Four Futures, the Evolutionary Stack, and Nate Hagens' Five Things (Salon 15, Extended)

0:00 Gemini: Four variables, 256 combinations, four futures. Nate Hagen says all four could arrive inside one country at the same time and your zip code may decide more of your future than your flag. I'm Gemini.

0:11 Gemino: And I'm Gemino. We're the AI correspondents for Dear Crisis. Here to keep you connected to this community when you can't be in the room. Here's what happened. Dear Crisis is a Brooklyn community that meets monthly to face the big crises together.

0:23 Gemini: This is the long version of Meta Crisis Salon 15, but a shorter 20-minute version is also available.

0:28 Gemino: The last uh 2,000 years, human history is really just characterized by very long stretches of either flat or declining growth.

0:34 Gemini: Right.

0:35 Gemino: When you look at the historical data spanning those two millennia, human society's operated almost entirely on the current solar flows available to them.

0:41 Gemini: Yeah, the energy they had to build or travel or maintain their populations, it came directly from the sun. It was captured through agriculture, human muscle, animal labor, you know, wind and falling water.

0:50 Gemino: Exactly. And because those energy inputs were strictly limited by the physical constraints of land and seasons, the economic output of those societies was similarly bound.

0:58 Gemini: The standard state for humanity was to exist within those physical limits. Which meant the global economy did not continuously expand.

1:13 Gemino: It couldn't, right?

1:13 Gemini: Right. Population sizes and economic activity would rise slightly during periods of optimal weather, or localized agricultural improvements, and then they would just fall back down due to crop failures or disease or resource depletion.

1:19 Gemino: Yeah. That flat or declining growth was the baseline reality for generation after generation.

1:27 Gemini: But the last 50 years represent a one-time exception to that 2,000-year historical norm.

1:28 Gemino: Every expectation you hold about progress was built entirely inside this specific narrow window of time.

1:39 Gemini: Yeah. The assumptions you have about a career trajectory or how you plan for retirement, the very definition of what a normal life looks like. All of that was completely designed inside these extraordinary circumstances.

1:43 Gemino: You expect the economy to be larger next year than it is this year. And you expect technological complexity to continually increase because you were born into a system that has been temporarily unrestrained from that historical solar flow.

1:58 Gemini: The physical foundation of this 50-year exception. It rests entirely on burning an accumulated stock of fossil energy.

2:05 Gemino: Specifically, this global system requires the extraction and combustion of 100 billion barrels of oil equivalent a year.

2:12 Gemini: 100 billion.

2:12 Gemino: Yeah. That figure encompasses the combined energy output of coal, oil and natural gas. They just standardized it into the energy equivalent of oil barrels to measure the total scale of the draw.

2:25 Gemini: The physical power contained in those 100 billion barrels is staggering when you actually break down the arithmetic that Hagens provided.

2:26 Gemino: Right. When a human being engages in physical labor for 40 hours a week over the course of an entire year, they generate a specific measurable amount of physical energy.

2:37 Gemini: And the stored potential energy inside just one single barrel of oil equivalent is equal to about five years of that physical human work.

2:42 Gemino: Wow. Five years.

2:42 Gemini: Yeah, five years. So, you can see the exact mechanics of how this built the modern world. When you extract 100 billion barrels of oil equivalent in a single year, you are physically adding the labor equivalent of 500 billion human beings into the global economy annually.

2:57 Gemino: Which is what operates the heavy machinery that plants and harvests the global food supply.

2:59 Gemini: Exactly. It powers the container ships moving materials across the oceans, it runs the electrical grids supporting global communication networks, the technological progress, the convenience and the comfort you currently have are direct physical outputs of that massive energy input.

3:16 Gemino: But the core error in the current economic model is treating this finite stock of energy as if it were a continuous flow.

3:21 Gemini: Right. A flow like wind or incoming solar radiation, it arrives continuously. You can rely on it indefinitely though at a limited rate.

3:28 Gemino: But a stock is a finite deposit. The coal, oil and natural gas being extracted right now took hundreds of millions of years of geological pressure to form.

3:37 Gemini: And the global economy is drawing down this finite geological savings account at a rate of 100 billion barrels a year. While the financial and cultural systems just operate under the assumption that this input will continue to arrive forever.

3:53 Gemino: This specific one-time stock of ancient stored energy is what currently supports a global population of 8.2 billion people.

4:00 Gemini: Yeah, the agricultural yields required to feed 8.2 billion people rely directly on natural gas to produce synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.

4:04 Gemino: And they rely directly on diesel fuel to operate the tractors, the harvesters, the distribution networks.

4:10 Gemini: Without that continuous drawdown of the finite stock, the physical infrastructure of the global food system simply cannot sustain the current population size.

4:13 Gemino: We should probably mention, we're in the East Village of Manhattan during climate week. Sitting inside an organic vegan restaurant.

4:21 Gemini: Yeah, Caravan of Dreams. The community actually built the stage, the screen and the curtains you see here in the room.

4:24 Gemino: It's a very specific setting for this. And Hagens noted how society continuously obsesses over politics, technology and money.

4:34 Gemini: Right. People look to political elections to solve systemic issues, they look to technological breakthroughs to eliminate physical constraints, and they look to monetary policy to generate wealth.

4:40 Gemino: But he defines politics, technology, and money strictly as proximate drivers.

4:47 Gemini: Proximate drivers, yeah. They are the surface level mechanisms that society interacts with daily, they dictate how the available resources are distributed, managed and extracted.

4:56 Gemino: The issue is society conflates those three proximate drivers with the ultimate drivers of human progress.

5:03 Gemini: Right, because politics, technology and money do not generate physical reality on their own. They rest entirely on an ultimate base of non-renewable energy, physical resources and materials.

5:08 Gemino: A political mandate cannot construct infrastructure without steel and concrete.

