How Innovation Works, with Matt Ridley

[Music] today the author of the marvelous new book how innovation works the journalist Matt Ridley or as he is known in the House of Lords the right honourable the Viking Ridley a graduate of madlyn College Oxford with a degree in zoology Matt wrote for a number of years at the Economist spending some five years here in the United States he's the author of many books on science and technology including his classic work the 2010 book the rational optimist since 2013 by count Ridley has said as a conservative in the House of Lords Matt thanks for making the time and welcome to everyone for to this special plague time edition of uncommon knowledge with Peter Robinson Hey I'm great to join you I'm locked down in Palo Alto in Europe in Northumberland correct I'm in Northumberland in the north of England and it's beautiful weather here I don't know it's kind of parlor outside weather actually here let's say it's cloudless sky today and you and your family are well you've escaped this things everybody as well so far all right we'll come to the book in a moment but there's a kind of mandatory question for you this is Matt Ridley writing recently in The Spectator quote until this year I thought this kind of infectious pandemic could not happen today the defeat of infectious diseases as a cause of death has been so complete as to seem invincible plague smallpox cholera typhoid measles polio whooping cough and many more eradicated or nearly so it turns out that I and many others were wrong how did you miss it well two reasons one is I got so used to people crying wolf and being wrong that of course I didn't pay enough attention to people who were crying wolf and were right and actually there are out there some very prescient warnings about what's happening in Chinese wildlife markets about what's happening in terms of understanding the infectivity of coronaviruses in bats in China it turns out they can infect human beings without adapting first you know they don't need to go through an evolutionary phase they can go straight into that's a discovery that I'd missed but it was made four or five years ago so I think a big part of this is that we've been looking in the wrong direction we've been panicking about climate change as a world and we should have been worrying about pandemics the specific argument I made in that paragraph was that every other pandemic threat from Ebola to SARS to swine flu to bird flu had proved to be overblown and they had disappointed if you like as pandemics and I thought that was because our new genomic knowledge of these viruses was so fast and so good we could read their genomes in in hours that we would be able to mobilise the work of science against them and it turns out that vaccine development really has lagged behind other forms of innovation and actually I found a very interesting article from last year before the pandemic by Wayne Koff who's the head of the global vaccine project in New York saying we really need to get better at making vaccines it's far too slow it's hard too old-fashioned there's very little being done about it and I think he was right so if I'm a hopeless layman so you're just gonna have to talk some baby talk to get me through this mat but is it correct to say that vaccines are still developed the way most drugs used to be that is to say by hit-or-miss these days as I understand it our our knowledge of molecular structure has reached the point where you can effectively well this is an oversimplification but you can use the computer to design the drug that you want and then go off and you've narrowed very dramatically the number of different outcomes so you've shrunk the cone of trial-and-error so to speak but with vaccines for some reason it's still the old-fashioned way you just try this damn thing and if it doesn't work you try another it's like Edison to whom will come in a moment Edison trying as you note six thousand different fibrous plants before you hit on the right filament for the light bulb is that so well yes and no I think I think it's you're not wrong that there's a huge amount of hit and miss and trial and error in vaccine development there is still in drugs too and as that example from Edison shows one of my arguments is that we mustn't take away the space for trial and error because actually that's how we've always done innovation it's a hugely important part of innovation you never get it right first time your your your brilliant insight isn't what counts it's it's honing that insight through trial and error so I don't think that's really the problem the problem is it just the once you've got what you think is a vaccine you have to test in animals you have to expose the animals to the disease that takes time you then have to try and find out that it's safe in human beings and once you've done that you're gonna have to give it to a bunch of human beings and hope they come in contact with the disease and otherwise you don't know if it works you know there's no other way really so it's very time consuming and the the example of Ebola is very interesting because firms did develop Ebola vaccines in 2014-15 when the pandemic the epidemic of Ebola was happening in Africa but by the time they got them going the epidemic was over and there were not enough volunteers to come forward to test it so it never in the end got properly tested and that is that's a very nice example of why vaccines aren't profitable for the drug industry they're very specific they only deal with one disease if they work they do themselves out of business very quickly and even if they don't work the disease usually goes away very quickly because the kind of things they're dealing with that tend to come and go so unlike statins which go on giving people for year after year they're just not very lucrative and recognizing that problem the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust did something rather good a few years ago they got together and together were the Norwegian government and the Indian government set up something called the coalition for epidemic preparedness innovation which was all about speeding up accent vaccine development but it's only really just got going now my question is why on earth didn't the World Health Organization do that 20 years before why didn't the governments of the world with their aid budgets look into doing that you know why did it take as Gates has done quite often actually when did it take gates to come along and say here's a better way of spending the money to achieve this because I think vaccine development is something that could be speeded up there are lots of new avenues for doing it and they need to be tried you are trotting out one of the themes from how innovation works and I suppose we need to we need to introduce the book a bit before we come back to that theme but you note in the book that large organizations are seldom the right place for innovation and I