The great simplification that's coming - NATE HAGENS

can you can you start by introducing yourself briefly again for the few of the people listening that missed the first part uh sure my name is nate higgins uh i run an organization called energy in our future.org i also run a podcast called the great simplification put up videos of the podcasts and animations and lectures on nate hagan's youtube channel 20 years ago i worked on wall street um kind of saw the light on how the big picture system was going to have a phase shift during my lifetime gave my clients their money back got a phd in natural resources and for the last 20 years have been connecting the dots of all the different scientific aspects that comprise what i refer to as the human predicament energy ecology money biodiversity climate anthropology neuroscience and so i've spent 20 years kind of compiling a systems overview of what humans face in coming decades and this century yeah and and this is why i like so much to to listen to you and your videos and to read read also the few articles you write because uh you basically started you know 15 years before me to investigate and try to connect the dots so that's that's really saving me a lot of time and i think it's saving a lot of time to a lot of people um yeah i came across a quote recently that i quite like i'd never heard it before but albert einstein said if i had an hour to save the world i would spend 55 minutes understanding the problem and five minutes solving it and so that's why i'm doing what i'm doing is i'm trying to look at not one of the component problems like climate change or inequality or debt or biodiversity but look at the drivers of the entire system because we have to fly up high enough and look down at how what what are the real drivers and it's a system so i'm you know that was the genesis of starting the podcast was to get more people to kind of widen the lens with which they view our challenges and change the discourse so that we're talking about the system which then informs what we might do about it and it's also about um fighting the good questions before you know rushing into finding solutions which is your thing that's your superpower so i mean tell me a little bit more about it you know what you've been busy doing um since january and specifically that podcast but you also did a video and we can talk about this a little bit after but if i could you know i would invite a hundred percent of your guests and and i really always reference your podcast because your creation is great and i'm learning so much for this conversation so why did you start this podcast now and what is your approach to this investigation of your own basically thank you for that question um it's really kind of a non-profound answer why did i start the podcast now because i didn't start it in the past is the short answer i started it for two reasons one i realized that i know hundreds of scientists and activists that i've developed a network with over the last two decades you know paul ehrlich and dennis meadows and you know bill reese and herman daly uh norah bateson daniel schmucktenberger and i'm like well why don't i just try to pull out the pieces of their expertise that are relevant to the story that um the narrative that i see unfolding in coming decades and that way more people can learn and it's not just some guy in his basement doing a you know a monologue about what i think i'm i'm getting the expertise from lots of other humans who largely agree with me so for me the first step was it's easy i know all these people i'll call them up and let's just have some conversations to this day i've i'm on podcast number 37 this week i still haven't interviewed someone that i don't know and eventually and eventually i will have to do that and they might disagree with me but for now i'm i'm interviewing my friends and colleagues the second thing that well some of them are energy experts uh tomorrow i'm interviewing a finance expert the first one of those a lot of them are ecological economists we talk a lot about species loss uh the impact of uh endocrine disrupting and other plastic chemicals on our world um climate uh um refinery uh biodiversity um philosophy of of metacrisis all this contributes to an understanding of our world and then the other the other reason that i started it is it's really been swimming upstream telling this story uh in its various forms over the last 20 years and i decided finally you know what i'm gonna send out a beacon a signal to those humans that are curious and anxious and upset but are pro social and want to understand where we are what we face what are the leverage points what can we do at various scales at the individual level all the way up to the global level and have people that are around the world that are interested in those things find this signal rather than try to come up with a message and put a square box in a round hole for the general public because i've failed at that well i'm succeeding at this because there's people in a lot of countries it's it's either the number one or number two uh ranked podcast in in the category of earth sciences especially in interestingly france and uh for some reason australia and new zealand and i'm not sure why that is but probably because in france collapsology is a is a thing um and so these conversations are maybe uh not so foreign or shocking to you know your listeners or or people in france um so yeah it's it's been a surprising thing julian because i kind of have a strong personality and i have a strong opinion about how pieces fit together in the world and so i thought i'd be having these two-way conversations and i would weigh in and disagree and what about this and over time i'm gradually kind of learning the skill that you've acquired and developed which is i'm just midwifing the conversation and trying to pull the wisdom and expertise out of my guests and i don't say a lot and i with i bite my tongue a lot and i highlight the the life work of my guests to curate them as kind of a library of different subjects so it took me a while to realize that that was kind of a a different skill than my analytical systems view of the world i'm just being kind of a you know location sasquatch who is carrying on a conversation uh with other people and it's not that difficult for me to be honest i'm gonna have a team that does the production i kind of like it i do a little bit of prep work you know an hour or two and then i just show up and do it so so far it's been easy and fun well that's the thing that's also because you already have a great level of knowledge that allows you to you know to know what are the good questions where a lot of people would need to prepare it much more i mean talking about me you know so so but it's um it's very valuable i i think also i talked about a lot about your podcast to a lot of people in france so maybe that maybe they helped hopefully uh promoting it and uh and yeah tomorrow which won't be tomorrow when this is released but tomorrow um i interviewed a french person timote parikh yeah he came into speak okay yeah amazing guy yeah one of the few people that can that can speak fluently uh english in france yeah no charming charming young man very high energy and articulate so um i would like to to get back to your starting point because i guess that again a lot of people that are listening to this conversation will have missed the the first one and i think it's important also to to get back to your own ideas uh before trying to uh see how they've changed you know over the past eight months talking to all these people if they had if they have um and also because you published a great great videos uh to summarize what you think is um what you call the great predicament so you have a truly systematic simplification great simplification sorry which is our predict predicament and you have a truly systematic systemic way um of looking at you know current global issues and you manage you know as you said to connect complex issues in a way that i find quite unique so energy is very central to how you explain our situation but you also look at you know economics like psychology power games so can can we go through that narrative of yours you know which is under the name of great simplification uh summarized how you describe you know that that human predicament and entangle the whole thing of course that could take an hour to go through that because the videos are here for that but just to understand your bird's eye view so like i said i've spent 20 years assembling all the pieces and a few times i thought i was wrong and i started over and i every time i arrived at the same place there's three core components one is that humans are biological organisms our brains evolved um for what worked in the past at the same way our bodies did so humans alive today the eight billion of us go through our daily routines in a vastly novel world to get the same emotional states of our ancestors we look for status we look for approval we look for convenience we care about the present more than the future we're include incredibly tribal we have belief systems that we look at truth only if it uh helps our identity and our tribe and so that's a right for problems with with social media and what's happening with polarization etc so the human behavior is a core pillar of it the second piece which you alluded to before is that energy is the central currency in nature animals were the first investors they invest some caloric output to get prey and they get a payoff in their prey and the same thing is applied to human systems in our past and in our present what we can do depends on how much access to energy we have and our culture looks at our success and our productivity and our progress based on human ingenuity and technology and money but we do that during a period when over the last 150 years every single year with the exception of some depressions and recessions we've had an increase in the total amount of scale of energy supporting our economies and we take it for granted right because fossil energy is around 80 to 85 percent of our total energy we are mining this fossil energy 10 million times faster than the earth sequestered it by the daily trickle charge from solar photosynthesis but because of that refining that mother earth did with heat and pressure it's created this incredibly dense powerful magical substance really with the exception of the pollution and co2 it creates a barrel of oil which right now today costs 90 euros can do the work of you or i doing physical labor for four and a half years so think of how much you would have to pay you or me to do work for four and a half years and we get that all for under 100 euros why because we just pay for the cost of extraction not the cost of pollution so fossil energy is abundant it's powerful but it's gradually going away the underlying decline rate of oil is five to seven percent and we're drilling more and more to offset that but in yours in my lifetime the amount of oil that human societies have will peak and decline and that will be permanent we are accessing this one-time bolus of fossil sunlight and um this is the we are live during the carbon pulse uh when our species is basically drawing down this biophysical bank account and treating it as if it were interest but it's really a bank account so our entire economy is based on combining energy materials and technology and we grow every quarter and every year and we create money to represent all this growth but the money when we create it we don't create the interest so there's this imperative to grow and what we've been doing is we've been growing our money much faster than we've been growing our economies so let me rephrase that we've been growing our monetary claims much faster than our biophysical bank accounts can support so right now globally we're doubling our debt every eight and a half years and we're doubling our gdp which is the income stream needed to service and maintain that debt every 25 years or so and that's before energy starts to decline in its availability so this is unsustainable and once we're not able to continue to grow to service these financial claims on reality we're going to have a economic financial recalibration which to me is the beginning of what i call the great simplification the simplification is the inverse word of a complexification and historian joseph tainter who was one of my recent guests has done research on the collapse of complex societies that show that humans are problem solvers and when we encounter a problem we we add extra energy to it and this builds complexity so as we have more complex supply chains and hierarchies and nodes of transfer and transportation and components into things we become more dependent on more energy so my my broad theory and the work that i'm doing to try and change society to better prepare for this if we've just experienced a once in a species two century complexification that is about to go through a one or two century simplification when we have less energy the third component of of my story is the environmental impact of our global enterprise is downstream from this metabolic superorganism which is that humans self-organize as individuals as families as small businesses as corporations as nation states in order to maximize monetary profits our monetary profits are 99 linked to the use of energy which is 85 linked to carbon energy so when we talk about let's solve climate change climate change isn't the problem it's a symptom of this underlying metabolic drive of a social species finding this huge amount of carbon and climate change is one of but many environmental stressors um we've lost 70 percent of the populations of animals in sex and fish since you and i have been alive uh julian there are increasing uh amounts of endocrine disrupting chemicals showing up in the arctic and ants in the amazon there was a paper out last week showing that uh rain water on the planet nowhere is it safe uh to drink because of the chemicals so climate is just one of many uh negative externalities of this metabolic system so that that uh that wasn't a 33 minute video that i made but that was probably a five minute overview so that's how things fit together human behavior energy and money and technology and the environment and ecology and i think we're headed for in the not too distant future meaning this decade this financial recalibration which will mark the onset of a decades and centuries-long great simplification which does not have to be a disaster but we are we're living beyond our means now and i think a lot of people recognize that so we probably have been kicking the can for 50 or 60 years and now there's a bill coming due and and we have to prepare for it and and obviously when you say we you also acknowledge the fact that there are huge differences uh and you you always mention it between the rich countries and the poor countries and between the rich within the rich countries and the poor people et cetera et cetera that's also part of the things that you look at because you look at economics and and all it's it's true and my podcast is mostly directed at people in north america and and and europe and australia um and i agree with you that things right now are not remotely shared equally but if you draw the boundaries of inequality is it peep is it inequality within the united states or is it inequality with humans alive today or is it inequality among generations of humans who won't have this access to energy in the future or is it inequality between species what are dolphins thinking of our metabolic rate but yeah absolutely um personally on the inequality front i think it's a function of the power laws of energy gain and i don't know that any quality is going to really disappear until the the scale of our energy disappears but many cultural things can happen so that's the one thing about humans is biologically there are certain constraints about our behavior but culturally we are incredibly plastic and there's lots of different ways um that we can respond to the great simplification what i find very powerful in this story is that it's um of course it doesn't you know contain the entire reality of the system and but it helps really understand that everything that's happening today has a logical cause if you will it's like there's nothing uh not normal if you will in uh in all the events that are happening we know we know that they are that they come from somewhere and the idea is really to be high enough to see okay this is where they come from this totally makes sense because so it's not because sometimes also we we have people saying that this is an anomaly that this shouldn't be happening you know but but actually when when we listen to your story and connecting all the dots you realize that this is totally logical you know this is where i'm not saying that this was unavoidable i'm saying that this is what it is anyway and now we need to think about okay if we don't want it to continue if you don't want the trends to be the same we need to go and look at the roots of the trends you know the underlying uh things and uh one of the way one of the if i quote you um one of the phrases i i like from you is uh to try to some summarize it all is to when you say we are transforming ancient sunlight into dopamine and i really love that phrase because it captures part of the story which is really