YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Ridley

lines on the record: 76
first: 2021-03-23
most recent: 2021-03-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I would tell the world that innovation is unbelievably important. It's by far the biggest story of the last five hundred years. It's the reason for optimism about the next five hundred years. It's infinite. I think this is probably what I'd tell people that there's no reason we can't innovate indefinitely, if not infinitely. And people say, well, how can that be? We'll run out of resources. And I'd say, no, because half the time these days we're innovating to use fewer resources. You know, the LED light bulb uses one quarter as much electricity as the compact fluorescence that replaces. So actually I don't see why we can't go on innovating to advance each other's welfare. Infinitely. And if you think how far we've come in the last 200 years, imagine what the world will be like in the next 200.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think we adapt as individuals, but we also negotiate mutually acceptable norms and rules and guidelines as to how to behave. Stephen Pinker is very interesting in his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, talking about how we became less violent. And in the end, it all boils down to this sort of model proposed by Norbert Elias that... In a medieval society, killing someone because they offended you was a sort of rather admirable thing to do. Because otherwise I'll get despised. I want people to like me. Adam Smith makes this point actually in his theory of moral sentiments, you know, that in the end it's the impartial spectator who is looking at us from the outside who are thinking of all the time. And we calibrate our behavior to what we know works or doesn't work in our society.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Undo the bad stuff and I have a feeling we're already doing it. I mean, if you just look at the sort of the way that the really nasty trolls, I don't think get the same. Today as they did 10 years ago, I might be wrong.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think something similar happened with radio in the 1920s, as I mentioned, radio played a big role in the rise of the dictators, and yet people had invested just as much utopian hope in it. I mean, some of the things written about radio when it was first invented are extraordinary, you know, saying this is going to result in world peace because everyone's going to hear each other's point of view. We're never going to have a war again. Well, that didn't work out. And people like Hitler and Mussolini used radio. Very extensively to reinforce the prejudices of their followers. And yet you and I don't think of radio as a source for evil in the world today. So it is possible to tame these technologies, to work out ways of living with them, to Come up with cultural norms”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But of course, that's newspapers are old media. Why is social media making that a stronger phenomenon? I don't fully understand it. It's something to do with the fact that it's interactive, that you look for retweets. Mike's responses. And you get them by reinforcing your own prejudices, not by stepping outside your bubble and saying unpopular things, or indeed saying moderate things. You know, one of the problems with social media is that the stronger the view you express, the more likely it is that it will be amplified. If you say, I don't know, I think there are two sides to this question on Twitter. On the whole, everybody ignores you.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, I was pretty utopian about this. 20 years ago, I thought, you know, now you don't just read one newspaper. You go online and you find all sorts of people saying lots of things and you think, oh, that's got a point. I hadn't thought of it like that. And that does happen. try and make a point of doing that, not just reading the people I agree with. But I have to say it's a relatively rare experience. And I'm more and more struck by how people are inside echo chambers now. And they don't even know you're, you know, if you're not in their bubble, they don't even know what you're saying. There was a very interesting remark by a journalist I read this morning who said, you know, when I left one newspaper and went to work for the others, people assumed I died because they never read that other newspaper.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's only in the last hundred thousand in some ways, that's how old trade seems to be on a massive scale with the division of labour and the collaborative system I described earlier, it's more like the last 10,000 years. It's only then that we've had to get our heads around intellectually around the idea that someone else's gain can also be your gain. It's not on the whole very common otherwise. There are examples, biological examples of mutual gain. For example, mating, you know, I mean two people mating to produce a baby is not a zero-sum game.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think it's because biologically zero-sum thinking did make sense in many cases. That is to say, 10,000 years ago, there's one woman available to marry in the encampment. You've got twice as many cattle as I have. You get the woman, I don't. That's a zero-sum game. And so, in that sense, we've spent millions of years thinking that your gain is my loss.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we have to get away from zero sum thinking here. Everybody, you know, the prosperity of another country is not a problem for you. It just means that there's some rich consumers out there prepared to buy whatever you're good at selling. And the whole point of the Ricardo principle, the principle of comparative advantage, brilliant concept is that it doesn't matter if somebody else is better at you making everything, then they're still going to find it easier to make the things they're best at and buy the rest from you. So there's always going to be something you can sell to another country, however prosperous they become.