April 27, 2026 • 57 mins
Why do we generally feel like the world is getting worse, when by almost all measures it’s getting better? How do ideas "have sex”, and why does that matter for innovation? Why do brains tend to systematically misread the future? What if optimism is a more rational stance than pessimism? If innovation isn’t primarily about lone geniuses, what’s it really about? Join Eagleman with scientist and author Matt Ridley to explore what it means to be, in Ridley’s phrasing, a "rational optimist".
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
How do ideas have sex and why does that matter
for innovation? Why do brains tend to systematically misread the future.
Why do we feel that the world is getting worse
when by almost all the measures we can make, it's
getting better. What if optimism is actually the more rational stance?
(00:27):
Is optimism a personality trait or can it be evidence based?
If innovation isn't primarily about lone geniuses, what is it
really about?
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Today?
Speaker 1 (00:38):
We're joined by scientists and author Matt Ridley as we
talk about what it means to be, in Ridley's term,
a rational optimist. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Egelman.
I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in
these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe
(00:59):
to understand and some of the most surprising aspects of
our lives. So let's start with a question, what story
(01:22):
do you tell yourself about the future? Because we all
carry around a narrative and internal model about where things
are headed, and that story shapes everything.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
It shapes our.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Moods, our decisions, our sense of what is possible now.
One of the facets of history that I've always found
the most fascinating is that every generation believes that it's
living through uniquely perilous times. Every generation feels the shadow
of something large and ominous hanging overhead, something that makes
(01:56):
this moment more fragile, more dangerous, and more on the
brink than anything that came before. Just as a personal
example of this, when I was growing up in the
seventies and eighties, there was a very specific cloud hanging
over everything, and that was nuclear annihilation. When I was
a kid, we all watched a film called The Day After,
(02:18):
and if you saw that, you know that it represented
the zeitgeist of that time, which was that the world
was going to end not with a whimper, but a
bang in a very specific way, and it was going
to happen any year now. So in my school we
practiced drills where we would get under our desks. Now,
I think even as kids, we appreciated at least somewhat
(02:39):
that this wasn't really going to help if a nuclear
bomb dropped, A little desk wasn't going to give us
much protection. But still we did the drills because it
was part of the atmosphere, this kind of ambient anxiety
that everyone shared at the time.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
So there were big.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Concerns like nuclear war, and there were more local concerns too,
like television sets, and parents were worried about it constantly.
In case younger listeners don't know this, the television used
to be called the boob tube from whence we get
the pun YouTube The word boob meant an idiot or
a fool, and that encapsulated this fear that the television
(03:18):
was going to make everyone lose major IQ points. Kids
would stop going outside, no more imagination, no more creativity. Instead,
the kids were going to sit drooling in front of
Gilligan's Island or love Boat, spooning TV dinners into their mouths,
and becoming passive consumers of flickering images, similar to the
(03:39):
way that we talk about social media now. And as
an interesting side note, when the printing press was invented
in the fifteenth century, a lot of thinkers were concerned
that that was going to make kids stupider, because now,
instead of having to remember things, they could just pick
up the book off the shelf and find the answer there. Anyway,
back to the nineteen eighties, there were fears about drugs,
(04:01):
about cultural collapse, about population explosion and mass starvation, So
every era sits under its cloud of existential threats. And
I'm not dismissing these It's not that these threats aren't
real and urgent. The only point I want to make
for now is that those fears feel difficult or impossible
to solve when you are inside them. But when you
(04:25):
step back and look at the data, we always get surprised.
Problems get solved by innovation, at least so far every
single time. This is a pattern we see again and again,
confident predictions of decline that don't play out in fact,
across the entire globe, the large scale trends are clear.
(04:45):
You find massive declines in poverty, increases in lifespan, improvements
in health, expansions, and access to knowledge and technology. But
here's the fascinating thing that we're going to talk about today.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
If you tune into your own.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Mind, especially as you scroll through the news, you might
feel something very different. You get a sense that things
are deteriorating, that everything is heading in the wrong direction.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
So what is going on here?
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Well, from a neuroscience perspective, this is not surprising because
the brain is a prediction machine that is tuned to
detect threats. If we think in evolutionary terms, missing something
dangerous had consequences measured in survival. So the system leans
heavily towards vigilance. And this is why bad news carries
(05:36):
a lot of attentional weight. With good news, it's totally different.
The moment something gets better, the moment it genuinely improves,
it becomes invisible. It just becomes part of the new baseline.
So look at the things that would have seemed like
miracles to our great great grandparents, things like electrification of
the nation, or clean water, or antibiotics or a global
(06:00):
instant communication. Any one of these would have seemed like
a science fiction miracle, and now they're just the way
that things are. We just flick a switch or we
dial the faucet, and we essentially never think twice about
the fact that we're bringing daylight into our home at
night time, or we're diverting a clean, little river of water.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Right to us whenever we want it.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
So our brains build models of a world that feels
more dangerous than it statistically is, and a future that
feels more precarious than it.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Actually might be.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Today, we're going to explore this tension through the lens
of someone who has spent years thinking deeply about it,
the scientist and author Matt Ridley. He's written many books
on topics from genomes to technology, but a special interest
today is his book called The Rational Optimist. Ridley earned
his doctorate in zoology at Oxford and has gone on
(06:57):
to do many things, including serving as an editor for
The Economist and serving in the British House of Lords
on the Select Committees for Science and Technology and AI.
So we're going to zoom in on this topic of
rational optimism because generally, when we talk about optimism, it
sounds like we're talking about temperament, like some people are
just wired to be upbeat. But Ridley's argument has been different.
(07:21):
He's all about grounding his optimism in evidence. He studies
long term, measurable changes that reveals something about how human
societies evolve over time. Here's my conversation with Matt Ridley. So, Matt,
(07:42):
let's start broadly. When you say rational optimism, what is that?
What can make optimism rational instead of just hopeful?
Speaker 3 (07:51):
The answer to that is evidence. In other words, I'm
optimistic about the future not because I'm hopeful or I
have a positive mood. It's because the extraordinary improvements in
human living standards in almost every way you can imagine
that have happened in my lifetime and in nobody else's
lifetime before that are set to continue and are something
(08:16):
worth noting and celebrating, and by the way, are also
in sharp contrast to the gloomy predictions that the adults
always make at every stage.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Why do you think that humans are so drawn to
pessimism even in eras of measurable progress.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
It's an extraordinary phenomenon, and we tend to think it's new.
The gloom and doom of today wasn't the way people
thought in the sixties or seventies. But I think it
goes back a very long way, and it speaks to
something in human nature. I mean, that's why fire and
brimstone preachers were such a success in previous centuries. And
(08:54):
there's several reasons I think for this. One is that
bad news is more salient. You know, if something catastrophic
is going to happen, you want to hear about it.
If something good is going to happen, you don't necessarily
need to know about it, So we are more alert
to that. And there's lots of evidence that given the
choice between bad news stories and good news stories, people
(09:15):
prefer to read the bad news stories, and editors know that.
Television producers know that everybody knows that, so of course
they feed into that, and they therefore make it worse.
The second reason is that the more we know about
a situation, the caerier we are. So people are actually
quite optimistic about local things in their lives, about the
(09:38):
success of their own careers and marriages, but the success
of their own town or village. But the bigger the
unit you look at, the more pessimistic they get, so
that they're relying on news sources for that and not
on their own experience when they think about the world.
(09:59):
But there's another evolutionary psychology reason I think here, which
is that we're always in competition with each other, and
the person who was alert to bad news probably survived
bad periods in prehistory better. You know, you and I
walking to the water hole on the Savannah one hundred
(10:20):
thousand years ago. You say, I don't think we should
go this way. There might be a lion behind those rocks,
and I say, no, no, everything's getting better. I've just
read a book about it. Your genes are in the
next generation at the expense of mine and probably via
my girlfriend.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
So when you look across the centuries, what do you
see as the strongest evidence that the world is improving.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
I think the big one is poverty. There's a wonderful
experiment that Hans Rosling did was he asked a thousand
people in America and they then repeated this in lots
of other countries. Do you think the percentage of the
world population that lives in extreme poverty has doubled, halved,
or stayed the same in the last twenty years. Sixty
(11:08):
five percent of people said it had doubled, five percent
said it had halved. The five percent were right, the
sixty five percent were wrong. But when you think about it,
if you wrote those three answers on three bananas and
threw them into a cage with a monkey in it,
the monkey would pick up the correct answer to that
question thirty three percent of the time, not five percent
(11:30):
of the time. So it would do six times as
well as human beings in answering this question about human society,
which is a pretty amazing fact when you think about it.
There's a wonderful quote from Josh Billings at nineteenth century
stage who said, it ain't what you don't know that
gets you into trouble, it's what you know for sure
that ain't so. And so, in my lifetime, the percentage
(11:52):
of the world living on less than a dollar ninety
a day and twenty eleven dollars has gone from fifty
percent half the world living on that extremely low level
of income to about eight percent. Now, nobody has ever
lived through a transformation like that, And of course money
isn't everything, but that's a measure of how many of
your needs you can fulfill. And it goes along with
(12:16):
incredible improving lifespan, lifespan going up at the rate of
seven hours a day at the moment globally falling child mortality.
But we're not just wealthier. We're healthier, happier, cleverer, kinder, freer,
more peaceful, and more equal. People are very surprised when
you say this, but for the last fifty years, people
in poor countries have been getting rich much faster than
(12:37):
people in rich countries, and that really does make a
difference to equality.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
What are the metrics of progress that you think people
most consistently underestimate.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
There's an extraordinary graph that our world in data has
done among other people, and it shows the distribution of
income in the nineteen sixties, and it's a two humped camel.
It has a great, big hump of very poor people
and a hump of rich western middle class people in
Europe and America, and not much in between. And the
(13:09):
big change of the last fifty years has been almost
the whole of Asia moving into that middle chunk, so
that it's now a one humped camel. Most of Africa
hasn't yet made that move, but it's starting to, and
it's doing so roughly the speed that Asia did so
a generation ago.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
What is the reason Africa hasn't made that movie?
Speaker 3 (13:29):
In?
Speaker 2 (13:30):
What's it going to take to get there?
