The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Unintended Consequences in a Complex World | Frankly 91

Starting point is 00:00:00 Greetings. I woke up this morning and was going to do a frankly on the continuation of the what can't happen, what won't happen, and what might. I think I'm going to turn that into a series. Then I went for a hike and read the morning news and I had a completely different idea. And what's on my mind this morning is the concept and the reality in today's world of unintended consequences. When we think we're doing something, and the end result ends up being quite something else. So in my space, back, well, almost 20 years ago, between 2005 and 2009, we were talking about conventional oil peaking. And there was quite a lot of fanfare in the news, in the media, in the global discussions about the concept of peak oil.

Starting point is 00:01:06 And then shale oil came and debt came. And that peak and plateau got extended quite a bit. It got extended to November of 2018, which were still around 3 million barrels below. And so peak oil quite possibly could be 2018. Yet no one in the world talks about it. And oil shortages in the future and the carbon pulse and the downslope are not really on anyone's minds. or understanding because there was an unintended consequence of that theme being debunked. Another related theme is climate change.

Starting point is 00:01:51 Over the last 15 years, there have been a combination of two things. One kind of doomsayers saying XYZ is going to happen in the next five years, and it didn't happen. And also people lumping in the climate science, which is quite legitimate and scary, but unfolds over decades and centuries, with the, what do we do about it? The solutions. And the solutions, the WEF, we're going to eat bugs and own nothing and be happy or net zero, are systemically and biophysically naive. So what ended up happening is our culture, especially in the United States, developed antibodies to these discussions. And now simplistic responses to climate get absolutely spread and go viral when the science continues apace that we're in a perilous long-term situation. but since we lumped everything together, the unintended consequences are we don't care and we're not doing anything about it.

Starting point is 00:03:02 It's not because it isn't real. It's because how it was presented and packaged. Let's move on to another example, which is what I saw in my news thread this morning. One could argue that the origins of wokeness were absolutely legitimate, the good and real intention of calling our awareness. to the United States' horrible historical treatment of native and minority populations. But this ended up being extrapolated into this fanatical, disconnected from reality narrative, which the unintended consequences of that arguably led to the election of Donald Trump. And by the way, the unintended consequences of Biden beating Trump in 2020 was that

Starting point is 00:03:54 Trump could then be president in 2024. There's all sorts of down the road unintended consequences. But now there's a further unintended consequence is that Donald Trump is keeping his word and quashing these woke, in his words, reactionary movements at universities, which is in turn quashing science funding, actual real research. And in my Twitter, feed this morning I read and I've heard from friends of mine that foreign students studying in the United States are deleting their social media accounts for fear of being deported. And of course, then the next implication or the next unintended consequence of that is that Americans abroad are arguably going to be sent back due to retribution.

Starting point is 00:04:50 And also the state of Massachusetts is worried. about if Harvard doesn't get the funding and endowment, what that does to the Massachusetts economy. So all this stuff is downstream from what was originally a well-intended effort to call attention to racial justice. Arguably, we could extend this to geopolitics, the USA pulling out of the war of Ukraine and thus isolating Europe, and it could be inferred that they were also involved in blowing up the pipelines, making Europe more dependent on USA-LNG. I don't know. But the unintended and perhaps surprising consequence is over time, Europe will kind of part ways with the United States and maybe turn back to partner with Russia.

Starting point is 00:05:37 It makes sense, right? They're in the same continent and Russia has a lot of natural resources and Europe doesn't. So in all this, I think what I'm trying to do with my work here on the podcast and in the future is try to look. look one or two or three steps ahead, try to tether as much as we can to science and a science systems view, try to have some humility and try to learn from what we've experienced and how the boomerang turns, how the worm turns to use a tequila example. And what the world is going to need is science tethered, transpartisan, open-eyed, open-hearted awareness of our situation. And so what other unintended consequences do we see in our world today?

Starting point is 00:06:34 There are a lot. Here are my brief spring, flu-addled thoughts on unintended consequences. Next week, a bit more unpacking on the concept of the bottleneck and what might happen. Hope you're all well.

The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Unintended Consequences in a Complex World | Frankly 91

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.