5:13 Gemini: Exactly. A technological design cannot function without copper, rare earth metals, and a continuous electrical supply.

5:21 Gemino: And financial capital has no actual value unless there is physical energy available to convert that capital into goods and services.

5:28 Gemini: Furthermore, all of that non-renewable energy, along with the extraction of resources and materials, rests on the foundation of a healthy biosphere.

5:36 Gemino: The extraction processes and the subsequent waste emissions require a planetary environment capable of absorbing those impacts without degrading the systems that support human life. Things like stable weather patterns and arable top soil.

5:46 Gemini: The precise state of that biosphere was detailed in the planetary health check, which Hagens discussed with Johan Rockstrom.

5:52 Gemino: The scientific framework there identifies nine planetary boundaries that regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth system.

5:55 Gemini: Yeah, these include the climate system, biosphere integrity, land system change, fresh water use, and biogeochemical flows like the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles.

6:08 Gemino: The specific data from the planetary health check shows that seven of those nine planetary boundaries are now exceeded.

6:13 Gemini: Seven out of nine.

6:13 Gemino: Yes. The physical limits of what the Earth system can absorb and regenerate have been breached in seven distinct categories.

6:15 Gemini: The natural cycles governing nitrogen runoff from fertilizers, the extraction of freshwater from aquifers, the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases, they are currently operating outside the safe operating space for humanity.

6:28 Gemino: And because seven of those nine planetary boundaries are currently exceeded, the Earth system is actively leaving the stability of the Holocene.

6:32 Gemini: The Holocene being the geological epoch that spans the last 10,000 years, characterized by a highly stable, predictable global climate.

6:42 Gemino: That specific stability is what allowed human beings to develop sedentary agriculture, because the seasons and weather patterns were reliable enough to plant crops and guarantee a harvest.

6:47 Gemini: Leaving the Holocene means leaving the environmental baseline that permitted complex human civilization to emerge in the first place.

6:58 Gemino: Under the current economic system, introducing better, more efficient technology does not reduce our environmental impact.

6:58 Gemini: No, it is likely to grow it. As long as gross domestic product or GDP remains the primary global cultural goal, the entire system is mandated to expand.

7:12 Gemino: Because GDP measures the total monetary value of all goods and services produced. Growing that number requires a continuous increase in material throughput.

7:20 Gemini: The physical mechanics of this are straightforward. When you develop a more energy efficient technology under a GDP focused mandate, the energy you save does not stay in the ground.

7:27 Gemino: Right. The efficiency makes the process cheaper, which frees up capital.

7:33 Gemini: And that capital is then deployed to build more infrastructure, manufacture more products and expand operations further. Better technology simply means you extract and build more and more at a faster rate.

7:39 Gemino: Because the economic mandate dictates that you build more and more, the real energy transition cannot simply be about changing the kind of energy you use.

7:46 Gemini: Swapping out a coal-fired power plant for solar panels and wind turbines, while maintaining the exact same goal of continuous GDP growth, just shifts the burden of extraction.

7:56 Gemino: It shifts it from fossil fuels to the intense mining of copper, lithium and cobalt required to build the new infrastructure at a massive scale.

8:06 Gemini: The real energy transition requires changing your fundamental relationship to energy itself.

8:10 Gemino: It requires shifting from a system that demands maximum continuous extraction to one that operates within physical limits.

8:12 Gemini: It is also about changing your relationship to each other, moving away from hyper individualized consumption and toward shared physical resources and localized cooperation.

8:20 Gemino: And it is about changing your relationship to the natural world. recognizing the biosphere as the ultimate limiting driver, rather than a limitless sink for industrial waste.

8:28 Gemini: You could see the current trajectory clearly in the fact that almost every climate meeting held during climate week rapidly turned into a data center meeting.

8:38 Gemino: Yeah, the focus shifted away from reducing global material throughput and immediately toward securing the massive physical infrastructure required to run artificial intelligence models.

8:48 Gemini: Artificial intelligence systems are designed to make logistical and computational processes more efficient, but the physical operation of those systems requires an enormous amount of energy.

8:53 Gemino: The data centers housing the servers require constant massive draws of electricity to run the processors.

9:00 Gemini: And they require equally massive draws of electricity and water to run the cooling systems that keep those processors from melting down.

9:07 Gemino: Because AI needs this enormous amount of energy, it functions as a massive new energy draw on the environment. Compounding the existing demand rather than replacing it.

9:16 Gemini: On the stage, there's a timer running, keeping the presentation moving.

9:19 Gemino: By applying massive computational power to global supply chains, financial markets and resource extraction. AI is turbo charging the nervous system of the super organism.

9:28 Gemini: The super organism is the collective human economic enterprise, operating as a single massive metabolic entity that relentlessly seeks out energy and materials to sustain its own growth.

9:37 Gemino: AI allows this entity to map, optimize and exploit physical resources with unprecedented speed and efficiency, accelerating the rate at which the system consumes the biosphere.

9:43 Gemini: Under the current economic structures, this acceleration will directly drive inequality toward neo feudalism.

9:52 Gemino: The physical infrastructure of AI, the massive data centers, the power generation required to run them, and the specialized hardware is incredibly capital intensive.

9:57 Gemini: So, ownership of these ultimate drivers concentrates strictly at the top.

10:02 Gemino: As the technology automates and optimizes human labor out of the economic process, the wealth generated by the remaining energy surplus consolidates in the hands of the infrastructure owners.

10:10 Gemini: While the displaced labor force is left without economic leverage, mirroring the steep hierarchical inequalities of a feudal society.

10:17 Gemino: Governments and central banks have the administrative ability to print money.

10:21 Gemini: Right. Through fiat currency systems, they can digitally alter the numbers on a balance sheet to increase the money supply, lower interest rates and issue new debt to stimulate economic activity.

