TRIGGERnometry - ＂The WHO is Corrupt＂

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin.

00:00:10.980 And this is the show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:17.240 And a fascinating guest we have for you today. He is the author of How Innovation Works.

00:00:22.700 Matt Ridley, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:24.920 Thanks, Constantine. Great to be on the show.

00:00:26.720 it is great to have you here i love the way you've ignored francis it's fantastic stuff we we love

00:00:33.000 that you just said hello constantine or thank you because you you said hello to me it doesn't matter

00:00:40.100 it doesn't matter too late i'm just using you to make fun of francis that's all that happened there

00:00:46.360 matt very warm welcome to you uh so good to have you on the show you've written an absolutely

00:00:51.540 fantastic book. We're so excited to talk to you. It's called How Innovation Works. So why don't you

00:00:57.180 just start us off by telling us how does innovation work? What are the things that you wanted to focus

00:01:03.000 on in writing the book? Well, the reason I wrote the book was because I think innovation is the

00:01:07.200 most important fact about the modern world. It's what gives us all our prosperity and all the

00:01:11.280 gadgets we use and so on. And yet it's a surprisingly mysterious process. Nobody really

00:01:16.060 knows why it happens to us and not to rabbits or rocks, or why it happens where and when it does

00:01:21.520 happen. And you certainly can't turn it on or off like a tap. So I tried to get under the skin

00:01:28.060 by telling a ton of stories about innovation, trying to distinguish it from invention first,

00:01:34.640 because I think we have this view that the brilliant genius dreams up a scheme and then

00:01:41.320 the world beats a path to his door. What's that phrase? Make a new mousetrap and the world will

00:01:45.560 beat a path to its door whereas that's not the case uh you've got to do a hell of a lot of work

00:01:49.740 to turn an idea into something practical reliable and affordable that people actually want

00:01:54.260 um there's a nice story i like telling at this stage which is in the book about a beaver and

00:02:00.440 a rabbit looking at the hoover dam and the beaver is saying no i didn't build it but it is based on

00:02:06.920 an idea of mine that's that's that is a very very lovely story matt and we talk about innovation

00:02:16.380 isn't part of the problem that we don't truly understand it and our education systems don't

00:02:22.540 really encourage it well i i think uh it is surprising how much resistance there is to

00:02:29.040 innovation in theory we're all in favor of it if you ask people are you in favor of innovation they

00:02:32.860 all say yes and we all buy the new iphone or whatever but actually if you know what happens

00:02:37.440 people think of every reason to throw obstacles in the way i have a chapter about resistance to

00:02:42.660 innovation um and it's really interesting how you know even coffee ran into huge obstacles when it

00:02:50.280 was first introduced in the 15 and 1600s um two reasons uh one because the wine and beer industry

00:02:56.520 didn't want a competitor and two because kings didn't like people gathering in coffee shops

00:03:01.480 talking about whether kings were doing a good job uh which they often weren't um so uh there's

00:03:06.960 an enormous amount of resistance but as you say there's also a complacency about this that that

00:03:11.420 you know we we sort of take it for granted that innovation will happen but then we say oh the

00:03:17.060 only people who can do it are geniuses uh who are quite different from you and me so and they have

00:03:22.620 something called creativity which other people don't and i think that's a myth i think if you

00:03:27.460 look at the great innovators from thomas edison to jeff bezos they're they're just people who work

00:03:32.500 a bit harder try a bit more fail off fail more often you know things like that so uh one of the

00:03:38.500 messages i'm trying to get across to young people in particular is we can all join in we can all do

00:03:43.260 innovation if we want in fact there's a lot of consumer-led innovation these days you know

00:03:47.740 there's a beautiful example in my book of something called night scout which is um a way of monitoring

00:03:54.660 your kids sugar levels if they're diabetic on the through the internet and this was basically

00:04:01.360 invented by a bunch of parents of diabetic kids rather than as it were by a pharmaceutical company

00:04:07.740 and you mentioned the the coffee shops and it kind of brings to mind the question that i had

00:04:13.240 about it which is how important is it for people to be able to gather together and communicate with

00:04:19.220 each other share ideas throw stuff around talk you're nodding vigorously people won't be able

00:04:24.580 to see it but you are uh and it seems like uh you know at the moment that's certainly become a much

00:04:30.160 more difficult thing to do do you think that will have some sort of impact on our ability to create

00:04:36.620 new things come up with new ideas and so on yeah i think i mean it may we may not measure it if

00:04:42.920 lockdown only lasts for a month or two but well it's already lasted longer than that um but to

00:04:49.000 the well and the other point is of course today through the internet we can share ideas still so

00:04:54.240 ideas are meeting and mating and having baby ideas as we speak without people having to run

00:05:00.660 into each other in coffee shops but there is no doubt that there is a huge advantage in people

00:05:10.040 being able to talk to each other and people to consult with each other one of the themes i try

00:05:14.000 and get across in the book is that innovation doesn't come from geniuses in ivory towers it

00:05:19.080 comes from people who are socially connected the story that best exemplifies this is two people

00:05:24.920 try and invent an airplane in the early 1900s at the same time one's called samuel langley

00:05:30.380 he's he's a grandee uh well-connected um uh sort of astronomer uh with a huge government grant

00:05:40.020 but he says the way i'm going to do it is i'm going to shut myself away i'm not going to tell

00:05:43.560 anyone what i'm up to and i'm eventually going to emerge with a perfectly designed airplane

00:05:47.320 which is going to be huge. I'm going to put a pilot in it and launch it off the top of a houseboat

00:05:51.460 on the river on the Potomac River. This is in December 1903. It went 20 feet before it crashed

00:05:57.680 okay. Whereas 10 days later on an island off North Carolina two bicycle mechanics from Ohio

00:06:05.260 called Orville and Wilbur Wright who had spent years communicating, writing, talking to everybody

00:06:13.760 who'd ever built a glider or studied bird flight or whatever. They harvested every nugget of

00:06:21.640 information they could. And then they did a ton of experiments with gliders before they ever went

00:06:26.580 near trying a power plane. They did it right. And Samuel Langley did it wrong. And one of the things

00:06:32.480 that I find most interesting in your book, Matt, was how you were saying that actually China has

00:06:37.700 become a hub of innovation as opposed to the West. Now, why is it that China have become so,

00:06:44.700 so successful when it comes to innovating? Yeah, I think it's true that China is not just a smart

00:06:52.680 copier of the West, which you could argue that it was 20, 30 years ago. It is now forging ahead of

00:06:59.240 us. If you look at what Chinese consumers do in terms of their use of electronics and things like

00:07:05.100 that. They don't even use credit cards, let alone paper money anymore. They're way ahead of what

00:07:11.120 we're doing. So some of the stuff that's going on in China, also in genomics and biotechnology,

00:07:16.020 but also in nuclear and other things, is now pathbreaking. How did China become such an

00:07:21.700 innovative country? Paradoxically, I argue because it's been quite free for most of the last 40 years.

