The Great Simplification is a podcast that explores the systems science underpinning the human predicament. Through conversations with experts and leaders hosted by Dr. Nate Hagens, we explore topics spanning ecology, economics, energy, geopolitics, human behavior, and monetary/financial systems. Our goal is to provide a simple educational resource for the complex energetic, physical, and social constraints ahead, and to inspire people to play a role in our collective future. Ultimately, we aim to normalize these conversations and, in doing so, change the initial conditions of future events.
379 episodes transcribedIn this week's Frankly, Nate explores how the prices we encounter in our daily lives are influenced by not only how much money is in the system, but a...
Technological development has always been a double-edged sword for humanity: the printing press increased the spread of misinformation, cars disrupted...
Over the past decade, the world has become increasingly chaotic and uncertain – and so, too, has our cultural vision for the future. While the events...
Over the past decade, the world has become increasingly chaotic and uncertain – and so, too, has our cultural vision for the future. While the events...
For centuries, modern science has relied on the scientific method to better understand the world around us. While helpful in many contexts, the scient...
In this episode, Nate weaves personal reflections into an exploration of the human predicament, unpacking a series of chronological insights that have...
Global heating continues, despite the increased use of renewable energy sources and international policies attempting otherwise. Even as emissions red...
Mainstream conversations about artificial intelligence tend to center around the technology's economic and large-scale impacts. Yet it's at the indivi...
In this week's Frankly, Nate outlines four bifurcations that are likely to underpin the human experience in the near future. While the broad biophysic...
Many of us wrestle with the unsettling truth that everyone – including ourselves and those we love – will one day die. Though this awareness is uncomf...
In this week's Frankly, Nate considers the ways in which our social species overvalues false-confidence rather than the more honest and inquisitive re...
Monopolistic business practices have been illegal in the United States for more than a century. Yet, monopoly power continues to accelerate in our mod...
In this week's Frankly, Nate reflects on the multiple metaphors brought to mind via a single photograph, which depicts a sloth climbing a barbed wire...
Twenty-five years ago, a landmark paper warned that the world's coral reefs could vanish by 2050. Now, halfway to that projected date (and amid ever m...
For many people in the modern world, electricity powers everything we do. Yet we take for granted how power flows in the background, seemingly always...
To view the graphs Nate is referring to in this episode, please click here. --- In this week's Frankly, Nate returns from New York City Climate Week...
The overarching definition of success today often looks like the accumulation of stuff – money, cars, property, clothing – anything that signals wealt...
In this week's Frankly, Nate reflects on intraspecies predation (ours) and the impact psychopathic actors have on the mean and median of human behavio...
For many people today, the idea of societal collapse is unimaginable. Yet history shows that well-established civilizations have fallen again and agai...
Psychopathy is often portrayed as a rare and distant phenomenon – something confined to movie villains or prison cells. Yet when psychopathy is combin...
