Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind brained behavior and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
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Speaker 1: That's transcend Course dot Com. Okay, now let's dive into
Speaker 1: today's episode. So today we have Matt Ridley on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Matt is the author of the recently released How Innovation Works,
Speaker 1: as well as The Rational Optimist and several other books
Speaker 1: related to science and human progress, which I've sold over
Speaker 1: a million copies. He's also a biologist, newspaper columnist, and
Speaker 1: member of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom. Matt,
Speaker 1: great chat with you. So you first came to my
Speaker 1: attention when I was in grad school and I read
Speaker 1: The Red Queen. I was doing research at that time,
Speaker 1: but your book was very inspirational to me. I would
Speaker 1: just want to thank you for really inspiring me to
Speaker 1: do what I'm doing today. So what does it mean
Speaker 1: to be a rational optimist? Well, that's a good question.
Speaker 1: My reason for using the word rational in that phrase
Speaker 1: is because I'm not an optimist by temperament or hope.
Speaker 1: I'm an optimist because the evidence is pointing me towards optimism.
Speaker 1: In other words, I wrote that book in twenty and ten.
Speaker 1: It came out in twenty ten, and it was reflecting
Speaker 1: on the fact that I had been steeped in pessimism
Speaker 1: as a young person. I was very interested in the
Speaker 1: environment and conservation and worked in that area, and so
Speaker 1: I imbibed all the pessimistic stuff about the population explosion,
Speaker 1: about pollution, about species extinction, about habitat loss, and all
Speaker 1: that kind of thing, as well as more general economic
Speaker 1: pessimism about how the world was doom Now. I ended up,
Speaker 1: you know, expecting my life to get steadily worse as
Speaker 1: I grew up. When it didn't. When I found I
Speaker 1: was living in a time of increasing prosperity, I began
Speaker 1: to look at the numbers and at the evidence, and
Speaker 1: I was astonished by what I found. I thought I
Speaker 1: was writing a book about progress, and I would say
Speaker 1: progress is good in some areas and bad in others.
Speaker 1: And I kept being unable to find areas where it
Speaker 1: was bad, where things were going in the wrong direction.
Speaker 1: There's a few, but they're pretty minor. I mean, I
Speaker 1: thought happiness was going to be one where happiness was
Speaker 1: getting less widespread, and we were becoming less happy. That's
Speaker 1: what everybody says there was even a theory, explaining, it
Speaker 1: turns out the evidence just doesn't support that that the
Speaker 1: richer you are, the happy you are within countries, between countries,
Speaker 1: and within your own lifetime. And so, of course not
Speaker 1: everybody is rich and happy. Some people are rich and miserable.
Speaker 1: But that's probably a good thing because it cheers up
Speaker 1: other people when that happens. My point is that whether
Speaker 1: you're looking at economic, environmental, medical, all sorts of other things,
Speaker 1: the most extraordinary improvements in our living standards. Human income
Speaker 1: has trebled in our lifetime. Globally, in real terms, lifespan
Speaker 1: has gone up by a third, child mortality down by
Speaker 1: two thirds, and not man of oil spilled in the
Speaker 1: ocean down by ninety percent, Your chances of dying in
Speaker 1: a plane crash ninety nine percent down. You know, fact
Speaker 1: after fact shows the world going in a better direction.
Speaker 1: Explaining that was interesting to me, but also telling people
Speaker 1: that because it turns out that the vast majority of
Speaker 1: people think the world is getting worse, think people are
Speaker 1: getting poorer. I think everything's deteriorating, and yes, some things are.
Speaker 1: Because the media attention is so relentlessly focused only on
Speaker 1: the things and the places that are going wrong, we
Speaker 1: get misled. Sure, then that's a similar approach that Stephen
Speaker 1: Pink takes to studying this and looking at the general trends.
Speaker 1: Did you write that before he wrote his Yes, I
Speaker 1: knew he was writing The Better Angels of Our Nature,
Speaker 1: and I went to talk to him to find out
Speaker 1: what he was writing, because, you know, writing the same
Speaker 1: trying to write the same book as Stephen Pinker is
Speaker 1: not a good strategy because he writes so beautifully. And
Speaker 1: it turned out he was focusing entirely on the issue
Speaker 1: of violence. But Rational has came out before Better Angels
Speaker 1: and well before Enlightenment Now, which is his more recent
Speaker 1: book on the same subject. But they're both terrific books.
Speaker 1: Great books. Yeah, they are very good books. He was
Speaker 1: on this podcast and I asked him the question that
Speaker 1: just people inevitably will ask, and they will ask you
Speaker 1: this question over and over and over again, which is well,
Speaker 1: that's called comfort for the person who whose personal life sucks,
Speaker 1: you know, whose personal life is well, they're in poverty,
Speaker 1: they're experiencing you know, racism is a big issue, and
Speaker 1: various places around the world people are saying that these
Speaker 1: issues are still at a systemic level. And what do
Speaker 1: you do when people make that argument, what do you
Speaker 1: say to that. I say, that doesn't change the fact.
Speaker 1: I'm simply telling you the facts about the world. And
Speaker 1: I also say, look, I think it's quite important to
Speaker 1: give young people hope rather than a counsel of despair,
Speaker 1: as long as that hope is based on evidence, because
Speaker 1: I think it's far worse to tell a young person
Speaker 1: who may not be well off there's no chance of
Speaker 1: you ever becoming well off. In fact, you're going to
Speaker 1: be crushed by racism and poverty and ill health and
Speaker 1: pollution your whole life if you say no. Actually, you
Speaker 1: may be living in an impoverished life in Ethiopia at
Speaker 1: the moment and have poor health, and have low income
Speaker 1: and are struggling to find decent food. But here's a
Speaker 1: fact that might interest you. The average income of the
Speaker 1: average Ethiopian has doubled in ten years. The amount of
Speaker 1: food available to Africans per head has gone up dramatically
Speaker 1: in the last twenty years. The chances of someone dying
Speaker 1: in warfare in Africa has gone down dramatically in the
Speaker 1: last ten years. Your chances of dying in malaria, that
Speaker 1: the number of people dying of malaria in Africa has
Speaker 1: halved in the last twenty years. So miserable as you
Speaker 1: may be, now, there is hope that we can you
Speaker 1: can find a way out of poverty and misery, and
Speaker 1: there are ways in which other people are achieving that.
