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>> >> it steadies the hidden laws that organize our systems from living organisms not only visionary and insightful little so beautifully written i'm so excited to hear more tonight and before i let him take over just a? word how we will run things then us signing in the back where books are also available for purchase thanks for being with us tonight and please help me to welcome. [applause] >> thanks for coming on such a beautiful night.

i was warned it could be a sparse audience because of the beautiful weather much i also would enjoy. so actually i think we will read something from the book of like to tie back to the subtitle of the book this is something my publisher put together. isn't that cute? [laughter] so it is a pretentious subtitle so i will read this little bit and you can see with the book is about a

little bit and then i will give a short presentation. this book is about a way of thinking and asking big questions. a book about how some of those major challenges and issues ranging from rapid organization and sustainability understanding cancer and metabolism and the origins of aging and death the remarkable similar ways the way that tubers and our bodies work with the general theme systematic nicole regularities of the organizational structure of the big picture framework allows us to address the spectrum of questions some

of which are addressed in the ensuing chapters and i will just give you two or three. like to relive 100 years but not 1,000 why do we die? can it be changed can lifespans be extended? why do we stop growing? wide reactors sleep eight hours every day why do most that only go for a few years but cities keep growing. can we develop with a conceptual framework in the contemplated every predictable ways? is there

a maximum size to the animals and plants could they be giant white is the pace of life increase and why it is innovation have to accelerate in order to sustain social economics? and those that evolves over 10,000 years for the next biological world so can we maintain a society period idea of wealth creation or are we destined to become a planet of devastation? so i will not read any more this is a different version of the book by the way but for some reason i brought the british version with me the

leading off from that the background to all of this that i become more and more passionately engaged is the question of global sustainability and the possible concept catches it is conceivable that this could be sustained indefinitely and also of to recognize that everybody is with the idea the physical universe is expanding exponentially but but that's toshio economic universe is also expanding so with the u.s. was formed to a hundred years ago but now 82% so the

world made this an easy transition and the planet as eligible is at that level and just tuesday view a sense of that if he is simply average now through 2015 what that means it is roughly speaking we are well over 1 million people every week that is the equivalent to adding in new york metropolitan area every couple of months so now into the foreseeable future it is like having a new york city every couple of months or like adding the city of seattle adding to the

infrastructure and that is extraordinary answer us straight on the energy and resources and don that social fabric is fantastic and that is the of backdrop of which everything happens so many are familiar with this it begins 10,000 years ago which is where we started to become collective and social and the city started to emerge after the you could see that extraordinary growth it shot up so i was born in 1940 so now justin my short lifetime

by the end of this century there ted billion people at the end of the planet so the sense of stress on the system is fantastic but of course, this is the paradigm of which we live with the idea of capitalism that has been unbelievably successful with the quality and standard of living and to give another metric the gdp of the united states since the civil war that is equivalent if you invested $1 into the stock market it would be worth $1 million today it is extraordinary expansion in terms of wealth. so now everything is

determined with a tsunami of problems with those 80 is of climate change and environment with energy and water all of these have been exacerbated by the rapid growth of urbanization. so the fate of the planet is determined by the fate so coming to terms house city's work as a physicist or asking is it conceivable to have that understanding the way cities work? so we

urgently need idea of how they work but of course, that the most primitive level that faces a great opportunity with more material wealth access to culture and fancy restaurants with a good education and so one so this is the extraordinary magnet for people of course, with that fundamental level with energy it needs to be supplied to the city i'm sure ready here is familiar with the words that if you create it in great order then you paid the price of

the unintended consequences of samara else so that process to use energy also creates disorder now i have just extended that idea with the consequences of this are the unintended consequences from what we have created which represents itself with things like this. all of these are part of what urban life has created and i would venture to speculate which is in the terms of ethnic or religious conflict that actually has its origins with this date to we have put ourselves

into the into the extraordinary stress so does that lead to so much to is association that this is what the planet will look like? this is what seattle will look like in 50 years? hopefully it is nowhere but there are those that do look like that. so that is the backdrop for what i want to talk about the talking in the terms that i was just talking about is when you think of a city you think of the roads and buildings and the skyscrapers of new york or paris but of course, that is just a stage for what this city really is because it is

