Guides
Things Nick built on camera, written out
Each guide is a companion to one video: the short answer, the steps, the questions people ask, and the moments to jump to.
Where do AI assistants get the answers they cite?Brett Farmiloe runs HARO, Connectively and Featured, and measured 22,000 AI citations across 405 audits. 64% came from earned media rather than a brand's own website, and 34% came from sites with a domain authority under 40.
Why do kids blank on tests they studied for?A psychiatrist and neuroscientist explains the physiology: under a perceived threat, about 80% of blood flow goes to skeletal muscle and roughly 5% is left for the brain. The material is still there. The retrieval system is offline.
How do you route customer email automatically? A five-step build with Jev and ZapierA keyword filter flags a furniture ad and misses the client who is locked out. Jev is a model that never writes text — it reads a message and returns a decision with a confidence score. Here is the five-step build.
Is AI replacing writers? What actually happened, three years inIn 2023 the big consulting firms forecast that AI would come for writers first. Joe Lazer bet the other way and wrote the book. Three years later he points to job listings for storytellers more than doubling.
Is superintelligent AI inevitable, or can it still be stopped?No. Max Winga of Control AI argues superintelligence is a choice a few companies are making, and that governments have the leverage to stop it.
Will AI replace your doctor? What a medical futurist actually saysNo. Dr. Bertalan Meskó says AI is covering a global shortage of health workers, and it moves your doctor from gatekeeper to guide.
Why is my AI bill exploding, and which steps actually need a model? A 6-step testBreak your workflow into steps and mark which ones need judgment. In Nick's example, one of six did. Zapier modeled 24 workflows: 71% average savings.
Can a treaty actually stop the race to superintelligence?MIRI CEO Malo Bourgon says yes: a US and China led agreement capping training compute, monitoring AI chips, and buying time for alignment work.
Should an AI workflow use more than one model? How to stay model-agnostic with ZapierYes. Build the workflow so the model can be swapped, and keep your data, tools, approvals, and business rules outside any one AI company.
How do you get your business recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude?You get recommended by being cited: answer your customers' real questions in depth on your own site, then show up on YouTube, Reddit, and review sites.
Does posting every day on social media actually work?Fantasy author T.D. Orel posted every day for 14 months and averaged about 12 likes a video. Then he made his content narrower instead of broader, and one video about a single scene in a 1,200-page novel got around 200,000 views.
Why does billing by the hour stop working, and what do you charge instead?Hourly billing prices you as a commodity. Alan Weiss prices the client's outcome instead: agree on objectives, metrics, and value before any number.
How do I build an AI board of advisors that tells me the truth about my work?Wire five AI advisor personas to your real transcripts and performance data, tell them to disagree with you, then ask the questions you avoid.
What skills should kids build that AI can't replace?Ryan Kiick, CEO of Revolution Prep, draws the line between offloading a skill you already own and never acquiring it in the first place, and names what he thinks holds up: real-time communication, executive functioning, and the habit of learning itself.
Why do I care so much what people think?Dr. Michael Gervais, the performance psychologist who spent about eight seasons with the Seattle Seahawks, has a name for this: FOPO, the fear of other people’s opinions. He explains what is actually at stake when it fires, and why it is identity rather than performance.
Will AI replace your job? What an AI risk researcher says is actually comingAI labs openly aim to automate all human labor, but Nate Soares argues the real danger isn't lost jobs, it's minds nobody knows how to control.
Can we keep control of AI? An Oxford neuroscientist answersProbably, but only if people keep the value calls: Christopher Summerfield says the real AI risk is a slow loss of control, not extinction.
How do I build an AI agent that does real work for me, without writing code?Nick built a working research agent in Zapier Copilot from one plain-English prompt: it finds five guests every Monday and drafts the outreach emails.
Is the 10,000 hour rule real, and what actually builds mastery?No. 10,000 hours was a number Malcolm Gladwell chose, not a finding. Dr. Alex Auerbach explains what actually separates good from great.
How ready are we for the next pandemic?Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm says we are not ready, and that the science is further along than the funding or the leadership.
Who owns the AI economy, and why does that decide who wins and loses?Economist Justin Wolfers says AI is an ownership problem: the same tool frees the worker who owns it and impoverishes the worker whose boss owns it.
What does college become in the age of AI, according to Howard Gardner?Gardner says campuses turn into lifelong learning centers: a small floor of reading, writing, math and coding, then coaching toward what you care about.
How do you get a perfect SAT score?Dr. Shaan Patel barely got above average on his first SAT, then studied across three years of high school and scored a perfect SAT in October of his senior year. He walks Nick Standlea through what that actually took, and what he tells students now.
Does trauma define you? Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman on the victim mindsetKaufman says being victimized is real and separate from a victim mindset, and that you still get a say in what happens next.
Why do good things stop feeling good?A cognitive neuroscientist explains habituation: the brain's shrinking response to anything that repeats or stays constant. Dr. Tali Sharot on why you stop smelling your own perfume, why vacation happiness peaks at 43 hours, and what brings the feeling back.
How do you calm nerves before a big game or performance?Nerves and excitement feel close to the same in the body, so the lever is interpretation rather than calming down. Micha Shaw, a mindfulness coach who won the US Olympic Trials in open water swimming, explains the shift and the one-minute daily practice underneath it.
How does FC Barcelona's La Masia academy actually develop players?La Masia develops players by making daily improvement the target, coaching decisions before skills, and letting young players struggle on purpose.
How much of your life will you spend looking at a screen?Dino Ambrosi's lifetime-time math: the average American 18-year-old has about 334 months of free time left and is on pace to spend 312 of them on non-productive screen time. Where the number comes from, and what he asks students to do about it.
How do you know if you're playing the wrong game?Seth Godin gives two plain tests for whether a game is worth playing: skip any game the other side only wins if you lose, and spend your hours where there is abundance rather than a crowd. From his conversation with Nick Standlea about This Is Strategy.
What is flow state, and how do you get into it?Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi named flow and spent a career measuring it across more than 8,000 interviews. This is his own account: the seven conditions, why your sense of self disappears, and the one rule that predicts when you will be in flow.
What are the modern etiquette rules that actually matter?Etiquette expert Myka Meier says modern etiquette is social and emotional intelligence: put people at ease, read the room, match the environment.
Does the brain create consciousness? Donald Hoffman says it doesn'tDonald Hoffman argues the brain doesn't create consciousness. He says consciousness is fundamental and the brain is just part of the interface.