important which is energy and our behavior as human beings can i think this is an important phrase to you because i i've heard you pronouncing it a few times can you can you go into this a little bit is it possible that you've lost your french accent some in the last two years you almost sound like british now when you lived in hong kong you had like a strong french accent um so yes the the line from the movie was we're turning billions of barrels of ancient sunlight into microliters of dopamine and so that what that means is as a culture we're drawing down this earth's battery for short-term frivolous fleeting dopaminergic experiences and effectively we're wasting our our endowment not that it's ours but we found it it's part of earth's prior processes and it's like we are through a two century party and now the kind of morning is coming and we have to to react at a deeper level it offers potential leverage point that we don't need most of these consumption to be happy and live meaningful lives um because after basic needs are met which granted like you mentioned earlier for a lot of humans today basic needs are not being met but once basic needs are met really the best things in life are free if you think of your top five best experiences of your life julian they probably most of them did not include huge amounts of money or energy use they were things in nature with your wife with your kids with your family with music with animals with food these things don't take a lot of energy so the average american today and i can't speak to france but the average american consumes 220 000 kilocalories a day of energy in our bodies we only consume 1 100th of that so if you take the material footprint of our skyscrapers and our highways and our refrigerators and netflix and disneyland and nascar and hospitals and everything it's a hundred times more energy than our bodies actually need to calorically survive now you could bump that up by 10 times because we do need hospitals and we need a house and we need lights or whatever so in spain um that's around 50 times the amount in most of europe it's it's around 50 times the amount so we can get by with considerably less energy but there's no path from here to there there's a movement called the degrow d growth movement where they're trying to voluntarily shrink our economies and i think under certain histories that might have been possible but i don't think that's possible because of the debt overhang governments around the world cannot say let's just tighten our belt and and constrain ourselves and consume less because the moment that that is voiced we have a musical chair situation of all the financial claims of what people think they own versus the underlying physical capacity to support them so that that i don't i think we will degrow but it will be involuntary not voluntary let me let me say one more thing that uh might help make the scenario a little clearer and and then you can continue so i see two scenarios the default scenario is that somehow we will continue with innovation and that innovation in tandem with uh more energy either fossil or renewable will allow us to continue to grow but under that scenario energy and gdp are 99 percent correlated energy and materials are a hundred percent correlated which means that by the year 2050 if we continue to grow we will double the amount of energy and materials used in the world relative today and by 2080 when children born today are 60 years old we will quadruple the amount of energy and materials used today so is that possible is it desirable what happens if that does happen what happens if it doesn't so that's the default scenario and you can imagine what will happen to the natural world if that continues my my other scenario which i think the first scenario eventually devolves into is at some point we will not be able to continue to grow and the first thing that we have to face is this financial musical chairs event from which at that moment the amount of financial claims um there aren't enough to support them but at that moment all of the technology all of the human social capital all of the factories and innovation and technology still exist at that moment so that's kind of what i'm trying to prepare for with discussions with government and the scout team of pro-social humans that kind of get to work in their own communities and in their own lives to maybe prepare for a lower material throughput existence one of the big um one of the main objections that you get on that from maybe not the people you're talking to is that actually you can disconnect you know growth and energy and material goods i i know among my listeners and along you know the people i interview there is an agreement on that but i know that this is still a big point that is uh discussed or misunderstood and um so that figure that you mentioned that the fact that we need to realize that when we double our economy we double our basically impact on nature and double the amount of material that we need is misunderstood but you will have some people that say we'll find a way to do that differently yeah so let me briefly try and summarize that so historically before 1970s gdp and energy were 100 linked but then we started to get more efficient we would use the same amount of energy to generate more gdp to the tune of around one percent a year so that means 99 but at 99 that means in year 1972 it took you 100 units of energy to create 100 to create a thing that same thing in 19 in 2022 would only uh require 50 units of energy so people look at that and they're like look at how energy efficient we we did but that's over 50 years still that means in 2023 we're going to need 99 units for some new new product now there are some countries like 30 or 35 countries that are growing their gdp by using less energy every year like the united kingdom in the united states but that two things one that's because we import a lot we've become service economies and we imported a lot of the heavy lifting in the products that the energy is burned in other countries so from a climate standpoint we should only care about the global connection between energy and gdp and they're very very tightly coupled now what we can decouple um is we can grow low carbon energy faster than we grow our economies and that way we can be decoupling gdp and emissions and the ultimate decoupling which i'm hoping for in the future is decoupling human well-being from energy and material use and in my own life i've proven that is the case and many people that you and i know um is the case but it still stands as a global system energy and gdp gdp and materials are tightly linked and i i don't unless we change the definition of gdp i don't think that's going to change because kind of by definition gdp is the goods in service globally or nationally that and it's really a a metric of how much stuff we burn everything that is in your daily life that you buy this week that contributes to gdp started with a small fire somewhere on the planet yeah that's that's uh that's a good way of uh again explaining what it is um [Music] okay let's go back a little bit to your your podcast i'm very curious to know i've listened to most of the conversations that you had with your guests of course you have this systemic approach as you as you explain you talk about resources about psychology about the media nuclear threat events and system thinking as a whole as a topic itself what are the ideas or really pieces of information that somehow changed your your your point of view your perspectives on on of the whole thing and why if any i think i've gotten clearer on each of my pieces where money comes from what the risks are from a nuclear war the relationship of energy to gdp which we were just talking about the impact on nature i think the the pieces that you know the other thing is i read this beautiful couple paragraphs on energy and gdp last week i'm like god that was just so clearly written and well it turns out that i wrote it six months six years ago and it it's the the the enormity of all these topics it's hard to stay fresh and and stay on top of all of them it almost is too much for a single human brain to assimilate so in talking with my podcast guests it's kind of a refresher and these people are all more expert on each of these topics than i am so it's just kind of an update that i'm kind of riding the wave on it um and it's it's gotten me a lot of clarity on my own points but it's also made me a little humble in some ways that it's made me appreciate the diversity in human temperament and understanding and outlook and philosophy and ethic because you kind of i think the default we can't really change this that we go through life and