In five years, five companies took in $771 billion in Pentagon contracts, more than twice what the U.S. spent on diplomacy and aid combined. This year, in the middle of a war, the Pentagon asked for a record $1.5 trillion. Why is that money is so hard to cut? And how ordinary people can back the few who are working to reduce the risk of war.

Read the paper: William D. Hartung and Stephen Semler, “Profits of War: Top Beneficiaries of Pentagon Spending, 2020–2024” Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft / Costs of War Project, Brown University (July 2025)

Also read: Jacob Gardenswartz, “Pentagon’s 2027 budget proposes big spending on munitions for Iran conflict, but officials mum on cost of war” Scripps News (April 2026)

I grew up in Washington, D.C., so I’m no stranger to military families. Heck, my grandfather fought in World War I, my father in World War II, his brother in Korea, and my brother attended the Naval Academy. As a wee lad, I dreamed of joining the Air Force. Alas, my eyesight soon put a damper on that aspiration. As I neared draft age, I decided that a Catholic military high school (yes, that is a thing!) was the right choice for me, and so I went — and loved it. As my senior year was winding up I was awarded a four-year ROTC scholarship to any university of my choice. Then, in the waning months of that school year, my kidneys failed and I almost died. When the military found out about my condition they rightfully rescinded the scholarship. That was the end of my military period. Notwithstanding, I found the military personnel I interacted with to be honorable, talented and literally willing to die for their country. Many of my classmates went on to successful military careers as well. These people have shown real dedication to the ideals of our democracy and they deserve our respect. The systems that govern the military, however, are suspect. One only need to interact briefly with the plethora of lobbyist neighbors in DC (a.k.a. Beltway Bandits) to get the ick — one of the reasons I left DC, never to return. As a country, we have failed to heed President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning in his 1961 farewell address, that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” He saw it as a peril to our great nation and tried to warn us.

The paper(s)

Start with the headline number, because it’s a good one. Between 2020 and 2024 the Pentagon spent $4.4 trillion. And $2.4 trillion of that, about 54%, went out the door as contracts to private firms. A third of that went to just five companies: Lockheed Martin ($313 billion), RTX, formerly Raytheon ($145 billion), General Dynamics ($116 billion), Boeing ($115 billion) and Northrop Grumman ($81 billion). Together, $771 billion. In comparison, over the same five years Congress appropriated just $356 billion for diplomacy, development, and humanitarian aid.

So yes, more than twice as much. Note: The comparison mixes categories: contract awards on one side, appropriations on the other, and the diplomacy figure deliberately excludes military aid. And despite the report’s title, $771 billion is revenue, not profit. That being said, neither caveat changes the shape of the thing. They’re just worth knowing before you repeat the number at a dinner party.

The more interesting part of the brief is why this money is so hard to cut. It isn’t a mystery and it isn’t a conspiracy. It’s plumbing. The arms industry had 950 lobbyists in 2024, 220 more than in 2020. The top hundred contractors gave $34.7 million to the top fifty think tanks between 2019 and 2023 (the Atlantic Council alone took $10.2 million), which means many of the experts quoted on what the country “needs” are funded by the people who sell it. At least fifty former Pentagon officials moved into military-focused venture capital and private equity in the same window. And a new tier of Silicon Valley contractors, Palantir, Anduril, SpaceX, now has multi-billion-dollar commitments and friends in high places. Hartung and Semler’s own conclusion is five words long: profits should not drive policy.

Then came 2026. The brief stops at 2024, and its numbers already looked large. This April, in the middle of a war with Iran, the Pentagon asked Congress for $1.5 trillion for fiscal 2027, a 42% jump over the year before and what officials called the largest investment in military capabilities in a generation. That request includes about $75 billion for drones and counter-drone technology. What it didn’t include was a figure for what the war itself was costing. Asked, the Pentagon’s comptroller said they didn’t have a final number.

So here’s the question the brief raises but, by design, doesn’t answer: is any of this actually making anyone safer? That’s not what the report set out to measure. It’s a money-trail study, and a good one. But a money trail can tell you who gets paid. It can’t tell you whether the thing being bought works.

Three TGS concepts to examine it through

With over 400+ episodes covering every aspect of the metacrisis, The Great Simplification has already mapped out the conceptual terrain behind a story like this one. We just need to connect the dots.

1. The escalation trap — TGS-235, Robert Pape

Pape, a University of Chicago political scientist who has modeled U.S. strikes on Iran for more than twenty years, describes a three-stage pattern: the attacker’s weapons hit their targets and kill the leaders, a tactical success; the attacked side doesn’t collapse but gains power; and the attacker can’t walk away. His explanation for stage two is what he calls the Second Precision Revolution, cheap mass-produced drones plus naval mines, which let Iran control the Strait of Hormuz selectively without an army. Asked why Ukraine held off Russia, he credits years of U.S. advisers helping build a professional officer corps and logistics, not money or Javelins. The most expensive arsenal in history, in other words, was not the deciding variable.

2. Threats, producers, drivers and root causes — TGS-153, Luke Kemp

Kemp, an existential-risk researcher at Cambridge, traces catastrophic risk through four levels: the threats themselves, the producers who create them, the drivers that push those producers (arms races, races to the bottom), and the root causes underneath. His point about producers is that they are few, secretive and economically powerful; two countries hold 89% of the world’s nuclear warheads. They also tend to lobby against the regulation that would reduce the risks they create. Kemp calls the United States, where a single person can order a nuclear strike, “a thermonuclear monarchy.” The Profits of War brief is, in effect, a detailed map of his second level.

3. Nuclear disarmament as real work — Frankly #159, Nate Hagens

In this monologue Nate names four kinds of work he thinks are badly underrepresented relative to what’s coming, and nuclear disarmament is one of them, work he says he does mostly behind the scenes. The danger he names isn’t a madman. It’s sane leaders, advised by sane technocrats and increasingly by AI, making a cold calculation that tactical nuclear use is worth the risk. Past near-misses, he notes, were averted by individual disobedience, with Stanislav Petrov as the example. The brief counts the dollars; this is what the dollars are ultimately pointed at.

What this means in practice

Put the three together and the brief stops being a story about waste. It becomes a story about a machine that grows whether or not it works. Pape’s escalation trap says the most expensive weapons in the world can hit every target and still lose the war, and that cheap, mass-produced drones now let a far weaker state hold off a far stronger one. Kemp says the producers of catastrophic risk are concentrated, and that concentration is exactly what lets them lobby. The brief shows the lobbying, the think-tank money and the revolving door in detail. None of this is new to TGS listeners. Back in 2023, the week Russia pulled out of the nuclear test-ban treaty, risk analyst and former military adviser Chuck Watson told Nate that for the defense industry and its lobbyists, nuclear weapons are “profitable business” TGS-97. Days later the Guardian reported that members of the commission advising Congress on nuclear strategy had financial ties to the arms industry. And the 2027 request shows the response to a war going badly: they asked for 42% more.

Nate made a related observation in Frankly #134, early in the Iran war. When energy gets scarce, individuals and communities tend to simplify, downsize and connect. Nations tend to drill more, hoard and project more force. The $1.5 trillion request is the second response, written as a budget line. I don’t think anyone in the Pentagon is cynical about this, and the brief doesn’t claim they are. Watson, who spent his career inside that world, put it plainly in the same episode: the people unwinding arms control aren’t Dr. Strangeloves, they’re specialists who each see their own piece, and what drives them, senior officials have told him privately, is fear of losing control. That’s the uncomfortable part. Nobody has to be cynical for the machine to keep growing.

Nate asked the sharper question back in 2024, in Frankly #63: winning for whom? The few people making these decisions, he worried, may no longer share the rest of our objectives, and their calculus can reward relative advantage, what evolutionary biologists call spite: accepting a loss so long as a rival loses more. In a nuclear war, though, everyone’s absolute fitness drops to zero. He also asked listeners to run the numbers on their own cause. Whatever you care about most, whether climate, net zero or better governance, its odds of succeeding are conditional on these conflicts ending well. That makes war policy everyone’s issue, not just the arms-control crowd’s.

Framework for Action

The connections below are my suggestions for applying the framework. If the archetype names are unfamiliar, the introductory article in this series describes them. I also produced an interactive find your archetype webpage that might be easier to grok than what is possible on Medium.

So what can an ordinary person do about a trillion-dollar budget? Honestly, not much alone. But the people who do this work aren’t alone either, and they need visible support to keep doing it.

**For the Effectivist.** The brief exists because two researchers followed the money through public records. That work can be done, and supported, closer to home. Back the watchdogs who do it professionally: the Costs of War Project, the Project On Government Oversight itself.

**For the Disarmer, and those who back them.** Few of us will ever work on arms control directly. What we can do is make sure the people who do aren’t working in a vacuum, and they shouldn’t have to be: in TGS-153 Kemp cites a survey of six countries, the U.S. and Israel among them, that found strong majorities for complete nuclear disarmament under a binding international treaty. The support is there. It just rarely gets asked for out loud. So ask, one representative at a time. Ask your representative and senators where they stand on the fiscal 2027 request, and what, if anything, should replace New START, which expired in February and left the U.S. and Russian arsenals without any binding limits for the first time since the 1970s Frankly #127. Ask it as a question about risk, not just cost. Watson’s own version of the ask, from TGS-97, is diplomacy first, not diplomacy as one option among many: if Ronald Reagan could negotiate with Yuri Andropov at the height of the Cold War, he said, Washington can talk to Putin or Xi.

For the Effectivist. When a think tank’s expert is quoted on what the country “needs,” spend thirty seconds checking who funds the think tank. That habit costs nothing, and it changes how every defense headline reads.

For the Disarmer, and those who back them. Public attention has mattered before: in Frankly #81 Nate recalls how a single 1983 broadcast, The Day After, catalyzed the disarmament movement and moved President Reagan, though he doubts anything could reach a whole nation that way now. Support groups that keep the nuclear question in public view, such as Back from the Brink. Kemp’s own advice was to learn how nuclear winter works, which he called a basic duty for anyone living in a nuclear-armed country.

For the Barber. Nate’s Barber knows that not every claim on the real world will be honored: there are going to be haircuts. A $1.5 trillion budget is exactly that kind of claim, on munitions, minerals, energy and skilled labor that the rest of the economy, and any energy transition, also needs. Pape’s war shows the triage already happening on the battlefield, where cheap drones outlast expensive platforms. Start the triage with your own money. Don’t Bank on the Bomb tracks which banks and pension funds finance nuclear-weapons producers, and most pension plans will tell you what they hold if you ask.

None of this cuts a trillion-dollar budget next year. But it does do something a bit smaller and more durable: it keeps the question of whether all this spending makes anyone safer open in public, which is the one place the lobbyists would rather it not be asked.

WWNS is an ongoing series connecting new research and reporting to recurring themes across The Great Simplification’s 400+ episodes. The linked episodes provide the fuller arguments behind these summaries and are well worth your time.

Next up: What happens when there are more claims than chairs?

Created using thinkr: an RDF/OWL Knowledge Graph I’ve built by hand. AI tools — including Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini — serve as research assistants and creative sounding boards throughout this work. The analysis, editorial voice, and conclusions are my own. I’ve also created a master index of all WWNS articles.

Read the paper: “There’s No Bailout for the American Farmer” Deseret Magazine (March 2026)

Also read: Austin Frerick, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry Island Press, 2024

The paper(s)

Sixty-three farms close every day in America. That’s not a typo and it’s not a Depression-era statistic — it’s the average rate since 2017: about 162,000 farms gone in seven years, nearly one in twelve. But most of that land didn’t stop being farmed. It changed hands. Land in farms fell only 3% while farm numbers fell 8%; the fields were absorbed by neighbors and larger operations. The squeeze lands hardest on the middle: the family farm too big to be a hobby and too small to compete on volume. Meanwhile farms grossing over $1 million now produce half the country’s food from just 5% of its operations.

Here’s the part that should be of concern: this has happened despite nearly a century of government intervention specifically designed to prevent it. As There’s No Bailout for the American Farmer lays bare, since the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act the federal government has poured an inflation-adjusted average of $17.6 billion a year into farm income. And yet in 2022, small family farms — roughly half of all crop-insurance participants — received just 12% of the payouts. Large and medium operations, 42% of participants, collected 80% of the money. When COVID relief briefly loosened the rules further, the top 1% of recipients took more than 20% of $5.6 billion in aid, while the bottom 10% split scraps. One Iowa hog conglomerate alone claimed over $2.5 million, comfortably routing around a $250,000 cap that was supposed to stop exactly that.

This is the part the “just send another bailout” conversation keeps missing: the subsidy system isn’t failing to protect small farmers. It’s succeeding at exactly what it was quietly redesigned to do decades ago — subsidize acreage and commodity scale, which means subsidizing the farms that already have the most of both. Every bailout since the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act has been distributed through a mechanism that rewards size. Which means every bailout mathematically accelerates the same consolidation it’s nominally meant to slow. Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz said the quiet part out loud fifty years ago: “get big or get out.” We’ve just kept paying for it ever since, one emergency check at a time.

If the Deseret piece shows the pattern in aggregate, Austin Frerick’s Barons shows it with names. Frerick profiles seven of the men who got biggest, in dairy, grain, coffee and more, and argues that their empires owe less to hard work than to deregulation and policy choices that let wealth consolidate while the rural towns around them emptied out. One of them, a small grain business, grew into an empire larger than Koch Industries with help from taxpayer dollars. Read the two together and “get big or get out” stops sounding like a law of economics and starts sounding like what it was: a policy.

Absorption by a bigger farming neighbor isn’t the only exit. Near growing metros the more lucrative buyer is a developer. American Farmland Trust estimates the U.S. converted 11 million acres of farmland between 2001 and 2016 — about 2,000 acres a day — and projects another 18 million by 2040, two-thirds of it as low-density housing. Unlike a field sold to a larger neighbor a field under a cul-de-sac never comes back.

And here too, the subsidy runs the wrong way. Strong Towns has spent years documenting that low-density development often costs more to maintain than it pays in taxes. When planner Dustin Shane ran the numbers for Nolensville, Tennessee, four of its five street types ran long-term deficits; only the townhomes paid their way. His question: “Why should the townhome dweller be forced to subsidize the McMansion resident?” Chuck Marohn calls the larger pattern a “growth Ponzi scheme”: new subdivisions bring revenue today and pipes, roads and drainage to replace decades later, carried by the denser, older places that do pay their way. Each new ring of houses also locks in more driving and fewer chance encounters — more energy spent to live further apart. Nate would call it a narrow-boundary decision: the farmer gets a fair price, the developer a profit, the town a few years of new revenue, and no one is accounting for what the land, the tax base and the community lose.

The upshot is that “no bailout” isn’t quite right as a headline. There have been plenty of bailouts — for the biggest farms, and, at the edge of town, for the subdivisions that replace the smallest ones. What there hasn’t been is one that actually reaches the people the word “bailout” conjures in your head — and there’s no reason to expect the next $12 billion “bridge payment” to behave any differently than the last dozen.

Three TGS concepts to examine it through

With over 400+ episodes covering every aspect of the metacrisis, The Great Simplification has already mapped out the conceptual terrain behind a story like this one. We just need to connect the dots.

1. Concentrated power doesn’t need to perform better to win — it just needs to be big enough to set the terms — Challenging Monopoly Power: Why Local Business is Better for People, the Planet, and Your Wallet, Stacy Mitchell

Stacy Mitchell, of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, argues that concentrated corporate power functions as a de facto governing force, deciding which communities thrive and which don’t — not through superior performance, but through structural market power alone. She grounds this directly in supply-chain fragility: a single slaughterhouse failure emptied meat shelves nationwide during COVID; one baby-formula plant failure caused a national shortage. Mitchell traces a direct line from that kind of economic powerlessness to democratic erosion itself, calling it “poison in the veins of democracy” that pushes people toward strongman politics. The Deseret piece’s own numbers read like a real-world instance of exactly this dynamic: less than 5% of all farming operations control nearly half the food supply.

2. Regenerative farming isn’t a lifestyle preference — it’s an answer to the economics industrial agriculture can’t solve — Farming for the Future, Jason Bradford

Jason Bradford, a conservation biologist turned working farmer, argues that industrial agriculture’s entire cost structure depends on treating fossil-fuel-derived fertilizer as a substitute for soil biology the system doesn’t otherwise have — comparing this directly to how ruminant digestion substitutes microbial fermentation for capacities the animal’s own body lacks. He states directly that regenerative practices can restore meaningful soil health within roughly five years, a concrete, human-scale timeframe within a single farming generation, not a multi-decade abstraction. Asked what he’d do with unlimited resources, Bradford’s answer wasn’t more subsidies — it was redirecting military and space-colonization spending toward building “a civilization that can last thousands of years.”

3. The barrier isn’t whether small-scale farming works. It’s whether an ordinary person without inherited land or capital can ever actually get in the door — The Future is Rural: Reclaiming Food Sovereignty through Farming Clubs?, Jason Bradford

In his second TGS appearance, Bradford describes a functioning model he built to solve exactly that problem: a Farming Club, structured as a 501(c)(7) social club in Corvallis, Oregon, where members trade labor and modest dues for a real share of the harvest and hands-on skill-building — sidestepping the capital and land-access barriers that keep most people from ever attempting small-scale farming at all. He’s direct that industrial agriculture out-competes ecological methods on price only because ecological costs get excluded from the ledger; full-cost accounting would favor the small farm every time. The Farming Club is what it looks like to build around that fact instead of waiting for policy to catch up with it.

What this means in practice

Here’s the uncomfortable symmetry: the same mechanism that’s killing small farms — subsidies that scale with size — is the mechanism most people instinctively reach for when they hear “farm crisis.” More money, distributed the same way, produces the same result. It’s not a funding problem. It’s a design problem and design problems don’t get solved by writing a bigger check to the same broken formula. What a different design looks like already exists. In Ireland’s Burren, the Burrenbeo Trust pays farmers by results, not acreage: each field is scored out of ten for biodiversity, water, soil and invasive species, and higher scores earn higher payments. Staff don’t prescribe practices; they set targets, and the annual farm plan is two pages long. Low scores unlock targeted investment rather than penalties. It’s a subsidy that rewards how well land is farmed instead of how much of it you own.

What actually works is smaller and already running: a 501(c)(7) social club that turns “I can’t afford to farm” into “I can trade my Saturdays for a share of the harvest.” It won’t feed 340 million Americans on its own and it isn’t supposed to. But it’s a workable answer to a question the Deseret piece leaves open — not “how do we bail out agriculture,” but “how does someone with no land and no capital actually get in” — and that’s a question policy has spent ninety years not asking. And it isn’t one experiment in Oregon. In Spain’s Altiplano, 61 farmers in the AlVelAl network share a community machinery bank, so no one has to buy a full set of regenerative equipment alone — along with a trading network for the ‘truquillos,’ the small tricks farmers share when they trust each other. In western North Carolina, the Blue Ridge Foodshed Fund’s Farm Food Access Program pays local farmers first for food that then goes to community resource centers across six counties aiming to replace one-off disaster money with schools, institutions, and households as reliable buyers. Neither waits for the farm bill.

If you want to do something with this beyond feeling grim about it: look up whether a CSA, a farming cooperative, or something like a Farming Club model operates near you, and actually join one — not as charity to a struggling farmer, but as a direct stake in a food system that isn’t waiting for the next bridge payment to save it. For more models to borrow from, Bioregioning Earth catalogues hundreds of on-the-ground regeneration projects around the world. The farm bill’s extension lapsed on September 30 2026 with no replacement and Congress is unlikely to act before the midterms. Waiting for that bill to fix this is the one thing we already know (with ninety years of data) doesn’t work.

Framework for Action

The connections below are my suggestions for applying the framework. If the archetype names are unfamiliar, the introductory article in this series describes them. I also produced an interactive find your archetype webpage that might be easier to grok than what is possible on Medium.

Economic — Cooperatives & Commons

The Farming Club works because it spreads the cost of getting in across many members instead of loading it onto one would-be farmer. That’s the commons answer to “get big or get out”: get together.

The Effectivist: Nate describes this archetype as someone who cares more about results than social accolades. The result that counts here is money and labor reaching a working farm instead of a commodity check. Join a CSA, a farm co-op or a farming club near you, and keep your membership going past the first season. Then make it visible: bring a friend to pickup day, serve the share at dinner, say where it came from. People copy what they see their neighbors doing far more readily than what they read.

The Catalyst: When a local farm puts out a call for a workday, a harvest crew, or a few extra shares, say yes. One Saturday is how most people find out whether they could ever do this themselves. It can also grow into something bigger. On Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula, the ReGenerOsa Collective revived an old custom of neighbors helping neighbors, Manos Cambiadas (“exchanged hands”) and more than 1,200 volunteers now rotate labor across local farms. If no one near you is organizing workdays, that’s your invitation.

Economic — Land & Housing Reform

The third concept above is the hard one: the barrier isn’t whether small farming works, it’s land and capital. Every farm that closes puts its land on the market, and the buyer is usually the operation next door that’s already getting bigger. The developer exit has an answer too. The same Blue Ridge Foodshed Fund is negotiating long-term agreements with landowners in three landscapes to acquire and permanently protect farmland at risk of development, then lease it to small-scale and BIPOC farmers below market rates, with lease-to-own paths for the next generation.

The Governess: Land doesn’t have to change hands that way. Farmland trusts, conservation easements and farm-link programs exist to match retiring farmers with new ones and keep land affordable to work. Ask whether your county or state has one, and how its board is chosen. If your town owns idle land, ask whether it could be leased to a beginning farmer or a farming club instead of sold.

Governance — Anti-Corruption

A $250,000 payment cap was supposed to prevent exactly what happened in Iowa. When a single operation can route around it to collect ten times that, the problem is in how the rules are written, not just in who is using them. And rules that pay by size invite people to simply invent size. The COVID livestock program paid per head on producers’ own counts, and another Iowa farmer claimed thousands of hogs he didn’t own, collected more than $1.5 million, and in April 2026 was sentenced to 13 years in federal prison. In this case the fraud got caught and prosecuted. Unfortunately the loophole still exists.

The Alchemist: Follow the money. The Environmental Working Group’s Farm Subsidy Database lets anyone look up who received federal farm payments, county by county. Look up your own county. Then share what you find with your local paper or your county extension office, whose reporters and agents rarely see it laid out.

The Silvertongue: This is one of the few issues where a small grain farmer in a red county and a food activist in a blue city want the same thing. Neither benefits from subsidies that scale with size. Make that case in the language of whoever you’re talking to — fairness to one, local food to the other — and urge your representatives to close the loopholes that let the largest operations route around payment limits.

Infrastructure — Food & Water

Mitchell’s examples were about fragility: one slaughterhouse, one formula plant, a nation’s shelves. Every family farm that closes takes one more independent link out of the chain.

The Muse: Make local food something people want, not something they should want. Host a harvest supper, a farm-to-table potluck or a seed swap. A full table does more to change what people value than any statistic in this article.

Infrastructure — Energy Systems

Most farm families already depend on income from somewhere else; WRI notes that 84% of farmers have some. Agrivoltaics, solar panels raised over crops or pasture, can add one more without taking land out of farming. Here in Massachusetts it is bringing idle cranberry bogs back: two bogs in Plymouth and Kingston that no longer paid to farm are producing again under panels raised ten feet, with the solar lease covering what the berries alone couldn’t.

It isn’t a cure-all. A new review by twenty researchers finds that for corn and soybeans, the crops that cover most American farmland, the shade costs too much yield and the raised panels too much money to make sense yet. It works best for grazing, for specialty crops, and in dry climates such as the southwest. The review also flags the deeper problem: solar leases pay several times what cropland rents for, so a landowner can be tempted to drop the farming entirely. Its authors conclude that wider adoption will take farmer- and community-owned models, not only leases to outside developers. That’s the same lesson as the subsidies: what matters is who keeps the money.

The Governess: The alternative to solar with farming is solar instead of farming. Ask your town’s planning board whether its solar bylaw favors dual-use arrays over ones that take land out of production and whether local farmers or a community co-op can own a share rather than only lease the land. Ten states have already written agrivoltaics policies and eleven more are considering them. If you farm, your state’s extension service can tell you what dual-use solar would take on your land.

Culture — Collective Sensemaking

The farm crisis is easy to read about alone and conclude nothing can be done. It looks different when a room full of neighbors works through it together.

The Wellspring: Start a reading group around Barons. A library, a church hall or a living room works fine, and some libraries can lend a book-club set. Give it four or five meetings, and plan the last one as an outing rather than a discussion: visit a nearby farm, look up your county together in the EWG subsidy database, or sign the group up for a CSA share. A book club that ends at a farm gate has done more than one that ends with dessert.

WWNS is an ongoing series connecting new research and reporting to recurring themes across The Great Simplification’s 400+ episodes. The linked episodes provide the fuller arguments behind these summaries and are well worth your time.

Next up: In five years, the five biggest defense contractors took in $771 billion in Pentagon contracts, more than twice what the U.S. spent on diplomacy and aid. Why that money is so hard to cut, and how ordinary people can back those working to reduce the risk of war.

Created using thinkr: an RDF/OWL Knowledge Graph I’ve built by hand. AI tools — including Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini — serve as research assistants and creative sounding boards throughout this work. The analysis, editorial voice, and conclusions are my own. I’ve also created a master index of all WWNS articles.

• Read the paper: The World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London Living Planet Report 2026 (October 7, 2026)
• Also read: Capdevila, O’Brien et al., “Halting predicted vertebrate declines requires tackling multiple drivers of biodiversity loss” Science Advances (February 2026)

The papers

When we moved to our house 27 years ago, there was a great big crabapple tree in our backyard that, come every spring, would literally buzz for days with a plethora of honeybees and bumblebees. About 15 years ago I noticed a sharp drop off in pollinators coming to our tree in the spring. Ten years ago there were almost none. Around that same timeframe we cut down that crabapple to make room for a kitchen garden but we also began a concerted effort to plant more native plants for the pollinators. Things are better now, but have not yet fully recovered to their peak, and we recognize that it may never return. Unfortunately, many of my neighbors are blissfully unaware of what is happening to our environment. Needless to say, this situation has been of concern to me for quite some time.

Every two years The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) publish the Living Planet Index, and every two years the headline gets misread. The 2026 edition, out October 7, tracks 35,803 populations of 5,790 vertebrate species. On average those populations are 73% smaller than in 1970: freshwater down 85%, Latin America and the Caribbean down 95%. That does not mean 73% of animals are gone. It’s an average of how much each tracked population has changed and their paper shows that about half of them are actually stable or somewhat growing. Nor is 73% a fresh drop. The 2024 report reported the same value and the index shifts as populations are added and the counting rules change (non-native species were dropped in 2024). Still the trend is real. The headline just compresses it.

So I was more interested in a quieter paper from February. A team led by Pol Capdevila and Duncan O’Brien, then at the University of Bristol, took 3,129 of those same Living Planet vertebrate populations (birds, fish, mammals, reptiles and amphibians, each tracked for at least ten years) and asked what was affecting each one. They identified six threats:

• Exploitation
• Habitat loss
• Climate change
• Pollution
• Invasive species
• Disease

The paper demonstrates that many populations face multiple threats at once. But there is also anecdotal evidence that shows that most all vertebrate populations worldwide are being negatively affected by multiple threats, so keep that in mind.

Three findings stood out to me.

First, the most common threats are not the most damaging ones. Exploitation and habitat loss are the threats reported most often, yet populations facing only one of them declined slowest of all, well under 1% a year. Populations hit by invasive species alone fell about 6% a year; disease, nearly 5%; climate change, 3%. Unthreatened populations, for comparison, grew about 1.7% a year. Ranking threats by how often they show up, the authors argue, misrepresents what they do. (One possibility the paper doesn’t test: much of the habitat damage in the best-monitored places happened before anyone started counting. WWF makes a similar point about Europe and North America.)

Second, the threats tend to add up rather than to multiply. This is where the popular coverage, my own biases included, runs ahead of the study. “Threats compound” makes a good headline, but across their dataset the authors found no synergies at all: 78–89% of combinations behaved additively, and the rest were slightly *less* bad than the sum of their parts. Genuine synergy showed up only in amphibians (which should concern us greatly notwithstanding). Still, adding up is bad enough. Among combinations, those involving pollution or disease declined fastest, and the worst trio (pollution, climate change and disease together) came in at nearly 17% a year, though with very wide uncertainty.

Third, and this is the part that matters: no single fix seems to do the trick. The team simulated removing each threat in turn. Removing exploitation helped most, but the typical population still declined. In the main analysis, the only scenario that reversed the decline outright was removing every threat at once. (The supplement finds a few three-threat combinations that also work, all of them including habitat loss and exploitation.) In the authors’ words, “single-target interventions are insufficient for reversing global biodiversity declines.”

The paper is restrained about its limited scope: the trends are correlational, the uncertainty is large, threat strength isn’t recorded, and the data lean toward well-studied regions and species. And importantly, it only covers vertebrates. Unfortunately, insects, which represent three-quarters of all known animal species, aren’t in it. Neither are other non-insect invertebrates included.

That said, the overall logic holds. Conservation has largely been organized one threat at a time: protect this habitat, regulate that fishery, fight this invasive species. That approach can slow a decline. However, given the paper’s findings, it’s unlikely to reverse it.

Three TGS concepts to examine it through

With over 400+ episodes covering every aspect of the metacrisis, The Great Simplification has already mapped out the conceptual terrain behind a story like this one. We just need to connect the dots.

1. Same walls, different path — Frankly #160: A State of the World Address, with Nate Hagens. 15 minutes.

Released in September, this Frankly is written as the climate speech Nate thinks no leader will give. He describes two false stories: One denies the problem; The other treats an ecological emergency like a product recall (i.e. swap out the faulty parts and keep driving in the same direction at the same speed). He then widens the frame beyond climate. Seven of nine planetary boundaries have been crossed: cleared forests and grasslands, nitrogen and phosphorus dead zones, drained rivers and aquifers, synthetic chemicals in rain and newborns’ blood, and wildlife populations down about three-quarters since 1970. None of it shows up on an economic scorecard. All of it, he says, traces back to one species using more energy and materials every year on a finite planet. So even capturing every molecule of carbon while keeping everything else the same, would bring us to “the same walls from a different path.”

In case it wasn’t clear: the six threats documented in the Science Advances paper ARE six of those paths.

2. The insect crisis and shifting baselines — TGS #189: The Silent Collapse, with Oliver Milman. 1 hour 20 minutes.

The Guardian environment correspondent Oliver Milman, author of The Insect Crisis, says a precise insect census is impossible, but studies across Europe, the US, Australia and Costa Rica show local drops of three-quarters to 90% over decades. The US has lost a fifth of its butterflies since 2000. He names three main drivers (habitat loss, farm pesticides, and climate change, which researchers now rank first) plus light pollution. Insects pollinate about a third of what we eat, recycle nutrients, and feed the birds that are now declining too. He calls our tendency to care about big-eyed mammals over the creatures that sustain us “a complete mismatch between what we value and what is actually valuable to us.” He also describes shifting baseline syndrome: as nature recedes from our lives, it recedes from our minds, and each generation accepts a thinner world as normal.

The Living Planet Index starts in 1970 and counts only vertebrates. Milman fills in the insects it leaves out, so together they give a more complete picture.

3. Actorless threats — TGS #183: The National Security Risks We’re Not Prepared For, with Rod Schoonover. 1 hour.

Rod Schoonover, a complex-systems scientist who spent a decade in the US intelligence community, argues that 20th-century security doctrine was built like the board game Risk: a fixed map, with pieces moving on top of it. Today the map itself is changing. Climate change, pandemics, and ecosystem collapse are threats with no adversary behind them: diffuse, systemic and deadly. And institutions designed to point capabilities at other states short-circuit on them. He calls the gap “a misalignment between doctrine and threat.” Earth-system stress, he says, doesn’t invent new kinds of insecurity; it adds new, interconnected drivers — soil stress, pollinator collapse, disease — that produce what he calls an ecologically embedded polycrisis. He never talks about solving climate change, only navigating it.

The Science Advances paper makes the same argument about conservation’s traditional focus on one or two threats.

What this means in practice

It would be easy to read this paper as bad news piled on bad news. I read it differently. The threats mostly add rather than multiply, which means every threat removed still counts. Removing exploitation alone made the biggest difference in the authors’ simulations. No good deed is ever wasted. It just isn’t enough on its own.

The harder question is why six threats keep arriving together. The Capdevila, O’Brien paper wasn’t implemented to address this. Instead, it measures proximate threats not what drives them. But WWF’s report does go there. It says the declines can’t be reversed by conservation alone and traces them to the food, energy, and finance systems. That is very close to Nate’s argument in Frankly #160. Habitat clearing, overfishing, fertilizer runoff, warming and the global trade that carries invasive species and disease aren’t six separate problems. They’re six expressions of one metabolism — an economy that has to use more every year. Protecting one species from one threat matters. Changing what we ask of the land and water, collectively, is what lets the protection last. Nate would call this a predicament rather than a problem: no single solution, only better and worse paths.

Admittedly, there’s something potentially hopeful in the WWF’s numbers. Half the populations they tracked are stable or growing, and the report credits some real recoveries: tigers, southern African elephants, green sea turtles, Atlantic and Pacific bluefin tuna. Where pressure eases on several fronts at once, populations can come back. But Milman’s reporting points to a more pressing issue: insects underpin nearly every food web on land and it appears they are in crisis, so we are not out of the woods. Not by a long shot.

It’s easy to read all this as someone else’s problem: farmers, fishing fleets, developers. But it isn’t. Just look at the American lawn: By one NASA-funded estimate, lawns cover about 40 million acres of the continental US. A perfect lawn is a monoculture where a meadow used to be (a habitat loss), kept green with fertilizer that washes into streams and pesticides that kill the insects birds feed on (pollution), and watered with drinking water: landscape irrigation uses nearly 9 billion gallons a day, almost a third of residential water, and up to 60% in the arid West. When USGS surveyed the nation’s streams in the 1990s, insecticides turned up more often, and usually at higher concentrations, in urban streams than in farm streams. Two of the most common, diazinon and chlorpyrifos, were later banned for home use, which shows that rules can work. But the habit of the perfect lawn hasn’t changed. A single suburban yard can carry three of the paper’s six threats at once. That makes it one of the few places where most of us can remove several threats ourselves, starting this weekend.

Your county’s conservation district works with landowners on soil, water and habitat, often with cost-share funding, and your state’s Cooperative Extension office (through its land-grant university) can help you replace turf with native plants or cut back on spraying. Every state also has an environmental agency with local data and grant programs; the EPA maintains a list of them. There is also the non-partisan ECOS list of member agencies that is a quite useful resource.

Some practical starting points: Learn what’s pressing on the wild places near you, not just one threat, but the whole list. Support the organizations working at the scale of a whole landscape or watershed rather than a single species. Stop spraying your lawn and let go of the idea that it has to be perfect. Then try what Milman calls an inaction plan: let part of your yard get a little untidy, leave the leaves, plant natives, dim the lights, and water less. It works better when the neighbors do it too.

The 73% reduction will likely be misunderstood by both sides of the political aisles for another two years. But the paper’s lesson is simpler and harder hitting: no single fix works, but every little bit counts, especially cumulatively.

Framework for Action

The connections below are my suggestions for applying the framework. If the archetype names are unfamiliar, the introductory article in this series describes them. I also produced an interactive find your archetype webpage that might be easier to grok than what is possible on Medium.

Ecology — Biodiversity Defense

The paper’s data come from decades of patient monitoring and its authors point out the gaps: poorly studied regions and species nobody is counting.

The Catalyst: Nate describes this archetype as someone who pays attention, because “you never know when your actions could shift the larger story.” Join a citizen-science count — a Christmas Bird Count, a butterfly survey, an iNaturalist project for your county — and report what you see. A single afternoon of counting adds a data point where there was none.

Ecology — Non-Climate Boundaries

Climate change is one of six threats in this study and one of nine planetary boundaries in Nate’s speech. Measuring only carbon misses most of what’s happening.

The Governess: Most of the six threats are decided locally, just by different bodies at different meetings: pesticide use on town land, fertilizer and stormwater rules, invasive-species control, development permits, and water restrictions. Ask your town or county to look at them together as one checklist applied to every major land or water decision, instead of one threat per committee. These aren’t partisan issues. Anglers care about runoff, hunters about habitat, gardeners about pollinators, water utilities about fertilizer. Bring them to the same table and you’ll find more agreement than the headlines suggest.

Culture — Reconnection to Place

Shifting baselines only shift when nobody remembers what was there. Reconnection starts with noticing.

The Muse: Wonder is contagious. Lead a bird walk, a firefly evening, or a creek walk with kids. Ask the elders in your community what they used to see and do in nature. Their memories are the baseline the data can’t reach.

The Effectivist: Nate describes this archetype as someone who cares more about results than credit. Milman’s inaction plan is about as results-focused as conservation gets: no pesticides or weed-and-feed, native plants in place of some of the turf, fallen leaves left where they lie, a corner of the yard left alone, outdoor lights dimmed, and the sprinkler turned off. Milman points out the real barrier is cultural — neatness norms and homeowners’ associations. Start with your own patch, then offer to help a neighbor with theirs. If your HOA requires a manicured lawn, ask it to allow native plantings; the rules were written by people, and people can change them.

Economic — Cooperatives & Commons

Farmland is where habitat loss, pesticides and fertilizer runoff meet, and no single farm can fix a landscape alone. Since 2016 the Netherlands has paid for farm conservation through 40 regional farmer collectives instead of farm-by-farm contracts. Thus measures can be coordinated across a whole area. It’s young and underfunded but it’s built for the very problem this paper describes.

The Governess: Co-op governance that works. If you farm or own land, ask whether a conservation district, land trust or farmer network near you could coordinate habitat and water work across property lines and how its decisions get made. If you don’t own land, you can still help govern it. Many conservation districts elect their boards locally and land trusts need volunteer board members and committee members. Attend a meeting, run for a seat, or join a farm co-op or CSA that does habitat work. This way your membership has a say in how the land is managed.

The Alchemist: Make the economics visible. Farmers who give up yield for hedgerows, wetlands or wildflower margins are producing something everyone downstream benefits from. Support programs, co-ops and buyers that pay them for it. Also, don’t forget to promote their efforts on social media too — they are today’s much-needed heroes.

WWNS is an ongoing series connecting new research and reporting to recurring themes across The Great Simplification’s 400+ episodes. The linked episodes provide the fuller arguments behind these summaries and are well worth your time.

Next up: America is losing 63 family farms a day, and bailouts haven’t stopped it. What would it take for farmers to stop going it alone?

Created using thinkr: an RDF/OWL Knowledge Graph I’ve built by hand. AI tools — including Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini — serve as research assistants and creative sounding boards throughout this work. The analysis, editorial voice, and conclusions are my own. I’ve also created a master index of all WWNS articles.

Interest in news has fallen sharply in five years, and trust has reached a new low. Have people stopped wanting to understand what’s happening to them — or have they stopped trusting the way it reaches them? And who benefits when they do? I want to look at this year’s numbers alongside a hypothesis Nate Hagens put forward in the spring of 2025.

• Read the report: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Digital News Report 2026 (June 2026)
• Also read: Piccardi et al., “Reranking partisan animosity in algorithmic social media feeds alters affective polarization,” Science (November 2025)

The paper(s)

Every year the Reuters Institute surveys people about how they get news and how they feel about it. This year’s sample is just under 100,000 people across 48 markets. Three findings stood out to me.

First, interest is falling. Across the markets tracked since 2021, the share of people who say they are “extremely” or “very” interested in news has dropped by an average of 13 points, from about 59% to just under 46%. Over the same five years, the people the report calls “news lovers” shrank from 29% to 22% of respondents, while casual users grew from 16% to 25%.

Second, trust is at its lowest point since the survey began asking in 2015: 37% globally. In the United States it is 25% — and 15% among people who lean right.

Third, the channel is changing. For the first time, social media and video platforms (54%) are a more widely used source of online news than news websites and apps (51%). Weekly use of AI chatbots for news rose from 7% to 10%, and to 16% among people under 35.

Then there’s the finding that doesn’t fit so neatly. News avoidance — the share who say they sometimes or often avoid the news — is “essentially flat” at 42%. That is far above the 29% of 2017, but it didn’t rise this year. So whatever is happening, it isn’t simply people turning away.

What a survey like this can’t show is who benefits from the distrust. A second study gets closer. During the 2024 US election, researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington gave about 1,200 people on X a browser tool that quietly reordered their feeds. For some, posts expressing hostility toward the other party were moved down; for others, moved up. Nothing was deleted. After ten days, the people who saw less of that content felt about two points warmer toward the opposing party on a 100-point scale — roughly the change the US population as a whole normally shows over three years. The effect held for liberals and conservatives alike. The ranking of a feed, in other words, is a design choice, and it moves how we feel about each other.

Cable news shows a similar pattern. A working paper from researchers at the University of Colorado and the Norwegian School of Economics analyzed closed captions from six networks between 2012 and 2024 and found that partisan channels spend much of their airtime on the other side. In 2024, Fox News covered Democrats about 60% of the time, and MSNBC mirrored the pattern with Republicans. The paper hasn’t been peer-reviewed, and the authors’ explanation — that anger sells — is their theory rather than something they tested. Still, there are documented cases where the incentive clearly won out over accuracy: in 2023, Fox News paid $787.5 million to settle Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit, after internal messages showed hosts and executives doubting the election-fraud claims the network continued to air.

This isn’t a story about one network or one party. It’s about what attention-funded media is paid to do.

Four TGS concepts to examine it through

With over 400+ episodes covering every aspect of the metacrisis, TGS has already mapped out the conceptual terrain behind a story like this one. We just need to connect the dots.

1. Peak Sensemaking — Frankly #93: Information Burnout: Are We Past Peak Sensemaking?, Nate Hagens

Nate opens this episode with two friends who reacted in opposite ways to the same video. One, an ecological economist who understands the predicament as well as anyone, found it too heavy to watch. The other was energized enough to start making calls in his own community. From that, Nate proposes a hypothesis modeled on the carbon pulse itself: as conditions worsen, the collective desire to make sense of the converging crises doesn’t keep rising. It peaks, then declines into overload and apathy, and people turn toward enjoying their lives, coping, or acting locally.

He names four reasons people watch content like his — entertainment, education and sensemaking, companionship and community, and agency — and says the show is shifting its emphasis toward the last two.

The Reuters numbers don’t prove his hypothesis, but a 13-point fall in interest over five years is what you would expect to see if he’s right.

2. From ultra-processed information to the end of shared reality — Frankly #128: Ultra-Processed Information and Frankly #161: Humanity’s Icarus Moment, Nate Hagens

In February, Nate compared AI-generated content to industrially processed food: both made cheap and abundant by a fossil-fueled system, both quietly stripped of what nourishes. Just as food companies engineer a “bliss point” of salt, sugar, and fat, he argues that content is being engineered for engagement — novelty, polarization, and righteousness — rather than truth.

His personal response is a discipline of three filters:

• Is it true?
• Is it relevant?
• Is it useful?

In this week’s Frankly, released October 9, he takes the argument a step further. Social media sorted us into separate feeds and then separate realities, and AI makes faking anything cheap while verifying anything stays expensive. The deeper danger he says isn’t that we’ll believe the fakes. It’s that “we’re gonna increasingly stop believing anything.” He draws on Hannah Arendt’s observation that people who believe nothing lose the ability to judge and then to organize or act. And he points this out as a central risk for his own work since every problem the show covers requires a shared understanding first.

Trust at 37%, and at 15% among right-leaning Americans, looks a lot like the early stage of what he’s describing.

3. Grief as a collective practice — TGS #167: The Lost Art of Grieving, with Francis Weller

Psychotherapist Francis Weller argues that modern Western culture has suppressed grief and that this applies to ecological loss as much as personal loss. Over three hours he and Nate discuss grief’s evolutionary roots, the cost of treating it as a private matter, and ritual as a way of moving through it together. Weller closes with a practical criticism: people travel thousands of miles to attend his grief circles when what’s needed are ordinary, local gatherings.

Nate cites this episode himself when he lists grief work as part of the Culture front in his Six Fronts framework (Frankly #132).

The connection I’m drawing is my own: if hard news arrives with nowhere to put the grief it causes then both avoidance and anger become inevitable responses.

4. The kinship journey — TGS #202: Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World, with Samantha Sweetwater

Wisdom guide and author Samantha Sweetwater argues that the metacrisis grows out of “the logic of separation” — the idea that anything can be separated from anything else. In her book True Human, she describes an epochal shift in the story we tell about personal development. The hero’s journey, in her telling, begins when you realize you need to understand yourself. What she calls the kinship journey “begins when you realize that disconnection is a problem.” She ties that disconnection to crises of addiction, loneliness, climate anxiety, and political distress, and describes the kinship journey as recognizing that a life can’t be meaningful unless you find how you’re part of a larger ecology, in service to something larger than yourself.

Nate pushes back with multilevel selection: within a group selfish individuals tend to outcompete cooperators. Sweetwater says she doesn’t have a fully worked-out answer, but that the way forward has to be built together through actions that are “not transactional” but “relational and grounded in care.”

The Reuters report measures our disconnection from the news; Sweetwater suggests that its root is in our disconnection from each other.

What this means in practice

I don’t read the Reuters numbers as evidence that people have stopped caring. Avoidance didn’t rise this year. What fell was interest in news and trust in the people producing it. Those are different problems. People may still want to understand what’s happening to them while being worn out by information that offers no companionship and no agency — the two things Nate says he wants the show to move toward.

There’s a question I can’t answer from this report: are people losing the desire to make sense of the world? Or only the desire to do it through the news? A survey of news habits can’t tell those apart. Nobody knows yet.

It’s worth asking what we’ve been feeding on. Much of the media most of us encounter is paid for by attention — by advertising and engagement — and the research above suggests that content casting the other side as the enemy is very good at holding attention. That’s not true of every outlet and it’s not unique to one side. But it does mean that a portion of our distrust has been cultivated and someone profits from it.

It doesn’t have to work this way. A 2020 comparison of eighteen Western democracies found the Nordic countries — Finland and Denmark among them — the most resilient to online disinformation, and the United States among the least. The differences that mattered were lower polarization, higher trust in news, strong public broadcasters, and audiences that still share common sources. Nate tells of losing a full wallet in a crowded shopping center in Finland and having it returned within the hour. Those societies aren’t immune: Danish news avoidance rose 7 points this year. But trust there appears to work like a virtuous circle — people who trust each other give manipulation less to work with, which keeps trust high. Here, it seems to run the other way. And it isn’t simply national character. Danish social trust rose markedly between 1979 and 2009, which researchers at Aarhus and Copenhagen attribute largely to generational change, rising education, and better-functioning institutions. Trust can be rebuilt.

Rebuilding it starts closer to home than the news. I find Weller’s point persuasive: grief and fear are easier to carry with other people and a neighbor you’ve grieved with is hard to see as “the other.” Community isn’t a cure for misinformation. But it may be the best antidote to the division that misinformation feeds on.

Sweetwater offers a working example of her own. She and her partner spent a couple of months collecting the names and phone numbers of everyone on their block, then hosted a first dinner; the next gathering will be a dance party, with a neighbor as DJ. She argues that what separates peaceful societies from warlike ones is how often people perform acts of reciprocity for one another. To serve as an example, she has recently started opening conversations by saying she’s neither a Democrat nor a Republican: “I live here. I care about… all of our kids.”

Some practical starting points: run what you read through Nate’s three filters. Notice which sources leave you angrier at your neighbors, and spend less time with them. And find, or start, one regular gathering where people talk face to face.

Much of today’s division, as Samantha Sweetwater puts it, comes from people trying to figure out where their security lies. There is more of it in the “we” than in the “me.”

Framework for Action

The connections below are my suggestions for applying the framework. If the archetype names are unfamiliar, the introductory article in this series describes them. I also produced an interactive “find your archetype” webpage that might be easier to grok than what is possible on Medium.

Infrastructure — Digital Commons

Most news now reaches people through a handful of platforms: Facebook is used for news by 43% of respondents worldwide, YouTube by 34%, Instagram by 26%, and TikTok by 20%. The Science study shows that how those feeds are ranked changes how we feel about each other. Who owns the channel matters.

The Governess: Better collective decisions about the information infrastructure we still control. Find out what your community has left — a public library, a local paper or nonprofit newsroom, community radio, public-access meetings, a neighborhood email list. Who funds it, and what would it take to keep it?

The Silvertongue: In Frankly #58, Nate describes social media as having “polarized and splintered” us, and this archetype as the translator between the resulting factions. Start in the spaces you already use: don’t amplify outrage, move heated arguments out of the comment thread and into conversation, and set clear norms for any group you moderate or host.

Poverty — Social Cohesion

Division feeds on isolation. The more of our picture of other people comes through a screen, the easier it is to believe the worst about them.

The Wellspring: Nate describes this archetype as a steady source of energy and support that others can draw on when they’re discouraged — not necessarily charismatic, just someone with “a really strong, deep-running ethic.” Be the person who keeps a regular gathering going: a potluck, a walking group, a monthly porch conversation. Consistency matters more than size. Sweetwater’s block dinner started with nothing more than a list of her neighbors’ names.

The Effectivist: Nate describes this archetype as someone who cares more about end results than social accolades. Local organizations such as food banks and churches are always looking for volunteers to drive people to doctor’s appointments or bring meals to people in need. You don’t have to join anything or take on a title. You just have to step up — call one this week and ask what they need.

Governance — Trust & Information

Trust at 37% is a civic problem as well as a media problem. In the US it’s 25%, and 15% among people who lean right.

The Silvertongue: Nate wants this archetype working “at the UN and in Washington” as well as locally. Act as a translator between people who no longer trust the same sources: bring the same facts to people on different sides, use the three filters out loud, and be explicit about what you know and what you don’t. Support outlets that are accountable to the public rather than to engagement metrics.

Culture — Collective Sensemaking

Understanding our predicament is a collective task, not something each of us has to absorb alone.

The Muse: Inspiration without a specific goal — warmth, music, and kindness that spread through a community during both good and hard times. Warmth doesn’t have to be grand. It can be a pie left on a neighbor’s porch, a sidewalk shoveled before anyone asks, or a dinner brought to a family going through a hard stretch. Small, unasked-for kindnesses are contagious. And each one quietly says that the people around us aren’t “the other.” Don’t wait for a crisis. The relationships that hold up in hard times are the ones built in ordinary ones. Who near you could use a kindnessthis week?

The Catalyst: Few people would call themselves a Catalyst — it’s a role usually recognized only after the fact. Nate offers it to anyone wondering what role they could play. But pay attention because “you never know when your actions could shift the larger story.” Making sense of hard news is easier together and the moments to do it usually arrive unannounced: e.g. a friend who brings up a frightening headline, a neighbor who has just lost someone, a community shaken by something local. When that happens, stay in the conversation rather than changing the subject and ask what it means to them. And if someone proposes getting together to talk it through — the kind of ordinary, local gathering Weller says we need — say yes. And be sure to bring someone with you.

WWNS is an ongoing series connecting new research and reporting to recurring themes across The Great Simplification’s 400+ episodes. The linked episodes provide the fuller arguments behind these summaries and are well worth your time.

Next up: Why Saving Wildlife One Threat at a Time Isn’t Working.

Created using thinkr: an RDF/OWL Knowledge Graph I’ve built by hand. AI tools — including Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini — serve as research assistants and creative sounding boards throughout this work. The analysis, editorial voice, and conclusions are my own. A master index of all WWNS articles.

A recent Dallas Fed working paper finds that the United States is less exposed to an oil supply shock than it was in 1980. That is useful information. But how much reassurance should we take from it? I want to examine the finding alongside several discussions from Nate Hagens’ The Great Simplification.

• Read the paper: Kilian, Plante & Richter, “How Times Have Changed: The Impact of the 2026 Iran War on the U.S. Economy” Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Working Paper 2615 (June 2026)
• Also Read: “Iran, the $39 trillion national debt and dedollarization: How Trump exposed America’s Achilles Heel in Hormuz” Fortune (March 24, 2026)

The paper

The authors model a 15% disruption in global oil supplies. Their estimated initial reduction in annualized U.S. real GDP growth is only 0.3 percentage points, compared with 5.6 percentage points if the same disruption had occurred in the economy of 1980. They attribute much of this difference to reduced oil dependence and the changed U.S. oil trade balance. That is a substantial improvement.

The comparison with other economies is also significant. The model estimates a 1.7-percentage-point decline for the rest of the world, roughly six times the U.S. response. Note that this is an aggregate comparison, rather than a separate forecast for each importing country.

But what does that result allow us to conclude? The authors explicitly exclude several other disruptions, including maritime shipping, fertilizer-related bottlenecks, and LNG markets. They do examine longer closures and inventory depletion, so it would be unfair to say they ignore duration. Your concern about this paper should be anyone interpreting a bounded economic estimate as reassurance about the war’s wider consequences.

A Fortune investigation published in March fills in some of what the GDP model leaves out: the national debt crossed $39 trillion just weeks into the war, while the UAE Central Bank Governor warned Washington that the Gulf state could be “forced to use Chinese yuan” in oil trade if the economic fallout continued. And now there is the threat of a major storm in the Gulf of Mexico which will likely affect refineries’ output. None of those things shows up in a quarterly growth figure. Might be time to start hedging your bets instead of breathing a sigh of relief.

Three TGS discussions worth examining alongside this

Three conversations help me work through those wider questions: how a conflict becomes harder to end, where energy shortages actually appear, and how the financial consequences might develop.

1. The escalation trap — TGS-235: America at the Edge: Robert Pape on Iran, the Escalation Trap, and the End of Pax Americana, with Robert Pape.

Pape examines how military pressure can produce consequences quite different from those intended. Successful strikes do not necessarily bring a political settlement closer. They can increase the attacked government’s determination to continue and create incentives for further escalation. That is the central problem explored in his discussion with Nate.

What is of interest here is how that should change our planning assumptions. If an economic scenario depends on a disruption eventually easing, we also need to examine the political conditions that would allow it to ease. What gives either side a reason to stop? What happens if each escalation makes backing down more difficult?

Strategic reserves and alternative supply routes can buy some time. But what does that time allow us to accomplish? By late September 2026, the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve had fallen to roughly 284 million barrels, its lowest level since 1982. That leaves less in reserve if the disruption continues. I would want to better understand the prospects for resolving it before taking much comfort from a relatively small initial GDP effect. This is where I find the TGS-235 interview with Robert Pape particularly relevant.

2. Crack spreads and the end of cheap energy buffers — TGS-229: Wide-Boundary Commodities and the End of Cheap Energy Buffers, with Jeff Currie.

Currie approaches the problem through the products people actually use. He draws attention to the crack spread: the difference between crude oil prices and the prices of refined products such as diesel and jet fuel. The episode discusses unusually high spreads and the limits of relying on stored supplies to absorb continuing disruption.

For starters, having access to crude does not by itself tell us whether the right fuel is available where it is needed. Refining and distribution still have to work. A farm, trucking company, or household buying heating oil or diesel faces the price and availability of a particular product.

This is why I find Currie’s argument useful alongside the paper. He identifies a physical constraint: crude oil still has to be refined into the fuels our equipment uses and delivered where it is needed. Drawing down reserves buys time, but it does not replace damaged refining capacity or restore disrupted supply routes. My takeaway is that businesses and communities should use that time to reduce fuel requirements, arrange alternatives where feasible, and decide which operations take priority if supplies tighten. Waiting until deliveries fail leaves fewer choices. A relatively small national GDP effect is little comfort to a community whose transport or food distribution depends on fuel it can no longer reliably obtain.

3. The dollar system and financial exposure — TGS-223: The U.S. Can’t Back Down: The Strait of Hormuz Closure Is Messier Than You Think, with Michael Every.

Every’s discussion examines several possible paths through the Hormuz crisis and why none offers an easy exit. Recorded on June 9, it also illustrates how quickly a conversation can be overtaken by the next proposed deal or contradictory headline.

The financial question I would want to consider is this: what happens if a prolonged conflict changes the relationships supporting dollar-based trade and investment? In particular, doubts about U.S. security guarantees could influence how other governments conduct trade and hold financial assets. What would that mean for our own exposure?

The war has already affected Treasury yields. Its energy shock has added to inflation concerns and expectations that interest rates will remain elevated — an effect Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has explicitly acknowledged. U.S. borrowing needs and a resilient domestic economy also contribute to the pressure. The war did not create all these conditions, but it has made an already difficult situation worse. Bessent reporting, UBS analysis

Every’s petrodollar argument takes this a step further: could a prolonged conflict change the financial relationships themselves? That is the scenario I would mull over, examining his assumptions and keeping an eye on the indicators that would support or weaken it. We already have reason to take the war’s financial effects seriously without treating every longer-term consequence as established.

What this means in practice

The paper gives us a useful reason to reconsider comparisons with earlier oil shocks. I would keep that finding intact while being careful about the conclusions we attach to it.

However we should be concerned that a friendly-looking national aggregate could become shorthand for everyone’s circumstances. Additional income for one part of the economy doesn’t necessarily pay another household’s heating bill. We need to ask who benefits, who absorbs the costs, and how long they can manage them.

The TGS discussions help explain why the GDP estimate alone is woefully insufficient for planning. The war is already affecting energy costs and borrowing conditions. The next question is how much worse those pressures could become if the conflict persists. I would take the paper’s finding seriously while also preparing for consequences beyond what it models.

Framework for Action

The connections below are my suggestions for applying the framework. If the archetype names are unfamiliar, the introductory article in this series describes them. I also produced an interactive “find your archetype” webpage that might be easier to grok than what is possible on Medium.

The suggestions below are my applications of the framework, rather than instructions from the paper or the podcast guests. Individual influence over a war or the international monetary system is limited. We have more immediate control over some household decisions and how we prepare with others.

Before getting to the archetypes, I want to suggest a few personal hedges. By that I mean preparations whose cost makes sense even if the worst outcome never occurs. Each still deserves examination. Calling something a hedge does not make it cheap or free of drawbacks.

If you heat with oil, ask your supplier about fixed-price, capped-price, and ordinary delivery arrangements. Compare the fees, prepayment requirements, and what happens if prices fall. A fixed price can provide predictability, but it can also leave you paying above the market rate. Massachusetts provides a useful guide to heating-oil contracts.

Weatherization is also worth investigating. An energy assessment can help identify which improvements make sense for your home and what assistance is available. Massachusetts lists assessments, insulation, and air-sealing opportunities in its household heating guidance. If paying for heat is already difficult, check assistance eligibility now; the state has also announced a separate middle-income heating-oil relief program.

On food, consider gradually building a modest reserve of shelf-stable things you already eat and will rotate through. If you have been thinking about a kitchen garden, winter gives you time to plan for spring. Neither requires a prediction about how the war ends. Both require some money, space, or time, which not everyone has available.

