The Nick Standlea Show

Brandon Guffey | “I pray it wasn't him that said, ‘Good night, buddy, I love you.’” Content warning: this episode discusses suicide and the online sexual exploitation of a minor. If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 (Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, US), text HOME to 741741 (Crisis Text Line), or find help where you live at https://findahelpline.com 🎧 Full episode, summary &...

AI can explain almost anything in seconds. But what happens to our ability to learn when we stop doing the explaining ourselves? Princeton psychologist and cognitive scientist Tania Lombrozo has spent 25 years studying why humans ask why, how explanations shape our understanding, and what happens when we mistake the feeling of understanding for genuine knowledge. Her new book, Why We Ask Why: The...

Everyone wants to be the answer an AI gives. Almost nobody knows where those answers actually come from. Brett Farmiloe does, because he owns the pipeline. He is the CEO of HARO and the founder of Featured, which also owns Connectively — 75,000 journalists, 2,500 publishers, and every pitch that moves between them. His first AI citation report measured 22,000 citations across 405 audits, and the r...

Dave Rabin was ten years old, having nightmares, and both his parents were doctors. He bought a dream catcher at a flea market with his dad, hung it over his bed, and the nightmares stopped that night. He calls it his first experiment that actually worked — and it made him permanently suspicious of the line between rigorous science and the practices Western medicine calls magic. He's spent the thi...

In 2023, every consulting firm published the same forecast: AI was coming for writers first. Joe Lazer went the other way. He took paternity leave, went down the research rabbit hole, and came out believing the opposite — that AI would make storytellers more valuable, not less. People told him he was crazy. He wrote the book anyway. Three years later the AI companies are posting job listings for s...

The AI companies say it out loud: their goal is superintelligence — systems more capable than humans at everything — and by their own admission it carries a greater-than-10% chance of ending humanity. Max Winga says the part they leave out is that none of this is inevitable. He's a physicist who left AI safety research to help build Control AI, which has now briefed more than 300 lawmakers across...

"What are you avoiding talking about, and why?" After 33 years studying sex and intimacy, sociologist Dr. Jenn Gunsaullus says every stuck relationship she's seen comes back to that one question. In this conversation she explains why Gen Z is the first generation on record to have less sex than the one before it — and why AI companions could make it worse. Her fear, in her own words: that too many...

Dr. Bertalan Meskó — The Medical Futurist — argues that AI in medicine was never a choice. It's arithmetic. The world is short roughly 6 million healthcare workers today, and the WHO projects 11 million by 2030. About a billion people have zero access to care. We will never train our way out of that gap. "It's not a choice. It's a must," Berci says — because without AI, "we will not be able to kee...

Igor Pogany — creator of The AI Advantage (one of YouTube's most-followed AI channels) — joins The Nick Standlea Show to map out how to actually win with AI right now, without the hype. Igor's framework is a pyramid with three levels: Level 1 is AI for answers (a fancy Google). Level 2 is AI as a thought partner — one with enough context on you that it sharpens every decision you make. Level 3 is...

AI tools are powerful. But do they actually know your company? Rick Nucci, CEO of Guru and founder of Boomi, joins The Nick Standlea Show to explain why AI inside companies is much harder than personal productivity with ChatGPT. The models may be capable, but they don’t automatically understand your team, your products, your customers, your pricing, your processes, or the way your company actually...

What happens when AI becomes so good that we can no longer tell what is real? In this episode of The NickStandlea Show, Nick sits down with Steve Rosenbaum to talk about AI, misinformation, fake video, social media, education, creativity, and the future of truth. Steve argues that AI is not simply another new technology. It is a force that may change how we understand reality itself. From deepfake...

Detective Julia Bowman was one of the investigators who helped expose John Meehan — the man the world would come to know as Dirty John. In this episode of The Nick Standlea Show, Julia walks through the real case behind the headlines: how John Meehan manipulated, stalked, threatened, and terrorized the people around him, and how law enforcement began putting the pieces together before the story be...