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, catch up growth is a well-recognized phenomenon. A lot of the East Asian economies. In my youth, Japan was famous for making cheap copies of stuff that Europeans made. Well, that didn't last long. Soon it was making by far the best stuff.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Use your advantage to be smarter. There's no reason you can't just maintain your advantage indefinitely. When other countries are playing catch-up, that's fine. That's just creating a market for you.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there's always this problem that the country that's most innovative gets very angry about other countries nicking their stuff. There's a fascinating period in history soon after the American Revolution when Americans were engaged in rampant industrial espionage to try and steal the secrets of Britain's industry. And they sent all sorts of people over to prowl around pretending to be preachers when in fact they were making drawings of the insides of factories and things. Of course, we have a similar experience with Chinese attitude to intellectual property more recently. My view on the whole is that you shouldn't worry about it. You should, if necessary, sell the stuff to them. Because if you can keep ahead, if you can”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hope somebody does pick up the ball and run with it because, for example, China has been relatively free economically, but very unfree politically in the last few decades. I think that's now changing. I don't think it's very free in either respect. And so I don't see it leading the world in prosperity for an awful lot longer.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With merchants relatively free to decide what they wanted to do and what they wanted to invent, extraordinarily innovative time. And then it's followed after a Mongol interregnum by the Ming Empire, which has the opposite approach. Basically, the Mandarins tell the merchants whether they can leave town or not, how much stock they must hold in their warehouses, whether they can trade abroad or not. That's not a recipe for prosperity.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is beginning to sound familiar, then it's meant to. I think civilizations get sort of greedy and self-indulgent in some sense and start investing their money and their expertise and their interest, not in the kinds of things that led to entrepreneurial innovation, but the kinds of things that lead to overspending and overborrowing. And then for a while you can keep going on financial engineering for a while, but it seems to run out eventually. The other way it comes to an end is when some dictator comes along and says, right now I'm in charge and I'm going to tell everyone what to do and I'm going to not let you trade. So for example in China a thousand years ago the Song dynasty was a time of very devolved, decentralized economy.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you look at what happened in Holland, the Netherlands, after their golden age in the 1600s when they were by far the richest and most prosperous, most successful part of the world, eventually they spent more and more money kind of on On themselves and on debt.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Allows that to happen will get results. I was looking the other day at a sort of index of prosperity and the countries that came top in their continents for the last 10 years in terms of the measures of prosperity. We're all open, free trading countries, but quite small ones. You know, Mauritius is the most prosperous economy in Africa, for example. Botswana is second. Israel in its part of the world, Denmark in Europe. Know Chile in South America and so on. So it's part of all that, I think. Basically the city-states.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very vigorous traders with other places tend to be places where a lot of innovation happens. Britain's moment in the sun was because it was part of an enormous network of free trade. And that's because people will meet each other for the first time. Ideas will therefore meet each other. Profits will be made to be invested in things, incentives will be available, and freedom to decide what to do. You know, most of humanity has spent most of the last few hundred years living under regimes that told them what they can do and can't do most of the time, whether it was in an empire or a military state or whatever, or a feudal state before that. It's extraordinarily rare for people to have the freedom to act as merchants and investors and entrepreneurs anywhere that”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This bushfire that breaks out for a number of decades in one place and then breaks out somewhere else, it really baffles me actually because it's not immediately obvious what's going on here. I mean, you can come up with explanations for why California was so extraordinarily innovative. The way you could float companies and retain control, the amount of defense spending in Stanford University, the freedom, the sunshine, you know, the number of immigrants, you know, there's all sorts of explanations. The general point you can make in this applies to Renaissance Italy and ancient Arabia and ancient China and so on as well is that city-states tend to be innovative, that independent, relatively small political units that are”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, that's what I say. Innovation explains all prosperity over the last 300 years, really, nearly all anyway. And it's clear that it is the consequence of letting people free to exchange their ideas. It's not the only thing that matters, but it is an important feature.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is fine, and others have been successes technologically. I'm thinking of Google Glass, the technology whereby you can see inside your spectacles, I don't know what the stock market's doing or what the weather forecast is or something like that. It was a brilliant piece of technology and it worked really well and they put it on the market and nobody wanted to buy it. Just turns out it's not what people want, not for two and a half thousand dollars anyway.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obviously, the main stuff is to make sure there's plenty of RD happening, to some extent to fund it, because after all, government takes a big chunk of our money office. So it'd be a shame if none of that money went back into things that encourage innovation, to make sure that there is good educational opportunity and to foster openness and freedom. You know, in the end, it all boils down to freedom, the freedom to exchange ideas, the freedom to fail and start again, the freedom to change your mind, the freedom to invest where you think it's right to invest, the freedom as a consumer to express your preference for one new technology rather than another. For example, Google set up this company called Google X that tries wacky ideas to see if they will make exciting new products, and some of them have been dismal failures.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cancer or infectious disease. And then along comes this pandemic. And suddenly the prize of these contracts from government has been just what they needed to break through. So I think the prize approach is to be explored in the future as a way of incentivizing innovation. It starts with the longitude prize in 18th century England when the government said we really don't want our ships being wrecked all the time on the Sili Isles because they think they're in the middle of the Atlantic. If somebody can work out a way to measure longitude as well as latitude, then we'll give them a lot of money. And the problem was solved unexpectedly by a humble clockmaker from Yorkshire by the name of John Harrison who said, all you need is a good clock so you can know what time it is in London. And you don't need to look at the stars or do complicated.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To produce a huge race among different companies. And the great thing about that is that the governments are not picking the winners. They are saying they're picking some winners, but then they don't have to decide in advance which of these technologies for producing a vaccine will work. And as a result, it's very interesting. It has incentivized a new technology to come of age, that is to say messenger RNA vaccines of the kind that Moderna and BioNTech were exploring before this. And had, you know, they'd tried very hard and they'd raise a lot of money and they were working on this and they'd hit a lot of dead ends and failed and tried again and found a workaround for some of their problems and so on. But there was no guarantee they would ever make their shareholders money or solve the problems or produce solutions to”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A solution to this problem, you will get a reward. The reward needn't be a cash lump sum. It could be, for example, an advanced market commitment. The Gates Foundation did this with a vaccine for pneumococcus saying if the pharmaceutical industry could come up with a vaccine for this disease which kills children in poor countries, then don't worry, although it looks unprofitable to invent such a thing, we will make sure you get properly rewarded by topping up the price you can charge effectively. And that worked very well. And essentially, we've done something similar with vaccines in this epidemic. I mean, governments all around the world have said, look, if someone can come up with a vaccine for COVID-19, we will buy 40 million doses, 50 million doses, whatever it is. That has worked.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Picking winners and saying, I want this technology to be developed by such, such and such a date has a pretty awful track record and is likely to end up by the losers picking the governments. In other words, the wrong people end up getting the grants and the subsidies because they're very well politically connected rather than because they have the best plans. I think the way to solve that problem is to dangle a prize in front of entrepreneurs and say if you invent”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is a very difficult question, and I don't think anyone's found the magic bullet in terms of government policies that will deliver innovation to a growing society. The main thing is to get the obstacles out the way, whether it's regulatory obstacles or other obstacles to innovation just to clear the pitch for the innovations to have a free run. That feels to me the most important thing governments can do.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I suspect one or two people did that, you know, that to some extent the digital world has sort of sucked people away from other areas of innovation. And we may want to rebalance that. By the way, the message of my argument that we had transport innovations in the 20th century and then in the first half of the 20th century and communications innovations in the second half is that the first half of the 21st century may not be all about computers and communications, may not be all about AI. It may be about biotechnology, for example, and I suspect it will be.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An idea for a point of care bedside diagnostic device of a portable kind to use for detecting viruses. Ten years ago, then we could have had it by now. But just imagine if that person had said, oh, I can't face three, maybe four, five years trying to get it licensed and going through enormously expensive trials to prove that it's safe and so on and effective, I think I'll go off and invent a video game instead.