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