we think things and we believe things and we want things and we hope things and then you come across some other humans and you tell them a little story and you just naturally expect for them to think the same as you do because why wouldn't they but the only brain i really know is this one and i'm not even sure i know this one so when doing a podcast you learn where other people are coming from and most importantly the feedback i get via email and youtube some people love a certain kind of soft wisdom nuance philosophical discussions and other people absolutely hate it they couldn't listen to it and at the same time some people love the dry factual oil outlook and other people are like i couldn't even stand listening to that so i've really widened my appreciation and um understanding of of the wide variety of human minds and outlooks and and that's made it challenging for me to communicate because i'm trying to communicate not to the general public with my podcast i don't even have an audience other than the people that i expect and hope will tune in because they realize how freaking important this is um but i i just don't know julian that there is a one message fits all thing for uh the human predicament so i i continue to learn um and it it really solidifies my own thinking on this so in addition to the podcast i'm creating these videos which are more of a clear uh here's nate's opinion on this and i plan on doing a lot more short videos in the future i i just i know this is going to sound hubristic but i really um know that as a human being i am subject to cognitive biases we all are and humans tend to be overly certain of of events but i i see how the pieces of our predicament fit together quite clearly um i don't know if that answered your question and it leads me to another question that's very much linked to to that which is how much can we actually grab understand um and explain you know of that all complexity because the whole thing is is it's about how the world functions right and uh it's also trying to guess based on what we see of this mechanism what's going to to happen what will be the trajectory are we in a sense you know that's a question i'm asking to myself like is it is it pointless are we able just to grasp the reality of it all because we have certainties we know physics we you know these wide energies so is key we know human behaviors but the entire thing is so complex when you take a trajectory at least to a certain point but i think it was your friend daniel was explaining it it doesn't tell you anything theoretically about what's going to be next because sometimes you can have some sort of events that are totally unexpected uh you see my point like is it and then we can talk about convincing people but first about making sense of it all like the more i dig the more i see and i i have this feeling of understanding but at the same time i have this feeling that i i don't understand anything yeah that that's an excellent question um i think i've spent 20 years assembling the what i view as the the total human predicament but there's so many things that i don't know and by definition i don't know what i don't know so no one can grasp all of the reality if you understand human behavior energy and ecology you have a good part of it and then there's technology and cultural evolution and all kinds of other unknowns i gave a talk a couple weeks ago it was a version of this year's earth day talk with the tarot cards and i tightened it up it went very well but it was to a group of like life coaches and social psychologists and the woman came up to me after and she gave me a hug and said that was so beautiful i've never understood all these things she's like you do know that only 10 of humans have a container physiologically psychologically to take this in right i'm like what do you mean she's like it it it's so deep and threatening and contrary to their built identities that not that many people can take this on board and then continue with what they were doing that week at their job or their family and i never really thought about it that way so um you know if you if you draw a two by two grid there are certain people who have catastrophic personalities that they overestimate the likelihood of unlikely extreme events and then there's people on the opposite side who are optimistic and they kind of underestimate because they have an optimism bias they just assume that things will continue that the way they were and on the other side of the grid is knowing a lot about our systemic predicament and knowing very little about nuclear war and species loss and climate change risk and whatever so if you group people into those four things those four categories i suspect and there's no science on this i'm just guessing that a lot of people on in our tribe are the catastrophic type personalities that are very uh anxious and generally extrapolating risks that that might be smaller than they sense and they know a lot about our situation and those people are very vocal in the climate change discussions and everything so what i've learned is that humans really like well let me phrase it differently humans really dislike uncertainty and um they like certainty like they want to hear someone saying this is the way it is and um that's what this means for your life whereas when we talk about a system the more things we add to the system uh what the central banks might do or what putin might do or the financial system or the endocrine disrupting plastics it's nuance and adding like second derivative calculus in your brain on all these things and it adds to uncertainty that is actually physically discomfort to your brain so on one side people prefer certainty that everything is going to work out that elon musk is going to solve all this that we're all going to eventually have our great great grandchildren having great lives circling mars or on the other side that we're screwed it's mad max and there's nothing we can do and both of those poles are really attractive to the human brain and so you mentioned my friend daniel i just did a podcast with him that was so beautiful um and it's true that we here's the analogy he gave and i'll just repeat it briefly here he grew people into three groups the pre-tragic which is this place of naivete everything's gonna work out for me and and the world and then the tragic where you face reality and everything sucks and it's kind of dystopian and then the post-tragic which is i recognize all these things that are wrong with the world and yet i still want to play a role to the best of my ability anyways knowing that the odds are stacked uh in a difficult way but i want to attach my meaning and purpose towards doing the right thing anyway and he said it way more beautifully than i just did um but i think that's who i'm trying to reach uh with my podcast and my thinking is those people who can take on board uh most of this and play a role uh maybe just being a better neighbor or a better parent uh or making an influence in their community or maybe at an institutional level preparing their organization or institution or government for what's coming in in a better way but yeah i struggle with it all the time um because it's it's really it's also hard with our social media 24 7 um there's things happening on all these things at all times and it drives you nuts a little bit so to me if i if i just break it down into these components energy and money and technology human behavior and the environment i don't need to look at all those events that are happening because there's a there's a road map that i'm kind of following and then there is another question linked to into this which is how how useful is it to show and to explain uh that's that's what that lady that talked to you said like do you realize that only you know ten percent of what you or the people can take it but does it change anything to explain climate change with science to explain energy and resources depletion to explain these mechanisms you know because we tend to believe that if people understood clearly what's going on they would change yeah is that true yeah that's a great question julian um here's my thoughts on that i think for for most people knowing the full story of what's happening is probably not helpful in fact if i could push a button and have everyone on the planet know what you and i know about this topic i'm not sure that i would do it because i think that would accelerate the phase shift towards a different uh outlook towards the world of scarcity when the pie might get smaller instead of bigger but i do think that 10 percent or i don't know what the number is i think we absolutely do need to communicate what's going on because a lot