Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the What Is Money Show. I'm sitting down today with Mr. Jeffrey West,

who is the author of a superb book called Scale that we're going to be talking about today.

And Jeffrey is also a theoretical physicist at the Santa Fe Institute, which is a place known

for a lot of bright minds and brilliant thinking.

So Jeffrey, welcome to the show.

Yes.

Thank you, Robert.

Thank you very much for inviting me. And I'm looking forward to the show. Yes. Thank you, Robert. Thank you very much for inviting me, and I'm looking

forward to our conversation. I as well, you know, I was telling you offline, I think it's been

two years since I read your book originally. It was recommended to me by a friend, Alex Gladstein,

and he knew I had been writing and thinking a lot about this, like where you draw the line

between living and non-living.

It's a very fuzzy line, as your book really points to.

And so, you know, I'll just read the title of the book, scale the universal laws of life,

growth, and death in organisms, cities,

and companies. So it does a great job of explaining, I guess, the network dynamics or the physics

even of these different forms of life. And maybe we could start there.

Like how do you think about living versus non-living life versus non-life, I guess?

How do you think about this topic and where do you draw the lines?

Well, that's, of course, a very challenging question,

one that many people have tried to answer.

And I don't think there is, at least to my mind,

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