Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think that the future is not determined. I think that it is up to us, and I think that we should always believe fundamentally in the ability of human intelligence when properly applied to solve problems.

00:00:17 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s about Muse, the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest Jason Crawford from Routes of Progress.

00:00:35 - Speaker 1: Hello, thanks for having me on.

00:00:37 - Speaker 2: And Jason, when we first met, you were a tech founder working on Field Book. Tell me about that.

00:00:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s right. So most of my career has been in software and technology. I was a software engineer, engineering manager, and tech startup founder. Most recently, starting in 2013, I started a company called Field Book. Field Book was a sort of hybrid spreadsheet database, a lot like Air Table, so very much in the mode of a tool for thought and I’m very sympathetic to that general space of tools. I still have a soft place in my heart for it. In fact, Adam, one of the things That inspired me and helped give my mindset early on in developing that tool was a book that I think I learned about from you, A Small Matter of Programming by Bonnie Nardi.

00:01:23 - Speaker 2: Um, yeah, so that was a 93. Yeah, you can believe that.

00:01:27 - Speaker 1: And still very relevant today, frankly, and so I told all my employees, recommended they read at least the first few chapters of that book and there’s a significant amount in there about spreadsheets, which are probably the greatest tool for thought ever created, so.

00:01:40 - Speaker 2: Absolutely, and I think the world’s most successful end user programming tool, which is almost everyone knows how to use a spreadsheet and probably can do at least the very most basic function like summing a column, and that is a small bit of computer code.

00:01:52 - Speaker 1: Exactly. So yeah, I built Field Book, worked on it for about 5 years. Unfortunately, didn’t work out, we ended up shutting down the product and selling the team. We did a sort of aquahire to start up Flexport.

00:02:04 - Speaker 2: And to be fair, the end user programming dream is one that many have chased and few have found there’s a few success stories, yeah, spreadsheets, you know, which are now decades old, maybe Flash, maybe Unity more recently, but it remains a really elusive dream to make a tool that both brings kind of the power of programming to an audience that is not already professional programmers.

00:02:27 - Speaker 1: It’s true, although at the same time, in the last couple of years, there’s been the notion of no code and low code has become, you know, much more prominent, and there have been a couple of major successes, so I’m happy to see tools like Air Table, tools like Notion, and, you know, a number of other sort of competitors in that space all keeping the dream alive and actually creating some pretty successful products.

00:02:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So going from there to, I don’t know, an independent scholar or educator or advocacy around progress studies seems like at least a pretty big leap. I’d love to hear that story.

00:03:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s right.

So what happened was I got interested in the story of human progress early 2017.

It began as not even a side project, it began as just a reading list, really. It was what books am I gonna read next. I always like to be reading a non-fiction book and at a certain point I discovered that it was kind of a good idea to read books in clusters, sort of pick a theme and then read a handful of books on one theme, and you can learn a lot more from that than just reading random books. So I decided to learn about the history of human progress, and mostly in the beginning at least was interested in focusing on kind of technological and industrial progress, really fascinated by just the simple basic fact of economic living conditions and standards of living throughout history, how much those have really skyrocketed in the last couple 100 years after, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of years of very slow progress and very little improvement overall in living conditions. And I just wanted to know, like, how did we get here? What were the major breakthroughs, the inventions and discoveries that created this standard of living? And ultimately I’m interested in getting to the root causes. When I started blogging about this, I called it the roots of progress. You know, so ultimately understanding what are the conditions, what are the root causes of this explosion of creativity and invention that ultimately has made everybody’s lives so much better. So it started off as just me sort of reading books, and then the books were so fascinating that I decided to start making some notes on them and maybe publishing the notes on a kind of a little blog that I didn’t even care if really anybody read except for maybe a handful of my friends. And then a couple of years went by and I was still doing it and frankly, it just became my hobby, you know, people would ask me, do you have any hobbies? And I would think about what do I do on nights and weekends? And then I would say, well, I don’t know, is economic history a hobby? Can that be a hobby? Because that was where my time was going. And so then when I decided that it was time for me to move on from the last tech job and figure out something new to do, I asked myself, what am I really obsessed with right now? What’s the one thing that I can’t see myself not doing in the near future? And it was really doing this research and writing about the history of technology. In the meantime, a couple of things that happened. One is that my audience had actually grown somewhat, some of my posts kind of got popular, one of them hit number one on Hacker News and So I was starting to actually see that there was an audience for what I was doing, people liked it. And then the other thing was that a whole community began to form around this notion of progress studies, particularly after economist Tyler Cowen and startup founder Patrick Collison wrote an article together in the Atlantic about a year and a half ago, calling for more focus on the nature of economic and industrial progress and indeed calling for a discipline of progress studies. And so that article sort of galvanized a community around this notion and it turned out there are a lot of people who are interested in this concept. And so, you know, between that community and my new audience and my just personal obsession with the topic. It was a, I won’t say it was an easy decision to kind of make a hard left turn and just take my career in a different direction, but there was something that just felt inevitable and undeniable about it. So here I am, it’s a little more than a year later, and I’m quite happy with it. It’s still a topic that continues to fascinate me and I think it’s still very important for the world.

00:06:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I find it really interesting that my own journey as kind of tech entrepreneur, like if you go back, I don’t know, 56 years, maybe you and I had pretty similar jobs in certain ways, you know, starting a company, building a tool, sort of standard software as a service inside the Silicon Valley startup, combinator model, and then we each in our own ways got interested in the meta process of innovation, and my path was to go off and start this research.

Switch that Mark later joined up with about how we generate big breakthrough kind of step change, new digital technologies and that in turn led to me working on Muse because that was a spin out of that technology.