have to suppose that argument applies to governments and world health organizations and so forth all right the book itself how innovation works quote innovations come in many forms but one thing they all have in common is that they are enhanced forms of improbability I love that phrase but it certainly needs to be explained yes well the world tends towards more chaotic and improbable structures in other words your your bedroom gets less tidy if you do nothing about it yes you need to put energy into make your bedroom more tidy when you've done so you've made your bedroom less probable more improbable it's very in I mean every single one of the books behind me here is an incredibly improbable arrangement of atoms the the not only to make the structure of the book but to make the the pattern of letters in the words in the book these are unbelievably import they couldn't come about by chance and that's what energy does for us we have to put energy into the system to reverse entropy and it's to say to reverse chaos and create order and improve ability and when you think about it every useful in the world has a sort of improbable structure I mean it's it's very precisely designed and that's what we human beings are in the business of with and by the way so is Mother Nature I mean that's what evolution is doing is it's creating improbable structures like you know bodies and brains and we're in the business of creating improbable structures like buildings and videoconferences these are improbable ways of reorganizing the atoms of the world and that's in the end what we're doing we're searching for other improbable outcomes that are useful to us and in doing so we have to apply energy and that's why I start my book with energy because I think it is actually very important and and I I used the beautiful analogy from my old friend Douglas Adams the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy who wrote this rather marvelous phrase in one of his books that one of the books of the Hitchhiker's Guide that a rocket was driven by an infinite improbability drive so I say that human civilization is an infinite improbability drive which i think is what douglas was getting at it is it is a wonderful phrase one more quotation from the very beginning of the book which feels like a terrible admission at the beginning of a book about innovation and it reads as follows yes brace yourself but you are the one who wrote it the surprising truth is that nobody really knows why innovation happens and how it happens let alone when and where it will happen next close quote so it is of the nature of innovation that it always contains an element of surprise well it's probably that we don't know where it's going to flare up in terms of which technologies are going to be subject to innovation people think all innovation is speeding up that's not the case I mean think about transport I very just exactly but I flew on a 747 the other day obviously not the other day but a couple of months ago that was an airplane invented 51 years ago in 1969 imagine using a computer invented 51 years ago you know it's impossible to so computers and communications have speeded up incredibly in my lifetime whereas transport has hardly changed at all and when I was born it we thought the opposite was going to be the case all the futurology of the 1950s is about how we're going to see personal jetpacks gyrocopters for commuting routine space travel supersonic airliners all that kind of stuff none of which happened instead we got amazing computers and communications which they didn't see coming mostly they thought we were going to use landlines by now so so in that sense it's unpredictable it's also unpredictable globally in the sense that it's hard it's it's that you can come up with good reasons why California has been the center of innovation for the last 50 years you can come up with good reasons why Italy was in the 1400s you can come up with good reasons why China was in the ten hundreds but it's it's all a bit random it's all a bit spontaneous it's all a bit unplanned and of course that's very much my point is that this is a a precious plant that grows in the ground and what you're going to do is till the ground and make it ready rather than plan an outcome you cannot really plan innovation you cannot say I'm going to go in and create exactly the following innovations because we're fantastically bad at predicting the future in technology as I point out in the book you know we don't we didn't see search engines coming as an importing country for example now one last brief quotation from the very opening how innovation works in this book I shall try to tackle this great puzzle I will do so not by abstract theorizing but mainly by telling stories now of course for a layman like me that's wonderful because you've got what a couple of dozen fascinating stories there but why did you adopt that technique why are you telling stories it's because I like reading stories it's taken me a long time to get to this realization you might think but actually what what we human beings like reading his stories tales about people's lives about who they were they did things and what happened to them and this to some extent contradicts the theme of my book which is that people don't matter that if Thomas Edison had been run over a tram the light bulb would still have been developed where 21 different people came up with the idea of the light bulb around the same time as it happens he was the one who made sure that it was reliable and affordable and all that kind of thing so in a sense Edison doesn't matter he's dispensable but in another sense he matters all the more because if there's if anyone can do it then it's all the cleverer of him to be the person who does it so by telling these stories about people that I sort of bring out the themes about the technology I feel this this being a vidcast this morning here in California but it's evening where you are we don't have time for story after story after story people have to buy the book for that but can you just tell us tell us briefly then the story of Thomas Edison Americans think they know that but when you read the story and how innovation works you realize you don't you don't quite know that story briefly the story of Edison and why he why that story if not Edison personally but why that what that story tells us that's important well what it what Edison's biography really tells us is the importance of trial and error he was someone who spotted that the way to do innovation and well first thing he spotted was that you could set up a factory to produce innovations you know you could you could actually set up a plant whose job was to find new new ways of arranging the world the light bulb the nickel battery you know these kind of things and you did it by trial and error you tried and tried and tried 6,000 different plant materials as you mentioned before he came up with Japanese bamboo for the