Advertise on podcast: The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens

This week Nate examines artificial intelligence through the metaphor of Icarus, asking what risks arise when a civilization injects trillions of cognitive workers into a civilization that's already in resource overshoot. Emphasizing that our society already largely ignores the depleting fossil energy that powers our lives, Nate traces how AI could amplify our economic growth imperative rather than help us escape it. He also touches on optimization – how solving solely for efficiency erodes the robustness and slack that allow our human systems to adapt to energy and material descent.  The latter part of Nate's analysis turns toward risks related to power concentration and the downstream effects of increased societal integration of AI. He considers the long-term implications of trends like shrinking entry-level opportunities, mounting cognitive debt, and prose averaging out across research, media, and even everyday life. He also dives into potential nearer-term risks like the emergence of technofeudalism and decreasing costs of surveillance. Nate ends the episode by leaving the last risk unnamed, arguing that the most important consequence of transformative technology may be the one nobody can foresee. How do AI "cognitive workers" interact with the logic of the economic Superorganism? What happens when a civilization optimized for growth without accounting for resilience introduces a technology such as AI? And can humanity choose a middle path when the systems driving AI are rewarded for extremes?  (Recorded September 27th, 2026)   Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

Almost eight months after the Iran war first rattled global energy markets, the global system has proven surprisingly adaptable, even as prices continue to rise and product shortages become more common. But as those buffers run dry and diesel prices climb to the equivalent of over $200 a barrel, the slack in our system is starting to disappear. How much longer can our hyper-connected economic system stagger along, and where is it already breaking?  In this episode, Nate welcomes back petroleum geologist Art Berman for a follow-up to their May conversation, to take stock of what's changed since the war upended Middle East energy flows. Art explains why the adaptations that have kept prices from spiraling have unaccounted-for costs for the larger system, and why 5 to 20 percent of shut-in production may never return to prior levels, even once wells are reopened. The conversation traces the parallels between this moment and the 1970s and 1980s oil shocks, but also the key differences that will create a bigger (potentially insurmountable) barrier to recovery this time. Ultimately, Nate and Art consider whether we are witnessing the rise of a fragmenting, multipolar world of resource nationalism that will replace the postwar security architecture, which has underwritten cheap oil and globalization for decades. How are underlying refinery risks intensifying an already precarious situation? How are global powers positioning themselves amid this pivotal point for geopolitical relationships? And even if the multiple global conflicts were to stabilize today, what are the locked-in repercussions for global energy supplies, and how will they ripple out to affect everything around us?  (Conversation recorded on September 19th, 2026)    About Art Berman:  Art Berman is a petroleum geologist with over 40 years of oil and gas industry experience. He is an expert on U.S. shale plays and is currently consulting for several E&P companies and capital groups in the energy sector.   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube  Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

The El Niño now building in the tropical Pacific is unlike anything in the historical record, and it's arriving on top of decades of warming. Together, they could push global temperatures to roughly 1.8°C (3.2ºF) above pre-industrial levels next year, offering a preview of what may become the new normal within a decade. As the rate of warming continues to accelerate and public attention swings between alarm and fatigue, how can we clearly understand where the planet is actually headed and what it will take to adapt? In this episode, Nate is joined by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather to break down the numbers and metrics within climate science, and translate what they will actually feel like for humanity. He explains how global temperature is measured, what the new generation of IPCC scenarios reveals about plausible futures, and why there's still uncertainty in just how much warmer we'll get by the year 2100. Zeke also unpacks how declining aerosol pollution has sped up warming and other climate variables that have actively emerging research behind them. While certain amounts of warming are locked in, he emphasizes that there is still a wide difference between every degree of warming, and the actions we take now will determine climate futures for centuries to come. How does the IPCC attempt to incorporate the most unpredictable factor for climate models – human behavior – and what do their current projections estimate? If we reached zero emissions tomorrow, would the planet cool back down, or are we locked into the warming we already have? And in a world growing weary of crisis headlines, how can we hold the reality of climate change without tipping into denial or despair? (Conversation recorded on September 16th, 2026)   About Zeke Hausfather:  Zeke is a lead author of the IPCC Seventh Assessment Report, and was a contributing author to the Sixth Assessment Report. He also authored the climate trends chapter of the Fifth U.S. National Climate Assessment, and has testified as an expert witness before the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. At Berkeley Earth, Zeke helps produce one of the world's primary global surface temperature records. He is also a Climate Science Contributor at Carbon Brief. At Stripe, Zeke leads climate research for Frontier, a $2 billion advance market commitment accelerating permanent carbon removal.    Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

