The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens

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 necessar...

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 pro...

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 bet...

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, Na...

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 – fro...

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. ...

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 t...

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, e...

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 glo...

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 event...

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 to...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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 predicam...

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 incre...

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 ver...

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 ma...

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. T...