Good morning. So at the core, my work over the last 20 years has been pretty much trying to understand and communicate the intersection of thermodynamics and the behavior of a very successful social primate, us.

We tend to think of the laws of thermodynamics if we think about them at all outside of

high school physics classes as something distant and mechanical, some esoteric rules that govern

heat and engines and entropy, but not something that's relevant to our everyday lives.

But the more you look at them, the more thermodynamics reveals about everything, life,

society, and even human behavior, especially human behavior.

So I am going to do a short series on, for lack of a better term, behavioral thermodynamics.

So let's start with a very quick review of thermodynamics laws and their foundation.

So energy is the capacity to do work like calories or watt hours.

Power is energy per unit time, watts, how fast we do things.

I don't know that I'll talk about this, but net energy or energy return on energy invested

at what's left after the energy it took to get the energy.

It's the net, not the gross, that funds everything else in society, except for GDP, which

is a measure of gross energy flows.

Okay, thermodynamics.

First, there's an obscure zero flaw, which simply states that systems can reach thermal equilibrium

and that temperature is a shared meaningful property of the universe.

Kind of profound, also kind of trivial.

The first law of thermodynamics, energy can neither be

created nor destroyed. It can only change form. Every time you turn on a light switch or flex a muscle

or take a breath of air or even have a thought, it is all an energy transformation.

And you may have learned about this idea through the food webs or food chains in biology where energy is transformed as it converges from sunlight and soil up to plants, insects,

...