Speaker 1: How do ideas have sex and why does that matter
Speaker 1: for innovation? Why do brains tend to systematically misread the future.
Speaker 1: Why do we feel that the world is getting worse
Speaker 1: when by almost all the measures we can make, it's
Speaker 1: getting better. What if optimism is actually the more rational stance?
Speaker 1: Is optimism a personality trait or can it be evidence based?
Speaker 1: If innovation isn't primarily about lone geniuses, what is it
Speaker 1: really about?
Speaker 2: Today?
Speaker 1: We're joined by scientists and author Matt Ridley as we
Speaker 1: talk about what it means to be, in Ridley's term,
Speaker 1: a rational optimist. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Egelman.
Speaker 1: I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in
Speaker 1: these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe
Speaker 1: to understand and some of the most surprising aspects of
Speaker 1: our lives. So let's start with a question, what story
Speaker 1: do you tell yourself about the future? Because we all
Speaker 1: carry around a narrative and internal model about where things
Speaker 1: are headed, and that story shapes everything.
Speaker 2: It shapes our.
Speaker 1: Moods, our decisions, our sense of what is possible now.
Speaker 1: One of the facets of history that I've always found
Speaker 1: the most fascinating is that every generation believes that it's
Speaker 1: living through uniquely perilous times. Every generation feels the shadow
Speaker 1: of something large and ominous hanging overhead, something that makes
Speaker 1: this moment more fragile, more dangerous, and more on the
Speaker 1: brink than anything that came before. Just as a personal
Speaker 1: example of this, when I was growing up in the
Speaker 1: seventies and eighties, there was a very specific cloud hanging
Speaker 1: over everything, and that was nuclear annihilation. When I was
Speaker 1: a kid, we all watched a film called The Day After,
Speaker 1: and if you saw that, you know that it represented
Speaker 1: the zeitgeist of that time, which was that the world
Speaker 1: was going to end not with a whimper, but a
Speaker 1: bang in a very specific way, and it was going
Speaker 1: to happen any year now. So in my school we
Speaker 1: practiced drills where we would get under our desks. Now,
Speaker 1: I think even as kids, we appreciated at least somewhat
Speaker 1: that this wasn't really going to help if a nuclear
Speaker 1: bomb dropped, A little desk wasn't going to give us
Speaker 1: much protection. But still we did the drills because it
Speaker 1: was part of the atmosphere, this kind of ambient anxiety
Speaker 1: that everyone shared at the time.
Speaker 2: So there were big.
Speaker 1: Concerns like nuclear war, and there were more local concerns too,
Speaker 1: like television sets, and parents were worried about it constantly.
Speaker 1: In case younger listeners don't know this, the television used
Speaker 1: to be called the boob tube from whence we get
Speaker 1: the pun YouTube The word boob meant an idiot or
Speaker 1: a fool, and that encapsulated this fear that the television
Speaker 1: was going to make everyone lose major IQ points. Kids
Speaker 1: would stop going outside, no more imagination, no more creativity. Instead,
Speaker 1: the kids were going to sit drooling in front of
Speaker 1: Gilligan's Island or love Boat, spooning TV dinners into their mouths,
Speaker 1: and becoming passive consumers of flickering images, similar to the
Speaker 1: way that we talk about social media now. And as
Speaker 1: an interesting side note, when the printing press was invented
Speaker 1: in the fifteenth century, a lot of thinkers were concerned
Speaker 1: that that was going to make kids stupider, because now,
Speaker 1: instead of having to remember things, they could just pick
Speaker 1: up the book off the shelf and find the answer there. Anyway,
Speaker 1: back to the nineteen eighties, there were fears about drugs,
Speaker 1: about cultural collapse, about population explosion and mass starvation, So
Speaker 1: every era sits under its cloud of existential threats. And
Speaker 1: I'm not dismissing these It's not that these threats aren't
Speaker 1: real and urgent. The only point I want to make
Speaker 1: for now is that those fears feel difficult or impossible
Speaker 1: to solve when you are inside them. But when you
Speaker 1: step back and look at the data, we always get surprised.
Speaker 1: Problems get solved by innovation, at least so far every
Speaker 1: single time. This is a pattern we see again and again,
Speaker 1: confident predictions of decline that don't play out in fact,
Speaker 1: across the entire globe, the large scale trends are clear.
Speaker 1: You find massive declines in poverty, increases in lifespan, improvements
Speaker 1: in health, expansions, and access to knowledge and technology. But
Speaker 1: here's the fascinating thing that we're going to talk about today.
Speaker 2: If you tune into your own.
Speaker 1: Mind, especially as you scroll through the news, you might
Speaker 1: feel something very different. You get a sense that things
Speaker 1: are deteriorating, that everything is heading in the wrong direction.
Speaker 2: So what is going on here?
Speaker 1: Well, from a neuroscience perspective, this is not surprising because
Speaker 1: the brain is a prediction machine that is tuned to
Speaker 1: detect threats. If we think in evolutionary terms, missing something
Speaker 1: dangerous had consequences measured in survival. So the system leans
Speaker 1: heavily towards vigilance. And this is why bad news carries
Speaker 1: a lot of attentional weight. With good news, it's totally different.
Speaker 1: The moment something gets better, the moment it genuinely improves,
Speaker 1: it becomes invisible. It just becomes part of the new baseline.
Speaker 1: So look at the things that would have seemed like
Speaker 1: miracles to our great great grandparents, things like electrification of
Speaker 1: the nation, or clean water, or antibiotics or a global
Speaker 1: instant communication. Any one of these would have seemed like
Speaker 1: a science fiction miracle, and now they're just the way
Speaker 1: that things are. We just flick a switch or we
Speaker 1: dial the faucet, and we essentially never think twice about
Speaker 1: the fact that we're bringing daylight into our home at
Speaker 1: night time, or we're diverting a clean, little river of water.
Speaker 2: Right to us whenever we want it.
Speaker 1: So our brains build models of a world that feels
Speaker 1: more dangerous than it statistically is, and a future that
Speaker 1: feels more precarious than it.
Speaker 2: Actually might be.
Speaker 1: Today, we're going to explore this tension through the lens
Speaker 1: of someone who has spent years thinking deeply about it,
Speaker 1: the scientist and author Matt Ridley. He's written many books
Speaker 1: on topics from genomes to technology, but a special interest
Speaker 1: today is his book called The Rational Optimist. Ridley earned
Speaker 1: his doctorate in zoology at Oxford and has gone on
Speaker 1: to do many things, including serving as an editor for
Speaker 1: The Economist and serving in the British House of Lords
Speaker 1: on the Select Committees for Science and Technology and AI.
Speaker 1: So we're going to zoom in on this topic of
Speaker 1: rational optimism because generally, when we talk about optimism, it
Speaker 1: sounds like we're talking about temperament, like some people are
Speaker 1: just wired to be upbeat. But Ridley's argument has been different.
Speaker 1: He's all about grounding his optimism in evidence. He studies
Speaker 1: long term, measurable changes that reveals something about how human
Speaker 1: societies evolve over time. Here's my conversation with Matt Ridley. So, Matt,
Speaker 1: let's start broadly. When you say rational optimism, what is that?
Speaker 1: What can make optimism rational instead of just hopeful?
Speaker 3: The answer to that is evidence. In other words, I'm
Speaker 3: optimistic about the future not because I'm hopeful or I
Speaker 3: have a positive mood. It's because the extraordinary improvements in
Speaker 3: human living standards in almost every way you can imagine
Speaker 3: that have happened in my lifetime and in nobody else's
Speaker 3: lifetime before that are set to continue and are something
Speaker 3: worth noting and celebrating, and by the way, are also
Speaker 3: in sharp contrast to the gloomy predictions that the adults
Speaker 3: always make at every stage.
Speaker 1: Why do you think that humans are so drawn to
Speaker 1: pessimism even in eras of measurable progress.
Speaker 3: It's an extraordinary phenomenon, and we tend to think it's new.
Speaker 3: The gloom and doom of today wasn't the way people
Speaker 3: thought in the sixties or seventies. But I think it
Speaker 3: goes back a very long way, and it speaks to
Speaker 3: something in human nature. I mean, that's why fire and
Speaker 3: brimstone preachers were such a success in previous centuries. And
Speaker 3: there's several reasons I think for this. One is that
Speaker 3: bad news is more salient. You know, if something catastrophic
Speaker 3: is going to happen, you want to hear about it.
Speaker 3: If something good is going to happen, you don't necessarily
Speaker 3: need to know about it, So we are more alert
Speaker 3: to that. And there's lots of evidence that given the
Speaker 3: choice between bad news stories and good news stories, people
Speaker 3: prefer to read the bad news stories, and editors know that.
Speaker 3: Television producers know that everybody knows that, so of course
Speaker 3: they feed into that, and they therefore make it worse.
Speaker 3: The second reason is that the more we know about
Speaker 3: a situation, the caerier we are. So people are actually
Speaker 3: quite optimistic about local things in their lives, about the
Speaker 3: success of their own careers and marriages, but the success
Speaker 3: of their own town or village. But the bigger the
Speaker 3: unit you look at, the more pessimistic they get, so
Speaker 3: that they're relying on news sources for that and not
Speaker 3: on their own experience when they think about the world.
Speaker 3: But there's another evolutionary psychology reason I think here, which
Speaker 3: is that we're always in competition with each other, and
Speaker 3: the person who was alert to bad news probably survived
Speaker 3: bad periods in prehistory better. You know, you and I
Speaker 3: walking to the water hole on the Savannah one hundred
Speaker 3: thousand years ago. You say, I don't think we should
Speaker 3: go this way. There might be a lion behind those rocks,
Speaker 3: and I say, no, no, everything's getting better. I've just
Speaker 3: read a book about it. Your genes are in the
Speaker 3: next generation at the expense of mine and probably via
Speaker 3: my girlfriend.
Speaker 1: So when you look across the centuries, what do you
Speaker 1: see as the strongest evidence that the world is improving.
Speaker 3: I think the big one is poverty. There's a wonderful
Speaker 3: experiment that Hans Rosling did was he asked a thousand
Speaker 3: people in America and they then repeated this in lots
Speaker 3: of other countries. Do you think the percentage of the
Speaker 3: world population that lives in extreme poverty has doubled, halved,
Speaker 3: or stayed the same in the last twenty years. Sixty
Speaker 3: five percent of people said it had doubled, five percent
Speaker 3: said it had halved. The five percent were right, the
Speaker 3: sixty five percent were wrong. But when you think about it,
Speaker 3: if you wrote those three answers on three bananas and
Speaker 3: threw them into a cage with a monkey in it,
Speaker 3: the monkey would pick up the correct answer to that
Speaker 3: question thirty three percent of the time, not five percent
Speaker 3: of the time. So it would do six times as
Speaker 3: well as human beings in answering this question about human society,
Speaker 3: which is a pretty amazing fact when you think about it.
Speaker 3: There's a wonderful quote from Josh Billings at nineteenth century
Speaker 3: stage who said, it ain't what you don't know that
Speaker 3: gets you into trouble, it's what you know for sure
Speaker 3: that ain't so. And so, in my lifetime, the percentage
Speaker 3: of the world living on less than a dollar ninety
Speaker 3: a day and twenty eleven dollars has gone from fifty
Speaker 3: percent half the world living on that extremely low level
Speaker 3: of income to about eight percent. Now, nobody has ever
Speaker 3: lived through a transformation like that, And of course money
Speaker 3: isn't everything, but that's a measure of how many of
Speaker 3: your needs you can fulfill. And it goes along with
Speaker 3: incredible improving lifespan, lifespan going up at the rate of
Speaker 3: seven hours a day at the moment globally falling child mortality.
Speaker 3: But we're not just wealthier. We're healthier, happier, cleverer, kinder, freer,
Speaker 3: more peaceful, and more equal. People are very surprised when
Speaker 3: you say this, but for the last fifty years, people
Speaker 3: in poor countries have been getting rich much faster than
Speaker 3: people in rich countries, and that really does make a
Speaker 3: difference to equality.
Speaker 1: What are the metrics of progress that you think people
Speaker 1: most consistently underestimate.
Speaker 3: There's an extraordinary graph that our world in data has
Speaker 3: done among other people, and it shows the distribution of
Speaker 3: income in the nineteen sixties, and it's a two humped camel.
Speaker 3: It has a great, big hump of very poor people
Speaker 3: and a hump of rich western middle class people in
Speaker 3: Europe and America, and not much in between. And the
Speaker 3: big change of the last fifty years has been almost
Speaker 3: the whole of Asia moving into that middle chunk, so
Speaker 3: that it's now a one humped camel. Most of Africa
Speaker 3: hasn't yet made that move, but it's starting to, and
Speaker 3: it's doing so roughly the speed that Asia did so
Speaker 3: a generation ago.
Speaker 2: What is the reason Africa hasn't made that movie?
Speaker 3: In?
Speaker 2: What's it going to take to get there?
Speaker 3: When I wrote The Rational Optimist in twenty ten, I
Speaker 3: got criticized by one reviewer because I used the phrase
Speaker 3: even in Africa things are getting better.
Speaker 2: And the reason I.
