The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens

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.

The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens is a science podcast hosted by Nate Hagens, with 419 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Nate Hagens hosts The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens, a science show with 419 episodes published.

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  The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens

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

  Sep 2, 20261h 38m

  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 the crises defining modern life all trace back to the story of separation, the largely unspoken belief that each of us is an isolated self, competing against other selves and against a nature made of indifferent, exploitable resources. Charles traces how this story co-evolved with technology, language, and scale, and how quantitative thinking both extends and distorts our understanding of complex problems. He and Nate also discuss why Charles has come to believe that ecological and energy constraints will not force humanity onto a wiser path, rather that the choice has to be made consciously, person by person. (Conversation recorded on August 12th, 2026) About Charles Eisenstein: Charles Eisenstein is an American author, public speaker, and teacher whose work focuses on civilization, consciousness, money, and human cultural evolution. He graduated from Yale University in 1989 with a degree in Mathematics and Philosophy, and spent the following decade as a Chinese–English translator before turning to writing and speaking full-time. He is the author of several books, including The Ascent of Humanity (2007), Sacred Economics (2011), The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (2013), and Climate: A New Story (2018). His most recent book, The Coronation, examined the pandemic as a mirror of civilization's relationship to control, fear, and uncertainty. His essays have circulated widely online, and he speaks and gives interviews frequently on themes spanning economics, ecology, and spirituality. 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

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  The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens

  Just Stop Oil!?: The Economic Foundation We Ignore | Frankly Archives 39 (2023)

  Aug 28, 202632 min

  This week's Frankly is an episode from summer of 2023, which is being re-released to provide context for one of the most important questions we face today: what is the role of energy, specifically oil, in the global economic system we've built? In this second part of a previous series on the channel – Just Stop Oil!? – Nate examines how and why energy is currently so deeply embedded in the foundations of our modern economy. He touches on the ecological and energetic laws that apply to all life, including humans and our economies, as well as the way accessing a huge surplus of dense carbon energy set us on the trajectory toward our current predicament. Building up from there, Nate looks at the relationship between energy and economic growth and why declining access to abundant, affordable energy will have implications that extend beyond the price at the gas pump. Overall this episode unpacks some of the systemic implications of an economy tethered to perpetual growth, particularly as the foundations that allowed for this system to emerge in the first place erode. Why did fossil hydrocarbons become so embedded in our modern economic system? What happens to an economy built around exponential growth when the energy surplus that powers it begins to decline? And how much "choice" do we really have within a system shaped by such intense physical constraints? (Recorded July 25th, 2023) 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

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  The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens

  The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis: The Rules of the Game Keep Us Trapped with Greg Elliott | TGS 231

  Aug 26, 20261h 41m

  Modern companies, markets, and institutions routinely behave in ways that would be diagnosed as pathological in a person: emotional detachment, strategic deception, grandiosity, and the treatment of people, animals, and ecosystems as means to an end. Yet, most of the individuals who make up these organizations don't naturally hold these traits and behaviors themselves. So, why does exploitation keep winning at scale, even when most people are decent, cooperative, and want the same basic things? In this episode, Nate is joined by Greg Elliott, a systems theorist and author of the Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis (PSH), to unpack why our institutions themselves have become so psychopathic, and how that affects the behavior of the average human. Drawing on evolutionary game theory, anthropology, and the neuroscience of psychopathy, Greg argues that cooperation is evolutionarily stable in small tribal systems, but that modern systems where anonymity and abstraction make exploitative, instrumental strategies more profitable. He walks through how this dynamic produces what he calls "entrapment games," in which pro-social people become behaviorally locked into relationships, jobs, and systems where leaving costs more than staying. All of this builds toward the core of Greg's theory: winning, instrumental strategies get crystallized into the operating logic of institutions themselves and reproduced by anyone who plays the game, whether or not they are personally psychopathic. While Greg doesn't see any easy answers, he does offer a set of possible leverage points: shortening feedback loops, increasing transparency and accountability, and rebuilding smaller, reciprocal communities. If domination isn't an aberration but a predictable output of the game board we've built, what does that mean for how we try to fix it? Is it possible for an entire civilization to behave psychopathically even when the vast majority of the individual people inside it are empathetic and pro-social? And if the ultimate goal is to steer toward a more pro-social system, is there a way to 'win the game' and re-write the rules without also resorting to psychopathic strategies and behaviors? (Conversation recorded on August 13th, 2026) About Greg Elliott: Greg is a Siemens solutions Consultant specializing in data science and AI, as well as the Co-Founder of Orbyfy. His research and writing of his book, Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis: From Natural Selection to Symbolic Selection, Scale, Abstraction, and Institutional Collapse, led him to found The Institute for Symbolic Selection, an interdisciplinary research program investigating how human-created symbolic systems shape behavior, institutions, and the long-term evolution of civilization. New to game theory? Here's a short primer: Game theory is the study of how people make decisions when the outcome depends on what everyone else decides too, often with the potential for mutual gain or mutual harm. Its most famous illustration is the Prisoner's Dilemma: two people, each individually better off betraying the other, who both end up worse off when they do. For a deeper understanding, check out these links: - Game Theory video explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ecJ_fDpWTg - Game Theory article explainer: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GameTheory.html - Prisoner's Dilemma video explainer: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-to-outsmart-the-prisoner-s-dilemma-lucas-husted 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