a really a place to facilitate action for human beings this machine that brings people together to interactive and exchange information and create the idea is to innovate and create wealth like everything else so this is more the image of the city really with that infrastructure that what is wonderful about this is people have been doing this for 2,000 years the stage is still the same but here is of marvelous picture of new york 120 years ago you can feel that innovation and interaction and you could

impose on to these ideas the creation of wealth and this is what york is about to. it doesn't look like that anymore those buildings are still there but those places to bring people together of what is represented here is integration between the physical in the social and this is a representation of that in one since it is just the metabolism with the energy physically inactive is in contention with that information and exchange

that is the economic part of the organism that represents and the socio-economic systems as innovation of wealth creation so many of those problems are representative of cities or all of problems that we face are generated by cities so they are the origin of these problems but there also the solution precisely because is debris in the smartest people that are attracted to cities with all the great wealth that is created in the urban environment. so now i will switch gears

and talk about biology i'm using it because it is a large part of the book but also a segue back into the city also what do you mean as daylong discussion but on that quantitative side it would be wonderful to the extent you can calculate anything so for example, in no the motion of the of planet of the degree of accuracy that we can do that because we've understand that a great detail so not only with that city work so

in physics that is the cross screen description in and of question whether the part of the book talking about aging and mortality so it is in answering the question why do we live? where does it come from the order of magnitude wise italy to three years from now? so there is a series of similar questions and as i mentioned also the time that we sleep because night is eight hours long review ask how long a now sleeps is 6917 hours or an elephant about four

hours. oh wailes sleeps about two hours. so where do the numbers come from? why? those of the types of questions and moving into this toshio economic coming by those field -- biological organisms to what extent can we do that? why is it that they are well destined to die were almost no cities do. global stenos cities die but 25 per 30 years later they are tied for the of fluctuation in the stock market news twa and lehman

brothers. swire the company's so fragile? but the cities are so resilient? so to understand that everybody understands what the hell happened here? that was too close to home. [laughter] so this is what is discussed in the book so the book by the way i tried to put all the equations into english so you could read it and understand it so one of those amazing things is that

despite the fact to live in quite different environments of the elephant if there is anything you could measure about them or anything about the i'd like history how long it takes to richer -- mature but just to give you an example age your metabolic rate or how much food you need to eat to stay alive so here is how much you need to stay alive because if you put a mouse on the table and you put it

on a linear plot so putting it up by the factor of 10 you go by the factors of 10 but then something remarkable appears with extraordinary irregularity with this process that potentially is the most complex phenomenon and furthermore we believe each of these has a unique history with evolution by natural selection so each of these is historically contingent but if you would

have thought this random protest was going on. so there would be points all over the graph reflecting that historic goal contingency but quite to the contrary and the second critical point at the most naive level you think the double the organism or the sole so you double the amount of the energy needed. but again that is untrue it is very close to the number three-quarters less than one, so instead of doubling the size requiring twice as much energy only requires

75 percent double the size of the couch -- gatt or mouse or elephant. so were out - - so these organisms is a scaled version of each other. so furthermore this is true of any group but it is also true of any other variable of the heart rate that increases the mat -- systematically and the scope of what -- that because it goes down this is your brain and the grave matter -- a grave matter in the a and then you can see beautiful scaling.

i could spend the rest of the evening showing you these said they all have the save characteristics with a straight line. furthermore there is this intriguing property with the slope of the of graph is a multiple of one quarter. so that plays a very special role in biology. word is that come from? so one other thing that is intriguing, i'm sorry i should have changed this but this statement simply says the of heart rate decreases negative 1/4 but the life

span is plus 1/4 and increases that slope said he will deploy those together that increasing of the life span is canceled by the decrease of the heart rate said few multiplied a heart rate by a life span there is no longer any dependents in a big elephant or a whale so there is some amazing results the buildings don't live very long but a big thing is live a long time but they all have this same number of portraits. so what is the origin of all

of this? so the point was to ask because all of these ordinances -- organisms but one thing that definitely transcended that they all have to be supported by networks that one in the middle is the circulatory system this is your brain is all so you and also a the mitochondria some of mathematics and physics of these networks that give rise to these the meiji -- amazing staging was i will not spend time on this but i

can tell you one other piece about biology that i will go back to the cities quickly. . . >> shows blood in the system and so forth. but you now have this theory, the structure which explains all this. now you can take it and asked some of the questions i asked earlier about longevity, about growth, about cancer, so on and about sleep. the only one i will talk about is growth because that is obviously where you scale.

