How to Think About the Future (Part 2): Four Variables Shaping the Coming Decades | Frankly 139
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 24 April 2026
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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 there, Nate layers three more grids on top of this economic foundation. A grid focused on power – military, political, financial, and technological – asks how concentrated each is and where the gains flow. A grid regarding geopolitics maps cooperation and adversarial relations against interdependence and self-sufficiency, using the Strait of Hormuz closure as a live example of an adversarial and interdependent geopolitical makeup. Finally, an Earth systems grid tracks climate stress and biosphere integrity, taking into account that we are operating from an already compromised baseline. Nate also describes the role of technology as a modifier across all these grids, which amplifies whatever direction the surrounding system is already moving. He emphasizes that the real future will always come as a composite across these layers, and that the same economic headline produces radically different lived realities depending on the power, geopolitical, and ecological conditions it sits inside.
Where do you find yourself already settled on a particular view of the future, and what gets filtered out when you are? Of the four grids Nate lays out, which feels most defining in your thinking, and which do you tend to underweight? What other grids might matter for anticipating the future, and how might they interact with the ones here?
(Recorded April 20th, 2026)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Good morning. This is part two of how to think about the future series where we're going to take a deeper dive into scenario building and ultimately using that for planning and doing. |
| 0:14.0 | In part one, I talked about why I think it's important to hold the future as sort of a landscape of possibilities, not the |
| 0:24.9 | futures we want or prefer, but those that are possible starting there. |
| 0:30.3 | And I shared the trap I often see people fall into when we get settled on a particular |
| 0:36.8 | view of the future and then start framing and judging |
| 0:40.0 | everything else against it. In contrast, I and many other system scientists that I've known |
| 0:48.4 | or studied find it most helpful to have a distribution of possible futures that I consider with kind of a |
| 0:56.4 | midpoint. And the reality is, I don't know which one specifically is coming. None of us do. |
| 1:02.9 | So the more honest and ultimately helpful move is to learn how to hold several scenarios at once, |
| 1:08.5 | if only to have overlap with discussion with people that you're |
| 1:15.1 | striving towards making change with. So today I want to lay out the building blocks for |
| 1:21.2 | how to do that. So I'll start with a frame. |
| 1:34.5 | Most of you have already heard me talk about the four scenarios I've used for years now to describe the near-term possible futures. |
| 1:43.9 | Green growth, Mordor, the Great Simplification, and Mad Max. |
| 1:49.7 | If you're newer to the platform here and want to dig deeper into these scenarios, |
| 1:54.9 | probably the best polished presentation is the 2024 summit presentation. We'll link to in the show notes. |
| 2:05.4 | And as a reminder, every podcast and every, frankly, we've ever done has thorough references |
| 2:11.7 | and show notes that you can find by clicking somewhere. |
| 2:16.4 | Okay, I'll quickly reflect the logic of this. |
| 2:21.0 | The first axis is whether the global economy keeps growing in aggregate or begins to contract |
| 2:28.4 | from today's level of throughput or from some future level of throughput. |
| 2:33.7 | The second axis is whether that growth or contraction |
... |
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