Speaker 3: Used that phrase was because I was reading people saying, look,
Speaker 3: Asia has had improved living standards. Africa's never going to
Speaker 3: achieve that. There's far too much population pressure, far too
Speaker 3: much poverty, far too much disease, far too much conflict.
Speaker 3: It just it's not realistic to expect it to go
Speaker 3: through a radical transformation in living standards, and I said, no,
Speaker 3: there's evidence that it is going to do that, and
Speaker 3: even in Africa, you are seeing these these measures move
Speaker 3: in the right direction. And then I got criticized for
Speaker 3: being a racist by saying using this phrase even in Africa,
Speaker 3: which was outrageous because I was saying exactly the opposite.
Speaker 3: But you know, people will do these kind of things.
Speaker 3: So Africa had lagged behind the rest of the world
Speaker 3: in terms of industrialization, in terms of trade. It has
Speaker 3: various geographical disadvantages. You know, it doesn't have great places
Speaker 3: for ports, and the hinterland is not very accessible in
Speaker 3: the way it is in other continents and so on.
Speaker 3: So there, you know, there are things like that, but
Speaker 3: above all, it was disfigured by disease. You know, the
Speaker 3: degree to which malaria was very, very widespread in Africa,
Speaker 3: and other diseases like sleeping sickness, and of course in
Speaker 3: the twentieth century age, I've really did set back African
Speaker 3: living standards. That has something to do with the fact
Speaker 3: that we are originally an African species, that we've been
Speaker 3: in Africa longer than any other continent, and that I
Speaker 3: think has meant that more and more pathogens and microbes
Speaker 3: have had a chance to hone attack on us in
Speaker 3: that continent. But as I say, that's changing incredibly fast.
Speaker 3: The malaria thing is really really interesting because you get
Speaker 3: widespread predictions right up until the early two thousands the
Speaker 3: malaria is going to go on getting worse, and it
Speaker 3: was getting worse. The mortality from malaria was beginning to
Speaker 3: improve in Asia, but it was actually getting rapidly worse
Speaker 3: in Africa. Why was it getting worse, Well, because there's
Speaker 3: more people and there are you know the Yeah, basically
Speaker 3: it's the rising population and not much in the way
Speaker 3: of public health services or mosquito control and things like
Speaker 3: that up and then in two thousand and three, the
Speaker 3: graft suddenly switches, it suddenly starts going down. African malaria
Speaker 3: mortality starts going down, and it's gone down ever since.
Speaker 3: What happened in two thousand and three. It's really interesting, actually,
Speaker 3: and I tracked it down for one of my books,
Speaker 3: the book about Innovation. The Gates Foundation basically picked on
Speaker 3: one technology and said we're going to fund this technology
Speaker 3: that wasn't a vaccine, and it wasn't an insecticide. It
Speaker 3: was insecticide impregnated mosquito nets because they were picking up
Speaker 3: on an experiment that had been done in Boquino Fasso
Speaker 3: in the nineteen eighties in which they put thirty six
Speaker 3: people in huts specially designed for catching mosquitoes, and they
Speaker 3: measured how many people got bitten under different circumstances. And
Speaker 3: they tried mosquito nets, and they tried mosquito nets with
Speaker 3: insecticide on them. They found it had a massive to
Speaker 3: terrent effect. And then they tried tearing holes in the
Speaker 3: mosquito nets, which is quite often happens. You know, it's
Speaker 3: very difficult to keep a mosquito net intact. And they
Speaker 3: found that a mosquito net with holes in it that
Speaker 3: had insecticide on it was better than a mosquito net
Speaker 3: that didn't have holes in it, that didn't have insecticide
Speaker 3: on it. So they realized that this was actually a
Speaker 3: very cheap technology, very low tech technology that you could
Speaker 3: distribute to people and it wouldn't stop working just because
Speaker 3: people tore holes in it by mistake. And so they
Speaker 3: really pushed this technology and it has made an enormous difference.
Speaker 3: And I tried to track down the French scientists who
Speaker 3: worked with a bikinos for Fascia scientists to do this experiment.
Speaker 3: I eventually found one of them living in retirement in
Speaker 3: southern France because I just thought it was such an
Speaker 3: interesting story. It's probably one of the biggest life saving
Speaker 3: stories of the lot, and it's very low tech. You know,
Speaker 3: it's not all about digital electrons. So I kind of
Speaker 3: like that story.
Speaker 1: Yes, so many of the big changes in the world
Speaker 1: have come from very simple things like chlorinated water and
Speaker 1: so on. So we touched on this issue about brains
Speaker 1: being threat detectors and so when things are getting worse,
Speaker 1: we feel that immediately. But why do you suppose progress
Speaker 1: generally feels so invisible.
Speaker 3: I think we take it for granted. When something gets better,
Speaker 3: we say, fine, you know I can now use my
Speaker 3: telephone when I'm walking around, a big deal. You know,
Speaker 3: I'm cool with that. But the damn thing doesn't work everywhere.
Speaker 3: So do you know what I mean? And so, just
Speaker 3: to give you an example, I went in my first
Speaker 3: way mo last November when I was in Austin, and
Speaker 3: it took me about ten minutes to get relaxed about
Speaker 3: having no driver in the car. I mean, it was
Speaker 3: very easy to get cool about that. I'm sure within
Speaker 3: half an hour I'd be complaining about way not going
Speaker 3: faster enough or something. But you know, for God's sake,
Speaker 3: this is a car driven by a robot, and here
Speaker 3: am I, somebody was born in the nineteen fifties, sitting
Speaker 3: in it, going to my destination, happily chatting to my
Speaker 3: friend in the back of this guy. It's an incredible thing.
Speaker 3: And so the degree to which we just lock in
Speaker 3: the things that happen and move on to complaining about
Speaker 3: the things that don't happen is very, very human. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I recently took my first way mow and I had
Speaker 1: my kids with me, and I told them, probably uselessly,
Speaker 1: I said, you know, really pay attention to this, because
Speaker 1: this is the first time I've ever had this experience.
Speaker 1: But for you guys, this is just part of the
Speaker 1: background furniture of the world.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 1: And I think our friend Kevin Kelly, I think he
Speaker 1: was the one who said technology is what gets invented
Speaker 1: after you're born, and all the stuff that already exists
Speaker 1: we don't pay any attention to.
Speaker 3: There's a one man oracle on all these topics. He's
Speaker 3: just so so interesting to talk to him.
Speaker 1: Okay, So what I want to ask you about is
Speaker 1: how we make progress. And in your work you've emphasized
Speaker 1: the importance of the exchange of ideas, as you call it,
Speaker 1: ideas having sex.
Speaker 2: So tell us about that.
Speaker 1: Why is recombination more powerful than individual genius?
