The core theme is that the fundamental driver of all life and economic systems is the pursuit and management of energy. Capitalism, at its essence, is about transforming nature into commodities and then into capital, which is fundamentally an energy accumulation process. The critical question is whether this drive for profit, fueled by energy, will lead to future prosperity or destruction.
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Everyone has an opinion about extremely
rich people. The top 10 richest people
right now have more than the bottom
three billion people. They're either
innovative heroes or greedy villains.
>> Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.
good.
>> Tell me, is there some society you know
that doesn't run on greed? Because the
essence of capitalism, the goal, its
function is not to help you, not to save
the environment, not to build homes for
the homeless. His goal is to transform
nature into commodities and commodities
into capital. It is to accumulate
accumulate invest to accumulate. In the
only cases in which the masses have
escaped from the kind of grinding
poverty you're talking about or where
they have had capitalism and largely
free trade,
>> the fight boils down to one question.
Will the drive for profit build the
future or destroy it? To answer this
question, we need to stop thinking like
economists and start thinking like
physicists. Instead of following the
money, we need to follow something more
basic. Because long before dollars,
pounds, gold coins, and even humanity
itself, there was the currency of life, energy.
energy.
If you zoom in enough to the world
around you, you'll see everything is
made of atoms connected by invisible
springs, what we call chemical bonds.
When atoms link together, they form
molecules. If you add energy to a
molecule, it vibrates faster. When
molecules vibrate randomly, we feel it
as heat. The first single-sellled
organisms on Earth were little energy
scavengers. They absorbed sugar
molecules floating in the ocean, broke
them down, and used that stored energy
to swim around and find more sugar and
make copies of themselves. And this is
where profit begins. These cells could
only survive if they captured more
energy than they spent getting it. Any
surplus energy got stored inside the
cell. The first profit is cellular fat.
So the most efficient energy foragers
survived and reproduced. The first
example of profitdriven competition but
at the cellular level. Even the most
successful energy foragers hit a wall.
You can drop one cell in a pool of
energy richch molecules and it will
divide into billions of cells. They
consume everything until the energy runs
out. Then the population crashes. A boom
bust cycle. Life's first bubble.
But then life discovered something
revolutionary. Photosynthesis.
On Earth, this high energy sunlight hits
simple molecules like carbon dioxide and
water and breaks them apart, causing
them to snap back together into more
complex molecules, storing more
potential energy. We call this molecule
a sugar, such as glucose. Think of it as
a molecular mouse trap storing solar
energy. When these sugar molecules break
down, those wound up springs unwind,
releasing energy that powers all
cellular motion.
Energy that would have just bounced back
into space became food. This was the
most important energy innovation since
the beginning of life, allowing
photosynthetic organisms to grow larger
and more complex, eventually becoming
the plants we recognize today.
As plants became multisellular, cells
specialized. Some captured sunlight,
others transported water and nutrients.
The division of labor made them far more
efficient at capturing energy for the
organism as a whole. But every new
energy innovation triggers a new form of
competition. Plants had to compete for
land to capture sunlight.
And plants came up with two key
strategies. go tall or go wide. Redwoods
went tall, hundreds of feet high,
monopolizing up to 98% of the sunlight
in their area.
Grasses, on the other hand, went wide,
small and fast to grow, capturing less
energy per square foot, but spreading
much faster. Today, grasslands cover
roughly 40% of the Earth's land. But
success always makes you a target.
Plants were packed with trillions of
energy dense molecules and that's when
animals emerge. Life that ate life, not
sunlight. It started with animals eating
plants and then animals started eating
each other, accessing even more
concentrated energy. And notice that
unlike photosynthesis, animals were not
creating new usable energy. They just
moved it around.
This is a crucial distinction. The sun
produces energy. Plants capture that
solar energy and convert it into
glucose, making it accessible for the
rest of life, while animals transfer
that plant captured energy up the food chain.
And like cells, animals stored surplus
energy as body fat. But animals went
further, storing energy outside their bodies.
bodies.
