The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens

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 a

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

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

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

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

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

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 beco

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 deca

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 ro

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, grand

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

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 epi

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 explo

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

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

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 r

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 informat

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 ev

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

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 spi