There is a longer-term question here as well, prompted by Nate’s essay, “The Human Predicament: What Would Change My Mind?”. My own distinction is between protecting ourselves from a price increase and reducing how much energy and material we need in the first place. A heating contract addresses one winter’s financial exposure. Changes in our expectations and consumption can extend well beyond it. We may also have to give some things up. I would rather examine those choices while there is room to plan.

Beyond household preparation, the archetypes give us several ways to contribute. If the following archetype names are unfamiliar to you, the introductory article in this series describes them in detail — identify yourself!

The preparations above are easier when there is money left over after paying the bills. For someone already struggling, buying ahead may be impossible. That makes assistance, affordable improvements, and community support part of the preparation itself.

The Governess — find out how your municipality and local organizations expect to help households that cannot afford heat. What assistance exists, who qualifies, and where are the gaps? Ask how the available funding would hold up under higher fuel costs. A food pantry or utility-assistance organization may already know exactly where additional volunteers or resources would help.

The Disarmer — Few of us will ever sit at a negotiating table, but every past arms-control success had a public constituency behind it. Robert Pape’s escalation trap is why this war matters beyond oil prices: each side’s “reasonable” step raises the odds of the next, and nuclear-armed powers are watching. Nate reserves this role for reducing the risk of catastrophic, especially nuclear, war. Few of us will negotiate a treaty, but citizens built the constituency behind every past arms-control success, from the 1982 Nuclear Freeze march onward. Ask your representatives where they stand on de-escalation and arms control, and support groups doing the work, such as the Arms Control Association or the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Currie’s discussion also gives people responsible for operations a reason to examine their dependencies. What fuel or material does the organization actually need? Where does it come from? How long could the organization function if delivery became unreliable?

The Effectivist — if you work in supply chains, energy procurement, agriculture, or municipal infrastructure, compare your actual dependencies with the questions the paper addresses. Identify what requires a separate assessment. The useful output might be a revised supplier arrangement, a tested contingency plan, or a better understanding of which operations could be reduced.

The Barber — work through the allocation decisions before a shortage makes them urgent. Which services must keep running? Which activities could use less fuel, be postponed, or stop? Ask elected representatives and service providers how essential needs would be protected if supplies tightened. This is where preparation involves explicit choices about what we can do without.

The economic analysis also leaves a separate question of governance: what are the objectives of the military campaign, what would count as achieving them, and how are elected representatives overseeing the decisions? An estimate of economic damage cannot answer those questions for us.

The Catalyst — one useful step is to organize a constituent meeting with your congressional representative’s office. Ask for its position on authorization, oversight, and the conditions for ending the conflict. Closer to home, find out whether a neighborhood support network already exists. Who might need help with heating, transport, or food? Who has relevant skills? Those relationships take time to develop, so there is value in starting before they are urgently needed.

The Silvertongue — bring the national figures into a conversation your community can act on. Talk with a local fuel supplier, food pantry, or transport operator about how higher costs are affecting their work, then use those concrete examples in an op-ed, a public meeting, or a discussion with a local journalist. Explain how a relatively small national GDP impact can coexist with a serious local problem. Make a specific request: expand heating assistance, help residents access weatherization, or establish a contingency plan for essential transport. Your contribution is to help people with different priorities understand the same problem well enough to agree on a response.

The financial exposure reaches into our own savings and debt. If yields continue to rise, long-duration bond holdings can lose more value, and borrowing costs may also increase. I would look at where those changes could put pressure on the household budget, then make targeted adjustments before being forced to. That is the purpose of hedging: reduce the damage if the scenario develops, without needing to predict exactly when it will happen.

The Alchemist — if you want to hedge against further increases in bond yields, there are three practical places to start.

• First, reduce interest-rate sensitivity where it could interfere with your spending plans. If money you expect to need soon is sitting in a long-duration bond fund, consider moving that portion into shorter-duration, high-quality holdings or a ladder of Treasury bills timed to those expenses. Longer-duration bonds generally suffer larger price declines when yields rise. Shortening duration reduces that exposure, although it also means giving up some potential gains if yields fall. This is a targeted adjustment; it doesn’t require abandoning your long-term retirement allocation. SEC explanation of interest-rate risk
• Second, reduce exposure to debt payments that can reset higher. Paying down expensive variable-rate balances removes some of that uncertainty. A fixed-rate conversion may also help, provided the rate, fees, and repayment term make sense. Compare the total cost before signing, and retain enough emergency cash to avoid borrowing again at an even higher rate. Treasury yields and your loan’s reference rate do not necessarily move together, so check what actually determines your payments. CFPB guidance on refinancing and debt consolidation
• Third, protect yourself against having to sell investments at an inconvenient time. Keep a reserve for foreseeable expenses in accessible savings or short-term instruments rather than relying on selling a bond fund after another decline. A government money-market fund is one option, but it is not an FDIC-insured bank deposit, and its income can fall when short-term rates decline. The purpose is to give yourself room to meet expenses while leaving longer-term investments alone. Investor.gov money-market fund guide

These steps hedge a specific vulnerability: higher yields arriving when you need cash or when your borrowing costs reset. You don’t have to predict the peak in interest rates to reduce that exposure.

WWNS is an ongoing series connecting new research and reporting to recurring themes across The Great Simplification’s 400+ episodes. The linked episodes provide the fuller arguments behind these summaries and are well worth your time.

Next up: Peak Sensemaking

Created using thinkr: an RDF/OWL Knowledge Graph I’ve built by hand. AI tools — including Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini — serve as research assistants and creative sounding boards throughout this work. The analysis, editorial voice, and conclusions are my own. A master index of all WWNS articles.

A new attribution study estimates how emissions from major fossil fuel and cement producers have contributed to water losses across the American West. I want to examine those findings alongside three concepts discussed on Nate Hagens’ The Great Simplification.

Read the paper: Williams et al., “Carbon emissions exacerbating the Western US water crisis,” Communications Earth & Environment (2026)

The paper

A new study attributes roughly half of the total decline in winter snowpack and river flows across the American West over the past decade to just 122 of the world’s largest fossil fuel and cement producers — known colloquially as the “Carbon Majors”. This is an example of what economists call an externality: a cost borne by someone outside the transaction. Companies receive revenue from their products, while the resulting environmental costs fall more broadly on the public. Here, the paper examines those costs in terms of water availability.

Additionally, these industrial emissions accounted for about one-third of the climate-driven groundwater loss in California’s Central Valley between 2003 and 2024 — forcing increased reliance on underground aquifers and thereby causing significant and destructive land subsidence that is ongoing. The paper’s modeling points to industrial emissions, not a standard natural drought cycle, as the primary driver of the region’s ongoing water crisis. The scale of water loss is equivalent to draining Lake Mead every single year, providing concrete evidence to support ongoing climate-liability litigation and proposed “climate superfund” legislation.

You can read the full, detailed study in Communications Earth & Environment, linked to above.

Three TGS concepts to examine it through

Three TGS discussions seem particularly relevant here. They address how institutions behave, which behaviors our economic arrangements reward, and why those patterns can persist even when the consequences are apparent.

1. Institutional psychopathy — RR-19: Dark Triad Personality Traits: How Psychopathy, Narcissism, and Machiavellianism Impact Our Cultures & Social Systems with Nancy McWilliams & Reid Meloy.

On this episode, Nate asked two of the field’s leading experts on psychopathy a direct question: can an institution — not just an individual — exhibit the traits of the dark triad: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy? His framing was that corporate personhood and profit-maximization structures reward manipulation and a lack of empathy, functioning like “a dark triad at a systemic level.” McWilliams’ response was pithy: “I think so.” Meloy went further, adding that a system which rewards psychopathic behavior again and again will eventually behave psychopathically itself.

I see a connection here to the institutional behavior discussed in the episode. The attribution study measures water impacts associated with producers’ emissions; it does not assess those institutions psychologically. That interpretation is something I’m bringing to the discussion.

2. The psychopathic selection hypothesis — TGS-231: The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis: The Rules of the Game Keep Us Trapped, with Greg Elliott.

Elliott’s research extends the RR-19 conversation and addresses a harder question: why does this kind of institutional behavior keep recurring instead of being the exception? Under conditions of cheap energy, cheap credit, and global scale, exploitative strategies simply become cheaper to run and higher-payoff than cooperative ones. In Elliott’s words, these conditions make “instrumental strategies adaptive and selected for in the environment.”

Consider a company that absorbs pollution costs its competitors are allowed to pass on to others. It may put itself at a competitive disadvantage. That is the incentive problem I think Elliott’s argument helps explain.

3. Extraction and the economic Superorganism — RR-19: Dark Triad Personality Traits: How Psychopathy, Narcissism, and Machiavellianism Impact Our Cultures & Social Systems, which builds upon TGS-14: Superorganisms, Crazy Ants, and Fire Apes, Oh My! with John Gowdy.

At the opening of RR-19, Nate describes society as operating on “a runaway train of consumption and extraction” — a self-reinforcing system he calls the economic Superorganism, something distinct from and larger than any individual actor’s choices. He laid the groundwork for that concept years earlier with ecological economist John Gowdy, who examined how capitalism, economic surplus, and evolutionary dynamics combine to produce the Superorganism’s own momentum, and how much real agency individuals still retain against it.

The connection I draw is that the paper traces a measurable environmental consequence to producers operating within this larger economic system. It gives us a specific case to examine through Nate’s framework.

What this means in practice

My concern is with the incentives that allow companies to pass environmental costs onto the public. What would have to change for those costs to become part of their decisions? If we let this continue, we as individuals will become resource-poor through the tragedy of the commons. The air and water belong to life itself first and foremost, not anonymized corporate entities.

The paper is already being cited in active climate-liability litigation and proposed climate-superfund legislation. This paper should not be seen as just a talking point — it is a peer-reviewed, citable figure with robust methodology behind it.

There is another consequence here that deserves more attention: if less water is reliably available, we will have to reconsider how much we expect to use. Holding companies accountable matters, but we also need to examine our own dependence on an abundant supply. For starters, do we need to keep watering all that lawn? Could some of it be replaced with plants suited to the local climate? Would collecting roof runoff be useful where we live?

I would rather begin making those adjustments while there is time to plan them. Some will involve better equipment or different landscaping. Others will mean giving something up. We should be explicit about that, including how to protect basic needs when deciding where the reductions fall.

Framework for Action

The Carbon Majors water crisis touches four of the Six Fronts. The connections below are my suggestions for applying the framework. If the archetype names are unfamiliar, the introductory article in this series describes them. I also produced an interactive “find your archetype” webpage that might be easier to grok than what is possible on Medium.

The ecological questions include both limiting further damage and improving watershed conditions. It either accumulates or it doesn’t — and right now, industrial emissions are tipping the balance against it faster than natural cycles can restore it. The ecological work here is both defensive (stop the damage) and regenerative (restore what’s been lost).

The Wellspring — your leverage is in the watershed itself. Advocate for or participate in local watershed restoration projects, riparian buffer planting, and wetland protection in your region. These aren’t symbolic gestures — they are the physical infrastructure that holds water in the landscape longer. Contact your regional water district and ask specifically what restoration work is underway and how citizens can participate or fund it.

This paper gives litigators and legislators something they rarely have: a specific, peer-reviewed number, attributed to specific companies, using defensible methodology. The practical question is how these findings might inform public decisions.

The Catalyst — One place to begin is a local discussion of the paper. Host a screening or reading group around the paper itself. Bring local officials, water board members, or city council candidates into the conversation.

The Silvertongue — your work is translation. Take the paper’s findings and render them in terms your community already cares about: food prices, fire risk, property values, insurance rates. The abstract becomes more concrete when it’s compared to Lake Mead draining every year, or your neighbor’s well running dry. An op-ed, council presentation, or public comment could explain a finding relevant to your community. Be explicit about where the study ends and your local interpretation begins.

