Anton Howes is an innovation historian and policy thinker. He’s written a brilliant history of the RSA - the royal society for arts, manufactures and commerce - arguably Britain’s national improvement agency over the last 260 years - and is the RSA’s Historian in Residence. I recommend you check out his book, Arts and Minds. He writes a substack newsletter blog on innovation thinking that has won an award from Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures. He has a day job as head of innovation research at the Entrepreneurs Network think tank and in my mind is an all round excellent thinker on innovation. His paper on re-thinking copyright here.
We discuss raising the prestige of innovators today, but consider it easy to say but harder to enact.
Anton argues for the benefits of a “great Exhibition” as a direct mechanism to inspire an “improving” mindset - the type of mindset that leads to innovation.
Anton shares what he has discovered about how invention has happened in history; and whether stagnation has happened or not recently, that it might be good to send a signal on the importance of innovation in any case. Why incremental innovation might be underrated, and why the process of innovation (ideas, iterations) is not publicised more.
Anton discusses evidence that formal education has not been needed for historic inventors (an improving mindset being potentially more important) and whether there are more than enough innovation prizes currently.
We have a strong section on problems with copyright and how rules around copyright might not be fit for purpose today and how to pronounce “gimcrack” - a useless invention - and why having more gimcracks might be a sign of healthy innovation.
A fascinating walk through innovation history.
See the podcast below, video above and unedited transcript below.
Transcript (edit light):
File Name: Anton Howes chats with Ben Yeoh on innovation history, the improving mindset and progress studies
Length: 01:26:11
Benjamin: Welcome, everyone. I'm super excited to have Anton Howes with me today. Anton Howes is an Innovation Historian and Policy Thinker. He's written a brilliant history of the RSA; the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. That's arguably Britain's National Improvement Agency over the last 260 years and he's the RSA's historian-in-residence. I recommend you check out his book Arts and Minds. It's a great read. He writes a Substack Newsletter Blog also on the ideas of innovation thinking and that has won an award from Tyler Cowen's Emergent Ventures. He has a day job as Head of Innovation Research at the Entrepreneurs Network, think tank and in my mind is an excellent all-round thinker on innovation. Anton, welcome.
Anton [00:00:45]: Thanks for having me on.
Benjamin [00:00:47]: Alright, so let's go straight in. So, productivity and innovation; when you think about value and welfare and maybe items that are not easily recorded in economic measurements. Do you think the decline in productivity or this period or possible innovation stagnation that some people have argued for recently has been perhaps somewhat overstated or not? And do you think we're entering another era perhaps now of an enhanced invention and innovation?
Anton [00:01:17]: Yeah. So, I tend to take the view that if it has been overstated, it's perhaps in particular realms or particular industries. My view is that there's actually more innovation than ever that the acceleration of invention has only accelerated all the more to the extent that in the past would have been considered quite groundbreaking stuff. Nowadays it seems boring. The 10% improvement in the textile industries doesn't have quite the impact that a 10% improvement in the textile industries would have had 200, 300 years ago. We see ever more diversity in products, we see ever more changes to logistics, to transport infrastructure, to the kinds of foods that we can eat to the kinds of experiences that we can purchase, what we can do with our leisure time in constant changes to the quality of the kinds of goods that we use, the materials that we use for them, and it's become so common for us to get. We're so used to those sorts of changes that I'm not convinced that we've had any kind of particular stagnation. Now, where I can concede a point is that perhaps in the really big headline stuff, the sort of things, for example, that Robert Gordon might point to. Maybe there've been slowdowns in particular realms or the introduction of radically new household items, for example, that everyone's going to use. Perhaps there's been some kind of change, but by at large, I think we've had a continued acceleration of invention.
That said, and this is a point I make quite often; it's no bad thing to be worried about it. Even though I might disagree with people who think that there's some kind of stagnation, I can see it being a good thing to say that there is a stagnation because if we do get the technology of the future a little bit earlier than we would otherwise have done, because of that concern, then that sorts the good. I'd rather have the future faster than have the future now if that future is one of technological progress and continued improvement and so on. So, a useful myth perhaps, although I think it’s well worth promoting and to a large degree, it has a big impact in the creation of this progress studies banner largely. Thanks to Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison, you know, others that have been working on this, or they've been kind of circling around this idea for a long time. The big impact that we've had as a sort of lightning rod, is that suddenly people who were already working on this sort of thing, but kind of circling around and, or didn't have a name for it, now have got a banner under which to do those sorts of studies and that's been useful.
Benjamin [00:04:02]: Yeah. And fast forward to today, there's some evidence that they slightly changed their minds. That actually a lot of innovation is happening, or rather we've seen it maybe in some fields like Biomedical. Your comment that leads me to think also around the difference between incremental innovations or things we kind of think of incremental and those transformational ones, and maybe also specific versus general-purpose, but maybe on the incremental versus sort of transformational. Do I sense that maybe we underwrite those five to 10% incremental innovations? The ones which might not even be worth a patent or something like that, but slowly improves over quality and it is quite hard to measure.
Anton [00:04:45]: Yeah. I think we generally do. We like to focus on the headline stuff. Partly because it's sexy. These exciting new products that kind of come out of nowhere and we think of the first big apple; showcase events with Steve Jobs standing in front of those people, wowing everyone. We think of these big launch events, but the reality is even if we look at those inventions or those innovations, when we boil it down to it, it's actually a collection of small improvements that have just been kept under wraps for a long time. We've allowed those margin improvements to accumulate to this point where, when we reveal it, it appears as though it is magic. And that, I think, is something for all of history as well. The steam engine is another great example. If you look at the development of steam engines, it is a story drawn out of decades and even centuries of margin improvements to its efficiency, margin improvements to the ways in which it can be applied, and so on. Margin improvements turn our understanding of how it works, then over time it results in this transformative technology, but there isn't any single inventor who kind of had 'the' one big breakthrough. Now, even when we talk about that, we actually have to split the credit across a small number of people. When we actually start to look into the very details of their invention, we actually split the credit even further. But even with any particular adventure in that regard, it's not necessarily that they had some kind of annus mirabilis, the sort of thing that people think of. When the pandemic started, a lot of people noticed that Newton seemed to have his plague. He was particularly productive. That's not really the case.
He writes a lot during that year, but it's actually still as a result of the accumulation of a lot of work that has been going on for years. So, that I think is what's happening. Then there's another thing worth mentioning, which isn't just that margin improvement is underrated. And often, not even measured, right? When we think of inflation statistics, for example, when we talk about real GDP, we're actually often discounting quality improvements because we're trying to equate the television of today to the television of yesteryear. Even if we actually compared the two side by side, they're obviously not the same. So, the money we're paying for these things, no inflation statistics are supposed to look at a set basket of goods, but the basket of goods that we use has changed radically. It has to be rebased every few years because of the changes to the diversity of products that we purchase and to the quality of those products as well. I think that often we understate in our statistics just how much improvements are going on there but the other point is that each of the industries that we have; this is what I call the Paradox of Progress. Each of these industries we have has become smaller as a proportion of the economy as a whole. I mentioned textiles earlier. Textiles used to be massive. We're talking at least 15% of the economy in Britain in the 18th century, but today, in the major textile exporter in the world, China, it's less than half of that. It's about seven percent based on the kinds of estimates that I could find. Now that's a massive industry today and we're talking all aggregate. Many more textiles have been produced, millions and possibly billions more textiles have been produced each year, but as a proportion, even of their economy, it's shrunk. So, any improvement that you have to this smaller industry as of; the industry itself is bigger, but the smallest proportion of the whole industry is going to have less of an impact on the economy overall. But, if coffee were something like 50% of the British economy, then the arrival of Starbucks and all the increased improvements for the autosomal coffee makers would put them on par with James Watson, John Kay, and Richard Arkwright. … or whoever you want to mention, right? Because of the impact that that would have had, but it's become the smaller thing and I think the paradox there is that through invention, we actually create new sub-specialism out of previous specialisms. Textiles have gone from overwhelmingly in England, let's say, being well to adding things like silk and linen and cotton, and then you've got all of these newly invented artificial fabrics; the nylon and the various kinds of polyesters, and so on. That there is invention. That's creating these improvements or creating that diversity. And as a result, any improvement to the sub-fields has a smaller apparent impact than an older invention of a very comparable sort would have had before.