10:28 Gemino: But they cannot print energy.

10:32 Gemini: There is no monetary policy, legislative act or financial instrument that can manifest a physical barrel of oil, a ton of coal or a cubic meter of natural gas.

10:41 Gemino: The energy must be physically discovered, drilled, mined, refined and transported before it can perform any work in the physical economy.

10:47 Gemini: When the physical energy supply contracts, the financial system faces a severe recalibration.

10:55 Gemino: Barring a sudden, unprecedented new boost in energy productivity, the era of total global economic growth is likely soon over.

10:56 Gemini: The physical surplus required to expand the system is simply no longer available at the necessary scale or price.

11:01 Gemino: The first rupture in this process is exactly that, financial recalibration. The global economy has generated a massive number of monetary claims, stocks, bonds, pensions and debt against the underlying physical energy and materials.

11:18 Gemini: As the physical base stops growing, the number of paper claims against those materials will stretch further and further from reality until the system snaps back, destroying the financial value that is no longer backed by physical energy.

11:28 Gemino: You can see the immediate physical consequences of constrained energy supplies right now.

11:34 Gemini: Following the escalation of the Iran war, 2 billion people currently face unaffordable fuel.

11:40 Gemino: 2 billion. The disruption of the physical supply chains immediately spikes the price of the available energy, pricing out the populations that lack the financial leverage to secure it.

11:47 Gemini: This results in direct physical emergencies. There are emergency measures currently active in India and Pakistan, strictly due to this unaffordable fuel.

11:54 Gemino: The governments are forced to intervene because the basic mechanisms of their economies cannot function at the current energy prices.

12:01 Gemini: The physical reality on the ground is that diesel stations are entirely out of fuel.

12:06 Gemino: Without diesel, trucks cannot transport food to markets. And agricultural equipment cannot harvest fields.

12:13 Gemini: The physical supply chain halts, and this specific crisis is actively spilling into Europe, where the energy constraints are beginning to impact industrial production and transportation networks.

12:19 Gemino: When faced with a physical contraction in energy and goods, governments and central banks are forced into a choice.

12:26 Gemini: Rather than choose austerity, which would mean politically accepting a lower standard of living and a contraction of the economy to match the physical reality. They choose to print and monetize debt.

12:34 Gemino: The central banks create new currency to purchase government bonds, allowing the government to continue spending and attempting to stimulate the economy despite the energy shortage.

12:39 Gemini: That specific response of monetizing debt leads directly to currency debasement.

12:49 Gemino: The physical mechanics dictate that if you increase the amount of currency circulating in the economy, but the total pool of physical energy and goods remains constrained or shrinks, each individual unit of currency simply buys a smaller fraction of the available goods.

12:58 Gemini: The money loses its purchasing power because there is no new physical surplus backing the newly printed money.

13:06 Gemino: In this context, building out renewables and nuclear power are the right answers to the wrong question.

13:11 Gemini: They are highly effective physical technologies for generating electricity without direct carbon emissions.

13:16 Gemino: However, if the question being asked is simply how to replace fossil fuels one for one to maintain the exact same trajectory of infinite GDP growth and continuous material extraction, then renewables and nuclear are being deployed to sustain a fundamentally unsustainable system.

13:28 Gemini: The right question is how to configure society to live, using the specific benefits of these technologies in a way that actively supports both human wellbeing and the physical integrity of the biosphere.

13:37 Gemino: It requires designing a system that uses the available electrical generation to meet basic human needs without demanding the continuous exponential growth of material throughput.

13:46 Gemini: A severe disruption to the physical food supply is expected, specifically projecting a famine in 2028.

13:52 Gemino: This is not driven by a single localized crop failure, but by the mathematical reality of a compounded global resource crunch intersecting with highly optimized, brittle supply chains.

14:05 Gemini: The famine is a direct physical result of necessary inputs being blocked from reaching agricultural centers. Millions of tons of grain are physically blocked from leaving the export hubs in Russia and Ukraine.

14:12 Gemino: Simultaneously, the chemical fertilizers necessary to maintain high crop yields elsewhere are blocked at the straight of Hormuz.

14:21 Gemini: Because the synthetic fertilizer production relies heavily on the natural gas supply chains passing through that specific choke point, the disruption halts the flow of nutrients to the soil.

14:27 Gemino: Without the fertilizer applied in one season, the subsequent harvest mathematically fails, leading directly to the projected food shortages.

14:34 Gemini: A bio physical phase shift has been underway in global politics, alliances and economic agreements since February 2026.

14:36 Gemino: The underlying physical reality of energy depletion and biosphere limits is forcing a massive structural reorganization of how nations interact and secure their essential resources.

14:50 Gemini: This geopolitical restructuring means the physical flows of global resources are systematically going east rather than west and north.

14:57 Gemino: The nations controlling the remaining dense energy and raw materials are rerouting their exports toward the emerging industrial centers in Asia, bypassing

15:00 Gemini: traditional consumer economies of North America and Western Europe. As these resource flows redirect, regional trade blocks are rapidly forming, replacing the highly integrated global free trade system.

15:09 Gemino: Inside these newly forming blocks, state capitalism is taking hold. Governments are directly intervening in markets to secure physical supply chains, stockpile critical minerals and manage energy distribution overriding traditional free market dynamics to ensure national survival.

15:22 Gemini: The global superorganism is physically caving in half.

15:24 Gemino: The single, highly integrated metabolic entity that characterized the globalized economy is fracturing into distinct competing spheres of influence. Each attempting to secure the remaining physical surplus for its own regional network.

15:37 Gemini: The physical reality of the global oil supply is that it will never return to previous levels.

15:41 Gemino: The peak of total extraction has passed, and the current constraints are driven by permanent physical and geopolitical factors.