The Central Valley subsidence story is an infrastructure crisis. When aquifers are overdrawn and land sinks, the physical infrastructure built above it — canals, roads, pipelines, agricultural tile drainage — is permanently compromised. Food systems built on that land are not stable.

The Effectivist — start by finding out where the water goes, whether you manage a household, a business, or municipal infrastructure. Check for leaks and unnecessary irrigation. Consider replacing unused lawn with climate-appropriate planting. If you’re considering a cistern, work through the expected rainfall, roof collection area, storage needs, maintenance, and local requirements first. The useful question is how much demand the change would actually replace.

This is where belt-tightening becomes explicit. Which uses can we reduce, and which need protecting? At home, that may mean giving up an irrigated lawn. At community scale, it means working through competing demands and deciding how shortages are shared. I would want those decisions made openly, with essential needs and people who already use very little water taken into account.

The Carbon Majors framework is, at its core, a commons problem. Private extraction, public cost. The economic transition work here is to build and defend structures that keep commons — water, air, soil — out of the profit-and-loss calculus of 122 companies.

The Alchemist — check whether your bank, pension fund, or utility’s supply chain has exposure to the 122 companies at carbonmajors.org. Shareholder pressure, divestment campaigns, and public pension fund resolutions have moved faster than federal legislation in the past decade. That’s a lever that works whether or not Congress does. If your retirement fund holds these stocks, you have standing to ask why — and to vote your proxies accordingly.

Want to see which 122 companies these are? Here’s the link to the public list ranked by cumulative emissions and grouped by investor-owned, state-owned, vs. nation-state producers. See: carbonmajors.org.

WWNS is an ongoing series connecting new research and reporting to recurring themes across The Great Simplification’s 400+ episodes. Every TGS quote above is sourced and linked to its original episode. I strongly feel it is well worth listening to the full conversations, not just this summary.

Next up: we will focus on a recent paper that analyzes Geopolitics and the Russia/Ukraine war.

Created using thinkr: an RDF/OWL Knowledge Graph I’ve built by hand. AI tools — including Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini — serve as research assistants and creative sounding boards throughout this work. The analysis, editorial voice, and conclusions are my own. A master index of all WWNS articles.

Updated October 2026. This issue now includes a guide to where each of the nine archetypes fits across all six fronts, with one graphic per archetype and an interactive matrix. The archetype descriptions have also been revised to follow Nate Hagens’ own words in Frankly #58 more closely; the earlier version drifted from them in places.

The previous issue asked you to identify which of nine archetypes align with who you are or what you are best capable of. This issue is about the upcoming phase those roles are for, and the six real fronts you’ll put your skills to work — and a graphic you’ll be seeing at the end of every issue from here on.

Read the source: Hagens, N., “What to Do as the World Falls Apart: A Framework for Action,” Frankly #132, The Great Simplification (2026).

The six fronts

In Frankly #58, Nate Hagens describes nine archetypes for the “bend not break” years ahead and argues they will need to work together in small “fellowships.” Two years later, in Frankly #132, he laid out a framework for action. The previous issue covered its first two steps: getting your own house in order, and finding the others. This one turns to the six fronts where the work actually happens.

Nate never connected the two. Matching archetypes to fronts is my own addition for this series. Under each front below, I name one or two archetypes as natural first picks. They are not the only ones who belong there; as you’ll see further down, every archetype has a role on every front.

1. Infrastructure & Physical Stock-and-Flow Planning

This front handles the hyper-practical redesign of local energy, water, retrofitting, and supply chains.

First picks: The Effectivist and The Barber. The Effectivist, in Nate’s words, cares “more about end results rather than the social accolades”: the person who weatherizes the house, builds the storage, and counts kilowatt-hours saved rather than pledges made. The Barber does triage. When supply tightens, someone has to decide which loads stay on, and Nate is blunt that “there are going to be haircuts.”

2. Poverty & Dignity Infrastructure

A front dedicated to managing structural contraction by softening the blow of displacement and keeping community support nets in place.

First picks: The Wellspring and The Catalyst. Nate’s Wellspring is the steady source of energy and support that others draw on when they’re discouraged, someone with “a really strong, deep-running ethic,” like Gandalf in the Fellowship. Mutual-aid networks and care for exhausted caregivers depend on people like that. The Catalyst is the ordinary person who pays attention and says yes when the food bank or the church calls for help.

3. Ecological Defense & Regeneration

Focused on biodiversity restoration, protecting local watersheds, and adopting regenerative food systems.

First picks: The Effectivist and The Alchemist. Much of this front is hands-on work: restoration days, native planting, cover crops. That makes it the Effectivist’s second home. The Alchemist, fluent in what Nate calls the biophysical balance sheet, makes the case that nature is not a luxury to cut when budgets shrink, and pushes our measures beyond carbon to water, soil and biodiversity.

4. Civic Resilience & Governance

This front involves building parallel local networks, building consensus, and crafting distributed authority as central governance steps back.

First picks: The Governess and The Silvertongue. Nate’s Governess exists because “our ways of making decisions right now are not suited for what’s ahead.” That is this front’s core work: citizens’ assemblies, local decision capacity, transparent institutions. The Silvertongue translates between factions that no longer trust one another, from your own community to “the UN and in Washington.” Nate’s verdict on this archetype: “Otherwise, we have no hope.” Where the stakes are national and international, especially war and nuclear policy, the Disarmer belongs here too.

5. Culture & Meaning

Coping with the psychological reality of economic contraction requires shifting human narratives away from consumerism toward analog fulfillment.

First pick: The Muse. Nate’s Muse has no specific goal. It is an inspiration, spreading “warmth and love and music and kindness” to more people as times get harder, and helping make Nate’s longer-term “stable attractor” something beautiful and local to strive toward rather than merely a loss to mourn.

6. Economic Transition (Post-Growth Models)

Reimaging localized trade, establishing alternative asset registries, token or barter economies, or commons-based stewardship.

First picks: The Alchemist and The Barber. Nate’s Alchemist understands that money and technology are markers for energy, materials, and ecological impact, and that the financial side will shrink toward the physical. Their job is to “prepare benign pathways for how that shrinkage occurs”: local currencies, time banks, co-op finance. The Barber returns here because this is where the haircuts land: deciding which claims get honored.

Find Your Archetype

Those first picks are a starting point, not a rule. Every archetype has a role on every front. A Muse might bring music into a care home on the Poverty front; a Disarmer might push for public deliberation over war powers on the Governance front; a Catalyst might be the neighbor who checks on someone during an outage on the Infrastructure front.

To make that concrete, I mapped all nine archetypes against all thirty facets of the six fronts. The graphics below show, for each archetype, where it fits best (in yellow) and where it fits well. Find the one you recognized yourself in last issue, and scroll to see where your work is.

The pairings are my suggestions, not Nate’s. They will get better as the series goes on and as readers push back on them.

Want the whole picture? The interactive matrix shows all nine archetypes across all thirty facets, with filters by front and by fit.

The “Fellowship” takeaway

In Frankly #58, Nate points out that even Frodo couldn’t get the ring to Mordor alone; it took Sam and Gollum. “These nine archetypes I just outlined have to work together,” he says, because “we can’t solve what’s coming just solo.” If you’re a Catalyst, you’ll want an Effectivist to make the plan real, a Silvertongue to bring the town along, and a Wellspring to keep everyone going when it gets hard. Picking a front and sharing a common language is the fastest way to find the rest of your local team.

Why now

Nate’s argument for urgency isn’t an abstraction. He rejects the idea that dismantling the current extractive system has to happen *before* any of the six fronts are worth building. The dismantling will happen all by itself anyway, we just need to get ahead of it. Waiting for that precondition would mean waiting forever. What is needed instead is parallel construction: building the new alongside the old rather than after things get dicey.

This is the interim phase where the above nine archetypes will have the greatest impact. Nate calls it “Bend Not Break” — the near-term window where triage and construction have to happen at the same time. Executed by people who’ve already found each other (step two, above) and are steady enough to do it (step one). If you identified your role in the previous issue, this is what it’s for. This brief window.

About the graphic

Now that we have the foundations spelled out, starting with the next issue every WWNS piece will close with a graphic (see below) mapping of that week’s content directly onto these six fronts and the thirty specific sub-areas inside them. And when appropriate, which of the nine archetypes for which the call-to-action is most positively aligned.

This graphic is not meant to be merely an index. An index is for looking back. That’s not the point here. The graphic is added in order to answer a question: given what this week’s analysis just revealed to you, what can you do about it, right now, with the people you already know and trust? It really is up to all of us.

WWNS is an ongoing series connecting new research and reporting to recurring themes across The Great Simplification’s 400+ episodes. Every quote above is sourced and linked to its original episode — worth listening to the full conversations, not just this summary.

Next issue: the series’ real work begins — a current paper, examined through this same lens.

Created using thinkr: an RDF/OWL Knowledge Graph hand-crafted by me. Kudos also to Claude, ChatGPT, & Gemini who have been invaluable in bouncing ideas around.

Getting your own house in order, finding the others, and figuring out where you fit.

If you have been following Nate Hagens and The Great Simplification, you have probably found yourself wondering what to do with all his information and insights. Understanding the problems is one thing. Deciding where to put your own time and effort takes a bit more thought.

Nate addresses this in “What to Do as the World Falls Apart: A Framework for Action,” Frankly #132. His starting point involves two fairly practical steps: get your own house in order, then find other people you can work with.

Simple enough on paper. But what do those steps actually involve?

First, get your own house in order

This includes your literal living situation as well as your ability to handle difficult information. Nate uses the term equanimity: being able to face what is happening and act without having certainty about how things will turn out.

That is a useful distinction. You can care deeply about a problem while remaining steady enough to help address it. But if you’re spending your days cycling between outrage and doomscrolling, how much attention do you have left for anything else?

The news cycle deserves some scrutiny here. Keeping informed can become an activity that consumes whatever time you give it. There is always another interview, another alarming development, another argument to follow. At some point, it is worth asking what you are able to do with the information you already have.

Getting your house in order gives you a better starting point for the patient work Nate is proposing. You will need some capacity left over for other people.

Next, find the others

For starters, who would you actually need to cooperate with if things became difficult? Some will share your view of the world. Others may disagree with you on quite a few things and still be people you depend on.

The next step is to begin talking while you have time to work through those differences. Establish what you mean by the problems you’re discussing. Consider specific risks together, what each might require, and where you would need help.

This is where scenario planning becomes useful. You can examine several possible situations without claiming to know which one will occur. The point is to have worked through some decisions with people you trust before circumstances force you to make them quickly.

There is already guidance on building coalitions and partnerships, so you don’t have to invent the process yourself. The Great Simplification’s community on Hylo is another place to look for people interested in these questions.

And some of your connections may be closer to home. Quite a few of my friends are excellent gardeners, and I have learned a lot from them. That counts too.

Why wait to begin?

An important part of Nate’s argument is that building something better can begin while the existing system is still operating. Making its dismantling a prerequisite leaves us waiting for events we have very little control over.

I’m hedging my bets.

His “Bend Not Break” framing involves dealing with immediate difficulties while also developing the relationships and arrangements that could help us through what follows. That gives the first two steps a practical purpose: we need people who have enough steadiness to contribute and enough familiarity with one another to cooperate.

So what might each of us contribute?

The fellowship

In his separate Lord of the Rings fellowship discussion, Nate describes nine archetypes. They give us a way to think about the different abilities this work may require — and to recognize people whose contributions we might otherwise overlook.

The Silvertongue is the diplomat, arbiter, and translator. They can work across polarized groups, helping people understand one another well enough to cooperate. That can be quite a skill when even the vocabulary has become contentious.

The Alchemist understands the energy, materials, and other physical realities beneath money and technology. Their task is to help find workable paths through the gap between financial claims and what the physical world can support.

The Disarmer works toward disarmament and reducing the possibility of catastrophic conflict. The approach may vary; the goal is fewer weapons being used and less risk of escalation.

The Muse brings music, warmth, creativity, and kindness. There is value in making life more bearable and enjoyable, without requiring each contribution to serve some further strategic purpose.

