Matt Ridley || How Innovation Works

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today's episode. So today we have Matt Ridley on the podcast. Matt is the author of the recently released How Innovation Works, as well as The Rational Optimist and several other books related to science and human progress, which I've sold over a million copies. He's also a biologist, newspaper columnist, and member of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom. Matt, great chat with you. So you first came to my attention when I was in grad school and I read

The Red Queen. I was doing research at that time, but your book was very inspirational to me. I would just want to thank you for really inspiring me to do what I'm doing today. So what does it mean to be a rational optimist? Well, that's a good question. My reason for using the word rational in that phrase is because I'm not an optimist by temperament or hope. I'm an optimist because the evidence is pointing me towards optimism. In other words, I wrote that book in twenty and ten.

It came out in twenty ten, and it was reflecting on the fact that I had been steeped in pessimism as a young person. I was very interested in the environment and conservation and worked in that area, and so I imbibed all the pessimistic stuff about the population explosion, about pollution, about species extinction, about habitat loss, and all that kind of thing, as well as more general economic

pessimism about how the world was doom Now. I ended up, you know, expecting my life to get steadily worse as I grew up. When it didn't. When I found I was living in a time of increasing prosperity, I began to look at the numbers and at the evidence, and I was astonished by what I found. I thought I was writing a book about progress, and I would say progress is good in some areas and bad in others.

And I kept being unable to find areas where it was bad, where things were going in the wrong direction. There's a few, but they're pretty minor. I mean, I thought happiness was going to be one where happiness was getting less widespread, and we were becoming less happy. That's what everybody says there was even a theory, explaining, it turns out the evidence just doesn't support that that the richer you are, the happy you are within countries, between countries,

and within your own lifetime. And so, of course not everybody is rich and happy. Some people are rich and miserable. But that's probably a good thing because it cheers up other people when that happens. My point is that whether you're looking at economic, environmental, medical, all sorts of other things, the most extraordinary improvements in our living standards. Human income

has trebled in our lifetime. Globally, in real terms, lifespan has gone up by a third, child mortality down by two thirds, and not man of oil spilled in the ocean down by ninety percent, Your chances of dying in a plane crash ninety nine percent down. You know, fact after fact shows the world going in a better direction. Explaining that was interesting to me, but also telling people that because it turns out that the vast majority of people think the world is getting worse, think people are

getting poorer. I think everything's deteriorating, and yes, some things are. Because the media attention is so relentlessly focused only on the things and the places that are going wrong, we get misled. Sure, then that's a similar approach that Stephen Pink takes to studying this and looking at the general trends.

Did you write that before he wrote his Yes, I knew he was writing The Better Angels of Our Nature, and I went to talk to him to find out what he was writing, because, you know, writing the same trying to write the same book as Stephen Pinker is not a good strategy because he writes so beautifully. And it turned out he was focusing entirely on the issue of violence. But Rational has came out before Better Angels and well before Enlightenment Now, which is his more recent

book on the same subject. But they're both terrific books.

Great books. Yeah, they are very good books. He was on this podcast and I asked him the question that just people inevitably will ask, and they will ask you this question over and over and over again, which is well, that's called comfort for the person who whose personal life sucks, you know, whose personal life is well, they're in poverty, they're experiencing you know, racism is a big issue, and various places around the world people are saying that these

issues are still at a systemic level. And what do you do when people make that argument, what do you say to that. I say, that doesn't change the fact. I'm simply telling you the facts about the world. And I also say, look, I think it's quite important to give young people hope rather than a counsel of despair, as long as that hope is based on evidence, because I think it's far worse to tell a young person who may not be well off there's no chance of

you ever becoming well off. In fact, you're going to be crushed by racism and poverty and ill health and pollution your whole life if you say no. Actually, you may be living in an impoverished life in Ethiopia at the moment and have poor health, and have low income and are struggling to find decent food. But here's a fact that might interest you. The average income of the average Ethiopian has doubled in ten years. The amount of food available to Africans per head has gone up dramatically

in the last twenty years. The chances of someone dying in warfare in Africa has gone down dramatically in the last ten years. Your chances of dying in malaria, that the number of people dying of malaria in Africa has halved in the last twenty years. So miserable as you may be, now, there is hope that we can you can find a way out of poverty and misery, and there are ways in which other people are achieving that.