Benjamin [00:09:21]: That brings to mind two reflections. One is on your first point about people not understanding incremental innovation and I'm sure we've talked about this. It's because the person in the street doesn't have a very good idea about what innovators do, how innovation actually happens, you know, small teams, big teams, corporate, and the like, so that will come out of there. They missed the incremental because they don't know it's kind of happening. And then on your second point about essentially the challenges of the mismatching of inflation, big TVs versus other TVs. I felt this generally over welfare. So, my example within healthcare is how we view pain. Now, we have ways of managing pain and, you know, talk about something extreme, like terminal illness in your last couple of weeks of life. You can now spend those last couple of weeks pain-free. I don't exactly know what the value of that is, but I'm guessing it's pretty enormous to you, if you could particularly last two weeks, you could have exchanged half your worldly value to be in your last month and to know your family is pain-free. You would maybe be making that decision, but because we have very cheap pain medications which being around all the time that nowhere in our measurement do we say, "What is the actual welfare value of being pain-free?" And that's one small example of where I think some of these general inventions or even that are quite hard to measure because actually, the value to us is extraordinarily high, but not in a dollar way.
Anton [00:10:58]: Yeah. Or, even on a societal level, I think medicines have a lot of really useful examples there, and that there are all sorts of drugs that have been developed year after year. Which are treating very specific diseases which may be a handful of people in the world suffer extraordinarily from. This is like debilitating stuff. It's the sort of thing--
Benjamin [00:11:16]: It gets narrow and narrower.
Anton [00:11:18]: It gets narrow and narrower but we've actually seen extraordinary improvements in the treatment of a lot of those diseases. But just because there are a few people, I don't think it means that progress has slowed down. Maybe on the big stuff, you know, the cancer research and the Alzheimer's and so on that affects millions of people worldwide that have been slowdowns of some sort. And even then I'm actually skeptical because it seems as though there has been dramatic improvement in the treatment of even the headline diseases. But the fact that we're having this incremental improvement that's still ongoing and actually sometimes even accelerating in these kinds of smaller cases. Their smallness is only comparable to looking at society as a whole and thinking things in this kind of frame metal way.
Benjamin [00:12:00]: Yeah. I look at healthcare quite a lot, and I agree that healthcare biomedical progress is still happening at a reasonably fast clip, obviously quite hard to measure. They maybe argue about how much we're having to spend to get that progress. But even there, I think it's a little bit unclear. So, you have this idea or a vision for a kind of grand or great exhibition as a mechanism for people to understand invention and innovation closer and maybe be inspired to invent and fix problems for themselves, but almost as a direct mechanism. Would you like to elaborate on why you think a great exhibition is such a good idea and actually maybe what you would do if you're organizing one? This in the UK has got a kind of mini one may be in the offing, but you know, how should we really think about the great exhibition both in history and what we should do now?
Anton [00:12:52]: Yeah. So, a lot of people think of the world's fairs and they'd be right in doing so, right? They camped at the Great Exhibition of 1851. The famous one for Crystal Palace as being the first of its number. Not that there was this idea of world's fairs coming out of it. It's just, that was the first one and they've kind of backdated the first of their number to that one. The problem is that nowadays world's fairs, I think, have become very much a national branding exercise. They're highly curated. You've got conference designers putting together exhibits that they think the public will like for a sort of mass market. You've got country stalls, but the country stalls are going to be the sorts where Britain is trying to show off particular things that it wants to show off at the time. I don't know. It's got buzzwords that some ad agency has come up with that it wants to promote. Various other countries will have certain cultural things they want to do. They're trying to get tourists along. It's a PR agency kind of-- I'm trying to think of the word that it's kind of delightful … They're kind of a grand international and they get lots of visitors and some of them are extremely popular, but that's not what the original exhibitions were. So, the Great Exhibition of 1851 is copying the French model of the industrial exhibition. Which is a highly commercial event in the sense that you have lots of businesses, but also individuals and scientists and whoever else all over the country and who are producing things. These producers should have this opportunity to showcase the best of what they're doing. By showcasing the best you do two things: you allow producers to educate one another by sharing best practices.
So, if you are a cotton manufacturer and you get to see what your rivals done in the south of the country and you're in the north of the country and you're like, 'Wow, this stuff is amazing, here's where I needed to catch up.' Here are the inventions I need to adopt in order to raise my game, then that sort of does it. So, it becomes an engine of invention in that respect. In another respect also, you've got the fact that by putting everyone in the same room or in the same building and in just the space of a few months, you're potentially going to create all of these connections amongst people. The Great Exhibition of 1851 happens to coincide and it's not a coincidence at all with the First International Chess Tournament. Now, World Level International is one that they're trying to organize and likewise with all sorts of other initiatives for international standardization. You start to get the first proper conversations about standardizing things from the postal service to telegraph rates too late with the later world's fairs, including things like musical pitch which hadn't been internationally standardized before. So, you've got those kinds of conversations that might spark further invention and then from the consumer point of view, if you are just an ordinary visitor to these things, you might be exposed to products that you hadn't even realized you wanted. In the same way, that constantly happened through advertising today is that often the main effect of advertising is just reminding you that you might want something already or just exposing you to a product that you had no idea was there. So, the highly commercial things, which I think nowadays a lot of government bodies will be uncomfortable with, perhaps explains even at the time, why the Great Exhibition despite the fact it has this Royal Commission that set up to organize it is still ultimately a private event. It was a for-profit event. The profits are reinvested in the creation of what ends up being the kind of museum model.
I think that rollout the other memorials; the Victorian Albert Museum, the Science Museum, all of that. That's a kind of cultural hub known at the time as Albertopolis, named after Prince Albert for being the kind of national head of this project. Ultimately, it's a for-profit thing with these nonprofit kinds of aims. Very strangely organized, but also the funding doesn't come from the government. It comes from subscriptions. I think today you'd actually have to probably copy that model fairly closely because it probably has to be something that's crowd funded to a certain degree that has private capital going into it to a certain degree that allows you to then do those quite commercial things. Like have people sending their exhibits and be able to use it as advertising and not get uncomfortable about you tendering processes and fair treatment and so on from the use of that event. I think it's the sort of thing that requires some kind of government involvement. Certainly, you're going to need permissions, you're going to need perhaps policing, you're going to need insurance kinds of questions that need to be sorted out. There are all sorts of things that need to be solved, but the way I like to think of it in modern terms is if you imagine some of the great big industry fairs that you see often for specific industries. Imagine all of those rolled into one super event. So, not just seeing the very latest in drones or software, but also the very latest in bathroom design, arts in general, sculpture, pottery or building. Just absolutely everything that you can think of jammed into this super events. The kinds of things I'm envisaging would include; if we do manage to genetically engineer dinosaurs and so on. Those would be featured if we do manage to sort of-- This isn't the right thing to say because I'm kind of going to raise Jurassic Park kind of concerns. Whatever is the next level of technology that we're just about to hit, it should be showcasing that like everyone doesn't see robotics.
Benton [00:18:26]: Robotics! Yeah. People moving things with their brain.
Anton [00:18:30]: People don't realize that today people are going around in mixed suits lifting heavy objects in factories. This is happening already and it's the sort of thing that is otherwise consigned to fiction. Like Iron Man kind of suits sort of exist in some very specific ways.
Benjamin [00:18:49]: Yeah. Although, I think to some of the other work you've been doing, it's sort of a bit of a false presumption that you've got this kind of rich Tony Stark, which is going to make an Iron Man suit in terms of how invention actually happens. So, I think that's a brilliant idea. I do think there's a touch with a huge big tech conference, which happens in Spain every year. I don't know. You might be fascinated to know when we do the real person in life thing again. Amazon, on their AWS side, have this big conference and I went around to one of them. This one is free with this idea and thousands were there, but it was really just the people who were interested in Amazon tech and it's open to the general public, but it wasn't. This is the problem about the fact that we've had advances in so many areas. This is just the little pocket of Amazon world. Like you say, "Where's the medicine? Where's the engineering? Where's the networks of fact? Where's the deep mind? Where are all of these? I think it would be a great thing although, I wonder about the scale of it to really happen. We need to cross all of these things, but it would then show that actually, we've made progress in so many of these different fields compared to where we were and that's part of it.