Speaker 3: Right? Well, almost every new device we manufacture isn't made
Speaker 3: from brand new stuff. It's existing stuff reconfigured in new ways,
Speaker 3: different combinations of existing atoms, different combinations of existing molecules
Speaker 3: and substances, and so on. So in a sense, all
Speaker 3: we're doing is coming up with new combinations. Now, as
Speaker 3: an evolutionary biologist, I see a very close parallel here
Speaker 3: with what happens in genetics and evolution. That is to say,
Speaker 3: when a species develops a new gene for solving a
Speaker 3: new problem, it doesn't do so ab initio. It generally
Speaker 3: does so by combining different bits of different genes to
Speaker 3: come up with a new gene. And the process that
Speaker 3: allows it to do that is called sex. I mean,
Speaker 3: that is sexual reproduction's main result. I'm not going to
Speaker 3: say main purpose because I've written a book saying well,
Speaker 3: you know, it didn't know that's what it was going
Speaker 3: to achieve, But the invention of sexual reproduction several billion
Speaker 3: years ago enabled us to draw upon innovations in genes
Speaker 3: that happened to our fathers as well as our mothers.
Speaker 3: And so if you imagine two different lineages of mammals
Speaker 3: and one invents milk and the other invents fur, if
Speaker 3: they're a sexual, there's no chance of getting both. You
Speaker 3: either have to choose which dry want fur or milk,
Speaker 3: you know which is the better invention. But if they're sexual,
Speaker 3: you can say, I think I'd like both those inventions, please.
Speaker 3: So I think the role of trade and exchange in
Speaker 3: human society is very very analogous, if not even homologous,
Speaker 3: with sex. You know, I mean when I say ideas
Speaker 3: having sex, I'm not even speaking metaphorically. I'm trying to
Speaker 3: be literally true. And I think that's really interesting. Just
Speaker 3: to give you my favorite slightly ridiculous example of ideas
Speaker 3: having sex in technology, there was a technology called the
Speaker 3: pill camera developed twenty years ago. You swallow it. It
Speaker 3: takes a film as it's going through your system and
Speaker 3: gives the doctor an idea of where you know where
Speaker 3: you're problems are. If you've got a problem in your
Speaker 3: enteric system, it came about after a conversation over a
Speaker 3: garden fence between a gastro enterologist and a guided missile designer.
Speaker 3: That's a sort of really weird example two of ideas
Speaker 3: having sex.
Speaker 1: So what conditions have to be in place for innovation
Speaker 1: ecosystems to really thrive for ideas to have sex successfully?
Speaker 3: I looked at in my book How Innovation Works. I
Speaker 3: sort of told a whole bunch of stories from different
Speaker 3: areas of technology, and several key themes kept emerging. They all,
Speaker 3: in the end boiled down to one word, and that
Speaker 3: word is freedom above all, the freedom to experiment. So
Speaker 3: if you talk to great innovators, they talk about trial
Speaker 3: and error. They don't talk. They insist that you never
Speaker 3: get it right first time, that you don't actually know
Speaker 3: what you're going to discover some times, but you have
Speaker 3: to fail and fail and fail again and fail again,
Speaker 3: and then suddenly you start to succeed. So Thomas Edison
Speaker 3: famously said, I haven't failed, I've just found ten thousand
Speaker 3: ways that don't work. And he tried six thousand different
Speaker 3: types of plant material before he was satisfied with the
Speaker 3: type of Japanese bamboo to use for the filament of
Speaker 3: his first light bulb. Now I've talked to Jeff Bezos
Speaker 3: and he says much the same sort of thing. You
Speaker 3: know that if you're not swinging and missing, you're not
Speaker 3: going to innovate. And people like Edison and Bezos, they're
Speaker 3: not inventors. They don't come up with brand new prototypes
Speaker 3: of things, but they are innovators in the sense that
Speaker 3: they drive down the cost and drive up the reliability
Speaker 3: and availability of a technology. And for me, that's almost
Speaker 3: more important than coming up with the first prototype. And
Speaker 3: it's a sort of reason why you know, scientists complain, oh,
Speaker 3: they've run off with my idea and made money out
Speaker 3: of it, but actually it's a lot of hard work
Speaker 3: turning an idea into a practical proposition. So the freedom
Speaker 3: to experiment, the freedom to fail, the freedom to change directions.
Speaker 3: It's quite often the case that you set out trying
Speaker 3: to invent one thing and you end up inventing another.
Speaker 3: If you're not free to do that, then that's a problem.
Speaker 3: The freedom to invest, the freedom to meet other people
Speaker 3: and talk to them. So you know, there's a reason
Speaker 3: that innovative societies have tended to have free ports in them.
Speaker 3: You know city states where people are meeting and mixing ideas.
Speaker 3: One thing that surprised me was that we know big
Speaker 3: companies are bad at innovation. Proportionately speaking, when they get
Speaker 3: above a certain size, they tend to become anti innovative,
Speaker 3: and cameras lot nockier and data phones more recently, and
Speaker 3: the reason for that is because they've become very centralized
Speaker 3: and very controlling, and someone you know, top down starts
Speaker 3: telling people want to do the same is true of empires.
Speaker 3: It's surprising, how you know. The Roman Empire invented very
Speaker 3: little apart from some decent civil engineering in hundreds of years,
Speaker 3: despite being a massive free trade zone and a very
Speaker 3: wealthy one. Much the same as true the Ottoman Empire
Speaker 3: invented almost nothing. It's band printing. Until the nineteenth century.
Speaker 3: Most of the Chinese dynasties were very poor at innovating,
Speaker 3: with the exception of the Song Dynasty in particularly in particular,
Speaker 3: which was a ferment of innovation. That's when all the
Speaker 3: things that we know about, like gunpowder and the compass
Speaker 3: and so on came into existence. And the secret of
Speaker 3: the Song Dynasty was that it was actually a very
Speaker 3: decentralized industry. It was. It was run like a series
Speaker 3: of city states with merchants in charge of the cities
Speaker 3: and the emperor just kind of presiding over it. So
Speaker 3: for me, the modern history of China is really interesting.
Speaker 3: So Martzeitung was like a Ming emperor. He was very centralizing,
Speaker 3: very controlling, and very little innovation happened under him. Dan
Speaker 3: Chaping when Mao died, allowed freedom to happen under certain circumstances,
Speaker 3: and it was you know, you obviously couldn't suddenly invent
Speaker 3: a new rival to the Communist Party or anything like that.
