This Week's Learnings: Corn Sweat, Coral Bleaching, and the Climate Credit Crunch | Frankly 102
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 550 Ratings
🗓️ 18 July 2025
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this week's Frankly, Nate shares a handful of things he's learned in the past few days that have implications for the Great Simplification. Nate covers a wide range of topics in this edition, from the connections between corn sweat and wet bulb temperatures to a timeline of coral reef bleaching events.
Our culture is marked by information overload, which has been expanded intensely by technology. This makes it difficult to absorb the data, narratives, and headlines we are presented—let alone sort through them and examine what is relevant for the Great Simplification scenario. This will perhaps be the first of a regular series where Nate outlines what he has learned recently, and what it means for this work and our lives.
What does it mean to have a "climate-induced credit crunch" across the financial sector? What's up with the recent tariffs on copper, and what connotations does this hold for the Great Simplification? Why are mental health issues currently more prevalent for liberal-minded individuals, particularly women?
(Recorded July 16th, 2025)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Good morning. It is Wednesday, July 16th. I am not finished with my frankly on the 10 blind spots of the progressive movement. That'll come out next week. What I thought I'd do, and maybe I'll start doing this once a month or so, is do a little overview of what I learned this week. |
| 0:23.4 | It may seem that I have an encyclopedic mind on all the issues we cover here from the |
| 0:30.5 | environment to finance to human behavior, but I don't. |
| 0:34.3 | I just am interviewing people who are experts, And there's a ton of stuff that I get |
| 0:40.3 | emailed or in the social media or my team shows me. And quite often it's in one eye and ear |
| 0:49.2 | and out the next. And I quickly forget it. But there are things that I learn every week. |
| 0:55.0 | And here are five that I've learned the last couple days. |
| 0:59.0 | First of all, I live in the upper Midwest on the border of Minnesota and Wisconsin, |
| 1:14.8 | and there is a lot of corn, and it is GMO corn, and it is growing fast. |
| 1:21.4 | The old phrase knee high by the 4th of July no longer is relevant. |
| 1:30.7 | Probably end of June, corn was knee high. |
| 1:39.1 | Here's a picture of me this morning. It's over my head. And it's July 16th. So I learned the term this week, corn sweat, because it is so unbearably heavy and uncomfortably hot here that I have to get up |
| 1:48.7 | at five in the morning to do any exercise in my bike ride. Otherwise, it's unbearable. So what I learned |
| 1:53.9 | was an acre of corn, just one acre can release three to four thousands of gallons of water per day |
| 2:00.7 | and fast growing corn like GMO |
| 2:03.2 | types more than that like six thousand gallons this equates to like three-tenths or four-tenths |
| 2:09.3 | of an inch of water in the local area which increases the dew point like three to five degrees |
| 2:15.7 | fahrenheit the dew point again is the temperature at which the air becomes fully saturated with water vapor. |
| 2:24.4 | So the higher the dew point, the more moisture in the air, and the harder it is for sweat to evaporate off your skin. |
| 2:32.5 | And of course, this is related to the term wet bulb temperature, |
| 2:36.7 | which we hear about in global heating discussions. So wet bulb combines heat and humidity into one |
| 2:45.9 | number, and it's how hot it feels when your body tries to cool itself through evaporation. |
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