The Ledger, every show

“I think the idea that China is about to overtake the U.S. Is looking out of date, actually.”

“China has been relatively free economically, but relative, but very unfree politically in the last few decades. I think that's now changing. I don't think it's very free in either respect. And so I don't see it leading the world in prosperity for an awful lot …”

“My view on the whole is that you shouldn't worry about it. You should, if necessary, sell the stuff to them, because if you can keep ahead, if you can Use your advantage to be smarter. There's no reason you can't just maintain your advantage indefinitely. You …”

“The highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world, bar none, second highest domestic electricity prices second to Germany.”

“Norway has drilled something like 40 new gas and oil wells just in the past 12 months, I think, Britain has drilled zero, but it's the same field.”

“We did Brexit. Many people think that was a mistake. I don't. I think it was the right thing to do, but we didn't make, take advantage of it. We didn't say, now we're out in the world, let's deregulate”

“I'm constantly told you can't have infinite growth in a finite world. Not true. Because growth can consist of doing more with less. So you halve the size of your machine or halve the amount of energy going into it. That is growth.”

“This could have been sexual selection, not natural selection. Because what do we use our big brains for? We use it to write poetry, and do art, and be funny, and all these kind of things. So we use it for seduction. So there's an argument that this thing is, a…”

“You've seen what's happened to a lot of Chinese entrepreneurs, they've been swallowed up by state owned enterprises or partnerships with them.”

“You've got to be careful that in picking winners, you don't end up with losers picking the government.”

“Well, I'm a bit of an old atheist myself who feels that we'd be better off with the rationalism from the classical world rather than the Judeo-Christian tradition that came after it.”

“Complaining to our government about its crackdown on non-crime hate incidents, which is the ridiculous Orwellian term for people who say things on, online that, that lead them to being arrested. You know, criticizing that, as J.D. Vance has done, is the right …”

“In that sense, they really, you know, the airplane and the boat really have evolved. It's not a metaphor. It's what's actually happening to them.”

“By the way, the message of my argument that we had transport innovations in the 20th century, and then in the first half of the 20th century, and communications innovations in the second half, is that the first half of the 21st century may not be all about com…”

“Picking winners and saying, I want this technology to be developed by such and such a date has a pretty awful track record and is likely to end up by the losers picking the governments. In other words, you know, the wrong people end up getting the grants and t…”

“We're reforesting the globe. There is more forest cover every year now.”

“If Steve jobs hadn't existed, there would still have been a hero of the personal computer.”

“I personally think that radio played a large part in the rise of the dictators in the 19 twenties. You know, if you look at the degree to which Mussolini and Hitler used radio to, As, you know, a demagogic tool.”

“You know, you get, you know, Donald Trump in America, Georgia Maloney in Italy, Nigel Farage in Britain, you know, you get similar characters, not exactly the same, but similar characters emerging at the same time in different places, and that suggests That th…”

“Yes, I think on the whole, we will win our battles against most pathogens, because we have so much possibility of ingenuity now, of human ingenuity to help us defeat them.”

“If we didn't have all these social contact tools, then maybe we'd never have locked down. You know, we just couldn't do it. In which case, of course, the epidemic would have been worse. But to some extent, as it were the existence of the video conferencing and…”

“I think what happens is that people share their ideas, exchange their ideas, collaborate, and what really counts is how well people are communicating with each other, not how clever they are as individuals.”

“One of the great things that America brought to the world of innovation, in my view, is a relative tolerance of failure. Compared with Most European countries. The fact that you've started a business and it went wrong was actually quite often a good thing in t…”

“You rerun the tape without Sergey Brin meeting Larry Page, without Thomas Edison, and you still get light bulbs, you still get search engines.”

“So for example, you know, we've been unable to come up with new designs for nuclear power stations for several decades. That's because licensing a new design for nuclear power station would cost billions under the present licensing system. So nobody bothers to…”

“Governments all around the world have said, look, if someone can come up with a vaccine for COVID-. We will buy You know, forty million doses, fifty million doses, whatever it is that has worked to produce a huge race among different companies, and the great t…”

“I think this is probably what I'd tell people, that there's no reason we can't innovate indefinitely, if not infinitely. And people say, well, how can that be? We'll run out of resources. And I'll say no, because half the time these days, we're innovating to u…”

“We've not grown in GDP per capita terms significantly in 15 years now.”

“On the whole, they stay mild because they want us going around going to parties, going to work. They don't want us sitting at home because we're not going to infect anyone if we stay at home. There's a sort of common interest there in not hurting us too much.”

“We're not so pessimistic about our individual lives, interestingly, as we are about people and the planet generally.”

“I want to talk about innovation, which is the process by which a bright idea is turned into something practical, reliable, and available, and affordable for ordinary people. And that's a long slog, and it's a lot of hard work, and it's often more important, mo…”

“And there are innovations that change the world dramatically, which don't actually depend on any inventions. Things like container shipping, which had an enormous impact on global trade by drastically cutting the cost of shipping goods overseas, which didn't i…”

“The Smithsonian Institution didn't want to give the Wright brothers credit for being the first people in the air for decades afterwards, and they had on display Langley's plane, which had been modified so that it would work after the event, but they were final…”

“The difference between him and the 20 other people who invented the light bulb around the same time is that he was prepared to put in the slog of testing 6000 different types of plant material before settling on Japanese bamboo for the filament of his light bu…”

“I think the search engine is probably the most useful innovation of my lifetime.”

“Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who invented Google, thought they were cataloguing the internet. They didn't think they were inventing a search engine to start with.”

“Malaria was going up until 2003. It's now going down as a cause of mortality in the world, going down pretty steeply. And it's entirely due to this, but not entirely, but it's nearly all due to this technology. It's more effective than anti-malarial drugs more…”

“Well, I think the great theme of human history over millennia is that we become more specialized in what we produce and more diversified in what we consume.”

“You know, in the end, it all boils down to freedom, the freedom to Exchange ideas, the freedom to fail and start again, the freedom to change your mind, the freedom to invest where you think it's right to invest the freedom as a consumer to express your prefe…”

“The general point you can make, and this applies to Renaissance Italy and ancient Arabia and, Ancient China, and so on as well is that city states tend to be innovative, that, that, that independent, relatively small political units that are very vigorous trad…”

“There's a fascinating period in history soon after the American Revolution when Americans were engaged in rampant industrial espionage to try and steal secrets of Britain's industry. And they sent all sorts of people over to prowl around pretending to be Preac…”

“We've spent millions of years thinking that your gain is my loss. It's only in the last a 100,000, in some ways, that's how well trade seems to be, On a massive scale with the division of labor and the collaborative system I described earlier, it's more like t…”

“The number of humpback whales in the world, right, was down to 5000 in the mid-nineteen sixties. It's now a 130,000.”

“There's an enormous network of people went into manufacturing this one pencil, and yet not one of them knows how to make a pencil. Not even the person working in the pencil factory. They just, because they don't know how to cut down a tree or grow coffee.”

“We've only totally extinguished one major human disease, and that's smallpox, but boy, is that an important one.”