The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future by Keach Hagey is one of the best windows I’ve found into the human being behind OpenAI.

Hagey, a Wall Street Journal reporter, conducted more than 250 interviews with Sam’s family, friends, teachers, mentors, co-founders, colleagues, investors and portfolio companies—and spent hours interviewing Sam himself.

So who is Sam Altman, and how did he get here?

• Why Peter Thiel says we should think of Sam as “more of a messiah figure”

• Why Paul Graham compared 19-year-old Sam to Bill Gates—and later called him “the god of fundraising”

• How a $15,000 investment in Stripe turned into a stake believed to be worth more than $600 million

Then there’s the question of how Sam actually accumulates power.

• The 2015 email where Sam pitched Elon Musk on a “Manhattan Project for AI”

• The early OpenAI power struggle where Elon wanted the CEO title, majority equity and board control—and Sam convinced Greg Brockman to change his mind about putting Elon in charge

• How Sam built enormous power at OpenAI while taking zero equity and no super-voting shares

And the book gets much more uncomfortable when it turns to trust.

• Why one longtime YC partner described Sam as moral and well-intentioned—but also “conflict avoidant,” a poor communicator, and someone who moves so fast he can break trust

• The tensions with Ilya Sutskever and OpenAI’s board that eventually led to Sam’s firing—and extraordinary return just days later

Then there’s the future Sam is trying to build.

• His favorite sci-fi story about humanity being gradually seduced into merging with technology

• His view of Burning Man as a glimpse of what life after AGI could look like

• The “shrine to human progress” inside his San Francisco home, from a 1.5-million-year-old hand axe to an OpenAI robot hand

• And the belief underneath it all: superintelligence may be only “a few thousand days” away

What fascinated me most is the contradiction.

Sam's an optimist with a doomsday-prepper streak.

He's a man with immense power who owns no equity in OpenAI.

And he's a connector who helped assemble OpenAI but repeatedly left some of the people closest to him questioning whether they could trust him.

Thx, 
-Rob Kelly

My guest today is Erik Svilich, the CEO of Encypher, a technology company that lets you prove who created a piece of content — and whether AI made it, changed it, or took it.

The tech is called C2PA -- think of it as a nutrition label for content…

And Anthropic just announced they're using it to watermark everything created on Claude.

Erik authored the text provenance spec for C2PA and co-chairs its task force alongside Google, OpenAI, Adobe, Microsoft, and the BBC.

• We talk about what this Claude watermarking moment means for AI companies who are now required by law to do it — under the EU AI Act and California's AI Transparency Act

• Erik explains how this finally gives publishers and creators visibility into what AI is doing with their content — and gives them a stronger hand in AI licensing deals.

• GEO/AI SEO -- He explains why chasing AI search rankings is a red herring — including how AI answers citing Reddit dropped from 3-5% to half a percent in just two weeks

Like I do with all my guests, we end by talking about AI's impact on our jobs, our families, and the future. 

I especially enjoyed Erik's advice for kids ages 10 to 18 in this new era of AI -- including what a new form of college looks like. 

And his prediction on how soon he thinks we'll see a billion-dollar company run by zero people.

Enjoy! 
Rob Kelly

My guest today is Eric Burgess, CEO of Credtent, a Public Benefit Corporation devoted to getting creators paid by AI.

He's also a professional game designer.

I loved Eric’s critical thinking on things we covered such as:

• Why OpenAI should pay Studio Ghibli $20 million a year for the style he says they ripped off
• Why the new AI SEO should “die in the crib
• What the favorite games of Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk reveal about how they think
• What an AI bubble could mean for M&A—including predictions on who buys OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity
• Whether “the pitchforks” are coming for Big AI
• How Eric runs Credtent with nine humans and 35 AI agents

I also pin Eric down on his prediction for when we reach the "age of abundance".

Please enjoy my conversation with Eric Burgess.

Thx!
Rob Kelly

My guest today is Dan Steiny, who advises content companies on AI deals.

Dan has spent nearly 25 years in licensing, including leading content partnerships at SoundHound AI.

Today, he helps content and data companies figure out which AI companies to approach, what kinds of deals to pursue, and why chasing only OpenAI and Anthropic may be a mistake.

Dan built Nexus, a database that tracks several hundred AI companies. For one book publisher, his process surfaced 49 potential partners, including Pearson, Chegg, Perplexity, Coursera, and several emerging content marketplaces.

We also discuss 

--why training an AI model can be like putting a banana into a smoothie, 

--why RAG deals may give publishers more control, 

--and his belief that [quote] “people make content, content makes AI, and AI shapes people.”

Away from business, Dan's a songwriter, keyboard player, screenwriter, and member of the band Whisky House—and he even plays a little Grateful Dead for us in the intro.

This is Dan’s first podcast appearance -- which I always love. 

Special thanks to Denise Garcia for connecting me with Dan many years ago.

Please enjoy my conversation with Dan Steiny.

Thx!
Rob Kelly

My guest today is CJ Chilvers, who went independent after parting ways with Studio North, a marketing agency.

CJ’s  my first return guest. He was on episode #3, “The AI Content Strategist Big Tech Calls First” where he warned that the AI hype would eventually collide with the need to show real results.

Now, he says some Fortune 50 companies are cutting 90% of their marketing teams—while expecting the people left behind to produce 10 times more with AI. In some cases, “the team trained the AI before they left.”

CJ also explains why moving marketing under sales is the wrong move, and why: 

“The future is gonna belong to the independents.”

His biggest prediction is that OpenAI and Anthropic have become too big to fail. He argues that ads and subscriptions cannot cover the trillions promised for data centers—and that a government bailout is inevitable, in part to protect insider investors. 

He says the public will pay the bill.