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  The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens

  Our Best "Invention": What Dogs Reveal About the Metacrisis | Frankly 156

  Aug 21, 202618 min

  This week, Nate turns a late-night emergency vet visit for one of his dogs into a broader reflection on the extraordinary relationship between dogs and humans. While dogs have been human companions for thousands of years, the modern version of "man's best friend" is a remarkably recent product of abundant energy, specialized breeding, industrial food systems, and increasingly sophisticated veterinary care. With the global dog population nearing one billion, Nate addresses the uncomfortable question of what might happen to these beloved animals as the metacrisis continues to unfold. Ultimately, sitting in an emergency clinic and confronting the possibility of losing his pet led Nate to larger reflections on grief, care, and the strange emotional power animals can have over us. In a world increasingly shaped by AI, surveillance, economic instability, and existential risk, he realized that the unconditional love of a puppy perhaps represents the exact opposite - something profoundly simple and real. For Nate, that may make dogs one of humanity's greatest "inventions" and one of the greatest antidotes to the grief of our modern world. How has the modern dog become a reflection of the energy abundance and complexity of human civilization? Why can something as simple as spending time with a dog feel like an antidote to the complexities of modern life? And what happens to dogs, and our relationships with them, if the economic abundance that supports modern pet ownership begins to disappear? (Recorded August 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

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  The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens

  Material World: The Key Resources Underpinning Modern Economies with Ed Conway | Archive TGS 127

  Aug 19, 20261h 49m

  Current geopolitical events continue to expose just how complex and fragile our global economic system is. As such, The Great Simplification team is re-releasing this episode with Ed Conway, which covers the deceptively critical materials that continue to underpin everything from the phone in your hand to the house that you live in. In contrast to 'The Great Simplification', some might call the events of the last few hundred years a 'Great Complexification' in terms of relationships, governance, supply chains, and many other human activities. This conversation with economics journalist Ed Conway focuses on the six essential resources that underpin our modern economies – sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium - and dives into the (often unseen) environmental and human costs of extracting them, as well as the surprisingly fragile global supply chains they fuel. In order to understand what possibilities – and dangers – may await us in the future, we need to understand the realities and constraints of the present, as well as the failure points of the past. What does it take to mine, refine, and transform the materials that are foundational to the world around us – which many of us now take for granted? How can we ensure the stability of global supply chains, and could we predict potential disruptions and chokepoints before they arise? If we understood the intricate web of complexity, energy, and resources that go into everything we consume, would it change our expectations for how much we need in order to live a good and fulfilling life? (Conversation originally released June 12th, 2024 | Recorded on May 7th, 2024) About Ed Conway: Ed Conway is the economics and data editor at Sky News, covering major UK and international economics, business and political stories. He has broken a series of exclusive reports on the banking and financial crisis. He is also economics columnist for The Times, and has been one of the longest-running economics editors in UK journalism, having started covering the sector in 2003. Prior to joining Sky, he was economics editor of The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph, where he was also a weekly op-ed columnist, and economics correspondent at the Daily Mail. Ed is the author of the book on Bretton Woods, The Summit: The Biggest Battle Of The Second World War – Fought Behind Closed Doors and an economics guidebook, 50 Economics Ideas You Really Need to Know. His 2024 book Material World, was nominated as one of the Financial Times Book of the Year. Ed is a governor of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, and has lectured on the international monetary system at the London School of Economics, the US Treasury and many other forums. 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

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