The Nick Standlea Show
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Where to Start with The Nick Standlea Show

New to the show? Start with the conversations that interest you most. Explore artificial intelligence, human behavior, consciousness, science, business, creativity, and extraordinary personal stories.

The Future of Artificial Intelligence

These six guests disagree about advanced AI, and not in the shallow way the argument is usually staged. Nate Soares and Malo Bourgon both come out of MIRI, and both start from the builders' own numbers: company leaders putting the odds of catastrophe between 10 and 25%. For Soares that figure alone settles it. Bourgon spends his time on whether a treaty could hold. Max Winga reads the risk the same way but treats the fight as political, not technical. Christopher Summerfield puts the danger somewhere else entirely, in control leaking away through ordinary agents interacting at scale rather than one system outsmarting us. Jeffrey Sachs says the technology decides nothing by itself; who owns it decides everything. Justin Wolfers puts a mechanism under that: what is protecting workers right now is competition rather than regulation, and a monopolist anywhere in the chain captures the gains instead. None of them think this is settled. That is the useful part.

Consciousness and the Human Mind

These three conversations ask what consciousness is and answer it three different ways. Donald Hoffman treats spacetime itself as an interface rather than the place where things happen, and gets there from evolutionary game theory. Anil Seth expects experience to be explained by what the brain does, and describes perception as a controlled hallucination built out of prediction. Philip Goff thinks the question has been unanswerable since Galileo wrote consciousness out of science 400 years ago, and starts from consciousness instead — his formulation is that matter is what consciousness does. Goff names both of the others in his own episode as holding views unlike his, so the disagreement is on the record rather than arranged by us.

Learning, Intelligence, and Psychology

Six conversations about how learning actually works — and about how badly people judge their own learning from the inside. Roediger and McDaniel have the hardest evidence here: rereading feels like studying and mostly isn't. Lombrozo found the same shape in children watching a cartoon, where being handed the moral worked worse than being asked to explain it. Gardner spent a career arguing that intelligence is plural, and now asks what a school still owes a student when AI handles most of the tasks. Csikszentmihalyi, whom Nick worked with for six years, measured what happens when a hard task meets a matching skill. Albert Puig counts the cost of that from inside FC Barcelona's academy, where almost everyone good enough to be there still does not make it. Myka Meier argues the thing we file under manners is social and emotional intelligence. Start with Make It Stick if you want something to use this week.

Entrepreneurs and Technology

Eight conversations about building things, most of them in the shadow of AI. Seth Godin's goes first because it is the least about technology and the most about the decision underneath it: the strategic act is picking which game you enter, and sharpening your play inside the one you already occupy is something else entirely. Then three people who work with these tools daily. Wade Foster and Rick Nucci say the model is the easy part; context, reliability and the people around it are the hard part. Igor Pogany puts the difficulty back in the model itself — if it still hallucinates one out of 20 times, no dependable worker can be built on top of it. Foster, Nucci and Pogany all stop short of expecting the jobs to simply vanish, and each of the three arrives there by a different route. Brett Farmiloe and Ross Simmonds take on a newer one — being recommended by an assistant is not the same job as ranking in a search engine, and both have numbers for it. Pat Flynn works the other end entirely, on what it takes to ship the first thing at all. Alan Weiss closes on the oldest question in business — what you are actually charging for.

Health and Human Performance

These seven conversations sit at different scales of the same subject. Michael Osterholm works on populations: which viruses are already circulating, and what we could still build before the next one arrives. Dr. Paul Rohdenburg works on one body, and argues that training and sleep outrank nearly everything people fight about online. Michael Gervais works on attention and identity during performance. Tali Sharot explains why a good life can stop registering. Scott Barry Kaufman takes up what happens when a hard chapter hardens into a self. Thomas Seager works on what cold does to the body, and Micha Shaw on the mental skills underneath an athletic career. Together they run from the air in a room to the story you tell about yourself. Start with the sleep episode for the fastest return, and with Osterholm for the largest stakes.

Extraordinary Stories and Unexpected Conversations

These five have no subject in common. A detective, an actor, a jiu-jitsu champion, an ocean swimmer, and a friend from Nick's college soccer team. Each conversation is about a life rather than a field. Julia Bowman built a felony stalking case out of a harassment complaint that other officers had already waved off. Jason Magee gives himself his first Wegovy injection while the camera is running. The detail in these hours is specific and sometimes uncomfortable. Nobody is explaining a discipline. They are describing what it took to keep going, and in some cases what it took to say so in public. Start with whichever life you recognize.

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