Innovation Richter Scale: How Much Do Technology and Ideas Change World History?

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Innovation Richter Scale

imagine an asteroid is heading towards your apartment. You can save either your freshly brewed morning coffee or your mobile phone. well You probably intuitively know, which is more important to you. But do you know which is more important to humanity?

And if you just yelled, it's still the phone. Well slow down because history has opinions.

Imagine every invention ever was stacked on a giant Jenga tower at the bottom. Fire language. The wheel. If you pull one of these out, the whole tower collapses. Game over. Higher up we have jeans, Cheetos, a weird hanging basket. You ordered at 3:00 AM but where would Buddhism fit in this tower compared to say TikTok? Hmm. Well enter the innovation Richter. Scale with it. We can treat ideas like earthquakes. They are unruly, occasionally disruptive, but they are [00:01:00] also measurable. Most days we wobble through a few micro quakes. An app update here, a new emoji there. But a very rare few ideas register as continent splitters, rewriting human history.

And somewhere in our future lies an inevitable monster quake, ready to change everything we know. So if you've ever wondered if football is more important than credit cards, well by the end of this episode, you'll be able to rank any creation, a religion, or a recipe, a rocket, or a rat catcher. And I promise you, you'll never look at a toaster or an international treaty in the same way.

So hold onto your thinking caps. We are going to tour through a million years of civilization rocking innovation.

In one episode.

Why create a Scale?

[00:02:00] Hello and welcome to How to Change the World, where we look at the history and future of innovation, building a Matic blueprint to understand progress and possibly help steer it.

I am Sam Webster Harris, Your Curious Companion.

And today we are building a fundamental tool for our adventure, which is the Innovation Richter scale. This is an idea that I have adapted from Nate Silver, who introduced the Technological Richter Scale in his book On the Edge. However, humanity is shaped by more than just technology. So I am widening the lens to all innovation.

This means that we can measure the width, the depth, and the staying power of any idea in history.

And why would we bother doing this?

Well, when the Rick to scale was introduced for seismology and earthquakes, it was an essential step to spotting patterns it really helped develop better models for earthquake prediction and [00:03:00] management.

So I think a way to measure the impact of ideas could be very similar for us. It also at a personal level, lets us rank our own ideas without ego or opinion. And it might help you appreciate the quiet magnitude of the inventions that you use daily and perhaps rarely notice.

And in case you missed the first episode

and are wondering how we're going to use the scale, it's going to be our decision framework for the entire show. So each history episode, we will only discuss the most important ideas ever and we won't get lost in all the fascinating chaos and side quests of history.

And so today we will explore all sorts of inventions at different levels and their impacts on society. And I found the exercise of creating this episode endlessly fascinating.

So I'm treating you to some of my favorite findings.

Eathquake Metaphor

firstly, before we get into it, I'd just like to quickly explore the metaphor of the seismological rip the scale because it has two main rules that perfectly fit our own needs for measuring the impact of ideas.

, Number [00:04:00] one, seismologists measure the energy that an earthquake releases, which then affects how much it shakes the world quite literally.

And so a level two earthquake might rattle a glass somewhere whilst a level nine will literally break city blocks. Now we, of course, are measuring how much an idea shakes society

Which fits nicely as a comparison.

And the second rule is that the earthquake Rooter scale is logarithmic, and that's science Speak for a little Change is really a huge freaking deal. It means that for one point on the scale, you have 10 times the amount of movement.

So a jump from a three to a four on the Richter scale has 10 times more ground motion and actually 32 times more energy released

if you're interested in the details.

And this is crucial because it's easy to look a lot of inventions and just think, oh, they're all so important, but let's say you look at Post-Its or Velcro, the world without them would be very strange. , but they are a mile away from the impact [00:05:00] of aqueducts or democracy.

the thing about these two rules is it creates two big other similarities. The first one being the regularity of occurrences. So Earth sees millions of tremors a year, but maybe one magnitude level, nine quake a century, and one level, eight quake a decade.

And when we look at ideas and innovations, we see the same thing The second curious similarity is the concept of four shocks and aftershocks.

In the lead up to a full earthquake. You see an increasing rate and power of earthquakes. And then of course afterwards there are aftershocks. And with ideas Friendster, bebo, MySpace led up to Facebook. Afterwards we get things like groups, Farmville, marketplace,

Also separate innovation ideas lead up to a bigger quake. Sotouchscreens, iPods 3G, black Breeze, leading up to the iPhone, after which you get things like Uber, Tinder, Shazam, Google Maps, and once you've started seeing this pattern, you [00:06:00] can't really unsee it and the timeline of ideas in history is like a seismograph in motion.