00:07:28.540 Now, that may seem a bit strange because it's not free. It's an authoritarian communist regime.

00:07:33.000 but that's only politically economically under the sort of compromise that dung shaoping came up with

00:07:39.660 um actually entrepreneurs are very free in china that is to say if you want to start a business

00:07:46.420 invent something um or do an experiment there's none of the petty officialdom that would get in

00:07:54.200 your way in this country uh you know the newt surveys and all that sort of stuff that you'd

00:07:59.520 have to do before you built your factory. So actually, you're free to just do it as quickly

00:08:06.540 as you can. One thing you can't do, of course, as an innovator in China is start a new political

00:08:11.460 party. That's off the grounds. Now, I think that's coming to an end. I think if you look at

00:08:17.800 what Xi is doing, he's crushing the economic freedom as well as the political freedom. And

00:08:23.880 I think he will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs if he goes on down this path. And

00:08:27.960 this happened there's a rather beautiful parallel with Chinese history which is that there was a

00:08:31.560 period when China was by far the most innovative part of the world around a thousand years ago

00:08:37.300 it's in the 10 hundreds roughly and it's under the Song dynasty and this is when they invent

00:08:42.700 you know gunpowder and the compass and the printing press and paper money and

00:08:47.380 several other things and what was key about the Song dynasty it was the most evolved empire that

00:08:56.340 China ever had. It was the one with the most devolution down to the local level of decision

00:09:01.240 making, economic decision making. So basically merchants were in charge in city states. And

00:09:07.280 then along comes the Ming Empire and does the opposite. And basically every Mandarin is in

00:09:13.080 charge and every merchant has to submit a request for a permit if he wants to leave his home village

00:09:20.680 or invent something, that ain't the way to do it. And China descends into poverty and

00:09:27.200 stagnation as far as innovation is concerned for several centuries. So I think Xi may be

00:09:32.600 recreating the transition from Song to Ming. I've left out the Mongols who came between the Song

00:09:38.100 and the Ming, but you get the point. Minor detail, minor detail there.

00:09:43.380 But it's interesting that one of the things you highlight as important to innovation

00:09:48.760 is actually perspiration uh you talk about how really it's not so so much the work of a single

00:09:56.240 genius yes but it's also not just a process of you know having an idea you have to be in the

00:10:03.160 space in which you have ideas which is at work and in china from nine till nine six days a week

00:10:09.280 is that the crucial factor here that perhaps in the west we're starting to become a little bit more

00:10:14.140 concerned with our quality of life, let's say, which may be a good thing. But the more kind of

00:10:19.880 hungry countries like China that are looking at breaking through at any cost. Is that really the

00:10:25.880 dividing factor here? I think what Konstantin is trying to say, Matt, is have we become wimps?

00:10:32.020 Yeah, and idle buggers.

00:10:36.100 So you will never hear that on another Matt Ridley interview again. So this is the beauty

00:10:41.540 of trigonometry we get the guests to reveal their true nature well we're lazy this is the guardian

00:10:47.100 headline tomorrow matt matt ridley says british people are idle buggers oh no oh god i didn't

00:10:53.060 say british i said the west and anyway even worse rowing back fast um the british were fantastically

00:11:01.460 hard-working when they were incredibly innovative in the victorian times notoriously so people from

00:11:06.780 other countries would come here and say so. People said the same thing about Californians

00:11:10.740 50 years ago. You know, it's unbelievable how many hours they put in, etc. And as you say,

00:11:17.900 they say the same about the Chinese today. So yeah, there really is a secret source to innovation,

00:11:23.760 which is to put in the elbow grease, to put in the hard work and do the experiments, do the trial

00:11:30.120 and error stuff. Again, there's a lovely phrase about the Wright brothers, that the guy who took

00:11:36.140 photograph of them taking off for the first time used, which was, he says, they were the

00:11:41.700 workingest boys I ever saw. And then I think you were alleging, with the word perspiration,

00:11:50.800 you're referring to Thomas Edison's famous remark that invention is 1% inspiration and 99%

00:11:58.240 perspiration. Although in the book, I point out that he originally said 98%.

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00:12:33.280 but matt doesn't it also need when it when it comes to these types of innovations don't you

00:12:40.300 need time to sit and ruminate and play and let the mind wander it can't just be work work work

00:12:46.300 otherwise you've got no time to let the mind wander problem solve pontificate all the rest

00:12:51.780 of it well the one thing that's certainly true is there's a lot of serendipity in innovation

00:12:56.460 that's to say a lot of surprising changes of direction by innovators they start out trying

00:13:01.680 to invent one thing and they end up inventing another teflon kevlar the post-it note these

00:13:06.800 were all invented by people who were looking for something completely different i mean the post-it

00:13:11.140 note story is quite nice at 3m they're looking for a permanent glue that works with paper

00:13:15.620 and they keep coming up with this temporary glue that doesn't work and they think what a waste of

00:13:20.640 time and then this guy called art fry goes off to his choir practice and he thinks hang on i could

00:13:25.840 use is to keep my place in the hymn book um and uh the post-it note and it happened to be yellow

00:13:31.360 the paper they were using so post-it notes have been yellow ever since um so um uh serendipity is

00:13:38.260 important and there's there's a really nice recent study there's a there's a there's a website called

00:13:44.380 inocentive where companies or other organizations can post problems that are getting in the way of

00:13:52.980 their development of an innovation and say can anyone think of a solution to this problem

00:13:57.320 and if you do we'll reward you and study and this has worked quite well quite a lot of people have

00:14:03.880 solved their problems on this sort of in this sort of open source way but nearly always it's

00:14:10.400 someone from completely outside that particular field of engineering or whatever it is that does

00:14:16.400 it so it really helps to have people coming together from different disciplines my favorite