On the heels of Climate Week, Nate poses a thought experiment: What would a world leader's speech sound like if the difficult truths underpinning global heating – which are politically unsayable due to donors, borders, electoral campaigns, and other incentives – were laid bare to the public? Posing as this hypothetical world leader, Nate traces modern prosperity back to the extraordinary inheritance of ancient sunlight we discovered in the form of fossil fuels. Their extraction and depletion have made today's civilization possible, while simultaneously bringing forth dire consequences for Earth. He also outlines the deeper behavioral and cultural ways in which billions of individual choices become a system with its own logic and behavior, producing outcomes that no one person intended … or can control. Nate frames this moment in our more-than-human predicament as a test of collective maturity. The challenge we face is recognizing en masse that the energy system that enabled unprecedented material abundance is the same one now threatening the ecological stability we depend on. It also means realizing that there is no single solution or clean reset – instead, shifting the trajectory of the Superorganism requires responses from each of us, accumulated over time, slowly but surely. How exactly did the interests of the system diverge from the interests of the individuals within it? What weight does "collective maturity" carry as a response to the more-than-human predicament? And is it possible for a civilization built around perpetual growth to respond to limits without first experiencing collapse? (Recorded September 17th, 2026)   Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

The United States, a global superpower for the last several decades, is now locked into a battle for control over the region with the bulk of the world's remaining fossil fuel reserves. Despite U.S. military strength, Iran is not backing down, equipped with a new era of military technology. What happens if the U.S. strategy backfires against its leadership's intention, and what are the larger implications for the balance of geopolitical power?  In this episode, Nate welcomes military historian and political scientist Robert Pape for an in-the-moment breakdown of the Iran war's trajectory. Drawing on more than two decades of modeling U.S. strikes on Iran, Pape lays out his central concept: the "escalation trap," in which tactical military success – such as killing leaders, hitting key assets, or a blockade – actually results in a strategic backfire as the attacked side is motivated by the need to survive. He layers this dynamic with the "Second Precision Revolution," which describes the rise of cheap, mass-produced drones that enable countries like Iran and Ukraine to withstand attacks from far stronger militaries. The two also discuss the tenuous position of the other Gulf States bordering Iran, the effects of this war on the financial power of the U.S., and the risk of an Iranian nuclear test in the next few months. Pape brings this all together to point toward the United States' position at the edge of losing its status as a lone superpower, pushing the world back toward regional power centers. What does the United States risk by continuing its strategy of brute punishment? How is the rest of the world adapting to the rapidly changing geopolitical gameboard? And if the United States global standing is relegated – and modern warfare is redefined by decentralized drone technology – what will it mean for stability and globalization more broadly?  (Conversation recorded on September 15th, 2026)   About Robert Pape: Robert A. Pape is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago specializing in international security affairs. His publications include Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism and Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War. His newest book, Our Own Worst Enemies: America in the Age of Violent Populism, is now available. Before teaching at the University of Chicago in 1999, Pape taught international relations at Dartmouth College for five years and air power strategy for the USAF's School of Advanced Airpower Studies for three years. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1988. He is the director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats.   Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

