I'm John Batchel with Keech Hage, the author of the new book The Optimist, Sam Altman, Open AI, and the Race to Invent the Future.

Our protagonist, our hero, Sam Altman's at Stanford University, and it's a leafy campus in California's weather,

and if you know what that is, you'll smile.

However, right then, at that moment, it is just beginning with the translation of Stanford

from a school known as the West Coast Ivy League into a school associated with Silicon Valley,

which is inventing itself all around Stanford.

Sand Hill Road, which was famous as a location of the early venture capital funds,

is in walking distance from the campus, along with all the fine shops changing all the time.

It's a beautiful neighborhood

where all the founders of the social media that you now use routinely, are once walked and

talked. And one of the joys of Keatsch's book for me is that I was there from 2003 every year

at the Hoover Institution, not knowing

what was going on and those young people talking over there behind the railing for breakfast

in the morning. Well, Keech has some of it. And one of it was Sam Altman inventing himself.

And by inventing himself, he had an idea with his friends that he met at Stanford.

The original idea was something about, this is before the iPhone.

There was a clamshell phone.

And Sam had an idea that friends want to stay in touch with each other.

Kind of like the television show Friends, Keach, that's what it reminded me of.

Yeah, so it's that moment when you were there in the Hoover Institution, what's really

important about it is that the dot-com boom and bust had just happened, and everyone from

the, you know, broader tech industry was sort of picking themselves up.

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