and you are familiar with how you grew and stay alive. you eat, you metabolize, that is food. the food is sensor networks and through the networks it delivers resources, and energy to the cells. what is it too at that level? it maintains the cells by repairing damage. it replaces ones that have died in gross new ones. and you can put that, this is just a schematic cartoon you can put this into the mathematics of the network. then he can solve the equation and determine how the size of an organism change with age. that line there is a prediction of theory and these basic points from rats and you can do this with any organism. the wonderful thing is that the

same parameters apply to all organisms such as the cells are pretty much the same as mammals. given that, you can understand growth in a particular aspect of growth and that is why it is you grow quickly on in this where things happen. it has mystified all of us, you stop growing even though you keep on eating. it turned turns out that has its origins in the network leading to the scaling of the metabolic rate being three courses and that being less than one. sub linear behaviors the origin of why that stops growing and why the curve bends and stops. if anyone wants to discuss it later we can go into more detail. the point is, there's the universality of this so that the

theory tells you how to rescale both the size and the time so that everybody grows in the same way. if you look at it to the right lens of rescaling the parameters of size and time, everybody's curve is dry by the theory is pretty good. it's just the animals and then you can put them all in there. you can even extend it to -- here's a quick summary of what i said. we have amazing nonlinear scaling laws that dominates them. they express which i do not stress and the scale, the bigger your the less energy is needed for cell to stay alive. your cells work harder but less

hard than your dogs. the pace of life also something i didn't emphasize get slower the bigger you are. hearts be slower, we saw that. blood diffuses among member rates slower and life gets stretched out in a predictable way so that you can rescale everything about the elephant in terms of its entire lifespan and its physiology to that of a mouse. that is india. lastly, growth stops and you die. that all comes from the structure of the network leading to the sub linear scaling. i will take that go back to this idea of can we put it how scientists can understand it. the first question is our cities

and companies complement one another the way a whale is a skilled updraft which is a skill that human being which is what you measure. the question is, is seattle just a scaled-down los angeles which is a scaled-down new york they don't look very much alike. there's different histories, geographies and cultures. but with these organisms you can only check that by looking at data. you get data and look at that. i will show that a moment. one reason you might think there is a scaling is the cities in terms of their physicality are met with systems and lines and transport systems and networks, but i mentioned earlier that the critical part of the city is not the buildings in the infrastructure but the people.

and so there's another network in cities that is us. the social network. the interactions between people and that's what misrepresents each note of this is a person, a line, the people there connected to. while familiar with and have these connections but two important points about this in the field of network series, this is how you represent things and it's in the cyberspace basically. but here's a different picture, first are not just individuals, we are in modular groups. we have a family, jobs with groups and departments and so we have a marginal characteristic and that also has generic properties and also what is representative, it isn't the

network that somehow stuck out in the cloud in cyberspace, our interactions have to take place some place. you cannot have interactions with yourself all to be in on the map and all the rest that stepping on facebook, instagram and the rest without being somewhere you may be waiting for a bus or waiting in the bathroom or somewhere but the you have to be somewhere. that represents what a city is, the interface of the same place and interaction. so, let's look at how city scale, will talk about the gas stations will talk about in the

same way these gas stations versus population the size of the city and what you see is that there is good evidence of scaling in the data. what you see also is that that line is linear and it's like linear meaning there's an economy of scale, the bigger you are as a city the last gas stations are needed per capital, not very surprising. what is surprising is the source of all of these are roughly speaking about 1.85. what that means is you double the size of a city, you don't need twice as many gas stations you only need 85% more so could be 75 or 25% savings. so it turns out it's interesting of itself. but like all european cities that look like this, if you look across i'm so european countries.

