Will Coral Reefs Be Gone by 2050? How Bleaching, Acidification, and Ocean Heating are Killing Coral Reefs with Ove Hoegh-Guldberg
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Release Date: 10/15/2025
Behavioral Thermodynamics Part 1: Beyond the 4th Law?
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
In this week’s Frankly, Nate takes thermodynamics out of the physics classroom, utilizing its principles to explain the invisible forces behind growth, competition, and complexity in our world. Competing life systems build organization out of chaos in order to maximize power usage today, even if it potentially undermines survival tomorrow. Within our energetic reality of finite and destabilizing fossil fuels, this tendency towards instant power accelerates us towards planetary overshoot. Nate poses a question in response to this tendency: What happens when a species becomes conscious of the...
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End of Year Reflections: Four Years of The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
In this week’s episode, Nate reflects on four years(!) of the podcast by answering listener-submitted questions, which cover a broad range of topics related to The Great Simplification. He invites subscribers to investigate how they navigate a complex and ever-changing world, while avoiding overly prescriptive solutions that brush aside personal agency and the inherent uncertainty that exists in our world. Whether it’s outlining his own evolving theory of change or emphasizing the importance of self-care and psychological grounding, Nate speaks to the epistemological resilience that we...
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Sunk Cost and the Superorganism | Frankly 116
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
In this week’s episode, Nate unpacks the pervasive behavioral pull of sunk cost as a force shaping our material reality, identities, and collective expectations about the future. Past investments – in careers, possessions, and cultural narratives – lock us into patterns of defending what might no longer actually serve us. This tendency becomes more and more relevant as the world shifts in ways that demand adaptability rather than stagnancy. Deep loyalty to former choices, even as we absorb new information about our lived environments, can limit our ability to make wiser, more...
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Fighting for a Livable Future: Exploring Frontier Climate Interventions with Kelly Erhart
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
While current conversations about global heating tend to center around a few well-established pieces of science, we don’t often hear about the scientists and leaders working at the frontier of what is still unknown about Earth’s systems. This includes unpredictable tipping points and cascading effects of our rapidly changing climate, as well as the unconventional adaptation strategies that might help us maintain a stable planet. What is the newest climate science being researched right now, and what areas are we still needing to explore as we fight for a livable future? In this...
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Inflation, Deflation, & Simplification: The 8 Things That Influence Prices | Frankly 115
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
In this week’s Frankly, Nate explores how the prices we encounter in our daily lives are influenced by not only how much money is in the system, but also by resource depletion, technology, affordability by 'the masses,' and trust within a complex global system. Prices are deeply intertwined with the biophysical reality that underpins our society, and are affected by major forces that often operate unseen to the average consumer. Other forces – like leverage, complexity, and currency reform – also have longer term repercussions within our monetary system. These have the ability to create...
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If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: How Artificial Superintelligence Might Wipe Out Our Entire Species with Nate Soares
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Technological development has always been a double-edged sword for humanity: the printing press increased the spread of misinformation, cars disrupted the fabric of our cities, and social media has made us increasingly polarized and lonely. But it has not been since the invention of the nuclear bomb that technology has presented such a severe existential risk to humanity – until now, with the possibility of Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) on the horizon. Were ASI to come to fruition, it would be so powerful that it would outcompete human beings in everything – from scientific discovery...
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Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World: Kinship, Interconnection, and Spirituality in the Metacrisis with Samantha Sweetwater
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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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...
info_outlineTwenty-five years ago, a landmark paper warned that the world’s coral reefs could vanish by 2050. Now, halfway to that projected date (and amid ever more frequent coral bleaching events), that grim prediction feels increasingly close to reality. What is the current state of Earth’s coral reefs, and what would happen to our planetary home without them?
In this episode, Nate is joined by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, the marine biologist who made this landmark prediction, for an update on the health of coral reefs and the primary ecological stressors driving their decline. Drawing on decades of research, he explains the mechanisms of coral bleaching, the critical biodiversity hotspots that reefs create, and the implications for human populations that depend on these ecosystems. Ove also touches on the emotional impact of witnessing the loss of reefs for the scientists who have dedicated their lives to studying them.
How are human actions increasingly putting pressure on the very ecosystems that support more than one billion people? What would happen to the broader health of the oceans if reefs were to disappear entirely? And most of all, what changes can both individuals and institutions make today to support the health of these vital ecosystems – and in-turn, the well-being of the entire Earth?
(Conversation recorded on August 6th, 2025)
About Ove Hoegh-Guldberg:
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg is Professor of Marine Studies at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, as well as the Deputy Director of the Centre for Excellence in Coral Reef Studies. Over the past 10 years, he was also the Founding Director of the Global Change Institute. In addition to this work, Ove conceived and led the scientific XL-Catlin Seaview Survey which has surveyed over 1000 km of coral reefs across 25 countries and captured and analysed over 1 million survey images of coral reefs.
Ove’s research focuses on the impacts of global change on marine ecosystems, and he is one of the most cited authors on climate change. He has also been a dedicated communicator of the threat posed by ocean warming and acidification to marine ecosystems, being one of the first scientists to identify the serious threat posed by climate change for coral reefs in a landmark paper published in 1999, which predicted the loss of coral reefs by 2050.
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