The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Towards Individual Wisdom & Restraint

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

In this Earth Day presentation, recorded earlier this year, Nate offers nine broad paths for individuals to cultivate resilience in an increasingly uncertain and unstable period of human history. From the intellectual & ecological to the spiritual & psychological, these ideas might be considered waypoints for navigating the human predicament, and - in aggregate - help build 'scout teams' of humans working on the upcoming cultural transition away from infinite material expansion. How do we slow down and reject the "hustle culture" that prioritizes gains in efficiency, wealth and consumption over all else? How do we maximize the positive impacts and minimize the negative effects we have on the environment around us? What should we do today to plant the seeds of a future we'd like to see, or would like generations beyond us to see? Changing the future starts with changing our relationship with today. This may first require being more reflective and realistic about our own relationship with the human predicament - and embracing the uncertainty of what's ahead. Perhaps if we're able to redefine 'individual sovereignty' in these hyper individualistic times, towards different attitudes, rituals and behaviors, we can act as seeds of something helpful to the future of humanity and the biosphere. (Recorded April 24th, 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  

Greetings, everyone. I've been working on the system story that I call the human predicament. Others call the metacrisis now for over 20 years. And one of the big discoveries I've had is it's not so much an environmental crisis or an energy crisis or an economic crisis or a political crisis. It's all of those things. But it's really a mismatch of, our social primate brain from a vast disconnection from our ancestral conditions to this super normal stimulus smorgasbord of technology and stuff world and we're trying to make sense of it and so I do think the answers quote unquote reside in our awareness our consciousness how we interact with other humans, how we interact with the natural world, and how this scales a human,

a family, a community, a region at a time. So in order to understand where we are, we know that something's wrong, but there's a lot of people working on solutions, but some technology or some policy only makes sense if we can see the bigger picture and have the correct diagnosis. The patient now is global human civilization and the biosphere. And there is a story that connects all the disparate disciplines and things that are relevant. So my framing is that we have an economic system that we take ideas and we combine energy and materials into products. And we represent those products in the marketplace by putting up value on them, like dollars or yen or euros. And we cycle through this every quarter and every year. And this whole process gives us feelings,

neurotransmitters and endocrine cascades. And the whole thing produces waste. I'm going to briefly talk about this economic system. So our culture is energy blind. We look at our progress and our productivity and our wealth with a money and a technology lens without realizing that we're all alive during what one day might be referred to as the carbon pulse, which is this few hundred year period where we're drawing down incredibly potent ancient carbon millions of times faster than Mother Nature sequestered it. This ancient carbon, when combined with machines, annually does the work of around 500 billion human workers, relative to around 5 billion real human workers.

And this stuff is not a paycheck. It's a trust fund that we are drawing down rapidly. We are somewhere between the yellow star and the red star on this graph. From a climate perspective, we hope we're at the red star. From an economic growth, comfort, convenience, stability. standpoint, we hope we're at the Yellow Star. I don't know, but we're somewhere in there. This stuff has been so incredibly potent for what it's done that the human economy, which is the number of humans times the average goods and services consumed per human, is a thousand

times bigger than it was in the year 1500. The waste product from our current economic system is not included in our prices, or for the most part, in our values. And we have fish swimming poleward because of reduced oxygen. We have one 50th or so of the weight of our brains is microplastics. We have declines in fish, animal bird species, all these statistics that aren't included in our stock market. But the real stock market is declining. quite precipitously at the moment. We go through our days trying to match the same emotional states of our successful ancestors in a wildly different technological

and social milieu. We are now a species out of context and kind of flailing around. There's lots of scout teams that are popping up, trying to describe not only what's happening, but at least directionally, where we might head. My contribution over the years is to describe how the parts and the processes

of the human ecosystem fit together into an emergent story that makes some of the surface nominal reductionist responses and solutions a little murkier and it shows a different plan and pathway forward. This is a murmuration of starlings.

Individual starling birds. They just follow one simple rule, three simple rules. Fly close to your neighbor. Don't get too close and fly to the center. Just following those three simple rules, there is an emergent phenomenon of these beautiful murmurations in the sky that we see.

