The Nick Standlea Show

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 Science of Explanation and the Human Drive to Understand, is about one of the most fundamental features of the human mind: our need to make sense of the world.

Tania raises a concern worth sitting with. AI makes it easier than ever to satisfy our curiosity, and that effortless satisfaction can come at the expense of real learning. You fall down a rabbit hole, you enjoy every minute of it, and two hours later you cannot say what you learned.

We get into why productive struggle is essential to learning, how parents can encourage deeper thinking in their kids, why we overestimate what we know, why children ask "why" endlessly, why teenagers stop telling their parents what's happening in their lives, how social media shapes what we're curious about, and why even the most confident explanation can be badly wrong.

And yes, we discuss the provocative 1998 paper titled Explanation as Orgasm, and what it reveals about why finding an answer feels so good.

The central question: when AI can provide every answer, how do we make sure we're still learning?

TIMESTAMPS

FROM THIS EPISODE

🔗 Support This Podcast by Checking Out Our Sponsors:

Connect with The Nick Standlea Show:

As an Amazon Associate, The Nick Standlea Show earns from qualifying purchases.

Ask questions. Don't accept the status quo. Be curious.

#TaniaLombrozo #WhyWeAskWhy #Learning #CognitiveScience #ArtificialIntelligence #Parenting #Podcast

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 result reorders what most businesses are doing about AI visibility.

64% of AI citations came from earned media — editorial coverage, not your own website. And 34% came from sites with a domain authority under 40: the mom-and-pop blogs, the page-seven results, the outlets no PR agency puts on a media list. A third of what AI engines cite is sitting wide open, and almost nobody is competing for it.

He also has the number nobody wants to hear: 86% of brands aren't mentioned for the prompts and queries they most want to be mentioned for. Most brands are invisible.

The other half of this is how not to get filtered out. Brett runs every pitch entering HARO through an AI detector. 21% are 100% AI-generated. On the other side, 35% of journalists one-click opt out of anything AI-written. His line: dictate your real experience and let a model polish it and that's AI-assisted, which is fine. Have the model read the queries and submit for you and that's spam. A journalist's inbox, he says, is the best-trained AI detector there is.

Also in here: how he bought HARO after it was switched off, and had it live again 22 days later.

TIMESTAMPS

FROM THIS EPISODE

🔗 Support This Podcast by Checking Out Our Sponsors:

Connect with The Nick Standlea Show:

#AIvisibility #GEO #AIsearch #PublicRelations #HARO #Podcast

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.

📕 A Simple Guide to Being Alive: https://asimpleguidetobeingalive.com

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.

TIMESTAMPS:

🔗 Support This Podcast by Checking Out Our Sponsors:

Zapier, build AI Agents and Automate Workflows: https://bit.ly/4j34Cof

High School Reach — see any high school's real college outcomes: https://highschoolreach.com/yt

Connect with The Nick Standlea Show:

Nick's Socials:

Ask questions,

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

📕 Super Skill — the book: https://joelazer.com/superskill

TIMESTAMPS:

SPONSORS:

PODCAST INFO:

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

Nick's Socials:

Ask questions,

#podcast #thenickstandleashow #becurious #AI #storytelling #futureofwork

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.

TIMESTAMPS:

CONTROL AI:

MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE:

FURTHER READING:

SPONSORS:

PODCAST INFO:

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Nick's Socials:

Ask questions,

#AI #superintelligence #AIsafety #ControlAI #podcast #thenickstandleashow #becurious

"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.

🎥 Watch the full conversation: https://youtu.be/atMSXCb_HK8

DR. JENN:

VISIT OUR SPONSORS:

Zapier:

Reach:

Subscribe for more conversations on intimacy, AI, and what it costs us to stop talking to each other.

#podcast #intimacy #relationships #AI #GenZ

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.

TIMESTAMPS:

EPISODE LINKS:

Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:

Zapier — build your own AI agent with the ChatGPT integration:

Reach — see any college's real admissions odds for your student's GPA and test score, free:

PODCAST INFO:

SUPPORT & CONNECT:

Ask questions. Don't accept the status quo. Be curious.

#AI #MedicalFuturist #BertalanMesko #HealthTech #AIinMedicine #Longevity #NickStandleaShow

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.

EPISODE LINKS:

Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:

Granola — the AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings:

Zapier — build your own AI agent with the ChatGPT integration:

PODCAST INFO:

SUPPORT & CONNECT:

Chapters: 

Ask questions. Don't accept the status quo. Be curious.

#AI #IgorPogany #AIAdvantage #ChatGPT #Claude #AIAgents #NickStandleaShow

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.

Learn more about Guru: https://www.getguru.com

Visit Our Sponsors: 

Granola: 

Zapier: 

#AI #Business #FutureOfWork #Leadership #Guru

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.

Topics include:

AI-generated video and the future of fake media

This is a conversation about truth, technology, and what it means to stay human in the age of artificial intelligence.

Subscribe for more conversations on AI, psychology, education, culture, and the future of human potential.

Visit Our Sponsors: 

Granola: 

Zapier: 

Learn more about Steve Rosenbaum:

The Future of Truth:

Steve on Medium:

Steve on LinkedIn:

Sustainable Media Center: