Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz: The Dangers Posed by Sam Altman

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“Hello, welcome aboard podcasts. I'm your host Tim Miller. On today's show, we are going to take a little swerve into AI politics with the authors of a New Yorker profile on OpenAI, Sam Altman.”

But first, the programming note and a little bit of what's on my mind. It's close to the Iran War. Tonight, next-level podcast, we live on Substack and YouTube at 7.45 PM Eastern to cover the latest war crime red line from the madman that the American people elected president again.

So make sure to tune in from that. Here's the latest. It was a bleached from his social media account this morning, Tuesday morning. A whole civilization will die tonight.

It's never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have complete into a regime change where a different smarter and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionary, wonderful can happen, who knows.

“We will find out tonight one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the world, 47 years of extortion, corruption and death will finally end. God bless the great people of Iran.”

You know, treating death of a civilization as some like apprentice reality show thing, whether it's a cliffhanger, can't wait to see what happens on next week's episode.

It's truly sick, it's truly deranged, it's obviously deranged, and even people who otherwise supported Trump can see that. We know this morning that Iran recognizes it as completely deranged, and they recognize that they have a counterparty that's not rational or worth dealing with. And now that they're cutting off all negotiations following the threat, it's a pretty ominous stuff ahead, and we don't exactly know what will happen tonight. But what we do know is that the consequences of his chaos and lunacy are going to impact people's lives, not just in Iran, but here at home and around the world.

We saw last night a Saudi petrochemical plant get hit is a random attack, but it's going to create a major supply chain disruption. It's going to impact the cost and availability of everyday products throughout the world. And if Trump does not turn back and is threat now, this is only just a small sample of what's to come. And so as people start to feel the damage that Trump's war of choice has wrought, they're going to be pissed. Some of those that supported them are going to feel betrayed, and as a result, this is the best opportunity for the Democrats to regain credibility with voters that have turned away from them during the Trump era.

“But human stakes are obviously more important than the political stakes, but it's because the human stakes are so high that it's critical that we get the politics right now.”

This relates to something we've been talking about around here all week. I feel like I've said my piece a little bit in a discourse about what the Democrats should engage with anti war streamers on the left, even if they have problematic or big reviews, so I'm going to leave that be on this show. As I've been thinking through my arguments about that and why I was making a case that I was making, and watching at the same time some prominent manifesto figures break up with Trump and some prominent mega figures break up with Trump.

I started to noodle on like what was underneath all that and what was underneath the argument that I was trying to make, and there are two topics I want to get to before we get to our guests. One is the importance of taking yes for an answer and the other is how to think about America first and how to engage with people that see themselves as America first if you're part of the pro democracy coalition.

I promise you it really isn't. I'm genuinely striving to be a person that takes yes for an answer like in politics and in life when people come around.

I just think it's important to accept it for what it is. This doesn't mean that we should allow ourselves to be made into a sucker to be fooled by people that are pretending to be converts, but it does mean that we should be open minded about folks that are changing their point of view. It's important to recognize that a person can be genuinely fooled or they can be blinded by their own motivated reasoning or tribal prejudices and as a result they end up participating in something that's true nature they didn't really see.

I'd be hard to believe given how obvious and awful Trump has been for so long now, but compartmentalization is a hell of a drug. I'm tribal mindset is a hell of a drug. We all have seen it.

“I think that in order for us to ever move forward out of this awful place that we're in we have to accept that there are people who are genuinely trying to change themselves.”

Engagement with politics, engagement with the country, engagement with fellow Americans and try to do the best we can do foster and environment where they can come on over. I want to play a bit from Tim Dylan is I think it's fair to call him an America first comedian. I don't know that he's mad, but if you listen to him he's from a comic standpoint he sounds a lot like Marjorie Taylor dream and has had Marjorie Taylor dream on the show and given her love about how she should run for president so that's kind of his politics. I want to play a little bit from his show over the past weekend for you.

The greatest con in history by the way, it's the greatest con in history. I mean, it's the greatest it's the in addon to great like a good way. It is truly the the most successful con in history. It makes enron look like a guy doing three cardmonti on the street anything that you can remember and identify as a complete nutter scam.

This is the greatest con in history to run as an America first and you're going to take care of America and then turn around and go, you know all of these things day care Medicare Medicaid.

“We've done to do it that we're fighting wars. That's what we're here to do. We're here to have a defense budget of 1.5 trillion and we're here to fight wars.”

It is the greatest scam in history. You got a handed to him and I mean truly and not you know again, not like a not a moral way, but like you got a handed to him. This is the greatest about face in political history that I have really ever seen. There are a lot there. I'm not sure we have to hand it to Trump ever or to ISIS and I think we can be honest while we're here among friends. This was not the greatest scam in history.

“70 plus million people, everyone listening to this podcast easily avoided being scammed by this many many many many many many people told the scam is that they're being scammed by it was happening. So for the rest of us it is a little frustrating.”

It would be nice at least if you're going to call it the greatest scam in history to give us our flowers on this one, you know I mean we must be all geniuses if we avoided getting scammed by this two bit huckster. And these bro ramps the mega bro ramps for the talk about how mad they are about this they never do seem to like kind of say hey I do have to hand it to the resist wine moms watching MS now seems like they had this one they don't ever do that so I get it. Many of us listening this one a shout at Tim Dylan and be like you're a fucking moron. All right, I want to do that. I'd love for this entire monologue to have just been about how people who were fooled by Trump have baby brains.

