Matt Clifford

speaker

176 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 16 Jul

Matt Clifford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Radical · The Best of Radical with Amol Rajan · 16 Jul 2026 podcast

Chess today is way bigger than it was in 1997.

Way bigger.

You know, what's really interesting as well is that, as far as I know, even though the best human chess players, you know, have sponsors today, I'm not sure even, you know...

No one has ever paid to watch a computer play a computer in chess, even though the computers are way better than Magnus Carlsen.

Now, chess is niche.

I'm not trying to pretend the whole economy is going to look like that.

But I think it does show that it's very hard to build good intuitions about what happens when a job gets fully automated.

I mean, this is the thing that I... that retains the core of my optimism about this country, is that actually, if you look at... It's such an implausible story that this tiny, cold, wet island in the North Atlantic should have shaped the world in the way that it has.

And really the reason that it has, I think, dates back a very long time.

You know, England had a, before it was Britain, even had a very distinct set of institutions and culture, you know, kind of long, long before the Industrial Revolution.

You mean common law, Magna Carta?

Common law, yeah, limited government, but also even just things like property rights, things like the invention of trusts, which was sort of forebears of limited companies.

You know, there's all these sort of like institutional innovations that come like way before the Industrial Revolution.

And, you know, if you read books about like, why did it happen here?

A lot of it dates back a very, very long time.

And I think at the heart of it is the idea that actually is what I would call permissionlessness.

The idea that actually this country has respected for at least a thousand years the idea that even very ordinary people should be allowed to try stuff.

Now, obviously, there's been enormous limitations on that.

I'm not trying to pretend that we haven't had enormous amounts of oppression of different individuals and groups.

But this idea of permissionlessness, the idea that you can try stuff, actually has very, very deep roots in this country.

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