[Essay] 11 Discoveries That Changed My Worldview

This essay is adapted from the Frankly episode posted on November 14th, 2025 titled, “11 Discoveries That Changed My Worldview.”

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Have you ever taken a pause and considered the events, learnings, and forks in the road that have constructed and built your current worldview?

Many followers of this platform are familiar with the concept of the more-than-human predicament and my online PowerPoint presentations unpacking it. Today, I’d like to present it in a different way: by going through the 11 principle learnings that I’ve had over the past 30 years, which have helped to form my current worldview.

Over the years, I’ve become more informed about a lot of smaller dynamics at play within the world, which I’ve discussed on this platform. Things like the Seneca effect, which states that things collapse much faster than they grow, and the rule of 70, used to estimate how long it takes for a quantity to double within exponential growth scenarios. But these dynamics are not the focus of this essay. Rather, this essay outlines broader lessons that have become core to my approach to conveying our human predicament and the Great Simplification as a whole.

The Power, Externalities, and Finiteness of Oil

Until my late 20s, I was a pretty normal Midwestern guy, who was born into the upswing of human economic growth in the 20th century. I liked girls, traveling, money, status, and food – you get the idea. In New York City, where I worked for Salomon Brothers, I often selectively handed out business cards on the street inviting people to weekend parties at my loft. I wasn’t quite the “Wolf” of Wall Street – maybe “coyote” would be a more apt description.

When one of my clients at Salomon Brothers started trading oil, I endeavored to understand what it was we were actually buying and selling. This pursuit of knowledge simultaneously became my own greatest blessing and curse – I became more and more obsessed with oil and its role in our world. The more I learned about it, the more I couldn’t unsee the wider-boundary story that was right under my nose the whole time.

Digging deeper into oil caused me to come to three preliminary takeaways, which led to many others over the decades to come.

The first was that we confuse the price of energy with the actual value of energy. A single barrel of oil contains 1700 kilowatt hours worth of energy potential, which is about the energy equivalent of five years of human labor. Yet, a barrel of oil also sells for less than a typical dinner in New York City. At scale, this means oil, coal, and natural gas – when combined with machines – function as roughly 60 energy-equivalent workers per person, or ~500 billion globally across 8 billion humans.

This questioning of oil’s value relative to price led me to another realization: the market externalizes the planetary costs of energy. None of the pollution, global heating, or other ecological damages are taken into consideration within oil’s market price…therefore the monetary “cost” of burning 100 million barrels of oil per day does not paint a full picture of the planetary expenditures required to use these resources.

The price of a barrel of oil also doesn’t take into account the fact that fossil fuels are finite material inputs into our economy. It took millions of years for the oil stock we use today to form under the Earth’s crust, and yet the way we use and talk about oil makes it seem like a constantly available flow. In reality, oil represents a limited investment from Earth’s deep geological past, which is becoming less and less viable to harness. The Carbon Pulse, enabled by oil and other finite energetic resources, has a peak – and therefore a downslope.

Perhaps some of this seems obvious now, but it was quite the realization for me at the time. The prices we pay, our incentives, our institutions, and our cultural expectations are based on the wrong long-term prices because we don’t include depletion or pollution. And in our defense, neither do other species.

Energy Primacy

What I learned in that deep-dive on oil changed how I saw everything. Once I began to understand oil, I started to see something larger: it’s not just about one fuel, it’s about energy itself.

Every economy, every technology, and every civilization is, at its core, a physical process of transforming energy and materials into things that humans value – food, shelter, comfort, status, and experiences. We measure all of this in dollars, but underneath the money, every transaction is an energy transformation. It takes energy to mine the ore, forge the metal, build the car, and then to drive it, repair it, and eventually recycle it. Nothing happens without energy.

That realization showed me how deeply energy blind our culture is. We’ve become so accustomed to abundance that we’ve mistaken cheap and on-demand energy for a background condition in our world – like air, gravity, or sunrises. But energy is not just another line item in our economy. It is the economy.

Every dollar of GDP represents a physical transformation powered by energy somewhere. Once you see this, you can’t unsee it. You start to notice how every story about growth, technology, or progress is, under the surface, really a story about energy: how efficiently we can turn sunlight, fossil carbon, and uranium into motion, heat, light, or some other services for humans. You start to notice how dependent everything is on the quality and flow of that energy – and its cost.

