A conversation with Professor Andrew Odlyzko about the forces that have driven the paradigm changes we’ve seen across the research world in the past several decades. Andrew is a professor at the University of Minnesota and worked at Bell Labs before that. The conversation centers around his paper “The Decline of Unfettered Research” which was written in 1995 but feels even more timely today.  Key Takeaway The decline of unfettered research is part of a complex web of causes - from incentives, to expectations, to specialization and demographic trends. The sobering consequence is that any single explanation is probably wrong and any single intervention probably won’t be able to shift the system. Links The Decline of Unfettered Research Andrew's Website A Twitter thread of my thoughts before this podcast (Automated, and thus mistake-filled) Transcript   audio_only [00:00:00]  In this conversation. I talked to professor Andrew Odlyzko about the forces that have driven the paradigm changes we've seen across the research world. In the past several decades. Andrew is a professor at the university of Minnesota and worked at bell labs for that our conversation centers around in his paper, the decline of unfettered research, which was written in 1995, but feels even more timely today. I've linked to it in the show notes and [00:01:00] also a Twitter thread that I wrote to get down my own thoughts. I highly recommend that you check out one of them either now or after listening to this conversation.  I realized that it might be a little weird to be talking about a paper that you wrote 25 years ago, but it, it seemed when I read it, it sort of blew my mind because it seemed so like all of it just seemed so true today. Um, and so I was, I was wondering, uh, like first do you, do you, do you sort of think that the, the core thesis of that paper still holds up? Like how would you amend it if you had to write it again today? Oh, absolutely. I'm convinced that the base thesis is correct. And as the last quarter century has provided much more evidence to support it. And basically if I were writing it today, I would just simply draw on this experience all those 25 years. Yeah. Yeah. Cause, okay, cool. So, so like, um, I sort of wanted to [00:02:00] establish the baseline of like asking questions about it is still, is still super relevant. Um, So, uh, just, uh, for, for the, for the listeners, um, would you sort of go through how you think of what unfettered research meets? Because, uh, I think many people have heard of, of sort of like, like basic or, or curiosity driven research, but I think that the distinction is actually really important. Mmm. Well, yes. So basically unfettered researchers, emotional curiosity, driven research, very closely related to maybe some shades of difference with the idea here is that you kind of find the best people. You can most promising researchers and give them essentially practically complete freedom. Give them resources, making them complete freedom to pursue the most interesting problems that they see. Um, and that was something which, uh, kind of many people still think of this as being the main mode of operations. And that's still thought [00:03:00] the best type of research in that case, but it's definitely been fading. Yeah. So, uh, would you, would you make the art? So what, like, what is the, is the most powerful argument that unfettered research is actually not the best kind of research. Well, so why is it not the best kind of research? So again, this is not so much an issue of world's best in some global optimization sense. And so on my essay. It wasn't really addressed to the forces that were influencing conduct of science technology research. Um, and, uh, I'm not quite saying that it's kind of ideal that it was happening. I said, well, here are the reasons. And given the society we live in and the institutions, the general framework here is what's happened and why it's happening. Yeah. [00:04:00] Now and a particular outfit. Yes, there was an argument coming out of my discussion was that, uh, this unfettered research was, uh, becoming a much smaller fraction of the total. And this was actually quite justified. But yes, uh, even so to a large extent, research did dominate for a certain period of time. Um, that era was ending now. It was likely to be the con kind of consigned to a few small niches. So evolving on the, a small number of people, much more of the work was going to be kind of oriented towards particular projects. Yeah, the, the, the thing that I really like about the term unfettered research that I feel like draws a distinction between it and curiosity European is that, uh, unfettered research, the idea of fettered versus unfettered, uh, feels like it refers to, um, Sort of like [00:05:00] external constraints on a researcher, whereas curiosity driven versus, uh, not curiosity driven is, uh, the motivation uh,  um, Where, where is like, curiosity? Do you have any, is like the internal, no motivation for a researcher. And I think it's, my whole framework is around  incentives. So it's like, what are the incentives on researchers and, and, uh, fettered versus unfettered really sort of, uh, touches on that. Yes. Um, personally, I don't draw a very sharp distinction between the two, I think has got into very fine gradations and so on. I'm not sure they kind of necessarily in most meaningful is our sons. Is that when we're talking, just driven around unfettered research, People are never kind of totally acting in isolation based on is our curiosity. They always react to the opportunities. They react to what they hear from other people. And very often also they are striving for recognition. Yeah, [00:06:00] invitations to stock home to receive about price and so on. That's something many people in the proper disciplines of course keep in mind or so, so there are always some constraints coming from particular group in that case, I kind of, I know these terms as almost synonymous. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so sort of a, the upshot of the decline of unfair research for me was, uh, kind of mind blowing. And it makes so much sense when you put it this way, that research has become a commodity. And I'm not sure how much you've been paying attention to sort of what I would called, like the, the, um, stagnation literature, where there's been a lot of literature around the idea of, of scientistic stagnation. And I realized that sort of at the core of that was this assumption about [00:07:00] research being a commodity. Like you look at these economic models and it's just like, okay, well we need more researchers to produce more research and it's this undifferentiated. Thing. Um, and so, so like in your mind, what are the implications of something specifically research becoming a commodity, right. Let me maybe kick it back a little bit. I'm not sure commodities quite the right term. Uh, I think we can relate it to something that has been documented and discussed very extensively in various areas, such as sports. Sports or maybe music and so on named new that what happens is, well, it's becoming very music, becoming very competitive, uh, schools, cranking out people are selecting them for the ability to perform at a certain level, scolding them, and then letting them go on the stage and so on and compete. And so what you find, for [00:08:00] example, you sport typically the gap between the. Top, whereas leads say the gold medal winner as a silver medal winner has been narrowing performance has been increasing in practically all areas of sports people, jump throws that are higher. They run faster. So on again, that seemed to be leveling off in many cases. People studying human physiology, argue with some quantitative models that we're approaching the limits of what's possible to do with our human body, unless we go to some other planet and other environmental assaults. Uh, so you hire these people, but you still have the best ones in there. Um, you were saying bolt, you know, kind of, uh, sprint or repeatedly case is I got a good example. And so you, you, you couldn't, it's not quite. Correct to say is that the hundred meter [00:09:00] sprinters are a commodity. There is definitely a differentiation there, and there is a reason to encourage them to compete and get better and train to do better and better. On the other hand, you come to a situation losing anyone knows the top around nurse makes less and less of a difference to the performance. It should observe. And I think that something similar happening with the research, you said that she saw you. And so I think that presupposes something that I love your take on, which is that sort of, there are natural limits to human physiology. I think like that's a pretty clear, right? Like, um, but there's. Not as clearly a limit to  technological ability or the, the amount that we can know about how the universe works [00:10:00] like possibly. Um, and so, so this is, this is almost like, it feels almost philosophical, but so the, the analogy to sports, um, Would presuppose some, some natural limit on, uh, sort of like the amount of science and the amount of technology that we could do. Um, and so, so do you think that that's, that's the case. Okay. Yes, there definitely is a difference in those kind of general research in science. We don't have these very obvious, very obvious reasonably well defined limits. On the other hand, what we're coming up against is the fact that these fields still are becoming more and more competitive, soft sciences are sort of growing. Uh, it's also your current number of sub fields is growing. A volume of information that's available is growing while that also means that watch any single individual can master [00:11:00] smaller and smaller fraction of that total. So in some sense, you could say that human society is becoming much more knowledgeable. The algorithm  each individual we can say is becoming less, less knowledgeable, knows less and less about the world. And we depend much more on the information we got from others. Uh, there's this extensive concern right now about the postural world and all of these filter baubles and such tied to how being created. And is that this almost inevitable because. How do you actually know anything? Um, sort of surveys show that maybe 10% of the people believe the earth is flat. And all those theories and all those pictures from space as being fake or creations of people with video editing tools and so on. And well, uh, most people can [00:12:00] live quite well with the mental model of that world. Uh, as long as they are not in charge of plotting rocket trajectories or airplane trajectories, and so on, same thing, vaccinations I'll do you know the vaccination is good. I'm assuming you're not . I, I believe that vaccinations are. Pretty good. How would you, you prove to me that vaccinations work again, there's a whole long chain of reasoning and data and so on. That has to be put together to really come to this conclusion that vaccinations work. Some is sometimes I ask my questions and my students. Whether they come through as the artists around now, you from Caltech, you may remember enough physics to be able to come up with a convincing argument. Most people can't. Okay. That's all. It would have been thought. It's consistent with everything sounds fine. So is [00:13:00] the result. Is that we have people, large groups of people working very hard and as much as very competitive, uh, in many cases, and you look many projects require extensive collaborations. Uh, and this has been documented in a kind of quantitative terms in some of my presentation decks. I had some, this slide. Where I showed the degree of collaboration amongst mathematicians. So similar, similar graphs could be drawn from other disciplines. Many of them moved towards more collaborative form, a head of mathematics, a lot less, but slower and so on in mathematics background, 1940 around I focused the exact numbers now, but there are 95% of the papers where it's in the bystander or, sorry. By year, 2000, 60 years later. No, it was down to about under 50%. Wow. And by now a check, I haven't [00:14:00] gotten the latest numbers. I suspect it's probably well under 40%. And so what does it reflect? Uh, I suspect to a large extent, I think that's consistent with what other people found in other disciplines who started more carefully is design need to combine different types of expertise. Great. Um, not knowing enough to be able to cut out the project. That's crazy. And so, so this, this paints for me, a really sobering picture of a world in which. Basically like as, as you need to collaborate on more things, there's more specialization. So you need more people to collaborate, uh, which just sort of by its very nature, nature increases, coordination costs. And so it feels like it's almost like just more and more friction in the system. And so each new that just like has more friction involved, um, and. [00:15:00] So like, is it, this is like the inevitable trajectory, just for things to, uh, to stall out or like, is there an escape hatch from this, uh, this conundrum? Well, I say we simply have to deal with it. No,  I don't think so. So I don't see any kind of silver bullet. I don't see a big breakthrough people doubt AI, and yes, I'm not downplaying the usefulness of various AI tools, but I still think they are likely to be fairly limited in this kind of real creative sense. Um, and so we'll simply have to deal with a fact cause that's things are getting messier. That requires more effort. Marshall was the low hanging fruit has been picked up. We'd have to work harder. And also there will be men, highly [00:16:00] undesirable features. Uh, people going off on tangents, uh, kind of, kind of creating their own alternate realities, such like going astray. That was all of those kind of build up kind of elaborate alternate realities where certain kind of art attempts are assembled together into convincing pictures. I think we'll be, we'll have to deal with that. Yeah. And, um, so, so. Another piece that you, uh, like sort of core to the thesis, is this increasing sense of competition? Um, w would it be too extreme too? Say that the, the game has sort of changed from I'm a sort of absolute game, uh, to a relative game in, in a lot of research where instead of trying to produce a. The best thing, it's just trying to produce something [00:17:00] that's better than the other person. Uh, I'm not sure, uh, whether I would put those stamps out there to think of it. Uh, I mean, there was always this element of competition. You simply look at these bitter disputes, Newton versus Libin. It's about calculus. For example, other cases. Sometimes they were resolved amicably, Darwin evolution and so on. But again, people often they're reacted to not to competition. So Darwin that, getting his book into print because he heard that well, that's just coming out with the work and so on. That's a really good point. Things like that. Uh, so I think the competitive aspect was always there. It's actually very important to get people to accelerate themselves to, to, to, to, to do their best. So I think that is always been important. Yeah, probably much more important now than used to be the occasion before is the [00:18:00] need for collaboration. A need to for collaboration, need to kind of assemble a group to work with groups towards some common goals. And especially that universities, you often see it now where the professor is less the. Yeah, investigator created more, almost like a thought leader or manager because ideas and by the customer assemble, you know, get the grants, bring graduate students and post docs who was an executor, a program. And you know, the head of the lab who gets his or her name, you know, other publications, not necessarily just lead the sense that. Because they're all found that person really is the inspiration kind of on maybe overly original ideas they use there by the second is very different from what it used to be. Say a hundred years ago. Yeah. Even a hundred [00:19:00] years ago, you saw some of it at the sun Edison. Well, it was a very good example, this larger lab, which was working under his guidance and trying out various things, all of the different materials for light bulb filament and such like it was clear that kind of Edison was driving it, but lots of people working on it and so on. But I mean, Edison was very unusual for that period these days. That is how research operates. Yes. And the, the pieces that you allude to in your paper is that, um, there's sort of, there's, there's more competition and, uh, what I would call less Slack, um, in terms, I think of those as being, uh, sort of like to counter opposing systems or to capture opposing forces. And if you. Have that, uh, like competition is what drives you to some [00:20:00] equilibrium. And then Slack is what lets you sort of like jump out of local equilibria. Um, And, and the thing that really drove this home for me was the example you give of, uh, the, the contrast between Xerox, having years and years to sort of do development around their patent and build up additional patents versus, um, the, the superconductor research where multiple groups, uh, came up with the same discovered the same thing, like within weeks of each other. And, uh, I wonder if there's. That is that, um, sort of phenomena is actually playing into the stagnation piece in that, like, this is probably not true in of itself, but like, is it possible that the reason we don't have room temperature superconductors is actually because, uh, nobody. Could would profit from bill, like could actually build up a patent portfolio around them [00:21:00] to the point where they would, where it would be profitable for them. And so like this, this competition is actually sort of like, uh, driving out, uh, paradigm shifts. Well, It's hard to say, because here we're talking about the real kind of, uh, um, natural barriers kind of room temperature, semiconductors exist, easy abstract. Okay. We don't know for certain. Yeah, of case on the other hand, what you can observe is that there have been a few labs that were established over the last couple of decades, which tried to kind of come up with this moonshots and so on. Well, I mean, Google has this X lab. I think something like that, that's been called it. Hasn't produced the very much, uh, Ellen was bill Gates collaborate on creating Microsoft. He had this kind of. So silver bullet, I mean the kind of lab in [00:22:00] Silicon Valley, uh, I forget his name right now. Again, not much has come out of it. Uh, so I think it's simply very difficult to come up with breakthrough ideas. Uh, and I mean, you know, my main area that I can talk to you about shape mathematics itself. Uh, there have been a few kind of. Really incisive ideas, new breakthroughs, last few decades, I would say many few words and used to be like I used to be for other areas more closer to applications cryptography. I used to work a lot. Uh, I would say March of what has been done over the last couple of decades have been pretty much incremental. There hasn't been all that much either way of significant breakthroughs. Um, if you look at something like Bitcoin has excited, uh, attention of many people, uh, in our work produced almost a dozen years ago. On the other hand, all the basic [00:23:00] technologies unit has been known for at least 30 years. Yes the result. Uh, so I think it's more, more a case that it's really harder to achieve breakthroughs, the kind of the low hanging fruit or the big pick. Only a few of them are, are maybe hiking around and maybe occasionally somebody will find them, but not too often. Yeah. I, I guess it's, I always, I find the, the low hanging fruit. Explanation sort of unsatisfying, I guess. And I'm always trying to, to at least like tease that apart and because, you know, it's, it's sort of like there are low hanging fruit until you find a different tree. And I feel like the, the history of the 20th century is one of just fi like repeatedly finding trees. And so the question sort of becomes like, Less [00:24:00] like, have we picked the low