Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

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Today I'm speaking with Jeffrey West. Jeffrey is a theoretical physicist whose primary

interests have been in fundamental questions of physics and biology. He's a senior fellow

at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a distinguished professor at the Santa Fe Institute,

where he served as president from 2005 to 2009. He's been named to Time Magazine's list of

100 Most Influential People in the World, and he is the author of the very fine book,

Scale, the Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in organism,

cities, economies, and companies. And we talk about his book at length here. As you'll hear,

Jeffrey is an extremely interesting guy. We ran into a few audio problems at the end,

so apologies for that. All I can say is that our robot overlords don't yet have this internet

thing fully worked out. But I should say that this conversation is pretty dense. I didn't really

appreciate how dense it was until I relistened to it. There's a lot of information here.

Those of you who are students of physics and mathematics will absolutely love it,

but some of you will find that you really need to concentrate to follow Jeffrey where he goes,

and you might need to rewind from time to time or just listen to the whole thing twice.

But this will repay your attention because Jeffrey is doing some very deep and interesting work,

...