You went a maybe more scholarly path, but I feel like they come from the same place, which is working within that box, that Silicon Valley box, which is very much about change, innovation, new technology, but it’s sort of narrow in a certain way. It doesn’t take that broader view of Human history and how do we get here? And for me, a big personal breakthrough or something like that source of inspiration was going back and researching all these older industrial research labs like ARPA and Bell Labs and even back to Thomas Edison, and you were nice enough to invite me to give a little talk at Torture Progress about that exact topic. So maybe yeah, there’s a seed of something that started in the same place, even though we ended up doing very different things in terms of our day job now.

00:07:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s interesting to see how much overlap there is between the software, kind of computer and internet and startup community and the progress community. It seems like it’s probably not a coincidence, but it’s interesting.

00:08:04 - Speaker 2: And Mark, you’ve been a little bit involved in the progress studies community. How do you think about this? How do you even define progress might be one place to start.

00:08:13 - Speaker 3: Well, that’s a big one. You might define progress as our ability to satisfy human wants and needs and desires.

It’s a big area, right? I guess I came to it similar to Jason through the lens of economic history and reading about all the progress we had made over the past several 100 years in particular, but then also how curiously we seem to be going pretty sideways in the last 50 years.

And it’s notable, I think that both you and Jason described reading about or having the sense. of there’s some sort of stagnation going on, because actually, if you look at the literature, it’s very pervasive.

In many areas, it seems like we’re going a little bit sideways in terms of not making the type of progress we made in the first half of the 20th century, for example.

And so as I read more and more, you keep seeing this over and over again, and it drives me to wonder what exactly is going on and how can we make it better.

And I also have an interest similar to both you and the, you might call it the meta of why this is all happening the way it is and what might make it better.

But to my mind, that’s perhaps the main thing. What’s the system of social technologies, if you will, that allows us to make progress or prohibits us from doing so.

00:09:16 - Speaker 2: Where do you fall on the stagnation hypothesis, Jason?

00:09:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, short answer, I have come around to it after being initially skeptical. It was not my initial or primary motivation for sort of getting into progress studies or, you know, starting to study this story of technological progress. I was more motivated by sort of the opposite, which is how much progress there actually has been in the last few 100 years compared to the previous several 1000. Right, and I think we need to keep in mind that is still the bigger story. Even if progress has slowed today, it’s still significantly faster than it was, I think in any pre-industrial era, right? Like the big division is still between the industrial age and pretty much all the time prior to that.

However, after some amount of time reading different arguments, quantitative and qualitative, looking at it in different ways. I’ve come around to this idea that progress actually has slowed down in the last approximately 50 years. I now see that. And part of what actually really helped me to see it was mapping out on a kind of a timeline, major invention. In different areas. So I made a sort of two-dimensional timeline for myself or one dimension was, well, time, and the other dimension was just sort of breaking out areas of technology into a few major categories like manufacturing, agriculture, energy, and so forth. And then I started placing on here kind of like, what were the huge breakthroughs, you know, in each of these areas at different times. And just from that, you can kind of exercise, you can really start to see it. And so the simplest way that I can summarize stagnation right now. is to just point out that around the end of the 1800s and into the early 1900s, we had, by my count, approximately 4 major technological industrial revolutions going on at once. One of them was electricity and everything that I was turning into, motors and everything, light bulbs, etc. Another was oil and all of its ramifications, including the internal combustion engine and the vehicles made from that the car and the airplane. Another was, I’ll just call it chemical engineering, the science of chemistry really coming into its own and beginning to really affect industrial processes. An early example would be the Bessemer steel process, a late example of this that really kind of capped it off would be the entire plastics industry. And then the fourth one, which maybe doesn’t always get a listed or counted as kind of a quote unquote industrial breakthrough, but which I think essentially does fit in that category, is the germ theory, the germ theory of disease and all of its ramifications in improving hygiene, improving public health, pasteurization of food, better food handling practices, especially water filtration and chlorination that improved that. And so these 4 things, oil, electricity, chemistry, and the germ theory, 4 major, mostly scientific and overall industrial innovation breakthroughs that are completely transforming one or two of those major areas of the economy, and then each one of them is having ramifications pretty much on like the entire world and on all areas of the economy, and they’re all happening at once. Now by the time you get to the end of the 20th century, the last 50 years or so, you’re basically down to 1. It’s the computer and internet revolution, right? And that is huge, and I think we shouldn’t dismiss it or discount it or downplay it, and there’s a lot of breath wasted on people arguing it across purposes a sort of like missing each other’s point going back and forth. Where I blame Peter Thiel for this a little bit. The whole, you know, we wanted flying cars, we got 140 characters. Well, what’s the matter with 140 characters? Like, That’s a pretty dismissive way of talking about this amazing information revolution that created the entire internet and put a supercomputer in everybody’s pocket and gives you access to all the world’s information and has connected everybody like never before. I mean, that is, you know, you don’t want to downplay that. But I think it’s fair to say that the computer and internet revolution itself is roughly comparable to any one of those four revolutions that I just mentioned, oil, electricity, and so forth. I don’t think it can measure up to all 4 of them going on at once. So if you just in a very crude way, if you want to count major technological revolutions that are going on, we went from 4 going on at once now to approximately 1. And by the way, that 1 has been going on for several decades, it’s kind. starting to level off. It’s starting to plateau. We’re starting to get to the point where it’s saturated the world and there’s still a lot more value to be generated out of computers and the internet, but it’s not gonna last forever, right? In a couple of decades, certainly we’re gonna start to see diminishing returns if we’re not already. And I think there’s some ways in which we are already starting to see it. So what comes next? Do we have another revolution on the bench or waiting in the wings to take over, right? Because the only thing worse from going from 4 technological revolutions to 1 is from going from 1 to 0. So that’s my current take on stagnation.

00:14:10 - Speaker 2: It does beg the question of what is the right number of revolutions to have or ideal number perhaps.

There’s one version which is just more progress is better, and just 4 is good, 6 would be even better, 10 would be great, so 25, there’s another version where we say, OK, we like the world that existed and that it produced to have 3 or 4 major revolutions going on at the time.