filament of a light bulb so his approach was very much a as oh you might call it a brute-force approach of just trying everything you could think of and he's his labs and his workshops were full of books full of ideas full of things said that everybody was just working really hard he made people work really hard to produce these things and he said that it is he I think he once said that I it's not that I've failed I've just found 50,000 ways that don't work or is other famous quotation is that it's 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration and I think that's that's the key to the distinction between invention and it's an innovation in my view at least I make that argument in the book that that you can have a bright idea you can invent a prototype but to turn it and inventions are something that people actually adopt that is reliable that is manufacturable that is affordable that's actually the hard work and so someone like Jeff Bezos is a modern Edison in the sense that he took the idea of e-commerce which we were all capable of playing with and turning it into something that worked and he did so by failing by failing again and again and again till he succeeded I mean he I'm not I'm not dissing him he says the same thing and there had to be a lot of failure to get to our success act for a moment of the virus in the United Kingdom and in all but seven states six or seven states I'm not sure I can't remember the count here in the United States the government has shut down the economy and ordered us all to remain in our homes in this country we've got over 25 million people out of work the GDP seems to have dropped by five percent in one quarter between four and five percent a figure that would be much larger if it hadn't been for huge government infusions of liquidity and even during the first and second world wars neither your government nor mine did what they have done now which is close all the schools how what is this all a terrible overreaction should we have had I tried to get to the I'm thinking out the rational optimist but the rational optimist says be optimistic and be rational and it feels as though there's a mechanism here the press is in the business of exaggerating every story to sell newspapers and politicians are in the business of enjoying the limelight they just like it and exercising power so you can see the way the incentives may have distorted I what do you make of it all what do you make it well point I have become more and more of a lockdown skeptic because it's you have to be young phrase I think it has been a huge mistake and I think that the the example that proves the rule here is Sweden Sweden has not locked down its economy it has encouraged people to work from home it has encouraged people not to gather in large gatherings it has encouraged people to wash their hands and to not shake hands and all that kind of thing it's done all of that voluntary stuff but without slamming on the brakes on the whole of its economy and it will still suffer it still has a relatively high death rate higher than some other countries in Europe but not as high as in Britain and certainly no higher than most European countries so I'm afraid it is proving that the that many of these measures were not necessary now some measures were necessary I mean I think it was right to ban large gatherings and I think it was right to on the whole closed down travel and a lot of public transport I think it was right to encourage people to work from home as much as possible and to you know self isolate and distance yourself etc but what what has been added by closing schools seems to be very little indeed what has been added by closing down most workplaces seems to be very little indeed because the more we find out about this virus the more it's clear that it's spreading in enclosed spaces it's not spreading out of doors it's not spreading through young people very fast at all it's possible for young people to give it to older people and that's one of the big problems but it's it's relatively rare I mean there's a there's a kid who caught it skiing in Switzerland who came back to London who and they've traced 170 of his contacts and not one of them got the coronavirus from him both his siblings got the cold he had a few days after that but you know that's much more infectious so how did countries in Asia escape better and to some extent Germany although Germany did do a full lockdown and the answer is testing it's it's now abundantly clear that testing makes a huge difference if you test everybody who thinks they've got it in the community as well as in the healthcare system from the start then you can keep on top of it why should that make the difference after all a test is not a cure and by the time you take the test you might be feeling ill you might have already passed it on you'd think it wouldn't make much difference well the answer is I think and the this is only becoming clear very recently is that testing allows you to prevent it getting into the healthcare system I think the real tragedy in Italy in Spain France and Britain has been that it's got into the health care system and in America because once doctors and nurses an awful lot of people in the health care system already are vulnerable you know they've got underlying conditions which make them vulnerable and if and people coming to hospitals coming to clinics are on the whole sick people and if they pick it up there then they get sicker and so there's been this bushfire going through the hospitals in Britain we sent patients home from hospitals to care homes to clear the wards for an expected wave of coronavirus patients well actually some of them were in were already infected so we gave it to the care homes so I think it is a disastrously nosocomial epidemic that is to say hospital-acquired and that's terrible news in some ways but it's good news in other ways because it means that if it's going that fast through the hospitals it must be going that much slower through the community and and therefore all you need to do in the community is wash your hands keep your distance and all the sort of reasonable voluntary things as it is we've we've done terrible harm to the economy we've locked people down and we've got an awful lot of people who are quite happy being locked up there on government salaries or there are now government subsidized salaries and they're saying you know in Britain the teachers are say are the ones saying we don't want schools reopening we're quite happy thank you we're still getting our salaries were at home so that's a real worry right so here's here's the sort of underlying question rational optimism how innovation works in both of these books you argue that things get better and better and better you just unleash human creativity and although the process is unpredictable over the longer term the material circumstances of our lives get better and better and better and we ought to appreciate