Latest / ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence / Anton Howes on Lessons from History on Innovation and Invention (#048)

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Anton Howes on Lessons from History on Innovation and Invention (#048) · ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_03: Actually, a great example of this today, of how the concern with preservation can end up being so useful, is uh some of your listeners may or may not be aware, there's a big prize right now to to read scrolls that were dug up in the 18th century from the volcanic blast at Vesuvius.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_03: So I think it's the 1720s.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_03: A shepherd discovers walking around Herculaneum near Pompeii, the famous Pompeii, that you know he he discovers basically a bunch of scrolls.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_03: They try to open them very carefully in the 18th century, but I think the first two or three scrolls they just crumble to dust.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_03: They're just way too um fragile.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_03: And so after that they just preserved all of them.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_03: They they tried not to touch them at all.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_03: And only now, with advances in AI, with advances in particle physics, with advances in all of the technology associated with those things, those can be read.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_03: So they can digitally unfold the scrolls without actually having to, they can scan the thing without actually having to break them open.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um so the preservation there will end up presumably giving us quite a lot of detail once we can read what's inside them.
• 1:23
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• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Hello everyone.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to another edition of Contraminds.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, I am talking to Anton House.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Anton House is the head of innovation research at the UK-based think tank, the Entrepreneurs Network, which encourages innovation and entrepreneurship.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: He is also the historian in residence at the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: I spoke to Anton about how the Royal Society of Arts encouraged innovation and invention in the late 17th and 18th century.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: We also spoke about how innovation spread during that time which led to the Industrial Revolution.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: We also spoke about the importance of interdisciplinary learning that stimulates innovation.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: We also had an interesting conversation on how the center of gravity of innovation and invention moved from Britain to the US in the early 19th century, and where does he think the center of gravity for innovation and invention will move over the next decade or two?
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Over to my conversation with Anton.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: Hi Anton, it's lovely talking to you.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm really super excited to speak to you.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a follower of your newsletter, your books, the work that you do, and uh I'm indeed privileged to have you as a special guest in the Contraminds podcast.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_03: Lovely, thanks very much for having me.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, Anton, I just wanted to start off our conversation on uh the work that you do on uh inventions, right?
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: You pretty much track it back to the 17th century, and uh you specifically talk about the fact that the eighteenth century was the age of improvement, right?
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so why do you consider 18th century as the age of improvement?
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_03: It's a period in which across all facets of human endeavor, so in you know making textiles, in agriculture, in ceramics, in gardening, uh, in the usage of different energy sources, in mining, in minerals, I mean, absolutely anything you name it, there is an appreciable increase in the rate of invention.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it's one of those things that's often lost on a lot of people.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_03: Like when people think of the Industrial Revolution or they think of the 18th century, they think of a few maybe big inventions, and that stands out in their mind as, and they say, okay, yeah, there's a bunch of inventions, and some of those are important, some of those not so much.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_03: What I think is often lost is just how much activity is going on in order to produce a few of those inventions, but also all of the stuff in the background that's happening, so improvements in tool making, in the machines, and across all of the different industries in which it takes place as well.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, most people aren't going to be able to name very many medical innovations of the 18th century, you know, perhaps beyond something like vaccination or inoculation.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_03: But there's a great deal of activity that's taking place.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_03: Likewise for ceramics or for gardening, these are not things that really spring to people's minds.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_03: But there's so much that's happening.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and it's hundreds of people doing very small marginal improvements.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_03: So it's not necessarily I I like to call it an age of improvement rather than invention, although my substack name is it's called the age of invention.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_03: It's the kind of just a title off the cuff, you know.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_03: It's really an age of improvement because it's like having hundreds or thousands of people improving the thing that they do or something else that they've seen by about 5%.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_03: It's not like big leaps forward, it's not, you know, we're suddenly going to the moon or something, you know, just from from from standing still, but rather that things are getting faster and faster and faster, they're getting more efficient, they're getting more beautiful, food is getting tastier, food is getting more abundant.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, all of these different things are happening in a way that's often very difficult even today for us to appreciate, right?
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_03: Even today, this this happens where you know we get used to the latest patch on our you know software.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um that kind of improvement doesn't win awards, it doesn't get lots of people interested, but it's the kind of thing upon which the modern world is made.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and it's in the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries that you start to see that, right?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_03: Before then it's really not obvious that there's very much going on.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: So so you're talking about uh you know incremental improvements happening.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: And uh do you see some kind of in your study?
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, uh, say for example, you talk about the 16th century, but the impact on how it hits the society takes you know several uh you know uh maybe a decade or a century, so to speak.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: So therefore, have you kind of studied that and looked at an invention to really make a significant impact uh in the way it changes the society and culture?
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um how long do you believe it takes?
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because you tend to look at the end most of the times and get excited, but you when you study history, you realize that you know it probably is almost you know maybe done about 100 years back.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: And is that some kind of a uh history or uh you know statistic that you kind of picked up?
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I don't think there's a general rule for particular inventions, right?
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_03: It's not like it's always going to be 100 years or 120 years or 80 years, and that maybe changes over time.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_03: Um, certainly there are changes in adop the speed of adoption of inventions, right?
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, a lot of people will have seen curves for showing the number of people in the proportion of people in the United States, for example, who owned a television or refrigerator or car or iPhone, like, and it gets steeper and steeper and steeper the further you get into the 20th and then into the 21st century.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so yeah, it's it's unclear with adoption.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_03: I suspect it was much slower.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_03: Things like the printing press do make a huge difference in terms of just speeding up adoption rates, because your ability to put out information for people to be able to figure out what's going on increases quite appreciably.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_03: So communications technology is a big part of that, and presumably we'll have changed that rate.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but also not all things need to be adopted by everyone, right?
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of the inventions we're talking about are only done by a handful of manufacturers, a handful of artisans, and they're often covering the entire country pretty much, or entire cities.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_03: And there are, I think, some big inventions or some impactful inventions, many of which will be almost unknown today, where just from the way that the economy is structured at the time, they have much larger and much more rapid impacts than others.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_03: So, to give you an example, you know, today, if you were to come up with an invention in Britain that improved agriculture by a hundred percent, so a doubling in the efficiency of agriculture in Britain, agriculture only accounts for what, one, two percent of the British economy today.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_03: So even your doubling's not going to have a huge impact on most day-to-day people's lives in the country.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_03: Uh if, however, you come up with a hundred percent improvement in agriculture in 1600, when agriculture accounts for the majority of employment, the majority of people's expenditure in terms of family, household expenditure, about 80% of people's wages, at least, is going on food and drink, uh and just on output in general as well within the economy, it'll again be about 50-60% still.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_03: You're gonna have a huge impact on basically everyone's lives.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_03: To the extent that even small changes in agriculture, one the 1% and 0.5% and 0.2% improvements, many of which we probably don't know much about at all and really deserve quite a lot of study, are not going to, they're not going to seem as though it's not going to seem as though there's much going on, but actually you could have very dramatic, very quick changes happening as well.
• 11:17
  unknown: Right?
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_03: You improve the efficiency of agriculture back then, everyone's gonna notice, even if not, even if they don't know what's responsible, they're gonna see results, right?
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_03: They're gonna see more people, they're gonna see better food, they're really gonna notice, considering just how much more of their daily experience is just revolving around that one sector of the economy.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_03: The same with textiles, right?
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_03: There's a reason everyone talks about cotton all the time when it comes to the Industrial Revolution, is because textiles were really, really big deal, right?
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_03: Clothing yourself was much more expensive as a proportion of your income as it would be today.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_03: Clothing, you know, textiles accounts for something like about 15% of the economy in Britain, you know, in the 18th century.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_03: That's a big deal, right?
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_03: Even in China today, where textile, where you know so many of the world's textiles are coming from, um, I don't think it's ever been more well around now it's it's not more than 7 or 8%, right?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_03: So even then it's it's it's double the size in terms of just internal, internally what's going on.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, those inventions have a much bigger impact.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_03: And it's it's no surprise that people notice at the time, and that's the reason those inventions are the famous ones.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas you can have just as much invention happening in, I don't know, I mentioned I keep mentioning gardening because it's just a nice example of something where not that many people are doing gardening, right?
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_03: But even though there's not that many people doing gardening, right, you can see very similar amounts of improvement taking place, but they're not having this much broader impact on everyone's lives.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: So, so uh from whatever I've been reading about your work, one thing that keeps coming back, which I kind of keep noting down, is this whole thing around the importance of interdisciplinary thinking, which fuels innovation.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, how important is that?
