Welcome back to the Tim Blocks podcast and hello again if you're watching on the Manhattan Institute YouTube channel.

I'm Brian Anderson, the editor of SETI Journal. I'm honored to be joined today by Johann Noberg.

Johann joins us from Sweden. He's well known to an American audience as an author, a lecture,

a documentary filmmaker. He writes on a numerous range of topics, globalization,

popular science, a lot more economic growth. He's a senior fellow at the Cato Institute

in Washington, D.C., and at the European Center for International Political Economy in Brussels.

Johann is here today to discuss his terrific new book, Open, The Story of Human Progress,

which is a finalist for this year's Manhattan Institute, Hayek Book Prize.

The Hayek Prize is an award that we give out every year to an author

whose book reflects Friedrich Hayek's vision of economic and individual liberty.

I'm proud to be a member of the jury for the award, and I'll be interviewing all of the finalists this year on the podcast and for our YouTube channel.

I know Johann is honored to have been nominated. He actually

opens his book with a quote from Hayek, which I'll ask you about later in the interview.

So, Johan, thanks very much for joining us. Thank you, Brian. I'm glad you liked the book.

As revealed in the title of the book, you identify openness as the key fundamental ingredient that explains what you call the story of human progress.

And in your view, this is more true than habits, culture, ideas, any of the other kind of explanations

that are often put forward to describe progress in history. Can you give the nickel version

of your thesis of this book to start us off? Well, it is a very Hayekian perspective, which goes something like this.

There are specific cultures and attitudes and systems and institutions that are particularly useful,

helpful to encourage innovation, growth and decent societies, but we just don't know which ones.

So we have to experiment and we have to learn.

Civilization is a learning process and openness is the basic institution that helps us to do it

...