if you look at countries across the group cloak, china japan chile, colombia you see the same behavior with the same slope. it turns out any infrastructure you look a whether the length of all the roads, the length of electrical lines in the water lines, whatever the infrastructures that you can measure it always skills in this way with the same slope and 50% savings anywhere in the world, any urban system or country in the world. so that's interesting that would occur. just like we need to figure out where that comes from this is the biological physicality of the city. the more interesting part which i'm trying to emphasize is the socioeconomic part that involves human beings and that involves huge quantities that did not

exist until humans evolved from being hunter gatherers and started forming communities and the ideas of wages, super creative people, professional people and what you see is an evidence of scaling but the important thing is that the slopes of these are now bigger than one. and roughly speaking their 1.15. bigger than one means the bigger the your the less per capita the more per capita. the bigger you are the higher the wages the more super creative people, the more policing crime, more taxes per capita the more restaurants per

capita, anywhere in the world to the same degree. anything that you can measure socioeconomic is 15% enhancement weather in china, japan, united states or albania. so here's just a summary of six arbitrary ones to show you different things here's a wages done in the right gdp of france, you can see they all basically have the same slope, there for the same return to scale. this increasing return to scale and the universality. the united states income gdp with pattern production, ideas being created in the city, all scaling in the same way. as you can see there's very good in this costs marvelous,

beautiful scaling and here it is in english, the good the bad and the ugly all caps together for the same degree anything to do associate and make activity. if you double the size of the city on average you systematically increase income, wealth patent creative people, all by about 15% independence of the city. any save 15% collectively on the infrastructure. so if you're able to suppress the bad, the bigger the city are even better. and by the way, since you're saving 15% on infrastructure, that means you have a special and transport, to produce 15%

less in pollution so the carbon footprint of a city is best in the united states, the greener city in the united states is new york city in terms of carbon footprint per capita. maybe one of the worst is santa fe because it's a small place. so now the question is where do these come from? how come the japanese cities and chinese cities in american cities in french cities all scale in the same way even though they have completely different histories, check reason cultures? there was not a congress in 1780 everybody sat down and said this is how were going to design cities and open systems. it evolved organically. so what is universal about this and just to go back what is universal is obvious. the fact that all of these places are built for people to live in and to facilitate interaction and the fact they

are the same as simply a manifestation of those interactions and the fact that people are pretty much the same across the globe. the cultures may be different, but the way they attract and the strength of their attractions are pretty much given. so how do you test that? i'm not showing any theory or mathematics. science progresses by understanding phenomenon, creating a theoretical structure and then making predictions which are tests. so, i don't have to go time to go through the but i can show you something without doing the mathematics. that is this behavior to rise from social interactions with city, therefore if i can measure

the number of interactions between people as a function of city size should follow. so how do you do that? they used to be difficult but now it's quite easy because everyone in this room is caring a little detector with them, cell phone. that means every single call you make is recorded and kept by the phone company. which means, you can determine who is talking to who, who's interacting with you, where you are, how long you talk and everything else. turns out i have collaborators who are able to get a hold of this data. it's billions of phone calls and we started analyzing them in these terms. here's the idea. i do find a relationship

meaning, i call within six months six months, three weeks you return the call to me, that defines a relationship. so you look at the record and he simply count those as a function of the city that is in you can see they are pretty much parallel and it's a simple example credence to the idea that i'm on all the social network structures now the character of the social network structures interesting. of these networks in biology's these networks were the sub linear and the pace of life slows down. the elephant is more ponderous

than the mouse in all respects. turns out the super linear networks coming from i talked to, you talk to another person and then he talked to me on the way buildup and so on, that's where the system works. we have a positive feedback loop that goes on with interactions giving rise to this extraordinary process and the result being the socioeconomic life we've created. that leads to the network dynamics the pace of life speeding up rather than slowing down in a predictable way. so look at the biology on the left is decreasing with size, that is the speed of walking as a function of size. this is ancient data.