00:14:21.880 example which i've used for years about ideas having sex as i put it is um the example of uh

00:14:30.160 the pill camera which you swallow and it takes a picture of your insides uh on the way through i

00:14:37.220 don't think it's a terribly successful technology but you know there you go it was an idea uh it

00:14:42.300 came about after a conversation over a garden fence between a gastroenterologist and a guided

00:14:47.120 missile designer fascinating so one thing that i really wanted to touch with you on with you matt

00:14:56.180 is the fact that our society seems to become ever more binary and that means that we tend to

00:15:01.020 associate with people who think like ourselves more and more whether it be socially culturally

00:15:05.680 or politically doesn't that therefore mean that our opportunities to create diminish as a result

00:15:11.900 of that because we work best i think with people who think differently from ourselves as the example

00:15:17.740 you've just given yeah i think that's a really important point and you know 20 years ago i was

00:15:25.620 utopian about the internet this is going to be a fantastic technology for bringing people together

00:15:29.920 from all parts of the world so they see each other's point of view and uh have each other's

00:15:35.100 didn't work out quite like that did it but that said you know you can't think of anything more

00:15:42.900 isolating or conformist than you know a slightly religious rural community in 19th century new

00:15:54.280 england or whatever so and that's why it's cities and city states where this stuff has has happened

00:16:00.560 best um fibonacci is one of my favorite characters in the book he goes from uh 11th 12th century uh

00:16:08.460 pisa to north africa and comes back with this idea of counting from one to ten and um having

00:16:15.140 a number called naught which turns out to be a really good innovation and makes mathematics much

00:16:20.140 better um so uh it it it it has all you know we do still have cities where people meet other people

00:16:30.620 and we do still have an internet where you can come across other people um i saw a tweet by

00:16:37.480 constantine this morning saying that he likes twitter despite everything um and i'm the same

00:16:43.320 you know i do come across stuff on that that i probably wouldn't if i was just reading the times

00:16:48.540 or the Telegraph every day.

00:16:49.940 Do you see what I mean?

00:16:51.040 No, I do.

00:16:52.060 I do see what you mean.

00:16:52.980 But on the other hand, I suppose what Francis is really getting at,

00:16:55.820 are we moving down because of political polarization,

00:16:59.980 particularly down the route of companies that only hire people

00:17:03.660 that think politically a certain way and organizations that think,

00:17:09.100 you know, only hire people with a certain mindset?

00:17:12.040 Will that actually preclude us from being more creative?

00:17:16.140 Well, it's been true in the past that, you know, IBM became too dominant, hired people who wore white shirts and black ties and short hair and, you know, and therefore missed out on the sort of, you know, what Bill Gates achieved.

00:17:33.360 so again and again you see the dominant industry the dominant company in an industry

00:17:39.120 being having an end run around it from a new entrant and that process has got to be allowed

00:17:45.620 to continue in the corporate world and there is a real worry in my view in that if you look at

00:17:50.880 the rate of turnover of businesses it's slowing right down actually that there hasn't been a new

00:17:58.420 entry into the top 40 companies in europe for something like 30 years um that's weird you know

00:18:06.800 you'd thought in this day and age you know where's where's the european amazon or google or or

00:18:11.740 facebook uh it's just not happening um and so um i do think that that the world is becoming

00:18:19.480 increasingly easy for conformists and complacent types to raise barriers to entry. And if group

00:18:33.620 think is part of that, it's only going to make the problem worse. So, yeah, we do need to shake

00:18:39.800 things up every now and then. And we need outsiders coming in and shaking up industries.

00:18:44.580 every now and then you come across quite a big business that's still quite good at innovating

00:18:50.220 and i i asked jeff bezos once you know how do you stop amazon becoming big and bureaucratic and

00:18:58.480 anti-novelty um and he gave quite a nice example of one of the management tricks that he does to

00:19:05.020 because he's aware of this problem um which was something called a reverse veto where

00:19:10.300 somebody junior in the organization comes up with a new idea and he goes to his boss and the

00:19:16.420 committee sits around and discusses this idea and nine of the ten of them think it's a bad idea

00:19:22.900 so normally that would rule it out but as long as one person champions it then it has to go up to

00:19:30.020 the next level of management and that way he at the top will hear about some very unpopular ideas

00:19:35.020 within his organization that's the kind of thing that i mean it doesn't happen in government

00:19:40.340 bureaucracies it doesn't happen in universities much anymore it doesn't happen in big companies

00:19:46.460 much it's the kind of thing that if i were any good at being a management guru which i'm not

00:19:51.420 i would teach and do you think the problem and we've touched upon this but i want to explore

00:19:56.900 this more is you know that old cliche necessity is the mother of invention is the simple fact that

00:20:03.600 right now in the west although things might change with covid we're simply too comfortable

00:20:07.960 we don't have that desire that drive to really change to really try and shake things up because

00:20:16.600 our lives are easier than they've ever been i know what you mean but i don't i don't on the

00:20:22.720 whole think that's true because if necessity was the mother of invention then zimbabwe would be

00:20:28.340 better at software than california i mean you know there's a huge desperate necessity for innovation

00:20:36.180 in the really poor parts of the world but actually innovation tends to happen in the richest parts of

00:20:41.280 the world so california recently um well china's not the richest part of the world but it's heading

00:20:46.180 that way uh you know victorian britain was the richest place on earth at the time but it was the

00:20:51.400 most innovative renaissance italy was way richer than anywhere else in europe and it was doing all

00:20:56.400 this innovation in the 1500s um so in that sense i don't think necessity is the mother of invention

00:21:03.840 but i think where you might be onto something is that um that bushfire of innovation doesn't seem

00:21:12.240 to last for terribly long in any one place you know italy passes the buck to the netherlands

00:21:17.920 which passes the buck to britain which passes the buck to california which passes the buck to china

00:21:22.380 and the reason for that may be because those hungry immigrant hard-working workingist kids

00:21:32.540 who start new companies and develop new ideas have children who go off and become you know

00:21:40.260 lecturers in cultural theory or something um i'm being a bit rude there but you you get the point

00:21:46.840 you know the second generation is often often wants to be an artist rather than an engineer

00:21:51.560 You see this problem again and again. You see it in Victorian Britain. You see it in California today.

00:21:56.680 So it doesn't last. And, you know, the question I wanted to ask you was actually about the potential downsides of some of the innovation that we've seen.

