Podcast

This week’s Frankly begins with a deceptively simple question Nate was asked in conversation: what would change his mind about The Great Simplification thesis?

In this episode, Nate is joined by Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, one of the earliest researchers in AI safety, to lay out why “controllable superintelligence” is a misguided goal, destined to lead to an entity smarter than all of humanity – and possibly our own extinction.

This week’s Frankly builds on Nate’s recent conversation with systems theorist Greg Elliott, who came on the platform to discuss why our institutions themselves have become psychopathic and how that affects the behavior of the average human.

In this episode, Nate welcomes author and philosopher, Charles Eisenstein, for a long-requested conversation on the mythologies underneath civilization.

In this second part of a previous series on the channel – Just Stop Oil!? – Nate examines how and why energy is currently so deeply embedded in the foundations of our modern economy.

In this episode, Nate is joined by Greg Elliott, a systems theorist and author of the Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis (PSH), to unpack why our institutions themselves have become so psychopathic, and how that affects the behavior of the average human.

This week, Nate turns a late-night emergency vet visit for one of his dogs into a broader reflection on the extraordinary relationship between dogs and humans.

Current geopolitical events continue to expose just how complex and fragile our global economic system is. As such, The Great Simplification team is re-releasing this episode with Ed Conway, which covers the deceptively critical materials that continue to underpin everything from the phone in your hand to the house that you live in. 

How can humans – at least those with access to the internet – ingest the same facts and data, yet arrive at radically different worldviews? That’s the question Nate explores in this week’s Frankly.

In this episode, Nate is joined by Dr. Richard C. Schwartz, the therapist who developed Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Steffi Bednarek, a climate psychologist applying that same model to organizations, governments, and culture at large.

In this week’s Frankly, Nate explicitly outlines just a few of the countless actions we can take to actually change what’s coming, rather than just prepare for it.

In this episode, Nate is joined by biologist and biophysicist Olivier Hamant to explore why living systems prioritize robustness over performance, and what that means for a civilization built almost entirely in the opposite direction.