Why Viruses Spread Faster in Big Cities: A Physicist Explains Scaling Laws

Vance Crowe [00:00:02] As the

Geoffrey West [00:00:02] Crow flies

Vance Crowe [00:00:03] On the Vance Crow podcast, Jeffrey West, welcome to the podcast,

Geoffrey West [00:00:13] Vance Delight to be with you. And thanks for inviting me.

Vance Crowe [00:00:17] So this is an exciting interview for me. You and I have met one other time before when I came to visit the Santa Fe Institute when I was working for Monsanto, and I was on a mission because I wanted to know why is it that some ideas spread out into a population and other ideas don't? And I was thinking about this in terms of GMOs are really beneficial and so much of society thinks some other thing they think it's bad or poison. And so I wasn't coming to talk with you about biotech. I was coming to talk with you about your expertise, which is in networks, which is how do, how does information flow, how do things work together in a certain type of scale? And we had a wonderful conversation, but it's been five or so years since we saw each other. It is now April 15th, 2020 during the Coronavirus pandemic. And I thought there were probably no person on the face of the earth that would have a more intriguing insight into the nature of how viruses like this spread reactions, all kinds of things. So I am super excited to have you on.

Geoffrey West [00:01:25] Alright, thank you. Appreciate it. And flattered.

Vance Crowe [00:01:29] So to start off, you have a theory that you developed out at the Santa Fe Institute that I think is fascinating but probably takes a little time to explain, which is how cities scale and why it's important to understand that. Could you give me a rundown and take all the time you need to, to do it over a podcast?

Geoffrey West [00:01:49] Yeah, sure, sure, sure. It'll be, you know, it'll be a bit nonlinear, but let me just give you some background and introduce some of the concepts and ideas. And obviously I'll keep it non-technical and try to speak only in English, so to speak. The, so it's an intriguing question about life itself, whether it's organisms or cities or companies, how do they scale from the very small to the very large? And, you know, so in, in what sense is an elephant a scaled up mouse? And in what sense is New York a scaled up St. Louis, for example? Now, at first, that seems sort of a weird question because all, you know, they, each of these things that we talk about have their own unique histories. They sort of evolved by some kind of evolutionary process, whether it's a city, city or an organism. And that involves all kinds of sort of accidents that happened in the in, in the development. And so it would seem that if, from that viewpoint, you know, even though there's obviously some commonalities, there would be tremendous variation as you looked between them.

Geoffrey West [00:03:22] And in fact, you know, I'm sure you know, when you think of, you know, let's say New York, Los Angeles, St. Louis and Santa Fe, you know, you look at them, they're very different looking cities and they have different histories, geographies and cultures in the same way that if you look at whale, elephant, giraffe, a shva being, and a mouse, likewise, they look very different. They live in different environments, different evolutionary histories, et cetera, et cetera. But here's the amazing thing is that if you make any measurement about them, if you measure any, any sort of basic physiological quantity or life history event, life history event, meaning, you know, how long did they take to mature, how many offspring do they have? We're talking about organ organisms. It turns out an extraordinary regularity emerges just from the data. So let me just tell you that, first of all, to take it away from cities about organisms, and I'll make it even more confined. I'll just talk about mammals because that's simple to think about, of which we're one, of course. So here's what's amazing is that if you looked at what is, in a certain sense, most fundamental quantity as associated with an organism, with a mammal as it would be for any of these systems, is how much food does it need simply to stay alive?

Geoffrey West [00:05:00] And that, of course, that's a metabolic rate. How much, how much food do you need to eat today to keep an elephant alive, a giraffe alive, a whale alive, a human being alive, et cetera? Ours, as you know, is about 2003 calories a day. So what is that number for these other animals? Well, when you look at those numbers, it turns out they're not arbitrary and they're not. In fact, they all relate to one another in an extremely elegant and simple way. And, and, and what the rule is that you discover by looking at the data is roughly speaking the following. The, maybe this is the easiest way to think about it. If I, if I double the size of a mammal, I go from a mammal that's, I should have had an example in mind. Maybe if you go from a mammal that is a hundred grams to one's 200 grams, you would've expected that you would eat twice as much food because you have twice as many cells. So you know, cells are basically the same as you go across all mammals. But in fact, what you find is that if you, every time you double the size, whether from two grams to four grams, 200 grams to 400, two kilograms to four, four kilograms, whatever, double it anywhere systematically, you find that instead of doubling the amount of food that's needed, you only need 75%, roughly speaking.

Geoffrey West [00:06:36] So there's this generic rule, which means puts also slightly differently when you think about it, that the bigger you are, the more efficient you are because per cell or per gram of tissue, per gram of meat, so to speak, a bigger animal, bigger mammal needs systematically and predictably less food, less energy intake to stay alive. And so that law, which has been known for my gosh, 75, 80 years as known in biologist Clyburn's law, it was discovered by biologist named Clyburn in the thirties. And it turns out this law isn't just for mammals, it's for all organisms. I mean, it, it's, it's true of fish, birds, insects, crusta, plants, trees, cells, everything follows this raw. And it's sort of amazing because as I started out with, we believe that all organisms evolved by pro some process, evolution process and natural selection. They have this, this history and the history has this sort of randomness associated with it. So you would've thought there would've been, you know, there might have been some relationship, but it would be a very random kind of relationship between the different metabolic rates rather than a relatively on the scale of which we're talking a relatively precise relationship for something like metabolic rate.

Geoffrey West [00:08:17] So that started the whole story back in the thirties and following that a huge amount of data was assembled that established something even more amazing, which was that not only was this true across all mammal, all, all organisms, but any physiological quantity or life history event that you measured followed a similar law. So for example, heart rates, talking about mammals, again, they follow a very simple law that when you, when you increase the size of a mammal, heart rate decrease. If you double the size, heart rate decreases by about 25% every time you double. So a shrew, which is the tiniest animal that sits on the palm of by hand, has a heart rate of, I don't know, somewhere about 1200 beats a minute, houses is about 60, 60 to 70, and a whale is about 15. And that follows this law. So it's quite extraordinary. And by the way, of course that slowing of the heart rate and the slowing of its metabolism is one of the fundamental reasons why a whale can live for 120 years. A blue whale can live 125 years and a shrewd dies after about a year or so. Their metabolism is so high, they sort of wear themselves out. And whereas the whale is extraordinary efficient.

Geoffrey West [00:09:49] So the bigger you are, the more efficient you are in a systematic, predictable way. So that was true of all, I'm not gonna bore you with other examples, but anything that you think of that can be measured follows a similar kind of mathematical law. And, and of course, by the way I should say it's not a precise law. It's what we call a cross grain law, meaning that, you know, your, there's variations of course, small variations between it within a species and then small variations between species. But if you look at it across the complete spectrum and you plot the graph, they all lie roughly speaking on a single line. And it's sort of amazing actually. So, so the question is, so that's the data. The question is why, where does the, where does this come from? You know, is it, you know, how did this happen if we have this process of natural selection going on and the work that got me in bold, well that data got me involved in this and I started thinking about it and then came up with some ideas, which I'll tell you about very briefly in a moment. But then worked with some biologists, some very good biologists, very well known ecologist named Jim Brown. And we eventually put together a fundamental theory that derived these laws from sort of first principles.

Geoffrey West [00:11:25] And the fundamental idea is, and here's, well, so here's the thing, here's one of the other weird things about the, these laws is that it's the same laws regardless of whether you are a mammal, as I said, a fish, a bird or a tree. And you know, they, you know, it was kind of weird. So what you ask yourself, what is it that is common among all of those that's common to all of life? And then you realize one of the commonalities that is often not realized is that all of life has to be sustained by networks. Goes back to what you introduction talking about networks. All life is sustained from the microscopic within cells all the way up through a multicellular organisms like ours to ecosystems they can all be thought of as networks. And ours we're very conscious of we have a circulatory system, a respiratory system, a renal system, a neural system, and so on and so forth. And the idea is, the fundamental idea is it is the mathematics and physics and sort of the, the generic mathematics and physics and underlying principles of networks that is that that transcends the details of the individual evolved design. So even though, you know, if you look inside you, if I tore open my chest and you look at my circulatory system, it looks like looking at the picture, what's in a picture right behind you, A tree, it's a tree, a branching tree, and it looks no, not so different.

Geoffrey West [00:13:11] And in fact it isn't very different from a tree, except that a tree is a bunch of fibers that are like an electrical cable that branch out, but we're like plumbing, you know, our circulatory system, it's tubes that that. But nevertheless they have very similar mathematical properties. And so it is across all organisms. And to cut a very long story short, if you start putting some fundamental constraints on those networks that are universal, like for example, one that's obvious, that network has to feed all of the cells. Well you have to put that statement into mathematics and so on and so forth.

Vance Crowe [00:13:55] What you've just described in a very sophisticated and nuanced way is that you can have a mouse that is tiny and its construction is basically the same as a giant whale. Yes. It's just that one runs at a faster timescale than the other. The other has become much more efficient in being able to use its energy input. So it uses less of it. Yes.