00:22:06.500 One of the huge issues that we're all going to become aware of, we're not already, that was something that Andrew Yang highlighted,

00:22:13.560 highlighted, which is the impact of automation on jobs in the West, particularly, but everywhere,

00:22:20.020 you know, the likely disappearance over the next 20 years of the vast majority of trucking jobs,

00:22:27.860 of, you know, supermarket assistance, all of that, shopping assistance, all of that stuff,

00:22:34.420 the closing down as a result of that, of shopping malls that's likely to happen over the place,

00:22:39.620 leading to very significant societal impact. Is there a danger that some of the innovations

00:22:46.340 that we create, we talked about it earlier with the internet, the downsides that we didn't think

00:22:52.720 about can be hugely significant and impactful on the world? And actually moving so fast and

00:22:59.500 breaking things isn't always a good thing. Well, I would say that we worry too much about

00:23:06.280 the downsides you know we we've fretted for example since the 1960s that any reproductive

00:23:13.300 technology in vitro fertilization test tube babies whatever would lead to eugenics would

00:23:18.680 lead to people going off to sperm banks and getting nobel prize winners sperm because they

00:23:23.640 didn't want uh you know because they wanted hyper intelligent children designer babies has been a

00:23:28.380 worry for about 50 years it's never happened why because people want their own kids they don't want

00:23:33.720 clever kids they want kids like themselves if they're clever they want clever kids if they're

00:23:37.580 stupid they want stupid kids you know i mean seriously you know people this is what people

00:23:41.860 want people want want and people have used test tube babies to have their own children to to cure

00:23:49.520 infertility not to have special children to everyone's surprise you know everyone predicted

00:23:54.260 otherwise so that's quite that's an example of us worrying too much about a misuse of a technology

00:24:00.400 and as for the automation issue we've been fretting about that for over 200 years since the

00:24:06.440 Luddites and it's not come anything like true in the early 1960s there was a huge panic in America

00:24:13.580 under the Lyndon Johnson administration because unemployment started to creep up and they said

00:24:20.180 this is because of automation computers are now going to be used in factories this is terrifying

00:24:25.960 this means nobody's going to have a job what are we going to have to do we're going to have to give

00:24:29.160 everybody more welfare and leisure and work out how we reorganize society well unemployment went

00:24:36.060 down again and at the moment we have higher employment or rather we did before covid started

00:24:40.980 in most western societies than ever it's true that each of us has to work a smaller proportion

00:24:48.100 of our time on the planet in order to have a good life so the average person today if they're in

00:24:55.140 school and university till their early 20s and they're retired from their mid-60s but live till

00:25:00.980 their mid-80s and they work a 38-hour week they'll spend less than 10 percent of their life at work

00:25:07.340 whereas 150 years ago you'd have to spend you know 30 percent of your life at work

00:25:14.100 to achieve the same lifestyle so we have achieved leisure but we've shared it out quite

00:25:21.200 equitably between us and there's a whole bunch of new jobs that you know a victorian wouldn't

00:25:28.920 understand he wouldn't know what a software engineer was and he wouldn't know what a flight

00:25:32.300 attendant was for example so so innovation creates new jobs as well as uh destroying them

00:25:37.780 there are issues of dislocation of adjustment um when new technologies come in but i really don't

00:25:44.740 think we need to worry about the idea that the robots are going to take all our jobs one of the

00:25:49.360 reasons people are more worried about that at the moment is because the robots are suddenly taking

00:25:54.480 upper middle class professional jobs um it's fine when they take agricultural laborers jobs or um

00:26:02.200 whatever but now they're starting to replace lawyers my god we can't have that

00:26:07.220 funny you mentioned that is it that a victorian wouldn't understand it would be quite funny

00:26:12.420 experiment to go back in in time and try and explain to a victorian that you're now a podcaster

00:26:17.280 i'm not sure they'd have a lot of time for that quite rightly so actually but um we were talking

00:26:25.920 uh matt uh you know sort of about the china and the west i really want to delve into that

00:26:31.640 do you believe that what we're seeing with the slow death of innovation in in the west is that

00:26:37.760 is the gradual decline of our society at the very beginning or do you think that is hyperbole and

00:26:43.280 a lot of nonsense well as long as somebody does the innovation we can still have access to it so

00:26:49.400 if the chinese invent vaccines and new forms of nuclear power they'll sell them to us so you know

00:26:54.140 it's not as if we'll be cut off completely if we don't do it ourselves but it does seem to me a

00:26:59.280 pity that for example if you invent a new medical diagnostic device in britain it takes between

00:27:07.600 three and four years to get it approved. And as a result, you don't do that. You go off and invent

00:27:14.380 a computer game instead, because you can get that approved instantly. You don't need permission.

00:27:19.600 This is a point Peter Thiel makes, that permissionless innovation in digital has

00:27:26.220 diverted a lot of energy into that and away from inventing things that really solve our problems.

00:27:31.660 I mean, I think it's really shocking that we are faced with, you know, years to develop

00:27:38.040 a new vaccine.

00:27:40.380 We should have been on the case 10 years ago saying there's going to be a pandemic.

00:27:45.620 When it is, let's have a new vaccine development platform ready to go.

00:27:49.700 That means we can be much faster in solving this problem.

00:27:53.940 Why haven't we?

00:27:54.900 Well, there's not much money in vaccines for pharmaceutical companies because if they work,

00:27:58.880 they do themselves out of business.

00:28:01.160 And, you know, the World Health Organization and other big bodies like that have sort of said, we'd rather fret about climate change or obesity. We're not interested in infectious diseases anymore. I exaggerate, but only a bit.

