In the second of a two-part series, How to Think About the Future, Nate Hagens expands on the case for holding a distribution of possible futures rather than a single preferred one, and walks through a structured scenario-building exercise. He begins with the two-by-two grid that he has used for years, which indicates whether the economy will expand or contract and whether this happens within ecological limits or in overshoot. The four quadrants this produces represent possible directions toward the future: toward green growth, Mordor, Mad Max, or the Great Simplification.
From there, Nate layers three more grids on top of this economic foundation. A grid focused on power – military, political, financial, and technological – asks how concentrated each is and where the gains flow. A grid regarding geopolitics maps cooperation and adversarial relations against interdependence and self-sufficiency, using the Strait of Hormuz closure as a live example of an adversarial and interdependent geopolitical makeup. Finally, an Earth systems grid tracks climate stress and biosphere integrity, taking into account that we are operating from an already compromised baseline. Nate also describes the role of technology as a modifier across all these grids, which amplifies whatever direction the surrounding system is already moving. He emphasizes that the real future will always come as a composite across these layers, and that the same economic headline produces radically different lived realities depending on the power, geopolitical, and ecological conditions it sits inside.
Where do you find yourself already settled on a particular view of the future, and what gets filtered out when you are? Of the four grids Nate lays out, which feels most defining in your thinking, and which do you tend to underweight? What other grids might matter for anticipating the future, and how might they interact with the ones here?
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.
00:00 – Frankly #138: How to Think About the Future (Part 1)
00:10 – Scenario planning, How to do scenario analysis, Scenario Thinking: A Historical Evolution of Strategic Foresight
00:43 – Systems science
01:35 – Nate’s 4 Scenarios – Summit presentation (Green growth, Mordor, The Great Simplification, & Mad Max)
02:40 – Overshoot – Economy and Human population
02:55 – Planetary boundaries
06:00 – Daniel Schmachtenberger, Bend Not Break series
06:10 – Military power national rankings, Current conflicts
06:50 – Financialized economy
07:51 – Fire apes
07:55 – Dark triad traits, Dark triad traits in positions of power, Percentage with dark triad traits
08:15 – 26 people hold the same financial claims on biophysical reality as the bottom 4 billion of the human population (Original report) (Graph in Frankly)
08:27 – AI race and relevant actors
10:35 – Phase shift
11:30 – East Asian post-war economic development
11:55 – Captured democracy – industry leaders and lobbyists write the laws
12:45 – Trust in the government in the U.S.
12:55 – Feudalism (Elements in contemporary society), Kleptocracy (Kleptocracy Tracker), Resource-curse states
13:30 – Marvin Harris, Social structure
15:05 – U.S. is highly dependent on complex supply chains, while Russia is more independent
15:25 – North Korea depends heavily on China for fuel
15:30 – U.S. is fairly energy self-sufficient, but deeply interdependent on semiconductors and pharmaceuticals from other countries (amongst other things)
15:55 – Iran War 2026
16:25 – Globalization since the 1990s
17:12 – The Carbon Pulse, Possible future shapes of the Carbon Pulse, Future growth scenarios
17:40 – Strait of Hormuz crisis: Sulfuric acid, Helium, Fertilizer, 15 charts that explain why the Strait of Hormuz shutdown matters for the global economy & Taiwan: Strait of Malacca trade chokepoint
18:23 – Cold War
19:18 – Philippines declaring an energy emergency, Bangladesh closing schools to save electricity, Japan releasing emergency oil reserves
20:50 – Global heating, Extreme weather events
20:58 – Recent flooding in Midwest
21:50 – Trophic webs
22:33 – Soils degrading, Pollinator populations decreasing, Fisheries declining, Water tables dropping, Food production struggling
23:00 – Carrying capacity
23:04 – Shifting baselines
23:09 – Holocene
24:30 – Atmosphere and Ocean degradation
24:40 – Seven out of nine planetary boundaries breached
25:10 – Regenerative agriculture, Ecosystem restoration
25:25 – Global cooling initiatives
26:44 – Dennis Meadows, TGS Episode
27:15 – Global data center electricity demand is on track to double by 2030 with AI as the main driver
28:22 – Global fertility rates (South Korea fertility rate) and Population pyramid, Effects of an inverting population pyramid, Peak Population Projections
30:15 – Autarky
Join us online on May 6, 2026, for a live panel discussion with Nate Hagens: “Chokepoint: The New Urgency of Ending Our Fossil Fuel Addiction.” Reserve your spot by registering today.