And they don't know the ability to abstract and and I worry that I'm being a little able to try to discuss the manosphere since they haven't achieved object permanence and they're too stupid to understand the one of the stupidest Americans pulled the rug over their eyes I'd love to do that. You know, here we are we're here and I think that as satisfying as that is on the surface. I also fundamentally believe that humans are redeemable that people are redeemable that they have good and bad impulses that they have good and bad judgments that we all do.

Maybe Tim Dylan can use his skills for good now. It seems like he is and so let's let's accept it. Let's take yes if the board is about anything it should be about welcoming converts we started as much a converts.

“So even if you refuse to give me that you're like 10 we're just being a softy. You know, we need to be more hard knows about all this okay just looking at this for a macio valiant perspective.”

The more people who bail on Trump the better right now and if the people who bail on Trump can come into an uneasy alliance with the Democrats even temporarily in for this midterm but even better for the next presidential election better still. Like Trump's power in domestic affairs is fading. This is why he's doing the insane wheels off threats about Iran. He feels like he has control in Venezuela and Iran. He's losing his ability to bully people here. I just look at the difference between April 2025 and 2026 in the way that all of these institutions in the country were cowering to him that they're stopping that now people are standing up to people in the streets.

And so the more people that jump off the Trump train and the more people who oppose him and the more commentators who oppose him and the more content creators who oppose him though the weaker he is.

“The lower his numbers get the harder it's going to be for him to fuck with the midterms of the 2020 election.”

You know, you can only do so much when it comes to. Shaking energy around. You know, an election system that. Sorry, buddy, isn't nationalized so this is good. We want this like this weekend's him the more people who come along. And so as far as I'm concerned. For now, I don't really care how fucking lunitians these people are. I don't care what gross comments they've made in the past. If they want to turn over a new leaf in a post Trump in this moment. As far as I'm concerned, the waters form and that takes us to the I think bigger question of like how to then build a viable coalition for defeating magma, which might have to include some of these people, which will have to include some of these people.

“The more I think about this, the more condensed I am that for the Democratic Party, they have an actual majority.”

A real majority where they're winning all over the country, not just in blue enclaves, they're going to have to speak to America first voters.

All right, this is going to be a tough pill for some people to swallow. But there is areas of common ground between Democrats and American first others. So I want to just talk about who I'm not talking about and what I'm not talking about first. I don't want the Democrats to become America first in the branding sense in the sense of Lynn Bergen Trump. I don't want anti-Semitism. I don't want them pretending like the US can just act as if the rest of the world doesn't exist. I don't mean we should zero out a to the poorest people in the world.

Or for some reason, America first always seems to coincide with siding with the fascists in other countries. I'm not for all that. And I also don't think that Democrats are going to get the America first capital AF, the America first is fuck people.

The ones with the red hats, they're not going to be getable, most of them. Okay, we can just acknowledge that.

But there's another category of people out there, a couple different categories of people really overlapping that are getable. And they just don't believe that politicians cared about people like them. And so they were attracted to these anti-establishment figures. So they're being the manosphere or on the far left and something is on the far right. They thought that the political class and both parties that screwed them over. There are leaders cared more about their donor friends and foreign entanglements and corporate interests and Georgetown cocktail parties and getting

goals and going to conferences and Davos. They cared about all of that shit more than cared about the average Joe or Jayden out there in the country. A person has that world view is right for the taking right now because they have legitimate grievances and Trump sold them out. You heard the case from Tim Dillon. They don't like this war. They're unhappy about the economy. They don't understand why they're spending money in Iran and let me tell you things are about to get a lot worse on one or both camps and it comes to this war or their economic standings probably both.

And once the economic struggles really start hitting them, not like what we're seeing right now, which is gas prices up a little bit, which sucks. But once we get into recession territory or once the supply change gets so fucked up, we get into a real 2022 style inflation. Once we have stagnation like the late 70s, these people are going to be more pissed than ever. And guess what, when they learn about the corruption, because they're not hearing about it from their outlets, when they learn about how rich the Trump kids and the other insiders are getting, they're not going to like that too much either.

as ballroom and the stupid war and all the stuff that they don't care about. Democrats need to tell those voters that they will prioritize American interests first.

“Once they take back the majority, they will be the ones that care about the forgotten man. They need to fashion a lower case America first of their own one that's in line with liberal values.”

That's about economic opportunity that talks about the common good and make a pitch to American first voters is about something other than demonizing brown people. But to do that in a way that's credible, they need to be doing it loudly right now, maniacally really right now.

They need to be opposing Trump and talking to the disaffected Trump voter or the disaffected American first voter about how they are going to respond to their priorities.

“They have to say it. The left flank of this party seems to get it right now. The people that are doing this best mostly come from the left flank of the Democratic Party.”

