Matt Ridley is the bestselling author of books such as The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, and his new book How Innovation Works and Why It Flourishes in Freedom!
Matt has also been an editor and writer for the Economist, The Times and the Wall Street Journal. On this episode Matt discusses the history of innovation, and how we need to change our thinking on the subject. He talks about how some of the most transformative inventions have come to be and how innovation is a collective, collaborative phenomenon, not a matter of lonely genius…
Sean Delaney: Matt, welcome to What Got You There! Thanks so much for taking the time.
Matt Ridley: Thanks Sean for having me on the show.
Sean: It’s a true honor for me. I’ve been a large fan of your work for a number of years and any time I’m intrigued by someone, I’m always curious how their career began, and what started it. So I’m wondering where your career path began.
Matt: Well, it’s always hard to do your own autobiography, isn’t it? How you got to where you did? But I was, I was taught natural history by my dad. I became very keen on looking for birds nests, watching birds, all these kinds of things and that got me interested in biology, I went into Biology. I ended up doing a PhD in Biology and then I sort of realized I wasn’t cut out for the hard work of concentrating on one thing for a very long time, which you need to do in research, but I love writing, and I’d always done a little reading and writing.
So I tried to become a journalist and succeeded in becoming a science journalist, and then a more general journalist, and then that led to lots of other things. And basically writing is the theme throughout my career, whether it’s journalism, column writing, opinion writing, but also most prominently and most interestingly to me, is the chance to write books. And I just pinch myself with my good fortune that I can sit down and write a book on something that interests me, interview people who know about the subject, and then have someone sell a book for me, and pay me to do it. I love, I love writing.
Sean: How did you develop the skill? I think you’re a very talented writer, and this is something you didn’t even know you’d be doing at some point, so I’m wondering how you developed that skill.
Matt: Well, again, it’s hard to tell how one does these things.
I kept a diary when I was young, and I suspect that helps just gets you into the habit of writing things. I probably had a bit of a natural gift that way or interest that way, at least. I love language and I love reading. But I think for me, the crucial thing was working for The Economist Magazine for nine years because that was… It’s a very collective experience that what happens is that nobody’s name is on any article, you write a draft, it gets passed around, edited, sent back to you for re-writing. There’s a huge emphasis on compression, on getting as much information in as possible while writing smoothly. So it was a bit of a brutal boot shop, boot camp training in how to… How to write, I think, and I think I learned a lot there. I learned a lot about, you know, do you ever… do you ever need the word very? Does the word very ever add anything to a sentence? You know, or something like that?
Sean: It seems a lot can be distilled down to curiosity for you.
Matt: Absolutely, I think curiosity is what it’s all about. I just can’t believe my luck in being alive in this extraordinary world, at this moment, when we know so much about the world. Of course I’m saying this in the middle of a terrible pandemic that’s causing loss of life and great unhappiness and misery to lots of people, so there’s a lot wrong with this world, as well as a lot right with it. But to be alive… Well, for example, the sequencing of the human genome happened in late 1990s, running up to the 2000 when the first draft sequences announced, and I thought “Hang on a minute.” This is the first time in four billion years that a species has read its own recipe. I want to not just be alive at this moment and see it happen, but I want a ring-side seat because this is just too interesting.
And so, I cooked up the idea of writing a book about the genome which would in some way not be overtaken by events, which wasn’t an easy thing with the stuff developing so fast, but I hit on this idea of a chapter about chromosome, choosing a gene for each chapter that would tell some kind of a story, and that really just was an excuse for me to get to know the people who are working on the genome project and become friends with some of them and dig into the work that was going on, and follow it very closely. So… It’s just licensed curiosity, what I do, I’m just allowed to go out and satisfy my curiosity about things that interest me.
Sean: Yeah, along the lines of that, you have that fox approach as opposed to the hedgehog with the wide-ranging interests, and I’m wondering when you come across something that truly peaks your interest, how do you focus on that one particular thing at that moment?
Matt: Sometimes there are things you ought to focus on, you know you focus on, but they just don’t spot that much interest in you and that’s tough, but if you find something that really interests you, one thing leads to another.
