One ring to rule them all. One ring to find them. One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. Greetings. Ooh, theatrics. I am back from traveling. Lots on my mind. Lots going on in the world. Yes, I am doing another

Tolkien reference from Lord of the Rings. I've been putting together an advanced kind of theory

of how power is driving humans towards a cliff, quite frankly. So today I'd like

to talk about the one ring of power metaphorically from the Lord of the Rings. And before I get to

that, I'd like to talk about the nine rings for mortal men, which are

behavioral tendencies of our species, homo sapiens, that have been successful for 290,000

years in ancestral tribes on the savannah in Tanzania, Kenya, Africa, but are misfiring in our current

globalized, technologically advanced, energy-rich culture. I do periodically get criticism that the

content on this channel is derivative of the same themes.

And while that's true, the content is derivative of we're animals, we're human.

Behaviors matter.

The energy and money and growth are this synergy that is pulling humanity forward and we're

impacting ecology and ecosystems of Earth.

It's kind of obvious once you see it, and yet if your hair was on fire, I would continue

to point out that your hair was on fire until you recognized it. So the nine rings for mortal men.

First of all, we're animals, we're primates.

Humans are predators.

We don't think about it much.

But ancestral times we coordinated to hunt a game.

There was an EROI equation there, optimal forging theory, and today we are hunting using

fossil energy to do most of our labor, but we're hunting bargains and we're hunting good investment

returns where we invest a little and get a lot.

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