around the evolution of colonialism in the u.s. and that hasn't stopped and ended i would argue that the militarization of policing began at the moment of conquest and remained with us all the way through. this is nothing new. >> kelly hernandez is the author of city inmates; conquest, rebellion and the rise of human caging in los angeles. 1771-1965. thank you for being on booktv.

>> we are pleased to welcome jeffrey west who is a distinguished professor at san e fe'. he studies complexity science. 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] >> it studies the hidden laws from living organisms to cities. the work is visionary and

insightful and beautifully written. i am excited to hear more. before i let him take over, a quick word about how we will run things. we will have talk and presentation from jeffrey and then a short q&a and then a signing in the back of the room where books are also available for purchase. thank you again for being with us tonight and please join me in welcoming jeffrey west. [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 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 andeconomic 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.

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 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 gre britain.

they all have the same step of the same slope and return to scale. this increasing in terms of scale and universality. here is an example. income, gdp and crime and patent production. scaling in the same way. the noise, variance. b ....

that means you have-- especially on transport you produce 15% less in pollution, so the carbon footprints of a city the bigger it is, so that greener city in the us is new york city per carbon footprint per capita and maybe one of the worst is santa fe because it's such a small place, so the question is wherein the hell did these come from and how come the japanese cities and chinese cities in american cities and frank cities

all scaled the same way even though they have different history, geography and culture. there wasn't a congress and 7880 that everyone sat down and said this is how we will design cities and urban systems. it evolved organically, so what is universal about these and back to what i said what is universal is almost obvious what is universal is the fact that all these places are built for people to live in, to facilitate interaction and the fact they are the same is 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 interact and the strength of their interaction, size of their modular groups is pretty much given. so, that's what i say. can you test that? i'm not showing you theory or mathematics, but science

progresses by understanding phenomenon, creating a theoretical structure and then making predictions which are tests in some ways. i don't have time to go through all of that, obviously, but i can show you one test without knowing the mathematics and that is the idea is this behavior derives from social interaction, the degree of social interaction. therefore, if i can measure the number of interactions between people as a function of city size, how do that? well, that used to be difficult, but now it's quite easy because everyone in this room is carrying a little detective with them, a cell phone meaning as you no doubt know every single call you make is recorded and kept by the phone company.

this means you can determine who's talking to whom, who interacting with who i'm aware you are, how long you talk and everything else, so it turned-- turns out i've collaborated with mit stater is billions and billions of the phone calls, billions. we then it started analyzing them in these terms. here's the idea, i define a relationship meaning i call-- that rethought-- defines a relationship. you count those as a function of the city size and then plot them in the same way. that's portugal and the united kingdom and you can see they fall on top of one another and

pretty much parallel. this is a simple example that gives credence to the idea of these social network structures. now, the character of the social network structures quite interesting. in biology these networks were three quarters, less than one and that gave rise to do just that it, that elephant is more ponderous than the amounts in all respects. turns out the super linear networks coming from social interaction come the super linearity coming from i talk to you, you talk to another person and then you talk to me and we build up and so on. that's the way the system works with this huge positive feedback loop that goes on with interactions giving rise to this extraordinary process and the result being the social economic life we have created. of that leads through the

network to dynamics, the pace of life speeding up rather than slowing down in a protectable way, so look at this biology in the left decreasing with the size. that is the speed of walking as a function of size. this is ancient data meaning the observations are the same. you can see that line is a prediction of theory. it's a bit of a stretch to say the network theory predicts this, but you are still part of a network you walk into a big city with a crowd. this is sort of interesting. this is something i took from a british newspaper about six months ago and is from the city of liverpool and under the caption reads: research revealed almost half the nation found the slow pace of high street to be the biggest

shopping-- not the noise of the city or the pollution and the rest of it. it was the people were walking to slow. what it liverpool do? they put in a fast lane for walking and that's what this is. this is the first day. this is happening in many cities around the world now. here's another version. it's a bit old, you can see i see you are buying the iphone five and shortly after apple launching iphone six. of course, now they are launching the [bleep]-- excuse me. [laughter] >> that was an emotional response. i will finish up by talking about taking this idea and this network theory for cities and so on, but doing what we did with biology talking about growth.

