remained with us all the way through -- this is nothing new. >> kelly hernandez, assistant professor of history at ucla and the other of this book, city of inmates: conquest, rebellion, and the rise of human caging in los angeles, 1771-1965. thank you for being a book to be. >> thank you. >> book tv is on twitter and facebook. we want to hear from you. tweet us, or post a comment on our facebook page. >> hello all. thank you for your patience. welcome to la's. we are thankful to welcome jeffrey west. jeffrey is a theoretical therapist was been a senior fellow at the national laboratory and a distinguished professor at santa fe institute where he served also as president from 2005-2009.

jeffrey studies a complexity science, the science of emergence networks which is also the subject of his new book "scale". we, of course, are celebrating tonight and you will be discussing it. it has received already wonderful reviews from journals like nature, all the way to authors like abraham for coffee. it studies the hidden laws that organize all of our systems from living organisms to cities and not only is his work a visionary and insightful but it's beautifully written. i'm excited to hear more from jeffrey tonight. before i let him take over, a quick word about how we will run things. we will have a talk and presentation from jeffrey and a

short q&a and will have a signing in the back of the room where books are also available for purchase. thank you again for being with us tonight. please join me in welcoming jeffrey west. [applause] >> thank you all for coming on a beautiful night in seattle. i was warned that there might be more spotty audience because of the beautiful weather. i too was enjoying it. so, i think what i will do is on the advice of my good friend catherine is read something from the book which i don't normally do. it's -- if the subtitle of the book and i'll show you this. this is cute. this is something that my publisher penguin put together. isn't that cute?

[laughter] i thought it was a pretentious subtitle and in the introduction it starts out with such a big sweep and i'll read this little bit and you'll see what the book is about. then i'll give a short presentation. "this book is about a way of thinking and asking the questions and about suggesting big answers to some of those big questions. it's a book about some of the major challenges and issues we are grappling with today ranging from verbalization, growth, global sustainability, understanding cancer and metabolism and the origins of aging and death and can be addressed in an integrated, unifying conceptual framework. it is a book about the remarkable similar ways in which cities, companies and our bodies work and how each of them

represent a variation of a general theme manifesting surprisingly systematic regularities and similarities in the organization structure and dynamics. the big picture framework allows us to address special fascinating spectrum of questions some of which in some of which will be addressed sometime speculate in the ensuing chapters. here's a sampling of some of them. why can we live up to 120 years but not for a thousand or a million? y in fact we die? what sets this limit of our lifespan? can they be changed and can life plan be extended? why do we stop growing brushwork why do we have to sleep for eight hours every day? why do we can we develop a

science brings a conceptual framework for understanding the dynamics, growth and revolution in a quantitative predictable way. is there a maximum size of the system? is there a maximum size to animals? can there be giant insects? why does the pace of life continually increase and why does the rate of innovation to continue to accelerate in order to sustain socioeconomic life? can we maintain a vibrant, innovative society with ideas of wealth and creation or are we destined to become a planet of slums, conflict? "that is what i will be talking

about. it's all in -- i brought the british version along me which has a different title in different cover. leading off from that, what i just read the background to all this and the thing that i become more and more passionately engaged in is the question of global sustainability and even the possible concept of mobile sustainability is conceivable that all of this marvelous, edifice that we have created can be sustained indefinitely. the first thing to recognize is that everyone is the idea that the physical universe is expanding exponentially and some of us don't try to appreciate the socioeconomic universe in which we live on the planet and

that's also expanding exponentially. want to give you some of our numbers to illustrate that. when the us was formed 200 years ago. [inaudible] 82% of americans live in cities in the world made this amazing transition a few years ago when more than half of us live in cities and the planet, as a whole, is moving towards that 75, 80% level by the end of the century and to give you a sense of the scale of that if you just average from now until 2050 what that means is that roughly speaking urbanizing well over 1 million people every week. it's more like 1.4 if you do the arithmetic. that's improvement adding a new york metropolitan area roughly

speaking every couple of months. every couple of months from now until the foreseeable future, midcentury, it's like adding a new york city every couple of months or to bring it home here every few days adding the city of seattle in terms of number of people in infrastructure that you need. that's extraordinary and the stress and strain on energy, resources and in particular, the social fabric is fantastic. that is the backdrop in which everything is happening. i will expand on that as we go along. many of you are familiar with this, the world population. it begins with 10000 years ago which is when we started to come collective and become social and the first cities started to emerge. you can see the extraordinary growth beginning with the industrial revolution that it

stopped straight up. if you look on this, i was born in 1940, which means there were not many more than to be billion people on the planet and in my short lifespan there are now seven and a half billion and by the end of the century there could possibly be 10 billion people on the planet. again, the sense of stress on the system is fantastic and again will return to this. this is the paradigm in which we live. the idea of capitalism and open ending growth and it's been unbelievably successful and it's given us the quality and standard of living and those of us fortunate to participate in it. to give you another metric of that here is the gdp for the united states since the end of the civil war. what the equivalent is to is the issued invested 1 dollar in the

stock market in 1870 and you correctly with inflation it would be worth $1 million today. this is extraordinary in terms of wealth. all of this is associated with the urbanization of the planet which i mentioned earlier and, indeed everything that goes on in the planet is pretty much determined by what happens in cities. all of the problems that we face whether it's ideas of climate change, the environment, crime, pollution, disease, availability of energy, all of these have been exacerbated and have been brought to the brink by this rapid growth and urbanization. this is the one equation, the fate of the planet is determined by the fate of our cities. we better stop and come to terms

