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.
417 episodes transcribedModern companies, markets, and institutions routinely behave in ways that would be diagnosed as pathological in a person: emotional detachment, strate...
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 an...
Current geopolitical events continue to expose just how complex and fragile our global economic system is. As such, The Great Simplification team is r...
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...
Most of us were taught to treat emotions like distress, numbness, and burnout as private failings to manage and move past, rather than normal response...
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...
For decades, modern civilization has treated efficiency as an unquestioned good: the leaner, faster, and more optimized anything is – from supply chai...
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 s...
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 ph...
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,...
A growing chorus of psychologists, contemplatives, and systems thinkers argue that most of us, and most of our institutions, are running an outdated p...
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 ex...
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 w...
Today, Nate scales his exploration of civilizational futures down to the future of a single human life and analyzes how the same patterns that shape e...
Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars flow through global philanthropy, yet only a small fraction reaches environmental, climate, and nature-rel...
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 h...
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 versio...
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 prepar...
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 fu...
Self-fulfilling prophecies; manifestations; the Oedipus Effect: Humanity has long had an intuition that the stories we tell ourselves the most are oft...