CJ warns that this could lead to hyperinflation hitting a population already facing much higher unemployment.

He saw similar warning signs before the 2008 financial crisis, when he bundled mortgages for HSBC, one of the world’s largest banks.

But he is not an AI doomer. We end with where AI is already working—like radiology, where it detect tumors that human doctors may miss.

Please enjoy my conversation with CJ Chilvers.

Thx!
Rob Kelly

My guest today is Noah Levin. After years of suffering from what he calls quote “founder envy,” he finally took the plunge to become a founder.

In less than 5 months of using AI, he quit his full-time job and launched his business, Serious People. 

He's already worked with 10 clients, and his business is less than a year old

He says AI finally gave him the confidence to take the leap.

He’s not a programmer. He describes himself as deeply risk averse. And he’s doing it all as a husband and father to a two-year-old.

Even more surprising, he says anyone can do it, and he shares the handful of simple steps he took to make it happen.

Make sure to listen for these core concepts:

• How the math of AI changes everything about starting a new business.

• How he used AI as his career coach to get him going.

• His $1 Challenge for finding his first customer—and solving the problem of convincing his wife.

• The quote “steel thread” milestone he learned at Amazon.

• Why you should “dogfood” everything.
• And how he used a combination of a Beastie Boys video and a line from Succession to create his brand.

Most importantly, you can hear the joy in his voice. Noah is having more fun than at any other point in his career. I wish this for all humans.

It’s a feel-good story for AI—and for anyone who finally wants to take the plunge and become a founder.

Special thanks to Marty Pesis for introducing Noah to me—you might remember Marty from Episode 17, "This AI Company Has Paid Out 20 mi. dollars to Content Owners"

Now please enjoy my conversation with Noah Levin.

Thx,
 Rob Kelly

In this episode, I profile Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind.

Demis's mission is to build AGI—artificial general intelligence—and use it to solve science's biggest mysteries. I do so through what I believe is the most comprehensive biography of him: The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby.

Mallaby spent 30 hours interviewing Demis and had more than 100 conversations with the people who know him best.

In this episode you'll learn:

•  How a chess prodigy became one of the architects of modern AI. 
•  The inside stories involving Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Peter Thiel, Mustafa Suleyman, and others who shaped the AI race. 
•  Why Hassabis walked away from money multiple times to pursue science instead. 
•  How DeepMind went from mastering Atari games to creating AlphaGo and AlphaFold. 
•  Why Hassabis is motivated differently than Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Dario Amodei. 
•  How Google produced many of the breakthroughs behind today's AI revolution—yet still lost the consumer AI race to ChatGPT.

This episode is part of a series profiling the AI titans.

Enjoy!
Rob Kelly

My guest today is David Perlman.

David has a PhD in Neuroscience and Meditation, and he’s an expert in misinformation.

He’s got an unusual background observing leaders up close — from the Dalai Lama to Jack Dorsey. 

And it was at Twitter, where David worked as a User Research Data Scientist, that he was shown the door after a controversial interview with Vice Media.

He shares that story.

His work has appeared in nine journals including The American Journal of Psychiatry, NeuroImage, and The Cyber Defense Review.

We talk about David’s contrarian view on Anthropic’s closely guarded Mythos model, what AI could mean for propaganda, misinformation, and future elections.

And why he thinks many people are wrong about climate change.

Special thanks to Jennifer Elliott for connecting me with David — you might remember Jennifer from Episode 10 (The Data Center Expert's Ride or Die Plan for When AI Turns.

Enjoy!

Thx, 
Rob Kelly

Marty Pesis is co-founder and CEO of Troveo.

Troveo helps content and data owners license their video, audio, and text to top AI models like OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic – and AI Unicorn startups too..

Marty says he may have the largest AI data corpus in the space (it includes 8M hours of video, 4m+ hours of audio, and billions of words of text).

We open the interview with Marty’s very first AI data deal, a request so strange I had to stop him and make sure I was hearing it right.

We get into how Tesla cars are really training machines on wheels.

We talk about the future of data collection. Picture factories with workers wearing GoPros, wrist cameras, shoulder cameras, sensor gloves, and narrating what they’re doing so robots can learn.

We cover the pricing of of data including what type of content AI Models will pay $1,000 per hour for.

And the one library of content he’d want if he could have any.

He also shares what  learned from Troveo investor Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, and MrBeast, who bought Marty’s last company.

And we end, as usual, on AI and families, including Marty’s view that because of AI, college is not even on his radar right now for his young kids.

Thx!
-Rob

Chris Keevil is co-founder and CEO of Versos AI, a company helping AI labs find the needles-in-the-haystack data they need to train their models.

Chris works at the center of a new market. It’s where the frontier AI models are paying for video most of us would never think to value: 10,000 hours of hands tying shoes, ice melting,, micro-dramas from Asia and a coffee shop in China. AI wants it all. 

We talk about why some AI training clips sell for 30 cents a minute while others go for a dollar per second… and why some AI companies are now doing “whole corpus deals” to buy entire content libraries in bulk.

Chris has a birds-eye view of this world being a partner to content companies such as CuriosityStream (which was profiled in Episode #1 "The CEO Quietly Licensing 2M+ Hours of Content to AI Giants"

Chris also explains why the demand for training data will “never run dry” as AI moves from understanding words to understanding the physical world — motion, gravity, culture, behavior, and eventually even industrial systems like oil refineries and hydroelectric dams.

We also discuss some goldmines of AI data such as security camera archives, niche media libraries, and even the videos sitting on your phone.

And finally, Chris shares why he’s a cautious optimist on AI, despite believing it could massively reshape jobs, business, and society.

Please enjoy my conversation with Chris Keevil.

Thx!
-Rob