There's no leader. This just happens. The same thing happens. happens in human systems. We self-organize as individuals, families, small businesses, corporations, and all the way up to nation states to maximize our profits or our wages. Those profits and wages are highly related to energy and materials and ecological output impact. And what ends up happening is we are functioning at a species-wide level as this energy-hungry, blind, unthinking superorganism.

So what's happened since we, for 290,000 years, we were in hunter-gatherer tribes until we started to store surplus in agriculture. And this started this new trajectory for Homo sapiens. that was totally unpredictable from our past. And we started hierarchy and storage and markets and kings and shamans and accountants and warriors and all that. And we started also to spread around the world.

And then 200 years ago, we, in addition to farming horizontally, we started to farm vertically and had access to the incredibly magical on human timescales benefits from the carbon pulse underground. Then we started to create monetary markers, which when money is created, it matches the amount of money on the other side of the ledger. But when money is created, there's no relationship to how much copper or oil or gold or sea water or dolphins or forests are left. And so we kept creating with digital and paper money this hierarchical system. And now AI is acting as a turbo boost on the whole thing. So the super

organism uses all these dynamics to continue to grow. It isn't evil. It is just maximizing for throughput. It doesn't care about equality or ecosystems or anything. It just grows, even when growing is becoming the problem. So there are four potential scenarios in the future, and the top left is green growth, that we have enough technology to improve our condition, but also enough surplus to heal the environment. The top right is a scenario I call the Mordor economy, which is we continue to grow, but more and more of our economy is allocated to the mining and energy sector and the environmental remediation sector. The bottom left is we don't continue to grow, but we manage a viable dissent in a post-growth world. I refer this to as the name of my podcast, The Great Simplification.

And the fourth category is Mad Max, which we've heard about in the movies. I believe that no matter what future we envision, we have these five horsemen that we have to navigate, which is this increasing amount of financial claims on reality versus flat to declining actual underlying biophysical reality. We have the geopolitical situation, which was quite peaceful on the way. up when all boats were lifted by the rising tide of economic growth. We have the complexity of a six-continent just in time, supply chain, and all the different components that comprise it. We have the social contract, which is the civil discourse between our fellow countrymen and women

and non-country men and women. And we have the ongoing impact from climate change, ocean acidification, and biodiversity loss. So the challenge at multiple scales at the level of the individual, the community, the city, the bioregion, the nation, the world is this superorganism will power on until it can't. So the challenge is to build systems and structures and ethics and relationships and values and consciousness and all the things that are going to need to be changed in parallel. Because once the superorganism breaks, then we're going to have fewer degrees of freedom. So what's at stake is humans have changed culturally many times in the past when the circumstances changed.

We developed new stories. And within our culture today, rapidly there are people becoming awake. and concerned and engaged with the challenges that I've mentioned. And so even on this call, there is the mitochondria of a new human culture starting to build. And that's what I'm going to talk about today. So around 25 years ago, William Reesmog and James Davidson wrote a book called The Sovereign Individual. And they rightly predicted that technology would get so cyber and, Bitcoin and things like that would scale so much that certain individuals would be able to have

so much power that they would transcend national boundaries and borders. And they were somewhat right about that. But taking this issue of sovereign, what does it mean a lot of the problems with today's discourse is we look at things using narrow boundaries, reductionist lenses. So if we take a wider boundary view and what it means, means to be sovereign today, what it means to be alive today, given some of the speed bumps and challenges I mentioned, this is the list that I would like to unpack with you today. So I think I have nine categories and three subcategories on each. The first category is intellectual. Like,

what do we do taking all this stuff on board? And there's such a thing as foundational reality. Some of that I just talked to you about. Underpinning everything is the biophysical macroeconomic of how energy, money, technology fit together. Above that is our evolved human brain and behavior, and above that is ecology and Earth systems. Above all that is a lot of trivia and stories which are nonsense in our society.

Most of the things that matter in our world and our to our future are in these three categories. The second is to start to look at our situation, not from a lens with blinders on or a single issue, but from a systems lens. So we have to go from narrow boundary to wide boundary thinking. Among the things this implies is we can move from thinking about things to connections, from linear to circular, from silos to emergence, from parts to holes. holes from analysis to synthesis and from isolation to relationships. So a wide boundary lens of what we face. And with that, a softened gaze.