And I'm sure you probably noticed that lately. There has been a lot of activity

Ranking Magnitude not MoralityInvention, Innovation, Technology

Okay. And now my final final point before we get into the spicy job of using the ranking system is that yes, this is a ranking system, but it has nothing to do with good or bad. It's about magnitude and not morality. Just as my height is my height,

Height is just a fact. It isn't an opinion, so let's say that you do love post-it notes. That's great. Me too, actually. But they aren't as impactful on society as electricity and yes, I think that's easy to be objective about, but if you were to start ranking something like football or maybe a religion, well, those might be very meaningful to you or someone else.

And if we were to compare them against the invention of language itself and the ability to [00:07:00] communicate with other human beings, well, we are just putting a number on impact and it isn't anything personal. So keep that in mind as I rank crucifixion to karaoke, horses to houses, Brexit to Bitcoin. Let's get into it already.

The innovation richter Scale - Level 1 - 10

I'll just start at level one and go upwards

Level 1 - Shower thoughts

firstly, a level one innovation is basically like a random thought in the shower. Perhaps you hum attune once and forget it. Maybe a witty pun that slips your mind. The impact of a level one innovation on the world goes no further than the momentary flashing through your synapses that disappears and is lost forever.

Level 2 - Actioned Idea (In private)

So let's move on to level two. This is an idea that you put into action, but it probably never goes beyond you. Perhaps it's the way you organize your suitcase or highlight your notes in the 15th century. Maybe a farmer puts a knot in his rope to hang his personal side,

but you know, that's it.

Level 3 - Public ideas (Not popular)

So we can move right on to a level three [00:08:00] here. We're talking about official ideas, something that you unleash onto the public, but let's say it has a low impact. Could be a recipe you share online, or a piece of science research that's published but never referenced.

In 1660, someone tried doing blood transfusions from sheep to humans, which was a disaster and quickly banned. Although nothing screams innovation, like trying to replace your blood with the blood of a sheep, sadly it was less of a medical breakthrough and more of a bad idea.

Okay, perhaps that was an un witty pun that belonged to stay in the level one category and should never have left my brain. I'm sorry. But level three is the place for messing around. So there you go. A different example of a level three could perhaps be, say somebody starting a podcast where only their family and friends listen to it and no one else.

So coincidentally, I have some reviews in for the show. It's great. What a journey this promises to be. Looking [00:09:00] forward to sharing it with you. That's from my mom, and I am looking forward to share the journey with you too. Mom, moms are the best Now, if you would like to leave a review, I'd be delighted to move the show from a level three to a Richter level four innovation, which could only be done with your help.

And now I shall actually move on with the show and stop messing around in level three.

as you are probably asking, what is a level four?

Level 4 - Popular and commercial ideas

Well, a level four is an invention successful enough that it has some popularity. People like it and use it regularly and share it with their friends.

Coincidentally, how all good podcasts grow. But seriously, if you were to think commercially, a level four invention can be defined by someone willing to pay you for it.

And at this point, it's worth remembering that we are on a logarithmic scale. So there's a very big difference between a 4.0 innovation and a 4.9 innovation here at the low end. You might have an idea that could create a single job, like a good YouTube channel or a patent [00:10:00] for a specific microphone to record bats with.

Great for like one person's job, on the higher end. Entire small firms might thrive off creating a level four innovation items like a fidget spinner or a robot vacuum knockoff, or maybe a really big YouTube channel.

Level 5 - Defining Brand

And now let's move on to level five where things get a little bit more mainstream. A level five would be like a product that owns its personal aisle. Levi Jeans that change work wear, it could be a brand that's shorthand for its category like Kleenex or Marmite. A level five might even reshape an entire vertical.

At the top end, you get something like the Gillette safety Razor.

When it launched in 1903, they sold 51 raises and 168 blades. Not a lot. But by 1918, the US Army was issuing them to every service man in the country, and Gillette was selling over 30 million blades a year. Competitors were retooling their factories, marketing [00:11:00] playbooks were being rewritten,

and the fashion of men's faces changed. and it became scruffy to be seen wearing a two day stubble. So level five is where we start seeing some real noticeable changes in society. And let's talk about money.

If you invented a category level five idea, that is enough for a fortune. A low end five could make you a multimillionaire, and a high end could make you a multi-billionaire.

However, the nice thing here is that although a level five has a widespread impact, regulators and philosophy professors aren't gonna start showing up with their clipboards and complaining about you legally or morally.

So overall, a level five is exciting stuff, But life takes along as normal outside of the innovation that that niche is within.

Level 6 - Innovation of the year

So let's talk about level six.

This is where an innovation graduates from a success within its niche to a culture wide shakeup. And it would be a contender for the invention of the year. [00:12:00] A modern example of a level six would be something like YouTube or Uber or Netflix. The scale is really ramping up quite fast. Already so let's discuss the hallmarks of a solid level six. Firstly, it will have ubiquity within its sector. By the end of a single decade, it will feel odd not using a level six invention.

Secondly, there'll be a cross domain spillover. So when the barcode was launched, it began as a time saving device for supermarkets, but it became an essential part of logistics and bookstores.

If you go to a hospital, you get a barcode on your wrist.

And then the third part of a level six is a visible behavior change within society. Airbnb made travelers comfortable sleeping in strangers homes, Skype and Zoom unlocked remote work.

And it's not just us. Members of the public who notice it. Economists will probably see a productivity change and start noticing entire new careers emerging. Regulators will [00:13:00] be scrambling to keep up. Just think of Airbnb and Uber that had entire new policy changes for cities.

However, despite all of this, at a personal level, you can still opt out of a level six completely. Like you don't need a Netflix account, you don't need to have the Uber app, and you still won't really notice a difference in your life.

Then, in terms of economic value, A level six would start at around a few billion dollars at the low end, and it would top out at around a trillion, maybe a few trillion dollars.

So as we're seeing, the logarithmic scale does have a big range, as I've mentioned. So we can quickly just explore the ranges here.

At the low end of a level six, you'd have something like the Post-It note or the Biro Tiny Gadgets. But on almost every desk on Earth

at a mid range, we might have Velcro or the microwave, or even pizza.

Yes, you might be surprised, but the global pizza industry is worth about $160 billion a year, the same as pasta. Then at the top end, you might have something like YouTube, which is worth $550 [00:14:00] billion. Coincidentally, the exact same value as the global sales of rice each year. Now, of course, monetary value isn't the only thing, so there is a fair argument that Rice provides the main energy source of three and a half billion people,

so that could make it more important than YouTube, as it's just one of many entertainment sources for two and a half billion people. And in fact, I'm sure plenty of people would rank pizza as more important than YouTube. Perhaps you do, and this raises a fun debate. Why not? If you want to think about it, yes, there are lots of pizza restaurants and pizza companies, but YouTube is also responsible for about half a million full-time jobs just in the United States alone.

And then how many skills are taught across the world for free because of YouTube, our initial gut reaction here starts to be like,Hmm, I wonder which one is more important. Uh, personally, I would love to see the entire world vote on whether they would want to keep YouTube in existence or pizza.

, My first reaction is that the vote would go towards pizza. [00:15:00] But when you think about it, it actually could be closer than you'd expect. Okay. Sorry for the philosophical diversion. Back to the scale.

Level 7 - Innovation of the Decade

Let's look at level seven. Here we are having another big step up.

We're talking about ubiquitous events that define a decade and meaningfully impact the lives and everyday behavior of millions of people. So we're looking at technologies like social media, GPS, air conditioning,

within a decade of these inventions, they reshape how we work, how we play, even how we fall in love. Okay, some signs of a level seven innovation.

Firstly, near universal adoption. Opting out of it is possible, but very awkward.

Secondly, a multi-industry overhaul. GPS completely changed logistics, insurance warfare, and even dating apps, as I mentioned.

Thirdly, there is an institutional scramble. There's new [00:16:00] laws, new degrees, many new job titles appearing overnight. Social media manager, drone pilot, et cetera. And then the value to the economy is multi-trillion dollars and above. At today's levels

In a level seven innovation, we'll start to see fundamental platformswhich allow for level six technologies to exist. So Uber, Netflix, YouTube, they all run upon web servers.

And if you want to think about the range of a level seven at the bottom end, we'd have something like bank cards. They allow for the credit industry,

which changed the spending habits of households and, global consumer behavior, and has a huge economic impact on the amount of trade and business that gets done. And at the high end of a seven, we have things like social media, which completely change culture, marketing, how we think about status, and what it's like to be a teenager.

Now an interesting point at a level seven on the technology side is that we find it's rare to see a single product or brand, and [00:17:00] we generally move towards a platform or technology. , So for example, we're talking about something like GPS rather than Google Maps.

You might say that Facebook or Google search could be a level seven possibly, . But social media itself is of course definitely more important to the world , than Facebook, which is just undeniable.

And if you want some examples from the past, whilst we're talking about level sevens, the wheel chariot, aqueducts, or Roman concrete all are solid level seven.

Level 8 - Innovation of the Century

So yes, fundamentally exciting innovations, but now we are getting onto level eight.

This is more than just big news. A level eight redraws.