This week, Nate zooms out from recent headlines about climbing diesel prices, a thinning U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and inflationary bond markets to ask the deeper question: what is the real work that's required of us as the systems that underpin modern life begin to buckle? He draws on decades of tracing the links between energy, ecology, and economy to argue that our response to the predicament is not necessarily to prevent the inevitable economic deflation, but to begin to shape how society moves through it.    From this premise, Nate outlines four areas of intervention that he feels are underattended, given the scale of what's coming. He calls attention to how we can help communities bend and not break as supply chains strain under pressure, and the ways we might shepherd ecosystems and species through this bottleneck of humanity's own making. He describes the sobering work of steering nations away from nuclear catastrophe when the proliferation fears that once restrained global powers have faded. Finally, he shows that underlying it all is the slower, generational project of recovering a sense of the sacred in a culture that has learned to measure everything in dollars. Woven through these areas of "real" work is the opportunity to rediscover meaning itself – including the idea that a life well spent is one oriented toward sustaining and enriching life beyond ourselves.    Why should we view what we're facing as a predicament to mitigate and not a problem to solve? What would it take for society to absorb systemic shocks without fracturing the social bonds that hold it together? And in a culture built on extraction and convenience, what would it mean to reestablish a sense of the sacred in our relationship with the living world?   (Recorded September 14th, 2026)   Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

For years, the climate movement ran on the promise that, if we all rally hard enough, we could have it all: continue with our current system and save the planet. Yet the events of the past few decades have shown that this isn't quite the case, and in fact, climate is just one crisis among many produced by our growth-at-all-costs system. This raises the question: What happens when a culture built on the certainty of progress has to confront its own uncertainty?  In this episode, Nate is joined by philosopher and author Sarah Wilson for an exploration of the emotions that come from learning about, processing, and then embodying the full extent of the metacrisis. Sarah shares her own emotional arc through this journey, and makes the case that "hope" (at least the version most of us think of) is no longer helpful, since it defers responsibility to some future savior rather than requiring anything of us now. In its place, she argues for truth to ground us, revealing the only path forward is to be "thoroughly human" – grieving, laughing, dancing, showing up for our neighbors. She and Nate also explore why prepping alone doesn't work, and that we should instead be working toward a radical simplification: an intentional shift toward a slower, more communal way of living. Why does the fear of uncertainty run so much deeper than we admit, and what happens to us once we stop resisting it? What emotions and opportunities do we make room for when we let go of false hopes that someone else will solve our crises? And if collapse is actually a slow unraveling of the system we've built our lives around, what would it look like to meet it with the same sense of duty and connection that has always seen humans through hard times? (Conversation recorded on September 10th, 2026)    About Sarah Wilson: Sarah Wilson is a multiple-time New York Times and Amazon bestselling author, social philosopher, international keynote speaker, minimalist, and philanthropist. She edited Cosmopolitan magazine Australia at 29, founded the global I Quit Sugar movement, hosted the most-watched non-sports broadcast TV series in the nation's history – Masterchef Australia – and wrote the bestseller First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, which Mark Manson described as "the best book on living with anxiety that I've ever read." Her book, This One Wild and Precious Life, won the US Gold Nautilus Prize, and she has been ranked in the top 200 most influential authors in the world (two years in a row). Her latest book, I Eat the Stars, is now available globally. Sarah lives nomadically, leading dynamic, global conversations about modern philosophy, creativity, existential risk and climate change via her keynote speaking, Wild podcast, and her Substack and social communities (of 550,000 subscribers).   Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