Here is kind of our human experience the last couple hundred years in the carbon pulse. And you might think and imagine various scenarios of what comes next. my coaches and friends, increasingly, a lot of them happen to live in California for some strange reason, have advised me to soften my gaze, which is to be not incredibly certain about things, to understand things and just to take a step back. And when you're looking at someone or something,

you look in the periphery, the same thing with looking at our situation. To simplify that even further, embrace a little uncertainty and humility when we look at our situation and don't be overly sure of what's going to happen. The second category is physiological. So we have an evolutionary stack, our microbiome, our cells, our organs, our interic system, and that's the homeostasis of our system. Above that is our hindbrain and then our limbic system and our cognition.

We think it's like this, but in reality it's like this. And these systems, for good evolutionary reason, were built on top of each other. And cognition, which we are so sure about things and we live in our head all the time, is actually the smallest when it comes to driving our behaviors. And if we feel unstable or unsafe, that is going to dominate our behavior. and all the way up. If we're unsatisfied, we're going to seek out dopamine or seroton or oxytocin, and we're not going to have the ability to process in the way we should, the facts and the scenarios. So given that backdrop, the very first thing that we need to do towards wide boundary sovereignty

is nourish ourselves. Prioritize the nourishment of your human body by good food, by exercise, by sleep, by meditation and mental wellness. I think many of you on this call are probably way ahead of me on this path, but I have recently come to know that this is hella important. The second is ancestral intimacy. There's something called the vagal nerve, which is the longest nerve in the body, and this has to do with trust and safety or fight and flight. and we co-regulate with others.

I was just in California last weekend at a full bloom event, and boy, did I co-regulate with other humans. And my vagal nerve was in such a place that I felt safe and secure, and there was lots of oxytocin. And there's so many things that we do in our days today that lack just the ancestral intimacy of spending time, slow time, with other humans at a human pace scale, and many of us lack that in today's age.

A friend with my two PhD advisors, this is my coach, a picture in Mill Valley recently, this is my friend Tristan Harris's house. Yes, see, these are California pictures for you all. Yeah, I increasingly see the importance of that. Lastly, under physiological is a dopamine reset. And as many of you are aware, we have a hell of a smorgasbord of options that capture our attention. I think the intertech in our brains is really important.

And we need to reset our dopamine ratchet. One thing I learned from Audrey Tang, who was on my podcast earlier this year, is Audie. Audrey hacked her phone so that she has everything in black and white, and that allows more unexpected reward and enjoyment of life when you see a yellow goldfinch or a green oak tree blooming in spring or all the things in life that are actually full of color. And you don't get the high dopamine bursts when you're on your phone. So this is a picture of my phone, and I now have the color filters turned off as one small example. Color filters turned on. Next is psychological. And I think we have to go through life as busy people finding there's something called cognitive load,

which is that humans can carry seven chunks of information at once. And at four chunks, you're actually doing quite well, but as you go to five, six, and seven, you lose capacity. So we have to force ourselves to build spaciousness into our daily routines. And beyond that, we have to build in zones of respite. I have a very stressful job because every day I wake up and I learn about the latest climate change updates or Japanese interest rates going up or some, war thing. We didn't evolve to handle this much 24-7 every day learning about traumatic things going on in the world. And we have to be kind to ourselves enough to find a two-hour or a four-hour window during your day where you shut all that off and find somewhere to recharge

in a normal human scale zone of respite. And lastly, under psychological metacognition. Metacognition means thinking how we think. So I'm thinking all the time, obviously. But I actually, once in a while, I have a little Nate on my shoulder that is opining and say, did you notice what you did there with Andrew and his friends? And it's just a little observational play-by-play announcer of our behaviors when we're by ourselves or with others. Of the categories here, awe is a big one. I get awe by the natural world. I have two wildlife cameras on the property here, and even if I've seen them before, I love

to see the animals that share the land with me. Many of you might get awe from different things, but awe is something that we lack in this Palmel culture. This. Ryan mentioned in the meditation how he made an offering of water to the plants or to remind that we're connected to everything in the web of life. Up to 10 million other species share the same evolutionary path that we took here separately. This is my dog, Frank. You know, there's a billion dogs on the planet right now.