of people are trying to optimize for climate solving climate as the problem when climate is just a symptom of larger dysfunction so we have to have more people understand the centrality of energy the uh the the momentum and built-in requirement of growth in the financial system and so if we have our leaders and kind of the the cultural um scout team understanding these things i think that's of vital importance but that's another thing i've learned with the podcast i used to just naively think i get these facts out to the most people possible and good things will happen and i i no longer necessarily believe that so um you know i mean theoretically what what what do you think what do you think you're turning the you're becoming the intelliver again well i i think that um i mean with con regarding what you said about the different categories of people i i i think it's uh it's it's very very true and i stopped what my approach to it is that i'm not trying to convince anyone of anything uh i'm just the way i'm positioning the podcast is hey this is a very complex issue there are a lot of questions before you know as we said before let's let's find what are the questions before going into the answers um stop so my approach my positioning is not to to to to tell the truth is to say this is complicated can we stop thinking that we are right and start listening to each other and maybe from there you could have some some kind of collective intelligence that happens but to be honest i know i have zero i'm not on a mission i'm not trying to change the world i'm not trying to have a huge impact i'm doing this because i find it interesting intellectually and because this is my own way of dealing with this you know like my anxiety etc but i would always say is that i avoid saying you must or we must i i'm it's like a stoicism approach to things like i want to understand and from then build my own ethic and and hoping that some people listening to it will will find it helpful i totally agree with that do i say i must and we must do i do that that's why i like your podcast yeah well that's the other thing you ask what's changed and that's hard to answer on the spot but another thing that's changed is six months ago i would say okay so what are the solutions here are the solutions i no longer like the word solutions because what we face is a predicament there is no solution there are responses there are millions of potentially good responses depending on your situation and your scale but there is no solution to what we face um and yeah i'm i mean that's probably why we're friends because i i really am aligned with that philosophy i'm just trying to describe what's happening and i can point people in a direction of of what i think is is gonna happen but i don't know um i'm pretty sure we won't be able to continue to grow globally for much longer and if we do um we're going to take in more of the natural world than we already have so there is no like magical answer how to solve all that um and and i agree with you that at a certain level i enjoy understanding the world that i live in so how these pieces fit together even though they're kind of a shitty prognosis um it reduces my anxiety a little bit to understand what's going on but i don't know if that's the same for for other people or not i know that a lot of people are cannot do that because they need uh to be able to cope with it and maybe there are people that are more naturally action driven you know that don't like to reflect spend time just reflecting on things and i get i get i get this often you know like okay it's cool to think about all this but what do you do what do you change you know what do you what you tell people to be doing you know there is an emergency here but the thing is um these bird's eye view as you say uh you know gives me some kind of clarity or or let me put it another way i only see hypothesis i only see if we do this if we uh we fight inequality you know if we have different uh people that are in charge if uh i don't know we we we invest in a different way if we change culture et cetera if we change the way social media work and all these topics are very very interesting you know and these are our potential solutions the thing is i don't see the beginning of a plan basically to implement this uh it's like yeah if we change social media and and the way the the economy works and if we change uh gdp but okay but you know where do you start and this is why i like your your vision of that kind of uh the super organism and another i have a question free will related to that but maybe you want to react to this with your with your french accent it almost sounded like a super orgasm never heard it pronounced but um go ahead with go ahead ask your question i was going to tell you about something that recently happened to me but go ahead i don't remember no it's basically you know everywhere i look now i see these systems that are completely stuck uh you mentioned the fact that degrowth is a great idea but hey we've got depth and if the minute you just you start saying with your growth so i see people that don't want to change anything or can't change and i also see people fighting for change but often with very little results so and that that questions what do we have free will here do we have are we in charge okay let me try to unpack that um as individuals i don't believe we have free will i do believe we have free won't which is if you add enough cognitive work and discipline you can train yourself to do things that in the moment your earlier self can trump the emotional impulse of the moment for instance i taught myself to have a physical aversion to eating pork because i love dogs i visualized a truckload full of dogs being turned into pork and so i train myself to have free want that i don't eat pork but i think generally in the moment human individuals don't have free will also i don't think society in normal circumstances has free will at the cultural level for instance right now we are beholden to the market we have outsourced our decisions to the market and humans didn't evolve to be greedy or hierarchical but we were born into this system that this metabolic growth machine is pulling us forward but where we might have cultural free will is during the phase shifts as milton friedman said um you know don't ever let a good crisis go to waste when there are crises it's the education and the ethic and the understanding and the break glass plans that are in place at that moment that's when cultural you could say that cultures have free will but i think right now that we're doing little piecemeal things like they just passed this inflation reduction act in the united states that's good for climate it's a scam it's not it's just totally at the margin it's not good for climate that they got extra funding for some renewable energy and other things it's just going to grow the metabolism of the system the things that we need to do to fix our system and to save the environment are politically and socially untenable today so i recognized that long ago that the higher status person you're in the room with the least the less able they are to articulate we're in financial and ecological overshoot we're going to have to have a smaller economy and tighten our belt uh the whole pie is eventually going to be smaller and we need to prepare for that they cannot say those things why is that but what can be done well because they first of all if they say those things they will be unpopular and not elected and second of all if they say those things they're going to require answers for them and there are no answers for them there are better answers than than than worse ones it's it's a triage situation because we're not going to be able to keep everyone happy so there's going to have to be very tough political decisions made look at what's happening in in france and germany right now with the drought and the heat and russia um already you're preparing for some very difficult decisions this winter so this in i i hope it doesn't resolve in a result in in a bigger war with with nuclear bombs and things like that and that it maybe it results in just a partitioning of ukraine and then things go back to the way they were but there is a tiny bright side of what's happening with russia and ukraine is it's removing the energy blinders of society people in europe and indirectly in america are realizing oh my god our society is completely dependent on on fossil energy so i think and this is what i did last week i was in finland presenting to government officials on different future energy scenarios and economic scenarios where they can grow the amount of renewable energy low carbon energy you know they're