Finding the others on the runaway train

A conversation with Nate Hagens

"On this runaway train, we have to find the dining car."
- Nate Hagens.

I enjoyed talking with Nate Hagens on his now widely admired podcast.

I like that opening line (from his chat with Kate Raworth to mark the 100th episode) about ‘the dining car’, which I guess would be ‘buffet’ or ‘cafe’ in British English. This is another way of saying that we have to “find the others” to work with, but it goes beyond that to say we should enjoy each other’s company too, because life is short and there for the living.

(If you like train metaphors in general, see Pheobe Tickell’s Impossible Train Story.)

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For those who don't know Nate, I can recommend his speech on The Superorganism and the Future at Stockholm Impact/Week 2023. There he lays it all out, and you have a sense of the depth and breadth of understanding that informs his deep concern for the future of life on earth, and his judicious questioning.

Nate's podcast explores macroeconomics, our energy blindness, the behaviours of 'the superorganism' and more. However, he also recognises that our capacity to address these ideas is not merely technological or technocratic, and in recent episodes, he has been delving deeper into cultural matters, and even beyond.

I particularly liked the role reversal in Kate Raworth's interview of Nate to mark his 100th episode, and his recent interview with Vanessa Andreotti (I'm a big fan of her book) really brings her ideas to life in a way that does them justice.

So Nate is great at what he does! And it was a privilege to be on his show.

Nate wanted to talk about metamodernism, not for its own sake, but to help to move the conversation beyond critique. As I said on the podcast, I believe critique should always travel with its buddies, vision and method, and metamodernism is partly about that.

As I have said before:

I had mixed feelings about metamodernism until I realised that it's about mixed feelings.

That still applies. Metamodernism is part of my 'conceptual practice' but a relatively small part of it. We do explore several other issues though, including what chess taught me about the metacrisis, the dissonance of living a normal life while the world appears to be collapsing, why I believe we are contending with a metacrisis rather than a polycrisis and why that distinction matters, the importance of experiments in social practice, and much more.

The title: The Flip, The Formation and The Fun, is a distillation of Perspectiva's purpose outlined here previously, and it argues that our challenge is to simultaneously transform our relationship to reality, to goodness, and to societal purpose.

That would be no small feat, and how we might do it is best discussed…

in the dining car…

I’m off to The Realisation Festival, which is a dining car of sorts. See you next week.

Thanks again to Nate, and I hope you enjoy listening 🙏