that in anyone who reads either of your books does do so on the other hand there does seem to be something in us that likes to be frightened why else would the press overplay the story over play this and every story there is something in us that would rather be told what to do this is Tolstoy and the Lord not Dostoevsky in the legend of the Grand Inquisitor being free is in some way hard work we find this difficult there's something in us that wants to be told go into your home and we'll let you know when it's safe to come out so I guess what I'm working you must have this must be a kind of the permanent dilemma of your life that human beings on the wall I don't know how does one describe it and what do you make of it is who are we talking about that the frontal region of the brain versus the reptile brain there is we are these strange animals that can be rational and duly optimistic and yet love to be scared and told what to do how do you handle that well it's it's a truly difficult puzzle that because there is something called the optimism gap which is the fact that although people are extremely pessimistic about the fate of the planet very pessimistic about their own countries pretty pessimistic about their own towns they're optimistic about their own lives yes they don't have this pessimism about they think they're going to earn more than they do they think they're going to stay married longer than they do they think they you know there's all sorts of ways in which people actually are unrealistically optimistic about their individual lives an unrealistically pessimistic about the bigger picture why is that well it's very simple the media and John Tenney and Ray Baumeister discussed this in their new book whose name I've temporarily forgotten but they discussed the point that the media tells them to be pessimistic about the world it doesn't tell them to be personís ting about their own lives where their own experience counts for much more than the bigger picture so that's part of it now why is the media circus and they stick well if it bleeds it leads bad news is more salient it's more interesting bad news is more sudden good news tends to be general gradual whereas good bad news tends to be sudden and deep within us there is undoubtedly a psychological bias to pay more attention to bad news and good news and it probably made sense back on the savanna you and I are walking to the waterhole you say I don't think we should go this way there might be a line behind that rock and I say no haven't you read Matt Ridley's book everything's getting better it's all going to be fine I'm dead and your jeans are in the next generation via my girlfriend right right right right alright and actually just on that point that there's a beautiful point made by Hans Rosling the late hands Rosling who's one of the so Godfather's of rational optimism he but when people have put me onto these these ideas because he did a poll of a thousand people in the US and they need to repeated it in the UK a number of countries and he said in the last 20 years has the percentage of the world population that lives in extreme poverty halved doubled or stayed the same which of those do you think is correct and in the UK in the u.s. about 65 percent of people think it has doubled and only 5% think it is hard the 5% are right and the 65% are wrong that's striking enough but he then says hang on with it if I wrote those three answers on three bananas and I threw them to a chimpanzee the chimpanzee would pick up the right answer 33% of the time not 5% of the time it would do six times as well as human beings and answering a question about human society that's the measure of how much we've been doctrine aided ourselves into global person mm-hmm do you must have known Bob Conquest do you remember Robert conquest through the oh yes yes no I didn't know him personally no but I oh you did not he was a colleague of mine here at the Hoover Institution was Bob's Bob had conquest rules and one of the rules was that everyone is conservative about what he knows best which is another formulation of this I think where your own experience back to how innovation works China quote there is little doubt that the innovation engine has fired up in China Silicon Valley's will sputter on for a while this was a bit painful reading this where I sit but it is likely that in the coming few decades China will innovate on a grander scale and faster than anywhere else close quote China will lead the world in innovation why well I'm basing this on empirical facts which is that China is way past the stage of catching up with Western economies by doing cheap manufacturing for them and emulating their technology it is now innovating and you can see that particularly in consumer behavior consumers don't use cash in China but they don't use cards either they have gone full ecommerce it's basically these little square things that you pay for everything in the menus of virtual and you know you you try and offer cash to a taxi driver and they hold up your phone and the transactions that's right that's that's the electronically yeah and how is that possible given that this is a repressive centralist regime that would do justice to the Ming Empire in terms of its authoritarianism and the answer there is that the system dong Xiao ping created which has persisted is in my view one that is surprisingly free at the lower levels but extremely unfree at the top level in other words I think Deng Xiaoping succeeds mal and in 1979 he begins talking about socialism with Chinese characteristics and he opens begins the opening to the market all right just just a bank job hanging out long dead but he's the man in the 70s 79 through the 80s who begins the market revolution in China all right carry on sorry yeah and you know well Xi Jingping is much more authoritarian figure than that on the whole what his Communist Party is doing is insisting that there be no innovation in politics so you can't start political party you can't disagree you can't start a Free Press but what you but as long as you don't annoy the Communist Party if you want to start a business making a widget and in doing so you need to build a factory and in building the factory you need to reclaim some land then the rules and regs you've got to go through to do that all the rules and regs you've got to go through to produce an innovative product an order of magnitude less than in America or your AC that's my hypothesis I've only been to China a couple of times I've read a lot about it but I haven't been often enough so I don't pretend to be an expert but my argument therefore is that it's sort of an exception that proves the rule because it's an exception to the idea that you need freedom to innovate but the free the freedom is there it's just below a certain level now I don't think that compromise can last forever I mean I that it feels to me very uncomfortable if the world comes to rely on an innovation