Let's do our best to make sure they're available to you, and let's give you the chance to enjoy the prosperity that many others have had. Ten years ago, when I wrote The Rational Optimist, it was quite common to hear the argument, Yes, Asia has experienced dramatic economic growth and lifted a lot of people out of poverty in China and India and elsewhere, but no, that's never going to happen to Africa. Africa is always going to be permanently

extremely poor. There are just too many people and not enough resources and not enough opportunities. And you would hear this argument quite often, and in that book, I actually took on that argument, and I kept saying, look, actually, I don't think that's true. I think you're going to see the same breakout improvements in human living standards because of what the Gates Foundation is doing, but also because of what Africans themselves are doing to help themselves and

for that. Do you know what. One reviewer actually accused me of being a racist because he said I used the phrase even in Africa. I thought this was incredibly unfair because my point was I was saying, yes, you guys who say this can't happen in Africa, Yes, even in Africa, it can happen. So it's been the opposite of racism. But reviewers see what they want to see. Actually, I became friendly with that reviewer afterwards, and he did

admit he'd misread that point. So, well, this is very interesting because you've convinced me that it's important to know about my probabilities for certain things, so I could or else. You know, I could make an infinite number of decisions throughout the course of the day, and it's nice to be informed by what is more probable. And if I crossed the street at this point and there are this many cars, maybe I shouldn't just run. Okay, you know

these sorts of things. So you will know the name Hans Rosling, who is something of a godfather to us. A rational optimist. He started giving incredible talks and eventually wrote a very good book called Factfulness. Sadly he's died. But he did a rather brilliant thing, which was he asked a thousand Americans. He did the same in the UK. In the last twenty years, has the percentage of the world population that lives in extreme poverty doubled, halved, or

stayed the same? And sixty five percent of people said it had doubled, five percent said it at half. The five percent of right. The sixty five percent are wrong. But he then said, look, if I wrote those three answers on three bananas and I threw those banaras into a cage with a monkey in it, the monkey would pick up the correct answer thirty three percent of the time instead of five percent of the time. It would do six times as well as human beings and answering

a question about human society, how can that be? And the answer? I think it was a nineteenth century sage who put it this way, But it's it's a good way of putting it. It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know that ain't so you what you think you know that ain't so right. But he's yeah, he's saying, what you know that ain't. So you're so sure of it, you know, you're obviously hundred percent and we're full of things we

know to be true, which just an true. This is tricky territory, my friend, because yeah, I agree, obviously, but it's tough having conversations with people who are that sure about something. And when a person leads with ideology. Like let's say I'm talking to someone, I'm just purely I'm like, I want to know, just let's explore the truth, and that person's coming to me like entirely through the lens

of ideology. Well, there's a conflict there because I mean, they don't want to hear from me that they could be wrong. That's not a good way to make friends with someone who's leading with ideology. It is kind of a good way to make friends with a rational optimist, you know, but not an ideologue. Well, you're right. There's one way in which the world does depress me, and that is the number of people who want to start with the facts seems to be smaller than I would

like it to be. Yeah, well me too, me too. It's frustrating. I mean, you work, I work in a dissertation, I work in a nerdy little silo of academic where I'm rewarded and I am praised for Well, that was such a scholarly, nuanced discussion section of your paper, you know what I mean. And then I enter the real world and I'm like, here, everyone, I really this is an interesting conversation we're having about politics, race, religion. Here's

my nuanced discussion section about that. And it's like, goodbye, nuance. Nuance is an endangered species at the moment, I fear. And there's an example of where my optimism may have been a little bit misplaced. I don't know about twenty ten, but certainly in the year two thousand, well, no, probably in twenty ten too. I was pretty darned optimistic about the Internet. I thought, this is a fabulous resource. It enables us to check every fact you know. You can.

