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

“Appear that there comes a moment when technologies are ripe, when the Come together to make a new technology have reached the point where it's sort of inevitable that people will do so. What fascinates me is how few of those transitions we can see coming in advance. So again, take search engines. It looks when you're looking backwards from here, it looks unbelievably obvious that search was going to be a really important part of the internet, that whoever cracked it and got us the best search engine would make the most money.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm fascinated by the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. I write about it in the book. I drawn upon the ideas of Kevin Kelly, who wrote a book called What Technology Wants About How Technology Seems to Decide what's going to be invented next by somebody. As I said, there were 21 different people who came up with the idea of the light bulb in the 1870s. even more people who came up with the idea of the search engine in the early 1990s you rerun the tape without Sergei Brin meeting Larry Page without Thomas Edison and you still get light bulbs you still get search engines that makes it sound like innovation is totally inevitable you know people are totally dispensable and of course that can't entirely be true because we'd have had light bulbs hundreds of years before or something like that but it does”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's not easy. And it's quite often a trope in a movie or something. Pick yourself up and carry on is a feature that we all have to learn at some point. I've certainly tried to tell my own kids, yeah, you did hopelessly badly at that thing, but that doesn't mean you're a bad person. It means all the more reason to try again at something else or in a different way. And you might well be much more successful.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We need to get across to kids these days because quite often they're brought up to think that we must protect them from failure at all costs. And I'm not sure that's a wise thing to do.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is simply a step towards success. And I write in the book about failures and fakes and frauds that do happen in the world of innovation and charlatans get away with them for a while and then eventually discovered. We have to keep our wits about us here. We can't expect that just because we're failing, we're eventually going to succeed. One of the great things that America brought to the world of innovation, in my view, is a relative tolerance of failure. Compared with most European countries, the fact that you've started a business and it went wrong was actually quite often a good thing in the eyes of venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, as long as it hadn't gone wrong too spectacularly or too often, at least it showed you you were trying and you had learned. Something from the failure. It's a lesson that.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The difference between him and the 20 other people who invented the light bulb around the same time is that he was prepared to put in the slog of testing 6000 different types of plant material before settling on Japanese bamboo for the filament of his light bulb, which would last a long time, whereas the others weren't prepared to do quite so much failure, as it were. That doesn't mean, of course, that every failure”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Jeff Bezos is interesting on this because he talks about the importance of swinging and missing. And if you're not swinging hard enough and missing, then you won't succeed in a big way. And the story of Amazon is you can tell it. I tried to do this in the book. You can tell the story of Amazon as a series of disastrous failures. They got all sorts of stuff wrong in the early days. Then they bought companies in the dot-com boom, which turned out to be flops and all went bust. They tried to get into the toy business and it didn't work. They made mistake after mistake. But every time they were just doing enough experiments so that one or two things would work and they were able to continue. And of course, eventually they became the biggest company in the world. It is vital to fail. Thomas Edison said I haven't failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something that is the special preserve of certain people. I was actually just recently told by an Italian friend a wonderful story about a garage mechanic in Argentina who very recently invented a device for safely delivering babies that have got stuck in the birth canal. And it's a very simple, very clever device. This is a guy with no medical knowledge of any kind. It's just a nice story to remind us that you don't have to be special to contribute.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, but I think the delusion that's unhelpful is that you need to be specially. Again, going back to the Wright brothers, there's a wonderful quote from the guy who took the photograph on the day they took off. He said they were the workingest boys I ever knew. So getting across this point that actually all you really need is an open mind, being prepared to do a lot of hard work, not minding if you fail the first 10 or 10,000 times. And these are characteristics we could all have. So one of the things I hope to get people to think is that innovation is incredibly important. It's incredibly rewarding. It'd be wonderful if for any of us, if we were able to achieve a significant innovation, it's something that is actually available to all of us.