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's a really good question, in a sense.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_03: In a sense, I don't think it's important.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_03: Because in a sense, I think it's the wrong way to think about it, in a way.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_03: It's not that we should be going out in our day-to-day lives, I think, and just saying, how can I apply this discipline to this discipline, or trying to be interdisciplinary.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_03: The way I think of it is that a lot of inventors or improvers, innovators in a general sense, they're applying improvement to whatever they see.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_03: And it's not so much that they're necessarily taking the skills of one sector and applying it to another sector.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think anyone kind of well, some people do, but I don't think that's the general thing that's taking place.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's more that they might improve some sector and then they just think, I don't know, they just a friend of theirs works in another industry and they say, Have you tried doing XYZ?
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_03: It works for us too.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_03: Or they find out a little bit about it and say, that seems really inefficient.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_03: Why are you doing it that way?
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_03: Like, I'm so used to doing it this other way, or I can immediately see just as an outsider that the way things done may not be the right way that uh or the best way that things can be done.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_03: So I think you know that kind of optimization is almost in a sense independent of disciplines.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_03: Um, in a way, yes, the outcome is that you end up with a lot of interdisciplinary action, but I don't think that's necessarily the intention going into it, right?
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_03: That's just more how it uh seems to occur after the fact.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: The reason I'm saying that is uh, you know, when I uh when I look at how mechanics, art, photography were all kind of uh, you know, uh, you know, there were premiums being paid by the uh you know the Royal Society of Arts, and then uh you had uh you know a whole host of uh I would say inspiration being built out of such disciplines, uh, and then it gets probably applied in say machines or in other forms of uh you know inventions.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's the reason I was asking that question.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_03: No, I think there's definitely something to it in the sense that you definitely see spillovers or people coming at different disciplines with different backgrounds in mind, where they're just used to the way things are done and can't they to them it's almost like ridiculous that people will be doing it the way they're doing it instead of the way that seems so obvious, right?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_03: It's almost like an outsider's advantage, I guess.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, okay.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: And what do you think uh was the influence of uh you know Francis Bacon in you know uh almost acting as a catalyst for this kind of thinking to start very early?
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, you you kind of trace it back to the uh you know 16th, 17th century.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: And uh you know, so what was his influence like and what impact that uh did it have on the future generations?
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think Francis Bacon's a pretty big deal, not as an inventor himself, but certainly as someone who almost like as a visionary, right?
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_03: Someone who outlines a vision of this is the kind of society we could have if we make ingenuity, improvement, invention a big part of what how we should be doing things.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that captures a lot of people's imaginations.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_03: So you you definitely had loads of improved inventors before he comes around or he starts writing, but when he puts out you know some of his works, people start to think that's a pretty cool, it's almost like a it's like a movement-defining kind of works.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_03: So like nowadays you often see manifestos from tech people which are often highly influential, and people kind of gather around those things.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_03: It's not like they're the first inventors, but those manifestos sometimes have a kind of, as you say, you you say a catalyzing effect, almost a kind of augmenting effect by sort of building up people's self-identities around it, right?
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_03: So I guess before you could have been, I don't know, improving woodworking or something.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_03: But the moment you read, and then you read Francis Bacon, you're like, oh, I'm not just improving woodworking, I'm an inventor, I'm an improver in this more general sense, I'm part of this big project that's actually a bit broader.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and that maybe gets you thinking, seeing the bigger picture, um, which in itself is also quite inspiring, right?
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_03: And kind of leads you to other projects beyond the ones that you already involved with.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, okay.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: And what kind of movement uh can you kind of talk to our audience on?
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: What kind of movement did it uh, you know, uh drive uh when he started talking about uh the work that he was doing?
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, part of the project from Bacon's perspective is around science.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_03: So it's about building up a lot well, it's two things.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_03: One is skepticism of things that have already been done.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_03: So going back and checking all the work that were done during the medieval period by the ancients, double checking if all of the stuff that's already written down is already being published is actually true.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_03: Um and then the second part of it is once we've established that, or while that's going on, let's also go out and systematically conduct, collect things.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_03: Collect things, catalogue things, create systemi, you know, systematize the collection of knowledge, and kind of see knowledge creation as being a part of this I mean he even compares it to a kind of like an assault on nature, right?
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_03: And not in the in the sense of like putting nature under under humans' feet, but rather um trying to prise open all of the secrets that nature has.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_03: Um so he he he compares it to the the small, the tiny army that Cortes conquered the Aztec Empire with.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_03: He says you need to have this core of this core group of people who are going out there and they're trying to figure out all of all of what's going on in nature.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_03: Um from that you can start to derive useful knowledge.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_03: You can start to derive physical laws about the way physics works, about the way mechanics works.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_03: You can start to find all of the plants that could be used in medicines, all of the minerals that could be used in medicines, or for dyes, or for chemicals.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_03: Once you've catalogued all that kind of information, you can start to apply it and use it.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and that's that's the other part of the vision that is so inspiring to people is they they think, okay, this isn't just about, I don't know, collecting insects because we like insects.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_03: It's about collecting lots and lots of insects because who knows, we might discover some use for this information.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and being part of that broader project means that we can better the lot of of humankind.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, okay.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it's almost like uh, you know, uh looking at connecting the unconnected, and uh there could be inspiration coming from you know various sources, but collecting information and keeping it so that uh it's almost like the indexing of a database, right?
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: You do not know when uh you know uh the idea is going to come, but as you collect more information, uh, you know, the chances of uh innovation and invention happening is something that he kind of practiced and preached, is what you're saying.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, he certainly practices that.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_03: Like some of his works are very much about just kind of listing all of the things we know, all of the experiments that we the things we don't quite know, and we should do some experiments on these things.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_03: Experiment, right, is it's about experience, like just seeing trying something out for oneself and seeing it with one's own eyes, and testing that against what we've read in in other books, right, from other older authors.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_03: So I think he's worried about the corruption of the older stuff we already seem to know, and whether or not we really do know those things, as as what so kind of firming up that base as well as um moving on to new uh information.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_03: And the other thing I'll mention, which is often missed, I think, in a lot of discussions of Bacon, is a lot of it's also about preservation.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_03: So you mentioned databases, you know Bacon's thought about how the world has changed, is that he's a bit worried about that a lot of the stuff that the ancients had done has been lost.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um you know his the when he when he describes the the New Atlantis, it's of a a society that existed before Noah's flood.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_03: And it's it's continued and preserved all of the knowledge that was there from before the deluge.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_03: And he's worried I think about kind of modern deluges.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_03: He's worried I I mean remember he within his with Engl within English recent political history you'd have had the dissolution of the monasteries.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_03: All of the monasteries were seized by the crown and then handed off and all the libraries and all those manuscripts ended up being dispersed.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_03: He's worried about the effects of war, of of fire, of all these different things.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_03: And I think part of it's not just that you have everyone collectively involved in this endeavor, but if they're also printing and exchanging information, you're going to create more a more robust data set or a more robust data.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_03: So that if something bad happens you can at least there's enough out there that you can rebuild these things.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: So it's just uh you know the subsequent question and the follow-up question that I really had was uh how does preservation act as a catalyst for creation?
