In this episode of Plugged In, host Jed Dorsheimer engages with renowned theoretical physicist and author Geoffrey West to explore the connections between biological scaling laws and economic systems, discussing how energy and network theories can provide insights into the growth and sustainability of cities and economies.

Podcast Transcript

00:04
Jed D
All right. Welcome. My name is Jed Dorsheimer. I will be your host on the Plugged In podcast. Brought to you by William Blair. Today is December 12th and I am delighted to have with me Jeffrey West, who is a renowned theoretical physicist, author, former president of the Santa Fe Institute, professor and founder of the High Energy Physics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

To put it plainly, Jeffrey knows energy, and today we're going to focus on scaling effects. In fact, he's written a book on this titled ‘Scale.’ We'll focus on fractals, and I'm going to do my best to try and connect the laws that govern our physical world to economic theory and social systems. We're going to ask the question, can the limits and the biological signals that govern the size of a shrew or a blue whale on the opposite end of the spectrum tell us something about the size of a city or more importantly, the capital formation or debt structure of our economy? So, join me on this fascinating journey and as always, please send any comments suggested which are welcome to my email JedDorsheimer@Williamblair.com.

Well, Jeffrey, thank you for being here. I'm, I'm delighted to have you today. So much so that I've, I've just gone back through, ‘Scale’ and reread that. I think it's one of the, you know, one of the key books that everybody needs to have on their shelf. And quite frankly, reminds me a lot of, I'm not sure if you're familiar with, Adrian Bhajan over at Duke, but you and, Adrian kind of come at basically fractals or scaling principles, you know, from a slightly different perspective, but I think end up in the same spot.

So thank you so much for, for joining me.

01:59
Geoff W
You as well. Thank you, Jed, for inviting me. I'm looking forward to our conversation. And, I'm flattered that you not only read my book, but reread it. I mean, that's, I appreciate that, honestly.

02:14
Jed D
It was, you know, it was part of it was a really critical, it was it was one of the key books for me in developing my thesis around net energy, and we can talk about this in terms of how to benchmark the economy for, you know, a metabolic clearing rate. And, and what we put into that and in understanding some of the limits to cities or, you know, mammals, you just you do that so well and, in the book. So, you know, I'm, I'm delighted and excited to get the opportunity to, to talk to you about some of these concepts.

02:52
Geoff W
Well, thank you very much. As I say, I look forward to.

02:55
Jed D
You've also done a lot. I mean, the Santa Fe Institute, by which I was introduced through, I think, Catherine Collins over at Putnam and, Josh Wolf and I did a keynote at MIT, at Lux Capital. And so, are you still involved with, with Santa Fe Institute? What is for those unfamiliar, Santa Fe Institute's probably the leading authority on complexity theory and, you know, information scaling, etc. So, what is your involvement at this at this point?

03:29
Geoff W
Well, I'm still very much involved. I'm, you know, I had been, the president of the institute, and, I stepped down from that already some years ago and I've remained on the faculty and, you know, even at my advanced stage, they, I guess tolerate me. But I still enjoy. No, I very much, I feel very much part of the institute. I enjoy it a great deal. And, you know, that is my home. So, to speak, my intellectual home.

03:59
Jed D
So, I guess, to jump in, you and I have, chatted a little bit about what I'm doing on, in terms of creating, organizing value around energy and, looking at the economy through a lens of energy. And we were just, chatting a little bit about the neoclassical economic framework and quite frankly, the shortcomings.

And the, the fact that energy is simply treated as a 3 to 5% input instead of the, the bedrock. And you know, how much of that played into your work, over the years in terms of this obvious, shortcoming in terms of what is this, you know, what is our economic theory able to actually tell us?

04:53
Geoff W
Yes. Well, it's central to my thinking and has been and that's, primarily because I am a theoretical physicist that spends most, much of my career doing, you know, canonical physics, you know, quarks and gluons and string theory, evolution of the universe, dark matter, all these marvelous things. And of course, energy is the fundamental, quantity, really in physics. In fact, you could even think of physics as the science of energy, if you like, in its multiple manifestations, of course. So, it was very natural as I moved into these other areas to think of it in terms of energy. And, it did come as quite a surprise to me as I started to develop my, understanding and theories to do with big picture view of biology, where energy also plays an important role, but also not, as much appreciated as maybe it should be.