Geoffrey West [00:14:20] So to, to put it slightly differently. So despite appearances, despite the fact that the whale is in the ocean and the giraffe has a long neck and an elephant trunk, and we walk on two legs and you know, mouse scurries around. So we in fact, in terms of anything that you can measure quantitatively, we're all scaled versions of each other, but scaled in a non-linear way. Meaning what I said earlier, it's not just if you double the size, everything goes up by a factor of two. It goes up by this nonlinear 75% in the case of metabolic rate. And so put also slightly differently just what you said, that a mouse lives life at a much higher pace, a predictable pace, a much higher pace than an elephant, but in such a way that if you rescaled it according to these laws, it would live the life of an elephant. That's sort of the idea that, so in fact we all could be rescaled. So they're all pretty much the same. And I'll give you a good example of that. Let me give you a good example of that. Well, let me first just say a little bit about the theory that again, I just wanna go back to that, that all of this could be derived mathematically from the, the mathematics and physics of these networks that are, which we are, this is the lens through which we look at this is that we're a bunch of networks, as I mentioned earlier, and the mathematics and physics from that you get these laws, you can understand these laws.

Geoffrey West [00:16:07] And one of the things indeed that comes out of it is not, is not just the physi physiological laws, but also the ones that you brought up a moment ago. That is the way in which time changes from the small to the large. The pace of life slows systematically as you get bigger. So one example of that is the following is that I mentioned heart rates decreases with size, but it also turns out lifespan, how long you're gonna live increases with size. And that is the bigger you are, as I mentioned earlier, because things are going slower. You can live longer 'cause you wear and tear on the system is much less when you're going slower than it is when you are speeding around as if you're a sports car. Oh, sorry about that. I have is that, is that time lifespan increases systematically, as I said, the shrew lives a very short lifespan of where all a very long span, long lifespan. But they do it in such a way that the number of heartbeats in a lifetime is pretty much the same for the shrew and the mouse as it is for the elephant, the giraffe and the whale.

Geoffrey West [00:17:41] So even though a whale lives 120 years, a shrew lives for one to two years during their life, their

Vance Crowe [00:17:49] Heartbeats for roughly the same amount, which is namely

Geoffrey West [00:17:52] One and

Vance Crowe [00:17:52] A half billion times. Wow. And just a psych. Yeah, it's sort of amazing and, and it comes out of the theory and that is a, so, so that's sort of a statement. It is sort of a, it's almost spiritual in a way, you know, that I think it became spiritual to me when I, when I realized that your theory, which you have, you have so intricately placed out is that it goes along with animals as it does with plants, as it does with cities. And when you make that yes, kind of jump over to the way that human beings organize themselves, that's when I get a sense of awe that there is some organizing principle that makes everything connect together. So how would you do, how would you make the leap from animals to cities?

Geoffrey West [00:18:42] Okay, so you know, when we did this work and it was fantastic, we were able to do the things I just said, but also apply it just first of all, within organisms, within mammals to how we grow, why we grow and stop growing. And questions about why do we sleep eight hours a night, whereas a mouse only sleeps, sleeps about 15 or 16 hours and an elephant only sleeps three or four. So all these kinds of interesting questions we could answer. And they all go back to the underlying structure and dynamics of the networks, what's going on in these networks that are controlling us. And it very led very naturally to extending this idea, this paradigm to other systems or to think about other systems of our network. And one obvious one is cities. And in fact of course in in in literature, cities have often been compared to organisms, often even referred to as organisms. And the other one of course is companies. Companies and corporations and firms also. These are network systems. And so one of the things that I turned my attention to a few years ago after doing this work, but in parallel with it, was to ask, first of all, do cities scale?

Geoffrey West [00:20:14] Is there, you know, is just as I said, you know what the whale elephant, giraffe humor being a mouse or sort of scaled versions one another following some mathematical formula. What about cities is going, is New York a scaled up Los Angeles, which is a scaled up Chicago, which is a scaled up St. Louis, which is a scaled up Santa Fe as I said earlier, even though they have different histories, geographies and cultures and so on. Well you have to look at the data of course, and we did, we had a lovely collaboration and all my young collaborators did a dug for the data and put this together. And it turned out to be quite remarkable. We discovered that on the one hand, cities are like organisms and they do scale in a regular way. That is, if you measure the various, let's just talk about the infrastructure of a city for the moment. If you measure the various infrastructural metrics of a city, like for example the length of all its roads, the, the al electrical lines, how many gas stations does it have? And so on these very physical things, the area of all the buildings, whatever, you know, these, these things that are very, the physical nature of the city. And often what we think of as a city, it turns out just like in biology, they scale in a systematic way. The only difference is that, well the major difference is that instead of that law, which I mentioned earlier, that in when you double the size of a, of a mammal of an organism, you don't double everything else.

Geoffrey West [00:22:02] You, you have a savings of 25%. Every time you double, you have this efficiency. It turns out in cities every time you double, you save not 25 but 15% roughly, approximately. So a city that's twice as large as another doesn't need twice as many gas stations or twice the length of roads. It only needs about 85%. So there's this wonderful economy of scale. As you get bigger, the bigger you are, you need less infrastructure to support the same number of people, which is fantastic because it's one of the sort of, you might think of as one of the reasons why it's good to have big cities forget about all the issues of big cities, but in terms of just, you know, good for the collective in terms of putting, having to put resources and energy into infrastructure we save the bigger we are. And what was interesting about that was this was true across all infrastructure, the same 15%, but even more amazing, just like in biology, it turned out to be true across the globe. That is of course the first data we looked at was in the United States. And then we started looking at European cities and then we looked at Latin American cities and we looked at China, Japan, Asian cities, and they all obey the same law, all this 15%. It's just like, so it looks just like biology, this extraordinary systematic economy of scale.

Geoffrey West [00:23:40] So it almost looks as if, you know, when you look at that, that you know, at some stage, you know, so to speak, after the industrial revolution, when cities sort of took off in the beginning of the 19th century, there was an international convention and everybody came together from all the various nations and said, look, we're gonna be building huge cities in the 19th and 20th centuries. We better decide how we're gonna do it. These are, this is the template, this, that's what it looks like. It of course wasn't each system, this is what's amazing. Each one evolved in its own new own way with its own city planners and mayors and so on, developers. And somehow they all ended up obeying the same law. So it's very similar to biology. And of course when you ask the question why, how could that have been, you realize that it's conceptually the same answer. Namely it's networks, it's because cities are networks. Those, when I talked about roads and electrical lines and gas stations, these are of course all parts of networks. Transport is networks to transportation, resources, gas, electricity, water are all done by networks and so forth. And again, it is the properties of those networks and, and I didn't say this earlier, it's true in biology that it is the efficiency of those networks that plays a crucial role.

Geoffrey West [00:25:13] That is the networks have evolved to be sort of maximally efficient just by trial and error. You know, this, this sort of organic process that has occurred. And there's

Vance Crowe [00:25:25] Fascinating things that come out of this, this fact that these cities bring together and become more efficient because you're talking about it all the way down on the level that a, a certain number of flower shops start popping up and a certain number of restaurants and a certain number of seats out in the plaza all start coming and manifesting themselves in greater volumes as you push people together. And that's a function or it, it causes more networks to form more people interacting with one another, makes more things happen.

Geoffrey West [00:25:57] Exactly. And that leads me to the second part of that, which is actually the most important part of a city and what a city really is, namely city of course is the buildings and roads and infrastructure. But actually in a way from this viewpoint, certainly from the scientific viewpoint that is sort of the mundane part of a city, the really interesting part of a city is what a city is for namely to interact with pe other people. That is, it's a place that just what you said, it's a place that brings people together. And in fact, in fact, I would even say the following, lemme back off a minute, I would even say that the city is the, the most fantastic machine the human beings have invented because it is the machine that has been evolved in order to facilitate, amplify and support more and more social interactions so that we can create ideas, we innovate, we create wealth by those interactions and thereby increasing the quality and standard of living. And that's pretty much what they are. They're this extraordinary kind of accelerator that accelerates the process of interaction. And because precisely by providing the format and the occasions for people to come together in groups, usually sometimes small, sometimes large by institutions that they support, like universities, colleges, town halls, governments, all these things to bring people together.

Geoffrey West [00:27:47] And out of that, out of that, those kind of positive feedback mechanism in the social networks that this infrastructure is supporting come of course ideas. And it's, you know, most of the ideas of wealth creation has come of course from urban areas because of that. You

Vance Crowe [00:28:07] Know, it strikes me, the, it strikes me that as you're saying this, we were talking just before we got started, a huge percentage of my audience right now is loading up planters or getting them ready to, to go out into the fields Sure. Or round up cattle or run their pigs. And, and they are deeply interconnected online. And in fact the, the coronavirus probably did very little to, and to make them, you know, wake up and realize they needed to use social media more because a lot of them are already connected in a way that just a few years before that you could only have done in cities. But now there's this new virtual thing, so what's going on there? Is the value of a city gonna change?

Geoffrey West [00:28:52] That's very good question. Can I come back to that in

Vance Crowe [00:28:54] One minute?

Geoffrey West [00:28:54] Yes, yes.

Vance Crowe [00:28:55] 'cause that's

Geoffrey West [00:28:56] A crucial question and we'll segue into that and into maybe the question of speculating about, first of all, what happens during a pandemic and then what happens in terms of the future of cities. So let me, let me just finish this little thought about this other side of cities and the most fundamental side of it, cities, namely its socioeconomic aspects, namely the wealth creation, the idea creation and so forth. And because what we discovered from that was that looking at the data, again, when you looked at socio socioeconomic metrics like wages, like a number of patents produced in cities, therefore some proxy for the i number of ideas created in a city for the crime in a city, which is another innovative phenomenon by the way, the crime, the the spread of disease, all these are socioeconomic things that can, that are outside of biology. That is, they only occur because there are human beings interacting with each other. What we discovered was that they also scale in a systematic way and they sit, they scale in a systematic way, which is never seen in biology. And that is instead of having what we had before, namely the bigger you are, you need less per capita the economy of scale. Now for socioeconomic quantities, the bigger you are, the more you have per, per per capita.

Geoffrey West [00:30:34] So that the bigger you are, the higher the wages per capita, the bigger you are, the more patents produced per capita, the bigger you are, the more crime per capita, the more disease per capita, all to the same degree, all following the same scaling law. And the scaling law is if you double the size, you get 15%. You don't just double the number of crimes or double the number of patents, you get a 15% added value to it, you get 15% more. So, you know, it's, and and indeed in terms of the other, so then you go back and again you say why? Well, it's very clear, we've already basically said it. It's because cities have brought people together to interact. And it is the interactions in social networks, the positive feedback that we have when we interact with each other. And cities bring more of that together, intensify and densify what is going on. And that leads to the good patents and ideas and wages, but the bad and the ugly like crime and disease and so forth. And I think what is important, and we'll come to this when we talk, talk about the coronavirus, is that they come together, they cannot be dissociated because they all have their root and origin in who we are, namely social beings. So, so maybe that is a segue into, you know, COVID-19 and all the

Vance Crowe [00:32:11] Stuff was struck. Well that phenomenal, I mean you, you just did something you normally do with graphs and pictures and everything, and you did it straight off the top of your head. I am very impressed you're able to paint a picture very well.

Geoffrey West [00:32:25] Okay. As long as you, it's hard because it's, it is mathematic. I mean all of this comes out of mathematics and it's all in hieroglyphics kind of thing. So it's hard sometimes to translate it into English, but I ho I'm glad you've got it.

Vance Crowe [00:32:37] Oh no, you absolutely. In fact, that's why I'm kind of jumping outta my seat here because I'm like, he did it and now everybody has a primer for the conversation that we can have because, you know, I had, I had already read and watched a lot of what you've put out, so even visited you at the Santa Fe Institute. So now that people have that primer, let's talk about how cities are impacted in a pandemic or really like does this, does this pandemic indicate to you that there's some upper growth on how far cities can get before they start having real problems like New York having so much larger of a problem with coronavirus than other places? Yeah,

Geoffrey West [00:33:18] The first thing is that, as I already mentioned, that the thing that makes cities so attractive or has made cities so attractive and so attracts people to them and why they keep growing has distinct from organisms which stop growing. Why they keep growing is they are this extraordinary attractor by, because of the social network phenomenon that you get more interactions, therefore you get higher wages, typically you have more buzz, more activity or coming from interactions between people. That's great. But it also leads, as I said to the band and the ugly and one of those ugliness is, is that by bringing more people together, we do, oh, so the other thing I should have said, I'm sorry, let me back off a second. The other thing that it does, which is also completely different than in biology in life where I said the bigger you are, the slower everything goes, the kind of ponderous elephant versus the scurrying mouse because of this, what we call super linear behavior. The bigger you are, the more capita and the positive feedback coming from social networks, it translates into life itself speeds up instead of slowing down the bigger you are. So life in New York is systematically, predictably and measured to be, and you feel it viscerally faster than it is in St.

Geoffrey West [00:34:52] Louis. And it's certainly faster than it is in Santa Fe. Everything goes faster. And one of that, one of the, the outcrops of that is that therefore disease spreads faster. And so it's not only that if you're in a big city like New York, you have more more cases of flu influenza or COVID-19, but you're gonna get them faster. It's gonna happen much faster.

Vance Crowe [00:35:22] It just dawned on me, one of the things that you guys put out that maybe people have heard is that you guys measured how fast people walk and you can tell how dense their city is based on the pace. And you're, you're, one of the ways that you've explained this is to say it's because people are trying to get from one network to another. They're bouncing between these things because they're sharing ideas. It never dawned on me that that could be what happened with New York City, that the fact that these networks move faster, they would spread a disease much faster.

Geoffrey West [00:35:53] Absolutely. Absolutely. So, so you know, you can then predict in principle, and we did before any of this about influenza. 'cause we had data on influenza. I'm talking about we did this 10 years or so ago that influenza would spread faster in a large city relative to a small city. And you could have predictably more cases and the datas supported that. And indeed, if you look at the beginnings of COVID-19 in during March when before we intervened, before there was intervention, you know, we started talking about sequestration and quarantining and flattening the curve by saying six feet apart and so on and so forth. So, so-called social distancing should have been called physical distancing actually, because you, you don't, I mean we're just a side comment. You and I are having, you know, social, we're socially very closely connected. We're gonna come to this in a minute, but fortunately viruses are not carried by electrons. So there's no, you know, you are not, you know, if you had a disease, you're not able to transmit it to me. But you would be, if you were this close to me in, you know, you're sitting here with me in Santa Fe and you had a disease, you would of course pass it to me.

Geoffrey West [00:37:26] So it's really physical distancing. Anyway, that's just a minor point. But all of that, of course, before that, so before we acted, some colleagues of mine that had been involved in this work earlier did a quick analysis of the data. And indeed if you did it as a function of city size, it was following these rules. But then of course, once you intervene, oh, so first of all you, it's obvious now why you need to intervene if it's being carried by the social network, what you have to do is shut down the social network, roughly speaking, you have to prune it in some way, cut out many of the links and stop people interacting as best you can. And that's of course what the policies have been. And in some places have been very successful and some not. And, and so after that, of course the data is becomes mixed or becomes much more difficult to analyze because different places, of course have different ways in which they break down the network. I mean, some parts of the country did try to do it very quickly. I think Illinois and California were very quick, but other places were extremely slow and certain states are still hardly moving actually and will suffer because of it. So, but it's ironic that in fact I had some emails by people saying, my god, you know, it's all happening in big cities.

Geoffrey West [00:39:06] We should, we've obviously gotta change cities and we'll talk about that in a minute. But it's, it's hugely problematic because it is that that densification and that amplification coming from having lots of people together that has led to us being able to do what we're doing now, led to computers and ideas and so on. And, and your audience in fact being able to use high tech when they're out in the fields and to use very sophisticated equipment to do their planting and so on and so forth. So unlike by the way, just another site coming, I was born and raised in my initial years in one of the most rural areas of the United Kingdom. No kidding. What part? Yeah, Somerset.

Vance Crowe [00:39:59] Okay. Which

Geoffrey West [00:39:59] Is very rural and in fact, so much so by the way that in England, when you wanna make fun of someone that comes from a rural background, you, you do it with a Somerset accent because

Vance Crowe [00:40:11] That's sort of, that's the equivalent of the, the hillbilly or the redneck accent. Huh? Bil yeah.

Geoffrey West [00:40:18] It's the analog to the hillbilly. It's sort of the analog to the hillbilly. So I grew up with that in the, my early years. So I'm very conscious of agricultural and farming life. And in fact, when I was a little boy, my great desire in life was to become a farmer. I wanted to be a farmer. But anyway, so I'm, so the, the change from that existence farming in the 1940s to farming now is like, you know, is completely different. And, and, and it's been fantastic. It's extraordinary. But it has been driven by the ideas and technology created typically in urban environments, obviously. And so, you know, it, it's, but on the other hand we pay a price for that. And one of the prices we paid for it is speeding up pan epidemics and pandemics. And so it's, it's, it's a very challenging question, you know, what is the future gonna be and how do we deal with these things? And let me say immediately coming from where I come from is that one of the most fundamental things that was missing in this, especially in the United States, but elsewhere in some countries not all, was that there was no appreciation of science that's simple. That had there been a scientific literate leadership at the political and policy level, it would've been understood at the very beginning what you had to do rather than just let it happen.

Geoffrey West [00:42:03] Because one of the things that I had learned before all of this, talking to policy makers and corporate people at the highest possible levels is people do not understand what an exponential is, would mean, you know, we use it now, now you see it in the papers all the time because it's been talking about, you know, this damn thing expanded exponentially. And indeed we understand the mathematics of that, we can derive those equations. So any graduate student epidemiology would've told you. But here's the thing about exponentials in the, in the in, in the kind of common language, we use it, it's entered into the language even before this of course. And we used to mean very fast. It's happening exponentially. It just means very fast. Well, it's true that is part of an exponential, but an exponential is so much more than that. And in fact, one of the tough things about an exponential is that it actually starts out very slow, starts out very gentle and very slow. And by the time you're not paying attention, by the time you realize that it's an exponential meaning that every time, for example, in this instance here, you know, every seven days something is doubling by the time you've realized that. So that in this particular case, there might've been 20 cases on day one, and then on day a week later there's 40 and then there's a week later there's 80.

Geoffrey West [00:43:42] It doesn't seem terribly, you know, it's not very threatening. You only have to do that a few times. And in fact it covers the entire population. So in two or three, you know, two or three months, if it's let alone, and people knew this at the beginning, the entire population is sick and many millions of people would die. And that was understood at the beginning. But unfortunately our leaders, and I don't just mean our leaders, but typically globally did not understand that. Because if you know that, you know immediately what you have to do set in place immediately sequestration, quarantining separating people and s and and distancing people and so on. And we would've saved many, many lives. Speculative, letting your hair down, so to speak. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:44:31] Breaking the Overton window.

Geoffrey West [00:44:33] Exactly. Got it.

Vance Crowe [00:44:34] All right. So I'll just do a quick lead in and then we'll go. So we had a little bit of a technical snafu. There is so much pressure on the grid that actually my internet went down and I had one of those, it felt like a glass ball falling from a, a table and me trying to grab it and I couldn't. But you've been very gracious to come back and we can continue our conversation right where we left off, you had just gotten done saying about how exponentials happen before you can see them. And that the experience of an exponential is that it doubles. And if you don't go react right away, if you wait until too long, it's exploded. And I was going to make the comment that it must be, while it's easy for us to sit as commentators and say, oh, the politicians should have done something earlier, it has to be an awesome responsibility to believe in math that you don't fully understand. Because when we talk about an exponential, I know the line just goes up, but at the end of the day, I don't have that visceral feeling that I see my friends that have this mathematical understanding, reacting to

Geoffrey West [00:45:44] Yes, no, i i you, you bring up of course a an absolutely central point that is of course specific, not, not specific to this case, it happens to be of crucial importance in the present situation, but in fact is a problem that society faces and in particular all leaders face. And, and I think it goes also to the heart of the problem that here we live in this extraordinarily sophisticated sort of technological innovative society that is sort of accelerating in its pace. And all of that is driven ultimately by the underlying science and the research that happens in science. And, and yet the, the decision makers, our politicians, our policy makers and practitioners generally have, are, are not scientifically literate. And so there's a huge disconnect there. So on the on, so if we just take that as the situation as it is, then of course your question has is, you know, is really quite provocative because it says, sure, how could you expect someone that is scientifically illiterate to understand and believe they have to, you know, trust that, you know, scientists have done the right calculation, have done the right observations, got the right data, and are making the right kinds of predictions.

Geoffrey West [00:47:34] And so the first general statement I would make, which is goes way beyond this, and that is that, and I'm, I am hoping, but I doubt that this will come to pass, that this will focus much more attention on closing that gap between our leadership, what at all levels and our technological scientific community so that we have a, at some level anyway, a scientific literate leadership. And let me just make tangential remark. I, a couple of days ago, someone sent me a marvelous YouTube click clip that from Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany.

Vance Crowe [00:48:24] I saw this, I know what you're talking about. Yes. That was extraordinary.

Geoffrey West [00:48:28] And and I was

Vance Crowe [00:48:30] So describe it, describe it for people that didn't see it.

Geoffrey West [00:48:32] Yes. I was, now I can't remember the details unfortunately, but she, in, in, in the matter of two or three minutes in an extraordinarily articulate and very connected way, explained the problem of dealing as a leader, dealing with an exponential and explaining what the implications are of exponential expansion, exponential growth. If you do not intervene ve and pointing out that, you know, what would happen, I think she did it in terms of, look, if we don't do anything by June, there'll be, I make up the numbers 'cause I remember them. There'll be 5 million Germans dead if we don't do it by, if we delay to July, there'll be 10 million and so on. Just showing the huge increases.

Vance Crowe [00:49:22] And it was very interesting. I I was reading her translations and basically she was saying, look, the, the r not the number of people that you spread it to, right? If it's at one, we still have a problem because it grows at this level, but if it goes to 1.2, then by August that's point we have these problems. If it goes to 1.4, then by June we have these problems. And you're like, wait a second, it's only 0.2 people. It's exactly makes that big of a difference. And it was really hammered home that it may look like things are good, but they're not.

Geoffrey West [00:49:55] Exactly. So she was much more articulate than I was in my rambling on trying to explain the, the threats of an exponential. But the crucial thing is if you have exponential growth or exponential change, then there is incredible sensitivity to small changes in parameters. And that's the problem. That's why you ha that's one of the major reasons you have to act very quickly because by the very nature of the problem, you don't know some of the details with sufficient accuracy and that's inevitable. 'cause we don't know how many cases there were in the beginning obviously and so forth. So she was incredibly good. So I, I recommend all your listeners or to actually trace down that meha little clip.

Vance Crowe [00:50:49] I'll, I'll throw it in the show notes. You know, I wanted to, to let use your expertise here to, to move into the world of speculation, which I, I think is a little hard to do. But we've talked about cities and how they scale and how density ends up making information move across networks faster. There are a lot of people out in the countryside. One of my friends Jared McDaniel is a cattle rancher in Texa. Yeah. Oklahoma. So middle of nowhere. And he's wondering out loud, are people gonna move out of cities and try and get to the countryside now? Yeah, you've been studying cities for a long time. Is this a pandemic that is a bleep blip and we don't ever see the population impact or 20 years from now, do we see? That's when cities took a dip and people started moving out of them.

Geoffrey West [00:51:34] Okay, it's very good then. Excellent question. And one prior to the pandemic, I often got asked because there has been this sort of rumblings in the last certainly 10, 20 years, maybe even longer, that especially with the coming of the internet, the fact that you can do the kind of thing we are doing now. And in principle, you or you can, you know, run your, run your corporation or your firm from, you know, some remote i i i idealized place in the country. You could run that remotely. You don't have to be in Detroit in principle to run General Motors. I mean that's the image. And indeed pe there are people that have moved in that direction. There are people that of course have moved from large urban areas to more rural kinds of areas to do that. But you know, the numbers are absolutely tiny. And if you just look at the mobility and migration of people in that whole period, cities will continue to grow. And because cities remain a, this extraordinary magnet, this extraordinary hub because they are places of, of course, greater social carbon activity, which is one of the reasons the virus took off in, in more in big cities than in small cities or small towns.

Geoffrey West [00:53:10] And they provide a greater buzz, greater sense of opportunity and so on for, for most people. And so, I mean, a good example is the following. You know, if you look at Silicon Valley, which has sort of been one of the big drivers of both culture and economy in the last 30 years, you do not see any of the major gurus of Silicon Valley, the managers, the the various people that are running those companies at multiple levels moving up into the Sierra Mountains, which they could do in principle, none of 'em do that. In fact, the opposite has happened. They, you know, most of Silicon Valley, I'm sure your listeners know, is south of San Francisco on what's called the peninsula, which is suburban. It's, you know, it's, it's fairly dense, but it is suburban and classically classic American suburbia. But what has happened, and that's where for example Google is and Yahoo and so on, and what has happened in the last, especially 10, 15 years is the opposite that's happened, is that those people are moving into San Francisco. They, they even find the suburban environment not sufficiently stimulating. And Silicon Valley is sort of taking over San Francisco so that if you go to San Francisco, you will find it now dominated by, it dominated in fact by, even though Google headquarters is still in Mountain View south of San Francisco, it has large buildings in, in the city, Salesforce.

Vance Crowe [00:55:02] Oh yeah, that's, I mean that is enormous company and they built an entire building and filled it up and probably filled up other ones right next to it.

Geoffrey West [00:55:09] Absolutely. And it's the tallest building west of Mississippi and, and so on and so forth. So it's gone in exactly the opposite direction. And, and by the way, again, a tangential comment, in a certain sense it's destroying that may be too strong a word, the sort of essence and spirit of what San Francisco is and or was, you know, it's becoming a bit stultified by the dominance of the IT culture rather than this image of, you know, a very different image that it had throughout its history. So is, and that's a big problem in San Francisco,

Vance Crowe [00:55:48] Is there, is there some sort of function that happens as you have this explosive growth when a, when a city gets to a certain level of density, does that then maybe homogenize the type of culture such that if you go to one major city with a but in a totally different culture, go to another city that's the same size, same density, are they gonna be really, really similar? Is there a homogenization that goes on as you grow

Geoffrey West [00:56:13] Also? Very good. Very good question. So yes, so one of the, one of the things cities try to do, which is both positive and negative, is in fact to encourage and facilitate that kind of agglomeration of a culture. You know, Detroit automobiles, San Francisco, now it and so on. But that is also extremely dangerous because the, if you, if you move from having a multidimensionality, which is what, for example, new Yorkers, I mean New York, York may appear to be sort of dominated by finance and so on. But in fact, New York, if you actually look at it, is extraordinarily diverse. In fact, fact, if you ask the question, what is the most dominant business in New York just by the number of offices of, of a given kind, then it turns out it isn't finance all lawyers, believe it or not, it's physicians. So, which is remarkable, you know, it's amazing and it's an interesting question why that is. But nevertheless, it just shows you that the, this extraordinary diversity of New York and why New York is such an attractive, powerful, and successful city, diversity is extremely important. And one of the major reasons it is so important is that it is the hub or the, the central feature of a resilient system.

Geoffrey West [00:57:49] The, the, the most resilient system is typically one that has lots of diversity because if the externalities change, if the external conditions change, if you have diversity, you are able to adapt and move into whatever the change is. And so a city that is, so let's one of the red word monocultural like Detroit. So Detroit was dominated by the automobile industry. And not only that, not just the the manufacturer of cars, but all of the multiple components that go into car manufacturing. So that when the automobile industry changed, and that was changed because of manufacturing elsewhere and in particular the move towards more efficient, smaller cars, which was not, of course the image and culture of Detroit, Detroit was too big, too locked into a single culture, too, locked into a single way of thinking. Did it effectively collapsed? I mean it's, it's, I mean, general Motors and Chrysler did collapse and it's, you know, it's, it's sort of one had to go outside of the free market system to save them. So being diverse is crucial. And one of the, I think the dangers for a city like San Francisco, for example, going back to the original question of and so on, is that with ironically the influx of people into the city in, within a single culture, they have the potential.

Geoffrey West [00:59:32] Although it seems weird to think of that at the moment that when things change in the IT industry or even in the overall culture in terms of it, San Francisco will be in trouble just like Detroit was. Oh, that's

Vance Crowe [00:59:47] Very interesting.

Geoffrey West [00:59:48] Just one last thing. One of the typical IES of these things is it looks at any time, it's a bit like the exponential narrative it looks at any particular time. Like, you know, how could, how could Detroit ever be in trouble? I mean, when I, I'm an immigrant, when I came to this country, one, one of the first things I heard was that famous statement, what's good for General Motors is good for the us right? And, and, and just to remind us, general Motors effect effectively went bankrupt just a few years ago. So we have to, we cannot be complacent.

Vance Crowe [01:00:28] So there's an interesting dichotomy that you describe here, which is that so much culture gets created where these high density networks are, these are where new ideas can slam into one another. You get different art forms that collide and then nuke things are created. And yet you are at the Santa Fe Institute where, and the way that I heard about you guys a long time ago, was it my good friend Rob Long, gave me a book called Surfing the Edge of Chaos. And much of what you guys are doing at the Santa Fe Institute is very cutting edge. There's very few people out there saying, watch out San Francisco, you might, you might be coming, going the way of Detroit if you're not careful. How is it that you can have this enclave up in the mountains tucked away in Santa Fe, New Mexico and have that be the edge of chaos when you don't have super high density?

Geoffrey West [01:01:22] Yes, that's a very, that's also a very, these are excellent questions by the way. Yeah. So the Santa Fe Institute is, is of course, is unique and it was set up to be unique, but it was set up, and this is, to answer your question, it was set up by a bunch of a small bunch of extremely distinguished people, scientists, mostly scientists in the mid to late eighties, several of whom had Nobel prizes because they wanted to have a place that was a little bit removed from academia, yet tied into the network of academia. So that partially answers your question because it's not that we're separate completely, it's not like we're some, you know, ivory tower stuck up on top of the mountains. There is a piece of that for sure. But there's another piece where we're highly integrated in a network way with the international academic and business community. By the way, we have a often not recognizing by those that are familiar with the Center Institute, that we have a large distributed business community associated with the, with the Sano Fe Institute.

Vance Crowe [01:02:42] So that well and point, point in case is that book, the Edge of Chaos Surfing. The Edge of Chaos describes how when Monsanto was trying to make the jump from being a chemical company to being something else, seeds and potentially biotech, it was one of their CEOs coming, spending a sabbatical at the Santa Fe Institute, of which you guys have people all over the place when I was visiting you, I got to meet people from all over the world. They come there, they collide with other ideas, and then they go back with an idea like, well, maybe we could genetically engineer crops.

Geoffrey West [01:03:13] Yeah, sure. So the, so the Center of Institute is a funny hybrid in that sense. It's sort of this hybrid between, I think someone described it sort of the, the image of the ivory tower on the one hand and sort of the geekdom of Silicon Valley, you know, the, all the, so we are, we're sort of this weird combination. And so we, in a way we get what, what we'd like to think the best of both worlds. That is that, you know, many ideas are created by individuals as if they're not, you know, as if that was that one in Einstein or you know, that that kind of image, Newton Darwin and so on. But you know, they didn't work in isolation. You know, Newton famously said, you know, if I have seen further it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants, implying there is because I had, you know, I I was interacting with all these other people. Yet, by the way, and it's very ironic as we're talking about this now, he did much the origins of almost all his great work were done when he was a student at Cambridge University. And the great plague hit and they shut down the university just as they've done today.

Geoffrey West [01:04:43] Exactly. They shut down the university and they sent everybody home and he went home and he lived in a rural area of England and he sat there on his own. But having had all these interactions beforehand and created all his, much of his great work, the law of gravitation, the laws of motion and so on, and the famous apocryphal story of him sitting in the garden and the apple force from the tree, and he gets, ah, a eureka moment about gravitation took place during that period.

Vance Crowe [01:05:16] Oh, I had heard that part of it, but I hadn't heard the, that clip, the, the, the last part that maybe that's where the apple falling from the tree came from. Amazing.

Geoffrey West [01:05:25] Yeah. That's where, that's where the bth came from. But the point is, there is that image that he, he did his work sort of as a singular person sitting alone, but he'd had all these, you know, be part of this network before, before getting to that place. And somehow the Santa Fe Institute is a bit of a combination of that. That is the idea of being a little bit removed so that you are not so tied in that you can't think independently and out of the box, but sufficiently tied in that you get the stimulation of, of the multiple interactions that come from being part of a collective community. So, and universe, sorry, go ahead.

Vance Crowe [01:06:09] Well, I was gonna say, so I am, I live in St. Louis, Missouri, and I moved here after having lived all over the world, and I just thought I was gonna stop in here. But I really like the culture. We have an art museum that, that is a national treasure. We have

Geoffrey West [01:06:25] Great

Vance Crowe [01:06:25] Parks and we're right on the Mississippi River. It's a beautiful city and yet it does not have the prominence. It's not, it, it's not a gravity. Well that is attracting large amounts of people. But I do look at what's going on with coronavirus right now and the fact that we are going to reshore a lot of manufacturing. We're gonna reorient the whole world, particularly the US and how we do things. As someone that has studied cities, if a city wanted to become a gravity well to attract this diversity, to attract these numbers and grow powerfully, what, what are the, what are the things they should look for? How could they change?

Geoffrey West [01:07:05] Well, I think that, you know, cities as distinct from companies and corporations are not top down. You know, they are, they are in some sense organic, and they thrive by social interaction, by the, the role of the city as an engine, as a device, as a machine is to facilitate interaction, to amplify interaction. And so given that, and given that in order to stop the virus, we had to do exactly the opposite of that. We had to prune social networks literally and decrease significant social interaction so that we could stop the physical transmission of the virus. Now, as we come out of that, we have to reverse that, and of course that will happen again organically. But the role of a city, the role of a city administration is to do whatever it takes to facilitate greater social interaction, and in particular, to encourage more and more entrepreneurship of various kinds. And in doing so, it, it needs to do it in, of course, some of it is, is culturally dependent, meaning depending upon, you know, the facilities that already exist in the city and so on and so forth.

Geoffrey West [01:08:41] And I'm not very familiar with St. Louis, so I can't speak to that specifically. But what it does need to do, and, and some of these is sort of obvious, is it needs to immediately, when, when things are safe, of course, is to encourage, you know, more events, more public events, more gatherings, more meetings to encourage people in whatever ways they can to be more present in the, in, in downtown. For example, gathering in parks. I mean, people would do a lot of this automatically, but to really facilitate that by creating attractors, by musical events or whatever, lectures, sporting events, and so on. As I say, all of these will happen inevitably, obviously, but to really encourage them by whatever the incentive processes that are at hand. And couple that with, I think clearly a combination of, on the one hand, encouraging, as I said a moment ago, more entrepreneurship by providing the kinds of, the usual processes of more funding, tax incentives and so on. But also crucially, I think is to provide as best they can safety net for those that have been left behind or find themselves in this horrible situation of being furloughed or let off, and jobs have not appeared.

Geoffrey West [01:10:14] So there needs to be intervention. And regardless, I believe of one where you are on the political spectrum, I think this is a period where we need the, a role of strong government, government has to take a leadership, but a leadership less in that kind of top down way, but in a facilitative role. And that's very subtle. And that depends upon the, you know, I know the wisdom, if you like, of, you know, mayors and their administration or governors and and so forth. So, you know, it it, I'm being very general of course, and each city and each state has to do what is appropriate for that city or state. And in terms of, you know, St. Louis, you've just, you've emphasized in this St. Louis, of course is a, is a highly cultured city. It has a, a very unique history in the United States as a

Vance Crowe [01:11:19] Well, and, and just across the river on the other side of, of Illinois is Cahokia Mounds, which was one of the largest Native American civilizations. Yes,

Geoffrey West [01:11:27] Exactly.

Vance Crowe [01:11:28] In all of North America. And it's because of where the, the river was. So I had an idea back when Amazon was doing that thing where they were saying, Hey, let us know what you wanna do to, to attract us to come here. And my thought was, Amazon is going to wanna get delivery. So St. Louis should try to be the first city that's going to allow as much autonomous delivery as possible. And the knock on effect of making a law change that would say we are gonna have the loosest, freest drone laws to be able to make people, either it's driving delivery or air delivery, is that in agriculture, you also have people needing drones. And you need to have places where those people can get together. And you're not gonna do it in San Francisco. 'cause the, you have to drive so far to get to open airspace. And so it was, this was my idea is to try and create these areas where you have pockets of freedom that allow entrepreneurs and then allow them to hire and, and develop out the ecosystem. How does that sit with you?

Geoffrey West [01:12:30] Yes. No, I think that's a great idea. I don't know, you know, as I say, I don't know St. Louis and the surrounding area very well. I've been there several times, but I don't know it. But I was actually going to say that St. Louis is an example of a vibrant city that also is contiguous with sort of the agricultural heartland of, of America, and also sits in a pivotal place geographically in the United States. So, you know, it would be, of course, it's sort of obvious to try to take advantage of all of that and, and an idea like you proposed, I can't say whether that's a, you know, it's gonna be good, successful or whatever, but sounds exactly the kind of thinking that's the point. That's the kind of thinking what needs to do as one moves into the next phase. As we start, we go from recovery into long-term future and, and, and long-term sustainable future.

Vance Crowe [01:13:34] So, you know, the, in St. Louis, they have the St. Louis Cardinals, and from the outside it looks like, hey, these are just a bunch of fans that really love baseball. But when you live here, you realize a huge amount of business happens at baseball games, right? People come with somebody that they've been wanting to meet up with for a while, they have tickets, they sit down and talk, and they work out a deal. And by the time they're walking outta there, businesses happen. New relationships are are going on. When you look at a summer of no sports or no picnics, or no, what does this do to a culture into a whe whether it's a city or even on the more macro scale?

Geoffrey West [01:14:14] No, that's why I say that's why, you know, it's, it's extremely important. It's absolutely urgent that a city encourages as many events of that kind as it can possibly manage. And even if it requires deficit spending

Vance Crowe [01:14:36] To do it,

Geoffrey West [01:14:37] Because it is definitely a, a critical invention at a critical moment for the future. You know, budgets are gonna be tight, et cetera, but getting things moving, but getting things moving in the sense of facilit, rebuilding in the language. I've been using those social networks. The, and, and part of that is the modularity, the, the, the way the groupings within social networks, you know, that means the companies, the, the, the sports fans, the, the concert goers, you know, get, get that, get the blood flowing again in a, in a serious way. And indeed, I very much resonate with what you said about the St. Louis Cardinals and the role of sports, regardless of what you think about them in, in the role of a city, it's part of its identity, but it also plays this kind of hidden role of bringing people together in often in a serendipitous way. And that's what you want to do. That's what you want to do. You want to mix things up. You want to, this is a stage where you wanna stir the pot even more because it's moribund at the moment. It's, it's, it's in hibernation. The city is in hibernation at the moment, effectively in terms of its socioeconomic activity. So, you know, getting whatever it is, what, doing whatever everyone can, whatever it takes to get all those networks flowing again,

Vance Crowe [01:16:18] You know, there's something very novel about your, the, the hypothesis that you have that cities scale like, like animals do or like plants do. But you've also made an observation that cities have a unique characteristic in that they don't die. They, they maybe go away for a while, but there's something that can grow up inside of there. That to me right now, gives me a lot of hope. Can you describe that component of this hypothesis?

Geoffrey West [01:16:47] Yes. So one, one of the things actually that got me into this work originally was the observation, which I began to realize people hadn't really focused on at all, was that the two major social organizations that dominate society are on the one hand, companies in general firms, corporations, but companies, businesses, on the one hand and on the other in terms of social organization are cities. And they have various things in common, of course, obviously. But the one thing that is so very different about them is that, as you just said, cities just seem to keep going. In fact, not only do they keep going, they seem to, they seem to always keep growing. I mean, they may grow very slowly or they may grow very fast and they may stop for a while and even contract for a little bit. But you know, if you look over long periods of time, cities just keep growing. On the other hand, companies, sure they grow and in fact, usually they grow very fast at the beginning. If they're successful and then they stop growing like you and me, and then they die, all companies die, basically. Or by, by die by the way, I mean, disappear. You know, they may die because they get bought up by another company.

Geoffrey West [01:18:18] They may die, of course from bankruptcy or liquidation, which is more like our death, but nevertheless, they disappear. So for example, thinking of St. Louis, TWA was incredibly important. Once upon a time to St. Louis it, I consider TWA to have died, even though, of course technically it was bought up by American Airlines, but to what intents and purposes, it died. And not long afterwards, St. Louis ceased to be a hub for American airlines, and therefore by implication the extension of TWA, so it died. And that's a very good example of it. And so what is that, what is, you know, that intrigued me. What is the difference in that dynamic? And indeed later work that we did was even more startling to, to me anyway, was that we looked at, and in fact all the data we had was from publicly traded companies in the United States from about 1950 until, you know, well the analysis went up to about 2010. And one of the things that we learned from that is that, so to speak, the expected lifespan of a US publicly traded company, that means one that's already been sufficiently successful to have traded on the markets is only 10 years.

Geoffrey West [01:19:51] So, you know, that's sort of amazing because that means half, actually, to be more technical about it, if you take a cohort of companies in a given year, within 10 years, 10 of them would've disappeared already. So, you know, long lived companies are very unusual. And most of them, by the way you mentioned Monsanto, so there's a very good example. If Monsanto had stayed the way it was, it would've been a dead company. It did do something that is extraordinarily hard for a company to do, is to effectively reinvent itself. And that's what, and that is the segue to what cities do. Cities are completely different because you may not realize it on a day-to-day basis, but cities are in fact continually reinventing themselves in one way or another. You know, it may take, you know, several years or decades. And, but cities do, you know, of course there's a core that remains the same. Obviously there's a certain culture that remains the same, but they're continually, and the reason for that is that cities are not top-down organizations and they're very multidimensional. I'm sorry, my landline is ringing.

Vance Crowe [01:21:15] If you hear that. It's okay, this is gold, man, keep running.

Geoffrey West [01:21:18] But they, cities are multidimensional, you know, and, and as they grow, they get more and more multidimensional, meaning they get more and more diverse. So if you look at the diversity of business types in a city, that means the different kinds of businesses at various levels, you know, how many different kinds of lawyers, different physicians, different, you know, water manufacturing and so on. If you look at those cities as they grow, that diversity continually increases. And the most successful cities are the ones that are, this goes back to what I said earlier, the most diverse. And that allows them to be incredibly resilient. Companies on the other hand, typically go the other way. They might start out quite diverse because there's lots of fantastic ideas we have for this product and that we're gonna try this. But of course, the market forces narrows that because some products are extremely successful, and even ones that you thought were very clever and very innovative, turns out they don't sell. So you junk those. And so gradually the dimensionality of the company shrinks. And when the market forces change, externally bump, you disappear. And that's sort of the, and cities don't do that.

Vance Crowe [01:22:50] When I learned this hypothesis about companies, it, it was like having the lights turned on, and all of a sudden I could see this all around. And one of the things that I observed is that as a company gets older people, as they add more people in, the, those people have freedom, but then they make mistakes. So you start putting in a rule and then another rule, and then a bureaucracy and a system, and it starts gumming things up. And I don't know if it's scar tissue or if it's just that the, the organs are decaying, but what ends up happening is they get so slow and so labored that the only thing they can do to invent new things, and I think this comes from your observation, is to find a new company, buy it, and, and kind of turn into a vampire, suck out the new blood, and then try and keep that going. But it really only gives you another year or two. Monsanto bought the Climate Corp, they sucked the, the new blood out of it, and then they were vulnerable and got bought by bear and they're gone now.

Geoffrey West [01:23:48] Yeah. So that's very typical. What you describe is very typical because what happens is the companies, as they grow more and more constraints are imposed on them. And, and more and more they impose. And this is the crucial point on themselves, precisely because of that process. You know, this p part doesn't work very well. So you put a new law in a new constraint, or what companies do despite their image when this isn't working well, well, we're just a little bit alone and we're formed this new piece within it. So you grow, you know, so you have all these kind of useless appendages that start to accumulate and the bureaucracy and administration becomes the company and the innovative kind of part that, that was the soul of the company in the beginning becomes smaller and smaller proportion of it. And so again, when it's, when things change and you have to move the battleship, you have to change the direction, you can't do it. And this is the fate of many companies that die. In fact, it's the fate of most companies that end up disappearing.

Vance Crowe [01:25:05] So it's interesting then if you juxtapose this analysis of the way that companies work and how you have to stay innovative and, and new and put it against the, when we're facing coronavirus, you need a central government, probably one that's been solid. What's the difference there? Why is, why is it in your opinion that the entrepreneurship, you know, let freedom and the free market be the thing that gets us out of this?

Geoffrey West [01:25:33] Well, I don't think, I, I think it's a combination of both really. I don't think one or the other, I'm a, you know, I'm, I'm sort of a great believer. I'm one of these people that's sort of a great believer in the free market system and capitalism, because that's what brought us all this stuff. But I also happen to be a great believer in government. I'm a, I I, I think government should play a, a significant role in our lives as a, as primarily a facilitator, you know, and, and a good government does that. And going back to what I was saying before, there is this, I consider it a myth that government, big government is somehow associated and dominated by big bureaucracy. And that somehow, you know, big companies, companies in the free market system, because they've been competing, are somehow lean and mean and could do things. Now, I, I know both, first of all, from personal experience, you know, just anecdotally, that's, if you don't mind me saying bullshit, but also we've done serious analysis actually of manage the number of managers and so on. And you find that in fact there are differences of course between bureaucracies in federal government and in industry. But roughly speaking, at the level we're talking, there ain't much difference. And in fact, one of the interesting things, I'm going off slightly tangentially here, but it is relevant to this, is there's an very interesting question that this raises that is, you know, when people complain, and I am one of the first always moaning and groaning about the bureaucrats and that you can't get anything done and all the rest of the stuff.

Geoffrey West [01:27:27] But there's a very interesting question, if you say something is too big, that means that you have in mind a sort of baseline level of what it should be. So, you know, what is that baseline is, you know, maybe it's in fact true that you can't run a government of the size. We have a state the size of Missouri, a city the size of St. Louis, without the kind of size and character of the bureaucracy, it actually has, I mean, maybe that's what you actually need. And we can't run the Santa Fe Institute, which is a small institution without, even though we're very small, having almost as many staff as we do researchers, you know, maybe that's just what you need to do, the kind of job we need. So that is a question which ironically, as far as we can tell, has not been seriously examined quantitatively in a kind of more scientific framework. It has of course been discussed, but it's mostly narrative in the kind of stories about bureaucracies. But one wants to have a very serious data-driven analysis of this. So, but that relates to all these questions, and it does relate to the question you asked and about attacking the virus, the, the COVID-19 disease. And that is that we do need a combination of both. We need obviously the buy-in from the private sector, we need to reinvigorate it and do the kinds of things that I talked about before, before.

Geoffrey West [01:29:01] But to do that you need government to help stimulate it, both financially, but also in terms of providing vehicles for things to happen, to reconnect people, to reconnect things. And one of the things I think I, am I allowed to make editorial comments in this

Vance Crowe [01:29:21] A hundred percent, this is free. We are free, free place here. This

Geoffrey West [01:29:25] Point, I mean, I was very surprised at was the, the, the, the role that our president and the, his administration took in dealing with this in not being facilitators rather than either being top down on the one hand and at the same time not taking responsibility for providing federal leadership leadership across the country, coordinating everything and so on. That is the role of government. And in the same way the role, and especially because this funny metaphor of using a war, we're fighting a war, okay? If you take that metaphor seriously, we do fight wars, and the way we deal with it is we have a federal army. We don't say to each state, okay, we're gonna be fighting, you know, we're gonna fight the second World war, okay, Missouri, you know, you fight you, you decide how you're gonna fight California, you decide where and who you wanna fight. We don't do that, obviously it's a war. We coordinate, we come together as an, as a nation collectively working together and so on. And that's what we should have done here. So that was where, that's the role of government. And part of part of that role of government is to facilitate, not just coordinate the entire populace in terms of all its cities and states, but also facilitate the building of social interactions and encourage more and more entrepreneurship the way a city does.

Geoffrey West [01:31:03] So it needs to come all the way down through this network from the very top seeping through the network in the same way that in your body thinks seep, so to speak, they're pumped from your heart all the way through to every single cell. It's a completely connected integrated system. And that is, you know, it's not a, it's not a perfect image, but it's a, it's a good metaphor for the kinds of things we need to see generally, but specifically at this kind time of, of potential crisis. So, so that's my kind of editorial comment.

Vance Crowe [01:31:40] I, I mean, I think it's been very interesting to hear various people's perspective on how things went and who did really well or what, what they were highlighting. You know, my counterpoint, but not, not one in that I, I disagree with you, but just another data point was I was shocked that the president was reading the names of companies that contributed. And it was almost like he had tapped into a, like a NASCAR style thinking, which is you can get those adver, you can, companies will be first in line to say something impressive enough so that they can get the bully pulpit to have their name announced, and that makes them want to contribute more. And I thought, well, you gotta give him credit. Like that's a good way to get these companies in engaged. Absolutely.

Geoffrey West [01:32:31] No, but that is good. That was, that's good. I mean, I'm not, you know, Mr. Trump has done some things that are right. Absolutely. And that's one of 'em, and that's exactly, you know, I mean, that was very creative actually, and he is very good at those kinds of things, you know, and, and he does, it provides a stimulus for companies to come forward.

Vance Crowe [01:32:52] So I have, I have a, I have a question that is burning and I wanna make sure I get it in before we run outta time.

Geoffrey West [01:32:57] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:32:58] And that is, networks are a way for information to get from one place to another. Yeah. How should, like I started this podcast because I was, I am very concerned that if you're only watching the mainstream news or you're only watching social media, of which you've curated your own little gravity, well, so it's only the people that you already, you either already agree with or you know, why you don't agree with these other people. What is it that people can do to make sure they don't fall into some echo chamber? How, what, what do you know about networks that help you stay broad and keep your ideas way far open?

Geoffrey West [01:33:38] Boy, I, I wish I could answer that question. I wish I had something original and insightful to say about it, but I don't think I do because, you know, we're in a new era obviously of, of, but internet connection with electronic connection, I mean, it's, it's, and there's many unknowns. The main thing that it will do for sure, and it's already done, it will speed up life. Things would just get faster. That's for sure. This other problem, which was not foreseen, I mean, I think it took most people by surprise, and especially those in the IT industry, ironically, that instead of everybody sort of being open to everybody else and being sort of more connected with everybody else, what, what it allowed people to do it, it was to actually narrow their outlook. You know? I mean, and I'm, I'm as guilty as the next person as much as I try not to. And you know, you can't legislate that, you can't, you can't tell Google and Facebook and so on, you know, you, this is, this is the only this. You've gotta make sure that Vance gets all this complete spectrum. You know, if he, if he wants to read the New York Times, get him, make sure that he is always watching Fox News too.

Vance Crowe [01:35:15] Otherwise he can't read.

Geoffrey West [01:35:17] Well, you can't do, so we can't do that, obviously. So I, it it's a serious problem. And it may, you know, if I, in my most pessimistic moments, I feel that it may lead to a unraveling of, of our sort of democratic system ultimately, because we're not getting, you know, we're not remaining open to multiple points of view, which is, you know, the two, two major things upon which democracy is founded really is one, is, you know, the education and information of, of the in of the individual constituent that, you know, they can make an informed decision about things. And so if you're not fully educating them, which is what we're doing, and, and I go back to the very beginning of this, this morning's conversation, for example, the vast majority of people don't learn what an exponential is. You know, they may use it in their daily language, but they use it completely well in a very limited way. And so they don't understand when this comes, for example. And so they're not in a position to make informed decisions. But also if on the other hand, or, or in addition to which, if you then only have stovepipe kind of news coming to you, information coming to you, then of course, you know, you are undermining the very essence of what democracy is based on.

Geoffrey West [01:37:05] And that is very dangerous in my opinion. And I do not know, I mean, the first problem of education we can solve that's in our hands, and we could in principle do it. I, I don't suppose we will, but I, in principle, we could and we undoubtedly should. The second is an ex much more difficult problem. And by the way, and, and I believe that one of the spinoffs that's gonna happen from this extraordinary event that we're all participating in this extraordinary situation is that it's gonna accelerate what we're doing now, what we have to be doing now that is remote interaction, remote meetings, even, you know, family meetings remotely, having dinners together remotely, going to a sports game together remotely and so on. And so, you know, one of the thoughts I had this past week is, you know, what, if you take the kind of end state of that, which was sort of George Orwell's 1984 basically, where you basically almost live interfacing with this two dimensional world. I mean, that's one of its issues.

