Metacrisis Salon #15 · Cleaned Transcript
September 22, 2026 · Caravan of Dreams, East Village, NY
Recorded by Mike the pigeon, our tiny mic mascot. This is a cleaned and condensed transcript: filler trimmed, crosstalk smoothed, the shape of the night kept intact. Names and figures spoken from the stage were checked where a source exists; where none does, they stand as the speaker said them. Attendees are not named. It is not verbatim.
Download as .txtHost · Thank you for being here, and thank you, Nate. Normally we do Metacrisis Salons at Lightning Lofts, but this week we are at Caravan of Dreams. You are in the Dream Room. This is the oldest organic vegan restaurant in New York City, a pillar of this neighborhood, and people have been coming here for decades. We found it about six months ago and started hosting weekly createathons here, which is a nicer word for hackathon, for people who wanted to do AI more collectively and ethically. We also started hosting Islands of Coherence dinners, dreaming about what it means to future-proof our communities and our city. Angel, the owner, shares our values. He wants Caravan of Dreams to be a third space that, as he likes to say, elevates human consciousness.
So we decided to do a whole week of programming here about what it means to build a regenerative future together. Instead of building an installation for one week, we invested in the place, so it can outlast the week. A lot of hands went into this room: a screen, a stage, curtains, flowers, lights, fringes, the timer. If you worked on it, raise your hand. Thank you. The most important part is that regeneration means building relationships with local people and local places that endure past our own project.
The agreements. Welcome the stranger: be kind, be warm, be welcoming. Share the space and land the plane, which came from a friend in another community where people talked for a very long time, so we made a hand signal. Hold the tension and do not rush to resolve it. We are dealing with hard problems, we might not agree, and we want to stay in that discomfort together, because that is how we move through hard things. Explore kinship over transactions. This is not a networking event where you present your resume. It is collaborative, and we are trying to form relationships, not extract from one another. And real feedback is welcome. You can say you hated it, and tell us why, so we can get better.
Tonight: Ben takes us through how we got here and what the metacrisis is, Nate does the first part of his presentation, you talk to each other and then out to the room, Nate does part two, then Q&A, then actions and community announcements. First, a breath. Close your eyes. Feel your seat get heavy, your shoulders drop away from your ears, your feet on the floor. A deep inhale, fill the lungs, and let the air empty out. Inhale what you brought with you from the day, hold it in your mind's eye, and exhale. Release it. Flutter your eyes open.
Ben · Nate has a 9:30 bedtime, so we have a hard stop. Fifty-seven people in this room was our first coordination challenge. This is our fifteenth salon, and a lot of the work that led here is a byproduct of following Nate's work, among many others. In two words, what brought us all here is concern about the future. If you are anything like me, the future you were promised looks different. This is Aaron Favila's photograph of a wedding in the Philippines, flooded, and the bride is not letting her moment be taken away by what is happening around her. The future is not as promised, and we can do something about it.
When we first start wondering about the future we think about the worst scenarios. Soldiers digging graves in the conflict in Myanmar. War escalating, people displaced, mass migrations, and the displacement caused by ecological breakdown on top of the human-caused kind. But crisis also means opportunity. This is a Gen Z protest. Sometimes crisis leads to change, if we are ready for it, if we have done the groundwork, if we have learned to see the world with open eyes and enough clarity to be prepared when these moments come.
I made you all do a survey. We put as much friction as we can on our events because they sell out. Of 46 answers on the near and long future, 14 are hopeful about both, 11 said hard now and hopeful later, 11 are uncertain, and only 10 are pessimistic. On your relationship to collapse, 16 called it an opportunity to compost, 10 are building the transition, 8 are already living it, 7 found it hard to pin down, and 5 named fear, grief and worry. So this room, funnily enough, feels oddly hopeful. Nate has a frame about people in the pre-tragic, the tragic and the post-tragic. There are those who are hopeful because they do not yet know, and those who are hopeful because that is the only thing left to do, because pessimism is not really a choice. Some of us are earlier in that journey, and together we can pull each other up.
I think a lot about the word collapse. When people ask my favorite hobby I say civilizational collapse. I do contact improv, and a teacher said collapse is when you fall and cannot get back up. But in practice we are always moving, falling forward, falling back, falling somewhere, and in that motion is an opportunity for transition. How we choose to play with the word changes our sense of empowerment. And this is a room that feels oddly empowered, which means you should all talk to one another, because I want to hear who in this room is building the transitions, and how they are already living it. And we can hold the fear and the grief and the worry too, with care.
In our salons we bring interesting speakers, and we have done a lot of diagnosing. Luke Kemp gave us the Goliath: power concentration leads to economic inequality and exploitation, which leads to status and military competition, which leads to faster technology, which leads to more extraction from the natural world, which creates systemic risk, fatal threats, latent risks and broken planetary boundaries, all feeding one another and filling us with dread. It is one thing to hear it and another to ask what to do. We have become numb to the systems we are part of. The first step is being able to see. Jeffrey Winters, who wrote two books on oligarchy, spoke here two weeks ago, and his term is participatory inequality: we live in a democracy, and the way we participate in it enforces inequality, because everyone still wants to win the lottery and run away from their problems.
