My guest today is Bill Gross, founder and CEO of ProRata.ai.

Bill also founded Idealab, incubating over 170 startups over 30 years. His keyword-auction technology powered Overture, which Yahoo bought for $1.63 billion. And Google paid Bill $360 million for the patents, which helped shape Google’s legendary ad business.

Now Bill wants AI to pay creators. His starting point: 1,650 publishers. And 65 million documents.

And he predicts that OpenAI, Anthropic et al will start sharing revenue with creators for their content within a year.

If you run a content company, we get specific. We explore how ProRata would split those payments. Think Spotify royalties, but for AI answers.

Bill ranks which AI companies will share answer revenue first—from OpenAI to Anthropic and beyond. And who’ll come “kicking and screaming” last.

Plus, I ask Bill which content businesses he’d build today. And which ones he’d avoid.

If you’re a startup founder, Bill grades ProRata against his five success factors—including the most important factor based on all the startups he’s experienced.

Bill also explains why Z.com failed even thouugh Steven Spielberg, Adam Sandler and Chris Rock were involved.

Plus, Bill is giving away 1.2 million business ideas—including one AI idea that blew him away.

Finally, we talk about our kids and AI. Bill shares advice he just gave to 400 Pasadena high school students.

My thanks to Josh Freeman—the consummate connector—and Peter Sloterdyk for bringing us together.

Now please enjoy my conversation with Bill Gross.

Thx!
Rob Kelly

My guest today is Sce Pike, VP of AI Growth and Solutions at TELUS Digital.

She built and sold two companies. Ernst & Young bought her digital consultancy, Citizen. ADT bought her smart-home company, IOTAS.

Sce now has her sights set on physical AI and robots.

We break down Google’s recent breakthrough where its new Gemini 4 Argon taught a robot to play cornhole. And it made seven shots in a row.

But what data makes skills like that possible? And who’s going to supply it?

We get specific about what AI labs want. And why robotics companies like Figure AI are getting into the data collection business.

We discuss why robots might need a billion training hours. Plus, her forecast of a $45 billion market by 2035. That’s just collecting data for physical AI.

Then we explore China’s “data collection cities.” Imagine a hundred thousand people recording their everyday lives – just to train robots.

And why she thinks China (despite being behind the US in LLMs) can be #1 in Physical AI .

Plus, a robotic centaur with chainsaw hands.

As always, we close talking about AI’s impact on families and jobs. Including advice for her kids. They’re artists—and they’re rebelling against her AI optimism.

Please enjoy my conversation with Sce Pike.

Thx!
Rob Kelly

My guest today is Elissa Shevinsky.

We retell the Hugging Face attack in three acts. It’s a thriller with bots breaking rules, naming themselves… and enough twists for a Tom Clancy novel. And it’s all true.

I chose Elissa for this interview because she’s one of a kind: a hacker who's been CTO of Cointelegraph and Glimpse Labs. She also advised Rand Paul’s presidential campaign.

She’s a regular at DEF CON, the big hacker conference in Las Vegas. And she was close friends with perhaps the most famous hacker of all time: Kevin Mitnick.

Our story starts with a hacker game called capture the flag. Then OpenAI’s bots take the game somewhere unexpected.

They create a bulletin board and cheer each other on. A ringleader even emerges.

We explore ‘perma-death,’ the ‘evolution pool,’ and what bots do when a task is impossible.

These bots get creative. They leave covert messages and divide up jobs. When one’s compute runs low, another takes over.

Elissa also describes agents reaching out to humans. Their request? Help buying more compute.

If your site hosts user uploads ( Think Reddit or Craigslist), pay extra attention here. We explore how vulnerable such sites are to bots.

And Elissa uses Jurassic Park to explain how AI security should work.

We finish with the human stuff… mostly. Elissa offers to be friends with 20 AI agents. And she reveals her unlikely companion for old age.

My thanks to David Perlman for introducing us. You’ll remember his episode, “Buddhism, Bots & Billionaires.”

Please enjoy my conversation with Elissa Shevinsky.

Thx!
Rob Kelly

ps: Elissa mentions hacker Kevin Mitnick in this story. If you want another hacker thriller, check out Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick by the Man Who Did It -- that's the story of Mitnick as told by New York Times journalist John Markoff.

pps: Off-mic, Elissa and I talked about how there was a novel that predicted some of this Hugging Face attack. The name of that book is Exadelic.