The blueprint of civilization and any invention in this category will be on the short list for innovation of the century.

We are talking about things like antibiotics that not only slash childhood mortality by 25%, they also extended the average human lifespan by a whopping 25 years.

[00:18:00] So welcome to the big time

some hallmarks of a Level eight event. Firstly, a level eight will completely interrupt every major sector. The internet didn't just change communication. It changed our work, our leisure, our shopping, and even science. Secondly, a level eight also marks a generational baseline reset.

This means that children born after a level eight event. Can't imagine a world before it,

I mean, try explain to someone who's grown up with smartphones what it's like to not have a device attached to you the whole time. They literally wouldn't know how to navigate around their city, let alone trying to navigate around the world.

Finally the adoption of A level eight is a bit of an existential crisis for a country, and if you ignore it, your nation will fall behind. So a classic level eight could be the steam engine

so nations like Ottoman Turkey in King China failed to adopt it and they fell behind the steam engine. Ended up rewriting entire industries, [00:19:00] changing manufacturing warfare , and of course a huge surge in mining. To give you some perspective, a 20 hour canal ride from Liverpool to Manchester.

Became just a two hour train ride, , which completely changed the speed and price of global trade. But it's more than that. The world, in fact, had to standardize time before trains. An individual town would just run off their own clock. . Afterwards. The whole country had to run on the same time because otherwise the train system didn't work. So it changed even some of these intangible concepts of everyday life.

Another thing we'll notice here is that if you try to put a dollar figure a level eight, it's almost meaningless

a level eight innovation touches every balance sheet. So the entire economy is, we know it would be entirely different without it. try estimating the financial impact of electricity. Sure, yes, the electricity industry has a size, but your phone, your TV wouldn't exist without electricity.

Neither would refrigerators or skyscrapers or [00:20:00] satellites or light bulbs. , , it's so deeply embedded into human existence. It's like trying to put a value on water or oxygen, at this point, a level eight just is, and you kind of accept that it's really important.

That is why this podcast is focused on only level eight and above, because level eight is crazy awesome and important stuff that we should know about , and there's lots of events in history that we kind of forget . Now whilst we're here, I could go on about level eights all day, but I have an entire show to cover the rest of them.

So I'll save it for the next 10 years. We've got over 100 episodes lined up every one of them, by definition, a game changer.

Level 9 - Innovation of the Era

And that leads us on to level nine.

There are only a handful of level nine innovations ever at most, one per era. And they unalterably change the entire arc of civilization.

So what defines a level nine innovation? , Well, we'll see a species wide [00:21:00] pivot. Every human life after it is impacted in a big way, take agriculture. It led to the first towns and cities, the hoarding of wealth and the creation of empires and civilization as we know it.

Another feature of level nine is that there isn't really an off switch once it's been discovered. It's rather hard for it to be uninvented and it can really just be managed or survived. . So when we learned to navigate the oceans and discovering the Americas in Australia, we unified the planet's ecosystems, transferring entire species, cultures, diseases across the globe.

Its spawned new industries, sugar, tobacco, the Atlantic slave trade, and in the process, entire empires were forged whilst other empires collapsed.

Right? The final attribute of a level nine is the huge amount of leverage it creates a whole garden of level eight Innovations can grow in the shade of a level nine. So take writing for example. [00:22:00] It allowed the recording of knowledge and became the bedrock of trade finance law. Because of writing, we get things like the first dynasties and again, empires, but we also get the Bible and later it gives us science and mass media.

So it's an innovation so big that it's the foundation for the things that we might think of normally as innovation.

, For me, a really good thought experiment for both A level eight and a level nine is trying to attempt to imagine the world if it didn't exist, if a level seven invention didn't exist like GPS. Yeah, it's a massive pain, , but you know, life can go on. But trying to imagine a world without houses, like what would we be doing?

Do we live in caves, tents? What on earth would a city even look like? Do we have cities like it? Your brain's just like, hmm, human civilization needs houses. It's, it's just a fact. I, that's it. Like I don't, I don't know what, what else do we do? So yes, that's a great test and essentially a level nine [00:23:00] completely rewrites the rules.

Level 10 - Species Epoch

, And of course that might beg the question, what the hell is a level 10?

Well, if level nine is rewriting the rules, a level 10 is rewriting the species who.

So let's briefly revisit the seismology metaphor for a second. Seismologists tell us that a magnitude 10 earthquake has never been recorded, and possibly has never happened because it would need a fault line that wraps the entire planet. And a fun fact is that if we follow the Richter scale, even higher, a level 13 earthquake would literally break the earth into two pieces.

