Scale by Geoffrey West focuses on the the principles and patterns connecting the ways that cities, organisms, and companies grow. West, a theoretical physicist, studied the way in which sizes of mammals related to their life expectancy, and further connected these laws to the growth and longevity of cities and the world of business. Nat and Neil unpack these laws and principles on today's podcast episode.

We cover a wide range of topics including:

The idea of '1 billion heartbeats' per lifetime
How COVID has impacted growth of cities and business
Human life expectancy
Paradigm shifting innovations
Growth in its relation to socioeconomic factors

And much more. Please enjoy, and be sure to grab a copy of Scale by Geoffrey West!

Links from the Episode

Mentioned in the show

Readwise (0:02)
Antilibrary (Umberto Eco) (4:41)
Evernote (1:07)
Notion (1:07)
Roam (1:07)
Airr (8:58)
Of Mice and Elephants: A Matter of Scale (21:08)
Steve Jobs introduces WiFi…with a hula hoop! (48:43)

Books mentioned

Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott (7:36) (Nat's Book Notes)
Antifragile (7:40) (Nat's Book Notes) (Book Episode)
The Blueprint for Armageddon by Dan Carlin (8:48)
The Startup Gold Mine (Neil Soni) (13:05)
Scale by Geoffrey West (14:08) (Nat's Book Notes)
Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett (27:08) (Nat's Book Notes) (Book Episode)
The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch (30:05) (Nat's Book Notes) (Book Episode)
The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin (35:31) (Nat's Book Notes)
Happy Accidents by Morton Meyers (59:02) (Nat's Book Notes) (Book Episode)
In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell (1:17:44) (Nat's Book Notes) (Book Episode)

People Mentioned

Umberto Eco (4:41)
Dan Carlin (8:48)
Geoffrey West (14:08)
David Deutsch (27:03)
Daniel Dennett (27:08)
Arthur Clarke (50:14)
Nassim Taleb (1:29:30)

Show notes:

0:27 - Using Readwise to gather your notes to export to other sites. Scanning book pages of physical books. Nat and Neil discuss their preferences surrounding digital vs. physical books.

6:32 - Re-reading books. The difficulty of finding a 'mind-blowing' book to read. If you have any book recommendations for a future podcast episode, send them our way!

8:45 - Airr - Highlight audio as you listen to podcasts. How to make podcast listening more educational for yourself. Purposes of podcasts can be both educational and entertaining. The massive market for "How To" content.

14:08 - This week's episode is on the book Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies by Geoffrey West. The book talks about how things grow, continue to grow, decline in growth, or decay. The author primarily focuses on growth of organisms, cities, and companies, as the book title suggests, but also within these large structures are smaller substructures that grow and change, too. Some of the same laws of growth apply in seemingly different systems.

20:31 - There are many things that scale along with size that are not growing at a 1:1 ratio.

The number of heartbeats in a specific mammal's life is roughly the same across species. Neil describes an article in which each species receives an average of 1 billion heartbeats per lifetime. The heart rate varies on size of the being.

Different lifespans between species. From an objective standpoint, an elephant tends to live longer than a mouse, but subjectively, do life spans feel the same length to each individual creature?

23:45 - How humans fit into this research of lifespan vs. body size. Differences in lifespan pre-technology vs. today's era. Life extension - whether or not the maximum life expectancy can be extended. The age of 125 seems to be the maximum at this point according to West.

28:02 - Entropy and natural decay in the cell's ability to replicate. You can bring things from disordered back to ordered, and with that creates externalities. Example: the waste created when we use the bathroom. Are there ways to minimize that?

30:46 - "The problem is that the theory also predicts that unbounded growth cannot be sustained without having either infinite resources or inducing major paradigm shifts that reset the clock before potential collapse occurs. We have sustained open-ended growth and avoided collapse by invoking continuous cycles of paradigm shifting innovations, such as those associated on the big scale of human history with discoveries of iron, steam, coal, computation, and most recently digital information technology." (pg. 31)

This quote is talking about finite-time singularity. This leads into a discussion in paradigm shifting innovations in today's world. Resetting the paradigm clock.

35:45 - The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin - One thing brought up in this book is that humans, technologically, are an exponentially developing species. Geoffrey West brings up the possibility of hitting a wall and running out of paradigm shifts. To continue growing at an exponential rate, do we have to keep discovering this innovations at an exponential rat...

63: The Universal Laws of Growth. Scale by Geoffrey West