That's a separate issue. But my dogs are my friends. I chose to have dogs more than children. But we are connected to every single living thing on the planet, and we've lost our ancestral connection that we are part of the web of life. We are nature. And to live that, embody it, remember it, I think is important. And to keep space for the unknown, I don't believe in God per se,

because I'm a scientist and I believe in evolution, but I believe that there are things we don't know. And I keep a healthy airbound in my mind about emergent things. And it is quite possible. And if I told you stories of what's happened to me in the last three months, I do tend to believe that the universe is winking at us in some way that we can't quite understand. So keep some spiritual bandwidth for not understanding everything and being, open to the unknown.

Economic. We have consumed beyond our means as a culture for quite a long time. In fact, our entire economic system is a buy-now, pay later sort of thing. And eventually, it is like the hair and the hair and the tortoise. And there's going to be a hangover and a bill to pay. One of the next three recessions will be a depression in my book. I think one of the next two will be a depression. And so as individuals, you can simplify first and beat the rush.

Try to imagine living with a 30% pay cut. Try to imagine having less energy and materials, less complexity in your life. Try flexing those muscles by not. consuming or shopping one day a week or any other things like that. If you really think about how the human animal behaves, you know that we're as a culture not going to do anything major before a crisis. And if you really internalize that, it empowers you to make decisions and changes in your own life ahead of when we'll be forced to.

Jean-Marc Jean-Colvici was a recent podcast guest of mine. and I'll share a framework that I thought was pretty helpful. He says as energy gets less available and more expensive, there will be three ways to deal with that. One is efficiency. So we use technology to make things more efficient by using less energy. The second is sobriete or sobriety, which is personally choosing to, instead of driving a car, you take a bus or walk or take a bicycle, that you actively choose to, to eat locally grown foods instead of importing something from New Zealand.

And I think there are some New Zealand people on this call. It's active choice. And the third category is poverty, which is we're going to have to do without those things. And it's not by our choice. It'll be forced on us, either by rules or by the market making things unaffordable. So I think efficiency and sobriete, in this case simplify first are good ideas. Next is slow, slow down, and try to do things at human scale.

We have so many time-saving devices with technology that we save an extra 56 minutes every day so that we can get on Facebook or play Candy Crush. We need to replace technology with human-scale things like planting potatoes or tending a garden or doing a puzzle or writing a poem or having a conversation or playing guitar, slowing down in our economic system instead of revving up. What sort of technology is going to be relevant using wide boundary sovereignty? I have, frankly, and materials on this. What sort of technology is the best discoveries ever by humanity?

The bicycle is the most energy efficient. device ever created. The story. Dungeons and Dragons, some of you, a lot of men on this call. I play Judges and Dragons as a teenager. You get together with seven or eight people and you imagine the virtual worlds in your mind with just a few dice and some scratches of paper. It is telling the story is one of the most amazing inventions of Homo sapiens. Number two is the dog. Many of my best friends in my life have been dogs. They're just constant, unconditional, slow release, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin. And it's a great invention. And number one is music, truly, truly beautiful things that humans have accomplished with beautiful art and music.

As a technology crowd, largely on this call, we have to include. We have to include. increasingly differentiate between clever and wise. So what technologies are going to be most suited for the downslope of the carbon pulse? I've come to call this Goldilocks technology, which is not too hot, like drones being able to deliver cupcakes to your 7-year-old's birthday party, and not too cold, which is Stone Age tools. We are not going back, that is for sure. We're going ahead into something the unknown that we don't know, but we're going to have to use less materials, less complexity, less globalization, better affect the environment.

