The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens

Most of us were taught to treat emotions like distress, numbness, and burnout as private failings to manage and move past, rather than normal responses to living within a world full of crises. The unintended result is a distrust in our own bodies and mind, further leading to more confusion about what is 'normal.' One framework offers a potential path to living in harmony with all of the mind's distinct parts, breaking the defensive and counterproductive loops we tend to get stuck in. What sort of systemic ripples might become possible if we stop trying to smother uncomfortable parts of ourselves, and begin embracing them as critical pieces of our own mental ecologies?
In this episode, Nate is joined by Dr. Richard C. Schwartz, the therapist who developed Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Steffi Bednarek, a climate psychologist applying that same model to organizations, governments, and culture at large. Dick walks through the origins of IFS, which describes the mind as naturally made up of "parts" – protectors and exiles – with their own histories, fears, and roles, which are all held by an underlying "Self." Steffi extends the model outward to show how institutions and even entire countries can be read as systems of exiles and protectors, and shares how she uses IFS with governments, financial institutions, and wealth holders to defuse shame and effectively guide toward pro-social behavioral change. Together, they explore why healing our relationship to our own most despised parts may be inseparable from healing our relationship to the rest of the living world.
How can looking inward to our own thought processes and patterns help us better understand and relate to others, especially those whose behavior we find hardest to accept? As we continue through challenging times, how can we balance critical physical and policy work with the internal work of healing our relationship to the mental parts we shy away from? And would our decisions and actions change if more and more humans began to lead from curiosity and compassion, instead of fear, and could that be enough to shift the larger system?
(Conversation recorded on August 5th, 2026)

 
About Richard C. Schwartz:
Richard C. Schwartz, PhD, is the creator of Internal Family Systems, a highly effective, therapeutic model with a growing evidence base, that de-pathologizes the multi-part personality. Richard is also the Founder of the IFS Institute that primarily offers training for professionals. He is currently a Teaching Associate in Psychiatry, at Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard Medical School teaching affiliate. Richard has authored or co-authored more than ten books on Internal Family Systems and related topics, including No Bad Parts and Internal Family Systems Therapy. He lives near Chicago with his wife Jeanne, Vice President of the IFS Institute, close to his three daughters and six grandchildren.
 
About Steffi Bednarek:
Steffi Bednarek is a gestalt psychotherapist, trauma therapist, and climate psychologist. Her work explores the interface between climate change and mental health. With twenty-five years of experience in depth psychology, complexity thinking, climate psychology, and grief tending, Bednarek has worked for national governments and global institutions to prepare leaders and organizations for the psychological dimension of climate change in decision-making processes. Her work has been featured in the Huffington Post, BBC, David Milliband's "Reasons to be cheerful" podcast and numerous international publications. She is the co-founder of "Explorations into Climate Psychology" journal and an associate member of the American Psychological Association's climate change group.
 
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What can one person actually do about the metacrisis? In this week's Frankly, Nate explicitly outlines just a few of the countless actions we can take to actually change what's coming, rather than just prepare for it. He touches on why the metacrisis is better understood as a predicament to be continually shaped, rather than as a problem with a single solution – calling for a shift in mindset in order to navigate the uncertainty ahead. In complex systems such as ours, even seemingly modest differences in initial conditions can lead to wildly different outcomes down the road, meaning that what each of us chooses to do today shifts what becomes possible in the decades ahead.
With that framing, Nate offers a list of small, specific, and slightly unordinary interventions that serve to challenge the forces driving the metacrisis. He explores methods like reducing dependence on constant stimulation, cultivating humanity and humility, and finding our own version of what is "enough." Along the way, he also shares how he sees resilience growing through shared effort, meaningful relationships, and a renewed sense of responsibility for the more-than-human world. None of these things will solve our predicament on their own. But if millions choose to start living differently in the immediate present, the forces shaping our future might just start to shift.
How can redefining success, consumption, and community make us less vulnerable to today's systemic challenges? Why does "practicing loss" help change the way we respond to disruptions? And what if the most meaningful response to the world's biggest challenges isn't a sweeping political movement or a technological breakthrough, but a collection of ordinary actions practiced consistently over time?
(Recorded August 2nd, 2026)
 
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For decades, modern civilization has treated efficiency as an unquestioned good: the leaner, faster, and more optimized anything is – from supply chains to your morning routine – the better. But emerging systems science argues that this obsession with performance is actually making humanity more brittle. What if the over-optimization baked into our economies, our agriculture, our institutions, and even our own bodies is at the root of our shared predicament, and how can nature's intelligence show us a different way?
In this episode, Nate is joined by biologist and biophysicist Olivier Hamant to explore why living systems prioritize robustness over performance, and what that means for a civilization built almost entirely in the opposite direction. Olivier distinguishes performance (efficacy plus efficiency) from robustness (the capacity to remain stable and viable despite fluctuation), and he points out that nature rarely selects for the most efficient organism; it selects for the most adaptable one. Together, Nate and Olivier also trace how cheap, abundant energy allowed human societies to substitute the "safety net" of resource abundance for the safety net that living systems actually rely on: diversity, redundancy, and cooperation. As the twenty-first century moves from an era of stable averages into an era of volatility and standard deviation, Olivier argues that the path forward likely isn't degrowth or continued growth, but a third way: economies and institutions designed to be robust and adaptable to risk, rather than avoid it. 
What wisdom have we forgotten for the sake of maximizing material output and efficiency? How has our search for optimization affected our quality of life, and what do we risk by continuing down this same path? Most importantly, could balancing our focus on performance and robustness be the key to reframing our relationship with the entire Earth, bringing more stability, rest, and meaning to our lives? 
(Conversation recorded on July 28th, 2026)\

