Lyn Alden: "The Myth of Frictionless Finance"
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Release Date: 03/13/2024
A Guide to Staying Human (Part 3): Why Mindfulness Matters When the World Is Breaking Down
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
In this week’s Frankly, Nate offers the third episode in his series on staying human, this time focused on presence. Nate shares a personal reflection on presence, and its importance in a reality where we are constantly living in anticipation of the future. What begins as a missed moment of coffee and a birdsong unfolds into an examination of the brain’s “default mode network” – one of the most studied structures in neuroscience, which supports functions like memory, future simulation, self-narrative, and wandering thought. Drawing from neuroscience, contemplative traditions, and his...
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Learning in a Way that Actually Matters: Why Standardized Testing Contributed to the Metacrisis – and How to Fix It with Theo Dawson & Zak Stein | RR 25
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Over the past century, standardized testing evolved from a wartime sorting tool into the defining feature of how we measure children's worth and potential, fundamentally altering the mental health and learning outcomes of an entire generation. Now, as global crises mount and our leaders struggle to navigate staggering complexity, a growing number of researchers are asking: what if the root cause of civilizational dysfunction is something as upstream and innately human as the way we educate our children? In this episode, Nate is joined by developmental psychologist Dr. Theo Dawson alongside...
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A Guide to Staying Human (Part 2): Navigating Dread and Carrying the Weight of Tomorrow | Frankly 142
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
In this week’s Frankly, Nate offers the second episode in his series on staying human, this time focused on dread. Opening with a personal reflection on his own relationship to dread, Nate describes how the chronic anticipation of collapse affects the human nervous system long before any single crisis fully arrives. He walks through how the neuroscience behind the body’s threat response was wired for more immediate risk, rather than the slow-moving and abstract risks of the more-than-human predicament. The latter part of the episode turns toward response. Nate outlines five practical...
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A World On the Precipice: The Last Oil Tanker From the Strait of Hormuz has Arrived – Now What? with Art Berman
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
The last pre-war shipments of oil products from the Strait of Hormuz have arrived at their destinations as of early May, meaning the promise of an energy crisis as a result of the Iran war is fast approaching. Leading experts are now forecasting energy disruptions ranging from rationing to severe shortages in import-dependent economies, with roughly 11% of global oil supply already offline. This leaves us with the question: even if this war were to end today, what sort of system-wide effects are locked in given the current loss in production, and what will be required of us to cope with the...
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Wide Boundary News: Sacrificing Wilderness, Oil Data Propaganda, and Feeding the Superorganism's Brain
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
This week’s Frankly is another edition of Wide Boundary News, where Nate invites listeners to view the constant churn of headlines through a wider-boundary lens. He begins with the misleading framing of recent oil production statistics by the United States, which blurs distinctions between crude oil and broader petroleum products. Nate uses this as a case study in how data can be technically correct, yet structurally misleading – particularly when used for political storytelling. The lens widens as he considers whether the peak of the carbon pulse could pass without clear public...
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Why Each American Lives Like a 40-Ton Whale: Power, Overshoot, and Climate with Tad Patzek
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Many of us were taught that humans have been the dominant force shaping the modern world through sheer grit, ingenuity, and innovation. While true to an extent, there are also deep, embedded laws of energy that have both constrained and enabled human cleverness and our influence over our surroundings. What exactly are these laws, and what happened in the past few centuries that allowed for an explosion of technology and consumption? Perhaps more importantly, how can that knowledge help us understand how the decades and centuries ahead might be different? In this episode, Nate is joined by...
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A Perspective From Lebanon: Who Will We Be When Things Get Hard? | Frankly 140
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
In this week’s Frankly, Nate steps away from analysis and reflects on a call that reframed his thinking. He shares a recent conversation with a close friend living in Lebanon, who amid ongoing daily violence and loss has been hosting displaced families and leading meditation practices in her community. Nate notes that her grounded presence, alongside the trust she carries from a centuries-old lineage in her village, reveals the ways in which social capital and contemplative practice can hold someone steady as the world around them changes. From that conversation, Nate distills the wider work...
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This War Changes Everything: Are We Ready for Energy Shockwaves From the Strait of Hormuz? with Rory Johnston
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Over three-quarters of the global population has never lived through a major global energy crisis, such as those of the 1970s. In early 2026, that is about to change as the world faces the largest energy disruption in history, measured by the daily loss of oil output. This crisis won’t be evenly distributed but will be felt everywhere – and is guaranteed to have ripple effects we won’t see coming. How much oil remains in circulation, and what level of damage has already been inflicted on our global energy infrastructure? In this episode, Nate is joined by oil market analyst Rory Johnston...
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How to Think About the Future (Part 2): Four Variables Shaping the Coming Decades | Frankly 139
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
This week’s Frankly is part two of the series How to Think About the Future. Today, Nate expands on the case for holding a distribution of possible futures rather than a single preferred one, and walks through a structured scenario-building exercise. He begins with the two-by-two grid that he has used for years, which indicates whether the economy will expand or contract and whether this happens within ecological limits or in overshoot. The four quadrants this produces represent possible directions toward the future: toward green growth, Mordor, Mad Max, or the Great Simplification. From...
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Wisdom in a World in Crisis: The Counterintuitive Need to Slow Down and Find Spaciousness with Iain McGilchrist
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
For many of us, our instinctual response to rising conflict and instability might be to recede further into pragmatism as a way to survive. Yet, if our cultural values and ways of life are what got us here, rooted in narrow-boundary, cold, and logical thinking – then perhaps moments of turbulence like these actually call on us to change our way of thinking entirely. Is this moment our opportunity to pivot toward worldviews that emphasize the intangible qualities of life, and could that shift cause a cascade through our actions and decisions, leading to more balanced decision-making for the...
info_outlineOn this episode, Nate is joined by investment strategist Lyn Alden to discuss how energy and technology have shaped our monetary system and current financial trends. While more people are becoming aware of energy’s foundational role in our global systems, it is still widely overlooked, especially among those working in finance. In contrast, Lyn’s biophysically rooted analysis of macroeconomic patterns expose the cyclical dysfunction of the world’s economy. How has increasing energy availability and productivity offset the inflationary nature of fiat currencies - and what happens if this trend were to slow or reverse? What assumptions and biases have led most analysts to mis-read long term trends, leaving us with vulnerable economies? Is it possible to rejigger our systems and innovate more biophysically aligned tools to enable a smoother transition into a future with a lower energy throughput?
About Lyn Alden:
Lyn Alden is an independent analyst and founder of Lyn Alden Investment Strategy with a background in engineering management. Her work provides institutional-level research in plain English, so that both institutional investors and retail investors can benefit from it. Lyn also serves as an independent director on the board of Swan.com and as a general partner at the venture capital firm Ego Death Capital. She is the author of the 2023 best-selling book Broken Money about the past, present, and future of money through the lens of technology. Lyn has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in engineering management, with a focus on engineering economics, systems engineering, and financial modeling. She worked for over a decade as an electrical engineer at the Federal Aviation Administration’s William J. Hughes Technical Center.
For Show Notes and More visit: thegreatsimplification.com/113-lyn-alden
To watch this video episode on Youtube → https://youtu.be/JTbZaSL1pHI