The technology is going to have to go towards important things and not trivia frivolities. And it's going to have to be made more with local and regional ingredients. So what technology does for us in a post-peak world is a really strong. central question. And those of you that are in tech, try to, in the same way I live in Minnesota, and when it's snowing out and you're in traffic, you look two or three steps ahead at the two or three cars ahead at the brake lights and not at the car just ahead of you. Most of us are looking at the car just ahead of us. And if you understand the nuances and scenarios and scenarios in what I'm putting forward, think two or three steps ahead and what technologies are we

really going to need. Socially, this is a term I came up with, I don't know how sticky or relevant it is, but every month that passes, at least in the United States and certainly in the world, there are more and more people who are suffering and more situations that are suffering, including the natural world. my philosophy here is attention and awareness in the moment fully to someone or something is about the greatest gift that humans can offer to someone. And if someone is suffering to give them the full attention while you're with them, but don't give it so full that you are drowned with them, but don't give it so full that you are drowned with them, which is the barbell empathy. We have to protect our own sovereignty and, you know,

our goals and our purposes and the work that we're doing. So a brief story I was in San Francisco, not last week, but earlier this year. And an Uber driver had lived in Africa and he hadn't seen his family in seven years and he's waiting for a green card. And he told me a story for 45 minutes. It was just so tragic. And I listened and I offered some thoughts. And one of my coaches was with me and we got out of the cab. And he's like, Nate, this was a moment of suffering. Let it pass through you.

Absorb it. Let it pass through you. And move on because I thought at the moment, if I let this affect the rest of my day, I had another presentation. I had a flight later. So Barbell, fully give your awareness. to people, but protect your own inner core at the same time. Equanimity, we are tribal apes, and we have a lot of in-group, out-group biases.

And to try and be more tolerant and have equanimity in social situations is something that is needed and can be trained. And just like working out in a gym can train your biceps, you can train your tolerance and equanimity in social situations. Lastly, the dining car. Not so metaphorically, we are all on a runaway train and the market, the financial market, is shoveling fuel into the engine. I don't believe that we can shift the system at large scales until there is a distrable. What we can do is meet other humans at the dining car metaphorically and learn, grow, strategize, plan, become more resilient. In the way that I see it, there are three, I have three groups of humans that I meet in my metaphorical dining car.

One is the intellectual people. Some of you are on this call that I talk to about the current. markets and climate and biodiversity and local resilience and bioregionalism and all those things. And I learn what's going on. Another is people I just like to have fun with. Tomorrow night, I'm having a dinner party here and we're going to play games and, you know, tell stories and people that you just like to do things with. And then the third is people that you want to do something of meaning and purpose with your time on this blue-green earth. And you find those people, it might be a small group, three, four, five people that you care about

the seals in Santa Cruz and want to do something to protect them in their habitat or whatever it is that you're deeply passionate about. You meet with those people on the dining car. Local. Become more intimately familiar with your local place, your local place, your local. local ecology, not just as a place between places, but it has its own spirit, its own vitality, its own history. And I have a couple places where every time I go there, I sit down for 10 minutes. And I've been doing that for about a year.

And I'm starting to know the bark on the trees and the different trees and the birds and the squirrels, and it's a home away from home. And at a deeper level, these sit spots and beyond, no one is going to protect those from the superorganism if it continues to grow. And that is on you in your local community, wherever you are on this earth, you and other people in your dining car to take a stand and say the superorganism doesn't get to this point, not this tree, not this field, not this meadow, not these animals. With respect to local, if we look ahead in the AI, well, in the AI can-kicking world or in the post-growth world,

we're going to need skills in addition to the things that our current culture advocates for. And in some of the scenarios that I outlined, ask yourself, what is a skill that I could contribute in my community that I'm pretty good at already and that I could hone and sharp like my own samurai sword. And I can't speak for any of you, but I'm really good at planting potatoes. I'm good at writing poetry on the fly like speed poetry. I'm a good host and a storyteller. I know how to chainsaw trees. I know how to raise ducks and make duck calls and they follow me around, they imprinted on me. I mean, those are just some things, but learn skills that are relevant to the future.