But that in economics that it was barely appreciated at all. And I found that kind of astounding since, you know, at the most naive level, at the most naive level. And it would be naïve, money is a substitute for energy. I mean, it is a proxy for energy. It's more sophisticated than that and much more complex than that. Nevertheless, it is it has, it does have a, direct relationship with energy and, you know, somehow that is never really explored much in, in economics. If I had done my homework, it could be that if one went back to, you know, early 20th century, 19th century and the development of economics, one might well discover the people discuss these kinds of questions in more depth, because much of economic thinking, did evolve from people who had studied physics originally.

So and even modern economists, many have come out of physics. So it's it's rather surprising that energy hasn't played, even in a small part, a more central role in economic thinking.

07:17
Jed D
You bring up a great point. I mean, it did. If you go back to the French physics Crats Adam Smith, the classical, economists, it was still very much central. It's really not until you get to a neoclassical framework post-World War II where we take this, you know, material shift away from this, and we look at labor and capital as superior and and ignore, energy is a primary driver. But last time I checked, labor without energy is a corpse and capital without energy is a sculpture, and neither are productive.

07:54
Geoff W
Yeah. It's neat. No, absolutely. Absolutely. No, I, I once had a fantasy of of, you know, is it possible to, so reformulate economic thinking in terms of energy. And so, the units would be joules and watts and kilowatts and so on rather than dollars. And that's how you would, you know, you'd start having metrics that are somewhat different.

And is that something conceivable and would that be useful. And so of course, from a physicist viewpoint, that would be very useful would be the ideal way of doing it. But, you know, as I say, the, the, the correspondence between energy and, and, and money dollars and, and all its consequences is rather, you know, it's not it's not exactly 1 to 1, that's for sure.

So, it does require serious thinking. But, just to repeat what I said, it is still surprising that you don't see that reflected in any modern economic thinking.

08:59
Jed D
So we'll have to connect after this because I have done that. So in a service economy, a dollar's worth about five megajoules. And in an industrial economy.

09:08
Geoff W
Exactly. That's the idea.

09:10
Jed D
So, in scale you really beautifully talk about you connect to blue whales and cities. And so I was wondering if you could, which, which don't often go together. So, so I was wondering if you might, just help unpack the relationship between, a blue whale, the largest, living, mammal on, on the planet and, in some of these mega cities that we're seeing in terms of, you know, over in China, or even, New York. What's the correlation between the two for the, for the audience that maybe, hasn't read your book? 09:48
Geoff W
Yeah. So. Well, this is a bit of a long story, and I'll try to keep it very brief, but, of course, you know, just to set the scene, the whale, as you say, is the largest organism on the planet. In fact, it's the largest organism that's ever existed on this planet, including, course, all the dinosaurs and all the rest of the stuff.

So it's kind of extraordinary. And, there's reasons to believe. And I can talk about that in a little bit, possibly, that you can't get much bigger than a blue whale if you want to be a mammal. So given the design, given our mammalian design, if you try to make something very much bigger than a blue whale, you would run into problems.

And, and and I will say one thing about that, one of the problems, the main problem we run into is it gets increasingly difficult to distribute energy efficiently to all the cells, the network that is supplying those cells. As the organism gets bigger systematically, that network sort of opens up, you know, I mean, as you often see in trees, I mean, if you look at a tree, a very large tree sort of opens up more and more.

So, what that means is that at the endpoints of the network about circulatory system, the capillaries get further and further apart and they can't feed the cells in between. And the whale sort of represents the limit to how how well and how efficiently you can do that. So, you could ask a similar question about cities. Is there a limit to the city size now? Tokyo, I think, is the biggest city now in the world is about 35 million. Just, so everybody remembers New York, and we're talking about when we say city, I mean the metropolitan area, you know, a contiguous metropolitan area. So, or at least a socioeconomically contiguous and metropolitan area. New York is about 15 million. And, you know, China, Africa, have cities that are beginning to approach that level.

And of course, the natural question is, is there a limit to that? And that goes to the very heart of the kind of work that I was involved in and as you remarked, is sort of summarized, in in the book ‘Scale’ that I wrote. And, what it but fundamental to the book of scale was the idea of scaling.

