Could the West Lose the Resource Wars? AI, Rare Earths, and Economic Statecraft with Michael Every & Craig Tindale | RR 22
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Release Date: 03/04/2026
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...
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How to Think About the Future (Part 1): Changing the Future Starts with How You Think | Frankly 138
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
In this week's Frankly, Nate opens a new series called How to Think About the Future. He begins with some comments he’s heard repeatedly on this platform: why cover nuclear, plastics, renewables, or climate when something else is the real issue? Nate observes that these questions come from people who have already settled on a single storyline about what's coming, and are filtering everything else through it. Our actual reality is much more complex and unknowable, and even the most well-informed perspectives may only be able to capture pieces of the bigger picture. Nate emphasizes that even...
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The Fantasy of Space Colonization: The Spaceship We're Already On with Tom Murphy & DJ White | RR 24
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
On the heels of Artemis II, our cultural obsession with space colonization continues, even as we face increasing global resource constraints and planetary health declines. Techno-optimists, including some of the wealthiest among us, dream of a future where we mine, travel to, and colonize other planets – all in the hopes of bypassing the problems we now face on Earth. But from the perspective of physics and ecology, how feasible is space colonization – and are these interplanetary ambitions blinding us to the miracle of the planetary spaceship we already inhabit? In this episode,...
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Oil 301: The World After Cheap Energy | Frankly 137
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Today’s Frankly is the final installment in a three-part series on the role oil plays in modern civilization, prompted by the recent flow disruptions and geopolitical conflict surrounding the Strait of Hormuz. Nate frames the entire arc of this series through the concept of the carbon pulse: a one-time inheritance of ancient stored sunlight that humanity is burning through in a few hundred years. He highlights how modern economies, now roughly a thousand times larger than five centuries ago, are built on the assumption that the energy abundance at the top of this curve is permanent, when in...
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Oil 201: What Happens When the Oil Stops Flowing | Frankly 136
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
This week’s Frankly is the second in a three-part series on the role oil plays in modern civilization, prompted by the recent flow disruptions and geopolitical conflict surrounding the Strait of Hormuz. This installment explores how modern society has been built on the assumption of cheap and abundant energy, and what happens when that assumption breaks down. Nate describes the ways our built systems, including food production, water treatment, manufacturing, and global trade, are calibrated to cheap energy inputs, and how processes that look economically efficient are often deeply...
info_outlineAs our governments, institutions, and the public become more aware of the increasing pressures on material and energy availability, we’ve simultaneously seen powerful ripple effects for industrial policy, economic planning, and geopolitical dynamics. Parallel to this story are evolving strategies unique to each nation as new lines of power emerge alongside the trends of artificial intelligence, competing demands for rare earth metals, and an increasingly unstable global power balance that underpins all of it. How have these seemingly disparate factors combined to influence recent international events – and how can understanding them help us forecast the future of global governance and power?
In this episode, Nate is joined by financial and economic analysts, Craig Tindale and Michael Every, to discuss the widespread implications of growing geopolitical tensions over scarce resources and the rapidly changing foreign policy and economic statecraft that countries are implementing in response. Importantly, Craig and Michael emphasize the centrality of China and the U.S. as the two superpowers reshaping global alliances, and how industrial capacity and material constraints underpin each move made in their pursuit for dominance. Ultimately, they emphasize the need for clarity and realignment of the goals for economic and industrial policy as we leave behind the era of growth and grapple with a simplifying world.
What can the long overlooked story of rare earth metals, energy resources, and industrial capacity tell us about ongoing geopolitical events? How might continued AI development play a key role in the future of economic statecraft and the international balance of power? And finally, how should we re-think what economic growth actually serves in an era of resource constraints, geopolitical competition, and ecological crisis? In other words, what is GDP truly for? (And what is GPT really for?)
About Craig Tindale:
Craig Tindale is a private investor who has spent nearly four decades working in software development, business strategy, and infrastructure planning, including in leadership positions at Telstra, Oracle, and IBM. Additionally, he has direct experience working in East-to-West supply chains, including as the CEO and Asia Regional Director for DataDirect Technologies.
He’s now pivoted to investing in groundbreaking ideas such as drone reforestation through Air Seed Technologies, and uses his knowledge of Chinese industrial strategy and Western tech demand to identify the choke points in Critical Metals markets. Most recently he released the white paper, Critical Materials: A Strategic Analysis, which offers a systems synthesis on how the race for rare earths and the return of material constraints is shaping geopolitical relationships.
About Michael Every:
Michael Every is Global Strategist at Rabobank Singapore analyzing major developments and key thematic trends, especially on the intersection of geopolitics, economics, and markets. He is frequently published and quoted in financial media, is a regular conference keynote speaker, and was invited to present to the 2022 G-20 on the current global crisis.
Michael has over two decades of experience working as an Economist and Strategist. Before Rabobank, he was a Director at Silk Road Associates in Bangkok, Senior Economist and Fixed Income Strategist at the Royal Bank of Canada in both London and Sydney, and an Economist for Dun & Bradstreet in London.
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