People who are paying bill Clinton style, channeling their rage and trying to repurpose it for good. Now, right now, this moment during this war during this economic crisis is a time for people who want to save the country from maga to jump into battle. They have to be unapologetically anti-stupid war of choice, anti-corruption, anti-Trump two and committed to putting Americans first and making sure that the American voter realizes that they care about them and their concerns. That's the job. And I think that right now trying to come up with trying to fashion a credible message that takes from the first that simple for people to understand the breaks through the bubble that goes out and reaches out to people who are indifferent media environments like this is the job right now for all of us.

“So now I'm going to be doing, so the Democratic Party should be doing too.”

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Now, while we're in catastrophe talk, it's a good time to chat about artificial intelligence and our Silicon Valley betters who are among the people that we should probably be railing against in the moment and I want to bring in two guys who have an amazing article out yesterday in the New Yorker.

Besides him, it's staff writer, through Yorker, you're at the technology and politics, he's the author of anti-social online extremist, techno-utopians and the hijacking of the American conversation, it's Andrew Moran's hey guys, you have a piece out yesterday titled Sam Altman, make and troll our future can he be trusted question mark.

“I mean, I think this raises actually an important point, which is, yes, a lot of CEOs and corporates, but I think this raises actually an important point, which is, you know, yes, a lot of CEOs and corporates.”

Are not, you know, beacons of moral responsibility, but the thing about Sam Altman is not that, you know, we went out looking for the person who, you know, inspired the most, you know, divisive opinions or who had the most critics.

The thing about Sam Altman is not that, you know, we went out looking for the person who, you know, inspired the most, you know, divisive opinions or who had the most critics.

I'm not going to act like a normal corporate CEO and in fact, open AI will not be a normal kind of company, in fact, it won't be a company at all. So, you know, this is feels like ancient history now, but we go back to the founding of the company, which is just about a decade ago. And the question on Musk out of the blue and says, AI is going to be so existentially dangerous, like literally existentially, like it will kill everyone on earth unless it handled properly. And the way to do that is to not leave it to the evil mega corporation Google or to leave it to China or some American competitor.

But to have us the good guys start an AI safety nonprofit research lab and the key component among others is we're going to try to ask for all regulation that we can from the US government. We're going to try to share information openly and it's going to be run by people of the utmost highest integrity and if you sense any slipperyness or any untrustworthiness or any power seeking behavior. We need a nonprofit board who's empowered to fire that person. So those were the standards that he laid out at the beginning.

That was the most interesting thing. I also tried to care and how to wrote a book about Sam, I don't know a couple months ago now, he'll go check out as well if they want. And, you know, as an outsider, it didn't occur to me the degree of the which he doesn't like really have technical skills with regards to AI and that he was these kind of the front man and the salesman for this and the executor, really of the of the program and, you know, it also didn't occur to me like kind of what you laid out like the degree to which

the central pitch of open AI was that this is dangerous and you need to have this in the hands of responsible people. And I think that to me, you know, sort of shines a light on like why this is why this is so relevant. So talk to us kind of about that, like a little bit more about that origin story of the start of the beginning of the company.

“Well, we should run and I want you to jump in a sec, but just to finish that thought like there basically is this kind of basic inductive logic problem here, right where it's like were you telling truth then or are you telling the truth now?”

Because if you fast forward to now, all this safety talk, all this, you know, doomer hysteria is very derided in Silicon Valley and in Washington and including by Sam Altman, but what is sort of lost in that is that we quote Sam Altman himself extensively in this piece being the doomerist of the doomers and saying if we don't solve the alignment problem, which is this basic unsolved problem in AI research that, you know, what if the machines interests are not aligned with our interests. So great book by Brian Christian called the alignment problem. Sam Altman among others was one of the loudest proponents of how dangerous this problem was and we have people in the piece who say that Sam Altman went out of his way to cold call them and say you are a researcher in this tiny field of AI alignment.

“I need you to come on board so I can endow a billion dollar prize to solve this problem, you know, you have to read the piece to get the full details, but basically that doesn't happen, right?”

The prize slips away, the problem goes unsolved and today you have Sam Altman saying the alignment problem remains unsolved, but like don't worry about that whole it might kill us thing like that was that was then this is now without saying that the problem is solved so either it was not true then or it's not true now. And I'd point out that there are immediate concerns that even people who are kind of pragmatists business people have about Altman it's not just the doomer set we explore a range of opinions in this piece and a range of anecdotes that support those opinions.

On the one end of the spectrum you have people who say you know one board member said he has two traits a strong desire to please people to be liked in any given situation and a sociopathic almost is the quote lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.

Then you have people who say look as Andrew is alluding to this is different AI has real existential stakes and it doesn't have to be the it's going to kill us all sky net terminator scenario.

And there's the way in which our entire economy has tilted into dependency on AI and economists are warning of a recession if open AI and other major companies go under underperform a lot of that stake here millions of jobs exposed to disruption we see how it's being used to very rapidly and effectively devise bio weapons how it's being deployed on battlefields how it's now increasingly integrated in our medical and our. Financial infrastructures so this scenarios that the so-called doomers warned about are less area and ethereal with each passing year and meanwhile you have what we document.

“About Sam Altman yes, but I think the reason we looked at it is these questions about integrity and the level of integrity we should demand with the people who in the words of one person we quote in the article have their fingers on the button.”

That is a big question it goes beyond Sam Altman and he is a particularly extreme case where even against the baseline of people expect dishonesty from Silicon Valley executives who.