this increases and that's a prediction of the theory. it's a bit of a stretch to say the network theory predicts this. but your part of the network when you walk in a big city with the crowd. here's an interesting example. something i took from a british newspaper about six months ago from the city of liverpool. under the caption reads, research revealed almost half the nation follow the slow place of high street to be the biggest shopping out there, not the noise of the city or the pollution, it was that people were walking to slow. what do liverpool do? they put in the fast lane for walking. so this is happening in many cities around the world now and here's another version of the pace of life speeding up, it's a bit old, i see you are buying the iphone five and the shortly

after apple lunch in the iphone six now they're launching the iphone -- excuse me that was an optional response. so i'm going to respect finish up by talking about taking this idea on this network series and doing what we do with biology and talking about growth. it's the same equation conceptually set more complicated because you'll include everything. so how does a city or company work there's resources coming in and you have to put those in the same units. but you have to add those up some goes to maintenance, repairs the infrastructure and the roads in the building. it repairs people hospitals and

doctors in the gross new stuff. buildings going on here for example in a grossly people. so you can write this down in mathematics and when you did it i showed you earlier that's what happens if you do it in biology when you have some linear scaling, the bigger you are the less per capita is rise to the stopping of growth. but now we have the opposite, the bigger you are and when you stick it into this equation with mathematics and it still getting that's you get in fact open-ended growth so it's very satisfying. that gives rise to open-ended growth which is wonderful because if it were this it would not be the paradigm we live in.

this would be total per city, company or economy with open-ended and that's what we are. i don't have time to show you all the data. the gdp i showed earlier and this is great. except it has a fatal flaw that fatal flaw is designated by the dotted line. this has built into it something we call a finite time similarity. that means what's indicated in some finite time to be tank, 20 or 100 years and, whatever it is you're looking at could be aids cases, wages, patents, the theory tells you what happens. it says at some stage what happens is the system stagnates and then collapses so that's

what would happen, it's a sophisticated version of the argument the question is how to get out of it and stop it from happening the idea is the following, so here it is just a version of that again but we have to realize is across this was done within a certain set paradigm. there's some major innovation like we discovered once upon a time ireland and tha iron and tt changed everything and then : recently we invented computers and we invented it. each one of those what it effectively does in this picture is reset the clock. you start over again.

you reinvent yourself and start over again in this new paradigm. so this is what happens, somewhere along here you made major innovation and paradigm shift and you take off. then you hit another finite time singularity, so the block ended up in the wrong place. so you have this idea that you would continually have to reset the clock. you have to make a major shift to have open-ended growth. he can prove that in order to maintain open-ended growth you have to do this. that is a fact that we have done, innovation has gotten us out of it. this is stated not by me, showing that if after it done

this work what it is is how many years it took each one of these technologists have 10 million customers. the way of giving the metric of how fast it's going. it's getting quicker and quicker. this is not my. it is -- who believes in a different kind of singularity. this is how long ago this took place. was a billion years ago we invented cells are cells involved in a took a billion years for them to actually you all. it took a very long time to make the shift a long time ago. and now down here the internet took over ten years and you

can't see it on the spot. so this line is actually what is predicted by the theory. now, let me go back. let's go back to this. so with this this is two things. one thing you have to realize is going along one of the curves life gets faster and speeding up. so you continually speeding up but the time between these innovations has to get shorter and shorter. so something we just saw man taken a hundred years thousand years ago now only takes 15 years. so the question is, if you take this argument is not only are we

going to have to make another innovation very shortly, in fact all of the data indicates in the next 20 or 25 years we have to make another innovation of the strength of the it revolution that eventually will have to make such an innovation every two years and then every one year and then every six months. so something has to give. the system cannot be sustained this way. all you're doing with innovation is postponing the collapse. the question is how to come to terms with that and i will finish on that point. the minute show you this, my last line. i did not point out when i showed you the graph of metabolic rate to point out that if you look where we are at man and woman on it, we operate at

about 91. each one of you is operating like one of these lightbulbs. that's all the energy needed to keep you alive. so we are extraordinarily efficient. and that's what we evolve with biologically and we fit perfectly on the scaling of metabolic rate. however if you ask what is our social metabolic rate, how much energy does each person in this room the to stay alive to the standard and quality of life each one of us has come accustomed to, meaning we have nice buildings, we have roads, we can go to this mall and have iphones the rest of the stuff. if you had that up it's 11000 watts not 100 watts and that's 100 times bigger than our natural metabolic rate.