Speaker 1: Let's do our best to make sure they're available to you,
Speaker 1: and let's give you the chance to enjoy the prosperity
Speaker 1: that many others have had. Ten years ago, when I
Speaker 1: wrote The Rational Optimist, it was quite common to hear
Speaker 1: the argument, Yes, Asia has experienced dramatic economic growth and
Speaker 1: lifted a lot of people out of poverty in China
Speaker 1: and India and elsewhere, but no, that's never going to
Speaker 1: happen to Africa. Africa is always going to be permanently
Speaker 1: extremely poor. There are just too many people and not
Speaker 1: enough resources and not enough opportunities. And you would hear
Speaker 1: this argument quite often, and in that book, I actually
Speaker 1: took on that argument, and I kept saying, look, actually,
Speaker 1: I don't think that's true. I think you're going to
Speaker 1: see the same breakout improvements in human living standards because
Speaker 1: of what the Gates Foundation is doing, but also because
Speaker 1: of what Africans themselves are doing to help themselves and
Speaker 1: for that. Do you know what. One reviewer actually accused
Speaker 1: me of being a racist because he said I used
Speaker 1: the phrase even in Africa. I thought this was incredibly
Speaker 1: unfair because my point was I was saying, yes, you
Speaker 1: guys who say this can't happen in Africa, Yes, even
Speaker 1: in Africa, it can happen. So it's been the opposite
Speaker 1: of racism. But reviewers see what they want to see. Actually,
Speaker 1: I became friendly with that reviewer afterwards, and he did
Speaker 1: admit he'd misread that point. So, well, this is very
Speaker 1: interesting because you've convinced me that it's important to know
Speaker 1: about my probabilities for certain things, so I could or else.
Speaker 1: You know, I could make an infinite number of decisions
Speaker 1: throughout the course of the day, and it's nice to
Speaker 1: be informed by what is more probable. And if I
Speaker 1: crossed the street at this point and there are this
Speaker 1: many cars, maybe I shouldn't just run. Okay, you know
Speaker 1: these sorts of things. So you will know the name
Speaker 1: Hans Rosling, who is something of a godfather to us.
Speaker 1: A rational optimist. He started giving incredible talks and eventually
Speaker 1: wrote a very good book called Factfulness. Sadly he's died.
Speaker 1: But he did a rather brilliant thing, which was he
Speaker 1: asked a thousand Americans. He did the same in the UK.
Speaker 1: In the last twenty years, has the percentage of the
Speaker 1: world population that lives in extreme poverty doubled, halved, or
Speaker 1: stayed the same? And sixty five percent of people said
Speaker 1: it had doubled, five percent said it at half. The
Speaker 1: five percent of right. The sixty five percent are wrong.
Speaker 1: But he then said, look, if I wrote those three
Speaker 1: answers on three bananas and I threw those banaras into
Speaker 1: a cage with a monkey in it, the monkey would
Speaker 1: pick up the correct answer thirty three percent of the
Speaker 1: time instead of five percent of the time. It would
Speaker 1: do six times as well as human beings and answering
Speaker 1: a question about human society, how can that be? And
Speaker 1: the answer? I think it was a nineteenth century sage
Speaker 1: who put it this way, But it's it's a good
Speaker 1: way of putting it. It ain't what you don't know
Speaker 1: that gets you into trouble. It's what you know that
Speaker 1: ain't so you what you think you know that ain't
Speaker 1: so right. But he's yeah, he's saying, what you know
Speaker 1: that ain't. So you're so sure of it, you know,
Speaker 1: you're obviously hundred percent and we're full of things we
Speaker 1: know to be true, which just an true. This is
Speaker 1: tricky territory, my friend, because yeah, I agree, obviously, but
Speaker 1: it's tough having conversations with people who are that sure
Speaker 1: about something. And when a person leads with ideology. Like
Speaker 1: let's say I'm talking to someone, I'm just purely I'm like,
Speaker 1: I want to know, just let's explore the truth, and
Speaker 1: that person's coming to me like entirely through the lens
Speaker 1: of ideology. Well, there's a conflict there because I mean,
Speaker 1: they don't want to hear from me that they could
Speaker 1: be wrong. That's not a good way to make friends
Speaker 1: with someone who's leading with ideology. It is kind of
Speaker 1: a good way to make friends with a rational optimist,
Speaker 1: you know, but not an ideologue. Well, you're right. There's
Speaker 1: one way in which the world does depress me, and
Speaker 1: that is the number of people who want to start
Speaker 1: with the facts seems to be smaller than I would
Speaker 1: like it to be. Yeah, well me too, me too.
Speaker 1: It's frustrating. I mean, you work, I work in a dissertation,
Speaker 1: I work in a nerdy little silo of academic where
Speaker 1: I'm rewarded and I am praised for Well, that was
Speaker 1: such a scholarly, nuanced discussion section of your paper, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean. And then I enter the real
Speaker 1: world and I'm like, here, everyone, I really this is
Speaker 1: an interesting conversation we're having about politics, race, religion. Here's
Speaker 1: my nuanced discussion section about that. And it's like, goodbye, nuance.
Speaker 1: Nuance is an endangered species at the moment, I fear.