hanging fruit and more like, why aren't we finding more trees? And so, um, the, the argument could be like that the trees themselves are, are, are fruit. And so that they're they're low-hanging but, um, I just, I just feel the need to like, keep poking at that. Um, and like, uh, like another, another thing that I found really compelling in your paper was this idea of, uh, expectations shifting from discrete, uh, discoveries to continue to discoveries. Um, that, that was, that was pretty mind blowing. And I think it actually has to do with, uh, These the, the idea of these trees of like finding new trees. Um, do you think that. Perhaps because of the expectations of continuous improvement, that we're less, uh, less willing to sort of like start like picking fruit from new trees. Do, did stretch the analogy to the limit. Well, my, so again, from looking at [00:25:00] everything, I'm kind of inclined into the view that are simply are not that many trees. It is occasional. Things are harder. Um, you just look at many disciplines. What can you do? Even when people have brilliant new ideas? Um, they often don't go very far because they have to be incorporated with other things so on. So I've encountered various areas like networking, cryptography and things like that, where people come up with really great inventions. But they are not implementable for one reason or another. So it's hard for me to see the breakthroughs. Uh, again, something might happen. Uh, look at something like fusion, lots of resources have been devoted to trying to come up with practical way of doing controlled fusion and get cheap energy out of it. It hasn't happened. Of course it would say, well that's because, you know, maybe when [00:26:00] maybe, or maybe all of these governments brought all their resources into a blind Ellie. On the other hand, there has been a lot of clever people trying to think of other ways of doing things that will bypass that barrier. And none of them have worked out for a while. There was a great excitement about cold fusion, but that kind of flamed out very quickly. So some people talk to the culture seriously for a while. Um, now I think it's gone. Uh, is there some other way of doing it again? People have been, nobody has found that even though there definitely are incentives to do it. And these are people who have basic technical knowledge, scientific knowledge, to be able to address that question. Yeah. I want to go back to something that you, you just said, um, and, uh, and almost sort of argue against you with what I see as [00:27:00] something that you wrote, uh, which is that. So, so you mentioned that people come up with these, uh, like brilliant technical solutions, but they're not implementable for one reason or another. And. Based on, on my, my reading of your, your paper. Um, one could make an argument that the reason that they don't get implemented is, uh, not because of like some fundamental, uh, reason in the world, but because the people who would implement it, like the people who pour the resources into making it implementable and then implementing it, um, Instead prefer, like expect that, uh, the systems they're using right now and the paradigms that they're using will just get better at a continuous rate. And so there's sort of no point in making the effort to switch. Um, would that be, would that be a fair reading of, of the paper? Oh, very much so well, not cellular paper, but in journal evidence. I mean, we see it very much in the [00:28:00] computer arena and so on. Uh, kind of we've had now kind of a domination of a few kinds of operating systems. Um, we have, uh, uh, the browser. Taking over there on the internet. There's an interesting case. One of my areas, papers kind of downside non technical papers was about electronic publishing written about 1994 and a user. I kind of. The rotor balls are tools for access of information as a web. And I said, well, we have all these great tools, like gopher ways, and there are better ones coming along. Like this thing called browser. It sounds like it will be better generations. Well, I mean, some, since I was the right browser was the better, but that was the end. The browser has just evolved to absorb or to incorporate all these other things that people wanted to do. And again, many people have commented. How, if you were [00:29:00] designing a web from the ground up, you would make various decisions in different ways, but we're pretty much tied to it. And you can only do incremental change. Yeah. That's so, I mean, for me, at least, at least through another really uncomfortable conclusion that it's like, we're almost like suffering the effect of our own success. Right. Like, because we've had such continuous improvement, um, we, uh, are sort of like unable, like the discreet improvements get crowded out. Um, yeah. And it's like, And, and so, and I feel like that's sort of a different effect from, uh, the, the increased friction from, from collaboration. Right. And so I guess, uh, do you have, it's not too much different. It has to do with the greater complexity. So we kind of, uh, Each into our brains are not growing. Okay. It's not much, you know, the event [00:30:00] and we're not certainly acquiring that much knowledge. We would just acquire waste to incorporate or excess graters amounts of knowledge case. And so we're. Devoting more and more of our energy managing the complex, trying to figure out how these things interact. It's much less, much less the point of trying to find some very simple principles F equals ma. Okay, brilliant Newton in that case. Uh, well, uh, people try to come up with such simple concepts that would explain a lot of what God's in his own world and they're failing. That was because of all this complicated. Yeah, no, that's, that's actually, that's a really good point. And that increases the switching costs for, for new systems. Um, if everything is super interconnected, you can't just sort of like [00:31:00] take off the, the module and stick on, on the other module. Although it might suggest that like in a, like a amazing world, uh, We would pay more attention to making things modular, um, right. Like, and, and that sort of like that is at least in some way, a way to abstract away complexities. Right, but we do a bad job of that. Yep. We're doing a very, very poor job of it in the case and yes. Uh, it's one of these other kinds of customers. It's a trade off, uh, the issues. How much effort do you put into making this modular? And one of the problems is that people. I've always had this mental image of software, something that can be modified very quickly. And so therefore there is really no need to, or about interoperability and so on. Well, we fix it when we, and then we generally, we don't, uh, a friend of my browsers [00:32:00] several decades ago. I had this great saying this was in a context of talk communication switches. And you said, what's the difference between hardware and software versus hardware? You can change. Brutal because the engineer is developing hardware sort of knows that these things are now going to be out there and people will have to live with them and then maybe have to repeat replaced and so on. So they pay much more. Attention to modularity. You have all these standards about this, which define what kind of connectors you have, what are the voltages and phase electricity and everything else, the attitude as well. Okay. It's all kind of can be modified. So you end up with this mess of spaghetti code. Okay, you cannot change. And so you have all of these crucial [00:33:00] systems running around, powering our economy. That's all written in Kabul. I've heard. I see, I saw a news article recently that like different governments were desperately trying to hire COBOL engineers that were paying like massive amounts of money because they can't switch. Um, Although, you're also seeing a sort of what I would call it, decreased modularity in hardware systems as well. You know, it's like the, the, the car engines that you can't service yourself for the batteries that you can't replace. Um, and obviously there are good things. There are good reasons for doing that. Um, well of course it's good or maybe not so good. So again, a lot of it has to do with intentional design Lakin. So one manufacturer's making difficult for you to kind of do things. Is there a largely in order to control the user, the other guy gets into the economic incentives. He's also STEM. [00:34:00] Yeah. And, um, I I'd actually love to, to rewind. And, um, what was the question text of you writing this, this paper in the first place again? Because it feels, it feels so contemporary that it's shocking that you wrote it, uh, like more than two decades ago. Yes. Well, that's a very interesting question and very easy to explain. So those written into context of working at bell labs and bell labs was one of these people because of jewels or whatever it is. So it's a really wonderful place. Uh, I joined it right after graduation from high school graduate school. That'd be very impressive. No, no, no, that was it. I spent a summer there before that, but not out of getting my PhD. I joined it and work as there for extended, you know, for several decades. She, most of my career so far has been spent at bell labs [00:35:00] and ATNT labs afterwards. And when I joined, uh, bell labs was still dominated by the of unfettered research. It wasn't completely unfettered. Actually. It was one of the big strengths of it. Namely, there was a certain thing to kind of pressure to do things and also being part of the bell system. We had contact with real world in some sense, closer than say academics did, but otherwise they're all still this ideal of almost unfettered research. Give me lots of freedom. And that was changing. When I was there over the decade before I wrote the essay or declined research. And so basically I was looking around the whole scene, not just that bell labs, what a world, the science of technology and so on, and was trying to explain to my fellow, uh, kind of colleagues at bell labs. [00:36:00] Why is it that we were experiencing this pressure, which many were very concerned about, you know, fearful, resentful or other kinds of things. So that's really, what's the context of it. It was really about these traditional. Uh, large industrial research labs, like bell labs. IBM kind of what's on the research lab and there's some algorithm. Uh, and are your answer? I already alluded that back to the same factors would start influencing kind of other types of research, especially academic research. And so on because when indeed been happening, but at that stage, I was kind of seeing it as a front lines as, as our wave was coming in and of reacting to it. Yeah. That, that that's fascinating. And, and sort of as, as more, I guess, more fetters were put on researchers at bell labs. Um, did [00:37:00] you, did you have any conversations? So sort of like with, um, The people who were starting to put, like put those pressures on, on the research. Not well, not, not real deep conversations or so no, but Tommy of course we had general conversations about what was being done. Uh, you know, how the reorganizations, how the reward structure was changing and all these other kinds of things. Yeah. How, how, how did the rewards trust structure change? If I may ask not much more, uh, uh, much more attention was being paid to work, being done for the company. Or interactions that were more closely related to what the company was doing and much less on just pure scientific accomplishments, which might be kind of a recognized on the outside. As one example, one of the, my colleagues wrote some papers with him. She was also in my department after I was promoted to department head for [00:38:00] many years, very distinguished researcher. He was on the. Few people who was member of national Academy of sciences, national Academy of engineering, and what was then called Institute of medicine now, national Academy of medicine. So on August bodies, this was all for work. He did on foundations of a kind of computer cat, computer, extra tomography, which is basically. Was working on some mathematical problems of reconstruction from, uh, kind of the images x-ray measurements and so on. So he did do a lot of this work and that had practically no kind of, uh, uh, no. No connection to bell system might do well, actually there was a little bit, we tried to develop some of these techniques for electrical tomography, for some cables, anomaly [00:39:00] detection, other kinds of things, but basically this was working a few did, but had a great influence. I say it. Improved the health of many people. And so on, it was widely recognized on the outside that, uh, you know, a bit of some things that belonged to the earlier era of bell labs, not to the final stages of it. Yeah. And, and, and so I guess the, um, sort of implication of that for me is that he then did not like he wasn't really that rewarded. Uh, w w basically he was rewarded because this was the earlier, you know, that he kind of retired when things were really changing and so on. And. So kind of a long story. He did very well. He was widely recognized. He contributed to many other things too, but this computerized tomography work, that was a major undertaking for him, which took a lot of time. [00:40:00] Yeah. And, and, um, do you have a sense of how long it took him to do that? Like, like how, how much time did he spend just sort of like, uh, Oh, seemingly producing nothing. Well, no, no, it wasn't not just that these things were getting published in general scientific journals, but they were not kind of relevant to what bell system was doing. Yeah, it's touched for a number of years, I'd say five years, something like that. And so like sort of counterfactually uh, is there a reason why sort of, if he were working today, he would not be able to do that in like a university setting? Uh, well, uh, again, it depends, so, um, he might be able to do it. Other than you need to make sure that you get some kind of a funding agency recognizing that this is a [00:41:00] promising area. Uh, I don't know, is that right? Once he started doing it, whether NSF or other agencies where knowledgeable knew enough about it and you regard it as promising enough, so not impossible. So there were some. People who kind of proposed doing this before there was an issue of how do you actually get useful reconstructions, extra imaging that you obtain. And I think that's kind of part of this big change. Now you'll have many more people kind of looking around trying to find something to do and, uh, Again, if you're persuasive enough, uh, and you can convince enough people and you can persuade you the private founder. Yeah. Shouldn't or maybe you can persuade and some adventure, some national science foundation. So the director to set up a program for fun, you know, a particular type of [00:42:00] research. Yeah. So, so no, I mean, I'm not saying that this new style of research is in capable of producing breakthrough results, but, but you do, you do it, it does seem like there are, there's a sort of different set of constraints on it, right? Like it's uh, so if you have someone who is, um, sort of antisocial and, uh, bad at bad at sales, basically, um, the chances of them. Being able to create this breakthrough, uh, are probably lower. That's right. So then they succeed on leave. They hook up with somebody who's more of a promoter. Okay. And then was she examples of it? Some, some people who managed to assemble a group and kind of collaborate.   Be very conducive towards, so, you know, facilitate interactions amongst them and direct them means our rights area. And even you, those are kind of these kind of [00:43:00] very nerdy types and so on. They might still be very effective at coming up with useful products or services. Yeah. And, um, uh, another area of the paper that I felt was, was very prescient, was you're, you're focused on sort of Japanese, um, sort of the Japanese, uh, economy, and that you pointed out that the Japanese business structure, uh, should be able to enable longterm work. Um, and, and yet it doesn't. Um, and so. Uh, that's, that's sort of a, a counter, like a counterfactual to the argument that like, Oh, we just like don't have long enough timescales and like, uh, like stockholder pressure is, is forcing people to work on shorter timescales. Um, do you feel like that is still true in, in terms of, uh, like the Japanese, uh, like that Japanese. Um, output has not [00:44:00] created like breakthroughs that we would expect to happen. No, it has not. Again, again, a part of it may have to do with the kind of cultural factors or how their corporations are structured. And so on. I certain are excellent. They are still pretty top technology sees a world in different areas. On the other hand, when you look at records of some people, there was one particular guy. I forgot his name now. I think the blue laser. I think this was the breakthrough invention and so on, but very hard time, this company was not really properly rewarded or so, and it was almost like a little bit do a skunkworks work and it kind of gets things most other side. Indeed.  I want to be respectful of your time. So the, the closing question I ask everybody is just, what, what should people be thinking about that? They're not thinking about enough right now, [00:45:00] people shouldn't be thinking about. Very very hard. Very hard question. I don't think I have a simple answer. Give a complex answer. Welcome to my particular concentration right now is a group thing. Uh, so I think that's, uh, again, I won't say this will be central for everybody and so on, but I think it's a very important question. The degree to which a human, uh, society really depends on groups, to what extent it's actually let us stray, uh, where people disregard are very obvious evidence in order to, uh, adhere to the preferred worldview. And I'm studying financial manuals, baubles, precisely from that standpoint, how is it that people manage to overlook all those very obvious sides? Yeah. Yeah. [00:46:00] It's uh, one thing, actually, I I'll just, um, what do you, what's your take on the argument that, uh, there are some like, especially like infrastructure, um, things that never would have happened without bubbles. So, so there's this argument that like, we, we actually would never have the railroad infrastructure or like the telecom communications infrastructure, uh, without bubbles. Yes. I don't think that's true that we'll never have had it. A single comment probably would have come more slowly. Oh, so, uh, I mean, technology will typically these basic technologies have been developed before achieve what led to the bubbles was the appearance of, uh, of the technology in a form that could be deployed. And that make money, the case, and that gives rise to excessive optimism and, uh, you know, future investment manuals. But I just can't think of anything. That's kind of juice, just the bubbles [00:47:00] by themselves. Like the, that there's there's. So, so you don't think that there's some sort of activation, like if you think about it, like a cat chemical reaction, there's like an activation energy that's actually higher than the sustaining energy of, of the reaction that's provided by a bubble. Yes. Well, okay. So I think there's some of it and to somewhat, you know, various ways of thinking about barcodes, they lead to faster deployment. Some technologies will be through otherwise they open up people's minds. Um, extent. And to some extent they may also drain of some of the irrational energies, which might otherwise be deployed in more destructive ways. That case some people regardless, just farfetched, but there are some ways you could think of the Bible says being conducive to human progress. My key takeaway is that the decline of unfettered research is part of a complex web of causes from incentives to [00:48:00] expectations, to specialization and demographic trends. The submarine consequences that any single explanation is probably wrong. And any single intervention probably won't be able to shift the system.