Speaker 3 (13:32):
When I wrote The Rational Optimist in twenty ten, I
got criticized by one reviewer because I used the phrase
even in Africa things are getting better.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
And the reason I.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Used that phrase was because I was reading people saying, look,
Asia has had improved living standards. Africa's never going to
achieve that. There's far too much population pressure, far too
much poverty, far too much disease, far too much conflict.
It just it's not realistic to expect it to go
through a radical transformation in living standards, and I said, no,
(14:05):
there's evidence that it is going to do that, and
even in Africa, you are seeing these these measures move
in the right direction. And then I got criticized for
being a racist by saying using this phrase even in Africa,
which was outrageous because I was saying exactly the opposite.
But you know, people will do these kind of things.
So Africa had lagged behind the rest of the world
(14:27):
in terms of industrialization, in terms of trade. It has
various geographical disadvantages. You know, it doesn't have great places
for ports, and the hinterland is not very accessible in
the way it is in other continents and so on.
So there, you know, there are things like that, but
above all, it was disfigured by disease. You know, the
(14:49):
degree to which malaria was very, very widespread in Africa,
and other diseases like sleeping sickness, and of course in
the twentieth century age, I've really did set back African
living standards. That has something to do with the fact
that we are originally an African species, that we've been
(15:11):
in Africa longer than any other continent, and that I
think has meant that more and more pathogens and microbes
have had a chance to hone attack on us in
that continent. But as I say, that's changing incredibly fast.
The malaria thing is really really interesting because you get
(15:32):
widespread predictions right up until the early two thousands the
malaria is going to go on getting worse, and it
was getting worse. The mortality from malaria was beginning to
improve in Asia, but it was actually getting rapidly worse
in Africa. Why was it getting worse, Well, because there's
more people and there are you know the Yeah, basically
(15:52):
it's the rising population and not much in the way
of public health services or mosquito control and things like
that up and then in two thousand and three, the
graft suddenly switches, it suddenly starts going down. African malaria
mortality starts going down, and it's gone down ever since.
(16:13):
What happened in two thousand and three. It's really interesting, actually,
and I tracked it down for one of my books,
the book about Innovation. The Gates Foundation basically picked on
one technology and said we're going to fund this technology
that wasn't a vaccine, and it wasn't an insecticide. It
was insecticide impregnated mosquito nets because they were picking up
(16:38):
on an experiment that had been done in Boquino Fasso
in the nineteen eighties in which they put thirty six
people in huts specially designed for catching mosquitoes, and they
measured how many people got bitten under different circumstances. And
they tried mosquito nets, and they tried mosquito nets with
(16:58):
insecticide on them. They found it had a massive to
terrent effect. And then they tried tearing holes in the
mosquito nets, which is quite often happens. You know, it's
very difficult to keep a mosquito net intact. And they
found that a mosquito net with holes in it that
had insecticide on it was better than a mosquito net
(17:19):
that didn't have holes in it, that didn't have insecticide
on it. So they realized that this was actually a
very cheap technology, very low tech technology that you could
distribute to people and it wouldn't stop working just because
people tore holes in it by mistake. And so they
really pushed this technology and it has made an enormous difference.
And I tried to track down the French scientists who
(17:42):
worked with a bikinos for Fascia scientists to do this experiment.
I eventually found one of them living in retirement in
southern France because I just thought it was such an
interesting story. It's probably one of the biggest life saving
stories of the lot, and it's very low tech. You know,
it's not all about digital electrons. So I kind of
like that story.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Yes, so many of the big changes in the world
have come from very simple things like chlorinated water and
so on. So we touched on this issue about brains
being threat detectors and so when things are getting worse,
we feel that immediately. But why do you suppose progress
generally feels so invisible.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
I think we take it for granted. When something gets better,
we say, fine, you know I can now use my
telephone when I'm walking around, a big deal. You know,
I'm cool with that. But the damn thing doesn't work everywhere.
So do you know what I mean? And so, just
(18:41):
to give you an example, I went in my first
way mo last November when I was in Austin, and
it took me about ten minutes to get relaxed about
having no driver in the car. I mean, it was
very easy to get cool about that. I'm sure within
half an hour I'd be complaining about way not going
faster enough or something. But you know, for God's sake,
(19:02):
this is a car driven by a robot, and here
am I, somebody was born in the nineteen fifties, sitting
in it, going to my destination, happily chatting to my
friend in the back of this guy. It's an incredible thing.
And so the degree to which we just lock in
the things that happen and move on to complaining about
(19:23):
the things that don't happen is very, very human. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
I recently took my first way mow and I had
my kids with me, and I told them, probably uselessly,
I said, you know, really pay attention to this, because
this is the first time I've ever had this experience.
But for you guys, this is just part of the
background furniture of the world.
Speaker 3 (19:43):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
And I think our friend Kevin Kelly, I think he
was the one who said technology is what gets invented
after you're born, and all the stuff that already exists
we don't pay any attention to.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
There's a one man oracle on all these topics. He's
just so so interesting to talk to him.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Okay, So what I want to ask you about is
how we make progress. And in your work you've emphasized
the importance of the exchange of ideas, as you call it,
ideas having sex.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
So tell us about that.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
Why is recombination more powerful than individual genius?
Speaker 3 (20:30):
Right? Well, almost every new device we manufacture isn't made
from brand new stuff. It's existing stuff reconfigured in new ways,
different combinations of existing atoms, different combinations of existing molecules
and substances, and so on. So in a sense, all
(20:53):
we're doing is coming up with new combinations. Now, as
an evolutionary biologist, I see a very close parallel here
with what happens in genetics and evolution. That is to say,
when a species develops a new gene for solving a
new problem, it doesn't do so ab initio. It generally
(21:16):
does so by combining different bits of different genes to
come up with a new gene. And the process that
allows it to do that is called sex. I mean,
that is sexual reproduction's main result. I'm not going to
say main purpose because I've written a book saying well,
you know, it didn't know that's what it was going
(21:38):
to achieve, But the invention of sexual reproduction several billion
years ago enabled us to draw upon innovations in genes
that happened to our fathers as well as our mothers.
And so if you imagine two different lineages of mammals
and one invents milk and the other invents fur, if
(21:59):
they're a sexual, there's no chance of getting both. You
either have to choose which dry want fur or milk,
you know which is the better invention. But if they're sexual,
you can say, I think I'd like both those inventions, please.
So I think the role of trade and exchange in
human society is very very analogous, if not even homologous,
(22:23):
with sex. You know, I mean when I say ideas
having sex, I'm not even speaking metaphorically. I'm trying to
be literally true. And I think that's really interesting. Just
to give you my favorite slightly ridiculous example of ideas
having sex in technology, there was a technology called the
(22:46):
pill camera developed twenty years ago. You swallow it. It
takes a film as it's going through your system and
gives the doctor an idea of where you know where
you're problems are. If you've got a problem in your
enteric system, it came about after a conversation over a
(23:08):
garden fence between a gastro enterologist and a guided missile designer.
That's a sort of really weird example two of ideas
having sex.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
So what conditions have to be in place for innovation
ecosystems to really thrive for ideas to have sex successfully?
Speaker 3 (23:29):
I looked at in my book How Innovation Works. I
sort of told a whole bunch of stories from different
areas of technology, and several key themes kept emerging. They all,
in the end boiled down to one word, and that
word is freedom above all, the freedom to experiment. So
if you talk to great innovators, they talk about trial
(23:51):
and error. They don't talk. They insist that you never
get it right first time, that you don't actually know
what you're going to discover some times, but you have
to fail and fail and fail again and fail again,
and then suddenly you start to succeed. So Thomas Edison
famously said, I haven't failed, I've just found ten thousand
(24:15):
ways that don't work. And he tried six thousand different
types of plant material before he was satisfied with the
type of Japanese bamboo to use for the filament of
his first light bulb. Now I've talked to Jeff Bezos
and he says much the same sort of thing. You
know that if you're not swinging and missing, you're not
going to innovate. And people like Edison and Bezos, they're
(24:38):
not inventors. They don't come up with brand new prototypes
of things, but they are innovators in the sense that
they drive down the cost and drive up the reliability
and availability of a technology. And for me, that's almost
more important than coming up with the first prototype. And
(24:59):
it's a sort of reason why you know, scientists complain, oh,
they've run off with my idea and made money out
of it, but actually it's a lot of hard work
turning an idea into a practical proposition. So the freedom
to experiment, the freedom to fail, the freedom to change directions.
(25:21):
It's quite often the case that you set out trying
to invent one thing and you end up inventing another.
If you're not free to do that, then that's a problem.
The freedom to invest, the freedom to meet other people
and talk to them. So you know, there's a reason
that innovative societies have tended to have free ports in them.
You know city states where people are meeting and mixing ideas.
(25:46):
One thing that surprised me was that we know big
companies are bad at innovation. Proportionately speaking, when they get
above a certain size, they tend to become anti innovative,
and cameras lot nockier and data phones more recently, and
the reason for that is because they've become very centralized
(26:09):
and very controlling, and someone you know, top down starts
telling people want to do the same is true of empires.
It's surprising, how you know. The Roman Empire invented very
little apart from some decent civil engineering in hundreds of years,
despite being a massive free trade zone and a very
wealthy one. Much the same as true the Ottoman Empire
(26:32):
invented almost nothing. It's band printing. Until the nineteenth century.
Most of the Chinese dynasties were very poor at innovating,
with the exception of the Song Dynasty in particularly in particular,
which was a ferment of innovation. That's when all the
things that we know about, like gunpowder and the compass
(26:52):
and so on came into existence. And the secret of
the Song Dynasty was that it was actually a very
decentralized industry. It was. It was run like a series
of city states with merchants in charge of the cities
and the emperor just kind of presiding over it. So
for me, the modern history of China is really interesting.
(27:14):
So Martzeitung was like a Ming emperor. He was very centralizing,
very controlling, and very little innovation happened under him. Dan
Chaping when Mao died, allowed freedom to happen under certain circumstances,
and it was you know, you obviously couldn't suddenly invent
(27:36):
a new rival to the Communist Party or anything like that.
