Get Nate Hagens on Dwarkesh Podcast

Most of Dwarkesh's guests are building the future. Nate Hagens is the person who can explain why the future they're building may not physically arrive.

Hagens is a former Lehman Brothers and Salomon Brothers trader who walked away from finance in 2003 to spend two decades studying the relationship between energy, economics, and human behavior. He earned a PhD in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont and now runs the Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future (ISEOF). His podcast, The Great Simplification, has run 216+ episodes — guests include Sam Harris, Tristan Harris, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Anna Lembke, and Kate Raworth. His central thesis: human civilization functions as an energy-dissipating "Superorganism" that optimizes for GDP growth the way ants optimize for colony expansion — without a brain, without self-awareness, and without the ability to voluntarily shrink.

This isn't a doomer newsletter. It's a systems framework that connects AI scaling, the carbon pulse, dopamine hijacking, and geopolitical fragmentation into a single coherent picture. And right now, it's being stress-tested in real time:

• April 2026: Hagens released a three-part Strait of Hormuz series mapping how a single shipping corridor disruption propagates through fertilizer, metals, food prices, and oil field physics — making the Superorganism thesis viscerally concrete.
• March 24, 2026: He published "What to Do as the World Falls Apart" — a framework for action that marked an explicit pivot from diagnosis to direction after twenty years of articulating the problem.
• April 8, 2026: His conversation with Sam Harris (Ep 216) explored meditation and awareness as preconditions for navigating civilizational crises — the inner complement to the systems analysis.
• April 2026: He launched a new "Staying Human" series on recovering personal agency inside systems designed to erode it — directly confronting the question of what AI does to human cognition when the information supply becomes infinite.

Dwarkesh has interviewed the people building the energy-hungry AI infrastructure — Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella. He's never sat across from someone who can articulate, with real systems fluency, why the biophysical substrate underneath all of it might not scale. Hagens isn't anti-technology — he's the person who can hold the entire picture in his head: the thermodynamics, the behavioral economics, the addiction neuroscience, the geopolitics, and the financial system, all at once.

People who matter in Dwarkesh's orbit already want this. Liv Boeree — whose Win-Win podcast shares the #1 overlapping audience with Dwarkesh per Rephonic — directly suggested Hagens when Dwarkesh asked for guest recommendations. The intellectual overlap is obvious: Boeree's work on Moloch traps and AI race dynamics is downstream of the same coordination-failure analysis Hagens has been mapping at the energy-economy level for decades.

Vote to make this happen. Shape the conversation by suggesting the topics and questions that would make this the defining Hagens interview — not another energy podcast appearance, but a real three-hour interrogation by someone who's done the homework. And share this page to rally the demand. Dwarkesh reads the signals. Make this one impossible to miss.