That is, how does a city, you know, what is the relationship of a small city to a big city? And the discovery that was already known a long time ago that, among animals, just by looking at the data, just take mammals, for example, a whale, to a remarkably good approximation, despite appearances, is actually just, a scaled up mouse or scaled up elephant, or scaled up giraffe or scaled up human being. Despite appearances. That is, what I mean by that is that if you make any measurement, any measurement of its physiology or its life history, physiology, meaning, you know, the heart rate, how fast the heart beats, or what is the length of the aorta, the first tube coming out of the heart. All those kinds of physiological phenomena, or you measure the life history events, how long they live, how many offspring they have, how long they take to mature.

These things scale in a very regular way, from the smallest mammal and indeed from the smallest animal, all the way up to the largest. And the work I got involved in was to explain that. And the explanation lies in something I've already mentioned. Namely, if you like the physics and mathematics of the networks that sustain life and in fact, when you think about it, life is a bunch of networks. It's your circuitry system, your adrenal system, your lungs, your neural system. And so on and so forth. And it is the mathematics and physics of those. And, the underlying principles of those that lead to these scaling laws and they lead to a, what we call a universality among them, not just that they all scale in a similar way, but that, they all have quantitatively similar numbers.

And just let me just spend a minute to explain that to those who are not familiar. And that is, the way so if you want to look at the scaling of mammals, you know, where the mammals go. They start with the shrew, which sits on the palm of my hand and ends up with the animal, which has been talking about the blue whale, which is 100 billion times heavier than that shrew.

So, if you want to plot data, so on the vertical axis, you will plot some physiological quantity, the most fundamental of which would be metabolic rate. How much food or energy in terms of what we're talking about, does the animal need per day to stay alive? Metabolic rate on the vertical axis against weight on the horizontal axis.

If you would go from a true to a blue whale 100 million times, you can't do it on a linear piece of graph paper. You can't do one, two, three, four. So, you plotted logarithmically. One, ten, 100,000. It's all gone by by factors of ten. So, you get it on one page. And when you do that, the scaling I just described is manifested as a beautiful straight line, which is kind of extraordinary.

But here's the most, you know, complex phenomenon, probably the universe. And yet when you look how it scales, it scales in the simplest possible way if you look through the right lens, namely this logarithmic lens that was discovered almost a hundred years ago by a man named Max Klein. But the other thing he discovered was that the slope of that line was approximately three quarters.

And that's surprising because you might have expected, if you doubled the size of an organism, well, you doubled the number of cells you would expect to have to supply twice as much energy. And what that law says is, no, you don't. You actually have this extraordinary economy of scale, that you only need, need to supply 75%. So there's this 25% savings every time you double, which is enormous, actually.

So, that was explained by this theory based on networks and that was used then to understand growth and aging and sleep and all kinds of other things. But the important point was that it was a quantitative theory that you could then use to discuss many issues, such as the one I or we already brought up. And that is the size of the blue whale.

And one of the things that theory says is it verifies what you sort of anecdotally recognize that this network is getting sparser the bigger it is opening up. And so, it's harder and harder eventually to supply the cells at the end of that network. And so, you reach maximum size. So, we took that same paradigm to cities because cities, you know, I mean, they've often been compared to organisms and in some ways they're kind of a super organism. They certainly are alive. And all similar questions about them. What, you know, do cities scale? And so is New York a scaled up Chicago or scaled up L.A or is a scale up Santa Fe, etc., etc.. And you know what is so we got hold of data of all the kinds of metrics that you might think about for a city, some mundane things like, you know, the length of all the roads or very importantly, how much energy does it use its metabolism, if you like.

But then things that are socioeconomic like, you know, how many patents does it produce? How inventive is the city? How much crime is there in the city and so on. Well, getting all those data and then plotting it in this logarithmic way, we discovered that cities, in that sense, like animals, like biology, they two scale, you plot them logarithmically, you see these straight lines with a little more variance, maybe, than you see in, animals.

Well, that's not surprising. Cities haven't been around that long compared to life, obviously. But the major difference was that, in socio economic activity, the cities had something, had an exponent, the slope of those graphs that was bigger than one rather than smaller than one. The three quarters that I mentioned in biology, they then cities that number, instead of being three quarters, was closer to 1.15 was bigger than one.

And that had extraordinary consequences. That relates now to this whole question of, you know, how big can a city be? Because if you think about the about animals and the three quarters, which we term sublinear, sublinear scaling because it's scaling slower, than linearly, what you realize is that, one of the consequences of that is that the bigger you are, you're needing less energy to support a gram of tissue or single cell, a single cell inside it.

It's getting more and more efficient the bigger you are, because you need less energy. So and then that has and by the way, that's, at some fundamental level, that's one reason why a whale can live 125 years, and a shrew only lives a year or two because its shrew cells are working incredibly hard, and the elephants don't have to work so hard because of the principles of the network that's doing the supply.

This is three quarters with at least this three quarters exponent. The slope of this graph. Now with cities, we have the opposite phenomenon. It's now bigger than one. And if you think about it, what that means is, and by the way, we call that super linear, what that means is the bigger you are, the more you have per capita, rather less per capita.

So the bigger you are, the higher the wages are per capita, per capita in the city. The more wealth there is per capita in a city, the more crime there is per capita in the city, the more disease there is per capita, etc., etc.. So, you have this, kind of open ended building up bigger.

So, so the way that plays into growth is that if you had sublinear scaling in terms of and in terms of what you have in animals, what does that say? That says that you're supplying energy at a rate that is slower than linear, but you're trying to build up in a linear fashion, more and more biomass, more and more cells and that slower than linear eventually cannot keep up with the demands of linear, the linearity of adding new biomass.

So, what happens is, well, we know you stop growing, that's it. On the other hand, in a socioeconomic system like a city where you have the super linear scaling, the bigger you are, the more you have per capita. And so, the bigger you are, you're supplying more and more. You have to supply more and more energy. And so, what happens there is that supply is continually outstripping demand.

And you have open ended growth, and you have this super exponential rise in population and every other socioeconomic activity. And that’s what we see. So, the theory and the theory is quantitative and predictive. So that's extremely satisfying that you have a theory that can, where you can understand both of these phenomena in the same context, even though they manifest themselves quite differently, one manifesting itself through sublinear scaling, as bounded growth, stopped growing, and the other manifesting itself through so super linear scaling as open ended, faster than exponential growth.

And that means going back to the question about cities and just to make it very specific that unlike in biology, where there will be a limit and there's a limit on everything and therefore leading to something that is sustainable, you have this open ended growth, which in principle would lead to open ended size of a city. Now, there may be other things, of course, that limit the size of a city, because eventually, you know, I mean, if you wanted to double the size of Los Angeles, you'd already have, what, 12 lane highways, 12 lane freeways.

You'd have to have, you know, 18 or 20 lane freeways and, you know, railroad tracks that are eight, like eight tracks instead of four tracks, etc., etc.. And all of that is in principle possible. The fact is that we're not going to do it. We don't have the, you know, either the willpower of the or the, even the resources that we're willing to put into that to do that.

And that's very good. So what happens? So just to finish that story, what happens in cities is that even though they keep growing and they will keep growing, they organize, so to speak, they break down into pieces, which become sort of semi-autonomous. And that's what we will see more and more happening. I think, is that as cities and you already see that, we already know that.

But, you know, they become even though they're contiguous in terms of their physicality, the buildings are continuous. In fact, the way they operate in terms of their social networks and social activity is, or semi or they're bounded within a metropolitan area.

24:48
Jed D
So, I'd like to try an experiment here real time with you. If you don't mind. And I'd like to just kind of, spitball a hypothesis with you and kind of work through it live. Probably a bad idea for a podcast, but let's just let's just have fun with this. So in your book. You talk about, the metabolic rate per person is about 90W.

And so, it's about the same that I've calculated. I probably bring that average up a little bit, but I calculate that everybody's like a 100-watt light bulb just to kind of have some round numbers. So, if we have 8 billion people and we look at the energy that's about on a daily basis, that's going to be about 1.5 terawatt hours of energy per day.

Now, one of the things that.

25:41
Geoff W
I do, I need to interrupt you slightly. That's just to keep you alive.

25:46
Jed D
Just to keep us alive.

25:47
Geoff W
Without doing anything.

25:48
Jed D
Without doing anything and not including our food systems to actually feed or. 25:53
Geoff W
Even while running around hunting and gathering, so to speak.

25:56
Jed D
Yep. So, I'm going to double that figure just because, just for a back of the envelope to assume three terawatt hours to basically, you know, have the cows or have the food system for hunting and gathering to metabolically keep 8 billion people alive. That's not including paved roads or lights that come on, you know, or you and I talking, you know, me here outside of Boston and, it's, you know, across the country with you right now in this podcast.

So, we, we know our, our economy globally consumes 19 terawatt hours of energy per day. So, the way that I calculate just as a quick triangulation, I basically get a ratio of about about 6.5 to 1 based on the metabolic to the total consumption. And what I've been developing is this idea that if we put, so that from a ratio, I call that an energy return on energy invested like a 6.5 to 1.

And if you go to a simple economy that you don't have any of the modern amenities. It would be lower, but in aggregate, kind of, do you agree with that logic so far?

27:21
Geoff W
Yes, indeed. I've done quite a bit of work on that actually. But the I may disagree slightly with your numbers, but I don't have it down here, and I have to dig it up from my ancient memory. But, in principle, that's exactly right. And it's extremely important to understand that that what, what you just articulated that there are various levels of when I use the term social metabolic rate in this instance, but, biological metabolic rate is, of course, a tiny portion of the energy that we need.

I mean, the biological metabolic rate was all the energy we needed.

You know, before we started forming communities. Now that has gone up by, you know, so, so if you start, let me just go back off a minute. You know, we work, roughly just to stay alive. You need of the order of 100W being supplied. To hunt and gather before we formed communities. So, when we were truly hunters and gatherers, it was probably 200 to 300W. And in fact, we know that from people that are still hunter gatherers, because there's still a few of us that do all still hunters and gatherers, and they use about 2 to 300W.

If you add up, and this is this is probably what you're referring to. If you look at the amount of energy that in the developed world, especially in the United States, you look at how much energy you actually need to do the equivalent to hunting and gathering, which is what you did articulate having an automobile and the roads of where being able to communicate like this I have a laptop in front of me, you have, etc. etc. all of that stuff, which is part of who we are. I mean, I think that's an important point to realize. We tend to put that think about as outsiders, but that's who we are. I mean, we have all that stuff with us. And I call that an extended human being. I think, you know, that we have to recognize that, that number is about 50 times bigger than just being a simple hunter gatherer. And I don't know how that translates. I've not. I did the calculations ages ago in terms of the entire planet, but of course, there are people on this planet that are still like hunter gatherers and some in very poor countries where this number is much lower.

The United States is the highest, and that's the one I've concentrated on mostly. But the point that you're raising is, is absolutely crucial is to understand that, this is a wonderful way of thinking about how we've separated ourselves from being, you know, a natural organism. And of course, that's all invested in all the infrastructure and all the, the stuff that makes, quality and standard of life the way it is today.

30:23
Jed D
To carry this on. Thank you. If we coming back to our first point, in terms of the economy and if we look at capital formation is a function of exchanging value between two people or within our community, then if our metabolic breakeven is, say, a 6.5 to 1, and whether it's an 8 to 1 or it's a 6 to 1, just a rough range, then would you agree that if we put, if we are, creating power or energy, in transforming that that is above the metabolic break even, it will allow, give the substance for growth. Then in other words, you know, as you point out in the city, there could be limitations. But if you have a surplus of energy, the naturally the way that our system or natural world is designed, the growth will occur.

31:26
Geoff W
That's right. That's what growth and growth is. The way I always think about this generically, both for animals or plants, animals, plants, companies, cities, and the globe itself. The entire globe itself is there's sort of a generic equation. If you like, and that is the metabolic rate, whether it's biological or social gets allocated on the one hand, between, for want of a better word, is maintenance. That is keeping the system going the way it is right now. Look, don't try to change anything, just repairing what's damaged. Replacing stuff that's died by the same stuff again. You know, just doing, just keeping it the way it is. And then the stuff that's over goes to growth. That then adds biomass if it's an organism. And for us, it adds people and infrastructure and wealth.

And when if you have a physical backed currency, almost like being a hunter gatherer, would you agree that it keeps the economy in check because there's a actual expenditure of energy to actually create that capital that's then exchanged within that economy?

Yeah. So, from, certainly as a physicist, I would certainly answer that in the affirmative. And one of the mysteries of economics to me is that economics has this idea, which is a good one to begin with, that you can relieve yourself of that by somehow borrowing from the future. I mean, that's one of the great, I don't know, inventions. If you like one of the great achievements, I would say, of modern sort of economic men, homo economics in the sense the recognition that you can borrow from the future, in order to, induce growth and expansion today. And that's great. But of course, hidden in that is there's got to pay it back.

33:42
Jed D
I would probably push back hard and say that that only works if the energy systems are growing at a faster rate than the economy.

33:54
Geoff W
That was the corollary to I was going to say, so you have to pay back. So therefore, since ultimately all this has to be related back to sort of physical energy, if you like, that those energy systems better be keeping up with it at a minimum. Otherwise, you're going to be in trouble, otherwise the system will collapse.

34:12
Jed D
So and so based on the principle in particular, if we're in in a fiat based currency and your energy systems are coming down even and below your metabolic clearing rate, then debt would actually be the instrument to actually clear, so your debt would grow faster than the real economy would be growing. Would you agree? Would you agree with that?

34:40
Geoff W
That's roughly correct, yes. No. You got to balance, you know, it all comes down. I mean, the question is, you know, you can violate, for want of a better word, let's call this the conservation of energy. For the moment, you can violate economically the conservation of energy, as I say, by, you know, taking our liabilities by borrowing. But if you but over you know, that's only short term over you know what you have to make sure is over the longer term. If you integrate over longer term and that's you know, that's question what is longer term? What do you mean by do you mean six months a year, ten years, whatever? But in some period of time that is definitely finite. You have to of grown the rest of the system in and in particular the energy production, in order to balance that budget on the average when you've added on a time average. So that's a different way of saying, I think what you were saying.

35:43
Jed D
Yeah. And if you don't, you actually tax the system, which is going to make the metabolic clearing rate actually go higher, which is going to require more energy to tread water basically.

35:56
Geoff W
Right. So again, you, you could get into yourself into a spiral. And of course now the ways of doing it is you just, I don't know, you, you presumably have to do some things within the society that's supporting this. And, presumably that might be one of the reasons why people are so concerned about inequality.

You know, that both across the globe and, you know, within the country that, you know, once you start to get out of whack and you're not keeping up with that, you have to pay the price somewhere. And, you know, one way of doing it is you make, a large part of the population poorer. You don't allow them to keep up.

I mean, it's one way of saying it. You don't. We may not do that. I mean, the interesting thing is it's not it's not done consciously. I would say I'm not, you know, but the system, in order for the, the system, you know, there's, as I say, there's a conservation law. And so, if you take one piece somewhere, somewhere else has to supply that.

And, you know, one other way of doing it is the you don't you just don't give to a large part of the society or a large part of the globe or the globe, you know, you just say some parts are going to have to remain very poor.

37:12
Jed D
The, the old adage that that nothing is free, right? There's a cost to everything. And so, coming back to your I think, your Maslow's hierarchy of social needs, which you were describing earlier in your work on patents and innovation. If you have more surplus energy, you should have a healthier society, more innovation, better health care. All of the better arts and humanities, etc., where if you go to a tighter energy system, those are the things that you're going to start to, to come down.

37:55
Geoff W
No, absolutely no. I mean, it's I mean, presumably, you know, I mean, the more energy you can in surplus energy you can produce can allow you to both to, it's just pure growth, whatever that may mean. But how do you define that? But certainly, adding people and adding buildings and infrastructure and so on. But, it can also improve quality. It's not just, you know, that's and I think that's one of the things that was that's another thing that we're seeing now is a loss of quality.

38:33
Jed D
So, growth or de-growth really is not of, of anyone's control. It's really a function of the equation. In other words, if it based on sort of how we set this up, whether you're going to grow or whether you're going to contract is really a function of whether or not you have surplus or a deficit in terms of, energy.

38:59
Geoff W
Yeah. But that we do have in principle, control over, I mean, you know, but of itself, you know, that of itself we do because that then that becomes, political, a political question and a policy question, you know, that's which, which people obviously, fight about, but and, and, and certainly we're going through that now, as you well know, probably much better than I do in terms of, you know, we, we there's this huge pressure to get more and more energy.

And the immediate thing is to do more and more fossil fuel, obviously, because that's abundant still, and we can use it. And there somewhat deleterious ways of getting more of it. But you can get it. And, but, you know, that's a short term. So that's clearly whatever, whatever you think. That's clearly a short-term solution. Short term, we don't know what that actually means. Could be ten years. It could be 50 years. But it's just it's it's inevitably a short-term solution. And so, you know, I'm very empathetic with the idea of, using what we've, of what has brought us to this place in any case. And that is, of course, the sun. I mean, that is renewable energy in some form or another.

And, because, you know, I mean, burning the planet, burning the surface of the planet to keep us going is a very stupid long term solution to the problem. And, you know, sure, we should do it was extraordinary. I mean, one of the I mean, after all the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels coupled with the discovery, if you like, or evolution of entrepreneurship, capitalism, free markets has been extraordinary, has brought us to this place.

40:52
Geoff W
But, you know, if you look back on it, it was a priori, a short-term solution, short term meaning in the history of humanity, you know, it can only be for hundreds of years. Not if you want humanity to be around for thousands of years or longer. So, you know, we should have been and in fact, we were thinking of alternatives.

Lot of people probably don't realize the, you know, the idea of fueling things by solar energy, for example, goes back to about 1900. You know, people have been thinking about this, and not only that, you know, thinking about the deleterious effects of fossil fuel were thought about, you know, also from almost about that time. So, there were people but it's, you know, in the heat of the moment, so to speak.

It's hard to think of those things because we're, you know, having a great big party. It's been amazing that what we've been through. But, you know, eventually you got to pay the price. And it's very hard for us to give up, you know, this very simple solution and not recognize that if we don't, great children, grandchildren, great great great children, I don’t know what it will be. Going to suffer badly. And, you know, we should be preparing for that. And, and the and the fact is, you know, it's sort of obvious the sun is is in these terms, an infinite source of energy to us that burns out victory, too. But we're not worried about hundreds of billions of year.

42:28
Jed D
Within a human time frame.

42:30
Geoff W
But in any human time frame, that's reasonable. You know, we should exploit the sun, which is what brought us here, after all, everything up to, you know, 1800. Or maybe you could even go further. 1850. Everything came from the sun. Everything. And in fact, you know, from then on, it's come from the sun, except for using the stored energy from the sun. And just burning the bloody thing up. And it's like having a big woodpile outside your house and just keep using it and so on and so forth, or just a forest that you keep cutting down and using it and eventually run out. So think about some other but slightly more sophisticated way of, of using this, the solar energy in various forms to fuel the whole planet, which we could do in principle, there's not, there's nothing in principle or even technologically, that, that is inhibiting us. It's ourselves.

43:29
Jed D
The incentives are askew. I mean, I think that the incentives are misaligned. And I think coming back, this is why I think your work is so important. And as well as, Adrian's on, looking at things through a fractal lens or a, you know, a systems perspective. Because what we tend to do is we tend to look at things myopically and say, well, if not this, then that. And so this is good, this is bad. And then we try and push that, square peg in a round hole. And then we, we, we get discouraged that it doesn't solve the problem. Whereas rethinking the system, and then understanding the and that's why I come back to energy. Because if we have an economy that we really don't understand what the signals are versus the noise, because we don't understand the role of energy, then one has to question, how much is that really telling us about what is going on versus coming back and rethinking the system from a ground up perspective, including our energy systems.

44:46
Geoff W
You know, by the way, I should have mentioned I focused on solar energy, but of course, and I'm somewhat neutral on this is the whole question of nuclear energy. And, you know, I mean, but two, you know, that suddenly, you know, we shouldn’t throw that out. I mean, we shouldn’t throw out the, you know, the nuclear energy, the previews so far that idea, I mean, it can have serious consequences, obviously. But, you know, if we had fusion. If fusion, what could be worked, which I'm dubious about, but maybe so, you know, that's another, you know, almost infinite source of energy that, we can use. So, you know, I mean, it's a matter of will as political will, and we simply haven't had it. We don't have political leadership or will to do it.

So it's sort of it, you know, for me it's frustrating because it takes it away from science. I mean, that is necessarily it's a political process that has to take place and even a cultural process, I would say, because it requires also slightly different cultural way of thinking about some of these questions that we haven't been able to do in the past.

I mean, because it requires long term thinking. As well as what you emphasize, which I've, I am, as you mentioned, Adrian, of pushing and that is systemic thinking, thinking on a much on a much grander scale coupled with, of course, necessarily it's just, you know, you got to also do your homework and do all the details of all the bits and pieces.

It's not that you don't do the other, it's that you need to, qualify the local thinking with global thinking.

46:28
Jed D
So, Jeffrey, I really enjoyed having you on. I would like to, have an open invitation to you. I'd like to have you back at some point where we can maybe take what we've built so far and apply it to networks and information theory, sort of, adaptive complexity, which I know you've done a lot of work at Santa Fe, because I think this kind of layering effect is, is how we actually do solve, the problems that, that we face as a society.

46:57
Geoff W
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I appreciate it, Jed. I enjoyed the conversation. And, and your observations and questions were really good. So I look forward to and I'll be delighted to, you know, reengage with you.

47:09
Jed D
Thank you.