One isn’t bad. Somewhere in there seems about right, but there is such a thing as maybe too much progress or that’s not the only thing that matters in the world. There’s other things related to just human happiness. So how do we decide, I guess what what what we want in terms of societal progress.

00:14:50 - Speaker 3: Maybe that’s an internal variable in the system because you can imagine different social technologies that is different political systems, different ways for organizing society, where you have more or less ability to metabolize change.

There are some structures that are very brittle, and if you put more than one, you know, industrial revolution on, it would just crumble and break. But we’ve also seen that there are systems that can handle 4 at a time, you know, reasonably well, at least get through to the other end. So I think there isn’t necessarily hard cap so much as you need the technology to be able to metabolize other technologies, if you will.

The other thought is, and this one was really driven home to me by the book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, which paints the picture that Jason just did about the huge amount of change that we had in our everyday lives before 1970 and basically the stopping aside from the information technology revolution after that. That book really focuses on the everyday lives of people and what it was like to live day to day. And a point that the author constantly makes is there are a few areas that are really key, housing, food, transportation, medicine, and these are kind of the bread and butter of everyday life. And it’s easy, I think, to forget that as people who work in the information economy. And so one way to answer the question of how many revolutions should we have is, well, we obviously have huge gaps in all of those areas. So we need enough to at least make progress in the big spaces like that.

00:16:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that is a good book that really does drive home, I think the how much progress there was in that late 1800s to early 1900s time frame, you know, compared to today.

I deeply disagree with his conclusions about the future, where he sees basically no more progress ever, as far as I can tell, but I think his history is excellent.

If you don’t want to read all 700 pages of the book, by the way, I did summarize it on my blog at roots of Progress.org.

I have a sort of summary and book review. So I break it down, um, I mean, food, clothing, shelters sort of one way to look at it. I break it down as kind of manufacturing, agriculture, energy, transportation, communication, and medicine. Those are sort of the big 6 that I think about in terms of areas of the economy.

And you can put almost all, not absolutely everything, but you can put almost all big breakthroughs and innovation into those categories. And so I see no reason why we shouldn’t have at least one major revolution, you know, affecting each of those things at any given time.

You know, if you want to ask, well, how many technological revolutions do we need at once, right? One thing to look at is the areas that haven’t changed much and especially the technologies that seemed promising and areas where people thought there might be a revolution. But either it was aborted or hasn’t arrived yet or just hasn’t lived up to its potential.

I mean, if you go back to the 1950s, everybody at the time thought that the future of energy was absolutely nuclear, you know, they almost just took it for granted that of course, this is the future, this is where it’s going, we’re gonna have nuclear powered homes, nuclear cars, nuclear batteries, nuclear everything. And I’m far, far from an expert in that technology and what is actually possible, but I think that far more is possible, at least according to the laws of physics that we know, than what we’ve achieved or than what most people actually believe to be possible.

So I strongly suspect that nuclear is a far under exploited technology, and in a world where everybody is very worried about carbon emissions, that really looks like an oversight, doesn’t it? Manufacturing is another interesting one. So another book that I recently finished and reviewed on my blog is called Where Is My Flying Car by J Stors Hall. It’s basically just sort of the polar opposite of Robert Gordon’s rise and Fall of American Growth. It’s in many ways a work of futurism, and the author spent a lot of his career in nanotechnology, trying to do, you know, true or, you know, investigating, researching true, like atomically precise manufacturing, where you have basically nanobots putting together. Whatever you want, assembling it atom by atom, placing every atom in the right place, that would be an absolute revolution in manufacturing, right? That would allow us to not only create things of enormously higher quality, building 100 kilometer towers out of diamond, right? But also would, you know, like pretty much every revolution in manufacturing enormously bring the cost of everything way down, right? Because you’d be able to do everything faster and with much less human labor.

You can look at genetic engineering technology and biotechnology, you know, we’re in the middle of a pandemic. Gosh, it would be really nice if we had had a broad-spectrum antiviral drug that was as broadly effective as our broad-spectrum antibiotics. We don’t have any such thing yet.

I’m really, really glad that somebody was working on Messenger RNA based vaccine technologies because the first two COVID vaccines that have come through and seem to have promising results in their phase through trials are both based on Messenger RNA. That’s a brand new technology, by the way. I mean, it’s been around in the lab for a while, but there’s never been a vaccine approved or in widespread use based on that technology. So this looks like COVID will be the first.

So there’s always more. More progress to be made. And I think that’s a really important theme of progress studies, something I think you learn by looking at the history and I think, you know, it was always very easy to take the current world for granted and just assume that kind of this is how things are. You know, the people 100, 200 years ago, many of them were quite happy with the world as it was. They didn’t see the need for these huge breakthroughs. They didn’t believe they were possible, they didn’t even necessarily believe that they would be a good thing. Every single one of them was fought and opposed, not only by special interests who maybe stood to lose if some new breakthrough came into the world, but also The original Luddites, right? Yeah, and also just by people who were generally afraid of the technology and didn’t know, you know, what to do with it.

00:20:27 - Speaker 2: So, yeah, well, by default, you could say that humans I think are Fearful of change, and I almost wonder if kind of the tech founder type is someone that, because I’ve always been drawn to novelty and I find adapting to change or even taking advantage of it, sort of making the most of it in some way to be an exciting and fun challenge and stagnation is sort of bad for me, but I’ve come to realize that that is very much the exception, not the rule. In general, change is just threatening, very simple.

00:20:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s right. So I think it’s very important that we remember that perspective and that we remember that. Now if there’s one message I really want to drive home to people, it is that the future can be as amazingly better compared to the present as the present is compared to the past. Are we in the future and our descendants can be as fantastically wealthy compared to today as we are compared to the people of 200 years ago, the vast majority of whom lived in what we today consider to be extreme poverty. So we should keep that in mind and always be working for that much, much better future.

00:21:31 - Speaker 2: And that’s part of what’s very powerful about the advocacy side of progress studies to me is that it’s probably a very crude summary of cultural attitudes about change, but I think from what I understand, most cultures through most of history, most of civilization.

Saw the world is largely static and it was really fairly recent that you had this, oh, we can actually steadily improve and each generation can be better than last, but maybe that was the Victorian era concept of progress, progress with a capital P, which was the sense that things must get better, that it’s sort of mandated somehow by God or nature or it’s in our nature that if we just keep doing what we’re doing, things will continue. get better and then maybe that the pushback to that is, well, wait a minute, it’s actually not quite like that. Things can and do get worse, you know, ask the folks in the declining empire like Rome or many of the others over the millennia, but in general, we can choose a society and as individuals to say that we actually think progress is possible and desirable and then do things to try to affect that.

00:22:36 - Speaker 1: That’s right. The most interesting book I’ve read on this was A Culture of Growth by Joel McKe came out just a few years ago. It’s one of the first books I read in my study of progress, and he says much of what you just said that the very idea of progress is a relatively new one.

It is not at all the default. In fact, a common view in many places and times in history was sort of the opposite, something he called. ancestor worship, where we looked back to our ancient ancestors as the most Aristotle.

Yeah, or even in the Middle Ages, people looked at the, they looked around and they saw the pyramids and they saw the Colosseum and the Roman aqueducts and, you know, they just thought, well, wow, these ancient people who and then especially in the Renaissance and, you know, when they started rediscovering some of the ancient texts, and they’re just getting this knowledge.

That had been lost in Europe for 1000 years, you know, like how to mix volcanic ash into your cement to make a hydraulic cement, right? That was something the Romans knew and worked with and was kind of rediscovered 1000 years later after the fall of the empire.

And I think it wasn’t just in the west either. I mean, I think the West had this special sort of historical thing where there was a kind of cultural decline for a long time and Than a rebirth, but I think in many places and times people have sort of looked to ancient ancestors as the wisest people who ever lived. We will never surpass their knowledge or achievements.

All we can do is kind of learn what they had to teach us. And so progress in a certain way requires reversing this notion and actually believing that we can do better, that we can discover knowledge that none of our ancestors ever had, that we can create things that work better than anything they ever made.

And that takes a little bit of hubris and Mir says that that notion of progress evolved in the West roughly between about Columbus and Newton, so say the 1500s and 1600s.

The Voyages of Discovery actually had a significant amount to do with it, because here we are out discovering entire new continents that the ancients never knew about. Francis Bacon had a lot to do with it, and he’s a pivotal role in Moyer’s book. Newton really put the cap on it with his system of the heavens and explaining the motion of the planets and clearly better than anything that, you know, Ptolemy or anybody ever came up with.

The summary of that book is basically it’s how the Enlightenment set the stage for and led to the industrial revolution.

00:24:55 - Speaker 3: This reminds me, one of the interesting things I see with the study of progress is that it’s very contingent and embedded. And by that I mean, you generally don’t have one person who strikes out and decides, I’m going to make some progress today. Instead, you have a culture, you have a society, it often takes several 100 years. Amen.

00:25:12 - Speaker 2: Speak for yourself. That’s what I think every morning. Perfect.

00:25:17 - Speaker 3: So you do think that Adam, but that’s because in part, it’s because you spent so much time in Silicon Valley, which has become the sort of magnet and amplifier of this attitude that if you spend enough time there, you can kind of catch as a contagious disease almost. And I think it’s important to understand these very human elements of how just the notion of the improving mentality can be transmitted and encouraged culturally or conversely, it can be lost if it becomes too diffuse.

00:25:41 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s almost a societal level growth mindset where, yeah, again, it’s the thing we can do and we can choose to do, but it is not automatic. It’s something we have to work out and over extended periods of time. Yeah. Exactly.

Yeah, and I certainly have plenty of ways that I talk about, and Mark, you and I talked recently about our decision to leave San Francisco, each on our own basis some years past, and some of that was for me at least was somewhat some Silicon Valley monoculture and feeling like I wanted to break out of that to have sort of new perspectives and new ways to pursue the things that are important to me.

But at the same Time for some of the critique I have there, it is really one of the few places in the world I feel where that it is a baseline cultural thing that we’re here to make changes that we think will improve and possibly very deep changes. We talk about disruption, which is sort of an overused word, but it’s this idea that it’s the creative destruction. You can’t go beyond very incremental improvement without some tearing down. What’s already there and hopefully that shouldn’t be in a disrespectful way. And sometimes Silicon Valley startups get into trouble with that a little bit, which is they get so wrapped up in there, we’re going to change the world and it’s gonna be better that they forget about that every change, every transition has impacts, some negative, and you should be aware of those. But at the same time, yeah, that perspective of we can make the world better is quite a unique thing.

00:27:05 - Speaker 3: Yeah, now we’re kind of getting into the discussion of why we progress or don’t. So Jason, I’m curious, you’re looking back 50 years and you’re seeing we’re not making as much progress as we did in the previous couple 100 years, even though it’s more than we did 1000 years ago. Why do you think that is?

00:27:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah. I have 3 main hypotheses right now. My hunch is that they’re all true and part of the issue. The most fundamental is cultural and sort of philosophic ideas and attitudes towards progress. I think in many ways our world is not nearly as favorable to progress and doesn’t think of it as highly as we used to. We’re much less appreciative and much more fearful and angry.

And I think when you value something less, you get less of it. You get less investment, you get less resources going into it. Fewer people want to devote their careers to it and so forth.

Exactly why that happened and why it happened when it did, I don’t totally know. But if you go back to again, sort of the late 1800s. The culture in general, I mean, particularly in the west, and especially in America, was extremely favorable to progress. It was seen as a very good thing. It’s coming along and improving everybody’s lives. It was transforming the world. Humans were proud of themselves as a species and about our abilities and what we could do, right? That was sort of how it was seen. It’s this kind of Victorian progress with a capital P, you know, the march of progress and so forth, right? I mean, you go back and those things are, I don’t know, almost cliches now, but they were very real attitudes. People celebrated progress. You go and you look at the imagery, the posters from the old World’s Fair type exhibitions and the way that they saw. They really saw progress as this positive force moving forward. As what you mentioned earlier, yes, I think some of them even. Got to maybe see it as inevitable and unstoppable, which is wrong, it’s not inevitable in any way, but people saw it as something, you know, overall that was making the world better. Sometime seemingly around the, I’m just gonna say the middle of the 20th century, the tide seemed to turn, and by the end of the 60s and with the rise of the counterculture, you definitely see popular attitudes turning against this. I think you See most of all, but not exclusively in sort of the rise of the environmentalist movement, there was just much more concern about technology, fear for unintended consequences, a different set of values, even that may be put nature and animals, other species, the planet itself, the quote unquote ecosystem, all of that, even above and beyond what’s good for individual human beings. And overall, again, I think just people stopped believing in progress as this fundamentally good force and some people even started seeing it as a fundamentally bad thing. And so, again, when you give less honor and prestige and acclaim and social. Status to invention and science and technology and business and capitalism, you’re gonna get less of it. You know, you have fewer people devoting their energies to it and more people devoting their energies to stopping it. One of the lines from, I mentioned that book, Where is my flying car? He said something like, today for every person who’s out there trying to change the world, there’s somebody else who believes that they’re saving the world by stopping that person. So that I think is maybe the deepest explanation. So my second major hypothesis is the growth of bureaucracy and especially government regulation, although not exclusively government regulation, I think there’s been a general kind of growth of bureaucratic overhead even within private institutions. But there’s just so many more rules now, so much more, you know, that any new thing, both the invention itself and the process of research and development, there’s just so much more to comply with, right? And so much more overhead, and it’s just an enormous amount of friction added to the entire process. I mean, the multi-billion dollar FDA pipeline now, right? I mean, that’s how much it costs to get a new drug out there. The cost of getting a new drug out there has been increasing over time, over the decades. There’s sort of an inverse Moore’s law. In fact, there was a famous paper by, I believe Jack Scannell at Al. That coined the term E-room’s law. Eroom is more spelled backwards because the price of getting a new drug to market on average was doubling every 9 years. And I think that may have leveled off or so in the last decade, but still, the prices are enormously high. It costs multiple billions of dollars on average per new drug approved by the FDA. And uh you know, there’s a number of different potential explanations for this, and they mention a number in that paper, including things like, by the way, every time you add a drug to the market, all new drugs have to be better than everything that’s ever previously, right, so the bar just keeps going up, right? But you know, one of their hypotheses was what they call the cautious regulator problem or the over cautious regulator, just that the requirements for new drugs have just been going up and up. To the point where, you know, the FDA doesn’t even allow people to try drugs experimentally, even after they’ve been proven safe, right? They have a further standard of efficacy. And it’s the phase 3 of the clinical trials that costs the most money, by the way. Like, why is nobody even talking about something like a universal right to try, not even, you know, putting these drugs out there just kind of on the open market, but At least allowing people who discover them and know about them, give them the right to try in their own bodies, at least after these things are proven safe, you know, in earlier trials or once we have like a certain amount of data, right? I mean, these are the kinds of things where I think, I mean, coming back to sort of cultural foundations, I think we have evolved something of a safety culture, especially in the United States and in the world in general. And I often wonder if the safety culture has gone beyond true safety into basically safety theater, where we just keep adding overhead and processes and bureaucracy and regulation. Basically, we’ve gotten to the point where you can justify anything on grounds of safety, and you can pretty much kill anything on concerns of safety. And there just doesn’t seem to be any really ability to talk about trade-offs. And so I fear that what has happened is that we’ve kind of built up the safety theater, which is extremely low ROI like it adds tons of overhead and does not actually add an appreciable amount of safety. So I think we need to get smarter about the ways that we create safety. And this is not, by the way, to say that safety is not a valuable goal. It absolutely is. In fact, increased safety is one of the enormous accomplishments of technological and industrial progress over the last couple 100 years. Our lives are actually much safer now in many ways, although there are some arguments that they become less safe in some significant kind of, you know, tail risk ways. But in many ways, you know, our exposure to germs and disease, our exposure to air pollution, just the safety of our machines and our vehicles, all of these things, we’ve actually gotten a lot safer in many ways. So I’m not against safety, I’m very much in favor of safety. I just think there’s a trade-off in how we create it. And then the third major hypothesis, and maybe the one that is closest to the hearts of Ink & Switch, is the way we fund, organize and manage research. We have lost certain ways of doing this, in particular, it’s been a significant decline of corporate research and corporate R&D labs. At the same time, concurrent with that, there’s been a kind of centralization and bureaucratization of funding for science and research, especially in a small number of large and bureaucratic government agencies, and I think there’s a good case to be made that we don’t have ways of funding the real kind of. Contrarian maverick breakthrough ideas anymore. And that also closely related to this, that we don’t have great ways of funding very uncertain long term research that can’t prove itself with very predictable or short-term results, but, you know, is actually the kind of thing that makes long-term fundamental breakthroughs. And so looking at how we organize and manage and especially get resources to fund different types of research and development, I think is an important place that we should look at for countering stagnation. So those are my three big hypotheses. 1, culture, 2, regulation of bureaucracy, 3, funding organization and management.

00:35:23 - Speaker 2: There was so much in there, I’m trying to figure out where to start on the response. You touched on many things, I think are very interesting safety is versus like anti-fragile FDA approval is the thing I’ve been involved in in some of my advocacy work, funding research is obviously a huge one, and they can switch in kind of broader independent research world, but actually I want, if I can respond to something at the very beginning there, he talked about the potential change in attitudes about kind of progress and maybe technology and maybe capitalism is kind of a piece of that as well.

And you know, I agree with you that if you of some of these mechanisms that have brought us so many great advancements, I think that is a problem both for progress and humanity.

But I also wonder if in that time range you were talking about that I don’t know, 1960s, 1970s counterculture, people thinking about the environment, a lot happened in there to make people maybe have almost a reality check against the maybe more uns the word for it, unchecked, kind of just positivism of science and technology and capitalism and the modern world’s all good. And we saw that nuclear, which as you said was this great big hope for the future of clean energy, we had these horrible meltdowns were so deeply traumatic to the individual countries where they happen.

Maybe there’s something like discovering the link between cigarettes and cancer and that for many, many decades, generations really, these huge corporate interests had been basically pushing this addictive drug that turned out to be quite deadly.

Obviously the environmental stuff, rainforest deforestation and shrinking ecosystems and all that sort of thing and. Yeah, that basically it was sort of reasonable to have a bit of a, wait a minute, maybe we should think about some of the downsides of some of the progress, technological progress or growth in capitalism that we experience.

Now maybe the place where I land on that is having a little bit of a reality check, maybe was a good thing or is a good thing, you know, you don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.

00:37:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think a major and significant factor actually was the World Wars.

So if you read what people were saying and thinking pre-World War One, the excitement and enthusiasm for progress, and it wasn’t just technical and economic progress, it was scientific progress and it was in many ways moral and social progress that people saw.

And the Enlightenment era was focused on all of those. And so, you know, people saw the and were hoping for, we’re looking ahead towards the perfection of morals and of society, just as we would perfect science and technology. And there was a belief and a hope that the new prosperity created by industry, the connections created by communications and transportation. The interlocking of peoples and economies created by trade, that all of this was leading to a grand new era of world peace, and perhaps even that war was a thing of the past. And the world wars completely shattered that illusion. They were, I believe, the most destructive wars in history, um, certainly they were enormous, highly destructive wars, and of course they were made more destructive through technology. You know, in World War One, we had chemical weapons, we have poison gas, right? We had the automatic guns, we had towards the end of the war, I think the tank.

00:38:44 - Speaker 2: One really powerful way to get your head around how shocking that was, the role of technology in essentially killing people in mass numbers is there’s this excellent history podcast called Hardcore History, and they had a series, I think it was like a 6 or 8 hour series on World War One, particularly the beginning of it and some of those first battles, and you know, at the start of that war, I don’t know, they have like French cavalry. Riding into battle with their blue jackets and their big puffy hats and their sabers on their side, and then you look at these battles where they pull out these new weapons that have been developed over the course of the previous few decades, and they’re able to just kill in just such efficient and brutal ways and it was just so shocking that war just took on a whole other meaning and I Listen to that whole series just as I first moved to Germany, which is of course a place that has very deep scars, cultural and otherwise from both of the World Wars and yeah, it was a really powerful thing and for me, even I tend towards techno optimism. I think I tend towards that like technology is unbalances for the good, but then listening to these kind of contemporary descriptions of the destructive power of the technology of that time. Again, it’s kind of a reality check.

00:39:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and then World War II, of course, was even worse. I mean, you know, World War 2 was the wizard’s war. If people could catch a glimpse of the role of technology in war in World War 1, it was very obvious by World War 2, right? I mean, we had planes and, you know, bombing runs and radar and and then to wrap it all up, the atomic bomb. And I think that when we think about people’s fears about nuclear technology and nuclear power and energy, I’m sure that a significant amount of it was the association with nuclear war.

00:40:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m pretty sure in a film if they ever want to give you the feeling of, I don’t know, technology’s gone too far, society’s gone awry, I feel like there’s a little montage of this in the Fifth Element, great little sci-fi movie from some years back where they showed that mushroom cloud, that is the icon for we went wrong somewhere and yeah, technology was a mistake, basically. Yeah.

00:40:54 - Speaker 1: So I think the World Wars were very significant in the psyche of the world overall, especially the West. But at the same time, I think that events affect people’s views of themselves in the world, but they don’t determine those views.

There’s always a question of interpretation. And so, for reasons that I’m not yet clear enough on.

To talk about them, people interpreted the wars in the aftermath in a particular way and in a way that caused many people to turn against technology as such, and in the phrase that you used to throw the baby out with the bathwater and to, you know, rather than saying, Well, we have put a lot of effort into creating these technologies that have made us very powerful, and we haven’t put enough effort into creating defensive technologies or creating safety technologies or Instead of just saying, well, our attention and effort has been misplaced, let’s refocus our efforts so that we make sure that progress serves mankind and not destroys it. I think a number of people turned to a particular kind of counter-enlightenment sort of romantic notion that had really been around for a long time. Had always been around in some form, a kind of a back to nature, you know, very Roussoy and sort of down to technology, back to nature, and let’s just live simpler, quiet lives rather than trying to sort of move forward and make everything better all the time the noble savage. Yeah, exactly.

00:42:22 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s an interesting angle in terms of the World Wars causing perceptions to be negative on progress. The people being negative on progress is interesting, because I think it’s kind of both a cause and an effect. It’s a cause for the reason that you just described, but I think something also went wrong around. The 70s in terms of how well the system was working for a lot of people.

And so to some extent you had people more or less rationally saying, this isn’t going well for me, I don’t want to sign up for even more of it. And this connects to a broader theme I have around our social technology. And I keep using that phrase, to me, that means the systems, the governments, the organizations, the norms, the patterns of behavior that we have that determine how we operate day to day.