A conversation with Eleonora Vella about getting the right people in the room, finding research on the cusp of commercializability, and generally how TandemLaunch’s unique system works. Eleonora is a Program director at TandemLaunch. Tandemlaunch is a startup foundry that builds companies from scratch around university research. This is not an easy task - check out Episode 15 with Errol Arkilic, Episode 19 with Mark Hammond, or Episode 21 with Eli Velazquez if you need convincing. Given the challenges, TandemLaunch’s successes suggest there’s a lot to learn from their processes. Key Takeaways - An under appreciated reason that commercialization is tricky because it involves a transfer from one skillsets to another - The timescales of business and patents seems to have become decoupled   Links TandemLaunch Homepage

A conversation with Dr Anton Howes about The Royal Society of Arts, cultural factors that drive innovation, and many aspects of historical innovation. Anton is a historian of innovation whose work is expansive, but focuses especially on England in the 18th and 19th centuries as a hotbed of technological creativity. He recently released an excellent book that details the history of the Royal Society of Arts called “Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation” and he publishes an excellent newsletter at Age of Invention. Notes Aton on Twitter: @AntonHowes Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation - Anton's Book Age of Invention - Anton's Newsletter The referenced post about Dungeons and Dragons We don't dig too much into the content of the book because Anton talked about it on other podcasts. He gives a good overview in this one. How much did a steam engine cost in today's dollars, these sources suggest it was roughly $100k , but as anton noted - it's complicated. Transcript (Rough+Experimental)  Ben: the place that I I'd love to start is the,society of arts did something that I feel like people don't discuss very much, which is focused on,  inventions that have positive externalities. So you, you talk a lot about how they, they would promote,Inventions that maybe people,couldn't make a lot of money off of they weren't going to patent. , and it's one of the few examples I've seen in history of like non-government forces really promoting,inventions with positive externalities. And so I was wondering , if you see that.  how could we get more of that today? And like, if there were other [00:02:00] things doing similar work at the time and maybe how that theme has like moved forward in time. Anton: Yeah. That's really interesting question. I'm trying to off the top of my head, think of any examples of other non-governmental ones. I suspect there's quite a few from that period, though, just for the simple reason that. I mean the context in which the society of arts and emerges right, is at a time when you have a very capable state, but a state that doesn't do very much. Right? So one of the, one of the things you see throughout it is actually the society kind of creating what you might call the sorts of institutions that States now take upon themselves all the time, voting positive externalities as you, as you, which is a very good way of putting it. , you know, Trying to identify inventions that the market itself wouldn't ordinarily provide. , later on in the night in the mid 19th century, trying to proper state into providing things [00:03:00] like public examinations or, you know, providing those things privately before you have a state education system. But I think one of the main reasons for that is that you don't really have that kind of role being taken up by the central state. Right. I mean, the other thing to bear in mind here of course, is that a lot of governance actually happens at the local level. And so when we talk about the government, we really mean the central government, but actually a lot of stuff would be, is happening, you know, amongst the, kind of the towns and cities. It seems with that written privileges, the various borrowers with their own often quite bizarre privileges and like the way they were structured,local authorities for want of a better word, although they kind of. Take all sorts of different forms. And I think you do see quite a lot of it. It's just, it wasn't all done by a single organization at the time. So I think that's kind of the main underlying context there. Ben: Yeah. And so I guess sort of riffing on that. , one thing that I was wondering, as I, as I read through the book was like, why don't we see [00:04:00] more of that sort of like non central, central state,Positive externality promoting work done. Now, like you think of philanthropy and it doesn't quite have that same flavor anymore. And I wonder like do, like, my bias would be, would be to think that sort of,there's almost like a crowding out by the centralized state now that people sort of expect that. , and I was wondering like, do you. W w how do you think of it, perhaps there's some crowding out. I mean, the interesting thing, right, is that Britain has actually kind of interesting in that it has quite a lot of these bottom up institutions. Whereas across the rest of Europe, you actually see quite a few top-down ones. Right? So I discussed in the book that there is actually not one, but two French societies of arts, sociology. Those are there's even a third one, which still exists, which is a kind of a later much later one from, I think the late 1938, early 19th, late [00:05:00] 18th, early 19th centuries. , part of the, kind of catch up with Britain project that Napoleon and others start pursuing,But yeah, you have a lot of these princely institutions, ones that depend on particular figures to be their patrons,to promote them,to, you know, provide a meeting space for them to provide them with funds, to provide up, to, to fund anyone who's doing fellowship of that, of that kind. Whereas in Britain, you seem to get basically those stuff that doesn't get funded by the particular patrons, even when they're promised that funding like the Royal society, which they always hoped we'd get some kind of government or, you know, some funds from Charles the second or something never does. , it obviously gets support that, you know, he gives them a Royal base that they can have on the table in front of them when they have that discussions. But that's about it. And the society of arts I guess, is, has to be set up because you have that lack of. , you have that lab because of state support. , I mean, what's interesting is I guess in certain [00:06:00] complex contexts, you do get state funding of these sorts of institutions. The Dublin society becomes the Royal Dublin society, but that one actually does get state funding as part of the kind of compact try and get Ireland to catch up with, with, with Britain in terms of its economy, same with Scotland, the society Scottish society of improvers does eventually get. I guess morphed into what becomes the Scottish board of trustees for fisheries and manufacturers, probably full title one. , so organizations like that, I guess become state ones. I mean, the idea that there, the fact that they're quite uncommon though, is, is interesting. And I wonder if Britain was just a bit better sometimes that they're organizing these things and keeping them going. , the Dublin society is. An outlier. So there's the society of arts. You see lots of these patriotic societies set up to emulate the society of arts across Europe, but very, [00:07:00] very few of them,assisted I think by the 1850s, the only one, like they're pretty much, refounded a bunch of them as kind of discussion clubs. And then since then, I think the only real one to keep going was it's the one on Malta for summary, bizarre reason. , I've kind of forgotten the original question now I've kind of gone. So, so the original question was just around,like why almost like why aren't there more,nongovernmental organizations sort of devoted to promoting,these positive externalities. Like that's, that's sort of the big question I have. So I guess my answer there is partially that. It seems as though if you did have crowding out it was happening just as much then, or at least had that potential. Right? Cause you have these Nobles who could be the patrons. You have the King, who could be the patron. , although potentially you're right in that, because British Monex worth giving their patronage. You end up with these actually ironically more robust institutions because they're [00:08:00] much more broad based and bottom up. Yeah. Being formed and then surviving. So perhaps it's the case that because we just expect the government to do it and the government's extremely rich and actually does give lots of money for lots of different things. We just say, well, it's easier to, just to kind of persuade a politician, to get some money set aside for a new agency in much the same way that you know, today Britain is trying to set up an ARPA. , I think just announced a few weeks ago. , because once the idea gets,enough currency, as long as you can persuade the panels that be the, maybe it's actually quite straightforward to do it. The reason I ask is actually based on something that, that Jomo cure has pointed out, which is how,Kind of like the federalisation of innovation makes it much more robust. , I'm sure you've seen the, the,sort of like the contrast between like the Chinese state. , and then how, like, in, in Europe, comer, [00:09:00] Copernicus could like go, go between Patriot to patron until they found someone who would actually support him. , and so I always wonder about like having multiple sources of innovation and like how to have that happen. , so that was that's, that's sort of something that, that I'm, I'm always thinking about. , I guess you could say that that's, that's present right on the European level. Certainly the big question then is why is it that you don't get it happening in other fractured States? , I think a very neglected part of the case thesis, right? Is that yes, fractured States is one thing, but the other half of that, of the, of the puzzle there is also having a kind of common culture. Yeah. Even if that's. Completely kind of invented right with Swedes who presumably is descended from whatever bar area, really fat calling themselves, you know, Albertus Magnus or, or, or whatever, you know, people who are certainly not Latin from, you know, in [00:10:00] any kind of. I guess ethics sense claiming a Latin heritage or Greek or Latin heritage for themselves. , I guess bricks as well. Right? , many of whom are probably Anglo, Anglo, Saxon, Germanic Anglo-Saxons or, or, or pre Roman council something. , you know, John D is actually referring to himself as the artist know. But, but that, that, that common language, you know, having a lingua franca, French of Latin then of French, and then I guess more, more recently of English having that common set of assumptions, you know, the Republic of letters. Wasn't just about the fact that you could, as a stop gap or safety valve move somewhere, that could be a bit more promising. , I think it's also very much, it very much requires that extra step, whether or not you have had in other places is, is debatable. Right. I think kit mentions, you know? Yes. Career in Japan and next to China, but they don't [00:11:00] quite have the common culture. So even though some Chinese intellectuals will move to Japan there, they get kind of forgotten neglected. It's a really good point. And I had, I appreciate you. You. Bringing up that neglected part. And so it's like then,actually this is a great segue into another thing I wanted to ask you about. , it's like, so we're, we're in the middle of the coronavirus and you've done a lot of work on sort of like the virality of,of innovation itself,and the ideas like that. And,and so. In contrast, it feels like there's a contrast between,sort of the, the industrial revolution where it seemed like people really would,see someone innovating on something and then take it on themselves to start doing something similar. , and then today you see something like Elon Musk doing something awesome, but then you don't see that many people. Replicating that. , and [00:12:00] do you have a sense of the what's what's different or whether I'm,basically that on like some false assumptions that makes sense, like, like, or just generally, how could we,have more of that innovation vitality? I mean, I think a lot of people probably are inspired by people like Musk. , the way in which they're inspired, I guess is debatable. , you do, I think it's important to have. Invention figureheads. If you like people who you can aspire to copy when it comes to improvement, when it comes to tinkering, when it comes to invention, I guess one of the problems with a figure like Musk is that he seems unaware, reachable or unobtainable, right? There's a kind of level of connectedness and wealth. That seems almost like a starting point before you can even. Get us starting the sorts of projects that [00:13:00] he does or involved himself with. And I think that's potentially harmful. And that it kind of, it's some idea I keep coming back to actually, which is that there's the, the myth of the genius inventor is on the one hand. Good. Because people aspire to be like them. But on the other hand, it can be quite damaging if it seems as though. You have to be born with that a couple lucky enough to just be, be a genius of that. , and that I think is very problematic,because that's not a tall, what we see, I think in the 18th century. And it's certainly not what we see in the 19th century, which is this idea. I articulated that you could be anybody in any past station of life. Right? The Samuel smiles self-help mantra is you can be dirt poor. And, you know, a minor or something in, in, in, in,in the Northeast, someone like George Stevenson and yet through the sheer force of [00:14:00] self-education and. Adopting that improving mindset, you can do great things. Yeah. , and so one of the reasons I quite like improvement as an idea, versus like, as something broader like innovation or invention, is that it has that kind of sense of marginality, that sense of tinkering, that sense of, you know, just doing a little bit to make things a bit better. Which can often have very outsized effects. So a problem with a figurehead, like Musk, I think is that it's like, Oh my God. Yeah. Where do you even start? If I said, if I say it, whereas I think if you can construct a narrative false or not, I think that's actually relevant here. Right. But if you construct a narrative where. It's simply through hard work, a bit of, a bit of hard work and just tinkering around the edges and then keeping on optimizing until you get something really great. That's much more accessible. And I think it also [00:15:00] happens to be true. Right. I think, I think that happens to be true that occasionally certain bundles of improvements with these huge outsize effects can make people extremely rich, extremely famous, and then it kind of spirals from there for certain people. But I think focusing on those initial stories is one of the reasons why, you know, I think, I think the Victorian narratives ended up being so effective, perhaps even had an actual impact on inspiring more people to go in and do that, that sort of thing. And that's actually something that,I've, I've comfortably been thinking about, which is the sorts of things that can be tinkered with and improved now feel different than the sorts of things that could be tinkered and improved in the 19th century. Right. So it's like you look at. , like you could actually like tinker with what was sort of the cutting edge technology, right? Like you could tinker with, [00:16:00] , like railroad brakes or you could tinker with,like sailing apparatus, but it's now harder. It's like, you can't really go like tinker with,like a fusion reactor in the same way. , and. Do you think there's something to that? Or like, like that, that, that contrast, I think perhaps there is something in the mid 19th century. You've got this focus, I guess, on. I'm trying to make some of these instruments, more accessible things like a sort of study of arts gets involved with things like having cheap microscopes that you can send out to working men's colleges, mechanics, institutions, all over the country so that people can then use these things and then make new discoveries, or at least know how they work. , you know, the closest thing we have to that now, I guess it's like something like the raspberry PI, you know, these very simple things that you can start tinkering away around [00:17:00] with. , and I guess, you know, maybe in certain respects you want as much as possible to make. Not, not even necessarily knowledge, but to make invention more accessible, you need the materials to become more and more accessible. Having said that if you think of something like the rust free pipe, that is a very complicated piece of machinery that is now available to school kids,that would be like, you know, in the 18th century taking, you know, a watch or something, something extremely complicated and being like, yeah, how the go, you know, like take this apart and do what you will. , you know, these are things,they certainly come down in price so the time, but they're still. They're not cheap to tinker with. I mean, you mentioned, you mentioned shipping, you know, doing any kind of tinkering with a ship is actually extremely expensive. I mean, it's in the 18th century, that's very much on par with trying to tinker with a jet fighter today in terms of the relative cost of it, you know? So, well, let me, let me push back against that a little bit, which is that. It at least like I've, I've never,like actually like built a [00:18:00] ship, but it seems like it's a little bit more modular, right? Like, like you could say, like tinker with the steering wheel of the ship without,necessarily affecting like the whole, whereas. There's, it's not really possible to like the jet fighter is so integrated that I'm not sure how much you could tinker with like, maybe that the instrument panel, but I'm like, that's it. Or it's like, you could, you could tinker with a sale, a sale design. , but you can't really tinker with the engine of a jet fighter. Yeah. Interesting. I mean, I guess something like the steam engine is kind of similar there where most of the time, most of the improvements you make probably involve redesigning the whole. And there are a few, obviously exceptions to that, but you know, something like in reaching the separate condense that [00:19:00] does require actually changing the way it works, the same with Marine engines, you know, the kind of much lighter, smaller engines that you can use on boats, because they're trying to make these things as small as possible light as possible, at least the same with high pressure engines. , I guess, yeah, those, those do require a big upfront cost. And yet what's astonishing now, I guess it's still that you have a lot of people. From all sorts of backgrounds, still, somehow managing to, to make their improvements to it. Model scale, perhaps not at full scale, but then using a model to show the principles and then getting it built at a much larger, much larger way. Actually, I'm not sure if you know this off the top of your head, but like, do you have a sense of how much a steam engine. Costs in term, in, in the 19th century. But in terms of today's money, not off the top of my head, that'd be real. I'd be just like interested in like, [00:20:00] even like order of magnitude, right? Like, would it be like, like 10,000 pounds or a hundred thousand or a million, right. Like. I mean, it depends how you measure these things a lot of the time as well. But