What happens if the companies racing to build superintelligence succeed before anyone knows how to control it? In this episode, Nick sits down with Malo Bourgon, CEO of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, to discuss why today’s chatbots are only a stepping stone, why leading AI companies are racing toward systems that could automate AI research itself, and why “letting it rip” may not be...

Most people think they understand how they work. They don’t. In this episode, Wade Foster, co-founder and CEO of Zapier, explains what actually happens when you connect AI to your tools, your data, and your workflow. It doesn’t just help. It sees things you don’t. From analyzing your work to automating entire systems, AI is becoming something closer to a second brain—one that can understand your b...

Google is no longer the only place people look. So how do we show up in AI searches? In this episode, Nick sits down with marketing strategist Ross Simmonds to break down what businesses, creators, and entrepreneurs need to understand as discovery shifts from traditional search to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Reddit, YouTube, and beyond. They get into query fan-out, why LLMs pull from multiple pla...

If you think AI in medicine is still some far-off future, it’s not. Dr. Peter Weir is a family physician and health system leader, and in this conversation, he explains how AI is already changing what happens in the exam room. We get into ambient AI for medical documentation, how these tools may reduce physician burnout, where AI is already helping with clinical decision-making, and why the future...

If you’ve ever been told “just post every day and you’ll eventually blow up”… T.D. Orel is living proof that advice can be wildly wrong. T.D. spent 14 months posting daily with basically nothing to show for it—then he made one shift, leaned hard into niche, specific, “if you know, you know” content, and his accounts exploded. In this episode, we break down: Why posting every day didn’t work (and w...

Most “business advice” on AI is noise. But if you’re building an AI-powered service, consulting business, or agency, the real bottleneck isn’t the tech... It’s positioning, pricing, and selling outcomes. Alan Weiss—author of *7-Figure Consulting* and the guy who’s been teaching value-based fees for decades—joins me to lay down the fundamentals that actually compound in an AI economy: how to stop s...

AI is changing school, college admissions, and the workforce faster than most parents and students realize. In this episode, I sit down with Ryan Kiick (CEO of Revolution Prep) to talk about the skills that won’t get automated, and how to use AI without becoming dependent on it. We get into the real danger of offloading thinking, why the most powerful way to use AI is to generate better questions...

In this conversation with philosopher Dr. Philip Goff, we dive into one of the deepest questions in science and philosophy: what if consciousness isn’t produced by the brain—what if it’s fundamental to reality? We explore panpsychism, the “hard-to-ignore” problem of subjective experience, why physics may describe what matter does but not what it is, and what it would mean if even the smallest buil...

Fear of other people’s opinions quietly shapes how we perform, how we speak, and who we allow ourselves to become. In this conversation, Michael Gervais—performance psychologist to Super Bowl champions, Olympic gold medalists, and Fortune 50 leaders—breaks down why the fear of judgment is one of the greatest limiters of human potential. We explore why winning and losing can become distractions, ho...

Most people use AI like a faster assistant. Leaders use it differently. In this conversation, Geoff Woods (author of The AI-Driven Leader) explains the shift that turns AI from a shallow productivity tool into a true thought partner—one that helps you think better, make better decisions, and unlock leverage you didn’t have before. We go deep into: *Why “better prompts” aren’t the real breakthrough...

If anyone builds it, everyone dies. That’s the claim Nate Soares makes in his new book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All—and in this conversation, he lays out why he thinks we’re on a collision course with a successor species. We dig into why today’s AIs are grown, not programmed, why no one really knows what’s going on inside large models, and how systems tha...

Professor Christopher Summerfield, a leading neuroscientist at Oxford University and Research Director at the UK AI Safety Institute, former Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, discusses his new book, These Strange New Minds, which explores how large language models learned to talk, how they differ from the human brain, and what their rise means for control, agency, and the future of wor...

Sam Altman told him that 95% of marketing as we know it will be done by AI within 3–5 years. That single sentence became the “holy smokes moment” that shaped the entire book AI First, written by this week’s guest, Andy Sack (co-author Adam Brotman) — a technologist who has built companies across four tech eras: internet, mobile, social/cloud, and now AI. Andy is the co-founder of Forum3, a VC inve...