Teddy (T.M.) Brown
Seven years ago, David Oks and Henry Williams started a viral online presidential campaign based for former Alaska senator Mike Gravel. The goal wasn’t to win the democratic nomination, but rather to use the language of online leftists politics to skewer what they saw as the anodyne inefficacy of centrist establishment politicians and get progressive talking points into the mainstream. When the campaign ended, they started the Gravel Institute, a nonprofit educational platform meant to serve as a counterweight to conservative sites like PragerU. The Gravel Institute shuttered abruptly in 2022, and officially ceased operations in 2023. Three weeks ago, Oks and Williams announced they would both be joining OpenAI working under former Trump White House AI policy advisor Dean W. Ball. My @cnn story, based on more than a dozen interviews, is about how the duo once known as the “Gravel Teens” went from some of the loudest voices in progressive politics to working for one of the powerful technology companies on earth. https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/29/us/gravel-teens-openai-cec