Where Will Humanity Move When the World Gets Too Hot? Mass Climate Migration & The Rise of Uninhabitable Regions with Sunil Amrith
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Release Date: 08/27/2025
Directional Advice for the (More Than) Human Predicament | Frankly 114
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Over the past decade, the world has become increasingly chaotic and uncertain – and so, too, has our cultural vision for the future. While the events we face now may feel unprecedented, they are rooted in much deeper patterns, which humanity has been playing out for millennia. If we take the time to understand past trends, we can also employ practices and philosophies that might counteract them – such as focusing on kinship, intimacy, and resilience – to help pave the way for a better future. How might we nurture the foundations of a different kind of society, even while the end of...
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Two Ways of Knowing: How Merging Science & Indigenous Wisdom Fuels New Discoveries with Rosa Vásquez Espinoza
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
For centuries, modern science has relied on the scientific method to better understand the world around us. While helpful in many contexts, the scientific method is also objective, controlled, and reductionist – often breaking down complex systems into smaller parts for analysis and isolating subjects to test hypotheses. In contrast, indigenous wisdom is deeply contextual, rooted in lived experience, and emphasizes a reciprocal, integrated relationship with the rest of the natural world, viewing all parts of the system as interconnected. What becomes possible when we combine the strengths of...
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11 Discoveries That Changed My Worldview | Frankly 113
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
In this episode, Nate weaves personal reflections into an exploration of the human predicament, unpacking a series of chronological insights that have reshaped his worldview. What began years ago as an investigation into oil has morphed into a deep lifelong journey into the complex web of energy, psychology, evolution, and systems that drive today's society. By sharing stories and realizations from his own life, whether it’s the debunking of Wall Street energy illusions or unpacking how sexual selection is often as important a behavioral driver as natural selection, Nate invites listeners to...
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Will We Artificially Cool the Planet? The Science and Politics of Geoengineering with Ted Parson
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Global heating continues, despite the increased use of renewable energy sources and international policies attempting otherwise. Even as emissions reduction efforts continue, our world faces more extreme weather, sea level rise, and human health impacts, all of which are projected to accelerate in the coming decades. This raises an important but controversial question: at what point might more drastic interventions, like geoengineering, become necessary in order to cool the planet? In this episode, Nate interviews Professor Ted Parson about solar geoengineering (specifically stratospheric...
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Hacking Human Attachment: The Loneliness Crisis, Cognitive Atrophy and other Personal Dangers of AI | RR 20
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Mainstream conversations about artificial intelligence tend to center around the technology’s economic and large-scale impacts. Yet it’s at the individual level where we’re seeing AI’s most potent effects, and they may not be what you think. Even in the limited time that AI chatbots have been publicly available (like Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.), studies show that our increasing reliance on them wears down our ability to think and communicate effectively, and even erodes our capacity to nurture healthy attachments to others. In essence, AI is atrophying the skills that sit at the...
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The Quadruple Bifurcation | Frankly 112
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
In this week’s Frankly, Nate outlines four bifurcations that are likely to underpin the human experience in the near future. While the broad biophysical realities of energy and ecology underpin our civilization’s movement over time, in the moment, people will experience these trends mostly economically and psychologically. Whether related to the widening of an already existing economic gap or the expansion of dependence on cognitive crutches like AI, the demographics that comprise society are starting to splinter – to bifurcate. These divergences, and the ways we cope with them,...
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Terror Management Theory: How Existential Dread Has Shaped the World with Sheldon Solomon
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Many of us wrestle with the unsettling truth that everyone – including ourselves and those we love – will one day die. Though this awareness is uncomfortable, research suggests that the human capacity to contemplate death is a byproduct of consciousness itself. In fact, our efforts to cope with mortality are at the core of culture, religion, the desire for wealth, and even many of today’s societal crises. How might a deeper understanding of our implicit reactions to mortality help us turn towards responses that are more supportive of our species and planet? In this episode, Nate is...
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The Three Most Important Words We’re Taught Not to Say
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
In this week’s Frankly, Nate considers the ways in which our social species overvalues false-confidence rather than the more honest and inquisitive response of “I don’t know.” He invites us to consider the science behind this cultural bias towards certainty: from our biological response from the stress of “not knowing” to the reinforcing effects of motivated reasoning that ensnares even the smartest among us (especially the smartest among us). Overconfidence and the desire for quick answers have been the root cause of many of humanity’s disasters, from the space shuttle...
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Challenging Monopoly Power: Why Local Business is Better for People, the Planet, and Your Wallet with Stacy Mitchell
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Monopolistic business practices have been illegal in the United States for more than a century. Yet, monopoly power continues to accelerate in our modern commercial landscape. Large, powerful corporations edge out smaller businesses, often citing scale, “efficiency”, and lower costs as their reasons for success. But looking more closely reveals a reality that is far different. Small businesses are more cost-effective and deliver better results to the people they serve than giant corporations. Furthermore, they form the backbone of engaged and connected communities. So what is actually...
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What Sloths Teach Us About the Superorganism
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
In this week’s Frankly, Nate reflects on the multiple metaphors brought to mind via a single photograph, which depicts a sloth climbing a barbed wire fence in Costa Rica. Beyond evoking compassion for a species that’s on the receiving end of human intervention into its ecosystem, the image raises larger ideas about the response of animals, including humans, to artificial cues and novel environments. Just as the sloth mistakes a fence post for the safety of a tree, modern humans mistake consumption, speed, and certainty for meaning. Moving beyond just the image, Nate unpacks the word...
info_outlineIn the next 25 years, the International Organization for Migration estimates that one billion people will be displaced from their homes due to climate-related events. From island nations underwater to inland areas too hot and extreme to sustain life, the individuals and communities in these areas will need somewhere new to live. Where will these people go, and how will this mass migration add further pressure to the stability of nations and the world?
In this episode, Nate is joined by environmental and migration historian, Sunil Amrith, to explore the complex history of human movement – and what it reveals about the looming wave of climate-driven migration. Sunil explains how the historical record shows migration has always been a defining feature of human life, not an exception. Together, they examine projections for future migration trends and the urgent need for acceptance, planning, and infrastructure to support the integration of new communities.
What lessons can we draw from past environmental crises that forced people to move, and how do today’s challenges overlap or differ? How have countries historically responded to large-scale migration, and what long-term impacts did those choices have on their stability and prosperity? Ultimately, how might a more open and welcoming mindset help us face the unprecedented migrations ahead, as well as transform them into opportunities for survival, resilience, and shared thriving?
(Conversation recorded on August 14th, 2025)
About Sunil Amrith:
Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University, with a secondary appointment as Professor at the Yale School of the Environment. He is the current Henry R. Luce Director of the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. Sunil’s research focuses on the movements of people and the ecological processes that have connected South and Southeast Asia, and has expanded to encompass global environmental history. He has published in the fields of environmental history, the history of migration, and the history of public health.
Sunil’s most recent book The Burning Earth, an environmental history of the modern world that foregrounds the experiences of the Global South, was named a 2024 “essential read” by The New Yorker, and a “book we love” 2024 by NPR. Additionally, Sunil’s four previous books include Unruly Waters and Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants.
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