Deep Dive on Global Energy Usage

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Really interesting conversation between Daniel Schmachtenberger and Nate Hagens.

I do see Game B having some of these conversations just around the area of complexity and trying to manage complex system but it sounds like Nate is trying to figure out ways to do whole systems accounting of energy usage, both now on the cultural and economic level but also through history and how this whole schema has taken shape or accelerated. Nate's dropping a lot of very interesting tidbits I hadn't heard of before, such as that the average person in the west might be consuming/eating 2,500 calories per day for endogenous use but is exogenously using 200,000 calories per day, as he also mentioned how many watts the equivalent of a person digging a ditch was (pretty low) vs the energy in a barrel of oil - which is effectively tens of thousands of years of distillate photosynthesis. He gets into how the accounting looks, something like from the industrial revolution onward of us having the equivalent of 500 billion additional 'virtual' workers.

To me this conversation comes at a really good moment as Karl Friston has been promoting at least his own version of the Free Energy principle, something that he attributes to disequilibrium systems (ie. life) assimilating whatever energy it can stave off entropy, and it seems like this is the view that Nate Hagan is actually starting from.

The discussion's about 90 minutes and I'm maybe halfway in. Not sure how many people can or want to hang with that level of analysis, I'm just really glad someone's doing it because if it can be done - I think solving 'energy blindness' is really a core issue of us figuring out where we've really been wasting energy and focusing our efforts on reducing that inefficiency.

Daniel Schmachtenberger “Bend Not Break Part 1: Energy Blindness” | The Great Simplification #05