is not to put in charge of disinformation Minister because a lot of things get labeled this The turn out to be true. I mean the lab leak is a classic example. Lab leak may be true. The US government says, it's a
definite possibility. The World Health Organization says, it's a definite possibility, but four months in 2020. You were called by the New York Times by Facebook by anyone a conspiracy theorist for even considering it. And that's a disgrace, you know, I'm sorry, but that was, you know, that was playing into the hands of Chinese propaganda. Under we now know, and that's partly where it was coming from, and that's what'll happen if you get one person in charge of this kind of thing.
And they'll, they'll be a cushion. They'll bear the imprint of the last person who sat on them. And the Expressions you Brits have are so funny. The last person who sat on the phone, I forget where I was even going with though. The the point is, is that all of these shortcomings that we say, apply to people that apply in a state of Freedom where people are free to engage in.
Voluntary exchanges also applies to Human Things once they're put in these positions of power Nina, Janka vets obviously fell for this ridiculous scam. That said, Hunter Biden's laptop, with all of his pictures on it. We're actually a plant by Putin and the Kremlin and then four years earlier Hillary, Clinton said 17, intelligence agencies said that the emails that trumps referring to are from Vladimir Putin and this is Russian disinformation on. On both attempts, they were totally wrong.
They said, hey, a nuclear power, violated our government, our governing Independence, and they were wrong. No apologies or anything. So, not only do they not have an incentive. If they were the most well-meaning people on the planet Earth, they still would fall short and that's why the evolution of everything and how Innovation Works. I think are so vitally important. Because you say, yeah, there are this Thomas Edison guy and Nikola Tesla. These people had a lot of shortcomings.
Make sure that they don't have a position of power where they wear their shortcomings don't face any consequences because then that then they won't be in this process of learning how to innovate. I absolutely love these books. I'm so appreciative that you wrote them. Do you have any favorite authors of yourself? Whether it's economists historians philosophers.
Oh well, a lot, I mean, I lots of people are enormously admire, you know, Steven Pinker is a friend, and a just brilliant writer and thinker Deirdre McCloskey. What a wonderful user of the english-language books are probably far too long but they're just a tremendous ride while you're reading them in. And she, you know, she's an
economic historian. So she's talking about the history of the world history of ideas, rich, Dawkins, the British Evolution biologist taught me and he's a friend and he's just a superb writer and has some as I think contributed great things to the, to the world of ideas.
Actually, I wrote a book about Francis Crick and I'm lucky enough to know James Watson who's still alive and Watson and Crick, you know, they, it's extraordinary to me that I met both those people because I think they made the most Important scientific discovery of all time, I think it beats gravity and relativity and all that kind of thing into a cocked hat, to have discovered, one day, 28th of February 1953, to have suddenly realized that there is a linear digital code
at the heart of all living things. And not a non-living things, you know, that double helix of DNA is what I'm referring to is just a remarkable thing and Jim Watson much-maligned These days in his old age because of various in cautious things he said, but he did write an extraordinarily good nonfiction novel about that experience called the double helix, which I recommend to any science writer to read. It's a, it's a, it's a remarkable and strange book. So, these are some of my heroes
in the world of writing. But I just love people who write. Well, I think it's a fabulous skill. And, you know, there's nothing better than than following. Someone's ideas in prose, I think the McCloskey series of books is titled bhujbal dignity something in this area. Could you explain the general thesis that McCluskey attempt to explain in this span of human history? We see significant amount of increase in innovation in this. In this time.
It's as a result of an ethic that people embraced can. You explain this thesis Yeah, well, she takes three books of 600, pages long age to explain them. So I may not do a very good job in two minutes but I will, I will have a crack at it essentially. What she's saying is that for most of human history, we valued and admired some rather dodgy virtues, things like courage,
and honor, and things like this. And that actually led to us on a world in which we killed our enemies and took her In general, this kind of thing. And then there are the, the Bourgeois values things like prudence. And, you know, making sure that two plus two equals five in your work etc, etc, that we despise and literature still despises them, you know that the movies you know they're all about superheroes going around doing superhero things.
Instead of people who go to work and make things for other people and and So she's saying that, you know, when we came to Value, you know, buying low and selling high and being in the market and supplying people with what, you know, with bread for their lunch as a baker. You know, these kind of there was a moment in history, when we sort of, came to Value this, this kind of stuff and the result was the extraordinary enrichment of the human race. The great enrichment is the
phrase she uses. So that's a sort of very very sketchy summary of at least one of one of the thoughts in those books. We have two minutes left. Sir, thank you so much for your time today. Do you have any advice on how people can sort of see through, guess you could call propaganda, what we can assume that let's say that the people in the media are very well intended.
Do you have any advice on how people can see through propaganda or actual misinformation and maybe how they can differentiate truth from falsehood? Yeah, I think in the end, it bows down to always asking yourself. Is it true?
You hear something on the media or you see something on the news and you can choose to believe it or not, believe it, you can choose to move on and do something else in your life, but if you're going to If it matters to you, if you think it's an important bit of news, just check it it's very easy these days to check the facts behind things.
I mean I'm Amazed by how people never go and look, you know, if there's something about a scientific discovery, just just go and look up the original papers. Some? You may not understand all of it, but you can Jolly. Well, check that a new that you find. Hang on a minute, this reporters got the wrong end of the stick or he's greatly exaggerating. What these people are saying about? Climate change or something like that, you know?
So let's let's just check stuff and the because of the internet, that's easier than it. You don't have to go to a library, you know, when I was young, if I read, you know, Paul Ehrlich saying, the whole world is going to starve to death in the next 20 years. I would have had to go to a library, to look up the data, Etc. Now, you know, you just click of the switch, you're onto the internet and you can check stuff so. So check The facts behind the claims, it's very easy to do and
it's actually a lot of fun. Thank you to everyone for watching the libertarian Institute and the Keith and I don't try to on anyone podcast, mr. Ridley. Thanks so much for your time sir. Thank you very much, indeed for having me on the show.