Speaker 1: And there's an example of where my optimism may have
Speaker 1: been a little bit misplaced. I don't know about twenty ten,
Speaker 1: but certainly in the year two thousand, well, no, probably
Speaker 1: in twenty ten too. I was pretty darned optimistic about
Speaker 1: the Internet. I thought, this is a fabulous resource. It
Speaker 1: enables us to check every fact you know. You can.
Speaker 1: You can nail the myths, you can look things up,
Speaker 1: you can find out what other people think. You can
Speaker 1: see each other's point of view. You're not relying anymore
Speaker 1: on what some your favorite newspaper is telling you. You
Speaker 1: can jolly will just go out and find the facts
Speaker 1: for yourself. So it's going to bring peace and harmony
Speaker 1: and utopia and come by our and we're all going
Speaker 1: to love each other. But I wasn't quite that naive,
Speaker 1: but I had an element of that naivety. Instead, it
Speaker 1: has social media has polarized us far more than I expected.
Speaker 1: And it's a worry. Yeah, it's a real worry. And
Speaker 1: it makes sense though from a psychological point of view
Speaker 1: what we're seeing on social media. The incentive structures are
Speaker 1: for likes for social status. I mean, don't they know that?
Speaker 1: Then the designers know that that like button would directly
Speaker 1: correlate with dopamine production in the synapses. If you put
Speaker 1: your nuanced stuff out there as a tweet, it just
Speaker 1: doesn't get clicked on either way. But here's the nuance
Speaker 1: to that. The meta nuance of that is that for
Speaker 1: really for the cognitive explorers among us, it actually does
Speaker 1: release dopamine to a different synepse that just it's rare,
Speaker 1: just a fewer number of people. So my colleague and I,
Speaker 1: most notably Colin to Young, have mapped out I starting
Speaker 1: to map out different dopamine systems and the sex drugs
Speaker 1: rock and roll system is what everyone talks about, but
Speaker 1: people are not as familiar with the dorsalata or prefiltal
Speaker 1: cortex projection of dopamine where people get there's a reward
Speaker 1: valued information to truthful information, to knowledge to nuance, and
Speaker 1: people who score high on IQ, people score high in
Speaker 1: certain measures of intellectual curiosity, do actually get that kind
Speaker 1: of sex? Drugs, rock and roll hit in a sense,
Speaker 1: so's it's more emerging research. I can send you a paper,
Speaker 1: I can send you the paper on that. I'd be
Speaker 1: very interested in that. So you've found the spot in
Speaker 1: my brain where I get a real thrill out of
Speaker 1: reading a good article or finding a new fact or
Speaker 1: even exploding a myth. You've found the nuance sulkus. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's your next book that actually would be a neat book. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There are different neurons that cade for different value of things,
Speaker 1: and of course sex, you know sex. The primal rewards
Speaker 1: have very subcortical projections, but there are higher level cognitive
Speaker 1: projections that exist for that respond to the reward value
Speaker 1: of information. You can see throughout the course of human evolution,
Speaker 1: we would it'd be very valuable to have backward information
Speaker 1: that was adaptive to survive, but not as many people
Speaker 1: get automatically excited about that. Far far less. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: do you think, do you think we're all capable of
Speaker 1: it if we just get educated into the experience of
Speaker 1: enjoying a good non factual, non fictional story or something
Speaker 1: like that, or or do you think some people just
Speaker 1: have that and others don't. Well, it's a great question.
Speaker 1: It's a great question, and I would love to say
Speaker 1: everyone is capable of it. And I think that's true
Speaker 1: to a certain extent, just like with creativity, which we're
Speaker 1: going to get to because that's an area of mutual
Speaker 1: interest of ours. I've written a book on creativity and
Speaker 1: then research on that. In the same sense, people always
Speaker 1: ask me that question when they read my book because
Speaker 1: the book's called Wired to Create, and so interviewers will say, oh,
Speaker 1: what does that mean? Are some people more wired? Are
Speaker 1: we all wired to create? And I like to be
Speaker 1: just honest, you know, and that's the individual differences exist.
Speaker 1: There's a bell curve of every single trait, psychological trait,
Speaker 1: psychological trait. There's a lot of variation that's influenced by
Speaker 1: both genetics and the environment interacting. So do I think
Speaker 1: every single person's equally probability of becoming a creative genius? No,
Speaker 1: that one can't say that is the case. I'd completely
Speaker 1: agree with that, But I do sometimes find the emphasis
Speaker 1: on creativity in stories about innovation lends people to thinking
Speaker 1: that there's something god like about innovators and inventors. And
Speaker 1: that's one of the things I'm trying to address in
Speaker 1: my new book. I'm trying to say, actually, do you
Speaker 1: know what there's not? Let's take the Right brothers. You know,
Speaker 1: all Ville and Wilburg, Right, did they have some unbelievable
Speaker 1: spark of genius that most people don't have. I don't
Speaker 1: think so. They were described by the guy who took
Speaker 1: the photograph of the plane taking off on the first
Speaker 1: day as the workingest boys I ever saw. That is
Speaker 1: to say, they just worked at it. They worked incredibly hard,
Speaker 1: They did a lot of experiments, They were open minded
Speaker 1: enough to learn from other people, They put in the hours.
Speaker 1: These are the characteristics that pretty well anybody could have.
Speaker 1: Albeit you know, so when you say creativity, do you
Speaker 1: mean workingst It's a good. It's a good. It's really good.
Speaker 1: And I'm glad I'm finding I'm frying to jump in
Speaker 1: to this topic of innovation now here. Here's my nerd
Speaker 1: I'm gonna put my nerdy hat on for a second
Speaker 1: and my critical self and point out that there's such
Speaker 1: a thing in psychology called restricted samples. This is this
Speaker 1: is the big problem with Eric anders Erickson's God bless him.