I would like to propose a different form of participation. Pigeons were once a civilizational cornerstone, food, messages, fertilizer, which is why they are everywhere. When the telegraph and other technologies arrived they were discarded, because the relationship was utilitarian. Not so different from the relationship our governments have with us. I volunteer at a pigeon rescue. It is my way of connecting with nature and of being in service to something that cannot do much for me, and I think about the metacrisis every time I see a pigeon. I hope you will too.
One quote struck me, a line from Václav Havel that I heard on your latest interview, because a precondition for action is being able to see. Real hope is not the belief that things are going to work out well. It is the knowing that things are starting to make sense. Once I accepted that change is coming, a simplification, a rupture, some kind of fall, I stopped being frustrated that the world is not being held together by the layers of duct tape we keep applying. Of course it is not working. At least I am seeing the world a little clearer, and I hope you will too.
We have a little app, built by Vincent. Scan the code, it loads your name, and as Nate goes through his thousand frameworks, drop your questions there for the Q&A. It also has needs and offers, and we will make a moment for that, because Nate is going home and we are stuck with these problems together. You can see every person in this room who registered. Nate, thank you for coming and making space for us. Your work has helped me, and it has cascading ripples you will never see. I wanted you to see some of the legacy in a room.
Nate · I live by myself in the country with the dogs and the horses, my staff is around the world, and I do not see real people very often, especially the people who follow the story I tell. What I wanted was to meet people who watch the podcast and have a conversation. Benjamin said no, you have to do a PowerPoint. How many of you have watched most of the podcasts? About half. Never watched anything? A few.
I am going to do a very rapid biophysical macro update, then some frameworks of possible futures. It is dark. Two things about that. One, I have an upcoming Frankly that is a comedy routine about the metacrisis, crowd work, and sitting in this venue I wish I had prepared it. Two, this morning I was walking to a meeting behind a woman and her three- or four-year-old daughter, and a man was passed out on the sidewalk so that people had to walk around him. The girl stopped, as a pure human naturally would, and said, mommy, what is wrong with this man? And the mom said, he is taking a nap, honey, let's go. Which was kind of true but not the real truth, because the real truth might have crushed her or started a huge conversation. The story I am presenting rhymes with that. One of the biggest challenges of this work is that the standard deviation of humans is large, and the people following the beacon, who want to understand the reality we face and taste the pickle, as it were, are the ones I speak to. A lot of you are here tonight.
Nate · Long term, growth was not the norm for humanity. Over the last 2,000 years there were very long periods of flat to declining growth, and all of our stories were designed inside the little red circle of the last fifty years, an extraordinary one-time set of circumstances. We use 100 billion barrels of oil equivalent of coal, oil and natural gas per year, each worth around five years of human work, and this cheap, abundant fossil energy has underpinned all of the progress and largesse and comfort we have. It is a stock that our culture has treated as a flow.
We have conflated the proximate drivers of progress with the ultimate drivers. Society talks about politics and technology and money, but all of that rests on a huge base of non-renewable energy, resources and materials, and all of that rests on a healthy biosphere. I was with Johan Rockström yesterday talking about the Planetary Health Check. The numbers are not good. We have exceeded seven of the nine planetary boundaries and we are leaving the stability of the Holocene.
As long as growing GDP is our global cultural goal, better technology is likely to grow, not shrink, our environmental impact, because we just build more. So in my opinion the real energy transition is mostly not about what kind of energy, but about our relationship to energy, to each other and to the natural world. Just about every climate meeting this week has turned into a data center meeting. Under the current economic system AI is going to be a larger draw on the environment. Why would it not be? It makes things more efficient and needs a hell of a lot of energy. It is turbocharging the nervous system of the superorganism, and it is going to accelerate inequality toward some sort of neo-feudalism.
Barring a new boost in productivity, maybe from AI, total global growth is likely soon over, and the first challenge is a financial recalibration. We cannot print energy, but we can print money, and eventually the number of monetary claims against our underlying energy and materials stretches so far that it snaps back. I do not need to remind anyone what is going on in the world right now, with two billion people facing unaffordable energy because of the Iran war. India and Pakistan have emergency measures. Diesel stations are out of fuel. It is spilling into Europe. We will print money to forestall those things, but I think we are heading into a financial cul-de-sac. Rather than choose austerity, governments and central banks will print and monetize debt, which leads eventually to currency debasement.
Renewables, nuclear, technology: these are the right answers to the wrong question. The right question is how we live, using the benefits of this technology, in a way that supports the wellbeing of humans and the biosphere.