Squirrels hid nuts for winter.
Woodpeckers drilled holes in trees to
store thousands of acorns.
Bees took it to the next level. They
concentrated their surplus energy.
First, they collect nectar and then
condense it into honey, nearly four
times the energy density.
A hive becomes a massive energy bank.
The most sophisticated strategy was
environmental engineering, and it looks
a lot like entrepreneurship.
Beavers spend massive upfront energy to
build dams that slow rivers, which
create pools where aquatic plants can
flourish. They're farming new food that
would not have existed otherwise.
So from the first cell onward, life
discovered increasingly advanced forms
of energy capture. Sometimes through
fierce individual competition, sometimes
through collective cooperation, and most
often both at once.
The difference between creating versus
transferring energy is important for
seeing where profit comes from. Start by
drawing a boundary around whatever
you're analyzing. Take the beaver. At
the individual level, the beaver does
work and gets surplus food, more energy
than it spent. Clearly profitable for
the beaver's body. But then we can
expand the boundary a step and look at
the local ecosystem. The pond now
supports dozens of new plant species
that would not have existed otherwise.
More usable energy in the system because
of the beaver's actions. So, the energy
stays positive no matter how wide you
look. That's the key.
Now, compare this to a seagull stealing
fish from another bird. At the
individual boundary, the seagull spent
some energy chasing and got back more in
food. But expand the boundary to the
ecosystem. The total usable energy
didn't increase. One bird gained and
another lost. It was pure energy
transferred. Now look at the algae
bloom. At the algae level, it's
capturing massive amounts of energy.
looks extremely profitable, but expand
the boundary to the lake ecosystem and
it's consuming all the oxygen, killing
fish and collapsing the food web. There
is less usable energy than before the
algae arrived. It only looked profitable
when we kept the boundary narrow.
This boundary test reveals that some
strategies actually create new usable
energy at all levels, while others just
move it around and in some cases destroy it.
it.
But regardless of strategy, natural
limits prevented any one organism from
runaway accumulation of energy because
competition diffuses energy. The more
you accumulate, the bigger target you
become. And more importantly, death
resets everything. When an organism
dies, its accumulated energy gets
redistributed back into the ecosystem. A
squirrel's cache of nuts does not
transfer to its offspring. If a squirrel
notices his cash being raided, it will
move the remaining items.
>> Property rights die with you. You only
control what you can defend while alive.
That is until humans came around.
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Now, we know humans developed unusually
large brains relative to body size. This
is energyhungry tissue that consumes 20%
of your daily calories, even at rest.
But there's a huge payoff. Brains
convert energy into information. Your
experiences burn energy, like learning
how to start a fire, and it gets stored
as information after you've learned it.
Language allowed information to jump
directly from one mind to another. Fire
was the first key breakthrough when
someone figured out how to start and
control flames. And fire wasn't just
useful for light and heat, but what it
did to food. Cooking breaks down cell
walls and tough proteins and makes up to
40% more energy available than if eaten
raw. That extra energy enabled brains to
grow larger and discover even better
ways to capture energy. And innovations
could sweep through populations within a
single generation instead of taking
thousands of years. And unlike food or
tools, knowledge grows when shared. This
accumulation led to massive energy
breakthroughs. The first was farming.
Deliberately planting and tending crops
to capture new energy from sunlight.
Farming created something crucial.
Storeable surplus energy. Grain could be
kept for months, supporting far more
people per square mile than foraging
ever could. And this enabled specialization.
specialization.
Some could focus entirely on making
better tools or better shelter or
working purely with information, doing
knowledge work or making new
discoveries. And then came the ultimate
energy unlock, fossil fuels. Coal and
oil formed from dead life compressed
over hundreds of millions of years underground.
underground.
Ancient concentrated sunlight with
energy density far beyond anything
before. One barrel of oil could do the
work of hundreds of humans for weeks.
This unleashed surplus energy into
society, powering engines that animated
machines and factories that could run
day and night. A wave of profit unlike
anything before.
Coordinating this explosion of activity
required another invention, money. A
portable claim on energy.
When you hold money, you can exchange it
for others energy, their labor, their
goods they produce, or services they
provide. It's an incredible technology
from an energy perspective because think
about it, gold doesn't rot like food. It
isn't stuck like land and it doesn't
need feeding like livestock.
And so large amounts of money can be
used to direct thousands of people to
align their efforts towards a goal no
individual could achieve in an
organization which is like a
programmable colon whether it's a
government or a private company.
Each level of complexity requires more
specialized roles to coordinate towards
that goal. Industry believes that one of
the major requirements for the success
of a free economy is that there must be
a steady flow of investment capital. We
must prevent and eliminate interference
with the basic processes of capital
formation. These are the processes which
make the new jobs possible. But here's
where the boundary test becomes
essential. Is this organization
increasing the total usable energy in
the system? Whether by creating new
energy sources or making existing energy
work better or is it just repositioning
Take a drug company. It spends billions
of dollars developing a new antibiotic.
Before this drug existed, people died
from infections. Afterward, they
survived and returned to productive
life. If we draw a boundary around the
company, it's profitable.
And now let's expand the boundary to all
of society. The energy stays positive.
More people are alive and productive.
The firm created new capability that
wouldn't have existed otherwise. So the
company might get a patent giving it
monopoly protection, meaning only they
can sell it as a payment for the years
and billions spent discovering it.
Compare this to another drug company
that takes the same drug just before the
patent expires and makes a trivial
change, a new coding or slightly
different time release, just enough to
file a fresh 20-year patent and block
any generic competition and then raise
the prices. Same drug, no improvement.
If we draw the boundary around this
company, we see even more profits. But
when we expand the boundary to society,
we see usable energy decrease. Higher
price means fewer people can afford the
medicine. Some skip doses or stay sick
longer. Others go bankrupt paying for
it. Now you have sick people who can't
work, lost productive capacity, plus
money diverted from productive uses
towards rent extraction.
This brings us to the fundamental profit
test. Whether a cell or a corporation,
we can say good profit increases total
usable energy in the system while bad
profit only works when you keep your
view narrow.
But even value creating firms face a
deeper problem. Remember nature's
limits. Death resets everything. Well,
humans removed these limits. We invented
property rights that survive death and
money that compounds indefinitely.
And this creates a fundamental mismatch.
Financial claims can compound forever,
but physical energy cannot.
For centuries, energy was so cheap and
abundant that this didn't really matter.
Reality could match the growth in
claims. But since around the 1970s, we
ran out of easy oil. And now whether
we're drilling deeper wells or building
solar farms, each kilowatt hour costs
more energy to produce than the last.
The energy cost of energy is rising. And
we see it everywhere. Basic wages that
used to cover life costs now barely
cover rent. Because as energy gets more
expensive to extract, human labor buys
less of the energyintensive goods we
need. housing, transport, healthcare.
The cost of living rises while the
energy value of human labor falls behind.
behind.
Eventually, claims adjust to reality.
And history shows us how. Debt defaults,
currency collapse, conflict.
But here's the final problem. Every time
we access more energy, we immediately
find new ways to use it.
When we made engines more efficient, we
don't save fuel. We build more engines.
When we invented LED lights, we don't
save electricity, we put lights
everywhere. This is known as Jevans
paradox. The more efficient we become,
the more we consume.
The question isn't whether we have
enough energy, it's whether we can ever
have enough. Like algae, we're consuming
energy faster than the system can
sustain. But unlike algae, we can see it
coming. And like the beaver, we have the
ability to transform our world. The
question isn't if we'll hit energy
limits. It's whether we'll see them
coming and be ready when we do.
>> Capitalism will search and move into
every corner of the world and transform
it into its own image.
>> Greed clarifies, cuts through and
captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
spirit.
>> Making this video meant thinking through
complex systems. how energy flows, where
boundaries matter, how physics and
economics overlap. When I hit those
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