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 Modfels 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

Mustafa Suleyman helped build DeepMind, sold to Google, licensed to Microsoft for a billion—and now he’s warning us what’s coming next.

This is based on the The Coming Wave biography (co-authored with Michael Bhaskar) and is a global crash course in AI, biology, and the power games driving the next era of human history.

10-Second Takeaways

• China’s AI Surge: AlphaGo’s victory was China’s “Sputnik moment,” triggering a full-blown national push to lead in AI.
• Job Disruption Is Coming: AI won’t just help us—it will replace many white-collar jobs faster than past tech waves.
• AI + Biology = Superwave: Two powerful tech trends—AI and synthetic biology—are colliding, accelerating change even faster.
• Regulation Is Critical: We need safety rules for AI like we have for aviation and laser weapons—before it’s too late.
• Tech = Power: Nations treat innovation as a race. Whoever leads in AI and bio will shape the global balance of power.

This is part of my ongoing series profiling the leaders shaping the AI era through their biographies, decisions, and ideas.

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

Thx!

-Rob

Nic Baird is the co-founder and CEO of Koah Labs -- they are building what Tom Tunguz of Theory Ventures calls the AdSense for AI.

Nic breaks down:

• AI token economics in plain English: why serving an AI user can cost 100 times more than serving a web user.That’s why he thinks most AI apps cannot reach global scale on subscriptions alone.

• Ads are coming to AI. The question is whether they’ll be useful—or terrible? Nic says the best AI ads won’t look like pop-ups, banners, or pre-rolls. They’ll be part of the answer.

• Where people will first see these ads: ChatGPT, Copilot, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and the agents and apps outside the frontier models.

• Whether Claude can really stay ad-free forever?

• We get into privacy too. How do you use AI in ads without reading people’s most personal chats and creeping them out.

And Koah's fundraising story is wild. Tom Tunguz reached out before Koah even had a product And after passing on 150 adtech companies he made his Series A decision in 24 hours.

Nic is also an 8-time national sailing champion and his dad won the America’s Cup and is in the sailing hall of fame. We talk about Nic's scariest sailing moments and how he got to meet Larry Ellison on the world’s biggest private superyacht.

Special thanks to Tom at Theory Ventures for putting Koah on my radar.

Please enjoy my conversation with Nic Baird.

Thx!
Rob

Andy Beach was the CTO of AI for Microsoft in their Media and Entertainment business.

He now consults AI startups and is a VC investor at Hallstone, a firm investing in media and tech.

Most people think AI'll be won by the biggest models—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini. Andy says that’s wrong. The real winners will be the apps built on top.

We talk about what that looks like. Think YouTube and TikTok—they didn’t invent video, they changed how we consume it.

Andy believes AI apps will do the same thing. Not just recommending what to watch, but building your whole day across Netflix, YouTube, and more.

Andy points to companies like Midjourney, Runway, and ElevenLabs. They started as models—but had to become full apps to win.

We also get into the “Mac vs PC” style battle between OpenAI and Anthropic. And why Apple using Gemini is smarter than building its own LLM.

We cover sports including Andy's work on AI with the NBA and Motocross.You'll be amazed at the fan experience AI is gonna allow us.

We also go deep on where the money is going. AI training and licensing could get even bigger

Andy also shares lessons from inside Microsoft. Why they never tried to become a media company like Google.

Finally, we talk about who wins first. It’s not big studios. It’s independent creators. Small teams using AI to make better content, faster.

Special thanks to Peter Csathy for putting Andy on my radar. Peter did a great interview of Andy back in early 2025

Now Please enjoy my conversation with Andy Beach.

Thx!
-Rob

Chris Hutchins is host of the All the Hacks podcast — heard by over a million listeners, with 10 million+ downloads. AI describes Chris as “Tim Ferriss meets Mr. Beast with a spreadsheet.”

He’s also founded and sold two companies — one to Google and the other to Wealthfront.

In our conversation, Chris explains why AI could replace a huge number of podcasts — and which ones actually survive and why.

He shares what he’s learning from a current test in which for the past 2 weeks he’s recorded everything he says (and I mean everything including conversations with his wife) .

He shares how that experiment is changing how he thinks about the new way content will be created and consumed.

He lays out a future where you don’t use apps at all — just one AI interface.

He also breaks down a test where he used AI to read his podcast ads — and even his wife couldn't tell which was her husband and which was AI

He explains why he stopped using OpenClaw, even though it blew him away… and how his use of LLMs has completely flipped in the past year.

Special thanks to Jay Clouse for connecting Chris and me through his amazing Creator Science Lab, including an event in Boise where Chris and I first sat down together.

Speaking of that, this episode has a bonus second part. The first part you’re about to hear is purely on AI.

But then at the end, I’ve included a separate, mostly uncut conversation we recorded last year where I asked Chris tactical questions I had myself on how to build a great podcast –I hadn’t yet launched mine.

That bonus includes how he thinks about audio vs. video, when to start selling ads, how he picks which topics to work on, and how he prepared for his appearance on the Tim Ferriss show

Please enjoy my conversation, parts 1 and 2, with Chris Hutchins.

Thx, Rob Kelly