You build businesses on high people come out of rooms with him commenting on this and we uncover these rooms of documents about this and efforts across this career to kind of force him out over this. But the problem is not just Sam Altman the question of integrity is something that I think we both felt. And I want to get to kind of the present day stuff in a second but we're just going back because I think that that Sam being a pitchman and him being in conflict with the folks who are actually working on the technology I think it's a pretty important part of the origin strikes it ties together like the integrity element with the technology element and the two folks who we focus on in the.

“One is Ilia Sutskiver I think that Ilia Sutskiver who was it seems like the first.”

Genius person that Sam and Elon recruited to actually like work on the technology selling him on the importance of you know doing this ethically and for good.

Another character is as Dario Amade who ends up leaving and running in Thropic the competitor AI company right now you have from both of them like menos that we're taking. At the time at the beginning of the company where they're starting to sense that like Sam can't be trusted to talk about those sets of that most a little bit to Ronan's point these are both individual and structural concerns right. The individual part has to do with this mistrust and I think a lot of people understandably have skepticism of people like.

Ilia Sutskiver and Dario Amade because in the present day they run competitor companies to open AI right so there's reason to be skeptical but I think the structural thing that really is undeniable here. Is that again it's hard to imagine how much these people were in this unique situation right they're constantly comparing themselves to the Manhattan project to Robert Oppenheimer and the reason they're doing that A is that they think the thing they're building has massive utopian potential you know to power the world to create unlimited energy and massive dystopian potential to literally destroy the world.

And the few scientists who are capable of building it right as you pointed out to him Sam Altman is not one of them right people like Ilia Sutskiver and Dario Amade and others are capable and so in order to harness that talent.

“There's a major obstacle one is these people all have lucrative jobs at places like Google so you need to tell a story.”

That gets someone like like Ilia in his case to turn down a six million dollar a year counter offer from Google and go work for this scrappy non profit safety lab called open AI but another thing is that these people disproportionately were terrified of building this thing of bringing it into existence right you have all these. You know atomic scientists or like I don't want to build the atom bomb and so in order to get them to build it by their lights this you know potentially most dangerous invention in human history.

Part of the pitchman's job is to tell them a compelling story about you not only need to build it but you need to build it for us and not for the other guy and so that has to do with you know this game theory of if we don't get it first the bad guys will get it first. But step one of that logic is to convince each individual discrete group of people I'm actually one of you so one thing we document over and over in the piece is that someone like Altman because he is a really good pitchman according to these documents which are most of them meant never before seen by the public never before reported on.

But what we keep seeing in these documents and hearing from interviews is that Altman is able to get into these groups and say to the safety obsessed kind of doomer people I'm really one of you and then turn around to investors and say actually let's go make a ton of money.

“problem is and this is what emerges in these documents and accounts from you know more than a hundred people we talk to here.”

That works up to a point right if you're telling everyone that your agenda is their agenda even if those agendas conflict you can accumulate a lot of money and you can rev up a lot of growth.

And then in a lot of these cases across this career there are just uprisings of colleagues who say enough is enough and feel like the conflicting assurances to different people and we document a lot of different examples of it across the piece. Just create too much chaos and as as Andrew is pointing out in this particular case with these particular stakes. There is the existential problem of the pitches about we've got to go slow that's the mission statement we're building a non profit that's what open AI again originally was.

And then a situation where over time it seems that Sam Alman was telling other constituencies that wanted growth that wanted profit that wanted to a framework uses a lot win no we're going to go as fast as possible so for example we look at internal documents from the early days of open AI in periods where. Their explicit pitch was look we don't have the money and resources that Google has but we're the good guys were a non profit that's how we're going to stay people were taking pay cuts to join and many of them feel burned by that now they feel they joined something that.

We document looking at these communications internally even at the time the co-founders were frustrated with we're stepping away from Greg Brockman almond second in command in one of his diaries talks about it being potentially a lie that they were you know pitching this as an on profit and then turning around and spinning it into a for profit.

And so some of these moments particularly at earlier wrote turn into the basis of this period where Sam gets pushed out as the head of the company for what five days by the board doing what.

You know that the charter had set up to do which is you know ensure that you know somebody got gained too much power was power hungry. We're just going to use this technology in the wrong way you know they could be removed. He gets removed for a short period of time maybe I'm just getting hung up on this because what we've learned immediately but I do think it's pretty telling as he tries to see. You know Wiggles is way back in you know he hires crisis comms guys with reputations for being hard nose like crystal hain and then he pushes away back in and he replaces the board and he brings in Larry summers.

“I think that that like little anecdote tells you a lot about you know the tight the mindset of of Sam Altman in this period.”

But the jademizer. I just want to demonstrate that you know I'm not doing this in order to gain power but I'm you know I'm doing this because I want to bring in a moral arbiter who can be a judge here we're going to bring in Larry summers.

So anyway just talk about anything else that struck you about but the research on that that period.

I think when it comes to Sam unraveling the effort to fire him right having pitched a company where there was this specific shape to it where the mission was not about growth. There are a lot of people who don't know what to do with their normal for profit imperatives didn't govern and where a board with a non profit mission about protecting humanity from this technology could fire a CEO at their discretion in the interest of that mission. And then just made that all go away. In this story right because it says a lot about Sam Altman but more than that it's another moment that feels like an inflection point in the AI business that is a moment where the convictions of these early AI founders who all said that they cared about safety were tested.