with how cities work, what their organization is, what their dynamics is and coming to it as a physicist that is understanding our asking is it conceivable to have a predictive understanding of the way cities work? we urgently need some idea of how cities work, what it is and, of course, at the most primitive level we understand white cities are attractive because their place is a great opportunity, places where you have access to more material well-being, you have access to culture, sexy places and fancy restaurants with education and so on. these are provided by the city and so cities act as this extraordinary magnet for people. of course, none of this can happen in the most fundamental level without energy. energy needs to be supplied to the city and i'm sure everyone

here is familiar with the words of the second law of thermodynamics and the idea of entropy. mainly, you create great order by treating cities and other organizations. if you organize stuff then you pay the price always of having unintended consequences in the sense of disorder somewhere else or the process of using energy to create order also creates disorder and that's called entropy and i've just extended that idea toward the consequences of this, unintended conferences, of this marvelous process that we have created, socio- economic entropy which represents things like this which you are playing with. all of these are part of what urban life has created including this, social unrest and i would venture to speculate so much of

the social unrest that we see on the planet which is often in terms of ethnic conflict, religious conflict or cultural conflicts is origins in this extraordinary state that we put ourselves in by this extraordinary expansion leading to this extraordinary stress which in one of the big questions is does that lead to so much association that this is what the planet will look like this is what seattle may look like in 60 years, possibly. probably not but of course there are lots of places in the planet that look like that or like that maybe that's the backdrop for what i want to talk about and what i want to discuss in that book. talking in the city in terms of i've talked about is very much

the way that we think of cities in physicality when you think of cities you think of the roads and buildings and you think of the boulevards of pairs or the sky coopers of new york or whatever. of course, this is just a stage of what a city really is because the city is the place that facilitate interaction among human beings and that's why we invested and in some ways it may be the greatest invention that this machine brings people together to bring people together to what we do tonight, to create ideas, to innovate and create wealth. like everything else, you can find the quote in shakespeare that too much says it and there it is. this is for the image of a city and if the interface of being people and infrastructure or this is a wonderful picture and what is wonderful about this is people have been doing this effectively for 2000 years and the stage is still the same and

here they've been doing it but maybe not quite as long there is a marvelous picture of new york 120 years ago and you can feel the innovation, the entre nous worship, the interaction and you can impose on the subject onto this for creating wealth and this is what new york is about. new york doesn't look like this anymore and the buildings look like that but the buildings are still there and those people are no longer there. different people but the inside buildings, but places that bring people are represented here. that's what a city is. interface and integration the physical and the social. indeed, this is how representation of that in one

sense of physical and metabolism and physical metabolism of the city, the energy and the way it works physically and that is in tension with integrated with information exchange which is the genomics -- it's represented in socioeconomic systems which is the city of wealth and creation. we stress that many of the problems of the pictures i showed of cities and organizations of all the problems this suite of problems that we face are generated by cities and so they are the origin of these problems which i emphasized earlier but there also these are the places that

bring in the smartest people. the smartest people are attracted to the great cities and the great wealth that is created in an urban environment. i will switch gears slightly now and talk about biology. i'm using it not only because it uses a large part of the book but because it's a segue back into thinking about cities and also it brings up the question about what you mean by cities in the long discussion and the quantity of science of studies is it would be wonderful if it was law and physics and you could calculate any degree of accuracy. for example, we know the motion of the planets within degrees of accuracy so all the it work like some phone calls and all the rest but we do that we can do that because we understand the

physics of that in great detail and we can calculate where things are in great detail. nothing like that about envisioning where the city works or organism or company works, for that matter. we call that in physics a course range or an average description and an example is for questions i asked in the book is aging and mortality. a course screen answer would be asking the question why do we live 100 years and where does that come from for the order of magnitude, lifespan of a human being and why is it only to have three years for a mouse even though a mouse and made up a much everything we are? it's the similar questions and as i mentioned in the excerpt where does the time that we

sleep, not because which many of us thought was the night was about eighthours long but because if you asked how long a mouse sleeps, they sleep 16-17 hours a night and i don't suppose anyone knows how long and often sleeps. elephants sleep about four hours. whale sleeps about two hours. where do those numbers come from? why, what is going on here? those are the questions. moving into the socioeconomic, thinking of cities and companies and biological organisms metaphorically and to what extent can we do that one of the questions would be why is it, then that companies are like us and were destined to die, all companies die. whereas most cities do.

it's very hard to kill a city. a classic example is almost no cities die and we've done experience by dropping atom bombs on cities and 25-30 years later they are fine. the fluctuation is not a very big fluctuation in the stock market and companies fall. we lose the twa, lehman brothers and so on. why is that? why are companies so fragile in human beings and organisms regularly fragile but resilient? we understand that. and we want to understand this -- what the hell happened here? all too close to home. i don't have time to discuss this but this is what is discussed and i tried to get us understanding. the book by the way is non-technical and i tried to put all the equations, so to speak,

which are implicit into english so that by mom, in principle if she were still life, would be able to read it and understand it. one of the amazing things about organisms, about us, mammals, is that despite the fact that they look different and live in quite different environments, the whale in the ocean and the elephant with this long trunk, we are one of those. in terms of anything that you can measure about them, physiological parameter and i'll show you some in a moment. you can measure about them or anything about their life history like how long will they live; how many children do they have and so forth are actually scaled versions of one another. just to give you an example of that, this is your metabolic which is how much food you need to eat to stay alive. here it is.