that's equivalent to about a dozen elephants or about 70% of a blue whale which is as big as the bookstore. the seven and half billion people on this planet. all of whom would like to be operating at 11000 watts. and soon it will be 10 billion people. so the problem is enormous and the dynamic we have set up and brought us to this has built into it its own sense of destruction unless we intervened to change something. i leave that open to discussions. this is just one part of the book but you can read about it in the book and see some of my ideas. i leave it more as a challenge in terms of the question of the

conceptual places of global sustainability in a critical idea that i have not discussed here is that if it is potentially misleading to think of each one of the problems we have addressed whether climate change the environment, energy or health, thinking of them in their own individual ways, to focus on each one individually and not see them as totally interconnected. you can see that in the graphs of the city scaling. all of these things are interconnected and behaving in the same way. they all have their origin in our social interactions. so change that needs to take place as something to do changing our social network structure. i'll finish there and i'm happy to take questions or discuss. [applause]

. . . . .... .... >> is that these networks have

evolved to be optimal. our solar system has balanced meaning all mammals and has evolved to minimize the amont of energy our hearts to do to pump flood through the system to supply cells. so, the way that works is you have the network or your own network. if you were to increase the size of the fifth branch of your system by 20% your heart has to work harder and if you decrease it by 20% it will work harder. that is the idea. so the system that we have evolved by the continued process of natural selection has evolved to a state where we have an optimal heart system in terms of

known energy our heart has to use to pump blood through it in order to maximize the amount of energy we devote to sex and reproduction. we minimize the amount of energy for the mundane challenge of staying alive so we can maximize energy to go into the reproduction. out of that optmiization comes this economy of scale. it is the optmization that leads to the bigger you are the less is needed to support an individual cell. or to put it slightly differently, the amount of energy going through the network on a per cell basis is lower the bigger you are. that doesn't explain why it

should be three quarters. i could go on talking about that but you have to read the book. >> would you say these ideas would apply to culture as defined by entolmologists? >> what to you mean by culture? >> just in so far as that culture stays alive. >> yes, well, intering question. i have an ongoing collaboration with that question. i would not have phrased it that way. but it is asking the whole question of sustainability of how to gather society. so, these are groups of people

of less than a couple hundred which what we are interacting and how is that sustained and what are their social networks in terms of keeping it sustained because they, many of them, were migrant. most of them would move. we are trying to understand that and model that. that is very hard. mostly because unlike -- the data is fast and you have to believe your archeological friends who give you numbers they gathered by looking at bones and various things. i don't know. that is an interesting question. i had not thought of that.

>> maybe too much and falling apart. >> you don't use hunter gatherism and one thing you can understand by n hunting and gathering. you know, why did they limit themselves? you can understand that. you know, it is -- one of the things human beings discovered economy scale and forming groups by building meaning that, you know, you and i working together can do more than each of us working individually is one way of putting it. so, that was discovered.

what wasn't discovered until language was developed is exchanging ideas. sitting around bull shitting and saying if you do this you can try this and joe over there says try that and getting together and so on. that was our real transition, i think. but we understand that and coupled with the discovery of agricultur agricultural. so you could be sedentary. that is the nexus we were trying to understand in this collaboration. i had one other comment on that. it is hard conceptually but the hard thing about science, i think, especially physics, is that you know, it is real. you can't just speculate.

the thing about how to gather is that it isn't very good and there is very few things that could ever be tested so in that ways it is much easier because it allows greater speculation. sorry, yeah. >> yeah, wondering -- you are looking at cities and places of people coming together and changing the networks of where people are cooperating. >> you mean by networks? >> it is a question.

