The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Daniel Schmachtenberger: "Bend not Break #2: Maximum Power and Hyper Agents"

Episode Date: May 25, 2022

On this episode we meet with founding member of The Consilience Project, Daniel Schmachtenberger. In the second of a four-part series, Nate and Daniel explore the relationship between energy, information, technology, the Superorganism, and the maximum power principle. How can we maximize returns on agency? Nate and Daniel explain the importance of hyper agents: those humans who have an outsized influence on what's happening in the world. About Daniel Schmachtenberger: Daniel Schmachtenberger is a founding member of The Consilience Project, aimed at improving public sensemaking and dialogue.   The throughline of his interests has to do with ways of improving the health and development of individuals and society, with a virtuous relationship between the two as a goal.  Towards these ends, he's had particular interest in the topics of catastrophic and existential risk, civilization and institutional decay and collapse as well as progress, collective action problems, social organization theories, and the relevant domains in philosophy and science. For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/20-daniel-schmactenberger

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. This week's podcast is a second installment of a conversation with my friend Daniel Schmockdenberger. We intended this series to be a three-part series on Bend versus Break, but we got a little sidetracked with both interesting and I hope relevant and helpful tangents on energy, maximum power, animist religion.

and the importance and relevance of hyperagents are those human individuals who have outsized influence on our cultural direction. Daniel and I come to this with wildly different backgrounds, and we've kind of found each other on the Internet and are learning from each other and exploring and trying to figure out the path ahead and basically share our our revelations and our thought process publicly because I think we need a lot more people engaged in these questions in this space at this time. I hope you enjoy this conversation. I certainly did. Here is Part 2 with Daniel Schmachtenberger. Okay.

This is podcast number two with you of a three-part series at least. And what I'd like to do today is kind of merge our meta-world on how energy, materials, technology, money, human behavior, all aggregate into an explanatory systemic overview of the human condition, the human predicament as it pertains to all the risks that we're facing. You and I have been kind of playing verbal mental ping pong on this stuff for a couple years. And our, we have a huge overlap in how we see this stuff. And I'd like to kind of hone that overlap to converge on, on maybe a unified thing that we both agree on today.

I will go back to the podcast missionary position of me interviewing you this time, as opposed to last time you interviewed me. But maybe if it makes sense to you, I'll just give like a one minute overview of what we covered on the first podcast on Ben versus Break, which was called Energy Blind. And the reason we did that as opposed to starting here is a lot of people are still naive about the relationship between the energy and the human experience. We talked about how important energy is in nature, how energy in biological systems is the currency of life, the same as human systems. We are massively supported by a hundred billion barrel of oil equivalents of fossil sunlight added to our systems every year. There's a big energy quality difference between so-called renewable energy, which is robust

and viable, but can it empower a 19 terawatt system in our current way is a big question? We talked about Jevin's Paradox, which is the rebound effect that new efficiency in technology help you save energy on a microscale, but on a macro scale, it ends up buying more stuff and having more surplus, and we end up using more energy in aggregate. and we talked a little bit about, you know, the tenuousness of oil supplies and depletion and things like that. So I hope everyone can go back and listen to that as a precursor to this. So good, good afternoon to you.

Where would you like to start this conversation, my friend? Just that it's been a few months since we did that last one. And I'm really excited that we are finally getting to this. You and I had had a conversation offline where we explored some of the topics in more depth. And I think they're really interesting and useful frames. So I'm excited for us to kind of get to dialogue through some of those things that we had discussed and then get to expand the topics. When you and I spoke last time, I had got the good fortune of having you explain your models to me. I read the superorganism paper and watched some talks, but I never actually read your book.

And in prep for this time, not because I didn't think it'd be great just because of scheduling. I did get read the book. And I just want to make sure that all of your readers that have not should go read his book because it's excellent. It's so well structured. You know, Nate has spent his career studying what is the world predicament and basically took the most important frames from the nature of how humans understand. stuff and how we kind of get understanding wrong to human motivation to evolutionary perspective to energy and infrastructure and like that and just kind of put it in these chunks very well chunked but like summaries of stuff that each would be a book and so it's like whatever 100 books summarized

in a nice sequence so I just wanted to acknowledge like a fucking brilliant book that was so well done I was so happy reading it last night and you know what I think you and I both kind of came to independently was the awareness that there are many different potential catastrophic risks, meaning different escalation pathways to the end of this world system's viability, that even though they look really different, whether we're talking about resource shortages that lead to war, that lead to kind of large-scale war or breakdowns of supply chains or planetary boundaries directly in ecological tipping points, that there are some things that all of those have in common.

And if you try to treat the Amazon hydrological pump here and the dead zone here and the soil depletion here and the species extinction here and the nuclear escalation here and the AI risk here and the bio risk arms race here as separate issues, you're going to fail because they're actually all unsolvable without solving the underlying kind of generative dynamics that give rise to them. And each year we keep getting more of them as there's more new tech. And the new tech increases the kind of destructive capacity, both unintentionally, throughout. externalities and intentionally through conflict theory war. And so we keep getting more total catastrophic risks, higher probabilities on them, more interconnections and cascades between them. So it's impossible to keep managing the front of that. So it's like, fuck, what is underlying those, which ends up looking like diagnosing what about civilization is kind of self-terminating? It's a little bit like the difference between the kind of traditional alopathic medical approach

and the anti-aging work, right? The traditional medical work is like, okay, well, maybe we can keep you from dying from heart disease, but we at most by a year because your cancer and your Alzheimer's and your diabetes are immediately following because you're aging and you're aging poorly for a bunch of underlying systemic reasons that the homeodynamics of your body aren't working that well. So whichever system gives out first doesn't make that much different. So if you want to do more than by a year, you have to look at can we age better comprehensively, which will affect all the systems. So what are the underlying dynamics? So the kind of anti-aging work is thinking at a much more fundamental way about pathology in general and pathogenesis in general

rather than specific applications. And it's very much like we're doing that for this world system. And just to close that, you did it in a particular way that I really appreciated that was very overlapping, but a little different than the metaphors I used. And I think this way we got along and I think getting to show the mappings between those is insightful. So that's what I'm hoping me do today. Yeah, excellent. Thank you for your kind words on the book. As far as aging, you know, we're part of a system. And that's what I've tried to do. That's what you're trying to do is explain how the system functions together. As far as anti-aging, if everyone lived to be 150 wider boundary perspective on that is we would have some more massive ecological problems

as well. So it depends where you draw the boundaries on. this stuff. Okay. So, yes, I have described the system as we self-organize as families, small businesses, corporations, nation states to optimize surplus, but it's not really surplus. It's financial representations of surplus. And that's tethered to energy, tethered to carbon, and that this system is out of control as a superorganism. A superorganism, it's not really a physical entity. It's just the behavioral dynamic of 8 billion of us, roughly, just pursuing these cultural objectives. And it's no longer in anyone's control. There's no politician or billionaire that is actually steering it. So that's kind of the dynamic that I've come up with.

is that we have outsourced the planning of our system to the financial market. And that momentum worldwide of making decisions to keep that optimized suppresses any other paths of wisdom or constraint that might be totally viable and make sense. There's just no fertile soil for those to germinate it. And so I would like to get your unpacking using your language and your work on that dynamic and how you see that. I mean, you already summarize so much stuff in your book. And if I was to summarize that and like the few concepts that give if someone had to hold a very minimum set that I would, that I might offer would be that the financial system has an embedded growth obligation. It has to keep growing, or this particular system breaks and it has to keep growing at a percentage of the previous year, so you have a compounding interest thing, which means you have an exponential curve.

So there is an exponential embedded growth obligation on finance. But finance is bound to the real world, and you can't exponentially grow the extraction in the real world. Specifically, you can't keep mining stuff unrenuably and turning it into pollution and trash, and you can't keep having the energy that it takes to move all those atoms or the bits around. indefinitely. So, and that specifically this, the combination of the Jevins paradox and the coupling of money and energy is a, which, you know, is a, I'll say the Garrett relation, but Nate will say what's wrong with the Garrett relation. I'm only saying it vaguely is the idea that there's a coupling between global GDP and energy that is an important coupling to understand. And roughly that coupling is

anything that makes money is probably moving atoms around in physical space or moving bits around, but it requires energy to do. So kind of across all industries, some will boom, some will bust, but they're all going to take energy. So there's some rough correlation between total money and total energy use. It's pretty clear what you mean when you say moving atoms around. That would be materials. But what do you mean when you're moving bits around, just to be clear?

Computation still takes energy. And so even when we're talking about capitalists. with digital goods and services, it's still energy dependent. It obviously takes energy moving atoms around to make the computational substrate. You've got to do a lot of mining and you got to do a lot of fabrication to make the computer chips and the servers and the satellites and whatever. And then the computational systems require energy. So the movement to digital doesn't get us off the need for energy.

Right. Well, so what you're saying is the cloud is not virtual and approximately 18% of our electricity today goes towards the servers and the gadgets and the wiring and everything. Like the cloud is definitely not virtual. Cloud has a physical substrate layer that it depends upon that has real physics and energy dynamics associated. So we can of course get into the way that maybe digital goods have a slightly better efficiency in terms of how much energy they take per dollar than the physical goods.

then this is why the Jevons paradox is so fundamental is ultimately the dollars are seeking returns anywhere and they'll seek the highest returns possible, but they'll seek any returns too. There'll be a power law distribution on returns. So if I can get a thousand X return, of course I'll get it. But if I can get a three percent return, you know, large amounts of capital, we'll do that. So when you get increases in efficiency, you just get a cheaper industrial input, you know, a cheaper market input, which means that a lot of things that weren't profitable now become profitable. So the surface area of profitability expands. And this Jevins paradox, just like everybody who's focused on environmental issues, needs to kind of take this very seriously, which is you increase efficiency of, say, here,

energy production. Now you have cheaper energy. Energy is one of the key by inputs to every industry. Cheaper input means a whole bunch of non-profitable areas become profitable in the market expands. And so that efficiency doesn't buy you the thing that you wanted to have. So the embedded growth obligation still holds. And so we're like, okay, so because of that, we still get this coupling between dollars and energy. Dollars are on an exponential growth curve up. That means energy has to be on an exponential growth curve up. You can't do exponential extraction of energy forever.