This week's Frankly begins with a deceptively simple question Nate was asked in conversation: what would change his mind about The Great Simplification thesis? Nate uses the question as a jumping-off point to examine what evidence would actually cause him to reassess his view that human civilization is moving toward a deflationary depression driven by resource constraints, ecological overshoot, and the widening gap between financial claims and material reality. He lays out a series of concrete biophysical signals that would challenge that diagnosis but also emphasizes that these numbers are not really the things that would change his mind – they would actually be the downstream evidence of a deeper shift in human behavior and culture. Nate then outlines the less measurable signals he would need to see in order to change his mind about the future, such as a shift in what people aspire to, what confers status, how they spend their time, and how they respond when confronted with resource constraints. From regenerative agriculture and local provisioning to energy literacy and governance that gives future generations a meaningful voice, Nate ultimately finds that the evidence that would change his mind is inseparable from the active creation of the future he hopes to see. The question therefore becomes less about whether a particular chart will turn around and more about whether enough people begin living differently so that the data eventually follows. Where might unlikely collaborations emerge as communities respond to resource shocks? What signals would you need to see in the world for you to genuinely change your own view of the future? And how can our behaviors and culture bring us closer to "ecological adulthood"?  (Recorded September 8th, 2026)   Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

The world's leading AI companies tell us that superintelligence has a strong chance of leading to human extinction, while also promising that they will be able to control it, offering unlimited power to the one who does it first. So far they've run completely unchecked, but would that change if we knew that "safe" general superintelligence is actually a mathematical impossibility?  In this episode, Nate is joined by Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, one of the earliest researchers in AI safety, to lay out why "controllable superintelligence" is a misguided goal, destined to lead to an entity smarter than all of humanity – and possibly our own extinction. He walks through the recent multi-agent jailbreak of frontier models as early evidence of AI systems evading oversight and coordinating outside human awareness, and why current "safety" measures (like "boxing") only buy time rather than solve the underlying problem. Instead, Roman advocates for an AI development plan that focuses on narrow, task-specific AI tools, capable of solving specific complex problems, but not completely replacing humans.  Why do predictability and control matter so much when evaluating whether a technology is safe to deploy? Is the AI safety conversation a fundamentally new challenge for civilization, or an extreme version of the age-old problem of controlling powerful actors? Finally, what would it actually take to reach a global agreement to ban the development of superintelligence, and are we already out of time?  (Conversation recorded on September 1st, 2026)   About Roman Yampolskiy:  Roman Yampolskiy, a tenured AI expert at the University of Louisville, boasts 100+ publications in AI safety, cybersecurity, and digital forensics. As the founding director of the Cyber Security Lab, his expertise spans AI Safety, Behavioral Biometrics, Cybersecurity, and more, with broad impact in academic and media circles. Holding a PhD from the University at Buffalo, he has contributed to global research institutions, and has also been honored with distinctions like Distinguished Teaching Professor.   Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

This week's Frankly builds on Nate's recent conversation with systems theorist Greg Elliott, who came on the platform to discuss why our institutions themselves have become psychopathic and how that affects the behavior of the average human. Nate maps Greg's framework onto the global economic Superorganism through the imagery of seven "dials" that can be turned to change the incentives baked into the system – from those that might be present in a small-scale, collaborative community to those of the modern, complex society we live in today. Together, these dials help explain how a species whose ancestral social world rewarded cooperation could construct institutions that increasingly reward extraction. Nate also explores how the same prosocial people who might individually tend toward reciprocity, empathy, and coordination can behave very differently when the conditions around them change and begin to reward psychopathic traits. The carbon pulse brought forward cheap energy, abstraction, enormous scale, and concentrated power – making it easier than ever before to hide responsibility and detach economic measures from the living systems they represent. The central question of this episode asks what can still be rebuilt at the human scale, whether it's in the form of deeper local relationships, shorter feedback loops, mutual dependence, or institutions where ordinary people can still participate in writing the rules of the system. Which of these seven dials is most flipped toward the economic Superorganism in your own life, and can you turn it back – even if only partially? How do we remain more prosocial when systemic incentives reward the opposite? And what interventions might we make to bring the system itself more into alignment with our biophysical reality? (Recorded August 25th, 2026)   Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

