You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins.

That's me.

On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society.

Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's-eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals.

Today's guest is ecological economist John Gowdy.

I've come to know John over the past 20 years in my research on the human predicament.

And every time I thought I discovered some novel aspect of our situation, be it our hunter

gatherer mines, energy depletion, climate change, cooperation, or the superorganism like optimizing for

surplus dynamic, which began with agriculture?

I discovered that John had written about that same topic five to ten years earlier.

Of all my guests, John's framing of where humans came from and how our society has self-organized via a market

system is most aligned with my own.

As such, it's my great pleasure to introduce my friend and one of my intellectual mentors,

John Gowdy, to discuss how humans got to this point. Hello, John, good to see you.

Hello, Nate.

Good to see you, person.

So when I worked on Wall Street, there were people known as macro guys and they were people

in the hedge fund industry that connected interest rates and foreign exchange and equities

and geopolitics and tell how everything worked and it would predict how things

went in the financial system.

Then when I left Wall Street, I started to meet people like you who connected an even broader

macro view of the human system, the human ecosystem.

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