00:28:14.100 um uh so i think that um uh that that that there is a real concern that we are

00:28:22.140 complacent about the need to keep innovating within our own societies and doing not nearly

00:28:30.160 enough to encourage it um and the single thing we best thing we could do is speed up decision

00:28:35.940 making by government bureaucrats because it's not that government bureaucrats say no they never said

00:28:41.160 no to fracking they never said no to genetically modified organisms in europe they just took such

00:28:46.220 a long time to say yes that everybody gave up and went home well man you talk about the vaccine

00:28:51.640 isn't isn't that a bit of a contradiction in that it seems at least at this point that the vaccines

00:28:56.660 are being developed predominantly in the west uh the way ahead of everybody else on that

00:29:01.480 that's a good point actually good old oxford um yeah is is seems to be ahead in in the vaccine

00:29:09.820 race and this is partly because uh the welcome trust and the gates foundation have thrown a lot

00:29:17.260 of vaccines in the last few years so my point is really they should have done that 10 years before

00:29:22.040 or rather someone should have done that 10 years before uh because i think i actually you know the

00:29:26.540 gates foundations are heroes actually in this that what they did with insecticide impregnated

00:29:32.300 mosquito nets which is the technologies made the most difference to malaria in the world

00:29:36.260 what they did with the pneumococcus vaccine

00:29:38.520 where they designed a clever scheme

00:29:40.120 to encourage pharmaceutical companies

00:29:42.020 to develop an unprofitable vaccine

00:29:43.760 that saved three quarters of a million lives already.

00:29:49.080 You know, there is some good stuff happening in the West.

00:29:53.680 You're right.

00:29:54.660 But we could have done this a lot sooner.

00:29:59.900 We could have been a lot faster with it

00:30:01.540 if we were, as a society, more interested in innovation.

00:30:06.260 And there's something that I wanted to touch on with you. So I can't remember the exact stat, but essentially the China makes over 90% of the antibiotics for the United States. They're made and they're patented in China. Doesn't that fundamentally put the United States as a society at a disastrous weakness, doesn't it? Surely.

00:30:29.160 well yes and no i mean sure it's possible for um uh the you know the chinese to

00:30:39.760 decide to cut america off to punish it for something cut off its antibiotic supply

00:30:47.780 but then that's true of every trading relationship um you know for years after the war the uk had a

00:30:55.320 policy of encouraging homegrown food in case the u-boats came back well um you know even if the

00:31:01.880 u-boats did come back now we don't make any combine harvesters in britain so we couldn't

00:31:06.240 do anything about all this homegrown food that we'd be growing so and you know and um we don't

00:31:12.620 make many laptops in the uk that pretty well every technology the world has become integrated and

00:31:18.200 dependent on each other and if the chinese are selling antibiotics to the americans then the

00:31:23.280 Chinese need the Americans just as much as vice versa. And the great lesson of free trade is that

00:31:29.100 it creates interdependence and it creates mutual interest really well. And I think most Chinese

00:31:35.860 business people understand that, even if Xi and Trump don't. It's an interesting point you make.

00:31:42.540 And actually, I remember when I was studying political science at university, the stat that

00:31:46.600 people love to talk about is that there'd never been a war between two countries which had a

00:31:51.020 mcdonald's um an illustration of the importance of free trade since actually been i mean you could

00:31:57.660 arguably say that uh russia invading eastern ukraine was the first time that that had that

00:32:03.180 rule had been broken but i think was there a mcdonald's in baghdad uh don't know actually

00:32:09.280 uh good question good question i'm sure we'll get a researcher on it man just we'll get back

00:32:16.120 to you on that one. And by research, we mean a man angrily tweeting us from his basement.

00:32:22.760 Exactly. We get plenty of that. But very upset about our lack of accuracy on that issue. But

00:32:30.080 just coming back to the serious point that Francis was making, sure, yes, the world is

00:32:35.380 independent. Sure, the Chinese need us and we need them. But there's a difference, isn't there,

00:32:40.980 between needing money and needing life-saving medicine, number one. Another point I would make

00:32:45.620 you on the political side of things, is that it limits our options. So right now, for example,

00:32:51.580 we're talking about the Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs. And if you are dependent on that country

00:32:59.380 for 90% of your essential medical supplies, you can't really go around saying, well, this is

00:33:06.640 genocide, this is mass murder, this is like Nazi Germany, even if that's what you believe. And I'm

00:33:11.780 not saying I know that that's what's happening. But if that's what you believe, it limits your

00:33:15.980 options, doesn't it? And politically, the ramifications of this sort of arrangement

00:33:20.100 are significant. Yeah, but we didn't have many options when the Soviet Union was behaving badly

00:33:26.980 towards its own people. We had no trading relationship with them. And that didn't give us

00:33:33.320 better leverage, if you see what I mean, the fact that they were exporting nothing to us.

00:33:37.740 I mean, it's certainly true. But my point, Matt, sorry to interrupt, but my point is,

00:33:41.900 could Donald Trump go out and call China the evil empire now? Well, I mean, Donald Trump probably

00:33:48.660 could and would. He probably did that yesterday, let's be fair. He probably will do that in the

00:33:54.300 time between now and the time we release this interview. But could Boris Johnson, I guess,

00:33:58.980 is my question. Well, I think you're putting your finger on quite an important point, which is that

00:34:05.180 the uh the the cozying up to china that george osborne was pushing five or six years ago um

00:34:14.180 and which led to some pretty unpleasant sort of veiled threats from chinese interests saying

00:34:25.180 if you want your nuclear power stations to work then you better not be nasty about us or whatever

00:34:29.920 um uh is a is an issue um and i don't suppose britain ever behaved like that did it i think

00:34:39.300 it probably did when it was top nation um uh and and of course but the answer is not for britain

00:34:46.520 to become more self-sufficient it's for britain to become more prosperous and stronger and often

00:34:52.360 you'll do that with trade so again i i still come back to the point that that we do need each other

00:34:58.700 you know, that there is a mutual interest here. And I think we have to sort of fasten our safety

00:35:08.640 belts and get through the Xi period and hope to get to a more reasonable regime running China

00:35:18.440 after that. Because, you know, China's got huge problems too. I mean, it's got an aging society

00:35:24.260 and a big welfare issue, and also it's trade surpluses of the last.

00:35:33.700 Here's the way my friend Don Boudreau, the economist, puts it.

00:35:37.320 So you mean they've sent us antibiotics and washing machines,

00:35:42.700 and we've sent them pictures of American presidents?

00:35:45.980 Sounds like a good deal to me.

00:35:49.400 You know, they've got that money.

00:35:51.100 If they've got our money, they need that money to be worth something.

00:35:58.140 And it's not worth something if they destroy us.

00:36:01.860 And what we've seen right now is our relationship,

00:36:05.440 and in fact the world's relationship, fundamentally changed with China due to COVID.

00:36:10.760 And we were talking beforehand about you were doing some research into the origins of COVID.

00:36:17.120 Would you be able to enlighten us?