engine that is run by the Communist Party that does not feel like a sustainable future so that's why I'm desperate for the West to rediscover the genius of innovation and indeed for India which is of course the other emerging giant here which is an innovative country and is a country addicted in a way to spontaneous order it is it's always been the best example of how society as a suburb from up phenomenon rather than a top-down one albeit doesn't look very ordered when you're in a traffic jam in Delhi but it's you know it's sort of that's that's where it's coming from I feel in the long run India will save us if America and Europe don't may I tell you you being you you probably are completely aware of this but I'd like to see how you respond to it I'd like your advice for this country here's what's happening right now I feel this I confirm it in one conversation after another I can't prove it but you'll see the point the old Cold War Ronald Reagan is elected on a platform of standing up more resolutely to the Soviets but after a decade and a half of d'etat the polls indicate that the American people are actually not all that anti Soviet and then the Russians shoot down a Korean airliner KL double-oh-seven and in 48 hours the polls turn and the end was not during the election campaign no that was nineteen it was it was after Reagan was elected would have been 83 I was working there right 83 I think it was it was early ish first term and suddenly the public support for his policy slid right into place and something like that feels to be going on right now Donald Trump is hardening toward the Chinese but the public is confused the business community here in Silicon Valley which of course is interlaced with Chinese we they invest in us we invest in them up and down this valleys Chinese students get hired out of Stanford to go to much more complicated than the old Cold War but now with this coronavirus where it seems unambiguous that at the minimum Xi Jingping understood what was happening long before he permit he informed the West and at a minimum he shut down Wuhan internally but continued to permit international flights to infect the that much now seems that at least that much seems unambiguously clear and the public opinion against China is hardening up now this is a this is a this is what this is a disaster for all of us some somehow we're now going to begin disentangling even that is the wrong way of putting it I suppose because whatever that they have they're part of our supply chain this is so different from the old Cold War they're part of our supply chain they've invested in companies all over the West we've invested in them the best figure I could find the other day when I was searching for it was that three hundred and sixty thousand Chinese students are studying in the United States right now and yet and yet there's a new Cold War taking shape bad news good news what are we to do I think that's a very acute analysis I think you're absolutely right that this is a moment at which public opinion could easily switch the fact that Donald Trump has been banging on about it for three years implies that public opinion was ready to switch on a lot of this that yes the economic trade war had already primed the public and of course I'm not with him on that I'm a free trader I don't believe the tariffs are the way to go about this kind of thing but I I think that in this crisis even those of us who had no illusions about Xi Jinping's rule have been deeply shocked by the behavior of the Chinese government not just the things you mentioned but also the disinformation campaigns yeah the the the blatant attempts to insert propaganda into Western media the attempt to blame the virus on the US military visiting Wuhan the lack of transparency about the origins of the virus and what is known about it the Wuhan Institute of Virology stories which while I seen the evidence that I've seen the molecular biological evidence does not support the idea that a specific leak from the Wuhan Institute of our own at all likely as the source there is another Institute in in Wuhan which was also working on bats with a lower security level that was working on local bats and it will be a local bat because we know that the Yunnan bats being looked at at the virology Institute are two different it's not impossible that a accidental leak might have been responsible the only way to to prove to us that that's not the case mr. ji is to open up bring the scientists out in the open tell us exactly what they were doing with their experiments exactly what the protocols were and bring them before the world's press so we can answer them and that's not happening and therefore conspiracy theories are growing including ones that it might have been a bio weapon which I don't believe for a minute I don't believe any one little even even Chinese scientists are clever enough to build bio weapons so I think you're absolutely right that this is a critical moment and but you're also right that we are horribly dependent on Chinese supply chain and as you mention on Chinese students the UK academic sector has become utterly dependent on Chinese students because they bring a lot of money with them and you've seen we've seen in recent days some surprisingly Craven remarks by the new vice-chancellor of Cambridge about how we must be nice to the Chinese and not discriminate against them and this kind of thing but of course I don't want to discriminate against them I just want to get at the truth about things I think is very interesting I was in Hong Kong and Japan in late 2018 so a year and a half ago and I was came away very surprised by how strong the anti China sentiment was in Japan again and again I was told you cannot underestimate what they're up to you mustn't overlook the degree to which in cyber particularly they are on a war footing was the way Japanese were saying to me and I was amazed I had not sort of heard this view I then went to Hong Kong where I talked to some who had spent 12 years in Beijing and was now in Hong Kong a journalist and he said yeah the Japanese are right and we are heading for war and I said what do you mean war you know war war no real war surely you mean trade war or cyber war and he said no no war with guns who with who they're gonna attack he said that that's easy Vietnam and I said why and he said because they have a grudge against Vietnam who whipped their ass in sorry I'm not allowed to use words like that but who damaged them in a war in the 1980s and they want revenge and they also know that America is not coming to the help of Vietnam in the second time now that's not how it has turned out this time but I am considerably many I put the problem in this way you're a lot you thank you very much I thought that I was going to get some really lovely answer from you about relax be a rational optimist this is all going to work out and you're frightening me even more the reptile brain of little Robinson here is unfelt right now but let me put this point where in 1914 but you know nobody talks so here's what incidentally as to as to Vietnam a colleague of mine here at the Hoover Institution is Jim mattis who's former Secretary of Defense and during his not quite two years as Secretary of Defense the Vietnamese got in touch and said by the way could you um could you produce some sort of show of friendship with us and and Jim this is his account although it's in the public record in Jim's what do you mean well could you just send us a ship on some sort of it have an American ship put in here so Jim mattis sent them an aircraft carrier and the Vietnamese were thrilled but but at least if Jim mattis or Secretary of Defense Vietnam falls within the perimeter to which the United States at least pays close attention these days all right but here's this here's the way it goes basic thinking on the American military they outnumber us they've got us there their economy is huge it may already be bigger than ours by some measures but soon enough it's likely to be bigger than ours not per person of course but still overall output bigger here's where we retain the edge and where we must retain the edge because it's the only edge we retain innovation we can stay if we are very shrewd about innovation and then transferring innovation from the startup firms where that all happens into our military if we do it quickly and well and more securely than we've been doing we can sustain a permanent edge and let the diplomats keep talking over the coming decade or two and now Matt Ridley says oh they're already out innovating us they're the engine of innovation and so this is actually a question of state that could arise in your present chamber so my noble Lord a short of surrender to these people what are we to do well and the answer is unleash the innovation engine in our economies again and for me it's for me the number one thing is speed of decision making by government I see it on a very small scale if I need a permit for something trivial in my garden I see it on a very large scale if my country needs a new runway for its main airport decisions are taken in a lethargic manner with absolutely no urgency and I've come to the conclusion that the problem with bureaucracy is not that it says no to innovators but that it takes a very long time to say yes I said and during that time the money runs out you give up just take diagnostic devices for eg DNA tests for viruses and things like that quite a topical subject it takes on average 70 months in Europe to get an you diagnostic zero seven zero months to get a new medical device licensed under the European Medicines Agency in the United States it takes twenty months much better but still pretty atrocious yes I mean it should take a week frankly you know maybe not a week but in the current crisis it is taking a week you know people are coming forward with new versions of ventilators new versions of DNA tests all sorts of things and they are being rushed through approval and safety is being assessed and they're being put on the market now how many entrepreneurs thought you know what I might go off and invent a new handheld device that will test for viruses in the field in ten minutes there's no reason I can't achieve that by miniaturizing polymerase chain reactions and applying them with electronic consumer electronics I could do that how many people were deterred from doing that by knowing that the regulatory hurdles were huge and the answer is a lot I think yes and you see this in spades for example in the nuclear industry where it has been impossible to innovate because regulators take so long to approve a new design that you're broke before you even break ground and and so I I think speed of decision making is the key thing that we need to address but there are lots of other things and we tend to take a top-down view of innovation particularly in this country at the moment we think that it's about putting money into the universities and hoping that widgets come out the other end of the pipe and that isn't the way it works I mean one of the points I try to make in the book is that the linear model where discovery leads to invention leads to application is wrong it's not always wrong but sometimes right but it's just as often the other way around just to give you a very nice example that the CRISPR the genome editing technology that is very exciting development of the last ten years looks like a purely academic discovery if you read the conventional accounts of it and it's all about whether Berkeley deserves the patents or MIT deserves the patents but actually when you drill down further into it where does it come from it comes out of the yogurt industry because if you're growing yogurt your bacteria sometimes get sick so you need to send for the vet to kill them and one of the things that you'd therefore do is you put money into understanding the bacterial immune system how bacteria don't get sickened by viruses so you need to understand what their defenses are against bacteria phage viruses and it emerged from work done actually with the help of the salt industry in Spain funnily enough that there were these weird sequences in bacteria that might be something to do with their system for defeating viruses and it turns out that's exactly what it is it's a sort of library of virus sequences that the bacteria keep on file saying if you see this sequence cut it up because it's a virus and so all this comes out of a very practical problem in industry how to solve bacterial cultures going sick and but it ends up going at the university is where it gets retooled as a genome editing tool and it comes back into industry now as a potential device for both curing people of cancer and giving us better crops for agriculture so it's a very nice example of the two-way flow between science and technology between universities and business and it for me we need to understand that much better if we're to unleash innovation again in the worst Matthieu toward the end of how innovation works you produce a number of predictions where you think bundles of innovations might lead us by 2050 and again we don't even as we don't have time for all your a couple of dozen of absolutely fascinating stories I'd like to take just a couple here of your predictions of which you make I guess half a dozen or so quotation by 2050 innovation will make it possible to fuel prosperity for all with far lower net emissions of carbon dioxide thrilling sentence probably you continue that will mean new forms of nuclear power oh well Matt politically we already know that's a problem and I just if your theme if your great theme is look at what humans are capable of doing let us rejoice I guess my my kind of counter pose Pau is Oh mad human perversity you really have no you're just not giving it adequate weight here if nuclear power represents the hope for the environment that you and many others tell us it it is why does the green move it movement utterly oppose it yeah yeah well this is one of the great tragedies of our era and the the degree to which the environmental movement was born in an anti-nuclear mood and then became anti fossil fuel and it refuses to recognize that the only technology that can deliver low-carbon energy on a sufficient scale without damaging huge swathes of the planet by putting them on our solar panels or wind turbines is nuclear power because of its concentrated form its potential to be very affordable etc as long as it can innovate that refusal is is ultra disappointing I agree and to understand it you you have to understand this this deep-seated resistance to innovation that that I write a whole chapter about because it's just not true that people love innovation and always adopt it there is huge resistance of innovation I talked about the resistance to the innovation called coffee when coffee came into Western Europe in the 1600s there was huge resistance from the industry which didn't want competition but also from Kings who didn't like people sitting around in coffee house coffee house is talking about how bad the king was running the government and so so even as something as simple as that had a real struggle to get adopted and we now have extremely well organized extremely well-funded businesses whose job is opposing innovation and technology and you know they're up as their opposition to nuclear power is basically that it's industrial and we it's quite easy for people to dislike anything industrial which is where Michael Moore's new film planet of the humans is so interesting because he's pointing out that the wind and solar industries are very industrial too they load a lot of mining a lot of equipment and so on it might be that we have to as it were throw fishing under the bus and move on to fusion before we can win this argument like it's a bit like in in my country we have to sort of abandon all hope to do conventional genetic engineering and try and win the argument for genome editing saying look this is even if you don't like genetic engineering there's no reason not to just there's no reason to dislike genome editing so to some extent one has to admit the ones lost the battle on certain places these days and Fusion is showing real promise now we've heard that before we've heard that 448 fusion has been 40 years away for 40 years is the old joke and it may yet be 40 years away but the development of high-temperature superconductors and particularly the involvement of the private sector in the fusion industry is making a spectacular difference because instead of a rather leisurely amble towards some kind of goal in 2050 the private sector is saying actually we want to build a working fusion reactor this decade and we think we can now and if that were to happen you know the fuel of this thing is water basically the radioactive output is extremely low and extremely short-lived so regulations should be different and as long as we get regulation right then just imagine what we could do if you had a fusion reactor the size of a you know a large closet powering every city or every town producing as much electricity as you ever want for decades on end with no fuel having to go into it except a little bit of water every now and then and with the water has to be turned into tritium in Allah you know there's a process involved but it's it the footprint is tiny compared with any other technology we have and then we'd have lots of energy and if we've got lots of energy then we can do all sorts of everything yes yes a few final questions ma'am I can't not ask you about brexit because you were one of the very few supporters of brexit in the upper chamber I thought I was gonna correct you there and say 52% of people support it breaks it but you're in the House of Lords it was a very very lonely do to take yes yes so your argument if I can summarize your argument as I gleaned it from looking at you you're all over YouTube you know you stand up and and and your colleagues actually wake up sit up and take notice when you speak so your argument is brexit brexit brexit amounts to a reassertion of British sovereignty and a reassertion of British sovereignty bringing the rule of the nation back from Brussels to Westminster opens the opportunity for Britain to restore the traditional rights including a much freer approach to life in all kinds of ways than is typical on the continent I think roughly speaking that's your sort of much more backward looking version of my argument than I would try to make in other words I would say this is a liberation and leap out into the world and a rejoining of the world as a traditional trading nation which Britain always was a maritime trading nation rather than a province of an empire and that's what it has increasingly felt like a very centralized system we harmonisation where all the rules must be the same and we're saying no equivalence is the way to go if something safe in your country will regarded as safe in ours if but you don't have to have the same rule about how you're decided it was safe that's that's called equivalence that's the way we deal with America you know we recognize your regulations and you recognize ours but we don't have to do them the same so this is very much I mean the the extent to which the Brussels machine has become the namib center of an empire with very top-down ways of working very slow where they're working very anti innovation ways of working is underestimated in America people don't realize it we asked for reform we were refused any form of reform at all at which point I became a rival if if you won't change will go and I helped edit a book called change or go and I never thought we'd win but we did we then had a terrible three year period where we'd said we'd go but the political cost didn't want us to so they kept doing their best to sabotage our own negotiating position so are you now we're out and now you're out just entirely before the whole thing collapses because of yeah the crisis here's here's the here's the actually I'm sure you can anticipate this one but Prime Minister Johnson gets you out and the very next day he wakes up and says oh by the way here's what happens next vast spending by this government we're going to launch one crazy infrastructure project after another up north we're moving the House of Lords from Westminster to York that seems to have gotten dropped I don't know if you helped smother it that was just to wind us up I think so but we've got the the the notion here is that instead of rejoining the world and pursuing the ridley path of greater freedom the current government heroic in some ways who but Boris Johnson would have been crazy enough to stick with Breck sit for a year after year when all the poles seem to be against it when the whole ruling class and I think it's fair to use that phrase of the elite in London these days the whole ruling class heroic effort