Recorded on: Mar 17, 2026
Description
This week’s Frankly marks a turning point in the work of The Great Simplification. Having spent twenty years articulating the more-than-human predicament, Nate shifts from diagnosis to direction as current events – including conflict in the Strait of Hormuz – accelerate the timeline. Today Nate shares a first-pass framework for action and response that’s organized around what to do now, which could be applied to various places and at multiple scales.
The framework begins with a personal foundation of inner work: stabilizing the nervous system, recapturing a sense of agency, doing grief work, and cultivating inner calmness as a precondition for effective action. Nate also emphasizes the need to build trusted networks and shared language so that when disruptions arrive, communities aren’t starting conversations from scratch. These two layers set the foundation for six broad fronts of intervention: infrastructure and physical stock-and-flow planning, poverty and displacement, ecological defense and regeneration, civic resilience and governance, culture and meaning, and economic transition toward commons-based and post-growth models. Nate stresses that these fronts are interdependent and not contingent on a single scenario – they hold across various possible scenarios for the future.
Nate also introduces a timeline axis of three overlapping phases, which build upon each other to shape the conditions of our future: the current stability window where building is still possible, the period of triage and “bend not break,” and the stable attractor that gives direction to the work of the first two. Nate closes with an observation about leadership: that modern systems select for dark triad traits, and that reluctance to lead may itself be a signal worth heeding.
What do you currently do with your time? Which of these six areas of engagement feels the most accessible to you right now? And where in your networks do you see the beginnings of shared language and trust that could support coordinated response?
Show Notes & Links to Learn More
The TGS team puts together these brief references and show notes for the learning and convenience of our listeners. However, most of the points made in episodes hold more nuance than one link can address, and we encourage you to dig deeper into any of these topics and come to your own informed conclusions.
This episode sets the stage for the next phase of work on The Great Simplification.It’s best experienced in its video version on or .If you haven’t yet, begin with to ground the context.
00:15 – The Great Simplification
00:45 – The Metacrisis/Polycrisis
01:00 – The peak of the Carbon Pulse (More info)
01:05 – Fossil fuels give us 500 billion human-worker equivalents, Burning fossil fuels over a million times faster than they were created
01:30 – Anthropogenic global heating
01:55 – Seven* of nine Planetary boundaries crossed: Plastics, Nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, Ocean acidification, Freshwater depletion, Biodiversity loss, and Ecosystem degradation
02:23 – Increasing wealth inequality in the U.S., Global wealth inequality, Financial claims on biophysical reality
02:42 – Polarization crisis, Addiction crisis
02:50 – Supernormal stimuli, Group bias
03:30 – Energy blind
03:40 – Week 3 of war in Iran
03:43 – Reduced flow of hydrocarbons in the Strait of Hormuz and countries affected
04:00 – The “magic” of fossil hydrocarbons
05:25 – Communicating a problem without solutions can be ineffective
07:30 – Ray Dalio, Ray Dalio’s post on the Strait of Hormuz, Grok AI summary screenshot of a video from Dalio on X
08:37 – Upcoming U.S.-China Summit
08:48 – 2008 financial crisis, Mortgage securities not accurately representing value
10:03 – Frankly #129: A Guide to Staying Human (Part 1): Desperately Seeking Agency
10:55 – Triggered sympathetic nervous system cannot hold complexity or logically reason, Sympathetic vs. Parasympathetic nervous systems
11:25 – Long time horizon
12:00 – Equanimity: Resources for Stabilizing our nervous systems, Developing our agency, Cultivating self-efficacy, Regulating addiction
13:01 – Finding the Others: Join our Hylo community channel, Toolkit: Creating and Maintaining Coalitions and Partnerships
13:55 – Tool to map your constituency
14:30 – Scenario planning, Examining shortfall risk
16:10 – Rocks in the River, Islands of Coherence, Cultural Mitochondria (The social nature of mitochondria)
16:52 – Nate’s 4 future scenarios
22:45 – How to map out infrastructure/physical stock and flow
23:00 – Technology won’t save us, How to reduce consumption, 2000-Watt Society (TGS Ep), Living Energy Farm (TGS Ep)
23:09 – Localization and re-regionalization, Design principles, Helena Norberg-Hodge (TGS Ep) of Local Futures, Global Ecovillage Network
23:35 – Decentralized energy infrastructure, 5 systems to use when the grid fails
23:52 – How to map your food system (CARAT tool)
24:00 – Protecting clean water and sanitation
24:25 – Retrofitting, DIY Weatherization (U.S. Weatherization Assistance Programs), Density patterns
24:35 – Suburban/urban sprawl
24:45- Medical and pharmaceutical global supply chains, Decentralizing healthcare in crisis
25:05 – Transporting goods when fuel costs rise
25:12 – Digital commons and Communication infrastructure, Decentralized communication platform
26:25 – Risk of automation
27:08 – Mutual aid hub, How to create a mutual aid network
27:33 – Improving the care economy
27:50 – Industries that prosper during recession
28:10 – Social Cohesion in Times of Crisis: The Role of Communication for Democracies
29:10 – COVID-19 Pandemic (and subsequent economic contraction) reduced carbon emissions
29:40 – Goldilocks Technology, Open Source Ecology (low cost, low tech blueprints for machines)
29:50 – Carbon drawdown
30:43 – How to protect biodiversity, Documenting and Protecting Biodiversity on Land Trust Projects: An Introduction and Practical Guide, Corridor creation design principles
31:02 – Protecting soil and watersheds, Regenerative agriculture 101
31:38 – Novel entities, Plastics and Fertility Reality Roundtable with Shanna Swan and Sian Sutherland, Endocrine-disrupting chemicals
32:37 – Economic benefits of preserving 30% of nature
34:10 – Power and wealth concentration
34:20 – Creating Deliberative (More info) and Participatory democracy (Importance of equality and democracy in collapse), Creating a citizens’ assembly, Sortition-based processes
34:30 – Audrey Tang (TGS Ep), Taiwan’s digital revolution
34:53 – Subsidiarity and Mapping local governance capacity, Rural Capacity Index map
35:00 – Decentralization and placing power back to local governments
35:16 – Creating Anti-corruption and accountability governance systems
35:27 – Maladaptive behaviors in disasters
35:47 – Ombudsman, Intergenerational governance bodies, Netherlands Child Mayor
36:10 – Building trust toolkit, Building an information commons
36:20 – People are inherently good (More info), Survey on this by country
36:55 – Importance of stories and meaning, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
37:25 – Cultural Materialism by Marvin Harris – Theoretical principles, Nate Hagens explaining Marvin Harris’ Cultural Materialism, Basic Premises of Cultural Materialism, Infrastructure, Social Structure, Superstructure
37:30 – Daniel Schmachtenberger (TGS Episodes)
38:06 – Alternative education, Zak Stein TGS episode on reimaging education, Education in a Time Between Worlds
38:25 – Grief work (Francis Weller TGS episode on grief as ritual), Methods for Collective sensemaking
38:50 – Reconnecting to place
39:03 – Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry
39:15 – Importance of ritual, How to create ritual
39:50 – Importance of cultural agency and sovereignty
40:50 – Ecological overshoot
41:20 – Cooperative and commons-based ownership (More info), How to implement, Dark Matter Labs: Smart Commons
41:43 – Local exchange trading systems, Local currencies, Barter networks, Time banks, Strong local economies foster community cohesion
42:25 – Land and housing reform
42:47 – Finance and credit redesign, Debt is a claim on future energy
45:50 – Nate presenting on Three overlapping response phases
46:20 – U.S. is currently losing allies
47:30 – Bend not break
