The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Power vs Life: Towards Wide Boundary Sovereignty | Frankly 82

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

(Recorded January 20th, 2025) We are alive at a critical juncture for human civilization, and the biosphere, where the pursuit and accumulation of power - accelerated by technology and AI - increasingly threatens the support systems of the diversity and majesty of complex life on Earth. These high stakes of our times require a radical reimagination and commitment to who we are capable of becoming as homo sapiens: a shift from narrow to wide-boundary sovereignty, moving beyond individual survival strategies and towards collective wisdom and restraint.  In this Frankly, Nate outlines nine aspirational categories for empowering more individuals towards mature and resilient development in service of life. From intellectual to ecological to psycho-spiritual, these act as signposts to help guide us towards forming interconnected islands of coherence in the face of an uncertain future.  What does it mean to be authentically sovereign in an interconnected world? How can we develop personal and collective resilience? And what changes can you make in your own life to help better steer humanity through the turbulence of our times?   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. Last night I recorded a long and fire hose like, frankly. It was so long that in the end, I forgot to articulate my main intended conclusion that I wanted to get across. So I'm going to say that now, which will kind of give you a destination in mind as we go through this 40 minute, frankly, where I lay out various categories and subcategories for empowering more individuals, presumably you, the viewers of this platform, towards mature and resilient development in service of life. This is meant to specifically contrast the concept of the sovereign individual, which is in service of increasing power and wealth accumulation, narrow boundary versus wide boundary. From the evolutionary perspective of multi-level selection, we are now at a place that being aware of the stakes of our times and all the things that we talk about on this podcast, the concept of the sovereign individual makes no sense. It is an oxymoron. The stakes of our

time demand that we embrace our interconnected nature and move beyond the pursuit of individual sovereignty for sovereignty's sake into being sovereign as homo sapiens, but collectively as islands of coherence together in service of life. So the following list of nine categories with three subcategories each is my first pass at mapping what this might look like, at least directionally. Plus, Frank makes a cameo. Here we go. Happy New Year. Happy 2025.

That's just one of those things that we say that we've gotten used to saying, but there's a big old asterisk saying, happy new year. Frank is doing well, though he's living the great simplification with duct tape on his little winter outfit. It is negative 15 Fahrenheit as I record this. I have a lot to say today. This is maybe more of a presentation than frankly. And I have many more to come in the new year. There's a lot going on in the world. I think as the months and now years go by, it's becoming central point of this podcast that we are alive at a time when there is a battle between power and between life. And power historically with surplus from grains, then fossil fuels, then paper money, then digital money, now artificial intelligence and military power.

it's all going much faster, much larger, and life. Human life, but also biological, ecological, caring capacity is being diminished in its wake. This is something that we're witnessing. We're a part of it. We're observing it. There was a book, why don't you get down, written about 25 years ago, called the sovereign individual, which anticipated, I think the author was William Rees, Mogg, and someone else. It anticipated that 25 years from then, which is today, that cyber and crypto

and different technologies would allow human individuals to transcend the poorest borders of nation states and become more powerful than governments. There's even a website today called the sovereign man, which has a checklist on how human individuals can amass such wealth and power. So what I'd like to talk about today is given some people are pursuing that path, given that our society is kind of approaching late stage clown world in some of the things we see happening, what's the barbell to that? What's the antidote for a, you? human being, being alive today, knowing what we know about ecological overshoot, the biophysical macroeconomic picture, the stakes of not only our generation and our species,

but future generations and species on this one blue-green earth that we share. So I've come up with a list of categories and sub-categories that's, that are aspirational. I certainly, you know, I'm trying to understand and follow these things myself. They're certainly not lines in the sand. They're just aspirational. But what are the categories of things that we can and might be able to do in counter to the sovereign individual? If you look at prior societies that succeeded in imbueing wisdom into their cultures, a common theme was restraint. And we don't have much restraint in our current society. So, long intro, somewhat less long, because I wanted you all to see Frank at the beginning of the year.