on his part and the moment brexit happens he wakes up the next morning and says from right done from now on we're going to do everything wrong well it's a slight exaggeration there's a lot of libertarian rhetoric coming from some of his ministers too I mean let's trust that the the International Trade Minister is a standard bearer for the liberal open view of what how we should be doing this but it is true that somewhere along the line Boris has allowed the sort of nationalist invest public money in our country and that's the way to grow line to develop and it it will be it's a difficult argument to win for example his chief policy advisor who's a friend of mine Dominic Cummings he's very keen on DARPA on model living an institute on DARPA and some of us are trying to point out to Dominic that actually DARPA is great success DARPA was set up in reaction to the Sputnik scare but it's great a branch of of the of the Pentagon of the United States military which invests in technology and is credited again and again and again with the creation of the Internet although right well you'll tell us that exactly and it's really when people leave darpur and go to Xerox and also when the internet escapes from darkest clutches that it really takes off so it's a miss reading of history to think that the government is behind the digital industry to the extent that people like to claim yes it's involved but then given that government is spending 40 percent of the country's money then it bloody well better spend some of it on digital innovation right that lasts less question for you how innovation works quote quote innovation is the child of freedom because it is a free creative attempt to satisfy freely expressed human desires innovative societies are free societies close quote and you've already explained how although it doesn't seem that way to us even in China where freedom applies is where creation innovation takes place all right how innovation works is appearing at a moment when your government and mine are engaging in the most comprehensive suppression of ordinary freedoms since the Second World War and pretty arguably ever again as I mentioned early on even during the first and second world wars even during the Second World War during the Blitz in London when children were sent to Canada or up north to where where you are to get them out of London they were still sent to school the schools remained open and we have in China under Xi Jingping a movement toward authoritarianism greater control and I don't know enough to argue with you on this point but it does seem at least a kind of counter to your earlier argument this social credit business that yeah people are be ordinary citizens are being tracked on their phones and by cameras on every street corner and if you do if you jaywalk the government knows about it and makes it more difficult for you to get a good hotel reservation or to borrow from a bet alright so Matt Ridley Matt Ridley says freedom freedom is is a good in and of itself but it's also essential for us in the West to preserve our way of life we must remain free because we must innovate and it feels as though Matt Ridley is brilliantly championing beautifully giving voice to a lost cause well it wouldn't be the first time in my family one of my ancestors was burnt at the stake for championing a lost cause but I there is a huge battle to be fought as we come out of this pandemic to regain the freedoms that we have surrendered in a flash we've passed some horrendously illiberal legislation through Parliament in the last couple of months likewise in Congress and not only that we've seen the police in this country doing the most ridiculous over interpretation of the rules that have been passed and you know we had a senior police officer stand up and says I'm not saying we've been inside the supermarket and we've looked inside people's baskets and on the whole they're doing the right thing they're not buying non-essential items but if they start doing so we will don't don't be afraid of it we will go in and we will arrest them what I mean where did that come from how do we know there were people like that in our society who even thought like that and there's quite a lot of people who are not in the police who are only too happy to you know tell their neighbors off for walking down the streets too slowly are you taking exercise or what are you going shopping you know you're wandering a lot that's not allowed you know the petty bossiness of society that has emerged in the last month and a half is really frightening and if there's even a hint that at the end of it we say well to keep some of these rules so that yes we need them then I and others in Parliament will be doing our damnedest to prevent that happening but it will be an uphill struggle but I will say one thing it's ten years since the rational optimist came out in every single one of those years I've been interviewed at some time or other about the thesis of this of that book and every single one of those years people have started to the questions with well you might have been right up until now but look at what's happening now there's an Ebola epidemic there's a war in Ukraine there's a war in Syria there's a eurozone crisis whatever it is that yeah people have thrown at me and said see it's all going wrong and we've got past those we will get past this we will restore Liberty we will sail on into the sunlit uplands of the 2020s have a very innovative time and do great things do you have your diary on your desk because I'd like to make an appointment to interview you again in a decade just just you've--you've that's I take that as a challenge Matt rip you're on you're on live entity Oh careful careful you and I are the same age within a matter of a couple of months I reckon is that wrong but the other I want to live to 2050 I'll be 92 then because there's so many predictions about what the world would be like by 2050 most of them extremely pessimistic and I think that'll be a great year to say I told you so yes yes all right well I'll be on oxygen yeah me too well we'll walk into the studio on walkers but we'll do that we'll do that we'll do that let's make that date turning bathroom and 2050 yes exactly exactly exactly Matt Ridley author of how innovation works and also of the classic work I actually I reckon how innovation works is good is it well is it classic excel will become a classic of the soon to become classic how innovation works and of the already classic the rational optimist thank you very much Peter it's always a huge pleasure to talk to you and very very interesting as always for the Hoover Institution uncommon knowledge and fox nation I'm Peter Robinson [Music] you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 76,472

Keywords: Uncommon Knowledge, Peter Robinson, Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works

Id: uazaIWuhJPs

Length: 64min 25sec (3865 seconds)

Published: Mon May 18 2020