The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - (Some of) The Central Questions of Our Time | Frankly 87

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

The period of relative peace and stability we've known - enabled by the energy surplus of the Carbon Pulse and the ecological stability of the Holocene - is slipping away. AI is turbocharging the Superorganism, governance structures are fraying, and ecological shocks are intensifying. As the Great Simplification approaches faster than expected, are we asking the right questions? In this Frankly, Nate invites us to reflect on some of the most urgent questions of our time - and what they might mean for both our collective and individual trajectories ahead. Can open societies endure on the downslope of the Carbon Pulse? Is a future without large-scale war still possible? As the pace of change accelerates, the challenge isn't just understanding what's coming, but deciding how to respond. What would you not regret doing if you knew major disruptions were imminent? Can you redirect frustration into meaningful action? And in a world that increasingly pulls us apart, can you help build a 'coalition of sanity'? (Recorded February 25th, 2025)   Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

Hello, my friends. I am just this second back from a trip where I recorded an episode on energy and climate change on PBS. It will air in four or five months. I'm probably, well, I'm definitely still wearing the makeup that I used. I am changing my priors. You know, we cover ecology and energy and food. finance and the four horsemen. And I think I've underestimated the AI pulse. And I've underestimated how soon we might lose the governance that's needed to enact many of the things that we discuss on this channel. And I'm metabolizing and processing what I'm witnessing, what I'm learning. And in coming weeks, I'm going to unpack that a little bit more. On the plane ride

back this afternoon, I jotted down some questions, some central questions of our time and aligned with my ethos and my sensitivity that I don't want to say overly dystopic, predict. or framings without providing agency and things for people to do in our own lives as we engage with the future. I will follow these questions by some questions that might apply to your own life. So in no particular order, some of the central questions of our time. On the downslope of the carbon pulse, can there be some form of open societies? said differently, can we eventually, in a post-growth sort of way, have social arrangements

that are not feudalism? We had feudalism before the carbon pulse, and I expect some form of feudalism is the default after. Said differently, can we acknowledge and events in our world in the first couple months of the year are suggesting this. Can we acknowledge that governance is at ground zero for the human predicament? So question number one, on the downslide of the carbon pulse, can we have some form of open societies? Question number two, can we prioritize life over death, living over killing of things? In my reality 101 course, I asked my students, what's an armadillo for?

And there's usually an uncomfortable silence and then people start raising their hands for a wallet or for shoes or an ashtray. Because we in our culture are primed to think that things in nature, armadillos, forests, ecosystems, can be turned into stuff monetized, consumed, and discarded. They are useful insofar as they're useful to us. But that's not the reality of life on this planet. What's an armadillo for? Well, on the one hand, an armadillo has intrinsic value in and of itself, just like one of the other 10 million species we share the planet with. But more importantly, at a deeper level,

no organism exists in isolation. Every individual and every species is part of a complex, web of mutualities which we call and understand today as the web of life. Every single creature provides ecosystem functions and plays vital roles without which the whole would not be possible. In the case of the armadillo, they're not for wallets or ashtrays or shoes. Through their movement and the movement of sediment, Armadillos helps spread seeds and cyclonutrients, errate the soil.

Armadillo's burrow provide temperature and habitat refuge for other animals. There's a lot of different services, even for lowly armadillo, as it were. And like all species, including humans, armadillos are embedded in relationships that sustain their ecosystems and ultimately life itself. And so a related question is, if armadilloes one day go extinct or other animals one day go extinct, will we miss them when they're gone? Because our survival depends ultimately on understanding that no species exists in isolation, least of all our own. Another question, central question, are there any intermediate futures possible without a world war?

We have had relative peace since World War II on the backs of the fossil armies that as the carbon pulse increased, sure, there's been violence and wars. But a big war has been forestalled because economic growth has risen the tide that lifted all boats. But now there's Russia, Ukraine, there's things in the Middle East that are bubbling up. humans, when they run into limits and conflict and large-scale game theoretic frameworks historically have not done well. So a subset of that question is, is a world war possible without nuclear war, without nukes? Maybe a subset of that is if there were a small nuclear exchange first, then maybe with mass media, we would avoid a bigger nuclear war. I'm not advocating that. I'm very concerned and curious

if we can make it through coming decades without a nuclear war. Another central question. Given what we know, given the wide boundary systemic framing on this channel, what percentage of our efforts should be going towards these three categories? Number one, propping up and extending our current systems and infrastructure, which I believe is a means. musical chairs sort of scenario. Number two, preparing for a bend, not break scenario. And number three is seeding a more sane and sustainable future system post-simplification. I think it's a central question how much of our resources, time creativity should be directed to those three categories. Another central question, can we somehow maintain and remain in the stability, the ecological

biosphere stability of the Holocene period. The many planetary boundaries that we are exceeding now, nitrogen cycles, novel entities, biogeochemical flows, climate, lots of different boundaries are being exceeded. We could remediate some of those with a percentage of our surplus redirected back to heal our ecosystems and regenerate. productive healing ecologies. We could do it, but it's an open question whether in the next century,

even in the next coming decades, we can stay within the stability of the Holocene. And a subset of that question is, will there be a sixth mass extinction measured by a large fraction of Earth species going extinct? Another central question, can small groups of people all the way up to of large societies organize and prioritize life over power. Power in the economic superorganism sense is what is driving our societies right now. It is winning. So I think the antidote to dark triad traits are groups, organized cohesive groups, can that happen at scale? At any scale is a central question of our time. Another central question.