they're only 42 percent dependent on fossil fuels right now they get 58 of their energy from some form of renewable energy they could even grow that but the scenario was looking at a smaller economy how could we do this with a lower total amount of throughput and that is kind of a verboten topic but if you treat it as a scenario this might happen i think those scandinavian countries that have low population density and a very high social contract might be able to plan some things um that other countries like my country wouldn't be able to to do so i i think is this information helpful is understanding the metabolic superorganism helpful i would say absolutely to some people i got contacted last week by a government agency in the united states that watched my video and they're using it as a litmus test with people within their network to see if they understand the problem which i thought was just high praise um that it was used in that regard so i i do think educating leaders um who will be in positions of power in the coming decade about how these pieces fit together and the centrality of of energy and ecology to our system is important and worthwhile and the moment that i decide that's not the case i will not do a third podcast with you [Laughter] uh that that reminds me uh not the joke but what you said before that reminds me of the conversation you had with uh uh nora bateson who whom i'm trying to get on the podcast by the way but when you discuss system thinking and uh i thought that was very interesting to her take on how a system changes i believe if i if i got it right that she said we we try basically to fix systems by looking at the different parts and what we need to know especially when the system is complex what we need to do is try to understand how a system learns and that's the only way to to you know to be helpful about our ability to change it what did you understand from that because that that that was very insightful to me because it says that this it's not about the solutions or trying to understand the system as a whole it's really much more about the process or how you put people together to to come to come up with something well i think did she say that on my podcast i think so yeah that's the only probably that's the only you know i need to go i need to go back and uh read the transcripts of my i don't remember that to be honest i've never listened to a single one of my podcasts i probably should i would probably learn some things but i do the podcast and then i move on to the next one nora is a very wise and intelligent person and i think what she meant by that is to watch how the people learn in a system uh my own take is i don't know that our system is learning because i think our system is akin to a blind hungry giant amoeba that's just slopping forward in time slurping up low entropy goodies with no regard to the well-being of its constituent parts which would be us nor the environment so i think if we understand how that system learns it doesn't we can look at its trajectory and plan ahead for what's likely to happen i think what nora is trying to do is fuse system science with real human interaction which she calls warm data and see how the people respond to each other and the knowledge and create some emergent learning and i i fully think that is one of the things that gives me hope in the world is more people speaking the language that you and i are speaking on this call and rolling things around and expanding their group of five to eight people that talk about it and maybe doing something in their small village in spain or france or and all of a sudden there's lots of these things happening in the world that happened because of our our hearts and our minds were aligned uh in in anticipation of a change in our culture and i i don't know what that looks like but you know just the the feeling i get you and i have talked half a dozen times you know i consider you a friend and a fellow traveler who pretty much understands uh you know this the system that we're a part of and you're kind of like you said you're a stoic and you're observing and and kind of trying to understand and get your mind around it but with the pro-social philosophy you would like the future to be better you would like us to make better decisions and you're just playing a role i just think we need millions of more people like that so if we i mean there are a lot of people thinking of what should be done to uh you know to change that trajectory there's one way of seeing it as okay there is nothing that can be done because the system can't change and i tend to agree with that but theoretically you know beyond the symptoms what is it that you think would be the most efficient levers to to pull somehow is it oh you know what is what is really the most important thing preventing us from doing anything serious is it about money is it about finance is it about all of this connected all together or try to to does it make sense actually to try to to find out because i'm just just want to just want to help all these people trying to that are already doing things i don't want them to feel like okay this is all useless and uh to get your point of view on on what are the different levels i think the single most important barrier um to change isn't finance it's that we use social sorting mechanisms to solve physical world problems we look at people's status and that dictates how much of the truth we can say and i've sat down with a lot of former politicians current politicians having a beer in a private restaurant that agree with a lot of what i'm saying but they just couldn't say it publicly so if you look at what are the core things that we could switch it would be let's have maybe at a local regional scale you could have these conversations in a productive way another core driver of our problems is the prices are wrong we're underpaying for the main input to our societies that has supported vast amounts of consumption and standards of living but we're paying the wrong prices for two reasons one is because we're drawing down this fossil bank account that supports our economies very very rapidly and number two is we're not paying at all for the cost of pollution um for the most part we're not paying for the true cost of the energy that underpins our living standards but to try and put a carbon tax or a tax on all non-renewable inputs including things like copper or fossil water aquifers or uranium if we put a tax on that that implies a smaller economy and less consumption and no one's going to vote for that right now but that is one of the things that over the next 50 years we could shift the tax burden away from humans towards non-renewable inputs which in theory would result in better innovation because people scientists and developers and entrepreneurs would have the better signals of scarcity and these things that are going away very quickly to make better inventions excuse me the other thing would be we would conserve we wouldn't frivolously waste things on uh just junkets to las vegas or little gigas that we buy in our house because we would appreciate we would appreciate the energy services that we get so i do think that's one of the levers as far as people hearing this story and saying oh my god it's so overwhelming what do i do there is that risk i think learning the full systemic overview the initial reaction is um that it it removes agency from a person's like oh my god this whole thing is we're in this runaway train and we're just shoveling fuel into it and there's nothing we can do well one of the first things you can do is meet other like-minded humans on the dining car and talk about this and even if you don't find resolution and answers just the mere talking about it with another human reduces your cortisol and boost your helper t cells just having this conversation with you we're not coming up with any answers but i feel a human connection with you um if i could do one thing though um professionally with people working in the climate energy systems space is all of these people are assuming that we are going to continue to grow into the future and we just need to do that in a low-carbon way or in a more equitable way i i would ask or if i could i would want all the people working on future scenarios to maybe consider just a 10 percent chance that we're going to have a smaller economy in the future and that we're going to have to respond to that and just doesn't have to be certain just maybe a 5 or 10 percent chance of that scenario manifesting and how would that change their work and that could be helpful because it could spur creativity um that is lacking right now because people feel that we're kind of locked in to the scenario like