It feels like that technology is becoming a worse and worse fit for purpose in the sense that a, it’s sort of Decaying, it’s becoming bloated and it’s losing the plot, but also the world is changing a lot, especially with information technology, and our social technologies largely haven’t caught up.

So this is why I keep coming back to this space as being a really important frontier.

We need better ways to organize and motivate our work as a better fit for our modern world. And I’m pretty optimistic that if we’re able to make progress in that domain, it will in turn facilitate progress in other areas like people feeling that the system is working better for them and also areas like funding more impactful research.

00:43:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s definitely true. I think that they’re reinforcing cycles in this, as with many things, I think in society, where the more you value progress and honor it, the more of it you get, and then the more people can see that it’s valuable.

Conversely, the more that you are fearful of progress and try to block it, the more you get technological stagnation, which then leads to people saying, well, what has technology done for us lately? You know, I don’t really see how technology is making my life better, so maybe it’s not even a thing to bother with or invest in.

It takes some cultural leadership with vision to break out of cycles like that. It takes somebody who can see beyond the recent past and see a different type of future other than what we’ve had to take things in either a positive or a negative direction.

00:44:27 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think there’s an opportunity both for people to innovate within the system and to help create new systems.

So as an example of the former, I would probably give Elon Musk, you know, he’s basically operating with the parameters of existing governments and organizations and Our model for capitalism, he’s like, I’m going to Mars. It’s kind of a mess to get there because of all this weird bureaucracy, but I’m doing it anyways, you know, good for him.

And I think we also need stuff like Routes of Progress and ink and switch where it’s like, OK, let’s try to change the game a little bit here and rearrange the pieces. And I hope we can encourage people to operate on both fronts.

00:44:58 - Speaker 1: Absolutely.

00:44:59 - Speaker 2: Role models is another thing I think I would like to see more of and Jason, you referenced the celebrating achievements and yeah, the tickertape parades for Lindenberg when he crossed the Atlantic, celebrations of scientists that contributed to vaccines and things like that. And I don’t know if it’s an effect of kind of our TV oriented culture or something else, but when you look at the role models that people are likely to just the famous people, people are likely to name or people that kids are likely to say, I want to be like this person when I grow up.

You know, they play sports, they’re actors, they’re maybe YouTubers nowadays that we aspire to be maybe political leaders and to some degree, there is, yeah, the kind of tech world, folks, the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and so on.

But maybe we don’t have enough celebration of, and again it becomes a cycle, either a virtuous or non-virtuous cycle that if you celebrate the people who do these great achievements, and then people look at that and think, I want to be like that, I want to do what they do, and then you get more of those people.

00:45:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I do think that is part of the cycle, and yeah, in one sense, one of the biggest things that Elon Musk has contributed to the world is just people look up to him as a role model of like, wow, here’s somebody who’s defining really ambitious technological visions for the future and then going after them full throttle. And I think there’s a lot of people who will come in his wake and be inspired by that, him and others like him who are doing things like that.

00:46:26 - Speaker 3: I think that this idea of role models is super important because so much of human behavior and action is basically imitation, and so much of what we do is influenced by who we just basically happen to be around.

And so it sounds kind of weird, but you can make really different stuff happen just by putting different people together. And this is why one of the frontiers of social technology that I’m so bullish on is different types of organizations and replacements largely for what was previously the university.

Which are basically an elaborate mechanism for getting a bunch of weird people in the same hall, and there’s all kinds of apparatuses happening around that, but that’s the core engine of it.

And I’m excited to see people exploring new models that try to get that same core dynamic, but that leverage the internet so that the routes of progress community would be one of those, for example.

I think there’s just so much more to do there, and I’m pretty optimistic that we’ll figure out some cool stuff. So a lot of work to do here. Jason, is there anything in particular that you’re looking forward to working on next or that you are looking for help on going forward?

00:47:20 - Speaker 1: Let’s see, so a couple of projects that are big for me right now. So one is over the summer, I created a high school program in the history of technology. We ran it initially as a summer program and it’s now being incorporated into the history curriculum. Of a high school, private high school called the Academy of Thought and Industry, and I’m continuing to do some curriculum development for them and really excited about how that’s gonna turn out.

I think high school is a great time to begin learning about the detailed history of technology and how it’s improved everybody’s lives.

The other somewhat longer term project is that I am working on a book. So I’m gonna take the writing that I’ve been doing at the Roots of Progress and the kinds of stories that I tell there about the development of technology and how it changed the world and I’m gonna be putting it.

Together into something a little more long form and comprehensive, so that is kind of my main focus right now.

Can’t say at this point how far out it is. I’ve still got a lot of research to do, but that’s the biggest driving thing, you know, for me right now and the thing I’m most excited about.

00:48:26 - Speaker 2: I’m really excited about that one too, not least of which because I think a book makes a field or a movement more tangible in some way, but also because you were nice enough to give me a peek at the list of chapters and yeah, I’m even with all of the reading I’ve done of your material, I think having together in this long form format will be, well, something I’m really looking forward to.

Well, it may be a fun place to end.

I think an interest that Jason and I both share is jet travel and particularly supersonic jets, which had an interesting story here. I think just recently this company Boom has been out doing kind of big product rollouts to announce their basically prototype of their supersonic jet, but I got really interested in this when I read the biography of one of the main, what you call it product managers, maybe the lead of the team that worked on the 747. The 747 is basically the plane that defined the modern airplane.

When you see planes designed before that, they look kind of old timey, and the 747 and that have come after it share kind of the same rough body shape and the same style of interior and that sort of thing.

So it really ushered in this new era of air travel, but one of the things that’s powerful to me about reading this book, both because I’m a. person and I like hearing the inside story about how the stuff evolved, but you realize it was just a guy, very smart guy, and he had some really good predictions about the future and what these technologies might enable for travel, but you saw, again coming back to that theme of progress is a thing we can decide to do and work towards as individuals.