. That is logarithms for you. But anyway, innovation has an equivalent to a level 10. It is a breakthrough so vast that it . ends the current chapter of humanity and even opens a new geological period of Earth's history. So if you wanted to look for a reference point, you could possibly argue that the control of fire was a level 10.

It drove the creation of our species as we know it. Cooked food [00:24:00] allowed our guts to shrink by 10 feet, and it allowed us to spend 10 times less time eating than our chimpanzee cousins. So curious amount of tens already, morphologically cooking food changed our jaw, our face, and our brain.

And it allowed us to stop living in the trees of Africa and become the invasive apex predator that dominated the entire world. . So I feel like this is a level 10. You might also want to propose the invention of language itself and possibly even the agricultural revolution.

Which are at least high nines, potentially 10, depends on how you want to look at it but regardless, combining fire language and agriculture that gave rise to human civilization and our current epoch of the Holocene.

When we look to the next level 10 event, that would create a new epoch and the really crazy thing is that could happen within our lifetimes.

To which you might ask how might this happen? Well, of course, top of mind lately has been artificial intelligence. It [00:25:00] has many names, a GI, the singularity.

But it is just a silicon based intelligence, greatly more powerful than our carbon based life forms. Essentially a mind that can improve itself faster than we can comprehend leaving us like ants in the dust compared to its overseeing powers. The questions of course are, would it be our ally or our overlord or something beyond those words?

Who knows? Like imagine if Google Maps decided that we were the traffic problem and it rerouted humanity into extinction. It's possible, but let's talk about some other potential 10 events. Nuclear fusion possibly could cause a level 10. If we can harness the power that the stars use, we could create an energy abundance , that if we felt like it, we could desalinate the oceans or turn Mars into a suburb.

We could make whatever climate we feel like and we'd start thinking in terms of planets rather than nations.

Another level 10 could be rewriting our genetics, thus [00:26:00] evolving homo sapiens into something post-human. It might sound unlikely now, but remember that companies are already genetically recreating extinct animals and that we already have gene therapies to remove genetic diseases from humans.

So what is really stopping someone from targeting genes to give a little extra help in aging or intelligence or speed or beauty? And then because that's happening, people do it a bit more

and so on and so forth until we have super humans.

So interesting times and if we want to think about impact of a level 10, , it's very hard to quantify. Of course, economists can't , they basically became useless at a level eight by level 10.

, They're long gone ethicists would probably lack the vocabulary to describe a level 10 and history teachers get an entire new chapter one. Lucky me.

Of course, the thing with a level 10 is that we don't know if we'll have an abundant, flourishing. With a new Age for humanity or an abrupt game over, but it does seem like it can't be [00:27:00] a neutral event. In the words of the philosopher Nick Bostrom, we are playing with cosmic fire.

So what a time to be alive. We often wonder what it would've been like to live through the fall of the Roman Empire or the scientific revolution, but we, my friends, have the privilege to potentially watch the dawn of something much more spectacular. So just think of that

we could witness something created that is more important than pizza or YouTube, and perhaps even language itself. So we live in possibly the most thrilling and equally terrifying moment to be holding front row tickets to watch the play of history unfold.

Part 2 - Using the scale

Okay. so that was the scale. Now we know where things fit from the brain farts of a level one to entirely new super brains on a level 10. . Hopefully armed with this framework, you could be more curiously aware of the impact [00:28:00] of anything from your trainers to the phone you might be listening to me on. And now that we've learned it, I thought we could have a bit of fun for 10 minutes, , because after all, the best form of learning comes from play.

There were a few sticky moments philosophically, as I was explaining the scale such as the pizza versus YouTube debate. And to make the scale more usable, I want to propose three more features to it that can help when we're trying to measure impact.

Brand versus categories, population size, impact, and the emotional joy, terror, or purpose derived from it. my test subjects, as we use these extra tools, will be the history of weapons, politics, sports, and religion. After all, we are in a world where we get bombarded with just how important everything is. And it's nice to step back , for some philosophical thinking about it all. ,

So we are just here to have fun and explore some different ways of thinking

Weapons and tools of death

.

Firstly to discuss the brand versus categories lens. Let's start with ranking weapons and various [00:29:00] tools of death. , On the innovation scale,

Level 5 - Forms of Capital Punishment

remember level five, we had category defining events or like the brand Daddy, Levi's, jeans, et cetera. And you could put something like hanging here as a level five, hugely popular for a long time, sends a strong message, but it is like a brand within the category of capital punishment.

You could also stone people or us guillotine or electrify them. Socrates drank hemlock. Joan of Arc was burnt at the stake. Jesus was crucified. Paul rolled, William Wallace had his man parts burned off and his entire body was cut into four quarters each put on display in different parts of the country.