The Effectivist wants to know what the work actually accomplishes. Showing support for a cause is easy enough. Following through and finding out whether an effort helped requires something more.

The Barber deals with difficult resource-allocation decisions and financial claims that cannot all be honored. The name refers to financial haircuts. Someone will have to work through those losses and how they are distributed.

The Governess helps develop better forms of collective decision-making. Nate leaves this archetype somewhat open, but the underlying need is familiar: people working together need ways to reach decisions and handle disagreement.

The Wellspring provides steadiness and a sense of shared purpose when others falter. Gandalf is the reference, although charisma is not a requirement. A deeply held ethic and the ability to keep showing up can matter a great deal.

The Catalyst is the ordinary person whose actions become important as circumstances unfold. Think Sam — and even Gollum, believe it or not — rather than Frodo. You may be occupied with your job, family, and daily life when something happens that calls for your involvement. The important part is being able to rise to the occasion.

These roles also draw attention to abilities beyond technical expertise. Someone who keeps a group together may be just as necessary to a project as the person who knows how to build it.

Who do you already know?

I see myself as a combination of Effectivist and Alchemist. But that immediately raises another question: who brings the abilities I don’t have?

Think about your neighbors, friends, and associates. Who gets things done? Who can get people talking again after a disagreement? Who do others turn to when they are having a difficult time?

You may already know your own Wellspring, even if that person would never use the term. Recognizing what they contribute gives you a place to begin.

Seek them out. Bake them a pie (that’s what I do). Find out what they are working on and where you might help.

I would use the nine archetypes to examine the range of abilities around you. Which are well represented? Which are missing? Are you expecting one person to handle too much? You don’t need to settle everyone’s classification before doing something useful together.

That is where a fellowship begins to take shape. Working together gives you a chance to discover what people can offer, including things they may not have recognized in themselves.

You may be more needed than you realize.

Which roles do you recognize in yourself — and who would you invite into your fellowship?

WWNS is an ongoing series connecting research and reporting to themes explored in The Great Simplification. The original conversations provide more detail than these summaries and are worth listening to in full.

Next issue: the six fronts where this fellowship’s work actually gets applied, and the thirty specific faacets inside them.

Created using thinkr: an RDF/OWL Knowledge Graph I’ve built by hand. AI tools — including Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini — serve as research assistants and creative sounding boards throughout this work. The analysis, editorial voice, and conclusions are my own. A master index of all WWNS articles.

Consider this an introduction to an upcoming series that tries to make a complicated world a little more legible — leveraging an existing framework built to do exactly that.

The gap

Every week, research gets published that matters: a peer-reviewed attribution study, a central bank’s own debt projections, a grid-reliability assessment, an institutional report on where the next crisis is quietly building. The information is sound. The methodology holds up. But most folks never get to read it or are even aware of it.

It’s not because people don’t care. It’s because a paper might be 40 pages of methodology and confidence intervals, because the report is written for policymakers instead of people, or because the actual finding is buried in paragraph six of the discussion section, three citations deep. Real understanding requires real attention, and most of us are already tapped out by the time we would need to invest in diving deep.

That’s not a failure of the reader. It’s a failure of the world we live in. The dense, rigorous, important work captured by research and the very person who could benefit from it rarely end up in the same room. It’s also partly because very little exists to introduce them together with any brevity or lack of bias.

My introduction to TGS

The Great Simplification is a rich tapestry of monologues and interviews produced by Nate Hagens, an ex Wall Street broker who has dedicated the last 20 years to helping others grok the consequences of the complex, oil-dependent world we live in. His guests are the best of the best in their field. IMHO, each episode is a treasure, well worth investing in. Anyway, I became inspired of his holistic approach about a year ago and set aside one to two hours per week since then to use his online resource as a way to educate myself about the world we have created. There sure is a lot to learn. At times I feel like Alice in Through the Looking Glass.

To wit: over four years and 230+ interviews, 27 round-tables, and 158 monologues, Nate and his guests have constructed a robust way of seeing how energy, economics, human behavior, and the biosphere all move together — and where they are taking us. TGS addresses concepts like The Economic Superorganism, Energy Blindness, the Carbon Pulse, and The Dark Triad. Not surprisingly, the sheer volume of coverage can itself be daunting. In the short time I discovered TGS about a year ago until now I have only viewed approximately 1/3 of the episodes in their entirety. So yes, diving deep can be an investment. I know it first hand.

The approach

This series didn’t start as a publishing project. As I got deeper into TGS I needed a way of navigating it from a hypergraph point of view (that just how my mind works). Thus, a few months ago I began building an RDF/OWL knowledge graph of every episode of the show, its guests, its concepts, and how they connect to each other. I did this purely to make sense of the show for myself. And yes, it was done manually one episode at a time, so consider this a labor of love. Early on I decided to call it “thinkr”, which I feel is an appropriate term that identifies Nate and the quality of his guests. Initially it was going to be a personal reference and nothing more. But once I saw how comprehensive and useful thinkr had become it occurred to me it could do more than just help me personally. The same map that helped me trace one idea across a dozen conversations could also help someone else navigate an entirely different piece of the world — the world of those dense research papers I mentioned above. It occurred to me that I just needed to cross-reference each paper to the rich vocabulary and insights that Nate and his guests had built up over the years using the new tool that I had engineered as a knowledge graph.

So I’m definitely not going to do a Cliff’s Notes version a research paper, especially given that I am no expert. Nor am I asking AI to do such a summary. Heck, that’s most of what’s already out there on the internet, biases and all. Instead, I’m going to analyze every paper in full and then distill it through the formal lens of the concepts and insights from The Great Simplification.

Which brings us back to why I am creating this WWNS series: on one hand we have scores of important yet dense research papers which can be obscure and hard to fathom on their own. On the other hand we have an important, deep resource in TGS, but one that requires another investment in time. My goal is to marry these two seemingly disparate sources into a concise mapping that is easily understood and digestible while providing links for further/deeper exploration as you see fit or have the time.

Think of it as listening in and overhearing how Nate and his guests might quickly respond to such a paper in an elevator-pitch kind of way.

The wrap

In Frankly 132, Nate introduced his “Framework for Action” (which I encourage you to eventually watch. It’s 53 minutes or so but worth it. See link below**). This framework rests on two foundations before it gets to any actual doing: a personal layer of inner stability (nervous-system regulation, grief work, a recovered sense of agency), and a layer of trusted local networks and shared language, so a community isn’t starting its first real conversation about any of this in the middle of a crisis. On top of those two sit six broad fronts of intervention — infrastructure and physical stock-and-flow, poverty and displacement, ecological defense and regeneration, civic resilience and governance, culture and meaning, and economic transition toward commons-based, post-growth models. He is direct that these six aren’t tied to one predicted future; they hold up across a genuinely wide range of ways things could go, which is exactly why they’re useful before anyone knows which future actually shows up. A timeline axis runs underneath all six: a stability window where building is still possible, a “Bend Not Break” period of triage, and a stable attractor that gives the first two some actual direction.

This is why the framework matters for everything that follows in this series, not just as a nice diagram to close on. Each WWNS article starts with something real happening in the world, and connects it to the specific TGS concepts that help it make sense. The other half is knowing where that understanding actually plugs into something doable. That’s what the closing graphic in every article will be for: not decoration. It serves as a map of exactly which of the six fronts, and which of the thirty specific sub-areas within them, that week’s paper actually touches.

The series name

And the name WWNS? is a genuine question, not a gimmick. Given a real, dense slice of the world, what would Nate say about it? We don’t know until we actually sit with the paper and the framework together. That’s the whole project. I hope you will enjoy it. We are in this together.

More soon.

Created using thinkr: an RDF/OWL Knowledge Graph hand-crafted by me. Kudos also to Claude, ChatGPT, & Gemini who have been invaluable in bouncing ideas around.

**A Framework for Action: Frankly 132

For starters, imagine we have a very simple table or view such as the following:

Let’s also imagine that we have modeled our RDF shape to look something like the following fictitious “thing” shape. Note the nested magnitude data-structure which makes use of a blanknode (as indicated by the […] brackets in Turtle).

So how do we get R2RML to output the above? Turns out it is relatively easy indeed. We first need to describe our entity’s triples-map, which is pretty much what we would expect. Notice the reference to a uniquely-”named” blanknode tmap. Here’s the turtle:

Next we need to describe the “named” blanknode’s triples-map in the same file. Here’s the turtle for that:

Finally, depending on your RDF database tooling, you convert the above merged turtle to n-triples, then run your R2RML scripts to inject the content into your database. Couldn’t be simpler. Happy mapping!

References:

https://www.w3.org/TR/r2rml/#triples-map

https://www.w3.org/wiki/BlankNodes

The complete, copyable turtle code:

@prefix rr:    <http://www.w3.org/ns/r2rml#>.
@prefix owl:   <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .
@prefix rdf:   <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix xml:   <http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace> .
@prefix xsd:   <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .
@prefix ex:    <http://www.example.com/> .


###################################################################################################
### the following tmap outputs the Thing content from the MY_VIEW_OR_TABLE data

ex:TTriplesMap_Thing      # the temporary name of the rr:TriplesMap_individual
    rr:logicalTable       [ rr:tableName "MY_VIEW_OR_TABLE" ]; # this is the view or table to extract data from
    rr:subjectMap         [ rr:class ex:Thing ;
                            rr:template "https://www.example.com/Thing{THING_MODEL_ID}_BulkPrice"; 
                          ] ;
    # the following represent simple mapped literals:
    rr:predicateObjectMap [ rr:predicate skos:prefLabel;               
                            rr:objectMap [ rr:datatype xsd:string ; rr:language "en" ;
                                           rr:column "THING_LABEL" 
                                         ];
                          ] ;
    # the following represent mapped links to referenced entities:
    rr:predicateObjectMap [ rr:predicate ex:hasThingColor ;  
                            rr:objectMap [ rr:termType rr:IRI ;
                                           rr:template "https://www.example.com/Color_{THING_COLOR}" 
                                         ] 
                          ] ;
    # the following references a blanknode nested under the ex:hasMagnitude property:
    rr:predicateObjectMap [ rr:predicate ex:hasMagnitude ; 
                            rr:objectMap [ rr:termType rr:BlankNode ;
                                           rr:template "_:BlankNode_Thing{THING_MODEL_ID}" #must be unique
                                         ]
                          ] ;
    . #end Thing tmap


###################################################################################################
### the following TMap outputs the blanknode content for the ex:hasMagnitude property

ex:TriplesMap_Thing_UOM   #temporary name of the tmap entity to hold the blanknode rdf content
    rr:logicalTable       [ rr:tableName "MY_VIEW_OR_TABLE" ] ; 
    rr:subjectMap         [ rr:class ex:Magnitude ; 
                            rr:termType rr:BlankNode ;
                            rr:template "_:BlankNode_Thing{THING_MODEL_ID}" #must match the unique handle above
                          ] ;
    rr:predicateObjectMap [ rr:predicate ex:hasUnitOfMeasure ; rr:objectMap [ rr:constant ex:PricePerThousandUSD ] ] ; 
    rr:predicateObjectMap [ rr:predicate ex:value_Numeric    ; rr:objectMap [ rr:column "THING_BULK_PRICE"       ] ] ;
    . #end blankNode tmap

Note: If you are on an Oracle database use the following method to load the triples-map into your database:

Load the above R2RML mappings (converted into N-Triples format) into a staging table, such as MY.RRTABLE, and grant the SELECT privilege for this table to MDSYS (see “Bulk Loading Semantic Data Using a Staging Table” for more detail).

Finally, call SEM_APIS.CREATE_RDFVIEW_MODEL procedure to load the data into the semantic store from the staging table. e.g.

BEGIN
 sem_apis.create_rdfview_model(
 model_name => 'thing_model',
 tables => NULL,
 r2rml_table_owner => 'MICHAEL',
 r2rml_table_name => 'RRTABLE'
 );
END;
/