A Perspective From Lebanon: Who Will We Be When Things Get Hard? | Frankly 140
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Release Date: 05/01/2026
Watch With Both Eyes Open: The Beauty and the Horror of Our Moment
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
In this week's Frankly, Nate reflects on a week spent with a group of friends and peers who share his understanding of the world's converging crises, and what it revealed about the deeply human need to be fully seen, without having to explain yourself first. Though the group rarely discussed climate, AI, or energy depletion, the shared awareness of these issues created space for humor, joy, and the reemergence of a version of himself that had quietly faded into the background over the years. He observes that most rooms he finds himself in either run either too hot – where people are overly...
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Taking Love Seriously: What Ancient Wisdom & Modern Psychology Say About Interconnectedness with John Churchill
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
A growing chorus of psychologists, contemplatives, and systems thinkers argue that most of us, and most of our institutions, are running an outdated psychological and spiritual "operating system," one never built for the converging ecological, economic, and cultural crises we face. Technological and policy responses absorb nearly all of our attention and resources, yet the maturity of the humans making the decisions may be the most needed and least prioritized intervention of all. Could ancient contemplative traditions, paired with modern psychology, offer a map for the kind of...
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Protect the Irreversible: What Matters Most in an Uncertain Future? | How to Think About the Future Pt 6, Frankly 151
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
This week’s video is the sixth part in Nate’s ongoing series, . Today, Nate turns from describing possible futures to exploring how we can make decisions when certainty is impossible. He introduces a framework for planning under uncertainty by distinguishing between two common mistakes – failing to respond to real risks, and taking decisive action based on incomplete understanding. Touching on examples like soil health, social trust, and children's developmental windows, Nate also advocates that the most important compass for navigating the future is learning to distinguish between what...
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It's Not Just Hormuz: The Chokepoints Changing Global Shipping Forever with Sal Mercogliano
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Roughly a fifth of the world's oil and more than a tenth of all global trade has been navigating a literal minefield, a wary insurance industry, and whipsawing geopolitics since late February of this year. But looking beyond the Strait of Hormuz closure itself, the same pattern threatens every critical chokepoint: passages open to all shipping for the past 80 years are becoming strategic assets within a geopolitical power struggle. If we continue this trend, what does a more fragmented, higher-cost, higher-risk maritime system mean for the norms and safety of the shipping industry, and what...
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Foundations Before Outcomes: The Future Beneath Your Feet | How to Think About the Future Pt 5, Frankly 150
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Today, in Part 5 of the “” series, Nate scales his exploration of civilizational futures down to the future of a single human life and analyzes how the same patterns that shape economies, power, geopolitics, and Earth systems turn inward. Building on the framework developed throughout the series, he describes how the factors from material throughput to personal agency are underpinned by our own physical/mental health and our web of relationships. Nate emphasizes that we cannot build any stable future on top of cracking foundations, pointing toward the importance of cultivating a strong...
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Can Money Serve Life? How to Fund Communities Doing the Real Work with Matthew Monahan
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars flow through global philanthropy, yet only a small fraction reaches environmental, climate, and nature-related causes. Meanwhile, in small towns and rural communities around the world, a hidden throughline of regenerative work is already underway. This work rarely waits for large-scale funding to begin, but it does need resourcing to grow into replicable movements capable of propelling system-wide change. What would it take to build financial infrastructure that actually gets capital to the people already doing the work of healing land and community?...
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A Legacy Worth Celebrating? Reflecting on 250 Years of the American Experiment | Frankly 149
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
As America marks its 250th birthday, Nate takes a moment to step outside of the celebrations to seek out a wider boundary perspective on this week’s holiday. He poses the question of whether the United States has truly matured as a nation over two and a half centuries, particularly through the lenses of energy, ecology, history, and culture. Nate walks through the extraordinary inheritance of fossil fuels that simultaneously shaped the American story while masking the real foundations of prosperity. He points out that even the symbols of this holiday – from backyard barbecues to fireworks...
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Mordor to the Long Repair: How Might Daily Life Feel in the Next Decades? | How to Think About the Future Part 4, Frankly 148
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
This week, Nate continues his “How to Think About the Future” series, where he invites listeners to imagine what it's like to live in different versions of the reality that lies ahead. In today’s edition, Nate builds upon the frameworks outlined in part three to create four distinct future worlds – composites that emerge from various combinations of economic conditions, geopolitical scenarios, power structures, and Earth systems stability. The resulting worlds are not meant to serve as a prediction, but as a set of thought experiments designed to stretch our imagination and to sharpen...
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We Weren't Expecting This: What Does a Super El Niño Mean For the Climate? with Tad Patzek
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
This year's projected Super El Niño forming in the Pacific could become one of the strongest climate oscillations in over a century. As regions prepare for the effects, and continue to adapt to extreme heat waves, intensifying storms, accelerating ice loss, and increasingly erratic rainfall, scientists and citizens alike are questioning what our new normal will look like under accelerated global heating. From climate basics to unfolding atmospheric research, what do we know about the trajectory our climate is currently on, and what gaps of knowledge still need to be filled? In this...
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How to Play 5D Chess: It's Not What You Think | Frankly 147
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
In this week's Frankly, Nate explores a pattern of thinking that permeates so many of our conversations: we often decide what we think before we've fully heard what's being said. Using the metaphor of a chessboard, he invites listeners to examine how we process information through a series of expanding perspectives. At the closest range, we instinctively assess people and ideas through lenses of threat, familiarity, and belonging. Soon after, conversations become filtered through ideologies, tribes, and cultural labels. That makes it harder to separate the argument itself from the person or...
info_outlineIn 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 of this platform into three questions he believes may matter more than the macro-analysis he usually offers. Who are we going to be when comfort and convenience start thinning out? How are we going to live with a biophysical haircut on the horizon? And what are we willing to protect, even at a cost? He notices how many people watching from the relative safety of the Global North live in a constant low-grade state of stress, even without immediate cause, while his friend remains grounded despite being surrounded by actual danger. Nate suggests that separating our internal responses from the external world is the primary work ahead of us, and closes by naming the recent shift in his own curiosity toward the question of who we might become as humans sitting at the precipice of a species-level transition.
When comfort and convenience start thinning out, who are you going to be? How do you separate your internal fight or flight response from what is actually happening around you? And what are you willing to give some of your life's energy to protect?
(Recorded April 30th, 2026)
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