Awesome! I haven't listened yet but just added to the queue.

@kr - a meta question for you: how do you approach potential guests for the podcast?

Do you find it hard to get their attention and interest for a new / small platform? Any tips on outreach to increase the chances of a yes?

I want to start a podcast too. Mainly as an excuse to have free conversations with thinkers who I'd happily pay to speak with for an hour. I've felt intimidated about asking them though, to give their time to a 'nobody' like me with a nonexistent audience.

Ok.

Very interesting to listen to. Of course I have not read his book but I have read James Gleick's CHAOS.

I think Professor West is missing some things that his data is telling. Decentralized verses centralized planning. Kubernetics is where we get the English word for Government (govern + mind).

Cities do die. Some cities like Somarkand, Uzbekistan have existed for 2600 years. Civilizations have had city states that eventually fall apart. Corporations are just central planning and cities that thrive are decentralized planning. As soon as a city gets a strong central government it falls apart because productive people are pushed out and chose to do different work.

I like your 3rd choice question. As the Yiddish saying goes, "If you only have two choices, choose the third." The governing principal is mathematics and the exoteric is the corpus of a single individual body and a collaborative effort in communication (Stacker News).

The interesting part is that he snapshots data of companies and of cities but he ignores that some cities are corporations! He also ignores failed cities. Dried up towns. Gold rushes that when the mines closes so did the cities or towns.

Professor West also mentions Trump and unfortunately his intellectual circles do not include small business men and women who loved Donald Trump. Why? Because they just wanted to do business and not have central government putting thousands of rules on them. That's what they believe. I have spoken to many of them.

Finally it's the Fiat funding of science itself. In the beginning West notes that academics are very specialized. That reason is clear because it's easy to fool the bean counters by playing the academic game of useless data, papers and peer massage / reviewed journals.

He is a very smart guy and I'd recommend listening to him but he also has observation bias. We all do. As soon as you pay attention to a process it will change by observation. To be successful you need to be lean.

Decentralized is the following of Natural Law because you don't have a choice. Man's law is FIAT and it's subject to error. We don't need leaders. West is totally falling into the 15 Minute cities nonsense and World Economic Forum theories of Stakeholder Capitalism.

If the money gets changed, Bitcoin, then the matter of moving too fast will also change. Things move fast because FIAT CURRENCY devalues so quickly. I've seen it in construction where I would get blue prints that were incomplete, stamped wrong, blank pages and specs that were cut and pasted. I'm taking billion dollar projects where no one knew exactly where the real plans were.

Anyway, over all it was a very good video. I learned something. I'd like to read his book but I'm going through Austrian Economics now. I also will subscribe to your channel.

I like forward to seeing more of your work, too.

I'M SO GLAD YOU POSTED THIS!

This is one of my all-time favourite books, lining up the video for later today.

I'll watch it and get back to you. It in my history.