#28 - Geoffrey West

38:34Geoffrey West:And that's called a fractal, but it's often called self-similar because it just repeats itself. And we're all very familiar with it, obviously with trees, but we're often familiar with it with river systems. If you look, you know, take a map or at a delta or, you know, river that has tributaries it also has this kind of behavior and indeed it's also a fractals and if you were to cut yourself open and look at your circuitry system it would be a fractal it's a wonderful fractal and in fact almost all of you is a fractal it turns out your brain is a fractal your white and gray matter in the brain is a fractal your circuitry system I just said is a fractal your lungs are fractals I'm sure everybody's seen sort of pictures of lungs and that just looks like a tree but they're fractals and they're fractals both in a colloquial way because they just keep branching down from bigger branches down to tiny branches but all these systems to varying degrees are mathematical fractals in the sense we do the measurements and you actually check, is this actually a regular scaling as you go down through the fractal?

39:55Geoffrey West:I just want to make a distinction here. This is a scaling of as you go down through a network. And the scaling I talked before was actually the relationship of one network to another, the network of London to the network of Birmingham. So this is like going down through the network of London, the London streets London in many ways has fractal behaviour cities are fractals and that's what Patty discovered and did a lot of work on so they were discovered in the 60s well they were actually first discovered much earlier than that by a remarkable man named Richardson who had discovered that coastlines are fractals in the sense that he wrote a wonderful paper on that.

40:56Geoffrey West:But he didn't coin the term. And what he discovered was that something very peculiar, and maybe it's worth, if we want to talk about fractals, it's worth just spending a couple of minutes on it. so he was a pacifist he came from by the way he was a cousin of Ralph Richardson the actor

41:24Geoffrey West:by the way but he was a pacifist and he was very concerned about war in general war and peace and he had a theory of war kind of weirdo theory of war that the degree of the number of casualties was proportional to the length of the border between the countries having a war so between France and Germany that was sort of the hypothesis which may have some I mean he tried to show that was true so but what he had to do and here's the relationship to fractals he had to measure of course the distance of the border how long is the border and I think the first one he looked at was between Spain and Portugal and he looked it up in a couple of places and I'm going to make up some numbers now one said you know 1 ,210 kilometers then he found in another place one said 1 ,896 kilometers and he thought and then he got worried and he looked up somewhere else and it had another completely different number and he said this is ridiculous You can't make that many mistakes.

42:37You know, a few percent, yes, but, you know, 50 or 100 percent doesn't make any sense.

42:44Geoffrey West:And so he started looking at it very carefully and he realized what the problem was. It was the definition of a border because or of a coastline is actually what he started to look at. That's where the coastlines came in. He started measuring the length of coastlines. And he realized, of course, that it depends on the scale of the ruler you use. If you, because if you just use a very, you know, coarse grain ruler that only can resolve down to a mile or five miles, let's say five, let's take a ridiculous five miles, then any cove that's less than five miles, you don't see. So if you go to a mile, even though then smaller coves, you can't see.

43:27Geoffrey West:if you go to half a mile, the tiniest coves you can't, and so on. It began to realize that the whole thing about measurement, specifically of coastlines, but more generally, depended upon the resolution of the instrument you're using. This was an extraordinary discovery that should have been known for the last few thousand years, and somehow no one had realized this, and it fell to a man named Mandelbrot, a French mathematician working in the United States who realized the importance of it and coined the word fractal and this idea of self-similarity and that's what, which actually Richardson had discovered but then Mandelbrot wrote a very influential book in maybe the late 60s, early 70s that is a lovely book actually but the only problem with that book is that he talks about the mathematics a little bit of fractals, but in no way discusses why.

44:34Geoffrey West:Why is this the case? So some of the work I've been involved in, to cut a long story short, strongly suggests that fractals are a result of an optimization that's going on. A system tries to optimize, like us. we have evolved over certainly hundreds of thousands and in fact obviously you couldn't even last say hundreds of millions of years but our circulatory system certainly over extremely hundreds of many millions of years and it's evolved by natural selection and you could argue that the the circulatory system that we have that all of us share and all of us meaning all mammals Every single mammal that's existed, every human being that's existed, the one that is evolved minimizes the amount of energy your heart has to do to pump blood through the system to supply oxygen and nutrients to the cell to keep you alive.