Speaker 3: But if you were starting a small business to invent
Speaker 3: something new, particularly in one of the free trade zones
Speaker 3: he set up, like the shen Zen Zone, then actually
Speaker 3: you faced far fewer obstacles than Western entrepreneurs because there
Speaker 3: was none of the local and regional red tape to
Speaker 3: get in the world. So you were off to the
Speaker 3: races very quick, with quick decisions, and able to do
Speaker 3: whatever you liked, really within limits. Shi Jinping is going
Speaker 3: back to a Ming emperor style way of behaving. It's
Speaker 3: like the switch from Song to Ming dynasties in my view,
Speaker 3: and is going to kill the goose that lays those
Speaker 3: golden eggs. He keeps complaining about entrepreneurs having too much
Speaker 3: freedom and not doing what they're told and not not
Speaker 3: not doing what the centralized bureaucracy wants. Now, for the moment,
Speaker 3: the Chinese economy is thriving as an innovator, but I
Speaker 3: think it's running out of gas. I think that that
Speaker 3: it's not going to be able to sustain that for
Speaker 3: much longer.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 3: By the way, when I was in India last year
Speaker 3: speaking of the Jaipoor Literary Festival, I said, look, with
Speaker 3: America retreating behind tariff barriers, Europe stagnate, stagnating because of
Speaker 3: red tape, Japan in a bit of a funk, China
Speaker 3: becoming far too centralized and derig east in the way
Speaker 3: it runs its economy. The job of most innovative economy
Speaker 3: in the world may becoming vacant. You guys should apply
Speaker 3: because India is a very decentralized civilization, very well educated,
Speaker 3: very good at experimenting and starting businesses and all these
Speaker 3: kind of things. And it's not a bet that I'd
Speaker 3: like to put a lot of money on, but I
Speaker 3: think India is the economy to watch in the next
Speaker 3: fifty years.
Speaker 4: What do pessimists get right. What do pessimists get right? Well,
Speaker 4: some of the extreme pessimists, like the late Paul Earlick,
Speaker 4: who died recently, he really didn't get anything right. I mean,
Speaker 4: he said my country, England would cease to exist by
Speaker 4: the year two thousand. You know, he said we would
Speaker 4: all be starving to death, famine would be.
Speaker 3: Would be terrible. But things like congestion, drug addiction, problems, obesity,
Speaker 3: you know, there are trends going in the wrong direction. Obviously,
Speaker 3: all three of those, to some extent are problems of success,
Speaker 3: problems of being too rich, of having too much food,
Speaker 3: of having access to too many distractions. Screen addiction, I
Speaker 3: think is something that people were warning about twenty years ago,
Speaker 3: and we're now seeing that, if anything, they should be
Speaker 3: more worried about. I personally also think that virology is
Speaker 3: something that we have not worried about enough. I didn't
Speaker 3: think this and when I was writing Rational Optimist, I'm
Speaker 3: a big fan of biotech generally, but I didn't realize
Speaker 3: until twenty when I looked into what that lab in
Speaker 3: Wuhan had been up to, just how good virologists have
Speaker 3: got at slotting cassettes of genes. Into viruses and increasing
Speaker 3: the infectivity of viruses up to ten thousand times. That's
Speaker 3: a pretty crazy thing to have been doing. So I'm
Speaker 3: baffled by the way most people are now saying, oh
Speaker 3: my god, climate change, Ah my god. AI, And I'm saying,
Speaker 3: you know what, I think you're looking at the wrong
Speaker 3: scary thing. I think the scary thing is a dangerous
Speaker 3: gain of function in virology because the pandemic has taught
Speaker 3: the bad actors, you know, whether it's the North Korean
Speaker 3: government or the terrorist organizations, that they can bring the
Speaker 3: world to its knees with a couple of biologists in
Speaker 3: a dodgy lab somewhere, And we need to do a
Speaker 3: much better job of monitoring what's going on in places
Speaker 3: like that. So that's something we need to be a
Speaker 3: little bit more pessimistic about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I know there are a lot of
Speaker 1: people who feel that as we do technological innovation, this
Speaker 1: can create new categories of risk faster than we can
Speaker 1: manage them. And you and I are both optimists, and
Speaker 1: so we know that we will manage them. But how
Speaker 1: do you respond to that idea? What are your thoughts
Speaker 1: on that idea that we're creating new categories of risk rapidly.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think, of course, we create new categories
Speaker 3: of risk, and AI is the big obvious one today.
Speaker 3: But I don't myself see the problems we face today
Speaker 3: as being any worse, indeed as bad as the ones
Speaker 3: we faced in say, the nineteen seventies, when we didn't
Speaker 3: think we were going to be able to control the
Speaker 3: population explosion. We weren't sure whether we were going to
Speaker 3: feed the world, We didn't know whether the communists system
Speaker 3: was going to overwhelm the world. We were worried about
Speaker 3: urban air pollution getting worse and worse, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3: So the idea that this is a uniquely dangerous time,
Speaker 3: I think, just doesn't work for me. What has tended
Speaker 3: to happen over the past couple hundred years is that
Speaker 3: we have devised technical solutions to most of our problems,
Speaker 3: one after another, and in doing so, we've put them
Speaker 3: into the rear view mirror and enabled us to go
Speaker 3: on and look at the next one. Now you can
Speaker 3: argue that we don't seem to be able to solve
Speaker 3: the rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We can't find
Speaker 3: technologies that can bring that down at least affordably yet,
Speaker 3: and so the energy transition that we want to achieve
Speaker 3: for that is proving uniquely difficult. Unique it's taking a
Speaker 3: long time, but it is I think the case that
Speaker 3: some of the problems we suddenly get worried about are
Speaker 3: problems that wouldn't have bothered our ancestors because they had
Speaker 3: more important things to worry about. You know, the the
Speaker 3: Britain at the moment is very worked up about sewage
Speaker 3: flows into rivers. These have not got worse, it's just
Speaker 3: when I'm measuring them for the first time. In fact,
Speaker 3: they've got better. But because we're measuring them, we're saying,
Speaker 3: oh my god, look how much sewage is getting into rivers.
Speaker 3: That's outrageous. And that's fine, that's great, good for us,
Speaker 3: Well done us for worrying about them. So I don't
Speaker 3: myself find anything we face to be likely to be
Speaker 3: insoluble forever. I think the solutions we have at hand
Speaker 3: are going to be very helpful. Actually, I just want
Speaker 3: to give you one really good example. There's a friend
Speaker 3: of mine called Boyan Slut in the Netherlands who was
Speaker 3: horrified by how much plastic he encountered swimming in the ocean, sorry,
Speaker 3: in the Mediterranean Sea. Actually when he was a boy,
Speaker 3: determined to do something about it, and he's set up
Speaker 3: a nonprofit which is now huge. It's very successful. It's
Speaker 3: got a lot of funding from a lot of philanthropists.
