The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The 20 Control Knobs for a Post-Growth Future | Frankly 64

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

In this week's Frankly, Nate shares twenty different things to expect in the future, some which will be extremely difficult to influence but others which are in our control to change.  From the forecast of an increasingly hotter planet due to the Superorganism's insatiable appetite for fossil-carbon energy to a world of growing conflict and inequality, our tendencies are to despair and feel a loss of control.  Will moving from a world of consumption and power defined by money and social status and away from apathy and isolation be possible?  What if we purposefully turn the 'control knobs' in our own lives to shift how we approach a post-growth future by embracing reality - instead of unrealistic tech solutions - redirecting our focus towards deeper interconnection with community and local systems? Which control knobs might we turn to fill our hearts and lives with goodness, awe and wonder?    Show Notes and More   Watch on YouTube    

Greetings. It's been a few weeks since I had a frankly, I have been working, believe it or not, on averting a World War III with conversations in D.C. and elsewhere, I feel we're slouching towards some situation, and it's bizarrely not in the news, et cetera. I digress. That is not the focus of this, frankly, I would like to talk about the future and some of the things that are likely to happen that are out of our control. And because of them, some of the things that might be in our control, I'd like to think about the control knobs or the volume knobs of the future. and I'm going to list 10, which are definitely not exhaustive categories, of what future decades might be of things out of our control, and follow with 10 that might be in our control.

And then tomorrow or the next day, I'm going up north fishing with nine of my male relatives, which is kind of an annual pilgrimage. So there will be no, frankly, next week. and when I come back, I'm going to be a tanner, fatter, and full of foul language, and probably soars on my fingers. So, without further ado, here are the 10 volume knobs of the future. First of all, many of you will instantly agree and understand this first one, and many of you will shrug it off. But the volume knob from cooler to a warmer world will be unfolding. overcoming decades and centuries, unless something incredibly bizarre like a nuclear war were to happen.

This year, because it's an al-Ninu year, it probably will peak and then we'll go back down for a few years, but the trend is higher. I don't know where we're going to stop, but a two degree is almost a certainty. see two and a half and three degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times are quite possible, if not likely. And this has major, major consequences for how we live, maybe not here in northern United States per se, as much as in Saudi Arabia last week on the pilgrimage over a thousand people died because the temperature was 51 Celsius, like 125 or something. This is going to have a huge role in our lives.

At this point, it's largely out of our control. It's going to cause hundreds of millions of migrations northward of humans. The volume knob on heat will be going up. Next, and we're already starting to see this, is the volume knob on freedom to constraints. And if freedom is the high volume, it's going to be dialed down. towards more and more constraints. On the upslope of the carbon pulse with available credit, we lived in open societies, democracy, and lots of rules, lots of freedom,

very few rules. And I think that's going to start to reverse with rationing and taxes and regulations and prohibitions, et cetera. We have just lived through one of the freest times. in history and that volume knob is going to go the other direction. Unipolar to multipolar. That is the way that we went in the last century and now the volume knob's going to go the other way. We're headed towards a multipolar world. You can see this happening every day. I was just overseas and you can see the narrative in the United States is different about the United States

than it is the rest of the world. People are watching what's happening in the United States. People are watching what's happening in Israel. And both Israel and the United States are losing a lot of global goodwill because of what's happening. The United States, Russia, China, all of this is ultimately about resources and power and control. And while on the upslope of the carbon pulse, everyone had access and could print money and could grow their own.

economies which gave more resources and goods and services to their population, and now we're hitting limits. So this is a world of more conflict and less peace and a world of different countries choosing sides, et cetera. There are certainly things we can do to avert the worst of this, but for most of us, this geopolitical game of risk is beyond our control, and that volume knob. is going to be going up. Credit versus cash, we have lived in a world where cheap available borrowing in order to consume now and pay with income in the future has been prevalent, at least in the industrial north. And this is going to start to change. We're adding a trillion dollars in debt every three months in the United States. This is all backstop by the Federal Reserve, the central

bank, massively expanding their balance sheet, not only in the U.S., but around the world. What is money is starting to be a question. There's no doubt that governments around the world will continue to print money, backstop things. But over time, it will become less and less credit worthy borrowers. Interest rates will go up. It won't be as easy to get a loan, let alone alone with cheap interest. So over time, we're going to be using our credit cards as citizens alive on the planet less than we are today.

And cash and paying up front is going to become higher up on the volume knob. Richer versus poorer, the volume knob is going to tend towards poorer in the sense of less energy and material throughput per human on the planet. Of course, there will be a distribution aspect on that. But we've just been through an amazing uptick in goods and services. Population times consumption, we're a thousand times larger economy today than the year 1500. And that's going to start to reverse. So on average, there will be wider and deeper poverty in the world. And then a little subnob on the rich versus poor is the,

equality versus inequality, and I expect at least for a while, inequality will continue to stretch both in wealth and income, especially with AI added into the mix. Once the great simplification starts in earnest, that definitely will become poorer, but the inner volume will, the inner volume knob will change because a lot of the richest people in the world will lose a lot of their wealth in that Wiley Coyote Ponzi scheme poof moment at some indeterminate future date. As I mentioned before, peace versus conflict is another volume knob. I meant that in the geopolitical sense, but this will also be in the more local sense. Yesterday, government of Kenya had riots because they put an eco-tax on plastics and diapers

and things like that, and people revolted and burned down the parliament building, and they had to repeal the tax today. These sorts of events where citizens react with angst and sometimes violence are going to become more the norm. So the volume knob is going to go up from peace and stability to more conflict. Global versus local, the carbon pulse, cheap energy, available, credit peace in the world have allowed us to continue expand the global economy to just in time complex supply chains with letters of credit. And we've created very complicated global distribution of food and micro components, et cetera. And not only because energy is going to get expensive, but also because a move to our multipolar world, some

Some of these interconnected lanes of commerce and agreement are going to shrink. And there's going to be more nearshoring and more things made locally. And that means we're going to have less of the things available that we used to. And some of the things that we still do import will be more intermittent and more costly. So I think the world is about to become a bigger place again in coming decades. That doesn't mean that global trade is going to stop, but it might be the world. limited to very selective things. And actually, this could be a good thing, but we are headed from globalization more towards a more local and regional world in coming decades. Another volume knob

is a unified collective goal and conversations to more isolated and tribal conversations. There are so many issues in the world right now. And a lot of people tend to focus on one or two, but we're all part of a growing capitalist, materialist status based on consumption society. And as that phrase, you're going to find different flavors of how people respond to this that are going to be isolated from other demographics, both globally and in countries. And we're going to become much more in-group focused. So far, the in-group focus of the last few decades is I'm a Green Bay Packer fan and I don't like Chicago Bear fans, but the in-groups of the future are perhaps going to be a little bit more serious than sporting events. The future versus the present. Right now, energy

surplus has allowed us to care about the environment and care about the future. And as events get tougher, the volume knob is going to move from the future back to focus on the present, events will steepen the discount rates of people, which actually, as an aside, makes it even more important, more imperative that the pro-social, pro-future humans out there now, you know, engage before those cultural discount rates steepen. So I think there's going to be a volume knob shift towards a focus on the very near term. Lastly, last last, last Lastly out of the list of a hundred of these that I probably could have come up with is we're going to move from a complex situation to more of a simplification. That doesn't mean that we're not going to use artificial intelligence and continue to innovate and have amazing technology.

But over time, the weight of all the trends that I'm describing here are going to lead to a more simplified society because we can't afford all the notes. all the really resource and trade and energy intensive institutions we have today. I mean, just take medical care, for example. I mean, look at 20% of American GDP goes to the healthcare industry, and it's really a patch. It's not making us healthier. It's just dealing with existing metabolic syndrome and other problems. So in the future, we're going to have to use simpler methods for a lot of the

the things in our society will have to do, use 20% of the money and energy to get 80% of the benefits that we used to, things like that. So gradually, and many countries, Ukraine, Syria, Bangladesh, Madagascar, Afghanistan are already approaching a simplification. More countries will be joining that. So, you know, with that backdrop, and again, I, I, I could have had a lot of different categories, but that was really a preamble to this, which is realizing or squinting and seeing the shape of these various volume knobs of the macro landscape of our situation. What are the individual volume knobs in our own lives that we might be able to shift consciously ahead of time? and I've also come up with 10.

The first one is moving from isolation to interconnectedness. We're going to need humans again. We're going to need community again. The carbon pulse has allowed us to be individual queens and kings and princes and princesses in our own little castles. But as things get tougher, we're going to have to be connected again, both socially with skills, with local input-output matrices on what we're doing in our watershed and our community and hopefully to nature. So start being less isolated and turn the volume knob up towards

interconnection, interrelatedness. Second is, as I've said before, money is really a marker for real capital, the things we care about. So to turn the volume up from focus on money to what it really means towards real capital, towards our health, our knowledge, our skills, our friends, our networks, the ecological and built capital in our backyards and our houses in our communities. And I think the more people that start to make that transmutation in their minds moving away from strictly monetary representations of their net worth to a wider definition that includes real capital would be helpful. Building on that, a volume knob from consumption to regeneration. 70% of energy and money in the world today goes towards consumption, private consumption,

and probably another 10% if you break out the consumption of private investment. So almost 80% goes to immediate consumption of some sort. As we understand what we face in the downslope of the carbon pulse, to be investing things instead of consuming them and investing them in things that allow a return in broader capital rather than just money, in ecosystem services, in social reciprocity, in relationships, in knowledge, we can regenerate, we can invest,

our scarce resources, including human capital, into things that pay us back on a longer-term basis. So move the volume knob up towards regenerative ideas. Next is one of my favorite concepts, which is to move from a narrow view of the world to a much wider view of the world. So widen the volume knob towards using wide boundary analysis, perspective, understanding, empathy, and a system's view of things. And it's difficult because we prefer to look at things from a narrow issue because then it's binary. We know where we stand if things are black and white.

