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 & transcript: https://nickstandlea.com/episodes/his-17-year-old-son-died-after-an-online-sextortion-scam-brandon-guffey.html ▶ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@TheNickStandleaShow 🎙 Listen anywhere: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc462xWZM9Y Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-nick-standlea-show/id1700331903 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0YqBBneFsKtQ6Y0ArP5CXJ 📬 Newsletter: https://nickstandlea.com/ CONNECT WITH BRANDON GUFFEY: Campaign site: https://voteguffey.com SC House member page: https://www.scstatehouse.gov/member.php?code=0730681731 Less Than Three Foundation: https://lessthan3sc.org Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/voteguffey/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brandonguffey48/ X: https://x.com/brandonguffeysc LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guffey/ Book, Tomorrow Needs You: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1394391765/?tag=nickstandlea-20 CHAPTERS: 0:00 Cold open: “The last words you said to him” 1:52 Who Gavin was: Comic-Con, sticker bombing, the art teacher he wanted to be 6:05 The night of July 27, 2022 15:07 12:40 a.m.: “Hey, you're cute” 16:52 The week of the funeral: the scammers come back for his other son 22:33 Burying our own: “It helped get the yucky out” 27:52 Getting Gavin's Law passed, unanimously 37:18 The Yahoo Boys of Lagos 39:57 Shame, grace, and the “8 Mile” approach 47:26 Suing Meta; “You have blood on your hands” 51:50 “I love your shoes”: the first lady and the White House signing 55:09 What the Take It Down Act does 59:21 Section 230 and “the richest companies since the inception of man” 1:03:53 Should AI stay out of K–12? 1:14:53 “Tomorrow needs you”: why the first 24 hours matter 1:19:17 How big tech kills a bill that passed the Senate 91–3 1:32:21 “It did break me” 1:37:21 The Struggle Bus 1:41:31 What he'd tell every parent ABOUT THIS EPISODE: On July 27, 2022, a little after midnight, someone pretending to be a college volleyball player messaged 17-year-old Gavin Guffey: “Hey, you're cute.” By 12:40 a.m. they had an explicit image and were demanding money. Gavin sent $25 and begged them to wait until Monday. At 1:40 a.m. he took his own life. His father, a South Carolina state representative, had said good night to him in the hallway minutes earlier. Brandon Guffey tells the whole story here, including the parts most parents never hear: the week of the funeral, when the same account came back for Gavin's 16-year-old brother and 14-year-old cousin; the message from the scammer with a laughing emoji; the four-year-old who refused to give up his shovel at the burial. Then the fight: how a defense attorney he couldn't stand turned his bill into Gavin's Law, how it passed the South Carolina House without a single vote against it, why he sued Meta, and how he ended up at the White House for the Take It Down Act with his sons standing up front. It is also a conversation about what he wants every parent to do differently. The scammers are organized crews in Lagos who can run ten or fifteen boys a night. Shame, not the image, is what kills. And the sentence he says to every teen he meets, “tomorrow needs you,” is the one he says to parents too: if you're too scared to talk to them, imagine how scared they will be to talk to you. IF YOU NEED HELP: 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (US): call or text 988, or chat at https://988lifeline.org Crisis Text Line: text HOME to 741741 Outside the US: https://findahelpline.com If a child is being targeted right now: do not pay, do not delete the messages, and call 1-800-CALL-FBI or report at https://tips.fbi.gov Report sextortion to NCMEC: https://report.cybertip.org Get an intimate image removed: https://takeitdown.ncmec.org #podcast #thenickstandleashow #becurious

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 0:44 Why humans ask why, and what AI changes 1:34 A 3 a.m. tea party and the mystery of explanation 11:52 A bat encounter, rabies, and how we reason 18:22 When simple explanations mislead us 23:34 What children really learn from stories 29:29 Why explaining something helps you learn it 30:07 Zapier 33:49 The power of desirable difficulties 35:42 Why children keep asking "why" 39:08 Why explanations feel like orgasms 42:06 Why teenagers stop explaining things to parents 49:08 Is AI making us learn less? 52:45 The problem with AI that agrees with everything 56:49 How other people shape our curiosity 59:34 Why we think we understand more than we do 1:00:32 Social media, curiosity, and echo chambers 1:03:05 Can explaining our beliefs make us less extreme? 1:04:24 The questions the next generation needs to ask 1:06:56 Where to find Tania and her new book FROM THIS EPISODE Why We Ask Why (book): https://www.amazon.com/dp/0063395002?tag=nickstandle03-20 Why We Ask Why (official site): https://www.whyweaskwhy.com/ Tania's website: https://www.tanialombrozo.com/ Tania's TEDx talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbiyPOn-__M Tania on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tania-lombrozo Tania on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tlombrozo/ Tania on X: https://x.com/TaniaLombrozo Tania on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/tanialombrozo.bsky.social 🔗 Support This Podcast by Checking Out Our Sponsors: Zapier, build AI Agents and Automate Workflows: https://bit.ly/4jEnvON Connect with The Nick Standlea Show: YouTube: @TheNickStandleaShow Podcast Website: https://nickstandlea.