Speaker 3: It's called the Great Ocean Cleanup. And he's improving techniques
Speaker 3: for catching plastic in the ocean. But the big thing
Speaker 3: he's achieved so far is interceptors for catching plastic that
Speaker 3: comes down rivers, because there's the vast majority of plastic
Speaker 3: gets into the ocean comes from a certain number of rivers.
Speaker 3: And he I mean, it's really spectacular what they're now
Speaker 3: achieving in terms of catching and disposing of or recycling
Speaker 3: hue which quantities of plastic in certain rivers. There's a
Speaker 3: river in Guatemala they've recently been working on for example, Ano,
Speaker 3: they're in Indonesia and so on. Now, the reason I'm
Speaker 3: telling that story is because he's quite unpopular with a
Speaker 3: lot of environmentalists.
Speaker 2: There's some severe.
Speaker 3: Criticism of him. Why well, they say, well, you know,
Speaker 3: you'll never clean it all up this way, and you're
Speaker 3: holding out the hope of a solution when actually there
Speaker 3: isn't one, and you know, maybe he's going to legitimize
Speaker 3: the use of plastic again if he says, look, we've
Speaker 3: stopped the problem. It's not getting into the sea anymore.
Speaker 3: Let's go back to using plastic straws. Because don't worry,
Speaker 3: they will. They'll never throttle a turtle. Then they just
Speaker 3: don't like that because they're puritans, they're aesthetics. They want
Speaker 3: us to stop using this stuff. They don't care why,
Speaker 3: they just want us to stop using stuff. I'm a
Speaker 3: little unkind on them, but you get the point. And
Speaker 3: so the people who come along and solve our problems
Speaker 3: are quite often pushing up stream when they do.
Speaker 1: So let me just ask you this because I'm curious
Speaker 1: what you take is on this the issue about paying
Speaker 1: more attention to smaller problems when the bigger problems get solved.
Speaker 1: I wonder this often when I look at college campuses
Speaker 1: where young people are are protesting things, and when they
Speaker 1: have things really good, when the world is going well,
Speaker 1: they seem to get very energized about protesting, and I
Speaker 1: wonder if this is an expression of the same thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, now, I think that's definitely a phenomenon that you
Speaker 3: have the luxury of worrying about certain things when you
Speaker 3: don't have to worry about other things. Greg Easterbrook once
Speaker 3: had a wonderful remark about it's something like, sure, people
Speaker 3: used to be poor and miserable and underfed. Now they're
Speaker 3: rich and miserable and well fed. They're still miserable, but
Speaker 3: it's better to be miserable and well fed, isn't it,
Speaker 3: and miserable and angry.
Speaker 1: By the way, it's so cool when we look across innovation.
Speaker 1: There were just two stories when you were talking that
Speaker 1: it struck me. One was Henry Ford. You may know
Speaker 1: this quotation. Henry Ford said, I invented nothing new. I
Speaker 1: merely assembled the innovations of a century of men before me,
Speaker 1: which was which was a nice nod to the fact
Speaker 1: that he was, you know, bending, breaking, blending, putting things together,
Speaker 1: remixing things that had come before him.
Speaker 2: And on the failure point, you almost certainly saw this,
Speaker 2: but maybe I don't know. Six years ago, Elon Musk.
Speaker 1: Released a video of the bloopers from SpaceX, all the crashes,
Speaker 1: and obviously it's you know, it's easier to release your
Speaker 1: blooper footage once you've got.
Speaker 2: A successful spacecraft.
Speaker 1: But it was lovely to watch that and to really
Speaker 1: look at the celebration of failure that he did there.
Speaker 3: I mean, Elon Musk is the most extraordinary story. And
Speaker 3: I was pretty skeptical about him for a long time.
Speaker 3: I thought his attempt to remake the car industry was
Speaker 3: far too dependent on subsidy and hype and would probably
Speaker 3: fall flat on his face. I'd have been shortening his
Speaker 3: stock if I did that kind of thing, which I don't,
Speaker 3: and I was wrong, you know. I mean, sure, there's
Speaker 3: still problems at TESLA, but it's an amazing achievement. I
Speaker 3: also thought that space was a bit of a side show.
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, fun to do that, and and no
Speaker 3: doubt NASA has been inefficient in various ways over the years,
Speaker 3: and you could do it better, but really you're going
Speaker 3: to really make it cheap enough to do stuff in space.
Speaker 3: He has brought the price of launching a ton of
Speaker 3: material into space down by ninety eight percent. I'm that's gobsmacking.
Speaker 3: And I've read Walter Isaacson's biography to try and understand
Speaker 3: what makes this man tick, and I'm none the wiser
Speaker 3: in a way. I mean, he is so unique and
Speaker 3: so extraordinary and doesn't come across as sort of particularly
Speaker 3: brilliant in particular ways, and I think he's just He's
Speaker 3: a good example actually of something at point I do
Speaker 3: try and make in my writing on innovation, which is
Speaker 3: that I don't terribly like the word creativity. You get
Speaker 3: people saying, oh, I wish we could teach kids to
Speaker 3: be more creative. I think if we did, we would
Speaker 3: give them the wrong impression that innovation is done by
Speaker 3: people of genius who have different blood in their veins,
Speaker 3: and that ain't true. It's done by ordinary people who
Speaker 3: have perseverance and imagination to keep trying things and to
Speaker 3: keep gambling, like Elon Musk does, and Edison and Bezos
Speaker 3: and others do as well. They're ordinary, you know. I
Speaker 3: want to tell kids, these are quite ordinary people. They're
Speaker 3: not that different from you and me. It's just they
Speaker 3: keep trying things and eventually they stumble on something that works.
Speaker 3: So anybody could be a great innovator in that sense.
Speaker 3: I hope I'm right about that. I don't want to
Speaker 3: encourage people to go off and think everybody can become
Speaker 3: Elon Musk, but it is a it's an extraordinary story.
Speaker 3: And the other thing that by the way that he's doing,
Speaker 3: and I'm really struck by this whenever I'm on the
Speaker 3: West coast these days. He is single handedly helping to
Speaker 3: solve the conundrum that Peter Teele put in front of
Speaker 3: us some years ago, which is that we've got really
Speaker 3: good at inventing things with electrons, but not very good
Speaker 3: at inventing things with atoms. In other words, you know
Speaker 3: the famous question, where's my flying car? We've done absolutely
Speaker 3: nothing to improve transport significantly in my lifetime. It's not
Speaker 3: quite true, of course, but you know, where's the flying car,
Speaker 3: where's the routine space travel, where's the supersonic airliner, where's
Speaker 3: the personal jet back, where's the gyrocopter? You know that
Speaker 3: we were all promised in the fifties and sixties, instead
Speaker 3: of which we had, you know, airport delays and more
Speaker 3: cup holders in cars for a while. You know, we've
Speaker 3: got a few things. We've got drones and things now.
