47: Why it's Time to Stop Using the Word 'Disruption'

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Joe Weisenthal (0:24)

Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal, Managing Editor of Bloomberg Markets.

Tracy Alloway (0:30)

And I'm Tracy Alloway, Executive Editor of Bloomberg Markets.

Joe Weisenthal (0:34)

Hey, Tracy, how's it going?

Tracy Alloway (0:36)

Pretty good. I get kind of nervous when you ask me stuff like that.

Joe Weisenthal (0:40)

Oh, you know, I just thought, you know, it's been a while, I wasn't on last week, so I wanted to catch up.

Tracy Alloway (0:45)

That's true, that's true, you were away. You missed Matt Levine and Space Robots, so I'm sorry.

Joe Weisenthal (0:50)

A little worried that he did better than me. So I'm kind of, I haven't listened to that yet, because I don't want to see if he's better than me.

Tracy Alloway (0:57)

You have to step it up today.

Joe Weisenthal (0:59)

So Space Robots, so technology is pretty cool, huh?

Tracy Alloway (1:02)

Yeah, it's impressive, and it seems to make a lot of people potentially a lot of money.

Joe Weisenthal (1:09)

So speaking of technology and making a lot of money, you know another cool thing you can do with technology is?

Tracy Alloway (1:16)

Uh, I feel like this is a trick, go on.

Joe Weisenthal (1:19)

You can catch up with old friends that you haven't seen in 20 years on Facebook.

Tracy Alloway (1:25)

No way.

Joe Weisenthal (1:26)

And actually, our guest today is someone who I don't think I've seen probably in like 22 or 23 years. He's an old middle school friend of mine from when I lived in Joliet, Illinois, which is kind of a suburb of Chicago.

Tracy Alloway (1:44)

Is this what Odd Lots has been reduced to? You're just bringing on your school friends?

Joe Weisenthal (1:49)

It is, but there's also, it is. So part of it is just an excuse to catch up with an old friend. But we're also going to be talking about, there's also a relevant angle related to technology because our guest is a historian of technology at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey.

And he recently gave a great speech called The Innovation Fetish, which is about why it's so bad that we're obsessed with words like disruption and innovation and why it's so perverse that we can't stop talking in this sort of nonsense language that we've all constructed and come to accept.

Tracy Alloway (2:30)

So those are words that we see on almost every technology press release that comes our way, right?

Joe Weisenthal (2:37)

We read them and see them unquestionably. Like no one ever talks about why are we talking about innovation so much? And are we really getting anywhere by hammering home the importance of innovation and disruption and entrepreneurship? And all these things that we've just sort of taken for granted are good.

And maybe there is a dark side to our endless focus on this language of technology.

Tracy Alloway (3:04)

I like this. I like where this is going. All right. You might be forgiven for bringing your friends on.

Joe Weisenthal (3:09)

My intro wasn't totally contrived. So, with us is Lee Vintsel, he's a professor, as I mentioned, at the Stevens Institute of Technology.

Lee, it's great to see you and thanks for joining us.

Lee Vinsel (3:20)

Thanks for having me here.

Joe Weisenthal (3:22)

So your talk, the Innovation Fetish, and your work focused on all these buzzwords that we just mentioned. So tell us about your work and why is it important to focus on the language, focus on these words.

Lee Vinsel (3:37)

Right. So I'm a historian of technology. My first book I just wrote is on the history of auto regulation in the United States.

But for this project, what I've been looking at is tracking word usage over time. And one surprising fact you find is that the term technological innovation only comes into use in about the 1960s, which ironically, if you read economists and economic historians like Robert Gordon, is about the time that really deep and meaningful technological innovation, revolutionary innovation kind of came to an end in the United States, right?

Because we kind of hit the skids in 1970 And since then, with a couple of brief exceptions, we have not gotten back to really deep innovation and really meaningful economic growth.

Joe Weisenthal (4:30)

Immediately. So that's very interesting. And I want to talk about that.