Speaking
Talks, Tape & Booking
Nick Charney Kaye builds studios that ship their own receipts — a published cap table, a granted patent, a privacy claim you can break in one command. He speaks to game-audio, business-and-culture, and AI-and-product tracks about the systems under the stories: how ownership can be arithmetic, how adaptive music stays rights-clean by construction, and why the most trustworthy software has no server to trust. Book him for a session that hands the room something it can verify on the way out.
Talks
Ownership Can Be Arithmetic
For a decade the studio ran on one rule: an hour of work earns a point, and points are the cap table — the founder’s share included, earned at the same rate as every line beneath it. This talk walks that decade of receipts, the published ledger anyone can audit, and what happened when the same arithmetic was handed to undergraduate founders to run their own companies. It’s the rare equity talk with the spreadsheet left open on stage. For business and culture tracks.
Rights-Clean by Construction
The generative-music lawsuits made every audio director’s lawyer nervous about where the notes came from. This talk lays out the alternative the studio patented and shipped: adaptive music assembled from human-authored source by a documented system, with provenance you can trace and a rights story a legal team can actually sign. It’s how you score a game that never repeats without borrowing anyone’s copyright to do it. For game-audio tracks.
There Is No Server
Local-first isn’t a privacy feature bolted onto a cloud product — it’s a product strategy, and this talk makes the case from the buyer backward. It covers why regulated buyers can’t touch most AI tools, how “your data never leaves your machine” becomes a claim you demonstrate instead of assert, and the one-command test that proves no data left the room. Trust you can’t verify is just branding. For AI and product tracks.
Tape
Three long-form conversations from 2024 — the founder on games, music, and the hacker ethos, unedited and at length.
- Professor Game #327 — "Charney Kaye Brings the Music Into the Mix" — failing faster, tight core loops, and building generative music for games. Listen · Feb 2024
- Design Your Legacy — "A Hacker's Ethos and Legacy" — the hacker attitude, open-sourcing the music engine, and the shift to dynamic experiences. Listen · Apr 2024
- Sunday SoulDay S2E15 — "The Creative Pulse of Charney Kaye" — DJ roots, post-production, tech, and the entrepreneurial through-line across twenty-five years. Listen · Apr 2024
Kit
Everything an event needs to introduce the founder and print a program.
Nick Charney KayeFounder & President, Outright Mental
Introduction · 75 wordsNick Charney Kaye is the founder of Outright Mental, a one-person interactive-entertainment studio in San Francisco. He is the inventor on a U.S. patent for generative music, the architect of the open-source XJ adaptive-music platform, and the builder of local-first AI products that keep data on the user’s machine. Across twenty-five years he has shipped work for David Blaine, the U.S. Department of Justice, and Stetson. He runs his studio as a published-ledger co-op.
Logos and headshot may be used in event programs and slides — please don’t recolor, crop, or alter the marks. The full studio press kit carries additional logos, key art, and the studio fact sheet.
Booking
Book a talk
For a conference, festival, or an internal session, email hi@outrightmental.com with your dates, audience, and track. He travels from San Francisco.