it's plotted on the vertical axis in watts. it's and how much you need to stay alive and here's the size and plotted in powers of ten. if you put a mouse here and you wanted to put an elephant on the linear plot with one-two, three, four it would be near the end of sheet of the paper. putting it up by factors of ten we can get a mouse and an elephant on the same graph. this is called logarithmic, technically. he plotted this way something remarkable appears and you get this extraordinary irregularity occurring for a process that is potentially a complex do not and i'm not in the universe. we believe these subsystems in

each cell type, genome, has a unique history. we believe in natural selection and each one of these is historically contingent meaning if you would have thought that there's this random process going on and if you plotted things like metabolic rate there would be points all over this graph and reflecting the historical contingencies the historical evolution of each one. to the contrary, they've all lined up on some simple line and plotted this way. secondly, the independent of that amount most naïve, well, jesus christ, you double the size of organisms and sells and therefore you double the amount of energy needed to support that animal. again, that's not true. the slope of this line is very

close to the number of recorders which is less than one which is the linear and that means that doubling the size of requiring twice as much food and energy only requires 75%, no matter whether you go from the size of the mouse to double the size of the cat or elephant. doesn't matter, 25%. these organisms, we are scaled versions of one another. these are scaled versions of each other. furthermore, this is true of any groups, fish, insects and this is on any other variable that i mentioned, the heart rate decreases systematically imparted in the same way. the slope of that, this is one quarter and we state minus one

quarter because it's going down. here is you, this is your brain, the gray matter to white matter in your brain. you see a beautiful scaled line plotted in the same way. i could spend the rest of the evening showing you 75 and they all have the same characteristic and they all have this simple straight-line writ plotted in this logarithmic way. furthermore, they have this intriguing property that the slope of these graphs always go in multiples of one quarter. the number four plays a very special role and the question is where does that come from. before doing it i want to show you one other thing which is intriguing. going back to mick jagger falling apart and that is, i'm sorry, i should have change

this. this statement here is a restatement that simply saying the heart rate is decreasing the slope of minus one quarter that is this. it turns out the lifespan, how long you live increases approximately with plus one quarter. it increases the slope and plotted lifespan would be plus one quarter. if you multiply those together the increasing of lifespan is exactly canceled by the decrease of the heart rate. they exactly canceled. if you multiply heart rate by lifespan there is no dependence any longer on size. it's the same for everybody whether you are a little mouse or a big elephant or a whale and what is lifespan times heart rate. you have this amazing result

that even though the little things don't live very long and big things -- these things go boom, boom, boom. they all have the same number of heartbeats. what is the origin of all of this? i worked with some wonderful biological colleagues to ask what is this that transcends evolved design. all of these organisms have evolved design. one thing that definitely transcends this is the fact that all of these systems have fortified networks. that one in the middle is you. that's your circulatory system. this is your brain, the white and gray matter and it's also you on the right. and that's inside cells, networks in the top right are

mitochondria. the idea was the mathematics and physics of these networks that give rise to the scaling and the origin of this number format. i will move on from there and tell you one other piece of biology and i will go back to very quickly to the cities. the idea is that out of this idea of networks, mathematics and physics of networks, the generic properties, universal properties of these networks, the transcend design arise all these scaling laws. by the way, at the same time you get an understanding for the structure of these networks such as the ones we are familiar with like the circulatory system, close the blood in the system and so forth. you now have this theory, structure which explains all

this and you can take it and asked some of those questions i asked earlier about longevity, about growth, about cancer and so on. about sleep and won't have time to go into those but the one i would talk about his growth. obviously, that's where we have scaled and you are familiar with how you grew. you still life, you eat, you metabolize that food, the food is sent to networks and through those networks it delivers resources, energy to the cells. what does it do at that level? it maintains the cells by repairing damage and replaces ones that have died and grows new ones. you can put that -- this is just a cartoon but you can put this into the mathematics based on the networks and when you can solve the equation and you can determine how does the size of

the organizational changes age and that line there and these data points and the wonderful thing about this is that the same parameters apply to all organisms such as the mass of cells for all mammals. given that, you can understand growth and understand a particular aspect of growth and that is why it is that you grow quickly and this weird thing happens that has mystified all of us is that you stop growing even though you keep on eating and it turns out that that has its origins in this in the hegemony of the network leading to scaling being three courses and that three courses being less than one.

if the origin of why that curve bends over and stops and if anyone wants to discuss it later i can go into more detail the point is is a universality to this so that you can rescale. it tells you how to rescale both the size and time so that everybody grows in the same way. if you look at through it the lower right lens of rescaling of sky size everyone is on this curve and this is some small sampling and you can put all the matters on there. you can even expand it. here's a very quick summary of what i said.