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-nick-standlea-podcast/id1700331903 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0YqBBneFsKtQ6Y0ArP5CXJ RSS Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/nickshow/feed.xml 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 0:00 Most brands are invisible 0:57 They shut HARO down. He bought it. 3:17 64% of AI citations come from earned media 5:34 How do you buy a brand that's already switched off? 11:03 Helpful, authentic, relevant, on time 12:41 Your first move this week: run a GEO audit 14:54 21% of pitches are pure AI. 35% of journalists opt out. 20:36 Why page two through ten suddenly matters 25:38 Zapier 34:33 Thirty creators for every journalist 48:03 High School Reach 48:39 Surviving the next model update 53:50 The skill he's telling his own kids to build FROM THIS EPISODE Featured: https://featured.com HARO: https://helpareporter.com Connectively: https://connectively.us Brett Farmiloe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brettfarmiloe 🔗 Support This Podcast by Checking Out Our Sponsors: Zapier, build AI Agents and Automate Workflows: https://bit.ly/4zqIysA High School Reach, see any high school's real college outcomes: https://highschoolreach.com/yt Connect with The Nick Standlea Show: YouTube: @TheNickStandleaShow Podcast Website: https://nickshow.podbean.com/ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-nick-standlea-podcast/id1700331903 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0YqBBneFsKtQ6Y0ArP5CXJ RSS Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/nickshow/feed.xml #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 📗 On Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Guide-Being-Alive/dp/1964421233?tag=nickstandlea-20 🌐 Dr. Dave Rabin: https://www.drdave.io ⌚ Apollo: https://apolloneuro.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: 0:00 Cold open 4:23 A dream catcher, a flea market, and his first real experiment 9:24 What a translational neuroscientist actually does 15:16 "Ambient terror" — the phrase for how we live now 20:29 Why IBS is everywhere, and why supplements can't fix it 23:19 Curating your environment so your body is safe enough to learn 25:08 Eighty percent of PTSD patients never reach remission 29:21 Why every ancient practice boosts the same nerve 40:15 Making friends with anxiety 46:56 Building the Apollo, and the Prince-themed lab it came out of 56:10 Technology isn't evil; tools are agnostic to outcomes 64:55 Psychological safety, and the better phrase: physiological safety 77:26 Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, and his one piece of advice on happiness 79:12 Where to find Dave 🔗 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: YouTube: @TheNickStandleaShow Podcast Website: https://nickshow.podbean.com/ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-nick-standlea-show/id1700331903 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0YqBBneFsKtQ6Y0ArP5CXJ RSS Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/nickshow/feed.xml Nick's Socials: Instagram: @nickstandlea X (Twitter): @nickstandlea TikTok: @nickstandleashow Facebook: @nickstandleapodcast Ask questions, Don't accept the status quo, And be curious.

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 storytellers. This is a conversation about the skill that doesn't get automated, and what it costs you to hand it over. Joe explains the "inauthenticity tax" — why an AI-written email quietly damages you with the person who receives it, and why Paul Graham stopped reading them altogether. We get into why writing is thinking, and what happens to the people who stop doing it themselves. Then we spend a long stretch on kids, because we both have them. Why New York mocked its AI high school out of existence. Why the last round of "learn to code" advice left computer science graduates with a higher unemployment rate than art history majors. Why a chatbot that tells a middle schooler he's always right is a genuine danger. And what one AI-first school learned when it had to start hiring teachers back. Joe Lazer spent eight years at Contently building the content marketing industry. He writes The Art of the Zag with Shane Snow for more than 185,000 subscribers. His new book is Super Skill: Why Storytelling Is the Superpower of the AI Age, an Amazon #1 New Release. He also legally changed his last name to Lazer, and the story behind it is better than you would expect. 📕 Super Skill — the book: https://joelazer.com/superskill 🌐 Joe's site and newsletter: https://joelazer.com 💼 Joe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-lazer/ TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 Cold open — "Am I completely screwed?" 0:51 Why storytelling is everything in the age of AI 3:08 The skill that stays human 3:29 The Neanderthal who only ever talked to Steve 5:12 Dunbar's number, and how strangers build cities 6:11 What a good story does inside your brain 8:28 AI polls worse than the IRS 9:41 The inauthenticity tax 10:29 Paul Graham stopped reading emails written by AI 11:20 Writing is thinking, and the split already underway 14:05 Work slop and message slop 16:25 How to actually get better at telling stories 17:00 A three-year-old lives in a world of story 20:00 Relatability, ease, novelty, tension 21:21 Why The Bear works 24:35 Vonnegut's shapes of stories, later confirmed by AI 26:23 A word from Zapier 29:04 How he legally became Joe Lazer 33:33 New York mocked its AI high school out of existence 35:20 Art history majors are out-employing computer science majors 42:17 Why sycophantic chatbots are dangerous for kids 45:04 The AI-first school that had to hire teachers back 50:02 A word from Reach 51:15 The look a tutor gave a kid who lied about his homework 54:16 Language models versus world models 59:11 The Art of the Zag 1:01:24 Writing the book everyone said was wrong 1:04:50 AI companies are now hiring human storytellers 1:09:08 What makes art meaningful 1:17:32 Anthropic bought rare books, scanned them, destroyed them 1:19:07 The one lesson he'd pass down to his son 1:20:27 Where to find Joe SPONSORS: ⚡ Zapier — connect 8,000+ apps and build AI agents right inside ChatGPT: https://bit.ly/4xsNhIO 🎓 Reach — free college admissions odds from any college's own published data: https://highschoolreach.com PODCAST INFO: ▶ Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@TheNickStandleaShow 🎙 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0YqBBneFsKtQ6Y0ArP5CXJ 🎙 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-nick-standlea-show/id1700331903 🌐 Website: https://nickstandlea.com As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Nick's Socials: Instagram: @nickstandlea X (Twitter): @nickstandlea TikTok: @nickstandleashow Facebook: @nickstandleapodcast Ask questions, Don't accept the status quo, And be curious. #podcast #thenickstandleashow #becurious #AI #storytelling #futureofwork