Anton [00:20:00]: Yeah. I think there's the benchmarking, right? With the original industrial exhibitions that are copied to the great submission. In France, they start these off in 1798 and every few years they have a new event. The idea at the time was that, out of patent fees that would be funded. The French ones were state-funded ones from this particular accrual of fees and then they were kind of holding the vendor for a few years. And then you have this benchmarking process, you're able to see how much has this particular industry progressed in the country versus where it was before and people started to get worried. The reason the Brits copy it is because they start to look at the levels of mechanization that are being achieved in France and starting to worry that France already has this lead in fashion, but if it also catches up to the lead that Britain had in any kind of mass production of things, then from an international trade perspective, the competition is really coming in and something needs to be done about it. The idea behind having the international exhibition was not just to celebrate British accomplishments, but actually to reveal shortcomings and it's used as a tool by reformers to point to things that need to be done by the government from a policy perspective. That's again, another very valuable thing about it. Which I think it can reveal who's ahead and who's behind along these certain metrics is I think often very valuable information that you just don't otherwise come by, right? Especially when it's in this kind of qualitative way. You can do all of the quantitative studies you like, but ultimately seeing is believing. Especially for policymakers.
Benjamin [00:21:32]: Yeah. For certain. That's one of the things I got from your book Arts and Minds; were I hadn't appreciated in the early history of the RSA and actually its whole history into the modern-day. This idea that there was a nation-state element to it is like, we will better the world as a sort of side effect but we should definitely better our nation. And then if what we do spills over to the rest of the world, that's great, but we need to ensure British inventions or British things don't fall behind. Therefore, this is why we're going to gang together and do that. This is what you might call an enlightened self-interest. It was seemingly quite a large driver which could kind of remain today and be utilized. You do not think even in a globalized kind of framework.
Anton [00:22:25]: I think there's actually a globalized justification for this kind of nationalism. In a way that if you have lots of countries like Britain; Boris Johnson said, "Oh, I want this country to be the best place in the world for scientists and inventors or something to that effect." I can't remember the exact words but that's a useful thing to what every national leader can say, right? We should be encouraging every national leader to do that because then we can get a race to the top of the kinds of institutions, the kind of support that invention gets worldwide. Some people often say, "Why?" But then given the agglomeration effects, given that usually the real driving force happens in the place. It's where people are most concentrated. Surely, we should just get everyone over to the kind of valley or whatever is the latest version. I don't know. Miami or there'd be lots of new ones lately, right? But to the Silicon Valley or newer Silicon Valley, we should just get everyone there and have the kind of agglomeration effect from everyone being so concentrated. But in actual fact, we want other countries to be the next place because that way, even if that particular hub starts to fail or starts to decay or starts to decline in some kind of way, then there's going to be a new place for them to step to.
Benjamin [00:22:31]: Most countries should be able to sustain at least one, if not more than one type of hub. It's kind of interesting that there are so few hubs of Silicon Valley's nature....
Anton [00:23:43]: Yeah. I mean, I suspect there were more hubs but for small specific industries that we give credit to. Think of Nokia and so on coming out of Finland and I think there were particular industry hubs of certain ways and Silicon Valley makes a big headline impact because of the fact that you've got these very successful companies making a lot of money and kind of attracts people to that as well.
Benjamin [00:24:05]: What role do you think innovation prizes should play or not? Because also, when I was reading your book, I was sort of struck by how many essential innovation prizes, all those types of things, seem to be around. And when I look at today, there are some, but don't seem to be the level and scale, also adjusted are the money and prestige available versus that. Do you think we should be having maybe more innovation prizes? I guess it's gone down the world of VC and accelerators in a different form of funding. But, I was intrigued by how many innovation prices there seem to be about versus today. Or maybe.....
Anton [00:24:47]: Well, today it seems like there's loads more. It's just that there's certainly a lot more money available by prices. I don't know about prestige available by prices and that's a slightly different thing. Now, certainly we're not talking here for a kind of more general listeners about things like the Nobel prize which is sort of lifetime achievement of prize, but more for a specific longitude style prize. Here's a particular problem. If you find a solution is 'X' amount of....
Benjamin [00:25:14]: That would be a more environmentally friendly cement or....
Anton [00:25:17]: Right. So we've got the 'X' prices. Elon Musk has got his various prices. I've seen all sorts of other particular ones. I think Prince William just announced a new prize with someone else for environmental purposes. I actually remember at one point even the RSA did a study on the number of environmental prices saying, 'there's too many and we need to start kind of...'
Benjamin [00:25:38]: Okay. Alright. Well, I take it back. There's not a problem with the number of prices, maybe it's the prestige essentially.
Anton [00:25:44]: Yeah. Or, perhaps the money is too spread out along between too many different prices and that actually is not sufficiently motivating. Now, the problem with prices I think is that just like a lot of innovation policies in general, it affects the direction of invention, but I don't think it actually does much to increase invention as a whole. If we think of there being a kind of pool of inventors; they have limited attention spans. There's only so many things that they can be working on at once. And what prices do is, people follow the money generally speaking. So, if you attach pools of money to particular activities, they're going to direct themselves towards those sorts of things. Now, that can be extremely useful. And one of the valuable things, I think that the Society for Arts did was it often tried to have prices that will be available to people who otherwise wouldn't have access to sources of funding. So, there might be people who are too poor for patents. They might be too gentlemanly too grubbing themselves with commercial things hence, the kind of prestige elements or they might be for prizes that aren't worth patenting because they're either too niche or they’re not for profit things there might be safety improvements where the profit-making isn't as obvious as a kind of, lying to them or they might use them to direct people's attention to the sorts of things that people were working on.
So much more humanitarian kinds of things to do so it includes how to rescue someone from a river who's drowning? Improvements of how to prevent carriages from overturning? Improvements of how to put breaks on steam engines? Improvements to the lifeboat and so on and so forth. All niche which actually often does have this hidden humanitarian aspect to them but isn't as obvious in hindsight like, improvements to carrying fish over land rather than sea so that you could break the monopoly of the Billingsgate Fishmongers because there's this social concern that monopolies are taking advantage and raising prices of basic commodities and so on. You have all of these. I think those are the particular uses of prices that I think people should focus on when designing them is that they should be about directing people's attention to things that aren't already being done. I think there's a lot of work on environmental stuff. I can see why they're environmentally focused prices, but the more specific they are the better. So, something like, I want a price that's going to take carbon out of the atmosphere is much better than a general environmental prize nowadays, given the value it has at least getting existing inventors to look at particular problems. The other lacking thing is definitely prestige. I think sometimes the prestige comes with the amount of money that's given out.
Benjamin [00:28:26]: Sure.
Anton [00:28:27]: Nobel Prize being what is it, a million dollars I think, or equivalent there too is a big deal. And so, the larger the prices, the better. Probably Elon Musk's one will have a big impact for a similar reason. Given the kind of amount of money that can be winnable, but even then, I worry that it's just going to be people who already were working on those problems just applying for the grant or applying for the prize money rather than it stimulating other people to work in.....
Benjamin [00:28:55]: New people, which is one of the good effects of a Great Exhibition. You might get a general public person thinking, 'Oh. I could do this. I've got this problem I might want to......'
Anton [00:29:05]: Prices can be combined as well. The Great Exhibition had a prize jury, right? That would look and try to find the best of the best within each category. Internationally drawn group of experts and they would give out prizes. In France, for the National Level Ones, they would hand out to Alicia and Donair to someone who happened to be the best of the best within some of these categories. There're ways of combining those two which might actually make the price stand out even more by being associated with the event rather than having a price and building things around that.
Benjamin [00:29:41]: Sure. I think one argument I've heard you articulate is that formal education may not necessarily be a good predictor for invention, which I think is quite interesting for people who aren't going down a formal routine; I can be an inventor. Do you think this is still true today? And, why might that be? And you have a small movement say, "Peter Thiel has these fellowships where you're purposely not allowed to go to university because it might open up different avenues of thought." So, I'm interested in whether you think maybe formal education is not needed for being an inventor today and perhaps why that might be?