00:36:18.700 because there's lots of different thoughts as to how the virus was created.

00:36:23.100 Did it hop from pangolin to another animal to back to pangolin

00:36:26.840 and then spread in a wet market?

00:36:29.360 Was it something that escaped from a laboratory?

00:36:32.160 What are your thoughts on this?

00:36:33.300 Yeah, great question, Francis.

00:36:34.560 I wasn't expecting this video to be monetized in the first place.

00:36:37.200 Thanks, mate.

00:36:42.420 Well, when this first happened,

00:36:44.620 I thought it was very likely that this was going to be a wildlife market issue.

00:36:48.700 that somewhere in a market, a bat and a pangolin had come together in such a way that a virus

00:36:55.940 recombined between the two and it then infected people. We now know that is definitely not what

00:37:01.660 happened. By the way, that is what happened with SARS in 2002, with civet cats. This did not happen

00:37:08.000 in this case. We know that for pretty well certain now, because the samples that were taken from that

00:37:13.160 wet market were all negative. They never found a positive sample. And moreover, the people in the

00:37:18.480 market who caught it caught a very well adapted to human beings form of the virus. So the market

00:37:26.460 was a super spreader event, not a zoonotic event, to use the technical terminology. This wasn't

00:37:30.820 where it jumped. We now know that for pretty well certain. And the other weird thing is that in SARS

00:37:36.660 or MERS or any of these other things, we quite soon identify the source of the virus, the animal

00:37:42.840 that has this virus in it. In this case, we have still not done so. Now, you may have heard of this

00:37:49.200 bat sample, RATG13, but that doesn't have the virus that infects us. That is a very similar

00:37:55.660 virus, but it's not nearly similar enough. It's 40 years divergent if you use normal

00:38:02.120 evolutionary timescales. And in particular, its spike protein, which is the bit that it uses to

00:38:08.900 get inside the cells is very different, is really not close enough at all. Now, the pangolins have

00:38:14.920 another virus. That's less close than the bat one, but its spike protein is more close than the bat

00:38:21.220 one. So neither of these viruses can be the one that somebody caught in October, November last

00:38:27.460 year in Wuhan, okay? Somebody there caught a different virus. Now, was it caught from a village

00:38:35.080 in Yunnan, where these two viruses had come together at some point and recombined, possibly,

00:38:40.940 or was it caught from a lab where experiments were being done to combine the spike protein of one

00:38:46.860 virus with the backbone of another virus? Those were exactly the experiments that the Wuhan

00:38:52.780 Institute of Virology was doing with coronaviruses. They were making so-called chimeric pseudoviruses

00:38:59.820 with the backbone of one virus and the spike protein of another.

00:39:04.660 Now, they won't say whether they were experimenting

00:39:10.600 with this particular virus, with the bat version.

00:39:14.320 In fact, they say the bat sample, they found it in their files

00:39:18.360 and it had already disintegrated, so we can't go back

00:39:20.680 and look at it again, which is a bit weird.

00:39:24.020 But actually, we now know that actually when they found it

00:39:27.400 their files they didn't admit that it's actually something they'd called by a different name

00:39:32.240 4991 back in 2012 when they isolated it from a 2013 sorry from a bunch of miners who died going

00:39:44.440 into a copper mine in southern unan three of them died and they died with pneumonia and had a and

00:39:52.260 tested positive for an unknown coronavirus. So it's looking very like someone is covering up

00:39:59.760 something about work that was done on this virus over the last five or six years,

00:40:05.480 either because they fear that it might be the source, or they know that it might be the source.

00:40:12.640 Now, that's the wrong way to go about it, because it's still very likely that it's not the source,

00:40:16.560 that it wasn't a lab leak. And the way to prove that is to come out and give us absolute open

00:40:22.140 transparency about every experiment that was done in that institute and that way and you know make

00:40:27.920 xi jeng li and tian jun huan these people who are working on bat virus make them available for

00:40:34.520 interviews if china would do that then we could rule out the lab leak hypothesis but at the moment

00:40:41.860 we can't if far from becoming less plausible it is becoming more plausible the more we find out

00:40:48.640 And you have just made every weed smoker on the Internet incredibly happy, Matt.

00:40:53.840 I want you to know that they're sitting at their computers going, I knew it.

00:40:57.740 I knew it.

00:40:58.840 Well, I know that is the danger.

00:41:00.160 And of course, you know, there is a fate worse than death on the Internet.

00:41:05.420 And that is to adopt a position that is also adopted by Donald Trump.

00:41:11.120 Well, I was going to say you would have upset a few David Icke fans earlier in the interview.

00:41:17.120 but now you've made some of them happy. So it comes out. But just sticking with that, I mean,

00:41:26.040 obviously, as you talked earlier about the kind of regime that China has, Xi Jinping wouldn't be

00:41:32.020 the sort of person that would allow that sort of information to be properly ventilated outside of

00:41:37.500 China if there was a risk that China had been responsible or this laboratory had been

00:41:43.720 responsible um and i guess it comes back to what we were talking about earlier which is you know

00:41:49.420 the the negative sides of innovation i mean why actually for most people an interesting question

00:41:55.240 might be is why would a laboratory be doing these sort of experiments what is are they trying to

00:42:01.600 develop biological weapons or are there legitimate reasons to try and no there are legitimate reasons

00:42:06.140 and and they were quite open about this a few years ago because there's two labs in a sort of

00:42:10.680 friendly rivalry doing this. One is in North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the other is in Wuhan.

00:42:16.320 These are the two leading chimera viruses labs in the world. And they published a joint paper in

00:42:24.940 2015, in which they say, you know what, maybe these experiments are a little too dangerous,

00:42:31.740 because we now realize that, because what we're trying to do is create a virus in the lab that

00:42:37.980 has the characteristics of SARS or something like it, but can definitely infect human cells,

00:42:44.280 not just bat cells, so that we can study it, so that we can then develop therapies and vaccines

00:42:49.960 to defeat it. But we realized that in the process, we are creating viruses that are more dangerous

00:42:55.620 to human beings. So they said that. And they said, you know, some of these experiments are,

00:43:02.740 ones that we perhaps shouldn't be doing. After that, the US government put a moratorium on such

00:43:09.740 experiments, but it only lasted for a couple of years. It lifted it again. And the Chinese

00:43:15.740 government didn't put a moratorium on these experiments. So the motive was definitely good.