Speaker 3: You know, I'll give you that. But on the other hand,
Speaker 3: if you read that sci fi stuff from the fifties
Speaker 3: and sixties, they hardly mentioned computing and communication. It's all
Speaker 3: about transport, and in fact, we've had spectacular changes in communication.
Speaker 3: The fifty years before that was nothing changed. They had
Speaker 3: the telephone and nothing much else, but they had the
Speaker 3: first airplanes, the first cars, the first rockets for men
Speaker 3: on the moon, you know, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: So I've lived through the opposite. I've lived through incredible
Speaker 3: changes in communication and computing and very little change in transport.
Speaker 3: And I think that's changing because Elon Musk and the
Speaker 3: people who have spun out of SpaceX in El Segundo
Speaker 3: in particular, they're all atoms people. They're all trying to
Speaker 3: change real things in the real world. You know. I've
Speaker 3: visited companies that are reinventing supersonic airline engines, companies that
Speaker 3: are reinventing prosthetic arms for people who've lost a limb.
Speaker 3: They're not just doing video games anymore. Do you see
Speaker 3: what I mean? And I mean you must know more
Speaker 3: about this, David than I do, so I'd be interested
Speaker 3: to know if you think I'm right to be intrigued
Speaker 3: by this trend.
Speaker 2: Oh, I completely agree.
Speaker 1: What's interesting is that investors still have skittishness about investing
Speaker 1: in hardware. They love to invest in software and they
Speaker 1: think it's less expensive.
Speaker 2: But yes, the progress there has been quite extraordinary.
Speaker 1: So what do you think it takes cognitively or culturally
Speaker 1: to maintain a rationally optimistic outlook.
Speaker 3: It's surprising how hard it.
Speaker 2: Is, you know.
Speaker 3: I read this book fifteen years ago called The Rational Optimist.
Speaker 3: I went around talking about it for a few years,
Speaker 3: and I would always get people coming out to me
Speaker 3: at the end of the talks and saying, now, come on,
Speaker 3: you can't still be irrational optimist. Look what that's happening
Speaker 3: in Ibola, or look what's happening in Syria, or look
Speaker 3: what's happening in Ukraine. And I would say, yeah, sure,
Speaker 3: there's bad things happening in the world. They didn't say
Speaker 3: they worn't. I'm just saying, look what's happening in Africa.
Speaker 3: Look at the number of people being lifted out of poverty,
Speaker 3: look at the number of people not dying of malaria.
Speaker 3: They're not going to make headlines, but they're happening. And
Speaker 3: I would try and say that, but I didn't always
Speaker 3: convince myself, you know. I mean, I'm as susceptible as
Speaker 3: anyone to getting depressed about the state of the world.
Speaker 3: And if I read the newspapers, a lot of things
Speaker 3: make me very grumpy, particularly at three in the morning.
Speaker 3: You know, when you it's always more grumpy anyway. But
Speaker 3: the big one for me is the opportunity cost of
Speaker 3: getting policy wrong, not so much because it means our
Speaker 3: descendants are going to be poor and cold and hungry,
Speaker 3: but because our descendants are not going to be nearly
Speaker 3: as rich as they could be. There's a bunch of
Speaker 3: scenarios produced for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called
Speaker 3: Shared socio Economic Pathways SSPs, and the best of them
Speaker 3: have US ten times as rich in per capita income
Speaker 3: in real terms in the year twenty one hundred as
Speaker 3: we are today all over the world on average. It's
Speaker 3: almost unimaginable. And they describe the world that would achieve this,
Speaker 3: and they say it's one in which we burn a
Speaker 3: lot of fossil fuels. And the Genie coefficient of inequality
Speaker 3: comes right down because poor countries get quick rich quicker
Speaker 3: than rich countries. We solve most of our technological problems,
Speaker 3: most of our environmental problems, most of our social problems.
Speaker 3: And I'm saying, well, what's the problem, And they say, well,
Speaker 3: it's going to have more warming, Well how much more? Well,
Speaker 3: it's going to reduce GDP by about as much as
Speaker 3: GDP is today. In other words, instead of being ten
Speaker 3: and a half times as rich, we're going to be
Speaker 3: nine and a half times as rich. Okay, is that
Speaker 3: really such a problem. The opportunity cost of choosing policies
Speaker 3: that restrain economic growth and innovation for our grandchildren are enormous,
Speaker 3: and we have to bear that in mind. You know,
Speaker 3: it's all very well saying we're doing things for our grandchildren,
Speaker 3: but the best present we can give our grandchildren is
Speaker 3: a rapid rate of progress.
Speaker 1: When you think about the next fifty years, what are
Speaker 1: you personally the most optimistic about?
Speaker 3: AI? Genomics energy AI is what everyone's talking about. I
Speaker 3: think it's going to be fabulous. Yes, there are concerns
Speaker 3: and worries there always are with every technology, but I'm
Speaker 3: not convinced it's going to turn on us and destroy
Speaker 3: us any more than biological species. Do you know? Great
Speaker 3: white sharks and coronaviruses are trying to kill us every day.
Speaker 3: They don't succeed because of countermeasures, saying will be true
Speaker 3: of AIS. I also think they're not going to destroy jobs.
Speaker 3: AI is going to make lawyers and doctors three times
Speaker 3: as productive. That means they can charge one third as much.
Speaker 3: That means we can hire more of them, etc. So
Speaker 3: I'm really optimistic about that. Genomics is the dog that
Speaker 3: hasn't barked yet. We have an incredible opportunity as a
Speaker 3: results of our ability to read the recipe of our
Speaker 3: own species and other species. It means we can do
Speaker 3: really clever things to cure cancer, to combat many other diseases,
Speaker 3: to improve people's lives in all sorts of ways. We're
Speaker 3: seeing the fruits of that starting to come through now.
Speaker 3: It's taken a bit longer than we thought after the
Speaker 3: Human Genome Project, but it is happening. I suspect actually
Speaker 3: biomedicine is going to be more important than AI. I mean,
Speaker 3: just look at you know, GLP one agonists. They're having
Speaker 3: a big effect. You could argue they're a bigger revolution
Speaker 3: than AI right now. I mean that's going to I'm
Speaker 3: sure they're not going to be forever, but it's and
Speaker 3: I'm sure there'll be side effects and so on, but
Speaker 3: you know there are. We're going to do really smart
Speaker 3: things in biomedicine. And then finally energy. I genuinely think
Speaker 3: we're going to get fusion in my lifetime I'm sixty
Speaker 3: eight years old, though, so it's touch and go. I mean,
Speaker 3: Sniper's aali already, and so it might not happen, but
Speaker 3: I think the money that's pouring, the private money that's
Speaker 3: pouring into fusion is going to produce results. There's about
Speaker 3: four or five different technologies for how to do it.