Lastly, in this category, rocks in the river. Not so metaphorically, at some point in the near future, the water is going to start to rush faster and deeper where we live. And many humans, without the psychological maturity or social networks or financial back drop are going to tumble down the river when these events happen. And so it behooves those

of us that can act as anchors to provide stability where we live locally. And if enough of us do that, we can actually redirect the flow of the water. Ecological. In a recent, frankly,

frankly's are the videos I do on Fridays. There's a hierarchy in the human economic system right now where AI is kind of king in the military, the currency, bond markets, economic growth, energy, politics, citizenry, our well-being and the environment are next to last in how we prioritize decisions in our economy. This has become even more obvious in the new administration. So with this backdrop, we have to be strategic about looking two or three steps ahead in service of life. There's a lot of ways to do that. Secondly, is to instead of, oh my gosh, we're overconsuming and this is unsustainable and we're

an ecological overshoot. I shouldn't eat meat. I shouldn't ever fly again. I should ride my electric bicycle. I should buy solar panels. I should not use plastic. I mean, if you do everything perfectly, you will spend all your day trying to be perfect.

And even then, you will still be one eight billionth part. You will be a smaller one eight billionth part of a larger metabolic problem that our species has become. Instead, I advocate to maximize your impact. with your skills, your special contributions to our cultural species level challenge. I still fly. I don't fly that much. I don't fly for personal enjoyment. I fly when I have a handful of opportunities to pass the baton to more humans educationally with philanthropists, with government, etc. I could use a lot less resources than I currently use and build a 10 by 10 shack on the back 40,

here, that would not be helping the human or the biosphere predicament maximize your impact during these times with the skills that you have. And lastly, seeds, many of the things that we're doing now are not going to have immediate fruit, but are going to take time to a sprout. And I'm sure any of you that have planted trees, you don't see the small sapling become a giant oak. tree in your lifetime usually. And some of the things that we're doing now are in that camp. I like to say that what we're doing now is changing the initial conditions of the future so that more better outcomes are available at the next period. And then there are even better, more outcomes available at the period after that. Personally, be kind to others. But the very first

person you need to be kind to is yourself. This is a lesson that has taken me a while. to figure out. You are the most important person in your life, and you have to be kind to yourself in order to do all the other things that I've mentioned here. Things are tough, but try to notice the glimmers in your life and in the world that are in the positive direction. There are actually a lot of good things going on, this little course that Andrew and Ryan are putting on. I've lost 15 pounds this year because I'm doing more nourishment for

my body. I mean, I'm a little tired. So those are the only two things I came up in the moment. But there are a lot of glimmers in our life that give us a little taste of that things aren't as bad as they seem. And there's improvement happening. My tagline recently is B-plus in service of life. And that is in contrast to this gentleman, my colleague and co-author of three of my books, DJ White. DJ White has been A-plus in service of life. There are a million dolphins alive today

that wouldn't have been alive because of his efforts. He didn't know what he wanted to do when he grew up. He was 23 years old and he lived in Indiana. And all he knew is he loved whales and dolphins. He bought a one-way ticket to Hawaii. And he volunteered to clean dolphin poop out of aquariums. And 15 years later, he was one of the, probably the single most successful ocean environmental activists of our times. He stopped dolphin drive kills in Taiwan.

He stopped the dredging of the ocean bottom in the 80s. He stopped the dolphins being merged with star-kissed tuna and things like that. all because he took a single step in a direction of something he cared about, and it felt, no, not on my watch. This is not going to happen. I'm going to learn about this. I'm going to do something about it. This is a picture with his dolphin friend that he did yoga with in the water for years.

And she chose the out of a hundred choices, she always chose Bach or Beethoven. She played practical jokes on him. She led the yoga sessions. There is consciousness, most of the consciousness on planet Earth. is in her oceans. And there are many, many conscious species live there and we just take it for granted. The point here, though, isn't you have to be like DJ. B plus is good enough. The stakes of our times are very high and to just generally, directionally make better decisions on behalf of the future and beyond your own self-interest and comfort is something I think is a good recommendation.

So this is kind of a loose wheel or circle of the things that I recommended. And my hope is that small groups of people align like this and meet each other and then something emergent happens. And they meet each other and then something emergent happens. And that's how cultural change happens. And the stakes of our times have never been higher. Power scales up, money, energy, control. hierarchy. Life scales deep, purpose, ecology, meaning. And our future depends on which of these dynamics we feed. The great simplification is on the horizon. I invite you all to play a role

in these important times. Thank you.