But a lot of things in the world are in the gray area in between. The system story is what makes the most sense. And a system's view of life also makes it richer. more interesting, more engaging, and potentially more impactful. Turn the volume from a narrow to wide. Next is regarding our own neurochemistry. The 20th century and thus far even more, the early quarter of the 21st century,

are about dopamine, are about 24-7 access to stimulation. Humans really don't need base load. our baseload. We carry around our bodies and our brains, whether the electricity or the lights are on, or we have gasoline in our car. So we've become dependent on 24-7 access to things. And I think in the future it would be much healthier to turn the volume from baseload to intermittence. Live your life by fasting a certain day of the week or not buying something. or not using energy because those things will be training grounds for the reality of coming decades. So baseload is something that our current society requires and assumes is as normal,

but we don't really need it. I mean, when I was a kid, there were sometimes I couldn't get a ride to the fair or I had nothing to do and I just finished reading The Hobbit for the third time. And I was bored. Okay? Bortem is okay. Bortem can be helpful. Right now, if you're bored, like, oh my God, I got to find some stimulation to keep me going. That has to change. Turn the volume knob towards intermittence in your own life. Next is technology versus reality. We live in a completely and increasingly more tech-dominated world. And it's not just cell phones. It's all the other things. And I think to do that.

aisle the knob away from recognizing that this tool is largely for convenience and comfort and turning billions of barrels of ancient sunlight into microleaders of dopamine towards a recognition of your relationships and the nature where you live in your community and that world should become more prominent, more loud on the volume meter. Next, I thought of the fact that as things get worse, we tend to critique, oh, it's their fault. And if it weren't for this and would come very political as well, I think to turn the volume knob from critique to awe and wonder and remember the unlikely amazing beauty and luck and fortune we have just to be alive. Like what a miracle just to be here and to every day have gratitude

and find something in the world in your morning hike or your meditation or walking down a street and talking to a stranger that gives you awe and wonder. Because with all the other 10 volume knobs that are out of our control that I mentioned earlier, it's easy to just critique and blame. Of course, That's simple. But I think we have to turn that knob towards appreciation, awe, and wonder. And the critique can still be there. It's just less loud. Apathy to goodness.

I think as these events accelerate, there will be more people who just give up and are apathetic about the future. You know, as an aside, there's lots of people that want me to interview David Wengro, who with David Graber, who's passed away, wrote a book called The Dawn of Everything. On the flip side, the anthropologists I know have completely panned that book as being a backcast on political ideology

and cherry-picking examples in the past. I'm agnostic on that, but I may have more to talk about that in the future. But my point in bringing that up is, do we need a book to tell us that humans can be good. Do we need academic research to look in the past for clues of how human goodness and pro-social behavior and just doing what's right?

Do we need a book to tell us that? No, we don't. We know intuitively what we can do, our interaction with others, and we can live by example, irrespective of what the academics say about our distant past. So I think turn the volume knob from apathy towards goodness. And the more people that do that, there's an auto correlation and a positive feedback that might come from that. Shallow versus deep. So many of the things in our life are really trivial and give us comfort and convenience and repeat what we did yesterday.

The times we are alive are profound. the next few decades will be the most important resolution of the human experiment and the human predicament ever with 8 billion of us almost 10% of all the members of Homo sapiens have ever lived or alive today. And as longtime followers of this podcast might know, there is no greater challenge, no greater thing that gives me, Nate, meaning in my life than to roll my sleeves up past the baton to try to change the initial conditions of the future by inviting people to play a role, by changing the hearts and minds of the time we are alive to play a role in your community, at your school, with your kids, with your neighborhood, with the global environment,

with your local ecosystem. We have to move from measuring our success as a culture, as individuals, by how much money we have and how much stuff we have and how much we can flex with our clothes and our cues to are we on the team of life? Do we use the time we have on this planet towards a better future than the default? Which brings me to the last volume meter, which is our society right now optimizes for power.

Power in an energy sense is energy per unit time. So our society optimizes for that. But the people within the society, the hierarchy of people are optimizing social power, which is usually measured by dollars, bank accounts, and social influence. That has to change. We have to look in a wider boundary at the stakes of our times and more of us, individually, collectively need to optimize life because life, complex life, millions of species, the ecosystems that we live on, this one blue green planet are at risk.

Last week I did a podcast with Johann Rockstrom and he talked about all the different boundaries that we are exceeding, leaving the safe space of the Holocene. there is no greater stakes than that. Yes, politics and war and financial haircuts and poverty and all those other things are going to shout louder in our heads in coming decades. But there is no greater challenge and no greater thing that we can do than protect and breathe more life into life on this planet. and that will take a village. That will take a lot of humans working collectively. So in total, here were 10 volume knobs of how I foresee things unfolding in coming decades and 10 ways that we can slightly or maybe crank up the volume in our own life on some of these things.

And I'm preaching of sorts, but I'm also a client of the great simplification. and I'm trying to make all these 10 changes that I just outlined in my own life. So to be continued, I will talk to you in two weeks after I get back from fishing. Cheers.