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_03: Well in a sense like it's a it's a big part of the deal because they're motivated by preservation.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you actually read a lot of the the reasons for doing this stuff preservation features a lot more than you'd think and then almost as a byproduct creation uh becomes one of the things that ends up happening that there's so you know I think science probably ends up uh advancing at a pace that Bacon would not quite have realized was possible right so so so therefore can you uh explain it with an example of how preservation acts as a catalyst for creation well if you think yeah yeah and in fact you go out and explain that in uh you know how the uh you know the old uh you know English buildings where when they went out and started preserving that in your book right you talk about how they started uh you know uh ensuring that the old buildings are preserved so that you know there is some kind of a history that people can have as the buildings for summit started changing right uh at the start of the uh industrialized era so uh again going back to preservation as a catalyst for creation because that's something that you normally don't uh associate with right yeah yeah well I mean in the sense of so what you're referring to there in my book is um in the early 20th century I'll just summarize it for listeners in the early 20th century there's a movement to well so much is being created by the Victorians you know that a lot of the older buildings are being torn down right um the Victorians really didn't care that much about the history a lot of the time I mean sometimes they did but in terms of just the general sense of this is a nice old building from the Middle Ages they'll be like can we build something better tear it down build a new thing they don't worry that much about the historical associations and so you do get these movements in the late 19th century about let's hold on a second and try to work out what's actually valuable and what's not um and a great deal of work is done in the in in the 1920s 1930s uh and even to an extent over the 40s but obviously with the war with the Second World War there's there's a kind of puts a pause to a lot of these things um to try and preserve ancient buildings.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_03: The Society of Arts is behind trying to preserve ancient cottages that is you know normal dwellings that would not have been the sorts of things that would be considered official monuments like you know the the earliest stuff to be preserved is stuff like Stonehenge you know really ancient monuments where they suddenly think well actually maybe this stuff ought not to just be chipped away by every tourist we should try to work out if we preserve these things we might actually discover more about them.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_03: Actually a great example of this today of how the concern with preservation can end up being so useful is uh some of your listeners may or may not be aware there's a big prize right now to to read scrolls that were dug up in the 18th century from the volcanic blast at Vesuvius so I think it's the 1720s a shepherd discovers walking around Herculaneum you know near near Pompeii the famous Pompeii that you know he he discovers basically a bunch of scrolls they try to open them very carefully in the 18th century but I think the first two or three scrolls they just crumble to dust.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_03: They're just way too too um fragile.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_03: And so after that they just preserved all of them they they tried not to touch them at all.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_03: And only now with advances in AI with advances in particle physics with advances in all of the technology associated with those things those can be read right so they can digitally unfurl the scrolls without actually having to they can scan the thing without actually having to to break them open.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_03: So the preservation there will end up presumably giving us quite a lot of detail once we can read what's inside them, which may be done by the end of the year if the prize is won you know there's there's quite a lot of money up up for grabs if any of your listeners are interested I think by 31st of December so you're you're almost you're almost there.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_03: There's quite a lot of information up for grabs.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_03: And it's interesting that you know it's that I think is part of that kind of feedback mechanism is that sometimes preserving stuff um can end up giving us quite a lot more information down the line which could be of interest.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_03: I mean if it turns out that some of that stuff is lost scrolls from telling us about ancient science and technology that could be huge, right?
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_03: There could be vast swathes of things where I mean it's amazing the extent to which our knowledge of what happened in the past is basically defined by whether or not one or two books survived or were copied out or you know pieces of work managed to kind of withstand the test of time.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_03: Even what we have today from from what I research the time, 16th, 17th century material, there will have been hundreds of copies of books printed and yet we only have one or two surviving and it's based on those one or two, you know, of each cop of each run, book run, it's based on those ones and twos that we actually know anything at all sometimes about about you know what was the cot what was in the contents of those books or based on the contents of those books what was going on.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_03: And that's the big thing about printing right that makes such a big difference.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_03: Manuscripts they're so laborious to copy out printing is again overwhelmingly seen as a preservation technology.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_03: You create a hundred copies instead of just one copy that means maybe one of them will in a few hundred years survive and our knowledge won't just disappear amazing amazing uh the other thing is uh do you believe that uh you know uh the 18th century industrialization uh led to the decline of craftsmanship uh which is really you know doing it by hand versus manufacturing by machine and are we now getting back into an era of craftsmanship okay with the decline of uh uh you know machines we are getting into an information era right so is there a kind of a change that you are seeing well it depends in terms of the modern change it depends what happens with AI right it looks like a lot of the craftspeople might be about to lose out their jobs you know or not lose their jobs but I think the tools are changing quite radically um I don't think craftsmanship ever went away completely in in many respects um but in terms of the number of craftspeople that you needed for any particular job done obviously that got gets reduced when entire swathes of the industry can be replaced by a few machines um yes there's I mean there's certainly the short answer basically is yes there is quite a bit of a move to machine made things or the use of machines rather than doing things by hand.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_03: And from a surprisingly early date right so a lot of the stuff that would have required craftsmanship in say watchmaking and clockmaking you start to see machines replacing a lot of those things as early as the very early 18th century maybe even a bit earlier than that you do start to see things like even in the late 16th century there's machinery for polishing armour and weapons and that kind of again something you'd have done by hand and presumably someone you know we might not consider it craftsmanship as such but it's definitely one of the things you'd have had to do as part of what you were doing in the workshop.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_03: But a lot of this stuff happens in a way where you know when you it's like it's like saying a lot of this is like you know telling telling a builder today would you rather use a drill or would you rather do this by hand?
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_03: Like obviously there's a craft in doing this thing by hand but using a power drill is a bit easier.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_03: Like it is it's potentially a tool it you know the introduction of drills power drills is going to result in you know there were presumably a few people who would have specialised in drilling technology doing it by hand.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_03: If you're going to replace them then that either frees them up for other aspects of the the same job which they can then specialise in so it displaces craftsmanship into other areas where it becomes more necessary I suppose or when the industry is structured in such a way that there aren't that many alternative tasks then yeah I guess it can be a much bigger deal.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_03: But the thing to remember about jobs in the 18th, 17th, 18th century is people were paid by the work they did.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_03: They weren't paid necessarily you know annual or weekly or monthly salaries like they are today.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_03: So you were paying you've got to imagine as most people being basically self-employed.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_03: So when you have these new new things coming along these are attractive new tools a lot of the time for them to use and it's only in a few industries where the introduction of machinery is often a bit like you know your competitor down the road has basically got a got a got a an advantage over you and then so you might not be quite so happy about that.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah so I'm taking off from what you were just saying now that you know uh in the 18th century a majority of them were self-employed and now when you go back and look at the next century it looks like you know there are going to be a lot more people who are going to be solo pruners or self-employed so that was the reason I was asking this whole question around the rebirth of craftsmanship but in a new form is that the kind of thing that you uh that uh we are seeing and that's how innovations need to be built you know that's really what I'm talking about.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah I see what you mean yeah okay yeah I mean in terms of the structure around I can imagine in lots of lots of industries that is going to be becoming that's going to become the norm.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_03: But you've got to remember that the way in which we structure employment in terms of you have a job, you earn a wage and basically no matter what you maybe you get a bonus but no matter what you do most of the time you're gonna get you know your annual wage that only emerges in the 19th century for the most part around the fact that you have machinery that is complex enough and large enough that you need to have lots of people managing that material that machinery.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_03: And it means it's not e it's not easy to tell how much have you done versus another person, right?
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_03: It's like so if you've got a machine tended by 10 people, how do you split up the output of that machine between those ten people?