Speaker 1: He passed away recently and a real legend in the field,
Speaker 1: and his work on expertise has been very valuable. But
Speaker 1: me and him cordially throughout his life, and we would
Speaker 1: spar about this a bit from time to time in
Speaker 1: a friendly way, because he would say, Okay, well, I'm
Speaker 1: looking at experts and I'm trying understand what they're special
Speaker 1: juice is, and I found they have the ability to
Speaker 1: focus for a long periods of time, and therefore those
Speaker 1: are the characters that matter, not I Q and all
Speaker 1: these other things. But he's looking at restricted samples. So
Speaker 1: how do you what would happen if you looked at
Speaker 1: how innovation works among a naturally occurring sample of the
Speaker 1: population that wasn't all race out on by a factors
Speaker 1: such as a Q, education, you know, other personal characteristics.
Speaker 1: How can you conclude those things don't matter just because
Speaker 1: you're looking at this a highly selected sample where those
Speaker 1: things have already been selected out, and so therefore those
Speaker 1: things aren't doing the prediction anymore. One point in my
Speaker 1: book I write about I write a brief biographical sketch
Speaker 1: of Gordon Moore, the man behind Moure's Law, And I say,
Speaker 1: you know, by now, you've probably got an image of
Speaker 1: the standard West Coast, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, innovator in your mind.
Speaker 1: He's an unreasonable guy. He knows his own mind. He's
Speaker 1: an immigrant, he's restless, he's hard to satisfy. He's incredibly
Speaker 1: sort of dedicated, he's very impatient. You know, I'm describing
Speaker 1: sort of Steve Jobs or something like that. And then
Speaker 1: I say, well, hang on, here's this guy, Gordon Moore.
Speaker 1: He lives about ten miles from where he was. He
Speaker 1: left California briefly for a couple of years. That was it. Otherwise,
Speaker 1: he's been in the Bay Area all his life. He's
Speaker 1: preternaturally reasonable and nice. Everyone says he's the nicest guy
Speaker 1: you ever met. He doesn't like confronting people. He's unbelievably patient.
Speaker 1: His favorite pastime is fishing. Well, you need to be
Speaker 1: patient for that, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And
Speaker 1: I run through it and I say, look, this guy
Speaker 1: is the exact opposite personality wise of Steve Jobs or
Speaker 1: someone like that, and yet he's in his own way
Speaker 1: just as successful an entrepreneur, and he's been right at
Speaker 1: the heart of the Silicon Valley story for a long time.
Speaker 1: So what is your point there that you found like
Speaker 1: a contradiction to the stereotype, because for instance, like you
Speaker 1: dispel that the longe genius stereotype, but then I could
Speaker 1: come back and point out, well, here's some examples and
Speaker 1: looks like they're actually long genius does exist, but you're
Speaker 1: just pointing out other examples of non one genius examples
Speaker 1: that also do exist. So all these things can exist simultaneously.
Speaker 1: So there's the meta point there that there are multiple
Speaker 1: pathways to innovation or are you arguing there's one specific
Speaker 1: pathway that seems more predominant. I mean, I would say
Speaker 1: that I don't think the loan genius does achieve as much,
Speaker 1: and that you might find me examples of loan geniuses
Speaker 1: who had philosophical insights that were extraordinary, but I don't
Speaker 1: think you'd find they were practical innovators who changed the world.
Speaker 1: But that you can't be a lone genius. You have
Speaker 1: to be a collaborator to some extent. So I don't
Speaker 1: think there are exceptions there. But the idea that an entrepreneur,
Speaker 1: an innovator has to be a restless, impatient, aggressive, unreasonable person,
Speaker 1: I think that doesn't actually hold. In other words, I
Speaker 1: think the personality characteristics don't seem to me to matter
Speaker 1: that much, whereas the ability to work with other people
Speaker 1: does matter. But I might you know, I haven't done
Speaker 1: the regression analysis on my case histories, but and you
Speaker 1: know you'll see what I do in the in the
Speaker 1: book is I take a bunch of case histories pretty
Speaker 1: well at ROUNDOM. I mean, they're about interesting and important issues,
Speaker 1: but I leave somehow. I don't don't write about textiles
Speaker 1: in the book, for example, very important technology. But I
Speaker 1: take these stories and I tell story after story of
Speaker 1: how innovations came about. Then I use that as my database, saying, look,
Speaker 1: what are the common themes that are emerging from these stories.
Speaker 1: Now that's not terribly scientific, I admit. And you're going
Speaker 1: to tell me I didn't you know I'm about to
Speaker 1: say that. Yes, I'm pointing out I'm a writer, but
Speaker 1: my mind is being born because I just want to
Speaker 1: point out something your whole argument is about, you know,
Speaker 1: the looking at the trends of the progress over human
Speaker 1: history from an objective statistical point of view, not listening
Speaker 1: to people's stories, narratives and idealities that surely you see
Speaker 1: that contradiction in yourself there. Well yeah, but now the
Speaker 1: stories I'm telling are not you know, they're not sort
Speaker 1: of moralizing themes, their biographical, factual what happened next? Stories.
Speaker 1: But you're right. I mean, I'm aware of the contradiction. Now.
Speaker 1: I discussed in the book that I say, the individual
Speaker 1: inventor and innovator doesn't matter as much as we think
Speaker 1: that an awful lot of innovations would have happened if
Speaker 1: the same if the Edison or Jeff Bezos has been
Speaker 1: run over by a bus, you know, we'd still have
Speaker 1: online retail or light bulbs. So the individual doesn't matter
Speaker 1: to that extent, and he's always embedded in a social network,
Speaker 1: and he's building on the work of predecessors and successes.
Speaker 1: So why am I telling his story as a particular story.
