Podcast · Tech & Science

The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens

by Nate Hagens · English · Tech & Science

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. Ou

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 59 min
Latest: 9 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

9 Oct 2026 · 59 min

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 energy that powers our lives, Nate traces how AI could amplify our economic growth imperative rather than help us escape it. He also touches on optimization – how solving solely for efficiency erodes the robustness and slack that allow our human systems to adapt to energy and material descent. The…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

7 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 15 min
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, the slack in our system is starting to disappear. How much longer can our hyper-connected economic system stagger along, and where is it already breaking? In this episode, Nate welcomes back petroleum geologist Art Berman for a follow-up to their May conversation, to take stock of what's changed…
30 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 32 min
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 normal within a decade. As the rate of warming continues to accelerate and public attention swings between alarm and fatigue, how can we clearly understand where the planet is actually headed and what it will take to adapt? In this episode, Nate is joined by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather to…
25 Sep 2026 · 15 min
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? Posing as this hypothetical world leader, Nate traces modern prosperity back to the extraordinary inheritance of ancient sunlight we discovered in the form of fossil fuels. Their extraction and depletion have made today's civilization possible, while simultaneously bringing forth dire consequences for…
23 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 7 min
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 happens if the U.S. strategy backfires against its leadership's intention, and what are the larger implications for the balance of geopolitical power? In this episode, Nate welcomes military historian and political scientist Robert Pape for an in-the-moment breakdown of the Iran war's trajectory.…
18 Sep 2026 · 33 min
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 decades of tracing the links between energy, ecology, and economy to argue that our response to the predicament is not necessarily to prevent the inevitable economic deflation, but to begin to shape how society moves through it. From this premise, Nate outlines four areas of intervention that he feels…
16 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 39 min
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 produced by our growth-at-all-costs system. This raises the question: What happens when a culture built on the certainty of progress has to confront its own uncertainty? In this episode, Nate is joined by philosopher and author Sarah Wilson for an exploration of the emotions that come from learning…
11 Sep 2026 · 19 min
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 civilization is moving toward a deflationary depression driven by resource constraints, ecological overshoot, and the widening gap between financial claims and material reality. He lays out a series of concrete biophysical signals that would challenge that diagnosis but also emphasizes that these numbers are…
9 Sep 2026 · 54 min
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 we knew that "safe" general superintelligence is actually a mathematical impossibility? In this episode, Nate is joined by Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, one of the earliest researchers in AI safety, to lay out why "controllable superintelligence" is a misguided goal, destined to lead to an entity smarter than…
4 Sep 2026 · 39 min
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 Superorganism through the imagery of seven "dials" that can be turned to change the incentives baked into the system – from those that might be present in a small-scale, collaborative community to those of the modern, complex society we live in today. Together, these dials help explain how a species…
2 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 38 min
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 belief that each of us is an isolated self, competing against other selves and against a nature made of indifferent, exploitable resources. Charles traces how this story co-evolved with technology, language, and scale, and how quantitative thinking both extends and distorts our understanding of complex…
28 Aug 2026 · 32 min
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 channel – Just Stop Oil!? – Nate examines how and why energy is currently so deeply embedded in the foundations of our modern economy. He touches on the ecological and energetic laws that apply to all life, including humans and our economies, as well as the way accessing a huge surplus of dense carbon…
26 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 41 min
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 organizations don't naturally hold these traits and behaviors themselves. So, why does exploitation keep winning at scale, even when most people are decent, cooperative, and want the same basic things? In this episode, Nate is joined by Greg Elliott, a systems theorist and author of the Psychopathic…
21 Aug 2026 · 18 min
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 abundant energy, specialized breeding, industrial food systems, and increasingly sophisticated veterinary care. With the global dog population nearing one billion, Nate addresses the uncomfortable question of what might happen to these beloved animals as the metacrisis continues to unfold.…
19 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 49 min
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 your hand to the house that you live in. In contrast to 'The Great Simplification', some might call the events of the last few hundred years a 'Great Complexification' in terms of relationships, governance, supply chains, and many other human activities. This conversation with economics journalist Ed…
14 Aug 2026 · 29 min
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 predicament. Each of these perspectives identifies a different source of the problem and offers a different path toward action, but what looks like an obvious solution from one perspective can look irrelevant, or even dangerous, from another. At the center of this episode, Nate explains why these…