There is a biophysical phase shift occurring in global politics, alliances and agreements. I think we will never go back to where we were in February of 2026. Even if peace breaks out in the Middle East, who trades with whom and where the flows go has changed, and I think they go increasingly east instead of west and north. I think we get state capitalism and regional trade blocs, the superorganism calving in half, and in my opinion we will never have the oil supply we had last year, because of shut-in production, damage to fields and security risk. That is a whole other conversation.
Climate change is not the problem but a symptom of a larger dysfunction, ecological overshoot. And the complex predicament I talk about cannot be voiced aloud in politics and media. A side story. Two women I talked to yesterday, who do not know each other, both European, both working on climate, were both stopped by Homeland Security and held for many hours, and basically had to promise they would not speak in the United States, and that if they ever speak at a publicly announced event they will never be allowed into the country again. This is happening in our country. They are not radical. I say much more radical things on my podcast, but I am a US citizen. This is the era we may be heading into.
The delta between reality and our public narrative has created a very large cognitive dissonance. If I flagged down a random person walking past this restaurant with the story I am telling, they would think I had sprouted antlers and come from another planet. It is not widely recognized, even though people feel something is wrong. Democracies and open societies followed the carbon pulse on the way up. What follows it on the way down is an open question.
Our current 19 terawatt global metabolism can power a great culture and civilization, just not the one we currently have. We do not face a resource shortage so much as a long edge of our expectations, especially in countries like the United States. I do not know what to do, but the task I am increasingly comfortable leaning into is to change the initial conditions of the future, and when that future arrives, change the initial conditions of the next one, through little gatherings like this, seeds of a new thing that replaces the metabolic, psychopathic, instrumental economic superorganism. There have been many cultural changes in the past. This slide is the Cave of the Hands. Something like this might be the mitochondria of what replaces our current economic operating system. The human story is advanced but not yet written, and there is no less at stake than the battle between power and life.
Nate · Some scenarios, fast, and apologies for the formatting. Does the global economy contract or grow, and as it does, do we move toward ecological limits or continue to overshoot them? Power: is it broad among people or concentrated in a very few, and are the gains shared widely or concentrated? Geopolitics: are we interdependent, as now, or autarkic, like Russia today, largely self-sufficient, and are relations adversarial or friendly? And Earth systems: climate stress is coming regardless, 2027 will be the hottest year of our lives so far and may be among the coolest of the rest of our lives, so is it moderate or severe, and is the biosphere unravelling or functional?
Put those together and there are 256 possible combinations. I used to just ask whether the economy would grow or contract, and I called the contraction a great simplification. But it is not just economic throughput, it is politics, geopolitics, who is in charge, and the biosphere. So from these I came up with four scenarios, discussion points at least. The most hopeful first: the Long Repair, which is economic descent with largely shared power and distribution, geopolitics that are not intensely adversarial, and a biosphere degraded relative to our childhoods but stable relative to the other options. Mordor Persists, Mordor from The Lord of the Rings, is the default path: society continues to grow, but more and more of our energy and materials go to the energy and materials sector, brown growth that throws off throughput and keeps destroying the biosphere. Fortress World is where the billionaires control everything, the world isolates, Earth systems are doing badly, and we are in economic descent. And the Unraveling, the negative quadrant of all of them.
This was from a series I did, which Benjamin liked, which is why I chose these slides. The future is not uniform. We just had a French biologist on the podcast, Olivier Hamant, and it was our most watched YouTube clip, around seven million views, where he said humans are leaving the era of the mean and entering the era of the standard deviation. That made a lot of sense to me. Many possible futures will coexist in the world. Even within a country all four scenarios could exist. On this map the northeast is in the Long Repair. Your region might diverge sharply in governance and resources from other regions, and your community, even your zip code, might determine your future more than the country you live in. That is why meetings like this are so essential. The seeds planted in these conversations spiral into things we could not imagine without them.
This was another Frankly, and I will not go through each point, but there are broad fronts of intervention: infrastructure, poverty and displacement, ecological defense, governance, culture, economic transition and the commons. Given those scenarios, what are the no-regret strategies? For me, living in Minnesota, to come to New York City and say here is how you should do things in New York would be odd. What I recognize coming to this room is that the months and years of me being the expert who explains this are near an end. The time is coming when people like Alexis Zeigler, who was on my podcast about local electricity systems at a fraction of the throughput we use now, are the ones on stage. I agree with what Benjamin said. We need to understand our situation so we can roll up our sleeves and get to work, because the degrees of freedom we have as individual citizens are never going to be greater than they are now. There are no-regret strategies for New York and wherever you are from, and we can talk about them in the Q&A.
Underneath all of that is how we be a human now. A call-out to my friend Samantha Sweetwater, who wrote a book about that. I have been obsessed with the biophysical macro setup of humanity for twenty years, and in the last six months it dawned on me. Do I really want a million or ten million humans who know everything about the metacrisis? What I want is ten million humans who are grounded, in their parasympathetic nervous system, who have community, spaciousness, psychological resilience, and enough to support others. Hell yeah, it is the second group. Which is odd for me to say, because I am trying to connect finance and energy and ecology and climate and all the things. Ultimately we need both, and that is the hope. When we come back I will talk about the being human part.
Ben · There is a general idea that when we have an expert on stage we should ask him all the questions and get the answers. What we have learned is that people come because they want to be with other people. Nate is the excuse to get you in the room. Turn to someone you do not know, form a two or three. What do you see yourself working on? What resonated, what did not? Has your mind changed? What made you comfortable or uncomfortable? Ten minutes.
Ten minutes later. This next part is for Nate's benefit and for the room: thirty seconds each on what was interesting, inspiring, challenging or uncomfortable, and say where you are from, because it is good to hear who is here.
Western Massachusetts · What I appreciated is that after all your years of study, where you came to is that the tour ends in your community. It starts there and radiates out in circles. That validates a lot of what I am hearing elsewhere.
A provocation · Are we willing to ally and cooperate with people who completely disagree with the logic we used to get here, collapse and all the rest, but agree deeply on the conclusion: local, resilient communities? Would we be allies of those people, or are they disqualified because they took a different route? My answer is yes. I would happily break bread with my climate-denying Christian neighbors and build community with them, and a lot of what we said tonight would send them out the door. That does not bother me. I was worried this room could not hold that.
Ben · Quick survey. Who would break bread with people who completely disagree with them but have reached the same conclusion? Hands. And who is already doing it? Wow. You are not alone.
Geographically unrooted · What to work on, where to put your time and attention, is a hard question for me right now. Do you still intervene at the institutional level, do you rise up in activist mode, or do you hunker down and prepare? In my bones, hyper-local preparation feels like the way forward. And as someone who does not know where to live, where to put roots in is a very hard question. There are no bulletproof zones.
Fifty land projects · I have had the privilege of visiting about fifty land projects and squatting communities to find the blueprints of what works, and it is amazing what is out there. Living Energy Farm is one of the blueprints, and there is a documentary coming on YouTube. Alexis, raise your hand. The biggest hurdle is what you touched on: would you rather be with people who get the metacrisis or with well-embodied communitarians? For anyone who grew up in an individualistic society, which is most of us, learning to be with community is the hardest barrier. The sooner you can live communally and shed the ego, the more prepared you will be. That is what I would prioritize.
A very small family · We share this space with people we will probably never meet again, and something is reached together in a tiny place. Very tiny places, and tiny existences, are the beauty of this kind of moment. We do not need much to do this. We just need to be a little bit smarter.
Our group talked about high-leverage policy: fusion, an end to inheritance, a land value tax. Are there silver bullets?
Nate · Predicament. There are many possible futures, and business as usual has a pretty low probability of continuing. Each of those is possible with asterisks. I think fusion is unlikely for a variety of reasons, but if it happened under the same governance, the same economic goals, the same prices and institutions, then, as Paul Ehrlich famously said, energy too cheap to meter would be like handing chimpanzees machine guns. We would keep growing and destroying other things. What you are really asking about is a subset of our work I call advance policy. The policies that will be needed in the next decade are too crazy to voice publicly and politically now, but they will be needed, so we need to research them. For instance, we pay the wrong prices. We include neither the externalities nor the finiteness of the main inputs. Price things that are not renewable on human time scales much higher and innovators get the signal that it is scarce and people use less. Doing that now, in our fragile state, would crash the system. Once there is a financial reset, such a policy could be a silver bullet of sorts.
Ben · We are out of time for this part. You are all holding a piece of the puzzle and a question worth asking, and maybe you are not as alone in your views as you think.
Nate · I wanted to get to this slide. What do we do? The answer is I do not really know, but I have learned over time that each of us is a catalyst for change. I spent 25 years understanding the relationships our economic system and our narratives ignore: energy versus GDP, energy versus technology, debt versus energy, net energy, humanity versus ecology. Only recently have I looked inward, influenced by my friend Samantha Sweetwater and other ecologically minded humans on the podcast, like Bill Plotkin, who talks about ecological adulthood, and says only about five percent of humans are adult in the sense of recognizing their connection to the web of life and acting accordingly.
There is an evolutionary stack. At the bottom is the microbiome, then cells and organs, which are not so relevant here. Then the enteric system, the digestive system, and the relationship between gut and brain, which is important. Then the hindbrain, the reptilian brain, then the limbic system, and above that cognition and the neocortex. Somewhere between limbic and cognition is our left brain versus right brain modality, which I did not have time to add to the slide. The left brain parses things into pieces and the right brain is holistic and wide-boundary, and our entire economic system has been dominated by left brain thinking.
The enteric system is responsible for homeostasis. When you are hungry or tired, you are unstable. Each region has something like a binary switch. In the sympathetic nervous system, fight or flight, we are not at ease, not in a state to have these conversations or help a neighbor. When the limbic system is hijacked we need to scroll or eat. There is satisfied and dissatisfied. This relates to something I finally understood: I tell people a lot of scary things about the future and a lot of people thank me, and for a while I did not understand why. It is because they can then see how the pieces fit together. When you read about the oceans and the polarization and the data centers separately it is just confusing. A map of how it fits causes some calm.
Here is the important part. We think of it as linear, as if cognition were in charge. I learned this, I saw this presentation. But cognition is a tiny thing on top of a pyramid, and the enteric system is very much in charge. We have to have the entire stack in a good place, stable, at ease, satisfied, before we can apply our cognition to these problems. So I have learned this about myself. I know a lot about the world. Big deal. What does Nate need in order to be at his best, productive, a healthy member of society? I will leave you with the question of what your five things are, but here are mine.
Nate · First, I did not realize how important exercise is to my wellbeing. If I do not prioritize exercise and sleep and nutrition and some sort of meditation, I spin. I do not do well.
Second, spaciousness. This picture is from three days ago, with my three dogs in the field behind my house. I cannot speak for you, I do not know your situations, so I can only share what works for me. I require gaps in my day, an hour or two, where I am doing nothing and almost thinking nothing, because the flood in this job of the oceans and the climate and the species and the war and the nuclear risk is a lot. I have to build gaps into my day, my week, my month, my year. I need spaciousness to function.
Third, nature. I lived in New York 34 years ago, in Battery Park City and then SoHo, and I do not know that I could now. I have to have nature every day, a hike, or just a sit spot by a tree. The forest bathing experience and some connection to other creatures and to greenery is a requirement for me. That is something I realized this summer.
Fourth, my people. It has become increasingly difficult for me to be in conversation with people who have no idea what is going on with the metacrisis. It feels like we are speaking different languages, almost a speciation. I have empathy, and to your point earlier, I am building bridges where I live, but not by talking about the metacrisis. Jeff, my colleague, knows this. He and I have laughed a lot in the last two days, because we do not have to talk about the metacrisis, we can just talk about life. I did a Frankly called The Beauty and the Horror a few weeks ago, after five days with fifteen metacrisis people, and we did not talk about the metacrisis. We went for dim sum and cracked jokes, and I had forgotten that I can be funny, because this job is so serious. Being with my people is not about the latest climate report. It is a shared understanding of our place and time, and then we talk about other things. Our culture is unbelievably over-tilted toward dopamine and endorphins, and we are under-experiencing oxytocin and serotonin. Dopamine drives the doing, the compulsion, the list. The other axis is being. Being with my people is a lot more being than doing, and it is cathartic to my nervous system.
Fifth, meaning. This is Don White, one of the original founders of Greenpeace, at 22. I have written a couple of books with him. He is one of my best friends. He was a geologist in Indianapolis and a goofball, and all he knew was that he loved whales and dolphins, and there were none in Indianapolis. He bought a one-way ticket to Hawaii and volunteered to clean out the tanks at aquariums with dolphins. Within eight years he was one of the most successful environmental activists of our time. He stopped the driftnets. He negotiated with the biggest tuna company for dolphin-safe tuna. He had a hand in the Star Trek film with the whales. He stopped a dolphin drive kill, and no one knows about it because he agreed with the government of Taiwan never to release the footage. He has a dozen success stories because it was meaningful to him. He took a direction in something meaningful, and despite the hard work, and despite my complaining, this is what I should be doing with my life, and it gives meaning to my days. You have to find something that gives you meaning, and no one can decide that for you except you.
If a lot more humans had a checklist like that, and then we had meetings like this, we would create islands of coherence in the world. Reflect on what the three to five things are that you know are good for your body and system, so you can be your best self in these times.
Ben · Speaking of spaciousness, an experiment in a cramped room. Everyone, arms up. Twist to the right, hands down. Back to center, arms up, twist the other way. Head roll one way. Sitting is hard. Head roll the other way. Squeeze everything tight, and shake it out.
Nate · There is a ton going on in the world, and we could talk about that, but if you step back and squint it is kind of trivia. We all like to know what is happening in Ukraine or Iran. The fact that you are here suggests we are looking two or three steps ahead: what do we do as individuals and as groups? On that question I am a peer with all of you. I have thought about it longer, maybe, but we are headed into an uncharted time, as I think we all feel. Questions, comments, hopes, dreams, disagreements. Take the tea bag.
Every day there is a new thing that will imminently kill us. It was AI a couple of weeks ago, and now more AI. How do you reconcile the longer current with keeping a nervous system in balance, when some people have very loud megaphones, and what do you make of the siren energy that is suddenly at the forefront of the culture?
Nate · That is a big juicy one. Part of the question is what the big risks are, and I do not want to get into that. I do not think AI is the biggest. The biggest risk from AI is that it may collapse our financial system. Two weeks from now I have a Frankly called Humanity's Icarus Moment, the top twenty risks from AI, and I am proud of how it came together, so please watch that.
Part of the answer is our individual temperament. I am naturally anxious. When I see a news event I want to go buy canned beans. I do not do that anymore. A funny story. In 2008 I buried 500 silver coins in a field about half a mile from my house and put a stump by the hole. I went back two years later, and, duh, stumps disintegrate. It was gone. For the next seven years I dug holes, and eventually I found them. Here we are in 2026, eighteen years later. Our minds can jump ahead of our reality.
That gets right back to what I was talking about. There will be people with megaphones. I am not the best promoter of my podcast. I have not scaled it. I could have paid for clicks, run YouTube ads, done a lot of things. Part of me does not want to shout at people about what is coming. It should be people who want to learn about this, self-selected, and I am happy with the community that has built there, because a lot of people in our culture and in the world are traumatized already and do not need more. YouTube and the rest are going to get more shrill and scary. If I had that personality and said the exact same words from a sympathetic nervous system instead of a grounded one, I would be doing a disservice to the world, and sometimes I do, on a deadline. There are people in my network who understand exactly what I do and are so grounded every day that I look at them and say, teach me. I am working toward that place.
A realistic response is discipline: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, check the news for half an hour. We have to be responsible for that ourselves. If you watched this presentation and understood a little of it, you know enough about the state of the world. You do not need much more, unless you are working on a project that needs the details. There is an addiction to learning every last thing. If you squint at the next ten years it is reasonably clear that our current path is not sustainable. My own view is that the disruption comes in the financial and currency markets. Not first, because the disruption is already here for many people, especially outside this country.
What gives you hope, and what openings do you see for fundamental transformation?
Nate · Meetings like this, and meetings I have had earlier this week with people who understand this and are rolling up their sleeves, in post-tragic states. The USA is not very popular in the world now, and it is not just the president, though that is not helping. It is the war, the billions of people who cannot afford fuel, the Epstein files, this administration. It is almost as if the pendulum had to swing this far for people to wake up. All of this work is about waking up, and then we need a lot of people to grow up and show up. It is out in the open now. We can see this is not right, and that allows conversations with unlikely collaborators, as was said earlier. Nature gives me hope. And to be honest, I think this war will do more for climate change than any technology has, if that is your issue. I do not think we get back to the oil production of eight months ago. What gives me the most hope is deep friendship. Jeff has become one of my best friends. We understand the same facts about the world, this is the time we are alive, and we have to go do the things. He has my back and I have his.
Years ago I ran a network of sixty local groups on these topics, and it grew organically until we could not fund it. We have seen Extinction Rebellion and Occupy. I am concerned about the retreat to the local, because small communities can be picked off. We have the media tools and the networking tools. Why can we not build a transformational movement, strategically and tactically, the way the right did?
Nate · The short answer is that we are too fractured and organized around what, is my honest answer. My real answer is that this is beyond my domain. I hear the logic and the passion in the question. I am trying to lay out the game board of how the pieces fit together, and I do not understand organizing. How many of you watched last week's Frankly, about the real work? A few. What really matters to me is imbuing a sense of something sacred in our lives beyond convenience and comfort and consumption. To me what is sacred is the natural world, and to midwife the biosphere through the bottlenecks of the 21st century is my personal goal. Organizing around that is a subset of what you care about. I do not know the layers, but it is a good question.
Reading anthropology, I think the superorganism is another name for empire, and the function of a superorganism is to concentrate power by disempowering everybody. After the contraction it will recreate itself, forever, until we figure this out. Is a socially intelligent superorganism possible?
Nate · An excellent question, and you will not be surprised that I have thoughts. A new thought this year, from what I have learned on the podcast and the research it forces me to do. Five or ten years ago I was anti-humanity. I looked at what we were doing to the natural world. Then I had a realization linked to the economic superorganism: there is a big difference between the humans in this room and aggregate humanity self-organizing around a huge amount of stored energy. Our expression as a species is not dissimilar from psychopathy, but as individuals, 99 percent of us care about our children and dogs and soup and rainforests and friends and people in other countries. Most humans are good.
The answer to your question is that we have to understand how we got here, academically, to put guardrails on a future superorganism, so we do not recreate it. Combine large numbers of humans with a lot of energy and this is an emergent effect. How do we keep it from happening again? How do we put guardrails on psychopathy, not only in individuals, of whom there are maybe 30 million in the world, not a lot, but in a system that is now psychopathic in its prices and the institutional incentives built over a century? Two years ago I would not have said that. I did not understand it. I just recorded with an evolutionary game theorist, Greg Elliott, on the psychopathic selection hypothesis, and did a Frankly after it, and it is pretty compelling.
Conversations like this at scale, where some fraction of the population become ecological adults. You could argue that billions of us had to arrive at this point to have a species-level rite of passage on who we might become. I have flipped in my mind. I now think humans as a keystone species, with the potential to be global caretakers instead of destroyers, is the goal, because no one else is going to fix the biosphere unless humans try. Regenerative living systems, at a lower scale, obviously. Our current system is not going to heal the biosphere, and that is what is at stake. And Alexis, how is the food off the farm? You grow your own grains and beans and do lacto-fermentation. That was my speculation in response to a very deep question.
