Why Kings Banned Coffee Houses and How Peer Review Became Corrupted Gatekeeping

Matt Ridley [00:00:00] As the crow flies on the Vance Crow podcast, what is up? Friends,

Vance Crowe [00:00:05] My name is Vance Crowe, and you are watching the Vance Crow podcast. In just a moment, I'm gonna have one of the best interviews I have ever done with Lord Matt Ridley, who is author of How Innovation Works and why it flourishes in Freedom. It is such a fun conversation. I cannot believe I got to spend my Friday morning recording this interview with him all the way across the ocean over in the uk. Before I get to that interview, I wanna let you know that I have made a radical change in my business model. I am still planning on giving speeches next year, and I'm doing online conferences, but I've taken the coronavirus time to work out some classes, some ways of thinking, and some ideas that I wanna share with podcast listeners. So I have put together a set of courses. Right now I have three of them, and I'm gonna keep building them every single week. I'm gonna keep adding more and more to them. Some of them are about how to become more engaging, how to get rid of uhs and ums in your speech. And one of them is just a series of conversations that I have with my intern, Ali Ali, which has actually been a really fun, enriching and kind of exciting experience. He gets on there, he's been working on his projects. He tells me what problems he's encountering, and then we kind of talk through how would I handle different situations. So it's just one person's opinion, but I know that the podcast listeners are super interested in getting better at communication, at figuring out how can I do more? Can I imagine a world in which I'm confident to talk about the things that I know about and to ask questions about the things that I don't?

Vance Crowe [00:01:38] And I would love to be a part of that. So for podcast listeners, I need some beta testers, and what I'm looking for is 15 people that I don't know, I'm not connected with, I've never met before, to write me and say, Hey, I want to be in the, in the channel. I want to check it out. And you can be one of the first people to take those three classes. Let me know what you think, help me set up the culture of the network, and we'll get it going. In a couple days, I'll announce the name of the network, but until then, if you are interested in being a part of the first beta testers, the first 15 people, I think I have maybe 12 spots left, then write me an email at Vance at Vance Crowe dot com and I'll put you on the list. We'll send you out a code once we're up. You can be a beta tester. We'll give you a couple of weeks and just let me know your feedback. So I'm really interested, I'm really excited about this. It's a new thing. Now buckle up for a conversation with Lord Matt Ridley on innovation evolution, dealing with your critics, coming up with new ideas. It is a barn burner. I absolutely love it, and I hope you do too. Thanks for joining. I am so glad you are here,

Matt Ridley [00:02:52] Lord Matt Ridley, welcome

Vance Crowe [00:02:54] Back

Matt Ridley [00:02:54] To the podcast, Vance. It's great to be back with you again. And this time I'm not sitting in a closet.

Vance Crowe [00:03:00] It is hilarious. You have the most amazing background, but the last time we were talking, your background was like a wrinkled comforter with like little stuffed animals above you. That's right. So what have been doing since Coronavirus hit?

Matt Ridley [00:03:13] Well, I've been at home and I've been reading and writing and publicizing my book. So my book, how Innovation Works, came out 10 days ago now, and in the US the UK launch is delayed until 25th of June. So two weeks time. And I had, I wrote a, a, an afterward about the virus for that. So that kept me busy. And then I've been doing a huge amount of writing partly about coronavirus, partly about innovation, et cetera. And of course, I can't leave home and it's beautiful weather. And I'm in a rural area in the north of England. You've been here, so you know how nice it is. And so let's, you know, that's, that's what I'm,

Vance Crowe [00:04:00] Life is wild, right? Like it's, it's a, it's a rare time in our history. I think everyone will remember this period of time, and it's really hard to know what will it look like in the future? How will we look back on it? But I know for me, exactly, part of it is I got to talk with Matt Ridley, my, my good friend. So last night, I,

Matt Ridley [00:04:17] Well, I mean, for most, for most people, this is a horrendous time. You know? I mean, if you are losing your job or unable to work or threatened your life is threatened by the virus, I'm just saying that, you know, if, if you are the kind of person who can work from home and you live somewhere nice and you have plenty of green space around you, it's not so bad

Vance Crowe [00:04:39] For me. I was very disappointed and I would say even depressed for a while when I was stuck at home, because I do so much traveling, and I love it. I love being out with crowds and speaking, but the coronavirus forced even me to be like, all right, really, what is the technology right now for doing telepresence? How, how much can you do over a video camera? Can you do education? Can you do classes? And it actually helped me reinvent a whole bunch of my business model, right? Like it's, it's been, there's downsides for sure, but the upsides have been full of innovation because I was stuck doing what I was doing, and now I got kicked into a new world.

Matt Ridley [00:05:20] I think there's no doubt that this will unleash innovation. It'll unleash innovation partly by giving us exposure to these new technologies like video conferencing and so on. You know, there are several brand names that I literally didn't know until a few weeks ago, like Zoom and Zencaster and Teams. I think I'd heard of Zoom, but I'd never used it. You know, that kind of thing. But the other way in which it'll unleash innovation, I think is, you know, maybe less pleasant for people, but crises like this, due to some extent make space for new technologies to come through in place of older ones, new ways of working in particular. And almost everybody I talk to who's in business is saying, I'm rethinking how I structure my business. I was hearing about a, a, a, a retail business that has decided that it actually, you know, if it, if it sells stuff by appointment, sort of click and collect stuff, it actually does better business than before because it doesn't end up filling its store with people who are not making a decision. It only gets people who are interested in through the door. So there's, there is some, there are, you know, there, there are gonna be new approaches to retail. There are gonna be new approaches to meetings. You know, I personally hope that my doctor, my lawyer, my accountant can see me remotely in future, maybe not my dentist or my hairdresser.

Matt Ridley [00:06:51] That may not work so well. But

Vance Crowe [00:06:54] I mean, you just imagine the culture change that we took, just the amount of time given back to people's lives, right? So the, the, it's not just going to see your accountant or your lawyer that costs you time. It's the drive, it's the parking, it's the getting in there. Now you lose the interaction and the serendipitous collisions that you don't know what's gonna happen when you run into somebody randomly. But you get, you get something back that's very hard to give human beings, which is more time.