You can nail the myths, you can look things up, you can find out what other people think. You can see each other's point of view. You're not relying anymore on what some your favorite newspaper is telling you. You can jolly will just go out and find the facts for yourself. So it's going to bring peace and harmony and utopia and come by our and we're all going to love each other. But I wasn't quite that naive,

but I had an element of that naivety. Instead, it has social media has polarized us far more than I expected. And it's a worry. Yeah, it's a real worry. And it makes sense though from a psychological point of view what we're seeing on social media. The incentive structures are for likes for social status. I mean, don't they know that? Then the designers know that that like button would directly

correlate with dopamine production in the synapses. If you put your nuanced stuff out there as a tweet, it just doesn't get clicked on either way. But here's the nuance to that. The meta nuance of that is that for really for the cognitive explorers among us, it actually does release dopamine to a different synepse that just it's rare,

just a fewer number of people. So my colleague and I, most notably Colin to Young, have mapped out I starting to map out different dopamine systems and the sex drugs rock and roll system is what everyone talks about, but people are not as familiar with the dorsalata or prefiltal cortex projection of dopamine where people get there's a reward valued information to truthful information, to knowledge to nuance, and people who score high on IQ, people score high in

certain measures of intellectual curiosity, do actually get that kind of sex? Drugs, rock and roll hit in a sense, so's it's more emerging research. I can send you a paper, I can send you the paper on that. I'd be very interested in that. So you've found the spot in my brain where I get a real thrill out of reading a good article or finding a new fact or even exploding a myth. You've found the nuance sulkus. Yes, yeah, that's your next book that actually would be a neat book. Yeah.

There are different neurons that cade for different value of things, and of course sex, you know sex. The primal rewards have very subcortical projections, but there are higher level cognitive projections that exist for that respond to the reward value of information. You can see throughout the course of human evolution, we would it'd be very valuable to have backward information that was adaptive to survive, but not as many people

get automatically excited about that. Far far less. Yeah, but do you think, do you think we're all capable of it if we just get educated into the experience of enjoying a good non factual, non fictional story or something like that, or or do you think some people just have that and others don't. Well, it's a great question. It's a great question, and I would love to say

everyone is capable of it. And I think that's true to a certain extent, just like with creativity, which we're going to get to because that's an area of mutual interest of ours. I've written a book on creativity and then research on that. In the same sense, people always ask me that question when they read my book because the book's called Wired to Create, and so interviewers will say, oh, what does that mean? Are some people more wired? Are

we all wired to create? And I like to be just honest, you know, and that's the individual differences exist. There's a bell curve of every single trait, psychological trait, psychological trait. There's a lot of variation that's influenced by both genetics and the environment interacting. So do I think every single person's equally probability of becoming a creative genius? No,

that one can't say that is the case. I'd completely agree with that, But I do sometimes find the emphasis on creativity in stories about innovation lends people to thinking that there's something god like about innovators and inventors. And that's one of the things I'm trying to address in my new book. I'm trying to say, actually, do you know what there's not? Let's take the Right brothers. You know, all Ville and Wilburg, Right, did they have some unbelievable

spark of genius that most people don't have. I don't think so. They were described by the guy who took the photograph of the plane taking off on the first day as the workingest boys I ever saw. That is to say, they just worked at it. They worked incredibly hard, They did a lot of experiments, They were open minded enough to learn from other people, They put in the hours. These are the characteristics that pretty well anybody could have. Albeit you know, so when you say creativity, do you

mean workingst It's a good. It's a good. It's really good. And I'm glad I'm finding I'm frying to jump in to this topic of innovation now here. Here's my nerd I'm gonna put my nerdy hat on for a second and my critical self and point out that there's such a thing in psychology called restricted samples. This is this is the big problem with Eric anders Erickson's God bless him. He passed away recently and a real legend in the field,

and his work on expertise has been very valuable. But me and him cordially throughout his life, and we would spar about this a bit from time to time in a friendly way, because he would say, Okay, well, I'm looking at experts and I'm trying understand what they're special juice is, and I found they have the ability to focus for a long periods of time, and therefore those are the characters that matter, not I Q and all

these other things. But he's looking at restricted samples. So how do you what would happen if you looked at how innovation works among a naturally occurring sample of the population that wasn't all race out on by a factors such as a Q, education, you know, other personal characteristics. How can you conclude those things don't matter just because you're looking at this a highly selected sample where those things have already been selected out, and so therefore those

things aren't doing the prediction anymore. One point in my book I write about I write a brief biographical sketch of Gordon Moore, the man behind Moure's Law, And I say, you know, by now, you've probably got an image of the standard West Coast, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, innovator in your mind. He's an unreasonable guy. He knows his own mind. He's an immigrant, he's restless, he's hard to satisfy. He's incredibly sort of dedicated, he's very impatient. You know, I'm describing

sort of Steve Jobs or something like that. And then I say, well, hang on, here's this guy, Gordon Moore. He lives about ten miles from where he was. He left California briefly for a couple of years. That was it. Otherwise, he's been in the Bay Area all his life. He's preternaturally reasonable and nice. Everyone says he's the nicest guy you ever met. He doesn't like confronting people. He's unbelievably patient. His favorite pastime is fishing. Well, you need to be

patient for that, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And I run through it and I say, look, this guy is the exact opposite personality wise of Steve Jobs or someone like that, and yet he's in his own way just as successful an entrepreneur, and he's been right at the heart of the Silicon Valley story for a long time.

So what is your point there that you found like a contradiction to the stereotype, because for instance, like you dispel that the longe genius stereotype, but then I could come back and point out, well, here's some examples and looks like they're actually long genius does exist, but you're just pointing out other examples of non one genius examples that also do exist. So all these things can exist simultaneously.

So there's the meta point there that there are multiple pathways to innovation or are you arguing there's one specific pathway that seems more predominant. I mean, I would say that I don't think the loan genius does achieve as much, and that you might find me examples of loan geniuses who had philosophical insights that were extraordinary, but I don't think you'd find they were practical innovators who changed the world. But that you can't be a lone genius. You have

to be a collaborator to some extent. So I don't think there are exceptions there. But the idea that an entrepreneur, an innovator has to be a restless, impatient, aggressive, unreasonable person, I think that doesn't actually hold. In other words, I think the personality characteristics don't seem to me to matter that much, whereas the ability to work with other people

does matter. But I might you know, I haven't done the regression analysis on my case histories, but and you know you'll see what I do in the in the book is I take a bunch of case histories pretty well at ROUNDOM. I mean, they're about interesting and important issues, but I leave somehow. I don't don't write about textiles in the book, for example, very important technology. But I take these stories and I tell story after story of

how innovations came about. Then I use that as my database, saying, look, what are the common themes that are emerging from these stories. Now that's not terribly scientific, I admit. And you're going to tell me I didn't you know I'm about to

say that. Yes, I'm pointing out I'm a writer, but my mind is being born because I just want to point out something your whole argument is about, you know, the looking at the trends of the progress over human history from an objective statistical point of view, not listening to people's stories, narratives and idealities that surely you see that contradiction in yourself there. Well yeah, but now the stories I'm telling are not you know, they're not sort

of moralizing themes, their biographical, factual what happened next? Stories. But you're right. I mean, I'm aware of the contradiction. Now. I discussed in the book that I say, the individual inventor and innovator doesn't matter as much as we think that an awful lot of innovations would have happened if the same if the Edison or Jeff Bezos has been run over by a bus, you know, we'd still have

online retail or light bulbs. So the individual doesn't matter to that extent, and he's always embedded in a social network, and he's building on the work of predecessors and successes. So why am I telling his story as a particular story. You know why am I singling out his life history his biography? Well, partly because I want to take that point along the way that this guy gets the credit you know, Samuel Mosse gets the credit for the telegrapher,

Marconi gets the credit for radio. But let's look at the way they were embedded in society and the way they had to talk to other people. And the other reason for telling it is people love reading stories. They do. They do love it, that's true, and they are fascinating stories. Well do Let's just talk about the study. This is

my doctoral work. So there's a table I want to point to because this is what I'm talking about with natural with looking at naturally occurring samples versus your restricted samples. Is that I can tell you what we found from a naturally occurring point of view, So you're right, from the jerk perspective, we found zero relationship with the agreeableness to mention. And I laugh a lot of a lot of times, as well as neuroticism. So I laugh when I give talk. Sometimes I say, trust me, I wish

neuroticism was predictive of creative achievement. I would be a creative genius. And also, you know, we like to we have this myth. We like to think that nice guys are nice people finish, you know, last look, I wish, But there's no correlation at all with agreeableness, because that puts everything in the pot at once, including including IQ G and as well, that's what you know G general intelligence,

as well as divergent thinking. And it turns out when you put all this in the pot, Yeah, and IQ is not terribly predictive, nearly as predictive as openness to experience. So it seems like this personality trait, and I wonder how you map on the openness to experience personality trait and in intellectual which encompasses intellectual curiosity, but it also

but that was more important for the sciences. For the arts, it was more important to be open to your emotions, to your intuition, to rely on your intuition and your experience, your experiential self, you know, in the world, and your appreciation of art and beauty and being a deep thinker, you know, being very imaginative and having a fantasy world or rich fantasy world. So I'm wondering how this naturally occurring data maps onto your your rich collection of stories.

So I'm just looking at it, and am I right in reading it? That openness is significantly correlated with creativity in the arts, but not in the sciences. Is that what your charge is saying, correct, yes, And in intellect in the sciences, something interesting there is intellectual curiosity is more predictive of creative achievement in the sciences than IQ. So we may be undervalue intextual curiosity and overvalue IQ in this But within the well, within the art oh

good good. But within artistic creativity, yeah, IQ wasn't predictive. It neither was intellectual curiosity terribly. It really was was these aspects of openness to one's experience and you know, emotions, fantasy and just having this rich, you know, daydreaming world within your own head. So fantasy versus ideas is another

interesting distinction within this. To mean, I need to just clarify that I think that this is perhaps more at the scientific discovery artistic originality end of the spectrum than at the innovator entrepreneur end of the spectrum, which is mostly what I'm writing about. I mean, they are connected, of course, but one of the things I'm trying to do is say there are people like Thomas Edison and Jeff Bezoso have mentioned before who are extremely good innovators,

but they wouldn't really be described as brilliant inventors. You know, they haven't come up with anything particularly new at themselves. They've just turned relatively new ideas into practical, affordable, and reliable things. And in that sense, I'm sort of trying to get away from the idea that that innovators are scientists, or and innovators and scientists are the same thing. I

think quite often that they're quite different. But putting that on one side and looking back at your chart, because I think it's really really interesting. What does the high was it low correlation with agreeableness tell you about scientists? Yes, and the science as it seems like to be more disagreeable is good? Okay, Yeah, I've just started a negative negative aggression. Yeah, I'm just starting a biography. Read to

read a biography. I'm reviewing of JBS hol Day in The Great Scientist, and came across a remark very early on just describing his personality. A very distinguished guy called Hans Kalmus sent Hold in a manuscript of his new book on human genetics. Thomas was a longtime colleague and a protege of sorts, a Czech refugee who had with Holdaen's helped found work at University College just before the Second World War. None of these personal ties softened Holday's

assessment of the manuscript. It ought not to be published. He listed some errors, then added, I could go on indefinitely. The proposed book would not only come Camus, but science of genetics itself. You would be better advised, if this is possible, to go back to experimental biology rather than to continue to work in human genetics. I mean, that's brutal to one of your protegees. That's quite quite brutal

about a book that you've written. I guess. The point here is there's different levels of analysis one can can try to tackle this question, I guess. And these stories are telling us information. But it's just funny. You'd be the first one to tell me in a different context that stories don't necessarily mean generalizable truths about an innovation. No, you're absolutely right, and plural of anecdote is not data,

