This Week's Learnings: Gold Holdings, Political Divides, and the DOE Climate Report | Frankly 107
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 12 September 2025
⏱️ 17 minutes
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Summary
In this week's Frankly, in a continuation of his 'This Week's Learnings' series, Nate updates viewers on things he learned in the past week, and the implications for our sociocultural trajectory. This edition focuses on recent financial and political headlines – global gold holdings, shifting geopolitical energy deals, and new U.S. Department of Energy reports – and explains their relevance to our biophysical reality and broader geopolitical landscape. Through this exercise, Nate invites podcast viewers to use a systems lens to integrate the wide array of news we are bombarded with into the large evolving story of The Human Predicament.
Why does it matter that central banks now hold more gold than the U.S. treasuries? How might expanding energy collaborations between Russia and China shift the global political power of the United States and Europe? How do current economic and political incentives affect the nature of energy science, and what we consider to be 'truth' itself?
(Recorded September 9th, 2025)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Good morning. I should put an under construction sign here because my office, my podcast studio is being |
| 0:09.1 | upgraded. It is a rainy, allergy-laden, Minnesota September day, and I wanted to do a brief |
| 0:20.0 | update. Lots of, frankly, is coming soon. Next week's is |
| 0:24.6 | going to be on psychopathy because next week's podcast episode is on psychopaths in human culture. |
| 0:33.5 | I hope everyone can watch that. I have some follow-up thoughts. |
| 0:44.0 | Paradoxically, I was in a very good mood after that podcast, despite the depressing subject. |
| 0:53.6 | So here are a few things that have come across my feed in the last week, and I'm just going to comment briefly on them, things in the news. |
| 1:14.6 | One is my friend Tavi Costa, who works with my former business school colleague, Kevin Smith, posted this graph showing that recently this last month, central banks hold more gold than U.S. Treasuries, and this is the first |
| 1:24.4 | time this has happened in 30 years. There's something biophysically ginormous |
| 1:30.8 | afoot in the world. Even if you're not paying attention, you can feel it. Gold is at |
| 1:38.2 | $3,600 odd dollars per Troy ounce. People sense that the, the biophysical gauntlet of creating more |
| 1:49.8 | and more financial claims on a finite amount of ecology and natural resources is problematic. |
| 1:57.5 | And so why would I want to hold something by an entity that is printing more and more of that thing when I could hold something physical that holds value over time? |
| 2:11.6 | So this trend is continuing. |
| 2:16.1 | And I often use the word for the phrase, bend, not break. This isn't, |
| 2:24.3 | the origin of that isn't about society. It was about my work with the financial credit system. |
| 2:30.8 | Over 10 years ago, I worked with two U.S. government agencies looking at what |
| 2:35.4 | would happen if the credit mechanism in the world seized up. And we would have to look at |
| 2:41.1 | more local and regional supply chains. And paradoxically, we looked at fertilizer because most |
| 2:48.2 | of the U.S. fertilizer is not made in the U.S. but in Trinidad and Tobago and |
| 2:52.8 | surgical gloves and things like that. But this story of really a musical chair situation |
| 3:01.7 | where we paper over more and more claims on a finite amount of resources with bonds and bills and stable |
... |
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