00:43:21.500 Let's study the heck out of coronaviruses so that when a pandemic does start, we know what to do

00:43:27.380 about them but it didn't work in the sense that it didn't put us in a position to have a quick

00:43:33.180 vaccine or therapy ready and it may indeed have made the made the pandemic more likely

00:43:39.980 and what responsibility do you think China have to take for this pandemic do they have

00:43:45.400 any responsibility did they do enough or were they being circumspect with the truth

00:43:50.920 well um uh obviously you can't be responsible for a natural accident that happens within your own

00:43:59.940 borders but when i thought it was a wildlife wet market uh issue as it probably was i thought they

00:44:08.560 had considerable responsibility because after sars which did happen in a wildlife market

00:44:14.680 um there were plenty of warnings you know there's a hong kong scientist who used the word time bomb

00:44:22.100 ticking time bomb about wildlife markets um and you would think and and short and after sars they

00:44:28.480 did shut down a lot of these markets they've then reopened them progressively in the last few years

00:44:34.760 and um uh indeed uh xi jinping has been particularly um uh espousing traditional

00:44:46.020 chinese medicine and the only reason you buy um pangolins is not because they're good to eat

00:44:51.280 but because you think they're they're a medical uh help to you know for health reasons not for

00:44:57.060 nutritious reasons. So in that sense, the Chinese authorities do have culpability for not doing

00:45:06.720 more to control the wildlife trade. And let's face it, there's another reason for that, which

00:45:11.260 is that we don't want pangolins to go extinct. And Chinese demand is what is driving pangolin

00:45:15.280 smuggling from Malaysia. But I have to now admit that argument has got weaker now that we know

00:45:21.880 the wildlife market wasn't responsible in this case. So attention then turns to the question of

00:45:27.520 the lab, and was the lab doing something for which China should be held accountable? And the answer

00:45:35.680 there is we simply don't yet know, but we need to know more. And are we ever going to get that

00:45:41.260 information do you think i don't know um i um i have such faith in human nature that i'm pretty

00:45:52.680 sure there are scientists within the labs who will want to get the information out and will

00:45:58.960 eventually find a way but uh the longer this goes on and the more tracks are covered i mean the only

00:46:06.220 reason we know about these copper miners who got ill in 2012 uh in yunnan is because um while a lot

00:46:15.680 of stuff was taken offline over the last few months a master's thesis that discussed this

00:46:21.480 case was not they missed it so you know that's quite a nice example of how hard it is for them

00:46:28.260 to to censor all this and shut all this down and they have got some good reasons for censoring it

00:46:35.440 which is that nutters in the West are going to make absolute hay

00:46:39.160 with anything that comes out.

00:46:41.260 You can include me in that phrase if you wish.

00:46:45.520 So you self-identify as a nutter, do you?

00:46:48.440 Definitely. Don't you?

00:46:50.940 Absolutely.

00:46:53.580 But, Matt, let me ask you this, because I think just for people

00:46:57.360 who don't have the scientific understanding of what you're talking about,

00:47:00.800 as I don't, as Francis doesn't,

00:47:02.560 if you're saying it's highly unlikely now that this happened at a wet market

00:47:08.440 other than some kind of problem that occurred in a lab is there another way that this could

00:47:16.540 have happened yes um yes the other hypothesis which is still very plausible is that somewhere

00:47:23.680 in yunnan the far south of china which is where these viruses seem to exist in bats or similar

00:47:29.880 viruses seem to exist in bats somewhere there a chap going into a cave to dig bat guano for use

00:47:38.560 on his fields picked up two different coronaviruses from probably from one species or possibly from

00:47:48.560 two species of horseshoe bat and inside his own body those two recombined to produce a brand new

00:47:58.560 virus and we know this can happen and this coronaviruses are particularly good at this

00:48:03.480 natural recombination and he then gave it to a couple of people in his village who gave it to

00:48:11.020 a couple of people but it never really took off but over a number of months it became better and

00:48:18.800 better at infecting human beings until the point where it actually somebody traveled to Wuhan

00:48:24.600 and started coughing in a restaurant or on a crowded train

00:48:30.220 or something like that, and then it exploded.

00:48:34.020 So that is, you know, as it were, just as plausible a hypothesis.

00:48:39.860 And those are the two hypotheses that I think we need to put up

00:48:46.360 against each other.

00:48:47.920 And, you know, in that scenario, the Chinese have got nothing

00:48:50.540 to blame themselves with it.

00:48:52.880 They couldn't have foreseen it, and there was nothing they could have done.

00:48:57.600 And Matt, Donald Trump has been famously very, very critical of the WHO.

00:49:03.800 Where do you stand on this?

00:49:05.300 Do you think his criticisms are justified,

00:49:08.580 or do you think they've been unfairly blamed for their handling of this particular crisis?

00:49:15.240 I think the WHO has behaved very poorly indeed in this crisis.

00:49:18.660 their refusal to talk to Taiwan even when the Taiwanese scientists were saying there is human

00:49:28.120 to human transmission there they they as late as the middle of January the WHA put out a statement

00:49:36.660 saying this virus does not transmit from humans to humans that's naughty I mean by then there was

00:49:42.480 plenty of good evidence they were ignoring it they were taking Chinese assurances at face value

00:49:48.640 and also in a more general way i think the world health organization has not been doing its day

00:49:55.720 job which is to keep us safe from pandemic infectious threats the who was spending a huge

00:50:01.660 amount of energy trying to suppress e-cigarettes and vaping over the last few years um five years

00:50:07.700 ago it put out a statement saying the greatest threat to human health in the 21st century is

00:50:13.200 climate change. This doesn't suggest an organization that was focusing on its day job.

00:50:19.180 And in the Ebola outbreak of 2014-15, the WHO eventually produced a hugely self-critical report

00:50:27.000 saying that it had, for political reasons so as not to offend people in Guinea, Sierra Leone,

00:50:35.880 and Liberia, long after it shouldn't have done, it had reassured people that the situation was

00:50:45.320 under control when Médecins Sans Frontières and other charities were saying it's not under

00:50:50.200 control. So I think the World Health Organization is an organization that is corrupt with a small

00:50:58.680 see not fit for mission and has performed badly. Whether the right thing to do is to cut off its

00:51:07.360 funds, I don't know. But as one of the largest funders, the UK has some responsibility, I think,

00:51:15.400 to push for some pretty serious reforms here. That is really stinging criticism there, I would

00:51:22.100 say, of the organization. Do we know why the WHO behaved in this way with this virus?