So yes. Capital punishment has marked truly historic events across history and sent some very big messages. But any individual tool at any time was just a method or a brand of the day within a category. . So I'd really put them all as a level five . And if you feel that crucifixion belongs [00:30:00] somewhere else, you are perfectly welcome to that opinion and that's fine.

Level 6 - Longbows to Rifles

Let's move on to level six.

Possibly the most important event or idea of the year by today's standards, or a billion to trillion dollar market value. Again, today's values,

when we look at the low sixties, we'd have something like the English Longbow of the 13th century or Greek fire of 600 bc. Very important tactical advantages for the holder help change the outcome of wars for 20 to a hundred years, and historians will tell us just how important they were.

But a key feature is that you don't see the enemy adopting the technology, let alone the rest of the world. These were inventions that didn't really leave the country and were hardly as important as the entire category of archery itself. So a modern parallel to the English longbow might be an especially nasty brand of attack drone with some serious tactical advantages, but not as important as the category of drones itself.

Then if we want to talk about high level sixes, perhaps the rifled gun barrel, [00:31:00] that doubled firearm range, or the bayonet that turned every gun into a pike.

The difference here in these ideas is that they were such an advantage. They were quickly adopted globally.

Level 7 - Subcategories - Wheel chariot, aircraft carrier

So for level seven weapons, these by today's standards would be defining the decade with a trillion plus dollar value. These are like entire subcategories. So the spoke wheel chariot as a weapon was a light, fast shock weapon , that dominated the Eurasian battlefield for a thousand years, and it's a subcategory of cavalry.

You could put the aircraft carrier here, a subcategory of the navy or the castle, a subcategory of the home, and it reshaped both war and the architecture of towns.

Level 8 - Categories

, Then we get to a level eight, the innovation of the century. Here we are now talking about entire categories. So gunpowder sits here. It sparked a weapons revolution of firearms ending medieval warfare. , And those that used gunpowders were able to create the early modern empires because they had such an unfair [00:32:00] advantage , that they basically dominated over four continents.

I'd also put something like cavalry archery, phalanx warfare, all here in level eight, because they completely rewrote the rules of warfare after it.

Level 9 - nuclear and existential threats

And that takes us to a level nine, the most important inventions of all time so far. It looks like nuclear weapons are the only weapon that rank as a nine due to their ability to completely wipe humanity out.

In, interestingly, it's a bit different to the other level nines we spoke about earlier because we don't really use or think about nuclear weapons every day in the way that we do with the other nines.

Like writing, et cetera. But the nuclear era was such a tactical change that created a problem. We had no way of really going back from. And if you want to think about future ideas in a level nine category, you could imagine an engineered pandemic agent that could literally kill everyone, or an advanced autonomous AI kill chain system, which thinking about does put a dampener on things.

Politics and population impact

So let's talk about [00:33:00] politics to spice things up and explore further the lens of global population impact.

Think about Brexit. Where do you think that ranks It was a big change for the British. Yeah, a bit of a change for Europe as well, but less so for the rest of the world. According to the OCB data, it shrank the British economy by 140 billion, not a trillion dollar impact. So yeah, I'd give it like a level six.

Possibly one of the global events of the year. But realistically, if we consider all humanity, hardly the event of the decade clearly not. Other examples at this level could include President Roosevelt's new deal, president Malay of Argentina, introducing his economic shock therapy to the country.

On the very high end, you might put the creation of Singapore. It's a small population, , but it's a very big shift for them individually. And they have a $500 billion economy.

Level 7 and contental policy

Okay, that might seem rude, but on a level seven, we are talking about continental [00:34:00] policy change. So events like the creation of the eu, all the Declaration of Independence. and you might even want to put them as level eight if you want. I will cover it on the podcast to be fair.

But here's one that might surprise you. Greek democracy ranks as a high level seven. And you might think I'm off my rocker because democracy is so, so important. But firstly, Greek democracy was hardly democracy as far as we might think of it now, it was really just the voting of the rich white guys in one individual city

of Athens. But it did prevent one person getting absolute power, which was a big innovation.

The deeper issue about Greek democracy that stops it from registering as higher than a seven is that who is in charge of Greece didn't change the fact that for most people they still just went to work in the field and did the same job as they did the day before. As humans, we do have this compulsion to pay a lot of attention to who is ruling when and who invades who.

And this does skip the fact that a lot of the time, , the day-to-day experience of the [00:35:00] people in that country didn't change that much. Now, of course there are examples where it did change a lot when the Roman Empire took over Europe. They bought a lot of new technologies with them that did change life.

Like the classic question of what are the Romans ever done for us besides the roads, the sewers, public order, education, wine, the aqueduct, et cetera. So the Roman Empire, of course, is a solid eight.

But whether the Roman empire had a democracy or an emperor didn't suddenly change the day-to-day life across Europe that much.

So the point is that a lot of politics , doesn't always matter as much as you think. , And if we want to talk about other level eight ideas, these need to be both, a continental change , and also a very, very big shift in the daily life of the population.

So something like communism or the Nazis, or the end of the slave trade. These could be considered level eights.

Now, of course, Greek democracy did inspire the Romans and served as a model for democracy for the future. So the long term [00:36:00] impact , could be argued as an eight.

Hence why I will talk about it on the podcast in the future. But at the time that it happened, I would say it was only a level seven for those involved.

. So some interesting nuances I thought worth discussing.

Level 9 - Politics is not level 9

And let's move to a level nine. I don't think politically there has been one you could propose that Genghis Khan did kill 20 to 60 million people, which at the time was 10 to 20% of the global population, , which is nuts.

, And if you want a reference point there, that is about five times the global impact of the Nazis, which is kind of unimaginable for us. , So I think we can rank him as more important

than a plague. But you can't say that he changed humanity in the long term in the same way that writing has and thus far. I would say who is in charge, what they think has not been as important as a level nine invention, at least yet, which is just nicely humbling considering how much attention we pay to politics.

Questions without answers

So [00:37:00] I'm not here to annoy anyone. I'm just here to try and get your gears turning as we wrestle with contemplating what is truly important and how to rank things. Of course, not everything needs a perfect answer.

Richard Feynman said he'd rather have questions without answers, than answers without questions.

And my goal here is certainly more to get you to think about things , rather than to project opinions upon you. For myself, something I found especially useful from this framework is how it helps you prioritize your own use of time and attention and what's important, especially when we consider things like the news.

And of course it inspired the framework for this podcast that I'm spending 10 years on.

Emotional Impact and Purpose

Anyway, onwards. If I haven't given you a reason to fight me yet, let's talk about sports and religion because I want to explore the final lens I proposed, which is the emotional impact in terms of joy, terror, and purpose

So let's consider the invention of baseball based on our current ranking system. Culturally, very [00:38:00] important, a big business, , but you know, not everyone likes it. It's mainly played in America and Japan in Major League baseball has about a $12 billion annual revenue.

In fact, if you're interested, cricket has twice as many players globally. So we're actually talking about probably a very high five or a low six. Either way less important than pizza. Sorry for the baseball fans out there.

, You might think I'm wrong.

That's fine. Let's consider football. Three and a half billion fans worldwide and many, big industries built around it. Endless movies, books, games, . But football as an industry is worth about $100 billion a year, which is not over a trillion dollars, which would put it firmly as a level six and, would not rank it as a level seven, one of the most important events of the decade,

which is so curious to think about. Now. Of course, as I said, we're here to talk about the amount of joy and purpose and innovation might bring to someone's life.

, And these are things that are important and shouldn't be [00:39:00] ignored

And if we want to start taking that into account, then maybe football should rank higher than a level six.

After all. It also has a health impact. You know, antibiotics that extended our lifespan were ranked as level eight important. So sports that get billions of people exercising and socializing.

You know, I think that should be considered as a factor.

I dunno about you, but intuitively it does sort of feel like sports should be more important than say Netflix. , But it is intriguing to ask the question, what does the world spend more time and attention on?

In 2024, humanity spent 500 billion hours watching Netflix , and sadly, I can't find an accurate estimate for soccer. So who knows how the two compare.

But it is of course worth thinking about just how long soccer has been around.

Regardless. What I like about using this lens of innovation impact is that it does pull us to step away from our first gut reaction and think from a species wise lens of just how important and impactful , has it been on people's daily lives, and what has it [00:40:00] changed

Peter Theil and Chess

on the topic of sports, ,

a curious story here comes from Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal and Palantir. As a youth. He was one of the top American chess players , and already ranked as a life master. But he stepped back from the sport because he said something along the lines of, when taken too far, chess can become an alternate reality in which one loses sight of the real world.

And if I put more time into chess, I would've sacrificed my ability to make a difference in the world. In fact, you see a very similar story for Demi SBIs who is the founder of DeepMind and MCC became a grand master at like age 12 or something.

I'm not saying that to put anyone off professional sport or doing the things they enjoy, just to remind you that however you want to look at a sport, it ultimately doesn't matter as much to humanity As a level eight,

Religion and Personal Beliefs in interpreting the scale

And that leads us onto religion in terms of passion, meaning, and purpose. Religions have really shaped the story of humanity. And before I offend anyone, this scale is interpretable under what you [00:41:00] believe to be true.

If you think that your God created humanity. clearly that was like a level 10 and above event that defined the human epoch and therefore you are right and that's great. After all, every theory in science is just a theory until proven wrong. and If we personally have some different theories, we can still be philosophical friends.

What I would propose to you is that, let's say for example, you are a follower of Islam, for you, that must be a level 10 and above. Using the framework we have defined. Now of course if you follow Islam and you don't believe in Christianity, you might think they are wasting their time worshiping the wrong God. , For this framework that doesn't really matter. All that matters is that you can recognize that there are 2.8 billion Christians worldwide and their belief in their God resulted in a lot of purpose and meaning in daily practices, even crusades , over thousands of years.

So you would objectively still rank Christianity as at least a level eight, , a defining event of an era.

[00:42:00] And remember, rankings are about impact and not about goodness or , whether you think it's great. Of course, vice versa. If you are a Christian and you think your God created humanity, then of course a level 10 and above.

But you would have to recognize that Islam and the 2 billion followers of Allah , must be at least a level eight innovation in the history of humanity. So hopefully I have explained a sort of touchy subject in a nonpolitical way, and that rounds up the different ways in which we can use the scale to objectively view innovation in the world.

Roundup conclusions

Okay, hopefully no one was offended by any suggestions. You are welcome to propose why you might think I'm completely wrong, simply discuss a ranking that surprised you in the comments.

As I said, I'm more interested in stimulating you to think about a new way to measure impact than whether or not one event in particular was important or not.

Reflecting on my [00:43:00] own history, I have certainly fallen into the trap , of building a world changing idea in my head. That was really just a feature change and nowhere near the category design of a level eight. And if you are someone that has ideas, this framework might be an essential tool to help you think rationally , about what your impact really will be at a global level.

Regardless, as this episode has hopefully demonstrated, this podcast isn't messing around. Level eight and above innovations are the story of global humanity and we have over 100 episodes of them to get through on the show. So I hope you are as excited as I am.

Okay, in terms of references for this episode, I expanded this framework from where Nate Silver left off with his technological rip to scale. So hats off to him for the first idea. He proposed it in the book on the Edge, but it really was basically just a graph in one chapter , where he uses it to help explain that AI is potentially very good or existentially [00:44:00] bad. , Like it's a fine book if you want to read it, but just to set your expectations. It's a book about risk calculations in our future..

However, there's also a great blog summarizing Nate's points on just the technological RTA scale by Z sitz, , and I'll link to that in the description as well. I also did some extra research to see if anyone else had spoken about it and Googling. I managed to find a Twitter discussion from 2013 where someone did propose an innovation Rick Richter scale idea,

which sparked Gary Lichtman to write a short blog upon the idea where he was proposing an idea , of ranking innovation maybe using a Richter scale or a Madonna curve, . But he didn't really give any indication of how to use the scale, and he did suggest naming it after himself, , which to be fair was just a pun based on his name, Lichtman

but I'm still gonna politely decline

and I am almost certain that other people have considered the idea before the internet existed. However, thus far, this episode is currently by far the most in-depth piece of work [00:45:00] on this innovation impact scale topic to date. So who says that you can't do new-ish things these days?

, When I finally launched the website, I do plan to get a blog up to expand on the idea as it is really a ton easier to just show in some tables and diagrams , rather than through audio.

So hopefully I've done a good job. But having a blog would just let you explore the rankings at will. Personally, I found this really fascinating, especially seeing the flow of different innovations at different levels over time.

'cause it tells such a story of human development. , so I did try to capture some of this in the episode, but compared to the amount of research and rankings that I've done, I've really shown you like 5% of the different things I looked at.

Because of that, I might do an innovation rankings blog for each era as we go through them, where I'll cover all the lower down items as well because, , there's a human desire

to organize things that, , does compel me. So yes, I have some homework to do.

If you want a piece of homework, well, you can try ranking coffee because I've given you the [00:46:00] tools. , If coffee was to disappear, would we have potential economies collapsing? . There might be untold trauma from kids finding out what their parents really look like in the morning.

So should it be a level eight? I dunno, what do you think?

And on that, perhaps you want to know what your friends think?

, Well, you can spark a discussion if you share the show with your friends. And coincidentally, helping me get to a level four, , innovation. , And you also get to stimulate discussion with your most intellectually stimulating friends as you consume your favorite stimulants coffee or otherwise.

Right. That really is enough from me. Remember, what we know is a drop. What we don't know is an ocean, so keep asking questions,