The Next Auction

“If you live in a linear world, this is sci-fi. But the problem is, it’s real.”

The person who turned human attention into a live, machine-run auction now says the

paradigm he built is running out of road — and he’s oddly thrilled about it. In this episode,

Brian O’Kelley traces the leap from cookies-and-rectangles to agentic media, where AI

agents buy from AI agents and offline channels like linear TV and radio finally come online.

But the real subject is reinvention: how to unlearn the ideas that made you, bet on an

exponential curve while everyone else thinks linearly, and use decades of scars to make

different mistakes instead of repeating old ones. He’s candid about collaboration as a

contact sport — when to say no, when to pluck weeds — and lands on a surprising principle

for the AI age: mentorship. Listen if you’re staring down a reinvention and wondering

whether your experience is baggage or your sharpest edge.