What are the categories that aspirational categories? the aspirational categories on the other side, the wide boundary side of a sovereign individual. So the first category is intellectual. And that's pretty much been my work for the last 20 years and the early years of this podcast. The three subcategories are, of course, foundational reality. Not all intellectual pursuits are equally relevant. We have biophysical macroeconomics, human brain and behavior. Obviously, the planet is full of 8 billion humans, individual and aggregate behavior, and

ecology in Earth systems. There's lots of topics that are part of the pyramid of how our human ecosystem works. Those three things are pretty foundational. Next is systems and the synthesis of systems. Learning to think in terms of connections instead of things and a synthesis instead of an analysis and emergence instead of silos, how the parts and the processes fit together is a central way of intellectually processing our situation. And lastly, is a softened gaze.

This advice was given to me by my therapist and my coaches, which is a visual thing to look at someone or something on the horizon, and kind of soften your gaze, which allows things in the periphery to come in and you're just a little bit more grounded. With respect to intellectual capacity, it means that we have to remain curious and not certain and have some humility and look at the world and all the things we learn as part of a probability distribution and be tolerant of other viewpoints and try to understand them. So a softened gaze. Those are the intellectual subcategories.

Then physiological. I did a frankly a year ago that showed the human evolutionary stack, which is our cognition in our neocortex. And remember that our brains were built upward and forward over time from prehomelids and pre-hominids and single-celled organisms ultimately. We have our cognition, our limbic system, our reptilian system, our interic system, organ cells in our microbiome. But these things aren't just equally important.

The further down you go, the larger impact it has on our behaviors. And our physiological fighter flight system is incredibly active and needs to be supported. And many of us that follow this podcast and the material things going on in the world with currencies and AI and oil and geopolitics, we see. spend a lot of time in our brains. So physiologically, I think it's very important to nourish ourselves. We have to prioritize it. This means nutrition, which is increasingly difficult with the food deserts in our world full of endocrine disrupting chemicals, et cetera, exercise, sleep, breathing, and the aspect of breathing we take for granted is, you know, the body is the

storehouse of the unconscious mind. And so we're holding a lot of the stress and other things while we're thinking all these thoughts. And breathing and all these things can take us into a more regulated nervous system, which brings me to my second point, which is safety and connection. Safety and connection are the what's called the ventral vagal state, the vagal nerve and the vagal system also went upward and forward in our evolutionary past. And the dorsal vagal, which is the vagal nerve going down our spine in the back, was the foundation of the fight, flight, or freeze. But it was the freeze. It was the shut down. When we had too much fear, we would just shut down and not move like a possum. And so it's not a pyramid per se, but from the freeze,

flight, fight, on the top of the pyramid is safety. And it's not just that our parasympathetic nervous systems are healthy and accessible, but it's not just safety. It's also connection. And this has to do with the fact that we're social primates. So we have to spend more time in our parasympathetic nervous system in balance with our sympathetic nervous system. And so safety and connection is is something we need to prioritize. I'm still learning this. And I think it's incredibly relevant. To be frank, I'm recording this an hour after my cranial sacral therapist left here.

And usually, frankly, I've done quite a few of my recent Franklys after she leaves. I started working with her a year ago. I'm going to digress. This may be a long, frankly. And she's like, I've watched some of your franklies. and I really love the content and I really love your heart and your authenticity, but in some of them I can tell that your nervous system is dysregulated. I'm like, what do you mean?

She's like, I hear the facts. I hear your honesty and your earnestness, but you can tell that you're somewhere between flight and shut down. Either you're overwhelmed or you have too much anxiety. Now, of course, I do, as many of you do, paying attention to what's happening in the world. So I've taken the step to get help with that and it is helping and it makes me realize that we need lots more. We need some people to understand a little bit about the metacrisis and roll up our sleeves and care about it a little bit. But then we need to find community and