I work in philanthropy and have moved through financial institutions and government trying to understand how resource decisions get made. How do we connect Horizon 1, the establishment doing impact work close to power and money, funding parks and libraries and emergency response, with Horizon 3, people living in community and growing food? Philanthropy already agrees that loneliness matters and public space matters, but it speaks a different language than this room.
Nate · Philanthropy is one of the larger degrees of freedom, and private companies especially, because they do not have to follow the rules and they have optionality that most of us do not. I have seven podcasts in the next two days, which is why I have to leave in twenty minutes, and one of them tomorrow is with Indy Johar, who is working on something he calls a civilizational hedge: look at large institutions, philanthropists and wealth holders, look at their expected returns, look at all the ecological, social, financial and energy constraints, and show that those returns will not be possible unless you change the present. These conversations are still a bit boutique, because the story that AI is going to save everything has taken over. I have a Frankly almost finished on a framework for philanthropy, the categories philanthropists need to work on. In every town, Topeka, Kansas, and Bellevue, Washington, people who have amassed digital claims on biophysical reality should spend them in the community on the things that are needed, and there needs to be a map of what those things are. That is part of the work. Mapping is your passion and it gives you meaning, so start mapping.
From the app: how do we approach the discussion when it is about how much, and which, human rights we are willing to let degrade in the interest of climate stability? If resilience through community prevails at the local level, to what degree are you prepared to tolerate transphobia and misogyny in your neighbors in an otherwise stable community?
Nate · There is a risk in our culture, not really to do with me, that if someone is confident and knows some things, people assume they know other things. I have no idea how to answer that question. Really. But where the question comes from is accurate, and I think on the default path Mother Nature is already going to make that choice for us. I think there is going to be a famine in 2028, for three reasons. One, grain exports from Russia and Ukraine, about a quarter of the world's grain, and about half of it is not leaving the ports. Two, the fertilizer that has not made it out of the Strait of Hormuz, the ammonia needed to plant next year. Three, the super El Niño is here and peaks over the next six months, and even in Europe right now it is so dry that people cannot plant their winter crops. Everything I read says our strategic petroleum reserve and China's oil buildup saved our bacon in the last six months as oil supplies drew down, which is why the big energy shock has not hit yet. The same thing happens with food stockpiles next year, and I think 2028 is a real wake-up call for global food. How do we choose, and who chooses? Is it the government? We got some hints of that with Minneapolis. I do not feel qualified to speculate.
Ben · I love it when a speaker says I do not know. It happens fairly often here, and too many people have a quick answer that sounds plausible.
A famine in 2028, affecting different parts of the world. What are your thoughts around kids?
Nate · I had lunch with Jeremy Grantham today, and he is convinced we are headed for a population collapse, because of microplastics and endocrine-disrupting chemicals and the demographic shift. China is now at a total fertility rate of one, and replacement is 2.05. He gave me a quotable: if you are 35 and live in China, in your lifetime you have witnessed more babies born than will ever be born in the human future. I do not know if he meant China or the world, but it is a profound statement. We have 8.2 billion people. Population questions very quickly become questions of equality and privilege, because we add about 80 million net eight-pound babies a year, and about 100 million three-thousand-pound vehicles. There is a number-of-humans and a consumption-per-human discussion.
I will be honest, and I do not think I have said this publicly. Fifteen years ago I decided, because of what I knew about the world, that I was not going to have children. The real truth is that is 70 percent true, and the other 30 percent is that I wanted to have fun and not have responsibility. But I did think about it a lot. I had Sarah Wilson on the podcast last week and asked her the same question. We need more humans in the future who are ecological adults. Someone who has a baby because they want to raise a wonderful human to play a role in an ecological awakening for our species is different from someone who wants six kids, like the movie Idiocracy. Again, I am not an expert. That is my quick thought.
We have a deep desire in this room to know what to do, and you have scenarios, like the famine you anticipate. In times of crisis, policies that could never have been envisioned suddenly become possible. What does it look like to stop chasing the ball and go where it is going to be, in a way that is not only hyper-local but part of a bigger strategy? Have you heard anything on the podcast about what becomes possible when food insecurity arrives or gas hits ten dollars a gallon?
Nate · The podcast has four categories. Natural scientists on trees and climate and ecology. Biophysical macro: energy, debt, systems, geopolitics. Neuroscience, anthropology and human behavior. And what to do on the ground. As time goes on, if I keep the podcast going, the fourth category takes a much larger share. Some of you were at the dinner earlier, where we imagined 2036, and one of my takeaways was that despite all the diversity of humans, we are all constrained by this economic system, and as things bifurcate, the standard deviation of how we express our creativity and our work and our meaning is going to explode. I think that is a good thing. Many of you are yearning for community and projects in your neighborhood, water systems, sustainable food, and the answer is that we are going to need all of it. Each of us has different passions and skills, and we need more maps, more conversations and more gatherings.
Here is the challenge for a podcast host. There are many audiences: politicians and hyper-agents, the walking worried, college students, climate activists. If there is a great simplification and a systemic disruption in the next twelve months, which honestly I put at 30 or 40 percent, then the audience is mostly hyper-agents, because they can do macro things fast and at scale. If we have fifteen years until the wheels come off the financial and currency system, my audience is young humans in their teens and twenties, because they will be the leaders. How do we have a message that fits all of those demographics when we do not know what will happen? It is not a cop-out to say I am not an expert on that. I am working on it, and many of you in this room are more expert on that question than I am, and I would love to learn from you.
Ben · A perfect segue. There is a needs button at the bottom of the app, which Vincent built to help us map our community, the people in this room and everyone who has attended events in this space. We have been running these little data collection projects across the salons to help find the others. We are still figuring it out, but it is one piece of the puzzle. That axis of being and doing: we can do both when we do them together. What we need is fewer friendships and more creationships. Get together and try doing things together while being together, exploring and not knowing together. Two minutes. Think of something you need and something you can offer. If the app is not working, it is probably because everyone is doing it at once. We are live-testing with fifty people. Or just contemplate the question in silence.
Normally we would do community announcements now, but we want to close the container properly. One thing first. We are trying to grow a local community here. This whole week is about planting seeds in the ecology of New York City. If you live in New York, dial in, tell us what you are working on, come hang out in this space. There is food and nourishing conversation and hopefully more humans like you. We are trying to increase not just surface area but depth of connection, and depth comes from repetition, from communities of practice. If you have been to our salons before, you know we like to end with something embodied, because it is one thing to connect with our minds and another to let things land in our bodies.
Hope · I wanted to take all of Nate's work and make it somatic. The Great Simplification is complicated, because when we think about the economy contracting there are things we want: less extraction, less exploitation, less consumerism, a lot of our current world composted. That is almost exciting. Then there are the scary parts: instability, whether our needs will be met, whether our children will have a safe world, whether there will be species left to share the planet with. Very real fears. And there is also an attachment to the current world that a lot of us feel, especially in wealthy countries, where modern convenience and access and bounty benefit us. We order something at the click of a button and it arrives at the door. Maybe collapse feels like the end of the world to us because we are so privileged in this system, while other people are already living collapse without access to any of it. So I wanted to explore that attachment, and the idea of what is enough. What do we actually need? What do we actually find important? What does the Great Simplification call on us to redefine?
When I tried to move my own life away from modern conveniences, I went fully zero waste for a while. Nothing single-use, nothing in plastic, my own toothpaste, my own deodorant. It caused a lot of friction. It was harder and not convenient, and I did it for sustainability. What I discovered was that it transformed my relationship to my body, because I realized I had been buying all of those single-use, disposable things because I did not feel like I was enough. Not pretty enough, not thin enough, not attractive enough. In changing my lifestyle for sustainability I redefined my enoughness, what I needed and what mattered. When we lose access to these conveniences, we will have to redefine our relationship to enoughness and our needs.
Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Ground yourself. We are going to use our imagination. Think of a time when you did not feel like you were enough. Do you see it? How does it feel in your body? How did that state affect your behavior, your relationships, the way you approached your work? Breathe in. Exhale, release it. Now think of a time when you felt you did not have enough. How did that feeling shape how you walked through the world? What did you prioritize? What did you pay attention to or invest in? Breathe in, and release. Now look at yourself from above, from outside your own body. What do you think of that version of yourself? How do you feel about that person?
Now we go into enoughness. Before you picture your own, some sounds that make me feel that I am enough.
A voicemail. Calling from the lake, just thinking about you, wanted to hear your voice. That is the beauty of these cell systems, except sometimes people do not answer, because they are doing something else, and I do not carry mine around with me. Anyway, I just wanted to say hi.
Keep your eyes closed. Now go into your own moments of enoughness, where you felt that you were really enough, that you had enough. Do you see it, do you hear it? Where does that enoughness sit in your body? Breathe in. Exhale. Step outside your body and look at this version of yourself, the person who is and has enough. How do you feel about this person? How do they move through the world? How do they relate? How do they approach their work? And can you access this person in moments of crisis, of confusion, of chaos, as we relate to each other and keep sense-making together through the Great Simplification? Flutter your eyes open. A deep breath in, and look at each other. Exhale, big sigh.
If you want to keep talking about what you just felt, or ask what you did not get to ask, the restaurant is open. At the front, on the left, is the Connection Corner, meant for group conversation. Find a pillow and make yourself comfortable.
Ben · A round of applause for Hope, for all the helpers and the hundreds of invisible hands that made this night possible, and for Nate for taking the time. Everyone is going to try to mob Nate, so we are giving him permission to leave before everyone else. He has seven podcasts in the next two days, and I promised he would be out by 9:45. For the rest of you: we are enough, and we are here for each other. Take the time to connect in the front of house, and keep coming back. This is what gives me energy, and all of us energy. We do this because we believe in you, in connecting you to us and to the world, and it feels like some of the most important work there is, even if we do not yet know where we are going. Thank you.