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas before you'd have just said make me 10 cloths and I'll pay you for 10 cloths right it's exactly in that way.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_03: So now we're kind of shifting I think you're right I suspect and possibly in a way that's quite long overdue in the sense of what you'd have expected given what was maybe you know the direction of travel.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_03: I think kind of wage employment's been quite sticky in a way throughout the 20th century.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_03: Because people like it right they like the certainty they like that kind of smoothing of income in a way that maybe now with things like greater access to credit it becomes easier for people to smooth their income and smooth their expenditure using kind of financial instruments.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely and that's really where I believe that some of the uh you know uh the way people were employed the way people were paid uh we still are living in an industrial era right but the era of today is completely changing but yet those practices have not changed right and that's really where I think we are in a transitionary phase if I were to call it and would you agree with me on that yeah I think so I think that's exactly right yeah and uh one thing that I wanted to talk to you was uh when you're tracking this innovation and inventions uh how did it shift from the British era to the American era right because obviously uh you know there's a significant shift in the late 1800s to the 1900s where innovation uh you know the center of the uh universe really was the British right empire and then with so much of action happening in the 16th 17th and 18th century so many things get invented and then the uh you know the shift happens to the US and have you kind of studied that and uh have you looked at how did that shift happen in spite of so much of uh you know melting pot of thinking happening in the British Empire yeah it's a great question I I have a sense of how it happens but I'm not like totally sure so I'll tell you what my kind of hunch is if you like is certainly over the course of I'd say the early 19th century the the centre of gravity starts to dissipate.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_03: In fact let's let's go back even further at first and let's go let's zoom in beyond country level at first in the late 16th century it's almost entirely happening in London so in a particular quite small city in 1550s about 5000 people right pretty tiny that grows very rapidly to about 2000 people in 1600 um 575000 people in 1700 so massive change London is very much I think the centre of activity in terms of inventive activity for that very early period after 1700 it starts to spread out of London so it spreads into other parts where would it spread most naturally probably the same country right people speak the same language they're moving around this the same country pretty easily so you start to see places like Birmingham you start to see places uh like around um uh the kind of Welsh borders region uh around Shropshire um in in the Midlands so the places are in and around Birmingham in Lancashire in the northwest so in and around Manchester and Liverpool in the southwest around Bristol in the north around uh northeast around um Newcastle even the northwestern extent so very distant Cumbria where there's not really not that many people you see start to see quite a lot of inventive activity taking place as well and of course in Scotland particularly in the belt between Glasgow and Edinburgh so you start to see this kind of shift of not just industrial activity but inventive activity outside of this particular city and then from those cities it starts to shift outwards again as well right because a lot of the act a lot of the industrial activity that's taking place is going to start moving to where it's most efficient to do those things.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_03: And especially as you get more developed areas in the sense of they get higher and higher wages it gets harder and harder you know as we see even today manufacturing starts searching for the cheapest people to employ right it wants it doesn't want to spend that much money if it can cheaper resources um lower wages to pay that so you start to see that that movement already out of London as a lot of these industries start searching for the lowest costs or at least the best kind of um you know better infrastructure and so on as well and with that you also get a lot of infrastructure building in Britain that makes more and more parts of the British economy more and more integrated as well canal building railway building later on road improvement which is often not as noticed river navigation so taking existing rivers making them navigable by boat so that you can improve connections between different towns and cities a lot of that is spurred on by this as people start to think how can I connect this all up not only to London but to these newer centres as they're springing up and then from there it starts to move even further outwards.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_03: So that's when you start to see a lot of artisans a lot of manufacturers a lot of inventors emigrating to what becomes the United States you see a lot of them even very early on moving to France it's as early as the 1710s end of the 1710s that Britain bans the emigration of skilled artisans in various different industries where it already has a bit of a technological lead particularly iron particularly watchmaking particularly tool making they're worried because the French are you know they're sending basically spies, industrial spies to Britain to round up as many workers as they can with these skills and bring them over to France.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_03: Right so that's pretty early right 1710s already it suggests the French are interested the Russians are sending apprentices over as well and that's pretty distant too to learn in British factories and then hopefully bring that stuff back.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_03: And the Russians manage it very badly because they bring back these apprentices and then they completely get ignored or they stop paying them I mean they just totally fail to learn a lot of these skills and it's a you know much bigger language gap as well and you know just just bigger distances and also just you know it's just it's just harder.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_03: The greater the distance the harder it gets um but you do start already to see this diffusion into the rest of Europe of a lot of that invention that kind of push for improvement and I think there are kind of other locations which already have kind of lots of groups of inventors like even early on Britain itself London benefits from the Dutch Revolt there's a mass movement of people from what is today Belgium to which is a very rich part of the country to the Netherlands but also into Britain.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_03: You also likewise during the the Reformation a lot of Italian Protestants they don't want to be in Southern Europe with the Inquisition so a lot of talented people leave to northern Europe they come to Britain as well so this is a very old story of inventors going wherever they they're gonna they're gonna have the best critical mass but London for a long time is like the Silicon Valley of the 16th 17th centuries it is one of the lodestones that's attracting everyone and then that spreads out.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_03: And then I mean you continue to see this right like think of I mean in India you've got Tata right Tata I think he he went and trained in Britain for a long time and then came back and brought a lot of the technology with him I know that there's a Jamaican version of Tata like another guy who came to Britain was like we don't have any of this back home let's just let's start a factory let's let's bring all this stuff over and start you know um there's no reason we couldn't do this at home and they think this is a great idea.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_03: You see the same with a lot of Japanese engineers were sent to to Germany to Britain to France to America in the late 19th early 20th centuries they came back not just bringing skills but bringing that kind of you know the improving mentality almost kind of gets like re redone in kind of new cultural social contexts right um in terms of the kinds of movements that they have the kinds of ways that they interpret it and so yeah for for much of the the 19th century it's the story first of the the the spreads to Europe and the Americas but also already starting I think to go even further afield as well.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_03: And that's the story I think of the last few hundred years is it's just continued to spread I mean today invention I think is pretty global we've reached a stage where different industries can be super high tech in a particular country which you'll not find in any other country because most cities are massive but they also have these critical masses of of people doing amazing things so do you believe uh you know uh we are at a stage where
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: The center of gravity of the Silicon Valley.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: So you're saying the 16th, 17th century was London, the 1900s were the Silicon Valley, the American continent.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_00: And when you look back and now you know and see, okay, for the next hundred years, would you see the center of gravity shifting?
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think civilizations keep shifting.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_00: And do you see a center of gravity shift happening?
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's still America.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_03: I've I I I think for 10, if you'd asked me 10 years ago, I'd have said maybe China, maybe somewhere in India.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_03: But I think still America, right?
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_03: There's no it looked for a while like it was China, but I think.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, again, just look at the migration flows, right?
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_03: It tells you where everyone's going, right?
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_03: The moment people can move to America to go to Silica Valley, or to it could be Miami or or Austin, Texas, or somewhere like that.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_03: America seems to keep creating the conditions that makes it attractive, right?
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_03: They've got a but remember, they've got a big advantage already, because they're already the place to be.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_03: It's hard to overcome that advantage.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_03: London, I think, gets overcome partly out of bad luck.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_03: Um, partly, I think, because of kind of the opportunities that America could already offer from the get-go.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um but also, I mean, the First World War probably has a big impact.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_03: You know, Britain goes from being in 1914, Britain is Britain is the equivalent today of China for being the manufacturer of the world, Saudi Arabia for being the main energy source of the world, because it's nearly all the world's coal has been produced to Britain.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, and and New York because it's it's the financial centre of the world in 1914.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_03: By 1918.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_03: But by 1918, this has changed, right?
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_03: Like the First World War radically changes it, and Britain becomes a debtor to the United States.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_03: So that the centre of gravity, I think, is officially shifted by the First World War.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but I think you can already see that America's trajectory is very kind of rapidly changing and overtaking by around 1900-1910.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you see that in GDP per capita statistics, but I think in a way those are a bit misleading.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_03: Like in terms of just center of activity, it definitely shifts in that period.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_03: So for it to shift again, I think you'd need America to somehow kind of fumble the ball, you know, just like drop the ball in some way.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_03: But look at look at look at its energy energy prices.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_03: They're so they're really kind of going all out in terms of creating the infrastructure, they've got plentiful natural gas.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_03: They're probably going to still create a lot of nuclear power, they're going to have all of the stuff for cheap energy, which is essential to industry.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_03: But not just industry, but like to anyone, just living, right?
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_03: You need energy to do all of these things.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_03: They've got so much money going into research and development to the extent that we still rely on basically American pharmaceutical companies to produce all of our drugs in terms of inventing new ones and curing new diseases.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um and again, the migration flows.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_03: And I think China looked like it could be a contender until the last few years, really, when it was like, oh, you know, people suddenly start having their doubts about what the state might or might not want to do.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_03: Um seemingly not prioritizing the economy anymore, prioritizing global strategic, geostrategic things or their COVID response, all these kinds of things became made it seem like it wasn't going to become the new place where things would be done.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_03: But who knows?
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, this is this is just my conjecture.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, no, no, no, I think I think I think it's a very, very beautiful point that you make.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_00: And uh uh, but at the same time, when you look at the 18th century inventions, which is the steam engine, the power loom, uh, completely changed some of the uh you know industry uh you know production capacities kind of a thing.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then when you go back to the 1900s and the early 1900s, you uh you look at the automotive completely changing the economy, you look at chips changing the computerization.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_00: But when you look back today, those kinds of innovations uh seem to actually not happen, right?
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_00: Say, for example, you know, uh like how trains change the way you travel, uh, you had the uh you know the uh the airplanes uh taking you to different countries, and now when you look back, it looks almost like uh you know uh incremental innovations are happening or incremental improvements are happening, but no serious invention that can change the way you are looking at.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_00: Is that the state that you see?
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_03: No, I think just because I think all of it's incremental, um I think all invention is incremental, but some increments have bigger impacts than others in a way that's very surprising, right?
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um it's like it's like you suddenly you're like you take something, a new technology, you improve it 5%, 5%, 5%, 5%, and then often you'll hit that threshold where suddenly that thing is profitable in a way that it wasn't.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_03: Suddenly that thing, I don't know, you improve the advertising by 5%, suddenly you reach the mass market versus the niche market.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's it's always those little 5% that I think are there's always that tiny little inch forward, you know, that with our toes inching forward, we we finally go over the over the precipice, and then a whole new reality is kind of shaped by it.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_03: All of all inventions I think are like that.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_03: Because when you look at detail at all inventions, you start to notice that there's this very long chain of events.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_03: And even particular inventions or patents, when we look at the detail, you're like, oh, this took ten years of margin improvement by one person in their shed, tinkering away until it was ready.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_03: Um so like that's that's another kind of aspect in which in which those things happen.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_03: But in terms of, yeah, I guess I can see there being transformative inventions that may change the location of activity, but it just looks like it's still going to be in America in terms of like they want to be first still, right?
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_03: They do all of their policies around still being ahead on AI, for example, having all of the chips set up, having enough computational power for artificial intelligence, um trying to sort out their infrastructure so that it's appropriate.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_03: All of those things I think make a big difference.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_03: Um and make it hard, it's not as though other countries aren't trying to catch up, they are.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_03: But in terms of keeping ahead, like if you want it, then you have to like every generation of improvers has to do that.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_00: So uh one other thing that I uh I found very interesting uh when I was reading your articles and the uh book was patenting for public good versus patenting for private goods, right?
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it has an implication on how society uh you know innovates, and um and just because it is publicly available, you then innovate on top of it, right?
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_00: So, therefore, uh some of these economies or some of these countries which patented for public good, um, you see a massive movement in terms of the curve of innovation, right?
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_00: And um, so is that very, very critical uh if you want the center of gravity to move, um, patenting for and America seems to be really patenting for private good.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, and largely I'm saying, okay, let me uh you know, if you look at the amount of patents Google is buying, or you know, many of these companies are buying, so almost like saying, Let me own everything.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, um, what we find is when you patent for public good, the amount of people who come in and develop on top of the of that public good is fairly large, and therefore innovation tends to move up.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_00: Is that something that uh you've seen uh in uh how nations get built and how empires get built?
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_03: I think there's a balance, right?
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm I think over the course of my career I've kind of gone from being mildly anti-patent to being in the middle.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_03: And the reason for that is I think there are two things at play.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_03: One is information.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_03: You do need more information, you need information to be out there.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_03: So the the origin of patents is about, well, back in the 16th, 17th century, a lot of invention is very tied up in particular people's expertise.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_03: And even today, it's very, very difficult to copy someone's invention without having the person who's worked on it.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_03: Even today, there's a reason that tech companies have non-compete clauses.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_03: So you fire someone or someone leaves and it's like, no, no, no, you're not allowed to work for our competitors for at least five to ten years or whatever, right?
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_03: There's a reason for that, which is that those people's skills are very valuable.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_03: It makes it much, much, much easier to copy technology if you yourself have worked on it.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_03: And it's a reason why one of the best ways to copy stuff is send people to go and work on it, bring them back, and then they'll know what to do.
• 53:34
  unknown: Right?
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_03: It's all like you can send as many blueprints as you want, but it's going to still be very difficult to reverse engineer that.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_03: Or you know, there'll be there'll be little hidden max or the kind of things that aren't shown on the plant.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_03: It hasn't been translated quite properly.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_03: There'll be, you know, you work out ways of making these things work.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_03: So a big part of patents was about giving individuals a monopoly on a new invention so that they would come to the country.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_03: So it's early patents are almost like immigration visas.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_03: It's like you come to the country, you get the privilege on the new thing that you're bringing to the country.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um, that way we've got you in the country and you're creating stuff for us and not for other people.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_03: And then often you have terms in the patent that say things like, you need to try you need to train a few locals into how to do the thing that you've brought.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_03: So there are conditions on these monopolies that you're giving them.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_03: And again, even just a temporary monopoly, but the the very early ones, they're modelled on the Venetian patent system, which is about ten years, so multiples of ten.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_03: But very quickly in Britain or in England, what you start to see is ones in multiples of seven.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_03: And seven years is the duration of an apprenticeship.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_03: So if you have it that's one for 21 years, that means you're thought to be able to create three generations of apprentices who are going to know this stuff.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_03: And at the end of it, once they've passed that that period, they're going to be able to take this industry further, and it's it's going to be rooted in the country, right?
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_03: So if you die or you emigrate or you leave again, you know, at least the industry will be able to stay and kind of creates that permanence.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_03: Later in the 18th century, you start to see the growth of what we now call patent specifications.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_03: So, as a condition for patenting, one of the things you have to do is you have to send in the blueprints.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_03: You have to say, this is how it's done.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_03: Give us a big description that people could reasonably copy.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_03: So by reading it, they should be able to kind of get a well, someone who's relatively expert should be able to work out what you're doing and copy the thing.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_03: And that's again very important because what you're doing is you're incentivizing people to reveal information that they might otherwise have kept secret.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_03: What does that do?
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_03: It creates a permanent base.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_03: Like again, it's like it's like data preservation, right?
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_03: It's that if someone keeps their technology a secret, they die, that's gone.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_03: And there's loads of examples of that.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_03: So, like 14th century China, the Ming Dynasty, there's a whole bunch of pottery, there's a kind of a particular technique in pottery that's just lost.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_03: The guy dies, all of his apprentices presumably also either failed to learn or they died, or they got distracted at something else.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_03: And it's only rediscovered later.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_03: And the story is it's rediscovered because a guy had a dream in which the dead potter who the secret had died with appeared to him in a dream and explained how to do it.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_03: Like, that's the story, right?
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_03: Um make of that what you will.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but that's that's a real worry, right?
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_03: So you want to have a system in place where people are at least almost kind of think of it this way: you could pay someone a prize, like the Society of Arts did, which is you know one of the interesting things it did, was pay people money to reveal their secret.
• 56:49
  unknown: Okay.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_03: But then you need to collect money, you need to get capital together to do that, to pay them for their secrets.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_03: Or you can say, I'll give you a monopoly, that's free in terms of getting the money up front for it, right?
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_03: They may or may not fail, they may take, they may exploit the patent, they may not exploit the patent, but at least they write down the secret.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_03: So for basically doing it on the cheap, again, without having to front the money, you can get people to reveal their secrets.
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so I think there is a usefulness to patents in that respect.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_03: Um, at least that's the way in which it's kind of evolved.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_03: And nowadays, you know, a lot of it is about a patent can be can be kind of rendered invalid if it doesn't seem to be descriptive enough.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_03: Um that's also the way the case law in the in the late 18th century evolves as well.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_03: So I think you do need to have some kind of protection.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_03: In a way, it's it's a cheap way of doing these things.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_03: And the other aspect here, so one is about information.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_03: The second one, though, is about I think there's an underlying principle in a lot of policy, which is that you get what you pay for.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_03: You need to put some resources into something to get something out of it.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_03: Now, it's not necessarily the fact that if you put the money down, you're always gonna get results.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of the time you're gonna pay for a dud.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_03: But if you're not paying for something, if you're not putting resources into something, you can't expect to get the outcome at all, right?
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_03: Like, so if you never invest in pharmaceutical RD, you're never gonna get new drugs.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_03: You're just not gonna do it.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_03: So you do need to have systems and system systems in place that at least allow for capital to be deployed to pursue particular RD routes.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_03: And so, like, this is the really interesting thing about pharmaceuticals, right?
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_03: People always talk about big pharma and like, oh, they you know, they spend billions and billions to create one tiny drug that barely changes things by 5% on some particular thing, and then it's super expensive for everybody to buy.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_03: And it's like, okay, well, part of the cost is from the way you've regulated it, but also if you're going to do that, if you want to regulate it that way, you need to get the billion pounds.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_03: Like you need to get that money to actually pay for any of it.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and so you need some kind of system in place in which you get that.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_03: So I do think where the balance is is not pro-patents, anti-patents, it's about how long are the durations of the patents.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_03: You know, how for how many years are you keeping things uh uh protected?
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_03: Um, how strong are the monopolies?
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you mentioned companies buying up lots of patents at once, so patent thickets, as they're I think they're often called.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_03: Like, yes, you maybe need to look at that and make sure people aren't just kind of chopping up lots of things and protecting it and kind of preventing change that way.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but if what they're doing is they're revealing loads of information about what they're doing just by acting defensively, then that means the moment the patent expires, it's gonna be great.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we're gonna have a whole load of stuff.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_03: So the the counterfactual is, you know, if you're not gonna use that system, you need some kind of alternative that pays for secrets to be revealed, that pays for information to be revealed.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_03: That could be prizes, it could be like the Society of Arts, where you pool subscription funds and they pay for these things.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but it seems to work pretty well on the whole.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_00: But what about public goods?
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_00: Say, for example, uh, you know, today if you look at the issue that big tech uh is facing, you've got those four companies or five companies dominating every aspect of uh you know business.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and uh, if you have a public good, then uh the distribution and the democratization of innovation can be far more widespread.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_00: So is that a problem?
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_03: But the public good, I think, is the ri the revealing of information.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_03: So as long as the system still allows for the information, the secrets to be revealed, that is, I think, the public good.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_03: Because because if you just reveal information, you're never gonna get you're never gonna you need to get something in return.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_03: Otherwise you're just not gonna bother doing it.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_03: You'll just keep it secret to yourself.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_03: Um you need to have a system in place that and that's the that's the kind of that's the public kind of cost if we don't have something in place to do that.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_03: Um I mean in terms of consolidation of power within a few companies, I mean, yeah, within certain sectors they have a lot of the power.
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_03: Uh to be honest, though, it still looks pretty competitive to me.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_03: Like, just because you have a as long as you don't have one, and you still have at least a few.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, the fact that they see the need to buy all the patents tells them that they're worried about outsiders coming in and swooping in with new technology, right?
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_03: Or the fact that they keep having to buy competitors when they're growing, growing, growing, being like, well, we need to spend a few billion to acquire this competitor.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_03: That actually, to me, that shows the system's working.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_03: Because that to me tells me there aren't things in the way that are preventing competitors emerging at all.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_03: So as long as that kind of as long as they're having to play defensively, I think that's fine.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_03: The moment they're not doing that, that's that's when I'm gonna be worried, right?
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh how important do you think is uh uh for innovation and ideas where you have to operate at the edge of you know different disciplines?
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_03: What you mean?
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_00: Say, for example, biology and technology, or uh, you know, therefore you've got biochemistry, right?
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_00: Or for example, uh you know, biotechnology, where I think these are uh you know at the edges of different subjects, and that's where a lot of innovation and invention happen, right?
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so do you think those are very important for uh you know inventions to spread?
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_00: For example, you're talking about neuroscience, right?
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, you know, it's uh uh you know neuroscience is again at the edges of two different uh subjects, right?
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, therefore, what we see as innovation today is uh you bring in two diverse uh fields and then start to kind of look at them, and then a new invention or an innovation happens.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_03: I think that is the way a lot of it occurs.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_03: Not always, though, I think I think often you still get all of invention that's within a kind of old old sector, and you still see new ways of doing things all the time.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_03: And there is a risk sometimes that if we always categorize innovation as being at the edges, that we actually neglect the kind of basic, not basic, but like stuff that's in older fields, more mature fields, um, specialisms that have been around for decades or hundreds of years, a lot of those things still see quite significant improvements.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, just look at look at across the world today, right?
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_03: You will see very different sectors in very different countries.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_03: That tells you that within the countries that don't have the technology of another country, that's clearly there's you know, it's not like these things just automatically go to the best thing, the most optimized thing.
• 1:04:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um you see those differences already, but I think even at the cutting edge, you can often see that.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_03: You know, there's people are still I don't know, shoes.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_03: We've been making shoes for how many years?
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_03: Millennia, right?
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_03: And yet we still see innovation in new shoes, better soles, but things that are better for your knees, better for runners.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, people running marathons are still inventing new shoes, bicycles are the same, they're a bit bit younger as a technology, they've been around for only a few hundred years, but you know, people are still were still not that long ago winning races because they had redesigned the bike.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_03: They figured out the way to optimize everything 5%, 5%, 5%, 5% until you get something that seems so transformatively different that you're getting completely different results.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_03: So I don't think it always has to be at the cutting edge of new fields.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_03: The other interesting thing that I think does go on though is you get quite a big degree of the world is very specialized, right?
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_03: And and always has been very specialized.
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_03: You spend many years kind of gaining a skill in a very particular niche.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_03: You maybe work in that niche for a few years, and then you basically the only thing you know is in that niche.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um and when you get the combinations, you're actually creating new niches, right?
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_03: Because you've got specialist biologists, you've got specialist chemists, and then you need to have specialist biochemists, right, who are combining the two.
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_03: They become their own subfield, and again, they Become they have a very specialized language, they have jargon that they use, they have they refer to things in a very particular way.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um, which you know, if we have a conversation with a biochemist, we're not gonna understand half of the words because it's like very specific things that only they know and only their kind of colleagues and other friends in that area will know.
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and that's always been the case, I think.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_03: Like if you were an artisan in the year 1400, you're gonna have your own very specialized lingo that no one else is going to understand as well.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_03: Like those specialisms have disappeared, maybe, or they're even more niche than they are today.
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_03: But we have lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of specialisms, and they're continuing to multiply.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but to my mind, what that means is that the scope for more invention is only growing.
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_03: So every time you have a new subfield, that thing can then be improved incrementally, and every time you birth a new kind of combination, that just increases the surface area of things that can be improved.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 1:07:07
  SPEAKER_03: So, I mean, this speaks to kind of uh you often hear people you know worrying about the end of invention, you know, have all the low-hanging fruit being plucked.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_03: Nonsense, I think.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I think if anything, we're we're just discovering, we're still kind of discovering just how much we don't know.
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_03: Because by expanding the sphere of what we do know, we discover even more surface air of things that we can then do next.
• 1:07:34
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so one of the things that uh you know uh I want to ask you is uh in the 16th, 17th, 18th century, you had the Royal Society of Arts, Commerce, and uh you know manufactures at as it was called, uh being the hub of inventions and encouraging invention, right?
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um do you see similar organizations in countries like the US, uh, India, uh, you know, the uh you know Japan and where um they encourage this kind of thinking because it happened uh as a melting pot in a um you know in an organization like uh the Royal Society of Arts.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_00: So do you see similar uh you know outfits in these countries?
• 1:08:25
  SPEAKER_03: It's a great question.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_03: So to explain to your listeners, the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce, nice snappy title, uh founded in 1754, um, is unusual because it's a subscription-funded kind of one-member, one-vote kind of organization where they pool the subscription funds, the membership fees, into a pot, and then using that pot they then pay for things to do projects.
• 1:08:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um in the first hundred years, that involves paying prizes for new inventions if they're not patented already.
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_03: Again, so that they kind of cover the stuff that isn't already being covered by the patent system.
• 1:09:07
  SPEAKER_03: So wherever the patent system isn't very good at encouraging invention, they are hopefully filling in the gaps.
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_03: Uh so I see patents and prizes as being kind of complementary, right, rather than competing here.
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_03: Uh so that's what they were doing, and then they kind of shift on to other different ways of encouraging invention, like using exhibitions, and then later on, you know, all sorts of other ways too.
• 1:09:31
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but that's that's the kind of organization it is.
• 1:09:35
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it's still very unusual.
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_03: It's a voluntary organization, it's deploying capital, it's very democratic because it's one person, one vote for that first hundred years, before they then later they have a committee which is representative.
• 1:09:49
  SPEAKER_03: Today it's more like structured just like a normal charity with only a few differences.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um it's a very unusual organization.
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_03: Even the RSA today, it gets the Royal much later in 1908.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_03: But even the RSA today doesn't look anything like the original RSA in terms of the way it's structured.
• 1:10:09
  SPEAKER_03: And the closest thing I can think to it are you do occasionally in kind of crypto circles, you have you see DAOs, these distributed autonomous organizations.
• 1:10:21
  SPEAKER_03: That's the closest thing I've seen.
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_03: Where DAOs are maybe used for funding new science or funding invention, that's the closest thing I've seen to it in terms of the way that it's structured.
• 1:10:31
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think of uh what do you think of VCs or crowdfunding?
• 1:10:36
  SPEAKER_00: Is it very similar, but you may not be doing it within the scope of say an organization like RSA?
• 1:10:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so crowdfunding is not far off.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_03: You did have crowdfunding in the 18th century as well, though.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_03: So most books were crowdfunded.
• 1:10:51
  SPEAKER_03: If you look well, not most books, but lots of books were crowdfunded.
• 1:10:54
  SPEAKER_03: If you look at a lot of books from the 18th century, there will be a list of subscribers.
• 1:10:59
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 1:10:59
  SPEAKER_03: If you go to the back pages or front pages, there'll be a huge list of subscribers.
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_03: These are the people who paid to get the book published.
• 1:11:06
  SPEAKER_03: Because it's a very costly endeavor, very capital-intensive thing to do.
• 1:11:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so you had crowdfunding, but crowdfunding I think of as being more per specific project.
• 1:11:16
  SPEAKER_03: Um, venture capital, I suppose, is different because it's for profit, right?