Speaker 3: They're all moving towards practical affordable fusion. If that happens,
Speaker 3: and if it is affordable and that, you know, those
Speaker 3: are big gifts, I admit. You know, it's been over
Speaker 3: the horizon for fifty years already. Then the sky is
Speaker 3: the limit on how much energy we can provide society.
Speaker 3: And energy really is the secret of life, because the
Speaker 3: economy is a thermodynamic thing. You know. We use energy
Speaker 3: to rearrange the atoms of the world into useful combinations.
Speaker 3: That's what we do. And the more energy we have,
Speaker 3: the more we're going to be able to do that,
Speaker 3: the more problems we're going to be able to solve.
Speaker 3: You know, you can desalinate water from the ocean pretty
Speaker 3: well anywhere on the planet if electricity is cheap enough,
Speaker 3: for example, which you know, just makes everything from agriculture
Speaker 3: to cities much more sustainable and nature reserves too, you know.
Speaker 3: So those are some of the reasons I'm very optimistic.
Speaker 3: Oh and another one, peak farmland. We are now growing food,
Speaker 3: more food every year from a smaller acreage of farmland
Speaker 3: every year. We're shrinking the farming footprint even as we
Speaker 3: grow the farming output. That's I mean, that's now been
Speaker 3: true for about fifteen years since we parked Peak farmland.
Speaker 3: We'd be doing it even faster if we weren't doing
Speaker 3: stupid things like biofuels, by the way, but that's another
Speaker 3: story ethanol and so on. And that means that we
Speaker 3: are returning land to nature. I mean, it is happening
Speaker 3: on a spectacul The world is now net reforesting. Rich
Speaker 3: countries are reforesting quite fast. Forest countries are still deforesting.
Speaker 3: But in between there's a lot of countries shifting from
Speaker 3: deforesting to reforesting. And you know, nature reserves on the
Speaker 3: whole getting bigger. So I think that our grandchildren are
Speaker 3: going to be able to live in a world where
Speaker 3: the footprint of mankind, both in terms of growing food
Speaker 3: and in terms of generating energy and in terms of manufacturing,
Speaker 3: can be really quite small. And the rest of the
Speaker 3: world can be this wonderful, verdant, green paradise. It'll never
Speaker 3: be that good, of course, but it's a nice thought.
Speaker 1: That was my conversation with Matt Ridley, and the idea
Speaker 1: of rational optimism is that when you step back and
Speaker 1: look at the long arc of history, there's evidence for
Speaker 1: massive progress, like declines in poverty and increases in lifespan,
Speaker 1: and expanding access to knowledge and to medicine and to opportunity.
Speaker 1: But the strange part is that people don't like hearing that.
Speaker 1: Why is it that when you present data about the
Speaker 1: world getting better it doesn't land as comforting. It often
Speaker 1: lands as irritad I've watched this forever with writers like
Speaker 1: Matt Ridley and Steven Pinker, who spend years assembling data
Speaker 1: about long term improvement, and instead of people saying, oh, awesome,
Speaker 1: maybe things are getting better than I thought, the reaction
Speaker 1: is often resistance. Why does it happen? Well, part of
Speaker 1: the answer lies in the brain. Statistics don't feel like anything,
Speaker 1: and they very rarely map onto your lived experience because
Speaker 1: your brain isn't wired to average across billions of lives
Speaker 1: over decades. It's wired to track your immediate environment, your relationships,
Speaker 1: your stressors, your sense of how things are going right now.
Speaker 1: So when someone tells you, hey, globally things are improving,
Speaker 1: your brain says, okay, whatever.
Speaker 2: How do I feel?
Speaker 1: And if you are feeling anxious or frustrated or angry
Speaker 1: or whatever, then the statistics bounce right off you. They
Speaker 1: very rarely penetrate the emotional layer where your sense of
Speaker 1: the world actually lives. So that's one thing. And also socially,
Speaker 1: if you tell other people bad news that seems to
Speaker 1: have a kind of moral weight to it. It signals
Speaker 1: serious and awareness. In other words, if you assert that
Speaker 1: things are getting worse, that can feel like a more
Speaker 1: responsible stance, like you're paying attention, like you're not being naive,
Speaker 1: while optimism can feel like complacency, like you're overlooking problems
Speaker 1: and you're not taking things seriously enough. So there's a
Speaker 1: psychological and social pull towards pessimism. And yet when you
Speaker 1: step back, you see the pattern, which is that every
Speaker 1: generation feels this way. Every generation believes it's living through
Speaker 1: uniquely dangerous times. And that brings me to a line
Speaker 1: that I've always loved from the American radio broadcaster Paul Harvey,
Speaker 1: who used to say, in times like these, it's important
Speaker 1: to remember that there have always been times like these.
Speaker 1: I love that line because it reminds us when we're
Speaker 1: inside our moment, it always feels unprecedented. It always feels
Speaker 1: like the stakes are higher, and the risks are sharper,
Speaker 1: and the future is more uncertain than anything.
Speaker 2: That came before.
Speaker 1: But any level of studying history will tell you a
Speaker 1: different story. There have always been threats, there have always
Speaker 1: been fears, There have always been reasons to believe that
Speaker 1: things might fall apart. So I want to add one
Speaker 1: more layer to Paul Harvey's line. In times like these,
Speaker 1: it's important to remember that previous generations often had it worse.
Speaker 1: They faced diseases that we can now cure, They lived
Speaker 1: without technologies that we take for granted. They navigated uncertainties
Speaker 1: that would feel overwhelming to us today. But progress happened,
Speaker 1: not without lots of setbacks, but it happened. And that
Speaker 1: brings us back to the central challenge. We have to
Speaker 1: hold on to both truths at once. The truth that
Speaker 1: there are real problems, serious ones and urgent ones that
Speaker 1: we need to hit hard, and the truth that across time,
Speaker 1: there has been extraordinary improvement. Part of meeting that challenge
Speaker 1: is to recognize that optimism doesn't ignore problems. Instead, it's
Speaker 1: about recognizing that problems are what drive progress. Every challenge
Speaker 1: becomes a target for innovation, Every constraint becomes an invitation
Speaker 1: for new ideas to emerge. Go to eagleman dot com
Speaker 1: slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Speaker 1: Join the weekly discussions on my substack, and check out
Speaker 1: and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of
Speaker 1: each episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm
Speaker 1: David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.