as somebody once said. You know, the one thing I did do is not sit down and say here's my theory about how innovation works, and I'm now going to produce evidence to support it in a confirmation by a sort of way. I mean, there's anything particularly wrong with that, But that's how most books are written. You know, I'm

the prosecutor. I'm trying to prosecute a case. I'm going to mention everything that supports my argument that the guy is guilty, but I'm not going to I'm going to gloss over the things that imply that my guys is innocent. Instead of that, I said, I'm going to tell a bunch of stories for six chapters about innovations and how they work, and then after that I'm going to start to say what I think the general themes are. So it's You're right, it's not hard science what I'm doing,

and I'm not pretending it is. It is a literary effort, after all, but it is at least data first, theory second, rather than the other way around. Okay, so I hear you. It seems like creative people don't have a linear pathway. They like pcassus that I often don't know where I'm going to get there. There's a very nonlinear sort of thing where later like creative emerges. It's not like that. That's quite well onto what I call serendipity, which is the need to change direction, the need to look out

for unexpected results that weren't what you thought. Kevlar Teflon the post it note all discovered by people looking for something completely different, who thought they'd failed, and then they realized they had something even more valuable. Absolutely maps on. So I do see a lot of mappings. And you talk about a bottom up approached innovation as opposed to a top down and I think that bottom up details with that emergence your model of innovation, I think in

its broad brushes are quite right. And maybe it's just worth distinguishing here between the process and the person, because our prior discussion for the last twenty minutes was a lot about what are the personality characteristics? They're predictive, but that's a separate issue than what you've outlined, which seems to conform quite nicely. I thought too, a lot of our own discoveries in our book on the process of the whole creative system, and so you can start to

separate the person from the process. Kevin Kelly has a book called What Technology Wants, which sees the whole thing from a completely different perspective and says, look, technology is in charge of its own destiny. It's it's inching towards certain in certain directions, in certain times, in certain places, and it's kind of choosing the people who do the discovering. Now he's being you know, he's going a little bit too far in in that deliberately, but it's a very

interesting perspective. And he calls it the technium. You know, this this machine, this evolving organism of our technology, which you know, when it wants to invent search engines, it picks Larry Page and Sogate bring to do it. But it's going to do that, do it whoever's around. You know, somebody's going to be there to invent search engines for it.

And it's quite an interesting way of looking at the world because, you know, one of the pieces of evidence for it, which he first introduced me to and I then followed up the research on it. It's very very striking is the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. Oh yeah, Dean

Simutin's done some good work in there. Yeah, to any one different people invented the light bulb independently, basically, you know, it's extraordinary, and only one guy credit and only one gets credit exactly, And so often these priority disputes that bogged down innovators. I mean, you know, the Wright Brothers, Marconi,

Samuel Morse. These guys spent some of the best lives of years of their life in court defending their monopolies, their patents, their intellectual property against furious rivals who said, well I came, I came up with half of that idea, and it said, you know, they should say, yeah, actually's probably true. You probably did. And that's one of the reasons I make that intellectual properties is misguided and is doing more harm than good at the moment. That's a

great point this idea. Dean sam talks about half if an idea, it's often if an idea is ready to pop out, so to speak, at your I'm mixing that you have your ideas have sex metaphors, So I'm like, you know, yeah, yeah, that's what I'm trying. That's where I'm going with us pop out when ideas ready to be born, That's what I'm trying to saying, Yeah, an idea is really to be born, it's almost in the air for the picking is. This was Dean Simonson's point,

So he said, multiples make sense. You know that people that it's not like these labs are stealing from each other. Can't we admit that, like we're all taking from the universe.

Going back to the search engine, I find out a very useful example because it's very clear to us the reason search engines were invented in the nineteen nineties by lots of different people around the same time is not because there was suddenly some deity who decided to implant the idea of search engines in certain human brains, but because once you've invented the Internet, it's kind of inevitable that you're going to invent the search engine. But the

weird thing is nobody sees it coming. So back in the eighties, nobody is going around saying, you know, once we've invented the Internet, somebody is going to make a ton of money out of searchin Even Larry Page and Sergei Britain don't think they're inventing search engines to start with. They think they're cataloging the Internet. There's a strange asymmetry here which I've wrestled with and don't fully understand, which is the predictability in retrospect of technological evolution, but the

unpredictability in prospect. Such a good point and it's it's so true, And I wonder what about the exceptions, like those who had that crazy vision that no one else saw and no one else believed in. Do you think Zuckerberg when he was maybe didn't know it would be this this big, but he started to have visions of like what a social media system would look like and how it would work for people while people would like it. But that hadn't existed before. Yeah, I mean there are

forgotten predecessors who thought of invention. There's a I would argue that if if Zuckerberg hadn't met the Winklevos trends, and if Zuckerberg had become a professor of neuroscience or something instead, I'd be pretty surprised if we if somebody else hadn't scooped the pool and become the extremely rich founder of some company with a different name, admittedly but very similar to Facebook. There's a certain inevitability about that.

But I mean, I do write about a guy who really did invent the telephone in you know a long time before Alexander Graham Bell in twenty years before or something, and then died in penury and poverty, and nobody appreciated what he'd done, but it's you could make the case that he churned the principle. But it's never really going to work till you've got till other technologies have made further advances. Again, I met this case with wheeled suitcases in the book you Know, which seems to be a

classic example of a technology that comes too late. I mean, why didn't we invent wheeled suitcases fifty years ago, one hundred year ago? What turns out if you research the history of this, you find that there are people patenting and suggesting wheeled suitcases way back into the nineteen twenties, but they don't catch on. Why not basically because you know, wheels are big and clunky and heavy, and airports or train stations are small and easy to navigate, and porters

are available and cheap. So actually it's a waste of time sticking wheels on suitcases until roughly the nineteen seventies. So there's surprisingly few things that you can name that we should have invented five hundred years before we did. It's a great point. I mean, yeah, I love that you make that point. Why does innovation require freedom? There's a general correlation here that you know, relatively free societies.

From the City States in Italy to the Song dynasty in China to modern California have been places where people have been free to experiment, free to innovate. So what is it about free that is necessary. Well, we shouldn't forget that. It's the freedom of the consumer to express his wishes that is quite important. You know, the Soviet consumer was not really free to express his desire for

washing machines rather than nuclear missiles. Probably more important, it's the freedom of the innovator and the entrepreneur to experiment, make mistakes, change direction, to change your mind, to backtrack, to seek out new sources of investment. In a system where you have to do what you've promised to do or you have to get permission to do something else,

then it doesn't work. So, for example, today in innovating in the nuclear power industry is basically very difficult because you have to go back to the regulator and say, look, I've changed my mind. I want to build this nuclear paerstation to a slightly different design and I use a

different material. You've got to start the whole licensing process all over again, and that costs you one hundred million dollars or something, and so people don't do that, Whereas if you're inventing a new video game, you are free to just say no, do you know what, I'm going to do it in a different way. I'm going to start a completely different way of doing the same thing today. So that freedom to change course is I think probably

the most important factor in the freedom behind innovation. There are some obstacles to that. One you talk about is you're stuck about governments can be a big obstacle to innovation.

Another one, as people like Jonathan Height and Greg wil keanaf I've talked about, and how university is these days seem to be more and more antithetical to the spirit of what you're talking about when you talk about innovation, which is trial and error, right, the safe space to fail exactly, and the grant giving bodies in science have I'm sorry to say, become obsessed with getting you to write down in your grant application what it is you're

going to discover. Well, what's the point of doing the experiment if you already know what it is you're going to discover. Can you talk a little bit more about your point about governments, is that what you're talking about with grant funding agencies and things like that. Yeah, and that was one of the examples. Governments can help innovation

and they can hinder it. A good example of them helping it is the Clinton administration passing a raft of legislation through Congress that was designed deliberately to make e commerce possible. It was essentially very permissive legislation, very libertarian legislation, somewhat utopian if you like, and it was a rare moment of bipartisan agreement that this is what we needed to do to clear the undergrowth to make it possible to roll the runway for Amazon and others to take off.