• 1:11:21
  SPEAKER_03: You're doing something where you're expecting to get a return.
• 1:11:24
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas one of the key things about the Society of Arts was that it was a charitable organization.
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_03: So there's nothing expected from the members in terms of them receiving returns.
• 1:11:34
  SPEAKER_03: There are earlier attempts in the 1720s to structure the same project as a profit-making institution, though.
• 1:11:41
  SPEAKER_03: So it's it is kind of an evolution from this idea of you know the business corporation.
• 1:11:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um, in a way, the business corporation, the modern business corporation, is itself very similar to the way VC is today structured, right?
• 1:11:58
  SPEAKER_03: Because the very earliest business corporations were for very, very high-risk ventures uh where they would maybe have a patent monopoly on the new discovery based on whatever they would get.
• 1:12:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um the very early ones are for things like voyages of exploration into completely new trading areas where no one's ever been from your country before.
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_03: So in search of a northeast passage to Japan and China, but instead they find Russia, in search of a northwest passage again to Japan and China, because everyone wants to trade with Japan and China, um, but they instead discover Canada.
• 1:12:36
  SPEAKER_03: Um, like, you know, they're they're trying it that way.
• 1:12:39
  SPEAKER_03: Or, you know, later on, the East India Company in 1600 um or 1599 slash 1600.
• 1:12:46
  SPEAKER_03: Um, again, trying to find a trade route across copy the the um the Portuguese, see if they can work out how the Portuguese have gone around the Cape of Good Hope, access to new markets.
• 1:12:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um, obviously later the East India Company becomes more like a state, but that's a much, much later development, right?
• 1:13:03
  SPEAKER_03: For the early early years, it's much more like it's a kind of it's a it's a company.
• 1:13:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but also at the same time for things like mining, because you sink a mine, let's say you put loads and loads of money, paying lots and lots of people to dig a hole down in the ground, and you find nothing, right?
• 1:13:19
  SPEAKER_03: It's like VC, right?
• 1:13:21
  SPEAKER_03: You spend lots and lots of capital, uh, you organize all these investors, all the same with the Voyagers of Discovery.
• 1:13:29
  SPEAKER_03: You send out a ship, you hope that in a few years' time it comes back.
• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_03: Who knows?
• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe it comes back full of spices because you found you found India, maybe it comes back with polar bears or something because you found nothing.
• 1:13:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's like yeah, true, true.
• 1:13:45
  SPEAKER_00: No, I think that's the reason why I was asking.
• 1:13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Are there you know the forms that it has taken uh you know uh you know is different.
• 1:13:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so uh I have a final question for you.
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um what's the perils of being a public historian?
• 1:14:01
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, you're referencing my later one of my latest uh pieces here.
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um what are the perils of being a public historian?
• 1:14:13
  SPEAKER_03: So the way to put this is that when you put research out, when you put your work out into the public, and as an audience grows, you do get what happens is if you care about these things, you find yourself getting quite worried about accidentally telling people the wrong thing.
• 1:14:35
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 1:14:36
  SPEAKER_03: You know, accidentally you know, you've heard a story, we do this all the time, right?
• 1:14:40
  SPEAKER_03: We'll we'll we'll hear a story, we'll be like, that's a great fact.
• 1:14:43
  SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna tell all my friends the next time something relevant kind of comes up.
• 1:14:48
  SPEAKER_03: You tell a small group of people at a party this new fact that you've learned, and then ten days later you read something saying, actually, this fact is completely rubbish, it's been debunked, and you feel a little bit embarrassed.
• 1:15:00
  SPEAKER_03: You probably don't go out of your way to correct it by emailing all your friends and being like, oh wait, ignore what I said, ignore what I said.
• 1:15:05
  SPEAKER_03: But you're a bit like, oh, I can't believe that happened.
• 1:15:08
  SPEAKER_03: But as your audience grows, this becomes a bigger and bigger deal.
• 1:15:12
  SPEAKER_03: Where, you know, I've got about 26,000 subscribers on my email list.
• 1:15:19
  SPEAKER_03: If I accidentally tell them the wrong thing, then I'm gonna feel pretty guilty about it.
• 1:15:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um so it comes with, I think, a responsibility to really fact-check a lot.
• 1:15:29
  SPEAKER_03: One of the great things about podcasts, actually, and doing stuff like this, is I can make loads of mistakes and people be like, oh, he's kind of just not really remembering, you know.
• 1:15:36
  SPEAKER_03: But when it's written down, I think you've got to be much more careful.
• 1:15:39
  SPEAKER_03: Um like no one's gonna reference or cite a podcast.
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_03: Lots of people are gonna cite something that's written, I think.
• 1:15:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um, they might hear it on a podcast and then go and double check for themselves.
• 1:15:50
  SPEAKER_03: It's much more likely to happen that way.
• 1:15:52
  SPEAKER_03: So it's a nicer, it's a more relaxed medium in a way.
• 1:15:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but if if yeah, when you're writing stuff for the public, the larger the audience, the kind of the greater the responsibility to not only prevent yourself putting out misinformation, but you I also find myself getting very worried about my own sources.
• 1:16:10
  SPEAKER_03: Like, where am I learning stuff from?
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I can't go and check everything I read.
• 1:16:17
  SPEAKER_03: I have, you know, there's there's there's not enough time in the day to go and check absolutely everything you read.
• 1:16:23
  SPEAKER_03: So there is a lot of trust involved in the way that we share information, the way that we share knowledge, right?
• 1:16:28
  SPEAKER_03: And so I am very concerned with the institutions of trust giving, right?
• 1:16:33
  SPEAKER_03: So academic journals, academic societies, what they they often do is they deploy trust.
• 1:16:41
  SPEAKER_03: They give a stamp of approval saying, experts have checked this, so you can, instead of taking it with a rock of salt, you can only take it with a pinch of salt now.
• 1:16:50
  SPEAKER_03: Um, or you can maybe a grain of salt, right?
• 1:16:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:16:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I'm not saying you should trust it completely, but actually that's what ends up happening, is a lot of people will just they'll say, Oh, it was an academic journal, trust it completely.
• 1:17:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um I think the public needs to be a little bit more careful about that, but it shouldn't go too far.
• 1:17:08
  SPEAKER_03: It shouldn't be like, I don't trust anything, it's all a lie, it's all a huge conspiracy, right?
• 1:17:13
  SPEAKER_03: There's there's I think there's such a thing as too far.
• 1:17:16
  SPEAKER_03: But I get very concerned that you know, the well, the well I'm drawing from, right, the water that I'm getting that of information, I want to make sure it's not corrupted, I want to make sure this stuff is fresh, this stuff is healthy, this stuff is good, right?
• 1:17:31
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:17:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and I had a sort of experience that your readers can go, or your listeners can go and read up all about it, because I think it's a bit too long to explain.
• 1:17:39
  SPEAKER_03: But I had an experience where I tried to correct something that I'd seen, you know, misinformation being put out there, and the reaction from the institutions was not the way that you would expect.
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_03: Like I kind of expect the institutions to self-correct.
• 1:17:53
  SPEAKER_03: Um but also if if you see misinformation out there that's being spread quite a lot, and you know because of your own expertise, because of your own knowledge, that it is something that's wrong, I do think it would be healthier if people took the attitude of putting their foot down and saying, no, that's wrong.
• 1:18:11
  unknown: Right?
• 1:18:11
  SPEAKER_03: I don't mean everyone should just, you know, this is not like a manifesto for internet trolls to say you see something, tell them it's wrong.
• 1:18:20
  SPEAKER_03: No, it's if you have the expertise, if you know because of you know your expertise that something is wrong, um, I think there is somewhat of a duty to kind of point that out.
• 1:18:32
  SPEAKER_03: And I think in healthy public debate you see that.
• 1:18:35
  SPEAKER_03: Um but that's and that's kind of what I what I expect to happen.
• 1:18:39
  SPEAKER_03: So I think there are kind of there are there are yeah, there are responsibilities that come with that, but there are also just in general, there's just risks.
• 1:18:47
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, when you put stuff out there, the wider the audience, the more people you're gonna find who know you're wrong.
• 1:18:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but also you're gonna come across people who are, I think I put them as mad, bad, and sad.
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_03: Like people who just hate whatever you're saying for whatever reason.
• 1:19:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah and that's it's it sucks, but that's what you're gonna get.
• 1:19:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and that's just I think that is just what happens when you talk to a group of any size, is that I mean it's like, have you ever seen polling done on any question where it's like, oh no, if you polled the population of a country, do you think killing puppies is bad?