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Innovation right in a way that Samuel Langley did it wrong, I would argue. The nice footnote to that story is that the Smithsonian Institution didn't want to give the Wright brothers credit for being the first people in the air for decades afterwards. And they had on display Langley's plane, which had been modified so that it would work after the event. But they were finally eventually persuaded to put the Wright Brothers plane in the Smithsonian instead.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ten days later on an island off the North Carolina coast, two humble bicycle mechanics from Ohio with no university education succeed where Langley failed. And they did so because they were prepared to be collaborative and do a lot of trial and error. They'd been doing hundreds of experiments with gliders and kites for years at this point. They'd used wind tunnels. They'd communicated with people all around the world, particularly a guy called Octave Chanute in Chicago, who was a sort of node in a network of people thinking about flight. And he had been drawing on the ideas of a guy called Lawrence Hargrave in Australia who had invented the box kite, which is basically the sort of principle that helps you build a biplane in effect. The point is that the Wright brothers were standing on the shoulders of people, but they were also collaborating with people and they were doing experiments.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Failure of getting things wrong and starting again. And they also emphasize the importance of collaboration. For me, the nicest story that illustrates this is the contrast between Samuel Langley and the Wright brothers, two different teams trying to create the first powered aeroplane in 1903. And Langley is very well connected, head of the Smithsonian Institution, an astronomer, gets a huge government grant to build an aeroplane, goes off and does it in secret because he's so clever and doesn't want other people to steal his ideas. And his aeroplane goes flop into the Potomac after 20 feet.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, to some extent, I'm trying to debunk the idea that lonely geniuses are what count in the world of innovation. We tend to hear people say things like the reason a big population can be more innovative is because there's more chance of there being a genius. I don't think that's the way it works. I think what happens is that people share their ideas, exchange their ideas, collaborate. And what really counts is how well people are communicating with each other, not how clever they are as individuals. And to some extent, I'm trying to get away from the this word creativity, which tends to imply that a special sort of juice runs in the vein of inventors that doesn't run in the vein of ordinary people. But if you look at the careers of people like Thomas Edison or Jeff Bezos or talk to any great innovators today, they all emphasize the importance of trial and error.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And a guy called Malcolm McLean gets most of the credit for that in the 1960s in the US. The emphasis on the more collaborative trial and error slog of innovation rather than the lonely genius idea of invention was something I was trying to get at. There's quite a nice funny story that I tell in the book which illustrates the point, which is a beaver and a rabbit looking at the Hoover Dam. And the beaver says to the rabbit, no, I didn't build it, but it is based on an idea of mine. And of course, getting from a simple beaver dam to the Hoover Dam requires a lot of innovation that isn't invention.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I deliberately talk about innovation ration rather than invention because I think we've talked a lot about inventors, about brilliant people who come up with bright ideas that change the world. I want to talk about innovation, which is the process by which a bright idea is turned into something practical, reliable, and available and affordable for ordinary people. And that's a long slog. And it's a lot of hard work, and it's often more important, more difficult than the process of coming up with a good idea in the first place. And there are innovations that change the world dramatically which don't actually depend on any invention. Things like container shipping, which had an enormous impact on global trade by drastically cutting the cost of shipping goods overseas, which didn't involve any invention of a new technology at all. It just involved a sort of change in the way we organize.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, of course, you could turn that round and you can say if we didn't have all these social contact tools, then maybe we'd never have locked down. You know, we just couldn't do it, in which case, of course, the epidemic would have been worse. But to some extent, as it were, the existence of the video conferencing and social media and telephones and email and all that kind of stuff makes it possible for governments to say, right, we're going to lock down the entire society, healthy people and all, which has never really been done before.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And on the whole, he's going around telling everyone that they're going to go to hell because they're all corrupt and sinful and so on. He's not selling a good news message. And then radio played a big role in the rise of the dictators, playing on our pessimisms in the 1920s. I have a feeling that media technologies can be dangerous in that respect. But would I give up social media? Would I give up the chance to have rampant social contact with my chums all over the world and shared jokes and find out how their family is? No, I wouldn't. I think, you know, for a lot of young people in particular, it's a godsend, it's a boon. So we've got to learn to live with these technologies and not let them overwhelm us, I suspect.