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Made it difficult for innovators to work in other fields. We've put too many regulations in the way, too many obstacles, too many costs. So, for example, we've been unable to come up with new designs for nuclear power stations for several decades. That's because licensing a new design for nuclear power station would cost billions under the present licensing system, so nobody bothers to even try. In the end, it's just regulation that gets in the way there. And there are other reasons. But if you think, you know, I was thinking the other day, if somebody had come up with a”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, why is that? In some sense, it's obviously Technological possibility, you know, the invention of the silicon transistor had enormous consequences in one field but not in the other. And the technologies of transport, the internal combustion engine and things like that have come up against certain diminishing return limits that, by the way, we're expecting to break in the next 10 years. And I'm a little skeptical about whether we will. The contrast between the two is quite striking. I don't fully understand why it is. To some extent, we have”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our grandparents had the opposite experience. My grandparents were born at the turn of the 20th century. That was well after the telephone. They had the telephone throughout their lives. But they had almost no other communications and computing improvements that reached them before they died in the 1960s. I've had the opposite experience, sorry, but they also had extraordinary changes in transport. They were born before the motor car and the airplane and they died with the man on the moon and rockets in the air and supersonic jet fighters and all sorts of weird stuff. Helicopters, you know, everything. In my lifetime, well, the 747 was invented when I was 11 years old. It was still in service until a few months ago. We've not got flying cars jetpacks, routine space travel, all the things we were promised in the nineteen fifties. But we have got incredible changes in computing and communication.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm very intrigued by this. We've lived through a period of extraordinary innovation in digital, in software, in computers and communications. We've actually lived through a period of stagnation with respect to innovation in, say, transport.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A design that someone else did with a few modifications and improvements. And he was copying a design that was made by somebody else and so on back to the Wright brothers. In that sense, the aeroplane and the boat really have evolved. It's not a metaphor. It's what's actually happening to them.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And actually, that's probably a better answer to your question about failure. It's not a failure, but it is an error. And there has to be, as long as there's a degree of randomness in the errors, then natural selection will go to work. I mean, one of my favorite quotes, which I got from Dan Dennett, is from a French philosopher by the name of Alain, who said in the early 20th century, When you think about it, a boat evolves in a Darwinian fashion because boats that don't work sink to the bottom of the ocean. And boats that are well designed don't. And so people who make boats copy the designs that didn't sink. So, you know, next time you get on an airplane, you think that unlike biological organism, this airplane has been built by an engineer, right? By an intelligent designer. Well, has it? Because that engineer was copied.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I said, Well, I don't think it's in that book. And he said, Well, I suppose it's not really. And my point is, we were collaborating to produce the idea, which was greater than the sum of our contributions. And I dare say other people have had the idea. I'm not trying to claim sole ownership of it. But it was quite a nice example of exactly the point we were making.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and just to make this story even funnier in a way. When I first started thinking about this about us getting more specialized in what we produce so that we could be more diversified in what we consume, the penny dropped when I was reading a wonderful book called Second Nature by a guy named Heim Offek, who was an academic. And I wrote to him and said, this is absolutely fantastic, this idea. Can you tell me if you've written anything else about it or where you got the idea? And he wrote back Do you know what? I think I got the idea from reading your book, The Origins of Virtue.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not even the person working in the pencil factory. Because they don't know how to cut down a tree or grow coffee. So when you start to see the world in this way It makes it clear what a fantastic collaboration is going on the whole time between us through the medium of exchange, through me doing what I am good at, and you doing what you're good at and us sharing the results on a massive scale. It's a magnificent piece of collaborative distributed intelligence that we've achieved this way.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's written by a pencil, and the pencil is trying to understand its own origins. How did it come into the world? And it's researched it, and it's discovered that it's made of wood and it's made of graphite, and it's got paint on the outside and a razor in the end and so on. And so it traces the origin of these materials, and it discovers that the wood came from a tree that was cut down in Oregon by a lumberjack who was drinking coffee at the time and using a chainsaw which was made by somebody else and the man who farmed the coffee was contributing and so on. There's an enormous network of people went into manufacturing this one pencil. And yet not one of them knows how to make a pencil”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whereas today most people work whatever it might be eight hours of the day at something terribly specialized. You know, they're not making everything they need. They're just doing one thing. They're making a podcast or whatever it might be. By selling that to other people, they then supply all their needs and they then go off and spend the rest of the day consuming what other people have created for them, whether it be a movie or a meal or whatever. So actually we're setting up this network where we all work for each other and a tiny, tiny fraction of your effort ends up making a big contribution to other people's wellness. There's a lovely essay that I often go back to called iPencil written by an economist named Leonard Reed in 1958.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the great theme of human history over millennia is that we become more specialized in what we produce and more diversified in what we consume. So compared with a self sufficient, a farmer trying to grow all his own food and make all his own machines and so on. Someone like that has to work a huge number of hours to produce not a very high standard of living because they're only consuming what they produce.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“what happened. The experiment was had unbelievably strong results. It showed that a mosquito net is quite good at keeping you from being bitten. An insecticide treated mosquito net is very good. And an insecticide treated net with tears in it, with holes in it, which in practice they often will have, is also very good. So it doesn't actually matter if the thing gets a little bit damaged over the weeks and months, which was a really important discovery. Nobody's heard of Dariot. He never got the Nobel Prize, should have done, in my view. Don't think he ever came rich. The whole thing was done on a non-profit basis. If I achieve one thing, I put his name on the map.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is the technology that reversed the increase in malaria. Malaria was going up until 2003. It's now going down as a cause of mortality in the world, going down pretty steeply. And it's entirely due to this, not entirely, but it's nearly all due to this technology. It's more effective than antimalarial drugs, more effective than draining swamps or spraying mosquitoes. So I said to myself, this is a really good technology. It's quite low tech. It's quite simple. It's quite cheap. It's very effective. Who invented it? You know, where did it come from? I traced the story back to a sort of typewritten document from 1983 in Burkina Faso describing a very well-designed experiment that a Frenchman named Frederick Dariot and his colleagues did. And I got in touch with Dariot in retirement and said, can you tell me how this came about?”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's true. To give an example of my favorite example of an unsung hero in the book, I write about the insecticide treated mosquito net, the bed net that keeps mosquitoes away from you while you're asleep, and which is far, far more effective if it's been treated with insecticide.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't any of us know any of their names, but they have had an enormous impact on our lives. We make a fetish out of talking about the person who invented the first light bulb more than 100 years ago. I've already talked about Thomas Edison. But actually the innovator is still working on a technology like that are just as important.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Build a business around making that device cheap. Can you think of a sort of monument to somebody just because they reduced the cost of something? Whereas in fact, if you look at, say, the history of electric lighting, it's come down spectacularly. So it's ludicrously cheap to light your house now compared with 100 years ago or 200 years ago. And that's an innovation that is extraordinarily valuable. I mean, the LED light that we all use now, which is both long-lasting and very low energy, but produces very good reliable light, is the result of a lot of people, some in Japan, some in Europe, some in America working incrementally over many years to perfect white LED lighting.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I tend to take the view that we overvalue the idea and undervalue the execution, the turning of the idea into a practical innovat Because we put statues up to the people who discover the basic principle or the first prototype, but we then don't put statues up to the people who”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that makes him all the more impressive because he and Watson were clever enough to see that this discovery was ripe and ready to go and grasp the opportunity when it came.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's say in the next few years it's inevitable that something's going to be invented. I can't tell you what because it's unpredictable, but it will, in retrospect, be inevitable. Then all the more credit to the person who actually goes out there and gets there because they're in a race. You know, Beethoven didn't have to worry about somebody else writing the Ninth Symphony at the same time as him. So there's a curious thing about inventors and indeed scientists. I mean, I wrote a biography of Francis Crick, and he once said this. He said if Jim Watson had been killed by a tennis ball, I don't think I'd have discovered the double helix of DNA. But somebody would, within a year or two,”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the search engine is probably the most useful innovation of my lifetime. I use it every day. But in the 80s, were people writing about the coming role of search in the nascent internet? Actually, no. Very few people see it coming. And even the people who invented the search engines didn't really think of it in those terms. I mean, Larry Bage and Sergei Brinn, who invented Google, thought they were cataloguing the internet. They didn't think they were inventing a search engine to start with. So there's a strange asymmetry here between the inevitability of certain innovations when you get to a certain point, and yet they're extraordinary unpredictability as you're moving forward. And of course, if it's inevitable that something's going to get invented,”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT