PODCAST · science
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
by Nate Hagens
The Great Simplification is a podcast that explores the systems science underpinning the human predicament. Through conversations with experts and leaders hosted by Dr. Nate Hagens, we explore topics spanning ecology, economics, energy, geopolitics, human behavior, and monetary/financial systems. Our goal is to provide a simple educational resource for the complex energetic, physical, and social constraints ahead, and to inspire people to play a role in our collective future. Ultimately, we aim to normalize these conversations and, in doing so, change the initial conditions of future events.
Episodes
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Optionality Collapse: We're Investing in a Future That Won't Exist with Indy Johar
Traditional financial management tells us that, if we invest right, we'll be able to retire and sink into a future of comfort and stability – and even pass on your wealth to your children and grandchildren. But this vision is built on an anomalous period of stability in which climate, energy...
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Humanity's Icarus Moment: The Wings, the Sea, and the Sun of AI | Frankly 161
This week Nate examines artificial intelligence through the metaphor of Icarus, asking what risks arise when a civilization injects trillions of cognitive workers into a civilization that's already in resource overshoot. Emphasizing that our society already largely ignores the depleting fossil...
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A World-Changing Event: We're Not Going Back to January 2026 with Art Berman
Almost eight months after the Iran war first rattled global energy markets, the global system has proven surprisingly adaptable, even as prices continue to rise and product shortages become more common. But as those buffers run dry and diesel prices climb to the equivalent of over $200 a barrel,...
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Climate Uncertainty: The Coolest Year for the Rest of Our Lives? with Zeke Hausfather
The El Niño now building in the tropical Pacific is unlike anything in the historical record, and it's arriving on top of decades of warming. Together, they could push global temperatures to roughly 1.8°C (3.2ºF) above pre-industrial levels next year, offering a preview of what may become the new...
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A State of the World Address: The Climate Speech We'll Probably Never Hear | Frankly 160
On the heels of Climate Week, Nate poses a thought experiment: What would a world leader's speech sound like if the difficult truths underpinning global heating – which are politically unsayable due to donors, borders, electoral campaigns, and other incentives – were laid bare to the public?…
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The Escalation Trap: Is America's Strategy in Iran Backfiring?
The United States, a global superpower for the last several decades, is now locked into a battle for control over the region with the bulk of the world's remaining fossil fuel reserves. Despite U.S. military strength, Iran is not backing down, equipped with a new era of military technology. What...
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The Real Work: Four Things We Can't Afford to Get Wrong | Frankly 159
This week, Nate zooms out from recent headlines about climbing diesel prices, a thinning U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and inflationary bond markets to ask the deeper question: what is the real work that's required of us as the systems that underpin modern life begin to buckle? He draws on...
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Radical Simplicity: The Opportunities of a World in Collapse with Sarah Wilson
For years, the climate movement ran on the promise that, if we all rally hard enough, we could have it all: continue with our current system and save the planet. Yet the events of the past few decades have shown that this isn't quite the case, and in fact, climate is just one crisis among many...
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The Human Predicament: What Would Change My Mind? | Frankly 158
This week's Frankly begins with a deceptively simple question Nate was asked in conversation: what would change his mind about The Great Simplification thesis? Nate uses the question as a jumping-off point to examine what evidence would actually cause him to reassess his view that human...
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Banning Superintelligence: Are We Building Humanity's Replacement? with Roman Yampolskiy
The world's leading AI companies tell us that superintelligence has a strong chance of leading to human extinction, while also promising that they will be able to control it, offering unlimited power to the one who does it first. So far they've run completely unchecked, but would that change if…
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Turning the Dials Back on Psychopathy: Decent People, Indecent System | Frankly 157
This week's Frankly builds on Nate's recent conversation with systems theorist Greg Elliott, who came on the platform to discuss why our institutions themselves have become psychopathic and how that affects the behavior of the average human. Nate maps Greg's framework onto the global economic...
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The Collapse of Our Mythology: Can Humanity Choose What's Next? with Charles Eisenstein
In this episode, Nate welcomes author and philosopher, Charles Eisenstein, for a long-requested conversation on the mythologies underneath civilization. For over two decades, Charles has argued that the crises defining modern life all trace back to the story of separation, the largely unspoken...
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Just Stop Oil!?: The Economic Foundation We Ignore | Frankly Archives 39 (2023)
This week's Frankly is an episode from summer of 2023, which is being re-released to provide context for one of the most important questions we face today: what is the role of energy, specifically oil, in the global economic system we've built? In this second part of a previous series on the...
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The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis: The Rules of the Game Keep Us Trapped with Greg Elliott | TGS 231
Modern companies, markets, and institutions routinely behave in ways that would be diagnosed as pathological in a person: emotional detachment, strategic deception, grandiosity, and the treatment of people, animals, and ecosystems as means to an end. Yet, most of the individuals who make up these...
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An Antidote to Despair: What Dogs Reveal About the Metacrisis | Frankly 156
This week, Nate turns a late-night emergency vet visit for one of his dogs into a broader reflection on the extraordinary relationship between dogs and humans. While dogs have been human companions for thousands of years, the modern version of "man's best friend" is a remarkably recent product of...
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Material World: The Key Resources Underpinning Modern Economies with Ed Conway | Archive TGS 127
Current geopolitical events continue to expose just how complex and fragile our global economic system is. As such, The Great Simplification team is re-releasing this episode with Ed Conway, which covers the deceptively critical materials that continue to underpin everything from the phone in…
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The Villains We Choose and the Work They Give Us | Frankly 155
How can humans – at least those with access to the internet – ingest the same facts and data, yet arrive at radically different worldviews? That's the question Nate explores in this week's Frankly, which unpacks eight different lenses through which people understand the current more-than-human...
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Your Anxiety Is Normal: A New Psychology for a World in Crisis with Richard Schwartz & Steffi Bednarek
Most of us were taught to treat emotions like distress, numbness, and burnout as private failings to manage and move past, rather than normal responses to living within a world full of crises. The unintended result is a distrust in our own bodies and mind, further leading to more confusion about...
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Unordinary Interventions: How to Plant Seeds for a Better Future | Frankly 154
What can one person actually do about the metacrisis? In this week's Frankly, Nate explicitly outlines just a few of the countless actions we can take to actually change what's coming, rather than just prepare for it. He touches on why the metacrisis is better understood as a predicament to be...
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The Optimization Trap: Why Too Much Efficiency Makes Us Fragile with Olivier Hamant
For decades, modern civilization has treated efficiency as an unquestioned good: the leaner, faster, and more optimized anything is – from supply chains to your morning routine – the better. But emerging systems science argues that this obsession with performance is actually making humanity more...
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When Truth Becomes Hazardous: Navigating Information Through the Metacrisis | Frankly 153
This week, Nate takes on a tension he has been navigating for years, at the heart of communicating about the metacrisis: the hazards that arise from sharing true information with a global audience. Building on his earlier episode, "The Limits to Podcasting," where he first described a "triple...
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The End of Globalization: Why Abundance Is an Illusion with Jeff Currie
For three decades, most of Wall Street has treated energy and commodities as a rounding error, or as a small slice of the portfolio rather than the physical foundation everything else runs on. But in mid-2026, with the Strait of Hormuz disrupted, tankers burning in the Red and Black Seas, and...
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Watch With Both Eyes Open: The Beauty and the Horror of Our Moment
In this week's Frankly, Nate reflects on a week spent with a group of friends and peers who share his understanding of the world's converging crises, and what it revealed about the deeply human need to be fully seen, without having to explain yourself first. Though the group rarely discussed...
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Taking Love Seriously: What Ancient Wisdom & Modern Psychology Say About Interconnectedness with John Churchill
A growing chorus of psychologists, contemplatives, and systems thinkers argue that most of us, and most of our institutions, are running an outdated psychological and spiritual "operating system," one never built for the converging ecological, economic, and cultural crises we face. Technological...
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Foundations Before Outcomes: The Future Beneath Your Feet | How to Think About the Future Pt 5, Frankly 150
Today, in Part 5 of the "How to Think About the Future" series, Nate scales his exploration of civilizational futures down to the future of a single human life and analyzes how the same patterns that shape economies, power, geopolitics, and Earth systems turn inward. Building on the framework...
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Can Money Serve Life? How to Fund Communities Doing the Real Work with Matthew Monahan
Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars flow through global philanthropy, yet only a small fraction reaches environmental, climate, and nature-related causes. Meanwhile, in small towns and rural communities around the world, a hidden throughline of regenerative work is already underway. This...
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A Legacy Worth Celebrating? Reflecting on 250 Years of the American Experiment | Frankly 149
As America marks its 250th birthday, Nate takes a moment to step outside of the celebrations to seek out a wider boundary perspective on this week's holiday. He poses the question of whether the United States has truly matured as a nation over two and a half centuries, particularly through the...
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Mordor to the Long Repair: How Might Daily Life Feel in the Next Decades? | How to Think About the Future Part 4, Frankly 148
This week, Nate continues his "How to Think About the Future" series, where he invites listeners to imagine what it's like to live in different versions of the reality that lies ahead. In today's edition, Nate builds upon the frameworks outlined in part three to create four distinct future worlds…
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We Weren't Expecting This: What Does a Super El Niño Mean For the Climate? with Tad Patzek
This year's projected Super El Niño forming in the Pacific could become one of the strongest climate oscillations in over a century. As regions prepare for the effects, and continue to adapt to extreme heat waves, intensifying storms, accelerating ice loss, and increasingly erratic rainfall,...
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How to Play 5D Chess: It's Not What You Think | Frankly 147
In this week's Frankly, Nate explores a pattern of thinking that permeates so many of our conversations: we often decide what we think before we've fully heard what's being said. Using the metaphor of a chessboard, he invites listeners to examine how we process information through a series of...
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No More Dystopian Stories: How to See a Future Worth Living In with Rob Hopkins
Self-fulfilling prophecies; manifestations; the Oedipus Effect: Humanity has long had an intuition that the stories we tell ourselves the most are often the stories we make come true. Science has found more and more evidence to back this up, through both historical cultural analysis as well as...
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The Ultimate Alternative: Are You Okay With Nuclear Warfare? | Frankly 146
This week's Frankly is another in Nate's recurring series Uncomfortable Questions for Unsettled Times, in which he poses questions about our shared future. Today, he uses headlines regarding a potential ceasefire deal between the U.S. and Iran to confront a subject that has re-entered public...
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The U.S. Can't Back Down: The Strait of Hormuz Closure Is Messier Than You Think with Michael Every
This episode was recorded Tuesday, June 9th, before the current 'deal' was floated. Given world events, we decided to post this episode immediately as a special release, and deal or not, this conversation is an excellent overview of the issues and stakes of this evolving situation. In a media...
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Why 'Community' Fails: Everyone Wants a Village, Nobody Wants to Be a Villager with Nora Bateson, Jonathan Goldsmith & Lucas Jackson | RR 26
Many of us lack meaningful community in our lives, either from a complete absence of relationships or simply the sense of disconnection from those around us. In response, a growing number of people attempt to cultivate community based on shared values and interests, which inadvertently reproduces...
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How to Think About the Future (Part 3): Uphill Futures in a Downhill World | Frankly 145
This week's Frankly is part three of the series How to Think About the Future. Today, Nate builds a framework for understanding the pathways that connect today's choices to tomorrow's realities. Drawing from biology, ecology, history, and systems thinking, he introduces a civilizational terrain…
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The Missing Half of Climate Change: Why Our Planet is at 50% Capacity and How to Get it Back with Brett KenCairn
The Dust Bowl of the 1930s is one of the worst ecological disasters in American history. Across the great plains, roughly 2.5 million people left the region over the decade, amid severe crop failures, livestock losses and widespread hunger. Caused by drought and extreme land degradation, this...
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Casting Call for a Future Frankly
Link to submit: https://senja.io/p/the-great-simplification/r/share-your-technology This week, Nate is putting out a call to listeners of this platform to share stories from the work they're doing on the ground, within their own communities and connections. He's specifically seeking stories that...
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A Word I Can't Seem to Understand: Non-Duality and Our Living World | Frankly 144
In this week's Frankly, Nate discusses his long-running attempt to understand non-duality, and why this concept has remained just out of his grasp despite years of conversations with teachers, thinkers, and podcast guests. He begins with a personal reflection on the possibility that his…
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Darkness Deficit Disorder: How Constant Stimulation Has Shaped our Consumption with Andrew Holecek
Most responses to civilizational crises focus outward – policy levers, energy systems, geopolitical actors, and material flows – with little focus on how the humans inside these systems might change and grow in parallel. At the same time, the minds that built this complex and fragile world are…
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A Guide to Staying Human (Part 3): Why Mindfulness Matters When the World Is Breaking Down
In this week's Frankly, Nate offers the third episode in his series on staying human, this time focused on presence. Nate shares a personal reflection on presence, and its importance in a reality where we are constantly living in anticipation of the future. What begins as a missed moment of…
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Learning in a Way that Actually Matters: Why Standardized Testing Contributed to the Metacrisis – and How to Fix It with Theo Dawson & Zak Stein | RR 25
Over the past century, standardized testing evolved from a wartime sorting tool into the defining feature of how we measure children's worth and potential, fundamentally altering the mental health and learning outcomes of an entire generation. Now, as global crises mount and our leaders struggle…
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A Guide to Staying Human (Part 2): Navigating Dread and Carrying the Weight of Tomorrow | Frankly 142
In this week's Frankly, Nate offers the second episode in his series on staying human, this time focused on dread. Opening with a personal reflection on his own relationship to dread, Nate describes how the chronic anticipation of collapse affects the human nervous system long before any single...
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A World On the Precipice: The Last Oil Tanker From the Strait of Hormuz has Arrived – Now What? with Art Berman
The last pre-war shipments of oil products from the Strait of Hormuz have arrived at their destinations as of early May, meaning the promise of an energy crisis as a result of the Iran war is fast approaching. Leading experts are now forecasting energy disruptions ranging from rationing to severe...
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Wide Boundary News: Sacrificing Wilderness, Oil Data Propaganda, and Feeding the Superorganism's Brain
This week's Frankly is another edition of Wide Boundary News, where Nate invites listeners to view the constant churn of headlines through a wider-boundary lens. He begins with the misleading framing of recent oil production statistics by the United States, which blurs distinctions between crude...
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Why Each American Lives Like a 40-Ton Whale: Power, Overshoot, and Climate with Tad Patzek
Many of us were taught that humans have been the dominant force shaping the modern world through sheer grit, ingenuity, and innovation. While true to an extent, there are also deep, embedded laws of energy that have both constrained and enabled human cleverness and our influence over our...
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A Perspective From Lebanon: Who Will We Be When Things Get Hard? | Frankly 140
In this week's Frankly, Nate steps away from analysis and reflects on a call that reframed his thinking. He shares a recent conversation with a close friend living in Lebanon, who amid ongoing daily violence and loss has been hosting displaced families and leading meditation practices in her...
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This War Changes Everything: Are We Ready for Energy Shockwaves From the Strait of Hormuz? with Rory Johnston
Over three-quarters of the global population has never lived through a major global energy crisis, such as those of the 1970s. In early 2026, that is about to change as the world faces the largest energy disruption in history, measured by the daily loss of oil output. This crisis won't be evenly...
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How to Think About the Future (Part 2): Four Variables Shaping the Coming Decades | Frankly 139
This week's Frankly is part two of the series How to Think About the Future. Today, Nate expands on the case for holding a distribution of possible futures rather than a single preferred one, and walks through a structured scenario-building exercise. He begins with the two-by-two grid that he has...
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Wisdom in a World in Crisis: The Counterintuitive Need to Slow Down and Find Spaciousness with Iain McGilchrist
For many of us, our instinctual response to rising conflict and instability might be to recede further into pragmatism as a way to survive. Yet, if our cultural values and ways of life are what got us here, rooted in narrow-boundary, cold, and logical thinking – then perhaps moments of turbulence...
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How to Think About the Future (Part 1): Changing the Future Starts with How You Think | Frankly 138
In this week's Frankly, Nate opens a new series called How to Think About the Future. He begins with some comments he's heard repeatedly on this platform: why cover nuclear, plastics, renewables, or climate when something else is the real issue? Nate observes that these questions come from people...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
The Great Simplification is a podcast that explores the systems science underpinning the human predicament. Through conversations with experts and leaders hosted by Dr. Nate Hagens, we explore topics spanning ecology, economics, energy, geopolitics, human behavior, and monetary/financial systems. Our goal is to provide a simple educational resource for the complex energetic, physical, and social constraints ahead, and to inspire people to play a role in our collective future. Ultimately, we aim to normalize these conversations and, in doing so, change the initial conditions of future events.
HOSTED BY
Nate Hagens
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens have?
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens currently has 432 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens about?
The Great Simplification is a podcast that explores the systems science underpinning the human predicament. Through conversations with experts and leaders hosted by Dr. Nate Hagens, we explore topics spanning ecology, economics, energy, geopolitics, human behavior, and monetary/financial systems....
How often does The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens release new episodes?
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens publishes regularly with 432 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens?
You can listen to The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens?
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens is created and hosted by Nate Hagens.
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