In this episode, Nate welcomes author and philosopher, Charles Eisenstein, for a long-requested conversation on the mythologies underneath civilization. For over two decades, Charles has argued that the crises defining modern life all trace back to the story of separation, the largely unspoken belief that each of us is an isolated self, competing against other selves and against a nature made of indifferent, exploitable resources. Charles traces how this story co-evolved with technology, language, and scale, and how quantitative thinking both extends and distorts our understanding of complex problems. He and Nate also discuss why Charles has come to believe that ecological and energy constraints will not force humanity onto a wiser path, rather that the choice has to be made consciously, person by person. (Conversation recorded on August 12th, 2026)    About Charles Eisenstein: Charles Eisenstein is an American author, public speaker, and teacher whose work focuses on civilization, consciousness, money, and human cultural evolution. He graduated from Yale University in 1989 with a degree in Mathematics and Philosophy, and spent the following decade as a Chinese–English translator before turning to writing and speaking full-time. He is the author of several books, including The Ascent of Humanity (2007), Sacred Economics (2011), The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (2013), and Climate: A New Story (2018). His most recent book, The Coronation, examined the pandemic as a mirror of civilization's relationship to control, fear, and uncertainty. His essays have circulated widely online, and he speaks and gives interviews frequently on themes spanning economics, ecology, and spirituality.   Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

This week's Frankly is an episode from summer of 2023, which is being re-released to provide context for one of the most important questions we face today: what is the role of energy, specifically oil, in the global economic system we've built?  In this second part of a previous series on the channel – Just Stop Oil!? – Nate examines how and why energy is currently so deeply embedded in the foundations of our modern economy. He touches on the ecological and energetic laws that apply to all life, including humans and our economies, as well as the way accessing a huge surplus of dense carbon energy set us on the trajectory toward our current predicament. Building up from there, Nate looks at the relationship between energy and economic growth and why declining access to abundant, affordable energy will have implications that extend beyond the price at the gas pump. Overall this episode unpacks some of the systemic implications of an economy tethered to perpetual growth, particularly as the foundations that allowed for this system to emerge in the first place erode.  Why did fossil hydrocarbons become so embedded in our modern economic system? What happens to an economy built around exponential growth when the energy surplus that powers it begins to decline? And how much "choice" do we really have within a system shaped by such intense physical constraints? (Recorded July 25th, 2023)   Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

Modern companies, markets, and institutions routinely behave in ways that would be diagnosed as pathological in a person: emotional detachment, strategic deception, grandiosity, and the treatment of people, animals, and ecosystems as means to an end. Yet, most of the individuals who make up these organizations don't naturally hold these traits and behaviors themselves. So, why does exploitation keep winning at scale, even when most people are decent, cooperative, and want the same basic things?   In this episode, Nate is joined by Greg Elliott, a systems theorist and author of the Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis (PSH), to unpack why our institutions themselves have become so psychopathic, and how that affects the behavior of the average human. Drawing on evolutionary game theory, anthropology, and the neuroscience of psychopathy, Greg argues that cooperation is evolutionarily stable in small tribal systems, but that modern systems where anonymity and abstraction make exploitative, instrumental strategies more profitable. He walks through how this dynamic produces what he calls "entrapment games," in which pro-social people become behaviorally locked into relationships, jobs, and systems where leaving costs more than staying.  All of this builds toward the core of Greg's theory: winning, instrumental strategies get crystallized into the operating logic of institutions themselves and reproduced by anyone who plays the game, whether or not they are personally psychopathic. While Greg doesn't see any easy answers, he does offer a set of possible leverage points: shortening feedback loops, increasing transparency and accountability, and rebuilding smaller, reciprocal communities. If domination isn't an aberration but a predictable output of the game board we've built, what does that mean for how we try to fix it? Is it possible for an entire civilization to behave psychopathically even when the vast majority of the individual people inside it are empathetic and pro-social? And if the ultimate goal is to steer toward a more pro-social system, is there a way to 'win the game' and re-write the rules without also resorting to psychopathic strategies and behaviors? (Conversation recorded on August 13th, 2026)   About Greg Elliott: Greg is a Siemens solutions Consultant specializing in data science and AI, as well as the Co-Founder of Orbyfy. His research and writing of his book, Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis: From Natural Selection to Symbolic Selection, Scale, Abstraction, and Institutional Collapse, led him to found The Institute for Symbolic Selection, an interdisciplinary research program investigating how human-created symbolic systems shape behavior, institutions, and the long-term evolution of civilization.    New to game theory? Here's a short primer:  Game theory is the study of how people make decisions when the outcome depends on what everyone else decides too, often with the potential for mutual gain or mutual harm. Its most famous illustration is the Prisoner's Dilemma: two people, each individually better off betraying the other, who both end up worse off when they do.   For a deeper understanding, check out these links: - Game Theory video explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ecJ_fDpWTg  - Game Theory article explainer: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GameTheory.html  - Prisoner's Dilemma video explainer: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-to-outsmart-the-prisoner-s-dilemma-lucas-husted    Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