Will there be a hostile takeover of what I refer to as the economic superorganism by artificial intelligence, small cadres of humans that eventually via artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence, result in Earth being kind of the launching pad for an industrial mordor home base of interplanetary travel for the few? I don't know the answer to this. I actually think our supply chains in the real physical world and humans are such that we might circumvent such a future. I think incompetence is probably under-emphasized as one of the future path dependencies. But I'm hearing a lot of people talk about things like this.

The artificial intelligence, as I showed recently, has pressed the turbo button on the economic superorganism. What's the end game of that? Another central question, will the masses of humanity have any voice in the future? And if so, can it be an informed voice? And that is the work of this channel. I am increasingly less sanguine that the masses, us, will have a voice. and it's something that deeply concerns me.

And I need to learn more about it and the possible red lines in the future of how that might arise. But I think it's an open question that we should consider how many steps away are we from feudalism today in 2025. Last central question. Can there be a fifth law of thermodynamics emergent from this cultural species? wide right of passage for our species. So the first law of thermodynamics is that energy cannot be created or destroyed. The second law is the entropy law. There's always a loss.

Entropy increases. The third law is at absolute Kelvin zero. There is no entropy. The fourth law of thermodynamics, often referred to as the maximum power rule, is that organisms and ecosystems self-organized to access an energy gradient at an intermediate point between maximum efficiency and maximum energy access. So I posit a fifth law, which is that humans realize that much of the energy use in our culture is exosomatic. It is outside of our body and that it's used in the present. But if we can abstract,

believe and understand and value in our ethics and our behaviors and our incentives and our laws, the future, we can, in theory, throttle our energy use suggested by the fourth law of thermodynamics. And we get the feeling of power by dopamine and all the other things. We don't actually need to burn the energy to get the neurotransmitters that our pre-Hominant ancestors had, I think it's an open question and deeply embedded in all of my work here on this channel whether such a evolutionary step could happen. So it's almost 9 p.m. here and I needed to get this out this week. So this is a little soft-spoken and I'm tired and these are ideas I just had on the plane. But let me leave you with these individual ideas for

the people, the humans, my colleagues around the world watching this program for your own life. Because again, I increasingly am worried about the future. I think the great simplification may be upon us sooner than I had imagined. I don't know that. Of course, I view the world in a probability distribution. But if I'm ever either unable to talk about what I really believe or if I'm just talking to things that scare people and are depressing without any agency or interventions or ways to improve our situation globally, nationally in our communities or in your own life, I'll stop doing this.

But until then, I'm going to be as honest as I can and speculative, but hopefully as helpful as I can. So here are a few questions in your own life. If you knew the great simplification of some shape, would. begin in your neighborhood, your nation in the next few years, what would you not regret doing right now? And if you're clear on that, what is preventing you from doing it right now? Another question. As events accelerate, can you shift the anger and blame that is natural for humans

and redirect that energy towards something that makes your future or someone else's future better than the default. A hard question. I struggle with it. Certainly there are a lot of people, organization, situations that deserve blame for our situation. But I think we do ourselves a disservice by putting all of our energy into blame

instead of some pro-social organized collective response. What in your own life is unhealthy or unaligned with life and a resource, freedom-constrained future that you could now jettison, that you could get rid of and extricate from your life, one thing. And building on that, what's one thing that is aligned with such a future that you could adopt and add to your current routine? I'll comment on some things that I've changed in the near future. Can you build real relationships as opposed to fake or social social media relationships on the

dining car of the runaway train that is our modern culture that are resilient to the coming AI polarization restriction of current freedoms? Can you start to build those relationships? Maybe start with just one. Another question. If pressed, what do you really stand for? Where are your own red lines deep within the core human who is you alive at this time? I ask myself this quite often.

Two more questions. Can you befriend the best version of yourself in the times ahead? Because B plus in service of life, you have to be your own friend first and then build outwork from there. So ask yourself, can you befriend the best version of yourself during these times? Lastly, can you start in your community a coalition of sanity, which is a term my friend, Greg Rufa mentioned, and I really think it's apt, a coalition of sanity because we're going to need people that are postpartisan, wide boundary, principled, diverse, skilled, and unafraid to connect with others like them and rise to the occasions coming our way and the

challenges. And I think the coalition of sanity is deeply called for in these times. A lot more to come in the very near future. next week I'm going to talk about some of my prior Bayesian beliefs that are changing and why and what it means for the future. I hope you're all well to be continued.