I didn’t remotely understand this back on Wall Street. In fact, it took me 15 years and a slog of a PhD to understand the foundational role of energy.

The Wanting Is Stronger Than the Having

However, there was a particular paradox that I did notice in my mid-20s on Wall Street. I saw that the wealthiest clients – billionaires who were moving fortunes with a keystroke – often seemed anxious, restless, and generally unsatisfied. In contrast, the back office clerks making 25 or 30 grand per year were laughing, swapping stories, and somehow seemed lighter in spirit even with long hours and little pay.

I could give dozens of interesting examples of this. One client in his eighties had $800 million with us in laddered treasury notes and bonds. He was as cheerful and witty as one could be, but if his interest payments hadn’t arrived in his account by noon on coupon day, he would call and berate me with swear words. I also discovered he lived in a tiny apartment, didn’t own a car, and didn’t spend any of his $800 million.

Over time, a pattern emerged: Wanting seemed a stronger force than having. It seemed that people with lots of material wealth actually just wanted even more material wealth. As a 28-year-old learning about the world, witnessing this paradox made quite a mark on me emotionally. Later on, I would understand that in ancestral times, wanting drove the doing, and doing led to survival and reproduction. Those circuits were adaptive then, but we’ve carried them into a world of material abundance. So today, dopamine drives pursuit, but it doesn’t drive fulfillment. Our entire economy, maybe even our entire species, runs on that loop.

The realization was uncomfortable. So much of modern life seems to be built on perceived scarcity – the sense that we’re missing something and we have to strive for more, even when surrounded by plenty. We’ve built a civilization addicted to the promise of more, but when more arrives it doesn’t bring contentment. It just raises the baseline for what ‘enough’ will mean in the next period.

Around that time, I also realized that, rich or poor, we’re all chasing the same thing: a particular mix of neurotransmitters. More money doesn’t mean more serotonin. More money merely buys a different path to the same temporary neurotransmitter chemical highs, which then retreat to baseline soon after.

This was hammered home to me one time when I went to Atlantic City. I was at a craps table where there was a man betting $5,000 a roll and right next to him was a guy betting $20 a roll. They both cheered when they won and groaned when they lost. The stakes, and probably their life situations, were worlds apart, but I realized the biochemistry in the moment was probably identical. That just seemed weird to me. Something about that experience and the dynamic it exposed has stayed with me.

There are billions of minds across every social class and culture who are all chasing the same fleeting signals through vastly different means. We are all supported by finite resources and competing for emotional flows, and it seems to make the wanting feel stronger than the having.

You may not be surprised to hear it was around this time that I pulled back from the usual New York scene. I was unsettled by these insights and was doing a lot of reflection – but I was also super curious and I started reading a lot. At the time, I was reading more than one nonfiction book per week (sometimes two) plus working. Those were the days… I don’t remotely read that much anymore.

Eventually that curiosity pulled me out of finance altogether. I quit and went back to get my PhD to study these questions more seriously.

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We Are All Made of Stars

The next discovery begins with a song I liked when I was younger: "We Are All Made of Stars" by Moby. I had heard this song like 20 times before I even considered, “What is he actually saying? What do those words mean?” Of course, once those questions dawned on me, I researched the idea further.

We tend to think of life as something local, something that began here on Earth. It turns out that the raw material of our bodies was forged long before the Earth existed. The elements that make up us – carbon, calcium, iron – could only be created in the unimaginable heat and pressure of dying suns.

Billions of years later those same elements cycle through us – combining, flowing, dispersing, and eventually returning to the world when we die. From that vantage, each of us is a kind of intricate thermodynamic pattern. We’re built from the ashes of ancient stars somewhere in the distant universe – but we’re also a living process powered by sunlight. That sunlight itself comes from hydrogen turning into helium, the same fusion that once created the elements we’re made of. So, we are quite literally the children of stars, composed of their remnants and animated by their light.

Realizing I was recycled star matter cracked open my sense of time, including deep time. It was like putting on a new pair of glasses – I could get into a mental frame where I perceived every cell in my body as ancient, connected, and temporary. Alongside that framing, I began to consider everything as part of an unbroken, continual story stretching back to the birth of the universe.

We are all made of stars. Once you start thinking in deep time, it’s hard to see anything, including yourself, as separate. You start to realize that conscious life – you, me, and all of us – is how the universe observes itself, which is kind of profound. That realization opened a door that I’ve never closed and it led me straight into evolution, complexity, and the strange question of how self-aware stardust behaves in modern Earth conditions.