you have these amazing nonlinear scaling laws that dominate them and they expressed -- i didn't destress but the bigger you are the less energy is needed to stay alive. your cells work harder than your horses and they work less hard than your dog. the pace of life is also something i didn't emphasize that is slower the bigger you are, heart speed is slower, we saw that. blood diffuses across membranes slower and life gets stretched out in a predictable way so you can rescale everything about the elephant in terms of its entire lifespan and its entire physiology to be a mouse. that is the idea. lastly, growth stops and you die. this all comes from the structure of the network and the

meeting to the sub linear scaling. i want to take this over and go back to the idea of can we develop the science of cities and understand it. so, the first question is our cities and for that matter companies in the same way the whale is scaled to a draft and skill to a human being in things that you measure. the question is is a seattle just a scaled down los angeles which is a scaled down new york and all of those are skilled. they don't look alike, different histories, geographies and cultures but you can check that by looking at data. you have to get data and look at that. also you did in a moment. one reason you might think it is a scaling is because in terms of physicality in networks in roads and electrical lines or the rest

of it in transport systems and the networks but i mentioned earlier the most critical part of a city is not the infrastructure but the people. there's another network in cities and that is us, the social network. the interaction between people and that's what this represents. each note of this is a person on the line for people they are connected to. were all familiar with that and we all have these connections but two very important points about this in the field of networks this is how you represent things and they are in this cyberspace basically but here's a different picture. first, we are not just individuals we are in module groups, family, jobs with departments and so on and we

have a modular characteristic and this modular characteristic actually has generic properties and also what is represented here isn't a network that somehow stuck out there in the cloud in cyberspace but our interactions have to take place some place. you can't have interactions with your cell phone or being on the net, despite it going to the cloud and all of the rest of that stuff, facebook, instagram and the rest without being somewhere. it may be waiting for a bus, sitting on the bathroom, but you have to be somewhere. that's important. that represents what the city, the interface between city and interaction. let's look at how cities scale. it's a mundane quantity with gas

stations and i did it with two germans and the zürich in switzerland and you can see you can see gas stations first the population and what you see is there's good evidence of scaling that will scatter and what you see is the dotted line that is linear and like biology and its sub linear meaning there's an economy of scale and the bigger you are the last gas stations are needed. capita and not very surprising but what is surprising is that the slopes of all of these are roughly speaking similar. they're all about 8.5 and what that means is you double the size of the city, you don't need twice as many gas stations and you only need 85% more so where in biology it was a 75% savings.

so, it turns out that interesting in the oven on itself is that if you look across european cities, it looks like this and if you look across, if you look across countries across the globe, china, japan, chile, colombia, you see the exact same behavior roughly speaking. it turns out, any introductory look at whether the length of electrical lines, the water lines, whatever the infrastructure you can measure you can always scale with the same slope but the same savings in the same 50% savings anywhere in the world. any urban system, country in the world. that's interesting that that would occur and we have to figure out where that comes from but this is the biological

physicality and the more interesting part of the city which i tried to emphasize is the socioeconomic human beings and that involves the qualities of human beings that didn't exist on this planet or universe until humans evolved from being hunter, gatherers and started to form communities 10000 years ago and only last few hundred years.

the more police there are per capita, the more taxes per capita. the more restaurants per capita. anywhere in the world to the same degree. anything you can measure socioeconomic with a 15 percent enhancement whether you are in china, japan, the us or albania. so here is a summary of just an arbitrary one to show you different things. wages in the right with gdp in france, japanese, you can see they're all basically have the same slope therefore the same returns to scale. this increasing returns to scale and universality. and this is income, gdp, patent

production, ideas being traded in the city. all scaling in the same way. as you can see there is variance in the system obviously. but you can see it is very good, this marvelous beautiful scaling. and here it is in english, the good, the bad and the ugly all come together to the same degree. anything to do with socioeconomic activity, double the size of the city and incur the system on average he systematically increase income, patent, education, people, police, and social interaction etc. all by about 15 percent independent of the city and you save 15 percent collectively on the infrastructure.so if you're able to suppress the

bad, the cities are bidding the bigger the city even better. and apply the way your saving 15 percent on infrastructure. that means that you have a special transport, you produce 15 percent less in pollution self the carbon footprint of a city is best the vineyard is. in the united states, the united states is near city as a carbon footprint per capita. so now the question is where the bees come from? half of the japanese cities and chinese cities in american cities and french cities all scale in the same way even though they have completely different history, geographies and cultures? there was not a congress in 1780 that everyone sit down and citizen how will design cities

and urban systems. it evolved organically. the question is, what is universal about these? and what is universal? what is obvious is is universal that all of these places are built for people to live in and facilitate interaction. and the fact that they are the same is simply a manifestation of those attractions and the fact that people are pretty much the same across the globe. the cultures may be different but the way that they interact and the strength of their interactions, the size of the modular groups are pretty much - now how do you test that? i denesha you and you the mathematics but science progresses by understanding phenomena. creating a theoretical structure and then making predictions which you test in

some way. so i do not have time to go through all of that obviously but i can do one test immediately falls without knowing any of the mathematics. and that is the idea that all of this behavior derives from social interactions. the degree of social interaction in the city. therefore, if i can measure the number of interactions between people as the city says it should underline it. so how do you do that - used to be difficult. but now it is quite easy because everyone in this room is carrying a little detector with them.a cell phone. that means as you no doubt know that every single call that you make is recorded and kept by the phone company. which means that you can determine who is talking to who, who is interacting with new, where you are, how long you talk and everything else. so it turns out the collaborators at mit were able to get a hold of the data.

it is billions and billions of phone calls. billions. and we then started to analyze in these terms. so here is the idea. i define a relationship, a social relationship may not on call ended six months, you return the call to me. that defines the relationship. see look at the records and say you simply count those accordance the city size and lot them in the same way. and that is portugal, united kingdom, two examples. you can see the thoughts of one another and pretty much parallel with this. this is just simple example that gives credence to the idea underlying it and the social network structures.now, the character of the social network

truck is quite interesting. of these networks in biology these networks for the sub linear and this gave rise to, and i just said this, the pace of life goes after the elephant - in all respects it turns out the super linear networks coming from social interactions, the super linearity coming from i talked to you, you talk to another person and then you talk to me and that would build up. as with the system works. we have this huge feedback loop that goes on with interactions. giving rise to this extraordinary process and the result being this socioeconomic life that we created. that leads to, through the network dynamic, the pace of life rather than slowing down in a predictable way. so this is the biology on the left. decreasing with size. that is the speed of walking in

cities as a function of size. the ancient data, the ancient meeting was made - a nice increase that rises production from the theory which is a bit of a stretch to say that the theory predicts this but you are also part of the network when you walk in the big city. so this is sort of interesting. here is an interesting example of it. this is something unstuck from a newspaper about six months ago. it is from the city of liverpool. the caption reads, research reveals almost half the nation found the slow pace of high street to be the biggest shopping - that the noise of the city or the pollution and all the rest of it. it was the people walking too slowly.so what did liverpool do? they put in a fast lane for

walking. that's what this is. so this is happening in many cities around the world now. and there is another version of this pace of life speeding up which some of you will respond to. it is a bit old. i see your find the iphone 5 and then shortly after, the lodging the iphone 6. of course now there are lodging a - excuse me! [laughter] that was an emotional response to feeling - i am going to finish up by talking about taking this idea and this network theory for cities and so on. doing what we did with biology and talking about growth. it is an equation and conception only accepted is more complicated. you of all kinds of resources and energy coming in, money

coming in. you have to put them all in the syncretic unit. so you add all of those up and what happens to it? some ghostly maintenance, repairs infrastructure, repairs the roads buildings, people, hospitals and doctors. then it grows. have all of these buildings going on here for example in the close new people. so you can write this down and in mathematics and remember that when you did this i showed you earlier, that is what happened if you do this in biology we have sub linear scaling.economy scale, the big you are, the less per capita. it gives rise to the stopping of growth. but now we have the opposite. we have, the bigger you are, the more per capita. when you stick it into this so to speak, equation of mathematics, you are still getting that. you get in fact open ended

growth. so it is very satisfying. i believe you understand this from the network. it gives rise to open ended growth which is wonderful because if it were this, it would not be the paradigm that we live in. this would be terrible for a city or economy. we are supposed to be open-ended. that is what we are and i do not have to - i do not have the time to show you the data. and this is correct, it is all wonderful except that it has a fatal flaw. the fatal flaw is designated by that dotted line. because this has built into it something that we call a finite singularity. what does that mean in english? means that what is indicated here in some finite time, to be 10, 20, 100 years - whatever it is you're looking at. it can be wages, patents, it

will be infinite. completely nuts. but the theory actually tells you what happens. it says at some stage what happens is system stagnates. then it collapses. so that is what would happen. it is a sophisticated version of an old argument and the question is how to get on with this and stop this from happening? and the idea is the following. . it is purity version of this again. what you have to realize is of course this growth was done within a certain set paradigm. some innovation line we discover once upon a time - we then discovered cold and we

have the industrial revolution. there we discovered oil, recently computers and more recently reinvented it. but each one of those, what it effectively does in this picture is it resets the clock. you start over again. you sort of reinvent yourself and start over again the mr. paradigm. so this is what happens. somewhere along here you have made some major innovations, paradigm shift and you take off. great! then of course have another finite singularity.you would collapse so you have to - the dad ended up in the wrong placement compiled.and so on. so you have this idea that you would continually have to reset the clock. you have to make a major shift, a major paradigm shift to have open-ended growth. and then in order to maintain

you have to do this. and that is in fact what we have done. innovation and this is data, not mine. showing that i found this after i have done the work. but what it is, how many years each one of these technologies to have 10 million customers. as a metric. it gets quicker and quicker. it takes less and it was time for this kind of idea. this is - different kind of similarity but you see this following, what this is to set the stage, this is how long ago this took place. it was a billion years ago we -

it took a long time to make the shift. now down here, the internet took over 10 years and it only happened about 10 years ago. so this line, this line is actually what is predicted by a theory. now, let me go back. so let's go back to this. what this is is two things. one thing you have to realize is that going on one of these shows muskets faster. life is speeding up. you continually speeding up with furthermore, the time between these innovations has to get shorter and shorter. so something that we just saw

that may have taken 100 years 1000 years ago now only takes 15 years. and so on. so the question is, if you take this argument to conclusions is that not only are we going to have to make another innovation shortly. in fact the data shows in the next 2025 years they have to make another innovation of the strength of the it revolution that eventually will have to make innovation every two years and then every one year and every six months and it is crazy. so something has to give. the system cannot be sustained this way. all you are doing with the automation in this picture is postponing the collapse. so the question is how to come to terms with that and i'm going to finish on that point. i'm just going to go back.