And these days, it’s so easy. When I first wrote books, I spent a lot of time in libraries and I would read, I would look up a paper in a journal in the library, and I would read that. And I think that’s really interesting. I must make a note of that. And then I would find halway through the paper there’d be a reference to another paper. And, “Oh, that’s gonna be interesting, too.” So I go and find that volume on the shelf and I’d look that up and read that and then I make a note of the author and then call them up out of the blue and say, “I would really like to understand what you’re doing now and how you develop that work,” or something.
I do exactly the same thing now, but I never go near a library. I haven’t been in a library for probably nearly 20 years… Because the libraries are at my fingertips, it’s called the Internet and I find that this one thing leads to another. You read something and that has a couple of links to something else, which has links to something else, which so on. And at some point in this process you send a social media message or an email to one of the authors saying, “I really wanna understand what you’re saying in this paper, and I also wanna know whether you’ve updated it.” So that’s kind of the process for me.
Sean: So the serendipity of that approach, we’re gonna talk a lot about that during this conversation, but I’m wondering how you navigate that rabbit hole. You were mentioning you come across a new theme, a new thread, how do you know when you’re going too far and you’re being distracted as opposed to really distilling down some relevant important information?
Matt: Yeah, no, it’s a good question, how to avoid being distracted and going down some rabbit hole if it is of no use. I’m lucky ’cause I’m my own boss and if I decide something is interesting to me, and it’s interesting now to go in the book that I’ve proposed, even if it’s got nothing to do with the proposal that I put to the publishers a year before, but I decide it’s worth including, then I can do that. If I was a reporter tasked with reporting on one subject, I couldn’t go off on my own tangent, as it were.
But I do think you do need to give yourself a certain amount of self-discipline as a writer to stick to the issue at hand. And occasionally I find myself getting very, very interested in something and then saying, “Look, the reader is not gonna be interested in this, certainly not to the depth where I’m going into it.” It isn’t as big a scandal as you thought, it isn’t as interesting a discovery as you thought as you get closer to it, it doesn’t quite stack up. Drop it and sometimes that means a lot of work abandoned and with nothing to show for it. And I think you have to know how to cut your losses as a writer when avenues of exploration that you’ve gone down turn out to be dead ends.
Sean: You’ve researched and focused on a lot of different ideas and themes, and I’d be intrigued to hear about what you think has just been for use, selfishly, the most satisfying and enjoyable theme that you’ve covered throughout your career?
Matt: For me, the biggest theme has been evolution by natural selection, and it’s an endlessly fascinating topic because as I write from my very first book was called The Red Queen: The Evolution of Sex, it was about the evolution of sex and that’s just such an extraordinary subject because we didn’t really understand why there are two sexes, and why male birds are more beautiful than female birds, and do all the displaying, and all these different issues that come with the evolution of sex. And I’d been studying some of those issues as an academic. So it was a natural progression to do that.
But 25 years later, I wrote a book called The Evolution of Everything in which I argued that evolution by natural selection doesn’t just happen in the biological world, it actually explains how the modern human world works, too. So that, for example, if you take the question of how is it that everybody in London gets fed every day, each lunch choosing at the last minute what to eat, how come there’s enough food of the right kind and the right quantity in the right place at the right time? Well, the answer to that is clearly not that somebody is in charge, and that it’s dictated by a brilliant planner who knows exactly how to make sure there’s no food in the right place at the right time, but this is an evolutionary process through trial and error. Different restaurateurs and shop owners are experimenting all the time with what people want, what people don’t want and where they want it and what time they want it. And until a rather beautiful system of immense complexity emerges by which a city feed itself and that’s exactly the same process as happens when the incredible complexity of the trillions of cells inside my body and the billions of different combinations of proteins and genes that run my body, or indeed any other body work, it’s the same phenomenon. And with that phenomenon, we had to learn, and it wasn’t easy, that the complexity did not imply a designer, that this came about in a bottom-up gradual process of trial and error we call natural selection, and so did much of the human world.