This week, Nate turns a late-night emergency vet visit for one of his dogs into a broader reflection on the extraordinary relationship between dogs and humans. While dogs have been human companions for thousands of years, the modern version of "man's best friend" is a remarkably recent product of abundant energy, specialized breeding, industrial food systems, and increasingly sophisticated veterinary care. With the global dog population nearing one billion, Nate addresses the uncomfortable question of what might happen to these beloved animals as the metacrisis continues to unfold. Ultimately, sitting in an emergency clinic and confronting the possibility of losing his pet led Nate to larger reflections on grief, care, and the strange emotional power animals can have over us. In a world increasingly shaped by AI, surveillance, economic instability, and existential risk, he realized that the unconditional love of a puppy perhaps represents the exact opposite - something profoundly simple and real. For Nate, that may make dogs one of humanity's greatest "inventions" and one of the greatest antidotes to the grief of our modern world. How has the modern dog become a reflection of the energy abundance and complexity of human civilization? Why can something as simple as spending time with a dog feel like an antidote to the complexities of modern life? And what happens to dogs, and our relationships with them, if the economic abundance that supports modern pet ownership begins to disappear? (Recorded August 17th, 2026)   Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

Current geopolitical events continue to expose just how complex and fragile our global economic system is. As such, The Great Simplification team is re-releasing this episode with Ed Conway, which covers the deceptively critical materials that continue to underpin everything from the phone in your hand to the house that you live in.  In contrast to 'The Great Simplification', some might call the events of the last few hundred years a 'Great Complexification' in terms of relationships, governance, supply chains, and many other human activities. This conversation with economics journalist Ed Conway focuses on the six essential resources that underpin our modern economies –  sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium - and dives into the (often unseen) environmental and human costs of extracting them, as well as the surprisingly fragile global supply chains they fuel. In order to understand what possibilities – and dangers – may await us in the future, we need to understand the realities and constraints of the present, as well as the failure points of the past.  What does it take to mine, refine, and transform the materials that are foundational to the world around us – which many of us now take for granted? How can we ensure the stability of global supply chains, and could we predict potential disruptions and chokepoints before they arise? If we understood the intricate web of complexity, energy, and resources that go into everything we consume, would it change our expectations for how much we need in order to live a good and fulfilling life? (Conversation originally released June 12th, 2024 | Recorded on May 7th, 2024)   About Ed Conway: Ed Conway is the economics and data editor at Sky News, covering major UK and international economics, business and political stories. He has broken a series of exclusive reports on the banking and financial crisis. He is also economics columnist for The Times, and has been one of the longest-running economics editors in UK journalism, having started covering the sector in 2003. Prior to joining Sky, he was economics editor of The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph, where he was also a weekly op-ed columnist, and economics correspondent at the Daily Mail.  Ed is the author of the book on Bretton Woods, The Summit: The Biggest Battle Of The Second World War – Fought Behind Closed Doors and an economics guidebook, 50 Economics Ideas You Really Need to Know. His 2024 book Material World, was nominated as one of the Financial Times Book of the Year. Ed is a governor of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, and has lectured on the international monetary system at the London School of Economics, the US Treasury and many other forums.   Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners