In this week's Frankly, Nate shares reflections on what we take for granted in life at multiple scales: from personal health to meaningful work to relative ecological stability. The things that kee...
Dopamine: the most famous neurotransmitter that regulates pleasure, motivation, and (perhaps most importantly) addiction. When examining why our society is hooked on consuming more and more o...
In this week's Frankly, Nate takes thermodynamics out of the physics classroom, utilizing its principles to explain the invisible forces behind growth, competition, and complexity in our world. Com...
In this week's episode, Nate reflects on four years(!) of the podcast by answering listener-submitted questions, which cover a broad range of topics related to The Great Simplification. He invites ...
In this week's episode, Nate unpacks the pervasive behavioral pull of sunk cost as a force shaping our material reality, identities, and collective expectations about the future. Past investments –...
While current conversations about global heating tend to center around a few well-established pieces of science, we don't often hear about the scientists and leaders working at the frontier of what...
In this week's Frankly, Nate explores how the prices we encounter in our daily lives are influenced by not only how much money is in the system, but also by resource depletion, technology, affordab...
Technological development has always been a double-edged sword for humanity: the printing press increased the spread of misinformation, cars disrupted the fabric of our cities, and social media has...
Over the past decade, the world has become increasingly chaotic and uncertain – and so, too, has our cultural vision for the future. While the events we face now may feel unprecedented, they are ro...
Over the past decade, the world has become increasingly chaotic and uncertain – and so, too, has our cultural vision for the future. While the events we face now may feel unprecedented, they are ro...
For centuries, modern science has relied on the scientific method to better understand the world around us. While helpful in many contexts, the scientific method is also objective, controlled, and ...
In this episode, Nate weaves personal reflections into an exploration of the human predicament, unpacking a series of chronological insights that have reshaped his worldview. What began years ago a...
Global heating continues, despite the increased use of renewable energy sources and international policies attempting otherwise. Even as emissions reduction efforts continue, our world faces more e...
Mainstream conversations about artificial intelligence tend to center around the technology's economic and large-scale impacts. Yet it's at the individual level where we're seeing AI's most potent ...
In this week's Frankly, Nate outlines four bifurcations that are likely to underpin the human experience in the near future. While the broad biophysical realities of energy and ecology underpin our...
Many of us wrestle with the unsettling truth that everyone – including ourselves and those we love – will one day die. Though this awareness is uncomfortable, research suggests that the human capac...
In this week's Frankly, Nate considers the ways in which our social species overvalues false-confidence rather than the more honest and inquisitive response of "I don't know." He invites us to cons...
Monopolistic business practices have been illegal in the United States for more than a century. Yet, monopoly power continues to accelerate in our modern commercial landscape. Large, powerful corpo...
In this week's Frankly, Nate reflects on the multiple metaphors brought to mind via a single photograph, which depicts a sloth climbing a barbed wire fence in Costa Rica. Beyond evoking compassion ...
Twenty-five years ago, a landmark paper warned that the world's coral reefs could vanish by 2050. Now, halfway to that projected date (and amid ever more frequent coral bleaching events), that grim...
