The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Best of TGS: What Would You Do With a Magic Wand?

Episode Date: December 22, 2024

This year on The Great Simplification, we heard from 54 guests, 18 Reality Roundtable panelists, and Nate shared his thoughts across 31 Frankly episodes. But even after releasing 300+ hours of conversations and reflections since this show began, we are only just beginning to connect all the moving parts that make up The Human Predicament. As 2025 approaches, we invite you to reflect on this compilation of answers to a question that Nate asks every guest: "If you could wave a magic wand – and there was no personal recourse to your decision, what is one thing you would do to improve human and planetary futures?"  While some of these answers would truly take magic to achieve, and others involve actions that we have the power to enact on the individual level and within the communities around us right now, we hope you feel motivated and inspired by the magical thinking of these experts to wave a wand wherever you find yourself in the unfolding story of The Great Simplification. Thank you so much for your continuing support, and for caring so deeply about the topics of this show. So, what would you do with a magic wand?   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

Greetings and happy holidays and winter solstice. We have had another incredible year on this podcast filled with fantastic humans as guests who've provided deep insights to our world on the human predicament and the road ahead. As you all know, every episode, I ask my guest this question. If you could wave a magic wand and there was no personal recourse to your decision, what is one thing that you would do to improve human? and planetary futures. So as 2024 comes to an end, I thought it would be nice to compile and share a highlight reel of some of our guests' answers to this question. I hope you find this meaningful and inspiring. And I invite you to share what you would do if you had a magic wand in the comments.

A bit of housekeeping as Christmas and New Year's this year fall on Wednesdays, there will be no episodes. out on those weeks. Also to give my wonderful staff a break. So our next full episode will be with John Verveke on the meaning crisis on January 8th, one of my best conversations of the year. And there's many other wonderful ones on deck after that. Lastly, I want to thank all of you, the community of the great simplification, this podcast, this channel.

I hope you've learned as much from this journey. our guests as I have. If you would like to support ongoing work in this space, in this channel for the coming year, please head to the great simplification.com to make a tax deductible donation. The link to donate can also be found in the show description for this episode. Thank you. Happy holidays onwards and see you next year. I would ordain with my magic wand that there should be. be no money in politics, that there should be no corruption whatsoever. Today in the United States, we have institutionalized corruption. No politician can arrive at any top to be a senator or

president or whatever without being corrupt. They're all corrupt, not because of personal flaws, but it's built into the system. And to get rid of this institutional corruption, get money out of politics, that would be my wish. The world we live in right now has an extinction rate that's probably a thousand times higher than it's ever been, or at least the average, or maybe even in order to magnitude more. And sometimes I think the role of a conservation biologist is similar to being a doctor. You want a patient to have a healthy, long life, good quality of life, but you also know that at some point it's going to die.

We have caused an incredibly high unnatural extinction rate right now. So my goal is getting it back to zero human-caused extinction. But I think the real goal is going to be humans decide, like they did with whales, that this really matters. We're going to put our time, effort into this. The wand would be, well, people are ready there, and now let's discuss how we get there. I would like to give people the gift which I feel has been given to me.

To have the big picture. to have this understanding of how it all began, how it's evolved, and how we fit in, culminating, and here's the key point, culminating in an understanding of human nature, because I think we make a mystery out of human nature. We should be teaching young people where they came from and why they are the way they are and how things are going to work out for them in the future. just make it a mystery. If I could induce one thing, it would be that like every human gets to have some sort of like God oneness with the universe experience. You know, hopefully at some point

everybody's lives, whether it's, you know, caused by the death of a loved one or the birth of a baby or they have some moment and they just like recognize their connection. We're just, you know, they're just like part of this fabric. And so if I could like wave my wand, it would be like everybody sort of simultaneously sheds whatever illusions that they're in and just like sees their life and themselves and, you know, creation for what it is.

I would affect a generational shift in the leadership of countries, continents, multilateral institutions, so we can have a generation whose interests are not yesterdays, but are in the now and the future. I care about the young women whose incredible energy, whose pride in their femininity, I would love to see them. lead together with my sons and grandsons all over the world. Because I know, and I watch them in action, when they lead, good things happen. I would find a way through education to help people and enable people to fall in love with their places. I would have everybody take that course.

that one course of how life works. So I would reconnect people with the natural world. And I would increase their respect through a course like that. Everyone would take that course. There would be a literacy requirement that we used to get, when we lived in our watersheds for long periods of time, and our elders would tell us how our place worked, I think I would find a way to recreate that

and to create that kind of curiosity. that would allow that to naturally start to happen again. I think the myth of separation is at the base of this, and the myth of separation allows us to believe in neoclassical economics. And neoclassical economics and the finance algorithm that it spawned is very much the root cause of the polycrisis. I would wave my magic wand and cause people to wake up to the regenerative paradigm. That's why I'm working on it.

If I thought there's something better I could do with my time, I'd work on that. Well, so I don't know if this is allowed in the thought experiment. I love the thought experiment, but it would be for everybody to have three communities that they knew well. Like where they knew the personalities, they sort of had enough, like, experience, like, meeting once a week or just being together to where they could function as a community handling challenges and crises. Because I feel like that would be the infrastructure upon which a new economy could be built. Why three and not one? So there is risk with communities, and sometimes you need to take risks to speak up and say things that will disrupt the power balance of the community or that will be outside of what this community is normally used to hearing. And when you have multiple communities like that, it lowers the risk.

It's sort of like, okay, if I take this risk in this community, I'm not risking my whole social structure. I'm risking a big part of my social structure, but I think it'll make people more willing to take those risks. So I do think it needs to be multiple. There's a few different things. But if there's one thing, it would probably be that everyone has a regular meditation and or yoga practice,

that if everyone had a moment of the day where they were grounding themselves and trying to find their better nature and remembering they have a body and remembering their mortal and how precious it is to be alive. If we could have each of us have a moment, half an hour to an hour of that every day, I can't help but think that would bode well for humanity as a whole. I do think there'll come a time when we look at the animal industry as a kind of abomination.

And I can imagine a world that was, if not vegan, and at least more vegetarian, perhaps with the occasional ritual meal that was some kind of important. human cultural experience, but not aisles in the supermarket, full of dead flesh. I feel there is something deeply diluted and disturbed about that. If we didn't have that violence baked into our daily life, and we weren't in flight from it, we weren't in denial about our complicity in that violence every day, I think that would also augur well for our spirits, our relationships, and our relationship to the natural world. I would have fully safe food packaging and food contact materials.

So that means materials that do not contain known hazardous chemicals and that do not contain untested chemicals because for untested chemicals by logic, you can't say if they're harmful or not, you don't know. So if you take a precautionary approach to life, which I do, you would have to assume they're hazardous. That's a bit boring. Maybe a more creative answer would be,

I would make everyone go work in a field or in a garden at least one or two days a year to produce their own food. Just to get in contact with nature again and to have an appreciation of how hard it is to produce food, but also how beautiful it is than to eat your own food. I would wave a magic wand and have the global population become one billion. I like to say that we live at such a finely tuned part of the race of our lives that if you imagine a world where we have the population of 1900

and the technology of today, we have no problem. We've made it. If we had the technology of 1900 and the population of today, we're toast. We have no hope. The whole of this race has played out in the 100-year gap between population growth and technology. It's quite remarkable. And therefore, finding yourself at $1 billion tomorrow, I think we have enough time and resources and talent to muddle our way through. The one thing I would attempt to do is to create a new constitution for the world based on the concept of avoidance of overshoot. Because we have to understand that we're on a finite planet whose capacity is actually shrinking because of our overwhelming predisposition to, deplete. How can we live on this earth in ways that sustain and support the rest of the systems

that support us? We need to develop policies that increase the distribution of natural wealth among the human species. We need to do that while reducing our overall consumption by at least 45 or 50 percent, that would be 75 or 80 percent in rich countries. If we want to have a reasonable a standard living for, say, somewhere around one to two billion people on a planet that could exist in perpetuity, at least for the next couple of billion years. We won't be around for all of that, but let's keep it going. One, of course, would be if I could wave a magic wand and rebalance the masculine and the feminine in everybody and our culture and our institutions, I would do that right away. And the other one is, I would shift our focus from count.

things and quantifying to mapping relationship. I also remember my father saying the measure of a person's life is really how many people you've touched and how many people you've affected and helped move towards love. And that feels true to me. So that magic wand would be to create a focus on creating connective tissue and learning how to relate across difference and dance with apparent contradictions. If you could wave a magic wand and there's no personal recourse to you. We are. We're waving a magical want. Right now, you and I are. Yeah, this is it. This is the magic. when you share, when you encourage, when you enlighten, when you listen and you learn, and it goes out in a magical way into the universe.

I don't understand all of these things that's going on right now, but I know you and I are connected on a very deep level, and I know that we are sharing that out there. I don't know how and I don't know who. but I'm waving a magic wand right now. Do you feel it?