>> when i was doing thes work, i thought ha and ran into this problem of the sustainability question. i thought that is fantastic. maybe we have stumbled across it which is globalized us as a way that will get us out of this. maybe it is an innovation that goes outside of this and that is not going to be an issue. and then i thought a lot about that and then i started reading a lot about the transitions during the victorian era. the more i read, and in fact i had a quote which i took out of this talk, but gerta, but was to do with becoming the railroad because the becoming of the railroad was a huge paradigm

shift. i suspect bigger than having an iphone, so to speak, because up until the railroad, most people, certainly in europe, less so in the united states, didn't move more than 10-20 miles from their home their entire life. you know, that was it. and suddenly you opened everything up and the united states wouldn't be the united states if it had not been for the railroad. that was a huge shift followed not long after with the invention of the telephone meaning you could have instant communication everywhere including before the 20th century you had it back and forth. these had profound effects but they were quantitative and not qualitative. what they did was speed

everything up. so, my speculation is despite how marvelous it is for all the it stuff with the cloud and the world being connected, my guess is it is still going to speed everything up. wall said for a long time you don't have to be anywhere. it is seattle. you can be anywhere you like if you have this thing. it is extraordinary. we have silicone valley and what is happening to silicone valley? it is migrating to san francisco. it is doing the opposite. how many of those high tech gurus are living up in the top of the sear sierras like a monk? none of them. they want to be in the city because we still have this need for interaction and positive feedback mechanisms that somehow is in our dna.

so, you know, total speculation and my speculation is it will just speed everything up which it has. that is why i used the explitve earlier is because the idea is i have to get another i-phone. the iphone 7. this one is a mac book air and here is something interesting. the shift key on the left doesn't work. i have to do capitol and i have to use the shift key on the right meaning i can't type pauperly. you know what i have been told by it people? this is two years old get another one.

>> [inaudible question] >> that is what makes me pe pessimisttpe pessimi pessimistic. i painted this picture and there are ways of avoiding the collapse. the problem is time. it is not that there isn't a principle aware but it is we

should have started thinking about this 75 years ago or whenever. and you know, some of you from this audience, i am sure, remember in the '70s there was this first attempt to make scenario of sustainability and then there was the population bomb and both of those were completely trashed especially by economists. they were trashed for a very good reason because neither of them took into account innovation. neither of them. paul nade outrageous predictions.

they put into the thinking the faster we intivate out of it we were wrong and they should have been trashed and the confusions kgb rejected. it led to a mantra you hear from the economists and in silicone valley that we will innovate out of this. the human mind and nothing to worry about. it is very republican by the way. i hope it is right and i hope everything i said is wrong. but, what i was surprised about is when you included innovation,

and you can do it at all scales, you don't get round of problems. you put it off and you have this frightening phenomenon that you are getting faster and faster. you have this new jersey you are an accelerating treadmill that goes faster and faster and you have to jump to another treadmill that is accelbrating and going faster. a little rater you have to jump from that one to this one. the question is, can that continue without socio economic heart attack. the innovation itself is something that has to change. i think that something is much more to do with social interaction, social behavior, and so on which we see a teeny

wienie bit of green but these are minor. in any this this is political. doesn't matter how much science you do. i could have agreed that this was the right start. it is irrelevant. it is politicians and practitioners and policymakers ignore it which is what has been happening not just in the united states but pretty much globally. we have not had any decision. we have a credit plant that is itself a singularity.

[inaudible question] >> there is a much better book. what is his name? the trouble with diamonds book is there are -- they pre-date a lot of the dynamics that is in here. they are from small societies. it is the same thing like what i said to this guy. you can clean me. you can mention cities in the units have died in a small town. that is a different dynamic, i think. that is much more -- when things are that small they are much

more vulnerable. there is greater vulnerability. it is where we have socio economic systems that we have now. that was not dealt with in diamonds book. what he dealt with was much more roman empire. it is a major piece of that. what i didn't talk about here which relates to that a little bit is how this translates into complime companies, and why it is companies fail or disappear. and some of the dynamics led to the demise of the roman empire.

they start out multi dimensional. innovation is in the forefront. the company grows and the dimensions decrease and at the same time one thing they do is

increase research and development saying we can come back to that later and usually it is too late by then. companies become vulnerable. cities are the opposite. they become more normal.

