(Some of) The Central Questions of Our Time | Frankly 87
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 551 Ratings
🗓️ 28 February 2025
⏱️ 17 minutes
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Summary
The period of relative peace and stability we've known - enabled by the energy surplus of the Carbon Pulse and the ecological stability of the Holocene - is slipping away. AI is turbocharging the Superorganism, governance structures are fraying, and ecological shocks are intensifying. As the Great Simplification approaches faster than expected, are we asking the right questions?
In this Frankly, Nate invites us to reflect on some of the most urgent questions of our time - and what they might mean for both our collective and individual trajectories ahead. Can open societies endure on the downslope of the Carbon Pulse? Is a future without large-scale war still possible? As the pace of change accelerates, the challenge isn't just understanding what's coming, but deciding how to respond.
What would you not regret doing if you knew major disruptions were imminent? Can you redirect frustration into meaningful action? And in a world that increasingly pulls us apart, can you help build a 'coalition of sanity'?
(Recorded February 25th, 2025)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, my friends. I am just this second back from a trip where I recorded an episode on |
| 0:09.2 | energy and climate change on PBS. It will air in four or five months. I'm probably, |
| 0:16.2 | well, I'm definitely still wearing the makeup that I used. |
| 0:26.1 | I am changing my priors. |
| 0:34.3 | You know, we cover ecology and energy and finance and the four horsemen. And I think I've underestimated the AI pulse and I've underestimated how soon |
| 0:45.1 | we might lose the governance that's needed to enact many of the things that we discuss on this |
| 0:53.5 | channel and I'm metabolizing. to enact many of the things that we discuss on this channel. |
| 1:02.0 | And I'm metabolizing and processing what I'm witnessing, what I'm learning. |
| 1:06.0 | And in coming weeks, I'm going to unpack that a little bit more. On the plane ride back this afternoon, I jotted down some questions, some central questions of our time and aligned with my ethos and my |
| 1:24.9 | sensitivity that I don't want to say overly dystopic predictions or framings |
| 1:32.8 | without providing agency and things for people to do in our own lives as we engage with the |
| 1:40.7 | future. I will follow these questions by some questions that might apply |
| 1:45.4 | to your own life. So in no particular order, some of the central questions of our time. |
| 1:53.4 | On the downslope of the carbon pulse, can there be some form of open societies? |
| 2:01.7 | Said differently, can we eventually, in a post-growth sort of way, have social arrangements that are not feudalism? |
| 2:12.3 | We had feudalism before the carbon pulse, and I expect some form of feudalism is the default after. |
| 2:20.3 | Said differently, can we acknowledge and events in our world in the first couple months of the year are suggesting this. |
| 2:33.3 | Can we acknowledge that governance is at ground zero for the human predicament? |
| 2:40.6 | So question number one, on the downside of the carbon pulse, can we have some form of open societies? |
| 2:48.6 | Question number two, can we prioritize life over death, living over killing of things? |
| 2:56.6 | In my reality 101 course, I asked my students, what's an armadillo for? |
| 3:04.0 | And there's usually an uncomfortable silence and then people start raising their hands for a wallet or for shoes or an ashtray. |
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