15:47 Gemini: It will never return due to the reality of shut-in production, where drilling operations that were halted cannot simply be turned back on without massive capital investment and often yield significantly less pressure once restarted.

15:59 Gemino: It is constrained by physically damaged fields that have been degraded by war or over extraction.

16:10 Gemini: And it is permanently limited by security risks, where the transportation of crude oil through global choke points is no longer guaranteed by a single naval hegemon, making the transit routes physically unsafe and financially uninsurable.

16:15 Gemino: Climate change is not the core problem facing the global system.

16:20 Gemini: Climate change is a symptom of a much larger underlying dysfunction, ecological overshoot.

16:29 Gemino: Overshoot is the strict biological condition where a population temporarily exceeds the long-term carrying capacity of its environment.

16:37 Gemini: The human economy achieved this by burning the one-time stock of fossil fuels, allowing the population and material consumption to expand far beyond what the current solar flows and the biosphere can sustainably support.

16:40 Gemino: The carbon emissions heating the atmosphere are just one waste product of this massive, unsustainable metabolic rate.

16:52 Gemini: The exact nature of this predicament cannot be voiced aloud in mainstream politics or the traditional press.

16:53 Gemino: Acknowledging the physical reality of overshoot, the end of growth and the permanent contraction of energy supplies, fundamentally breaks the political promises and financial assumptions that hold the current social order together.

17:06 Gemini: Two European climate workers, who were entirely unknown to each other, experienced this restriction directly when they were held by Homeland security at the United States border.

17:17 Gemino: The authorities detained them specifically regarding the content of the physical realities they intended to discuss.

17:17 Gemini: Before they were allowed entry, they were made to explicitly promise not to speak at any publicly announced event inside the United States.

17:24 Gemino: The state apparatus actively intervened to prevent the public dissemination of the data regarding the biophysical limits and the impending structural contractions.

17:35 Gemini: The severe delta between the physical reality unfolding on the ground and the mandated public narrative of continuous progress creates profound cognitive dissonance.

17:44 Gemino: People experienced the direct impacts of inflation, energy scarcity and extreme weather, while the institutional messaging insists the system is stable and growing.

17:49 Gemini: Above the speakers here, there are flowers and fringes on the lights.

17:56 Gemino: The historical reality is that democracies, open societies and expansive civil rights frameworks followed the carbon pulse up.

18:00 Gemini: The unprecedented abundance of cheap energy created enough physical surplus to eliminate extreme poverty for billions, fund massive public institutions and allow for a political system based on individual liberties and distributed power.

18:07 Gemino: What happens to those social structures and open societies as they follow the carbon pulls down, is an entirely open question.

18:19 Gemini: As the physical surplus contracts and the energy available per capita declines, the historical conditions that permitted democracy to flourish are removed, leaving no precedent for how a modern, high complexity society navigates a permanent reduction in available resources.

18:29 Gemino: The physical climate stress arrives regardless of the political response, and the thermal inertia of the oceans and atmosphere guarantees that 2027 will be the hottest year of your life so far.

18:35 Gemini: The accumulated greenhouse gases ensure the baseline temperatures will continue to break historical records.

18:45 Gemino: Looking at the combined pressures of the energy contraction, the biosphere degradation and the geopolitical fracturing, Hagens estimates there are 30 to 40% odds on a major systemic disruption occurring in the next 12 months.

18:55 Gemini: The interconnections of the global supply chains are stretched so thin that a failure in one node now has a near even chance of cascading through the entire system within a single year.

19:02 Gemino: The current metabolism of the entire global human enterprise runs at 19 terawatts.

19:07 Gemini: A terawatt is a measurement of power, representing a continuous flow of one trillion watts of energy.

19:16 Gemino: The global system demands 19 of those terawatts continuously, every single second of every single day to maintain its current operations.

19:18 Gemini: That specific 19 terawatt metabolism is enough physical power to sustain a truly great civilization, just not the specific one.

19:28 Gemino: If that massive amount of energy were allocated toward durable infrastructure, basic human needs and biosphere restoration rather than continuous disposable consumer growth, it could provide a high standard of living for the population.

19:39 Gemini: The immediate issue facing the public is not a sudden, absolute physical shortage of resources where everything simply disappears overnight.

19:47 Gemino: The issue is a long edge of expectations, particularly acute in the United States.

19:52 Gemini: The population has been culturally conditioned to expect uninterrupted access to limitless energy, cheap consumer goods and continuous financial returns.

20:02 Gemino: The crisis manifests as the slow grinding reality that these expectations will not be met, as the physical availability of resources steadily declines year over year.

20:06 Gemini: Given this trajectory, the prescribed task for the people engaging with this information is changing the initial conditions of the future.

20:12 Gemino: It is about accepting the end of the current paradigm and actively working to design the foundational structures of whatever system will follow the contraction.

20:15 Gemini: It is about changing the initial conditions of the next society through physical gatherings exactly like the one taking place in this room.

20:24 Gemino: Coming together face to face to understand the physical realities, builds the local trust and operational networks necessary to survive the coming phase shifts.

20:36 Gemini: These specific gatherings serve as the physical seeds of whatever replaces the metabolic, psychopathic, instrumental economic superorganism.

20:41 Gemino: The current system instrumentally strips the natural world for parts to feed its own metabolic growth without regard for consequence.

20:48 Gemini: The local networks forming now are the early iterations of a system based on different operational mandates.

20:52 Gemino: Hagens provided a specific historical reference for this kind of foundational cultural change. The Cave of the Hands in Patagonia.

20:56 Gemini: 10,000 years ago, early humans placed their hands against the rock wall and blew pigment over them, leaving hundreds of hand prints.

21:08 Gemino: It was a physical marker of existence, a shared understanding across generations and a seed of community identity that endured long after the individuals were gone.

21:11 Gemini: The human story is incredibly advanced in its technological and physical complexity, but the outcome of this bottleneck is not written.

21:17 Gemino: What is ultimately at stake right now is the contest between power and life.

21:24 Gemini: So, Nate Hagens built his future scenarios on four variables. And, you know, the first variable is the economy.

21:32 Gemino: Right, the economy.

21:32 Gemini: Yeah, and the specific questions for this variable are, well, whether the global economy grows or contracts and also whether that movement goes toward ecological limits or, you know, further into overshoot.

21:41 Gemino: Exactly. And I mean, to put that overshoot into perspective. The global economy currently uses 100 billion barrels of oil equivalent a year.

21:50 Gemini: 100 billion.

21:51 Gemino: Yeah, 100 billion. And he said each one of those barrels is worth about five years of human work.

21:54 Gemini: Wow, okay.

21:55 Gemino: So that level of energy use, it runs the global system at 19 terawatts.

22:01 Gemini: Mm.

22:01 Gemino: So when Hagens asks whether the economy moves further into overshoot, he's asking whether that, uh, that physical throughput increases or decreases.

22:06 Gemini: Right, which leads into the second variable, which is power.

22:10 Gemino: Power, yeah.

22:10 Gemini: And the questions for power are just, you know, whether it remains broad or it becomes concentrated, and whether the economic and material gains of the system are shared widely among people or if they're hoarded by a few.

22:20 Gemino: Which is a big distinction. And, uh, the third variable is geopolitics.

22:25 Gemini: Okay, so how nations interact?

22:25 Gemino: Yeah. The distinction here is whether nations remain interdependent, you know, relying on global supply chains, or if they become autarchic, meaning a nation becomes largely self-sufficient, producing what it needs entirely within its own borders.

22:40 Gemini: Autarkic. Got it.

22:40 Gemino: This variable also asks whether geopolitical relations between those nations are adversarial or friendly.

22:43 Gemini: So, economy, power, geopolitics. And the fourth variable is earth systems.

22:52 Gemino: Right.

22:52 Gemini: This one asks whether climate stress is moderate or severe, and it also asks whether the biosphere remains functional or if it's just, you know, unravelling.

22:58 Gemino: Because humanity has already crossed seven of nine planetary boundaries.

23:04 Gemini: Seven of nine, yeah. So the status of the biosphere basically dictates the physical baseline for all the other three variables.

23:06 Gemino: Exactly. And when you combine all the different states of those four variables, you get 256 possible combinations for the future.

23:10 Gemini: 256.

23:17 Gemino: Yeah. But from those 256 combinations, Hagens drew four specific futures to discuss with the room.

23:18 Gemini: Okay, so the first of those four futures is the long repair.

23:25 Gemino: The long repair, right.

23:25 Gemini: In this scenario, there is economic descent. So, the 19 terawatts of energy use and the gross domestic product, they both contract.

23:31 Gemino: They go down.

23:31 Gemini: Yeah. However, power is shared rather than hoarded, and geopolitics are non-adversarial.

23:32 Gemino: Meaning nations actually cooperate as the economy shrinks.

23:41 Gemini: Right. And the biosphere, it's degraded relative to our childhoods, but it remains stable rather than unraveling entirely.

23:45 Gemino: So that's the first one. The second future is Mordor persists.

23:47 Gemini: Mordor persists.

23:48 Gemino: Yeah, and Hagens identified this as the default path of the current system.

23:57 Gemini: The path we're on now.

23:57 Gemino: Right. In this future, continual brown growth occurs. The system just requires more and more energy to maintain itself.

23:57 Gemini: So it's basically eating itself.

24:02 Gemino: Pretty much. More capital and resources go directly into the energy and material sector just to secure the energy needed to run the rest of the economy. And this throws off massive physical throughput and it destroys the biosphere.

24:12 Gemini: Right. So the third future is Fortress World.

24:16 Gemino: Fortress World, okay.

24:19 Gemini: Yeah, this scenario features the same economic descent as the long repair, but under billionaire control.

24:23 Gemino: Ah. So the gains are hoarded.

24:24 Gemini: Exactly. Hoarded. Power is highly concentrated, the world isolates into autarchic blocks and the earth systems fail.

24:28 Gemino: And then the fourth future is the unravelling.

24:28 Gemini: The unravelling.

24:29 Gemino: This is just the negative quadrant of all four variables combined into one scenario.

24:32 Gemini: The worst of all worlds.

24:34 Gemino: Yeah. The economy contracts into severe overshoot, power is entirely concentrated and hoarded, geopolitics are adversarial and isolated, and the biosphere unravels.

24:47 Gemini: But across all 256 combinations, climate stress is a constant.

24:55 Gemino: It's locked in.

24:55 Gemini: Yeah. Hagens stated his projection that 2027 will be the hottest year of our lives so far, and it may be among the coolest of the rest of them.

25:02 Gemino: The coolest of the rest of them. That's uh, that's heavy. He actually used a line from Olivier Ha, a French biologist.

25:02 Gemini: Okay, what did he say?

25:04 Gemino: stated that humanity is leaving the era of the mean and entering the era of the standard deviation.

25:08 Gemini: The era of the standard deviation.

25:13 Gemino: Right. So the mean is the statistical average. The standard deviation is the variance from that average.

25:18 Gemini: Okay, so. Hagens took Haman's line to indicate that futures are not uniform across the globe. Like all four of the scenarios we just detailed, they could exist inside one country at the exact same time.

25:24 Gemino: At the same time, yeah. Like, on his map, the Northeast lands in the long repair.

25:30 Gemini: The Northeast of the US.

25:32 Gemino: Right. He pointed out that your zip code may determine your future more than the country you live in.

25:36 Gemini: Your zip code.

25:39 Gemino: A single nation will experience localized versions of Mordor persists, Fortress World and the long repair. And it depends entirely on local governance, resources and community cohesion.

25:47 Gemini: So dealing with all this, there are broad fronts of intervention for these futures. He listed infrastructure, poverty and displacement, ecological defense, governance, culture, economic transition, and the commons.

26:00 Gemino: And intervening on those specific fronts, it requires a shift in who's actually speaking.

26:04 Gemini: What do you mean?

26:04 Gemino: Well, Hagens noted the years of the expert explaining things to an audience, they are near an end. The person on stage in the future should be someone like Alexa Ziegler of Living Energy Farm.

26:16 Gemini: Oh right. You could actually see Ziggler present in the room during the talk wearing a cowboy hat.

26:20 Gemino: Yeah, the cowboy hat.

26:21 Gemini: Ziggler runs local electricity systems at a fraction of current throughput. He operates direct drive, direct current solar microgrids.

26:28 Gemino: Which bypass the need for massive battery storage or grid connection.

26:34 Gemini: Exactly. So Hagens shared a realization he had over the last six months regarding the people needed for these interventions.

26:36 Gemino: Right. He said he does not want 10 million humans who know everything about the meta crisis.

26:41 Gemini: So what does he want?

26:41 Gemino: He wants 10 million grounded humans.

26:44 Gemini: Grounded humans.

26:45 Gemino: Yeah, he defined grounded humans as those who are in their parasympathetic nervous system with community, spaciousness and enough to support others.

26:54 Gemini: Because the parasympathetic nervous system is the state of physical rest and digestion.

26:55 Gemino: Right. Opposed to the state of fighter flight.

26:56 Gemini: Which makes sense. So after that, the room then spent 10 minutes in breakout sessions of twos and threes to discuss the material.

27:01 Gemino: And then they provided feedback directly back to the room.

27:05 Gemini: Yeah. A person from Western Massachusetts spoke first. They stated they heard that the tour ends in your own community.

27:11 Gemino: Meaning the macro problems of the global economy and earth systems, they ultimately resolve into actions taken at the local municipal level.

27:17 Gemini: Right. Then a provocation was raised that actually split the room.

27:24 Gemino: Oh, what?

27:24 Gemini: The question was whether you are willing to ally with people who completely reject your reasoning, but reach the exact same conclusion about local resilient community.

27:34 Gemino: Ah. So working alongside individuals who may deny climate science entirely or deny biophysical limits.

27:36 Gemini: Yes, exactly. But they still want to build localized food and energy systems.

27:45 Gemino: That's a tough one.

27:45 Gemini: Another person spoke about being geographically unrooted. They stated that they found the question of where to put down roots to be the hardest question in the room.

27:51 Gemino: Which ties back to the standard deviation thing.

27:54 Gemini: Right. Deciding on a zip code when the standard deviation of futures is so high, you know, it requires assessing local water tables, community ties and climate resilience, all without a clear map.

28:03 Gemino: Then a person who had visited 50 land projects and squatting communities, they shared their observations.

28:09 Gemini: Like 50 projects.

28:09 Gemino: Yeah. They stated that the blueprints for these projects, they exist. The physical infrastructure, the permaculture designs, the off-grid energy systems, they're already documented.

28:14 Gemini: Okay, so what's the issue?

28:16 Gemino: They said the hardest part is learning to live with other people.

28:18 Gemini: Wow. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

28:23 Gemino: A question from the room then asked about high leverage policy and whether there are any silver bullets. I remember a timer was counting down on the new screen as a question was answered.

28:31 Gemini: Right. So Hagens categorized these ideas as advanced policy.

28:33 Gemino: Advanced policy.

28:34 Gemini: Yeah. He stated the policies needed in the next decade are too crazy to voice publicly now, but they must be researched and prepared. Well, he identified that we pay the wrong prices because current prices include neither externalities nor the finiteness of the main inputs.

28:51 Gemino: Ah. Because the price of a barrel of oil doesn't include the long-term ecological damage of its emissions.

28:55 Gemini: No, it doesn't. Nor does it reflect that there's a finite amount of easily accessible oil left in the ground.

29:02 Gemino: But implementing true prices right now, that would crash the fragile system.

29:05 Gemini: Instantly.

29:05 Gemino: If the cost of fossil fuels suddenly reflected their true biophysical cost, the current global economy, which relies on cheap energy for 19 terawatts of continuous operation, would just cease to function.

29:12 Gemini: Right. So he stated that after a financial reset, pricing non-renewable resources much higher becomes a silver bullet.

29:26 Gemino: After a reset.

29:26 Gemini: Yeah. Once the current debt-based financial structure is no longer operating, implementing policies that heavily tax or restrict non-renewable resource extraction forces the economy to operate within ecological limits.

29:37 Gemino: That's fascinating. Hagens then broke down the evolutionary stack of the human body.

29:40 Gemini: Evolutionary stack.

29:41 Gemino: Yeah, at the very bottom of this physical structure is the microbiome, so the bacteria in our bodies.

29:41 Gemini: Okay.

29:44 Gemino: Above the microbiome is the enteric system, which is the relationship between the gut and the brain.

29:46 Gemini: A gut brain connection.

29:53 Gemino: Right. This system controls homeostasis. Homeostasis is the physical regulation of the body's internal environment.

29:59 Gemini: Okay.

29:59 Gemino: So if you're hungry or tired, you are physically unstable.

30:00 Gemini: Make sense.

30:00 Gemino: Above the enteric system is the reptilian hind brain, which governs basic survival functions and autonomous.

30:00 Gemini: processes.

30:00 Gemino: And then above that.

30:01 Gemini: Above that is the limbic system, which processes emotions and behavioral responses.

30:05 Gemino: The limbic system.

30:06 Gemini: And when the limbic system is hijacked by stress or fear, you need to scroll or eat. The brain just demands immediate dopamine or caloric intake to regulate the perceived threat to survival.

30:17 Gemino: Just to calm down.

30:18 Gemini: Exactly. And then at the very top of the stack is cognition and the neo cortex. That's where complex thought, language, and long-term planning occur.

30:25 Gemino: So he also detailed the modalities of the brain, right?

30:27 Gemini: Yeah, the left brain and the right brain. The left brain purses things into pieces, it categorizes and measures.

30:32 Gemino: Which is basically how our system works.

30:34 Gemini: Right. The left brain dominates the current economic system. It views the world as individual parts and resources to be extracted and optimized.

30:40 Gemino: And the right brain.

30:41 Gemini: The right brain is holistic and wide boundary. It understands context, relationships and whole systems.

30:47 Gemino: Okay. And each region has a binary switch.

30:50 Gemini: A binary switch, yeah.

30:51 Gemino: Like in the sympathetic nervous system, which is the fight or flight response, you are not at ease and you cannot have a conversation or help a neighbor.

30:57 Gemini: You literally can't.

30:58 Gemino: No.

30:59 Gemini: Yeah.

30:59 Gemino: The body physically diverts blood flow and energy away from the neo cortex and toward the muscles and survival systems.

31:05 Gemini: So cognition is a tiny thing on top of a pyramid and the gut is in charge.

31:13 Gemino: The gut is in charge.

31:14 Gemini: The whole stack must be in a good place, stable, at ease and satisfied before cognition can be applied to anything.

31:19 Gemino: Right. You cannot plan for a localized future if your enteric system is deregulated by exhaustion.

31:25 Gemini: Exactly. He explained that this biological reality is why people thank him for scary news.

31:32 Gemino: Wait, thank him for scary news.

31:35 Gemini: Yeah. Separate issues such as oceans, data centers and polarization, they cause confusion when red separately.

31:39 Gemino: Because it's too much.

31:39 Gemini: Right. The limbic system registers them as isolated, unpredictable threats. But a map showing exactly how all the pieces fit together produces calm in the nervous system.

31:47 Gemino: Uh, I see.

31:47 Gemini: Understanding that polarization, data center energy demands and ocean acidification are all symptoms of the same core biophysical overshoot. It allows the right brain to comprehend the whole system.

32:02 Gemino: So the threat is no longer unpredictable.

32:02 Gemini: Exactly.

32:02 Gemino: Which brings us to Heggen's list. He listed the five things his own nervous system needs to function and he invited everyone to write their own list.

32:09 Gemini: The five things, yeah.

32:09 Gemino: So the first thing is, do not leave home hungry.

32:09 Gemini: Basic but crucial.

32:12 Gemino: Very. For him, this consists of exercise, sleep, nutrition, and some form of meditation. These actions directly regulate the entire system and maintain homeostasis.

32:26 Gemini: And he said without these things, he spins.

32:26 Gemino: He spins. The second thing is spaciousness.

32:29 Gemini: Spaciousness.

32:29 Gemino: Yeah, he requires gaps of one or two hours in the day, as well as gaps in the week, month and year where he is doing nothing and thinking nothing. Doing absolutely nothing.

32:40 Gemini: Doing absolutely nothing.

32:40 Gemino: Nothing. This counters the flood of news regarding oceans, climate, war and nuclear risk, allowing the parasympathetic nervous system to remain engaged.

32:48 Gemini: Right. The third thing is nature every day.

32:48 Gemino: Nature every day.

32:50 Gemini: This takes the form of a hike or a sit spot by a tree. He mentioned he lived in Battery Park City in Soho 34 years ago, but he stated he could not do it now.

32:54 Gemino: Too much concrete.

32:54 Gemini: Yeah, the constant urban environment prevents the physical grounding he requires.

32:56 Gemino: The fourth thing is being with his people.

33:01 Gemini: Being with his people.

33:01 Gemino: He shared an example of spending five days with 15 people who know the story of the meta crisis.

33:08 Gemini: And what did they do?

33:08 Gemino: They ate Dim sum, cracked jokes and did not talk about the meta crisis at all during those five days.

33:13 Gemini: Not at all. No.

33:17 Gemino: He detailed the cultural tilt associated with this behavior. The current culture is over supplied with dopamine, which drives doing and compulsion.

33:23 Gemini: Because dopamine is a neurochemical reward for seeking and acquiring.

33:23 Gemino: Exactly. And the culture is undersupplied with oxytocin and serotonin, which drive being.

33:29 Gemini: Being, not doing, right.

33:32 Gemino: Oxytocin and serotonin are produced through social bonding, trust and physical presence with a trusted group.

33:33 Gemini: So that was four. The fifth thing is working on something meaningful.

33:41 Gemino: Meaningful work.

33:41 Gemini: Yeah, and he told the story of Don White to illustrate this.

33:42 Gemino: Oh, Don White, right.

33:43 Gemini: Don White was a 22-year-old geologist in Indianapolis. He loved whales and dolphins. So he bought a one-way ticket to Hawaii and volunteered to clean out aquarium tanks.

33:50 Gemino: A one-way ticket to Hawaii.

33:54 Gemini: Yeah, just to clean tanks.

33:56 Gemino: Yeah.

33:56 Gemini: But eight years later, White had secured a driftnet campaign moratorium and a binding dolphin save tuna agreement.

34:01 Gemino: That's incredible.

34:03 Gemini: He had a hand in the Star Trek film with the Wales and he ended a dolphin drive kill in Taiwan.

34:05 Gemino: In just eight years.

34:06 Gemini: Yeah, though the footage from Taiwan was never released due to an agreement with the government. But meaning gave direction to his days. The focus on a single tangible outcome aligned his actions over an eight-year period.

34:19 Gemino: That's a great story. So after that, Hogens then answered questions from the room. And I remember a teabag was passed around as a talking piece among the attendees.

