In his scenario of a boss running at 21x the speed of the workers, why isn't the whole team being run at the higher speed? Does anyone understand his reasoning here?
How fast you run these employees depends on the economics of your industry, I think the idea is that coordination failure is expensive. Thus if running bosses faster than workers avoids such failures it seems more justified running bosses faster than nearly any other kind of worker. The value of good management in a large company is much higher than the productivity boost any one low level worker could acheive. He touches this when he notes that it is vital the most competent people are as high up the chain as possible.
Sorry, I think I didn't explain well enough why it doesn't make sense to me, so let me try again. In his example there are 256 workers and 64 line bosses running at 1x, and a CEO running at 21x. Why not instead have 16 workers, 4 line bosses, 1 CEO, all running at 16x, which would do the same amount of work in the same amount of time? If we assume that 21x is the maximum feasible emulation speed, it doesn't seem plausible that slowing down the workers to 1x saves enough money (compared to running them at 16x) to make up for increasing the memory requirement by 16 times.
Lecture at youtube.
Sorry - haven't watched it yet so no summary, but I expect it to be fun.