00:51:30.880 Is it a political issue? Is it an issue of incompetence? Is it an issue of something else?

00:51:37.540 I think a lot of these big international organizations end up being very bureaucratic,

00:51:42.640 very political. It's in the nature of the beast. The particular appointment of Dr. Tedros from

00:51:52.100 Ethiopia as a director general of the WHO in competition with a Brit called David Nabarro

00:52:00.920 a few years ago, I think was a mistake. He was the former Ethiopian foreign minister and health

00:52:10.860 minister. And as such, he had been very, very close to China. And Ethiopia is China's sort of

00:52:22.380 favorite country in Africa. So there is a very close relationship there. And just for example,

00:52:30.240 the business that Taiwan is not allowed to be part of the WHO or even attend its meetings,

00:52:34.740 that is something China has only recently begun to insist on, and the WHO has just gone along

00:52:39.960 with it. It hasn't protested. Before that, the previous Chinese regimes were being more reasonable

00:52:45.640 about Taiwan. So essentially, they're a very weak organization with no real power. And instead of

00:52:52.960 standing up to China and being honest, they kowtowed to them and they helped us get to where

00:52:58.860 we are. Well, we'll have to see what happens with their investigation into the origin of the virus,

00:53:04.140 which they recently announced but it has um uh also announced that it won't be visiting the

00:53:11.780 wuhan institute of virology which does seem to me a pity a pity i mean that's uh that that's like

00:53:20.200 not going to to the potential murder scene isn't it if you're investigating a murder wouldn't that

00:53:25.300 be a good analogy i think so yeah right okay i'm slightly lost for words here so

00:53:34.920 why wouldn't they do that um i don't know you'll have to ask them yeah i'm sure ted ross is coming

00:53:43.920 he'll be very happy to come and trigger no mature and find out but but then that begs the question

00:53:49.140 what's the point of having this investigation well um they will presumably talk to lots of

00:53:55.680 people in the chinese academy of sciences uh and in the centers for disease control which

00:54:00.520 and in the wuhan government as well as the national government um and they will hope to get

00:54:08.600 direct answers the way you've described that gives me no confidence whatsoever i have to say

00:54:17.080 and you're nodding again people won't be able to see it but uh okay guys well um i don't really

00:54:24.740 know where to go from here matt um it doesn't sound like we're really going to get you into

00:54:29.460 terrible trouble and myself no probably yourself uh we are going to be fine i mean we've already

00:54:36.180 been tried to been cancelled about eight times we've lost the studio three times i'm more lost

00:54:40.920 for words because uh i mean that does not sound like a good way to be dealing with this situation

00:54:47.020 Matt. And it sounds to me, we joke about it, we laugh about it, but from what you're telling us,

00:54:53.660 we've had a serious problem which may have been man-made, and the investigation into this problem

00:55:00.480 is not going to look at what may well have been the source of the problem, and rely solely on

00:55:06.340 evidence from people who have a political reason not to give stray answers. Is that an accurate

00:55:11.920 summary yeah i think it is and i would repeat the point that if it's not man-made if it didn't come

00:55:18.260 out of the lab then the the only way you're going to persuade us that that's the case is by being

00:55:24.500 completely open about what was going on in the lab and that's not what we're getting at the moment

00:55:28.740 well ladies and gentlemen there we go i don't know where to go from here this is crazy

00:55:34.900 you you're basically saying to i i don't francis help me out here man uh what he's saying is there's

00:55:41.440 no point in uh the report uh the who is at the behest of china and uh we're fucked anyway great

00:55:48.860 fantastic stuff uh all right well uh matt the last question we always ask is what's the one

00:55:55.140 thing we're not talking about that we should be but that sounds to me like what we should be

00:55:58.440 talking about doesn't it yeah that's quite a good answer but the the the other thing that i think

00:56:04.740 is a terribly important thing and i'm a biologist really originally uh and i'm a keen naturalist

00:56:10.640 we don't talk nearly enough about invasive species i just seen a gray squirrel go past my

00:56:15.720 window this is a species that's wiping out the red squirrel um there's all sorts of uh wherever

00:56:21.680 you go in the world you know ash dieback killing things uh this is the big conservation issue and

00:56:27.320 we we neglect it in favor of climate change or other issues or air pollution or something but i

00:56:34.100 i think invasive species are a terribly important issue but that's for another day

00:56:38.320 yeah I'm not sure that's going to be what we lead with in publishing this episode Mike given

00:56:43.560 some of the stuff we just talked about but listen thank you so much for talking to us

00:56:48.800 the book is absolutely fantastic and beautifully written as well it's very easy to read lots of

00:56:54.260 interesting stories to illustrate the points that you're making how innovation works I recommend

00:56:59.620 everybody gets it uh if you this is the first time i'm lost for words in doing trigonometry

00:57:07.500 i don't know what to say get the book but also wear a mask and should we wear masks even let's

00:57:14.000 talk about that before we go oh yeah um well um i'm not sure uh i mean it seems crazy to be

00:57:21.940 making masks compulsory at this stage you know if we should have done so back in

00:57:28.000 march if we were serious about it but i do i i i'm not an anti-mask fanatic um because i do think

00:57:36.220 they to some extent a they signal that you're trying and b they do make some sort of difference

00:57:42.020 i personally can't stand the ordinary masks because they fog up my spectacles so i've gone

00:57:47.740 and got one of these uh you know what are they called visor things you know like you're a knight

00:57:51.840 in shining armor except it's made of plastic and um you can see through them and they're great i

00:57:57.160 mean i i find that much the easiest way so when i was at an airport recently i was wearing that

00:58:02.040 instead and you can even you can even eat under them you have to sort of do this but

00:58:05.940 all right well there we go buy the book wear a visor and uh don't eat bad so i don't maybe we'll

00:58:14.180 end on that uh matt ridley thank you so much for coming on the show it's been a pleasure uh and

00:58:20.240 yeah we're all going to look into the who now absolutely good work thank you very much matt

00:58:26.280 and if you want to follow us

00:58:29.940 please remember that

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00:58:56.280 Thank you.

TRIGGERnometry - July 29, 2020

＂The WHO is Corrupt＂ - Matt Ridley

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