So I ended up with this argument that we are essentially still being too creationist about the human world, we’re still expecting to find somebody in charge, whether it’s the government or big companies over whatever. We don’t see it as an organic evolutionary phenomenon to nearly the extent that we should.
And I’ve continued this particularly in my interest in technology, and where technology comes from, where innovation comes from, why it happens, when and where it does, why it happens to us as a species and not to others. It’s very much a process of evolution by natural selection.
Sean: Yeah, I think the bottom-up theme is one of those eye-opening moments where you have to pause and really think through that and the title of your new book, How Innovation Works and Why It Flourishes in Freedom, and that subtitle is what really peaks my interest in, and I wanna pull on the thread throughout the book about freedom and the serendipity of things. You mentioned even making mistakes and experimenting. Can you just talk further on that idea about the experimentation and serendipity of things?
Matt: Yes, if you go and read what inventors said about the process by which they came up with inventors and particularly innovators, and the distinction I make between innovation and invention is that innovators are the people who turn inventions into practical realities that are affordable and sustainable and available to people, and often that’s a lot harder than coming up with the original prototype.
If you go and listen to what these people say about the process by which they reached some outcome like the airplane, the Wright brothers or vaccines or whatever it might be, they inevitably and always stress experimentation, they stress the fact that they didn’t dream up the right answer at the beginning, and just work their way towards it. They did a ton of experiments to try and find what worked, and they found an awful lot of things that didn’t work along the way. Thomas Edison famously said, “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 5,000 ways that don’t work.” It’s rather a nice way of putting it. And Edison literally tried 6,000 different types of plant material for the filament of a light bulb before he hit upon Japanese bamboo, and he understood very much that this innovation process wasn’t a matter of genius, it wasn’t a matter of inspiration, it was a matter of perspiration as he put it. You just had to put in the hard… Hard work and the long hours.
But you need the freedom to experiment. That’s the crucial point where it comes back to freedom.
If for lack of money, or lack of license, like a regulatory approval, you can’t just keep trying things and failing, then you’re not gonna have an innovator economy. It really does come back down to this and just back to the sort of creationst, the top down versus bottom-up view the world, I tell the story of the beginning of… The end of the year 1903, two different attempts to develop powered flight, one of which had a lot of government funding and had gotten to a very prestigious institution with a very grand chap in charge who was being very secretive about his work, about the details of his work and who launched his new airplane with a huge crowd watching with a lot of publicity and it completely flocked. He was called Samuel Langley, it was done on the banks of the Potomac River in Washington, and he had just gone about it the wrong way. He designed everything together at once without trying it out, he not really listen to anyone else. He thought of himself as the heroic inventor. He spent a ton of money and the thing literally stalled in midair, dropped into the ice-filled river and the pilot who had a cork-lined life jacket on, showing that he probably didn’t think it was gonna work, had to swim to the shore. Just 10 days later on a lonely beach in North Carolina, two bicyclist mechanics took to the air with power flight for the first time.
And they did so after years and years of experiments with gliders in which they constantly adjusted and readjusted their designs in the light of experience, and they’d used wind tunnels and things like that, and they put together the different elements, the wings, the tails, the engine separately, they tested them all separately and this was finally bringing everything together. They left the engine ‘til last ’cause they figured that was the easy bit, it was just… all it needed was to provide power, but even that proved to be very difficult because it had to be lightweight, so that they’d had to design it from scratch and of course they weren’t believed literally for about several years, nobody believed the Wright brothers, they were called frauds and cranks. They wrote all these articles in the scientific magazines saying, “If you think that it’s likely that two humble bicycle mechanics from Ohio have cracked this problem that even the great Samuel Langley, head of the Smithsonian Institution couldn’t crack, then you’re an idiot. And we keep hearing rumors that they’re flying around Dayton, Ohio for miles at a time. These can’t be true ’cause if it was true, we’d have been able to report on it by now.”
Well, why don’t you go and look?
So, it’s a lovely story that that is terribly well-known, but my point is that again and again, it’s the same story, whether it’s the light bulb or the airplane or the search engine or artificial intelligence, whatever it might be, right up to date, it’s again, and again, it’s the freedom to experiment that is the absolute crucial ingredient of innovation.
