A Country of Geniuses: Anthropic CEO’s Warnings, Plus Wide-Boundary Considerations on AI
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Release Date: 02/02/2026
The Consumption Pyramid
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
This week’s Frankly unpacks humans’ current identification with the label “consumer.” Consumption is something much deeper and more nuanced than shopping or spending. Nate highlights the ways that it shows up across our whole lives – from basic needs and stability to status and mental escape. He outlines a “consumption pyramid” framework that acts as a map for the different layers of consumption present in daily life, emphasizing that they vary in dependency, reliability, and necessity. This episode also explores why this understanding is especially relevant in a world that will...
info_outline
How to Read the Signs of Collapse: Economic Stagnation, Resource Scarcity, and Europe’s Industrial Decline with Balázs Matics
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Collapse has long been discussed in the public imagination as something that happens suddenly, immediately turning the world upside down. But history shows that collapse is more often characterized by the slow unraveling of a civilization. Usually, this is due to some combination of resource scarcity, economic stagnation, and compounding disruptions to productive capacity – yet it’s barely perceptible in the day-to-day lives of the people within it. What are the signs that we could be living through such a moment right now, and if we are, how does history tell us to prepare for what’s to...
info_outline
A Country of Geniuses: Anthropic CEO’s Warnings, Plus Wide-Boundary Considerations on AI
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Last week there was so much news Nate recorded two Franklies – this is the second of those, which shares his reflections on a recent seminal essay posted by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, likening Artificial Intelligence as a "rite of passage" for the human species rather than just a narrow technological breakthrough. Amodei posits the possibility that we are now in what Carl Sagan once called a phase of “technological adolescence,” wherein humans’ technologies and tools become powerful enough to reshape or destabilize civilization faster than our collective wisdom can keep up. As a...
info_outline
Wide Boundary News: Japan, Silver, Venezuela, and More – the Biophysical Phase Shift Cometh
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
This week’s Frankly inaugurates a new category for videos on The Great Simplification platform, Wide Boundary News, in which Nate invites listeners to view the constant churn of headlines through a wider-boundary lens. As we are increasingly inundated with vast quantities of news (and nervous system dysregulation!), it becomes important to be able to tease out a thread on how they interconnect. The stories we tell ourselves about progress, growth, and stability no longer perfectly line up with the biophysical reality beneath them – in Nate’s words, ‘A biophysical phase shift cometh.’...
info_outline
The New Generation of Environmental Leadership: Stubborn Optimism, Tending Your Inner Fire, and Why Hope Is Not Enough with Xiye Bastida
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
For many people reading this, the crises we discuss on this podcast – from ecological instability to financial collapse – often feel like a distant problem in the future. But for the youth of today, managing the impact of these situations will define most of their lives, and many have already dedicated their careers to mitigating the worst outcomes. What do the leading young voices envision for the future, and what are they doing today to make that a reality? In this episode, Nate is joined by indigenous environmental justice activist and Planetary Guardian, Xiye Bastida, to discuss...
info_outline
The Creature in the Machine | Frankly 120
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
In this week’s episode, Nate reflects on his experience with knee surgery and being a “creature in the machine” (the Superorganism). He touches on the often-forgotten nature of our physical existence in a world dominated by cognitive labor and abstractions, exploring the tension between gratitude for the gains of modern medicine and knowledge of the hidden energetic cost of these technologies. Alongside these personal reflections, Nate unpacks his thoughts on some current political events and considers timely questions of power, legitimacy, and social fragmentation in a post-peak...
info_outline
Arms Race or the Human Race? Governance in the Age of AI, Nuclear Threats, and Geopolitical Brinkmanship | RR 21
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Humans have shaped the world more than any other species in existence, largely due to our ability to coordinate and work together as a unit – in other words, to govern ourselves. This means that, while human societies are at the center of the many crises we face today, we are also the key to navigating through them safely. But this is only possible if we’re able to hold the foundations of our governance together: communication, agency, and remembering our shared humanity. What is the current state of our ability to do this, and what policy mechanisms and agreements are needed to navigate...
info_outline
Technology and Wealth: The Straw, the Siphon, and the Sieve | Frankly 119
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
In this week’s Frankly, Nate explores the relationship between technology and wealth when viewed through a global biophysical lens. He uses the visualization of a straw, siphon, and sieve to describe how technology enables the acceleration of physical resource extraction and the concentration and filtering of resulting ‘wealth’ towards the human species. Running contrary to the commonly-held idea that technology automatically creates monetary wealth (and therefore prosperity), this episode asks listeners to view real wealth as the underlying stocks and flows that make life on Earth...
info_outline
Why the West Can’t Defend Itself: How Material Scarcity Is Reshaping Global Power with Craig Tindale
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
For decades, the West has outsourced its own material production to other countries, in favor of lower costs and short-term returns over more expensive, long-duration investments like mining and manufacturing. But while this has seemed like a success on the surface, it has left us with a society based on consumption, unable to produce what we need on our own. What are the deeper costs of this long-term offshoring – including for our geopolitical, climate, and technological ambitions? In this conversation, Nate is joined by materials expert and investor Craig Tindale, who explores the...
info_outline
The Things We Take for Granted | Frankly 118
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
In this week’s Frankly, Nate shares reflections on what we take for granted in life at multiple scales: from personal health to meaningful work to relative ecological stability. The things that keep our everyday lives functioning often go unnoticed until they’re needed or suddenly absent, suggesting that real wealth might come in the form of reliability rather than material gain. Nate also considers what has happened to our attention in an age of constantly-available stimulation, reflecting on how moving towards a quieter and slower lifestyle (whether by choice or by external...
info_outlineLast week there was so much news Nate recorded two Franklies – this is the second of those, which shares his reflections on a recent seminal essay posted by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, likening Artificial Intelligence as a "rite of passage" for the human species rather than just a narrow technological breakthrough. Amodei posits the possibility that we are now in what Carl Sagan once called a phase of “technological adolescence,” wherein humans’ technologies and tools become powerful enough to reshape or destabilize civilization faster than our collective wisdom can keep up. As a civilizational force, AI doesn't automatically act as humanity’s salvation or catastrophe – it acts as a mirror that reflects the maturity (or immaturity) of the humans – and systems – deploying it.
In this episode, Nate then widens the boundaries of the AI conversation to incorporate the biophysical reality and institutional systems that support these technologies, emphasizing energy, materials, infrastructure, governance, and incentives as the real limiting factors and alignment challenges. By incorporating the deeper structures that shape societal outcomes in this dialogue, he raises questions about how the assumption of shared goals like growth and optimization might steer AI towards outcomes that undermine ecological and social stability.
What will it mean in biophysical terms if we introduce near-limitless cognitive power into a world already constrained by energy and materials? Is it possible for societies to build the wisdom, restraint, and governance needed to survive the “technological adolescence” of AI? And if “intelligence” becomes cheap and abundant with AI expansion, how might that impact humans’ shared semblances of values, goals, and definitions of success?
(Recorded January 29, 2026)
---
Watch this video episode on YouTube
Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.
---
Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future