Wide Boundary News: Sacrificing Wilderness, Oil Data Propaganda, and Feeding the Superorganism's Brain
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Release Date: 05/08/2026
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...
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No More Dystopian Stories: How to See a Future Worth Living In with Rob Hopkins
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Self-fulfilling prophecies; manifestations; the Oedipus Effect: Humanity has long had an intuition that the stories we tell ourselves the most are often the stories we make come true. Science has found more and more evidence to back this up, through both historical cultural analysis as well as unexpected neurological connections in our brains. If we fully accept this, then what sort of future are we telling with our current cultural narratives, and is there still time to write a new one? In this episode, Nate welcomes Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Network and author of “How...
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The Ultimate Alternative: Are You Okay With Nuclear Warfare? | Frankly 146
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
This week's Frankly is another in Nate’s recurring series Uncomfortable Questions for Unsettled Times, in which he poses questions about our shared future. Today, he uses headlines regarding a potential ceasefire deal between the U.S. and Iran to confront a subject that has re-entered public discourse with a quiet but startling force: nuclear warfare. Through a wide-boundary lens, Nate outlines how the renewed discussion of nuclear force raises questions that extend far beyond the current conflict, including important (and uncomfortable) questions about nuclear proliferation, human...
info_outlineThis 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 understanding, especially as access to the underlying data becomes more restricted and fragmented.
Nate then moves into the geopolitical and physical consequences of energy strain, focusing on Iran and the Strait of Hormuz as a critical chokepoint in global oil flows. He connects ongoing disruptions not only to price spikes, but also to how energy functions as a security commodity. These disruptions also extend into cascading effects on food systems, as things like fertilizer supply and cooking fuel reverse in access and affordability. Moving closer to home, Nate discusses the opening of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters for copper-nickel mining, highlighting the tension between ecosystem protection and demand for mineral inputs to power any magnitude of energy transition. He also touches on the rapid expansion of AI data centers and the large share of electricity they use, framing this trend as the economic Superorganism diverting massive energy flows toward its cognitive layer, rather than only its muscular layer. Finally, Nate closes with a reflection on industrial livestock productivity as another expression of a system optimized for high output, but operating under energy conditions that may no longer hold.
Why do we need to think about energy as a security commodity? How much of our future depends on being told the truth? And what have we bred for – in cows, seed varieties, supply chains, cities, and financial systems – that we will not be able to feed, medicate, or transport on the backside of the carbon pulse?
(Recorded May 5th, 2026)
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