Time Travel & The Superorganism: A Movie Idea | Frankly 81
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 552 Ratings
🗓️ 20 December 2024
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
(Recorded December 16, 2024)
As we wrap up another year of thought-provoking discussions on The Great Simplification, Nate takes us on an imaginative journey in this week's Frankly - exploring a potential movie script idea that blends systems, science and fiction. What if someone who deeply understood the challenges of today's global economic Superorganism could travel back in time? Armed with the knowledge of our current ecological and economic trajectory, what would they change? What could they change?
Hollywood media could serve as a powerful tool to educate and inspire a wider audience on the systems science of our current predicament. Unpacking his movie idea, Nate shows us how the interventions highlighted - even if sci-fi - could educate audiences about the complex dynamics which have shaped the issues we now face. Through key character developments, we explore the constraints imposed by the path dependency of the Superorganism, realities about aggregate human behavior, and where degrees of freedom might exist to shift the trajectory of the future - in service of life.
If you could travel back through time to the 1970s (or to any date), how would YOU intervene to shape the future? Could education, regenerative ecology, or "Superorganism-free zones" alter the trajectory of civilization? And more broadly, how might Hollywood still play a role in translating the systems science towards providing agency to the general public?
Watch this video episode on YouTube
---
Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Season's greetings. It's the end of the year. The end of our third year, we've had 150 weeks of |
| 0:09.5 | uninterrupted content, including frankly. Oh my God, Frank, you are so cute. You don't know what |
| 0:19.4 | you look like on camera. |
| 0:22.8 | I have a movie idea. |
| 0:27.9 | I'm never going to actually get it into movie form, so I figured I would share it on this, |
| 0:28.2 | frankly. |
| 0:33.4 | It's a little bit science, a little bit fiction, but it's about someone who thinks and is aware about the metabolism of the human economic superorganism and goes back in time |
| 0:40.6 | and tries to do something about it. And that's going to be the theme of today's, frankly. |
| 0:47.7 | So before I get into that, I will talk about the audiences of this show. There's the walking worried or the pro-social scout team or the people like you that tune in that understand what's going on and they adhere to the bat signal without being directed to or being paid to or anything. |
| 1:14.4 | It's the natural systems thinkers around the world. |
| 1:24.0 | The second category is philanthropists, foundations, and people who have attained outsource, |
| 1:29.9 | outsized financial claims on biophysical reality that have degrees of freedom to direct our current situation in ways that prior human cultures didn't have other than kings |
| 1:37.7 | and queens and rulers. There is now a class of humans who have outsize capability and, in my opinion, outsize responsibility |
| 1:47.0 | because I think there's a lot of antagonism towards the rich that may be misdirected. I think being |
| 1:54.0 | rich isn't the problem. Once you understand the metacrisis, the great simplification, the human |
| 1:59.8 | predicament. |
| 2:09.7 | And then there's a responsibility and a fiduciary to use your resources towards doing something. |
| 2:15.4 | A third category is government, future policy makers. |
| 2:17.1 | I'm calling it advanced policy. |
| 2:19.8 | Those people that are going to need to make what would now be unpopular decisions in the future to intervene on behalf of better outcomes. |
| 2:28.8 | So that's a third category. A fourth is community leaders, pro-social preppers, those people who can have an |
| 2:37.5 | outsized role in advancing these issues ahead of time in their communities, locally, regionally. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Nate Hagens, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Nate Hagens and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.