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“generally certainly social media seems to have focused amplified that to some degree and that is I think an uncomfortable thing media technologies tend to do that I mean I think printing and the role Martin Luther played I mean he's the greatest entrepreneur of printing he was the best selling author by a mile of his day”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I am worried about the effect social media is having on society. It clearly has. Good news is no news and bad news is news. But that's not new. We've always been like that. We've always stressed the negative, not the positive. I mean, I was fascinated when I wrote that book to go back, you know, 100 years, 200 years and find that the bestseller of the day was nearly always a pessimistic tract, you know, whether it's Thomas Robert Malthus in 1798 or the decline of the West in the turn of the 20th century, books saying, yes, things have got better on the whole, but they cannot possibly go on getting better were the generation that sees the deterioration setting in. So there's nothing new about our generation saying that there's nothing new about the dominance of pessimism in our everyday discourse about the world. We're not so pessimistic about our individual lives, interestingly, as we are about people and the planet.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's because we've cut off, we've broken the cycle, we've cut off the way that we got infected. The one way that pathogens do get into us that we haven't been able to cope with so far is through the nose. There's something like 200 different types of virus that cause the common cold. The average child gets 7 to 10 colds a winter. We are just a very tempting target for respiratory viruses as we are discovering this year. On the whole, they stay mild because they want us going around, going to parties, going to work. They don't want us sitting at home because we're not going to infect anyone if we stay at home. There's a sort of common interest there in not hurting us too much. It's this sort of game theory way of seeing the battle between viruses and people that I think is really interesting.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But quite a lot of diseases, particularly those carried by insects or through water, have kind of given up on Western civilization. They can't get a toehold in our populations. They're still around in poor countries. But, you know, cholera, typhoid, all these terrible killers from the past, yellow fever, malaria in the Western world are not able to mount offensives anymore.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think, on the whole, we will win our battles against most pathogens because we have so much possibility of ingenuity now of human ingenuity to help us defeat them. We've only totally extinguished one major human disease, and that's smallpox. But boy, is that an important one? It's probably maybe the biggest killer of all, certainly when you think that it was responsible for killing the vast majority of the people who lived in the Americas when smallpox arrived with European contact. But we've reduced polio to almost extinction. We've done the same with a lot of other diseases. We've pretty well wiped them out. We're getting on top of malaria and HIV, etc. Now, you're absolutely right that we gain 100 yards and then we lose 50. Because the disease mutates or it finds a way around the issue, etc.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it also, of course, describes quite a lot about how our own human world works, how society works, how sexual politics works as well. It's a theme that has cropped up again and again in the back of my mind ever since I wrote about it. It was a fascinating experience digging deep into the origins of those ideas.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the Red Queen is a character in Alice through the looking glass, who runs but never gets anywhere. The faster she runs, the more she stays in the same place. And that's a very good description of a lot of what happens in evolutionary processes. That is to say the arms race between parasites and their hosts, one side changing their genes, the other side trying to unlock those genes and so on. But it's also quite a good description of all sorts of aspects of human life and how the world works. I found very, very interesting writing that because I was mainly trying to explain sex, the evolution of sex, which is in the first place something that seems to have evolved to foil parasites, but later on in the form of brightly colored male peacocks and things seems to be all about a sort of arms race between males to seduce females and things like that. It's a general theme that runs through sexual evolution.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did a PhD in biology in the 1980s and while I enjoyed it, I didn't have quite the same stamina for going deep into small subjects that my colleagues did. And I spotted this. But at the same time, I had more enjoyment out of writing up my thesis than my colleagues did. And it just sort of switch went in my head and I thought, you know what, my skill, my talent, my interest might lie in writing about science rather than doing science. So I gave up thought of getting a Nobel Prize and set my heart on a Pulitzer instead. I haven't got a Pulitzer, but, you know. Not yet, exactly.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I deliberately talk about innovation rather than invention because I think we've talked a lot about inventors, about brilliant people who come up with bright ideas that change the world. I want to talk about innovation, which is the process by which a bright idea is turned into something practical, reliable, and available and affordable for ordinary people. And that's a long slog. And it's a lot of hard work, and it's often more important, more difficult than the process of coming up with a good idea in the first place.”
2021-03-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT