The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 153. Rational Optimism

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00:00:16.220 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and

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00:01:09.180 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. This is season four, episode four. I'm Michaela

00:01:14.840 Peterson. This episode was recorded with Matt Ridley on January 11th, 2021. Matt Ridley is a British

00:01:22.180 bestselling author, The Origins of Virtue, The Rational Optimist, How Innovation Works, and many

00:01:27.800 more, who's best known for his writings on science, the environment, and economics. He's also a well-respected

00:01:34.020 journalist, businessman, and a member of the House of Lords in the UK. Matt and Jordan spoke about

00:01:40.000 economic optimism, trade through the reciprocity of nations, enlightened self-interest, feeding 9

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00:04:18.820 I have the good fortune today of speaking with author Matt Ridley, who's written a number of books.

00:04:24.640 We'll list them in the description of the video. The ones I reviewed this week in preparation for

00:04:31.040 this interview include this one published in 1996, The Origins of Virtue, which is a lovely

00:04:37.360 investigation into the biological origins of morality, essentially a very thought-provoking book

00:04:42.920 and a very straightforward read for such a complex subject. The Rational Optimist, which was published,

00:04:49.780 I believe, in 2010, which I think probably serves as a pretty good description of Matt Ridley himself.

00:04:57.140 That was my impression after going through his work. And then more recent work,

00:05:02.500 How Innovation Works and Why It Requires Freedom to Flourish. Sorry. And Why It Flourishes in Freedom.

00:05:13.220 So, I wanted to talk to Matt primarily because I've been struck in my career as a university professor

00:05:24.820 and also on my tours talking to thousands of people, many of whom are desperate, especially young people,

00:05:31.780 because they're fed a never-ending diet of gloom and doom. It seems to be an Armageddon-like

00:05:38.760 cultural predisposition to assume without, to only look at evidence that suggests that the future is

00:05:45.900 going to be much worse than the past, despite the fact that the present is much better than the past.

00:05:51.080 And that's been the case for many decades, I would say. And Matt's books, they're a lovely read during

00:05:59.120 the COVID crisis, I would say, because, of course, it's a very rough time for everyone, I would say,

00:06:03.940 with the lockdowns and the uncertainty that reigns as a consequence of that. And

00:06:07.980 he very carefully documents the improvements that have been made in all around the world over the

00:06:14.900 last, especially over the last 400 years, this incredible explosion of technological intelligence

00:06:21.460 that's produced an unparalleled increase in human living standards by virtually any measure

00:06:30.060 across virtually all dimensions. And so, well, that's my rationale for talking to Matt. He's

00:06:37.400 a very straightforward author, and despite the complexity of the ideas. And so I'm really

00:06:42.700 happy to be speaking with him today.

00:06:45.700 Well, Jordan, thank you very much. It's a real honor to be speaking with you. And I'm someone who

00:06:49.900 enormously admires your courage and intellectual, what's the word, gravitas that you bring to

00:06:59.540 discussions. And I think it's just fantastic to be able to meet you, albeit online. And just on that

00:07:05.960 question of optimism, it's a bit of a evangelical cause for me this, because I was steeped in

00:07:16.200 pessimism as a young man, as a boy at school, at university. I believed that the population was

00:07:22.500 that explosion was unstoppable, that famine was inevitable, that the oil was going to run out,

00:07:26.820 that the rainforests were going to disappear, that cancer was going to shorten my lifespan,

00:07:30.900 that pesticides were going to make life unlivable, you know, all that kind of stuff.

00:07:34.580 And it came as quite a shock when I found that the world was getting better, not worse during my

00:07:38.460 life, dramatically so. And so I want to tell today's young people that there is another possibility

00:07:46.300 to the, you know, extinction rebellion kind of stuff that they're being fed by everybody,

00:07:52.260 not just the education system, but the media and their parents, you know, the grownups.

00:07:59.100 I think it's quite important to have some optimism. Why is it that with nothing but improvement behind

00:08:04.780 us, we're to expect nothing but deterioration before us? That's a great quote. And it's not me,

00:08:10.080 it's Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lord Macaulay, writing in 1830. So already then he was fed up with the

00:08:16.900 doomsters saying it can't get better. It's been getting better in the past, but it's going to get worse in

00:08:21.160 the future. And that's what every generation says. And I think so far, they've been wrong. And I think

00:08:25.340 there's a good chance they're wrong now. Well, it might be a consequence of our of the human

00:08:29.960 tendency to overweight negative information, right? We're wired to be more sensitive to threat and to

00:08:35.680 pain than we are to hope and pleasure. And I suppose that's because you can be 100% dead, but you can only

00:08:43.560 be so happy. And so it's better, it's better in some sense to err on the side of caution. And maybe when

00:08:48.820 that's played out on the field of future prognostications, everything that indicates

00:08:54.720 decline strikes us harder than everything that indicates that things are going to get better.

00:09:01.000 I mean, it's a real mystery, right? Because the news tilts itself very hard towards the catastrophic.

00:09:06.120 And I can't think of any explanation for that, given that news purveyors seek attention, I can't come up

00:09:13.460 with a more intelligent explanation than our proclivity for negative emotion. But we do have

00:09:18.160 to overcome that to some degree, if it's not in accordance with the facts.

00:09:22.400 Yeah, there's an interesting angle there that I think might be a clue to what's going on.

00:09:29.620 Several people have observed that we are less pessimistic about our own lives than we are about

00:09:36.100 larger units. So we're not very pessimistic about our village. We're not very pessimistic about our town.

00:09:42.580 But we're very pessimistic about our country. And we're extremely pessimistic about the planet.

00:09:47.340 The bigger the unit you look at, the more pessimistic people are. And of course,

00:09:52.500 you know, so people on the whole think their own life's going to work out, it's going to be fine,

00:09:56.520 they're going to stay married, they're going to earn a lot of money, you know, that they're okay when

00:10:01.020 they talk about themselves. And I think what that's telling you is that your information about your

00:10:05.280 own life comes from your own experience, your information about the planet comes from the media.

00:10:09.860 And that implies to me that it's not just our inbuilt biases that are doing this, that there

00:10:16.360 is a there is a top down effect from what the culture chooses to tell us.

00:10:23.460 Do you have any sense of the motivation for that? I mean, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume

00:10:28.860 that much of what drives the production of the news is the search for attention, the search for eyes.

00:10:35.660 And you'd expect the news to evolve towards the maximally attention grabbing form, right? And so

00:10:44.080 apart, apart from the ability to grab attention, can you think of any reason why pessimism

00:10:52.100 is this is the is the sales item of the day? From the perspective of the news companies?

00:10:59.480 Exactly. And this is where my argument breaks down a bit, because it becomes circular.

00:11:04.220 Because I say, yeah, you're right. The reason they're telling us bad news is because they know

00:11:08.340 we're interested in bad news. So that on the whole, we don't look at good news stories to anything like

00:11:13.900 the same degree. So we're avid consumers of pessimism. And that and they play to that.

00:11:21.880 But there's another phenomenon, too, which is that good news tends to be gradual and bad news tends to

00:11:29.380 be sudden. That's not always true, of course, but it's surprisingly often is true. You know, 168,000

00:11:38.380 people were lifted out of extreme poverty yesterday, and the day before and the day before and the day

00:11:43.880 before it's a it's a it's a it's never newsworthy. Whereas 3000 people were killed when an airliner

00:11:51.560 flew into a skyscraper. That is newsworthy. Because it's so sudden, so unexpected. So it's so new.

00:11:59.760 Well, it's funny when I when I when I ran across statistics like the one that you just quoted,

00:12:05.100 which I think is worth repeating over and over 170,000 people lifted out of poverty today,

00:12:10.420 could be three inch headlines every day, because it's an unparalleled event in human history,

00:12:15.100 although it's occurring every day right now. But maybe it's also because you have to prepare for

00:12:21.200 the worst, but you don't really have to prepare for the best. You know, if if the best is happening,

00:12:27.240 then you can just keep on doing what you're doing. But if the but if there's a flaw somewhere or an error,

00:12:32.540 then maybe you have to make some changes in your behavior. And that might be another reason why we're

00:12:36.660 we're prone to seek out negative information.

00:12:41.420 And does that explain why we're loss averse to the extent we are?

00:12:45.500 Well, I think so. I think it's the same phenomenon.

00:12:49.760 So anyways, the point is, is that one of the points is that despite the potential adaptive utility of

00:12:56.480 being more sensitive to negative information, it can really get out of hand, right? Because it can

00:13:01.120 precipitate, say, a nihilistic attitude with regards to the future or depression or high levels of

00:13:06.820 anxiety or, or resentment, or even hatred of humanity, for that matter, if we're the destructive

00:13:13.600 species that we're always made out to be. And so it still seems to me that work that concentrates on

00:13:20.560 demonstrating from a historical perspective, how much better things are getting is very much worth

00:13:25.580 putting forward. So and there's a deeper element of optimism in your work as well, which is, in a

00:13:31.360 sense, a kind of non naive Rousseauianism. I mean, Rousseau, of course, famously believed that people

00:13:38.000 were good and that human institutions made them as malevolent and evil as they might become.

00:13:43.020 So we're naturally good and corrupted by culture. And I think that's half the story, because we're also

00:13:48.900 naturally bad and ennobled by culture. But despite that, you make a really good case in

00:13:54.880 the origins of virtue, that virtue itself, that morality itself has a biological basis, and that

00:14:03.240 it's grounded in our evolutionary history. And I'll let you, if you would, I'd ask you to

00:14:09.240 expound on that a little bit. You talk about the discovery of the future and the necessity of

00:14:17.500 reciprocity as driving agents in that evolution. And that's, it's a wonderful idea. And it's a profound

00:14:24.800 idea, because it does hint at a non arbitrary base for, for moral thinking. And that's, I think,

00:14:33.200 that that's been something I've been pursuing my entire life, I would say, but

00:14:36.840 Well, what I set out to do in that book, and it is admittedly, 26 years ago, or something that I

00:14:47.000 finished writing it. So I may have changed my mind on one or two things. But what I set out to do was to

00:14:54.580 persuade the reader that our good instincts are as animal as our bad instincts, or our good behavior is

00:15:02.500 as natural, is as instinctive, if you like, as our bad behavior. We tend to get, I think, from

00:15:10.920 Christianity, mainly, a view that there's a deep sort of animal side of us, which is bad,

00:15:19.580 but we can teach each other to be good. And I don't think that's right. I think there's just as

00:15:25.240 much of an animal instinct to be good in us as there is bad. Because if you look at, you know,

00:15:32.520 we are a social species, lots of species are very social. And what they tend to do is they express

00:15:38.380 various forms of kindness and generosity and self-sacrifice towards other members of their

00:15:43.520 species. The most obvious example is that we're nice to our children, as are most creatures. And

00:15:49.740 the reason we're nice to our children is obviously because we share their genes. People who were nice

00:15:55.160 to their children tended to leave more children behind than people who weren't nice to their

00:15:58.600 children. And so the genes for being nice to children thrived at the expense of genes that did

00:16:05.060 the opposite. But obviously, it goes further than that. There are social species that collaborate

00:16:10.220 with other ones. And they do so often with a form of, that collaborate with strangers, as it were.

00:16:16.540 And they do so often with a form of reciprocity. You know, you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.

00:16:21.420 I'll be nice to you today. You'll be nice to me tomorrow. You know, when a fish visits a cleaner

00:16:27.920 station on the reef and allows small fish to clean the parasites off it, it's resisting the temptation

00:16:33.340 to eat the cleaner fish. And so there's a mutual gain, gain from trade there.

00:16:38.760 Yeah, that's a remarkable example that these cleaning stations are set up on coral reefs,

00:16:44.400 where small fish congregate, often brightly colored, and large fish line up like cars at a gas station

00:16:50.960 to have their scales and even their teeth denuded of parasites and dying tissue. And some of those

00:17:02.020 cleaning stations are apparently tens of thousands of years old.

00:17:06.500 So yes, that's, that's what, and of course, that's a cross species collaboration. You know,

00:17:11.340 this is, this is, you know, two different species collaborating. But I don't know whether it's in

00:17:17.780 that book or later, I, in the end, come down on to the view that that kind of reciprocity,

00:17:25.440 you scratch my back, I scratch yours, is surprisingly rare, actually, that actually,

00:17:30.580 you can't find that many examples. There's a wonderful example of vampire bats doing it,

00:17:35.240 vampire bats that didn't get a blood meal, beg for one from their neighbor, the neighbor then,

00:17:40.200 you then return the favor to the neighbor next time that he doesn't get a blood meal. And that way,

00:17:46.940 you're both better off. Actually, it turned out that they were closely related. These were,

00:17:51.340 this was to some degree, a family thing as well. So actually, and in human beings, it isn't very

00:17:59.520 common for me to say, look, you did me a favor yesterday. So I'm going to do you the same favor

00:18:05.160 today. What are the circumstances under which that's going to happen? You know, I mean, I'm going

00:18:08.580 to have too much food today, and you're going to have too much food tomorrow. It's kind of doesn't

00:18:13.080 happen very often. But we human beings have developed another form of exchange, which is far more

00:18:19.160 powerful, which is, I've got more food than I need, you've got more water than you need,

00:18:24.500 I'm thirsty, you're hungry, we'll come to a deal, we'll swap. So we'll swap different things at the

00:18:29.480 same time, rather than the same things at different times. And for me, that's the real insight into how

00:18:36.440 human sociality and cooperation evolved. Now, I'm only here repeating what Adam Smith said in

00:18:44.620 the wealth of nations about the, you know, the butcher and the baker are not giving you bread

00:18:52.980 and beer, because they want to be kind to you. They're doing it to make a living. But they end

00:18:59.100 up being kind to you, and you end up being kind to them by giving them money, which is what they want.

00:19:03.060 Well, I also thought that in some sense, you made a deeper case than that to talking about the human

00:19:09.320 capacity to understand and envision the future in reciprocity requires the ability to view transactions

00:19:19.220 across time. And so as soon as a creature becomes aware of the future, like we have, we can even engage

00:19:25.360 in reciprocal behavior with our future selves. And that makes our self interest a much more complex

00:19:31.180 phenomenon. So I might define self interest as the impulsive pursuit of pleasure. And I think

00:19:38.140 that's a perfectly reasonable definition, perhaps when you're talking about animals. But

00:19:42.900 the question immediately arises, pleasure over what time span and at what cost? And I'm compelled by my

00:19:51.760 knowledge of the future to act in a way that doesn't betray my future self. And that's very much

00:19:57.040 like acting in a it. So then I'm a collective that stretches across time as an individual,

00:20:01.860 and I have to act in the best interests of that collective. And I don't think that's very different

00:20:06.960 than acting in the best interests of other people. You know, if I'm in my last book, I wrote about

00:20:13.800 the morality that emerges from games, there's a neuroscientist who you might be familiar with,

00:20:18.960 Yach Panksepp, who studied rat behavior in games. And he showed that if you pair two male juvenile

00:20:26.560 rats together, the one with a 10% body weight advantage will pin the other almost 100% of the

00:20:34.000 time. And you might say, well, what that demonstrates is that might makes right the stronger

00:20:40.140 animal wins. But if you pair them together repeatedly, after the first bout, the defeated rat

00:20:46.520 juvenile has to be the inviter of play in the next match. So he'll invite the bigger rat to play,

00:20:55.200 but over paired over repeated pairings, unless the big rat lets the little rat win about 30% of the

00:21:02.520 time, the little rat will stop inviting him to play. Right. So what happens is that you get an

00:21:09.060 emergent morality, which is not the ability to win any given game, but the ability to repeat

00:21:16.520 repeatedly play a multitude of games. And there's something in that that's very much like what

00:21:21.700 you wrote about in The Origin of Virtue and something very much like a complex reciprocity,

00:21:27.640 right? So where you store your good behavior in your reputation, essentially. And that's of great

00:21:34.560 advantage. Yeah. And there is this very, very simple thing that was happening in the 1990s when I wrote

00:21:41.620 that book, which was the people were playing the Prisoner's Dilemma game on computers and finding

00:21:47.000 out which strategy worked. And the Prisoner's Dilemma game is simply a game in which if both players

00:21:55.860 agree to remain silent, then they benefit each other. But you can make a bigger gain by betraying

00:22:02.180 the other one. But then if he betrays you as well, you both end up with nothing. So you've got to find a

00:22:07.020 way of trusting each other enough to cooperate. You're being held in separate cells and interrogated

00:22:12.340 separately is the sort of story that's being told. And it turned out that the best strategy in a

00:22:20.880 repeated business dilemma game is tit for tat. That is to say, be nice first time around, cooperate on

00:22:30.300 the first play, and then simply do whatever the other guy did on the previous play. So as to

00:22:37.540 punish or reward the other guy for behaving badly or well.

00:22:43.080 Right. So you're not a sucker. Using that strategy, you're cooperative, but you're not a sucker.

00:22:48.020 Yeah. And in a sense, we are engaged in iterative, repeated Prisoner's Dilemma games all the time.

00:22:57.460 You know, you don't say, well, I'm not going to bother paying for this loaf of bread. I'm just going

00:23:03.820 to grab it and run because then I'm better off because then you can't go back to the shop the

00:23:09.840 next day. You'll be recognized by the police. Yeah. So it's morality as the shadow of the future

00:23:18.120 in some sense. Right. And again, this all comes back to Adam Smith, I think, because his previous

00:23:24.240 book, his book in 1759, not The Wealth of Nations, but The Theory of Moral Sentiments, seems to me to

00:23:29.900 have a very profound insight in me. And it's taken a long time for me to understand it. And that is that

00:23:34.760 morality isn't, as it were, taught to us by priests and other people. It's essentially a calculation by

00:23:41.580 us as to what works in the society we're in. And you kind of calibrate your behavior to find out what

00:23:48.300 is moral, what is ethical, and so on. And, you know, 500 years ago, the right ethical thing to do

00:23:54.520 when somebody snubbed you was to, you know, challenge them to a duel and run them through with a

00:24:00.220 sword. Well, that doesn't get you very far today. So we've learned that actually, we've evolved a

00:24:10.600 higher form of morality, sort of gradually by standing back and saying, in this society,

00:24:21.460 what's going to get me the best rewards, given how other people are behaving? Because of course,

00:24:27.660 everything's a moving target. It seems to me too, that that's deep enough now. So imagine that the

00:24:32.680 landscape that human beings occupy is a social landscape, but it's a social landscape that

00:24:37.500 extends across time. And we've been conscious of that for a long time, at least 150,000 years. So

00:24:43.600 that's about when we changed into the genetic, we changed genetically into the subspecies that we are

00:24:49.560 now. And so you can imagine that given the utility of perceiving the future and the clear benefits of

00:24:59.320 reciprocal action, that that's altered us enough neurologically, so that even conscience speaks to

00:25:05.480 us internally in terms of reciprocity. So it, and that goes, that goes along with the idea that this

00:25:12.320 isn't something taught by priests, it might be something that priests and other ethicists remind us of.

00:25:18.440 Yes. So we can have an inbuilt moral sense, that's got a biological basis that still requires

00:25:27.060 cultural activation and modification. And the analog to that would be our instinct for language.

00:25:33.760 You can't teach chimpanzees language, because they don't have the biological capacity for it,

00:25:39.780 or not to the degree that we do. Although some parrots can can perform remarkable stunts in that regard.

00:25:45.420 But we still have to be taught language, or we have to be at least put in an environment where it's

00:25:51.160 happening. So...

00:25:54.040 Exactly. And yeah, so, yeah, it just because, you know, there's a language instinct, but that doesn't

00:26:02.120 mean that every child is born speaking Hebrew, as James, the second king of England is supposed to

00:26:07.180 have, James, the first is supposed to have thought was going to be the case.

00:26:11.720 So, you know, I would say that I've studied archetypal representations of moral behavior,

00:26:18.740 because I think that dramatic stories represent various, they represent various pathways through

00:26:26.940 life, like pathways writ large, right? It's drama is life with all the boring bits edited out.

00:26:32.460 And what drama is trying to present to us are different modes of behavior, some of them

00:26:37.180 unsatisfactory, and those would be the bad guys, and some of them highly satisfactory. And I would

00:26:42.800 say the central hero in, in, in dramatic representations is someone who's as fully reciprocal as

00:26:49.980 possible. That's, that's what the drama is aiming at. And, and I think that's also what you're doing

00:26:57.000 with your children. When you teach them to be good sports, when they're playing a game, you basically

00:27:01.260 say to them something like, although you don't know this, you say something like, it doesn't matter

00:27:06.280 whether you win or lose, it matters how you play the game. And the reason that matters, and this is

00:27:11.200 the part you don't say, because you don't know it is that life is a never ending series of diverse

00:27:16.620 games. And your goal, as if you want to be a winner, is to be invited to play as many games as

00:27:23.900 possible. And what that means is that you have to, you have to have a morality that works across the

00:27:30.060 set of all possible games, and it has to trump the morality that drives you to win a single game.

00:27:37.080 Yeah, and the phrase for that is enlightened self interest, as opposed to short term self

00:27:42.280 interest. And I think it's a very important insight. For me, the interesting one is that

00:27:48.340 that connects with economic optimism, that connects with how we got to be so much better off, because it

00:27:55.820 brought us the division of labor, it essentially enabled us to say, look, I'll make the spears,

00:28:01.600 you make the axes, and we'll both be better off, because we'll both be good at what we're doing.

00:28:05.760 And even if I'm better at making both spears and axes than you are, it still pays me because I'm

00:28:10.980 slightly better at making spears than axes, for me to make the spears and get you to make the axes.

00:28:15.900 That's the basis of trade. That's David Ricardo's theory in one Stone Age story.

00:28:23.440 Yeah, so when we started to be intelligent enough and sophisticated enough so that a debt could be

00:28:30.080 repaid in currency other than that in which it was accrued. And so what that must have meant was that

00:28:36.400 we developed the abstract representation of a reciprocal debt. Not only did we reciprocate like

00:28:43.060 chimpanzees do, for example, with grooming, but we could conceptualize the fact that we owed or were

00:28:49.160 owed, and then we're able to be repaid in all sorts of different manners. And by the way,

00:28:57.640 it wasn't in this book, but it was in The Rational Optimist that I did quite a diversion into the history

00:29:05.740 of trade. And it's very persuasive that the trade is far, far older than agriculture, that pre-agricultural

00:29:15.260 people were trading probably 100,000 years ago. The oldest evidence we've got is seashells moving

00:29:22.640 long distances inland from the coast of North Africa around 100,000 years ago. And they're moving these

00:29:28.880 long distances not because somebody's walking hundreds of miles to the seashore, picking up some

00:29:33.440 seashells and walking back, but because they're going hand to hand from tribes. And we can find,

00:29:38.340 I think I do tell the story in The Origins of Virtue of the Yir Yoront, who were an Aboriginal tribe

00:29:44.020 living in northern Australia, who were getting stingray barbs, as many stingray barbs as they wanted

00:29:53.740 on the coast by catching stingrays. But what they really wanted was stone axes. And several hundred miles

00:30:00.460 inland, there was a quarry that produced stone axes. And the tribe that owned that traded with the Yir Yoront

00:30:05.880 via several other trades. And you can actually see the exchange rate of stingray barbs for stone axes

00:30:13.100 along that trail. So that's people being nice to each other when they could be fighting each other.

00:30:22.020 Right, right. Well, I think it was in The Origins of Virtue, too, that you chased the idea of trade

00:30:27.740 down into the past even further, relating it to the strange human propensity to share food,

00:30:35.600 and associated that as well with hunting. And I believe you used the example of mammoths,

00:30:41.620 which is also an example that I've found fascinating, because obviously you can't store a whole mammoth.

00:30:46.700 But you can store it in the form of your reputation by sharing it. And if you store it in the form of

00:30:53.380 your reputation as a generous hunter, then you can be repaid back indefinitely in a currency that

00:31:00.260 doesn't spoil. So maybe it's, and you do outline it in this manner, human beings share food in a very

00:31:11.060 egalitarian manner within families. So men and women share food, men mostly meat, historically

00:31:16.840 speaking, and women mostly what they gather. And that makes for a balanced diet. And that ability

00:31:25.380 to exchange food seems to me to be perhaps the biological platform on which the idea of trade per

00:31:32.340 say, was able to evolve. So once you can share food and trade, and enter into a reciprocal arrangement

00:31:39.620 with regards to food, then it isn't that much of a leap to start do that with other commodities,

00:31:45.960 especially those that might be related to the provision of food, like stone axes or arrows or,

00:31:51.680 or, or any any implement of that sort.

00:31:54.720 I'm rather fascinated by the fact that a, a sexual division of labor over food is very,

00:32:05.620 very universal and ancient, that men hunt and women gather essentially in, in hunter gatherer

00:32:11.280 societies. Now, in some societies, gathering is much more important than hunting. And in some

00:32:16.340 societies, hunting is much more important than gathering, like the Inuit, for example, is the

00:32:20.200 latter case. And there are sort of odd types of foraging that are neither gathering nor, nor

00:32:27.780 hunting. So honey tends to be something that men get, but because it tends to be that you get it

00:32:33.280 from hunting. It's like hunting, as it were, and digging up reptiles and rats tends to be something

00:32:42.780 that women do, because it's like digging up roots. Now, some people think this is a sexist view,

00:32:47.720 you know, that I'm saying, you know, a woman's place is digging, a man's place is out hunting.

00:32:53.320 But I think it's just that, unlike other species, we really did invent this really useful distinction,

00:33:01.500 whereby you've got the best of both worlds, you've got the protein from hunting, but you've got the

00:33:05.860 reliability of food from gathering. So on the whole, you didn't go hungry. But on the whole,

00:33:11.000 you did get access to protein, which was difficult thing for women to do when they had small dependent

00:33:15.540 kids and things like that. And you can sort of see an echo in it today that far more vegetarians

00:33:20.980 are women, or rather far more women are vegetarians, if you like, that may, and you know, men just like

00:33:28.080 meat more than women do. So I think there is a deep thing going on here. But I've got to be very

00:33:33.940 careful talking about it, because people are quick to get upset and think that you're in some sense

00:33:39.140 saying something very, very prejudicial. People get upset now, if you accept that there are sex

00:33:44.520 differences, and if you deny that there are sex differences, so they're going to get upset no

00:33:48.300 matter what you think. So you might as well just think what you think. You know, the advantage to

00:33:54.220 that sexual division of labor, in part, is that it provides additional utility for long term

00:34:00.560 relationships, because they're actually more, because of the union of specialization there,

00:34:06.620 the gathering and the hunting. You're deriving your food from more than one source, it means it's more

00:34:12.520 reliable across time. And that's a prerequisite for the origin of long term pair bonds. So it's a

00:34:18.440 really good thing. And no one loses in that trade. And that's, well, that's Adam Smith's point. And the

00:34:24.440 point of optimist, it's funny, because economists tend to be optimistic, and biologists tend to be

00:34:29.820 pessimistic on along when discussing questions like this. But if you make virtue...

00:34:35.720 While we're on that, it's just that this is perhaps a digression, but I've also been fascinated,

00:34:41.840 but it's quite nice to challenge people and say, how about the reproductive division of labor? We're

00:34:46.740 happy with all sorts of divisions of labor, you know, you hunt, I gather, you work one kind of job,

00:34:54.060 I work another kind of job. We're prepared to share out absolutely everything. But the one we never

00:35:01.780 do is the reproductive division of labor. Ants and bees do, they say, well, we're going to leave the

00:35:07.420 queen to do the reproducing, and we're all going to be the workers. Imagine, you know, not even in

00:35:12.620 England with the queen, do we expect to do that? It's the one thing we try and do for ourselves is

00:35:19.640 and hang on to. And that's, for me, rubs home, drives home the message of just how universal this

00:35:27.260 division of labor concept is otherwise in our life, because it's so shocking to try and think of a

00:35:33.060 reproductive division of labor. It's just something we don't aspire to.

00:35:38.060 Okay, so your optimism, it manifested itself, at least in part in your writing career, with this notion that

00:35:44.460 there's a biological origin of virtue. And so it's a fundamental instinct, and there's a universality

00:35:49.500 about it, which, which I think is very optimistic, because if there is a universal basis for morality,

00:35:55.400 despite its, its obvious cultural differences, it means that we can potentially understand each

00:36:01.240 other well enough to engage in reciprocal action across even tribal boundaries, which we're obviously

00:36:07.020 capable of doing. And it implies that we might understand each other enough so that we could

00:36:12.620 establish something like a long term peace, that would be the hope. But so so that's, that's a very

00:36:19.060 fundamentally optimistic viewpoint. And then when when you move into analysis of, of, of innovation

00:36:26.280 and trade, you start doing that with the rational optimist, you're documenting transformations that

00:36:32.540 have made life better. And, and I could, I could list a couple of those, and maybe we can talk about

00:36:37.800 them. So in the rational optimism, optimist, for example, you talk about the fact, well, you start by

00:36:45.000 talking about ideas having sex. And so that's a form of reciprocity, I would say, that's the exchange of

00:36:53.500 information rather than, than, than goods, but information is exchangeable for goods. And so in

00:36:59.860 some sense, it's this, it's the abstract equivalent of the exchange of goods.

00:37:03.760 Yeah, but, but, but, but I'm, I'm in a sense, I'm being much more literal, even than that, because

00:37:09.540 sex is the process by which genes get shuffled. And you, you recombine genes with new combinations. So

00:37:18.540 you've got a gene for, for fur in one reptile, and you've got a gene for milk in another reptile,

00:37:24.100 and you bring them together, and you've got a mammal that has both fur and milk. And that couldn't

00:37:29.900 happen without sex, because they'd stay in separate lineages. So sex is the process that enables

00:37:37.060 genetic novelties to find each other and combine. It's what makes evolution cumulative, in effect.

00:37:45.040 And I'm saying that exchange has exactly the same role in innovation, that, that one, one tribe can

00:37:52.260 invent, you know, one gadget, and another tribe can invent another gadget, and you can't bring them

00:38:00.200 together, unless they're trading. And the trading is what enables you to make culture cumulative, to

00:38:06.900 start to say, well, hang on, I'll have that, I'll have that invention that was made in California, and I'll

00:38:13.300 have that invention that was made in China, and I'll, I'll actually be able to benefit from both of them. So it's a

00:38:18.480 very, it's a very explicit metaphor. I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a flippant, attention grabbing

00:38:25.100 phrase, ideas having sex. And it, I used it for the title of a talk, a TED talk, and it rather caught

00:38:30.980 on. And the next TED meeting, I went to, they were giving out badges saying, whose ideas have you had

00:38:38.520 sex with recently? It's a bit weird. Who have your, anyway, whatever, you get the point.

00:38:45.000 Well, we do talk about a fertile conversation. We do. And we talk about cross-fertilization.

00:38:53.220 Yes, yes, yes. And well, you hope that someone who's specialized in one area can talk to someone

00:38:58.540 who's specialized in another, and that at the border, where there aren't specialists, new ideas

00:39:03.760 can be generated. And I mean, I've seen that over and over when talking to, well, when looking for

00:39:09.380 scientific innovation, it's, it's one of the things that's happened in the field of psychology over the

00:39:13.880 last hundred years is that a lot of our radical innovations, especially on the methodological

00:39:19.860 front have been a consequence of engineers being trained as psychologists and bringing what they

00:39:25.240 knew as engineers into the field. So a lot of, a lot of fertile intellectual activity happens

00:39:32.460 where two fields rub together, so to speak.

00:39:36.640 That's right. And some of the great breakthroughs in biology came from physicists moving into biology.

00:39:41.520 You, you, you move from when ideas have sex to the idea of a better today. And I was actually going

00:39:48.900 to read something, if you don't mind, from your book, from page 12, which I, which I liked quite a

00:39:54.040 bit. It's, I suppose it's funny in a black hearted sort of way. So there are people today who think life

00:40:02.160 was better in the past. They argue that there was not only a simplicity, tranquility, sociability,

00:40:07.560 and spirituality about life in the distant past that has been lost, but a virtue, too.

00:40:13.400 This rose-tinted nostalgia, please note, is generally confined to the wealthy.

00:40:17.780 It is easier to wax allegaiic for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long drop

00:40:22.760 toilet. Imagine that it is 1800, somewhere in Western Europe or Eastern North America.

00:40:29.480 The family is gathering around the hearth in the simple timber-framed house.

00:40:33.440 Father reads aloud from the Bible, while mother prepares to dish out a stew of beef and onions.

00:40:39.380 The baby boy is being comforted by one of his sisters, and the eldest lad is pouring water from

00:40:43.900 a pitcher into the earthenware mugs on the table. His elder sister is feeding the horse in the stable.

00:40:50.180 Outside, there is no noise of traffic. There are no drug dealers, and neither dioxins nor radioactive

00:40:56.200 fallout have been found in the cow's milk. All is tranquil. A bird sings outside the window.

00:41:01.780 I am going to read the next section, too. It is a very interesting paragraph because it speaks to

00:41:07.360 something that I think has a dramatic origin, too, a mythological or archetypal origin, which is the

00:41:13.340 idea of the simple life where everyone is living in harmony with nature and the depredations of

00:41:19.220 culture have not yet manifested themselves. It is Rousseauian, isn't it?

00:41:25.440 It's Rousseauian, but it's deep. It's deeper than that as well, because it actually reflects a truth is

00:41:30.560 that there is a purity about individual individuals that can be corrupted by society. But you have to

00:41:35.980 take the reverse position as well if you're going to get things balanced. Well, then you you add a

00:41:40.460 corrective to this, which is quite comical. Oh, please. Though this is one of the better off families in the

00:41:47.120 village, father's scripture reading is interrupted by a bronchitic cough that presages the pneumonia that will

00:41:54.020 kill him at 53, not helped by the wood smoke of the fire, right? And indoor pollution is still a

00:42:00.320 leading cause of mortality worldwide, often from the romantic hearth. He is lucky. Life expectancy

00:42:06.580 even in England was less than 40 in 1800. The baby will die of the smallpox that is now causing him to

00:42:12.700 cry. His sister will soon be the chattel of a drunken husband. The water the sun is pouring tastes of the

00:42:18.480 cows that drink from the brook. And that would be if the water was good, I would say toothache

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00:46:28.420 today. Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. This is season four, episode four. I'm Mikayla Peterson.

00:46:37.080 This episode was recorded with Matt Ridley on January 11th, 2021. Matt Ridley is a British

00:46:44.060 best-selling author, The Origins of Virtue, The Rational Optimist, How Innovation Works, and many

00:46:49.720 more, who's best known for his writings on science, the environment, and economics. He's also a well-respected

00:46:55.920 journalist, businessman, and a member of the House of Lords in the UK. Matt and Jordan spoke about

00:47:01.900 economic optimism, trade through the reciprocity of nations, enlightened self-interest, feeding nine

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00:49:04.180 slash peterson. Thanks to our sponsors for making this possible. Thanks to you guys for listening.

00:49:08.800 I hope you enjoy the episode. If you do, remember my dad has a Clips channel too at Jordan Peterson Clips

00:49:14.320 if you want to see short-form content, and the video version of this podcast will be released

00:49:19.200 Monday, February 1st on his YouTube channel. Enjoy.

00:49:22.460 I have the good fortune today of speaking with author Matt Ridley, who's written a number of

00:49:46.280 books. We'll list them in the description of the video. The ones I reviewed this week in preparation

00:49:52.540 for this interview include this one, published in 1996, The Origins of Virtue, which is a lovely

00:49:59.280 investigation into the biological origins of morality, essentially. A very thought-provoking book

00:50:04.840 and a very straightforward read for such a complex subject. The Rational Optimist, which was published,

00:50:11.680 I believe, in 2010, which I think probably serves as a pretty good description of Matt Ridley himself.

00:50:19.020 That was my impression after going through his work. And then more recent work, How Innovation Works

00:50:26.540 and Why It Requires Freedom to Flourish. Sorry. And Why It Flourishes in Freedom.

00:50:35.140 I wanted to talk to Matt primarily because I've been struck in my career as a university professor

00:50:46.720 and also on my tours talking to thousands of people, many of whom are desperate, especially

00:50:52.800 young people, because they're fed a never-ending diet of gloom and doom. It seems to be an Armageddon-like

00:51:00.680 cultural predisposition to assume without... to only look at evidence that suggests that the future

00:51:07.640 is going to be much worse than the past, despite the fact that the present is much better than the

00:51:12.500 past. And that's been the case for many decades, I would say. And Matt's books, they're a lovely read

00:51:20.660 during the COVID crisis, I would say, because, of course, it's a very rough time for everyone,

00:51:25.280 I would say, with the lockdowns and the uncertainty that reigns as a consequence of that. And

00:51:29.900 he very carefully documents the improvements that have been made in all around the world over the

00:51:36.800 last, especially over the last 400 years, this incredible explosion of technological intelligence

00:51:43.360 that's produced an unparalleled increase in human living standards by virtually any measure

00:51:51.980 across virtually all dimensions. And so, well, that's my rationale for talking to Matt. He's

00:51:59.320 a very straightforward author, and despite the complexity of the ideas. And so I'm really

00:52:04.620 happy to be speaking with him today.

00:52:07.600 Well, Jordan, thank you very much. It's a real honor to be speaking with you. And I'm someone who

00:52:11.820 enormously admires your courage and intellectual, what's the word, gravitas that you bring to

00:52:21.460 discussions. And I think it's just fantastic to be able to meet you, albeit online. And just on that

00:52:27.880 question of optimism, it's a bit of a evangelical cause for me this, because I was steeped in

00:52:38.120 pessimism as a young man, as a boy in school, at university. I believed that the population was

00:52:44.420 that explosion was unstoppable, that famine was inevitable, that the oil was going to run out,

00:52:48.740 that the rainforests were going to disappear, that cancer was going to shorten my lifespan,

00:52:52.820 that pesticides were going to make life unlivable, you know, all that kind of stuff.

00:52:56.500 And it came as quite a shock when I found that the world was getting better, not worse during my

00:53:00.380 life, dramatically so. And so I want to tell today's young people that there is another possibility

00:53:08.220 to the, you know, extinction rebellion kind of stuff that they're being fed by everybody,

00:53:14.180 not just the education system, but the media, and their parents, you know, the grownups. I think

00:53:21.420 it's quite important to have some optimism. Why is it that with nothing but improvement behind us,

00:53:26.980 we're to expect nothing but deterioration before us? That's a great quote. And it's not me, it's

00:53:32.400 Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lord Macaulay, writing in 1830. So already then he was fed up with the

00:53:38.800 doomsters saying it can't get better. It's been getting better in the past, but it's going to get worse

00:53:42.980 in the future. And that's what every generation says. And I think so far they've been wrong. And

00:53:47.080 I think there's a good chance they're wrong now. Well, it might be a consequence of our,

00:53:51.440 of the human tendency to overweight negative information, right? We're wired to be more

00:53:56.220 sensitive to threat and to pain than we are to hope and pleasure. And I suppose that's because you

00:54:03.160 can be 100% dead, but you can only be so happy. And so it's better, it's better in some sense to

00:54:08.640 err on the side of caution. And maybe when that's played out on the field of future prognostications,

00:54:15.580 everything that indicates decline strikes us harder than everything that indicates that things

00:54:21.900 are going to get better. I mean, it's a real mystery, right? Because the news tilts itself very

00:54:25.820 hard towards the catastrophic. And I can't think of any explanation for that, given that news purveyors

00:54:33.140 seek attention, I can't come up with a more intelligent explanation than our proclivity

00:54:38.260 for negative emotion. But we do have to overcome that to some degree, if it's not in accordance with

00:54:42.460 the facts. Yeah, there's, there's a, there's a, there's an interesting angle there that I think

00:54:48.680 might be a clue to what's going on. Several people have observed that we are less pessimistic about our

00:54:56.340 own lives than we are about larger units. So we're not very pessimistic about our village. We're not

00:55:02.840 very pessimistic about our town. But we're very pessimistic about our country. And we're extremely

00:55:07.600 pessimistic about the planet. The bigger the unit you look at, the more pessimistic people are.

00:55:13.100 And of course, you know, so people on the whole think their own life's going to work out, it's going

00:55:17.960 to be fine, they're going to stay married, they're going to earn a lot of money, you know, that they're

00:55:22.320 okay when they talk about themselves. And I think what that's telling you is that your information

00:55:26.780 about your own life comes from your own experience, your information about the planet comes from the

00:55:31.440 media. And that implies to me that it's not just our inbuilt biases that are doing this, that there

00:55:38.280 is a, there is a top down effect from what the culture chooses to tell us. Do you have any sense of the

00:55:46.960 motivation for that? I mean, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that much of what

00:55:52.300 drives the production of the news is the search for attention, the search for eyes. And you'd expect

00:55:59.980 the news to evolve towards the maximally attention grabbing form, right? And so

00:56:06.000 apart, apart from the ability to grab attention, can you think of any reason why pessimism

00:56:14.000 pessimism is this is the is the sales item of the day, from the perspective of the news companies?

00:56:22.240 Exactly. And this is where my argument breaks down a bit, because it becomes circular. Because I say,

00:56:27.060 yeah, you're right. The reason they're telling us bad news is because they know, they know we're

00:56:31.820 interested in bad news. So that on the whole, we don't look at good news stories to anything like

00:56:35.800 the same degree. So we're avid consumers of pessimism. And they play to that. But there's

00:56:46.320 another phenomenon, too, which is that good news tends to be gradual, and bad news tends to be

00:56:51.500 sudden. That's not always true, of course, but it's surprisingly often is true. You know, 168,000 people

00:57:00.700 were lifted out of extreme poverty yesterday, and the day before and the day before and the day before

00:57:06.120 it's a, it's a, it's never newsworthy. Whereas 3000 people were killed when an airliner flew into a

00:57:14.340 skyscraper. That is newsworthy. Because it's so sudden, so unexpected. So it's so new.

00:57:21.380 Well, it's funny, when I when I when I ran across statistics, like the one that you just quoted,

00:57:26.840 which I think is worth repeating over and over 170,000 people lifted out of poverty today,

00:57:32.340 could be three inch headlines every day, because it's an unparalleled event in human history,

00:57:37.140 although it's occurring every day right now. But maybe it's also because you have to prepare for

00:57:43.120 the worst, but you don't really have to prepare for the best. You know, if if the best is happening,

00:57:49.180 then you can just keep on doing what you're doing. But if the but if there's a flaw somewhere or an

00:57:54.180 error, then maybe you have to make some changes in your behavior. And that might be another reason

00:57:57.980 why we're, we're prone to seek out negative information. And does that explain why we're

00:58:05.260 loss averse to the extent we are? Well, I think so. I think it's the same phenomenon.

00:58:11.740 So anyways, the point is, is that one of the points is that despite the potential adaptive utility

00:58:18.020 of being more sensitive to negative information, it can really get out of hand,

00:58:21.880 right? Because it can precipitate, say, a nihilistic attitude with regards to the future

00:58:27.240 or depression or high levels of anxiety or, or resentment, or even hatred of humanity,

00:58:33.640 for that matter, if we're the destructive species that we're always made out to be.

00:58:38.000 And so it still seems to me that work that concentrates on demonstrating from a historical

00:58:43.840 perspective, how much better things are getting is very much worth putting forward. So and there's a

00:58:49.720 deeper element of optimism in your work as well, which is, in a sense, a kind of non naive

00:58:55.280 Rousseauianism. I mean, Rousseau, of course, famously believed that people were good and that

00:59:00.920 human institutions made them as malevolent and evil as they might become. So we're naturally good and

00:59:06.500 corrupted by culture. And I think that's half the story, because we're also naturally bad and

00:59:12.140 ennobled by culture. But despite that, you make a really good case in the origins of virtue,

00:59:19.700 that virtue itself, that morality itself has a biological basis, and that it's grounded in our

00:59:27.000 evolutionary history. And I'll let you, if you would, I'd ask you to expound on that a little bit.

00:59:33.580 You talk about the discovery of the future and the necessity of reciprocity as driving agents in

00:59:42.440 that evolution. And that's, it's a wonderful idea. And it's, it's a profound idea, because it does

00:59:48.080 hint at a non arbitrary base for, for moral thinking. And that's, I think, that that's been

00:59:55.980 something I've been pursuing my entire life, I would say. But

00:59:58.760 Well, what I set out to do in that book, and it is admittedly, 26 years ago, or something that I

01:00:08.920 finished writing it. So I may have changed my mind on one of two things. But what I set out to do was

01:00:16.240 to persuade the reader that our good instincts are as animal as our bad instincts, or our good behavior

01:00:24.040 behavior is as, is as natural is as instinctive, if you like, as our bad behavior, we tend to get,

01:00:32.320 I think, from Christianity, mainly, a view that the there's a deep sort of animal side of us,

01:00:40.700 which is bad, but we can teach each other to be good. And I don't think that's right. I think there's

01:00:46.700 just as much of an animal instinct to be good in us as there is bad. Because if you look at,

01:00:54.040 you know, we are a social species, lots of species are very social. And what they tend to do is they

01:00:59.360 express various forms of kindness and generosity and self sacrifice towards other members of their

01:01:05.440 species. The most obvious example is that we're nice to our children, as are most creatures. And

01:01:11.640 the reason we're nice to our children is obviously because we share their genes, people who were nice

01:01:17.080 to their children tended to leave more children behind than people who weren't nice to their children.

01:01:20.780 And so the genes for being nice to children thrived at the expense of genes that did the opposite.

01:01:28.520 But obviously, it goes further than that. There are social species that collaborate with other ones,

01:01:33.140 and they do so often with a form of that collaborate with strangers, as it were. And they do so often

01:01:39.600 with a form of reciprocity, you know, you scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours, I'll be nice to you

01:01:44.140 today, you'll be nice to me tomorrow. You know, when a fish visit visits a cleaner station on the reef

01:01:50.920 and allows small fish to clean the parasites off it, it's resisting the temptation to eat the cleaner

01:01:56.120 fish. And so there's a mutual gain, gain from trade there.

01:02:01.140 Yeah, that's a remarkable example that these cleaning stations are set up on coral reefs,

01:02:06.320 where small fish congregate, often brightly colored, and large fish line up like cars at a gas station to

01:02:13.120 have their scales and even their teeth denuded of parasites and dying tissue. And, and some of

01:02:23.560 those cleaning stations are apparently 10s of 1000s of years old. So yes, that's, that's what and of

01:02:30.740 course, that's a cross species collaboration, you know, this is this is, you know, two different species

01:02:36.200 collaborating. But I don't know whether it's in that book or later, I, in the end, come down on to

01:02:43.200 the view that that kind of reciprocity, you scratch my back, I scratch yours, is surprisingly rare,

01:02:50.820 actually, that actually, you can't find that many examples. There's a wonderful example of vampire bats

01:02:56.060 doing it, vampire bats that didn't get a blood meal, beg for one from their neighbor, the neighbor then

01:03:01.300 that you then return the favor to the neighbor next time that he doesn't get a blood meal. And that

01:03:08.680 way, you're both better off. Actually, it turned out that they were closely related. These were this

01:03:13.520 was to some degree, a family thing as well. So actually, and in human beings, it, it isn't very

01:03:21.440 common for me to say, look, you did me a favor yesterday. So I'm going to do you the same favor today.

01:03:27.520 What are the circumstances under which that's going to happen? You know, I mean, I'm going to have

01:03:30.760 too much food today, and you're going to have too much food tomorrow. It's kind of doesn't happen

01:03:35.280 very often. But we human beings have developed another form of exchange, which is far more

01:03:41.080 powerful, which is, I've got more food than I need, you've got more water than you need, I'm thirsty,

01:03:47.080 you're hungry, we'll come to a deal, we'll, we'll swap. So we'll swap different things at the same time,

01:03:52.240 rather than the same things at different times. And for me, that's the real insight into how human

01:03:58.840 sociality and cooperation evolved. Now, I'm only here repeating what Adam Smith said in

01:04:06.540 The Wealth of Nations about the, you know, the butcher and the baker are not giving you bread and

01:04:15.300 beer because they want to be kind to you. They're doing it to make a living, but they end up being kind

01:04:21.640 to you and you end up being kind to them by giving them money, which is what they want.

01:04:24.920 Well, I also thought that in some sense, you made a deeper case than that to talking about

01:04:30.300 the human capacity to understand and envision the future. I mean, reciprocity requires the ability to

01:04:39.220 view transactions across time. And so as soon as a creature becomes aware of the future, like we have,

01:04:46.300 we can even engage in reciprocal behavior with our future selves. And that makes ourself

01:04:51.620 interest a much more complex phenomenon. So my, I might define self-interest as the impulsive

01:04:58.160 pursuit of pleasure. And I think that's a perfectly reasonable definition, perhaps when you're talking

01:05:03.820 about animals, but the question immediately arises pleasure over what time span and at what cost.

01:05:11.700 And I'm compelled by my knowledge of the future to act in a way that doesn't betray my future self.

01:05:17.660 And that's very much like acting in a, so then I'm a collective that stretches across time as an

01:05:23.380 individual. And I have to act in the best interests of that collective. And I don't think that's very

01:05:28.500 different than acting in the best interests of other people. You know, if I'm in my last book,

01:05:35.000 I wrote about the morality that emerges from games. There's a neuroscientist who you might be

01:05:40.280 familiar with, Yach Panksepp, who studied rat behavior in games. And he showed that if you pair

01:05:47.160 two male juvenile rats together, the one with a 10% body weight advantage will pin the other almost 100%

01:05:55.500 of the time. And you might say, well, what that demonstrates is that might makes right the stronger

01:06:02.060 animal wins. But if you pair them together repeatedly, after the first bout, the defeated rat

01:06:08.440 juvenile has to be the inviter of play in the next match. So he'll invite the bigger rat to play,

01:06:17.120 but over paired over repeated pairings, unless the big rat lets the little rat win about 30% of the

01:06:24.440 time, the little rat will stop inviting him to play. Right. So what happens is that you get an

01:06:30.980 emergent morality, which is not the ability to win any given game, but the ability to repeatedly play

01:06:39.300 a multitude of games. And there's something in that that's very much like what you wrote about in

01:06:44.520 The Origin of Virtue and something very much like a complex reciprocity. Right. So where you store your

01:06:51.960 good behavior in your reputation, essentially. And that's of great advantage.

01:06:57.060 Yeah. And there is this very, very simple thing that was happening in the 1990s when I wrote that

01:07:03.740 book, which was the people were playing The Prisoner's Dilemma game on computers and finding

01:07:08.920 out which strategy worked. And The Prisoner's Dilemma game is simply a game in which if both players

01:07:17.780 agree to remain silent, then they benefit each other. But you can make a bigger gain by betraying the

01:07:24.240 other one. But then if he betrays you as well, you both end up with nothing. So you've got to find a

01:07:28.940 way of reach of trusting each other enough to cooperate. You're being held in separate cells

01:07:33.440 and interrogated separately is the sort of story that's being told. And it turned out that the

01:07:40.340 best strategy in a repeated business dilemma game is tit for tat. That is to say, be nice first time

01:07:51.240 round, cooperate on the first play, and then simply do whatever the other guy did on the previous play.

01:07:58.440 So as to punish or reward the other guy for behaving badly or well.

01:08:04.520 Right. So you're not a sucker. Using that strategy, you're cooperative, but you're not a sucker.

01:08:09.960 Yeah. And in a sense, we are engaged in iterative, repeated Prisoner's Dilemma games all the time.

01:08:19.160 You know, you don't say, well, I'm not going to bother paying for this loaf of bread. I'm just

01:08:25.480 going to grab it and run because then I'm better off because then you can't go back to the shop the

01:08:31.640 next day. You'll be recognized by the police. Yeah. So it's morality as the shadow of the future

01:08:40.040 in some sense. Right. And again, this all comes back to Adam Smith, I think, because his previous

01:08:46.120 book, his book in 1759, not The Wealth of Nations, but The Theory of Moral Sentiments, seems to me to

01:08:51.800 have a very profound insight in me. And it's taken a long time for me to understand it. And that is that

01:08:56.600 morality isn't, as it were, taught to us by priests and other people. It's essentially a

01:09:02.280 calculation by us as to what works in the society we're in. And you kind of calibrate your behavior

01:09:09.240 to find out what is moral, what is ethical, and so on. And, you know, 500 years ago, the right ethical

01:09:15.640 thing to do when somebody snubbed you was to, you know, challenge them to a duel and run them through

01:09:21.720 with a sword. Well, that doesn't get you very far today. So we've learned that actually we've

01:09:31.160 evolved a higher form of morality sort of gradually by standing back and saying,

01:09:42.200 in this society, what's going to get me the best rewards, given how other people are behaving?

01:09:49.000 Because of course, everything, everything's a moving target.

01:09:50.840 It seems to me too, that that's deep enough now. So imagine that the landscape that human

01:09:55.800 beings occupy is a social landscape, but it's a social landscape that extends across time.

01:10:00.920 And we've been conscious of that for a long time, at least 150,000 years. So that's about when we

01:10:06.440 changed into the genetic, we changed genetically into the subspecies that we are now. And so you can

01:10:13.640 imagine that given the utility of perceiving the future and the clear benefits of reciprocal action,

01:10:22.840 that that's altered us enough neurologically, so that even conscience speaks to us internally

01:10:28.200 in terms of reciprocity. And that goes along with the idea that this isn't something taught by priests.

01:10:35.960 It might be something that priests and other ethicists remind us of. Yes. So

01:10:43.720 we can have an inbuilt moral sense that's got a biological basis that still requires cultural

01:10:49.880 activation and modification. And the analog to that would be our instinct for language.

01:10:55.800 You can't teach chimpanzees language because they don't have the biological capacity for it,

01:11:01.560 or not to the degree that we do, although some parrots can can perform remarkable stunts in that

01:11:06.920 regard. But we still have to be taught language, or we have to be at least put in an environment where

01:11:12.760 it's happening. So exactly. And yeah, so yeah, it just because, you know, there's a language instinct,

01:11:23.320 but that doesn't mean that every child is born speaking Hebrew as James, the second king of England

01:11:28.440 is supposed to have, James I is supposed to have thought was going to be the case.

01:11:34.280 So, you know, I would say that I've studied archetypal representations of moral behavior,

01:11:40.840 because I think that dramatic stories represent various, they represent various pathways through

01:11:48.840 life, like pathways writ large, right? Drama is life with all the boring bits edited out.

01:11:54.760 And what drama is trying to present to us are different modes of behavior, some of them

01:11:59.560 unsatisfactory, and those would be the bad guys, and some of them highly satisfactory. And

01:12:04.280 I would say the central hero in dramatic representations is someone who's as fully

01:12:10.920 reciprocal as possible. That's what the drama is aiming at. And I think that's also what you're

01:12:18.520 doing with your children. When you teach them to be good sports, when they're playing a game,

01:12:22.520 you basically say to them something like, although you don't know this, you say something like,

01:12:27.320 it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, it matters how you play the game. And the reason that

01:12:31.960 matters, and this is the part you don't say, because you don't know it is that life is a never ending

01:12:37.000 series of diverse games. And your goal, as if you want to be a winner, is to be invited to play as many

01:12:45.240 games as possible. And what that means is that you have to, you have to have a morality that works across

01:12:51.640 the set of all possible games, and it has to trump the morality that drives you to win a single game.

01:12:59.080 Yeah. And the phrase for that is enlightened self interest, as opposed to short term self

01:13:04.120 interest. And I think it's a very important insight. For me, the interesting one is that

01:13:10.440 that connects with economic optimism, that connects with how we got to be so much better off, because

01:13:17.480 it brought us the division of labor, it essentially enabled us to say, look, I'll make the spears,

01:13:23.400 you make the axes, and we'll both be better off, because we'll both be good at what we're doing.

01:13:27.640 And even if I'm better at making both spears and axes than you are, it still pays me, because I'm

01:13:32.760 slightly better at making spears than axes, for me to make the spears and get you to make the axes.

01:13:38.520 That's the basis of trade. That's David Ricardo's theory in one Stone Age story.

01:13:45.160 Yeah, so when we started to be intelligent enough and sophisticated enough so that a debt could be

01:13:51.880 repaid in currency other than that in which it was accrued. And so what that must have meant was that

01:13:58.200 we developed the abstract representation of a reciprocal debt. Not only did we reciprocate like

01:14:04.920 chimpanzees do, for example, with grooming, but we could conceptualize the fact that we

01:14:10.200 owed or were owed, and then we're able to be repaid in all sorts of different manners.

01:14:18.200 And by the way, it wasn't in this book, but it was in The Rational Optimist that I

01:14:25.080 did quite a diversion into the history of trade. And it's very persuasive that the trade is far,

01:14:33.400 far older than agriculture, that pre-agricultural people were trading

01:14:40.520 probably 100,000 years ago. The oldest evidence we've got is seashells moving long distances inland

01:14:45.720 from the coast of North Africa around 100,000 years ago. And they're moving these long distances,

01:14:51.400 not because somebody is walking hundreds of miles to the seashore, picking up some seashells and walking

01:14:56.120 back, but because they're going hand to hand from tribes. And we can find,

01:15:00.120 I think I do tell the story in The Origins of Virtue of the Yir Yoront, who were an Aboriginal tribe

01:15:06.840 living in Northern Australia, who were getting stingray barbs, as many stingray barbs as they

01:15:15.160 wanted on the coast by catching stingrays. But what they really wanted was stone axes. And several

01:15:21.640 hundred miles inland, there was a quarry that produced stone axes. And the tribe that owned that

01:15:26.120 traded with the Yir Yoront via several other trades, and you can actually see the exchange rate of

01:15:32.840 stingray barbs for stone axes along that trail. So that's people being nice to each other when they

01:15:42.680 could be fighting each other. Right, right. Well, I think it was in The Origins of Virtue too, that you

01:15:46.840 chased the idea of trade down into the past even further, relating it to the strange human propensity

01:15:56.200 to share food, and associated that as well with hunting. And I believe you used the example of

01:16:02.840 mammoths, which is also an example that I found fascinating, because obviously you can't store a

01:16:07.720 whole mammoth. But you can store it in the form of your reputation by sharing it. And if you store it in

01:16:14.680 the form of your reputation as a generous hunter, then you can be repaid back indefinitely in a

01:16:21.480 currency that doesn't spoil. So maybe it's, and then you do outline it in this manner, human beings

01:16:29.000 share food in a very egalitarian manner within families. So men and women share food, men mostly

01:16:37.720 meat, historically speaking, and women mostly what they gather. And that makes for a balanced diet.

01:16:45.400 And that ability to exchange food seems to me to be perhaps the biological platform on which

01:16:52.840 the idea of trade per se, was able to evolve. So once you can share food and trade,

01:16:59.000 and enter into a reciprocal arrangement with regards to food, then it isn't that much of a leap

01:17:05.960 to start do that with other commodities, especially those that might be related to the provision of food,

01:17:10.760 like stone axes, or arrows, or, or, or any, any implement of that sort.

01:17:17.240 I'm rather fascinated by the fact that a, a sexual division of labor over

01:17:23.560 food is very, very universal and ancient that men hunt and women gather essentially in, in hunter

01:17:32.760 gatherer societies. Now in some societies, gathering is much more important than hunting.

01:17:37.320 And in some societies, hunting is much more important than gathering, like the Inuit,

01:17:41.240 for example, is the latter case. And there are sort of odd types of foraging that are neither

01:17:48.440 gathering nor, nor hunting.

01:17:50.040 So honey tends to be something that men get, but because it tends to be that you get it from hunting.

01:17:56.360 It's like hunting, as it were. And digging up reptiles and

01:18:03.320 rats tends to be something that women do, because it's like digging up roots.

01:18:07.000 Now, some people think this is a sexist view, you know, that I'm saying, you know,

01:18:11.560 a woman's place is digging, a man's place is out hunting. But I think it's just that,

01:18:18.360 unlike other species, we really did invent this really useful distinction, whereby you got the

01:18:24.600 best of both worlds. You got the protein from hunting, but you got the reliability of food from

01:18:29.320 gathering. So on the whole, you didn't go hungry. But on the whole, you did get access to protein,

01:18:34.440 which was a difficult thing for women to do when they had small dependent kids and things like

01:18:38.280 that. And you can sort of see an echo in it today that far more vegetarians are women,

01:18:44.360 or rather far more women are vegetarians, if you like, that may, and you know, men just like meat

01:18:50.280 more than women do. So I think there is a deep thing going on here. But I've got to be very careful

01:18:56.120 talking about it, because people are quick to get upset and think that you're in some sense

01:19:00.920 that's saying something very, very prejudicial. Well, people get upset now if you accept that

01:19:05.800 there are sex differences, and if you deny that there are sex differences. So they're going to get

01:19:09.640 upset no matter what you think. So you might as well just think what you think. You know,

01:19:15.160 the advantage to that sexual division of labor in part is that it provides additional utility for

01:19:21.800 long term relationships, because they're actually more because of the union of specialization there,

01:19:28.760 the gathering and the hunting. You're deriving your food from more than one source, it means

01:19:33.960 it's more reliable across time. And that's a prerequisite for the origin of long term pair bonds.

01:19:39.800 So it's a really good thing. And no one loses in that trade. And that's, well, that's Adam Smith's

01:19:45.400 point and the point of optimism. It's funny, because economists tend to be optimistic and biologists

01:19:51.080 tend to be pessimistic on along when discussing questions like this. But if you make

01:19:57.000 Well, while we're on that, this is perhaps a digression, but I've also been fascinated,

01:20:03.560 but it's quite nice to challenge people and say, how about the reproductive division of labor? We're

01:20:08.600 happy with all sorts of divisions of labor. You know, you hunt, I gather, you work one kind of job,

01:20:15.880 I work another kind of job. We're prepared to share out absolutely everything. But the one we never

01:20:23.880 do is the reproductive division of labor. Ants and bees do. They say, well, we're going to leave

01:20:29.080 the queen to do the reproducing, and we're all going to be the workers. Imagine, you know,

01:20:33.960 not even in England with the queen, do we expect to do that? It's the one thing we try and do for

01:20:40.120 ourselves and hang on to. And that's, for me, rubs home, drives home the message of just how universal

01:20:48.840 this division of labor concept is otherwise in our life. Because it's so shocking to try

01:20:54.040 and think of a reproductive division of labor. It's just something we don't aspire to.

01:21:00.040 Okay. So your optimism, it manifested itself, at least in part in your writing career,

01:21:05.160 with this notion that there's a biological origin of virtue. And so it's a fundamental instinct. And

01:21:10.360 there's a universality about it, which I think is very optimistic, because if there is a universal

01:21:15.800 basis for morality, despite its obvious cultural differences, it means that we can potentially

01:21:21.880 understand each other well enough to engage in reciprocal action across even tribal boundaries,

01:21:28.040 which we're obviously capable of doing. And it implies that we might understand each other enough

01:21:33.880 so that we could establish something like a long-term peace. That would be the hope.

01:21:37.560 So that's a very fundamentally optimistic viewpoint. And then when you move into analysis of innovation

01:21:48.200 and trade, you start doing that with the rational optimist. You're documenting transformations that

01:21:54.360 have made life better. And I could list a couple of those, and maybe we can talk about them. So

01:22:00.040 in the rational optimism, optimist, for example, you talk about the fact, well, you start by talking

01:22:07.240 about ideas having sex. And so that's a form of reciprocity, I would say. That's the exchange of

01:22:15.400 information rather than goods. But information is exchangeable for goods. And so in some sense,

01:22:22.200 it's the abstract equivalent of the exchange of goods.

01:22:25.640 Yeah. But in a sense, I'm being much more literal even than that, because sex is the process by which

01:22:34.360 genes get shuffled. And you recombine genes in new combinations. So you've got a gene for

01:22:41.960 fur in one reptile, and you've got a gene for milk in another reptile. And you bring them together,

01:22:46.760 and you've got a mammal that has both fur and milk. And that couldn't happen without sex,

01:22:52.840 because they'd stay in separate lineages. So sex is the process that enables genetic novelties to

01:23:02.120 find each other and combine. It's what makes evolution cumulative, in effect. And I'm saying

01:23:07.560 that exchange has exactly the same role in innovation, that one tribe can invent,

01:23:14.440 you know, one gadget, and another tribe can invent another gadget. And you can't bring them together,

01:23:22.920 unless they're trading. And the trading is what enables you to make culture cumulative.

01:23:28.520 To start to say, well, hang on, I'll have that invention that was made in California,

01:23:34.840 and I'll have that invention that was made in China. And I'll actually be able to benefit from

01:23:39.080 both of them. So it's a very, it's a very explicit metaphor. I mean, it's a flippant,

01:23:46.040 attention grabbing phrase, ideas having sex. And I used it for the title of a talk,

01:23:51.400 a TED talk, and it rather caught on. And the next TED meeting, I went to, they were giving out badges

01:23:57.000 saying, whose ideas have you had sex with recently or something? It's a bit weird.

01:24:03.800 Who of your, anyway, whatever, you get the point. Well, we do talk about a fertile conversation.

01:24:10.200 We do. And we talk about cross fertilization.

01:24:15.080 Yes, yes, yes. And well, you hope that someone who specialized in one area can talk to someone who

01:24:20.600 specialized in another, and that at the border, where there aren't specialists, new ideas can be

01:24:25.960 generated. And I mean, I've seen that over and over when talking to, well, when looking for scientific

01:24:31.720 innovation, it's, it's one of the things that's happened in the field of psychology over the last

01:24:35.960 hundred years is that a lot of our radical innovations, especially on the methodological

01:24:41.800 front have been a consequence of engineers being trained as psychologists and bringing what they

01:24:47.000 knew as engineers into the field. So a lot of, a lot of fertile intellectual activity happens

01:24:54.760 where two fields rub together, so to speak.

01:24:58.200 That's right. And some of the great breakthroughs in biology came from physicists moving into biology.

01:25:04.280 You, you, you move from when ideas have sex to the idea of a better today. And I was actually

01:25:10.600 going to read something, if you don't mind, from your book, from page 12, which I, which I liked

01:25:15.560 quite a bit. It's, I suppose it's funny in a black hearted sort of way. So there are people today

01:25:23.240 who think life was better in the past. They argue that there was not only a simplicity, tranquility,

01:25:28.680 sociability, and spirituality about life in the distant past that has been lost, but a virtue too.

01:25:35.240 This rose-tinted nostalgia, please note, is generally confined to the wealthy.

01:25:39.480 It is easier to wax allegaic for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long drop toilet.

01:25:45.160 Imagine that it is 1800, somewhere in Western Europe or Eastern North America.

01:25:51.320 The family is gathering around the hearth in the simple timber-framed house.

01:25:55.720 Father reads aloud from the Bible while mother prepares to dish out a stew of beef and onions.

01:26:01.160 The baby boy is being comforted by one of his sisters, and the eldest lad is pouring water

01:26:05.480 from a pitcher into the earthenware mugs on the table. His elder sister is feeding the horse in the

01:26:10.840 stable. Outside, there is no noise of traffic. There are no drug dealers, and neither dioxins nor

01:26:17.480 radioactive fallout have been found in the cow's milk. All is tranquil. A bird sings outside the

01:26:23.240 window. I'm going to read the next section too, but this is a very interesting paragraph because

01:26:28.440 it speaks to something that I think has a dramatic origin too, a mythological or archetypal origin,

01:26:34.680 which is the idea of the simple life where everyone is living in harmony with nature and the

01:26:40.040 depredations of culture have not yet manifested themselves. And it's, uh, it's, uh, it's Rousseauian,

01:26:47.080 isn't it? It's Rousseauian, but it's deep. It's deeper than that as well, because it actually reflects

01:26:51.800 a truth is that there is a purity about individual individuals that can be corrupted by society,

01:26:57.320 but you have to take the reverse position as well. If you're going to get things balanced.

01:27:01.000 Well, then you, you add a corrective to this, which is quite comical. Oh, please.

01:27:06.760 Though this is one of the better off families in the village, father's scripture reading is

01:27:11.240 interrupted by a bronchitic cough that presages the pneumonia that will kill him at 53, not helped

01:27:18.120 by the wood smoke of the fire, right? And indoor pollution is still a leading cause of mortality

01:27:23.400 worldwide, often from the romantic hearth. He is lucky. Life expectancy even in England was less than

01:27:29.880 40 in 1800. The baby will die of the smallpox that is now causing him to cry. His sister will soon be

01:27:36.120 the chattel of a drunken husband. The water the sun is pouring tastes of the cows that drink from the

01:27:41.640 brook. And that would be if the water was good, I would say. Toothache tortures the mother. The

01:27:47.160 neighbor's lodger is getting the other girl pregnant in the hay shed even now, and her child will be sent to

01:27:52.280 an orphanage. The stew is gray and grisly, yet meat is a rare change from gruel. There is no fruit or

01:27:58.920 salad at this season. It is eaten with a wooden spoon from a wooden bowl. Candles cost too much,

01:28:05.080 so firelight is all there is to see by. Nobody in the family has ever seen a play, painted a picture,

01:28:11.560 or heard a piano. School is a few years of dull Latin taught by a bigoted Martinet at the Vicarage.

01:28:18.760 Father visited the city once, but the travel cost him a week's wages, and the others have never

01:28:24.440 traveled more than 15 miles from home. Each daughter owns two wool dresses, two linen shirts,

01:28:30.280 and one pair of shoes. Father's jacket cost him a month's wages, but is now infested by lice. The

01:28:37.240 children sleep two to a bed on straw mattresses on the floor. As for the bird outside the window,

01:28:43.400 tomorrow it would be trapped and eaten by the boy." Well, I love that section. It's quite comical in a

01:28:51.000 dark and tongue-in-cheek sort of way, but it's a great corrective to the foolish romanticism that

01:28:56.520 characterizes people's longing for even the near past. You know, it's not unreasonable to say that the

01:29:04.120 typical middle-class person I could say in North America or Europe, but increasingly

01:29:09.720 anywhere in the world is wealthier by almost every measure than a billionaire was in 1920.

01:29:17.240 Right. Absolutely. And, you know, particularly, I mean, I can't remember who it was who said,

01:29:24.360 just take dentistry. You know, it doesn't matter how rich you were in 1800,

01:29:32.520 it was no fun having a rotten tooth. And, you know, and that's a relatively basic thing that we all

01:29:40.440 can have access to today. So there's no question that in material ways, our lives are so much better

01:29:48.760 than those of our ancestors. And we tend to read Jane Austen and think, well, wouldn't that have been

01:29:55.720 fun, you know? But actually, those are books about an incredibly small elite who were rich enough to

01:30:04.280 have candles and go to dances. Yes. And even in those circumstances, their social lives were

01:30:11.480 restricted enough so that a single dance could be the social event of an entire year.

01:30:16.200 Exactly. And you, if you didn't fall in love with the chinless officer who took your

01:30:24.760 arm, you might be a widow for the rest of your, I mean, not a widow, a spinster for the rest of your

01:30:28.200 life. So, you know, it was not much fun compared with today. We are so lucky. Everything is so good.

01:30:35.800 And for me, and I think I make this, well, actually, there's an interesting story about this,

01:30:40.040 this point. I like to talk about how the big theme of human history is becoming more and more

01:30:47.880 specialized in the things we produce and more and more diversified in the things we consume.

01:30:54.440 So you actually, your jobs get narrower and narrower, more and more specialized,

01:30:59.640 but your life gets richer and richer, you know, because you can consume, you know, movies and exotic

01:31:05.560 foods and all these different things. That's a great antithesis to the Marxist notion of alienation

01:31:12.440 in labor, right? Because one of the things that's attractive about Marxism, and it's understandably

01:31:17.720 attractive, there's two things, I think. One is the emphasis on the unpleasantness of inequality,

01:31:24.040 but the other is the idea of alienation from the created product. But if you make the case that,

01:31:29.480 well, you might be alienated from the created product with regards to the workplace because of

01:31:33.800 specialization. But in the two thirds of the hours that you're spending of your life, when you're not

01:31:39.160 working, your life is much more diverse than it would otherwise be. And I think that COVID has

01:31:45.240 probably taught everyone that again, because we're so isolated now and stuck at home and facing the

01:31:53.000 restriction of all these things that we took for granted, the wonderful restaurants.

01:31:57.400 And by the way, we do sort of go backwards with respect to specialization and exchange during bad

01:32:04.840 recession. So in the depression, a lot of American families, you know, found they were keeping a

01:32:09.960 chicken and growing their own vegetables. Again, you know, you start to do more for yourself and have

01:32:15.400 less to consume overall. Because if you only could consume what you produce, it would be a pretty miserable

01:32:21.400 life. You had to make your own food, your own lighting, your own heat, you know, everything like that.

01:32:25.720 Yeah. And, but by the way, there's a really nice story about this concept, because I read it in a

01:32:33.240 book called Second Nature by Haim Ofek. It's a beautiful book that I read around 20 years ago.

01:32:41.640 And it's laid out this point very nicely that we've become more and more specialized in how we produce,

01:32:47.560 but more and more diversified in how we consume. And I wrote to him and said, look, this is a fantastic

01:32:53.320 idea. Can you tell me how you came up with the idea and where you got it from and how it developed?

01:33:01.480 And he wrote back and said, I got it from your book, The Origins of Virtue.

01:33:07.560 Well, that's a good, that's a good compliment, the best form of compliment.

01:33:10.680 And I said, but I don't think it's in my book. And he said, well, I guess maybe it's not. I just, you know,

01:33:15.480 but I thought I got it from your book. So that's a lovely example of the division of labor in the

01:33:21.720 production of ideas, if you like.

01:33:23.160 Well, and ideas can be implicit as well as explicit. So it's not always obvious what ideas are in your

01:33:28.600 book. You know what? It isn't, you can't put a boundary around the ideas that even the ideas that

01:33:34.280 you write, because they have tendrils that reach beyond your understanding. And so you never know.

01:33:39.320 Which is why I'm something of a skeptic about intellectual property, by the way. I think

01:33:43.560 copyright is vastly overdone. I think we should be much more prepared to share the stuff that we

01:33:49.720 produce. But there we go. That's another story.

01:33:51.880 Well, I wonder if that, I wonder if that anecdote that you just related is an indication of the

01:34:01.800 sexual behavior of ideas. I don't know if the metaphor works, but you know, every book

01:34:09.320 each, every each book is different for every reader. And the meaning of the book is actually

01:34:15.560 a complex consequence of the knowledge that's held by the reader and the knowledge that's implicit in

01:34:22.600 the book. And so what that means is no book is the same for any two readers. Now, postmodernists

01:34:31.080 figured that out a while back, but they seem to read it to indicate that there was no canonical

01:34:35.880 meaning whatsoever in a text as a consequence and, and then slipped into the idea that perhaps

01:34:41.400 there was no meaning at all, which I think was a major mistake. But is that, is that a sexual,

01:34:47.960 is that a sexual, is that process akin to sexuality as well? The fact that you have a

01:34:53.640 a reader on one part and a, and something to be read on the other part and a third thing emerges

01:34:59.640 as a consequence. As a consequence, it seems like it, you need two things to produce something new.

01:35:05.640 Yes. I think, I think that is equivalent. I mean, we're talking books here, but if we were talking

01:35:12.520 gadgets, it would be much more explicit. I, I love telling the story about how the,

01:35:18.440 the pill camera was invented. It's something you swallow and it takes a picture, a film of your insides

01:35:23.800 as it goes through. And it came about after a conversation over a garden fence in Boston

01:35:29.160 between a gastroenterologist and a guided missile designer.

01:35:33.800 That's a very good example of the, the generation of ideas at the border between two specializations,

01:35:41.080 right? You wouldn't necessarily expand. If you wonder too, if there's a,

01:35:45.720 particularly robust ideas emerge as a consequence of people from very disparate disciplines talking,

01:35:51.480 you know, that would be, well, there's, there's a, I, in my latest book, I, I talk about a,

01:35:58.120 a website called Innocentive where you can post your problems. If you're a company that's,

01:36:05.080 that's got a technological problem you can't solve, you can post the problem and say, look,

01:36:09.720 does anyone have a solution to this? And you, there are ways of rewarding people who answer,

01:36:15.320 yes, I've, I've got the answer for you. It's quite well set up. And, um, a study of the,

01:36:21.400 the successful solutions that have been provided on this website found that, uh, most of them had

01:36:28.520 come from people completely outside the field. So it really was a case that you needed a fresh mind

01:36:34.440 with a fresh, with a different training to look at the problem from a different direction.

01:36:40.120 So I think, I think all this goes to show that, you know, we are, we are more than the sum of our

01:36:45.560 parts. We operate in the cloud. Um, uh, our ideas are, um, you know, again, that lovely thing that,

01:36:53.240 um, Leonard Reed said that, you know, if you take a pencil, um, there are millions of people who

01:36:59.320 contributed to making it because somebody had to cut down a tree and somebody had to grow coffee for

01:37:03.080 the man who was cutting down the tree and the wood had to go to the factory and so on. There's,

01:37:06.520 you know, incredible number of people involved in making the pencil. Not one of them knows how

01:37:11.160 to make a pencil. There isn't a human being on the planet who knows how to make a pencil because

01:37:15.720 the person who knows how to work in a factory doesn't know how to cut down a tree and so on.

01:37:19.560 Um, so, uh, the, the knowledge, the, the knowledge of how to run the human world sits in a cloud

01:37:28.280 and has done since long before the internet cloud was invented. Um, it sits between brains, not within

01:37:34.840 brains. Why do you think then, look, I mean, we're, we've been talking, we've been batting back and

01:37:40.520 forth the idea that virtue itself is tightly associated with trade. And then in, in some sense,

01:37:48.360 they may not be distinguishable from one another. Fair trade in some manner is virtue, especially

01:37:54.360 fair trade across long spans of time and maybe fair trade across long spans of times with diverse

01:38:00.440 communities. Right. Um, so why is it that, why do you think that the idea of trade itself

01:38:09.400 has also become contaminated with this terrible pessimism? I mean, one of the things that characterizes

01:38:15.880 if, if, if, if it's trade that constitutes virtue and if it's trade as well, that's lifted people

01:38:22.040 out of poverty, then why is it that people who engage in novel trade entrepreneurs say,

01:38:29.080 or even capitalists for that matter, why is it that that form of trade has, has is so easily associated

01:38:35.480 with, um, with, um, with so easily despised and, and so, and, and so frequently met with contempt.

01:38:44.120 Yeah. I find it baffling because, you know, Voltaire made the point that, that, that commerce

01:38:49.000 tends to make people nicer. Um, uh, uh, you know, it, it, if, if, if two people are, uh, trading,

01:38:56.120 then they suddenly stop fighting. Um, but they're worth more to each other if they're alive,

01:39:01.960 then. Well, exactly. Um, then that seems to be a good thing. Like it's a good thing to have

01:39:07.800 everyone worth more dead, more alive than dead. Right. And, and actually, Steve Pinker talks about

01:39:14.200 this too, but the, the, the, the, the, the piece that breaks out at various times in human history is

01:39:22.040 tends to be more associated with whether countries are trading with each other than whether they happen

01:39:27.080 to be democracies or, or any other relationship with their political system. So it's, it's the,

01:39:32.280 you know, the degree of trade really does make a difference to how peaceful things are. I mean,

01:39:36.360 it doesn't stop war breaking out between countries that are trading with each other, but it's no

01:39:40.360 accident in the 20th century, you get a, a period of huge protectionism that precedes the second world

01:39:46.920 war. I mean, and to some extent sparks it, you know, Japan is saying, well, if you're not going to trade

01:39:51.000 with me, I'm going to bloody well invade Asia and take stuff for myself. Um, well, you know, I was,

01:39:56.760 I, I, I thought it was a dubious, entering into trade with communist China was a big risk on the

01:40:05.000 part of the West. And when that first started to happen, it was something that, well, I was interested

01:40:12.440 in and, and also concerned about, but, but mostly curious about, because on the one hand you could say,

01:40:18.760 well, it's, why would you trade with a totalitarian state, a cruel totalitarian state,

01:40:25.640 a murderous totalitarian state for that matter. But on the other hand, you could say, well,

01:40:31.080 maybe it would be better off for everyone if the Chinese weren't dirt poor and starving. And if

01:40:36.520 they depended on us, um, in a, in a, in a mutually beneficial manner. And I would have to say that

01:40:44.840 despite the fact that the Chinese communist party still rules with an iron fist,

01:40:49.480 it's probably been better for everyone all concerned that extensive trade with China has

01:40:54.680 taken place. I know the North American and European working class has taken a major hit

01:40:59.960 because of that, although they benefited from cheap, um, manufactured items for sure. But

01:41:07.400 you've got to think a Chinese population where no one is starving and that's completely engaged in

01:41:15.480 trade with the West is a more reliable long-term partner than one that's isolated and, and,

01:41:22.040 and pursuing its own destiny.

01:41:25.080 Yeah. Um, uh, I certainly thought that until recently, I, you know, uh, I thought that our

01:41:31.160 best chance of turning them into a liberal democracy was to trade with them. Um, and after all,

01:41:37.160 it was a great deal for us, we gave them, as Don Boudreau once put it, we gave them pictures of

01:41:42.920 presidents and they gave us, um, uh, goods and services. In other words, money.

01:41:48.440 Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. Um, but, uh, but it, I have to say in the last couple of years under Xi

01:41:56.760 Jinping, China has become something very different from what it was five or even, or 10 years ago,

01:42:02.680 I think. Um, and I think we are reaching the point where, uh, it is a problem that we are, um, uh,

01:42:11.000 buying goods off a regime that is doing terrible things to, uh, Hong Kong, to the Uyghurs.

01:42:17.800 And there's a moral, there's a moral quandary there, but it still seems to me, even that a China

01:42:23.720 that holds a substantial amount of Western debt is much less likely to upset the apple cart than a

01:42:29.320 China that doesn't, you know, um, it's not such a bad thing to have their destinies.

01:42:33.480 They have an interest in the dollar not collapsing, for example, but go back to your original question

01:42:38.280 there. Why are people so, um, uh, cynical and, and, uh, unhappy about trade and think it's such an evil

01:42:45.720 thing. And I think in the end, it's that, that, that we are zero sum thinkers. We find, we find it hard

01:42:53.080 to believe that, uh, that, that, uh, somebody isn't winning in a relationship.

01:42:59.800 And I suppose that's because crooked people, crooked, foolish people do try to win.

01:43:06.040 Yeah. And for, for 99% of our, um, 4 billion years of history, it was true that if someone won,

01:43:13.000 it was at the expense of someone losing. Um, but you can see very clearly in the rhetoric of Donald Trump,

01:43:19.480 um, the view that, that, that trade is a, is a zero sum game is a, is, is a win lose, uh, equation.

01:43:26.520 And it's quite hard, even for you and me to get our head around the idea that, that actually, um,

01:43:34.760 uh, I, you know, yes, I've driven a good bargain in buying a car or house, but maybe I've been ripped

01:43:42.840 off. Who knows? You know? Well, I guess, okay. So part of the problem is that fair trade can

01:43:49.160 revert to a crooked zero sum game quite rapidly. And so we're on edge because of that. But I mean,

01:43:55.080 people still pursue long-term relationships and they still pursue friendships. They, they still

01:44:01.160 make the assumption that reciprocal interactions are not only possible, but also part of what makes life

01:44:07.880 worth living and a really important part. And it doesn't seem that complicated to, I guess you,

01:44:14.760 it's, it's, it's the difficulty of extending that outward towards non-kin or even strangers,

01:44:19.240 but it's a remarkable thing that that's possible. And it'd be nice if we were more grateful for it

01:44:24.680 than we are. Right. The remarkable thing about human beings is that we do treat complete strangers

01:44:30.840 as honorary brothers and sisters. Um, and how do we do that partly by building up these, uh, these

01:44:38.760 levels of trust through reciprocity over long, long periods. Well, eBay, eBay is a great example

01:44:44.200 of that because when eBay first emerged, the cynics said, well, you know, I'll put something up for

01:44:51.160 sale that's junk and send it to you and it won't work. And you'll send me a check that bounces and

01:44:55.720 that'll be the end of eBay. And that's not what happened is that right off the bat, almost all the

01:45:01.080 trades were fair and equitable. And, and then it evolved a reputation tracking system. But even

01:45:06.920 before the reputation tracking system, the, the default transaction was precisely what it claimed to be

01:45:15.080 on face value. Our reputations are very precarious. It's very easy to lose your reputation.

01:45:21.080 Yes. Uh, even in quite a mobile society, it will track you down. Um, well, that's even maybe more true

01:45:28.520 in, in, in, in society now, because you can lose your reputation very easily with one misstep on

01:45:33.320 Twitter. That's, uh, certainly true. Yes. Well, it's also interesting to see how sensitive people

01:45:42.600 are to, to reputation maintenance, because I've watched this intently over the last four or five

01:45:48.680 years that you see people who post something, for example, on Twitter, and then a small mob generates

01:45:55.640 itself around them and might be, it might not be more than 20 people who are complaining about

01:46:00.760 this particular post. And almost inevitably the person will back down with profuse apologies and

01:46:06.440 show every sign of severe, um, um, emotional distress. And I suppose I've thought about it a

01:46:14.120 lot. I suppose it's, it's akin to, in some sense, it's the electronic equivalent to having 20 neighbors

01:46:19.720 show up on your doorstep. You know, you'd, you'd assume if you were a reasonable person that you might

01:46:24.440 have done something wrong, even though the analogy doesn't really hold true. If you're communicating

01:46:29.400 with 150,000 people and you upset 15 of them, it's really difficult to, it's really difficult to say

01:46:36.360 exactly what that means. This is back to the loss aversion point, because we're all, we, we,

01:46:42.680 we know this very well as, as authors, you, you read 10 good reviews of your books and you think,

01:46:48.600 well, I, I, you know, I'm embarrassed about that. I don't really deserve it. Or, you know,

01:46:53.560 it's nice, nice, good review. And then one bad review and it preys on your mind and you get furious

01:46:59.720 and you get upset and you write a letter to the editor saying the review is unfair and things that

01:47:05.400 we've all done. At least I did that.

01:47:07.560 Well, the same thing happens with regards to comments on social media, you know, like I'm

01:47:12.520 fortunate with regards to what I've produced on YouTube, for example, because most of it garners

01:47:19.640 far more positive commentary than negative commentary, you know, and the ratios are usually something like

01:47:25.800 50 to one, but it's not the case that when I read through the comments that my mood is reliably

01:47:34.600 buoyed. And that is because the, the outlier, the negative comment strikes me, strikes a pang into

01:47:43.560 my heart, you know, and I don't want to make too much of that because overall, I think this is like

01:47:49.960 the bad news story being more salient. Yes, it is the same thing. Well, I can't, I, I cannot see how

01:47:56.520 people who are accumulating more negative comments in a social media platform than positive comments.

01:48:04.520 I don't see how they can survive it. I couldn't survive it. So, and then that's sensitivity to

01:48:10.840 reputation. I took a decision some years ago to stop looking at the replies to my tweets altogether,

01:48:18.360 and I've never done it since. And it's been very good for my sleeping and other things.

01:48:24.120 I'm sure that's true.

01:48:25.480 Missing out on some interesting feedback. Yeah. And every now and then, you know,

01:48:31.240 I will look at something specific where I've asked someone a question or something like that. But,

01:48:35.160 but actually, and I talked to a British politician who's a friend who was a conservative party leader

01:48:42.040 and was hugely criticized at the time. He never became prime minister. And I said, you know,

01:48:49.720 how do you develop a thick skin, Ian? Because you're still in politics 20 years later and you're

01:48:54.520 still, you know, you've been a successful cabinet minister, but you've been the subject of

01:49:00.840 vitriolic cartoons and all sorts of stuff. And he says, nobody develops a thick skin.

01:49:05.480 You just learn to ignore the stuff. And the politicians who decide not to ignore it,

01:49:11.240 but to answer back, just drive themselves. Well, it helps to be blessed with a favorable

01:49:15.400 nervous system too, and to be low in trait neuroticism. So you're not as sensitive to

01:49:19.880 negative information as you might be. So I think, so the thick skin might be partly

01:49:25.960 a biological phenomena where, you know, people differ in their degree of loss aversion. And I suspect that

01:49:33.800 public figures who managed to maintain themselves over long periods of time in the face of criticism

01:49:38.440 are relatively robust when it comes to their physiological response to threat.

01:49:44.600 Well, something I greatly admire about you is your ability to remain cool under pressure. You know,

01:49:48.600 when Cathy Newman is trying to rile you on Channel 4 news or something, you remain logical. I would get,

01:49:57.400 my heart rate would go up, I would start to bluster, I would stop thinking, and I would say sort of stupid

01:50:05.160 things that I would regret. Is that something you learned? Well, it's very funny, because I just

01:50:13.400 hate it. Like, it's so stressful. I find that so unbelievably stressful. But fortunately, I think

01:50:22.280 it's probably a consequence of being trained as a clinical psychologist. Right. Is that I can detach

01:50:27.880 myself and watch? But that doesn't mean the physiology isn't racing, like it's racing. And,

01:50:33.880 and it's definitely the case that it's very strange thing, because the negative interviews that I've

01:50:39.800 conducted, the interviews where people were attacking me, let's say, have garnered far more

01:50:48.040 views than the positive interviews. So in terms of impact on my reputation, the negative interviews

01:50:55.160 have been more beneficial than the positive ones. Yeah, but that's partly because you've performed

01:51:00.040 well in them. Anyone can perform well when they're being interviewed nicely, as you are interviewing me

01:51:05.080 nicely now. It's the sheep from the goats are the people who can can remain cool under pressure,

01:51:14.040 as you do. I think it is a consequence of clinical training. I mean, because I can snap into an

01:51:19.000 an observer mode and, and, and detach myself in some sense from what's going on, partly because

01:51:25.480 I know as well that it isn't clear what's happening. Like it might be a battle, but it's not necessarily

01:51:33.160 the war. And so being under attack doesn't necessarily mean that you're being defeated.

01:51:38.440 It's something like that. But that's associated that's a that's a rationalization of the ability

01:51:43.640 to detach. But I do think it's, it's, it's the clinician in me that allows for that.

01:51:48.840 Well, the old bomber pilots remark that if you're taking flak, you know, you're over the target.

01:51:56.600 Is, is some comfort in this. Yeah, well, yes, at least there's a possibility that that's true.

01:52:05.000 So, so I want to ask you some more specific questions, or not precisely that. I would like

01:52:11.320 you to discuss more specifically, if you wouldn't mind some of the things that you've outlined as

01:52:16.280 so intensely positive. And I can throw out some reminders. These are chapter titles from

01:52:22.040 the rational optimist. And then maybe we'll move to, to how innovation works. You talk about

01:52:30.200 feeding 9 billion, for example, which is that that's a remarkable story. And, and I've read it in

01:52:36.600 various sources. But we have biologists in particular, in the 1960s, we're absolutely

01:52:43.560 certain Paul Ehrlich, for example, that we were all going to perish of starvation, if starvation

01:52:49.320 combined with an absolute dearth of raw materials by the year 2000. And that hasn't happened. It's

01:52:56.360 decided now the biologists might say the Malthusians might say, yeah, yeah, well, we got the time frame

01:53:00.840 wrong by a couple of decades. But, you know, the other shoe is still going to drop. But nonetheless,

01:53:07.800 when you make a prediction, you have to include a timeframe, or it's not a prediction.

01:53:12.840 Well, no, but they can't even really make that claim. Because during that period, not only have we,

01:53:17.400 I mean, since the early 60s, we've doubled the human population, but we've slightly shrunk the amount of

01:53:23.000 land we put under the plow every year. There's been a 68% reduction over 50 years in the amount of

01:53:32.680 land needed to produce a given quantity of food. That's the most extraordinary phenomenon. It's

01:53:38.520 basically the story of the Green Revolution. You make the case there too, that without that

01:53:44.600 occurring, and then that is a concept, we should go into the Green Revolution to some degree, because

01:53:48.520 lots of viewers won't know about that, unbelievably, even though it might, it's arguably the biggest

01:53:56.200 story of the last 50 years, in some sense. You know, you make the case that had the Green Revolution

01:54:02.040 not taken place, and so that was partly a consequence of careful breeding of new foodstuffs like dwarf wheat,

01:54:09.400 wheat, and the manufacture of nitrogen-fixing fertilizers. We would have already used up

01:54:18.040 land space equivalent to more than the entire Amazonian rainforest. We would have converted

01:54:23.480 virtually all arable land on Earth into food producing, well, into food production, and we

01:54:29.000 haven't done that. And in fact, I believe now there are more trees in the Northern Hemisphere than there

01:54:34.520 were a hundred years ago. Oh, yes, definitely. I mean, the whole world is now reforesting fairly

01:54:40.600 rapidly. When I say the whole world, the world is net reforesting. Some places are still losing

01:54:46.120 forest, but on the whole, places like China are gaining woodland at an extraordinary rate.

01:54:52.840 Yeah, well, China has more woodland now than it did 30 years ago, despite the fact that, well,

01:54:57.720 they just declared this week, or last week, the Chinese government just declared the eradication of

01:55:03.000 extreme poverty in China. And, you know, you can be cynical about that and claim that it's a

01:55:07.720 totalitarian, it's totalitarian, what would you call a posturing? But it's certainly the case that

01:55:15.800 even by UN standards, we've almost, we were on track to eradicate extreme poverty by, according to

01:55:23.800 the UN definition of extreme poverty by 2030. And we've halved it since from the year 2000, I believe,

01:55:30.120 to the year 2010, it was cut in half. But it's absolutely phenomenal.

01:55:34.840 It was 60% of the world was lived in extreme poverty when I was born. Today, it's less than 10%.

01:55:42.840 That's the greatest achievement of any human generation ever. It's, nobody's lived through

01:55:48.120 anything like that in the past.

01:55:48.840 Yes. And that, despite the fact that the population, what, tripled?

01:55:52.600 Yes. Well, yes, only two and a half times. And nobody saw it coming. And it wasn't planned,

01:56:00.600 even. Most of it came about because of, you know, relatively local innovation to make farming more

01:56:09.880 efficient and things like that. And the amount of calories available per head has gone up on every

01:56:15.320 continent, including Africa. There is still extreme poverty and extreme hunger and malnutrition,

01:56:22.600 and nutrient shortages, and so on. But the thing I always say to environmentalists is,

01:56:30.840 why do you think it would motivate people to tell them that this problem is insoluble?

01:56:37.960 Why not say, look how well we've done in the past? Why don't we try and do just as well in the future?

01:56:44.200 Well, it's especially the case. This is something that really confuses me too, because I worked,

01:56:50.120 I generated, partly generated a UN report or contributed to a UN report about six or seven

01:56:56.360 years ago on sustainable development. And I had the same sort of realization that you described,

01:57:02.920 was that on all these dimensions where we were supposed to be, you know, careening towards

01:57:07.560 catastrophe, we were in fact doing better and better, with the possible exception,

01:57:11.160 I think, of oceanic management. But we don't have to get into that.

01:57:14.360 I agree with that.

01:57:15.160 Yeah, yeah, it's a the oceanic management is a catastrophe, but it's it could still be rectified.

01:57:20.280 And it seems to be a tragedy of the commons catastrophe. And in any case, everywhere I looked

01:57:28.440 at the actual statistics, the the evidence was that things were getting better fast and like

01:57:33.640 really fast, fast in an unparalleled manner. But what really got me was that

01:57:39.240 the evidence, as far as I can tell, is clear, that as soon as you make people rich enough so

01:57:46.440 that they're not living hand to mouth, then they start to become concerned with environmental

01:57:52.680 degradation. Yeah. And so the biggest contributor to pollution, you could make a case, a strong case,

01:57:59.000 the biggest contributor to pollution isn't wealth, but poverty. And that if you raise people out of

01:58:04.520 poverty, then they start to manage their environments properly, because they can afford to

01:58:09.000 look at the long run. And so you'd think that for the radical types who are hyper concerned,

01:58:14.280 according to their own self description, with poverty and oppression, as well as environmental

01:58:19.480 degradation, that they would look at the facts and say, oh, my God, we can have our cake and eat it,

01:58:24.520 too. The faster we make people rich, the better off the planet is going to be completely. This is so

01:58:31.640 clear to me. And it's so hard to get across to to a lot of the environmentalists. And by the way,

01:58:37.160 there's a word I want to introduce the conversation at this point, which is Panglossian.

01:58:41.480 People sometimes accuse me of being Panglossian. Dr. Pangloss, as you remember in Candide in Voltaire's

01:58:48.040 novel, is someone who says he's a he's a caricature of Leibniz. And he says that all is for the best in

01:58:56.680 the best of all possible worlds. And yes, Lisbon has been destroyed by an earthquake. But that must have

01:59:01.160 been because they were evil people, because God wouldn't do a bad thing. And it's a very silly

01:59:06.280 argument. And it's being lampooned by Voltaire. But actually, the people who say that now are not

01:59:13.280 you and me. We're saying good as this world is compared with what it was, it's a veil of tears

01:59:19.320 compared with what it could be. If we press on, we're not saying we've got to the best possible

01:59:24.360 world. We're saying let's keep going. But the people who are saying that, who are saying,

01:59:29.480 oh, we mustn't do any more development. We must make sure that people still live in mud huts.

01:59:35.080 You outline data indicating that one of the responses by the catastrophists, let's say,

01:59:41.700 of the 1960s was to write off places like India and and proclaim that even aid was futile because

01:59:48.920 all you were doing was encouraging increasing starvation in the future.

01:59:52.800 When I was writing The Rational Optimist in 2010, it was quite fashionable still to write off Africa

02:00:04.100 to say, yes, Asia has seen extraordinary improvements in living standards, but it is

02:00:10.600 very unrealistic to assume that that could ever happen in Africa. People would say that kind of

02:00:15.780 thing quite often. And in my book, I said, look, even in Africa, we are seeing incredible

02:00:23.880 improvements. And so I got criticized by a reviewer in the New York Times for using the phrase even in

02:00:32.560 Africa that showed I was a racist, apparently, you know, you can't win, can you? I was saying the

02:00:36.540 opposite. But now, 10 years on, Africa's had an incredible decade, actually, much better than the

02:00:43.480 West, which has had a rather grim decade of low productivity and the overhang of the Great

02:00:48.320 Recession and so on. But, you know, countries like Ethiopia have doubled their income per capita in

02:00:53.560 real terms in a decade. You've seen malaria mortality collapse, you've seen HIV mortality falling fast,

02:01:01.640 you've seen warfare disappearing from much of the continent, you've seen an emerging middle class,

02:01:07.940 you've seen far less hunger and malnutrition. Actually, Africa is just doing roughly what Asia did a

02:01:14.740 generation ago. And it will soon be where Asia is now, which is a middle class, middle income

02:01:21.320 continent. That's an incredible thing. And it...

02:01:27.460 Well, in Africa, Africa has unparalleled potential. I read an analysis probably 15 years ago,

02:01:34.940 I believe it was by the former CEO of Alcoa, the aluminum company, who was working for a Republican

02:01:43.020 government as a cabinet member at that point. I'm afraid I can't remember his name. But he

02:01:50.480 visited Uganda and was very curious about its potential with regards to agriculture and calculated,

02:01:58.100 first of all, Uganda apparently sits on a water table that's only about 200 feet down,

02:02:02.160 and it's very fertile. He calculated, and maybe this wasn't his calculation, but he reported that

02:02:07.300 Uganda alone could feed all of Africa. Yeah.

02:02:11.160 And so there's no reason to assume that despite the fact, for example, I think it's Nigeria is on

02:02:19.780 course to be the world's most populous country by the year 2100. I think the demographic projections

02:02:26.500 are that it will surpass China by that point. Yes, I believe that's true. And that's quite an

02:02:33.240 interesting thought, isn't it? But no, I mean, just to cast your mind forward to the year 2100,

02:02:39.460 I think we will be producing food, an awful lot of it from factories by then. And by factories,

02:02:44.760 I mean, vertical farms, you know, indoor, LED lit, multi-story operations.

02:02:53.820 And why LED lit? Why LED lit?

02:02:56.280 Because LEDs are so cheap. They use so little electricity and produce so little heat that you

02:03:02.360 can actually start to make indoor farming make sense. Because light was the big problem for

02:03:07.980 farming. You had to be outdoors for the light, because the plants don't grow except in sunlight.

02:03:12.160 Right. But the LED revolution has made a big difference there. And, you know, I can imagine

02:03:17.280 us having, you know, basically some indoor farms the size of Uganda that feed the world and the

02:03:23.880 rest of the planet. Yes, we'll have hobby farming and we'll have grass fed beef in here and there and

02:03:29.560 so on. But an awful lot of the rest of it will be one giant national park in which we will allow

02:03:35.420 nature to thrive. And allow people to operate as tourists. I mean, increasingly, ecologically

02:03:42.840 pristine areas pay for themselves with tourism. And so that brings them into the economy, which is an

02:03:49.260 almost certain way of preserving them. Yeah. And I suspect we'll bring back some extinct species by

02:03:55.080 then as well.

02:03:55.640 So you talk about you talk as well about I'm going to list a few things here. So we talked about feeding

02:04:03.860 nine billion and that that's become a possibility. You talk about the triumph of cities and the escape

02:04:09.520 from Malthus. So maybe we could talk about that briefly. And the end of slavery as well, which that's

02:04:15.140 a lovely one, because that's unheralded, I would say, partly because I think people don't really

02:04:21.560 understand how universal slavery or near slavery was across civilizations for the entirety of human

02:04:28.160 history. So triumph of cities.

02:04:34.780 Well, people are moving into cities. Cities are where innovation happens on the whole. They're

02:04:40.660 disproportionately innovative. The bigger they are, the more efficient they are in some sense. They have

02:04:47.940 fewer gas stations, fewer miles of road per person in bigger cities, if you see what I mean. You know,

02:04:53.960 they become more concentrated. More than half the world now lives in cities. That leaves the rest of

02:05:01.240 the landscape untrampled. Cities only occupy about 3% of the world's land surface, I believe.

02:05:08.120 So actually, it's a good thing. And, you know, yes, you know, some of us like to live in rural areas

02:05:18.880 rather than in cities. But those of us who want to can do that. Cities are where people come together

02:05:26.380 and they mix and they have ideas and they produce baby ideas, you know. So it was the city-states of

02:05:32.520 ancient Greece or the city-states of Renaissance Italy that really drove the world economy in their

02:05:38.020 day. Likewise, in Britain and Victorian times or California today, you know, California is two great big

02:05:43.900 city-states, Los Angeles and San Francisco, effectively. And so I think the fact that the world is becoming

02:05:54.160 more urbanized or was until the last year, I mean, it'll be interesting to see whether city centers

02:06:01.220 really do lose their allure after the pandemic, because a lot of businesses have discovered that

02:06:08.320 they don't need to pay for expensive real estate. They can let people work from home. I suspect it'll

02:06:14.300 lead to a lot more hot desking, you know, people coming into the office two or three days a week,

02:06:20.240 working from home two or three days a week, which will cut down on commuting, make some of the

02:06:26.440 city's problems less bad, and cut the cost of real estate in the middle of cities. So I suspect we're

02:06:34.920 in, that we could have quite a soft landing for some of the problems that cities have these days. But

02:06:40.880 it won't all be plain sailing. I mean, things are going to go wrong in that respect.

02:06:46.720 Escape from Malthus.

02:06:48.440 Well, the Malthusian trap was Robert Malthus's notion was that if you kept people alive,

02:07:01.860 they would simply, you know, if you gave them more food, then they would simply have more babies.

02:07:07.140 So they'd end up just as poor and just as hungry.

02:07:10.620 Yeah, well, something like that happened in Ireland when potatoes became the dominant crop and then

02:07:15.720 failed, right? So the Irish pop, you outline this in your book, it's not an idea that originates with

02:07:20.420 me. When the Irish started to farm potatoes, their population exploded. And then a blight came in and

02:07:25.840 wiped out the potato crop and blew out the Irish population. And that's a classic Malthusian example.

02:07:32.600 Yeah.

02:07:33.100 He's sort of the ultimate pessimistic biologists.

02:07:36.080 Yeah. And he wasn't entirely wrong in that respect. But the thing he did get wrong

02:07:39.920 is that technology might change it. And we then moved to a world in which food became more and more

02:07:48.540 productive. Babies stopped dying. We got better at keeping them alive. And weirdly, once they stopped

02:07:57.020 dying, people started having fewer of them. And this is a phenomenon called the demographic transition

02:08:04.080 that took us really by surprise. You know, if you stop baby rabbits dying, they have more babies.

02:08:10.260 But if you stop baby human beings dying, people say, right, I'm not going to try and have as many

02:08:15.400 kids as possible in the hope that a few survive. I'm going to have two and try and get them through

02:08:21.660 college.

02:08:21.980 That's another thing that's occurred very, very rapidly in the last few generations that no one

02:08:26.380 predicted is that the rate of reproduction has plummeted and increasingly across the world.

02:08:34.380 It looks like as soon as you educate women, open up the marketplace to them and provide a modicum

02:08:39.600 of birth control, as well as these other improvements in the living standard that you described, that

02:08:44.080 the birth rate plummets to below replacement.

02:08:48.960 Yeah. No, and an awful lot of countries are going to have problems with below replacement fertility

02:08:53.240 in this coming century, which means that you've got a very aging workforce, which won't be able

02:09:01.240 to afford retirement because there's not enough working people and so on. So that's another

02:09:04.540 problem you've got. But it's better than a population explosion continuing to the point

02:09:10.520 where there's 20 billion people trying to live on the planet, which is what we were worried

02:09:14.400 about 40 years ago.

02:09:15.540 I think the projections now are that we're going to peak out at about 11 billion, something

02:09:19.160 like that.

02:09:19.680 That's the UN median projection, but a lot of people think it's overblown, actually,

02:09:24.340 that the numbers, if you run the numbers with sensible, you know, a lot depends on how fast

02:09:30.380 the Nigerian birth rate comes down, as you said earlier.

02:09:33.660 Right.

02:09:34.100 But with a sensible assumption, we might not even get much past 10 billion.

02:09:38.800 Well, it'd be really quite remarkable if an emergent problem for the latter half of the

02:09:43.120 20th century was that there was too many goods and not enough people.

02:09:46.920 And that could easily be the case.

02:09:49.980 That could easily be the case, especially not enough young people.

02:09:54.360 So maybe the answer to Malthus is sort of hidden in some sense inside the presumptions

02:09:59.900 you made in your book.

02:10:00.860 So maybe we could pause it as a general biological rule is if the rate of sexual reproduction of

02:10:06.780 ideas exceeds the rate of sexual reproduction of human beings, then there's no Malthusian

02:10:11.100 catastrophe.

02:10:11.760 That's a very nice way of putting it.

02:10:14.540 I think that is exactly the point I like to make.

02:10:17.360 Yeah.

02:10:17.880 Well, it's possible.

02:10:21.060 It certainly seems to me to be possible, given that we are clearly able to make more and more

02:10:26.160 using less and less.

02:10:27.660 And, you know, there's lots of things that we're not doing that we could do that you

02:10:31.640 also touch on.

02:10:32.520 One of the things that strikes me as somewhat catastrophic is the tragic underdevelopment

02:10:41.200 of nuclear power.

02:10:42.760 I've spoken with a number of people about the possibilities of nuclear power.

02:10:47.240 And you point out in your, I think it's in how innovation works, actually, that there

02:10:53.020 are no shortage of plans for much smaller nuclear reactors that don't use water as the primary

02:10:59.740 coolant that use salt or some other substance like that, certain salts, and that if they

02:11:04.920 fail, they actually shut down rather than melting down.

02:11:10.420 And so that's another example, I think, of where the environmentalists, which is a broad

02:11:17.440 brush, but the environmentalists got things seriously wrong and are still doing so.

02:11:21.000 Because as far as I can tell, if you wanted, the question is, what do you want?

02:11:25.320 Like, if you want cheap power of the sort that would make people rich enough to start

02:11:30.380 caring about the environment, it seems to me that you would be a nuclear power supporter

02:11:34.300 rather than a supporter of solar or wind power, which I think only still accounts for about

02:11:39.460 3% of total energy needs.

02:11:42.280 That's true.

02:11:44.260 People say, oh, no, no, that's wrong.

02:11:45.960 It's more than 10%.

02:11:46.760 And you find they're referring to electricity, but electricity is only about 25% of energy at

02:11:51.140 the moment.

02:11:51.460 So it's around 3% comes from solar and wind.

02:11:55.080 But the real problem with solar and wind versus nuclear, nuclear is still horribly expensive

02:12:01.020 because of the way we've regulated it and driven up its price.

02:12:03.860 So our problem is how to get the price down.

02:12:06.680 But the real problem is the amount of land that solar and wind use, because they're very

02:12:10.880 low density sources of energy.

02:12:12.640 So you have to have a lot of land and you need more land than there is.

02:12:16.260 You know, I mean, even Canada has hardly got enough land to produce renewable energy for

02:12:20.400 its population.

02:12:22.520 And frankly, that's going back to a medieval economy where you had to use the landscape

02:12:29.500 to produce energy.

02:12:30.460 You had to dam the rivers and grow the crops that you then, and cut down the forests, you

02:12:37.480 know, to burn for wood.

02:12:38.680 Well, it's not obvious either that wind farms aren't a blight on the landscape.

02:12:43.260 I'm afraid they are.

02:12:44.200 They're terrible for birds.

02:12:45.200 I'm a keen bird watcher.

02:12:46.200 I don't like the idea of these birds being devastated by onshore and offshore wind.

02:12:52.200 And, you know, a wind farm spends the first seven, eight years of its life earning back

02:12:57.800 the energy that went into building the wind turbine.

02:13:01.620 You know, and only after that is it net positive.

02:13:06.080 And even then, it's a huge investment of capital that could be doing something else.

02:13:12.180 You know, the point about energy is that it's the master resource.

02:13:15.000 It's the thing that everybody else needs to use.

02:13:17.420 So you want to make it as cheap and as reliable as possible.

02:13:20.320 Yes, exactly.

02:13:20.960 And that should be said over and over that if you were, it seems to me that if you were

02:13:25.400 truly concerned about the planetary fate, let's say, or even more precisely, the fate of the

02:13:32.980 people on the planet, that you would do everything you could to drive the cost of energy, including

02:13:40.000 the externalized costs to something as low as possible, because it's the prerequisite

02:13:44.860 for everything else.

02:13:45.860 And starving people aren't, we already talked about this, but starving people aren't good

02:13:51.240 planetary stewards.

02:13:53.240 So even if you...

02:13:54.220 But you'll notice, Jordan, you and I have now slipped into a slightly pessimistic mood in

02:14:01.180 that we're finding the energy policies of our countries rather stupid.

02:14:05.640 Yeah, it's probably because we're old enough so that a 90-minute discussion starts to become

02:14:09.560 tiring.

02:14:12.200 Well, there's that.

02:14:13.140 But also, you know, the identity politics stuff, the anti-enlightenment mood of our times.

02:14:21.440 I can make a case that we might just be about to kill the goose that has been laying these

02:14:30.620 golden eggs.

02:14:31.780 Well, I think, look, I think we should, I truly think we should avoid going there.

02:14:35.740 And I've thought about this a lot, watching people respond, for example, to some of the

02:14:41.340 things that I've been talking about over the last few years, you know, there's a huge

02:14:45.540 population of young and not so young people out there who are literally starving.

02:14:51.580 No, they're metaphorically starving, they're psychologically starving for a positive but

02:14:56.440 believable story.

02:14:58.120 And I think that, like, as you pointed out, we could decry the state of modern politics

02:15:04.420 and concern ourselves with the fact that counterproductive economic and social policies might be put

02:15:10.080 in place for all sorts of ideological reasons.

02:15:12.340 But I actually think a much better use of our time is in the kind of enterprise that you've

02:15:18.160 already pursued, which is to produce a robust counter-narrative that's thoroughly grounded

02:15:24.780 in, to the degree that that's possible, thoroughly grounded in the facts.

02:15:29.480 We can say, look, forget about that.

02:15:33.200 Forget about the pessimism.

02:15:34.640 Forget about the policies that that pessimism would drive.

02:15:37.380 We could make the assumption that we can have our cake and eat it, too.

02:15:41.260 We can eradicate poverty.

02:15:42.800 We can constrain relative inequality to the point where societies are stable.

02:15:47.120 And we can produce a massive increment in environmental quality.

02:15:50.660 And all that's within our grasp, if that's what we want within the next hundred years.

02:15:55.680 And I mean, you've devoted the last 30 years of your life, at least, to exactly that message.

02:16:03.200 And I think that's a much more powerful solution than being pessimistic about the counterpositions.

02:16:13.040 You've got to people need a better story.

02:16:15.860 You're dead right.

02:16:17.040 Thank you for reminding me that that's what I think.

02:16:20.020 Yeah.

02:16:20.340 Yeah, exactly.

02:16:21.320 Exactly.

02:16:21.880 Well, it's easy.

02:16:22.480 It's easy to get tangled up because you did.

02:16:24.680 And politics, especially moment-to-moment politics, can tangle you up badly and knock you off your central axis.

02:16:33.660 And, you know, your work, this is probably a good place to end, too.

02:16:36.600 Your work is refreshing in that regard.

02:16:39.400 There's other people who are doing this sort of thing, too, like Bjorn Lomberg, for example, and Hans Rosling, who are, and Marion Toopy, who are informed optimists.

02:16:49.700 Yeah, both Bjorn and Hans were huge influences on me.

02:16:55.760 And very sadly, Hans Rosling is no longer with us.

02:16:59.340 But, you know, Bjorn's book was a true eye-opener to me.

02:17:05.400 It was about the same time I was starting to think along the same lines.

02:17:09.340 And an eye-opener to him, too.

02:17:13.360 Exactly.

02:17:13.800 Yeah, so let's, well, I think that would be a good place to leave it.

02:17:17.840 And we could say, look, you know, to the people who are listening to this, there's no reason for a counterproductive and anti-human pessimism.

02:17:27.760 We could have a planet where there was enough for everyone, and where there was enough for the non-human inhabitants, too, that contribute to making life rich.

02:17:38.240 And there's no reason not to aim for that, and there's absolutely no reason not to assume that it's within our grasp.

02:17:44.600 So we want to aim properly, and we can have what everyone seems to want, whether they're on the right or the left, when they're thinking properly,

02:17:52.380 which is an eradication of absolute poverty, so no one is forced into penury and starvation, and no children fail to develop.

02:18:00.600 We can reduce the impact of relative poverty, which is an intransigent problem, but not unaddressable.

02:18:07.740 And we could restore to a large degree or maintain a sustainable ecology around us.

02:18:15.520 And we don't want to forget that and drown in our threat sensitivity.

02:18:22.260 Yeah.

02:18:22.720 But we do it by development, not by anti-development.

02:18:26.720 Yeah, we do that by faith in human beings, fundamentally.

02:18:35.700 And I think that faith, I don't think there's any reason for that faith to be unwarranted.

02:18:40.800 We're not a plague on the planet.

02:18:43.440 There's no reason to assume that.

02:18:45.240 So, anyways, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today and for talking to me, and also for your books, which they're uplifting in the proper manner.

02:18:56.460 You can read them and you can think, good for us, man.

02:18:59.960 We're incrementally making the proper sacrifices to lift everyone's standard of living everywhere.

02:19:07.720 And more power to us, and hopefully we'll continue.

02:19:12.760 Well, look, thank you very, very much, Jordan.

02:19:14.900 It's been an honor and a pleasure and something I've always wanted to do to meet you and have a conversation with you.

02:19:20.980 And let's hope we can have a drink in the real world when the pandemic's over.

02:19:27.460 Yes, God willing.

02:19:28.520 Wouldn't that be nice?

02:19:29.440 All right, so I was speaking with Matt Ridley today, the author of a variety of books we discussed today.

02:19:39.700 We discussed The Origins of Virtue, which is a lovely description, at least in part of The Biological Origins of Morality, and an optimistic book.

02:19:48.080 The Rational Optimist, which contains an extended argument for why reasonable people could sustain an optimistic and positive view of a future in which everyone has more of what they need and want.

02:20:09.140 And finally, How Innovation Works, which is Matt's most recent book, which is also a book I would really recommend during COVID times, because it's a sequence of narratives about the triumph of human ingenuity in small ways and in great ways.

02:20:30.240 And it's a reminder, I would say, it's a reminder for gratitude.

02:20:38.660 There's all these people who came before us, worked diligently, and with no shortage of self-sacrifice frequently to produce all these improvements that we now take for granted.

02:20:50.320 And it'll improve your view of humanity to read the book.

02:20:55.620 And since you're a human being, it's quite good for you psychologically to improve your view of humanity.

02:21:01.380 So thank you all for listening.

02:21:03.660 Thanks, Matt.

02:21:04.620 It was a pleasure.

02:21:06.460 Thanks, Jordan.

02:21:25.620 Thank you.

02:21:26.780 Thank you.

02:21:27.380 Thank you.

02:21:39.040 Thank you.

02:21:43.460 Thank you.

02:21:51.960 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - January 31, 2021

153. Rational Optimism ｜ Matt Ridley

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