And we're already on a diminishing return on hydrocarbons, meaning hydrocarbons into hydrocarbons out, the energy return on energy investments in diminishing return. And yet it has to keep up with a very verticalizing part of the exorbitricerbors. exponential curve on finances, there's a problem there, right? And you can only quantitative ease and subsidize that thing for so long. There's like a fundamental problem there. And so, of course, the answer is just renewables. Well, great. We'll meet all of that energy need with renewables, except right now the energy return on energy of investment of the renewables means you've got to use way more oil to get the non-oil producing stuff. And the curve still just don't work in the current

way we're looking at it. So there's just some very deep reckoning in the relationship between the embedded growth obligation and finance and the physical. limits of the real world atomically and energetically and the relationship between those is a heap of complexity from there. But that simple summary kind of gives you the exponential growth of the metabolism of the superorganism, as Nate has argued it, which I think is fucking insightful. And then we want to kind of take that as the base input with whatever Nate's about to say and then play from there.

I agree with everything you just said. And one thing I would like to put a, oh, well, that's why then, naturally. So one thing that we didn't get to in the first conversation that you indirectly referenced here, and I want to unpack it a little bit, is how money comes into existence and how that relates to GDP growth and future expectations. So money does not come into existence the way that's. taught in economic textbooks. We do not make a loan from existing capital. 95% of our money comes into existence from commercial banks making a loan.

And when they make the loan, they create the money. So if you're a bank and you have $10 million on your books and assets and liabilities, and you, Daniel, come in and have this great nootropics business idea, and they say, you're You're a great guy. We're in good standing with the Federal Reserve. We're going to give you a million dollars for your business. At that moment, your account went up by a million dollars. The IOU asset on the bank account went up by a million dollars.

You can spend that million on anything you want, presumably a business. The bank is equal. Now they have 11 million in assets and 11 million in liabilities. But the same amount of coal, oil, copper, water, Amazon, forests existed on the planet that did 10 minutes earlier. We created more financial claims just based on the recent productivity of you and our country and our world as the reference. There was no biophysical reference at all.

The other thing that's important to note is when that million dollars was created, The interest was not. So that's the underlying embedded growth obligation is we create money with no tether to natural resources. But when you have to pay that million dollars back to the bank, over every year, you're going to have to pay 5% interest as well. So you need to grow to do that. Now, debt doesn't have to be a bad thing if you take a loan from a bank.

If the productivity of your results are higher than the debt. But what ends up happening now as a world, not as individuals, we're doubling our debt every eight to nine years as a world. And we're only doubling our GDP, which is the income stream required to pay back that debt every 25 years or so. And that's before energy declines. And, you know, peak oil, it's like you were saying, declining marginal returns to hydrocarbons. So this is a real problem.

So money isn't created out of thin air. That's going too far because there is productive capacity and capital and industry and technology and knowledge. But there is no recognition that all the financial claims in the world, be they stocks or bonds or pensions or retirement fund, when they are cashed in, they have to be cashed in on something that will require energy and materials to convert. And that is just a fundamental disconnect in macroeconomics. The Bank of England wrote a great little paper, modern money creation that debunks how

it's written in the economic textbooks. So I just wanted to add that bit in there. The other thing I wanted to say is all governments and institutions, at least ostensibly in the world, expect two and a half to three percent growth into the future. That is like the standard expectation out 50 years. So given the tether of energy and GDP, which is around 0.99 to one globally, and given the tether of materials to GDP, which is pretty much one for one. You refer to that as atoms.

So the link between atoms and GDP growth is pretty much one for one. We've grown our material footprint 2.8% a year since the year, 1900. So given that, if we grow at 3% a year in order to maintain and service the financial claims that we're adding all the time, we will do. double the amount of energy and materials used on the world in the next 25 to 30 years. And we'll double it again after that. That is a serious problem that more people need to think about because I don't think the next doubling is going to happen.

And so how do we respond as a culture to that? So that was my pin in your summary. Yes. You know, the thing that we're saying right now. is hopefully adding a little bit of clarity to a really basic intuition. It's like the most basic hippie shit that gets said in the kind of renewable degrowth world if you can't run an exponential economy on a finite planet forever. It's like everybody's kind of heard that if you paid any attention to environmentalism

because a financial economy and a materials economy can't be totally decoupled. And of course, people get excited about no, no, no, you can decouple them because the digital universe doesn't have to require the materials economy or services don't have to require of materials economy and we can do more thinking stuff. Well, kind of. But as we were already mentioning, you know, about the cloud and like that, the digital economy, the services economy, still require materials economy and the growth of them still requires growth there. And even if you get some increases in efficiencies, which is awesome, you get those increases and efficiencies. Those increases in efficiency also grow the total material economy in a pure market system because

the market system is going to take returns wherever it can get them. Yes, with a caveat globally, Because there are countries that are decoupling materially, not absolutely decoupling, but they're relatively coupling, like our country. We are producing more GDP while using not less energy, but less than one for one. And we've been doing that for a while. But if you look at the average American consumes 57 barrel of oil equivalence of coal, oil and natural gas, of three main fossil fuels per year. but we consume another 17 barrel of oil equivalents in stuff we buy from China and Bangladesh, etc. Because we've outsourced our means of production overseas. So globally, what you just said is correct.

But there are countries who can material decouple. But I do not believe that the whole world can material decouple. Yeah, to just restate what you said in another way. Individual country metrics on things that involve global supply chain. are just always gibberish. They're basically always some kind of greenwashing gibberish. And I think we got into this last time. But in case we didn't, I'll recap quickly.

It's very easy to export your shitty thing somewhere else. And then import. Like I can import stuff from a country that has slave labor. I don't have slave labor. I can have a very good genie coefficient in my country. But my country depends upon stuff that depends upon slave labor. So what does my genie coefficient really mean? It just means that the really fucked up genie coefficient,

I externalized somewhere else. And so to me, that's just called cooking the books. It means your genie coefficient has narrow boundaries. Yeah. So whether it's my genie coefficient or my jewels to dollars ratio, if I'm externalizing the shitty metric somewhere else, but it's still on a closed biosphere. And what we're talking about is limits of the biosphere. All we're doing is cooking the books, right?

Like this is just basically bad accounting. And cooking the planet. India just announced today their coal consumption is up 29%. I'm not laughing at cooking the planet. I'm laughing at the pun that just naturally emerged there. But yes. Well, it's horribly tragic. Crying is probably more appropriate than laughing.

But in order to maintain the increased air conditioning because of the massive heat in India, at Pakistan, they have to burn more coal. So that is a positive feedback that is just, it's profound. Yeah. You know, I first came across this. There's an Indian man who explained the situation to me in a particular way that, I hadn't thought about quite like this before. He's said, look, climate change is not going to hit the world evenly to begin with.

if it's going to hit certain areas much worse. The places that have air conditioners and good aquifers with running water and those types of things are obviously going to do better. The places where you have high population multiplied by high population density and that are already in hot areas, the extreme weather events are going to hit a lot worse. So he's like, India is really going to get screwed well before Europe and the U.S. are. But it's because Europe and the U.S. have air.

conditioners that they built with, and his number was something like $50 trillion of extraction during British rule of resources, US, I mean current equivalents from India. And to be able to build that, which was both the use of all the hydrocarbons that got us to this climate change position, plus also what protects them from it, but what also keeps them from having the resources to be able to deal with it themselves and then say, pull yourself up by your bootstraps to another country. And that put him into a kind of like eco-terrorist point of view of like, what choice other than taking the West out do we have? Is this not a genocide of negligence? And it's like, fuck, that's not an invalid perspective, right? Genocide of negligence is a,

is a thing we can actually look at. And a lot of people, when they think about climate change, Think about like systemic venousification of the planet, but well before you get to systemic venusification, which might never happen depending upon the model, getting the 50 Celsius heat waves over the next few years in places like India in Bangladesh and Pakistan that have high populations with high population densities with low groundwater, with low food resources that can lead to crop failures like the Newgate resource wars. And those resource wars can scale to global wars. Does a war over resource in northern India turned into a cleaving on, you know, Hindu-Muslim lines? Does that become an India-Pakistan war? There's a lot of places where things like this come. So this is, again, a global issue.

You can't take it as a local issue. Even if you were sociopathic and only cared about your country, these things escalate to global issues very quickly. And the timeline on stuff like that could be this year. Could be next year. Could be we can't guarantee because it's a complex system where you can't forecast well. but it doesn't take venousification timelines for those things to occur. No, and the only thing I would add there is even wider boundaries is the genocide of the oceans

and the complex self-aware life in the oceans where 93% of the heat generated so far has been absorbed by the oceans because they can absorb it. But there too is a limit. So I think personally, climate change is the largest risk for our species and civilization by two orders of magnitude. Having said that, I don't think it's in the top 10 in the next 10 years of the various risks that we face. So just to come out of the closet on that, I care the most about future ecosystems, other species. long after I won't be on this planet. But I think we have, like in your language, the governance and regulation and the inner beating

heart of the superorganism, that is where we have to work and come up with solutions because there's lots of other things, the financial recalibration, the nuclear war risks, a lot of the other things you talk about, CRISPR and AI and polarization and all that. that. Just to continue on your tangent for a moment, and then we get back, you're mentioning caring about the complex life in the oceans and obviously the rest of the non-human life that we have been genociting or displacing. This is why our mutual friend, Aza Raskin, who co-founded the Center for Human Technology, is taking a good chunk of his time off that to do the Earth Species Project. And I just kind of want to mention it because whether it succeeds in its goal

really soon or not just even thinking about it is very interesting and cool. They're using AI's most cutting edge I mean Google's AI cutting edge translation software to translate between languages to try to translate animal languages

with the idea that if we could actually listen to the whales and what they had to say in the dolphins and understand the depth of their sentience it might be a wake-up call

and yeah I think that's a cool project that if they succeed in translating other species languages and figuring out how Bonobos or starlings or whales talk to each other.

