The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Reflections, Predictions, and Interventions | Frankly #21

Episode Date: December 29, 2022

As The Great Simplification podcast celebrates its first anniversary, Nate reflects on an incredibly busy year and what he learned from the wide array of guests over 51 podcasts and 21 Franklys.  Nate looks ahead into 2023 and the challenges we face geo-politically, socially, technically, and behaviorally.  Join Nate as he shares insights, personal intentions and kicks off year two of The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens.   To Watch on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-6LTeqOHyg For Episodes, Show Notes and More go to https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/21-reflections-predictions-intentions 

Greetings and happy solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza holidays to you, the followers of this podcast, The Great Simplification. I wanted to do a brief end of year reflection after the first year of this podcast. First of all, my team keeps reminding me to tell the listeners that on every episode and on every frankly, on the main site, the great simplification.com, there are copious show notes and references of every episode that we do that my team puts together along with the scientist or the interviewee. So every fact that is stated here is referenced. So check that out if you haven't all the way back to episode one. So here we are after 51 episodes of this podcast.

Let me start with some reflections. One thing I've learned this year is that I like and respect all my guests and they all offer something to the unfolding story of the human predicament that I call the coming great simplification. I don't agree. In fact, I disagree with all of my guests on something. And I agree with all of them on something. something I feel strongly about is having a diversity of opinions, but tethered to the fundamental logic of energy, ecology, and human behavior. So this podcast in many ways is attempted to be an everything bagel where we look at lots of different things and how they interrelate.

And many of you watch my podcast with Thomas Bjorkman. I think I'm becoming a meta modern thinker in that I try to incorporate multiple ideas into my worldview. We're going to be talking more about that next year. But it's very fascinating to me to see the viewership of this podcast grow. But people love certain episodes and other people really don't like those episodes. And it's almost the case on every episode. And that gives me insight, not into my, I'm not only into my guests, but into the global

demographic of human beings paying attention to our story is everyone's got different lenses. And the goal of this podcast is to converge those lenses towards the biophysical story of what we face, and that will be one of my first Franklies next year. Second thing that I learned is that with many of my guests, I learned something new, and usually it's something that further constrains my worldview and outlook. From Tristan Harris, I learned about social media and polarization, from Aza Raskin about what AI is going to be doing, from Daniel Schmachtenberger about, you know, CRISPR gene editing and bio weapons and from Chuck Watson, nuclear war, which I'll mention

again a bit later, as we expand from the energy, money, growth, nexus, which is kind of my expertise and you learn about other things, boy, the whole thing gets more complex and a little more scary. But let's continue forward on that. Lastly, on the reflections bit. There was an ad. I can't remember when it was 20, 30 years ago where this guy was a balding gentleman and he had a hair product to grow hair. And at the end of the commercial, he said, not only am I the hair club for men president, but I'm also a client. And I feel much the same way about the great simplification. I'm here trying to share insights, data analysis, and maybe some inspiration to other.

humans around the planet on what we face but I'm also living it I am a human going through this myself and I don't have the answers and it's a lot so one thing that I'm thankful for is is the tens of thousands of followers of this program make me feel less alone and that itself is a way to cope because we are a community of people, you know, trying to roll up our sleeves and navigate away through what's coming. So, yeah, I am personally not sure about what to do. And I have animals and a farm and gardens that are not taken care of because I'm doing this podcast. So I'm also navigating a great simplification. Okay, moving on to

predictions. Everyone does these end of year predictions. By definition, I kind of don't do near-term predictions because the story that I'm telling about the carbon pulse is going to unfold over decades. I do still strongly believe that we have a financial recalibration of epic size in the coming decade. But you all know the general landscape. of how I see the future. Some specific learnings from this past year that give me predictions for next year. You know, I've learned a lot.

I've long known about evolutionary biology, the Earth's biodiversity, oil depletion, the Wizard of Oz kind of nature of our monetary system, the coming warming of the Earth, and the cultural bill that's coming due due to the ghost of dopamine past, we're soiling our nest and taking more than our share, these things are known.

What I didn't know and a little bit to my sadness and horror is I think now the greatest risk to humanity and planet Earth is none of the things I just said. But it's the game theoretical now lit fuse of the 12,000 nuclear warheads between US and Russia. And I think the biggest news of 2023 will be a hot war between NATO and Russia, or hopefully, the biggest news in 2023 will be that we avoid a hot war between NATO and Russia. In the latter case, it probably won't be news because it'll be another example of risk homeostasis

that we avoided. But this is really, really freaking serious now. And I'm afraid that it's going to take U.S. troops looking at Russian troops with no Ukrainians in between before things really have a chance of de-escalating. But I don't know, but I'm very worried about it. What other predictions for 2023? Well, I think AI is now here and here to stay. We're going to have this chat GPT and people are going to eventually have their own AI

and that accelerates some of the polarization and wealth inequality and income inequality issues because eventually we won't need low and mid-level programmers or artists or things like that because AI can do it for us. I think that's going to continue to be an issue. I think we're going to have wider and deeper poverty in 2023, not only in the United States but around the world, and this is already accelerating in how we navigate that after. after we've had the hangover from the super sugary stimulus packages post-COVID is going to be a central question.

Lastly, I think it's clear now, especially with what happened in February of this year, that we are approaching a biophysical phase shift, where instead of looking at the world in strictly a monetary and technology lens, now it's an energy resource geopolitics. lens. And I don't know how this is going to shake out, but there will already be negative feedbacks to some of the main trends and themes, for example, electric vehicles, because power prices are going up, there's going to be a negative impact on demand for those sort of things. So the environment and the economy and the decisions we make are going to be, you know, more prominent. You will see during the year in my frankly's many more of my predictions and outlines

of how to think about the future and events. So finally, on intentions. You know, one thing I feel strongly about is having a diversity of voices, but not just diversity for diversity sake, I really want to highlight people and ideas that are very creative and diverse, but tethered to the reality of wide boundary ecology and the biophysical story that we're presenting here. In other words, I really, oh, and the third part, I want to interview good people, good human being. So there are some people that are very creative and articulate and do understand our biophysical predicament, but they're assholes and I probably won't have them on the show. But what this means is I want to, my intention is to have not produce a podcast and a frankly

every week because that's what we do, but I want to have a high signal to noise for the listeners. And that means, and it's already happened sometimes that I record a podcast, and I decide not to release it for various reasons. It also means that I don't want to go the way of Jordan Peterson, not that I'll ever be that popular, where his audience dictated what they wanted to hear, and he went that route. And now he's a brilliant man, but a bit sensationalist

and catering to more of the far right. I will continue to be apolitical on this show, but I really want to stick to the fair way of what I view as the great simplification, as well as give voices to environmental scientists, because that often is not highlighted. They don't get a microphone to talk about their specific issue on oceans or plastics or whatever. So please send suggestions on who I should interview, but understand I'm going to focus on what fits under this umbrella. I also realize that this podcast and my voice will never really be popular. So the reason I did this podcast is to find the seekers, you listening, watching this, who are very curious and passionate about understanding the truth. And the truth is an asymptote that none of us understand and we're all working towards.

So I recognize that I will never be popular in the public. I'm too goofy and scary and complex for a general audience. So this organization, energy in our future will be working on campaigns to help navigate the great simplification, but many of those won't have my voice or face involved. But I will continue to do for the seekers who find and subscribe to this channel, either on YouTube or Twitter or I have a substack, you know, this kind of fire hose wide open sort of thing. Lastly, as I mentioned before, I'm not only the hair club president, but I'm a client.

I personally need to have more balance. The irony is, is I'm telling my listeners that our society is dopamine-centric and we're neglecting the other parts of our neurochemical portfolio of matching our successful ancestors, oxytocin, serotonin, et cetera. But in the process of doing that, I am actually heavily weighted on dopamine. of me because of the social media, because of the deadlines, because of all the emails, I need to find more balance. And so I'm going to take breaks from podcasts. In fact, I've got 12 podcasts in the queue right now that are already recorded so that I can take a little time off in January, not time off

from work, but I have to travel in January and February for ISOF. But I think, all of us need to find a balance between thinking and acting on behalf of the future and living in the present moment because otherwise we spend too much time doing and not enough time being. So, and I may from time to time do it frankly on how I'm doing and what I'm learning and I do plan on having more a psychologist type people on the show. Robert Sapolsky has agreed to be on the show. I have a lot of great episodes coming up. Bill Reese, George O'SKalas, Olivia Lazard,

David Sloan Wilson, Jonathan Haidt are on the near-term docket. I have a lot of great Franklin's planned. I want to talk about nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. I want to talk about a probabilistic future, both from a science standpoint and what's in our minds. I have a float chart of the future choreography of how things fit together, planned. But I'm going to try to take the advice that I give all of you, which is to be kind to yourself. So if there are some Fridays without a frankly, please send me your namaste over the ether. Thank you all for sharing this journey with me.

And happy New Year to be continued.