Vance Crowe [01:38:25] Yeah. That's like Isaac Asimov, the naked son, right? Where they only, where they only

Geoffrey West [01:38:29] My body is like three dimensional. Yeah. I have another, you know, I mean, and I can't reach out and touch you. I can't, you know, I can't smell you, you know, I can't, you know, it's so, it's very different. It's viscerally completely different. It lacks a certain soul. It lacks a certain essential feature. And one of the thoughts I've had is, you know, can man and woman live by the internet alone? Is that conceivable or is it like sleep? Namely, you know, you can have as much nutrition as good nutrition as you could possibly imagine, as much entertainment as you could possibly want, as much money and resources as you could possibly want. But if you are denied sleep, you will die very quickly. So is the internet like that in some ways? I mean, to be, I'm taking an extreme kind of image, but that if we force ourselves always more and more to interact this way, are we, in some sense, is a piece of us dying and what does that mean? Or, or it could be that we just evolve into something different. You know, culture is something completely different, in which case cities might become something different.

Vance Crowe [01:39:52] It it, this experience, first of all, going back to the, the, one of the things that Coronavirus has done for us has given us a shared experience, a global shared experience.

Geoffrey West [01:40:03] It's the first ever Glo truly global experience ever,

Vance Crowe [01:40:07] Right. For

Geoffrey West [01:40:08] Human beings.

Vance Crowe [01:40:09] And, and it's interesting because we all experienced it almost completely apart, right? Like you and I have not come in contact with one another, but we've now had this shared experience. Exactly. But I take your point, like on the one hand I've connected with my friends and my family in ways that I have not in years, right? Yes, definitely. So you have way more of this. And also I have discovered that you can get ahold of the most important people in the world. They'll take your phone call because they're stuck at home like yourself. And so there's been that, but if I didn't have my wife and my dog here, if I was, if I didn't have any other person to interact with, to touch, to smell, to cook with, I think you're right. I think that I would go a little crazy, like, like not having sleep.

Geoffrey West [01:40:57] Yeah. So I'm, I, it it, anyway, there's some interesting speculations about where this is going and what the residue of it all will be, or you know, the completely opposite view is, you know, people have very short memories and you know, you could easily imagine in even months, but certainly in a year, people were saying, well, you know, it wasn't so bad. It wasn't terrible what was so, you know, look, turns out there weren't so many people, you know, a lot of people who died, it wasn't that many. A lot of people got sick, but I hardly know anyone that did and many people got, it wasn't such a big deal, you know, it's like the flu, going back to that argument, it's just like the flu or a cold, what the hell? You know, what

Vance Crowe [01:41:42] Were we thinking? You know, remember we were buying all this food and we were doing this stuff. Yeah.

Geoffrey West [01:41:46] So, you know, and just go back to the same old way. So I don't know. I mean, that's not inconceivable. I think that's completely wrong, by the way, I mean, that, that conclusion would be extremely dangerous, by the way.

Vance Crowe [01:41:58] Well, better to make it after the fact, right. Better to come to that conclusion several years from now than to decide that that's true before it, before you know,

Geoffrey West [01:42:07] It's true. That's, yeah, that's the problem. So anyway, there's lots of interesting things.

Vance Crowe [01:42:12] So the final question, I've been asking every guest this, what do you think that today, because we had to restart it. So today is April 18th, it is Saturday, April 18th, 2020. What will the world look like in two weeks from today?

Geoffrey West [01:42:32] Two weeks from today? That's interesting. I, I think it'll be, it won't be so different, but there'll be more buzz. There'll be, you know, we're already seeing it. I have, I saw this morning that, you know, first of all the president, you know, was trying to get people to liberate their states, whatever that means. But people, I think some people will probably be violating some of the restrictions more and more. I think we'll see the beginnings of that. I think there'll be more and more frustration being expressed, and I think more and more depression occurring among those that were, you know, outta jobs and fear that they won't be able to get back into the workforce in the foreseeable future. I think there'll be a combination of these things. There'll be sort of a weird contradictory admixture between which we're already seeing between people, you know, in the manufacturing, in agriculture, your part of your audience wondering whether, you know, will they be able to sell their products and distribute their products and so on, on the one hand.

Geoffrey West [01:44:11] And on the other hand, people investing even more in the stock market because they think it might be coming back and they can make a killing. So there'd be these weird, I think that's, there's gonna be these weird schizophrenic contradictions more and more building up in the next couple of weeks. And my fear looking further into the future is that we're gonna try to move out of, because of all that, we're gonna try to move out of this too quickly. And that is, you know, it's sort of like, don't know if I talked about this at the beginning of this, you know, one of my images I had at this from the beginning is to compare it to the individual that is, you know, if your eye gets sick, I mean really sick, mean, forget about coronavirus, just get the flu. Or you got some other disease that forces you to stop working and so on. Go to bed, go to a hospital, and so on. Well, you know, you, you, you, you have built in most people, if you are fortunate, you have built into your sort of system, both biologically and economically that if you're out for a month, you're gonna be able to come back and it might take you a week or so, and then you're back to normal. And, you know, we, we all experienced that at least once in our life. I suspect that that happens. I, I got pneumonia extremely badly a couple of years ago, and it completely wiped me out. But, you know, I have sufficient resources both in my body and in my bank that, you know, was okay.

Geoffrey West [01:45:47] And I, and, and that's sort of taken for granted, you know, it wasn't like when I was out, my body immediately fell apart and I died within a day or two, nor did my boss say, Jeffrey, you didn't come in for two days fired. You know, I don't care if you got pneumonia, your, your problem. No, that doesn't happen. And somehow what is extraordinary is that collectively as an economy, we don't do, we can't handle that. We're going sort of bonkers.

Vance Crowe [01:46:20] Well, I mean, very quickly, I I, last night I saw probably the most horrifying thing I've seen so far in the United States, which was in Maryland, there was a group of people that were offered free baskets of food from this shopping mart and is a large Latino population. And the lines were so large. Yes. Always saw that, saw you could only see them from a helicopter.

Geoffrey West [01:46:43] Yes, I heard about that. So that is scary. So that mean, that shows you how, I mean, what we've learned here, I think, and I, and this is sort of platitude in a way, is how close to the edge we are when we think things are normal. It doesn't take very much to really push us to a crisis state. And that was very disturbing. And it's particularly disturbing to learn how many people in the workforce live day to day like that. I mean, we knew those people existed because we know there's poverty. But I think what at least I learned was that, that what we, it goes beyond poverty, you know, it goes way up into the workforce that there are people that you assumed, you know, had savings and were resilient and so on. But actually we're very close to the line. And that is something I, I just hope we can take a lesson on.

Vance Crowe [01:47:47] Yeah. And I think it's, it's very easy to sit there and say those people either weren't prepared or they, they are, but there are gonna be companies that they are going to get exposed for the fact that they were piling on debt by doing stock buybacks and doing all these tricks. And so it's easy to look at an individual and say, well, you didn't prepare, or you should have been working harder or saving your money harder. But we're gonna watch a huge segment of even the professional class really show that, yeah, nobody expected this. And sometimes you get caught unexp unaware.

Geoffrey West [01:48:21] Sure. I mean, look, let's face it, if we had a rigid free market system, absolutely, you know, classic, I don't know, I suppose 18th, 19th, early 19th century capitalism, whatever that means, but absolutely rigid. There would be no airlines. They should all be, you know, there'd be completely wiped out by now. You know, so, you know, we, so they're essential. But I would contend that. So all those human beings, they're also essential because we believe in them. We believe in life, we wanna support life. And that's because we're human beings and we're all interconnected. And you know, in the end, love should transcend economics.

Vance Crowe [01:49:05] Well, Jeffrey West, that is the best way to leave this. I have been poking Stewart Brand and anybody that I can to try and get you on Twitter, but you're not on Twitter. So if people wanted to, I refuse to be every chance I get, I'm like, if you're talking to Jeffrey West, would you mention to him he should get on Twitter? But, but since you're not, if people wanted to read one of your books or, or learn more about the Santa Fe Institute, how, how should they go about that?

Geoffrey West [01:49:36] Well, I wrote a book a couple of years ago that is actually, I consider extremely relevant for the situation. It's called Scale is the major title, and then it has some pretentious subtitle, you know, the universal law, the Universal Laws of Organisms, cities, companies, economies, and Sustainability. But it's a big, it's a book that covers many of the things we talked about. Obviously not addressing coronavirus, but that book. And then there are, I, I think the best way of learning about the Santa Fe Institute is, is first of all go to our website, which is just santa fe.edu, www santa fe.edu. But also there are a couple of good books. There's a recent one by a woman named Melanie Mitchell, who's on our faculty, wrote a popular book that is very good. And I think it's called Complexity. I forget.

Vance Crowe [01:50:33] Yeah, I was actually just looking up. You guys have a podcast, one of your social media guys is great, and he does complexity explorer and,

Geoffrey West [01:50:42] And is an you have,

Vance Crowe [01:50:43] You have a great organization. I will put some links up in the show notes. Thank you so much for not just giving me one afternoon, but giving me a Saturday morning too.

Geoffrey West [01:50:52] That was great, Vance, you were very, you were extremely good. Your questions were excellent and I enjoyed very much our conversation. And I, sorry I talked too much and, but

Vance Crowe [01:51:01] Oh, this was great. This is a great honor. So thank you so much.