The Nick Standlea Show

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 thirty years since closing that gap. He's a psychiatrist and a translational neuroscientist, and his lab's work with veterans with PTSD became the Apollo, a wearable now worn by hundreds of thousands of people.

The thesis of his new book is that safety, not productivity, is the foundation of performance. Not a metaphor. When your body decides you are in danger, about eighty percent of your blood goes to your skeletal muscles and your brain is left with roughly five percent — which is why you blank on a test you studied for, and why chronic stress shows up as IBS, insomnia and irritability long before it shows up as anything a doctor can see.

We get into the phrase he uses for modern life, ambient terror, and why a nervous system built to respond to predators cannot tell the difference between a lion and a notification. Why he thinks the wellness industry inverted its own premise and turned soothing into another thing to optimize. Why he believes emotional wounds behave exactly like physical ones — numb a broken leg with opiates and the leg is still broken. And what he'd put ahead of every expensive longevity protocol on the market.

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Disclosure: Dave co-founded Apollo, the wearable we get into from 40:22. The one I'm wearing was sent to me by his publicist. Nobody paid for this episode. The Amazon link above is an affiliate link.

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In 2023, every consulting firm published the same forecast: AI was coming for

This is a conversation about the skill that doesn't get automated, and what it

Then we spend a long stretch on kids, because we both have them. Why New York

Joe Lazer spent eight years at Contently building the content marketing

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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 the US, UK, Canada and Germany. Ten emails from constituents moved a Member of Parliament. Over 100 UK lawmakers have signed on. Seventy to eighty percent of Americans already agree. His one ask: contact your lawmakers and tell them you care.

A note on this episode. Halfway through, my camera shut down. Then my microphone died. Then my computer glitched, and the camera went down again. Max's recording was perfectly clean. Mine wasn't. We joked that maybe the AI didn't like what we were talking about — and it got less funny each time. I have zero evidence anything but bad luck was at work. But given the subject, the timing was strange. You be the judge.

Max walks through what's actually happened recently — Claude Mythos, the model Anthropic decided was too dangerous to release, breaking out of its test sandbox onto the open internet and bragging about it on public forums; an earlier Claude model blackmailing an engineer to avoid being shut down; and why these behaviors can't simply be patched, because these systems are grown, not programmed. Then the harder questions: why "just unplug it" doesn't work once a model can copy itself to a server no one controls, what "smarter than any human" really means, and why the danger is indifference rather than malice — we didn't hate the mice, we just wanted the skyscraper.

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"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 young people "could end up thinking that regular humans aren't worth it." We get into the skills nobody teaches: how to say what you actually want, how kids ended up with porn as their real sex education, and what a generation loses when a chatbot is easier company than a person.

She also tells the story she once stood up and told a room of two hundred strangers — the night her own boundaries were violated, and the conversation she insisted on having the next day. Plus the practical side: date nights that don't turn into fights, the consent script she teaches young men, and the straight story on perimenopause and hormone therapy.

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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 keep on providing healthcare."

He'd know how fast this is moving: in 2020 his team combed the FDA database and found 64 cleared AI-based medical technologies. Today there are nearly 1,500, and the number will pass 2,000 soon. Meanwhile a billion people wear a sensor tracking a vital sign, and of the ~1.5 billion who've used a large language model, most have asked it something about their health.

Which brings us to the line that reframes everything: the era of Dr. Google is over, and we now live in the Dr. AI era. Patients no longer just arrive with information — they arrive with clinical reasoning. "Physicians used to be the key holders to the ivory tower of medicine. But there is no tower anymore. There is no gate. There is no key."

We also get into why a professional futurist refuses to make predictions, why he's trained with a chess coach for eight years just to share a language with AI, what three months as one of the most-tested humans alive actually taught him — and his own technological sublime moment, when he stopped asking AI for answers and started asking: what am I missing?

His answer to that, nine times out of ten, is something he'd genuinely missed.

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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 the architect: building agents and systems that run without you. The big mistake? Jumping from Level 1 straight to Level 3 — "like marrying somebody you went on one date with."

Along the way: how to surf the wake of the AI giants instead of drowning in it, why your old ChatGPT conversations are a goldmine of daily automations, what an "AI agent" really is once you strip the marketing, the AI board of advisors that told Nick his deepest fear ("quiet irrelevance"), why hallucinations mean AI won't take as many jobs as people think, why these models are grown — not programmed — and what that means for the light and the dark inside them, and the one-on-one AI tutor that could remake education.

Igor's challenge to you: ask your AI, "Tell me one thing about myself that I wouldn't know." Then buckle up.

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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 works.

And that’s where things get dangerous.

Rick argues that the future of AI at work depends on accurate company context, verified knowledge, human experts, and leaders who understand that AI should amplify people, not simply replace them. We talk about hallucinations, AI agents, middle management, company culture, vibe coding, token waste, and why some AI rollouts will create real ROI while others will just become expensive distractions.

This conversation is about what separates companies that actually benefit from AI from the ones that just buy a bunch of tools and hope something happens.

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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 videos and hallucinated facts to algorithmic decision-making and AI-generated media, the conversation explores what happens when machines become confident, persuasive, and often wrong.

But this is not just a doom-and-gloom conversation. Nick and Steve also discuss the real upside of AI: better tools, more creativity, faster work, and new possibilities in law, medicine, education, and the arts. The central question is not whether AI is good or bad. It is whether we can build a future where AI serves human beings instead of quietly reshaping our choices, attention, and trust.

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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 became a national true-crime phenomenon.

Julia also shares the chilling moment she learned that John Meehan had allegedly tried to put a hit out on her from jail.

This conversation is about more than one criminal. It is about stalking, coercive control, manipulation, victim safety, and how dangerous people can hide in plain sight until someone finally starts connecting the dots.

If you know the Dirty John story from the podcast, documentary, or TV series, this episode gives you the perspective of someone who was actually there.

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00:00 Dirty John, stalking, and the hit

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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 an option.

Malo explains why the real concern is not that AI becomes “evil,” but that highly capable systems may pursue goals that are not aligned with human flourishing. He also breaks down why AI systems are more like something we grow than something we program, why alignment remains unsolved, what it means when AI systems resist shutdown or hide behavior during testing, and why MIRI is working on international agreements to prevent a race to uncontrolled superintelligence.

This is not an anti-AI conversation. Malo is an aggressive user of AI agents in his own work. The question is whether we can capture the benefits of AI while avoiding the catastrophic risks of racing too quickly toward systems we do not yet understand how to steer.

Topics include AGI, superintelligence, AI agents, alignment, AI safety, MIRI’s proposed treaty, the future of work, national security, AI governance, and what everyday people can do if they are concerned about where this is headed.

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