• 1:19:27
  SPEAKER_03: Like, you're gonna get a 99-98% saying it's obviously bad.
• 1:19:32
  SPEAKER_03: Who are these two percent?
• 1:19:33
  SPEAKER_03: There's always gonna be the two percent, right?
• 1:19:35
  SPEAKER_03: Who are always gonna say, no, no, no, yeah, it's good, right?
• 1:19:40
  SPEAKER_03: You just but like the larger the audience, the more likely you are to find that 2%, and they're gonna cause trouble of some kind.
• 1:19:47
  SPEAKER_00: So uh so I'm gonna wrap up with a set of rapid fire questions for you.
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the first question that I have is uh what would be your advice to the inventors of today?
• 1:19:59
  SPEAKER_00: And what do you think they should pursue?
• 1:20:03
  SPEAKER_00: And how do you think they should work towards uh breakthrough inventions?
• 1:20:11
  SPEAKER_03: Focus on the marginal, I'd say focus on the incremental, focus on the marginal.
• 1:20:15
  SPEAKER_03: Don't get distracted by the big picture.
• 1:20:20
  SPEAKER_03: Getting that marginal thing and actually getting it done, it's amazing how many of the big breakthroughs are just from focusing on the kind of minu share there.
• 1:20:31
  SPEAKER_00: Fantastic.
• 1:20:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh what does success mean to you?
• 1:20:36
  SPEAKER_03: Oh I don't know.
• 1:20:41
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know, I don't even completely stumped me there.
• 1:20:44
  SPEAKER_03: What does success mean to me?
• 1:20:48
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's up to people themselves.
• 1:20:51
  SPEAKER_03: They have their own value systems.
• 1:20:53
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:20:53
  SPEAKER_03: But it's good not to get distracted by it's good to think about what not get try to work out whether or not you're using proxy measures or whether or not they're actually your values, right?
• 1:21:06
  SPEAKER_03: So I don't know, getting getting more subscribers on your Twitter or X or whatever is maybe just a proxy for influence.
• 1:21:13
  SPEAKER_03: It's not actually influence, right?
• 1:21:16
  SPEAKER_03: If that's your if that's your aim.
• 1:21:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:21:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh do you think uh uh a public historian uh has a foundation built for becoming a futurist?
• 1:21:30
  SPEAKER_03: Becoming a futurist.
• 1:21:33
  SPEAKER_03: Not necessarily.
• 1:21:34
  SPEAKER_03: Um a lot of public history is maybe not that future looking at all.
• 1:21:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um so not necessarily.
• 1:21:42
  SPEAKER_03: I don't I don't I don't think so.
• 1:21:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um but it could in some I mean the the more you study history, the more patterns you learn, or the more patterns you notice about the way the world works and has potentially always worked, um, or the differences you see in the way things can change, which can be very dramatic and surprising.
• 1:22:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um yeah, I guess it may give you some senses of you know being a futurist or or the some skills to bring to the table, maybe.
• 1:22:14
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, fantastic.
• 1:22:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh what's one piece of advice that uh you will never uh you know forget, which you carry on in your work even today.
• 1:22:29
  SPEAKER_03: Uh don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
• 1:22:34
  SPEAKER_03: So which is ironically, ironically, the almost the anti-inventors manifesto or a bit of advice.
• 1:22:42
  SPEAKER_03: Because they're constant optimizers and perfectionists, but there is a point at which you need to stop optimizing and just as they say in tech, ship.
• 1:22:52
  SPEAKER_03: You've gotta you've gotta put it out there at some point.
• 1:22:56
  SPEAKER_00: What would be your advice to an 18-year-old in an university today?
• 1:23:03
  SPEAKER_03: In a university.
• 1:23:08
  SPEAKER_03: Uh my advice would be check that the career you want is actually one that requires a higher education.
• 1:23:22
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm not saying don't do a higher education, but a lot of people get distracted from jobs they would find very personally satisfying, but which are often seen as like beneath them, you know, what used to be called blue-collar jobs and so on.
• 1:23:36
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of those can be very, very satisfying for a lot of people, and I think there's a lot of social pressure to put you push you into white-collar and vertical commas jobs because of going to university, and that's not necessarily actually a recipe for happiness.
• 1:23:51
  SPEAKER_03: Like some I don't know, I sometimes I look jealously at people who become electricians and plumbers.
• 1:23:55
  SPEAKER_03: They earn a lot of money sometimes, and they have very happy lives, you know.
• 1:24:00
  SPEAKER_03: So, in terms of just covering the basics for flourishing, sometimes it can be achieved in that way.
• 1:24:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, brilliant.
• 1:24:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh, if you were to invite two or three people for your dream dinner, who would you like to be on the table?
• 1:24:17
  SPEAKER_00: And what would you ask them and do?
• 1:24:19
  SPEAKER_03: Alive or dead?
• 1:24:22
  SPEAKER_00: It can be alive or dead.
• 1:24:24
  SPEAKER_03: Oh my goodness.
• 1:24:25
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, if it's dead, then then we get loads.
• 1:24:27
  SPEAKER_03: Uh yeah.
• 1:24:29
  SPEAKER_03: Wait, so dinner party, two or three people.
• 1:24:33
  SPEAKER_03: Oh Chingis Khan.
• 1:24:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um, just an extraordinary story.
• 1:24:39
  SPEAKER_03: I'd love to know that what happened.
• 1:24:43
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, this is a guy who starts in his forties from basically nothing and then ends up conquering half the world.
• 1:24:50
  SPEAKER_03: So this is quite an interesting guy.
• 1:24:52
  SPEAKER_03: Awful guy as well, but I'm interested.
• 1:24:54
  SPEAKER_03: You know, if if I'm at the dinner party, might as well.
• 1:24:56
  SPEAKER_03: I get the one shot charts, right?
• 1:24:59
  SPEAKER_03: So you were asking about how to like how to get success.
• 1:25:04
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think there's any more people in terms of the thing he chose, which was very awful for millions of people, he was very effective.
• 1:25:12
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so I'd be interested.
• 1:25:15
  SPEAKER_03: And was it two or three people?
• 1:25:19
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I mean, it's gonna be a bunch of inventors.
• 1:25:23
  SPEAKER_03: It's gonna be I want to talk to James Watt, who does the separate condenser for steam engines.
• 1:25:31
  SPEAKER_03: I'd love to know more about just what's going on at the time.
• 1:25:35
  SPEAKER_03: Let's almost get his memoirs, if anything, on all his stories.
• 1:25:41
  SPEAKER_03: Um and someone like Samuel Hartlib, who's a guy he's known as an an i a sort of intelligencer.
• 1:25:53
  SPEAKER_03: This is a guy who's at the heart of all the stuff happening in the mid-17th century in in England, where he's the guy who's exchanging all the letters with people, and so he knows everything that's going on.
• 1:26:06
  SPEAKER_03: I have a few specific questions for him about what you what he's written in the stuff that we've got.
• 1:26:11
  SPEAKER_03: So some of it's for my for my research interest, but some of it's also kind of general interest stuff, too.
• 1:26:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the last question that I have is what is one thing that you believe in that people around you don't agree with you?
• 1:26:24
  SPEAKER_03: That I believe that people don't agree with.
• 1:26:27
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's it's it's something I touched on very briefly before, which is the the scope for further invention.
• 1:26:34
  SPEAKER_03: I think I have a pretty strong belief that there's a lot of low-hanging fruit.
• 1:26:38
  SPEAKER_03: And most people, even around me, don't think that, right?
• 1:26:42
  SPEAKER_03: They believe that invention is getting harder, it's getting more difficult to make new advances.
• 1:26:48
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't think there's anything innate about the way that that's the case.
• 1:26:55
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Anton.
• 1:26:56
  SPEAKER_00: It was lovely talking to you.
• 1:26:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you took us back in history, you took me back personally to different people uh who have done phenomenal work, and the transition and the transformation that they did in their period is something to learn, to understand, and there's so much to kind of use it in today's uh invention and the work that we do.
• 1:27:22
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks a lot.
• 1:27:23
  SPEAKER_00: It was a learning and a brilliant session, and thanks for this conversation.
• 1:27:28
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks very much for having me.
• 1:27:29
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 1:27:29
  SPEAKER_03: I enjoyed it too.
• 1:27:31
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks.
• 1:27:33
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening to this episode.
• 1:27:35
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• 1:28:05
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