12 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 40 min
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 what is 'normal.' One framework offers a potential path to living in harmony with all of the mind's distinct parts, breaking the defensive and counterproductive loops we tend to get stuck in. What sort of systemic ripples might become possible if we stop trying to smother uncomfortable parts of…
7 Aug 2026 · 30 min
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 continually shaped, rather than as a problem with a single solution – calling for a shift in mindset in order to navigate the uncertainty ahead. In complex systems such as ours, even seemingly modest differences in initial conditions can lead to wildly different outcomes down the road, meaning that…
5 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 25 min
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 brittle. What if the over-optimization baked into our economies, our agriculture, our institutions, and even our own bodies is at the root of our shared predicament, and how can nature's intelligence show us a different way? In this episode, Nate is joined by biologist and biophysicist Olivier Hamant…
31 Jul 2026 · 24 min
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 information hazard," Nate now outlines twelve distinct risks that emerge when honest insights about the more-than-human predicament are broadcast at scale. Drawing on philosopher Nick Bostrom's concept of an "information hazard," he explains why certain ideas become dangerous precisely because they…
29 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 28 min
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 nearly half of Russia's refining capacity knocked offline, that complacency is being tested in real time. The noise around increasing crude oil prices is loud, but this week's guest argues that the signal beneath it – the decline of refined products like diesel and jet fuel – is already sounding the…
24 Jul 2026 · 9 min
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 climate, AI, or energy depletion, the shared awareness of these issues created space for humor, joy, and the reemergence of a version of himself that had quietly faded into the background over the years. He observes that most rooms he finds himself in either run either too hot – where people are overly…
22 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 35 min
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 and policy responses absorb nearly all of our attention and resources, yet the maturity of the humans making the decisions may be the most needed and least prioritized intervention of all. Could ancient contemplative traditions, paired with modern psychology, offer a map for the kind of collective…
17 Jul 2026 · 32 min
Protect the Irreversible: What Matters Most in an Uncertain Future? | How to Think About the Future Pt 6, Frankly 151
This week's video is the sixth part in Nate's ongoing series, How to Think About the Future . Today, Nate turns from describing possible futures to exploring how we can make decisions when certainty is impossible. He introduces a framework for planning under uncertainty by distinguishing between two common mistakes – failing to respond to real risks, and taking decisive action based on incomplete understanding. Touching on examples like soil health, social trust, and children's developmental windows, Nate also advocates that the most important compass for navigating the future is learning to…
15 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 31 min
It's Not Just Hormuz: The Chokepoints Changing Global Shipping Forever with Sal Mercogliano
Roughly a fifth of the world's oil and more than a tenth of all global trade has been navigating a literal minefield, a wary insurance industry, and whipsawing geopolitics since late February of this year. But looking beyond the Strait of Hormuz closure itself, the same pattern threatens every critical chokepoint: passages open to all shipping for the past 80 years are becoming strategic assets within a geopolitical power struggle. If we continue this trend, what does a more fragmented, higher-cost, higher-risk maritime system mean for the norms and safety of the shipping industry, and what…
10 Jul 2026 · 29 min
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 developed throughout the series, he describes how the factors from material throughput to personal agency are underpinned by our own physical/mental health and our web of relationships. Nate emphasizes that we cannot build any stable future on top of cracking foundations, pointing toward the…
8 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 8 min
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 work rarely waits for large-scale funding to begin, but it does need resourcing to grow into replicable movements capable of propelling system-wide change. What would it take to build financial infrastructure that actually gets capital to the people already doing the work of healing land and…
2 Jul 2026 · 21 min
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 lenses of energy, ecology, history, and culture. Nate walks through the extraordinary inheritance of fossil fuels that simultaneously shaped the American story while masking the real foundations of prosperity. He points out that even the symbols of this holiday – from backyard barbecues to fireworks…
26 Jun 2026 · 33 min
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 – composites that emerge from various combinations of economic conditions, geopolitical scenarios, power structures, and Earth systems stability. The resulting worlds are not meant to serve as a prediction, but as a set of thought experiments designed to stretch our imagination and to sharpen our…
24 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 25 min
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, scientists and citizens alike are questioning what our new normal will look like under accelerated global heating. From climate basics to unfolding atmospheric research, what do we know about the trajectory our climate is currently on, and what gaps of knowledge still need to be filled? In this episode,…

About The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens

The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens is a English tech & science podcast from Nate Hagens. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Nate Hagens
Language: English
Category: Tech & Science
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 59 min
Latest episode: 9 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1604218333
Rights: Nate Hagens, 2025

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