“And what was proved out is when the rubber meets the road the money talks you know there were a lot of investors who had put a lot of money into an AI in this particular case the board badly fumbled the ball.”

This was a board of in the words of one former member JV people who really were not cut out for this cutthroat corporate warfare and they did the firing and this is the first piece that I think really documents in meticulous detail why and what their proof points were a reader can decide do they think it was enough lying do they think that Sam disembling about you know whether a model had been tested whether a model had been leaked. And the two were requirements were in place for safety testing does that matter enough but they had their reasons they didn't express them adequately they didn't make the case in the public arena the way Sam was and there was a ready audience of investors who were thinking about the bottom line and you know none of these people are villains they were also flummixed they were saying what the hell happened.

So Satya and Adela we have you know him in this piece calling read Hoffman and saying what happened and then they're all calling around trying to figure out you know it was it sexual misconduct was their investment.

“But this was a different kind of critique and and it was a critique that really requires the kind of gradual accumulation of wrongs that we document in this piece. What the market proved out is.”

People at least with the amount of information that was available at the time didn't care enough now I would point out one last thing. There are some people who at the time talk about having given Sam all in the benefit of the doubt and even helped him come back in that investor community who now tell us. Looking back and seeing how in their view the alleged lying has persisted since then that they're not sure they would have done that again and that even if they wouldn't have fired him at the time or allowed the firing to go down.

There would have been much more severe warnings they would have done more to ascertain that this wasn't a stable trait that was going to cost future problems because since then.

There have been a lot of cases where even outside of open AI and these smaller examples about the safety of their products and so on there's just deals being announced that other parties sometimes feel are conflicting you know there's a fight going on with with Microsoft right now that we write about in the piece about that. And also just final thing just to listeners who are thinking like how could some of these employees and board members have been so naive that like they were shocked that a business guy wanted to make money from something even though he said something else.

A lot of the people now say the same thing about themselves like a lot of people who we've spoken to say in retrospect, yeah I guess I wasn't naive but I really believed it at the time.

Go through the history with him in the various of interviews I noticed there's a lot of times where sand doesn't recall that or sand thinks it went a different way and somebody else said it seems like that was a trend in your conversations with him now.

“Yeah I mean I think we we both cared very much about getting his and open as responses to everything Andrew yeah I mean the thing is when you go back through this stuff we we do actually have a very meticulous fact checking process and you know.”

One thing that when you're dealing with the daily news cycle of you know TV newspapers whatever you're not often asked to account for like did you say this thing in a closed door skiff meeting with intelligence agencies in 2017 right so that the fact check that we came to them with and also before the fact check the interview stuff that we came to them with. I think it's just not the level of detail that you're used to being asked to account for but the fact is you know the pitch over the whole decade taken as a whole has all these inconsistencies in it that really are just hard to account for so I think often you would get from an executive and in the moment.

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Very convincing charismatic Jedi feel like wins people over and I don't know I've consumed a ton of his interviews now and and I find him to be like robotic and like devoid of human.

Human feeling or touch, and so you guys were with them a dozen times like help me like with that disconnect. I don't like particularly, but I understand that they're charismatic. I mean, our current president for example, but like I don't get that at all with him. We obviously capture a range of opinions on this. Yeah, and Andrew and I have had this conversation internally too. In the piece we have people who are very convinced and wowed by his persuasive powers and much less so I had this conversation with my mom.

“Last night I had she read the piece and she called me and she was like, "Oh, you know, I just I see him in interviews and I think he has this vulnerability and I have kind of my mom instincts kick in."”

So I see why, you know, he damages people.

I know. I know. I know. I will say when I look at the range of perspectives in the piece, clearly the man is an incredibly savvy pitchman as we've been discussing. And I think there's a through line of character analysis from people close to him where they talk about him really being void of doubt in the moment. As he is telling you that the thing you care about most is the thing that he cares about. He's saying something that it feels like he believes. And I don't think there's a lot of sort of follow-up or self-questioning and according to many of these critics there really is no true north that provides a baseline of consistency or facts underneath all of that.

There is a portrait of him from a former board member who's on the record in the piece Sue you.

That I find very measured and interesting where she says there's a lot of people in Silicon Valley who look at this trait and this kind of dissembling on things small and big. It's everything from in the piece we talk about. I have one of his earlier startups in supposedly claiming to colleagues that he was a champion ping-pong player and then turning out to be one of the worst ping-pong players in the office and he says he was probably joking. But there's small stuff like that and then there's you know the bigger showdowns where we talk about like he calls Danielle and Dario Amade and to a room.

And accuses them of plotting a coup against him and he attributes it to another executive who's told him this and then they call the executive in and that executive says I didn't say that and then Sam in the moment says why never made this claim either. And they're like you just set it and this is another one where Sam says you know it's not quite how he remembers it he has different sons who can read the piece for more. But this board member Sue Yoon talks about look people see all of that and they say he's Machiavellian he's some villain.

“But she pushes back on that and says look having dealt with the guy I think he is she uses the word to the point of recklessness just convinced of the shifting realities of his sales pitches.”