in a successful city, there is a huge spectrum of jobs and opportunities. i was in new york last week, there was a store there that only sold antique fire places. the next day i had to go to the west village. there was a store selling only chess pieces. i can say neither of those businesses exist in seattle or los angeles and much bigger

cities. all these specialists things grow and form a diversity that makes new york city a great city. that is true of any great city. as you know, it started relying on musl(inaudible) as defense.

it was never discussed but this guy... >> your background is in (inaudible) and what year is biololgy and economics. two things i think that might be supriseing. two things. the major thing was i was involved with conducting super collideer. a big accelerating being built in texas. it was canceled. at that time, in the late 1830s, we used to hear this comment

about biology being the science of our industry and before it was physics. but it was mumbled or implied and that was no need to do any more fundamental physics. we know the physics and we know and i heard that. biology will probably be a dominant science but my arrogance as a physics came through saying it won't be a serious science or predictable until it embraces the culture and paradigm of physics.

i put these together and i started i have to think about why you age and why you die.

i thought my god that is weird. i live in sante fe.

i spent many days in the library reading and studying and i discovered it was complete back water and there was very little work in it it was all narrative and totally nonquantitative. then i turned on my physics hat and i said look, first of all what is the mechanisms of aging and equally important and this is what i thought i would find in a biology book. my attitude at the time was if biology were a real science, serious science, that would be a first question. how can we understand how a

hundred years is the span of a human lifespan. the next thing i thought about was the obvious. if you want to understand how something dedays, anals and dies you have to understand what keeps it alive and that is metabolism. i started reading about that.

that was long and tedious. who is running this? >> did you look at nation states? they said it was interesting --. the trouble with the nation

states is they are not organic. cities grow organgically. ohio has. whereas, nation states are political and the boundaries are somewhat arbitrary and that is work and others have been involved for nations. b you see many more out liars and in some cases it is arbitrary. it hawseant been taken seriously. >> you didn't tell us about the ending of the book.

>> oh, they live happily ever after. [laughter] >> [inaudible question] [inaudible question] we know that. we know that. we are in trouble.

you know? are we just trying to find solutions to delay the trouble. >> i don't know. i was trying to form a conceptual framework that you could start thinking in a scientific language about the questions and make it more quanatative, mechanistic and so on. this is, you know, scratching the surface in a way. but it is um, you know, i think we need something i use the phrase a grand theory of sustainability where everything -- in fact, one of the things i do feel is that, you know, if we were serious about this, there should be a project, you know, hundreds of millions, that is much greater than the apollo program was or the manhattan project. something really grand that is

international and addresses these questions at the detailed practical level and also at the big picture conceptual level. we cannot even get that going locally, so to speak. there is just no force moving in that direction. you know? there aren't any world leaders. it is political as i said. it has to be a political decision. it has to come from majority who thing this is important and most don't think this is important. this makes living in the 1939 and nazis are coming small in terms of the future of the planet. you know? it is really -- i think, quite

dire, really if you start looking at all the various metrics and thought. now, you know, who knows. maybe, you know, i am as a person surprisingly ought mystic has a person and there is a piece in the newspaper that is sort of republican. wow, we modeled through it and it will work out. i hope that is right. especially in the present climate because mr. trump is a singular person and in some ways i had it in terms of this picture he sort of, you know, it looked a singularity has to occur according to this if you can believe it and this is an analysis by other people in the next 25 years or so. something new changed. it could be driverless cars, it could be artificial intelligence, machine learning, one of the high top things.

but it could have been mr. trump waiting for five years. he certainly disruptive. i mean he is really a major -- you may not like him. he has done something extraordinary and disrupted the whole system that you can say the things he said and rational thinking and truth no longer matter is a major paradigm shift that should not have happened yet. [laughter] >> he should have waited. so it is too bad all that energy didn't go into the lightness of the dark side. the light can bring on, you know, a network to come to

terms with the big questions rather than just business as usual and just going backwards which is what much of this is and doesn't go very well. [applause] >> you are watching booktv, television for serious readersism you can watch any program you see here online at booktv.org. jenna and barbara bush have a new book coming out. that's called sisters first. why does the title quest >> we are sisters first but we have been so lucky in our lives which meant we always have a partner in everything we are doing so whether it was growing up in texas because they're there was someone wis