Matt Ridley [00:07:21] Yeah. Although I think one, one can't underestimate also the degree to which for certain kinds of meetings, like zoom meetings with more than five people in them, it's a very unsatisfactory medium. You know, the business that you can't interrupt people that, that you keep finding, you're talking over people, et cetera, et cetera. That the, the, the quality of the line isn't always ideal. So I I, we, we will go back to a lot of face-to-face interaction. I'm very interested in the psychology of this. I feel it myself, and I'm hearing about this on a wider scale, that people are mentally quite prepared to believe that it's safe to go back out there. But they're kind of psychologically still a bit scared about it. You know, I can't remember, how do I catch a train or a plane? How early do I have to set out, you know, what's it like passing lots of people in the street when I've been told to fear contact with strangers? You know, there, there, there is a psychological impact that I think will be quite profound For a while,

Vance Crowe [00:08:26] I remember about a month into the coronavirus lockdown, I had somebody delivering groceries and I just wasn't paying attention when they came to my house. And suddenly there was a stranger at my house, which ordinarily would not have been that big of a deal. But now I found myself being in that fight or flight, like I could taste adrenaline in my mouth. And you think like human beings need to interact with one another because this is not a great psychological reaction to seeing another human being.

Matt Ridley [00:08:53] Right? Right. I mean, back in the paleolithic, a stranger was a threat, you know? I mean, somebody approaching your encampment for who you didn't recognize was probably an enemy. So deep inside us, there must be a little bit of that which we've managed to overcome. You know, we do. There's a lovely, I remember a, a a, an anthropologist saying to me once, imagine chimpanzees boarding a plane, queuing up and boarding a plane and bumping into each other and saying, sorry, you know, it just doesn't work. I mean, chimpanzees kill each other if they're strangers.

Vance Crowe [00:09:35] Last night I was with a group of guys and we were talking about our, our weekends and stuff, and I was very excited and said, I'm gonna be interviewing you. And somebody had not heard of you. So I described you as a guy who got his start, or at least where I found him explaining evolution in a way that made you like come alive. It made it so it wasn't just like, oh, survival of the fittest, but how are there various strategies and, and how does it met out? Now you're talking about innovation, and it seems to me that innovation is one of those things that it's like, what is there to say about it? People run into a problem, they solve the problem. That's innovation. How can you write an entire book going from being able to talk about the sophisticated aspects of evolution to this? Is, this is what innovation is?

Matt Ridley [00:10:20] Well, partly it's the same thing as evolution. Evolution and innovation are in a sense, just, just the same process. That is to say the, the creation of improbably useful and detailed, complex structures out of the world with the use of energy. You know, that's what an organism does. It makes, you know, a heart and lungs and a brain outta food. But what do I do as an innovator? I mean, not, I'm not, what does somebody do as an innovator? They, they take a lump of metal and turn it into an iPhone. It's the same thing. They need energy to do it, but they end up with something that is non-random, functionally effective, complex, and highly improbable couldn't come about by accident. And it's the same process. So I, I genuinely see it as a, that's why I have a chapter in my book called Prehistoric Innovation, in which I talk about the invention of farming, which was probably a pretty unconscious process. It was probably a very, very gradual thing in various different parts of the world. At the same time, when the climate settled down at the end of the ice age and became much more predictable, it became possible for one group of hunter gatherers to sort of just gently nudge nature towards producing the crop of grains again next year, or the animals or whatever it was. And then I talk about the innovation of the dog 40,000 years ago.

Matt Ridley [00:11:53] The, the domestication of the dog, probably the dog took the initiative, it started hanging around human encampments. It wasn't something that somebody said, you know what? I'm gonna try and train a wolf. It wasn't like that. It would've been a very gradual evolutionary process. And then I talk about the, you know, the first stone tools, the sort of flowering of, of, of, of human ingenuity that happened sometime before a hundred thousand years ago in southern Africa, which gave us a much wider range of tools. What was going on there? Well, it was something to do with the density of the population living on seafood, which enabled them to have a division of labor exchanging and specializing. And that led them to create specialized new tools and things like that. Again, it's not a conscious process. And so eventually in that chapter, I end up talking about the origin of life when from the randomness at the bottom of the sea, somewhere some molecules got captured in these little pores with electrical currents across them. And that enabled them to somehow use that energy of the electrical currents to end up being a bit more ordered, a bit less disordered. And that gradually turned itself into what we now call life. So in a sense, life is just a technology or technology is just a biological process.

Vance Crowe [00:13:16] There's something almost magical when you talk about electricity moving across either you know, oxygen and then turning into cells. You're talking about some level of organization. Does this give you this like tingly feeling or is this something that you get excited thinking about? To me, it feels like the same way when somebody to describe something on such a finite level. So small is the same as describing the universe, right? Being able to see far off into space. So do you feel this sense of mysticism and awe when you think about electricity causing organization?

Matt Ridley [00:13:55] Absolutely. I, I mean, ever since I first got excited about evolution, about genetics, about all these aspects of science, it has never left me the thrill of imagining what science makes it possible to imagine whether it's the unbelievable scale of the universe, the depth of geological time, the extraordinary insight that the secret of life is a digital linear code. I mean, I wrote a biography of Francis Crick and he and James Watson, 28th of February, 1953, suddenly for the, for the first time in history, saw something that has never been seen before and could never be unseen again. And that is, that right at the heart of life was a digital linear system that copied itself. And that was the secret of life. It wasn't something to do with quantum physics or spiritual mumbo jumbo. It was this weird little thing that there is digital information there copying itself. Now, you know, these kind of things are so thrilling. And I would, I would say to any child, yes, art can be beautiful. Yes, literature can be beautiful. Yes, religious insights can be enjoyable, but there's nothing to compare with a, a true scientific insight. And far from taking the mistress, my mystery and mysticism out of life, great science actually takes you deeper into greater mysteries.