From examples of governments preventing innovation, I would cite the European Union on genetic modification of crops, where it's never been banned. They've never actually said no. It is legal to produce a genetically modified crop in Europe and grow it, but in order to do so, you must go through a process that is so lengthy, so labyrinthine, so uncertain in its outcome that nobody any longer bothers to even try.

And I give the story of Basf with its one of its potato products how positively Kafka esque the way in which it would think it would get to the end of the process, and then someone would go to court and say, ah, but you, in approving this, you used the reason that you originally gave, not the reason

you've given more recently. You know, whatever, you know, it's just Bonker's process, and that has cut Europe off from technologies that have manifestly reduced the use of pesticides in other parts of the world and and other crops, which seems to me a pity. So there is you know, government can be a real problem to innovation innovators as a regulator and also as a subsidizer and protector of

incumbent interests. You know, powerful companies lobby government saying can you just bring in these rules because actually we don't

want this new upstart rival eating our lunch again. Very good European example, guy called James Dyson, who's a British innovator, makes these hand dryers and vacuum cleaners and things, and he invented the bagless vacuum cleaner, and the big German vacuum cleaner manufacturers saw this as a threat, so they went to the European Union and said, you know what, we should have new rules in Europe about how you measure the power output of vacuum cleaners, because there's a

little problem here, which is that our vacuum cleaners ramp up the power they demand as they get half full of dust because the bags are no longer so good. You know, they're having to suck harder too, because the bag is getting in the way. So let's change the rules away from the international standard, and let's say every vacuum cleaner now should be tested for its power consumption without dust, because then we can appear a little bit cheaper than mister Dyson. He eventually went to court, it

took him five years. He won, but this ridiculous, you know, little European regulation was thrown out and we were back to the global regulation. But by then Dyson imitators from China who were beginning to compete with him. So it's a fascinating story of how crony capitalists use government to raise barriers to entry against innovators. I hear you, mad, And there's so much you gain from these rich stories

that you just can't capture with regression efficients. So I enjoyed getting lost in your world and learning about about the barrier as well as the facilitators of innovation. Just a thought here, and I'm I want to know what you think about this. I'm a biologist, and I often felt that my biologist colleagues were suffering from a form of physics envy, whereby they wished they were more mathematical, they wish they had more laws. If for me to

feel any better, psychologists have biology envy. So it goes all turtles all the way down. It turns all the way down. You're right. I mean what I was going to say was that somebody said biology is the science of exceptions, not rules, which is a bit unfair. But you look at Darwin, He's essentially he's using no regression. He's just saying, here's a bunch of stories that support my point of view, and I'm finding in the variety of life ways of testing my hypothesis without being too

mathematically precise about it. Now, I recognize we have to have maths in biology too. I'm not saying we throw it all out, but perhaps my training has led me to be to use case histories a bit more. That's so fascinating, because there's a great point there as well about physics really does live in the rules. It's not like child Sean Carroll on this podcast, and we kept bumping up against Like we start talking about the biological

realm of life, there's a certain unpredictability there. And then we start talking about humans that when I study human nature that my gosh, it's hard to come up with general rules. That you'll come with general rules and then you'll meet one neurodiverse human being who breaks all the rules in the way that they see the world, and it's like, it's like, what do I do with you? I don't want to ignore you. You're you know you're

you're important, So I hear you. Matt. I just want to thank you so much for the chat today and for your one of my favorite science writers. I don't say that to all my guests. You're one of my favorite science writers. And yeah, thanks for inspiring me well, Scott. I've had many interesting conversations about this book, but this has definitely been one of the most interesting, and I've learned a lot in it. So thank you so much. Thanks Matt. Thanks for listening to this episode of the

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