Speaker 1: You know why am I singling out his life history
Speaker 1: his biography? Well, partly because I want to take that
Speaker 1: point along the way that this guy gets the credit
Speaker 1: you know, Samuel Mosse gets the credit for the telegrapher,
Speaker 1: Marconi gets the credit for radio. But let's look at
Speaker 1: the way they were embedded in society and the way
Speaker 1: they had to talk to other people. And the other
Speaker 1: reason for telling it is people love reading stories. They do.
Speaker 1: They do love it, that's true, and they are fascinating stories.
Speaker 1: Well do Let's just talk about the study. This is
Speaker 1: my doctoral work. So there's a table I want to
Speaker 1: point to because this is what I'm talking about with
Speaker 1: natural with looking at naturally occurring samples versus your restricted samples.
Speaker 1: Is that I can tell you what we found from
Speaker 1: a naturally occurring point of view, So you're right, from
Speaker 1: the jerk perspective, we found zero relationship with the agreeableness
Speaker 1: to mention. And I laugh a lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of times, as well as neuroticism. So I laugh when
Speaker 1: I give talk. Sometimes I say, trust me, I wish
Speaker 1: neuroticism was predictive of creative achievement. I would be a
Speaker 1: creative genius. And also, you know, we like to we
Speaker 1: have this myth. We like to think that nice guys
Speaker 1: are nice people finish, you know, last look, I wish,
Speaker 1: But there's no correlation at all with agreeableness, because that
Speaker 1: puts everything in the pot at once, including including IQ
Speaker 1: G and as well, that's what you know G general intelligence,
Speaker 1: as well as divergent thinking. And it turns out when
Speaker 1: you put all this in the pot, Yeah, and IQ
Speaker 1: is not terribly predictive, nearly as predictive as openness to experience.
Speaker 1: So it seems like this personality trait, and I wonder
Speaker 1: how you map on the openness to experience personality trait
Speaker 1: and in intellectual which encompasses intellectual curiosity, but it also
Speaker 1: but that was more important for the sciences. For the arts,
Speaker 1: it was more important to be open to your emotions,
Speaker 1: to your intuition, to rely on your intuition and your experience,
Speaker 1: your experiential self, you know, in the world, and your
Speaker 1: appreciation of art and beauty and being a deep thinker,
Speaker 1: you know, being very imaginative and having a fantasy world
Speaker 1: or rich fantasy world. So I'm wondering how this naturally
Speaker 1: occurring data maps onto your your rich collection of stories.
Speaker 1: So I'm just looking at it, and am I right
Speaker 1: in reading it? That openness is significantly correlated with creativity
Speaker 1: in the arts, but not in the sciences. Is that
Speaker 1: what your charge is saying, correct, yes, And in intellect
Speaker 1: in the sciences, something interesting there is intellectual curiosity is
Speaker 1: more predictive of creative achievement in the sciences than IQ.
Speaker 1: So we may be undervalue intextual curiosity and overvalue IQ
Speaker 1: in this But within the well, within the art oh
Speaker 1: good good. But within artistic creativity, yeah, IQ wasn't predictive.
Speaker 1: It neither was intellectual curiosity terribly. It really was was
Speaker 1: these aspects of openness to one's experience and you know, emotions,
Speaker 1: fantasy and just having this rich, you know, daydreaming world
Speaker 1: within your own head. So fantasy versus ideas is another
Speaker 1: interesting distinction within this. To mean, I need to just
Speaker 1: clarify that I think that this is perhaps more at
Speaker 1: the scientific discovery artistic originality end of the spectrum than
Speaker 1: at the innovator entrepreneur end of the spectrum, which is
Speaker 1: mostly what I'm writing about. I mean, they are connected,
Speaker 1: of course, but one of the things I'm trying to
Speaker 1: do is say there are people like Thomas Edison and
Speaker 1: Jeff Bezoso have mentioned before who are extremely good innovators,
Speaker 1: but they wouldn't really be described as brilliant inventors. You know,
Speaker 1: they haven't come up with anything particularly new at themselves.
Speaker 1: They've just turned relatively new ideas into practical, affordable, and
Speaker 1: reliable things. And in that sense, I'm sort of trying
Speaker 1: to get away from the idea that that innovators are scientists,
Speaker 1: or and innovators and scientists are the same thing. I
Speaker 1: think quite often that they're quite different. But putting that
Speaker 1: on one side and looking back at your chart, because
Speaker 1: I think it's really really interesting. What does the high
Speaker 1: was it low correlation with agreeableness tell you about scientists? Yes,
Speaker 1: and the science as it seems like to be more
Speaker 1: disagreeable is good? Okay, Yeah, I've just started a negative
Speaker 1: negative aggression. Yeah, I'm just starting a biography. Read to
Speaker 1: read a biography. I'm reviewing of JBS hol Day in
Speaker 1: The Great Scientist, and came across a remark very early
Speaker 1: on just describing his personality. A very distinguished guy called
Speaker 1: Hans Kalmus sent Hold in a manuscript of his new
Speaker 1: book on human genetics. Thomas was a longtime colleague and
Speaker 1: a protege of sorts, a Czech refugee who had with
Speaker 1: Holdaen's helped found work at University College just before the
Speaker 1: Second World War. None of these personal ties softened Holday's
Speaker 1: assessment of the manuscript. It ought not to be published.
Speaker 1: He listed some errors, then added, I could go on indefinitely.