Matt Ridley [00:15:33] It actually increases the, the wonder at the heart of, of, of, of the world. I think in your role with

Vance Crowe [00:15:42] Deep diving into Watson and crick and innovation and evolution, I would imagine you would have to be very, very comfortable with not understanding things as you get in there, because the deeper you go, the more complicated they become. And so in order to get somewhere deeper, you have to go further away from what you know. What, what do you think prepared you to be able to handle over and over and over again going into these difficult complex places?

Matt Ridley [00:16:10] Well, there are certain difficult, complex places that I try to go into and I just can't handle it. And I'm not capable. It's, my brain isn't good enough or whatever most mathematical things of, of an extreme mathematical. And my brain isn't a very good mathematical brain. But in biology and in genetics in particular, I often find subjects to be dauntingly difficult. I really dunno what this paper is talking about. I dunno what this word means. I dunno what this concept is. I'm gonna have to go back and read something else before I can tackle this paper. And then I can go back and read something else and think, well, I don't understand this either. I've gotta go even further back. But what, what reassures me that I can eventually comprehend this stuff? And there's a wonderful feeling when it does suddenly click. You know, when, you know, you know, I, I've been looking into the virology of, of the coronavirus a lot recently. And when, when it, when it does finally dawn on me what a fur in cleavage site really is and why it's different from something else, what, what makes me cake confident that I can do that

Vance Crowe [00:17:19] Is

Matt Ridley [00:17:20] Probably the fact that I had a wonderful genetics tutor when I was at Oxford, who was himself a leading geneticist. And it was at the time when how genes were translated into proteins was still being worked out in detail. And he was right at the forefront of this. And he gave us an infectious excitement about the knowledge that was coming available. And he sort of said, look, this is what we think at the moment, but we might be wrong. And I found that so exciting just to be told that, you know, I had reached the frontier here. This wasn't a case where this stuff had been cataloged and agreed upon. This was the hypothesis at the moment. So I, I love that idea that that that the job of the scientist and the science writer is to take you to the edge and look over.

Vance Crowe [00:18:14] I have a friend that's a mathematician, and I have asked him to come on the podcast and he's been like, no, I have no interest in that because I spent eight years getting to the frontier, took me all this time to do this mathematics. And I didn't study how to communicate it to other people. It's, I'm, I'm working with irrational numbers that literally are imaginary. They're not real. You can't draw them in, in some concrete way. And he is like, if I go to describe this, the only way I can do it is if I say it is like something else. But mathematics is so pure that to try and say that it is like something else actually breaks what's beautiful about it. And at first I was kind of resent resentful of him, right? I was sitting there being like, who are you to say that this is impenetrable? But then I kind of respected him because there's very few people that will ever tell you like, you know, this is just not my thing. I don't need to win you over. I'm painting seascapes. There's only a few people that can even see these seascapes and that's fine with me. What do you think of that level of that, that type of thinking?

Matt Ridley [00:19:16] Well, I think that that, that that is more of a problem in the mathematical end of science than in the biological end, where in the end it's just, you know, there's nothing particularly conceptually difficult. It's just very complicated as it was. So I think he's, he's right. I mean, I have tried to, I remember trying for a long time to write an article about string theory and in the end you just get a lot of hand waving metaphors and hope that, that the reader's satisfied. But the one, the one beef I have with my, with other science writers and with, with journalism generally is, and, and I'm constantly having arguments with editors about this. I've had two such arguments in the last month. Is that, is is the idea that if you must leave out the detail in order to make it comprehensible, I don't think that works. 'cause if you say, Dr. Vance Crowe has discovered a cure for cancer, this is very exciting. And he hopes to make a billion dollars. That's not actually that interesting. A story. The interesting story is Dr. Vance Gro has discovered a cure for cancer. The reason he's excited about it is because it addresses a weird little phenomenon inside the cell that is found only in certain kinds of cancer cells and not in healthy cells. And the way it works is this, that and the other. And constantly you find articles about science trying to leave the interesting stuff out, you know, and cut straight to the chase.

Matt Ridley [00:20:52] And that seems to me to, to lose half the fun, you know? Sure. You don't have to put every detail in, and sure, you don't have to use every long word. You know, you call something a version rather than an allele or, you know, you know, you use span Anglo-Saxon words instead of Latin ones. But you've got to, you've got to try and explain what's going on. 'cause that's the excitement, that's the detective story, you know? So then Dr. Crow realized that if he did this, he might find that. And that was the breakthrough. You know, that's, you've, you've gotta tell, tell, tell it like it is.

Vance Crowe [00:21:28] I used to present, I mean, when I was working with Monsanto before I would encounter these scientists that would tell me something, and then I would try and repeat back for them what they had just taught me. And because it'd be a lot easier just to skip over the details. And they would keep stopping me. And so I'd be like, starting to talk and then they'd interrupt me and say, oh no, that's not quite right. And at first, or for a very, very long time, it's not even a quick process. You, I was resentful 'cause I was like, just let me get it done. Right. We can go back and fix the details later. But then you start to realize like, wait, if you want people that actually are going to deeply understand this so that you're communicating something that matters. If you get the details wrong, then the end result is irrelevant. It doesn't matter. Yeah,

Matt Ridley [00:22:11] Yeah, yeah. No, that's right. And and to an extent, you've gotta understand it much more than you're gonna put in the piece you're writing. You know, you, you've, you've gotta, you, you, you, in order to simplify it, you've gotta understand its complexity. That's, is that a profound remark or a sort of yogi rum might've said that actually.

Vance Crowe [00:22:36] So, you know, it's, it's easy to be struck by your background that you have many, many books there. And it, what strikes me is you're talking about details and fine grain reading. How do you set up your day so that you have enough time to read and write and participate in social media and be in governance? And how do you do this

Matt Ridley [00:23:00] Badly? It's, it's difficult. And it's not like it used to be 20 years ago, I would sit down and read for long periods of time. Now I, you know, I read for five minutes and then somebody sends me an email or sends me a text or sends me a WhatsApp or sends me a direct message on Twitter or, you know, I mean, there are all these damn channels of communication to, to interrupt one's day. And, and, but you know, I use social media to navigate two interesting pieces. So another way of looking at it is, although I'm constantly being interrupted, some of the things I'm being interrupted by are, have you seen this article in such and such? No, I haven't. That's interesting. I go straight to read it and I read it. And actually the, you know, if it's no use, I don't read it. But if it's interesting, I read it and suddenly I'm, I'm following it up and it leads me to another article and so on. It's like being in a library. I mean, I spent a lot of time in real libraries when I was writing earlier books, my first three or four books were researched 80% in libraries. You know, I would be in the university library near here for many hours at a time. And I would be reading a paper in a journal and it would, and I would then look in the references and go and get another paper off the shelf and look that up and so on.