if I have the figure to hand, it it'd be a bit easier, but yeah. Cause you can make it to things later. I'll look it up. Yeah. Stick it in the link. Yeah. But there's different ways of measuring it as well. Right. So just the real cost doesn't actually tell you very much because the basket of goods changes so dramatically over time, the labor cost maybe tells you a bit, but then it's probably it's relative to the average. Wage, which is like the labor is wage very often and not, you know, if you're, if you're a middle class in the 18th century, you were actually pretty damn rich. If you're upper class, you'll extremely rate unimaginably wealthy. , and if you're not, then you're extremely, then you're very, very poor. , like the levels of inequality at the time seeing was unfathomable today, I think,Even when we talk about Nicole T increasing, it's really the comparison. Not that bad [00:21:00] people forget that. The very, yeah, it's difficult to appreciate, I think how, how things change qualitatively as well as typically, but then you've also got measures, like, you know, what is the cost of it relative to the size of the economy, which can also be an interesting way of looking at that. , so, and then you've got different ways of, of, of comparing those measures. So it's very difficult to compare the money over time. I mean, certainly these are expensive machines. , making a model even is extremely expensive, requires quite a lot of careful work. , but I wonder how much of that to scale tinkering happens. It's possible that, you know, in. In the process of making machinery with interchange parts and making it as kind of custom built. It's not really custom built, but. As integrated, as you say, as possible, we've made it actually harder to make changes. Perhaps we should be putting more in the way of tweak ability into our [00:22:00] design. Yeah. I mean, like that's, that's a, that's a huge thing. , it's like you see that with,you know, it's like, you can't take the,battery out of most Mac laptops anymore. , most cars you can't tinker with the engine. Anymore. , because you, you do get sort of like re efficiency returns by making things unconquerable. , so, so I, I, I definitely agree with, with you,I really appreciate you bringing in the nuance of comparing,the, the prices now to prices in the past. And,So think that I also wanted to ask is what do you think, like you're, I feel like one of the real historians who engages the most with sort of like the, the technology,world, what do you think that I would guess, I would say like, technology, people get wrong when they're thinking. Historically, like what, what sort of like, almost like cognitive [00:23:00] errors do you use, you see people making that just like make you want it, tear your hair out? What an interesting question. Couple. This is where I offend people. I think this is, I think, I think like, like you gotta, you gotta be okay with that as long as, as long as you like really believe it. Hmm. That's an interesting one. I mean, certainly you occasionally see a sort of simplified oversimplification of certain trends. Right. , but I, I don't know if that's common to technology people particularly, or if that's just general humans, a general human thing,which you probably see quite a lot. But, you know, I have to think about that one. Yeah, we can, we can circle back on it. I'm just, I guess it's just my, my bias is that I think a sort of historical thinking is under [00:24:00] done. , like, like lots of people talk about history, but they don't approach it like historians. And so I would love to just like inject a little bit more of the way that you think into the world. So I try to the general thing, I guess it would be that very occasionally I'll see the kinds of. Historical work, where you're effectively see people reading the Wikipedia page and kind of coming up with this very straightforward, almost linear narrative of this invention and led to this invention, which led to this invention or this understanding led to this invention. And I think what's often missing there is, is the extent to which. A lot of fan is just tinkering a lot of thought that there are so many more steps along the way that go into this and dead ends and you know, ways in which things either, either failed from a scientific point of view or a technical point of view [00:25:00] or. Just kind of, there's a lack of understanding at the time. We'll just from a business point of view where I think dead ends happen very easily in the history of technology. And there are a lot of them and they're probably somewhat unexplored, but on the converse, the other thing I notice a lot is that people often have a bias, I think, towards very technical explanations. , so a good example of this was, so I wrote this,Sub stack this newsletter, this newsletter blog post about the invention of Dungeons and dragons. Yes. I bought that one. I don't think it was quite as, it was probably my most popular one so far, even though, you know, bizarrely that thing, this is the one I spent the least time writing. Mmm. And the most common reaction. So that the overall argument for listeners who may not be aware of it, or probably won't be aware of it was that you have a lot of inventions that are behind that time, [00:26:00] which is the phrase, Alex, tap rock economist users. I quite like it essentially very, very low hanging fruit things that could have been done very, very early. And for some reason just worked. , and I think the reason I was just very few people in the past tinkered. Yeah. , and even fewer, perhaps, you know, of those who did tink or even made things public. So sometimes you get things invented and they actually failed to reveal it, to discover by the way, which is, you know, the word discover is uncover it's to kind of, not just that you found the things that you actually bother to tell someone about the thing and through the transmission of that knowledge, you know, that, that technology as a whole, as a, as a society advances,so yeah, some idea that it is is that you have a lot of these ideas that are, or inventions that could have been done any point within the past. And my main example of this or the one that I discussed that was doughnuts of records, right? This is literally for those who haven't played, literally, you need. Nothing except the people, right? It's it's you just [00:27:00] basically tell a story and then I guess you need dice. But I actually noticed the other day that they had,the 20 sided dice in each, in Egypt, something thousand, something BC, whatever, they found, very intricately inscribed. So you've got all of the raw materials and then all you do is you have the structured plate and the pushback from this was overwhelmingly. No, but there must be other factors, right? That there has to be some kind of constraint. I think the way that, and this is, this is the economist thing like this,cause they're trained to, and I think a lot of people in, I guess the, the technology sector thing like this as well, that there must be some kind of constraint that needs to be overcome. So a lot of people were saying, well, you did have some things like a Creek spiel. , which is this Prussian army game, which was kind of similar. Going back to the 19th century. There were potentially a few, I think it's the Bronte sisters may have come up with a similar form of structured play. , so there was the [00:28:00] questioning from that level, but then the other one was what cable you needed. I don't know the American suburb so that kids are like the invention of Childs so that kids would have, and yes, I get that those things may have contributed towards the specific form that D and D took. But. It still could have been invented earlier, right? These are, these are weak constraints. , and I think a lot of people, they, they tried very, they try very hard to find hard constraints, the same with the famous example,of the. , the suitcase with wheels, you know, people were just like, well, you know, first of all, you need to have, you know, good enough floors in the airport. You need to have a lot of people going to the airport, you know, an international flight because otherwise, what are you gonna use? This thing you need good enough roads for the wheels to work. You need good enough rubber. You probably need the, the ball bearings or something or something rather for this to be technically possible. But the reality is there are, there are absolutely loads inventions that just didn't require, you [00:29:00] know, maybe that's just a bad example. , but there are actually loads and loads of other ones as well. , another one I mentioned. Yeah. And that post, which not many people picked up on was Semafore systems, you know, signaling between ships or from ship to shore. Like you need a flag. Yeah. I mean, a lot of the early, when they, when they discovered it well, when they create invent the one that kind of becomes modern Semifore, you know, people are literally just doing with like a white handkerchief. Yeah, they wrapping around their arms. , the holograph by leftenant James Spratt is the one where they just kind of wrap it around their arms. It almost has a picture of Vitruvian man. , with the, you know, the, the kind of arms different positions all at once holding these handkerchiefs,very long kind of white cloth,or wrapping it around their arm. , the only example I can really think of,you know, The warning system that they used in Elizabethan times for when someone was invading England, which [00:30:00] is a bit like the lighting of the beacons and all the rings, you know, where they just set up a fire, it's like attack, you know, there's no, there's no signaling going on there. And another one I noticed just the other day was from the early 17th century was some kind of signaling system when they were fishing off the coast of Cornwall. But it's actually say what, how. How intricate that system was. So these are inventions though, that, you know, given it probably did exist in Cornwall in the 17th century. Why isn't it used while the Royal Navy until the late night, the late 18th, early 19th century, or even the kind of physical infrastructure that you see in France beforehand, they have these towers with signaling systems. Where they kind of have almost like they look a bit like windmills, except they don't turn around. They just kind of have these shutters that kind of go up and down in different arms of the shutters go up and down for different letters. Why do they only set that up in the seventies and eighties? This would have been useful, you know, underneath. 200, 300, 500,000 years. Exactly. I would say like the Greeks, like why didn't the Greeks [00:31:00] a signal between ships with,and I think a, you know, something when people say, Oh, it was invented earlier. Well then the question is, well, why wasn't it more widely adopted, right? Yeah. Invention does happen all the time. You do get things reinvented all the time. , but there are actually very few hard constraints on, on those inventions. I think that's just as true today. , I mean, one of the really interesting things about, I think a lot of people in today's technology, the sphere, the industry, and I guess the kind of intellectual sphere. Is that if you look at how a lot of them actually make their money, it is often from exploiting, extremely simple things that could have been done quite a bit earlier, which has worked well. They were, but they failed for whatever, either unrelated reason or the conditions weren't quite right. Or they just a bit unlucky. Yeah. Yeah. That's , Man. Okay. So there's, there's a couple of places that I'd love to go from this. I think one that I really want to get your take on is, and I think you're [00:32:00] really sort of touching it here is,if you look there, there are two really big schools of. Thought around history, right? Like, so you have the great man people, and then you have sort of like the evolutionary,sort of, so like, almost like I was, I was looking into this and there's no like single, like anti great man. It's theory, but like, it's, it's sort of like, is it just like, do things come about because like, like singular people really push things through, or is it a much more like, like it would have happened anyway process,and. I, I completely realized that it's not a binary thing, but what I'd love to do is just hear like your mental model of like, how like those, those two poles and where like, how things actually work. I think you, you probably need a bit of both. Right? So in a lot of my own work, I, I guess I'm [00:33:00] methodologically individualist, right? I like looking at what it is that individuals deed and said, and then from what they did and said, try to work out what they also thought or what motivated them, which isn't necessarily the same thing, but, you know, but you can, you can get at it a bit. Yeah. , At the same time, I think it's worth taking it's it's worth taking stuff off the kinds of forces that are pulling the strings, so to speak of those individuals and maybe affecting all of them all at once. So I think you need a bit of both. You have to be aware of the kind of overall macro level arguments. Yeah. Was it just, the prices were right in general, which is, you know, such a kind of broad sweep of coordination of millions, potentially people. Resulting in this single figure, right. , it's kind of spontaneously generated or created a thing. The emergent thing. , but at the same time, you do need to be aware that, you know, people I think do have agency,yes, their context [00:34:00] matters as to how they are mine, their agency. But I think one of the things I've learned is yeah, great, man theory may not exist. Great person theory may or may not be quite right. But so I think bad to throw the baby out with the, of water and say, well, yes, we've just, you know, in the kind of Marxist. Reading of things just at the mercy of these, these suffer national global forces around which we have no say whatsoever. I mean, the reality is that, you know, I think the industry relations is a great example of this because you have this broad acceleration. Imagine with some of these inventions, having these global scale effects on the rest of the world, you know, things like the steam boat. Okay. It's a collective endeavor that leads to that point where you have steam boats, but once steam boats effectively shrink the world, I mean, that completely changes the game when it comes to. Trade patterns, right? Suddenly the whole world can be globally integrated. You can see price convergence across the entire [00:35:00] globe. You see this kind of distinction between this growing distinction, as they, as people put it in the forties and fifties, you know, the periphery and the S and the core, an industrialized series of. The nation's sucking in raw materials from the rest of the world, because those raw materials were profitable. Those countries start specializing in those things alone. And, you know, perhaps they get the industrialized or whatever, you know, those forces are still ultimately caused by the actions of a few individuals. So I guess the way to think of it is that, you know, we should take the individual actions seriously in their context and not necessarily think of them as heroic individuals. You know, changing the course of the river, but they can definitely change the rate of the flow, the, the direction that it, that it flows in. , they can, you know, eat away at the banks a bit more or a bit less. Okay. I think, I think that there's room for change [00:36:00] there. , especially when it comes to network effects and that very much relies on individual initiative. Right. I think we take for granted that, Oh, you know, okay. Let's say a place like Vienna in the early in the year 19th century. It's just, yeah. You know, there's something magic in the air or in the water and people come together. No, you require individuals to be these kinds of. Social butterflies and bring together particular groups. And through those interactions almost create new ideologies potentially right? Where the convergence of different ideas and interest leads to a sort of synthesis. , you know, the Royal society in England in the 1660s is often cited as being a kind of outgrowth of  the circle around Samuel Hartlieb   he draws together all of these different people and they become, essentially a,an invisible college . Yeah, even though he's not really that involved himself in what then happens, the Hartlieb [00:37:00] circle kind of manifests itself as the Royal society later on, even though a lot of the Hotlips circle, you know, you could say we're very associated with the Cromwell Rasheem, you know, during the English civil war, you know, the Royal is sympathizers amongst the mobile we're adjacent to that ended up forming their own society. , so I think you need those sorts of fingers. People like hot flip or someone like Benjamin Franklin, right. Is he's as much a connector as he is an actor. Yeah. Bringing together particular people, sometimes that's just through writing, but often it's through correspondence is through active meeting. It's through setting things up or what the society of arts, which I wrote my book about, right. Would not have happened. Had it not been for the ship assistance of the guy like William Shipley, a lot of people have this ideal of an organization like that, but to actually make it happen, you need to actually do the organizing. So two things that makes me think of a first, actually going back to your point about soft [00:38:00] constraints. , what would you say to the argument that the softer, the constraints, the more important the individual is? So if it's something where it's like the world, just like wasn't ready for it. Like a hard constraint changed and then the world could have it then maybe it's like, okay. It just happened to be someone who made the thing, but then you look at such as the dragons,the inventor, Gary Gygax,maybe he was actually very important,because he was the one to really crystallize the whole thing. In my understanding of that particular example is there are quite a few people hovering around what, what would it, what he kind of hit it hit upon in his kind of unique way. , which strikes me as suggesting that, you know, perhaps there were a bunch of soft constraints that get lifted,in that particular case, or at least maybe not constraints, but things that led to that kind of particular. Form that it took.   