 
About Olivier Hamant:
Olivier Hamant is a French biologist and biophysicist whose work combines plant science and civilizational thought. He serves as Director of Research at the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment, teaches at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, and directs the Institut Michel Serres – an interdisciplinary institute focused on ecological transition. 
Hamant's work is centralized around the idea that modern civilization has confused "performance" with "fitness" by prizing efficiency/optimization/specialization/maximum output. This is in direct contrast to most living systems, which rarely optimize for these characteristics – instead, living systems survive because they are robust, or able to maintain their identity despite unpredictable disturbances. 
 
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This week, Nate takes on a tension he has been navigating for years, at the heart of communicating about the metacrisis: the hazards that arise from sharing true information with a global audience. Building on his earlier episode, "The Limits to Podcasting," where he first described a "triple information hazard," Nate now outlines twelve distinct risks that emerge when honest insights about the more-than-human predicament are broadcast at scale. Drawing on philosopher Nick Bostrom's concept of an "information hazard," he explains why certain ideas become dangerous precisely because they are true, and why the era of AI raises the stakes, as everything said publicly is now ingested as training data and metabolized by the very superorganism he describes.
 
Some of these hazards land on the speaker, some benefit the powerful, and some fall on the audience itself. Nate reflects on the dangers of despair and false reassurance, the "half map" problem of naming risks without corresponding strategies, and the private burden of weighing what can and cannot be said. Yet he is clear that these hazards argue for care rather than silence: attention to timing, context, scale, and the trust of the people listening. He closes by suggesting that truths that become hazardous when shouted into a global microphone can become benign, even healing, when shared around a kitchen table, and that growing trust and community at human scale may be the deepest response to all twelve.
 
When does sharing the truth create new risks rather than reducing existing ones? How do we balance openness with the responsibility to protect people, strategies, and emerging possibilities? And what does honest communication look like in an era when every word can be amplified, weaponized, or metabolized by machines?
 
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For three decades, most of Wall Street has treated energy and commodities as a rounding error, or as a small slice of the portfolio rather than the physical foundation everything else runs on. But in mid-2026, with the Strait of Hormuz disrupted, tankers burning in the Red and Black Seas, and nearly half of Russia's refining capacity knocked offline, that complacency is being tested in real time. The noise around increasing crude oil prices is loud, but this week's guest argues that the signal beneath it – the decline of refined products like diesel and jet fuel – is already sounding the alarm bells of a world in crisis.
In this episode, Nate is joined by Jeff Currie for a wide-boundary look at what happens when the buffers that have suppressed energy price signals for fifty years finally run dry. Using his decades of experience as a former commodity strategist at Goldman Sachs and as a current senior advisor at The Carlyle Group, Jeff walks through why the "crack spread" between crude and refined products just hit its highest level in three decades. He also describes why draining strategic reserves is, in actuality, simply a bet that scarcity can be avoided rather than solved – in Currie's eyes, the West's refusal to admit scarcity since the 70s has left it structurally unprepared, particularly compared to China's security-driven build-out of nuclear, solar, and battery capacity. He also lays out the "Grand Bargain" underlying the postwar dollar system, wherein the U.S. protects global sea lanes in exchange for global trade running through New York. Jeff explains why a failure to reopen the Strait of Hormuz could unravel this arrangement, bringing forward consequences that would land hardest on middle-class Americans' access to credit and consumption.
Is the world entering a new commodity supercycle driven by scarcity and deglobalization, or is the market going to keep shrugging off these shocks? What might it mean for ordinary people if the credit and dollar system that has funded American consumption for eighty years starts to break down? And if, as Jeff argues, we are only in "the foothills of the Himalayas," how much higher does this climb go before societies are forced to reckon with the physical limits behind the price signals?
(Conversation recorded on July 23rd, 2026)
 
About Jeff Currie:
Jeff Currie is the Chief Strategy Officer at Altis Partners. Previously, Jeff served as Chief Strategy Officer of Energy Pathways at Carlyle and currently serves as a Senior Advisor to the firm. Jeff's analysis focuses on the energy and commodity markets and the supply chain central to an energy transition. Jeff is the former Global Head of Commodities Research at Goldman Sachs, where he helped to build their commodities business.
During his nearly three decades at the firm, he became one of the leading commodity market strategists on Wall Street, known for advising clients through the commodity "super cycle" of the 2000s, the shale supply shock of the 2010s, and most recently the twin shocks of the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war.
 
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