My Six Degrees of Separation to Sam and Sir Jony

My pal Jason Snell posted a link on Six Colors today to this SF Standard piece breaking down the 9-minute video, released earlier this week, announcing the much-ballyhooed collaboration between OpenAI’s Sam Altman and legendary former Apple design boss Jony Ive. The Standard’s story is a fun little read in its entirety; what caught my eye, however, was the section about the end of the video and the credits, at the 8:56 mark.

“Let’s take a look at the ‘special thanks,’ or credits(?),“ Sophie Bearman, the Standard’s head of audio, said in the blurb. “Davis Guggenheim, the screenwriter, director, and producer known for “Training Day” (2001), “Waiting for Superman” (2010), “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006) … and “Sam & Jony introduce io” (2025). And you can’t ignore the music: Also thanked is composer Harry Gregson-Williams, who most recently scored “Gladiator 2.” This seems fitting.”

Guggenheim, of course, is also known as the producer and director of the new Apple TV+ documentary Deaf President Now. The film, released last Friday, chronicles what Apple says are the “eight tumultuous days in 1988” during which students at Washington DC’s Gallaudet University, the world’s only collegiate institution for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing, led a protest over the board of trustees’ decision to name a hearing person over two Deaf candidates. The fury was understandable: until I. King Jordan, who took over in the wake of the protest, there had never been a Deaf leader at Gallaudet—again, a place devoted to deaf people—in the school’s 124-year history.

I watched Deaf President Now again last night and loved it even more than I already do. The reason I’m writing about the aforementioned OpenAI video and Davis Guggenheim is because of the six degrees of separation here. Earlier this month, I interviewed him, along with Nyle DiMarco, about making Deaf President Now and what it meant for Guggenheim, who’s hearing, to learn about such an important show of disabled people fighting for their civil rights and their representation, in addition to being exposed to an intimate look at a seminal moment in Deaf history and, more poignantly, Deaf culture.

“I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know about this [DPN protest] story,” Guggenheim said. “It’s meaningful to me… I’ll never fully understand Deaf culture, so it was a privilege to be invited [to make Deaf President Now] by Nyle to tell this story together.”

He added: “We both realized the story must be understood from both audiences: a Deaf audience and a hearing audience, and that the neglect [of the history] from the hearing side. If you’re Deaf, most people know this story. If you’re hearing, most people don’t know this story. For me, [working on Deaf President Now] was correcting history.”

Anyway, it’s cool to see Guggenheim apparently hobnobbed with Sam and Sir Jony.