Sexual and Natural Selection

As I got older, I noticed another pattern that deepened into a broader observation. I began to notice I was attracted to women with blue eyes.

This seemed like a small thing, but then I researched why this might be. There are lots of reasons that are not relevant here, but what is relevant is that blue eyes in humans emerged only 8,000 years ago, likely from a single mutation, which they’ve pinpointed near the Black Sea. So for 99% of our species history, no human had blue eyes, and then suddenly, this oddity appeared and spread to what is today around 10% of the global population. Blue eyes didn’t emerge because they provided any survival advantages, they emerged because they caught attention…which then led to other things.

Blue eyes are an epigamic trait, a feature selected over time by attraction, not by adaptation – like a peacock’s wings, a bird’s song, or the coloration of guppies and other fish. That revelation cracked open the bigger gateway for me to look at the evolved psychology of humans. I discovered that all of our current physical and mental structures are directly or indirectly a product of what worked or was preferred in the past, combined with – of course – environmental factors.

We are not born as blank slates, rather we are following evolutionary scripts of mating choice, status games, and social learnings. These evolving behavioral tendencies are all deeply conserved, often invisible, and often irrational – but also often predictable. They ultimately explain a great deal of the current human and planetary predicament: social status, addiction from supernormal stimuli, power, loss aversion, collective action problems, tragedy of the commons dynamics, steep discount rates, and cognitive biases. All of these and more are a product of our behavior.

So much of what we desire, value, and even fear has deep roots in biology and history. What feels like our own free will is often a whisper or a quiet nudge from our ancestors. But what I eventually came to realize is that, with some training, discipline, and a lot of time, we can sometimes ignore those evolutionary nudges and whispers.

Importance of Net Energy

The next learning was so central to my worldview that I ended up writing my PhD thesis on it: the concept of net energy.

Every living system depends on getting more energy than it spends. I’ve come back to my oft used cheetah example many times because it’s the clearest way to show this. A cheetah has to gain more calories from the gazelle it consumes than the calories it burns in the chase plus all the chases that ended in no food. The difference between what it gets and what it spends is called net energy. The surplus leftover is what allows the cheetah to rest, heal, and reproduce. This is the real driver of life and evolution.

Human societies work the same way. We use energy to get energy – we drill wells, mine lithium, build solar panels, and maintain grids. What’s left over after all those cost inputs is the energy that actually runs civilization. That energy surplus builds cities, grows food, and powers hospitals, libraries, and football stadiums. It drives everything we call ‘the economy.’

For centuries, the energy cost as a percentage of total energy in society kept falling. That decline, coupled with the sheer scale of more energy, enabled civilization’s massive expansion. But in the 21st century, energy’s cost share began to rise again. According to research by my friend, Carey W. King, energy’s cost share of GDP hit a 700-year low around 1999 at around 4%. That means we spent 4% of energy to find, refine, and deliver the rest to society. Today, it’s hard to exactly know what that number is, but it’s over 10% and headed towards 15% as the easier-to-access resources have now been used and exhausted.

In effect, more and more of society’s energy and materials are now spent just to maintain the system that extracts them. The economic equivalent of a cheetah is having to run further and more times to catch smaller gazelles.

I used to think declining net energy meant declining growth, but it doesn’t. GDP is 99% correlated with energy use, but energy use is gross energy use. So as we direct more and more of our total energy and materials into getting energy – yes, AI, I’m looking at you – that’s actually good for GDP. But who consumes the energy and at what cost? Those are different questions.

Money as a Claim on Reality

Understanding energy made me revisit how I thought about money as well. It turns out that the fractional reserve banking model I was taught in business school was wrong.

I had always believed banks lent out existing funds – that money was some fixed pool, growing slowly through wealth, accumulation, innovation, and productivity. But that’s not how it works at all. Banks don’t lend out old money, they create new money. Every loan is new purchasing power brought into existence by the promise of future repayment, with customers deemed credit-worthy. The system expands not because of stored wealth, but because of people’s confidence in future growth. From this lens, credit expansion makes complete sense on corporate and government account ledgers, because it assumes the future will be bigger than the present.

There are some problems with this.

The first problem is when we create more money, we don’t create more stuff. The moment a million dollars in new credit appears, we have the exact same amount of soil, forests, oil, copper, water, dolphins, and orangutans as we did before the creation of that credit. Our financial system multiplies abstractions, but the physical world underneath it doesn’t scale at the same time or at the same rate.

The second problem is that when a loan is created, the principal comes into existence but the interest does not. The interest has to be paid from growth in the system sometime in the future. This means the very structure of how modern money is created has a built-in growth imperative for the system.

Our entire economy is tethered to trust and recent productivity, not to physics or thermodynamics. That realization broke a kind of a spell in my late Wall Street days. I started to see money itself differently – I saw the digits in the bank accounts around the world and the pieces of linen that we have in our wallets as claims on real things and real capital. And I saw financial crises less as accidents and more as physics periodically catching up to finance.

Underneath the numbers, the global economy runs on joules, atoms, and functioning ecosystems – not credit, ledgers, and spreadsheets.

Every time that we spend dollars to buy something, that something also requires an energy transformation. Every good in the global economy we pay money for was created somewhere with a small fire on the planet. Every dollar of debt in the global system will one day have to be made good with some form of energy when it’s repaid and spent.

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The “Straw” of Technology

The deep dive into energy, and subsequently money, then brought me to technology – a subject I’ve continued to roll around in my head today as it’s moving ahead at light speed.

I used to believe that technology created wealth. It took me decades to realize that technology mostly just accelerates access to wealth. Real wealth doesn’t come from the stock market. It comes from the sun, soil, water, living systems, and natural resource accounts – the foundation that makes everything else possible.

Technology doesn’t create that wealth. It functions more like a straw to access it, and the straw gets bigger and wider over time as technology changes. In the short run, it helps us turn stored wealth into income faster. I was thinking about this relationship this weekend while I was cutting and chopping firewood: What I can accomplish with a chainsaw, a splitter, and a utility vehicle using some gasoline and oil is way more than my own ability to extract wood from the land with human labor alone. Think about various versions of this multiplied by 8 billion people on the planet. We’ve come a long way from stone tools.

This all landed me on what is called the maximum power principle. It explains that systems, in nature and in the human economy, that maximize energy throughput the fastest tend to outcompete others. Technology is how we do that. It lets us extract energy, materials, and value from the biosphere faster, which has historically been adaptive for creatures, for individual humans, and for socioeconomic systems.

But that advantage also carries a trap, because when we make a process more efficient it doesn’t necessarily save energy, it often increases total consumption. This dynamic is called the ‘rebound effect,’ the ‘backfire effect,’ or Jevons paradox. Cheaper, faster, and more efficient systems expand total use because we can afford to do more with less resources.

The world calls this progress – but from a long-term, or even an intermediate-term perspective, it usually just means we’re burning through our low entropy stocks faster. Technology does extend our reach, but it simultaneously deepens our dependency.

Competition and Cooperation

The combination of understanding technology and recognizing the endless ‘wanting’ led me to a deeper question about human behavior: Are humans fundamentally competitive or cooperative?

The answer is, of course, both. Multi-level selection theory helped me see why. Evolution doesn’t just act on individuals, at which level it’s most beneficial to be competitive, it also acts on groups. At this level, groups with more cooperative individuals work together more effectively and tend to outcompete those that don’t. The same theory and selection process applies at other levels, for example, viruses and microbiomes that benefit their hosts are more likely to persist.

One of my PhD advisors, Charles Goodnight, who unfortunately has passed away, was an evolutionary biologist studying multi-level selection in beetles. I remember long conversations with him in his beetle lab about animal behavior.

So, it turns out that selfishness is a very narrow driver of evolution.

One experiment made this vivid in my mind and has stayed with me years later, and I’ve shared it on this channel several different times. A colleague of Charles oversaw a study to increase egg production by selecting the most productive chicken hens from a number of groups. But unexpectedly, over time, it turns out that the top egg layers were also super aggressive chickens. When you selected them and put them in a new cage, they pecked and killed each other, and the total egg output per cage actually fell. But when the people in the experiment selected the most productive cages – the groups of chickens instead of individuals – cooperation flourished and overall egg production rose significantly.

This was a small experiment, but that insight reshaped how I saw human behavior and systems. Our entire civilization runs on this same tension. Competition drives innovation, but cooperation sustains it.

So the ‘selfish gene’ story that I’d grown up with wasn’t wrong per se, but it was incomplete. The real story is about balance between the individual and the collective – between winning and belonging. In our culture, we’ve spent decades or longer glorifying winning and pretty much neglecting belonging.

More Than Our Share

I’ve always cared about animals. When I was little, I would watch Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and I would memorize the names: platypus, lion, mongoose, ibex. My mom took me to dozens of zoos around the country because my parents traveled a lot when I was young.

I knew a lot about individual animals, but I didn’t yet have an ecological wide-boundary context. When I began learning about the natural world as a system – the flows of energy and matter that connect everything, population ecology, and the details of the web of life – I came across a figure that was a gut punch at the time and still haunts me today.

Humans and our livestock today – our cows, pigs, goats, and sheep – outweigh all wild land mammals by roughly eighty to one. 10,000 years ago, before agriculture, that ratio was reversed. Wild mammals outweighed us by about forty to one. That’s a 3,000-fold swing in biomass composition within an evolutionary eyeblink.

Human population growth explains part of it, but the deeper story is one of planetary reallocation – the living fabric of Earth reorganized around human needs. We now direct around 30 to 40% of the net primary productivity – the sunlight hitting Earth, all the photosynthesis happening on this planet – towards human purposes.

That’s on top of all the ancient productivity we burn in the form of coal, gas, and oil. We’ve become the ecosystem. Our food chains, our industries, and our economies are consuming the wild world and remaking it in our image. We’re taking more than our share.

That ratio hit me like a punch to the stomach when I first heard it, and even

telling the story now I feel the echoes of that. Right now it’s the most tangible measure I know that showcases our dominion on this planet. This figure became one of the guideposts that pulled me deeper into this work because it’s so unsettling. Once you realize humanity is the ecosystem, the next question is, “What kind of organism have we actually become?”

Humans, Humanity, and the Superorganism

The final discovery in this list was recent and is ongoing. It’s both really depressing but also hopeful.

I’ve recognized that the “humans are bad” narrative in environmental and ecological circles has an important asterisk: humanity as a whole functions very differently than humans as individuals. Everywhere around the world, most people are decent – we have always been kind, cooperative, and generous, at least within our own circles and in local contexts. But at scale, something changes. We create emergent systems, media, politics, and markets that begin to take on a life of their own.

In a hyper-connected world with ample energy surplus relative to the past, we self-organize as families, small businesses, corporations, and ultimately as nation-states to maximize earnings, salaries, and profits – which are all tethered to energy, material throughput, and ecological impact. Over time, we behave less like collections of individual people and more like a mindless, unthinking economic Superorganism, which is driven by its own need for energy to continue growth. It’s this system that has emerged with its own metabolism, now approaching 20 trillion watts of continuous energy demand.

Within these systems, people with narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy – what psychologists call ‘dark triad traits’ – often rise to the top. This isn’t because they’re chosen or more capable, but because our current system rewards short-term power over long-term balance. Thus, at key nodes of the system, the metabolism and structures are reinforced. Through what Donald Campbell called ‘downward causation,’ those incentives ripple outward, shaping the behavior of everyone below. The system becomes the organism and we are its cells.

It’s unsettling to realize that our collective intelligence can act in ways few people would consciously choose to. Yet, this insight also holds a seed of hope to me. Perhaps this is what an evolutionary transition looks like at a species scale. Maybe it’s what the painful process of becoming aware of ourselves as a planetary force would have to look like. I think it starts with the self aware cells. If we can integrate that awareness, maybe we can grow into something wiser.

Conclusion

Each of these historic realizations on my journey dismantled a layer of my own naïveté, both of myself and our times. Yet beneath the disillusionment, something else grew in me: a sense that our species may be approaching a kind of rite of passage. Not economically, but about who we are and our relationship to the broader world.

We have learned, accumulated, and acquired the powers of gods, but have not yet acquired the wisdom of what Bill Plotkin would call ‘ecological adults.’ To see ourselves as stardust, as animals, as energy systems, and as social organisms is to begin to remember that we are expressions of nature.

The hope is not found in escaping these truths, but in integrating them and entering into conscious membership of the long – and I hope continuing – story of life on Earth.

At times, I feel somewhat powerless against the metabolism of the Superorganism and its power structures. But I’m human. I’m still learning and discovering, and with this channel, sharing.

Thank you for reading.

More soon.

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