i'm going to show you this, my last slide of this. i did not show you. i did not point out what i showed you the graph to point out that if you look where we are, we operate about 90 watts. so each of you in this room is operating, this is all the energy needed to keep you alive. we are extraordinarily efficient. however, and that is what we are born with biologically and we fit perfectly on the scaling of metabolic rate. however, if you ask what is the social metabolic rate. how much energy really does each person in this room need to stay alive to the standard and quality of life each one of us has become accustomed to? meaning we have holdings,

roads, we can go to the cinema, have iphones and all the rest of that stuff.if you had elevated edit of its 11,000 watts. that is equivalent to 100 times bigger than our natural metabolic rate. and that is equivalent to a dozen elements. about 70 percent of the blue whale which is as big as a bookstore. so, and the seven and a half billion people on the client that would all like to be operating at 11,000 watts. and soon there will be 10 million people. so it is enormous and the dynamic we have set up, the dynamic that has brought us to this has built into it its own scenes of destruction. and only this open to

discussion in all of this, this is just part of the battle. you can read about this in the book, some of my ideas. but i believe this was a challenge and the whole question of the conceptual basis of sustainability and a critical idea that i haven't discussed here is that it is potentially misleading to think of each one of the problems that we have addressed whether it is climate change, global warming, environment, energy. speaking of them in their own individual way. focus on each one individually and not see them as totally interconnected. and you can see that in the graphs of the city scaling. but all of these things are interconnected and behaving in the same way and they all have their origin in social interaction.

so a change is something to do with changing the social network structures.i'm finished here and i'm happy to take questions or discuss. [applause] >> what accounts for the economy scale 50 percent bonus that you get -- >> in the cities? let me just tell you, i will spend one minute telling you the little bit about the generic properties of the network. it comes from the underlying physical mathematical properties of the network structures.one of the crucial elements that was in the

generic properties that transcends the design. meaning that it is the same for plants, trees, birds, fish is these networks have evolved in some sense. that is for example, how the circulatory system meaning all mammals, our circulatory system pumps blood through the system to supply the cells. the way it works is you have an arbitrary network and for you to cure our network and if you were to increase the size of the arterial system by 20 percent, your would have to work harder. so be decreased that by 20 percent it would also have to work harder. and that is true, that is the

idea. so the, the system that we have evolved by the continual process of natural selection has evolved to a state where we have an optimal heart circulatory system in terms of the amount of energy our heart has to use to pump blood through it in order to maximize the amount of energy that we devote to sex and reproduction. to produce babies. so we minimize the amount of energy for the mundane challenge of staying alive so that we can maximize energy to go into reproduction. and out of that optimization comes this scale. the optimization of the network that leads to the bigger you are, the less is needed to support an individual cell.

for 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 the three quarters. i can go on talking about that but you have to read the book. [laughter] >> you say that these ideas would apply to culture -- >> culture? it is an interesting question what do you mean by culture? >> groups of people who are essentially a network. [inaudible question] >> well, very interesting question. i have an ongoing collaboration

with anthropologists on a question. at least i would not have phrased it that way. but in asking the whole question of the sustainability, these are you know groups of people of less than a couple of hundred. which is what we were interacting. and how is that sustained and what are the social networks in terms of keeping it sustained? because many of them are migrant. most of them would move. so we have a whole unit we are trying to understand and to model that. it is very hard. mostly because unlike the magnus cities, we don't you know the -- have to believe your friends will give you numbers that they gathered by

looking at various things. [inaudible question] >> i don't know. i have not thought about that it is an interesting question. [inaudible question] >> we have only looked at these hunter gatherers. one thing you can understand is why you know, you can ask the question, what weren't the hunter gathering groups of million people? hunting and gathering together? it's a crazy idea but why did they limit themselves? and you can actually understand that. it is to do with the scale because one of the things, the great thing that happened was that human beings discovered the scale quite early.

meaning that you know you and i working together can do more than each of us working individually the way we are putting in. so that was discovered. what was not discovered was exchanging ideas, sitting around and extending ideas and saying you can do this or try this and joe over here says you should try that and then getting together. that was the real transition i think. but we try to understand that. and coupled with by the way, the discovery of agriculture. so that you could be sedentary rather than always on the move. so that is the next that we are trying to understand in this amusing collaboration. i had one other comment on that.

it is hard conceptually but it is easy in other ways. this is a curious thing. the high thing about science i think, especially physics.is that you know, it is real. you cannot completely speculate. you know you have data, you have to test your theory. the thing about this is the data is never good and there is very few -- it allows much greater speculation. >> you look at cities and people coming together. and then going back to your comment -- [inaudible question]

>> do you mean networks and you know, it networks? >> yeah. >> i can only speculate. [inaudible question] >> when i was first doing this work i thought, you know i ran into this problem of this sustainability question. you know that is fantastic you may be we have stumbled across it which is sort of globalized. as a way that would get us out of this. maybe it doesn't somehow, this is an innovation that goes outside of this 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, the fact that a quote.

and it was the coming of the railroad. because the coming of the railroad was a huge adventure, enormous! i mean i suspect bigger than having the iphone so to speak. because up until the railroad, those people in europe enter because of the nature of the country, did not move more than 10 or 20 miles from their home their entire life. that was it. and suddenly you -- this was followed not very long afterward with the invention of the telephone. in any event instant

communication everywhere including before the 20 century came but you had these you know these had profound effect. but they were quantitative. what they did was speed everything up. so my speculation is that despite how marvelous it is with the cloud and - my guess is that it is still going to speed everything up. and then they said for long time you not to be anywhere near authoring the silicon valley or clu to be anywhere you like. how many people, you know it's extraordinary. the silicon valley, what is happening to silicon valley? it is migrated to san francisco! so exactly the opposite. how many of those high tech gurus are living up in the top

of the sierra somewhere? none of them! they all want to be in the city because we still have this need for interaction and this positive feedback mechanism that somehow is in our dna. so this is total speculation but this is that it will speed everything a budget has which of course, that's why transfer the idea that i have to get another iphone you know pressure to get the iphone seven. it's really frightening frankly. in this computer by the way, this is a macbook air. the shift key on the left does not work. so i have to do uppercase, i need to use the shift key on the right.

which means i cannot type properly. you know what i've been told by the it people? get a new one. this is less than two years old. not necessarily you know, you know when i was a boy he would repair this. and by the way, they could repair it but it will take two weeks. and i will be without it for two weeks. i cannot afford to do that. this is really sick. [laughter] [inaudible question] >> absolutely. [inaudible] >> yes, phenomenal. that is what makes me very pessimistic. i think that you know i painted this picture which is, i left

you hanging in a certain sense but there are ways. i think this ways to avoid collapse. the problem is time. it is that we should have stopped this their people and show that remember the first attempt to make scenarios of sustainability and then there was the population -- both of those were completely trashed by, they were trashed very very good reason. because neither of them took into account innovation. neither of them.

and paul ehrlich made some outrageous predictions. he wrote that in 1970, by 1980 india would completely collapse. and of the world population would - [inaudible] they were wrong and shouldn't be trashed, certainly conclusions could be rejected but it led to something very bad. let's do it kind of monster that you hear and silicon valley. that we are going to innovate our way out of all of this. you know we are going to you very republican. [laughter]

>> well that you can have faith in man. which i love to believe. i hope it is right and i hope everything i have said is wrong. but what i was surprised in this work is that when you include innovation and you can do this at all scales, i just did a big scale. you don't get around the problem.all you do is postpone it. you put this off and you have this burning phenomenon that you're getting faster and faster. so you have this image that you were on the accelerating treadmill. faster and faster. then at some stage you have to jump to another treadmill that is accelerating and it goes even faster. and in a little bit later you jump from that one to another treadmill going even faster. and you have to make the jumps at an accelerated rate. to double the exhilaration. and so the question is, can

you, cannot continue with the socioeconomic - so innovation itself, something has to change and i think it is something that has much more to do with social interaction and social behavior of which we see a teeny bit. but we do not have the fundamental issue in the end. it is political. about how precisely do, think you know, everybody can agree that this is exactly the right stuff. it is irrelevant with politicians and practitioners, policymakers. they ignore it. which is what has been happening. not just in the united states but pretty much globally actually. and certainly we have not had any leadership charismatic leadership, we had a little bit with al gore a little bit with

obama. now we have a president that is himself singularity by the way. [laughter] >>. [inaudible question] >> there is a much better book. what's his name? the trouble with jared diamond's book is that, they predate allowed the dynamics. you know, they are from small societies. it is the same thing like you know when i said cities do not die. both course, the ancient world

both mayan and greek and roman. and you mentioned cities in the united states that have died in terms of small towns. so that is a different dynamic i think. you know a much more, when things are that small they are much more vulnerable. you know there is great vulnerability. when we have a socioeconomic city you know that was not dealt with. in diamond's book. i'm sorry cannot remember the other name but would he dealt with was much more of the roman empire. a major piece of that. but i did not talk about here, which it relates to that in a little bit is - how this translates into companies.

invited is that companies fail. all companies die eventually. or disappear, let's put it that way. and some of the dynamics that you, the demise of the roman empire is much more like what happens to companies. which has to do with top-heavy administration and being, not being very diverse. many companies disappear is a great success and multidimensional. lots of space and ideas, innovation sort of in the forefront. but as market forces start to narrow the product, 10 or 15 products to two or three.

of course are getting feedback from the market. the company grows and the dimensionality of the company decreases and so that the same time they have to have a bureaucracy and they have taxes and this tends to make the innovative part of the company very small. very vulnerable on itself so that the company goes through a hard time one of the first things that they do they decrease the research and development. as they always say will go back to that later and so on and is usually too late. and i had a whole bunch of graphs and pictures showing you that. companies become very vulnerable as i mentioned earlier, a fluctuation of the stock market can lead to the

demise and cities are quite the opposite. because cities as they grow become typically more and more multidimensional. more and more in terms of diversity of jobs and employment and businesses. the bigger the city the more systematically diverse. and that makes, and a successful city it is very robust to changes because it has a huge spectrum of jobs and opportunities. i was in new york last week and was sort of amazing. i had an interview somewhere and going to the building there was a store. and the store sold only antique fireplaces.and the next day i had to go into the west village. and i am walking along bleecker street. and there was a store only selling chess pieces not chess

sets, chess pieces! i am sure and i can say competence none of those exist in seattle. and they certainly don't even in los angeles. it is new york. every city has lawyers and doctors and everything is. there is a baseline. but all of these specialist things grow and from this extraordinary diversity. which makes new york a truly great city. and that is true of any great city. and ron lost that. [laughter] rome lost that diversity that made it vulnerable. and of course part of that diversity was loosely related as you well know i started to rely on - for his defense rather than.

[inaudible] no gibbons, in the fall of the roman empire. this guy - [laughter] anthropologists. [inaudible question] [laughter] >> i actually talk about that. let me give a quick answer. two things. two things led to it. the major thing was, i was involved with a superconducting, a supercollider. it was being built and it was canceled.

at the time, in the late 90s i guess it was. we used to hear a comment that physics was the science of the 19th and 20th century. biology is the science of the 21st century. and it is hard to disagree with that actually.but there was, this was often implied and it was that no need to do anymore fundamental physics. we know all of the physics, we know - and i have actually heard that. in washington. so it made me very angry. and my reaction was yes, biology will probably be the dominant science in the 21st century. but now my arrogance as a physicist came true.

it will not be a serious science meeting and will not be mathematician eyes or predictable quantitative until it embraces the culture and paradigm with physics. and biology readily. but this was the first thing that happened. parallel to that, i was in my 50s and it just so happens i come from a line of short-lived males. my father and his grandfather. i have lived much longer than they did. so i assumed when i was in my 50s that i would have maybe only 5 to 10 years to live. in fact, i grew up you don't household it was assumed that

you would die at 60. in retrospect, it was just taken for granted. and it was because of my uncles and so on. so i put these two things together. i thought geewhiz, i have to stop and think about why you age and why you died. and then i thought and i started reading a little bit. then i discovered something extraordinary! i discovered that here is an example, there is a big fat biology book with all the biologists.undergraduates and there is a section on genes and growth and metabolism in physiology and so on. so i looked in those books. there must be a chapter on aging and death. death is the second most important thing in every organism's life after birth! so there must be, not only is

there a chapter but if you look in the index, nothing on aging or mortality. my gosh, that is weird! so i lived in santa fe. i went down to albuquerque with university is and i spent many days in the medical library. reading and studying gerontology and aging and i discovered that it was a complete bathwater. there is very the working of his own narrative. nonquantitative. and i was - then i turned on my physics hand. innocent first of all what is the mechanism of aging and then this is what i thought i would find in a biology book. it will be a little calculation. and it would be a bunch of equations that would say you know, lifespan equals 100 years. and i don't think anywhere

anyone ask the questions. my attitude at the time was if biology were a real science, serious science, that would be a question. how can we understand what 100 years is the human lifespan? so i decided that is what i'm going to work on. and that is what got me into all of this. because the next thing i thought about was the obvious. if you want to understand how something ages and dies you better understand what is keeping it alive. it is called metabolism. and then i studied all of this stuff and i said my god, this means that a physicist can stop thinking about -- that wanted to the biology was very natural because it is based on network to stop thinking about what

other systems are like that. the obvious ones are cities. so cities in particular. particularly, when i first did it i thought i was working on companies and cities that were dull and uninteresting and the only reason i worked on cities is you can't get data on companies with a huge amount of money. it is unfortunate. so i turned to cities and then of collaboration and because you can get that. the data is accessible.and that is the reason that, when i started working on this i realize actually was much more interesting and what is a whole other direction. it is long and tedious and i'm sorry you got me.

[inaudible] >> the trouble with nationstates is that they are not organic. cities grow organically basically. and whereas nationstates are political and the boundaries are somewhat arbitrary.it depends on other phenomenon. it is work and i have been involved a little bit but others have been involved in doing similar things for nations.you know not surprisingly, you see many more outliers just because the boundaries which define those nations, in some cases it is quite arbitrary. but the answer is yes. there is work and it hasn't been taken very far.

[inaudible question] >> they lived happily ever after! [laughter] >> fantastic! >> exactly. [inaudible question] [inaudible]

>> yes, yes it is. and we know that. [laughter] we knew we were in trouble. [inaudible] >> are we what? [inaudible] >> i was trying to form a conceptual framework that you could stop thinking in a scientific language about some of these questions and make it more quantitative. and so on. and just we are scratching the surface in a way. but it is - i think that we need something i use the phrase, grand unified theory of sustainability. you know where, in fact one of the things i do feel is that if

we were serious about this, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars but it is much greater than the manhattan project, something really grand that is international and addresses these questions with a detailed practical level in a conceptual level. they cannot even get that going locally so to speak. you know there is no force moving in that direction. there is no, they are not any world leaders. it has to be a political decision and it has to come from political decisions presuming the population and in a majority of people do not feel it is important. from the viewpoint this makes

1939 and the nazis are coming small in the future of the planet. you know it is really i think quite dire really. if you start looking at all the various metrics. who knows, maybe as a person i'm surprisingly optimistic and there is a piece of me that is sort of republican. that may be orca somehow. i hope it is right. i don't see it. mr. trump is a singular person. in terms of this picture is a singularity that has to occur.

and this is in the next 25 years. something you change will happen. it could be driverless cars, and machine learning, one of these hightop things. but it could be mr. trump that waited 24 years because it is certainly he is destructive. he is really amazing. hey, you may not like him. feel the stupid he is, he has done something extraordinary. disrupting the whole system. you can say the things he says and rational thinking and truth no longer matters. it is a major paradigm shift. and it shouldn't have happened. [laughter] he should have waited.

so it is too bad that all of the energy do not go into the dark side into the light side and bring on you now forever to really come to terms with these questions. other than just business as usual and going backwards which is what much of this is. and it doesn't go very well. [applause] >> 50 b recently visited l test members of congress what they are reading the summer.>> congressman republican what is on your meeting with the summer and why? >> i just finished reading american god. i try, i read multiple books at