Speaker 1: The proposed book would not only come Camus, but science
Speaker 1: of genetics itself. You would be better advised, if this
Speaker 1: is possible, to go back to experimental biology rather than
Speaker 1: to continue to work in human genetics. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: brutal to one of your protegees. That's quite quite brutal
Speaker 1: about a book that you've written. I guess. The point
Speaker 1: here is there's different levels of analysis one can can
Speaker 1: try to tackle this question, I guess. And these stories
Speaker 1: are telling us information. But it's just funny. You'd be
Speaker 1: the first one to tell me in a different context
Speaker 1: that stories don't necessarily mean generalizable truths about an innovation. No,
Speaker 1: you're absolutely right, and plural of anecdote is not data,
Speaker 1: as somebody once said. You know, the one thing I
Speaker 1: did do is not sit down and say here's my
Speaker 1: theory about how innovation works, and I'm now going to
Speaker 1: produce evidence to support it in a confirmation by a
Speaker 1: sort of way. I mean, there's anything particularly wrong with that,
Speaker 1: But that's how most books are written. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: the prosecutor. I'm trying to prosecute a case. I'm going
Speaker 1: to mention everything that supports my argument that the guy
Speaker 1: is guilty, but I'm not going to I'm going to
Speaker 1: gloss over the things that imply that my guys is innocent.
Speaker 1: Instead of that, I said, I'm going to tell a
Speaker 1: bunch of stories for six chapters about innovations and how
Speaker 1: they work, and then after that I'm going to start
Speaker 1: to say what I think the general themes are. So
Speaker 1: it's You're right, it's not hard science what I'm doing,
Speaker 1: and I'm not pretending it is. It is a literary effort,
Speaker 1: after all, but it is at least data first, theory second,
Speaker 1: rather than the other way around. Okay, so I hear you.
Speaker 1: It seems like creative people don't have a linear pathway.
Speaker 1: They like pcassus that I often don't know where I'm
Speaker 1: going to get there. There's a very nonlinear sort of
Speaker 1: thing where later like creative emerges. It's not like that.
Speaker 1: That's quite well onto what I call serendipity, which is
Speaker 1: the need to change direction, the need to look out
Speaker 1: for unexpected results that weren't what you thought. Kevlar Teflon
Speaker 1: the post it note all discovered by people looking for
Speaker 1: something completely different, who thought they'd failed, and then they
Speaker 1: realized they had something even more valuable. Absolutely maps on.
Speaker 1: So I do see a lot of mappings. And you
Speaker 1: talk about a bottom up approached innovation as opposed to
Speaker 1: a top down and I think that bottom up details
Speaker 1: with that emergence your model of innovation, I think in
Speaker 1: its broad brushes are quite right. And maybe it's just
Speaker 1: worth distinguishing here between the process and the person, because
Speaker 1: our prior discussion for the last twenty minutes was a
Speaker 1: lot about what are the personality characteristics? They're predictive, but
Speaker 1: that's a separate issue than what you've outlined, which seems
Speaker 1: to conform quite nicely. I thought too, a lot of
Speaker 1: our own discoveries in our book on the process of
Speaker 1: the whole creative system, and so you can start to
Speaker 1: separate the person from the process. Kevin Kelly has a
Speaker 1: book called What Technology Wants, which sees the whole thing
Speaker 1: from a completely different perspective and says, look, technology is
Speaker 1: in charge of its own destiny. It's it's inching towards
Speaker 1: certain in certain directions, in certain times, in certain places,
Speaker 1: and it's kind of choosing the people who do the discovering.
Speaker 1: Now he's being you know, he's going a little bit
Speaker 1: too far in in that deliberately, but it's a very
Speaker 1: interesting perspective. And he calls it the technium. You know,
Speaker 1: this this machine, this evolving organism of our technology, which
Speaker 1: you know, when it wants to invent search engines, it
Speaker 1: picks Larry Page and Sogate bring to do it. But
Speaker 1: it's going to do that, do it whoever's around. You know,
Speaker 1: somebody's going to be there to invent search engines for it.
Speaker 1: And it's quite an interesting way of looking at the
Speaker 1: world because, you know, one of the pieces of evidence
Speaker 1: for it, which he first introduced me to and I
Speaker 1: then followed up the research on it. It's very very
Speaker 1: striking is the phenomenon of simultaneous invention. Oh yeah, Dean
Speaker 1: Simutin's done some good work in there. Yeah, to any
Speaker 1: one different people invented the light bulb independently, basically, you know,
Speaker 1: it's extraordinary, and only one guy credit and only one
Speaker 1: gets credit exactly, And so often these priority disputes that
Speaker 1: bogged down innovators. I mean, you know, the Wright Brothers, Marconi,
Speaker 1: Samuel Morse. These guys spent some of the best lives
Speaker 1: of years of their life in court defending their monopolies,
Speaker 1: their patents, their intellectual property against furious rivals who said,
Speaker 1: well I came, I came up with half of that idea,
Speaker 1: and it said, you know, they should say, yeah, actually's
Speaker 1: probably true. You probably did. And that's one of the
Speaker 1: reasons I make that intellectual properties is misguided and is
Speaker 1: doing more harm than good at the moment. That's a
Speaker 1: great point this idea. Dean sam talks about half if
Speaker 1: an idea, it's often if an idea is ready to
Speaker 1: pop out, so to speak, at your I'm mixing that
Speaker 1: you have your ideas have sex metaphors, So I'm like,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, yeah, that's what I'm trying. That's where
Speaker 1: I'm going with us pop out when ideas ready to
Speaker 1: be born, That's what I'm trying to saying, Yeah, an
Speaker 1: idea is really to be born, it's almost in the
Speaker 1: air for the picking is. This was Dean Simonson's point,
Speaker 1: So he said, multiples make sense. You know that people
Speaker 1: that it's not like these labs are stealing from each other.
Speaker 1: Can't we admit that, like we're all taking from the universe.
Speaker 1: Going back to the search engine, I find out a
Speaker 1: very useful example because it's very clear to us the
Speaker 1: reason search engines were invented in the nineteen nineties by
Speaker 1: lots of different people around the same time is not
Speaker 1: because there was suddenly some deity who decided to implant
Speaker 1: the idea of search engines in certain human brains, but
Speaker 1: because once you've invented the Internet, it's kind of inevitable
Speaker 1: that you're going to invent the search engine. But the
Speaker 1: weird thing is nobody sees it coming. So back in
Speaker 1: the eighties, nobody is going around saying, you know, once
Speaker 1: we've invented the Internet, somebody is going to make a
Speaker 1: ton of money out of searchin Even Larry Page and
Speaker 1: Sergei Britain don't think they're inventing search engines to start with.