45:39Geoffrey West:and you want to minimize that in order to maximize the amount of energy you can devote to rearing of your offspring, to having off to sex and reproduction and the rearing of offspring. What's classically called Darwinian fitness. That's integral to the survival of the fittest. And so it turns out if you do that, that leads to these fractal, in that particular case, it leads to fractal behavior. and more generally this kind of optimization this tendency towards the system optimizing because of the continuous feedback coming about from competition in particular leads to some kind of tendency towards optimization and for animals certainly for mammals but for animals generally we show that brilliantly if you do the measurements but also from what I said earlier it leads to extraordinary scaling laws for animals and they are you know if you look at the graphs of the scaling of mammals in terms of anything you want to measure about us everything from metabolic rate to the lengths of our aorta to how long we live but especially metabolic rate mammals from the shrew and mouse all the way up to the whale lie beautifully on these straight lines plotted logarithmically cities as I said earlier they also lie on them but there's much more variance among cities and you sort of can understand that from this point of view because whereas we've evolved over enormous evolutionary timescales cities have only been around hundreds and at most thousands of years.

47:29Geoffrey West:So, you know, we haven't had that long a period really to evolve. I mean, as serious cities. So it's a very nice, consistent framework and it unifies these kind of the social, our social manifestation of being a human being in the form of cities with our biological, which is our physiology and our life history. So fractals play a crucial role. Just one last point on that. I said those straight lines were called power laws, and fractals are a manifestation of those power laws. I mean, they're all one thing. self-similarity fractals power laws rising from these networks are all in a certain sense interchangeable and uh and the very last point on that is that um they are all these things are fractal

48:52Geoffrey West:evolutionary history or details of your geography if you're a city and so on that have small effects yeah sorry i lost you for a few seconds there i don't know what's going on with you yes i saw it came up on my schedule if it was me probably was i don't know yeah um and in relation to fractals also we're used to three dimensions what is a fractal dimension

49:16Geoffrey West:ah very good yeah so we most i think everybody knows what three dimensions means sort of up i guess up down and sideways and uh you could even think of time as the fourth dimension so we have these and they're very and we normally think of dimensions as integral that is they're integers one you know one dimension is a line two dimensions is a square or rectangle three dimensions a cube etc um so uh the the one of the things that comes out of fractals is that in the mathematics, and this was Mandelbrot's whom I mentioned earlier contribution really, was to recognize that you can describe fractals by extending the definition of dimension in terms of the way systems respond to scaling itself.

50:24Geoffrey West:that is the simple geometric scaling that we're used to that if you have a square of you know one inch by one inch and you double this the length of its sides to so it's two by two the area goes up by a factor of four because of like two squared and you know if you doubled if if it went up by, if it were four inches by four inches, it would be 16, it goes up by four squared, et cetera. So it goes up at the square of the length. A cube, similarly, would go up by the cube of the number, a cube of, if you doubled, it goes up by two cubed, eight, eight times.

51:15Geoffrey West:In fractals and the things we've been talking about, both cities and organisms when you I already said if you double the size you don't go by a factor of two that would be linear scaling you go by two plus this 0.15 so that 0.15 you could sort of think of as extending the dimension of of the city. It's using that word and extending it because the mathematics of that is identical to the mathematics that led us to saying that two-dimensional objects, when you scale up linearly, go as a square of a length, and three-dimensional objects go as the cube. So when you scale them up. Here, when you scale up a city, you have this curious phenomenon that it isn't a simple integer.

