The Optimist Quotes

“I have for a very long time believed that energy and intelligence are the two most important things,” he said. “I didn’t realize how much they fit together. I got totally lucky on that.”
― Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

“This is all a dream. And in the dream, anything is possible.”
― Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

“Altman learned a fundamental lesson from the deal: “The way to get things done is to just be really fucking persistent.”3”
― Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

“original ideas are among the rarest commodities in the world.”
― Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

“The way to get things done is to just be really fucking persistent.”
― Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

“Software that can think and learn will do more and more of the work that people now do. Ever more power will shift from labor to capital.”
― Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

“Perhaps the biggest change came during a weekend-long retreat he spent in Mexico taking psychedelics with a guide. “It was one of the most transformative things in my life,” he told the San Francisco Standard’s Life in Seven Songs podcast.8 Mostly, he spent a lot of time in Big Sur, amid the redwoods by the sea, the landscape on the planet that most appealed to him, and read books. “I felt like I knew a little bit about everything and felt like everything was possible,” he said. “I felt very uncertain, but very good.”
― Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

“If you’re the founder of the company and you wanted to work one hundred hours a week and be super focused and productive that’s cool, but most other people you hire, especially as you get bigger, have other lives and you need to understand that.”18”
― Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

“In retrospect, one of the most interesting questions is, how on earth could such a talented group work on such an intractable problem for so long that was never going to be solved? It turns out that the demand for this service, this product that Loopt was building, never manifested. And pre-smartphones it was never going to because the idea that you can have a critical mass of people who use this service, when you had to deploy it on literally one hundred different types of devices on five, six or seven different mobile networks was, in retrospect, kind of ludicrous.”
― Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

“They built something that could be built in a weekend.” Loopt, by contrast, had to build custom APIs for each wireless company to have access to location information, and negotiate deals for access to each one. Bored and unable to use his scaling skills, Jacobstein decided to move on.”
― Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

“Winer recalls clearly his brush with Altman, all these years later. “Anyone who came across him at that time wished they had some of what he had. There was a sense that anything was possible. He’s quite optimistic—decisive and optimistic. Rarely is he skeptical about anything.”
― Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

“Shortly after ChatGPT was released, he tweeted that one thing he believes that few others do is the “absolute equivalence of brahman and atman.”15 Advaita, which roughly means nondualism, holds that there is no difference between Brahman (the eternal consciousness that is the fabric of all reality) and Atman (the individual soul or self), and that the world that we experience is an illusory manifestation of Brahman. “I’m certainly willing to believe that consciousness is somehow the fundamental substrate and we’re all just in the dream or the simulation or whatever,” Altman told podcaster Lex Fridman. “I think it’s interesting how much the Silicon Valley religion of the simulation has gotten close to Brahman and how little space there is between them.”16 In other words: This is all a dream. And in the dream, anything is possible.”
― Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

“Sam’s mother, Connie Gibstine, bequeathed her son both her family’s “science brain” and her own ferocious work ethic. Jerry and Connie’s daily affirmations that Sam and his siblings could be whatever they wanted to be helped fuel Sam’s confidence and optimism. At the same time, within their ultimately unhappy marriage lie many of the seeds of Altman’s own self-professed history of anxiety and the rift that led his sister, Annie, to break off contact with the rest of her family after Jerry died in 2018.”
― Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

“Sprint PCS charged five dollars for “picture mail,” but users first had to sign up for fifteen-dollar mobile data subscription to use it.”
― Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future