My biggest worry there is that humans on mass will just shrug and say no big deal. Where, you know, my core belief here is we need a new sacred standard religion and economic growth for everyone have kind of been our goals, our aspirations. And at the end of the day, my belief is the sacredness of the natural world that we inhabit and share with 10 million other species. That is what really matters at the end of the day. But now we're getting way off tangent from our state of goal today. Actually, this is about to tie us right back into where we're going through another tangent,

but I see the loop back. So indulge me. Okay. Your concern is that even recognizing the much greater contentious, you know, sentience of other species that we can't currently talk to wouldn't change because values are the change in values isn't going to change behavior in an economic system that isn't senting behavior in a direction that follows this embedded growth obligation to convert the entire natural world into currency. So obviously values can influence our behavior. Economics can influence our behavior. The other key thing is that technology directly influences our behavior and there's a coupling between these. We've talked about the way Marvell Marvin Harris models these three in terms of civilizations being made of infrastructure, social structure and superstructure. The social structure is kind of the social agreement field, the law governance in particular, and the institutions that mediate, how do we do our social

agreements, the infrastructure is the tech stack that that rides on, the modes of production, agriculture, energy, waste management, all that kind of stuff. And the superstructure is the what is the definition of the good life, what are our ethics, what is the basis of the of the jurisprudence of law. And so that could be religion, nationalism, all those types of things. And so different social theorists will argue which of these is most fundamental. We, I would argue that these three are co-informing. We can show call loops where each one can inform the others.

A lot of what we're, you know, obviously the goal that Aza has is can we make a play in superstructure? Can we make a play in the understanding in human values that would have a somehow bind our economic incentive on our use of technology. And economics and the technology are related because obviously you can't venusify the planet with Stone Age Tech, right? You can't blow the planet up with Stone Age Tech. It's all of our catastrophic risks are mediated by tech because otherwise we're not powerful enough to do shit at that scale.

But obviously our tech and the incentive structure to grow it, use it in particular ways and the laws on binding those ways. The relationship of all that kind of goes together. But just to give an example, because so many people, there's a paper we're writing a Conscience Project that will be published probably by the time this comes out on why tech is not values neutral. A lot of people have this weird kind of conception.

The technology is just values neutral. I can use a hammer to build a house for the homeless or I can use it as a weapon, but there's no value system embedded in the hammer. It's just the value system of the person that chooses to use it, And that would be the same with everything in our industrial supply chain. And they either have that view or some people have the view that tech is fundamentally values positive. That's kind of the general Hobbesian, Pinker and, you know, Gatesian kind of view of the dialectic of progress that tech only gets selected for and the market only upregulates it if it's solving some real problem that people want and they're willing to pay for.

So of course, it is inherently liberating humans from problems. problems that allows them to expand. And so it's fundamentally net positive. Then there are the Lewis Mumfords and everyone who have critiqued why that's not true. And many people then can go in a Luddite direction of like, no, tech actually messes up religions and societies and ecosystems. And so tech is fundamentally net negative to our value systems. I would say we're arguing in this paper, all three of those are naive. Tech is values affective. It affects it in a complex set of positive and negative ways. And very much in the same way, that tech will produce some positive thing in the physical world, but also externalize some negative things. It doesn't have one effect. It has a complex set of effects, and we need to factor the positive and negative externalities in addition to the thing it was supposed to do and factor that into design. That's also true in the psychological space. I want to get into where I was going with that, but did you want to say something neat? I did. I want to add something and then ask you a question. You're saying that from a tech standpoint, I would say that we would not be

able to venusify the planet without fossil hydrocarbons because my friend Steve Keen says that that's what I would call industrial tech. A body without energy is a corpse and technology without energy is a sculpture. And so our cities without energy are a museum de facto so my question to you is is energy values neutral no and we'll get to that but let me come back to the tech thing there obviously without an internal combustion engines oil is not worth all that much um obviously without uh in electric electricity and an electrical grid we don't fucking need all that so basically the energy is driving tech tech is also without oil drilling which is tech. You don't get the oil without oil refining, which is tech. Yeah, there's a, there's a positive

feedback and there in my earth day talk I refer to it as the economic trinity that information, energy and materials are bound and they need all three to go forward. So we're going to go into that, but let me finish this loop because it's where there's, it connects back to the binding of these and a good example of why tech's not values neutral and your other friends other than humans on the planet. So tech allows us to exploit energy in different ways, like our ability to drill and refine oil and then use it to run tech that requires energy. And obviously, energy gives us the ability to develop new techs and you get this positive feedback in that. And so oil was this massive increase in our ability to use energy. Before that, the last massive increase you might argue was agriculture and the ability to make a huge amount more caloric surplus per acre with grains.

And with that particular one, obviously baskets were a part of it and a number of things. But the plow was a huge part of it because the plow moving from kind of the digging stick and to Oxrong plow, the caloric surplus skyrocketed. And with it, obviously, population did. And then oil was the next big one, and it was way bigger, right? But when we look at the plow, this is a classic example of kind of the way tech is not values neutral and related to values on animals. Following the plow, many kind of historians have argued that following the plow, animism died everywhere. And animism was nearly universal before that. Most all of the kind of in.

Wait, I didn't know that. What? Most all of. The development of the plow for ox's animist religions fell out of... I did not know that. I first came across this in sex ecology and spirit by Wilbur. And I've heard a number of a... There's obviously the historians have deep, detailed arguments on it, but I'll give the kind of general gist

gist in argument is that the... You can be a hunter and kill a buffalo while still being animistic. You can pray to the spirit of the buffalo. You can take no more buffalo than you need and use it all well. You can cry when you kill it and then say, you know, I'm eating you. We're going to get buried when we die and become grass that your great-grandchildren will eat and we're part of this great cycle of life. So I can let an animal have a free and sovereign life and be a predator and be part of that and still kind of be animistic. But I can't yoke a buffalo.

I can't breed it into an ox, yoke it, cut its testicles off, bind its horns and beat it all day long and be able. animistic and still respect the spirit of the buffalo. I have to say it's a dumb fucking ox. It's here for us, man's dominion over and chained the memetics to do it. And so the key insight here is that the plow, using the plow, the plow existing, actually, wait, I want to construct this very specifically. The first part is that tech that is highly advantageous to use is obligate. You don't get to not use it and make it through history. And so somebody else will use the plow. They'll grow their population because of the massive caloric increase.

They'll make it through the famines. If we don't, then our tribe will get killed by them and or die in the famine. So even if I don't want to, I have to. And if I don't, I don't make it through history. So very adaptive tech is obligate. That's principle one. Principle two is that it codes a pattern of human behavior. Now, rather than being a hunter-gatherer, I'm beating a ox all day, right?

And I'm branding it and binding its nose and whatever else I have to do. Because it codes a pattern of human behavior, it codes a pattern of values in human psyche. And then to do that in scale means it codes a culture. And so animism was universal. In South America, North America, Africa, Europe, whatever, is pretty universal. And animism died following the ox-criven plow. almost everywhere because you can't be animistic and be an animal all day long. And so kind of some version of man's dominion over type ideologies emerged following it.

And so to get that that piece of tech changed the value systems from all life is sentient, we're not the web of life. We're merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves to man's dominion over. It's all here for us. You know, that kind of thing. That was the result of a value system embedded in the technology. It's self inexorably embedded, not based on how people used it, but embedded in it.

And then some historians go on to argue that not only did the Plough do that regarding animism, it also went from where previous to the Plow societies and David Graber's new book adds a lot of nuance. I'm doing like a hundred thousand foot view. But that whether women were gathering and men were hunting or women were doing horticulture and men were hunting, women could still provide half the foodstuffs. men had to do the plow because women would miscarry men's upper body strength mattered so now men provided the meat stuff and the vegetative stuff women moved in the house as a result you also move from a distribution of male and female gods to mostly male gods so the thing that is called patriarchy is often attributed as a byproduct of the plow also in the movement from all the food that gives life being male derived rather than female because again of the physicality involved in the nature of the plow then of course that gives you surplus and before that you didn't have surplus. So you didn't have private property ownership. You have these different kinds of sharing systems. Now with much more surplus, you could grow the population a lot faster.

Now you got larger than Dunbar number kind of empires. Now you got radical wealth and equality and class systems. So we're like, there are arguments about why that ended up requiring more formal institutionalization of marriage on larger scale because now I own stuff that I could pass on to my kids when I died. So I wanted more paternity certainty. So every Everything from like institutionalization of marriage to views towards animals to patriarchy versus matriarchy to the formalization of economic to class systems, all is possible second, third order outputs, not in the physical world, but in the cultural world of a piece of tech. Now, we can go through similarly the way the printing press ended up giving rise to the Protestant

revolution and democracy. And because without the printing press, you can't have everybody have a newspaper and have book so only a nobility has access. And we can go on and on and look at how each piece of tech, if you use it in codes game theoretic power, where those who use it will get ahead and those who don't will end up not making it through history. So it's obligate. It codes behavior. As a result, it codes values and minds. As a result of doing that in scale, it codes cultures. So it's not just that we have to have values from something like religion or whatever to make us use tech well. It's the tech is directly creating our values also.

So we have to design tech with that in mind, not just how does this tech externalize costs in the physical world, meaning, you know, the mining byproduct and toxic tailings that come out of this mining technology and whatever. But how it externalizes things into the human psychological cultural world. We're calling this kind of axial design. How do you embed the axiology, the ethics into the tech design? Now, we'll get into, that's an example of how infrastructure drives superstructure and also social structure. And Nate talks a lot about how the social structure, the economic growth, the embedded economic growth obligation, forces us to keep using more tech and energy and keeps forcing more and more fucked up social superstructures that justify doing that, that are increasingly kind of nihilistic and etc. So getting into how these interrelate is fascinating, and it's probably beyond the scope of this, because I want to get back to the nature of the superorganism, but you do have to recognize the feedback loops between all these in the superorganism. So I just, when you were mentioning people not caring about the complex life enough, I'm actually wanting to give that example of ways that that actually resulted from the inexorabilities of the tech stack itself.

First of all, that was beautiful. And the first part of that where you were talking about the ox, I actually got emotional. I'd never heard that before. And embedded in what you were just describing is the core innards of the superorganism. And I asked you the wrong question before. I asked you if energy is values agnostic. And what I should have asked you is surplus. values agnostic because when we started that transition in agriculture, it was to maximize

surplus of energy, right? It was calories. Largely stored calories. It was energy. I see agriculture as being the first, not the first. I see agriculture as being the second major spike in our ability to extract energy from the environment. I see fire being the first major spike, then agriculture, then oil, and then digital

technologies that increase our ability to do all of that faster. And of course, there's a million sub refinements. So it is surplus and its energy. Like they're both fair. And just to look ahead, and I don't know that I've said this on a podcast or in my life before, but fire, agriculture, oil and fossil hydrocarbons, and info and tech, those were the cans that we kept kicking to expand our reach, I don't think physically we have any more cans to kick. And the next can is in our minds. It's in how we get our evolutionary neurotransmitter

cocktails of meaning and love and excitement and motivation and peace by using less resources. that's the only can left to kick, I think. Look at the Jevins paradox way back to agriculture. Then we're going to move it forward. So the Jevons paradox on oil and kind of fossil energy makes perfect sense, which is when you get a increase in efficiency in the ability to make more oil or energy generation, you're going to use more energy because it opened up new market sectors. But you can see that that was also true for agriculture, right? And basically the generation of human calories. calories as you grow the population.

If you get an increase in efficiency where you can get a lot more calories per acre or you can convert more acres to crop land, that increase in efficiency means you get more surplus, which means you grow your population faster and that thing keeps happening. So there was a Jevins paradox way back then, right? And a superorganism dynamic way back then too, because if you didn't do that, if you didn't clear the land, someone else would have and out competed you. So all of a sudden there was this imperative that hadn't existed before. So now do you want to go ahead and define the maximum power principle?

And then we can tie those three concepts together. The maximum power principle is sometimes referred to as the fourth law of thermodynamics. And it is defined as organisms and ecosystems self-organized so as to access an energy gradient. So there's something also related called Kleber's. law, which shows that the metabolism or the energy burning of an animal or an insect or a whale or anything in nature is related to their size, their body size to the two-thirds power. So the maximum power principles shows that organisms in nature self-organized to get more access

to energy. But it's power, right? It's not just access to this pool of energy. energy per unit time, which is defined as power. Now, in nature, other species only access energy that they use endosomatically in their body. Humans use 2,000 calories a day in our body, but in America, we use 200,000 calories a day exosomatically outside of our body. So we have a hundred to one exosomatic magic wand that we're waving around on average. So maximum power principle just means there's a tether between animal behavior and access

to energy. Yeah. Let me say it a different way that is a corollary of that, which gets to the obligate nature, which you were just starting to speak to. When I was saying before, if you don't use the plow, then your civilization is not going to make it through and define the world system. relative to anybody else using it. If you don't exploit the energy source, that doesn't mean nobody's going to exploit the energy

source. Somebody's going to exploit the energy source, whoever exploits the energy source, which includes the way that changes their culture and their memes to be able to justify doing the thing. That's the culture that's going to end up using that energy game theoretically and getting ahead, which also means the memes that correspond with that are the ones that get selected for. Right. So we did briefly mention in the first conversation, Alfred Latka wrote a paper 100 years ago that access to energy was a core driver of evolutionary success and that those animals that had access to energy had options that those who did not didn't have access to. So access to energy was a core driver in our evolutionary past.

And you're right, an energy resource would not long remain untapped in the wild. maps and evolutionary theory to niche filling, the concept of niche filling. If there is any evolutionary niche that has some energy in it, some critter is going to evolve to be able to access that energy. Now, the thing with humans, and as you point out, the exosomatic capacity of humans is there's a lot of environments that with our tech, we can identify, have energy in them that animals could not get the energy out of. And they couldn't do a lot to turn uranium more into energy and we can, right? They couldn't get a whole lot of the energy out of fossil fuels, and we can. They couldn't deplete all of the top soil to turn it into grains, you know, back to the

earlier one. They also couldn't control fire to be able to burn shit and cook things that were unedible into, you know, edible things and or drive steam or whatever it was. So in evolution, there is this kind of niche filling, but with our toolmaking, we're able to do that on crack, like on the totally different version of that. And, but the Macs, but the Macs, maximum power principle. Okay, there's a chunk I want to do. Can you give me, like the minimum chunk size will take a bit to construct these things? You have as large a chunk as you need, my friend. So the Jevons paradox says you get more efficiency and rather than just use less stuff, you use that increased efficiency to do more stuff that is now gives you, there's more things that ever

return possibilities than you had before. If you don't, because you're like, oh, we can just live sufficiently now. Somebody else will. And in general, that's the concept of a multipolar trap or a kind of... Can you give an example of the efficiency that you just said, just something in our regular lives? Yeah. I mean, the example we gave up the plow is a perfect example. A plow will allow one man using a plow to produce, I don't know, if it's 10 or 100 times more calories than a guy who's just hunting, right? because his ability over the course of a year to plant crops, you know, grain crops that have

increasingly hybridized them, the grain calorie per acre per year relative to hunting or horticulture is just fucking uncomparable. So that is an increase in efficiency. So we could just say, oh, great, now we just don't need to work as many hours and use less land and be able to feed ourselves and do more art and spirituality, except we don't. We're like, great, let's work all of the. the hours and grow our population. Or, you know, build bigger surpluses to be able to create systems of trade and exchange,

to be able to do increased division of labor and more total specialization and complexity of our society so that it can beat another one in war because we have better weapons. So there's two things that are happening there. One is all the 10 to 100 times extra surplus then has ripple effects in the economy that then there's more surplus to do more things. And the other thing is the other guy who's still the hunter has a choice to make. Am I still going to hunt and get this low caloric output? Or am I, too, going to switch to this new technology, the plow?

So our people, he might think, only took what we absolutely needed to live in harmony. And so we wouldn't kill the pregnant buffalo and we wouldn't kill the babies. And we wouldn't kill when the buffalo were too low. had had a hard season, we actually decided to leave Buffalo alone, even though they were great and only hunt deer because of this long-term understanding of how to be part of a cycle of life. But, and when we took Buffalo, we took just kind of what we needed. Now, if I don't kill the Buffalo and these other guys have moved in who are just going to kill all the fucking Buffalo they can, right? And they don't practice that thing. If I don't kill it, it doesn't mean that it stays alive anymore.

If I don't kill it, it just means that they do and that they will grow their population. And not only will they grow their population, they'll now do division of labor, make better weapons, and then they'll come kill all of our people. So me not killing it doesn't protect it anymore. I have the ability to kill it, but not the ability to protect it. Therefore, I actually should race. I know you're talking about buffalo and plows. Everything. But you're talking about our modern fucked up culture as well and how we are living in the superorganism and we can't help but be part of the superorganism, even though we understand and don't like it.

it's a compulsion. So this is, you know, you and I've talked about this. I'll go ahead and formalize the concept because I want to bring the maximum power principle, Jevin's Paradox, the superorganism, the inexorability altogether to understand what this forcing function has been to understand how we make it not inexorable. How do we get out of it? Because the guy who doesn't want to kill the buffalo recognized if I just kind of finish that sentence.

So it's probably obvious to everybody. If I don't kill the buffalo, the buffalo doesn't still live. The buffalo is going to get killed and fucked in. anyways, these other guys then are going to kill our people with their increased capacity. So not only am I going to leave the Buffalo, I have to hunt to kill it faster than the other guy to be able to grow our population in defense and whatever because now in the face of, you know, in-group out-warfare of whatever kind, I kind of have to do that. So now there's a race to the bottom because if anybody does the fucked up thing for the whole,

but that provides a lot of game theoretic advantage for them in the near term. and they're going to use that game theoretic advantage in game theoretic ways, then everybody has to race to do that thing faster, or they lose in the midterm and they don't get to the long-term sustainable thing that they're trying to do. We call this a multipolar trap as the generalized case of it, of which there are a few examples, and they're the most intractable issues for society, and I would argue this is one of the deeper frames to understand what humanity has to solve. The multipolar trap, one example is a tragedy of the commons,

and we were just giving an example of a tragedy of the commons. It's also, if I don't cut the tree down, the tree doesn't say somebody else cuts the tree down. The force is all going to get destroyed anyways, but they're going to use that timber and the increased economic capacity to then also advance in a way that we'll fuck our people, whether it's direct warfare or economic warfare or whatever. So now we're in a race to cut the trees down the fastest. Or they're externalizing costs to the environment in the form of pollution or dumping or mining, or whatever it is, if I don't do it, it doesn't not happen. They're going to do it anyways, and then they're going to use that adaptive advantage to. So this is a thing where the inexorability of it happening anyways means that we have to race to

not be, to have anything we care about, be fucked by other people doing it. And of course, everybody thinks that. If I don't, they will. So if you don't have the ability to make a system-wide agreement and enforce it, then you get those kinds of race to the bottom. So tragedy of the commons is one example. We can bind these on small scales where you can create some agreement process and some enforcement process, but we need to have transparency of who violated the thing.

And then enforcement we can actually enact and everybody agree. On very large scales, it's really hard, which is why climate change is still a thing and which is why we have not got conservation of the oceans, the atmosphere or any kind of thing well is because if we tax carbon and China doesn't, And that messes up our GDP growth relative to theirs. And there's a great power competition for who controls the 21st century. Then by us taxing carbon, we're still not preventing climate change. We're just agreeing to seed power of the world to a different power system that may be for a lot of reasons.

We might not think it's a good idea. So unless everybody can, nobody can, that kind of thing. So tragedy of the comments is one example. A arms race is another. If they build nukes, we have to build nukes. because otherwise whoever doesn't have the nukes loses. And nobody wants to give up the nukes because whoever gives up their last nuke first just is going to get fucked.

Everybody's kind of clear on that. And I'm not going to give up my last nuke because I'm pretty sure that if they say they're giving up their last nuke, they're lying. How do I know that in some deep secret underground military banker they don't have a nuke? And so we're just not going to be proliferate. Now, it gets worse when you start to get very fast areas of new tech. I don't really want to live in a world of AI weapons, but I have to build AI weapons. and I'm basically representing any advanced nation states thinking right now, right?

We have to build the AI weapons because they are. So if China is going to build AI weapons and the AI weapons are just obviously going to have supremacy, then the U.S. and Russia and India and everybody has to race to do them, well, why don't we just make an agreement that nobody does? Because we can't ensure that people are keeping the agreements, because what are they doing in some deep underground military base? As a result, we need to not neither make the agreement and we defect on it, knowing they're defecting while pretending that we aren't defecting,

spying on them and trying to lie to their spies. And that's kind of the thing happens. Or we just don't even bother making the fucking agreement. And then we're in a all-out race to build the most fucked up stuff that increases everybody's likelihood of dying from AI weapons. Now add this to bio weapons and on and on and on. So the arms race and the tragedy of the commons are two. There's a third one, which is in the market, the kind of first mover advantage, race to first mover on a market or race to scale on a market that then externalizes everything other than the possible win potential. So there is a perverse game theory on paying attention to opportunity versus paying attention to risk. If I am going to develop some new technology, like let's say some advanced genetic engineering technology like CRISPR.

Of course, there are some positive applications. Like maybe I can try to do immunoncology and CRISPR gene, oncogenes out and whatever. But of course, as I'm developing the capacity to do that cheaply, anybody can use it for any purpose, like bio-weapons or make more cancer, right? And so one of the tricky things that happens in the world today is somebody develops a technology in major corporation or, say, in academia, right? They have an ethical review board if it's an academia to ensure they're doing some ethical purpose and there's oversight and there's all like that. But then they're developing the techniques and then they publish it. And they're publishing something that unlike Nukes is not hard to build physically. I don't have to have cyclotrons in uranium enrichment.

It's just now like pretty simple technologically to make the AI thing or the or the or the Synth Bio thing or whatever. So I have an ethical purpose to develop the thing, but the knowledge by which I just developed it and that I published and that I used the huge MIT funds or the Stanford funds or the whatever it is, now anybody without those funds and ethical review boards has access to build that same thing for other purposes. And even if I'm going to go to market applications, I say, no, no, my market application is good. I'm using it to do this thing. Well, there's externalities that it might cause directly, plus other people using that tech for fucked up purposes. But if I think about that, if I think about the rest and say, oh, you know what, before we move forward on this, I'm really going to do a complex risk assessment of all the second

and third order effects of what this might do directly, plus what putting the information out might enable others to do. And then we're not, if it's bad, we're not going to do it. And if it's bad, but we find a way to mitigate it, then we'll do the mitigate version. So let's say I do that. Somebody else in the market doesn't do that. They're just like, fuck it. There's an opportunity.

I'm just going to sell the story that this opportunity is awesome. There's no downside risk. We did risk mitigation, but it was a total bullshit kind of version. They win the first mover advantage. They get all the dollars. They have socialized the risk to the world. They have privatized the gain to themselves. And as a result, the game.

Game theory and sense being focused on the opportunity and not the risk, whoever focuses on the risk just loses and has no power. So all of these, the market race, which ends up being a race to the bottom externality-wise, the arms race, the tragedy of the commons, are examples of multipolar trap where anybody doing the thing that is fucked up for the whole in the long term but provides game theoretic advantage to them in the near term, ends up causing races in the wrong direction. Humanity has to solve for that thing categorically. there are ways, I believe, of solving for it categorically. And we can talk about what some of those are. And there are examples of where we've done it on local scales. We just haven't solved for it categorically. Now, this is directly related to the dynamics of the superorganism with it.

You talk about it. It's directly related to the obligate nature of the plow, right? It's directly related to the maximum power principle. So I just wanted to construct a multipolar trap. We'll come back to that. But you wanted to say something. Yeah. Well, so what you're saying is the hunter version.

versus the guy with the plow and the obligate nature and the Jevins Paradox rebound effect from the surplus generated by the plow. I've been writing about how that applies to our economic system and money and energy and CO2 absorption by the biosphere in the oceans. But you're adding another layer to it, which is saying the same dynamic applies to technology, especially exponentially, soon to be AI-informed technology and spins off all these other mini-superorganism volcanoes with X-risk attached to them because we're optimizing for opportunity, not risk. Yes. And we define, there's a reason why it is intrinsically easier to, and this is worth note. there's a reason why it's intrinsically cognitively easier, let alone game theoretically easier, pragmatically easier. I'm going to build tech to solve a problem. I'm going to have already defined that problem in a pretty specific way, and I'll have

one or a small number of metrics that are the success, the success metric of the opportunity, right? The problem solve or the opportunity. So the plow is going to increase the calories of surplus that I can generate per person per year, right? Like, that's the metric of success. It's pretty straightforward. And I can measure the plow versus the digging stick. I can measure one plow versus another. Later, I can measure a tractor versus a plow. And what I'm trying to optimize for is how much total calorics or plus can be created per person or per acre or whatever it is, right? So the opportunity is measured in, or the upside is

measured in one or a small number of known metrics. The risk is going to happen. And it's a first order effect, I'm directly causing that. The tech is built to do a first order effect on one or a small number of known metrics. The tech is going to have second and third and fourth order effects on a very large number of as of yet unknown metrics was where the harm is going to occur. So to do the risk reduction, to prevent the externalities, I've got to think about not just what the results of using the plow to get calories out, but using that every season on topsoil erosion and what topsoil erosion then we'll do as a next order effect on the rivers because the roots aren't there anymore and what that'll do on the fisheries and what it does to human

minds and what that will be. So now the externalities might be a million metrics with end order effects. So it is easier. It's intrinsically easier to optimize for opportunity than it it is to prevent against the risks. Well, we don't have the surplus to do the research even to optimize for all those risks. There are so many people right now that are concerned about global insect population. The estimate is we're losing one to two percent of insect biomass per year. How the hell do we test that? We can test little 10 acres plots here. We don't have the resources because that's not in our economic system. It's not that we don't have the resources. It's that the multipolar trap doesn't orient those resources that way.

Well, that's my question is how can all of the tech that has currently being built is in order to amass digital representations of surplus. And then this ties back to maximum power principle and evolution and ecology is that energy is going to be used and in nature. So where is this opportunity here that we're just naturally drawing down Earth's energy battery 10 million times faster than it was sequestered? we found it, how could we not optimize for energy surplus, which is our biological tendency? Is that where you're going with the what to do and the governance?

I have to get back to why we use all these ex-somatic calories and other animals don't to get into the nature of the biological tendency of humans. It is distinct. But I wanted to define the maximum power principle regarding markets. in a pure market system, obviously we don't have pure market systems. There's regulation, but let me just kind of try to define the idea of in as close to pure market type thing as we can think about. So outside of regulation and enforcement, return on investment of capital will be in the area that provides return of investment will be exploited. There is a search function and an exploit function.

And the market will search anywhere that capital can turn into more capital. It will preference the higher returns, but there will still be some appetite for returns of any kind. And so if I get positive returns, I'm there going to be exploited. And so, and we can say that in terms of capital, but we can say it in terms of energy too. And to find the maximum power principle is wherever there are positive energy return on energy investment. So even if we start getting down to that it takes most of a barrel of, oil to get a new barrel of oil. So long as it's, I still get net oil out of the process. We're going to keep doing that thing if it is simply based on incentives, right?

Because of oil is so special, yes, but we wouldn't do the same for like corn ethanol. From an energy perspective, obviously, uh, it takes some energy to get new energy. So long as I'm getting more energy out than the energy I'm putting in, it makes sense to do it. I'll always seek the maximum energy. return on energy investment. But as the maximum decreases, I'll continue to do anything that gives me some energy return on energy investment. And that's also true with fiscal return on fiscal investment. And from a game theory point of view, any player, any agent in a game theoretic situation is going to try to maximize their returns on agency. I'm going to try to implement my capacity to act to get more

capacity to act. So that's your optionality in a way. And it's actually very interesting. One of the other papers we're writing right now, Conscience Project, is on a theory of hyperagents. And the idea that of throughout history, it's pretty obvious that Genghis Kons and Alexander the Greats are different than most people, right? Like there's something in their motivational structure, their psyche, their capacities. It's pretty different than most people.

and they have a outsized influence on what happens to the world. And 8% of men alive today have Genghis Khan's Y-Kronosol and whatever the number is. It's a very interesting. Yeah, something in that neighborhood. Where we try to look at the patterns of what's happening in the world from a sociological perspective, from patterns of kind of human psyche and behavior in general, we would kind of argue that there is a tiny percentage of people at the top of, the power law distribution who have a outsized effect on the world.

And specifically, then they create the topologies that everybody else operates in. They create the incentive deterrent landscapes and cultures and stuff that then ends up making everybody else's values a lot what they are. And these people are outside of the bell curves on most of the psychological things that we assess sociologically as humans. They are better at game theory, better at war, generally more sociopathic, highly more competitive, you know, those types of things. And one good way to think of it is that they are good at maximizing returns on agency. And so the hyperagent is someone who will implement agency to grow more agency. And a good hyperagent is someone who figures out how to do that at maximum scale.

But are those people, is it exactly the same people that are the richest people on the planet or not necessarily? A major unit of agency. It's not the only one. So Kissinger. had way more global influence than he had personal money. There was massive pools of money that he had indirect influence over. So how much money do I personally own versus how much do I have an assets under management versus how much do I have an assets under indirect influence versus, you know, like, so obviously like how much does Xi Jinping have personally versus stewarding the GDP of China? It's not how much he has personally.

it's how much it's how much total agency he has influence over and there are different strategies for how to do that so those people are optimizing they're optimizing agency and optionality and the money that they amass is kind of an externality of that money is a unit of agency and optionality it's not the only unit but it's a particularly interesting and important one and it's why like obviously before we had a financial system with a global reserve fiat currency type thing the system the system emerged towards better and better optionality, right? The financial system emerged towards that. So when we were just talking about agriculture, the unit of currency might largely be just grains, right? And being able to exchange grain for shoes or whatever it is. Or

then we might start getting into seashells or at a certain point gold coins or something that is some kind of representation to mediate it a little bit easier. And then the movement from some kind of mediated barter with local currencies to being able to change the gold to paper units that are easier, to then be able to get rid of the gold, to then be able to have a global reserve currency. What that gives is increased. And if you look at the current system with a global reserve currency with kind of the OPEC backing, Petro dollar backing, whatever, you have the system of relatively high stability

with maximum optionality. And it's usually hard to get both of those. Things that are very stable, like the value of real estate or whatever, is very low optionality. It takes me a long time to sell it. And the things that can move very fast, oftentimes, if I didn't have a global financial system made to do this, wouldn't have the same kind of stability.

So the system was kind of engineered to maximize total market movement, right? And so if you think about, I think you and I talked about last time, the military concept of Udoloup, O-O-D-A, observe what's going on, orient to that to make sense of what to do, decide, and then act. And that the fastest and most accurate Udo Lupins up winning in game theoretic scenarios, some kind of in a situation where the world is changing rapidly, long-term planning is not as good as very fast ability to adapt and figure out what to do. And so if I have a bunch of land and then all of a sudden the world changes where I need

energy or steel or computation or a military, my ability to convert that land to those things takes a while. I got to sell that asset and find a way to sell it. So if I have a lot of currency, my currency gives me maximum speed, right? Maximum optionality to get... Gives you more options. And so the thing that everybody wants the most is the thing that has absolutely no intrinsic value, but the maximum optionality for every source of value. And yet, of course, there's this perversebler. thing that it says we will destroy sources of real value to get the optionality value. Because I want to have more options than the next.

And there's a multipolar trap, right? Because if I don't maximize my returns on agency because I value things, so I'm going to put money into protecting the forest and not turning the forest into lumber and then into capital. If I don't maximize my returns on agency and someone else does, they're going to end up either beating me in war, influencing the world more than me. So there's a multipolar trap between hyperagents to maximize returns on agency and there's a rationalization that even if it's because I think I'm the most ethical hyperagent, I would be the best rule or whatever it is. I am still

obligated to get the maximum power to be able to do that in what is considered a obligate game. So how many hyper agents are there on the planet today, roughly? Lots and lots of people who want to do maximum returns on agency. There's plenty of of people who are very power-oriented, they just aren't equally good at it. So there's plenty of people who are trying to climb the corporate ladder and they're in middle management. And they are hyper-agents and their motivational complex. It's just how good at it they are is not that much. There's individual thugs who have nobody working under them who are trying to maximize their agency. So they might be a hyper-agent motivationally, but their skill to do it is relatively low.

So if we're talking about a tier-one hyper-agent, the highest-capacity ones, they're not just motivated to do returns on agency. They know how to do it at scale, which requires being able to understand how to navigate things like finance, politics, technology, culture, human motivation, you know, the things that can extend my agency in scaling dynamics. And depending upon how we define tier one, there's not that many. So contrast that to the superorganism, you have this small group. of hyperagents that are maximizing

optionality tethered to digital representations dollars, linked to energy, and they're competing with each other for more agency. Is that the driver of the superorganism or is the superorganism driving them?

You're asking a bottom-up, top-down causation question in a system that is recursive. And so there is a bottom-up dynamic, which is individual people are motivated to do stuff. But then that creates larger systems and at this point now global systems that then have their own embedded dynamics, right? Like the embedded growth obligation on capital is not any particular hyperagent. It's a global financial system that because of interest, if nothing else, and there's a lot more on top of that. But simply because of that structure has to have an exponential growth curve.

And to stay bound to goods and services means you have to have an extra- exponential growth of materials economy, blah, blah, blah. But that system creates a top-down influence on all of the agents to do the bidding of that system. And so, you know, you produce the, rather than people produce goods and services, and then we figure out some way to index and then make an amount of currency. As you mentioned, making up the money out of the, not thin air, but the contract is basically saying, let's put up, put up the money to incent the growth of goods and services to keep up with it so it doesn't debase itself. But if you think about the money incentive system, okay, so if I get money, I get the optionality for anything I want. That's pretty cool.

That means that rather than have to figure out what somebody wants, you just get to give them this unit of choice making, right? And the money is just kind of like a unit of choice making, whatever the fuck you want. So now everybody wants the unit of choice making. And the incentive of the decentralized system is for everybody to figure. out how to do the best job at converting their own life force, both labor and creativity, into currency. That's the kind of market motivation. And so it's my labor energy will get me a little bit, not all that much. My creativity multiplied by that might get me a whole lot more. And so there is a both search algorithm, which is all the humans in the world, which was a

smaller amount before, but 8 billion humans incentivized to figure out new and better ways to make stuff that will correlate to capital and then to exploit the fuck out of doing that. And as soon as somebody figures out a new thing that people hadn't figured out, now there is a race for others to try to exploit that space maximally. Once you get, so somebody figures out early computation or whatever it is, now then everybody starts to race on that thing. Once that space gets glutted enough, it creates more incentive for search on new things. when somebody figures it out, then there's a race on that thing.

I don't have a lot of money. I would like more money, but I'm not driven by it. I'm driven by discovery and friendship and conversations like this and doing meaningful things. And so I'm optimizing for a broader portfolio of results than the optionality for money. Having said that, I would dearly like more money in the bank for a rainy day in case I get sick or something happens or I don't get funding, you know, et cetera. But there is the capacity for humans to optimize things other than a single monetary representation of all our ancestral experience.

The scientists, philosophers, artists, spiritual teachers throughout history that we like the most were mostly motivated. Like you said, there is an intrinsic motivation that was not that much of an extrinsic motivation. Like, original theory of money, partly was how do we mediate barter, partly was how do we incentivize people to do a bunch of shitty labor jobs that society needs that nobody's intrinsic motivated to do. So we need to ex-transically motivate them to do it because that is ultimately more efficient

and kinder than the state forcing them to do it. The state could just take care of everybody's needs and then force them to do it, but we'll let the market force them instead of the state. So that one of the core ideas of money was a system of extrinsic incentive because of There's a bunch of shit that needs to get done that nobody really wants to do. But then, of course, some people then take that extrinsic incentive and figure out how to just get very good at getting lots of it, not doing the labor stuff, right? So, interestingly, was Einstein money motivated?

It doesn't not seem so. It seems like he was very intrinsically motivated to figure out the universe as deeply as he could. Was that game theoretically, not just money, but agency game theoretically motivated at all? pretty much seems like a genuine curiosity, sacred even kind of imbles. Now, did his scientific insights give the basis for how to make the nuclear bomb? Totally. Was that his intention, though?

Was the development of the bomb motivated by game theory? Totally. And it couldn't have done that without him doing that thing. So then the game theory ends up exploiting the non- non-game theory things. One could argue that Jesus didn't make a lot of Christians. Constantine made a lot of Christians. And I take this argument for the spirit of it rather than the literality because I don't know the historicity of, I don't know if anybody knows the historicity of any of this well enough. But kind of standard narrative between Jesus and the

third century, there were just not that many Christians. And small amount of Christians you know, getting thrown to lions and Roman Empire and like that, then we get a huge number of Christians when the Roman Empire goes from throwing Christians to lions being the Holy Roman Empire and the Crusades and spreading Christendom. And so the Council of Nysa, the creation of the Bible, the idea of spreading it by force through crusades. That wasn't Jesus, right? And so it's not who made the concept. It's who identified a utility of it and it was motivated to make it spread. That was a hyperagent. And so I would say Jesus and Einstein were both motivated by non-hyper-hyperagency oriented things. And then Constantine and Eisenhower or Eisenhower and in that case, you know, Hitler or whatever,

we're motivated to see how do we extract that and convert it to game theory. So we need wider boundary hyperagents, but the system doesn't reward that. And most wider boundary hyperagents have very little power and optionality. optionality hyper agent is um is right getting returns on agency right there they're there are I want to be hyperagents care about a lot of things but yeah I when I was a kid and my mom was taking me to do activists stuff we were going to green peace protests and PETA and CalPerg and all these kinds of things and I really cared and but I saw that everybody there really really cared they were willing to self-sacrifice for other sentient beings they had

never met, whether it was an animal in a factory farm or a whale that would get hurt or a, whatever. And I remember seeing that and then thinking about the industries they were up against and the tools of capital advantage and political advantage and technological and intellectual advantage that those industries had relative to the tools of effectiveness these people were using was handcuffing themselves to things and, you know, picket signs and like that. that it was just so clear they were going to keep losing. And the way I saw it at first was that that represented the kind of head-heart divide at the level of humanity and that those things can't actually be divided. And then I realized one more step. I started thinking of it as like

head-heart will, you know, something like that, those three. One, there's, of course, lots of types of intelligence, lots of types of capacity. We need to think about them all together. But if you just take those three as a beginning kind of model, and you kind of say, okay, solar plexus will, agency, heart kind of values, and mine kind of strategic technological insight. And I started to see that any two out of the three together and the world dies, because if you, it's not just single ones die, if you end up having a lot of agency and a lot of heart, a wide kind of heart rate, which is oriented to care about a lot of things inclusively. Well, the activists had that, right?

The activists had high agency. They were willing to work their asses off, wrists themselves, get on zambonies, handcuff themselves, things. So a lot of agency, a lot of heart, very poor, strategic thinking about how to actually. So they had agency, but they didn't have the strategy to do hyperagency. And so they would continue to lose. if you had kind of wide inclusive values and you were smart, but you didn't have a huge amount of agency, I saw so many like caring liberal intellectuals who had some thought about the problems in the world. They really cared and they felt crushed and like they couldn't do anything.

If you didn't have wide values, you had narrow values, but you had very high agency and you had high strategic thinking and your strategic thinking was in service of your agency and your values were only optimizing for yourself or your corporation or your nation state. And you were willing to externalize harm elsewhere. You became a awesome hyperagent that ruled the world while externalizing lots of harm and creating multipolar traps or other hyperagents to do so. So how to get all three of those together, right? Which would be the will and strategic capacity, but with the wide inclusive values. I'm not trying to optimize for a narrow set of metrics, but very wide inclusive of everything. I would say that is a minimum necessary requirement for people that can help turn the ship around.

Now that doesn't end the multipolar trap that whatever values I care about that don't optimize my agency still seem like they game theoretically lose if I care about them to the people that only do the agency returns. And so one of the things that we have to get into is how to make that not lose. And that's one of the criteria of turning the superorganism thing around. I think there are answers to that. And it's probably in our next podcast. Well, I was going to say, I mean, you and I know some of these hyperagents and is one of the possibilities to change the values in this group to be wider, or wider values, as you were saying? Is that possible?

I mean, the question of do you try to increase the understanding of interconnectedness and the embodied values and commitments of the hyper agents? Do you try to increase the agency of the people who already have wider and deeper values? You know, any of those are possible paths. They're all hard. Human development is not a quick thing. And more fundamentally, we want to ask the question, like when we were mentioning the way plows affected values at scale, is not just what do we try to do with individual people, but how would we make? changes to society that would be developing people differently at scale. Now, of course, you have this bootload question of like, well, who's going to do that? Who is going to do that that

that was in this current system that isn't doing that to try to make systems that, you know, incentivize different things long term? I think we're approaching a bend versus break moment. And we discussed that in the first conversation where our financial claims on our physical reality are diverging. And that gap is getting wider. and it's unsustainable. So when we have our third conversation, I would like to horizontally look at triage, transition, and long-term solutions for the human enterprise, and then vertically, globally, nationally, and communities and as individuals. You have off the record and tangential to this conversation, given me some excellent personal advice on how to cope and thrive

during this time. I don't know if we want to fit that in the next macro podcast, but you're very good at that stuff. So that's where I want to head to on the what to do, because learning about the sperm organism actually does something paradoxical. when you understand it, it actually makes you at least feel like you have less agency. People that understand the momentum of all this, it's kind of a shitty thing to discover because it feels like, oh, we can't just pass a climate law and everything is fixed. Or, oh, we just can't have a law that is more equality and that doesn't fix things.

that the problem is much more systemic and deeper than that. It is certainly often the case that as people understand that the individual problems are not so easily solvable on their own, they're part of a deeper set of interconnected things, and there's this kind of really tricky gang theory of multipolar traps and incentives on opportunity and not risk, and that even if you try to regulate a thing, that the regulatory apparatus moves slower than the thing. thing is trying to regulate, and so it continues to wiggle out of the regulations. As people start to understand all that, it can make them feel less agency and a little bit overwhelmed and

shitty. And so, as you mentioned, talking about how to emotionally, psychologically hold that's valuable, but it doesn't have to make them feel less agency. It can make them feel more agency. And that's actually what I hope happens. So that's the effect as for me. And I'll explain why inside of me because I think it can for a lot of people if they hold it this way. I think there's a lot of people who care, but the problems seem intractable. There's a certain kind of nihilism they have because climate change seems like such a huge deal and almost impossible to solve. And then so does species extinction and so does nuclear risk and so does. And it seems like there's a million problems and then they learn about a new one and a new one. And even if they started to feel like

they got hope around some chunk of them, there's more. And there's a certain sense of like impossibility in trying to deal with at all of that level that when you start to get, oh, there are underlying system dynamics that all these are expressions of, it can start to feel more tractable. Those problems are hard. But now that we're able to actually articulate that all the other problems are expressions of a set of system dynamics, now we at least know where to focus. Now possibly we've defined the problem well enough to be able to solve it. And in understanding a problem better, more solutions start to emerge. If I don't understand the problem well enough, I probably can't solve it at all.

As I'm understanding it better, I might say, wow, that's a hard problem, but at least possible. So I think we move from impossible to hard when we start to understand it better. And hard is better than impossible. And what I want is that it actually kind of cures the nihilism. people have running of maybe this is fucking impossible and creates a inspiration and upregulation with regard to the heart of like hard but possibly fucking tractable this should get all my life energy the fact that I don't know the answer instantly nobody fucking knows Einstein didn't know the answer to the questions he was asking and no inventor knew the answer of how to make the invention

they were thinking of there is some faith that the thing that you don't know exists that makes you do hard discovery work and stay with it one of the other problems you talk about kind of the dopamine-nergic nature of the superorganism is that the delete gratification to work on a problem for a long time that you don't know how to solve instantly is fucking critical. And so one of the attributes of the people, in addition to these three things, you know, together, the kind of agency, heart mind is part of the agency is the capacity to say, I don't know the answer, but that doesn't mean I'm demotivated. The fact that I can even start to wrap my head around the problem more means that there is a possible path to answer.

And I'm motivated to continue to explore that space until I have it and then implement the best answers I have. And then when they fail, find out why they failed and not take it as a failure, but learning. So that psychology, I would say, is critical to being part of solution. Thank you. That is helpful. And it makes sense to me. One of my biggest challenges is all along, I'm an expert.

on describing the constraints of our situation, less so than expert on the solutions, because they're not impossible, but they're hard, as you said. But I spend most of my time debunking people that say, no, we can decouple energy from a GDP and no renewables will be able to power a 19-terwatt society. We just need to have the political will or whatever. I spend most of my time on that instead of in the solution space because as you say, we have to understand the systemic nature of the problem in order to work on the real solutions. One of the reasons you have the podcast is to help more people understand the design criteria.

And the reason you're motivated to do that is not because you just like attention being on a podcast, but because more people understanding the criteria leads to more people's creativity working on solutions. And so there is an implicit faith in your strategy. We need a lot more people involved. Collective intelligence, if it has the right input, can do something, right? Obviously, that's why I'm talking with you here is the same kind of faith. We're actually working on a project right now on what are the kind of very hard questions that are underneath most of the problems that we think are a better. orienting framework than things like sustainable development goals.

How do you solve multipolar traps as an example of one of those questions? And being able to make that very widely understood, not to bum everyone out, but to say, let's get the decentralized collective intelligence of the world, having the best frameworks for understanding the most fundamental problems as the center of the innovative focus of the creativity of the world. If we have people understand those constraints widely, of course, some people say, I don't what the fuck to do with that, but a lot of people would be like, oh, this isn't engineering problem. Let's start to work on it. And some of the problems, like how do you solve

multipolar traps don't have a single solution? They'll have lots of partial solutions. Well, in order to get enforcement, you have to be so there's going to be transparency tech. So how do we create force transparency in some places and how do we create incentives on transparency? And other things will have to do with enforcement. Others will have to do an incentive. Others will have to do a better regulatory process. And then, of course, whenever you figure out a thing, it'll be game because there will be still be an incentive to game it. So it's, and that's why it's not, here is the answer forever. It's why it's an orienting question.

How do we continue to pay attention to things like perverse incentives and externalities and multipolar traps and do a better job ongoingly and procedurally upregulating our responses to these things that are fundamental to all the other problems? And if people like you are not articulating the design criteria well, then other people be coming up with solutions really well intendedly that we're just missing some of the design criteria. And this is one of the problems is, as we were. mentioning, we define the problems with narrow definitions of what success means that still externalize

lots of harm or miss some of the constraints. Getting the constraint set better might make it harder, but actually it makes it possible, whereas before it was impossible because all the things were bound to fail because they didn't understand what the success required. So rather than go from easy to hard, the easy was for sure going to fail, so it wasn't easy. It was impossible. We're actually going from impossible to hard, which is a movement in the right direction. Okay, so you wanted to unpack a little bit more about atoms, bits, jewels, and maybe dollars and human behavior. So go for it. Yeah, just to kind of underscore the energy blindness that you talk about.

