#225 Geoffrey West – Episode Notes

Big Idea

Geoffrey became fascinated by aging and mortality, and applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. 

The result was astonishing, and changed science: West found that despite the massive diversity in mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything from how much food it eats per day, what its heart-rate is, how long it will take to mature, its lifespan, and so on. 

Key Takeaways 

Geoffrey West grew up in a household where taking risky decisions resulted in unstable finances, which led him to being more conservative in his decisions during his younger years. However, Geoffrey soon learned that intuitive risk is necessary in order to live the life that you want. 

“Eventually it becomes to clear to you that you only have one life, we’re not practicing for anything, this is it” 

Geoffrey became fascinated with the questions around scale and why human life ends around 100 years. He began researching how all organisms scale, and found that every organism scaled the same and relied on networks.

“It sounds sort of simple in a way and it turns out that underlies much of science, trying to answer that question “how do things change the scale of the system?” 

After this, Geoffrey researched cities to compare them to the scaling of organisms and found that they too, scaled the same and relied on networks. Geoffrey found that the inner networks of every city globally is what creates the social interactions that lead us to innovation. 

“What the city is really, a cauldron, an incubator, a facilitator of social interactions. That’s what the city is and in that sense it’s the most marvelous machine we have ever built” 

This fascinating research led to Geoffrey publishing his book, Scale. 

1:53 Lessons From His Father 

Geoffrey says that because his father was a gambler, it meant that their finances were unstable which caused stress within the family. This made him cautious when it came to money and career risks, and Geoffrey says that it took him quite a while to feel comfortable going outside of the box. 

“The lesson I learned was probably to be more cautious than I need to be, that I would not go the route of basing my life on extreme risk where there is no fundamental basis” 

4:17 Handling Risk 

Geoffrey believes that determining how much risk to take is an intuitive judgement. Understanding that we have to take action to live the life we want is the guiding hand to taking the risks that will get us to where we want to be. 

“Eventually it becomes to clear to you that you only have one life, we’re not practicing for anything, this is it”   

For Geoffrey he says, 

“The recognition that stepping outside of the canonical boundary became more and more important in order to feel that I was living”

Geoffrey describes this gradual realization as liberating due to his conservative outlook in his previous years. 

8:10 The Mysteries of the Unconscious 

Geoffrey has always been intrigued by the psyche and the consciousness. 

“I recognize the role of the unconscious and I am very open to allowing intuition to play a role” 

Geoffrey’s career as a physicist has trained him to break down the numbers behind the big decision. However, when he actually makes the decision, Geoffrey says that it always turns out to be his intuition and unconsciousness that he allowed to come through. 

“When you’re grappling with a problem, especially conceptually, grabbling and trying to solve a problem, very often the solution seems to come out of the blue” 

Geoffrey says that moments where solutions come to us out of the blue are a clear representation that there is a process within our consciousness that we are not aware of. 

13:30 Lessons From His Son 

Geoffrey’s son Joshua has competed as a meddler for rowing in the Olympics and Geoffrey has learned a lot as a father about elite performance at the highest level from his son. Geoffrey says that it was amazing watching Joshua dedicate himself to rowing after many years of trying multiple sports. 

Geoffrey describes Joshua’s dedication as even more extraordinary when he was a graduate student because he was a full time athlete while in the process of receiving his phD. This led Joshua to rowing in two Olympics and becoming a professor of sciences at USC.

 Comparing himself to his son, Geoffrey explains that he does not consider himself a dedicated person like Joshua but when he is interested in something he works very hard at it. 

“What is interesting is that that was not something that either of us as parents instilled in him, that brute sense of discipline” 

21:10 Why ‘Drudge’ work is important 

Geoffrey feels as though society is losing a sense of discipline due to the convenience of information that technology has provided us. 

“The computer has rightly and wonderfully relieved us of a lot of drudge work. On the other hand, one of the weird things about some of the drudge work is that even though it’s drudge, it forms a way of thinking” 

22:46 Consequences of the Ease of Computation 

Geoffrey believes the ease of computation is coupled with the pressure to be an expert in one specific thing. He talks about the impacts of Google and Wikipedia providing us with the general sense of an idea or the answer to a problem and how this information impacts education and learning the foundations of math and science which provide us with useful ways of thinking. 

“There is clearly a tradeoff, but my concern is more and more we are going to lose the power of understanding things conceptually” 

28:08 Geoffrey’s Conceptual Process 

Geoffrey describes physics as the quintessential example of a paradigm for solving a problem.

The features of physics that Geoffrey says are extremely powerful is the element of not being overwhelmed by the details, understanding the mechanisms of cause and effect within the problem, and putting this information into a quantitative form. Geoffrey runs through his problem-solving process using aging and life expectancy as an example. 

“If I were giving advice to anybody I would say you should keep a notebook and you should write down your thoughts” 

While Geoffrey advises writing down your thoughts, he finds difficulty in holding himself accountable to this. 

34:18 Geoffrey’s Mentors & Collaborations  

During his younger years Geoffrey says he had outstanding physicists as mentors who he says didn’t challenge his thinking necessarily, but were role models on how he should think. 

Among Geoffrey’s mentors was Nobel Peace Prize winner Neville Mott, author of Quantum Mechanics Leonard Schiff, and MIT professor Victor Weisskopf. 

“All three always wanted to think big and they all said pretty much the same thing. They presented what is really the arrogance of physics, that you should be able to work on any problem.” 

Geoffrey says he also learned from these mentors the importance of asking the right questions. 

“It’s the question sometimes as much as the solution that is important” 

In terms of people in physics that he has worked with, Geoffrey says working with Suart Raby was his favorite collaboration.  After moving more towards biology, Geoffrey’s favorite collaboration was with ecologist James Brown. 

“There the challenge was of bringing these two different ways of attacking fundamental questions together in a collaborative way and that was incredibly challenging” 

43:35 The Fundamental Question of Scale 

Geoffrey describes scale as looking at anything with the idea of what would happen if you were to scale it up. 

“It sounds sort of simple in a way and it turns out that underlies much of science, trying to answer that question “how do things change the scale of the system?” 

45:40 Researching the Scale of Human Life 

Geoffrey originally set out to answer the question of what sets the scale of human life to end around 100 years. Before he could answer that question, Geoffrey says that he had to dive deeper into what is keeping the human system alive. 

“Every subsystem, every organ, every cell type, ever genome in your body has its own unique evolutionary history”

Geoffrey explains the work of Max Kleiber in the 1930’s and the systemized data that he found on metabolic rate. Throughout his research, Geoffrey found that the thing that is generic to all life is the mathematics of networks. 

“All of these systems have one thing truly in common and that is they distribute energy and information via networks” 

Geoffrey explains that he was able to derive the origins of the scaling laws and understand the growth timing. When we metabolise energy and it goes to our cells, it gets allocated to repairing damaged cells and then grows new cells, which is controlled by the flow of the networks within us. 

“The reason you age and die is your cells are working and they’re creating damage and it’s that eventual accumulation of damage, even though you do repair yourself, but it’s too expensive so to speak to repair precisely so gradually the system degrades” 

Geoffrey talks about why the bigger an organism is the more efficient the cells work, why every organism requires different amounts of sleep for optimal energy.

“It also explains not just the scaling between organisms but how you scale within yourself” 

 1:05:45 How Cities and Biology Scale the Same 

Geoffrey explains how he expanded his research to learn how cities are similar to the commonalities he found between organisms. . 

“Is New York a scaled up Los Angeles which is a scaled up Chicago which is a scaled up Santa Fe, which is where I live, even though they have different histories, geographies, and even different cultures”

They have extreme differences but also fundamental similarities, such as the importance of networks within them and between them. 

“It was very much like biology it had a sort of universality transcending history, geography, and culture and it had this economy of scale” 

Throughout his research, they discovered that cities were just like biology and the scaling was similar throughout them all, even when it came to infrastructure, crime, disease, and wages. 

“Anything with socio economic activity regardless of whether it was good, bad, or ugly, it scaled in the same way and it did, as far as we could tell, across the globe” 

Geoffrey’s findings displayed that without the social network within cities, there would be no innovation.

“What the city is really, a cauldron, an incubator, a facilitator of social interactions. That’s what the city is and in that sense it’s the most marvelous machine we have ever built” 

1:20:39 The Role of Time 

Associated with the concept that the bigger an organism is the less energy is expended per cell, is a slowing down of the pace of life. The opposite is true in socio economic quantities because of the role of social networks.

“Social networks have in them something that you can’t see in biology and that is positive feedback over short periods of time” 

Geoffrey talks about how his findings showed that innovation has to be happening faster and faster, but this does not mean the problems have been solved. 

“You don’t solve the problem by innovating, what you are doing is postponing the problem”