The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens

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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In this week's Frankly, Nate reflects on a week spent with a group of friends and peers who share his understanding of the world's converging crises, and what it revealed about the deeply human need to be fully seen, without having to explain yourself first. Though the group rarely discussed climate, AI, or energy depletion, the shared awareness of these issues created space for humor, joy, and the reemergence of a version of himself that had quietly faded into the background over the years. He observes that most rooms he finds himself in either run either too hot – where people are overly fixated on systemic risk and its gory details – or too cold, where the state of the world goes unacknowledged entirely. This group served as the rare in-between: people who could hold both the beauty and the horror of our moment with both eyes open, and still show up each morning with presence, purpose, and laughter.
From there, Nate widens the lens to the role of community in an age of converging crises: our evolutionary wiring as social animals, the physiological nourishment of daily in-person connection that even the strongest online relationships cannot replicate, and the quiet loneliness of seeing the world differently than those around us. Many listeners of this platform might be in the same position: aware and engaged, yet locally alone. As The Great Simplification continues to unfold, Nate suggests that finding – or helping to build – local communities grounded in shared reality, mutual presence, and care may be among the most important no-regrets strategies available to us – and one this platform intends to help cultivate.
What changes when you no longer have to explain the world as you see it before you can simply be yourself? Why does in-person community meet needs that even meaningful online relationships cannot? And what first steps can we take toward the kinds of local communities that help us face an uncertain future with resilience, meaning, and joy?
(Recorded July 21st, 2026)
 
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