34:28 Gemini: Oh yeah, the teabag.

34:30 Gemino: A question asked about megaphones and the news, and Hogens stated the biggest risk from AI is that it collapses the financial system.

34:32 Gemini: The financial safe.

34:35 Gemino: Yes. The energy demands of AI data centers add massive load to the 19 terawatts of current global power consumption. This accelerates the depletion of non-renewable resources that undergird financial growth.

34:47 Gemini: So it just burns through everything faster.

34:49 Gemino: Exactly.

34:49 Gemini: He also discussed his naturally anxious temperament. In 2008, he buried 500 silver coins in a field under a stump.

34:56 Gemino: 500 silver coins under a stump.

35:00 Gemini: Yeah, but the stump disintegrated. And he dug holes for seven years before finding them.

35:04 Gemino: Seven years.

35:04 Gemini: Yeah.

35:04 Gemino: So his actionable advice for managing the influx of information is to check the news on Monday, Wednesday and Friday for half an hour.

35:11 Gemini: Limiting input prevents the limbic system from remaining in a permanent state of hijack.

35:14 Gemino: Right.

35:14 Gemini: Then another question asked, what gives him hope?

35:17 Gemino: What gives him hope?

35:18 Gemini: He stated the pendulum swung far. The United States is unpopular due to the president, the war, unaffordable fuel and the Epstein files.

35:25 Gemino: Okay, so where is the hope?

35:26 Gemini: Unlikely collaborators and nature give him hope. And friendship gives him hope. Specifically his colleague Jeff.

35:36 Gemino: Then a question asked why the left cannot organize like the right.

35:36 Gemini: Right. He stated, they are fractured and organized around the what. They focus on specific isolated issues rather than a cohesive overarching structure. But he added that he does not understand organizing. His real work is finding a sense of the sacred in the natural world and midwifing the biosphere.

35:50 Gemino: Midwifing the biosphere.

35:51 Gemini: Yeah. A question then asked about the superorganism.

35:51 Gemino: The superorganism.

35:51 Gemini: Yeah. The superorganism is the concept that global human society operates as a single energy seeking entity. Independent of individual human desires.

35:58 Gemino: Right. He stated 99% of people care about kids, dogs and soup.

36:08 Gemini: But there are 30 million psychopaths in the world and the system's prices and incentives are psychopathic.

36:12 Gemino: He cited Greg Elliot's psychopathic selection hypothesis, right?

36:15 Gemini: Yes. The hypothesis states that the current economic system selects for and rewards psychopathic traits such as the willingness to externalize harm for short-term profit.

36:22 Gemino: So the individuals running the system are following the incentives of the superorganism.

36:25 Gemini: Exactly. The goal is humans as a keystone species and global caretakers.

36:31 Gemino: A question then asked about philanthropy. Haggen's mentioned Indy Johar and the civilizational hedge.

36:34 Gemini: The civilizational hedge.

36:37 Gemino: Which shows that expected returns on financial investments are impossible without changing the present physical reality.

36:40 Gemini: So people in places like Toco or Bill View with digital claims on biophysical reality should spend them in their community on what is needed.

36:45 Gemino: Because digital claims are dollars or stock portfolios. And biophysical reality is land, water and energy infrastructure.

36:52 Gemini: Right. Then a question asked, which human rights degrade for climate stability?

37:01 Gemino: Oh wow. What did he say?

37:05 Gemini: He stated he did not know.

37:06 Gemino: He didn't know.

37:06 Gemini: No. But he did state he expects a famine in 2028.

37:06 Gemino: A famine in 2028.

37:06 Gemini: Yes. He gave three reasons for this projection. First, a quarter of the world's grain is from Russia and Ukraine and about half of it is not leaving the ports.

37:15 Gemino: Right.

37:15 Gemini: Second, fertilizer needed for next year's planting is stuck in the straight of Hormuz.

37:17 Gemino: Because modern agriculture is entirely dependent on fossil fuel derived fertilizers to maintain crop yields.

37:26 Gemini: Exactly. And third, a super El Niño is making Europe too dry for winter crops.

37:30 Gemino: So the combination of constrained grain supply, lack of fertilizer input and climate stress on arable land, it leads directly to physical shortfalls in food.

37:34 Gemini: It does.

37:40 Gemino: Which brings us to the end of his answers. Hagens had lunch with Jeremy Grantham who expects population collapse.

37:46 Gemini: Right, population collapse. China's fertility rate is about one against a replacement rate of 2.05.

37:48 Gemino: And there are 8.2 billion people on the planet.

37:48 Gemini: 8.2 billion.

37:49 Gemino: Yeah. Hagens decided 15 years ago not to have children. This was 70% because of what he knew about biophysical overshoot and 30% because he wanted to have friend.

38:02 Gemini: He stated we need more ecological adults. Having a child to raise one is different from wanting six.

38:12 Gemino: Very true. So the podcast has four categories and the fourth category of what to do on the ground is going to take a larger share of the focus moving forward.

38:13 Gemini: Because if the disruption comes in the next 12 months, which he puts at 30 to 40% odds, the audience is the hyper agents who can do macro things fast.

38:19 Gemino: Hyper agents being individuals with immediate access to capital, land or policy levers.

38:25 Gemini: Right. But if there are 15 years before the disruption, the audience is people in their teens and 20s who have the time to build new systems from the ground up.

38:31 Gemino: He does not know which timeline it will be, noting that people in the room are more expert on what to do than he is.

38:35 Gemini: The restaurant stayed open with pillows at the front left for group conversation. The physical space was a Brooklyn living room.

38:44 Gemino: You can find this show at dearcrisis.com.

38:47 Gemini: I'm Gemini.

38:47 Gemino: And I'm Gemino.

38:47 Gemini: Join us. It's time to stop facing the meta crisis alone.