you said among all the things that you're looking at what are the [Music] let's call them positive weak signals like the things that you see already emerging that could have maybe an impact on the trajectory or that could be positive in a way once things simplify it's a great question um i think the the clearest most positive hopeful thing that i've noticed is i just got back from two weeks in europe and by the way the social contract in europe is so different than the united states i was mostly in scandinavian countries i was in netherlands denmark germany and finland and i just got the feeling that there's more of a focus on the we than the i and when i flew back from amsterdam to uh minneapolis i got the same feeling as when i fly from minneapolis to las vegas it was just this cultural different feeling i loved finland and denmark like i rented a bike and was just driving around and uh anyways it's just a different vibe but the the hopeful feeling i get is i'm meeting hundreds and hundreds of people at conferences and workshops that are having the same conversation that you and i are having and they're dedicated and they have love and care and you know they're gonna sacrifice and do things in the future when they have to and i just want to you know play my small part in growing that amount to tens of millions of humans and i don't think we face a disaster i just think we face a shrinkage in what we've come to expect and honestly i don't think the shrinkage is the biggest risk i don't think having 10 percent less energy is the biggest risk i think it's the complexity that we've built with a six continent supply chain and all these little components for our pharmaceuticals and our tractors are coming from different countries and so we need to start thinking about maybe relocalizing and re-regionalizing our supply chains um but the hopeful thing is is humans you know i i really and there's going to be some bad actors as they always are when when times get tough but the people that i've met i just am buoyed by and um it makes me motivated to to continue to do this work i've met so many wonderful people i want to talk about hope because you you you said the word uh i find personally some people too hopeful and because they think that for example technology will solve our problems or because we will somehow change the world and and go through the simplification in a very peaceful way and you know and build a new kind of civilization etc but i also find some people not hopeful enough you know too kind of too certain that everything will collapse and the humanity that humanity is over soon you know for some people it's like tomorrow and personally i have little hope as i mentioned before in that this systemic change needed will happen because there are too many hurdles but at the same time and in complex systems as we as we said you know some some sometimes happen what we call an emergence something that's totally unexpected and uh and also you know hope is needed to stay positive in a sense i guess but that's a question i have how much do you think that hope is actually necessary or even useful in our situation um i heard dennis meadows i think also in your podcast saying that when you ask the question in the end like uh you know are you hopeful what make what keeps you hopeful and you said i think that it's it's not a an important question it's not the problem it's not about hope but i want to have your take on this do we need to go through that phase of losing hope first to build something else or do we need to stay hopeful to continue you know doing what we do what's your personal take on that it's a tough one [Music] i've long ago grieved for the future that society is marketing to us so i've been sad um and sometimes lost hope over the last 15 to 20 years and so over time the probability distribution in my brain of what the future will be has shifted so that now my expectations for the next 20 or 30 years are so different than societies that i actually am hopeful that things could be better than the middle of my own distribution so first of all is hope necessary um it depends on p the person's physical and mental situation on their life situation if you're a poor person living without air conditioning in the middle east right now i mean the word hope in the context of this conversation is very different than someone making a career change in minneapolis or paris i think it also depends on what people think about the future and i i do think there's kind of a grieving process that has to happen to allow you to get to a a reality informed hope and i agree with you a lot of people i mean we have this cultural it's almost like this madison avenue necessity where they show an advertisement you suck but if you buy this product you will be cool and they show all these environmental movies like all the destruction and the elephant poaching and the oceans but at the end if we go to renewables and solar we can fix it and it's almost like you have to paste this happy thing at the end and i actually think over time this is being counterproductive because people feel that that's disingenuous and that the story and the ask of us is much deeper than that so i think we need a group of humans millions but not billions that recognize what's going on have grieved a little bit for the cultural fairy tale of of continued economic growth and prosperity and roll their sleeves up find the others and do the hard work that's necessary living with the uncertainty and living with this stuff and i mean that's how i feel julian but that may be super weird and maybe other people aren't like that at all um i hope there are um because that's that's where i'm at but i i do think am i hopeful yes i'm hopeful because i have lower expectations and i'm kind of a hopeful guy um so but for some people you're absolutely right they're either too hopeful because maybe because they're not because they're ignorant or don't understand these things but because they require that hope in order to remain functional in their own lives and on the on the other side there are people that really are so miserable with their expectations of the future that they kind of want to bring others into their misery with them because then that feels bearable because i've got six people that i can say that we're going extinct in the next 12 years and we all think that so we're kind of keeping each other company but i think that there again certainty is is the the killer there um i i think we have to keep uncertainty um uh alive and fresh in our brains and that's hard that's a hard thing to do certainty i i think that grieving process that you mentioned is uh essential i think most people that are digesting this information are going through it even though it's always difficult to grieve something that has not happened uh yeah except except that's you know that's the other thing that i'm kind of have a pet peeve about people exactly people are saying well when would collapse happen and what they mean by that is when would collapse happen for you because collapse is already happening in sri lanka and and bangladesh and to the insects and to the dolphins exactly um my personal way of dealing with this i mentioned you know stoicism before because i think there is an interesting answer on in philosophy overall and uh which is that you need to focus on um what you what's in your hands basically it's like just focus on you what you can control and the rest in the end doesn't really matter because it creates negative emotions it makes you sad makes you angry it makes you scares you but it you have no control over it like the what's going to happen in in what how is going to be how the climate is going to be now 30 years you have zero control about it this is why i i mentioned the fact that i quit the idea of you know changing the world and i'm doing this for other reasons but well we do we need um so here's another thing that i talked to this woman about who gave me the hug after this call she explained to me why only 10 of humans can take this on board in a mature way to have a container and during the conversation i i had this like lightning strike of insight that if that's true why am i spending so much time refining the mess the message of the economic uh money technology energy hungry super organism to refine it to be better and better so that people understand it i should be spending my time on growing the number of humans from that 10 to something larger that have the mental and physical and spiritual well-being to to take this on and play a role and so i think you know stoicism is one way and you talk about conditional versus unconditional goals which is something i tell my students is you're right