It goes back to this lack of of doubt and so therefore he says things that people wouldn't say in the real world if they're connected to the real world. Yeah and the other thing to remember about this pitchman charisma question is who the audience is right so you mentioned him you know. As a charisma you know Obama has a charisma right but that's not the kind of charisma that would necessarily work in these rooms of engineers or even with regulators right so if you're an engineer what you want is someone who's really kind of.

Thoughtful humble conscientious right or looks like it and if you're a regulator actually a big part of this is the public piece. Coming on the heels of you know the tech lash and the social media boom it seems to me anyway as an observer of this stuff that what the public wanted and what Congress wanted was someone who did not come off as really you know. Blustery and charismatic but someone who would come to them and say I'm terrified of this thing I'm building please put me in regulatory handcuffs.

Are you seeing someone these are quotes from other people to be clear yeah the chat has all those the LLM has all those traits. LLM is a big as a pleaser and irrational confidence and randomly hallucinates lies and I don't maybe there's no connection there at all but I felt like I wanted to at least mention it you know sometimes you know the creation reflects the creator.

“I think about a topic that I want to spend a year and a half of my life on and this one in particular I think for both of us had a lot of you know sweat and almost or perhaps even literally tears.”

Do it it's incredibly complex and you can imagine how pressurized the environment around this is and you know the amount of push back and just a piece like this is a heavy lift and incredibly detailed and ambitious and we both wanted to get it really right and fair for me all of that flowed from the fact that this again felt like a bigger inflection point.

Responses that mirror back what they have said better than responses that challenge them and say no, that's incorrect.

“So you wind up with these two phenomena which we talk about in the piece of sick of fancy you know these models just parading back things that you're going to like hearing and hallucination where they fill in gaps by making stuff up.”

And these are traits that you know are very troublesome to root out of the technology and in the case of sick of fancy especially. You know we've talked to computer scientists who really frame this as. It's accepted as a necessary cost of of doing business. There's a feeling that these frictionless answers help retain users and keep them on the hook. So I do think that that is a metaphor of some consequence. I mean, it works. We all know people like this. Like I know, please, there's no shortage of people that have these traits.

No and gay and gay in the case.

No, totally I guess. We have a lot of narcissistic. A pleasers and gay world, you know.

“Right to point it out to him because, you know, I will say.”

Andrew pointed out, you know, we didn't go into this looking at some in some pieces I've done. It's I have a specific lead about criminal activity. And the kind of moral shape of the piece is clear fairly early on, even if of course then I'm testing those assumptions all the way through. This was a case where we really like we parachuted in and looked at what are the biggest unanswered questions and can we examine them forensically and fairly. And further to that as I was dealing with Sam over and over again in this, I really felt a great duty of care to be incredibly fair to him.

And part of that was because I did feel, you know, a kinship in many ways. Some of the traits you talk about. I really get as a gay man. He talks about this in the piece and to be clear he's very quick to dismiss any link between his gayness and this kind of like best little boy in the world. And I'm going to hand that we all know about in the gay community. But he fit an archetype that is familiar to many of us. You know, he was hyper hyper ambitious hyper focused on winning. That can come from a number of places, but he does in one moment talk about having been beaten up as a kid. We couldn't find, you know, records of this. He didn't report it to anyone, but he does mention it.

And then he kind of wheels back and says, well, maybe that gave me an enduring desire to please in a way that I haven't examined and don't get the significance of, but I'm sure not.

“I just missed the significance of this. So we relate all of that in the piece, but I think it's telling the portrait of him in this is actually undertaken with a lot of sympathy and care.”

And I think it's reflective in their response, you know, they are in this position right now of doing kind of two things. They're trying to obviously downplay the piece. But they're doing it softly because they're also relying on the piece and legal filings now. They're in their fight with Elon Musk relying on it on a number of assertions about Musk's competitiveness. I'm Charisa and my experience in all entrepreneurs started a choppy fry at full price. I think choppy fry is already the first day. And the platform makes me no problem. I have many problems, but the platform is not one step away.

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Start at a test-not-hard to feel like an euro-promona. Of choppy fry.de/recorder. This is a sense with a politics podcast, so I'm going to hold a section of politics topics as it intersects with Sam, but also just AI, probably, and Elon.

The first is what he said after Trump won, which was watching at Podis more carefully recently, has really changed my perspective on him.

Prantices, I wish I had done more of my own thinking. You know, that struck me as somebody really try and hard to appeal to Trump and people around Trump, like this notion that he got caught up in the woke mind virus.

I don't know when you're last interview ones with him, but things aren't going as well with Trump, maybe. When that tweet was sent, I'm just wondering if you asked him about that, like what is current thinking is about the administration? Andrew, I mean, I think for me, the big takeaway is this is yet another area where there were very clear assurances in statements of principle, and then very different conflicting statements.

Well, first of all, I noticed you only asked Ron, and for his thoughts about the gay community, but I'd like to offer some of my, no, I'm just kidding.

Let's get some straight commentary. Yeah, exactly. I would like to straight explain. We want to know how allies see us, exactly. Exactly.

Exactly. That's what I'm here for.

“No, I actually think that the Trump stuff is a key example of this, right?”

Like you have someone who, and this is not unusual for his milieu, very stalwart donor to Democrats and democratic packs for many years.

He has his milieu, also a gay commentary or some other, some other part of his milieu. That's actually Silicon Valley liberals who were, you know, a thing until a couple of years ago. Yeah. And he says actually in the piece, you know, I am very worried about the rise of autocracy, which he says, that's not a gay thing. That's a Jewish thing.

But then suddenly his fears about Trump, who he has alluded to as, you know, compared to Hitler and all these things in the past, as you say, they kind of go away after it seems like Trump is going to win. And there's just something about this, I'm sorry, I'm caught up in it. I know you discussed it at length, like his relationship with Trump, we could talk about it more.

But there's something that just really, I guess really get caught up with because it ties to his personality, just this notion that, like, he's really changed his perspective on it.

Like he's watched him closely.

“Like that's, like Tim Cook has shown sick of insane to Trump, right?”

But like in a more, I see what you're saying. I don't know, normal way. I see what you're saying. So just, and a more like, hey, we can do, I can do deals with him, I can work with him. Like, this was, he was trying to say that, like, he really had changed his, like, that he thought about it and he'd been wrong about something.

And that Trump had won a move. The rest of that tweet, which we left out because it wasn't worth sort of explaining to the New Yorker audience was, I thought about it more, and I realized I really fell into the NPC trap, right? Which is this kind of Mimi speak for, like, I was acting as this non-player character. So it's exactly what you're saying. Yeah, can I have that created the biggest AI company in the world?

Right. Compare to himself, like, tries to diminish himself. And be like, now I was just, you know, an NPC. I was just a mindless person who went along with the crowd. Like, that's a pretty concerning trait that he about himself that he self-analyzed, by the way.

But anyway, like, to go into that with Trump, I mean, that is just a level of suck-upitude that is, I think even a little bit higher than we've seen from other people. Obviously, we're all witnessing what is happening in Silicon Valley right now, right? At a time when Silicon Valley is the center of gravity in the economy has essentially all of the levers of power in Washington, with AI specifically, AI money is flooding politics. Little surprise that we see such anemic pushes for federal regulation on this that could actually meaningfully slow development in the name of safety in the way Open AI initially committed to, because if you are running for office in this country right now, you know, you're contending with a whole new economy of AI-driven pack money.

We talked to people, even in the camp of Altman's defenders, who really just said it, I think, what the reality is, which is, like, Sam isn't actually Trump be come on, you know, this is a guy who wants to win. And right now, as you put it suck-upitude, is an avenue for winning. And I think it's just, you know, it is, understandably dismaying. That's just a good judgment, maybe, though. Yeah. Well, and the other thing about the material consequences of it, yeah, we couldn't get suck-upitude past our copy.

But the, but the, the other, the material consequence of this is directly tied to the thing we were talking about before. Do we proceed with caution and sort of tie our hands regularly, if that's a word, or do we kind of go full speed ahead? This transition from Biden to Trump, it's not only about the rhetoric and how he justifies it. He spent, according to our reporting, all four years of the Biden administration working in public and behind the scenes to say, you guys are doing a lot, but you're not doing enough to regulate us.

“You need to be more aggressive with your eos and all this stuff.”

And then literally on the first full day of the Trump presidency, all the shackles are off and they announced this plan to launch, you know, the most infrastructure investment in history and his line since then has been. What are refreshing change? What a pro business president. You know, I'm so glad that the woke regulations. And this is, you know, I think the problem to him, it is a situation that we're witnessing now where the organizations that are best positioned to understand the danger.

Are also the ones with the financial incentives to downplay that danger and rush past it and ask for forgiveness, not permission.

“So there it is really truly a situation where strong governance and a meaningful regulatory framework is needed.”

And the environment for that just doesn't exist right now. Yeah, a couple of clothes that's related to that. So one is to now they're giving ton of money. I mean, just in addition to Sam now, like big friends, like pretending to be friends with Trump, traveling with them, talking about how he's seen the light Greg Brockman, you mentioned a second command donated 25 million to Trump super PAC 50 million to a separate super PAC going after anti AI candidates.

Maybe this is the naivete of a former Republican who didn't come up in democratic world to think that this might be possible, but I don't like this feels risky as far as backfire is concerned.

I mean, I just think that the potential backlash against these guys in this moment. Trump's popularity is fading seems like it has to be real and they don't, I don't know, maybe they're just like, hey, we're living this one day at a time and we'll deal with deal with the future when the future comes in 2029, but it's a pretty significant gamble and bet. It seems like they're making particularly in the context of what you see is having a dairy with Claude and with Darryl.

Well, yeah, I mean, you're already seeing some consumer backlash right after the Pentagon thing, which we can get into in detail, but after.

“And, um, uh, and Thropic kind of emerge from the Pentagon thing, I think to many people looking better and open AI emerge looking worse, you did see a big sort of deleting chat GPT moment.”

I have to say like a lot of these people, I think take their own rhetoric seriously enough that they think after 2029, the world will be permanently altered by super intelligence and all of this will be different. Extend that you see people going all in now, I think it's because they really think like this is the decisive time and whoever grabs the ring now will own it forever. So I think there are people around Sam Alman who also make the same argument that you make that some of these moves are strategically risky.