balance our nervous systems, get into the safety and social connection space and then go back and work on the deep aspects of the metacrisis. Fax alone, I can. going to cut it. The third category under physiology is spaciousness. Another coach of mine gave a really good analogy that all of us have this cultural overlay, which is a hurricane in our minds, but that each of us has an inner core of how we really are. I was just at a party last week with a lot of people who are fans of the Great Simplification. It was organized by some friends mine. And something amazing happened the next day. I didn't check my phone until three in the morning, three in the afternoon. And that's because the community and the space and the love and

the, you know, kind of all being on the same team shouted louder to me than my phone. And so my friend said that that's how we really are. That's who we really are and who we really are and who We were in ancestral times. It's just the hurricane of social media and advertising and politics and all the things spin up in our minds. And it's harder for us to find this inner eye. And so we need as agents who are aware of this during these times to find that inner eye, partially to combat the eye of Soron and to find a protection.

perspective space. So ultimately what I mean by spaciousness is not busy, busy, busy all the time, but carving out an inner core of time to feed your inner core, your physiology, and instead of being productive and busy all the time. Next category, psychological. Of course, I'm very interested in this and on the behavioral stack, the limbic system is our mammalian brain and it's either satisfied or dissatisfied. And there's lots of things in our culture today that lead us to dissatisfaction. And we face every day a smorgasbord of supernormal stimuli. So the category, the first subcategories, ancestral intimacy. We go through our lives in a novel environment trying to get the same neurotransmitters and hormone endocrine cascades as our

successful ancestors in a wildly different environment. But we often get the chemicals like pornography or stock options or shopping or social media likes. We get the chemicals without actually doing the work. We don't have the tenderness and the intimacy and the time and the social glue that our ancestors had getting the same neurotransmitters. So I think there's something to be said for slow human nature interactions every day. And this feeds back on our nervous system and the ventral vagal that I mentioned earlier. And it's very important to understand our ancestral, imagine our ancestral environment and try to get those same things in a healthy as opposed to unhealthy way. Zones of respite.

Again, I'm just kind of wearing my heart and my life on my sleeve here because I have a very difficult job as much as I love what I do. It's quite stressful because this isn't a single issue podcast. So I'm talking about climate change, biodiversity, debt, geopolitics, energy depletion, psychology, all the things. And so there are lots of people who are disagreeing with everything I say. So I've been very busy and one of the things I've learned is we have to have zones of respite where your work and your stress and your anxiety and the things that are charging you and making you anxious are out of bounds.

So for me this means time with my ducks or my chickens or my dogs or in nature or just playing New York Times Spelling Bee or listening. to music that is absolutely walled off from my work. And we need these zones of respite that are healing centers for our minds. Last subcategory is metacognition or thinking about how we think. I think in the past I've made the little reference point that I have a little Nate on my shoulder who is a primatologist and who will go into a big box. store or see an advertisement on TV and recognize and tell my big Nate, that's an actor being paid by a company to sell you something that you don't want or need or watching the optimal foraging theory dynamic unfold in a Walmart or something like that, to take a little

step, a little space between who you are in our modern culture and observe the situation as a primatologist is a little boost to our wide boundary sovereign individual. The next category is spiritual. I think we need more awe in our lives. And I get awe from things in nature. When I see a new bird or a lizard or an animal, last week we had a staff and board retreat, looking at how the new administration and AI acceleration is going to change our work. And I was staying in my board member's house and I walked out to take a hike.

And lo and behold, there was a deer staring at me. And I stood there for over a minute talking to it. And we just had a little connection. And that was in the midst of a very busy work week. I had a period of awe. I think it was a piebalt deer because of the whiteness and the color and everything. But we need to find those moments of awe. I get them in nature.

You may get them in different ways. A building on that is the connectedness, which is related to awe, but it's also related to spirituality. We're all stardust as a product of four billion years of life evolving on this planet. We're related to everything. all other humans but all other species. And there is maybe something cosmically going on where we're all holons. Within the cells of our body, there are other smaller bits. The cells are part of the organs.