Anton [00:30:24]: Yeah. I think invention itself is more of an attitudinal thing. I like to describe it as an improving mentality that the people who do invent things are people who see room for improvement where other people perhaps don't. Then, they work at solutions to the problems that they've created. So in a way, the first step is kind of whining and complaining about things saying, "Oh, this could be better. It's not so great after all." And not being satisfied with the way things are but what makes them much more interesting than just people complaining about things is that they actually try to find the solutions as well. It's those two things combined which I think is the most interesting thing to look at. But, the first step really ultimately is against people who are saying it is broke and I want to fix it rather than kind of being satisfied saying that, 'if it ain't broke then don't try to fix it.' The problem identification is the crucial thing there. And then what happens after you've identified the problem is that actually you don't necessarily need to have been skilled in the industry that you're trying to improve there. That's typically inventors. You just self-educate which is easier than ever today. Thanks to the kind of information technologies that we have.
To the extent that things like YouTube have opened up tacit knowledge to us in a way that wasn't really there before. It could be getting the expertise to solve a problem that used to involve at least spending a few years with you doing an apprenticeship, copying someone else, and trying to get those kinds of tacit things that can't be written down and communicated just through the written word or text. Nowadays, I think video is breaking that barrier to the extent that you could effectively do an apprenticeship with someone a million miles away and it would be just as good or close to as good. Or, they rely on other experts in the same way that for you to have a life-changing app idea, you don't necessarily need to be a software engineer. You can rely on other people and as long as you've got a clear idea of how you're going to go about all of the improvements that are being envisaged there and that you can still be an innovator in that way, but with a bit of a division of labor going on. And that's where I think teams when they innovate, they actually do it properly. There are people who are doing different stages of the invention process; the ideation, the implementation, the iteration, and then improvements along certain lines alongside that as well. I have forgotten the original question, but that...
Benjamin [00:32:59]: It was the formal education that was needed and basically your answer is no because mindset is more important. Which means...
Anton [00:33:07]: It could help, right? So, it's yeah. I qualify there is, but obviously if you are a software engineer, you come up with an app idea that is helpful. If you already know about the process and you know what's possible, for example, you know some of the limitations and with that said, sometimes the only limitations can be a bad thing, right? So there are cases in history where sometimes the complete novice actually had an insight into these things or not so much had an insight, but was willing to waste their time in experimentation in a way that the experienced person wouldn't be. So, Bessemer and steel is a great example of this, where he was told by all of the IMS legit, 'Don't bother. It's not possible.' And he says, "Well, I wouldn't have a go anyway, because that's just what he'd been doing for decades." He's already been an adventurer in all sorts of other ways, but he says, "You know, I had nothing to unlearn," and that was the benefit there. And that he was kind of rebuilding something from scratch. Now, not everyone's going to be a Bessemer. Some people might kind of listen to this and start to reinvent a field and discover that actually, the experts were right all along for years. But eventually, it's inherently wasteful in many ways, right? Experimentation is inherently waste...
Benjamin [00:34:13]: A lot of failures or…
Anton [00:34:16]: There is a lot of failure or...
Benjamin [00:34:17]: ......or learning. "Fail attentive learning," they say. F-A-I-L. This is why I'm really excited by your idea about this mindset. First of all, it goes into all of these books where you had the growth mindset. Now, I know you've got the scale mindset and things, but it is not just curiosity. Although, curiosity has a problem complaining as an element, but then going to do something about it and maybe this idea of stamina, like keeping at it as well. So, these qualities, which are just subtly different from just being curious about the world. I'm curious. You can read a lot about it, but then you have to do something and then not quite give up, you kind of keep going on, which I think is really interesting.
Anton [00:35:01]: So, I think there's one thing. This is a really important point that you're raising here. I know I haven't even let you finish the question, but there is an important point here which I want to tease out. Sometimes out here, kids are naturally innovative. The problem is the education system has stifled kids. They're naturally experimental, they're natural thinkers. Now that's true. I think kids are naturally creative and a lot of us are in general. And that sometimes, we learn conformity in some ways or sometimes our creativity is poo-pooed enough that we kind of give up on certain elements a bit, or we kind of restrict ourselves in terms of the kinds of things we reveal. But that's not quite what I'm talking about when it comes to the improving mentality. It's that yes curiosity and the kind of creativity is maybe extremely useful in finding those solutions, but there's a lot more direction going on, right? There are a lot more kids who are experimenting with this stuff aren't necessarily identifying problems and then finding solutions. I don't think that's going on. They're just tinkering and creating random things, but they're not necessarily thinking about the applications of those things or their usefulness. Now, maybe once in a while, maybe one in a hundred inventions turns out to be the reason that way. Where someone just kind of randomly doing something and through the kind of natural bubbling up of their creativity that they create something that they then think, 'Okay, it solves this problem.' But that I think is actually one of the problems with how the public at large thinks about the invention is that we almost have this idea of maybe, it is used to be people in some R&D Lab in some major company like Xerox or something or Bell Labs. Nowadays, it's just a bunch of people in smart suits sitting around a whiteboard and, or maybe not in smart suits but in t-shirts and shorts sitting around a whiteboard and coming up with ideas and brainstorming. But in actual fact, I think when it's people just noticing the problem and saying, "Let's find a solution." That's when creativity comes in. Perhaps as useful as a kind of means to an end, rather than the engine itself.
Benjamin [00:37:03]: Yeah. As you hinted to earlier; the sort of ideation or the idea, but then whatever you're doing. Say modeling, prototype, testing, iterating, an idea it's like, 'Oh, maybe we need to shave off this, move that, do this prototyping, iterating and measuring. Oh, it may be that went the wrong way so, maybe we need to do the reverse.' That sort of effort involved being directed much more than just, 'Oh, genius. I thought about that idea.'
Anton [00:37:30]: I've been calling it the optimizing mindset in some ways. It's like people have these-- who's your friend who has an Excel spreadsheet for like a particular activity that they do. And that optimizes the efficiency of that particular thing. I know a few people who have applied that to like going to the gym or something, right? That's self-improvement, it's actually still an improvement. It's the same mindset at play there. It's that they've realized there's a particular activity they do but they also want to make sure they do it as efficiently and as best as they possibly can.
Benjamin [00:38:01]: Yeah. I agree. I guess the one extra I would add is if you're working in a small team or large team, you don't need necessarily everyone to have that. Because you might have the one person who's working much more on the ideation or how to tweak it. It's still their underlying current because that's what your team is working on, but someone's very good at the kind of recording, measuring, iterating and someone's kind of very good at like, 'oh actually maybe we should try this or maybe we should try that.' Actually, that leads me onto this sort of follow-up about how invention works, because I guess when you go back 300 years ago maybe you did have these kinds of singular inventors. They do worth speaking to a lot of other people, but maybe it was just them and some of their assistants, but today it very much seems to be more small teams, large teams. I'm interested in whether we should back the person or the project. What do you think works best for innovation? What are the strengths and weaknesses between smaller teams, larger teams, iterative teams, and all? Do you think this is a myth? I've said its myth, so maybe it's not of just the lone inventor. How true does that actually happen and how important is teaming and thinking about that for innovation?
Anton [00:39:17]: Yeah. I think if there's a division of labor amongst people, for me, it kind of brings to mind as though invention is something that happens by committee. The people sitting around the whiteboard; I don't think that's what happens. I think it is much more divided. There's a lot more individual effort that's then combined in the same way as science overall, right? And you have lots of scientists doing their own thing and then through their interaction we get science, right? This kind of thing which is accumulated and kind of, not even accumulated, but often being tested kind of knowledge. Where there's a lot of individual effort then through various other impersonal mechanisms combined into something else of its own. I think that's what happens with technology as well. I think what happens with invention is that we should think of it as something that happens on the individual level and we should seriously take the fact that people who work in teams are definitely individuals doing a bit of invention. But it's through their combined marginal improvements that we sometimes get for the invention, right? If we want to start putting it into a box. That again, is why this ultimately comes back to focus on marginality. Let's focus on the small tweaks and implementations and small changes. We were right to say that an invention isn't just the product of a single genius necessarily, although it might be. But even that thing is drawing upon prior improvements, right?
Benjamin [00:40:57]: Sure.
