You're listening to the Great Simplification.

I'm Nate Higgins.

On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future.

By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles

in the coming great simplification.

Today I'm welcoming back to the program, my colleague Chuck Watson.

Chuck's been on the show five or six times highlighting geopolitics, war, particulars about nuclear weapons and the risk homeostasis that we've all taken for granted these last decades on the nuclear situation, and particularly what's been happening in Ukraine in often prescient detail over the last couple years.

Why did I ask Chuck to come back on?

Because we are slowly moving from a proxy war to potentially an open war.

And most of us are kind of asleep.

Things have kind of slowed down in Ukraine.

Not to Ukrainians, they haven't.

We've lost 400, 500,000 Ukrainian humans in this war.

But recently, France, Poland, and others are making noise about directly involving their troops, their equipment

moving into the arena, which would potentially trigger Article 5, Russia would retaliate,

and then we are quite potentially off to the escalatory races, as Chuck has talked about before.

So as much as I'm an energy systems finance ecology analyst, I think geopolitics of this sort is the mother of all risks.

And I feel a fiduciary to share what's going on to the followers and hopefully decision makers among you.

Why should we listen to Chuck Watson?

Chuck worked on the technical aspects of international relations and foreign policy for over 30 years, starting on detached duty

from the U.S. Air Force to the State Department and National Security Council in the Middle

East under Robert McFarland and Donald Rumsfeld.

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