I think the first time I heard the term atoms and bits together in terms of describing the economy was from Peter Thiel. And of course, makes sense that from someone who made money in Silicon Valley in the domain of bits, recognizing that there is still stuff to do in the domain of Adams, which is what Peter's very favorable of, which is why he likes Elon and, you know, people who build physical technologies. For the people coming out of Silicon Valley where everything was about digital tech, and obviously digital tech kind of subsumed so much of the world and particularly the financial world's attention because of the capacity for the scaling dynamics, right?

The network dynamics that Metcalfe law that gives you kind of natural monopolies and the speed at which you can get 3 billion users into a platform, which is so unheard of or anything else like that, and the speed at which you can get to a billion dollar valuation or anything else because of the bits give you exponential returns, right? I can make a piece of software once and then sell it an indefinite number period of a number of times. And that obviously started with computation software. Then when I get a beyond just software, and that would be like the Microsoft story, into something that is a network, so it's software, but then it's applied to mediating human interaction where the value occurs

across the interaction. So the number of people that goes up, the value squares as something like a second power to that, which would be true for digital currencies, Amazon, Facebook, all those types of things. Now you're doing with something like, you know, an exponential curve with another exponential or at least polynomial curve on top of it. And so of course, from a financial point of view, money into software equals more money out relative to most other things. And so that sucked up a lot of the world's attention, but then people recognize there's still stuff to do in the domain of atoms that matters. But even calling it atoms and bits,

of course these guys are very sophisticated. I've heard Peter Thiel refer to it that way or Bology. Of course they know that the energy sector is one of the biggest sectors. They get pitched its VCs all the time on new energy tech. They know Saudi Aramco as maybe the biggest or one of the biggest valuation companies in the world. And yet just even in the framing, it's not explicit in the framing. And the first time I heard the three together, atoms, energy and bits as the key parts of the materials of colonies from Forest Landry. And that obviously doesn't still include all the human aspects, but from a materials economy point of view, kind of reducing it to the things that have fundamentally different physics, it's a good structure.

The atoms we don't really get more of, right? The amount of copper we have on the planet is what it is. Outside of mining asteroids, we're not going to get more. And even then, it's still within a larger space of Earth plus the asteroid belt or whatever that we're looking at. And we also don't get rid of them. So we have a finite amount, and then we turn them into pollution if we don't go close. closed loop on them. And so we have, we have to go closed loop on the atomic accounting things, right? Energy we're getting more of all the time, but we have a kind of fixed bandwidth of how much

comes in and we have to work within that bandwidth, how many jewels are coming into the planet from the sun per day and like that. Bits, there is not the same fundamental limit of either a fixed amount that we have to work with or a fixed input. So they have a different scarcity dynamic. It's really only limited by the energy and atoms needed for the computational substrate, but then also limited by human time, the attention seconds thing, of how much software is useful if it requires either an interface. The software is either going to move atoms around, so you have to couple it to atoms. It's going to move bits around in ways that take energy.

The software is, but it's going to require energy, so it's coupled with that, and or it's coupled two. you know, entertainment or some kind of human engagement directly. So it's coupled two finite amounts of attention. So you don't get an infinite scaling on the value of bits that is decoupled from human attention, atoms, and energy. Well, there's also a qualitative aspect to the bits, too, based on what culture cares about. One thing I would say on the atoms energy bits. So the first thing is, of course, atoms aren't that useful unless we can rearrange them and move them around, and that takes energy.

and energy is not useful if we aren't moving atoms or bits around with it or moving it through things made of atoms right so we care about it to have a motor that moves an atom around or something like that and bits are going to be coding for the thing that we're going to you know the digital pattern that we're actually going to build in the physical world or something that is related to and at minimum on running on a computational substrate, energy, and atoms. So there are coupling coefficients between them where you don't get to just increase bits indefinitely independent of atoms and energy. You can increase them to some extent, and those are where you'll get increases in efficiency, but then that's why the Jevons Paradox still matters is what happens with those increases and efficiency. So those increases and efficiency have to not Jevin's Paradox, which means we need a binding

dynamic because the pure market dynamic will just turn that into a maximum power principle and forever growth. Those increases in efficiency have to also turn into less total utilization to deal with actual limits of growth. And you're not going to get that through a pure incentive system. You need that through a binding system. That'll get into what we talk about later of how do you make governance in the presence of international multipolar traps and the fact that markets typically capture the regulatory system rather than the other way around. So how do energy, well, jewels, bits, and atoms Well, the first thing I want to say is there's something like a Jevin's paradox on all of them.

And Jevin's paradox was obviously named that looking at energy. But it's because energy is a relevant input to any kind of industrial process, any kind of, you know, market process. So when energy gets cheaper, more total market space opens up. Well, compute has become useful to pretty much every market. Right. So when compute becomes cheaper, we use more total compute. That's another kind of Jevon's paradox. on computation. And we don't say, great, now we'll compute with less energy. We say, great, now there's more total shit that we can apply computation to. But it would also be true to say anything that is industrial input that is useful, not in one industry, but widely when it becomes cheaper, will increase total market. So if we can extract steel more cheaply and steel is key to our ability to build vertically and high population spaces,

As that gets cheaper, we will build more shit, grow populations more and grow net markets more. So what I would say is there is this generalized Jevin's paradox that when anything that is relevant for the market as a whole gets cheaper, the market as a whole grows. And so you have that kind of boomerang on efficiency, not just on energy, but kind of writ large. And that's an important part of understanding maximum power principle. I agree with that. Though, I think the opposite is about to start happening that we've gotten a clue with Ukraine and Russia and Europe's dependence on Russian hydrocarbons, that as energy gets more expensive, everything in society is going to get more expensive, including solar panels and wind turbines,

you know, the last three months, et cetera. So as we've been focusing on the powers of what technology can provide for us during that era, that narrative was supported by pretty much every year we grew our access to fossil energy. And most of the time, it was very cheap. But there's a multiplier effect that we add thousands to 10,000 of units of fossil energy to replace tasks that the ox or, my great, great, great, grandfather did in the fields. And so that, because of that, our industrial processes, our bits and atoms are incredibly sensitive to price increases in energy.

At $200 a barrel, oil, it's still effectively magic for what it can do for us. But many of the energy intensive processes in the world would become underage. profitable at that point. The entire market depends upon pricing. You talk about pricing the cost of energy, the cost of extraction, rather than what it would actually take for us to make that substrate and the total externality cost. This is also another kind of corollary of the kind of market dynamics and maximum power principles is not just the cost of energy, but the cost of steel, the cost of anything, is going to be the cost of extraction and then some margin, right? So it's going to cost us something, And this is kind of that return on investment topic.

It's going to cost us something to get out of the earth. But we didn't make it there. And there's going to be a lot of cost that is externalized not to our balance sheet in terms of we just destroyed rivers and extincted some species and ruin some indigenous people's lives and, you know, whatever. But we just can't make hydrocarbons at scale. like that that have that organic chemistry complexity. And so, but if anyone just extracts it because there isn't a law, we call it being industrious to extract, there isn't a law saying stealing from the balance sheet of nature because nature doesn't have a balance sheet is anything other than being industrious, then I just have to have

enough margin to sell it. And I don't want too much margin because somebody else will do it and come with a lower margin. So the market will end up setting the price, right? So the market incentivizes extraction and externalization. And so what that means is a sustainable market, because you can't keep extracting and externalizing and using unremobile resources forever, a sustainable market, almost everything that we currently have would not be viable. Like almost nothing would be profitable. And the profitability dynamics, if we weren't externalizing all of the costs and burning through unrennoble things unrenobly, would be completely fucking different. And this is the thing you're underscoring.

And it's like, what would that actually look like if we made sure that we actually had, we were using energy in ways that we could continue to use energy and we were using atoms in ways that we could continue to use atoms. What would that system look like? And it looks fundamentally different. I think this is what's so fundamental in your work is saying, hey, we have to really rethink what does it mean to have a system that you're not continuously subsidizing as we're about to lose our ability to keep subsidizing this thing. I totally agree. A slight clarification. We actually can make low carbon, hydrocarbon fuel with technology. We can overbuild solar panels and wind turbines near bodies of water via hydrolysis. We can create methane, which is basically natural gas. But the all in cost of that is $10 a gallon oil equivalent, which would be,

we could have a viable society around that, but not this society, not this amount of goods and services and complexity. And we can talk about that on our next conversation. The plan is to continue to grow to reach some sustainable technology level. There is no plan to have a smaller society because our system won't select for that plan. And that's part of the impossible to hard distinction that we made is I think we have a 19 terawatt society right now, which is 190 billion light bulbs turned on 24-7. That is the metabolism of the human enterprise.

What is more sustainable? What is using our remaining lower quality, higher cost hydrocarbons, hopefully not any coal at all and in combination with our best renewable tech and AI or whatever, our work suggests it's closer to 10 terawatts. Maybe it's 5. Maybe it's 12. I don't think anyone really knows, but it's not 30. I don't think it's 25 either.

And it's not 19 because these fossil armies that we've woken in the last two centuries, we can't continue to add their labor to our workforce. They're going to be retiring. And waking more, also they poop and they breathe and the externalities from that are mucking up future generations of ours and other species' house, a home where we live. Anyways, I'm digressing just to say that we have the technology to create energy. It's just the quality of it and the scalability of it is not what we have today. Thank you, Daniel.

Seriously, doing these in real time with you. Helps me understand my own story better. And I think we're working towards something important. So thank you to be continued, my friend. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of the Great Simplification, please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform and visit the Great Simplification.com for more information on future releases.