same equation conceptually except it's more confiscated because you include everything. how does the city work. you have resources and energy coming, money coming in any put those on the same unit and so on. you at all of those up and what happens to it, some goes to maintenance repair and infrastructure, roads, buildings repairs hospitals, doctors and then it grows new stuff. grows these buildings going on here, for example and it grows new people, so you can write this down in mathematics and you remember when you did it i showed you that's what happens if you do it in biology when you have sub linear scaling. the bigger you are the less spectacular with the rise to the stopping of growth. now, we had the opposite.

we have the bigger you are the more per capita and when you stick it into so to speak this equation with mathematics then still getting that and i just remake cartoon version of it, you get in fact open ended growth so it's satisfying with the super behavior. you understand from the network and that gives rise to open ended growth which is wonderful because this is not the paradigm we live in. this would be terrible for a city or a company or economy where it supposed to open-ended and that's what we are and i don't have time to show you the data. the gdp i showed earlier was like this and this is great, lovely and wonderful except it has a fateful flawed that fateful flock is designated by that dotted line because this has built into it something we call a finite time singularity.

what does that mean in english? that means what he located here and some finite time, 10, 20, 30, 100 years. whatever it is you are looking at, it could be a number of patents, it will become infinite which is completely nuts, almost impossible, but the theory actually tells you what happens here it says at some stage what happens is the system stagnates and collapses. that's what would happen. it's a sophisticate-- sophisticated version of the argument and the question is how do you get out of it and stop it from happening. how do you stop that collapse of the socioeconomic system from happening? the idea is the following: here it is a version of that again, but you remember what you have to realize is this growth was done within a certain that paradigm. that is some major innovation

like we discovered once upon a time iron and that changed everything. we then in some state discovered coral in the beginning of the industrial revolution the discovered oil. recently we invented it, but each one of those when it effectively does this picture is reset the clock. start over again. you sought a reinvent yourself start over again in this new paradigm. this is what happens. somewhere along here you make some major innovation, some paradigm shifts and you take off. great. then you hit another finite time cingular date. it would collapse and you would have to-- the .-dot 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 paradigm shift to have open ended growth. there's eight dram to maintain open ended growth to do this and that is in fact what we have done. innovation has gotten us out of it and this is data, not by me. not my data. i mean, i found this-- it is how many years it took each one of these technologies to have 10 million customers. just a way of getting a metric to ff things are and gets quicker and quicker. you do it in less and less time following this idea or this, this is not mind you-- mine. you can 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 invented cells or self-involved and it took a billion years for them to actually evolve. a very long time to make the shift a long long time ago and now down here the internet took over 10 years and only happened about 10 years or. you can't see it on this spot. so, this line, once again this line is actually what is predicted by theory. okay. now, lets me go back. i want to go back to this. let's go back to this. this is two things, one thing you have to realize is going along one of these curves life

gets faster. it's speeding up. so, you continually speed up. furthermore the time in between these innovations has to get shorter and shorter. something we just saw that may have taken 100 years a thousand years ago now only takes 15 years and so on, so the question is if you take this argument to a absurd conclusion is not only are we going to have to make another innovation for a short length and in fact all the data indicates in the next 2025 years we have to make another innovation of the strength of the it revolution, but eventually we have to make such innovation every two years and every one year and every six months and every week. that is completely crazy. so, something has to give. of the system cannot be sustained this way.

all you are doing with the innovation in this picture is postponing the claps here come 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 and show you this, my last slide. i didn't show you, i didn't point out when i showed you the graph of metabolic rate that if you look where we are within their women on on it we operate at about 91, so each one of you in this room is operating like one of these light bulbs. all the energy needed to keep you alive. 2002 calories a day. your kellogg's corn flakes is 91 we are extraordinarily efficient. however, and that's what we will follow up with by a logically

and we fit perfectly on the scaling of metabolic rate. however. if you ask what is our social metabolic rate which is how much energy is each person in this room need to stay alive for the standard"-- quality of life each one of us have come accustomed to meaning we have nice buildings, roads, we can go to the cinemark. we iphones and the rest of that stuff. if you had that up its 11000 watts. that's 100 times beer-- bigger in our natural metabolic rate and that is equivalent to about a dozen old heads or about 70% of a blue whale. there are seven and a half billion people on this planet, all of whom would like to be operating at 11000 watts and is soon going to be testing people. the problem is enormous and the

dynamic we have set up, the very dynamic that has brought us to this is fantastic and has built into its own destruction unless we intervene to change something and i leave that open to discussion. this is just one part of the book. you can read about it in the book. i leave it more to challenge in terms of the whole question of the conceptual basis of global 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 we have addressed whether it's climate change, global warning, the environment, energy, health, thinking of them in their own little individual way and focus on a 20 individually and not see

them as totally interconnected. you can see that in the graph of the city scaling that all of these things are interconnected and behaving in the same way and they all have their origin in social interaction, so it's a change that has to take place and something to do with changing our social network structures. i will finish there and i'm happy to take questions or discuss whatever. [applause]. >> what accounts for the economy of scale or savings that you get >> for cities? >> for cities or-- >> so, let me just spend one minute telling you the little bit about the generic prophet of

the network because that's what it is. it comes from the underlying physical and mathematical properties of the network structures and one of the crucial elements that is in the generic properties that transcends the evolve design meaning it is the same for plants, trees, mammals, birds, fish is that these networks have evolved being optimal in some sense. that is for example our circulatory system, hours mean all mammals and our system has evolved to minimize the amount of energy our hearts have to do pump blood through our system to supply itself. the way that works is you have a network and or you take your own network.

if you were to increase the size of the branch of your arterial system by 20% your heart would have to work harder, but if you decreased by 20% hard it would also have to work harder and that's idea, so the system we have evolved by the continual process of natural selection has evolved to a state where we have an optimal heart secured to our 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 we devote to sex and reproduction to produce babies. so, we minimize the amount of energy for the monday challenge of staying alive so that we can maximize energy to go into reproduction and out of that

optimization comes this economy of scale. it's the optimization of the network 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 flowing to the network on a per cell bases is lower the bigger you are. that doesn't explain why it should be the three. i could go on talking about that , but you have to read the book. [laughter] >> would you say these ideas would apply to culture as defined by anthropologists. >> culture cracks that's an interesting collection-- collection-- question. what you mean?

>> different cultures. insofar as that culture is staying alive. >> well, very interesting question and so i have an ongoing collaboration with anthropologists on exactly that question. at least i would not have phrased it that way, but it's asking the whole question of the sustainability of hunter gatherer society. these are groups of people of less than a couple hundred, which is what we were contracting and how is that sustained and what are their social networks in terms of keeping it sustained because many of them are migrant. most of them would move, so we have-- we are trying to understand that an model that. that's very hard mostly because unlike the cities, you have to

believe your archaeological and anthropological friend to give you some numbers, which they gathered by looking up bones and you know various things. >> i'm also thinking-- [inaudible question] >> i've not thought about that, but that's an interesting question. as i say, we have only looked at the hunter gatherers and when can you can understand from them is why-- you could ask the question, why weren't there hunter gatherer groups of a hundred million people hunting and gathering together. crazy idea, but why did they limit themselves and you can actually understand that from this and it has to do with,

ms. of because one of the things , the great thing that happened was that human beings discovered that economy of scale forming groups quite early meaning you and i working together can do more than each of us working individually. that's one way of putting it or -- so that was discovered, but what was not discovered until language was developed was exchanging ideas, sitting around and exchanging ideas and saying if you willing to do this, try this and joe says you should try that and getting together and so on. that was a real transition, i think. also, coupled with the discovery of agriculture. so you could be said to terry

always on the move, so that's the nexus we would find ourselves in using collaboration. it's hard. one other comment on that. i said it's hard. it's hard conceptually, but it's easy in other ways. the hard thing about science, i think especially physics, but doing this is that it's real. you can't just completely speculate. you have data and yet the dust-- test her theory. the thing about this other hunter gatherer is that the data isn't very good and there's very few things that can never be tested, so it's actually much easier because it allows much greater speculation. sorry. yes? >> you are looking at cities

being billed as places for people coming together originally and then going back to your comments of you are in santa fe whereas new york is one of the largest cities. heady cds networks changing the kind of overall policy of the networks where people are collaborating and where they are not quick make you mean by networks, you know, it networks? >> yeah. >> i can only speculate. so, when i first was doing this work i thought and i ran into this problem of sustainability question and i thought that is fantastic. may be we have stumbled across it which is sort of globalized as a way that will get us out of this. may be somehow it's innovation that goes outside of this and it

won't be an issue and then i thought a lot about that and then i started reading a lot about the transition during the victorian era and the more i read and in fact i had a quote. it was to do with the coming of the railroad because the coming of the railroad was a huge paradigm shift, enormous having i suspect bigger than having your iphone, so to speak. because up until the railroad most people certainly in europe, less so in the us because of the nature of the country didn't move more than 10 or 20 miles from their home their entire life. that was it and suddenly you

opened everything up and the us would be the united states, so that was a huge shift, but it was followed not long afterwards with the invention of the telephone, which meant you could have instant communication everywhere including-- you know before the 20th century came we had transatlantic calls. these had profound effects, but they were quantitated and not qualitative. base-- they speed everything up. so, my speculation is that despite how marvelous is for the it stuff in the cloud and we are all interconnected, my guess is that it will still speed everything up. once had for a long time you don't have to be anywhere. you can be anywhere you like because you have this thing. you know, how many people-- it's

extraordinary with silicon valley and what's happening in silicon valley? it's migrating to san francisco doing 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 it's total speculation as i say and my speculation is that it would just speed everything up, which it has, of course. that's why i used the expletive earlier because the idea i have to get another iphone, you know the pressure to get an iphone seven is really frightening, frankly. this computer, by the way, which

is a macbook air, here's something interesting, the shift key on the left doesn't work. i can't do capital. i have to use the shift key on the right meaning i can't type properly. could do you know what i have been told by our it people? it's only two years old. get a new one. [laughter] >> you know, when i was a boy you would repair it. by the way, they could repair it , but it's going to take two weeks and i will be without it for two weeks. i can't afford to do that in this juncture of my life. this is really sick. [laughter] [inaudible]

[inaudible] >> so, that's what makes me very pessimistic because i think that -- so, i painted this picture, which i left you sort of hanging in a sense, but there are ways-- i think there are certainly ways of avoiding the collapse. the problem is time. it's not there isn't avoiding. it's that we should have started thinking about this 75 years ago or whenever. as you know, some people in this audience i'm sure remember in the 70s there was called a rogue report, attempt to make scenarios of sustainability and then there was the population bomb and both of those were completely trashed by economists

they were trashed for very good reason. either of them took into account innovation, neither of them. paul made some outrageous predictions that in 1970 and by 1980 in yet would completely collapse. and that the world population, i don't know what it was 3 billion or 4 billion. we have gone on because he did not put into the thinking the fact that we integrate our way out of it and so they were wrong shouldn't have been trashed. they certainly, their conclusions could be rejected, but it led to something very bad, i believe. it led to a kind of montross

that you hear from economists and in silicon valley that we are going to innovate our way all of it this. the human mind, nothing to worry about. very republican, by the way. i mean, you have faith in man, which i would love to believe. i hope it's right. i hope everything i have said is wrong, but what i was surprised at in this work is that when you include innovation and you can do it at all scales. you don't get around the problem. all you do is put it off and you have this frightening phenomenon that you're getting faster and faster, so you have this image you are on an accelerated treadmill going faster and faster and at some stage you have to jump to another treadmill that's accelerating

and going further and then a little later you have to jump in that one to another one that's going even faster and yet make those jumps at an accelerated rates. so the question is can you-- cannot continue without a socioeconomic impact and so innovation itself, something has to change and i think that something has much more to do with social interaction, which received teeny-weeny bit, but these are minor. there's no fundamental issue in the end in any case political. doesn't matter how science you do, i mean, everyone could agree this is exactly the right stuff. it's a relevant. politicians and practitioners, policymakers ignore, which is

obviously happening, not just in the us, but pretty much globally we have certainly not had any leadership, vision leadership, charismatic leadership. we had a little bit with al gore, teeny bit with obama and now, we have a president that himself as a singularity, by the way. [inaudible question] >> scene that you are thinking about how collapse occurs. >> there is a much better book. what is his name? the trouble with derek diamonds book is that they predate a lot

of the dynamic that's in here. they are from small societies, you know the same thing like when i said cities don't die. you can name many cities from the ancient world, myan spaccarelli, greek and roman world and you can even mentioned cities in the united states that died in terms of small towns, so that's a different dynamic, i think. that's much more because when things are that small they are much more vulnerable. greater vulnerability. when we have a socioeconomic system the size of the economies and cities we have now that was not dealt with in diamonds book. i'm sorry i cannot remember the other one's name, but what he dealt with was the roman empire, major piece of that.

what i didn't talk about here, which relates to that a little bit is how this translates into companies and why it is that companies fail, all companies die eventually or disappear let's put it that way. some of the dynamics led it to the demise of the roman empire is much more like what happens to companies, which is to do with top-heavy administration up to find and being-- not being very diverse. you know, many companies disappear because out of their great success they start out very multidimensional. lots of large product space and ideas, innovation is sort of in

the forefront, but as market forces start to narrow, they go from 10 or 15 products to maybe two or three. they are getting feedback, of course, from the market. of the company grows and the dimensionality of the company decreases and so that at the same time they have to have a big bureaucracy. that to do laws, taxes, had to have the floor swept and this tends to make the innovative part of the company very small and very vulnerable of itself so that if company goes through a hard time, one of the first things they do is decrease research and development because they always say we can come back to that later and usually it's too late by then.

i had a whole bunch of graphs and pictures showing you that, so companies become very vulnerable as i mentioned earlier with a small fluctuation the stock market can lead to their demise. cities are quite the opposite of that because cities as they grow become typically more multidimensional, more in terms of diversity of jobs, employment, businesses. of the bigger the city the more systematically they become diverse and that makes successful city is then very robust, changes because it has huge spectrum of jobs and opportunities. i was in new york last week .-dot-- it was sort of amazing. i had an interview somewhere and as i went to the building there was a store. what did the store sell only?

antique fireplaces. the next day i had to go to the west village and i'm walking along bleecker street and there was a store only selling chess pieces, not chess sets, chess pieces. couldn't believe it. i'm sure i can say with confidence neither of those kinds of businesses exist in seattle and they don't even in los angeles. you know, that's new york because every city has lawyers and doctors and everything else. a baseline, but all of these specialist things grow and form this extraordinary diversity, which makes new york a truly great city and that's true of any great city. london is not so dissimilar. rome lost a certain sense of diversity and made it very

vulnerable. of course, part of that diversity has been lost and only loosely related as you well know it started to rely on-- [inaudible] >> i wish i could remember the name. >> not gibbons connect no, no not gibbons. it doesn't discuss it in these terms that all, but this guy, he's an anthropologist. >> your background is in theoretical physicist. wetland or interest to biology, sociology, economics and so on? >> i talk about it in the book. let me give a quick answer. two things.

two things led to it. the major thing was i was involved with superconducting super collider. do you know what that was? it was being built in texas and it was canceled and at that time in the late '80s early '90s i guess it was we used to hear this comment that's physics was a science of the 19th and 20th century. biology is the science of the 21st century and it's hard to disagree with that, actually. it was often mumbled or implied and that was, no need to do any more fundamental physics. we know all the physics we know and i have actually heard that from various sources in

washington. so, that may be very angry and up my reaction was, yes, biology will probably be the dominant science in the 21st century, but and now might arrogant physicist came through. won't be a serious science meaning it won't be magnetized or predictable, quantitative until it embraces the culture and paradigm of physics. that was the first thing that happened. parallel with that i was in my 50s and it just so happened i come from a lineup short lived males meaning my father and his grandfather, they are all-- i have lived much longer than any

of them. so, i assumed when i was in my 50s that i would have maybe only five or 10 years to live. in fact, i grew up in a household that it was assumed you would die at 60. in retrospect i was just taken for granted because my uncle and so on. so, i put these two things together. i thought geewhiz i have to start to think about why you age and why you die. then, i thought it started reading a little bit about this and then i discovered something extraordinary. i discovered that-- here's an example. there are these big fat biology books with biology in them for undergraduates and there's a section on genes and growth and metabolism and 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 organisms life after its birth, so there must be. not only was there not a chapter, if you look in the index nothing on aging or mortality. i thought that's weird, so i live in santa fe. i went down to albuquerque, where the university is a night spent many days in the medical library reading and studying gerontology and aging and i discovered that it was complete backwater and very little work and it and it was all narrative. totally on quantitative. i was-- so then i turned on my physics hat and i said first of all what is the mechanism of aging, but equally important and

this is what i thought i would find in a biology book with a little calculation that would start out with something and there would be equations and it would say l for life span equals 100 years. i don't think anywhere you see anyone ask that question requires it 100 years, so my attitude at that time is if biology were a real science, serious science that would be the foremost question. how can we understand why 100 years is the span of a human lifespan. white is a mouse-- why is a mouse only to to three years. i decided that's what i would work on and that's what got me into a well of the next thing i thought about is the obvious. if you want to understand how something ages and dies you understand what keeps it alive. that's called metabolism. i studied all the stuff and down these laws and said this means a

physicist can start thinking about them. when i did that biology was very natural since it was based on network to start thinking about what other systems are like that and the obvious ones are cities and socioeconomic. so, cities in particular. particularly-- when i first did i thought i would work on companies and the only reason i worked on cities is you can't get data on companies without paying a huge amount of money. it's unfortunate. so, i turned to cities and formed a new collaboration because that data you can get. it's assessable and that was the reason then when i started working on that cities work i realized actually was more interesting.

that's long and tedious and i'm sorry. who's running this? should i finish here? >> we have time for about one more question. >> all right. >> village upon what you just said, did you look at nation states that all? >> a little bit, but the trouble with the nation states is that it's not organic you know. i mean, cities grow organically, basically or have and whereas nation states are political in the boundaries are somewhat arbitrary. it depends on other phenomenon. i've been involved bit, but others have involved and try to do similar things for nation's. you know, not surprisingly you see many more outliers because

the boundaries-- what you define as nation in some cases is quite arbitrary. the answer is yes, there is work and it's not been taken very far. are we done? >> very last question. >> you don't have to tell me the ending of the book. >> oh, they live happily ever after. [laughter] >> fantastic. [laughter] >> [inaudible question] [inaudible question]

[inaudible question] [inaudible question] >> we sort of know that, actually. [laughter] >> we knew we were in trouble. >> are we just trying to find a solution to delay the trouble? >> i don't know. i was trying to form conceptual framework that you could start thinking in a scientific language about some of these questions and make it more quantitative, mechanistic and a salon and this is just scratching the surface and ways, but you know i think we need

something like i use the phrase grand unified theory of sustainability. in fact, one of the things i do feel is that if we were serious about this there should be a project of maybe hundreds of millions of dollars that is much greater than that apollo program was or the manhattan project, something really grand that is international that addresses that expression both at a detailed practical level and also conceptual level. you know, we can't even get that going locally so to speak. there is just no-- there is no force moving in that direction. there is no-- there aren't any world leaders. it's political, as i have said.

it has to be a political decision and it has to come from -- political decisions are assumedly something the population feels is important, but the majority of people that don't feel it's important, from my viewpoint this makes living in 1939 and the nazis are coming small in terms of the future of the planet. you know, it's really i think quite dire, really if you start looking at all the various metrics. now, you know who knows. may be i'm as a person surprisingly optimistic as a person. there is a piece of me that is sort of republican. we muddle through and it will work out somehow, but that is correct. i don't see it. i don't see it especially in the present climate because

mr. trump is a singular person and in some ways in terms of this picture metaphorically he sort of, there's a singularity that has to occur according to this if you believe it and this is analysis by other people in the next 25 years or so and something you change will happen and it could be driverless cars. could be artificial intelligence, machine learning, a high thing. , but it could have been mr. trump waiting 25 years because he certainly is disruptive, i mean, he's really amazing. you may not like him and a few of us really do appreciate him, but he has done something extraordinary. he has disrupted the whole system. that you can say the things he says and rational thinking and truth no longer matter is a

major paradigm shift and that shouldn't have happened yet. he should have waited. so, it's too bad that all that energy didn't go into the dark side into the light side and bring on a fervor to really come to terms with the big questions rather than just business as usual and going backwards. doesn't bode very well. sorry to end on that. [applause]. >> book tv visited capitol hill to ask members of congress what