The Free Retreat Where Programmers Go to Escape — or Master — AI

Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock on the Recurse Center

In this episode, Samuel Arbesman had the pleasure of speaking with Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock. Nick is the cofounder and CEO of the Recurse Center, a kind of retreat for programmers and community for people to work at what they term the edge of their abilities. RC has been running these self-directed retreats since 2011 and the company is a very intentional effort in fostering curiosity and is informed by the philosophy of unschooling.

Samuel and Nick had a chance to discuss his unschooling experience and how he became interested in coding, the founding of what eventually became the Recurse Center, and how it developed. They talked about the uniqueness of RC's model, how Nick thinks about AI and programming, and the intentional culture of RC. Sonnet 4.6