Anton [00:40:58]: Newton famous said, "He could see further because he stood on the shoulders of giants, right? That's something that all inventors must do. There's no way that they're not doing that. They're building on previous improvements that other people have done. That's either something that happens outside of a team because you've got some inventor down the garden shed who is working on a thing and has read about something that comes up with their own improvement. But I don't think them doing that is actually that much course, it's qualitatively different than if they'd been in the same room with the person, they just read about their invention. They're kind of bouncing ideas off one another. Perhaps bringing the inventor from their garden shed and into the room will speed things up a bit. And that's perhaps where the team comes in useful, but ultimately, it's still individual.
Benjamin [00:41:42]: Do you have a view? Some of the literature suggests that at a certain point a certain size of team doesn't work as well when you're working on a project. In extremist, I think if you're getting 300 people to work on something, it doesn't seem to work as well as three to 12 people or teams. Although the project is a bit mixed, you are going to have many experiments on it. Do you think you'd have a view there or is it hard to say?
Anton [00:42:09]: I don't know much about the intricacies of innovation management, but where there is a problem often is in what you might call the research element that you have to do to prevent yourself from doing any wasted research of your own. If you are someone who comes up with some improvement to the mop and you're going to get your patents on that, even if you're not, it's not necessarily going to exploit it. That commercially is going to be your proof that you are the inventor of this margin improvement. You're going to have to go and do a whole lot of research before you even start...
Benjamin [00:42:52]: I think...
Anton [00:42:54]: ...doing much of the tinkering to work out if your things are original, and someone hasn't really done it. Now, when you have hundreds or thousands of people all working on those sorts of improvements, that becomes a bit of a slog and requires wasted effort, almost doing research for people to even kind of do the search before they even start doing other stuff. That's where I can see is being the problems today, that there's such a proliferation of stuff. There's so much going on that it's difficult to know where to put your own intentions. There is this very harmful idea that there's nothing new under the sun. In actual fact, very often, the sun has not seen a lot of interesting things that you'd think were quite obvious. But I think having that extra bit of self-confidence to be the person to say, "No. This is actually regional and no one else has done this." I think a very useful attribute of inventors is what some inventors are accused of and the innovators accused seem to be quite egotistical. Maybe there's a kind of correlation there between the people whose bold enough to say, "This is brand new." That someone who would...
Benjamin [00:44:02]: There seems to be a partial element of that. You think of someone like Elon Musk, who thinks of himself as an engineer is just somewhat off mainstream, can sometimes seemingly be helpful. Actually, large teams and small teams are what people are conflicting theories over, I do think there is a duplication element. There's also an element of potential. You want to follow the person rather than the project and if you have 300 people, not all of them really want to be on the project and just things like that. But I was interested and didn't have a view, but if you were then in charge of a corporate R&D lab, or maybe say in Tech or Software or even Biology. Do you think there's a way of organizing or having an insight of over history that you think maybe they could do a little bit more and therefore be a bit more effective? Or, is it too unique to the culture and projects of the actual organization to have any insights?
Anton [00:45:00}: That's a really interesting question. Now, what's interesting about my own research is that it's almost the wholly concentrate over the pre-lab era where it's the overwhelming individuals doing stuff often in concert with one another. And, they're a part of communities of engineers where they're all working on their separate thing. Yeah. I guess...
Benjamin [00:45:19]: ...don't have. Yeah. That is interesting whether the modern world has something to learn from how we did it before. I'll re-ask the question, which was if you're in charge of a corporate R&D lab or thinking about R&D today. Are there any learnings that you might've had from your historical perspective on innovation?
Anton [00:45:42]: Yeah. It's an interesting question because largely the period I've studied is that one before the rise of the corporate R&D lab. Which is kind of in the late 19th century kind of thing, it really takes off in the 20th century. We've seen a decline since then in the mid-20th century and late 20th century in particular. A lot of my insight is from this era of individuals. Now, they're not necessarily just people who just work on their own in isolation. They're certainly a part of communities of engineers; London engineers. The people who were starting the kind of standardization that you have of mechanical parts. These are the people who are doing their individual stuff possibly with their own individual companies. It's their apprentices who are going off and setting up rightful companies that are using other kinds of machinery, but it's still improving on the standardization, that's taken place at the parent company, where their previous masters have been doing stuff. Ultimately, it was something that was done by individuals there. So, in terms of lessons from it, it's hard to say. Now, one possibility there is that over the course of the late 19th century, we saw the improvements in the process of invention which then gave rise to the corporate R&D lab. I think there's possibly something to that, but again I couldn't say for sure. That's kind of an open question for me. It's still something I'll have to work on, in the future.
Benjamin [00:47:17]: Well, if we'd solve this, then progress studies would not be such a hot topic, in terms of how we think about progress. You might not have anything to say on this one either, but I will ask it anyway. So, that was on the corporate R&D lab, but then here in the UK we're about to launch ARIA, which is modeled on the US DARPA or ARPA-E. It's aside from NIH, but I guess we're talking about government-funded innovation labs. I was just thinking if you were going to give a bit of advice to the new executive director, or maybe you would be the new executive director of ARIA yourself. What do you think it should be doing or not? And, given maybe another preamble to work into this because there is this idea now that maybe we should be sponsoring more people rather than projects. And, if you look at little labs at the moment, they're often led by a lab leader who's having these ideas, and then they have three to 12 people or teams working under them with their own kind of research projects which they are feeding into and then constantly talking with the lab director of thinking, let see how we do this. Actually, even in corporate R&D labs there is a touch of that. Although it's changed a lot. The UK R&D seems to be going to do a program management approach, but it does seem to be quite open. Executive director, UK ARIA, is there any advice for them?
Anton [00:48:50]: Yeah. So, I guess the question is about the model that's going to be adopted here. I think one of the things that you often hear, at least within the mythology of DARPA ARPA is that it's funding; if the kind of blue skies research that doesn't necessarily have a particular application yet, and you just want to see where they throw some money at people doing all kinds of research without having to answer too many questions and have too much oversight and see what happens and then perhaps start looking at applications. Now, maybe there's something to that. I guess, I still think an organization like that needs a kind of framing of problems. In terms of strategic oversight, I think I've always assumed that there's a problem in the back of people's minds. Perhaps, another model that we need to look at here is what happens during World War II. Where you have in the UK and the US you have these kinds of defense, or you have experts in various fields brought into close proximity and asked to find things that will help the war effort. So, you've got some framing of problems there, and perhaps you have specific problems identified for them to solve, and then that's the kind of research model that the individuals through conversations and through just their own research would be coming up with solutions to work on. There was a book I read a few years ago. I'm not sure how historically accurate a lot of it is because it was a biography. It focused on the achievements of an individual. It was called Churchill's Iceman.
Someone who works in one of these World War II British laboratories and is coming up with ideas like, instead of building these fast aircraft carriers why don't we use icebergs and create artificial icebergs, and then you can land planes on them. Now, I don't know how feasible that work is, but he also comes up with all sorts of other ideas which do have interesting applications, like trying to draw the Germans out into Norway. Through the use of troops on what would be later become snowmobiles. This is pretty interesting fun work, but again, even though it sounds quite random and sort of out there, it still has that basic purpose that the application is actually at the forefront of their mind, not even at the back of their mind. This is the strategy that we should use, and here's a way to solve that strategy, even though this means that is quite creative and out there. I think there's potential that ARPA or ARIA ends up giving a lot of funding to people who are working on interesting things and just for them to carry on doing those things. But, where I think things get really interesting from the kind of state-funded model isn't so much the blue sky stuff, but it's actually, which I think a lot of the universities-supported sector really does. But it's more in solving particular challenges where a lot more investment in solving those challenges could be very useful. So, perhaps something to do with climate change. I don't know. The governments all have their strategic kind of ideas about things they want to have improvements in.
Benjamin [00:52:01]: Yeah. I have a personal view that they should be looking at some of these things where there's a lot of public goods, but private companies might not necessarily be looking into it. And, some things which are sort of controversial or anecdotal which could just do with better study, like personal productivity. If it's really true that if we can work in psychological flow and be that much more productive, then surely, we should be doing lots of research on something like that. Or, if it's really true that intermittent fasting is really going to work for you? That's not something that a private company is really going to ever make that much money from to be interested in. Therefore, we should look at it like, people think educational mastery may or may not be a thing, but actually the work is quite patchy and no one's going to really look at it. We should really look at how progress studies or how we teach these things which could be studied. But I think you're right. That it would stem from having a really interesting program behind it. Like, this is the application, this is how we're going to learn better and then get some kind of people thinking like, 'Oh wait, that's the problem. I really kind of want to work with them.'