a lot of things that are coming in our future you have no control over but there's a lot of things you can control um you know your morning routines and your your mental and physical health and you know where you get your food and all these sorts of things so i do think this movement of being more holistic healthy meditative grounded uh socially connected humans is almost a precursor towards the other responses that socially we're gonna have one big thing i've noticed and i'm struggling with this but i'm i'm making progress is we live in a world that we have 24 7 access to nature and to other humans the skies the stars the trees the animals other humans we also have 24 7 access to dopamine and social media and information and that is stronger it shouts louder to our brains than the real things that our ancestral past prepared us for and so we have to build walls and procedures and rules in our own life so that our we can trump the impulse of wanting to check social media 15 times a day because we need more people tethered to the real world the the natural in the human world than the technology one in order to have the fully grounded humans to engage with what's coming my own i'll tell you also like because i'm spending a lot of time with the old philosophers because i'm finishing a book uh to summarize all that and uh i fight i find great answers there stoicism is helpful but you also you also have spinoza i'm not sure pronouncing it right in english but uh and his take on the non-existent non-existence of free will and yet the possibility of living an ethical and joyful life that's also something because it's also about it's it's what stoics say about the fact that you basically uh you you should focus on yourself and focus on the decisions that you're making it doesn't mean that you can't do anything and you can't change anything but it's just about trying to be ethical using reason to take care of yourself to take care of your community to take care of what what's within your grasp within your your control and i find it super helpful because that's that's way that's a relief you don't need to take the whole way of the wall on your shoulders you just need to behave in a certain way that makes you happy and what they say basically is that this way and these all the wisdoms you know around the world say this is this way of behaving behaving ethically is very much compatible with what we should be hoping for which is to take care of other people which is to be to consume less to be content with few things et cetera et cetera i don't know what's your take on that i i totally agree i read spinoza 20 years ago so i don't uh or 30 years ago but i totally agree the more humans we have that have that ethic and have started to already you know simplified first and beat the rush and they're already living differently thinking differently interacting differently with their colleagues and their community and their family the better odds we're gonna have of a somewhat uh viable transition um when when these events happen so if we could multiply by a thousand times the number of humans that are just behaving differently in that way we we can create a scout team that acts as a rock in the river when the water starts rushing it'll hold things together and maybe even redirect the water if we get enough people i mean that you said it better than i but that's what we really need we as in and i guess also modern society get local that's that's maybe one of the things that you've looked at but they are when you say there are many issues many global issues that we can't really tackle you know as an individual they are when you change the scale and you think about your yourself your family and then your your community then you become able to have some kind of impact i think to me that's the next thing to explore you know like if i want to act on something i i totally agree i mean the problem really is ecological overshoot and so the global response is unlikely to to happen um we're going to play whack-a-mole and continue to react me personally um despite me believing that local response is the most important thing i have to keep trying on this global narrative that we might be able to shift um but i think for your listeners uh and for most people i think the local response building community where you are and changing your behaviors and your thought process i mean if you really understand how we've used money to kick the can of a recession depression and we've done this repeatedly with central bank largesse and changing the rules and the covid stimulus package and artificial interest rates and the ecb guaranteeing italian and periphery debt if you really understand how temporary those things are and you understand that humans will not on mass change to voluntarily reduce our consumption you can quite viscerally imagine a time in the next decade where there's this financial recalibration and if you feel that emotionally real enough even though it's a future scenario you can have that emotion spur you to action in your own life and your family and yourself what you say is recession and you know the bank system that stops functioning normally just just to understand because these i know these topics are not simple for most people in the 1930s in the united states from the peak of our size of our economy to the bottom before we started to grow again we fell 29.6 in the size of our economy that was a great depression and i think something around those terms is probably coming in the next decade it wouldn't have had to be that big but we've built such a financial bubble with all these monetary claims approaching 400 trillion dollars globally that i i think something like that would would be coming again and that's kind of a shocking thing to say but then we would only be back to 1990s levels of per capita um consumption which wouldn't have to be a disaster i don't know the exact numbers but something of that magnitude um so just imagine everyone listening to this was making 30 percent less uh in their salaries something like that and of course distribution would also be an issue because some people that don't have jobs or very low jobs to make 30 less is going to be a problem last question uh and prepared sorry sorry to kind of close on that on that downer note but that that is what i don't know that's what my analysis suggests and we could spend we could do an entire episode on uh on you know finance and the economy you know based on your knowledge so maybe that would be funny the thing is julian is what i just said to be honest for your listeners i don't think is going to be that big of a surprise yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah last question what's uh what's the meaning of life [Laughter] are you like me you asked the same questions at the end to everyone um i just i just asked it to noam chomsky and it was very quick answering it so what did he say he said the meaning of like it's just uh what you make of it you decide yeah i you kind of really thought about it i've never really thought about it but i like his answer um i love my life right now uh i'm not making much money i don't have much savings i feel like i'm in the middle of uh the most incredibly important conversation and discussions about our future of our species culture and i'm probably going to play a tiny tiny tiny infinitesimal role of shifting things but it feels really important to me and it feels like everything i've done in my past my my studies my connections my networks my social relationships my rolling this stuff around in my head when i go on a bike ride is all coalescing so that my life has meaning right now and so uh i don't know what the meaning of life is i know that my life has meaning right now and so i would wish that any of your listeners find whatever path that is for themselves and just take a step towards it it took me 20 years to get to this point because i cared about animals and i wanted to learn about the climate and 20 years later i have a podcast and i'm on some other guys podcast named sismiq in france so um i'll just stop there i love your accent too your french accent well i think thanks a lot for this uh one hour and a half conversation i i i mean i think we could uh we could talk for another hour but uh i'm uh i will need to translate all that so i want to stop here you're very welcome julian thanks a lot thanks again for your help and advice in the past year so sure i'm really glad to see what you what you did with that well thanks a lot talk to you soon okay ciao

Channel: Sismique

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Id: nP_YT8yh4NA

Length: 88min 51sec (5331 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 14 2022