52:20Geoffrey West:It's this added little bit, which is 0.15, which comes about from the underlying dynamics, mathematics of the networks. and so he termed that fractal dimension that kind of phenomenon fractal dimension and so these objects that are self-similar typically have non-integer fractal dimension and that plays a crucial role obviously in understanding their geometry and if you want to predict things if you scale something up what it is. So most man-made objects simple objects that are around us when we think of scaling are linear and so-called Euclidean they follow classic Euclidean geometry and they scale with these integers but the natural world, and this was the point Mandelbrot made the extremely powerful and correct statement.

53:32Almost the entire world around us scales like a fractal.

53:38Geoffrey West:It doesn't scale in a Euclidean way because it's, in fact, I don't know if we were on the air before, it's sort of like I live in a house that is inspired by local Pueblo architecture, which is highly organic. It's adobe and has no right angles. I mean, this room is, you know, even the corners are sort of all crooked, a little bit crooked and so on.

54:10Geoffrey West:But all the new houses being built over there by all the immigrants from California and Texas want to put right angles in because that's what we're used to. and all the houses I grew up in it's very right I swear right angles I would apply the theory of fractals and the super linear scaling directly to individual architecture and levels of beauty within individual buildings because as you say within nature we have that sort of positive return on increased complexity in terms of the perception of beauty in nature i'd apply that directly to architecture and say that the more complex your building in terms of its uh intricacy and ornamentation etc that you get even greater returns in super linear way on the perceived beauty of that building and the same is true at a street level and a city and urban level as well No, I strongly agree with that.

55:16Geoffrey West:I mean, absolutely correct. Most people don't realize, you know, I'm looking across a mountain range just across it. That's a fractal. There's clouds in the sky, they're fractals. Those trees are fractal, etc. You know, the only thing that's not fractal is the stuff that's made by men and women. Yeah, that's absolutely true. So no, so I strongly agree. I mean, I love architecture that's more, has built into it something a little more organic, a little less geometric in the usual sense of that word. You know, I also, you know, I can appreciate geometric building, I can appreciate for sure. but I was very I mean I tell you an example that irritated me in terms of argument if we're talking about architecture and cities was Norman Foster's design of Mazda in you know what I'm talking about the city in Saudi Arabia that was going to be which was a great you know it was a great idea trying to build a city and of course it was totally weird to build it in a desert but anyway an ecological city, environmentally friendly city.

56:25Geoffrey West:As I say, bizarre to do it in a desert, but okay. But it was a square, which is exactly what a city is not. And I thought, he must be kidding. The only thing worse than that is the linear city, isn't it? You see the linear city. Yeah, the linear one, the latest one, the linear. And when I saw that, I thought this is now even more, you know, I mean, come on. You know, it was very interesting to me. I was surprised. I mean, even if you go back to, what's his name? The Garden City. Oh, yeah. The man that invented it. Ah. Name escapes me now. Yeah, or Letchworth. You know, I mean, they're very designed and so on.

57:13Geoffrey West:But he did use a lot of curves, at least. You know, they were geometric. I mean, they were still sort of Euclidean, but they were curves. I was, you know, I mean, I'm not, he was obviously trying to do something very different, but he still stayed somewhat geometric. But this extreme of squares and lines, I think is, you know, I don't know. I was flabbergasted in both cases. And it's not surprising. so I'd like to lead into something that you I think you asked earlier and that is you know as part of the original question the potential impact on design and cities and so forth and the one and it is exactly this that if you design I mean, I'm going to be, this is terrible, I'm going to be sarcastic, I guess.

58:18Geoffrey West:But, you know, sitting in an armchair, designing what you think a city should be, is wonderful. I mean, it's great. And I'm sure there's great things that have come from it. But in general, you're going to get it wrong, I think. I think in general, people doing that have got it wrong almost every time. And that's the point. the point is as far as I know in terms of big cities there hasn't been a successful one that is everywhere from Washington DC all the way up through Brisbane and Islamabad and of course the famous Brasilia all of them turn out to be failures we have to define what that means I I think really, but most of them have not been, most people have not deemed to be successful.

59:09And I would argue partly that's because

59:15Geoffrey West:they didn't know that the scaling laws were at work. They didn't know that if I give you, so another way of talking about the scaling laws is that you give me the size of a city in the United States, I can tell you to within 10-15 % or whatever it is the length of all its roads the number of police, the amount of crime how many patents it produced and that's why I say so you should know those numbers when you design a city of a certain size you design Brasilia you should know okay, we're going to do it in such a way that, you know, it'll have X, Y, and Z conforming with these rough numbers, at least.

1:00:03Geoffrey West:And you should also know that at some level, the city, two things, is a fractal, both in terms of its infrastructure and in terms of the dynamics of people interacting, and especially their mobility, but in terms of bringing people together. and of course the fundamental thing which they probably did anyway was was rereading jane jacobs and knowing that the city is the people or i guess shakespeare said that actually but um but this is particularly uh this is particularly relevant to us at the moment in the uk because we're about to get a proposal for 13 i think it's 13 new towns from the uk government oh is that right yeah they finally sort of bit the bullet and they're about i think they're about to announce i think it's meant to be in july but i probably delayed it um a whole load of new towns i don't know how big they'll be um no there's one one near me in hampshire that's likely to happen but i'd be very interested to see how they actually rather than just saying oh these are the locations like sure yes it's on a train line on a motorway whatever but how are they going to about designing it, setting it out, laying it out, all this kind of thing, because that will make such a difference to so many people for so long.

1:01:26Geoffrey West:Well, I hope they don't do what China did. I mean, China, of course, is under enormous pressure. It was quite an extreme situation. I mean, my God, they had to urbanize, you know, to urbanize a billion people, basically. So, but they just went, you know, thoughtlessly, and it's been a disaster, mostly. so you know just build these blocks one after the other and there's no thought really given I mean that's an extreme case so no I do hope they do you know pay a little attention to some of the stuff that's been done on the science of cities together with all the usual stuff I mean there's in no way in any way impinging on all the work that's been done as I said earlier on urban geography and urban planning design etc but here's a new piece that should be added to the toolkit or at least to the way of thinking to help mitigate against inevitable problems that will occur so it's a way of, the way I think about it is it doesn't guarantee there won't be problems, but it helps minimize the kind of problems that inevitably will occur because you didn't understand something, you made a mistake here, there, and so on.

1:02:54Geoffrey West:This happens. I mean, it cannot be an exact sign. This is not, you know, going back actually to the very beginning of our conversation, you know, I come out of physics. I mean, that's what I said at the beginning. and physics, I'll use the word exact science, of course, but what I mean is we can make very precise predictions. We couldn't be talking to one another across 8 ,000 miles in this way with looking at each other even if we didn't understand with enormous precision those satellites and the way electromagnetic waves work and the way this computer works and all the rest of that stuff. That's extraordinary.

1:03:34Geoffrey West:well you can't do that for a city we know that that doesn't mean to say there can't still be a quantitative science of cities that's somewhat coarse grained and low resolution but we don't have that anyway so you should use that so I strongly you know I feel very strongly that this is something that should be incorporated into things like thinking about designing new cities and so on so you know and I think that is the one practical lesson you know when you know one of the things that's you know I've talked to in the past many mayors and administrations of cities and this cannot be prescriptive in the sense you know I'm not that's not what I'm an expert at I can't do that I can just tell you about these general features that should be incorporated as I say in thinking about cities, whether they exist now and you're mitigating problems or whether you're going to build a new one.

1:04:39Geoffrey West:As I say, just to emphasize again,

1:04:45Geoffrey West:the success record has been so poor in the past, it's hard to do much worse, I would say, from the various reports. But by the way, it does bring up the question that I mentioned earlier, is what do you want to optimize for? and I think that's one that it's more thought that we haven't given enough to in a way I mean ours are very straightforward but you know the whole you know sort of slightly flaky question optimizing happiness you know and contentment and fulfillment alternatives to GDP isn't it like gross national well-being and that kind of thing but we need that we need that we need something we need other metrics that somehow, you know, you want GDPs and all the other hard metrics and the ones we've used, but you also want these softer ones and people are getting much more sensitive to those and rightly so.

1:05:43Geoffrey West:And you could use, you know, quality of life is, you know, generically speaking, is something, you know, and that's what cities should be doing, obviously. That's what we want. That's what our politics should aim for, or even increased quality of life for everybody, which doesn't mean, you know, we want to get rid of all inequality or whatever. It just means you've got to really think through what quality of life means across the entire spectrum. Yeah. Well, we'll segue slightly to slightly more bigger macro questions. I've been wondering, and I've constantly wondered, is it possible to make capitalism a system that is sustainable if it's not based on infinite growth and on GDP?

1:06:33Is that even a possible outcome within our current system? Or is it literally physically impossible because of the laws of the system?

1:06:46Geoffrey West:Well, that's something I think about a lot. I don't know that's been on my mind a lot actually since the beginning since this beginning of this work because when one of the things we haven't talked about this theory this underlying network theory and so on these scaling laws lead to equations that determine the growth of a city and you can use those as again in a similar way but they have built into them something that is very disturbing. It's very good. I mean, in fact, it's very successful because, you know, the underlying theory can be thought of as, you know, it's this network theory and the network theory has built into it the positive feedback that comes about from interactions, people interacting with each other, they're building on each other, building ideas and so forth.

1:07:47Geoffrey West:That creates wealth, creates ideas, again, with this idea of increasing quality and standard of living. And that theory leads to a growth equation, which says that a city should grow in an open-ended way, as distinct from organisms, which, you know, we stop growing. And the theory, by the way, in the context of biology can explain that. But that same theory, when taken over to cities, because of this positive feedback in networks and the superlinear scaling that it implies, leads to open-ended growth. And that's very good because that's what we see. I mean, cities generally have just continued to grow and economies have continued to grow, especially under capitalism.

1:08:41Geoffrey West:and that's great it's been an enormous success and you know we're privileged to be part of it but unfortunately it has built into it something that's very disturbing if you believe in mathematics if you just take it so to speak to its logical conclusion it leads to something that we call a singularity in fact we call it technically a finite time singularity because it happens in a finite time that is it can happen very soon or maybe 100 years from now but it's going to happen according to this and that is that this thing will keep growing uh but that growth cannot be sustained because the singularity says that all these metrics have become infinite which is completely nuts you can't have infinite gdp you can't have an infinite number of aids cases i mean it doesn't make any sense.

1:09:34Geoffrey West:So, and the theory tells you what happens. It says the system starts to stagnate and then it goes the other direction. It depopulates and collapses.

1:09:53Geoffrey West:So that was, the theory sort of led to that when we first did this work and I just sort of put it aside because there wasn't data. I was thinking globally, not so much on cities, but globally, but there wasn't global data. But global data has appeared in the last few years. And when we took that, to my amazement, it agreed with the predictions of the theory. And that prediction was that we're going to hit this bloody singularity and we're in trouble. Any idea when? That's going to come soon. Yeah, that's the big question. When? It's hard to predict because the data isn't quite good enough to say whether it's 10 years or 50 years, but it's in your lifetime.

1:10:47Geoffrey West:Let's put it that way. Do we think that the stagnation is potentially starting to happen with the slowdown in economic growth of a lot of countries, the slowdown in population growth and the birth rates falling? Or do those things not matter because the energy use per person is still going up so much that it's still an unsustainable system? It's all of the above. Everything you say is there. and but in the end and that's what makes this difficult to be more precise in the end and I would say certainly within 50 years and I suspect within 25 years, 20 years even we're got this thing as you say is you know at the moment the concern is we've been growing faster than exponentially I mean the world population and most cities have grown faster than exponentially and it's still growing that way I mean actually it's just that it's not going quite as fast it's decelerating but it's still growing exponentially but there's signs of turnover and so what this theory predicts is that that will turn over as I say stagnating drop and going to your question there are already signs of it you know, there are, I think, Bulgaria, Hungary, and indeed the United Kingdom and the United States, if we didn't have immigration, would be turning over.

1:12:24Geoffrey West:And so it's kind of ironic. It's kind of this, it's a critical question because at the moment we're all going nuts because we don't have enough housing. You just said we were going to build, you know, 15 new cities or whatever it is in England because we're, and here we're talking always, You know, there's not enough housing. It's terrible for people. And, you know, I just read the paper two days ago here. Only 13.6 % of people living in Santa Fe can afford a house now. I mean, that's crazy. So need to build more affordable housing. You know, this is the big mantra. but quite soon on the scale of things we're going to be the other way around and somehow we need to understand that and be prepared so we need to do both we need to somehow accommodate the people that are here now but somehow be prepared for the fact that they're going to be much we're going to start not increasing and then depopulating and how we're handle that and and the other big issue needless to say is that it's high it's across the planet it's quite inhomogeneous because africa and especially but also asia are still doing what western europe and north america were doing you know during the 19th 20th centuries so you know we need and so I'm very I'm extremely concerned about the long-term future because of that and I'm particularly concerned not that we couldn't solve the problem in principle that is there is this sort of inevitable dynamic you might think of work but you could deal with it I believe but there's no sense that the leaders of the world are in any way either dealing with it or at least even conscious of it and that's very disturbing that even the business about global warming and so on which now most people do accept in the United States it's still a big issue and even that whether it's anthropogenic which from my viewpoint it sort of obviously is but you know if you don't believe that it's people believe it's it's obviously happening so you've got to deal with it anyway i mean it's sort of silly to make your politics and your sort of whatever they are beliefs get in the way of dealing with a serious problem regardless of its origins that you know so we're in a very unfortunate time and i one of the things that i've also speculated about is that uh is that unfortunate time the polarization and the extreme views on all sides is that an accident that it's happened or is there a causal connection here

1:15:36Geoffrey West:that of itself it has formed this sort of collective anxiety and so people have, you know, in trying to deal with it, have taken extreme and from my viewpoint, you know, irrational views about it or certainly non-scientific views. Anyway, these are all speculative things. I don't know the answer to that, But I am very disturbed that we don't have either at the national and certainly not at the international level a serious concern. Because you should, even if none of this comes to pass, there are enough indications. You need insurance. Maybe it will. I mean, maybe this is all wrong. But the data is telling you something.

1:16:27Geoffrey West:So, you know, just in case. That's why I spend a shitload of money to insure this house. You know, it's unlikely. I mean, there could be a forest fire or a lightning. We have a lot of lightning here. Maybe it's right. But I'm willing to spend that money, and the world should be willing to spend the money just in case. Because I think it's not just in case. I think it is the case. But even just in case. So this is my frustration, frankly. So how would practically that look? Are we talking about using the revenues from the remaining fossil fuel reserves to pay for very large investment in things like renewable energy to ensure that we're benefiting from an open system from solar gain rather than a closed loop system based on carbon pulse, effectively?

1:17:21Is that one of the things? Is it just that? Or is it like redesigning macroeconomics?

1:17:27Geoffrey West:Yes, no. So certainly that's one of the things. I mean, certainly the one that you mentioned, to return to, as you said, very rightly, and I'm pleased you said that, an open system so that the second law of thermodynamics no longer applies, so to speak, but to a closed system, which we have now, which is disastrous long-term, and to somehow induce the carbon economy to move towards this renewable system. I mean, it's ridiculous. I mean, the amount of energy coming from the sun is more than enough to power us to, I don't know, forever probably. So it's, you know, we have the ingenuity and the engineering to solve these problems.

1:18:21Geoffrey West:It's whether we have the political will to do so and to really deal with the vested interests and to deal with them in a fair way. I do not have radical views about this. It has to be dealt with in a way that's a smooth transition and that means taking care of people that are at the moment dominating the scene, but they need to understand that. And, you know, the trouble is, you know, to what extent do you believe in altruism? You know, how much, how big is altruism as a phenomenon versus, you know, for want of a better word, greed? My thoughts are... Yeah, go ahead. Sorry, I was just going to say, my thoughts are, can we design the system or adjust the system in such a way that we don't need altruism to make it work?

1:19:15that it can be individually interested self-ish capitalism that can be redesigned in such a way that it results in the positive outcomes that we're looking for.

1:19:27Geoffrey West:Absolutely. That's what I was leading to, exactly. You can't trust altruism, that's for sure. There's no... But so maybe we need to induce in some way to redesign the system. capitalism has been so extraordinarily successful entrepreneurship has been powerful um so we need to somehow keep those alive and well and healthy but do it in such a way that we can get this some kind of smooth transition to a system um where um you know we're not driving ourselves literally over the edge of a cliff. I mean, it's completely nuts.

1:20:11Geoffrey West:But that needs, so one of the things I've concluded is that it doesn't matter what kind of work I do and all the various scientists working on it. In the end, it's a political phenomenon in the end. I mean, we need political action. and maybe something that's related to it is I don't know spiritual reaction I don't mean that flaky way but you know we've had leaders I'm not a religious person in fact I'm if anything I've become more and more in my old age contrary to what usually happens less religious

1:21:00Geoffrey West:but religious leaders have played an extremely important role in changing paradigms and getting people to act in ways that are that are good for the collective or potentially good for the collective i mean martin luther king even nelson mandela and you know the extreme cases of jesus christ or muhammad you know who can galvanize people that's the point i mean i know that more what you want to call it. But, and even Donald Trump, I mean, is a fantastic example of someone that can galvanize people. I mean, I'm to be strongly disagree with him, but, you know, he's got this genius of galvanizing people.

1:21:41Geoffrey West:And so we need someone, people like that, who are charismatic, can really change the way we think, and yet keep the good parts of what is working for us, but do it in a way that guides us through what is, you know, really a really frightening future, I think, potentially frightening future. But at the same time, we need to put significant resources into understanding the problem itself. You know, I think, you know, one of my complaints, by the way, curiously, is that global warming, yes, and climate change is a tremendously serious issue and we need to think about it a lot. But it's all part of one big system.

1:22:33Geoffrey West:It's just a manifestation of something else and that's what we need to address. So unfortunately, in a certain sense, too much attention is being paid in terms of conceptual thinking to that rather than seeing it in addition as just one part of this big problem. And so that's what I'd like to urge as well. So there's a sort of, you know, a scientific side of this that needs to get serious injection of funds and people, so I'm addressing it, as well as the sociopolitical side. Yeah, I mean, for me, like the sort of the energy side of things is a sort of engineering, solvable engineering problem, and even a capitalist can be done through conventional capitalism.

1:23:24What I don't know enough about is whether the economic system can be designed in such a way that it can divert its claims on carbon-based energy to claims on external solar-based energy and still operate in the same way, or does it need to change, do we need to change the way our economic system works fundamentally to make that actually sustainable?

1:23:47Geoffrey West:Well, as you know, the whole of economics, modern economics, is based on open-ended exponential growth. I mean, that's fundamental. I would venture to say that every so-called Nobel Prize in economics, if you scratch the surface, assumes that there's open-ended exponential growth. I mean the cure for that is that it's actually been faster than exponential and secondly unfortunately it got trashed at the beginning because of Malthus you know I mean who recognized the problem but got it wrong actually in my opinion as did you know the club of Rome and Paul Ehrlich and all the rest I mean that they focused rightly on the problem but they didn't get it right because partly because they forgot about innovation and innovation has got us out of this mess but what in in my way of thinking and the work that i've been involved in innovation is not a solution it just um you know temporarily solves the problem for the now moment because it's going to come back to you and it's going to come back to you and that's what the theory predicts faster and faster.

1:25:12Geoffrey West:So, you know, and that's, you know, just as innovations accelerate, you're going to have to solve it, solve this problem faster and faster to become untenable. And so... As a devil's advocate to that, is it possible that there would be such a big innovation that it would solve things for so long, say, for example, fusion energy, or potentially extraterrestrial mining. So something like that, that's so big that it fundamentally has such an effect on the system that it could overcome the sort of the sequence of ever increasing, ever faster innovation. I would not rule that out. I mean, I don't think that's going to be the case.

1:25:59Geoffrey West:I don't think that's the case. But I wouldn't entirely rule that out. I mean, AI may do that. I mean, God knows what it's going to bring to us. You know, it's so extraordinary and powerful. I also don't believe AI well, because AI is just us anyway. And it's used mindlessly, as far as I can tell, mostly. So I'm not very optimistic in these terms. I'm optimistic about, you know, AI, as I say, is extremely powerful and will do a lot of wonderful things for us. but it'll also create huge mess in lots of places. Anyway, that's yet to be seen. But going back to your statement, no, it's not, you know, you can never, you should never rule out possibilities of some almost miracle happening and something that either releases.

1:26:55Geoffrey West:I mean, the irony is we have infinite energy available. It's up there in the sky. I mean, much more than you'll ever produce from fusion, fission or anything else. There it is, waiting. That's it. Well, we could do that. You know, the amount of engineering, ingenuity that's been brought to the problem is small on the scale of it's been brought to some of the other problems that we've tried to deal with. and I think if that were a truly dedicated issue, if governments would truly dedicate themselves and China is the nearest to it, of course. China, to give credit to it, I guess, for all its problems and so on, has taken it much more seriously.

1:27:48Geoffrey West:The United States goes through very short periods when you think it will. It did under Carter. It was huge for a very short period. And some advances, very significant advances were made. But these, you know, we're still at the beginning. But it becomes a political football, unfortunately, in democracies. So it's too bad. And it's so weird that solar energy would become a, you know, I find that weird anyway. I mean, forget, even if you didn't, I mean, let's just think about it. even if you didn't have this whole question of climate change and all the rest solar is so it's such an obvious thing it's hard to believe that everybody would jump on the bandwagon and say fantastic I mean you know that you I mean the idea even I mean I don't do it so I'm guilty as the rest you know that you could um you know you wouldn't have to go to no one would have to go to a gasoline or petrol station anymore you wouldn't have gas piped into your house that you could i mean you could imagine you know it's not inconceivable that's not a crazy system to have imagined to have evolved that we just rely on the sun like the whole biosphere does the whole biosphere doesn't go around trying to pump petrol from the ground and you know generate electricity it well it does it generates it from the sun it's found a brilliant way of doing it and well i guess it's it's storage that's really the problem isn't it because it's like in the uk we have to have the the gas and the nuclear um backup for the times during the night or when the sun's not shining to meet demand on the system.

1:29:42Geoffrey West:Yeah, no, absolutely. That is the issue. But I feel that if we put brilliant minds to it, these things could be solved. And by the way, I'm not opposed to nuclear either, necessarily, because that's another source. You've already said it in a way. You said it earlier. I mean, that could in its various forms solve the problem so yeah no now that we've sold all of the world's problems i'm gonna on my small micro level as an architect i'm gonna put as much uh fractal beauty into the world as i possibly can in the meantime but good for you i appreciate i think that's wonderful i want to encourage you and i hope you could be successful at it i think it we need we need more beauty and uh I you know when I go back to London I'm always amazed to see how London has changed in terms of it's you know what is beautiful and what isn't without any further comment yeah right I shall do a shameless plug of your book if I may this wonderful book called Scale by Geoffrey West is an exceptionally good book and I highly recommend to everyone that they read it if they want more detail of everything we've talked about today.

1:31:09And I think it's been an extremely interesting conversation. And I hope that your work continues and that you're out there spreading the messages as much as you can.

1:31:22Geoffrey West:Well, thank you, Bruce. Thank you for having me. I'm afraid I'm now in my mid-80s. It's getting a little more challenging. both to do the writing and to do the sort of going to events and proselytizing, so to speak, or at least advertising my work and so on. But there are a lot of people thinking about these kinds of things, you know, within the scientific community. So hopefully it will gradually get into the public and the public press and the political ecosystem. anyway but i really appreciate it and thank you it was very stimulating and i enjoyed the questions and the comments thank you very much great thank you very much jeffrey brilliant