Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley is the author of How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom (2020), and co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 (2021)

The ‘experts’ who enabled RFK Jr’s rise

22 min listen

The nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr to be secretary of health and human services in the second Trump administration has horrified ‘experts’. A left-wing Democrat who admires the late Venezuelan Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez, hates big business, rails against the ultra-processed food that Donald Trump likes to eat and wants climate sceptics jailed.  But

The ‘experts’ who enabled RFK Jr’s rise

The nomination of husky-voiced, musclebound Robert F. Kennedy Jr – who once dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park – to be secretary of health and human services in the Trump administration has horrified ‘experts’, according to the BBC. A left-wing Democrat who admires the late Venezuelan Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez, hates big business,

Dam shame: what really caused Valencia’s floods?

Who is to blame for the devastating floods that hit Valencia on 29 October? The mob that surrounded King Felipe at the weekend and drove Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez out of town with a hail of mud and stones was angry at the failure to forecast the flood and warn people to get out of

How Ed Miliband plans to conjure electricity out of nothing

Electricity is magical stuff. From a couple of tiny holes in a wall comes an apparently endless supply of invisible, weightless, silent ether that turns instantly into light, heat, motion or information at your command. It is a metaphor for the modern economy: we use pure energy to create useful outcomes in the real world.

Is another pandemic really inevitable?

Future pandemics as bad as Covid are ‘a certainty’, says Sir Chris Whitty. He is right in one sense. So many people gained so much money, power or fame out of the pandemic that they will be all too willing to declare another one soon. The WHO is trying to vastly increase its budget and its

Matt Ridley, William Cook, Owen Matthews and Agnes Poirier

28 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Matt Ridley argues that whoever you vote for, the blob wins (1:02); William Cook reads his Euros notebook from Germany (12:35); Owen Matthews reports on President Zelensky’s peace summit (16:21); and, reviewing Michael Peel’s new book ‘What everyone knows about Britain’, Agnes Poirier ponders if only Britain knew how it

Whoever you vote for, the Blob wins

At the age of 66 I feel like a first-time voter. As a member of the House of Lords, I was not allowed to vote in the last three general elections. But I retired from the House in 2021, so democracy here I come. I shall scan the ballot paper with interest: who is standing

William Moore, Sean Thomas, Matt Ridley, Lionel Shriver and Kate Andrews

41 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: William Moore questions if the Church of England is about the apologise for Christianity (1:19); Sean Thomas recounts his experience taking ayahuasca in Colombia (8:13); Matt Ridley argues that private landowners make better conservationists (16:40); Lionel Shriver warns against pathological niceness in the debate about immigration (28:37); and, Kate Andrews

Private landowners make better conservationists

The Duke of Norfolk is best known for presiding over the coronation as hereditary Earl Marshal, but what really gets him excited is a native farmland bird, the grey partridge. Nearly 20 years ago he was appalled to learn from the veteran ecologist Dick Potts that the species was down to its last three pairs

Blue tits vs willow tits: a lesson in subsidies

I last saw a willow tit on my farm about a year ago. I’m searching for them again this spring, listening for their ‘chair chair’ calls, but I am worried that they may be extinct here. They are dying out everywhere: down by 92 per cent nationwide in the 50 years from 1967. And the

DNA profiling is a great British success story

Hardly a week goes by without a mention of DNA’s contribution to criminal justice. Last week Sandip Patel was convicted of killing a prostitute near Baker Street 30 years ago: DNA belatedly proved that his hairs were caught in her ring. A few days before, a double murderer, Colin Pitchfork, was controversially granted a parole

Virology poses a far greater threat to the world than AI

Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked earlier this year by his fellow tech billionaire Patrick Collison what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic. I think we can all agree that wasn’t a

Melissa Kite, Nigel Biggar and Matt Ridley

24 min listen

This week Melissa Kite mourns the Warwickshire countryside of her childhood, ripped up and torn apart for HS2, and describes how people like her parents have been treated by the doomed project (01:15), Nigel Biggar attempts to explain the thinking behind those who insist on calling Britain a racist country, even though the evidence says

Battle begins

40 min listen

This week: Katy Balls writes in her cover piece that after Tory conference the battle lines have now been drawn between the two main parties. She says we should prepare for a ‘presidential campaign’ ahead of the 2024 election and joins the podcast alongside The Spectator’s editor Fraser Nelson to discuss the dividing lines between Labour and

The new age of gullibility

Is the Loch Ness Monster real? Many thousands of people think so. ‘Existence “plausible” after plesiosaur discovery,’ the BBC reported. ‘Hundreds join huge search for Loch Ness Monster.’ Not only that. The Beeb had live coverage of congressional hearings about possible UFO sightings in July. It ran a series on the yeti the previous month

Science fiction: the crisis in research

The president of Stanford University, the neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne, has announced his resignation following an investigation into allegations of fraud and fabrication in three of his lab’s scientific papers, including one cited as the most important result on Alzheimer’s disease in 20 years. The report exonerated him of committing the fraud but found he had