Sean: You bring up another thing that’s just endlessly fascinating and that’s just the inevitability that these technologies come along at a certain time. Why is that?
Matt: Isn’t that fascinating?
Sean: Endlessly fascinating. It’s, it’s one of those things I could wrestle with all day.
Matt: Kevin Kelly explores many examples of this in his book, What Technology Wants and pretty well every technology has several people independently inventing it around the same time.
Again, the light bulb gives the best example, ’cause you can document 21 different people who came up with the idea of the light bulb as a glass bulb with a vacuum in it and filament through which electricity is passing.
Independently, there was Swan in England, there was Edison in America, there was Lodygin in Russia and so on and so on forth.
So there’s something about the 1870s that means that it’s impossible to get through that decade in western economies without somebody inventing the light bulb. It doesn’t matter how many people you run over you… Edison falls under a tram, Swan is run over by a horse and we still would have had light bulbs and the same thing in the 1990s. There are lots of people inventing search engines. Google ends up scooping the pool. It’s tremendously inevitable. It doesn’t… If Sergey Brin had never met Larry Page, we’d still have search engines. Search engines were in an unbelievably obvious way now, the main sort of where you were gonna organize the internet and the way you were gonna make money out of the internet, but here’s the interesting thing. However, inevitable these things look in retrospect, and there sort of ripe in the sense that the combined technologies that you need to combine to make them come together at that time, however, inevitable they look in retrospect, nobody saw them coming.
And if you go back to the 1980s and say, “Right, who’s predicting search as a key ingredient of the internet?” Almost nobody, there all… You can dig out one or two somewhat prescient remarks. They are a bit confused. And even the people who invented search engines didn’t realize that that’s what they were doing. I mean, Page and Brin did not set out to invent a search engine. They set out to catalog the Internet, and they only slowly realized that what they had developed was a device that would monetize the internet very effectively through advertising.
So there’s an extraordinary asymmetry here. As we look forward, we can’t see these moments of ripeness, of inevitability in technology coming, but as we look backwards, we can see them very clearly, and by the way this applies to scientific discovery as well as technological innovation. If Darwin had not written The Origin of Species, Wallace would have discovered natural selection, indeed he did. If Einstein had not thought of special relativity, Hendrik Lorentz would have done.
You reach a point when the ideas are coming together that you just can’t help but stumble on the next one. But you have to go through the process of those preliminary ideas to get that and those preliminary technologies.
Sean: How with technology today, social media, this connected world, how do your thoughts around that change moving into the future, do you think it becomes easier to predict the next innovations?
Matt: I don’t think it’s any easier to predict. No, I think it’s easier to invent because you can tap into an idea that someone has had in Shanghai 10 minutes ago to combine with the idea that somebody else has had in Chicago three minutes ago and put them together right now, which was not an option available to your ancestor 100 years ago. He would have had to wait for a letter from some part of the world, and he would have been jolly lucky to be able to track it down. So it must be easier to bring together ideas to… As I put it to enable ideas to have sex than ever before, but it doesn’t seem to be any easier to predict where the next technological breakthrough is coming.
I give you an example of how difficult technology is to predict. There are lots of examples of very clever people making very stupid remarks about the future. But if you go back to the 1950s and you look at what they thought the future was all about, they thought it was all about transport breakthroughs. They thought it was personal… Personal gyrocopters, supersonic travel, routine space travel, jetpacks for postman, things like that. They hardly mentioned communication and computers at all in a lot of these futurology things. And the reason they thought that was ’cause of the previous 50 years had all been about spectacular breakthroughs in transport.
I often think that my grandparents were born before the motorcar and the airplane, but they died with men on the moon and supersonic jets in the air. Lived through the most unbelievable changes in transport, whereas I have lived through almost no changes in transport at all. I mean, I flew on a 747 last year. That’s a plane that was… Began service in 1969. Imagine using a computer that was invented in 1969. It would look very different. So whereas my grandparents, again, although their transport experience had changed, their communication experience had changed very little. They were born after the telephone and they died with the telephone.
So, I suspect the next 50 years are not gonna be about communication and computing to the extent that we think they will. We’re thinking about artificial intelligence and the effect of the internet and so on, today. But it’s possible that the next 50 years, we’ll see enormous breakthroughs in bio-technology that we are not really expecting, for example.
Sean: I’m curious, who’s gonna be the one to bring these to light? I know you’ve written in the past about these innovators, they tend to be outsiders, correct?
Matt: Absolutely, yeah, no. One of the fascinating features of innovators is that it often is the maverick, the outsider who comes up with the best ideas. Not always. One shouldn’t rule out the possibility that a Harvard educated guy is gonna solve a problem, but to a surprising extent ever since… If you go back to the Longitude Prize in Britain in the 1700s, they refused to give it to this guy, John Harrison because he was a humble, humble clockmaker from Yorkshire. I’m sorry, this was supposed to be… This is a prize to work out longitude when you’re at sea. And this was supposed to be a brilliant astronomer or a mathematician who was gonna solve this problem, not a chap who just built very good clocks that would work, even in the roughest storms, which is what he did.
Sean: I’m wondering, with everyone being connected then, I know you’ve written in the past about how Tasmania about 10,000 years ago when they got disconnected from Australia, they lost access to the flow of ideas, and now everyone’s so connected. Is it less about the flow of ideas and being able to filter out the most important and distill down those ideas?
Matt: I think the Tasmanian example is very nice because it shows how not only you get cut off, if you got cut off from ideas, you don’t get ideas that happen a long way away and in a different place, you can’t import them, but also you end up with a small population disinventing things. They had to give up technologies ’cause they just didn’t have a big enough population to keep it specialised skills alive.
That’s obviously not an issue today. Most people are living in big enough societies to keep skills alive even if they get a bit cut off from the rest of the world and most of us are not cut off as you say. We’re able to draw upon this incredible network of brains that are applying themselves to problems all over the world.
And it’s like drinking from a fire hose, if you’re an innovator.
The problem is too much information coming at you from all sides. And we all know the experience of people trying to force great new ideas on their friends. “Please, can you take this seriously,” or “this guy’s a genius. He’s gonna solve the world’s problems, and it’s gonna… All you need is a little bit of a cup of water, and you can make enough fuel to drive an airplane.” And you have to sort of gently explain the second law thermodynamics and saying, “This isn’t gonna work,” and in the back of your mind is this slight worry that you may be wrong and this guy may be right, the maverick genius. But I think what there is still a surprising lack of is people looking outside their own silos. So people look within their own disciplines, within their own technologies for the solutions, when they should go out and study something completely different that would give them an insight. There’s a recent study of a… There’s a sort of website called InnoCentive which is where people or companies or organizations can post problems and say, “Does anyone have an idea how to solve this?” And I’ll pay you if you do… And there was a study of this site and of the many successful projects that have happened as a result of it, and it found that the solutions were on the whole coming from people from a surprisingly long distance away in terms of different technologies. In other words, it really was the outsiders to a field who are solving the problems for people. And so I think we haven’t… We’re still building a world that is too vulcanized into “This is Biology, this is Chemistry, this is the digital world,” are not cross-fertilizing enough, that’s the limiting factor, is cross-fertilization.
Sean: That cross-fertilization is something I’m truly intrigued by. We have a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of business owners who listen to the show, and we wanna create more innovative companies, and I’m wondering how we should approach that and the lens you’re looking through, about getting that outside perspective. Any insights or advice you have there?
Matt: Well, I’m one of these people who tell stories about what has happened in the world, and I’m not necessarily very good at turning that into how to make 10 million bucks myself from doing it. If I was, I’d have done it. I wouldn’t be bothering to write books, but yes, so I’m not necessarily the most practical person here, but here’s a couple of thoughts. I’ve had several conversations with Jeff Bezos about this issue, and one of the things I asked him one day was how do you keep Amazon innovative, when you’re such a large organization? How do you stop becoming a sterotic and sort of anti-innovation organization as so many big companies do become? And he’s very alive to this question and he may not be entirely succeeding, you know Amazon might be becoming a great big dinosaur eventually, but one of the answers he gave me was very interesting. I hadn’t thought of it like this before. He said in most organizations, if somebody has an idea, a group of people meet and they discuss it, and if most of them think it’s a bad idea, then it goes no further.
