Hi, it's Brendan here, and you are about to listen to my conversation with a fascinating

Matt Ridley.

I just wanted to let you know that we recorded this next door to a room that was pretty noisy,

so there is some background noise but don't worry you can still

hear the whole thing and it's really worth listening to enjoy. We're witnessing a gradual shift to something that looks much more like direct democracy.

You know, this is the birth more like direct democracy.

You know, this is the birth pains of direct democracy.

You know, that representative democracy is fine,

but we are going to have to get used to the fact

that people want to express their view directly through these new technologies and things

and that a referendum is a genie out of the bottle and is not going back in.

Hello and welcome to the Brendan O'Neill show with me Brendan O'Neill. This is a podcast in which an esteemed guest joins me to talk about the big ideas, the bad

ideas, the problems and the controversies of life in the early 21st century. In this episode, I am delighted to be joined by Matt Ridley.

Matt is a businessman, a journalist, an author, and perhaps most famously and unusually an optimist.

Matt writes a weekly column for The Times,

and he also contributes to the Wall Street Journal.

He is the author of numerous books,

including The Origins of Virtue, The Rational Optimist, and most recently,

the Evolution of Everything.

His books have sold more than a million copies, and they have some impressive fans. Mark Zuckerberg described the rational optimist as

very important and powerful while also saying that he had some major disagreements

with it too.

...