Matt Ridley [00:24:35] I'm just doing the same thing, just virtually. I haven't set foot in a library for 10 years now. 10 years. Isn't that, isn't that interesting? So as long as you use it, right, the infinite library that is the internet is extraordinary.

Vance Crowe [00:24:51] That's right. And I think that the biggest challenge is that it is filled with pitfalls of places that you can go have any sort of distraction that is possible for the human mind to come in contact with. Exists on the internet many, many times over what could distract you at the library. And there was lots of information at the library.

Matt Ridley [00:25:10] Yeah. But back in the days when I was in a library, people didn't send me funny videos about dogs and cats doing thing, which is, which is a pity in a way. I would've liked some, some of those.

Vance Crowe [00:25:23] So what do you think about the innovation is not like in the book? Tell me about where, where you're going with this, with the, Hey, you know, we, we were talking before about prehistoric and tools, but you must take this all the way out to modern day.

Matt Ridley [00:25:40] Oh yes. Now, I mean, the book is mainly about modern technologies, although quite a lot of historical examples. So I go back and look at steam engines, but I also come forward and look at search engines. I talk about social media, artificial intelligence, all the, you know, modern biotechnology, all these different technologies. But I try to set them in the context of comparing the development of insect resistant biotechnology, say with the first development of the potato, which is 500 years ago, as it were.

Vance Crowe [00:26:17] We've only had potatoes for 500 years

Matt Ridley [00:26:19] In Europe. That's true.

Vance Crowe [00:26:21] From, but they were grown in the Andes and then brought

Matt Ridley [00:26:23] 'em, they were grown, they were grown in the Andes. But when they first brought to Europe, I mean, they're just such an interesting innovation from, for the, from the rest of the world's point of view. Because they, they are an incredibly productive food. You can, you can basically grow more calories with potatoes than almost anything else if you've got suitable growing conditions. But, you know, brought to the Canary Islands sometime in the 15 hundreds and didn't really work very well at first. 'cause they, they're, they're a tropical plant, a high altitude plant, and they're, they're looking for a certain kind of day length. So there wouldn't fruit in the, the, the northern summer. But somebody selected a variety in the Canary Islands that did. And from there they went to Belgium, really, the, the, the low countries, which was Spanish at the time. And, and then suddenly all over Europe, but patchy. And it was really patchy. There were places that wouldn't take them. France was very slow in adopting them. Germany was very quick in adopting them. And eventually the French realized that the Germans kept winning wars against them. The Prussians kept winning wars against them because their soldiers were better fed. 'cause they were eating potatoes, you know? So it became a sort of military necessity to adopt this innovation.

Vance Crowe [00:27:46] What was the, what

Matt Ridley [00:27:47] Was the resistance of proposition to the potato?

Vance Crowe [00:27:49] Why, why, why would they oppose the potato?

Matt Ridley [00:27:51] Because it, well, here's, here's, it's one of the reasons it's not mentioned in the Bible. Whoa. So we can't, a lot of foods we can't

Vance Crowe [00:28:02] Grow. Something mentioned in the Bible.

Matt Ridley [00:28:04] And then there was a, a guy called Fraus von something, Heim, who's otherwise known as Paracelsus. And his theory, which was extremely popular at the time, was that plants resembled the diseases they cured. Okay? And so this, this theory got somehow muddled. So people started to think that potatoes caused leprosy. 'cause a sort of wrinkled potato looks like a finger with leprosy. So there was this theory that potatoes were causing leprosy, you know, so all this kind of, I mean this pseudo weird stuff happens all the time. Coffees a lovely example of resistance to innovation. I, I write about in the book, coffee comes into Europe in the 15 hundreds, again, same sort of era from Arabia, but even in Arabia, it's a new drink. And it's been banned. It's been banned in Cairo, it's been banned in Constantinople. It's still being drunk. 'cause every time the Salton bans it, somebody eventually starts serving it again in a Backstreet. But it comes to Western Europe, it's banned there and it's banned on the on, well, there are two reasons. One is that the competing technology of wine and beer doesn't like this competitor.

Matt Ridley [00:29:37] So the wine and beer industries campaign against it. And they actually use, you'll recognize some of these features. They use medical scientists to back their claims. So they go off to the local university in Marse and say, this, all this coffee, everyone's drinking is bad for us, isn't it? And the professor basically says, well, give me a million pounds and I'll prove it's bad for you. So he writes a report saying that coffee dries out the lymph nodes and destroys the liver. It's all nonsense, but you know, it gets published. And so the authorities said, we both ban this dangerous drink called coffee. But

Vance Crowe [00:30:20] The other reason, what time period was this?

Matt Ridley [00:30:21] This is, we're talking about the 16 hundreds.

Vance Crowe [00:30:24] Oh my God. I didn't know they were doing the papers and the scientists things back then.

Matt Ridley [00:30:28] It's a really interesting example actually. I mean, I dug out this paper. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it, it would, I mean, Greenpeace would be proud of it. It's not bad. But then the other reason that you're getting opposition to coffee is because coffee gets drunk in coffee houses. And the problem with coffee houses is people are sitting in coffee houses and they're a bit animated 'cause they've just had a caffeine shot. So they indulge in conversation and while they're indulging in conversation, they gossip. And one of the things they gossip about is whether or not the king is doing a good job. And quite often they come to the conclusion that he's not. And the king doesn't like this. And so, again and again, I mean, there's a, there's a, there's a user saltan in Constantinople who'd killed most of his family to get the job. And he banned coffee explicitly on the grounds that the fact that he killed most of his family to get the job was a topic of conversation in the coffee houses. Right. Can't have that. And King Charles II in England does the same. He issues a proclamation closing down all the coffee houses in London in 1672 on the grounds that people are going into coffee houses and telling lies. It's fake news that, that he objects to, oh, but I have to tell you the best coffee story.

Matt Ridley [00:31:59] And I don't wanna tell you all the stories in the book 'cause people have to go out there and buy it.

Vance Crowe [00:32:03] Oh, I'm hooked, man. I'm gonna get this book. This is great. I'm go, go, go.

Matt Ridley [00:32:08] Best coffee story, which is really late. It's in the 17 hundreds is the, the, in Sweden, the, the, the usual suspects come along and say to the king, you know, you've gotta ban this coffee stuff. It's bad. It's, it's disastrous. And oh yeah, by the way, we're funded by the beer industry, but we won't tell you that. And so the, the, the king says, well, I'm not convinced that it's bad for you. I would like to do a double blind trial, a proper scientific, randomized controlled trial to see whether it works. He doesn't quite put it in those terms, but that's what he's saying. So he says, find me two convicted murderers. Right. Put them in different cells in jail and give one of them nothing but coffee to drink and nothing but the other one, nothing but tea to drink. And we'll see which one dies first, and then we'll decide whether to ban coffee or not. Okay. Now, the beauty about this story is that the first person to die was the doctor overseeing the experiment. The second person to die was the king. The third person to die was the tea drinker. And the fourth person to die, the last person to die was the coffee drinker.

Vance Crowe [00:33:25] Coffee wins. I, I mean, that is mind blowing in and of itself, particularly for a moment, like right now where it feels like everyone is battling over the science. What does this science say? What does that science say? How should we, and, and flipping is to ought, you know, we know this is what is true and therefore we ought to do this. To me, I it feels almost refreshing in a way to know that that's going on since the 16 hundreds. Like, you can survive this.

Matt Ridley [00:33:57] I agree. It is quite reassuring that, that, you know, they tried to ban margarine. They tried to ban recorded music. They tried to ban the tractor, they tried to ban the umbrella. You know, handsome cab industry didn't want people going around sheltering from the rain under umbrellas. They wanted people hiring a cab. And this is in London in the 17 hundreds. So they made up all sorts of stories about people having their eyes poked out by umbrellas, which is true. You can have your eye poked out by an umbrella, but it doesn't happen very often.

Vance Crowe [00:34:27] So,

Matt Ridley [00:34:28] So you're right. These novelties do survive these attacks in a lot of cases. One of the differences though, is that if you look at Europe and genetically modified organisms, you know, biotech in agriculture, here's a whole continent turning its back on a whole technology now that it has happened in the past. I mean, the, again, the Ottoman Empire managed to ban printing for a couple of hundred years. But it's quite scary to think that a whole continent will ban a whole technology hasn't quite banned it, but it's made it impossible to develop it. And that it does feel to me that the, the, the combination of jealous incumbent interests over weaning bureau bureaucracies and fear-mongering activists are somewhat capable of achieving even greater things than they were in the 16 and 17 hundreds.

Vance Crowe [00:35:36] When you say over, over, is it overreaching bureaucracies? What you were used the word there? I didn't quite catch it. It was different.

Matt Ridley [00:35:43] Yeah, I think I said over weaning, but yeah, it's the same thing. Overreaching. Yeah, I mean, basically I bureaucrats who love having more rules to enforce.

Vance Crowe [00:35:52] Yeah. So a crazy thing happened this week just I think yesterday in the United States that I was shocked that I didn't hear about it earlier, the EPA, which had registered dicamba, which is a chemical that you put over genetically modified soybeans. And they said they, they pulled the registration. So we have already planted, I think it's something like 30 million acres, the, the United States in dicamba tolerant soybeans. And that they were preparing to use this chemical to go over top of it. Now, this is not like the easiest chemical to use. It's not the best, but it's been around for a long, long time. And now it just got its card taken away, which means the, we're gonna have like an actual problem. We have the potential to have a very real problem in the United States because dicamba was a thing that could kill a plant called Palmer pigweed, which causes all kinds of problems in the field. And it's glyphosate tolerance. So meaning that we don't have another chemical that will magically knock this plant out. So now if you knock that out, you now are gonna have 30 million acres that are exposed to the potential of not, of not being able to get rid of the weeds. So, so what is our option gonna be here to use way outdated chemistry or labor? And, and this, I mean, I don't think it'll wipe out all of the soybean crop, but it certainly will put hem on that when people have already planted the seeds before you took away their chemical.

Matt Ridley [00:37:22] Right. Well, that's not dissimilar to what's happened in Europe over neonicotinoid pesticides, insecticides, which were effectively banned on spurious crans, that they were killing honeybees. And when some of us pointed out that honeybee numbers were going up not down, they said, oh, well they're killing wild bees. And you said, well, are they going down? Well, in some cases they might be, you know, that's basically all the evidence suggests. And neonicotinoid insecticides are particularly useful because they, they're seed dressings. You dress the seed in it and the the plant is then insect proof, but you don't have to spray it on. So it's far less destructive than spraying on a pyrethroid, a more broad spectrum insecticide that is sprayed all over the place. And yet they may, because it was so widely used, they targeted it, they easily got politicians and media to get behind them. And it's now banned. And as a result, the, the, the rape seed crop in the uk, the canola crop as you'd call it in the US, is now failing most years in the southern, in southern Britain anyway, because of flea beetle. You can spray erythroid on to kill the flea beetle, but it's more expensive, more difficult and less effective. And it's worse for butterflies and other insects that are passing nearby that are doing no harm, that are not part of the problem, but are nonetheless collateral victims of spraying.

Matt Ridley [00:38:53] So it's been a wholly counterproductive point of view, not just for the productivity of farming, but also for the environment. So this, these campaigns against insecticides and modern farming technologies are, are very dangerous indeed. And, you know, they're all in the end driven by ambulance chasing lawyers trying to make huge killings out of lawsuits.

Vance Crowe [00:39:19] You live in this very unusual place, a bridge between explaining complex science and innovation and understanding it and also being very active in explaining things like, Hey, this is my perspective on neonicotinoids and why they're better to do that inserts you into a fight, which to me, I, I, I'm highly disagreeable. I like having a conversation and it's fun for me if you say something I don't agree with and we go back and forth. But when it's writ large, when it's you disagreeing with masses of, of people about something like whether or not we should use GMOs, how do you keep your mind flat or calm or, or moving forward because the fight itself seems destructive and you seem to be the type of person that's building something, writing a book or, or, you know, planting

Matt Ridley [00:40:14] Products. Well, it, it's a really good question. And you know, I have at times ruined my mental health by getting riled about the things people say about me, the ad ho and Emma attacks and so on. And I tune them out. Now, I'm quite careful about it. I never read comments on Twitter on my pieces. I mean, I sometimes come across them by accident, but I don't, I don't sit down and try and respond to the nutters who, who attack me. If somebody writes a nasty review of my book, I don't read it. I don't read the good good reviews either. I just try and just do my stuff. Lots of people will tell you what's in nasty reviews. I mean, years ago when, when I, when I wrote genome, somebody gave it a particularly vicious review in the London review of books. Apparently I still haven't read it, but the number of people who wrote to me saying, I'm really cross about that review of your book, it was outrageous. They got it all wrong and they were really nasty about you. And I would write back saying, maybe, but I haven't read it. And they would say, oh, well, let me get you a copy. No, the whole point is I'm not gonna read it. Why should I waste my energy on it? So I, I think the only way to stay, stay positive to, to, you know, to keep making your own point and not get dragged onto somebody else's point is to ignore the, the attacks. Now if somebody makes a reason, polite criticism of what you've said and says, look, I think you've got your facts wrong on this, or please will you think again because of this, then you enter into a debate with them.

Matt Ridley [00:41:50] And I do that all the time. You know, I'm not so, so blind that I never do that.

Vance Crowe [00:41:54] Yeah, you're not a gentle butterfly. I mean, you're, you're a guy that, that bounces back and forth. I mean, I think that that's what makes life so interesting is to find somebody that you respect and battle them with ideas. Like you, you walk away from a conversation with a person that is treating you with respect and they're not like, I want to destroy your, for your beliefs, but instead I'm interested in using this data and what I read and what I've heard. Those are the ones that make you come out like excited and, and having built something as opposed to just burning it down. Yeah,

Matt Ridley [00:42:26] Yeah, exactly. And, and the, the, the, the argument that's been hardest in this respect is climate change where I'm, what they call a lukewarm, someone who thinks climate change is real and potentially dangerous, but not nearly as bad as the extremes are, are arguing. And that we have to be careful that we don't do more harm than good in some of the measures we take against it because the availability of abundant energy that doesn't destroy the environment in creating it, the energy is quite important to civilization.

Vance Crowe [00:42:59] You, you, I I think you're the one that coined the phrase, or at least I heard it first with you, global greening. Can you describe what that is?

Matt Ridley [00:43:06] Yeah, no. Well this is, this is very interesting because the, the, there's a, a brilliant professor at Rockefeller University called Jesse Obel, who I've talked to about lots of global phenomena and who's got some really interesting perspectives on things. And he let me know one day he said, you know, the carbon dioxide fertilization effect? And I said, yes, this is that if you put more carbon dioxide into a greenhouse, the plants grow faster. Right? That's been well known. It's practiced all over the world. Every tomato grower uses it. They deliberately pump CO2 into greenhouses so they get more crop. He said, well, the, the satellites are now picking up evidence that this is happening on a global scale because of the increase of about a third in the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We are now seeing a significant increase in the amount of green vegetation on the planet. And they worked out how to measure the leaf area index of the planet, the total number of green leaves on the planet, if you like, and compare it between one year and another. And he said, go and watch this record record of a talk given by professor at Boston University, which it's publicly available talk, where he discusses how they've done this and what the results are. And they were very striking results. They were that there was a roughly 15% increase over 30 years in the amount of green vegetation growing every spring in the northern hemisphere and then disappearing every autumn, if you see what I mean.

Matt Ridley [00:44:50] That's a lot. And this was verified by other data. So, you know, if you measure the rate of growth in a forest delib, you know, on a small scale, you can pick this phenomenon up. If you measure the CO2 level in the atmosphere, it goes up and down by a greater amount every year than it used to. Which means there's, it means there's more, more plants take pulling it outta the air in the spring and putting it back in the air in the autumn. And so, so I wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal about this saying, you know, here's global greening. This is a really interesting phenomenon. And everybody came down on me like a ton of bricks. What an idiot I was, I'd misunderstood the study, it was all wrong of da da da. And anyway, it didn't matter if it was true, you know, and all this kind of thing. And rarely has there been such a foolish article and da da da.

Vance Crowe [00:45:54] Oh man, just so you're aware, I have taken real heat for repeating your argument on this Yeah. Where people went out of their minds because I was like, I don't know, I heard this idea. What do you guys think? And people were like, how dare you suggest that? And I was like, I, it is just an idea. I don't, I don't know if it's a good idea. It

Matt Ridley [00:46:11] Doesn't, it doesn't, doesn't fit their prejudices and well, anyway, the, the long and the short of it is that eventually the, this professor published an enormous paper about this in 2017, which was with huge number of co-authors from all around the world. Beijing University was the lead author and things like that and said, yeah, it's, it's, it's a huge effect. 70% of it is caused by carbon dioxide increases, the rest is caused by warming or rainfall or synthetic fertilizer or these kind of things. But, but on net the world is getting considerably greener how much by well over 30 years, it's like adding two continents the size of the mainland United States worth of green vegetation. So imagine all of Kansas and Texas and everywhere covered in green things. We've added that much green vegetation in twice over in the last 30 years. Now where have we added it? Well, in the Sahel region of Africa, but also in the tundra on, in the northern forest, they're growing faster too. You know, imagine one extra leaf on a pine tree or

Vance Crowe [00:47:30] Something like that, or, or

Matt Ridley [00:47:32] A bunch of extra leaves on a pine tree. You wouldn't necessarily see it, but it's there. Every year we're growing more green vegetation. Now that's, that's food for insects. It's food for gazelle's, it's food for monkeys, it's food for people as well. You know, the reason that, that the Sahel region, which was thought to be getting drier is now getting greener. It's this phenomenon is particularly true in arid areas. So it's a, it's a small piece of good news. Now it may be the case that it's not a good enough piece of good news to outweigh the bad news. And that's what people keep telling me is the, is the case. But they haven't yet produced much good evidence. In fact, they've shown that, that this phenomenon is likely to go on for several decades, if not more. And that it's result resulting in much, it's resulting in much less use of water per increment of green vegetation that is produced. So it's making crops and things less water hungry as well. So I think this is quite an important piece of news. And do you know what now about seven years after that original article, do you know what they now say about me? They say, yeah, but of course that's true. But we always knew that was true.

Vance Crowe [00:48:52] Oh, oh, when you have to have burned so much

Matt Ridley [00:48:56] And people

Vance Crowe [00:48:57] Have spilled so much ink about how you're terrible and then it just, it gets evaporated. Yeah. That's

Matt Ridley [00:49:03] Wild.

Vance Crowe [00:49:05] But I mean, I, I have to say that argument is one of those things that until I heard it, I had never had a way of even thinking about it in a different way. And, and just the act of like, well, what happens if you, like you said whams, if every single tree you have has just one more leaf, what does this change? I don't know. But it's a hell of a lot more fun to think about what does this mean than we know we're all doomed. There's nothing to be done about it. Those people over there need to change and we all know it. Let's yell about it. Th this, I can become completely intoxicated with new ideas. And I think my biggest challenge in life, particularly if I'm, you know, if I find one of your books, I almost find myself being defenseless of like, is this a real idea? Is this a good idea? Because I'm just happy playing with them. It doesn't, people aren't living and dying based on whether or not I believe in global greening.

Matt Ridley [00:50:01] Well, I, I mean, I, I try very hard never to jump on a bandwagon just because I like the sound of it. It's gotta really convince me. And I, I've quite often gone back to people who've made an argument that I suspect is right and would be good news for me if it was right. 'cause it confirms one of my other beliefs in the world. But I've gone back and said, look, I'm sorry you're not persuading me. You know, your, your, your evidence is not good enough. And I try and raise a higher hurdle for things that I know I'm gonna be happy if they're true than things that I think are wrong. That's hard.

Vance Crowe [00:50:51] I try and that's hard.

Matt Ridley [00:50:52] I try and fight my own confirmation bias. The only way really to fight confirmation bias in the world and science is riddled with confirmation bias. And, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's just the way human beings are. They look for, for things that confirm their view, not for things that disprove their view. The only real way to fight that is to have a red team and a blue team to have people allowed to disagree because then Professor A points out that professor B is talking nonsense and they have a good old argument and the rest of us decide who's right and who's wrong. But if you say no, professor A and professor B must agree on everything, must be on the same team and must and we must all agree what the, the, the truth is then, I'm sorry, you're not inventing a science, you are inventing a religion.

Vance Crowe [00:51:40] I a hundred percent. I think you're dead on with that. What do you think about, and this is a little edgy, but what do you think about the peer review process? People are now calling that into question once the once hydro chloroquine was, you know, seen to be a miracle drug now not seen to be, and it's throwing everything up in the air. What, what do you think about the peer review process?

Matt Ridley [00:52:00] Well, I think the peer review process has been irredeemably corrupted and spoiled for some time now, Man, I've watched it, I mean, I've watched it turn into a way for gatekeepers to keep mavericks out of science. You know, for example, the amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer's has been so dominant in the explanation of the etiology of, of Alzheimer's, that people who think that there are other things going on that you need, that this is a symptom, not a cause of an Alzheimer's have been frozen outta the field. And there are plenty of examples of that. So there's a gatekeeper effect from peer review. There's a, you scratch my back, I scratch your back effect whereby chums give each other's papers good or bad reviews, depending on whether they're chums or enemies. And if peer review was anonymous at both ends, then I think it might work better. But it's asymmetrically anonymous. What happens at the moment is that the reviewer knows the name of the author, but the author doesn't know the name of the reviewer, which is really just a license for sort of being rude to people actually. So I, I do think it's hugely problematic the way peer review has, has become an issue. And also it's very slow. So if, you know, during this last few months, we have wanted to know every last thing about this virus as soon as it's available.

Matt Ridley [00:53:37] So everyone has been sticking out preprints and those preprints have not been peer reviewed. And all of us have gone online and looked at them and said, actually peer review, do not, this is really good science. This data is very clear, it's very well presented. Is methods sound convincing? Et cetera, et cetera. Or the opposite. This paper's clearly rubbish, I'm not gonna pay any attention. The true peer review is the world, you know, it shouldn't be one or two people deciding whether a paper is good enough. You put it out there and the world decides whether it's good enough. In the case of this latest issue with the Lancet publishing the hydro chloroquine stuff, it seems like the, they published a peer reviewed paper that said that Hydro Chloroquine wasn't working and the PI didn't do their reviewing properly because the data in it were made up. It came from this truly dodgy site, which has sort of three employees who claim to have data from hundreds of hospitals all around the world on how trials were going. And it, the data looked convincing superficially, but scratch the surface. And you find there was nothing there. It's, it's, it's, it's fraudulent. I think The Lancet has very serious questions to answer about this. I think in the middle of a pandemic to publish a peer reviewed paper that

Vance Crowe [00:55:10] Who is the Lancet, by the way? That's a phrase I've heard. Is that an organization? What, what is that?

Matt Ridley [00:55:16] No, it's an independent magazine. It's a, it's a, a medical journal that publishes medical papers and it tends to have a reputation and has for many decades have a reputation for publishing bold hypotheses about medical issues. Okay. Which I'm all in favor of, but I think to, to publish something that rubbishes a possible treatment based on fraudulent data and does so possibly with the motivation that the very left wing editor of the journal, Richard Horton, doesn't like Hydro Chloroquine because Donald Trump does like hydro chloroquine, I'm sorry. But that's what's happening at the moment in this kind of world. And it's, it's not acceptable. You know, we need to be above petty political things. I dunno whether hydro chloroquine is any good or not. It might be useless, but I want, I want reliable data published on this.

Vance Crowe [00:56:22] So as a person that has studied innovation and how this process works, but then also understand the peer review process. How do you think, if we want to have innovations that solve the problems we have and you need to use science and data, how would you set up the, the what was, what solving the problem that peer review was started to solve? Hmm.

Matt Ridley [00:56:44] Well, I I think it's just, it's a reputation thing. In other words, I think anybody can put anything out there, but if you are the Lancet or your nature magazine, you should the edit, the editors should act as the peers that as, as the, the people who decide whether something's good enough to publish, whether it's reliable enough, they should go through the method section, they should go through the results. They should look up some of the backgrounds of the people writing the people paper to make sure that they're not called Mickey Mouse or something like that. And then they should publish it. And if the reading public says, you are publishing a lot of dross, I'm not gonna buy your magazine anymore. That's the true peer review. It's the same with an innovation, you know, a technology, the, the, the true judges of whether a technology is any good are the public. Take Google Glass for example, which was a, a wonderful, brilliant technology developed by Google X, their skunk works at Google to enable you to, I can't remember what it did, but it kind of gave you a heads up display inside your spectacles. Brilliant piece of technology, very clever, very ingenious. They thought it was gonna catch on. They made it look sexy. Turned out people weren't prepared to buy it. And that's the true peer review. Have

Vance Crowe [00:58:05] You used one of these a VR headset

Matt Ridley [00:58:09] Lately? Occasionally, but not, I mean experimentally, but not, not March, actually

Vance Crowe [00:58:14] In the last six months. I, I, I mean this is, it was expensive, it was 500 bucks or something like that. But this is a world changing, shocking innovation technology integration. You put this thing on and you are transported to a different world and the latency issues are getting worked out and the sound. So I, I am I, this is gonna be a big deal and if you haven't been able to play with one of these recently, I highly recommend it.

Matt Ridley [00:58:42] Okay. So that's really interesting. 'cause three or four years ago, I, I at Facebook headquarters actually I was, you know, playing with one and it was very impressive and it was extraordinary. But I was sort of thinking, yeah, right, I'll wait till somebody makes it into a really accessible consumer device and it I didn't feel that it happened yet, but obviously this is now happening.

Vance Crowe [00:59:04] Oh, I, what do you do?

Matt Ridley [00:59:06] What do you watch on it? A movie. Oh,

Vance Crowe [00:59:07] I, I sometimes watch interviews because now it's like you're sitting with a person. So a person being able to watch this interview on vr, it will be like they're sitting in front of you and then they're sitting in front of me and it, it's a much different dynamic. But you can also play games and I watch a bunch of things on the oceans, or I, I went to a bunch of WWF rallies and Monster truck rallies. Like, I wanna see what are these people going to, 80,000 fans go to WWF, let's go check it out without having to buy a ticket. And it's not the same thing, but it is way up close. So I, I, the best example I have is I had Jackie Joiner, Kirsty over, we didn't have much time. She came over, put the goggles on. This is serious athlete. Very serious woman. Puts it on and she starts giggling and playing and dancing with a robot. And, and you think like, this technology has arrived. It may not be all of where it's going, but it is definitely there now.

Matt Ridley [01:00:05] Right. Fantastic. Well, I, I, I want to try it also, it could solve the problem that my wife and I and my daughter sometimes want to watch three different movies so we could all sit on the sofa watching our own movie.

Vance Crowe [01:00:16] Yeah, that's very black mirror. Okay. I am so grateful that you were willing to do this. What will people find in your book that we didn't talk about and give us the name of the book and how they can get it?

Matt Ridley [01:00:29] The name of the book is How Innovation Works and Why It Flourishes In Freedom. They can get it on Amazon or any online bookstore. They can get it in real life, in real bookstores now, too. They can get it on Audible. It's, and they, they can hear me reading it if, if you like reading audio books.

Vance Crowe [01:00:44] Oh, that's what I'm doing. You're reading me this book

Matt Ridley [01:00:50] And it, it covers, it doesn't cover every innovation ever made. Of course not. I can't possibly begin to, but it covers innovations in energy, in computing, in public health, in transport, in Stone Age technologies. It covers failed innovations, fraudulent innovations, fake innovations. And it covers the lessons of innovation and the economics of innovation. So, so it's got a lot of stories, a lot of stories about weird ambitious people who achieved extraordinary things changing the world or didn't and how they went about it.

Vance Crowe [01:01:24] Well, Lord Ridley, I am so glad to see you putting more memes into the world. I hope they spread and multiply and grow because I, I really like the way that you view the world. So thank you for taking the time and energy to put into this book and having something to share. And thank you Steven, more for coming back on the podcast.

Matt Ridley [01:01:42] Really enjoyed the chat.

Vance Crowe [01:01:45] Alright, everybody that is going to do it. Thank you so much to Lord Matt Ridley for coming on the podcast. This was one of the most enriching mornings that I could have possibly imagined. It was wonderful and it was good for the soul and I hope you found it exciting. If you are interested in becoming a part of the classes that I was talking about before, I'm offering a deal just to podcast listeners. I want some beta testers, some people that I don't know that can come check out what I'm offering. So in the future we'll use it as a way for people to support the podcast. And if you support it, then you can get involved in an Articulate Ventures network, where you can see classes, where you can interact with other people. And right now, for the next week or so, I need some beta testers. I need some people to take the classes, give me feedback, let me know how it's all working. Test out the system. So if you're one of those people, let me know by writing me an email Vance at Vance Crowe dot com or you can DM me on Twitter. That'd be cool too at Vance Crow. Thank you so much for joining me. I will be back next week with some more barn burners and really enjoying having you along this ride for these great conversations. Ah.