Anton [00:53:12]: Yeah. The interesting thing is that ultimately, it's going to come down to who is chosen to work for those projects. So, even if we take the people; not projects approach, which I think has a lot of merits. Especially, probably more than most, I think that approach have a lot of merits. Then, which people are we choosing because they're going to have their own projects in mind that they're probably already working on and they probably want to get a bit of funding for. It's the strategic direction there. It's going to be very important. So, whoever's in charge is going to be having to make some hard decisions because whoever they don't choose, perhaps it's not going to be working on this thing at all.
Benjamin [00:53:47}: Yeah, that's true. Then, there's that mystical but very important culture piece which I think goes back to your kind of inventing mindset of having a culture of rewarding or thinking about like this and the tension between not knowing what you're doing so that you can do something a bit different and new, but then working in the field. I think about Paul Graham's Y Combinator, and that part has seeded this whole model of seed in VC, which has been really important. The way he tells it is, he partly did it because he didn't know he couldn't do it. Right? So, that model came from that. Although obviously, he had all of these other things, but then the other thing about why it's been very difficult to replicate in other countries is because there's something particular about the culture and the people that you also form, that makes it work. Y Combinator really works for that, but essentially you haven't, although it's seeded a lot of other ideas in that whole thing, you haven't actually had a UK Y Combinator, for instance...
Anton [00:54:49]: Yeah.
Benjamin [00:54:51]: ...or actually any other one really. So, it's this really weird blend which I'm hoping progress studies make some insights into, but we certainly don't seem to have the...
Anton [00:55:01]: Yeah. I think in that case, success breeds success. There is two steps. If you had a lot more people in the UK who get very rich and successful off of their innovation in particular, and didn't just retire to the home counties to some big match and not talk to anyone ever again, but then decided it's up to them to also give back to the community and inventors in particular, not even necessarily giving back a lot of money to charities, but decided that the thing they want to do is raise the next generation of themselves in some ways. Then that's what you require for that to happen. For it to be bottom-up, I think you...
Benjamin [00:55: 43]: I think this is the bet which we touched upon. The reputation or prestige, or want to call it life purpose. This kind of intangible thing to touch upon about why you might want to do something right...
Anton [00:55:57]: People going to VC is crazy financially, it makes very little sense, I think. There's much more kind of secure things you could do with your money. I suspect throwing money at some crazy ideas, but the fact that it's a very prestigious thing for a successful entrepreneur in California to do is what's helpful there. Again, invention is wasteful. I think that the question is, how do you create a culture that can accommodate that waste?
Benjamin [00:56:21]: Yeah. I...
Anton [00:56:22]: And that's perhaps the key thing there.
Benjamin [00:56:24]: I'm going to say I learned a new word reading your book as well. I don't know how you pronounce it correctly as a gimcrack. Is it a practice gimcrack or a [Gimcrack]? [Different pronunciation]
Anton [00:56:35]: That's a good question. I think it's a gimcrack... [inaudible 00:56:36].
Benjamin [00:56:36]: [inaudible 00:56:36] Yeah. I actually thought that gimcrack is quite a good sign because if these are useless inventions coming out, which is what a gimcrack kind of means. It was kind of used in a slightly derogatory rate, but that's quite good because you're getting this flow of ideas coming up and you can recognize them as gimcrack, which is great. For every hundred, as you say, you're going to have 99 gimcracks to get one which isn't, and we don't have that...
Anton [00:57:03]: Yeah. It’s a sign that something that is working.
Benjamin [00:57:06]: It's a sign of something working...
Anton [00:57:07]: When there are bad ideas coming to you as an inventor, then that's actually a sign that there's enough people who think that being an inventor is a good thing. That you're getting the crazies and the cranks and the people who don't really know what they're doing, but they kind of have the wish to identify as an event. Yeah.
Benjamin [00:57:24]: Great. Okay. Actually, I got a few more questions. We'll see how we do in time. One of those is that success breeds success; is kind of what you said. I was really interested, particularly in history, which is probably different today; but why certain inventions didn't stick or also to your point that actually there were some small things or even not so small, which in some respect should have been obvious to a lot of people, but didn't. You give a lot of examples of small improvements industrially. One I've always think about is this idea that we've talked a lot about within healthcare now, but also in other fields of the double-blind trial, which seems to have to be rediscovered. We think that may be Captain Cook did one around scurvy. He gave some people lemons or citrus fruit. But it seemed to be rediscovered over the ages, but as a concept that maybe that was also prevalent in Babylonian times. But the idea of a not testing and trialing with one group and the other and comparing is actually the idea which could have happened and probably did happen quite a lot, but didn't really stick until relatively recently. And actually didn't move away from healthcare into economic, randomized controlled trials that we have today until relatively late. So, I'm interested in dispersion of invention and what makes it stick and is that a mindset cultural idea, or is it that something more complicated going on there? This is probably quite a difficult question to come up with, but I have thought about something like double-blind and then my follow-on thinking while I'm just talking is that the value of the double-blind test. This is going to the stuff you can't measure. Has been immeasurable. You couldn't do any pharmaceutical development until you understood that and that's something which doesn't go into measurements; some of these journal purpose ones. It's also going into economics and all of these other fields, because of that. So, that's another element, but I was thinking, what makes certain inventions stick or not? And has that changed? Is it to do with the mindset where something like double-blind or in your book, you have a lot of these things where you kind of look at it and go, Wow! They could have invented this a lot earlier and then someone did at this point in time and it stuck.
Anton [00:59:46]: Yeah. The question of, why certain things don't get adopted at certain times? Isn't a particularly fascinating thing. I think there's a certain kind of activation energy to adopting an invention and that can be the biggest hurdle because adoption is costly, right? The double-blind trial is a good example. If you're in a field where you're reasonably certain that something is true and you're probably not bothered to subject to this gold standard; very costly way of doing things versus the other things that are available to you. In medicine, obviously, the risks of creating something that then does something awful is perhaps higher than it would be in another science or in another field. I can see the kind of cost-benefit analysis for some of the same whether or not you adopt to something is perhaps very different there. I don't know the specifics of that case. One thing I have been looking into is the printing press and its spread. This can have advanced notice here. This is my next substack piece for me. A very long investigation of why the Ottoman Empire for about 300 years doesn't adopt the printing press for Arabic script in particular. So, that's Arab in Turkish. Both of those languages at the time haven’t been written in Arabic script and it's a kind of interesting question. In 1727, you get this official Ottoman Press. Before then, it's done by minorities but never in Arabic script. You've got Jewish printing presses in Istanbul. You've got Armenian presses being set up in Greek presses. There seems to be a few even Protestant presses in the kind of Ottoman-ruled Hungary. There's use of this technology, but it, for some reason isn't adopted by the majority or even by the kind of ruling majority in particular and you think that's kind of crazy. That's a very useful thing to have the printing press. Now, the thing is there are obviously counter arguments to it. You've got lobby groups against it, scribes, even in Western Europe. They were opposed to the introduction of the printing press. There were stories of scribes perhaps burning down the printing house in Moscow because they were angry at the printer who had set up there in the 16th century. I'm not sure how much to credit that story. At the same time, there are potential political concerns. Having seen the wars of religion in France, the ultimate emperor's probably like, 'Well, I probably don't want to introduce new ideas and new religious ideas into my country that might spread as a result of printing.' It has to be something that's either I have to have a lot of censorship or maybe I don't bother with censorship at all, or there's an even more present kind of boring view which is probably the correct view based on what I've seen so far which is that it's actually just a very costly thing to do. You require a lot of paper, you require metals. The printing press itself is a very large cumbersome piece of equipment, it weighs a lot. There were very small technical problems to overcome when it comes to Arabic scripted ligatures versus the kind of plain alphabet. We don't have to connect up the letters in particular ways.