The organs are part of me. I am part of a community. The community is part of a nation. The nation is part of a world. The world is part of a universe. We are hollons in both directions. We're connected to everything. There's a spiritual content.

connotation to that. And then beyond that is the unknown. We can science as much as we can about the chemistry, the physics, the ontology, the archaeology that brought us to this moment. But science will never really only asymptotically get to the major questions of why we're here, how we got here and what it's all about. And so a little error bound on the certainty of spirituality, I think, is necessary. Next category is economic. Some of you might just say everything I just said before is irrelevant. Let's just start with economic and go from there.

And that might be true for most humans. but what I'm trying to pass the baton or collectively pass the baton together, whatever that metaphor would be, is those of us who are aware of these things have to step up, wake up, play a role, mature, and then eventually find the others. And so it's being aware of the biophysical macroeconomic situation of our world and the stakes necessitates taking the harder path. And the harder path is doing some of these things,

which are difficult that cause some restraint, that cause you to give up some of the unexpected reward, convenience and comfort of our modern life in order to play a role in something larger. So with that, on the economic side, of course, the title of this podcast is the great simplification, we've just had several centuries of complexification and we're kind of on fumes in the money,

energy nexus that might get a meth boost from AI still to be determined. But there's enormous complexity risk in the world, the six continent supply chain and just in time inventories and pharmaceuticals being imported from China and Japan, I mean, India, etc. So in your own life, a pre-simplification is called, for to be more resilient. We don't need giant houses with the average American has 68 devices plugged in all the time.

A lot of that is complexity that we did because we could. It's not necessary. And yes, the tortoise will outcompete the hair. The tortoise will be outcompeted by the hair in the near term. So simplifying first actually has consequences if you compare yourself to others, but it will make you more resilient for a simpler future. Second category is slow. By slow, I mean, our economic system is built to turn time and effort with materials and energy into money. And then that money is spent on other things. And so we end up having time-saving devices that

save us a lot of time relative to our parents and grandparents and ancestors. And then we spend that time playing Candy Crush or doing Facebook likes or something like that. We need to slow down and get more an inhuman time scale and value our time and do with our time what really matters to us or what really brings us joy and comfort. So Planting Potatoes is probably a more healthy pastime then Candy Crush. The next subcategory, other than slow, is fast. And I don't mean go fast. I mean fast in the same way as intermittent fasting has become recognized as a thing

where you eat eight hours a day and you don't eat 16 hours a day. But you can extend that beyond food to shopping or consumption or traveling where we just voluntarily issue some of the conspicuous consumption habits that our modern culture advocates. The next category, social. And I'll start with something that I'm going to term barbell empathy. Given the trajectory of the world, I do not think we're going to have justice, fairness, and equality the way that many people are hoping and striving for. We should still strive for them. They're unlikely to happen.

But what we can have is full attention, empathy in the moment. If you run into someone struggling, you give them your full attention at the moment. I always, when I encounter a homeless person, I was in San Francisco recently. And I try to look the person in the eye out of respect just briefly. I often give them a few dollars or whatever, but that metaphorically, we're going to encounter things like that five or ten times a day in coming years and decades. So full attention, full empathy in the moment. But the barbell aspect of it is we need to have some sort of a force field around us that

we experience, this is a moment of suffering. Please help this person be kind and have empathy. maybe help them in the moment, but let it pass through me. I have larger tasks. And if we try to have full fairness, justice and empathy in every moment, we're going to move so slow and be so unproductive that sparrows could feed on us. This is a hard thing to say, but I'm trying to outline the things that are aspirational and real for the future that faces us for the people that want to play a role in that future. The second subcategory in social is equanimity.

And by this, I mean a place of neutrality, much like a calm pool or a Zen garden, that we have that in social interactions. I've talked about in this podcast the difference between pre-tragic, which is not being aware of the metacrisis, tragic, which is like, oh my God, this is all happening while I'm alive, this is really sucky. And post-tragic, which is the ability to hold it, but also be mature and balanced and process it in a post-tragic way. Also, it's blameless.

We really like to blame outgroups as an evolved social primate. And certainly some people and groups are more to blame than others. But we're part of an energy-hungry social, metabolic, superorganism and the rules and laws that were evolved over the last 50 years are additive and it's the structure, it's the system, it's the incentives and people are playing by those rules. So check that, the blame a little bit. And lastly, we just should come from an inner core of decency where you have this force field that I mentioned on barbell empathy, but that force field goes around just naturally being good and

decent as the default behavior when we interact with others. The dining car. I've talked about this before, and I think it's really central, so I'm repeating it. We are on a train, a runaway train, where governments and the markets are shoveling fuel into the engine. That is difficult to change, to change the engine and the conductor. But, we can change is meet others in the dining car. And while we're riding on this train, Ashley Hodgson on her podcast suggested for diversification reasons to have three different social groups. The way I like to frame it is meet people in the dining car, have a very small group of people that you are intensely close with because that is one of the biggest riches

of being a human is intense, close social relationships. But in my world, In my life, I have three groups. I have one group that is just intellectual systems ecologists. We live all over the world and we share intellectual ideas with. Another is people that I just like to hang out with and go fishing and watch football and go for hikes and play with dogs. And another group is trying to impact the future and change the initial conditions of what's coming to be better than the default.

Those are the people that give my life meaning because when I talk to them, we can cut through all the BS and we know that we care about in service of something greater than ourselves and we're working towards it. So find the others on the dining car. The next category is local. And I'll start with your own area physically where you live in the world. Find a place where you can walk to that has a sit spot where you sit there every day or every couple days when you can get there for 30 minutes or whatever you can make work. Get to know the trees, the birds, the ecology, the grasses, the sky. Get intensely familiar with your sit spot in your local area.

That is your home on this planet. The second piece of advice is learn a skill that is not computer programming or blogging, but that is relevant to an energy and material and maybe socially disrupted future that will be relevant to your place, to your local people. What sort of a skill could you have that would be valued and sought out in an economic simplification? And thirdly, consider being a rock in the river, which is that you have the economic, psychological, social maturity and wisdom that when things start getting tougher, you have roots and you're not going to be swept away by the rushing water where others in your community might be. And you might be able to help them. And if there's enough of you, might be able to redirect the water itself.

So consider being such a rock in the river locally. The next is ecological. I think it's clear, and I had a little visualization showing the hierarchy of things that contribute to decisions in our society. And AI and geopolitics are at the top. And well-being of citizenry and the environment is at the bottom. As much as I care about the natural world, I realize that we have to be strategic. My next, frankly, is going to be a framework for philanthropy. and one of the categories is in service of life underground because we're going to have to quote unquote solve climate, biodiversity, plastics, ocean issues indirectly because they're

not going to be voted on by the market. In fact, they're going to continue to become more antagonistic against what the market dictates. So the ecology and the environmental response is going to have to be looking two or three steps ahead and being strategic about it. Secondly, maximize your impact on the planet. Don't minimize it. Me not flying or any of you not flying means that the people riding high on the superorganism flying to Mordor are just not going to have any foils or speed bumps in the way of their things.

If I lived in the shack on the land here and me and Frank just ate canned goods and never went anywhere, I would be one eight billionth less of a problem, but I would not be maximizing my impact with my skills, my network, my abilities on this planet. It's good to not eat meat and not fly for frivolous reasons and all the things that give us good ecological hygiene, but the stakes are now very high. And I think it's much better to maximize your impact in service of what you value. I value ecosystems and other species making it through the bottlenecks of the 21st century. You can fill in the blank for something that matters to you, but maximize your impact now because at some point, the superorganism will shrivel and the

rules are going to change between now and then is when you want to maximize your impact. Building on that, the third category is seeds. Just like I meet people and they tell me the changes they've made in their life and their investments on mangrove forest in Indonesia, where the profits get fed back into the local community. And I was never aware of this, but they follow my podcast. In the same way, the things you do today, you may not see in this year or get an ROI the way that the market says in the next five years. But I think we are paying attention to this story now, we need to plant seeds that we might not see the fruit or even the full-grown tree while we're working. But lots of us planting these seeds, looking two or three steps ahead,

thinking about the future. And suddenly that future has a better chance of better outcomes that we're not aware of. This is a very different mindset than investing in something and watching the monthly, quarterly, yearly financial returns. We need to plant seeds. The last category, is personal, knowing all these things and discussing them and feeling the stakes of what's at risk with the biosphere, the economy, our lives, I think we have to become more comfortable with discomfort. We like certainty. Uncertainty feels bad. But I think we have to become comfortable with being discomfortable. And this is, you know, this is the stakes of the game.

Having said that, another subcategory that, again, I got the word from my coach, is glimmers or glimpses. We see glimpses of something that's better, something that's changing in our life, something that's emerging. And it's not a full thing. You know, I just have changed some of my habits where I don't eat, drink, right when I wake up. I have some water and I sit in this chair and look at the birds on my back porch just for 10 minutes and I breathe and I just sit there. And six months ago, I would check

my email while I'm having coffee on my phone like right away. And I can see the impact that that's had in my life. That's a small thing. But look and expect for these glimmers that are happening simultaneously with the gathering storm clouds. Lastly, I've been evening. using this word B-plus. DJ White has been on this podcast twice, a long-term friend and colleague. He probably, there's a million dolphins alive now that wouldn't have been without his work. He stopped the drift nets in the 1980s. He stopped a dolphin drive kill in Taiwan. He changed the starkest tuna to have it not have dolphins in it. DJ did some A-plus stuff in service of life. I'm not that. I have a podcast.

I like to watch football and hang out in the woods and take naps and play cribbage and do spelling bees. And I'm just a guy who cares. And but I care a lot. And so the things I'm doing, let's just call it B plus in service. In my particular case, I deeply care about the natural world. So it's in service of life. But my recommendation to you, the followers of this podcast, is B plus.

which means you have to be kind to yourself. Be kind to others, but the first person you need to be kind to is yourself. B plus in service, full stop. Or you can add the in service of life. So I'll add one more category, which I hadn't thought about, but imaginal. Imaginal are the cells that are not caterpillar or butterfly. There's something that's like an amalgamation of both. And once those cells start to become butterfly, they self-organize into structures that become the butterfly.

What are those things in your own life, in my life, that can change and structure those cells in a different way that who you are a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now has been changed by maybe following some of the categories here and striving and aspiring to be something different than you were during the, the upside roller coaster of the carbon pulse. Those are things for you to think about. I can't imagine them even for myself, though I think they're happening. Lots more to talk about on this, but I think there's three rough scenarios. One is that we can tweak the existing system somehow and make it better with policies or electric cars or something. I no longer think that's possible or not possible for much.

longer. The second scenario is the bend not break and then we stabilize something like a great simplification. And the third category is a significant, massive upheaval, decline, collapse, you know, population culling, all that. You know, the things that I've just outlined here are relevant in all these scenarios. So I, the logical change I've had recently is instead of saying, oh, we need to do this and get from a 20 terawatt down to a 10 terawatt system. And how are we going to do that with the renewable energy in tandem with the seed corn, which is our remaining natural gas? I think it starts with individuals rolling up their sleeves, understanding, squinting and seeing a blurry version of it,

but understanding what we face, building their own resilience aligned with some of the categories I've listed here, finding the others, and then strategizing and engaging. We're at the stage right now where we need more people finding each other and building islands of a coherence. Almost we need islands of coherence of islands of coherence. This is what I think is possible for the sovereign. individual, wide boundary style, someone who is pro-social, pro-future. You know, who we are as homo sapiens is not really being advertised well by the modern Western men and women.

Who we are capable of is still an unknown question. So I hope this was helpful. This was just directionally interesting to me. I'm certainly no guru or spokesperson for any of these things. This is something that I'm going through myself. This is a journey I'm trying to, you know, hike, hitchhike in a sapient direction with this work. And I'm learning along the way. So let me know what you think about these categories or things I've missed.

Here's two islands of coherence and some antidote to a sovereign. human individual. Talk to you next week.