I mean, it's definitely a [00:39:00] plausible mechanism, right? That sounds like it probably works. I'm just trying to think through an example of how, of whether or not that that's the case. I guess, I guess the right comparison would be, are there cases where I get or how, how quickly do old ideas that had very solid, hard constraints then get adopted? The moment those hard constraints get lifted. Yeah. Is perhaps the way to think about that. That'd be an interesting. Just like actually like going through those case studies. And I suspect there's quite a few from the 20th century. I mean, I'm trying to think of something like the steam engine, but the problem of the steam engine is that actually the hard constraint of simply not understanding how air works. And then once that gets once, once we do have an understanding of the air, it's actually pretty rapid from there. No, it's a matter of decades. I would say [00:40:00] once they, once they hit upon that, and once they, they realize they can do it with steam, it moves very, very quickly because I've seen, I mean, just today I was apparently there's a Spanish claimants to the adventure of the steam engine from 1606. I've got very worried. So I looked into it because it would have been validated my last blog post. , but I was safe. It turns out,because you know, that the steam mentioned is, as we know it doing the kind of work did from the 18th century onwards very much realized that understanding the weight of the air and then using atmospheric pressure through the steam condensing that you get the, the work being done. Whereas this much early one it's very much just. Basically using the steam itself to push water up. So you kind of get, put the, put the water that you're trying to drain into a tank yeah. Which is lower than the altar itself. And then you kind of push the [00:41:00] steam from the boiler through that up. So it kind of spouts out the top through a pipe, which is not the tool, same thing. Right. The amount of work you can do with that kind of dimension is completely different. , Yeah, I guess the things to look at would be actually, I can't, I can't think of an example. There are certain forms of engine, which I think are only, I think it's the Sterling engine, which are now being looked at again, because at the time that they were come up with in the 1820s, if I remember rightly,The Sterling engine just didn't really have the materials to make it work. Yeah. But now that we can do it, it seems as though they're starting to be a bit of movement around it, but they are, the problem is perhaps half dependence that we've, we've invented all these very good engines that do things pretty well. And to shift to a different path will only be worth it. If it becomes extremely, extremely expensive to, to work or to continue producing or. Well using the [00:42:00] existing laws that we have. Yeah. It's a sort of enhanced two question, I guess, is the sort of case where once you have those sorts of developments, it does start to rely a lot on relative prices in terms of the kind of investment that goes into certain things or the effort that goes into certain things, or when something is invented. You know whether or not it succeeds in the market, it definitely relies on those overall historical forces beyond our control, like prices and costs. Yeah, no, it's just,It's fascinating to think about it. And I appreciate you,actually thinking about it. Like, I feel like everybody has their, so, so many people have their narrative about like, this is the way it works. Like it's all evolution or it's all great people. , and, and so like actually like digging in and thinking about like, okay, like when, when is it, which,I really appreciate,I want to switch a little bit and talk about risk. , So a lot of the things that, that you discussed,blow up when they [00:43:00] fail. And yeah. So I'm, I'm wondering, like, if there's some like, and I feel like people today would not use something, if it would blow up when it failed. Right. So, so,and so, so,I'm wondering, like if there's something. In like, like you need a societal risk tolerance, like of, of like physical danger in order to be able to do this tinkering with,Sort of intense technology, right? Like, so like steamships, they, they blow up when they fail. And like you see all these pictures of,like steam engines that have, have exploded and they, they kill people. , and so it's like, do you think that there's, there's a difference in our level of, of risk tolerance between now and,the, the 18th and 19th centuries. Maybe I'm not, I don't think so though. Okay. I'm trying, I'm just thinking of all of the sorts of things that just [00:44:00] from recent memory, you know, things like washing machines used to explode and fridges explode pretty easily, and it has that risk associated with them. , it's not until certain regulations come into force as the ways they have to be produced to kind of conform to certain standards. I mean, that's only a few decades ago. , And we certainly seeing a lot of inventions with the rocketry going on. Right. Which have a very, very real risk of exploding with absolutely no chance of survival. It's true. But you don't see that many, like, like, ah, I would say like sort of like civilians or, or customers getting on them right now, perhaps. I mean, certainly when it comes down to the wire, people are willing to take the risk for things like, you know, Testing a vaccine for the coronavirus. Right? What I've noticed is actually a lot of people are very bravely putting themselves forward for that sort of thing. I think I read the other day that the children of one of the, one of the [00:45:00] scientists working on it, an Oxford where, you know, very willing Guinea pigs for their moms,work in terms of there's vaccine and, you know, things go wrong with the vaccine. Things can do very, very wrong. Yeah, life-changing Lee or like Killingly I guess,even if they don't kill you, it could, it could affect the rest of your field days. So it seems as though, I mean, usually of course, you've got all sorts of regulation about the stages in which you test things out, and that's definitely different to what happens in the 18th century where, you know, it would gener. Gets his Gardener's son and gives him, you know, he purposely gives him cow pox and then smallpox to see if he gets it. And he's fine. Thank God. You know, or, you know, in the 17th century, the early experiments with track blood transfusions, they get pretty widespread and ultimately it just requires a doctor to kind of persuading their [00:46:00] patient on the, the procedure. , So, I suppose in some ways were more cautious about risk. , and again, even in these early cases, you know, they would often, when it comes to the first small pox inoculations, when they're trying to test them, they choose people who are going to be hanged as they're, you know, so they're, they're not, they're not always choosing people who are volunteering without any other constraints around that. Well, without any other possibilities, that's actually, that's very reassuring. I think it's like a, like there's I have this narrative in my head where we're like super risk averse and like, that's why we can't do anything, but,be very happy. That's actually wrong. I mean, certainly if you look at the number of people who become entrepreneurs and. In terms of just financial risk, basically give everything up and go bankrupt freeze. I mean, I don't see, I don't sense any change there. [00:47:00] Yeah. If anything, probably because the money available given how cheap capital is, it's just like everywhere for whatever idea, no matter how crazy, you know,in a way that in the past, just wasn't available. So. You know, even if society as a whole is becoming more risk averse in terms of regulation and trying to prevent loss of life, the ability to take financial risks as much, you know, we're were able to take as much. Much more risks, I think, than the net before, you know, society is now enabling the risk takers in that kind of stuff. As, as long as you will, could possibly make the money, I think is one of my concerns, I guess. So, but even then, I mean the business cases, aren't exactly what we solid. So that very kind of what's the classic, you know, do this question, Mark. Make some money. Yeah. I will speak to him. I'll also, also,Sell you a hundred dollars for $99 get [00:48:00] all the users. Yeah. , so,another thing that,I wanted to ask you about is like, sort of like in terms of the cultures of innovation is something that I've been struggling with is like almost by definition to really innovate on something. You need to break a spoken or unspoken rule. And,So, like, have you seen anything in the relationship between,like cultures and rule breaking and innovation? Do you know what this actually, maybe also answers your earlier question about something that people mentioned a lot, which is that the. As though it's a kind of us for you, them. I had a narrative where we must take on the entrenched interest and they're going to block us at every turn. Luddites are everywhere. Yeah. That's the classic Silicon Valley. Yeah. And maybe in some ways it's a [00:49:00] useful, even if it's a myth in the sense that, you know, if you're going to troll people together, what better way than to create an enemy for them to fight or to help do. Right. , So maybe it's not necessarily a bad thing and can be quite motivating in a way that isn't necessarily that harmful. Right. Cause it's more about out competing someone,than it is about destroying them necessarily. , no, it's okay. Competition as a word could perhaps be a bad thing cause it, it, it, it. Implies a contest or not really a contest, but maybe combat. Whereas what's really meant is something more like a sports where whoever whoever's first wins, the race versus boxing or something where whoever knocks the other one out is the one, the one who wins, so I think this, this narrative is very common. And I'm so skeptical of it nearly all the time, right? Is that you do have that kind of opposition to invention, but it's always been there. And I don't think, I think it's, I think that kind of opposition is very rarely to innovate invention per [00:50:00] se. I think it's much more commonly in opposition to particular ways in which those inventions affect existing interests. , So the Luddites, for example, a smashing particular kinds of machinery that are, that they feel are framing their jobs, the suite, the captain swing rights, again, affecting particular kinds of machinery. , I mean to, to, to go beyond machinery, think of the kind of anti enclosure movements where, you know, this is an economic change that is potentially improving the, the rental yields of the land in the sense that it's a more efficient use of it. , but it's certainly. Yeah, depending on the kinds of enclosure, it could be kicking labor is off. So the replacing fields with, with sheep,which is, you know, competing like 40, 40 laborers suddenly replaced with one shepherd,So these are things that I think affects particularly interest in the same way that, you know, Uber opposition to Uber, isn't Israel, Haley about kind of general opposition to that kind of [00:51:00] technology. It's usually a kind of just opposition by taxi drivers. Having invested a lot of money in getting these rents and being like, you know, what the hell I've, I've invested all that money. And you're telling me this was for nothing. And I could have just gone and use this app. , Which is understandable, right? It's, it's something that you see throughout. And so I think, you know, a lot of the time when I see this and you see this throughout history as well, I often see something being like, so, and so inventor was rejected by the emperor of China, the emperor of Turkey, or. The queen list with the first. And so they went abroad and took their invention elsewhere. And the moment you actually start to dig into the details of those, they're either completely apocryphal or they're much more about the specifics of the invention and not about inventors in general. , I very rarely come across cases where people are just anti novelty. Because if you're [00:52:00] anti novelty in one direction, you might actually be very pro novelty and other ones, right? The kinds of people who might be very unhappy about things, look, call center to call an employment, probably perfectly happy to have new designs for the silks they're going to wear. You know, there's novelty as a whole is Jen is I think it's we over overanalyze it, we over kind of label it, like creating this kind of fake. We in the same way that I disliked discussions before the scientific revolution or, you know, big, broad terms that cover these huge sweeping things or individualism. Right. I find these very difficult concepts to get my head around because when I actually. Think okay. How would I use this myself? I kind of can put the Gates a bit of a problem now, even industrial revolution to even define it. You require an essay. So, yeah, so, so the upshot is, is it's actually like much more nuanced and complicated. , [00:53:00] Man, I, this is like, this is like the historian's buzzkill. Right? Which is like, you've covered this great theory. I'm sorry. Well, I think it's something that happens a lot and weirdly I think I'm off historians, actually, a lot more willing to entertain the broad sweeping theories. Cause I think, you know, they, they do, I mean, certainly have a certain sort of historian, right? Those who are brought up in the economic history or the Marxist and various other traditions or the long duration kind of traditions, they certainly have these, these broad sweeping theories and they like to tinker with those. , but there's also a lot of historians who are much more specific. And I think you do need a bit of both that, that. But you've got, when you do use it, who's you or your boss killing bit by saying actually it's more complicated than that. , I think that's best when put in relation to the theory as a whole. Yeah. So it should be telling us about our general mental models of how the world works. So yeah, for me, that my [00:54:00] problem with a lot of these Luddite things is they, they kind of give me this instinctual kind of, I don't know if it's such a big. Battle,in that particular way, I mean, actually to give you an example that I've just been writing about right now, just before we started the podcast, I've been reading the work of Daniel Defoe, so famous for Robinson Crusoe,and to foe is both pro improvement and yet seemingly very anti particular forms of technology. Right. The whole book that I've been reading, which is a tour through the islands of great Britain. Is him just going all around Britain and commenting on the recent things that have happened, the economic growth, the improvements, the land, you know, the, the, the change, the changes to manufacture, how many more people are now being employed. And they were formally, you know, how much more trade is going on in these sports. And he's excited about this stuff. He thinks that improvement as a whole is a good thing. He's pro I would say he's a [00:55:00] pro improvement technology. Awesome. Yeah. And yet when you come to specifics, like. The stocking frame. He is lamenting the fact that it's made certain whole villages completely unemployed. Yeah. Cause the, the, the, the economy, that's all the kind of where the growth is, has shifted to other places where those frames were being applied earlier. I mean, he's even talking, you know, very in favor of bands or imported. Silks and important cottons because it affects the wool, the fine wool industry and East Anglia. , and so this isn't his, it's not like he's anti openness or anti, I mean, he's a pro-trade person. I mean, he's someone who is extremely pro-immigration,who was trying to create these settlements almost like charter cities for religious written political refugees in the early 18th century. And yet. When it comes to those specific things, he can still [00:56:00] think that's a bad thing. It's not inconsistent for that. So I guess that's what I mean, there is that we, we should be careful about labeling people as Luddites or anti-technology I guess, where that's interesting though, is that you do at the same time, have certain people who I guess from an ideological perspective will be quite panty. Those things, but they're rarely workers. They're rarely people who are directly affected. I mean, I guess like to a lot of your listeners, it's going to be the kind of. The, I guess, increasing email, traditional feeling between journalists who cover technology and technologists, right. That you see a lot of the kinds of critiques. And I've noticed on Twitter that have that all of this kind of a growing vehemence like that. And that's, that's, that's interesting, right? , and I don't know if that's ideological or, or if it's just the journalists, I find good stories and good stories are usually negative or they involve, I have [00:57:00] people. So if you're put in charge of technology, you're going to be looking for bad people,in particular sectors. And so that might color your whole view. Of the sector, or if you're, if you're asked to come up with the kind of general op-ed about what the state of what's going on, you're probably going to come up with like the bad things that happen, the things to be careful. So, yeah, again, I don't think that's necessarily like anti technologist and I mean, to a certain extent, those people are probably pro a lot of the kinds of technologies that are coming up. They're certainly using them often as well. I think, I think the problem with. Having so much nuance is that it really involves like sitting down and like talking to people and like really trying to understand them and people,often don't want to spend the time doing that. the last question I always like to ask people is,what is something that people you think should be thinking about that they're not thinking enough about. [00:58:00] In a historical way in this is, this is your  or just anything like this. This is your, I think of this as sort of like the, the open, open podium. , no pressure, no pressure at all. It's an interesting one. I guess that changes day by day for me as to what I think people should be thinking more about. Yeah. Well, what about today? Today. I mean, the, the main general one is that, and this, I guess isn't probably as targeted as your usual audience, but as a more general thing is it would be nice if people appreciated technology a bit more and they thought about its evolution a bit more,Or even just the people who were involved in making those things possible. I mean, if you just look around the room that you're in right now, or the space that you're in right now, like the, the nearly everything in it [00:59:00] regarding whether it's actually manufacturer even natural as involved someone doing a bit of tinkering. I mean, I'm looking at a house plot right now and thinking to myself, okay, what even allowed this plant to be here. That's always, certainly not native to England. It's you know, so it probably involves perhaps, you know, greenhouse technology, it involved all sorts of glass, making that in involved people learning how to cultivate it, spreading that knowledge of cultivation probably involves fertilizer improvements. You know, the, the, the, the capacity of improvement is almost infinite. , I guess, I guess this is a kind of other general thing that maybe you'll usual listeners will also be kind of more interested in, which is that, you know, a lot of what we can improve. Isn't just about efficiency. It isn't just about making things cheaper or work faster or work better. , it can, or even simplifying things, which I imagine a lot of people do. It's also about [01:00:00] aesthetics. It's also about beauty. It's also about. Capacity of things to provoke, meaning I guess, or interpretations of a particular kind. , which sounds a bit fluffy. , but I don't think it is. I think, you know, a lot of, a lot of improvement that takes place happens along these kind of unexpected. Lines,where it's, you know, maybe just something like increasing the variety of plants in your garden, you know, in the 17th century, unexpectedly leads to dramatic improvements in agricultural productivity a hundred years later because of the sorts of things that you had to problem solve to do that. I mean, just today I was reading or yesterday I was reading about the first orange trees in England and how. When those were introduced, you know, during the winter they created a sort of shed that would have been put up all of the trees to protect them from the frost. And that actually, you know, does have an impact later on in the kinds of multicultural development that you get later on as well. So yeah, I [01:01:00] guess that's a kind of be open to those artists affected. I wish people were more open to those unexpected avenues for invention.

A conversation with Ashish Arora about how and why the interlocking American institutions that support technological change have evolved over time, their current strengths and weaknesses, and how they might change in the future. Ashish Arora is the Rex D. Adams Professor of Business Administration at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. His research focuses on the economics of technology and technical change and we spend most of this conversation focused on his recent paper: “The changing structure of American Innovation - some cautionary remarks for economic growth.” I tried an experiment this episode and wrote notes on the paper before the interview.  Key Takeaways Ashish introduces a useful framework by breaking the innovation world down into four players : academia, incumbent companies, inventors, and government and then look at how their relationships evolve over time. The current innovation system is well equipped to enable new products with large technology risks and almost no market risk (like new cancer drugs) or high market risks and almost no technology risks (like most software) but falls short in between those two extremes. A fuzzy one but it’s important to marinate in the constant complexity of the answer to ‘How does technology happen? ’   Notes Ashish’s Home Page Ashish on Twitter The Changing Structure of American Innovation My notes on the paper Steve Usselman’s Website Transcript (Experiment and automatically transcribed) [00:00:00] [00:01:00] just to start us off, , would you give a summary of the paper? I'm going to direct everybody to go read it, but just for people who are, are listening, like what, what do you think are the key things that you would want people to take away from reading your paper? So the paper itself is descriptive, but our objective data is to, to make, make one argument, which is that the way in which innovation in America is organized? Has changed over time. And there's a sense in which the system we have now is closer to what we had say at the turn of the night of the 20th century. So, you know, a hundred years [00:02:00] ago there are important differences. So that's, that's one from a descriptive point of view. There are important differences too. And we, you know, we can talk more about that, Ken. The part, which I think is, is most interesting. And perhaps also most speculative is, you know, two things. One, why has, why, why, what, what caused this change? What caused this system to evolve? And the second is, well, you know, is it good or bad? And you know, what, what might, what should one do about it? What could we do about it? , and I suspect we would spend some time on that as well. Yeah. I thought the, the dividing up the paper into different areas was, was really important., and so actually, would you say a little bit more about how,, the way that innovation is structured now resembles the way that it did at the turn of the 20th century? [00:03:00] So if you think let's start with today, right? If we think about today, we have the, the. Big tech companies. , but most people would say, you know, if you think about the innovation system today, we have sort of three sets of players, maybe four, we have the universities where, which do a lot of the research produce a lot of the fundamental knowledge and importantly, a lot of the, what economists call human capital people that, that do it. so that's one. The second part is, is the startup community, right? The startups and the VCs that fund them and all that kind of stuff. And the third are the firms, the, the incumbent firms, as we call them in economics, the peanut, the Googles, the Facebooks, but also the IBM's Microsoft and so on. And these, these are the different components. And if you go back to Adam Smith, He talked about a division of labor as being the quintessential aspect of capitalism. That [00:04:00] capitalism is this relentless force towards specialization. And what we have, you might think of it as a division of labor in innovation there, the universities that produce the research, the startups that take it and make it more commercially applicable. And then the incumbents that apply it. If you go back. Say two 1860s, that's kind of the system we had. We didn't have the universities, but we had independent inventors and we had people that backed them. And then those inventors would sell that inventions for the most part to companies that were producing, you know, early ones were railroads, for example. And so there's a sense of, you know, in that sense, it's similar. You could think of this as a splinter or a fragment system. I prefer to think of this as, as specialization and a division of innovative labor. Does that make sense? Yeah, definitely. I think so. Something that, so I completely agree with that. , those similarities, the thing that strikes me, that's [00:05:00] different between that, like the technology then, and the technology now is. Sort of the level of complexity and the amount that it takes to integrate it. Like something that I noticed about, , 1850s technology, and maybe this is this, this might be like a cognitive bias where it's like a fish in the water sort of thing. But you look at like patents from 1850. And like, you could, you could take that. You could take that patent and you could like build the thing., whereas now. Everything is just, is so complex. And like, literally, if you like, even just like downloading software from get hub and try to get it to run, sometimes doesn't work. and, and so do you, do you think that that comparison breakdown at all there, you know, that's a fair point and that I've struggled with it? So, so there's a sense of what's surely things are much more complex now than they were earlier. , but, but let me offer you. , a sort of a counter example or two, please. So one, if you think about one [00:06:00] complex industry of the time was agricultural machinery, right? Those mechanical devices were complex and people did, , innovative parts of it. , and at some point, you know, the whole system became integrated. You can just sort of bolt on stuff. The second sort of, probably more compelling one is, is, , the railroads, which if you think about as a technical system, we're quite complex. And, , Steve  who's at Georgia tech has written up. He he's a historian of study science. He studied this extensively and I'm persuaded by his work that this was really complex. , but somehow the railroads managed to integrated. While, still relying on independent inventions. So if you think about track switching, these all came from different, different parts of, , you know, different people in different parts of the co , of the country. And, and they didn't really, the railroad companies themselves didn't really have a function whose [00:07:00] job it was to, to, to develop these innovations. This somehow had got managed. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, I find it depending on which side of the bed I wake up, I either agree with you or disagree with you. But yeah, I think the trick with all of this,, that I think is fascinating is that it's so multi causal and so nuanced that it's, it's very, it's tough to say like, okay, like this is. Exactly the same or exactly different., and so I, I think that conversations like this are actually really important for sort of exploring that nuance., actually like just something that I'm wondering about the railroads is, , my, my sense of modern corporations is that they are very hesitant to integrate. External systematic change. Right? So it was like in my, my mental model, if we've had a railroad today and someone came and said like, Oh, I have this, this like, great way to change the way that you do tracks, but you need to [00:08:00] do all your tracks this way. It would never adopt that., is, do you have a sense of whether there was like a cultural difference or a good point? I'm not an expert on this, but again, relying on Steve's work. Steve Musselman's work. There's an interesting case of, , of breaking, you know, when you have a, when you have a locomotive and you've got these, these are these bogeys that are coupled, how do you stop this thing? And so this was a complicated thing and it was, it was a system that had to be installed, , in, in, in all the, all the cars and the railroads were. So, so there's a sense in which they were very open to the system, , and Westinghouse. Was that was the guy who was one of the people who came up with the whole system. There were others who came up with different ways of accomplishing this. And the railroad said, fine. , you know, we'll, we'll take it, but we want to do it. And Westinghouse said, no, no, no, I'll supply you the whole system. And just, you just put it in. And there was a lot of friction around that and, and [00:09:00] eventually Westinghouse prevailed, , thanks in part to his, his patent position. And his willingness to take the railroads on. So,, but to go back to your big question, is there a cultural change? I mean, surely there has to be right. And we were talking about 150 years, right? Yeah. But you know, that, that particular axis. Yeah. I suspect, I suspect that that all particularly since companies now have an autumn D function or an engineering function, that's that, you know, build certain. Builds up such certain sort of preferences or biases or, or views. It would be hard to adopt something wholesale from the outside and give up what you have internally. If you didn't have such an entrance function, it might be easier. But you know, I'm really speculating on this one. Yeah, absolutely. That's, that's what we're here for. The, the, like, this is not, , we're not doing any sort of peer review or anything. and, and so I guess I, another. Big [00:10:00] theme that I was wondering about that you didn't. Like, I feel like you hinted at, but didn't quite touch on in the paper was sort of the nature of the technology in these different areas themselves, like, you know, , late 18 hundreds, you have a lot of sort of mechanical inventions and then sort of giving way to chemistry and then electronics,, and then eventually software. and, and do you, do you have a sense of whether the, the organization of American innovation. Was Al was like, which way does the causality run? Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, so, so, so far I think it is, I think you've got something really important there, which is, it may be that mechanical systems are maybe designed based systems have this kind of a, are different from more integrated systems, like, like a, you know, if you think of. , a modern chemical process, which is highly optimized in many ways, and everything [00:11:00] is, is interacting with each other. So, so the shortly our differences, and you could make the argument that, that sort of the mechanical systems were more amenable to sort of bolt on parks. Right? You take this part out of the, the, the agricultural machinery and you bought a different type of, , part onto it. Yeah., A variant of that, which is an argument that, , again, a historians have made economic historians have made, which is the one difference from, from the mechanical technologies of the late 19th century and the, the chemical and electrical technologies of the early 20th century was the latter of a much more science-based and your independent thinkers, you know, had much less of a, , The opportunities were much, much less fruitful for just the tinkerer, the famous Yankee in January, which, which, you know, was that was irresponsible for, for America's [00:12:00] rise to riches prop, you know, in some sense, had, had, had, had to change and evolve to accommodate the new science based industries. And I think that's probably true. And that may be one reason why. Companies like DuPont had to start doing some of the, the inventing themselves and to, to bring some of this insight there inside the phone. That's certainly, certainly one possibility on the other hand, you know, I'm sorry, this is going to be on the one hand, on the other hand, that's amazing. On the other hand, think about a petroleum refining, which is. We started out as tinkering, but eventually had a very strong science, scientific and engineering base. Yeah., some of the most far reaching and inventions were made by, , independent inventors, but by a guy called interestingly enough, CP dubs and I've read, I can't [00:13:00] verify that C stands for carbon and P stands for petroleum. So the guy's name was carbon petroleum dubs, and he came up with a dubs process. And the, that led to, to the technology that is that's used in pretty much every on refinery that you can think of the, the platin , what's called the platform. Other platinum reforming technology uses a platinum catalyst. So, you know, there was lots of room for independent invention., even in these new science based industries, by the way, dubs was competing with standard oil. Wow. Standardize. It had the song process and this guy that the modern day company, you can look it up. It's called UOP universal oil products build itself as the supplier of technology to the independence, the independency of being the independent oil refining companies, independent of the standard oilbrella. Yeah. Wow. And, and [00:14:00] so yeah, the, the, the relationship between like a science and tinkering is. I feel like there's, they're, they're like the people on the science side and they're the people on the tinkering side. But my, like the hypothesis that I've sort of been coming more and more towards is that it's almost, almost like a cycle where like, everything goes through cycles where it's like very tinkering heavy and then very science heavy. And then maybe back to tinkering heavy,, depending on, on where it is., and so. I think what's, what's interesting to me now. So like let's pull to the present day is that the structure of the American innovation system feels to me at least very geared towards software, right? Like this, the whole started started a software company in your garage. You have like these really cheap startup costs., You know, high, high capital expenditures, low operating [00:15:00] expenditures,, really does seem to lend itself to venture capital, , acquisitions by large companies, sort of this externalized R and D model that you talk about., what I wonder is like, have you looked at how, but at the same time we still do have all of these other industries, right. And. At least to my eye. It feels like they, that model, which is really good for like the call it the like the hot, or like most top of mind industry then gets applied to all the other industries., is that like, does that ring true to you? And like, did that sort of happen in other places as well, where you would see like when corporate labs started rising up. Get the corporate lab started get applied to industries that previously didn't need them. So, so, so let's, let's break this question up into two. One. Is, does the VC model work elsewhere? [00:16:00] It's certainly being was started elsewhere., I think the other place, what it arguably works is is, is biotech, which is a very different kind of sector. Right. Very science heavy. Yeah., Capital-intensive as heck, , at least in terms of sort of paying for, for equipment and reagents and people., and it, I would say on the whole, it works well there as well. So it works with two very different, you know, almost like two extreme sides of the economy. Yeah. I think, and you know, I, I want to be cautious. I think it, it sort of breaks down in the middle. And we have a way of thinking about it that it's, it's speculative at this point. , so, so, so that's the answer to your first question is, you know, yet it works at extreme ends of the spectrum is sort of breaks down in the middle. You know, if you think about materials, technologies, , energy, climate change related stuff, it's, it's difficult. [00:17:00] I mean, we haven't really seen very much coming out of it., and Peter deals sort of famous quote. Oh Quip, you know, we wanted flying cars and we got 140 characters. It is, , it's in a sense, has it has a element of bitter truths there that the system, for whatever reason, hasn't really worked in the middle to go back to the other, you know, how did it work earlier? I suspect we didn't have, you know, professional investors investing other people's money, which is what VCs are for the most part. Right.,, But we did have people who, who backed independent in ventures., you know, if you think about, , I, I spent a long time at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh and Alcoa was a homegrown company and it was, it was funded by, by wealthy individuals today. We will, we might call them angel investors, but really that, that involvement went much farther than, than a typical angel investor would do. And you, there are lots of other examples. Well, you know, the, the [00:18:00] people who backed Tesla, for example, the Nikola Tesla, you know, Westinghouse back, back to him out of personal funds. So, so we, we had, we had people willing to, to, to, to back in independent inventors., you know, obviously things were never quite the same, you know, history never quite repeats itself, but, but yeah, there's certainly, you know, you can see the, you can hear the resonance. Of the past in what we see today. Yeah. I think the, where I'm, I'm interested in, whether you could make sort of a broad sweeping statement that the, and, and I, and I realized that this is like a very, sort of like a big statement, and I'm not asking you to like, endorse her undergoes, but like, what would you say about the, the, the thought that,, the structure of the American innovation system. Sort of follows what's best for the most profitable, [00:19:00] , industry at the time, and then sort of applies itself to all industries regardless of applicability, like at that time. Yeah. You know, so it's, it's, it's, it's, there's an interesting point. I think I would put it in a different way, which is it's certainly the case that. If, if you're interested in, in the VC type model, there are a couple of sectors, you know, the VC is like a particular model and they're willing to go to go for that. The thing that's striking to me about the American system. Has been its diversity and its, you know, the incredible diversity, , and the, , willingness to experiment in many different forms. So even, even within the VC sector, you'll find VCs who are specializing in science-based. , thing, , you know, startups, they're not whether it's showing the, that they're sort of, they're saying we won't follow the heart and just do you know, SAS, or we just do, you [00:20:00] know, B to C companies or platforms or whatever it is. You can find people to back. You pretty much, no matter what you're doing, , maybe not, not enough, , in some sense to meet societal needs. So I would say, in fact, it's the opposite that the American system has been very good in terms of diversity in large measure because of its scale. I mean, America is in some sense, , and this is a tangent, but it is just a giant exception, right? It's a continent, which is one which has had a unified currency, a largely unified set of rules for commerce, , for trade. A common system of law. It's, it's, it's really quite, quite amazing, , what, what we have here. , so for countries who want to emulate America, I always have this caution is that is only one, you know, , , and, and the