But he said in my organization, I’ve got a rule that if one of those people in that meeting, even in the minority, thinks it’s a good idea, then it has to be reported to another level in the organization.
It’s a sort of a reverse veto. It’s like a jury, where one juror says, “Now I think he’s not guilty.” In which case, the… For some reason, there’s a requirement for unanimity on this jury. So there’s a requirement for unanimity to reject an idea within Amazon. If there’s no unanimity, then it has to be referred upwards so that people like Jeff at the top of the organization get to hear about it.
And I think that’s a way of keeping the maverick stuff flowing to the people who take the decisions, and I suspect that’s quite an important entrepreneurial secret, ’cause if you look at the history of Amazon, it’s a history, it’s a story of blunder after blunder and mistake after mistake, and bad bet after bad bet. And yet, it’s ended up the biggest company in the world, and the most successful and the very definition of online e-commerce. And Bezos submits this and he says, “If you’re not rolling the dice…” Sorry, there’s a baseball metaphor, he uses. I’m not very good at baseball. But, if you’re not swinging at every ball, then you’re not gonna hit it or something, you’ll have to explain what that means to me.
Sean: He’s a truly generational type thinker. And I’m curious who some of the mavericks, the thinkers, the change makers you’ve most admired throughout your research.
Matt: Well, there’s so many it’s difficult in some ways to pick out some, but part of what I’m trying to do is downgrade the individual and I tell a lot of stories about individuals and how they achieved innovations which is… And yet I’m also trying to make it clear that they are just part of a network. And so I think the story that, in my book, that left most of an imprint in my memory, because in a way it doesn’t evolve a hero, is the story of the insecticide-treated bed net which is turned out to be the technology that has done most to stop malaria increasing and started dramatically decreasing over the last 20 years and it’s done so because it’s been championed by the Gates Foundation.
But I’d set out to find out where this insecticide treated bed net idea come from? Who invented it, who’s the genius behind it? And eventually traced it back to a very simple little sort of Xeroxed report written about an experiment done in Burkina Faso, in 1983 by some French and the Kina Fason scientists who were, who literally just set up 36 huts, each of which was designed as a mosquito trap as well as an ordinary hut made of local materials, in just a normal part of Burkina Faso in West Africa. And measured every, counted every mosquito that came in and went out of each hut. There were volunteers sleeping in each hut, some of them had mosquito nets and some didn’t, some of the mosquito nets were treated with insecticide, and some weren’t, some had holes in the nets, and some didn’t because most mosquito nets end up having holes in them after a short period in practice. So they want to know if that made a difference. And the results were astonishing, just adding insecticide to mosquito net, it was a huge deterrent to mosquitoes and killed a lot of them, and it didn’t matter if there were holes in the net.
And it’s a cheap technology that nobody really thought of in this way. It was a beautiful experiment. I got in touch with Frédéric Darriet, one of the scientists who did this work and asked him how it came about. Unfortunately, he didn’t speak English. My French isn’t very good, but we… We had an email conversation for a few weeks and for me that was… It’s the very… He’s not a household name, he’s not being given the Nobel prize, but that’s kind of my point. It’s someone like… It’s anonymous people like him who really are the heroes of my book.
Sean: That’s why I love the serendipity of these conversations. This will be listened to all over the world and you never know what idea this will spark.
Matt this truly has been so informative. Like I mentioned, your work has been instrumental in my thinking and my thought process is the new book, How Innovation Works is out May 19th. Anywhere else the listeners should be staying connected with you checking out any parting words you’d like to instill?
Matt: Well, I collect all my journalism and videos and other things on my website, which is mattridley.com.uk or rationaloptimist.com, it effectively leads to the same website and I’m on Twitter as @MattWRidley.
Sean: Well, all that will be easily linked up in the show notes, but Matt really I cannot thank you enough for joining us on What Got You There.
Matt: Sean, thanks for some really interesting questions, it’s been a pleasure.