He had a vision for more wide travel. He saw the technology could make it possible. He got Himself in the position to work on that project and made it happen and basically ushered in this modern era of travel, which, putting aside the last year of relative lockdown has been an absolute golden age where essentially most people have the ability to get on a plane in a major city and go to almost any other city in the world for a relatively affordable price, which is a really amazing breakthrough when you think of it.

But we also thought at that same time that the 747 was being developed or the industry feeling was supersonic was the future. And so at the same time they were sort of designing and developing the 747 and some of the related technologies, there was also the development of what would eventually become probably the Concorde is the best known of the supersonic technologies, but that actually turned out to be a dead end or had this eventual abandon. where essentially a combination of the air pollution from the sonic boom, the fuel cost, and a few other factors meant that even though we have this technology that would allow you to fly, say from Paris to New York in just a few hours compared to the usual 6 to 8 hours it takes us across the Atlantic, eventually we shut all that down. And now there’s a new company that’s working on it saying basically some things have changed, some technologies have changed. We can do something different, but I find that story or that evolution to be an interesting example of progress as first of all, something that individuals drive and decide to do. Obviously in groups and through mechanisms like capitalism and government funding and all sorts of other, all those social technologies that Mark talked about, but ultimately it is just people deciding this thing they want to do.

But also this path of you. About the revolutions that we have, we had a revolution in air travel, but then we also thought there would be a similar or a next step change in travel based on supersonic, and that actually didn’t turn out to work out, or at least we stepped away from it. And maybe we’re coming back to it now, maybe we will be able to make it across the United States or across the Atlantic in just a few hours, but that remains to be seen. But it was exciting to me to see that banner picked up again.

00:52:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the speed of passenger aircraft over time is one of the clearest graphs you can look at that just sort of shows the stagnation of the last 50 years, right? It was going up and up and up, and then it actually went up to supersonic, and then it went down. We actually regressed, right? Forget about stagnation.

00:52:37 - Speaker 3: This is actual regress, especially if you count the time in airport security lines, which is increased significantly.

00:52:42 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, which ties back to the safety emphasis topic.

00:52:45 - Speaker 1: And the regress in passenger airplanes is not unlike and in fact came around the same time as the regress in space travel, right? We used to be able to go to the moon, and then it right at a certain point, we didn’t even have the Saturn 5 rocket anymore, and our space capacity had actually regressed. And in fact, there’s an argument to be made that you can chalk both of them up to very similar causes.

Both supersonic passenger travel and the space race were pursued primarily as government projects for government glory, I mean, for lack of a better word, they were put out there for national prestige and to show off technological capability. And they weren’t set up to be economically sustainable, right? And that was a real problem with Concord, wasn’t making enough money.

So I think part of the lesson of these things is that big showy government projects can temporarily push the frontier forward, maybe much faster or farther and earlier than it otherwise would have. And maybe that has some good effects, but they can also set areas up for regress and stagnation for decades. The way to make something actually long term sustainable is to give it a sustainable economic model, which means a profit model. And so I’m excited that both supersonic and space travel are coming back as private efforts from for-profit companies that are setting up sustainable economic models to actually make them profitable, make them pay for themselves in the long term. That’s how they will stick around and how they’ll grow.

00:54:18 - Speaker 2: So Jason, given everything we’ve talked about, do you find yourself at this moment optimistic, pessimistic, or somewhere in between about progress?

00:54:27 - Speaker 1: Well, I think it’s important to distinguish between two types of optimism, and I’ve used the terms descriptive optimism and prescriptive optimism. So descriptively, you can predict what you think is going to happen, or, you know, whether we’re on the right track, whether we’re on a path for good or bad outcomes. And I’m somewhat ambivalent, frankly, at that.

I think part of me wants to be optimistic or is optimistic. I think there’s a lot of good things going forward, you know, the vaccine efforts against COVID are just like a great example of what we can do when the best of our science and technology comes forward to. a major problem. For people who don’t know the history of vaccine development, developing a vaccine in like a year or less than a year is amazing and basically unprecedented. Generally, vaccine development is something that takes decades, and so this really shows how far some of our technologies have come and what we can do. To use a cliche when we put our minds to it and put our efforts into it and our resources. But you know, there’s a lot of things to make one pessimistic as well. I mean, the US government’s response to COVID has been mostly incompetent. I think there is a lot of buildup of bureaucratic craft, a lot of our social technologies, to use Mark’s term, are not in such a great state. And so I think we’ve got a lot of work to do and in some ways, you know, have slid backwards. But I think it’s important to distinguish that kind of prescriptive like descriptive rather, are we on the right track from the prescriptive optimism or pessimism of what should we do about it? And prescriptively, I am always and ever an optimist. I think no matter how bad things are looking. The only thing we can do is to step up, bring our best efforts to the game, and, you know, even if we’re on a bad path to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. I think that the future is not determined. I think that it is up to us, and I think that we should always believe fundamentally in the ability of human intelligence when properly applied to solve problems and to make the world better. So, descriptively, I’m sometimes an optimist and sometimes a pessimist, and it’s very case dependent. But what I’m not and will never be is defeatist, and I think there’s a lot of defeatism out there, you know, the notion that combining perhaps a descriptive pessimism with a prescriptive pessimism that essentially tells people to give up, or to scale back our ambitions or maybe even to deliberately regress to a safer or, you know, more comfortable world. So prescriptively, I’m always an optimist. Forward, you know, let’s confront the problems, no matter the odds, and let’s do our best to make the future better.

00:57:01 - Speaker 2: Can’t think of a better place to end than there. Yeah, right on. If any of our listeners out there have feedback, feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or via email, hello at museapp.com. We always love to hear your comments and ideas for future episodes. Jason, thanks for inspiring those of us who are working on building the future, and I’m looking forward to reading the book.

00:57:24 - Speaker 1: Absolutely, thank you for building the future and thanks for having us was a great conversation.