But if you were starting a small business to invent
something new, particularly in one of the free trade zones
he set up, like the shen Zen Zone, then actually
you faced far fewer obstacles than Western entrepreneurs because there
was none of the local and regional red tape to
(27:59):
get in the world. So you were off to the
races very quick, with quick decisions, and able to do
whatever you liked, really within limits. Shi Jinping is going
back to a Ming emperor style way of behaving. It's
like the switch from Song to Ming dynasties in my view,
and is going to kill the goose that lays those
(28:19):
golden eggs. He keeps complaining about entrepreneurs having too much
freedom and not doing what they're told and not not
not doing what the centralized bureaucracy wants. Now, for the moment,
the Chinese economy is thriving as an innovator, but I
think it's running out of gas. I think that that
(28:42):
it's not going to be able to sustain that for
much longer.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
So.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
By the way, when I was in India last year
speaking of the Jaipoor Literary Festival, I said, look, with
America retreating behind tariff barriers, Europe stagnate, stagnating because of
red tape, Japan in a bit of a funk, China
becoming far too centralized and derig east in the way
(29:11):
it runs its economy. The job of most innovative economy
in the world may becoming vacant. You guys should apply
because India is a very decentralized civilization, very well educated,
very good at experimenting and starting businesses and all these
(29:33):
kind of things. And it's not a bet that I'd
like to put a lot of money on, but I
think India is the economy to watch in the next
fifty years.
Speaker 4 (29:42):
What do pessimists get right. What do pessimists get right? Well,
some of the extreme pessimists, like the late Paul Earlick,
who died recently, he really didn't get anything right. I mean,
he said my country, England would cease to exist by
the year two thousand. You know, he said we would
all be starving to death, famine would be.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
Would be terrible. But things like congestion, drug addiction, problems, obesity,
you know, there are trends going in the wrong direction. Obviously,
all three of those, to some extent are problems of success,
(30:26):
problems of being too rich, of having too much food,
of having access to too many distractions. Screen addiction, I
think is something that people were warning about twenty years ago,
and we're now seeing that, if anything, they should be
more worried about. I personally also think that virology is
(30:48):
something that we have not worried about enough. I didn't
think this and when I was writing Rational Optimist, I'm
a big fan of biotech generally, but I didn't realize
until twenty when I looked into what that lab in
Wuhan had been up to, just how good virologists have
got at slotting cassettes of genes. Into viruses and increasing
(31:16):
the infectivity of viruses up to ten thousand times. That's
a pretty crazy thing to have been doing. So I'm
baffled by the way most people are now saying, oh
my god, climate change, Ah my god. AI, And I'm saying,
you know what, I think you're looking at the wrong
scary thing. I think the scary thing is a dangerous
(31:39):
gain of function in virology because the pandemic has taught
the bad actors, you know, whether it's the North Korean
government or the terrorist organizations, that they can bring the
world to its knees with a couple of biologists in
a dodgy lab somewhere, And we need to do a
much better job of monitoring what's going on in places
(32:01):
like that. So that's something we need to be a
little bit more pessimistic about.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
Yeah, I mean, I know there are a lot of
people who feel that as we do technological innovation, this
can create new categories of risk faster than we can
manage them. And you and I are both optimists, and
so we know that we will manage them. But how
do you respond to that idea? What are your thoughts
on that idea that we're creating new categories of risk rapidly.
Speaker 3 (32:31):
I mean, I think, of course, we create new categories
of risk, and AI is the big obvious one today.
But I don't myself see the problems we face today
as being any worse, indeed as bad as the ones
we faced in say, the nineteen seventies, when we didn't
(32:52):
think we were going to be able to control the
population explosion. We weren't sure whether we were going to
feed the world, We didn't know whether the communists system
was going to overwhelm the world. We were worried about
urban air pollution getting worse and worse, et cetera, et cetera.
So the idea that this is a uniquely dangerous time,
I think, just doesn't work for me. What has tended
(33:17):
to happen over the past couple hundred years is that
we have devised technical solutions to most of our problems,
one after another, and in doing so, we've put them
into the rear view mirror and enabled us to go
on and look at the next one. Now you can
(33:40):
argue that we don't seem to be able to solve
the rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We can't find
technologies that can bring that down at least affordably yet,
and so the energy transition that we want to achieve
for that is proving uniquely difficult. Unique it's taking a
(34:01):
long time, but it is I think the case that
some of the problems we suddenly get worried about are
problems that wouldn't have bothered our ancestors because they had
more important things to worry about. You know, the the
(34:24):
Britain at the moment is very worked up about sewage
flows into rivers. These have not got worse, it's just
when I'm measuring them for the first time. In fact,
they've got better. But because we're measuring them, we're saying,
oh my god, look how much sewage is getting into rivers.
That's outrageous. And that's fine, that's great, good for us,
Well done us for worrying about them. So I don't
(34:46):
myself find anything we face to be likely to be
insoluble forever. I think the solutions we have at hand
are going to be very helpful. Actually, I just want
to give you one really good example. There's a friend
of mine called Boyan Slut in the Netherlands who was
(35:10):
horrified by how much plastic he encountered swimming in the ocean, sorry,
in the Mediterranean Sea. Actually when he was a boy,
determined to do something about it, and he's set up
a nonprofit which is now huge. It's very successful. It's
got a lot of funding from a lot of philanthropists.
It's called the Great Ocean Cleanup. And he's improving techniques
(35:35):
for catching plastic in the ocean. But the big thing
he's achieved so far is interceptors for catching plastic that
comes down rivers, because there's the vast majority of plastic
gets into the ocean comes from a certain number of rivers.
And he I mean, it's really spectacular what they're now
achieving in terms of catching and disposing of or recycling
(35:59):
hue which quantities of plastic in certain rivers. There's a
river in Guatemala they've recently been working on for example, Ano,
they're in Indonesia and so on. Now, the reason I'm
telling that story is because he's quite unpopular with a
lot of environmentalists.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
There's some severe.
Speaker 3 (36:18):
Criticism of him. Why well, they say, well, you know,
you'll never clean it all up this way, and you're
holding out the hope of a solution when actually there
isn't one, and you know, maybe he's going to legitimize
the use of plastic again if he says, look, we've
(36:39):
stopped the problem. It's not getting into the sea anymore.
Let's go back to using plastic straws. Because don't worry,
they will. They'll never throttle a turtle. Then they just
don't like that because they're puritans, they're aesthetics. They want
us to stop using this stuff. They don't care why,
they just want us to stop using stuff. I'm a
(37:00):
little unkind on them, but you get the point. And
so the people who come along and solve our problems
are quite often pushing up stream when they do.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
So let me just ask you this because I'm curious
what you take is on this the issue about paying
more attention to smaller problems when the bigger problems get solved.
(37:38):
I wonder this often when I look at college campuses
where young people are are protesting things, and when they
have things really good, when the world is going well,
they seem to get very energized about protesting, and I
wonder if this is an expression of the same thing.
Speaker 3 (37:58):
Yeah, now, I think that's definitely a phenomenon that you
have the luxury of worrying about certain things when you
don't have to worry about other things. Greg Easterbrook once
had a wonderful remark about it's something like, sure, people
used to be poor and miserable and underfed. Now they're
(38:21):
rich and miserable and well fed. They're still miserable, but
it's better to be miserable and well fed, isn't it,
and miserable and angry.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
By the way, it's so cool when we look across innovation.
There were just two stories when you were talking that
it struck me. One was Henry Ford. You may know
this quotation. Henry Ford said, I invented nothing new. I
merely assembled the innovations of a century of men before me,
which was which was a nice nod to the fact
(38:57):
that he was, you know, bending, breaking, blending, putting things together,
remixing things that had come before him.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
And on the failure point, you almost certainly saw this,
but maybe I don't know. Six years ago, Elon Musk.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
Released a video of the bloopers from SpaceX, all the crashes,
and obviously it's you know, it's easier to release your
blooper footage once you've got.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
A successful spacecraft.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
But it was lovely to watch that and to really
look at the celebration of failure that he did there.
Speaker 3 (39:30):
I mean, Elon Musk is the most extraordinary story. And
I was pretty skeptical about him for a long time.
I thought his attempt to remake the car industry was
far too dependent on subsidy and hype and would probably
fall flat on his face. I'd have been shortening his
(39:50):
stock if I did that kind of thing, which I don't,
and I was wrong, you know. I mean, sure, there's
still problems at TESLA, but it's an amazing achievement. I
also thought that space was a bit of a side show.
I mean, yeah, fun to do that, and and no
doubt NASA has been inefficient in various ways over the years,
(40:11):
and you could do it better, but really you're going
to really make it cheap enough to do stuff in space.
He has brought the price of launching a ton of
material into space down by ninety eight percent. I'm that's gobsmacking.
And I've read Walter Isaacson's biography to try and understand
what makes this man tick, and I'm none the wiser
(40:33):
in a way. I mean, he is so unique and
so extraordinary and doesn't come across as sort of particularly
brilliant in particular ways, and I think he's just He's
a good example actually of something at point I do
try and make in my writing on innovation, which is
that I don't terribly like the word creativity. You get
(40:56):
people saying, oh, I wish we could teach kids to
be more creative. I think if we did, we would
give them the wrong impression that innovation is done by
people of genius who have different blood in their veins,
and that ain't true. It's done by ordinary people who
have perseverance and imagination to keep trying things and to
(41:19):
keep gambling, like Elon Musk does, and Edison and Bezos
and others do as well. They're ordinary, you know. I
want to tell kids, these are quite ordinary people. They're
not that different from you and me. It's just they
keep trying things and eventually they stumble on something that works.
(41:44):
So anybody could be a great innovator in that sense.
I hope I'm right about that. I don't want to
encourage people to go off and think everybody can become
Elon Musk, but it is a it's an extraordinary story.
And the other thing that by the way that he's doing,
and I'm really struck by this whenever I'm on the
(42:05):
West coast these days. He is single handedly helping to
solve the conundrum that Peter Teele put in front of
us some years ago, which is that we've got really
good at inventing things with electrons, but not very good
at inventing things with atoms. In other words, you know
the famous question, where's my flying car? We've done absolutely
(42:31):
nothing to improve transport significantly in my lifetime. It's not
quite true, of course, but you know, where's the flying car,
where's the routine space travel, where's the supersonic airliner, where's
the personal jet back, where's the gyrocopter? You know that
we were all promised in the fifties and sixties, instead
of which we had, you know, airport delays and more
(42:52):
cup holders in cars for a while. You know, we've
got a few things. We've got drones and things now.
You know, I'll give you that. But on the other hand,
if you read that sci fi stuff from the fifties
and sixties, they hardly mentioned computing and communication. It's all
about transport, and in fact, we've had spectacular changes in communication.
(43:14):
The fifty years before that was nothing changed. They had
the telephone and nothing much else, but they had the
first airplanes, the first cars, the first rockets for men
on the moon, you know, all that kind of stuff.
So I've lived through the opposite. I've lived through incredible
changes in communication and computing and very little change in transport.
(43:34):
And I think that's changing because Elon Musk and the
people who have spun out of SpaceX in El Segundo
in particular, they're all atoms people. They're all trying to
change real things in the real world. You know. I've
visited companies that are reinventing supersonic airline engines, companies that
(43:59):
are reinventing prosthetic arms for people who've lost a limb.
They're not just doing video games anymore. Do you see
what I mean? And I mean you must know more
about this, David than I do, so I'd be interested
to know if you think I'm right to be intrigued
by this trend.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
Oh, I completely agree.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
What's interesting is that investors still have skittishness about investing
in hardware. They love to invest in software and they
think it's less expensive.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
But yes, the progress there has been quite extraordinary.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
So what do you think it takes cognitively or culturally
to maintain a rationally optimistic outlook.
Speaker 3 (44:40):
It's surprising how hard it.
Speaker 2 (44:44):
Is, you know.
Speaker 3 (44:45):
I read this book fifteen years ago called The Rational Optimist.
I went around talking about it for a few years,
and I would always get people coming out to me
at the end of the talks and saying, now, come on,
you can't still be irrational optimist. Look what that's happening
in Ibola, or look what's happening in Syria, or look
what's happening in Ukraine. And I would say, yeah, sure,
(45:08):
there's bad things happening in the world. They didn't say
they worn't. I'm just saying, look what's happening in Africa.
Look at the number of people being lifted out of poverty,
look at the number of people not dying of malaria.
They're not going to make headlines, but they're happening. And
I would try and say that, but I didn't always
convince myself, you know. I mean, I'm as susceptible as
anyone to getting depressed about the state of the world.
(45:30):
And if I read the newspapers, a lot of things
make me very grumpy, particularly at three in the morning.
You know, when you it's always more grumpy anyway. But
the big one for me is the opportunity cost of
getting policy wrong, not so much because it means our
descendants are going to be poor and cold and hungry,
(45:52):
but because our descendants are not going to be nearly
as rich as they could be. There's a bunch of
scenarios produced for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called
Shared socio Economic Pathways SSPs, and the best of them
have US ten times as rich in per capita income
(46:17):
in real terms in the year twenty one hundred as
we are today all over the world on average. It's
almost unimaginable. And they describe the world that would achieve this,
and they say it's one in which we burn a
lot of fossil fuels. And the Genie coefficient of inequality
(46:37):
comes right down because poor countries get quick rich quicker
than rich countries. We solve most of our technological problems,
most of our environmental problems, most of our social problems.
And I'm saying, well, what's the problem, And they say, well,
it's going to have more warming, Well how much more? Well,
it's going to reduce GDP by about as much as
(47:01):
GDP is today. In other words, instead of being ten
and a half times as rich, we're going to be
nine and a half times as rich. Okay, is that
really such a problem. The opportunity cost of choosing policies
that restrain economic growth and innovation for our grandchildren are enormous,
(47:28):
and we have to bear that in mind. You know,
it's all very well saying we're doing things for our grandchildren,
but the best present we can give our grandchildren is
a rapid rate of progress.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
When you think about the next fifty years, what are
you personally the most optimistic about?
Speaker 3 (47:47):
AI? Genomics energy AI is what everyone's talking about. I
think it's going to be fabulous. Yes, there are concerns
and worries there always are with every technology, but I'm
not convinced it's going to turn on us and destroy
us any more than biological species. Do you know? Great
(48:12):
white sharks and coronaviruses are trying to kill us every day.
They don't succeed because of countermeasures, saying will be true
of AIS. I also think they're not going to destroy jobs.
AI is going to make lawyers and doctors three times
as productive. That means they can charge one third as much.
(48:33):
That means we can hire more of them, etc. So
I'm really optimistic about that. Genomics is the dog that
hasn't barked yet. We have an incredible opportunity as a
results of our ability to read the recipe of our
own species and other species. It means we can do
(48:54):
really clever things to cure cancer, to combat many other diseases,
to improve people's lives in all sorts of ways. We're
seeing the fruits of that starting to come through now.
It's taken a bit longer than we thought after the
Human Genome Project, but it is happening. I suspect actually
biomedicine is going to be more important than AI. I mean,
(49:17):
just look at you know, GLP one agonists. They're having
a big effect. You could argue they're a bigger revolution
than AI right now. I mean that's going to I'm
sure they're not going to be forever, but it's and
I'm sure there'll be side effects and so on, but
you know there are. We're going to do really smart
things in biomedicine. And then finally energy. I genuinely think
(49:39):
we're going to get fusion in my lifetime I'm sixty
eight years old, though, so it's touch and go. I mean,
Sniper's aali already, and so it might not happen, but
I think the money that's pouring, the private money that's
pouring into fusion is going to produce results. There's about
(50:00):
four or five different technologies for how to do it.
They're all moving towards practical affordable fusion. If that happens,
and if it is affordable and that, you know, those
are big gifts, I admit. You know, it's been over
the horizon for fifty years already. Then the sky is
the limit on how much energy we can provide society.
(50:21):
And energy really is the secret of life, because the
economy is a thermodynamic thing. You know. We use energy
to rearrange the atoms of the world into useful combinations.
That's what we do. And the more energy we have,
the more we're going to be able to do that,
the more problems we're going to be able to solve.
You know, you can desalinate water from the ocean pretty
(50:42):
well anywhere on the planet if electricity is cheap enough,
for example, which you know, just makes everything from agriculture
to cities much more sustainable and nature reserves too, you know.
So those are some of the reasons I'm very optimistic.
Oh and another one, peak farmland. We are now growing food,
(51:07):
more food every year from a smaller acreage of farmland
every year. We're shrinking the farming footprint even as we
grow the farming output. That's I mean, that's now been
true for about fifteen years since we parked Peak farmland.
We'd be doing it even faster if we weren't doing
(51:28):
stupid things like biofuels, by the way, but that's another
story ethanol and so on. And that means that we
are returning land to nature. I mean, it is happening
on a spectacul The world is now net reforesting. Rich
countries are reforesting quite fast. Forest countries are still deforesting.
(51:50):
But in between there's a lot of countries shifting from
deforesting to reforesting. And you know, nature reserves on the
whole getting bigger. So I think that our grandchildren are
going to be able to live in a world where
the footprint of mankind, both in terms of growing food
and in terms of generating energy and in terms of manufacturing,
(52:11):
can be really quite small. And the rest of the
world can be this wonderful, verdant, green paradise. It'll never
be that good, of course, but it's a nice thought.
Speaker 1 (52:26):
That was my conversation with Matt Ridley, and the idea
of rational optimism is that when you step back and
look at the long arc of history, there's evidence for
massive progress, like declines in poverty and increases in lifespan,
and expanding access to knowledge and to medicine and to opportunity.
(52:48):
But the strange part is that people don't like hearing that.
Why is it that when you present data about the
world getting better it doesn't land as comforting. It often
lands as irritad I've watched this forever with writers like
Matt Ridley and Steven Pinker, who spend years assembling data
about long term improvement, and instead of people saying, oh, awesome,
(53:11):
maybe things are getting better than I thought, the reaction
is often resistance. Why does it happen? Well, part of
the answer lies in the brain. Statistics don't feel like anything,
and they very rarely map onto your lived experience because
your brain isn't wired to average across billions of lives
(53:31):
over decades. It's wired to track your immediate environment, your relationships,
your stressors, your sense of how things are going right now.
So when someone tells you, hey, globally things are improving,
your brain says, okay, whatever.
Speaker 2 (53:47):
How do I feel?
Speaker 1 (53:49):
And if you are feeling anxious or frustrated or angry
or whatever, then the statistics bounce right off you. They
very rarely penetrate the emotional layer where your sense of
the world actually lives. So that's one thing. And also socially,
if you tell other people bad news that seems to
(54:09):
have a kind of moral weight to it. It signals
serious and awareness. In other words, if you assert that
things are getting worse, that can feel like a more
responsible stance, like you're paying attention, like you're not being naive,
while optimism can feel like complacency, like you're overlooking problems
and you're not taking things seriously enough. So there's a
(54:31):
psychological and social pull towards pessimism. And yet when you
step back, you see the pattern, which is that every
generation feels this way. Every generation believes it's living through
uniquely dangerous times. And that brings me to a line
that I've always loved from the American radio broadcaster Paul Harvey,
(54:55):
who used to say, in times like these, it's important
to remember that there have always been times like these.
I love that line because it reminds us when we're
inside our moment, it always feels unprecedented. It always feels
like the stakes are higher, and the risks are sharper,
and the future is more uncertain than anything.
Speaker 2 (55:17):
That came before.
Speaker 1 (55:18):
But any level of studying history will tell you a
different story. There have always been threats, there have always
been fears, There have always been reasons to believe that
things might fall apart. So I want to add one
more layer to Paul Harvey's line. In times like these,
it's important to remember that previous generations often had it worse.
(55:41):
They faced diseases that we can now cure, They lived
without technologies that we take for granted. They navigated uncertainties
that would feel overwhelming to us today. But progress happened,
not without lots of setbacks, but it happened. And that
brings us back to the central challenge. We have to
(56:03):
hold on to both truths at once. The truth that
there are real problems, serious ones and urgent ones that
we need to hit hard, and the truth that across time,
there has been extraordinary improvement. Part of meeting that challenge
is to recognize that optimism doesn't ignore problems. Instead, it's
(56:25):
about recognizing that problems are what drive progress. Every challenge
becomes a target for innovation, Every constraint becomes an invitation
for new ideas to emerge. Go to eagleman dot com
(56:45):
slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Join the weekly discussions on my substack, and check out
and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of
each episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm
David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.
How do ideas have sex and why does that matter
for innovation? Why do brains tend to systematically misread the future.
Why do we feel that the world is getting worse
when by almost all the measures we can make, it's
getting better. What if optimism is actually the more rational stance?
(00:27):
Is optimism a personality trait or can it be evidence based?
If innovation isn't primarily about lone geniuses, what is it
really about?
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Today?
Speaker 1 (00:38):
We're joined by scientists and author Matt Ridley as we
talk about what it means to be, in Ridley's term,
a rational optimist. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Egelman.
I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in
these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe
(00:59):
to understand and some of the most surprising aspects of
our lives. So let's start with a question, what story
(01:22):
do you tell yourself about the future? Because we all
carry around a narrative and internal model about where things
are headed, and that story shapes everything.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
It shapes our.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Moods, our decisions, our sense of what is possible now.
One of the facets of history that I've always found
the most fascinating is that every generation believes that it's
living through uniquely perilous times. Every generation feels the shadow
of something large and ominous hanging overhead, something that makes
(01:56):
this moment more fragile, more dangerous, and more on the
brink than anything that came before. Just as a personal
example of this, when I was growing up in the
seventies and eighties, there was a very specific cloud hanging
over everything, and that was nuclear annihilation. When I was
a kid, we all watched a film called The Day After,
(02:18):
and if you saw that, you know that it represented
the zeitgeist of that time, which was that the world
was going to end not with a whimper, but a
bang in a very specific way, and it was going
to happen any year now. So in my school we
practiced drills where we would get under our desks. Now,
I think even as kids, we appreciated at least somewhat
(02:39):
that this wasn't really going to help if a nuclear
bomb dropped, A little desk wasn't going to give us
much protection. But still we did the drills because it
was part of the atmosphere, this kind of ambient anxiety
that everyone shared at the time.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
So there were big.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Concerns like nuclear war, and there were more local concerns too,
like television sets, and parents were worried about it constantly.
In case younger listeners don't know this, the television used
to be called the boob tube from whence we get
the pun YouTube The word boob meant an idiot or
a fool, and that encapsulated this fear that the television
(03:18):
was going to make everyone lose major IQ points. Kids
would stop going outside, no more imagination, no more creativity. Instead,
the kids were going to sit drooling in front of
Gilligan's Island or love Boat, spooning TV dinners into their mouths,
and becoming passive consumers of flickering images, similar to the
(03:39):
way that we talk about social media now. And as
an interesting side note, when the printing press was invented
in the fifteenth century, a lot of thinkers were concerned
that that was going to make kids stupider, because now,
instead of having to remember things, they could just pick
up the book off the shelf and find the answer there. Anyway,
back to the nineteen eighties, there were fears about drugs,
(04:01):
about cultural collapse, about population explosion and mass starvation, So
every era sits under its cloud of existential threats. And
I'm not dismissing these It's not that these threats aren't
real and urgent. The only point I want to make
for now is that those fears feel difficult or impossible
to solve when you are inside them. But when you
(04:25):
step back and look at the data, we always get surprised.
Problems get solved by innovation, at least so far every
single time. This is a pattern we see again and again,
confident predictions of decline that don't play out in fact,
across the entire globe, the large scale trends are clear.
(04:45):
You find massive declines in poverty, increases in lifespan, improvements
in health, expansions, and access to knowledge and technology. But
here's the fascinating thing that we're going to talk about today.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
If you tune into your own.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Mind, especially as you scroll through the news, you might
feel something very different. You get a sense that things
are deteriorating, that everything is heading in the wrong direction.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
So what is going on here?
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Well, from a neuroscience perspective, this is not surprising because
the brain is a prediction machine that is tuned to
detect threats. If we think in evolutionary terms, missing something
dangerous had consequences measured in survival. So the system leans
heavily towards vigilance. And this is why bad news carries
(05:36):
a lot of attentional weight. With good news, it's totally different.
The moment something gets better, the moment it genuinely improves,
it becomes invisible. It just becomes part of the new baseline.
So look at the things that would have seemed like
miracles to our great great grandparents, things like electrification of
the nation, or clean water, or antibiotics or a global
(06:00):
instant communication. Any one of these would have seemed like
a science fiction miracle, and now they're just the way
that things are. We just flick a switch or we
dial the faucet, and we essentially never think twice about
the fact that we're bringing daylight into our home at
night time, or we're diverting a clean, little river of water.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Right to us whenever we want it.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
So our brains build models of a world that feels
more dangerous than it statistically is, and a future that
feels more precarious than it.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Actually might be.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Today, we're going to explore this tension through the lens
of someone who has spent years thinking deeply about it,
the scientist and author Matt Ridley. He's written many books
on topics from genomes to technology, but a special interest
today is his book called The Rational Optimist. Ridley earned
his doctorate in zoology at Oxford and has gone on
(06:57):
to do many things, including serving as an editor for
The Economist and serving in the British House of Lords
on the Select Committees for Science and Technology and AI.
So we're going to zoom in on this topic of
rational optimism because generally, when we talk about optimism, it
sounds like we're talking about temperament, like some people are
just wired to be upbeat. But Ridley's argument has been different.
(07:21):
He's all about grounding his optimism in evidence. He studies
long term, measurable changes that reveals something about how human
societies evolve over time. Here's my conversation with Matt Ridley. So, Matt,
(07:42):
let's start broadly. When you say rational optimism, what is that?
What can make optimism rational instead of just hopeful?
Speaker 3 (07:51):
The answer to that is evidence. In other words, I'm
optimistic about the future not because I'm hopeful or I
have a positive mood. It's because the extraordinary improvements in
human living standards in almost every way you can imagine
that have happened in my lifetime and in nobody else's
lifetime before that are set to continue and are something
(08:16):
worth noting and celebrating, and by the way, are also
in sharp contrast to the gloomy predictions that the adults
always make at every stage.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Why do you think that humans are so drawn to
pessimism even in eras of measurable progress.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
It's an extraordinary phenomenon, and we tend to think it's new.
The gloom and doom of today wasn't the way people
thought in the sixties or seventies. But I think it
goes back a very long way, and it speaks to
something in human nature. I mean, that's why fire and
brimstone preachers were such a success in previous centuries. And
(08:54):
there's several reasons I think for this. One is that
bad news is more salient. You know, if something catastrophic
is going to happen, you want to hear about it.
If something good is going to happen, you don't necessarily
need to know about it, So we are more alert
to that. And there's lots of evidence that given the
choice between bad news stories and good news stories, people
(09:15):
prefer to read the bad news stories, and editors know that.
Television producers know that everybody knows that, so of course
they feed into that, and they therefore make it worse.
The second reason is that the more we know about
a situation, the caerier we are. So people are actually
quite optimistic about local things in their lives, about the
(09:38):
success of their own careers and marriages, but the success
of their own town or village. But the bigger the
unit you look at, the more pessimistic they get, so
that they're relying on news sources for that and not
on their own experience when they think about the world.
(09:59):
But there's another evolutionary psychology reason I think here, which
is that we're always in competition with each other, and
the person who was alert to bad news probably survived
bad periods in prehistory better. You know, you and I
walking to the water hole on the Savannah one hundred
(10:20):
thousand years ago. You say, I don't think we should
go this way. There might be a lion behind those rocks,
and I say, no, no, everything's getting better. I've just
read a book about it. Your genes are in the
next generation at the expense of mine and probably via
my girlfriend.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
So when you look across the centuries, what do you
see as the strongest evidence that the world is improving.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
I think the big one is poverty. There's a wonderful
experiment that Hans Rosling did was he asked a thousand
people in America and they then repeated this in lots
of other countries. Do you think the percentage of the
world population that lives in extreme poverty has doubled, halved,
or stayed the same in the last twenty years. Sixty
(11:08):
five percent of people said it had doubled, five percent
said it had halved. The five percent were right, the
sixty five percent were wrong. But when you think about it,
if you wrote those three answers on three bananas and
threw them into a cage with a monkey in it,
the monkey would pick up the correct answer to that
question thirty three percent of the time, not five percent
(11:30):
of the time. So it would do six times as
well as human beings in answering this question about human society,
which is a pretty amazing fact when you think about it.
There's a wonderful quote from Josh Billings at nineteenth century
stage who said, it ain't what you don't know that
gets you into trouble, it's what you know for sure
that ain't so. And so, in my lifetime, the percentage
(11:52):
of the world living on less than a dollar ninety
a day and twenty eleven dollars has gone from fifty
percent half the world living on that extremely low level
of income to about eight percent. Now, nobody has ever
lived through a transformation like that, And of course money
isn't everything, but that's a measure of how many of
your needs you can fulfill. And it goes along with
(12:16):
incredible improving lifespan, lifespan going up at the rate of
seven hours a day at the moment globally falling child mortality.
But we're not just wealthier. We're healthier, happier, cleverer, kinder, freer,
more peaceful, and more equal. People are very surprised when
you say this, but for the last fifty years, people
in poor countries have been getting rich much faster than
(12:37):
people in rich countries, and that really does make a
difference to equality.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
What are the metrics of progress that you think people
most consistently underestimate.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
There's an extraordinary graph that our world in data has
done among other people, and it shows the distribution of
income in the nineteen sixties, and it's a two humped camel.
It has a great, big hump of very poor people
and a hump of rich western middle class people in
Europe and America, and not much in between. And the
(13:09):
big change of the last fifty years has been almost
the whole of Asia moving into that middle chunk, so
that it's now a one humped camel. Most of Africa
hasn't yet made that move, but it's starting to, and
it's doing so roughly the speed that Asia did so
a generation ago.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
What is the reason Africa hasn't made that movie?
Speaker 3 (13:29):
In?
Speaker 2 (13:30):
What's it going to take to get there?
Speaker 3 (13:32):
When I wrote The Rational Optimist in twenty ten, I
got criticized by one reviewer because I used the phrase
even in Africa things are getting better.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
And the reason I.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Used that phrase was because I was reading people saying, look,
Asia has had improved living standards. Africa's never going to
achieve that. There's far too much population pressure, far too
much poverty, far too much disease, far too much conflict.
It just it's not realistic to expect it to go
through a radical transformation in living standards, and I said, no,
(14:05):
there's evidence that it is going to do that, and
even in Africa, you are seeing these these measures move
in the right direction. And then I got criticized for
being a racist by saying using this phrase even in Africa,
which was outrageous because I was saying exactly the opposite.
But you know, people will do these kind of things.
So Africa had lagged behind the rest of the world
(14:27):
in terms of industrialization, in terms of trade. It has
various geographical disadvantages. You know, it doesn't have great places
for ports, and the hinterland is not very accessible in
the way it is in other continents and so on.
So there, you know, there are things like that, but
above all, it was disfigured by disease. You know, the
(14:49):
degree to which malaria was very, very widespread in Africa,
and other diseases like sleeping sickness, and of course in
the twentieth century age, I've really did set back African
living standards. That has something to do with the fact
that we are originally an African species, that we've been
(15:11):
in Africa longer than any other continent, and that I
think has meant that more and more pathogens and microbes
have had a chance to hone attack on us in
that continent. But as I say, that's changing incredibly fast.
The malaria thing is really really interesting because you get
(15:32):
widespread predictions right up until the early two thousands the
malaria is going to go on getting worse, and it
was getting worse. The mortality from malaria was beginning to
improve in Asia, but it was actually getting rapidly worse
in Africa. Why was it getting worse, Well, because there's
more people and there are you know the Yeah, basically
(15:52):
it's the rising population and not much in the way
of public health services or mosquito control and things like
that up and then in two thousand and three, the
graft suddenly switches, it suddenly starts going down. African malaria
mortality starts going down, and it's gone down ever since.
(16:13):
What happened in two thousand and three. It's really interesting, actually,
and I tracked it down for one of my books,
the book about Innovation. The Gates Foundation basically picked on
one technology and said we're going to fund this technology
that wasn't a vaccine, and it wasn't an insecticide. It
was insecticide impregnated mosquito nets because they were picking up
(16:38):
on an experiment that had been done in Boquino Fasso
in the nineteen eighties in which they put thirty six
people in huts specially designed for catching mosquitoes, and they
measured how many people got bitten under different circumstances. And
they tried mosquito nets, and they tried mosquito nets with
(16:58):
insecticide on them. They found it had a massive to
terrent effect. And then they tried tearing holes in the
mosquito nets, which is quite often happens. You know, it's
very difficult to keep a mosquito net intact. And they
found that a mosquito net with holes in it that
had insecticide on it was better than a mosquito net
(17:19):
that didn't have holes in it, that didn't have insecticide
on it. So they realized that this was actually a
very cheap technology, very low tech technology that you could
distribute to people and it wouldn't stop working just because
people tore holes in it by mistake. And so they
really pushed this technology and it has made an enormous difference.
And I tried to track down the French scientists who
(17:42):
worked with a bikinos for Fascia scientists to do this experiment.
I eventually found one of them living in retirement in
southern France because I just thought it was such an
interesting story. It's probably one of the biggest life saving
stories of the lot, and it's very low tech. You know,
it's not all about digital electrons. So I kind of
like that story.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Yes, so many of the big changes in the world
have come from very simple things like chlorinated water and
so on. So we touched on this issue about brains
being threat detectors and so when things are getting worse,
we feel that immediately. But why do you suppose progress
generally feels so invisible.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
I think we take it for granted. When something gets better,
we say, fine, you know I can now use my
telephone when I'm walking around, a big deal. You know,
I'm cool with that. But the damn thing doesn't work everywhere.
So do you know what I mean? And so, just
(18:41):
to give you an example, I went in my first
way mo last November when I was in Austin, and
it took me about ten minutes to get relaxed about
having no driver in the car. I mean, it was
very easy to get cool about that. I'm sure within
half an hour I'd be complaining about way not going
faster enough or something. But you know, for God's sake,
(19:02):
this is a car driven by a robot, and here
am I, somebody was born in the nineteen fifties, sitting
in it, going to my destination, happily chatting to my
friend in the back of this guy. It's an incredible thing.
And so the degree to which we just lock in
the things that happen and move on to complaining about
(19:23):
the things that don't happen is very, very human. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
I recently took my first way mow and I had
my kids with me, and I told them, probably uselessly,
I said, you know, really pay attention to this, because
this is the first time I've ever had this experience.
But for you guys, this is just part of the
background furniture of the world.
Speaker 3 (19:43):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
And I think our friend Kevin Kelly, I think he
was the one who said technology is what gets invented
after you're born, and all the stuff that already exists
we don't pay any attention to.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
There's a one man oracle on all these topics. He's
just so so interesting to talk to him.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Okay, So what I want to ask you about is
how we make progress. And in your work you've emphasized
the importance of the exchange of ideas, as you call it,
ideas having sex.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
So tell us about that.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
Why is recombination more powerful than individual genius?
Speaker 3 (20:30):
Right? Well, almost every new device we manufacture isn't made
from brand new stuff. It's existing stuff reconfigured in new ways,
different combinations of existing atoms, different combinations of existing molecules
and substances, and so on. So in a sense, all
(20:53):
we're doing is coming up with new combinations. Now, as
an evolutionary biologist, I see a very close parallel here
with what happens in genetics and evolution. That is to say,
when a species develops a new gene for solving a
new problem, it doesn't do so ab initio. It generally
(21:16):
does so by combining different bits of different genes to
come up with a new gene. And the process that
allows it to do that is called sex. I mean,
that is sexual reproduction's main result. I'm not going to
say main purpose because I've written a book saying well,
you know, it didn't know that's what it was going
(21:38):
to achieve, But the invention of sexual reproduction several billion
years ago enabled us to draw upon innovations in genes
that happened to our fathers as well as our mothers.
And so if you imagine two different lineages of mammals
and one invents milk and the other invents fur, if
(21:59):
they're a sexual, there's no chance of getting both. You
either have to choose which dry want fur or milk,
you know which is the better invention. But if they're sexual,
you can say, I think I'd like both those inventions, please.
So I think the role of trade and exchange in
human society is very very analogous, if not even homologous,
(22:23):
with sex. You know, I mean when I say ideas
having sex, I'm not even speaking metaphorically. I'm trying to
be literally true. And I think that's really interesting. Just
to give you my favorite slightly ridiculous example of ideas
having sex in technology, there was a technology called the
(22:46):
pill camera developed twenty years ago. You swallow it. It
takes a film as it's going through your system and
gives the doctor an idea of where you know where
you're problems are. If you've got a problem in your
enteric system, it came about after a conversation over a
(23:08):
garden fence between a gastro enterologist and a guided missile designer.
That's a sort of really weird example two of ideas
having sex.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
So what conditions have to be in place for innovation
ecosystems to really thrive for ideas to have sex successfully?
Speaker 3 (23:29):
I looked at in my book How Innovation Works. I
sort of told a whole bunch of stories from different
areas of technology, and several key themes kept emerging. They all,
in the end boiled down to one word, and that
word is freedom above all, the freedom to experiment. So
if you talk to great innovators, they talk about trial
(23:51):
and error. They don't talk. They insist that you never
get it right first time, that you don't actually know
what you're going to discover some times, but you have
to fail and fail and fail again and fail again,
and then suddenly you start to succeed. So Thomas Edison
famously said, I haven't failed, I've just found ten thousand
(24:15):
ways that don't work. And he tried six thousand different
types of plant material before he was satisfied with the
type of Japanese bamboo to use for the filament of
his first light bulb. Now I've talked to Jeff Bezos
and he says much the same sort of thing. You
know that if you're not swinging and missing, you're not
going to innovate. And people like Edison and Bezos, they're
(24:38):
not inventors. They don't come up with brand new prototypes
of things, but they are innovators in the sense that
they drive down the cost and drive up the reliability
and availability of a technology. And for me, that's almost
more important than coming up with the first prototype. And
(24:59):
it's a sort of reason why you know, scientists complain, oh,
they've run off with my idea and made money out
of it, but actually it's a lot of hard work
turning an idea into a practical proposition. So the freedom
to experiment, the freedom to fail, the freedom to change directions.
(25:21):
It's quite often the case that you set out trying
to invent one thing and you end up inventing another.
If you're not free to do that, then that's a problem.
The freedom to invest, the freedom to meet other people
and talk to them. So you know, there's a reason
that innovative societies have tended to have free ports in them.
You know city states where people are meeting and mixing ideas.
(25:46):
One thing that surprised me was that we know big
companies are bad at innovation. Proportionately speaking, when they get
above a certain size, they tend to become anti innovative,
and cameras lot nockier and data phones more recently, and
the reason for that is because they've become very centralized
(26:09):
and very controlling, and someone you know, top down starts
telling people want to do the same is true of empires.
It's surprising, how you know. The Roman Empire invented very
little apart from some decent civil engineering in hundreds of years,
despite being a massive free trade zone and a very
wealthy one. Much the same as true the Ottoman Empire
(26:32):
invented almost nothing. It's band printing. Until the nineteenth century.
Most of the Chinese dynasties were very poor at innovating,
with the exception of the Song Dynasty in particularly in particular,
which was a ferment of innovation. That's when all the
things that we know about, like gunpowder and the compass
(26:52):
and so on came into existence. And the secret of
the Song Dynasty was that it was actually a very
decentralized industry. It was. It was run like a series
of city states with merchants in charge of the cities
and the emperor just kind of presiding over it. So
for me, the modern history of China is really interesting.
(27:14):
So Martzeitung was like a Ming emperor. He was very centralizing,
very controlling, and very little innovation happened under him. Dan
Chaping when Mao died, allowed freedom to happen under certain circumstances,
and it was you know, you obviously couldn't suddenly invent
(27:36):
a new rival to the Communist Party or anything like that.
But if you were starting a small business to invent
something new, particularly in one of the free trade zones
he set up, like the shen Zen Zone, then actually
you faced far fewer obstacles than Western entrepreneurs because there
was none of the local and regional red tape to
(27:59):
get in the world. So you were off to the
races very quick, with quick decisions, and able to do
whatever you liked, really within limits. Shi Jinping is going
back to a Ming emperor style way of behaving. It's
like the switch from Song to Ming dynasties in my view,
and is going to kill the goose that lays those
(28:19):
golden eggs. He keeps complaining about entrepreneurs having too much
freedom and not doing what they're told and not not
not doing what the centralized bureaucracy wants. Now, for the moment,
the Chinese economy is thriving as an innovator, but I
think it's running out of gas. I think that that
(28:42):
it's not going to be able to sustain that for
much longer.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
So.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
By the way, when I was in India last year
speaking of the Jaipoor Literary Festival, I said, look, with
America retreating behind tariff barriers, Europe stagnate, stagnating because of
red tape, Japan in a bit of a funk, China
becoming far too centralized and derig east in the way
(29:11):
it runs its economy. The job of most innovative economy
in the world may becoming vacant. You guys should apply
because India is a very decentralized civilization, very well educated,
very good at experimenting and starting businesses and all these
(29:33):
kind of things. And it's not a bet that I'd
like to put a lot of money on, but I
think India is the economy to watch in the next
fifty years.
Speaker 4 (29:42):
What do pessimists get right. What do pessimists get right? Well,
some of the extreme pessimists, like the late Paul Earlick,
who died recently, he really didn't get anything right. I mean,
he said my country, England would cease to exist by
the year two thousand. You know, he said we would
all be starving to death, famine would be.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
Would be terrible. But things like congestion, drug addiction, problems, obesity,
you know, there are trends going in the wrong direction. Obviously,
all three of those, to some extent are problems of success,
(30:26):
problems of being too rich, of having too much food,
of having access to too many distractions. Screen addiction, I
think is something that people were warning about twenty years ago,
and we're now seeing that, if anything, they should be
more worried about. I personally also think that virology is
(30:48):
something that we have not worried about enough. I didn't
think this and when I was writing Rational Optimist, I'm
a big fan of biotech generally, but I didn't realize
until twenty when I looked into what that lab in
Wuhan had been up to, just how good virologists have
got at slotting cassettes of genes. Into viruses and increasing
(31:16):
the infectivity of viruses up to ten thousand times. That's
a pretty crazy thing to have been doing. So I'm
baffled by the way most people are now saying, oh
my god, climate change, Ah my god. AI, And I'm saying,
you know what, I think you're looking at the wrong
scary thing. I think the scary thing is a dangerous
(31:39):
gain of function in virology because the pandemic has taught
the bad actors, you know, whether it's the North Korean
government or the terrorist organizations, that they can bring the
world to its knees with a couple of biologists in
a dodgy lab somewhere, And we need to do a
much better job of monitoring what's going on in places
(32:01):
like that. So that's something we need to be a
little bit more pessimistic about.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
Yeah, I mean, I know there are a lot of
people who feel that as we do technological innovation, this
can create new categories of risk faster than we can
manage them. And you and I are both optimists, and
so we know that we will manage them. But how
do you respond to that idea? What are your thoughts
on that idea that we're creating new categories of risk rapidly.
Speaker 3 (32:31):
I mean, I think, of course, we create new categories
of risk, and AI is the big obvious one today.
But I don't myself see the problems we face today
as being any worse, indeed as bad as the ones
we faced in say, the nineteen seventies, when we didn't
(32:52):
think we were going to be able to control the
population explosion. We weren't sure whether we were going to
feed the world, We didn't know whether the communists system
was going to overwhelm the world. We were worried about
urban air pollution getting worse and worse, et cetera, et cetera.
So the idea that this is a uniquely dangerous time,
I think, just doesn't work for me. What has tended
(33:17):
to happen over the past couple hundred years is that
we have devised technical solutions to most of our problems,
one after another, and in doing so, we've put them
into the rear view mirror and enabled us to go
on and look at the next one. Now you can
(33:40):
argue that we don't seem to be able to solve
the rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We can't find
technologies that can bring that down at least affordably yet,
and so the energy transition that we want to achieve
for that is proving uniquely difficult. Unique it's taking a
(34:01):
long time, but it is I think the case that
some of the problems we suddenly get worried about are
problems that wouldn't have bothered our ancestors because they had
more important things to worry about. You know, the the
(34:24):
Britain at the moment is very worked up about sewage
flows into rivers. These have not got worse, it's just
when I'm measuring them for the first time. In fact,
they've got better. But because we're measuring them, we're saying,
oh my god, look how much sewage is getting into rivers.
That's outrageous. And that's fine, that's great, good for us,
Well done us for worrying about them. So I don't
(34:46):
myself find anything we face to be likely to be
insoluble forever. I think the solutions we have at hand
are going to be very helpful. Actually, I just want
to give you one really good example. There's a friend
of mine called Boyan Slut in the Netherlands who was
(35:10):
horrified by how much plastic he encountered swimming in the ocean, sorry,
in the Mediterranean Sea. Actually when he was a boy,
determined to do something about it, and he's set up
a nonprofit which is now huge. It's very successful. It's
got a lot of funding from a lot of philanthropists.
It's called the Great Ocean Cleanup. And he's improving techniques
(35:35):
for catching plastic in the ocean. But the big thing
he's achieved so far is interceptors for catching plastic that
comes down rivers, because there's the vast majority of plastic
gets into the ocean comes from a certain number of rivers.
And he I mean, it's really spectacular what they're now
achieving in terms of catching and disposing of or recycling
(35:59):
hue which quantities of plastic in certain rivers. There's a
river in Guatemala they've recently been working on for example, Ano,
they're in Indonesia and so on. Now, the reason I'm
telling that story is because he's quite unpopular with a
lot of environmentalists.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
There's some severe.
Speaker 3 (36:18):
Criticism of him. Why well, they say, well, you know,
you'll never clean it all up this way, and you're
holding out the hope of a solution when actually there
isn't one, and you know, maybe he's going to legitimize
the use of plastic again if he says, look, we've
(36:39):
stopped the problem. It's not getting into the sea anymore.
Let's go back to using plastic straws. Because don't worry,
they will. They'll never throttle a turtle. Then they just
don't like that because they're puritans, they're aesthetics. They want
us to stop using this stuff. They don't care why,
they just want us to stop using stuff. I'm a
(37:00):
little unkind on them, but you get the point. And
so the people who come along and solve our problems
are quite often pushing up stream when they do.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
So let me just ask you this because I'm curious
what you take is on this the issue about paying
more attention to smaller problems when the bigger problems get solved.
(37:38):
I wonder this often when I look at college campuses
where young people are are protesting things, and when they
have things really good, when the world is going well,
they seem to get very energized about protesting, and I
wonder if this is an expression of the same thing.
Speaker 3 (37:58):
Yeah, now, I think that's definitely a phenomenon that you
have the luxury of worrying about certain things when you
don't have to worry about other things. Greg Easterbrook once
had a wonderful remark about it's something like, sure, people
used to be poor and miserable and underfed. Now they're
(38:21):
rich and miserable and well fed. They're still miserable, but
it's better to be miserable and well fed, isn't it,
and miserable and angry.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
By the way, it's so cool when we look across innovation.
There were just two stories when you were talking that
it struck me. One was Henry Ford. You may know
this quotation. Henry Ford said, I invented nothing new. I
merely assembled the innovations of a century of men before me,
which was which was a nice nod to the fact
(38:57):
that he was, you know, bending, breaking, blending, putting things together,
remixing things that had come before him.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
And on the failure point, you almost certainly saw this,
but maybe I don't know. Six years ago, Elon Musk.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
Released a video of the bloopers from SpaceX, all the crashes,
and obviously it's you know, it's easier to release your
blooper footage once you've got.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
A successful spacecraft.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
But it was lovely to watch that and to really
look at the celebration of failure that he did there.
Speaker 3 (39:30):
I mean, Elon Musk is the most extraordinary story. And
I was pretty skeptical about him for a long time.
I thought his attempt to remake the car industry was
far too dependent on subsidy and hype and would probably
fall flat on his face. I'd have been shortening his
(39:50):
stock if I did that kind of thing, which I don't,
and I was wrong, you know. I mean, sure, there's
still problems at TESLA, but it's an amazing achievement. I
also thought that space was a bit of a side show.
I mean, yeah, fun to do that, and and no
doubt NASA has been inefficient in various ways over the years,
(40:11):
and you could do it better, but really you're going
to really make it cheap enough to do stuff in space.
He has brought the price of launching a ton of
material into space down by ninety eight percent. I'm that's gobsmacking.
And I've read Walter Isaacson's biography to try and understand
what makes this man tick, and I'm none the wiser
(40:33):
in a way. I mean, he is so unique and
so extraordinary and doesn't come across as sort of particularly
brilliant in particular ways, and I think he's just He's
a good example actually of something at point I do
try and make in my writing on innovation, which is
that I don't terribly like the word creativity. You get
(40:56):
people saying, oh, I wish we could teach kids to
be more creative. I think if we did, we would
give them the wrong impression that innovation is done by
people of genius who have different blood in their veins,
and that ain't true. It's done by ordinary people who
have perseverance and imagination to keep trying things and to
(41:19):
keep gambling, like Elon Musk does, and Edison and Bezos
and others do as well. They're ordinary, you know. I
want to tell kids, these are quite ordinary people. They're
not that different from you and me. It's just they
keep trying things and eventually they stumble on something that works.
(41:44):
So anybody could be a great innovator in that sense.
I hope I'm right about that. I don't want to
encourage people to go off and think everybody can become
Elon Musk, but it is a it's an extraordinary story.
And the other thing that by the way that he's doing,
and I'm really struck by this whenever I'm on the
(42:05):
West coast these days. He is single handedly helping to
solve the conundrum that Peter Teele put in front of
us some years ago, which is that we've got really
good at inventing things with electrons, but not very good
at inventing things with atoms. In other words, you know
the famous question, where's my flying car? We've done absolutely
(42:31):
nothing to improve transport significantly in my lifetime. It's not
quite true, of course, but you know, where's the flying car,
where's the routine space travel, where's the supersonic airliner, where's
the personal jet back, where's the gyrocopter? You know that
we were all promised in the fifties and sixties, instead
of which we had, you know, airport delays and more
(42:52):
cup holders in cars for a while. You know, we've
got a few things. We've got drones and things now.
You know, I'll give you that. But on the other hand,
if you read that sci fi stuff from the fifties
and sixties, they hardly mentioned computing and communication. It's all
about transport, and in fact, we've had spectacular changes in communication.
(43:14):
The fifty years before that was nothing changed. They had
the telephone and nothing much else, but they had the
first airplanes, the first cars, the first rockets for men
on the moon, you know, all that kind of stuff.
So I've lived through the opposite. I've lived through incredible
changes in communication and computing and very little change in transport.
(43:34):
And I think that's changing because Elon Musk and the
people who have spun out of SpaceX in El Segundo
in particular, they're all atoms people. They're all trying to
change real things in the real world. You know. I've
visited companies that are reinventing supersonic airline engines, companies that
(43:59):
are reinventing prosthetic arms for people who've lost a limb.
They're not just doing video games anymore. Do you see
what I mean? And I mean you must know more
about this, David than I do, so I'd be interested
to know if you think I'm right to be intrigued
by this trend.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
Oh, I completely agree.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
What's interesting is that investors still have skittishness about investing
in hardware. They love to invest in software and they
think it's less expensive.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
But yes, the progress there has been quite extraordinary.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
So what do you think it takes cognitively or culturally
to maintain a rationally optimistic outlook.
Speaker 3 (44:40):
It's surprising how hard it.
Speaker 2 (44:44):
Is, you know.
Speaker 3 (44:45):
I read this book fifteen years ago called The Rational Optimist.
I went around talking about it for a few years,
and I would always get people coming out to me
at the end of the talks and saying, now, come on,
you can't still be irrational optimist. Look what that's happening
in Ibola, or look what's happening in Syria, or look
what's happening in Ukraine. And I would say, yeah, sure,
(45:08):
there's bad things happening in the world. They didn't say
they worn't. I'm just saying, look what's happening in Africa.
Look at the number of people being lifted out of poverty,
look at the number of people not dying of malaria.
They're not going to make headlines, but they're happening. And
I would try and say that, but I didn't always
convince myself, you know. I mean, I'm as susceptible as
anyone to getting depressed about the state of the world.
(45:30):
And if I read the newspapers, a lot of things
make me very grumpy, particularly at three in the morning.
You know, when you it's always more grumpy anyway. But
the big one for me is the opportunity cost of
getting policy wrong, not so much because it means our
descendants are going to be poor and cold and hungry,
(45:52):
but because our descendants are not going to be nearly
as rich as they could be. There's a bunch of
scenarios produced for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called
Shared socio Economic Pathways SSPs, and the best of them
have US ten times as rich in per capita income
(46:17):
in real terms in the year twenty one hundred as
we are today all over the world on average. It's
almost unimaginable. And they describe the world that would achieve this,
and they say it's one in which we burn a
lot of fossil fuels. And the Genie coefficient of inequality
(46:37):
comes right down because poor countries get quick rich quicker
than rich countries. We solve most of our technological problems,
most of our environmental problems, most of our social problems.
And I'm saying, well, what's the problem, And they say, well,
it's going to have more warming, Well how much more? Well,
it's going to reduce GDP by about as much as
(47:01):
GDP is today. In other words, instead of being ten
and a half times as rich, we're going to be
nine and a half times as rich. Okay, is that
really such a problem. The opportunity cost of choosing policies
that restrain economic growth and innovation for our grandchildren are enormous,
(47:28):
and we have to bear that in mind. You know,
it's all very well saying we're doing things for our grandchildren,
but the best present we can give our grandchildren is
a rapid rate of progress.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
When you think about the next fifty years, what are
you personally the most optimistic about?
Speaker 3 (47:47):
AI? Genomics energy AI is what everyone's talking about. I
think it's going to be fabulous. Yes, there are concerns
and worries there always are with every technology, but I'm
not convinced it's going to turn on us and destroy
us any more than biological species. Do you know? Great
(48:12):
white sharks and coronaviruses are trying to kill us every day.
They don't succeed because of countermeasures, saying will be true
of AIS. I also think they're not going to destroy jobs.
AI is going to make lawyers and doctors three times
as productive. That means they can charge one third as much.
(48:33):
That means we can hire more of them, etc. So
I'm really optimistic about that. Genomics is the dog that
hasn't barked yet. We have an incredible opportunity as a
results of our ability to read the recipe of our
own species and other species. It means we can do
(48:54):
really clever things to cure cancer, to combat many other diseases,
to improve people's lives in all sorts of ways. We're
seeing the fruits of that starting to come through now.
It's taken a bit longer than we thought after the
Human Genome Project, but it is happening. I suspect actually
biomedicine is going to be more important than AI. I mean,
(49:17):
just look at you know, GLP one agonists. They're having
a big effect. You could argue they're a bigger revolution
than AI right now. I mean that's going to I'm
sure they're not going to be forever, but it's and
I'm sure there'll be side effects and so on, but
you know there are. We're going to do really smart
things in biomedicine. And then finally energy. I genuinely think
(49:39):
we're going to get fusion in my lifetime I'm sixty
eight years old, though, so it's touch and go. I mean,
Sniper's aali already, and so it might not happen, but
I think the money that's pouring, the private money that's
pouring into fusion is going to produce results. There's about
(50:00):
four or five different technologies for how to do it.
They're all moving towards practical affordable fusion. If that happens,
and if it is affordable and that, you know, those
are big gifts, I admit. You know, it's been over
the horizon for fifty years already. Then the sky is
the limit on how much energy we can provide society.
(50:21):
And energy really is the secret of life, because the
economy is a thermodynamic thing. You know. We use energy
to rearrange the atoms of the world into useful combinations.
That's what we do. And the more energy we have,
the more we're going to be able to do that,
the more problems we're going to be able to solve.
You know, you can desalinate water from the ocean pretty
(50:42):
well anywhere on the planet if electricity is cheap enough,
for example, which you know, just makes everything from agriculture
to cities much more sustainable and nature reserves too, you know.
So those are some of the reasons I'm very optimistic.
Oh and another one, peak farmland. We are now growing food,
(51:07):
more food every year from a smaller acreage of farmland
every year. We're shrinking the farming footprint even as we
grow the farming output. That's I mean, that's now been
true for about fifteen years since we parked Peak farmland.
We'd be doing it even faster if we weren't doing
(51:28):
stupid things like biofuels, by the way, but that's another
story ethanol and so on. And that means that we
are returning land to nature. I mean, it is happening
on a spectacul The world is now net reforesting. Rich
countries are reforesting quite fast. Forest countries are still deforesting.
(51:50):
But in between there's a lot of countries shifting from
deforesting to reforesting. And you know, nature reserves on the
whole getting bigger. So I think that our grandchildren are
going to be able to live in a world where
the footprint of mankind, both in terms of growing food
and in terms of generating energy and in terms of manufacturing,
(52:11):
can be really quite small. And the rest of the
world can be this wonderful, verdant, green paradise. It'll never
be that good, of course, but it's a nice thought.
Speaker 1 (52:26):
That was my conversation with Matt Ridley, and the idea
of rational optimism is that when you step back and
look at the long arc of history, there's evidence for
massive progress, like declines in poverty and increases in lifespan,
and expanding access to knowledge and to medicine and to opportunity.
(52:48):
But the strange part is that people don't like hearing that.
Why is it that when you present data about the
world getting better it doesn't land as comforting. It often
lands as irritad I've watched this forever with writers like
Matt Ridley and Steven Pinker, who spend years assembling data
about long term improvement, and instead of people saying, oh, awesome,
(53:11):
maybe things are getting better than I thought, the reaction
is often resistance. Why does it happen? Well, part of
the answer lies in the brain. Statistics don't feel like anything,
and they very rarely map onto your lived experience because
your brain isn't wired to average across billions of lives
(53:31):
over decades. It's wired to track your immediate environment, your relationships,
your stressors, your sense of how things are going right now.
So when someone tells you, hey, globally things are improving,
your brain says, okay, whatever.
Speaker 2 (53:47):
How do I feel?
Speaker 1 (53:49):
And if you are feeling anxious or frustrated or angry
or whatever, then the statistics bounce right off you. They
very rarely penetrate the emotional layer where your sense of
the world actually lives. So that's one thing. And also socially,
if you tell other people bad news that seems to
(54:09):
have a kind of moral weight to it. It signals
serious and awareness. In other words, if you assert that
things are getting worse, that can feel like a more
responsible stance, like you're paying attention, like you're not being naive,
while optimism can feel like complacency, like you're overlooking problems
and you're not taking things seriously enough. So there's a
(54:31):
psychological and social pull towards pessimism. And yet when you
step back, you see the pattern, which is that every
generation feels this way. Every generation believes it's living through
uniquely dangerous times. And that brings me to a line
that I've always loved from the American radio broadcaster Paul Harvey,
(54:55):
who used to say, in times like these, it's important
to remember that there have always been times like these.
I love that line because it reminds us when we're
inside our moment, it always feels unprecedented. It always feels
like the stakes are higher, and the risks are sharper,
and the future is more uncertain than anything.
Speaker 2 (55:17):
That came before.
Speaker 1 (55:18):
But any level of studying history will tell you a
different story. There have always been threats, there have always
been fears, There have always been reasons to believe that
things might fall apart. So I want to add one
more layer to Paul Harvey's line. In times like these,
it's important to remember that previous generations often had it worse.
(55:41):
They faced diseases that we can now cure, They lived
without technologies that we take for granted. They navigated uncertainties
that would feel overwhelming to us today. But progress happened,
not without lots of setbacks, but it happened. And that
brings us back to the central challenge. We have to
(56:03):
hold on to both truths at once. The truth that
there are real problems, serious ones and urgent ones that
we need to hit hard, and the truth that across time,
there has been extraordinary improvement. Part of meeting that challenge
is to recognize that optimism doesn't ignore problems. Instead, it's
(56:25):
about recognizing that problems are what drive progress. Every challenge
becomes a target for innovation, Every constraint becomes an invitation
for new ideas to emerge. Go to eagleman dot com
(56:45):
slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Join the weekly discussions on my substack, and check out
and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of
each episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm
David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.
Host
David Eagleman
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