Now, that's something that could be overcome either through adopting a script where you don't bother using ligatures anymore which is something that is possible or, you have to come up with improvements to solve it. There's another hurdle to overcome that, but enough of those small costly hurdles means that perhaps it's just the sort of technology that requires some kind of direction from the top. It requires patronage. Another interesting thing about the printing press even in Europe is that very often rulers in a country actually took active measures to introduce the technology to their country. They used patents and monopoly. They used funding and acted proactively to giving money to the potential person who's going to bring the printing press over from France or Germany or wherever, in order to spread this thing. I think very often a failure of adoption of certain things isn't so much that there's any particular blockage; so much as it is that there's just someone not taking the proactive steps to do it. That's what you see in the 1720s, is someone who goes on a visit to France in a period where there's also a kind of shoe-lift period in an alternate history. Where there is this kind of pro-Western approach amongst certain factions and the ultimate's court. Where they're looking at the Western saying, “Look at what France is doing.” We should have gardens and canals and printing and observatories and all these other things that, for some reason, our quarterly culture hasn't adopted for a long time. Even though it's had very strong economic and diplomatic ties to countries that have had all those things. I think very often it's nothing to do with a barrier per se, but just that you actually require an inventor to take a very simple idea from one field to another.
Benjamin [01:04:43]: I like your idea. You said earlier in our conversation that you need activation energy and that activation energy has to partly come from a person because it's maybe cost money technically and partly reputational, like someone's doing something new. Someone's got to take the reputational kind that's a bit weird, that's not what we do, right? So, you're doing something new and that almost always has to come from a little body or a person to go on. I'll do this, I'll normalize it and if it requires a little bit of technical or money; those are the extra hurdles on that. So, pivoting very slightly or not really because it's on type into this idea of copyright. I've read your very interesting paper on the idea that a copyright today is maybe not quite fit for purpose. This is a way that copyright things have evolved over time, but there's also an intersectional idea of that. I think risen from time to time, Matt Garcia said it more recently that copyright might be too long in the trade-off between inventions and that which is actually not a new idea. I think Milton Friedman also argued that maybe copyright is too long. And certainly, if you look at patents which are generally about 20 years, copyright is at 50 years plus that definitely seems long. I wondered whether you'd maybe sum up these ideas. Is copyright too long? And where are we going on digital as well? Have nations governments not really thought hard enough about the complications that will bring to copyright?
Anton [01:06:14]: Yeah. I think there's a whole load of this in a real thicket. I think in terms of intellectual property, copyright is the one that's most in need of improvement. Now, I do personally think the copyright is too long, you know, 20 years is a pretty good time to have a monopoly on things. Having your entire lifetime plus 50, sometimes even 70, sometimes even more years is ridiculous, right? I can see the case for being able to pass on ownership copyright to your children, but to your great-grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren. This is getting a bit out of hand especially if we have this idea that copyright should be a temporary monopoly. With the idea that it should strike a balance between promoting creativity, by giving an artificial monopoly at the start. Also not getting in the way of people improving further on the things that you've done and taking those things and running with them.
Benjamin [01:07:10]: It doesn't incentivize your children to write anymore.
Anton [01:07:13]: No. Not at all, actually it probably does exactly the opposite because they can live off those proceeds. Now, on the other hand, there is obviously an argument that the market around copyrighted works can emerge when it is property, right? So, you can have licensing regimes. Now, some of the things I pointed out in that paper is that for example, it's very difficult to actually often identify the owners of works simply because they're so old, right? So, even if you could work out who the original artist of something was; to work out who their great-great-grand child who happened to inherit the rights is actually almost impossible sometimes. Particularly given nowadays, that the process we have is that a copyright is vested in you. The moment you create something, the moment you have a fixed form. So, the moment I write a doodle down on a piece of paper, that's my copyrighted work. As long as it is original. Now again, the other thing there is I can simply assert my copyright all the time and just say, "This is mine." The only way we're going to ever test that is in court because there's no way of registering and then having the registration being contested like you would with a patent or with any other trademark or anything else. There's this great deal of strength in copyright. Now, the thing is a lot of that emerged in the context of the weakness of enforcement. Now, ultimately it comes down to the person who is claiming ownership of a copyrighted material to enforce their claims and to find infringes and to bring them to task and say, 'Look, you need to pay your license fees,' and to bring them to court. Now, I've noticed that in the past few years, the ability of bonus to enforce copyright is getting much easier. I think in the next decade or so you'll have a situation where we've got near infinite copyright, at least in terms of from the perspective of any creator with extreme strength. That is extremely easy to enforce because we've got so used to this idea that you can rip off CDs and have torrents and download all this stuff. Okay. We'll give the creators a SOP in terms of legal powers to try and prevent this stuff, but let's imagine a case where we can effectively automate. We can scrape the web for infringements and have automated services that will send subpoenas or whatever you require just like that without you even having to really go through the task of doing all these things. We're already starting to see these things emerge. I've noticed that people have been paying back license fees for using some stock photo that they just found. They've put it on their blog and they're getting emails; five, six, seven emails from some companies saying, "On behalf of the owner of the photographer, I'm trying to get him £ 10,000 off you for using this thing once," and then forgotten about it many years....
Benjamin [01:10:13]: Even worse than patent trolls.
Anton [01:10:16]: Yeah. Even worse than patent trolls in many ways. Now, the US system is kind of interesting because on the one hand it encourages some forms of creativity because there are all sorts of ways in which you can claim fair use. Now, the problem with fair use is it is self-contested. So, you see all sorts of different legal cases in the US where the next legal case can have a huge impact on what counts to be incorporated or not. Things like Fan Art; that a lot of people who upload Fan Art based on the copyrighted material will claim fair use for that. Now, in a country like the UK you just don't have that. We have what's called fair dealing which is basically just a few rules set out specifically that are exceptions to copyright. Ultimately in the UK, unless you happen to be within these very few five, six, seven exceptions, then whatever you're doing is almost certainly infringing copyright. If you happen to write some doctor who fan fiction and upload a book somewhere. You have broken the rules in the UK. Now, in the US you might be able to claim your fair use and maybe there's the chance that the BBC or whoever owns the copyright is not going to come and pursue you through the courts and try to get you to pay up. They may just simply ask you to cease and desist. But the fact that they can is worrying for the future. Now, the big worry is going to be video games. Right now, you see mods of sorts of kinds. I've seen popular games where there's like the Lord of the Rings Mod and the Game of Thrones Mods. These things are not licensed as far as I can tell. I can see no way that these things have been licensed and people are putting enormous amounts of creativity and energy into these things. For the better right, they're creating things that most people like. The meticulous things that load of people have put a lot of effort into and a lot of people are benefiting from, but they haven't paid for it. Often times, they're doing this thing not even for the profit themselves but they haven't paid for it and there's a very real risk that maybe not this year, maybe not next year, maybe not in next 10 years’ time, but maybe in a hundred years’ time; the children of the people who we're the owners of this original property is going to start taking those people to task for it.
Benjamin [01:12:42]: Yeah. Now, I agree. I think there's use to the other phrase. I don't think there's enough activation energy about wanting to try and look at this, but I do think so. There are a couple of ideas you propose, which seem really useful to take up. One idea is that maybe the patent office can be extended to rule on when a transformation might be a failure. In advance, that you can know these types of things; you found out five poetry transformations or fan fiction. Now, the only way we're going to accept those because they trade-off the other way. The other thing is when you get author copyrighted things. You can't find the original author and let's say it lapses after 40 years and you can get another 40 years if you relicense it. If the presumption is after 40 years, then actually it's lapse because actually 90% of the work doesn't have a value after that. It's something like maybe 10 or 20 cents, so the orphanage put it into that. Now, if you want to claim it at that 40 years, and you're active it should be very easy for you to continue that, but then to put the presumption within that.
Anton [01:13:45]: Yeah. So, with author works, the presumption at the moment is on the potential user. They need to basically pay a license fee and then it seems to be license for some reason will go to the person who claims it many years. Hence...
Benjamin [01:13:57]: For the sake of invention, it seems to be the wrong owners, right?
Anton [01:13:59]: Yeah. I think it should be on the owners to say, "This is ours and if you want to use it, here's where to find us now." That's the main thing. The analogy I like to use is imagine we had a property system where you literally didn't know who owned what and you tried to have a property market where something that has happened. While we don't have a centralized land registry, or it has all sorts of problems in the UK. We still at least could find out with a reasonable degree of certainty who owns the property through a bit of inquiry. But imagine you have some kind of artwork or when you have very complex media video games being a great example of where it's actually a combination of lots of different copyright rights. Now, on the IPO, being able to rule on stuff. This was me proposing that the UK has something like the transformative use defense or acceptation like they have in the US, but one which isn't going to be one that's constantly litigated over and where the boundaries of it are going to shift over time, but where the IPO can rule on these things and at least publicly say, " This is what we think it is." Now, that's giving a regulator a lot more power than they currently have, but it's potentially a good thing if it reduces the wasted resources that you might have on disputes.