Speaker 1: They think they're cataloging the Internet. There's a strange asymmetry
Speaker 1: here which I've wrestled with and don't fully understand, which
Speaker 1: is the predictability in retrospect of technological evolution, but the
Speaker 1: unpredictability in prospect. Such a good point and it's it's
Speaker 1: so true, And I wonder what about the exceptions, like
Speaker 1: those who had that crazy vision that no one else
Speaker 1: saw and no one else believed in. Do you think
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg when he was maybe didn't know it would be
Speaker 1: this this big, but he started to have visions of
Speaker 1: like what a social media system would look like and
Speaker 1: how it would work for people while people would like it.
Speaker 1: But that hadn't existed before. Yeah, I mean there are
Speaker 1: forgotten predecessors who thought of invention. There's a I would
Speaker 1: argue that if if Zuckerberg hadn't met the Winklevos trends,
Speaker 1: and if Zuckerberg had become a professor of neuroscience or
Speaker 1: something instead, I'd be pretty surprised if we if somebody
Speaker 1: else hadn't scooped the pool and become the extremely rich
Speaker 1: founder of some company with a different name, admittedly but
Speaker 1: very similar to Facebook. There's a certain inevitability about that.
Speaker 1: But I mean, I do write about a guy who
Speaker 1: really did invent the telephone in you know a long
Speaker 1: time before Alexander Graham Bell in twenty years before or something,
Speaker 1: and then died in penury and poverty, and nobody appreciated
Speaker 1: what he'd done, but it's you could make the case
Speaker 1: that he churned the principle. But it's never really going
Speaker 1: to work till you've got till other technologies have made
Speaker 1: further advances. Again, I met this case with wheeled suitcases
Speaker 1: in the book you Know, which seems to be a
Speaker 1: classic example of a technology that comes too late. I mean,
Speaker 1: why didn't we invent wheeled suitcases fifty years ago, one
Speaker 1: hundred year ago? What turns out if you research the
Speaker 1: history of this, you find that there are people patenting
Speaker 1: and suggesting wheeled suitcases way back into the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: but they don't catch on. Why not basically because you know,
Speaker 1: wheels are big and clunky and heavy, and airports or
Speaker 1: train stations are small and easy to navigate, and porters
Speaker 1: are available and cheap. So actually it's a waste of
Speaker 1: time sticking wheels on suitcases until roughly the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: So there's surprisingly few things that you can name that
Speaker 1: we should have invented five hundred years before we did.
Speaker 1: It's a great point. I mean, yeah, I love that
Speaker 1: you make that point. Why does innovation require freedom? There's
Speaker 1: a general correlation here that you know, relatively free societies.
Speaker 1: From the City States in Italy to the Song dynasty
Speaker 1: in China to modern California have been places where people
Speaker 1: have been free to experiment, free to innovate. So what
Speaker 1: is it about free that is necessary. Well, we shouldn't
Speaker 1: forget that. It's the freedom of the consumer to express
Speaker 1: his wishes that is quite important. You know, the Soviet
Speaker 1: consumer was not really free to express his desire for
Speaker 1: washing machines rather than nuclear missiles. Probably more important, it's
Speaker 1: the freedom of the innovator and the entrepreneur to experiment,
Speaker 1: make mistakes, change direction, to change your mind, to backtrack,
Speaker 1: to seek out new sources of investment. In a system
Speaker 1: where you have to do what you've promised to do
Speaker 1: or you have to get permission to do something else,
Speaker 1: then it doesn't work. So, for example, today in innovating
Speaker 1: in the nuclear power industry is basically very difficult because
Speaker 1: you have to go back to the regulator and say, look,
Speaker 1: I've changed my mind. I want to build this nuclear
Speaker 1: paerstation to a slightly different design and I use a
Speaker 1: different material. You've got to start the whole licensing process
Speaker 1: all over again, and that costs you one hundred million
Speaker 1: dollars or something, and so people don't do that, Whereas
Speaker 1: if you're inventing a new video game, you are free
Speaker 1: to just say no, do you know what, I'm going
Speaker 1: to do it in a different way. I'm going to
Speaker 1: start a completely different way of doing the same thing today.
Speaker 1: So that freedom to change course is I think probably
Speaker 1: the most important factor in the freedom behind innovation. There
Speaker 1: are some obstacles to that. One you talk about is
Speaker 1: you're stuck about governments can be a big obstacle to innovation.
Speaker 1: Another one, as people like Jonathan Height and Greg wil
Speaker 1: keanaf I've talked about, and how university is these days
Speaker 1: seem to be more and more antithetical to the spirit
Speaker 1: of what you're talking about when you talk about innovation,
Speaker 1: which is trial and error, right, the safe space to
Speaker 1: fail exactly, and the grant giving bodies in science have
Speaker 1: I'm sorry to say, become obsessed with getting you to
Speaker 1: write down in your grant application what it is you're
Speaker 1: going to discover. Well, what's the point of doing the
Speaker 1: experiment if you already know what it is you're going
Speaker 1: to discover. Can you talk a little bit more about
Speaker 1: your point about governments, is that what you're talking about
Speaker 1: with grant funding agencies and things like that. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that was one of the examples. Governments can help innovation
Speaker 1: and they can hinder it. A good example of them
Speaker 1: helping it is the Clinton administration passing a raft of
Speaker 1: legislation through Congress that was designed deliberately to make e
Speaker 1: commerce possible. It was essentially very permissive legislation, very libertarian legislation,
Speaker 1: somewhat utopian if you like, and it was a rare
Speaker 1: moment of bipartisan agreement that this is what we needed
Speaker 1: to do to clear the undergrowth to make it possible
Speaker 1: to roll the runway for Amazon and others to take off.
