A chance meeting at President Donald Trump’s second inauguration brought together OpenAI CEO Sam Altman with YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul, an unlikely connection that gave Paul a crash course in efficiency.
Speaking with host Molly O’Shea on the Sourcery podcast, Paul explained how he immediately bonded with the OpenAI CEO over a shared interest in “fast cars” after they were seated next to each other at Trump’s inauguration last January.
“We just started talking about cars, and then we kind of just got along, and that was really it,” he said on the podcast.
The meeting with Altman may have been incidental, but it has already sparked real results, including an investment in OpenAI and a collaboration on the company’s video-generation app Sora 2. Paul said he consulted with OpenAI ahead of the app’s September launch, and he became one of the first celebrities to allow his name, image, and likeness to be used in the app. Upon release, Sora 2 users quickly jumped to include Paul in AI-generated videos that featured him as a robber, a makeup artist, and in other personas, helping propel the app to No. 1 on the App Store in the U.S.
Along the way, Paul said the most important lesson he learned from Altman had nothing to do with AI, but rather how to conduct efficient meetings.
As soon as Altman walks into a meeting, he gets down to business with a “boom, boom, boom” approach of assigning tasks and approving ideas that he said fills every minute of his characteristically short meetings.
“No wasted time, 15 minutes. He was hella productive, and then we’ll go to the next meeting,” Paul said.
Altman has long been outspoken about productivity on his personal blog. In a 2018 post, Altman wrote he generally likes to avoid meetings and conferences because he finds “the time cost to be huge.”
When he has to attend a meeting, he likes to schedule them in the afternoon, outside of his productive morning hours. Instead of opting for the default one-hour meeting time, which he said leads to time-wasting, he schedules his meetings for either between 15 and 20 minutes or two hours.
Paul said Altman’s preference for brevity was eye-opening for him.
“I think that was inspiring because time is the most valuable thing, and it’s the only reason that you can’t accomplish more essentially,” Paul said.
Altman’s tips on efficiency may be especially relevant for Paul, who has leveraged his YouTube persona into a professional boxing career and a growing portfolio of business ventures.
He makes a good portion of his money from the top-tier boxing matches he has organized and participated in in recent years. His 2024 fight with retired professional boxer Mike Tyson, drew in 108 million live global viewers, according to Netflix. Another 33 million viewers reportedly tuned into his December fight with former heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua, in which Joshua knocked him out with a jawbreaking punch in the sixth round.
Paul also cofounded Anti Fund, a VC firm with $65 million under management, with venture capitalist Geoffrey Woo in 2021 and has already invested in OpenAI, defense-tech startup Anduril, and prediction market Polymarket.
Meanwhile, the 29-year-old is still one of the highest-grossing YouTubers on the planet, coming in third on Forbes’ Top Creators list for 2025, earning an estimated $50 million through June of last year.
And yet, despite all the ventures he juggles, Paul told the Sourcery podcast his work, while sometimes tedious, is still something he looks forward to.
“It can be monotonous, the daily grind,” he said. “So you got to find the fun. Enjoying it, I think, that’s success.”