Benjamin [01:15:20]: Yeah. You don't get the path to the regulator. You're essentially doing it to judge who are making common law and there tends to be more important cases like a Harry Potter fan fiction thing which may not be then readily applicable because you're only talking about these really high commercial level things.
Anton [01:15:37]: Well, the other thing is there is actually very little law to draw upon. So, what happens in practice is that loads of countries all over the world simply copy the US because they have a more contested system. Where people are claiming there's copyright and they're claiming it fair use and they're battling it out in the courts all the time. That results in a lot of other countries especially even the UK where there's actually very few copyright cases that even make it to court. Now, there's probably a lot that settled out of court, but because it's settled out of court, we're potentially seeing cases where people are paying non-owners for copyright stuff, but there's no president being set that people can then site. So, we're often following the US president. I think having proper guidance on these issues is better. Now, there are certain things in that report, were it say we should copy the EU in some respects. In other respects where we should definitely not copy the EU where they've strengthened copyright owner's rights in a way that you will have much bigger ramifications for other things. One that is hotly contested right now is whether or not internet platforms should take responsibility to basically filter what's even being uploaded. As to whether or not that's copyrighted before it's even put up. And, there's all sorts of controversy right now on YouTube about people getting stuff taken down and their entire channels deleted because they were playing something by Bach or Beethoven, which is obviously........
Benjamin [01:17:12]: Yeah. With a clip of five seconds of a little happy birthday in the background or something.
Anton [01:17:17]: Yeah. But, like the background where it isn't actually copyrighted, but someone is claiming copyright for a particular version of it that they're saying is being copied because a particular performance of Beethoven can be copyrighted, but obviously Beethoven is so long dead that this is in the public domain. Now, the fact that they're getting like the onus is on the person to prove that they haven't infringed is kind of interesting there. At the moment, it's much too geared towards the people claiming ownership. Now, the fact that the EU and a lot of other countries are proposing that it actually should be up to the platform to even filter stuff before it's put up. I think we're going to see some really horrible things as a result of that. Particularly, when you've got things like parody, for example, being at the moment exempted, like there's a real mind field of cases that at the moment I think are just waiting to blow up. But again, because the durations, it could be decades and it lowly become a scandal many years from now. We haven't designed these things for the long-term.
Benjamin [01:18:21]: Yeah. Now, I would agree and I think just too sort of finish off on this. When people are not aware like the US, they didn't have copyright on international works. That only came in the early 1900s. I think it's very interesting that there's an argument that you have two large biopharmaceutical companies based in Basel, Switzerland today because of where French dye patenting laws or process patents happened a couple of hundred years ago. So, you should look that up. That's really interesting about how nations use a patent laws defensively or offensively in that time. Also, in Germany and in fact, there's arguments that Japan itself only has a semiconductor industry because it held up IBM's semiconductors patents in the patent office for many years. Allowing their own home industry to essentially copy the patent before it's being issued to get them up to the scale and then issuing the patent when actually it was already not necessary. There's a lot more which goes on with IP copyright patents than perhaps it would seem I had lots of second order and third order effects.
Anton [01:19:36]: Yeah. How interesting. The problem with copyright actually is it's so internationally regulated. There are a lot of international treaties that you can't implement a proper registration system. Some countries do anyways. Like, the US has a sort of orphan works type get around where it kind of requires that registration be done for certain legal rights to be used, but technically the treaty forbids any such thing. So, any change that has to happen is now very difficult. It has to happen at a global level.
Benjamin [01:20:04]: Yeah. 180(+) country negotiation.
Anton [01:20:07]: Yeah. It's one of the very few things I can think of where the UK can actually take a different copyright regime...
Benjamin [01:20:13]: Yeah. Actually, post-Brexit is one area that you can actually do something different.
Anton [01:20:18]: But even then what I propose is a bit of adoption and a bit of difference it's....
Benjamin [01:20:24]: Cool. Yeah. So, definitely check out that paper. The last two questions would be, what did you learn from the US university system? I think you spent some time at Brown. Do you think the liberal arts way of doing everything is superior to the more narrow way of UK or is there a different culture? Any thoughts on your US University experience?
Anton [01:20:53]: Very different. Yeah. It's very interesting teaching students who are drawn from a lot of different fields versus people who are already hyper specialized from actually late school level. I think they're different systems, but they have their advantages. They have their pros and cons and it'd be best if there's just a mix of different systems that people use and I think it's good to have that diversity of systems. That's what I think the US is so interesting in. There are so many different university models coexisting which is less common in the UK.
Benjamin [01:21:33]: Yeah. My parallel thought is that the diversity of innovation organization and innovation funding is also something that maybe we should explore a little bit more. Not just one way of doing things, but because of where it plays.
Anton [01:21:48]: Yeah. I think more models is better than fewer...
Benjamin [01:21:52]: This is it because we get the flow of ideas. We get more of these gimcracks. Okay. Then, last question and in a personal productivity note is, what does a productive day look like for you? Or, do you have any sort of ideas on personal productivity or also any advice you'd like to give to independent researchers or who want to be inventors?
Anton [01:22:17]: A productive day for me looks like a lot of writing typically. If I was in, I'm usually listening to video game or a kind of epic movie soundtracks because they're often optimized. I think for concentrating on something other than the music and also being quite of an enjoyable thing to listen to, in getting into some kind of writing flow state typically for a few hours or so. That's a pretty good day for me. It's getting some writing down because writing is a very difficult thing in general. Even when you've done a lot of it, it doesn't quite get any easier to formulate things and put them on the page.
Benjamin [01:22:59]: Do you write every day?
Anton [01:23:01]: No. I definitely don't write every day. I know people like Tyler Cowen; I'm very good at somehow finding the time in the mornings to do that. I'm very much evening and night person though. I think that's a part of the problem. It's that evening and night is also like hanging out and watching TV kind of time. So, there's the two things initially exclusive. If I may be over time, I've become better at getting up in the mornings but I still find that a morning for me will go by very quickly and then I'll actually start writing a bit later on, once I've managed to let things go a bit. That said, I think bums in seats is the main way to go as long as you're certainly at your workstation doing something, even if it's reading before writing that's important. The other thing I find well in a good day is one where I've done a lot of writing. Sometimes, you've only been able to do that writing because you spent the entire previous few days just reading and taking notes and not actually doing any kind of writing for popular consumption or for wider consumption than your own. That's the thing that I often lose sight of and it can be a bit of anxiety-inducing, but actually is completely necessary to the whole project.
Benjamin [01:24:17]: Yeah. You need thinking time for sure. Any advice for others? Except these seems to be definitely keeping an idea on an innovation mindset, something like that. Is there anything else you'd give as advice?
Anton [01:24:32]: Yeah. I think the main message I have for people that are evangelist is that it's worth adopting the improving mindset. I think it's trying to find problems in whatever and wherever, even if it's not something you're particularly concerned in and think of solutions to it and it might be that you become particularly obsessed with particular solutions that can have an impact. Even if that impact isn't profitable, even if that impact is for just a few people, I think that's a useful thing. Self-improvement often affects you yourself, but it's still a thing that's worth doing all of the time. The more people who are affected by it the better or by any kind of improvement that you follow, and then once you've done those improvements, if they are particularly successful, I think the most important thing is then giving back to the next generation of people who are going to do those improvements. This isn't just something that I think is unique to Silicon Valley today and things like Y Combinator like we discussed earlier, but it's also the reason why Britain becomes the kind of initial Silicon Valley in London particularly in the late 16th, through to 17th centuries becomes the initial hub is because you have inventors kind of not just being invented but also using the proceeds of invention, or even the proceeds of other things they're doing to then promote invention still further. And it's creating those institutions and those norms and that kind of culture of being pro-invention as well as being an inventor yourself which I think are very two distinct things is the most important thing. So it's a sort of adopt the improving mentality and then actively try and pass it on.
Benjamin [01:26:05]: Great. Anton, thank you very much.
Anton [01:26:09]: Thanks for having me on.
