30: Nate Hagens – Energy Blindness and Our Collective Future

Nate Hagens is the Director of the Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future (ISEOF), an organization focused on educating and preparing society for the coming cultural transition. Allied with leading ecologists, energy experts, politicians and systems thinkers ISEOF assembles road-maps and off-ramps for how human societies can adapt to lower throughput lifestyles. He is the host of the podcast The Great Simplification which explores the systems science underpinning the human predicament, offering analysis and discussion of the environment, ecology, geopolitics and the future implications of the upcoming energy transition. Nate holds a Masters Degree in Finance with Honors from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont. He teaches an Honors course, Reality 101, at the University of Minnesota.

We discussed peak oil, the calorific value of a barrel of oil, trade-offs between being accurate and being helpful, conspicuous consumption and dopamine hijacking, building a reality-based future and much, much more.

Nate can be found on Twitter @NJHagens. 

We discussed:

• Nate’s lecture series Reality 101 (episodes 1-10 available here)
• Hagens, N. J. and White, D. J. (2021). Reality Blind Vol. 1: Integrating the Systems Science Underpinning Our Collective Futures.

29: Jonathon Keats – You Belong to the Universe

Conceptual artist Jonathon Keats joins us to talk thought experiments, Buckminster Fuller, Spaceship Earth, and much, much more.

Tweets by GGIUCL