The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Frankly Re: Franklys | Frankly #47

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

Recorded October 27 2023   Description   In this forty-seventh Frankly, Nate reflects on…..Franklys. As real time global events move faster and faster, they alter the timing (and content!) of planned Frankly reflections on aspects of our global discourse. In light of this, Nate offers a raw take on events in Israel (and financial markets) and a growing list of upcoming topics relevant to the unfolding human predicament. The purpose of these Franklys is not to provide real time intel or analysis but is instead to continually provide a systems lens to inform the scout team of humans who seek an integrated world view to inform their actions.  Our tendencies to focus on single issues - the war in Israel, the geo-political impacts of the Russia/Ukraine war, the growing financial crisis and debt, global heating - challenges our ability to build a broader awareness of how these pieces fit together and shine light on the viable  paths we can still take to the future.  Is it possible to focus less on productivity and more on awareness and reflection?  Can we effectively change the consciousness of those in power? How can we attempt to navigate the ever-shorter road to the Great Simplification?   For Show Notes and More: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/47-frankly-re-franklys   To Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/ZJbKVu7vbLk

Greetings. May we live in interesting times. World events are occurring faster than my ability to opine on them. Things are very busy. This podcast is growing. Relationships. I'm about to be hiring, Chief of Staff, some communications help. I have a lot to say about the world. And I really today just wanted to do a brief update, very brief on what's going on in the world, as well as the purpose of these frankly reflections and what I have planned for the near future. And I have no outline here. This is just a complete off-the-cuff riff Friday afternoon, October 27th. And hopefully my team can get this out later today or tomorrow.

Israel situation. To be blunt, the purpose of this podcast is never going to be to give real-time intel and analysis on what's going on in the world to make better investment decisions or advise people on portfolios. The entire purpose of this podcast and this work is to inform. humans around the world for the broader systemic picture of what's coming. Now, of course, real world events can change what the distribution looks like. So in Israel, my take, they don't have the manpower to do a full ground invasion of Gaza and protect their northern border. They are probably going to continue, unfortunately, pushing

the citizens of Gaza towards Egypt and Jordan will probably continue to be a growing humanitarian disaster. The United States is moving a significant amount of our defensive military capacity to the region. This morning there were a drone, an airplane attacks in Syria. We announced we're putting troops in Syria, logistic troops, the real troops would probably be much more than that, in an attempt to cut off supply of military equipment from Iran to Hezbollah in the north. So this all has the earmarks of a broader unfolding conflict in the Middle East with no easy. outcomes, as I mentioned last week. It does seem, especially with new House Speaker Johnson being elected yesterday, that Ukraine may be thrown under the bus with military aid and support because

he's going to separate funding for Israel and funding for Ukraine. And this puts a very real risk of the desperate situation in Ukraine for them to do something to call attention back to that arena. So there are all these things that are unfolding. And I'm not an expert on that other than to say a lot of energies in the Middle East and a lot of the world is watching the United States. And this is, you know, the first or the second or third of many battles that are. are defining the transition from the unipolar to a multipolar world order. Simultaneous with this and not completely unrelated is a growing financial crisis in the United States.

We have added a trillion dollars of debt in the last three months and the next trillion will happen even faster because of social programs, because continuing the guarantees that were made in prior years, because we're adding all this military. support to the rest of the world. What's happening is historically interest rates were of U.S. treasuries, which all the other interest rates are pegged off of, have been a representation of how strong the economy is and people's inflation expectations. That is still the case, but increasingly there is the who will buy this stuff? And what are the risks of buying in a biophysically constrained world? Would I want to hold U.S. Treasuries or gold or oil or Bitcoin or land? And

around the world, people are starting to ask that question. So as the interest rates approach much higher levels, like 5% on the 10 year note, what ends up happening, many things, but briefly, lots of regional banks especially have huge mark-to-market losses on their fixed income investments that they bought when interest rates were one or two or three percent, and now they're 5 percent. So there is a solvency issue looming in the banking system. Additionally, the higher interest rates bleed into mortgage and car payments, house payments, things like that, that people have to pay 8% or something like that when our cultural expectations were in a much lower interest rate environment.

I'll see if Lizzie can find the reference for this, but approximately 50% of U.S. citizens can't afford a car payment right now. So forget about the whole electric car argument. People can't afford cars, period. And part of that is due to interest rates. By the way, higher interest rates will also crimp the scaling of renewable. energy because interest is one of the largest expenses of renewable energy. So this is all kind of happening together.

And I don't want to give a play by play on this other than to say that the Great Simplification runway is getting shorter. So the reason I wanted to do this, frankly, today is to reflect on why I'm doing these Franklies and what I want to say. So what is the purpose of my work, the organization, the Institute for the Study of Energy in our future, our growing organization work, our networks, the podcast, the frankly. I think broadly it is to build broader awareness to the scout team of humans. That's you. Watching this, seeking out the signal to noise, wanting to to play a role in their own lives in their community in the broader world.

The second purpose, not so much the podcast, but with our work, is to change the consciousness of those in power because those in power have the optionality to make outsized choices on our institutions, our goals, our policies, and really outsized movements. That's the goal of my work to change the initial conditions of the things coming our way. I thought I would instead of have one of these fleshed out because I've been so busy with other things this week. And I'm ashamed to admit that after two weeks ago is frankly about taking a knee and doing my own tasks, I have someone delivering firewood to the house this afternoon. I wasn't able to find time to do it myself. It's a mild insult to my manhood,

but it's a greater insight, insult, demerit to my trying to live more holistically on the land and do things at a human scale pace. Well, I'm too freaking busy, so I'm buying firewood. Without further ado, I would like to give a 30-second each overview of some of the Franklies I plan to do between now and the end of the year. The first one mentioned last week, I'm going to title Artificial Intelligence. and real ecology. And in that, I'm going to steal man the argument from those who are advocating that AI can solve our climate problems and many other problems and boost productivity in the world. But compare that to real ecology and what the rules are of nature and how artificial intelligence

at best will be intelligent but not wise. And I'm going to expand on that a little bit. I also want to talk about something like the flow chart of the future and show how all these things, interest rates, governance, social inequality, poverty, nuclear power, debt. All these things are relevant to our future, but certain things are more important and certain things shout louder to our brains. And it turns out that the things that are probably most important, the biosphere the oceans, biodiversity, are going to be least important in the political and individual responses.

So I'm going to do a choreography of how these different topics relate. Next up, in rough order, I don't know yet. I would like to offer a framework for philanthropy, given the great simplification overview that we're unpacking on this site, What are seven or eight categories that philanthropists around the world are missing, given the systemic overview? And what are two or three ideas in each of those categories? And I think I also, though I don't have this planned, do a similar thing for governance, for communities, and for individuals. Another, frankly, I have planned title Renewable Energy, right answer to the wrong question and give a very detailed overview of what renewable energy can and can't do. And the punchline is that I am pro-renewable energy. Eventually, humans are going to use predominantly renewable energy.

But it's the size and the scale and the complexity of what that looks like is very deep. different than most of the pro-renewable crowd is portraying. A related, frankly, I would like to do is what if solar panels were free? And the punchline is that not much would change and especially with regard to our environmental situation, it would probably make climate change and plastics and biodiversity and all that worse. You'll have to stay tuned for that. Another thing that I'd like to talk about is the seven lenses with which we view the future. And we start from the individual emotional response that we experience every day all the way through economic and cultural all the way to universal, which is the pale blue dot perspective of this blue green earth that we live on.

I have some thoughts there. Another, frankly, that's long overdue is what about nuclear power? AI and nuclear, nuclear fusion. What role does nuclear power play in a energy-constrained future? What does this mean for the environment for safety? I'm working up some thoughts on that. Another that I should probably do sooner or later is the relationship between debt and oil. And specifically, we are raising our debt.

at almost a billion dollars an hour in the United States. And we're also drawing down the strategic petroleum reserve. And the relationship between those two is never connected. And the amount of debt that we have, which is now $34 trillion, is more oil probably than is left extractable in the earth. So a long time theme here is that money is a claim on energy and debt is a claim on future energy. And this will not end well, but I want to explain the relationship between those two. I also want to talk about something I'm learning from my coach, which is a behavioral stack of modern humans. We have our cells and our organs. We have our enteric or our digestive system. We have our reptilian fighter flight system, our limbic system. And on top of all that is our cognitive system where we look

facts and charts and data. But that little tiny piece on top, we think controls all of it, and that is not true. It's more like a pyramid shape. And if you don't have a vertical stack of alignment between these things, your enteric system, your parasympathetic, sympathetic, your limbic system is satisfied and not dissatisfied, the cognitive thing ends up being the tail wagging the dog. And I have personal insights in this. And I will never be anyone's guru. I'm an analyst that's trying to describe the systemic overview. But as I've said previously, I'm not only an analyst, but I'm a client. And so I'm learning about this stuff as well. And related to that, and I'll stop this non-exhaustive list of ideas I'd have to discuss,

is something that my coach has advised me to do, which I'm doing kind of half ass because I'm so busy is the concept of becoming a less focused on productivity and more aware, a shifting from focus to awareness. And I'm trying to do these things called silent Saturdays where I don't look at email, I don't look at social media, I don't make phone calls on Saturdays. And I should take that time to reflect on what I learned. and slow down and get back to human scale. Of course, given the demands of this job, especially when I'm talking to people in government

and people that have deadlines, I can't do that per se yet, although I aspire to. But I have had these timers set so that every hour on Saturday, I check for five minutes on things that I might need to do and then nothing else for the next hour. I have been able to manage that. But I think at the core of everything we face is humans in our culture that are watching this podcast, we can't not have trauma from what we're experiencing in this culture. And we suppress a lot of it. And so I think at the end of the day, the more humans we have that are healed,

and not riding the one-legged stool of dopamine, but have a more balanced portfolio of serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins, and have a quiver of arrows of activities that we can get these evolutionary neurotransmitters without being hijacked by networked tribalism and everything that calls the siren song of our immediate attention, the better off will be to meet the future halfway. So with that, I'm going to do some chores outside and shut down for the day and hopefully my team can get this out soon. These are my thoughts. I have a lot more to share. I'm on to use Douglas Rushkoff's term team human and more to say soon. Be well, everyone.