How to Think About the Future (Part 1): Changing the Future Starts with How You Think | Frankly 138
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 17 April 2026
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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 his own base scenario – that the global economy is likely to hit a wall in the relatively-near future – should be held with humility.
Nate introduces the idea of "scenario thinking" as a practical strategy to reflect on and prepare for several versions of the future, keeping one engaged and grounded in what matters. He also names why this line of thinking is hard in practice – 1. our nervous systems want resolution, 2. our careers and identities are attached to particular futures, and 3. cultural incentives reward confident stories over honest uncertainty. The episode closes by introducing shortfall risk, which is the danger that something essential, like topsoil, social trust, grid stability, or the nuclear taboo drops below a threshold from which it cannot easily recover. This concept will act as connective tissue across the rest of the series, which is an attempt to expand perception instead of picking the right future, and to identify what is coupled, what is irreversible, and what kinds of responses stay robust across many possible worlds.
Where in your life have you quietly settled on a single story about the future? Which of the essentials you rely on would be hardest to rebuild if they fell below a threshold? And how might the decisions you make this week change if you held more than one plausible future in mind at the same time?
(Recorded April 11th, 2026)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Good morning, friends. |
| 0:13.7 | This is the first episode in a new series I'm calling How to Think About the Future. |
| 0:21.4 | There are going to be four parts, and I'm going to lay out the structure of all of them in a moment. |
| 0:26.1 | But first, why am I doing this series? |
| 0:29.7 | If you followed the great simplification for any length of time, you have probably noticed that we cover a lot of different topics, energy and geopolitics |
| 0:39.5 | and ecology and increasingly AI and economics and mental health and food and governance |
| 0:46.3 | and plastics and nuclear meaning, community, pretty much everything that I think relates to the unfolding more than |
| 0:57.0 | human predicament. And every single time we put up an episode on one of these topics, |
| 1:01.6 | we get a predictable kind of comment. Maybe you've left one yourself or maybe you've read |
| 1:09.8 | some of them and quietly agreed, and it usually |
| 1:12.3 | sounds something like this. Why are you having a nuclear expert on? Nuclear is too late and |
| 1:18.2 | too expensive to matter. Or why are you focusing on plastics and toxics when the global |
| 1:24.4 | economy is going to roll over anyways? Or why future renewable energy people, when we both know renewables can't replace fossil |
| 1:33.3 | hydrocarbons at the current scale? |
| 1:36.3 | Or climate isn't even in the top 10 risks that people are worried about, so why are you |
| 1:40.3 | spending so much time on that and other environmental issues? Or dozens of other |
| 1:46.4 | comments along the same vein, you get the point. I read these comments, though my staff |
| 1:54.5 | tells me not to, and I take most of them seriously because that's how I roll for better or worse. |
| 2:03.5 | And each of these assertions comes from someone who is likely settled on a particular flavor |
| 2:11.6 | of the future and is framing most everything else against it. |
| 2:17.0 | If you've decided that economic collapse is imminent, then conversations about long-term |
| 2:22.8 | ecological restoration feel like a luxury. |
... |
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