Speaker 1: From examples of governments preventing innovation, I would cite the
Speaker 1: European Union on genetic modification of crops, where it's never
Speaker 1: been banned. They've never actually said no. It is legal
Speaker 1: to produce a genetically modified crop in Europe and grow it,
Speaker 1: but in order to do so, you must go through
Speaker 1: a process that is so lengthy, so labyrinthine, so uncertain
Speaker 1: in its outcome that nobody any longer bothers to even try.
Speaker 1: And I give the story of Basf with its one
Speaker 1: of its potato products how positively Kafka esque the way
Speaker 1: in which it would think it would get to the
Speaker 1: end of the process, and then someone would go to
Speaker 1: court and say, ah, but you, in approving this, you
Speaker 1: used the reason that you originally gave, not the reason
Speaker 1: you've given more recently. You know, whatever, you know, it's
Speaker 1: just Bonker's process, and that has cut Europe off from
Speaker 1: technologies that have manifestly reduced the use of pesticides in
Speaker 1: other parts of the world and and other crops, which
Speaker 1: seems to me a pity. So there is you know,
Speaker 1: government can be a real problem to innovation innovators as
Speaker 1: a regulator and also as a subsidizer and protector of
Speaker 1: incumbent interests. You know, powerful companies lobby government saying can
Speaker 1: you just bring in these rules because actually we don't
Speaker 1: want this new upstart rival eating our lunch again. Very
Speaker 1: good European example, guy called James Dyson, who's a British innovator,
Speaker 1: makes these hand dryers and vacuum cleaners and things, and
Speaker 1: he invented the bagless vacuum cleaner, and the big German
Speaker 1: vacuum cleaner manufacturers saw this as a threat, so they
Speaker 1: went to the European Union and said, you know what,
Speaker 1: we should have new rules in Europe about how you
Speaker 1: measure the power output of vacuum cleaners, because there's a
Speaker 1: little problem here, which is that our vacuum cleaners ramp
Speaker 1: up the power they demand as they get half full
Speaker 1: of dust because the bags are no longer so good.
Speaker 1: You know, they're having to suck harder too, because the
Speaker 1: bag is getting in the way. So let's change the
Speaker 1: rules away from the international standard, and let's say every
Speaker 1: vacuum cleaner now should be tested for its power consumption
Speaker 1: without dust, because then we can appear a little bit
Speaker 1: cheaper than mister Dyson. He eventually went to court, it
Speaker 1: took him five years. He won, but this ridiculous, you know,
Speaker 1: little European regulation was thrown out and we were back
Speaker 1: to the global regulation. But by then Dyson imitators from
Speaker 1: China who were beginning to compete with him. So it's
Speaker 1: a fascinating story of how crony capitalists use government to
Speaker 1: raise barriers to entry against innovators. I hear you, mad,
Speaker 1: And there's so much you gain from these rich stories
Speaker 1: that you just can't capture with regression efficients. So I
Speaker 1: enjoyed getting lost in your world and learning about about
Speaker 1: the barrier as well as the facilitators of innovation. Just
Speaker 1: a thought here, and I'm I want to know what
Speaker 1: you think about this. I'm a biologist, and I often
Speaker 1: felt that my biologist colleagues were suffering from a form
Speaker 1: of physics envy, whereby they wished they were more mathematical,
Speaker 1: they wish they had more laws. If for me to
Speaker 1: feel any better, psychologists have biology envy. So it goes
Speaker 1: all turtles all the way down. It turns all the
Speaker 1: way down. You're right. I mean what I was going
Speaker 1: to say was that somebody said biology is the science
Speaker 1: of exceptions, not rules, which is a bit unfair. But
Speaker 1: you look at Darwin, He's essentially he's using no regression.
Speaker 1: He's just saying, here's a bunch of stories that support
Speaker 1: my point of view, and I'm finding in the variety
Speaker 1: of life ways of testing my hypothesis without being too
Speaker 1: mathematically precise about it. Now, I recognize we have to
Speaker 1: have maths in biology too. I'm not saying we throw
Speaker 1: it all out, but perhaps my training has led me
Speaker 1: to be to use case histories a bit more. That's
Speaker 1: so fascinating, because there's a great point there as well
Speaker 1: about physics really does live in the rules. It's not
Speaker 1: like child Sean Carroll on this podcast, and we kept
Speaker 1: bumping up against Like we start talking about the biological
Speaker 1: realm of life, there's a certain unpredictability there. And then
Speaker 1: we start talking about humans that when I study human
Speaker 1: nature that my gosh, it's hard to come up with
Speaker 1: general rules. That you'll come with general rules and then
Speaker 1: you'll meet one neurodiverse human being who breaks all the
Speaker 1: rules in the way that they see the world, and
Speaker 1: it's like, it's like, what do I do with you?
Speaker 1: I don't want to ignore you. You're you know you're
Speaker 1: you're important, So I hear you. Matt. I just want
Speaker 1: to thank you so much for the chat today and
Speaker 1: for your one of my favorite science writers. I don't
Speaker 1: say that to all my guests. You're one of my
Speaker 1: favorite science writers. And yeah, thanks for inspiring me well, Scott.
Speaker 1: I've had many interesting conversations about this book, but this
Speaker 1: has definitely been one of the most interesting, and I've
Speaker 1: learned a lot in it. So thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Thanks Matt. Thanks for listening to this episode of the
Speaker 1: Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way
Speaker 1: to something you heard. I encourage you to join in
Speaker 1: the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the
Speaker 1: Psychology podcast dot com. Also, please add a reading and
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Speaker 1: for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.