fact, you know, unlike Yoda, it didn't really have to, to kind of reinvent something from all plot and wait for [00:21:00] 200 years. I mean, I'm overstating it, right? I mean, it's an important point. Right., so, so we have this diversity, there's a sense in which the VCs, you know, a lot of them are chasing the trends as you talk as you, as you say., and perhaps for good reasons. I mean, maybe this was, this was getting us off point, but maybe if you think about it, right, , we're. Work w America is a really rich country. And, you know, it seems odd to say this in, in the situation we're in, but we pretty much solved a lot of the basic problems that signed some technology could solve., you know, if you go back 250, 300 years ago, the big problem was getting enough to eat, fighting off jumps and microbes, and just basically the sheer drudgery of daily living. And for the most part. Again, I don't want to sound, , like, like a, like a nut, but to some, to, to, to a large extent, we've solved [00:22:00] those problems. So if I, if I look, I have teenage kids, I have a, you know, a kid college rising, rising senior, and I look at their lives and their lives are so different from what I grew up in India. And it strikes me that that biggest problem is, is boredom. That we've, we've ultimately reached the stick stage in, in, in, in America where people people's people have to fight the boredom. And you could argue that many of the so-called innovations that the VCs are funding are a solution to that problem, which was the problem. How do, how do, how do you stay off boredom? Yeah, I think now, no, it's my turn to do the on the other head, which is so I, I actually, I completely agree with you about how far we've come and how, how many amazing things we have. And I like don't, , I don't want to understate that. And I think that people do, I think that people are not [00:23:00] grateful for like what, how different it was even a hundred years ago. and yet I think my. My point is, or my hope is that there's so much more to be done. Right like that, that it's not, we're not at some tapering off point. Right. But ideally there's, there's so much more to be done. So ideally not only would we not worry too much about bacterial infections, , but we would also not have to worry as much about viral infections. Right. And instead of going like really the maximum speed limit being, you know, Couple hundred miles per hour on an airplane, it would be, you know, a couple thousand miles per hour on a rocket ship or something. So, yeah. Well look, I, I completely agree with you. I'm, I'm, I'm an optimist and we will find that the, the challenges we're dealing with now, to some extent we've created, right? If you think of the big challenge we face or a big [00:24:00] challenge we face, which is, which is climate change, it's, it's, it's something that essentially is a fruit of our own success. Yeah, that the arts can now support so many more people. It's, it's fundamentally changing the earth itself. Right. All of the fossil fuels that took so to, to build we're we're, we're consuming and we're dumping all the carbon back in the, in the environment. So to CO2 back in the, yeah, that's a tough one. It definitely is. And so I guess actually sort of looking to the future,, you, you touch on this sort of lightly in the paper, cause it's mostly focused on, , the, the history and sort of like how we got to where we are today., where do you see sort of like in your mind, where is the American innovation system? Sort of like less equipped to handle sort of featured things then [00:25:00] maybe it could be. So, so that's, that's a great point. And, you know, we've between my Cortez and me, we've had a, , , , I would say a very spirited debate on both this and therefore what, what might happen., so, , So I'm not going to represent them. I'll represent my views. Oh, okay. Well, if you, if you, if you could like mention their views as well, that would be amazing. Right? So, so, so let's, let's start with sort of, you know, where we might be going. One view is, and th their view is in some ways market forces or the profit motive. Has entered so deeply into the innovation system that it's taking us away from, from pressing important problems to, as I said, you know, for example, solving the problem with bored teenagers. Right? Okay., so this, this is one view I don't disagree with, you know, [00:26:00] when we are in terms of what were the, what big parts of the innovation system are doing, but. The question is, you know, what is it? Is it, is it profit motive or something else? You know? Cause every it's, it's natural to look back at, just roughly say the period between 1930 and up to 1980, what we had these, you know, the DuPonts, the GEs, the Kodaks the IBM of course, the bell labs, Xerox park, you know, one after the other, these companies great companies that did great things,, did one for themselves. What also did get, did great things produce, you know, fantastic, , innovations., you know, there's a sense in which people want to go back and sort of go back to that golden past, , in, in many ways, , really possible. And my view is that's just not going to happen that, you know, Much for whatever it's, it's, it's far, there's a sense in which we're not, I don't think it's possible to go back there. [00:27:00] So this is the system we have for, for better or for worse., which is the, you know, they mentioned the universities, the startups, and then the incumbents. And the question is, , where might we go and what, what might we be able to do with it? I think that this kind of system could be improved., You know, if you look at the current pandemic, , which is an interesting case in point, we find ourselves hopelessly under prepared. And if you look at, for example, the CDC has guidance on what universities should do to, to reopen the CDC does not recommend at this point,, widespread and regular testing, which I find absolutely. Definitely it's absolutely baffling. I do it baffled given that we really don't have any, any, any prophylactic, any way to prevent. If we don't have a vaccine, we're not going to get a vaccine for the next 18 months, no matter who and whatever, you know, on a widespread or wide-scale. Yeah, we [00:28:00] don't have a cure. The only thing we could do is to sort of test and isolate and prevent people. , you know, from, from infecting others and the fact that this wonderful innovation system has left us six months after this, why this was first discovered, why are the CDC is still not prepared to say you should test and test regularly? I suspect it's because our testing capacities, woefully inadequate. That's the only charitable reason I can, I can describe as to why they're doing it. Yeah. But it's, it's, it's, it's a huge, I think we're putting thousands of lives at danger, , because we haven't developed this, this ability to deploy, destined, which uses technologies that by and large exist, right. You're you're using PCR based antibody testing or, or automate [00:29:00] testing, whichever. I, you know, I'm not an expert, but certainly those technologies exist. We know how to do these things. And the fact that the richest country in the world, the technically the most sophisticated country in the world is, is unable to deploy. It tells us something about the innovation system that I think is not flattering for the system. It's, it's failed us in important ways. And I suspect one could make a similar claim as regards climate change. I think the system is failing us., what I think we will have to do is imagine a more constructive role for the government and perhaps, , private philanthropy as well, that can fill in some of the gaps that the cotton system leaves, where we can have more of our minds, the bright, wonderful minds that America produces on that it attracts. Use to S you know, employ to solve what I, at least I consider to be more pressing problems and [00:30:00] more important problems., and, you know, we, we, we could, we could talk about what, what shape those things might take, but at least, you know, at a high level, that would be my answer to your question is I it's, it's, it's a great system. There are some weaknesses that need to be fixed. Yeah, I, I would, I would, would you mind sort of digging into, into those weaknesses? , cause I mean, I have, I have my own opinions on that, but I 100 w yours and I can react to them. Okay, sure. So I think mine actually, , you, you, you illustrate this very well in the paper where you talk about. I believe it was a DuPont. I think it was DuPont, , tried to acquire, they, they bought the patent, , for, I think it was synthetic silk,, yes, Korean and, , they just, they couldn't get it to work. And so they, they eventually needed to actually bring the people in and start doing things in house. And that [00:31:00] was one of the reasons that they started, , Like that, that corporate labs took off was because,, there was, there was like a lot of sort of integration work that needed to be done. And at least in my mind, we've sort of returned to. That weakness now. And so I see at anything that can either, , sort of stand on its own or be very modular and quickly,, become part of a larger thing. , it does well, like th the system does really well for it, but,, technologies that sort of are like improvements to systems or replacements for systems. they, they sort of wither on the vine. Yeah, no, I think that's right. I mean, one way to think about this is that, you know, if you go back to where the VC based system does really well, you see the two opposing ends. If you think about software, I would argue to a first approximation software is mostly about [00:32:00] figuring out what consumers want, will enough people buy it? Do I, can I find them? So if you think, if you see what, what, what a lot of VC money gets spent. It's not in, in solving the technical problems. It's in solving the commercial problems. Yeah. How do I find the market? What is the market? You know, how do I sell it? And, and, and I did those things out, which is why VCs don't care about whether you make money, but they're care. They care about top line growth. Can you acquire the customers? Can you acquire them cheaply enough? So the system is well tailored to that. On the other hand, other end, if you think about the biotech side, The problem that is not do customers want it? Yes. We want a cure for, for, you know, for Colbert. We want a cure for cancer. The big problem is the scientific and technical problems. Can we find something that will do it? And once again, I would argue the VC system for the most part is, is, is well suited or VC system. The startup [00:33:00] based system is well suited to that. Yeah. You have patient capital people willing to put in money where they will not see. The final outcome for another 20 years, people are, you know, are spending money in, in how you could make a human beings immortal and you know, just think, think about, you know, there's no, there's no doubt. There's a market for that. And we also know, we also know who, who, who will want it. Right. I'm in that category. I like living too, right. It's the stuff in between it, where these two things interact and important place where, you know, if you go back to the question of, of, , nylon, let's say our, our rail on the question of what are you going to do with it? So you have a new material, what should it be used for? So did we used to make. Make underwear for women, or should it be used to make parachutes, could it be used to make a billiard balls, which is one of the earliest, , not for nylon, but for something else. [00:34:00] There's a myriad of possible ways so that, you know, you could have many different kinds of markets, many different kinds of consumers, and depending on each, you would have to take this and get to a different price point, have different sort of performance characteristics. And all of those have considerable technical uncertainty. So for example, when nylon first comes in, you can dye it, you can call it it. So it's this really crappy looking, Dell gray kind of material. Well, who would want to buy stuff? You know, clothes may not have that if you could only buy gray, so you have to solve the problem of, okay, how do I diet? But that depends on what you use it for. If you go to make it to use rope, you don't cash, right? Right. So it's when these two things need to interact in important ways and that are important, you know, funding decisions that have to make, should I invest in, in changing the performance characteristics of this material? Well, that depends on what market I'm going after. Well, which market should I go after? [00:35:00] That's when I think the system does much, you know, it's not clear at all, , that the system is, is, is weak and it, I would argue. , the, the integrated system would work much better. Yeah. That's really insightful. , I hadn't, I, I hadn't put those pieces together before. and that, that sounds really correct., and so do you have any thoughts about,, How instead of like, I guess without saying like, Oh, let's just make corporate labs again. , do you, do you have a sense of what steps we could take from where we are now towards, , a system that supported those kinds of innovations? Yeah. So I would say that they're probably one just to come back to, , the question of, of the role of government. One another place where the current system works breaks down is when you [00:36:00] have what economists call externalities. Whereas, you know, it's hard to capture all the benefits that you're producing and some cases, those benefits could be, could be quite significant. The government is already involved in one sector in a big way that solves this, which is a university sector. We we're now, you know, , , the university sector just would not survive. Without the NIH and the NSF funding and the other source of the funding over the last two decades, maybe three, I certainly three decades. I think that the system has the government system has become more short term. I think they're willing to take fewer bets, , perhaps for good reasons. , but, but I think. If you think about many of the things that, that we got many of the breakthroughs we got, certainly after following world war II, the government not only subsidize some of the upstream [00:37:00] research, they were happy to support the training of students and they were happy to, to buy the things that came out at the backend. what's. Interesting. So let's go back to covert. One of the things that would have been very useful is for the government have also announced early on that they would, they would be ready to buy, you know, 250 million units of vaccines for the next so many years. I couldn't agree more. And if he has to write and test and forget, government buying government is actively hindering. The use of, of tests, right? They won't allow people to do tests. The FDA has become such a force, , such a destructive force and disrespect, I would say, , it's it's, it's, I'm, I'm shocked and saddened by, by how, at least in this particular case, the FDA has behaved., so, so, so the, but just not to get too [00:38:00] far off on my pet hobby horse right now is. So the government, I think we need to find a way where, where the government can, can not only solve some of the upstream, scientific uncertainty, commercial, you know, technical uncertainty part, which they're currently doing through funding research and so on, but maybe also try to do something at the, at the backend where they stand ready to, to procure or to, to, to be important customers for, or somehow. Help mitigate some of the commercial uncertainty through the procurement. So I'm, , I feel like very torn on this subject because so, , to, to expose my biases, like I, I'm a big fan of markets. And so,, I'm very, I buy the arguments that, , government is not. Well, especially when, when it's, they're not buying something for themselves, they're not, they [00:39:00] will always make the best choice about what to buy. But at the same time, I, I find the argument you just made compelling., do you have any sense of like how to, to balance those two? Yeah, I think it's a good point. So, I mean, The government as, as the user, as a lead customer, for many of the technologies and electronics computing, et cetera, kind of makes sense because I don't know if they bumped the best ones, but they certainly bought a lot of them. And it was justified by, you know, by the, by the space race, you know, the Sputnik and then the core war that followed. And in some sense, even if you bought the wrong things as the government. In those days, you could console yourself by saying, well, at least we trained a whole bunch of PhDs and engineers. , and so we, we got something in the body game, right? We, we developed a capacity. We developed a way to test these systems. So [00:40:00] I'm, my biases are the same as yours. I am generally having grown up in India. I'm very suspicious of government. , You know, actively interfering in the marketplace because usually no good comes out of that. Yeah., but at the same time, it's hard not to look at the, the current crisis we have and say, well, here's one thing that, you know what, I would have supported some sort of government intervention, both on the front end, in helping develop the knowledge that we need to develop the vaccines and the tests. But also to S to, to at least backstop some of the commercial risk. Yeah., without it, nobody will make investments. There was a very nice article that I read about the, either the Ebola or the SARS epidemic, where some people made significant investments in, in scaling up capacity for, for vaccines and or for PPE. And then we're left, hanging. Because if the government doesn't, doesn't intervene [00:41:00] actively to buy some, you know, to provide some significant quantity of demand is just not viable. People. People are not going to pay for tests for themselves, or at least the right people will not pay for tests for themselves. They will pay for tests when they think they're sick. You want the test when they don't think they're sick. Exactly. And most people won't pay for that. You do need, this is a classic case where you do need the government to come in and say, well, we'll pay for it. And within in India, for example, smallpox are more or less wiped out because the government subsidized not only the acquisition of the vaccines, but also the large scale deployment. Yeah, we also need government to help perhaps deploy this, but given our fragmented insurance and medical delivery system, we need, we need a lot of help both on the regulatory side and on the dollar side to help that. And so while I share your biases, I think there are definitely cases where [00:42:00] we need the government to be more thoughtful and more, more progressive. Yeah, I think that the tricky thing, so I agree and I think. The tricky thing that I, I don't know how to do is how to decide like where, where where's the line., and that's, I think beyond, beyond the scope of this, but, , it's, it's an interesting, , question that I don't think that we have a good conversation about yeah. I mean, w w a different way to do it is we don't have to draw the line, , which we can do it on a, on a, as is basis. Right? I mean, part of the thing that I asked. Over time. I've come to the view that we want to have principles, policies, or principle ways of, of, of, of approaching these kinds of decisions, which is fine. And it's a, it's a, it's an instinct and an impulse that I understand, but sometimes that stands in the way, so, so we can draw the line. Fine. Yeah. [00:43:00] It's okay. Let's do it here. Then when the next one comes along, we can figure out whether the government should do something like this or not, or whether the government and the reality is the government does get involved. Right. I mean, yeah. So all the nice lines we draw don't seem to stop anything in any case. Yeah. And actually speaking of bare, mid and shifting a little bit, I, you, you sort of outline., the antitrust trends over time. And,, like in, in the paper, , you make the argument that antitrust was pressure to, for corporations to do more internal research so that they could expand markets. and there's examples. Both of this., but then at the same time, there are also examples of, , sort of the, the technology. Like another reason why people have really liked corporate labs is because [00:44:00] technology also like escapes them, right? Like you see, , the transistor coming out of bell labs and, and to my understanding, they government antitrust also. Sometimes would prevent, , big companies from going into new markets, even if they were to invent things. So,, can you, can you sort of like walk me through, , your, your argument of. The value of trust. Yeah. So that's a really good point and I should have, I should have thought about that. Thank you for reminding me. here's a, here's an interesting piece. Just going back to DuPont in 1911, DuPont had a monopoly on smokeless powder. They were the monopoly suppliers of smokeless powder to the us Navy in 1911 in a famous antitrust case. The government went in and broke up DuPont into three parts. So there was DuPont Hercules and Atlas three companies to, to provide, , to provide smokeless powder. And this is quite remarkable. If you think about right, they took a dominant one form that was doing well. And they said, you know, we're going to break you up [00:45:00] into three producers. Now, those Atlas soon March with Hercules, I believe. And then Hercules' remained as an independent company for many years in similar spaces to DuPont and they had reasonably friendly relationships. But I think that episode was a singular episode for DuPont because they understood that that ability to grow was going to be constraint that they could not do what companies do now, which is just buy up competitors and, you know, look at T-Mobile and sprint. Right. I mean, it's, we've gone from four to three and I'm not an antitrust experts. I don't understand these things, but there's a sense in which. If growth is, is an imperative for companies. And if they're going to be constrained from growing, by buying up, , you know, by expanding by, by, through, through, through sort of what we call inorganic acquisitions, there's a sense in which, , they will [00:46:00] have to find new products and these new products could come from startups. Although there's an antitrust scrutiny there as well. , but it's much easier if they come internally. And that's essentially how DuPont went from being a producer of large, largely undifferentiated chemical products, like explosives and fertilizers into new materials. And they eventually went almost all the way into getting into textiles and then they stopped and they, you know, when they got into nylon and polyester, they said, how far do we go? Do we want to be producing our own cloth? And they said, no, no, no. We want to stop here. We're going to demand an industrial company. , ATMT while they could not get into merchant semiconductors, they use semiconductors internally. It was very important for them that they needed those to solve their own internal problems and to grow the telephony business. Yeah. Did, did they,, produce, did they make their own semiconductors or did they purchase them from, [00:47:00] I believe. Hi, I'd been interested. I believe they did for, for quite some time and an IBM similarly. Right. I don't think they were a merchant supplier of semiconductors to others, but they've certainly produced any conductors for themselves. Yeah. And so this is going to be a naive question, but like, why, so, I mean, I would like, I guess the question is like, why doesn't Bowie, why don't we see a lot of amazing research coming out of Bowie? Because I sort of think of them as. Basically a monopoly on, I mean, it's like, there's like Boeing and Airbus and they're the only, , companies that can produce like giant airplane, like giant complex airplanes. so if, , the, if like the monopoly profits are what enables like longterm thinking and,, really great corporate labs, like why, why doesn't Boeing have an amazing corporate lab? That's a great point., I don't know, but remember boy was allowed to buy McDonald Douglas,, [00:48:00] and, and words was not stopped there. And really, , that, I don't know. I don't know the answer, but I think, I think part of it is at some, they, they never either never developed the capability to do this kind of fundamental research. Are, or they do. And somehow it's all tied up in various kinds of government contracts that we don't see, you know, because they had a large government contractor as well. And maybe the government is not demanding from them. The same sorts of innovative products that it might have demanded of its contractors in an earlier era. Yeah. So, but it's a, it's a great question, Ben. I don't know. I never thought about it. Like why don't they have,, a large corporate lab? No. Remember one reason we will never go back to these large corporate labs is because they are incredibly difficult to manage insight, a publicly traded company. Yeah. And this was the big [00:49:00] point of disagreement between my, my, my coauthors and me. My view is research inside of a large public company is always a strange animal. It's always a strange animal., and the only way it's happened is if, if corporate headquarters protects it and nurtures it as the shiny example, here is Microsoft. Microsoft is, had set up under bill Gates, , and more of a world of fantastic research lab, which, you know, they, they nurtured, but, and this is a big part. If, if you ask yourself, what did Microsoft shareholders get out of that lab? That, that would be an interesting quality. I don't know that it's been systematically studied. Yeah. But looking at it from the outside, if you look at what Gates as successors have done, I think I'm going to get in trouble for saying [00:50:00] this, but I think. What we are now seeing since probably 2015, 2016 is the beginning of the end of Microsoft research. Wow. That's and I say this because you're that the person was heading, Microsoft research was replaced by two people. Oh yeah. And part of that was, was taken away. And part of what was, was moved into sort of more applied. so. You know, I that's, why both, I think we'd never go back to the corporate labs, , in a, in a serious way. Yeah. Because it's incredibly hard to manage and it's incredibly hard to justify, you know, the billion dollar, roughly expense that Microsoft research, you know, cost Microsoft. If you think about huge, huge public good. , but it's, it's, it's no longer justified given that Microsoft now faces significant competition. Yeah. In terms of growth goes back to the externalities piece [00:51:00] again. Yeah. So there's certainly large externalities., you know, if you think about IBM when IBM had to take a potential crisis or even a little bit before that IBM's Watson research lab, essentially God reoriented and pushed more and more into being managed by the individual divisions and the businesses inside. IBM. And those divisions have quarterly reporting responsibilities, right? You have to justify the capital that you get from, from, from the parent corporation. And it's really hard to say what something you've, you know, investing in now may or may not work. If it works. We might see the results in six years, you know, in terms of the technical and scientific findings and the commercial benefits might be even further down the line. It's, it's hard to manage that. I, I don't blame it on, on. On on short term as though I don't believe that argument, but I certainly do think that it's this, this kind of bundling between a main activity of a corporation, let's say [00:52:00] IBM, which is to sell computers, to produce, and then to do all this other cool research, which could be relevant, but perhaps not. But, you know, perhaps someday it's really hard to manage and do that. And I think this is the relentless logic of, of. You know, golf capitalism is we have to unbundle things. We have to specialize. So they go back to, to kind of Smith and say, and as I said, this was the point of contention between the research team that's working on this problem. So you're just hearing one side of it. They think I'm,, I'm overtaking the customer so to speak. I, well, I mean, I certainly buy your argument, so. I forgot what that's worth., I'll, I'll tell them, , so the last thing I always like to ask guests is,, what is something that people are not thinking enough about that they, they should be thinking more about? That's a tough one, [00:53:00] not very imaginative sort of guy.,, I would, I would disagree, but, well,, Okay. No, I don't think I can give a, give a clever enough to justify the advertisements. That's that's fair. That's fair. Well,, I really appreciate you doing this. , this is,, and I really appreciate you being willing to, to sort of like, Almost like play with these ideas., I think that, that people don't do that enough. And,, I, my, my hope is that by I sort of playing with them, , we can, we can figure out new ways to make awesome things happen. I really hope that, you know, I would really like to learn because none of these ideas are set in stone and it's. I, I thank you for the opportunity to talk to you. And I hope we'll, we'll, we'll learn some more and people will, will come up with, with new and better ways of thinking about this problem. [00:54:00]   [00:55:00]      

Former Bell Labs director Venkatesh Narayanamurti challenges the basic vs. applied research distinction, advocating for trusting good people in research organizations. Topics cover research reliance on people, Bell Labs innovation, NSF structure, and starting a research institute from scratch. Discussion on visionary leadership, challenges in energy policy, industry involvement in research, profit incentives in renowned institutions, and the role of AI as an adjunct to human research dynamics.

In this episode I talk to Adam Marblestone about technology roadmapping, scientific gems hidden in plain sight, and systematically exploring complex systems. Adam is currently a research scientist at Google DeepMind and in the past has been the chief strategy officer at a brain-computer interface company and did research on brain mapping with Ed Boyden and did his PhD with George Church. He has a repeated pattern of pushing the frontiers in one discipline after another - physics, biology, neuroscience, and now artificial intelligence. I wanted to talk to Adam not just because it’s fascinating when people are able to push the frontier in multiple disciplines but because he does it through a system he calls technological roadmapping. Most of our discussion is framed around two of Adam’s works - a presentation about roadmapping biology and his primer on climate technology. The conversation stands on its own, but taking a glance at them will definitely enhance the context. Links below. Key Takeaways Technological roadmapping enables fields to escape local maxima It might be possible to systematically break down complex technical disciplines into basic constraints in order to construct these roadmaps Figuring out these constraints may also enable us to reboot stalled fields Links Road-mapping Biology presentation Architecting Discovery paper Adam’s Website Adam on Twitter The Longevity FAQ The Longevity FAQ - Making of Hypothes.is

In this episode I talk to Jude Gomilla about distributed innovation systems focused especially around the bottom-up response to the coronavirus crisis. Jude is a physicist, founder and CEO of the knowledge compilation platform Golden, and a prolific angel investor. He’s also been in the thick of the distributed response to the coronavirus response from day one. Key Takeaways - There’s a clear gap between market-based distributed systems and a top down systems coordinated by the government but it’s not clear how to fill it. - Twitter is shockingly important as a coordination tool. - The concept of centralized top-down problem statements coupled with distributed bottom up solutions may be under explored. Notes Gödel finding inconsistencies in the constitution Jude on Twitter Golden.com - [especially their cluster on the virus Feline Coronavirus Gilead - company working on treatment Balaji Srinivasan on Twitter Chris Dixon Idea Maze Article Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing paper on distributed manufacturing - Government as a giant flywheel - Claims and counter claims - How do you figure out what’s going on quickly without a centralized system? - Strategies based on timescales - hybrid strategies - Wave 1 - Ramp up for Wave 2 - How to respond to the [[‘Someone is working on that’]] problem - related - Too much explore vs too much exploit - Prizes for solving problems - Top down problem generation and bottom up solution generation

Intro In this episode I talk to Joel Chan about cross-disciplinary knowledge transfer, zettlekasten, and too many other things to enumerate. Joel is an a professor in the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies and a member of their Human-Computer Interaction Lab. His research focuses on understanding and creating generalizable configurations of people, computing, and information that augment human intelligence and creativity. Essentially, how can we expand our knowledge frontier faster and better.  This conversation was also an experiment. Instead of a normal interview that’s mostly the host directing the conversation, Joel and I actually let the conversation be directed by his notes. We both use a note-taking system called a zettlekasten that’s based around densely linked notes and realized hat it might be interesting to record a podcast where the structure of the conversation is Joel walking through his notes around where his main lines of research originated. For those of you who just want to hear a normal podcast, don’t worry - this episode listens like any other episode of idea machines. For those of you who are interested in the experiment, I’ve put a longer-than normal post-pod at the end of the episode. Key Takeaways Context and synthesis are two critical pieces of knowledge transfer that we don’t talk or think about enough. There is so much exciting progress to be made in how we could generate and execute on new ideas. Show Notes More meta-experiments: An entry point to Joel’s Notes from our conversation - Wright brothers - Wing warping - Control is core problem - Boxes have nothing to do with flying - George Vestral - velcro - scite.ai - Canonical way you’re supposed to do scientific literature - Even good practice - find the people via the literature - Incubation Effect - Infrastructure has no way of knowing whether a paper has been contradicted - No way to know whether paper has been Refuted, Corroborated or Expanded - Incentives around references - Herb Simon, Allen Newell - problem solving as searching in space - Continuum from ill structured problem to well structured problems - Figuring out the parameters, what is the goal state, what are the available moves - Cyber security is both cryptography and social engineering - How do we know what we know? - Only infrastructure we have for sharing is via published literature - Antedisciplinary Science - Consequences of science as a career - Art in science - As there is more literature fragmentation it’s harder to synthesize and actually figure out what the problem is - Canonical unsolved problems - List of unsolved problems in physics  - Review papers are: Hard to write and Career suicide - Formulating a problem requires synthesis - Three levels of synthesis 1. Listing citations 2. Listing by idea 3. Synthesis - Bloom’s taxonomy  - Social markers - yes I’ve read X it wasn’t useful - Conceptual flag citations - there may actually be no relation between claims and claims in paper - Types of knowledge synthesis and their criteria - If you’ve synthesized the literature you’ve exposed fractures in it - To formulate problem you need to synthesize, to synthesize you need to find the right pieces, finding the right pieces is hard - Individual synthesis systems:       - Zettlekasten       - Tinderbox system       - Roam - Graveyard of systems that have tried to create centralized knowledge repository - The memex as the philosopher’s stone of computer science - Semantic web - Shibboleth words - Open problem - “What level of knowledge do you need in a discipline” - Feynman sense of knowing a word - Information work at interdisciplinary boundaries - carol palmer - Different modes of interdisciplinary research - “Surface areas of interaction”   - Causal modeling the Judea pearl sense - Sensemaking is moving from unstructured things towards more structured things and the tools matter

In this episode I talk to Anna Goldstein about how the ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) model works and what makes it unique. We focus on ARPA-E: the department of Energy’s version of DARPA that funds breakthrough energy research. Anna is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of the paper “Funding Breakthrough Research” that systematically breaks down how the ARPA model works based on research at ARPA-E. Anna is full of insights about the ARPA model and innovation systems in general. Key Takeaways Different innovation systems depend on empowering individuals and taking risks but shift around who is empowered and when the risk is taken on. It’s almost impossible to tell how well an early-stage high-risk system is doing. More Resources Anna's Personal website  Anna on Twitter  Funding Breakthrough Research - the paper we reference often Howard Hughes Medical Institute ARPA-E DARPA

In this episode I talk to Jason Crawford about his work on the history of progress, funding and incentivizing inventions, ideas behind their time, and more. Jason is the author of the Roots of Progress blog, where he focuses on telling the story of human progress in an amazingly accessible way.  Key Takeaways Funding *structures* are understudied as a progress-enabling mechanism *Why* inventions happen is not so straightforward as we might think Culture may matter more than we think for building the future and there are concrete things we can do to build a culture of progress Links Roots of Progress Posts Smallpox - The history of smallpox & the origins of vaccines Charting progress  Six threads of technology  Arsenic as a pesticide  Other Jason Appearances Palladium Podcast with Jason that touches on the philosophy behind progress studies Random Anki and memorizing - Augmenting Long-term Memory Ideas behind their time - Ideas Behind Their Time - Marginal REVOLUTION Tyler Cowen talking about bricks - My Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg and Patrick Collison - Marginal REVOLUTION