The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens20 Mar

What to Do as the World Falls Apart: A Framework for Action | Frankly 132

This week's Frankly marks a turning point in the work of The Great Simplification. Having spent twenty years articulating the more-than-human predicament, Nate shifts from diagnosis to direction as current events – including conflict in the Strait of Hormuz – accelerate the timeline. Today Nate shares a first-pass framework for action and response that's organized around what to do now, which could be applied to various places and at multiple scales.

The framework begins with a personal foundation of inner work: stabilizing the nervous system, recapturing a sense of agency, doing grief work, and cultivating inner calmness as a precondition for effective action. Nate also emphasizes the need to build trusted networks and shared language so that when disruptions arrive, communities aren't starting conversations from scratch. These two layers set the foundation for six broad fronts of intervention: infrastructure and physical stock-and-flow planning, poverty and displacement, ecological defense and regeneration, civic resilience and governance, culture and meaning, and economic transition toward commons-based and post-growth models. Nate stresses that these fronts are interdependent and not contingent on a single scenario – they hold across various possible scenarios for the future.

Nate also introduces a timeline axis of three overlapping phases, which build upon each other to shape the conditions of our future: the current stability window where building is still possible, the period of triage and "bend not break," and the stable attractor that gives direction to the work of the first two. Nate closes with an observation about leadership: that modern systems select for dark triad traits, and that reluctance to lead may itself be a signal worth heeding.

What do you currently do with your time? Which of these six areas of engagement feels the most accessible to you right now? And where in your networks do you see the beginnings of shared language and trust that could support coordinated response?

(Recorded March 17th, 2026)

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 Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(429)

A State of the World Address: The Climate Speech We'll Probably Never Hear | Frankly 160

On the heels of Climate Week, Nate poses a thought experiment: What would a world leader's speech sound like if the difficult truths underpinning global heating – which are politically unsayable due t...

25 Sep 15min

The Escalation Trap: Is America's Strategy in Iran Backfiring?

The United States, a global superpower for the last several decades, is now locked into a battle for control over the region with the bulk of the world's remaining fossil fuel reserves. Despite U.S. m...

23 Sep 1h 6min

The Real Work: Four Things We Can't Afford to Get Wrong | Frankly 159

This week, Nate zooms out from recent headlines about climbing diesel prices, a thinning U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and inflationary bond markets to ask the deeper question: what is the real wo...

18 Sep 33min

Radical Simplicity: The Opportunities of a World in Collapse with Sarah Wilson

For years, the climate movement ran on the promise that, if we all rally hard enough, we could have it all: continue with our current system and save the planet. Yet the events of the past few decades...

16 Sep 1h 38min

The Human Predicament: What Would Change My Mind | Frankly 158

This week's Frankly begins with a deceptively simple question Nate was asked in conversation: what would change his mind about The Great Simplification thesis? Nate uses the question as a jumping-off ...

11 Sep 18min

Banning Superintelligence: Are We Building Humanity's Replacement? with Roman Yampolskiy

The world's leading AI companies tell us that superintelligence has a strong chance of leading to human extinction, while also promising that they will be able to control it, offering unlimited power ...

9 Sep 53min

Turning the Dials Back on Psychopathy: Decent People, Indecent System | Frankly 157

This week's Frankly builds on Nate's recent conversation with systems theorist Greg Elliott, who came on the platform to discuss why our institutions themselves have become psychopathic and how that a...

4 Sep 38min

The Collapse of Our Mythology: Can Humanity Choose What's Next? with Charles Eisenstein

In this episode, Nate welcomes author and philosopher, Charles Eisenstein, for a long-requested conversation on the mythologies underneath civilization. For over two decades, Charles has argued that t...

2 Sep 1h 38min