And I think when you talk to particularly the set of people who maybe aren't safety-pilled, and they're not rendering this in a pocket loop, it's a pocket loop, it terms, but they still think that the amount of dissembling on evidence in Alman's record is a problem. One of the ways in which they consider a problem is if you have that trait, there can be a lot of rationalizing and a lot of not reflecting on whether your assumptions are right. Right, you see over and over again, Sam Alman seemingly uncritically believing these conflicting things, as he's saying them, and you know when he talks about these alliances with Trump, with some of these Middle Eastern autocrats, you know, with MBS, we have a whole trench of reporting about his geopolitical activities where people around him were saying like, hey, you know, MBS just chopped up a journalist with a bone saw.

You can't like be on a board associated with him. But he's single-minded about his mission, he wants that Middle Eastern money, as many in Silicon Valley do.

“What is distinctive to Sam is he, I think, is very resistant to those cautionary notes around him because when he says he believes a thing, even if it conflicts with other points of evidence, he shows over and over again that he runs with that.”

Trump and with some of these other alliances, he makes the argument that that provides him more access and that that's useful and the old chestnut of, you know, it's better to be on the inside to try to help. And I think he's able to convince himself of that if not others around him. And also in business of Shaq Tanune, the UAE, family member of the autocrat who bought into Trump, combing, passes a big story about the amount of money that he put into the Trump family. I just, part of me would be, there's a consumer backlash, but you might look at this and say, you know, hey, the Democrats take back control.

There's me investigations into this type of stuff into the nature of my relationship here, and this could be risky. Maybe though, there's a dream not to worry about that, looking at how toothless the Democrats were looking into the last generation of tech leaders. And then with regards to the regulation bill in California, I was interested in that. I didn't follow that story that closely, which where it seemed like there was a popular piece of AI regulation in California that knew someone's up vetoing.

But what happened? What happened there? I mean, we have reporting suggesting that a lot of investors, you know, we have Ron Conway people in our piece say, who's a powerful Silicon Valley investor, who's an Altman loyalist.

This is the standard stuff of politics, but again, the thing that makes it unusual is that the public posture of Altman and OpenAI is we support all regulation.

And then behind the scenes, we document a lot of cases where they're doing precisely the opposite.

“I mean, a kind of middle path, I think, between the most sci-fi, you know, the universe will be tiled with super computers and we'll take over galaxies and the most mundane.”

Okay, you know, businesses full of dissembling, what did you expect? I think this regulatory stuff in geopolitical stuff really is kind of the middle ground between the two because the amount of power Internationally and domestically that you can consolidate in the next couple of years. Even if you do that in a way that causes your core audience to have all these doubts about you and even if you kind of are, you know, unmasked to a certain audience as, you know, I think to be hypocritical, I think the bet of a lot of these guys, and this is not just opening eye, but a lot of them is if we have direct deals with the Emirati is the Saudis to some extent with the US government,

that will be powerful enough for our game plan that the consumer piece of it won't really matter. And to some extent, maybe the regulatory piece won't even matter because we'll be so far out ahead of it.

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“I want to talk about Elon being awful, but we're running out of time. I think we should focus on more important things. We all know that Elon is awful.”

I should just mention that probably the grossest behavior in the profile after we spent all this time talking about Sam was the way Elon seems to be spreading lies about Sam,

and you guys debunk some of that in the piece which folks could go read. I'm more just more curious, since you did all these interviews. I moved from the bay, so I'm here in New Orleans and I'm not around these guys anymore. I'm not hearing this cuttlebott as much. What do these guys all really think? Do you think about the tech? Because on the one hand, I look at it and I'm like, you know, these are pitchman, their PR folks, like talking about the catastrophic risks and talking about all the jobs going away is also a way to get investment.

And I had read Hoffman on it. I keep thinks that this is a great product that has some downsides, but like also there's all these opportunities. On the other hand, the safety guys when they quit, there's this trend of them like writing notes that seem like dystopian kind of like makes them turn like sound like they're dystopian profits. They're planning to live out their days in monkeys solitude and like that's a little alarming for some of us when you see like a sequence of those resignations from safety guys.

“So how did you guys when you're actually interviewing the safety guys interviewing the executives? How do you balance that in your head?”

We document this range of opinions, right? And in some ways, this reflects the collision of businessmen and scientists in this arena. There are the safetyists who leave and write these do me notes as you talk about and they're really scared. There are the business people who are full accelerationists. And there are people on both sides of the business and science aisle who have arranged with these opinions. I tend to find very sober appraisals, some of which have been made in public, so we can talk about them from people like Demis Hassabis who talk about, you know, the immense potential.

Both in terms of dangers and in terms of upside, right? This isn't totally vaporous. This is already technology that is changing medical diagnosis, you know, it's helping catch cancers earlier. It's helping with weather warnings, you know, that can save lives. There's nuts and bolts things happening that are material. Hassabis is one of the people who says, yes, both the potential and the risk of a real, but also some of these projections are way farther out. And there's a significant contingent of scientists we talk to who share that view, you know, that the kind of pitchman height machine that you get from some of these leaders in the field is talking about certain kinds of developments.

You know, when Sam Alman says, we're almost there. We've cleared the horizon. We're going to be on other planets. We're going to cure all forms of cancer. In recent days around the launch of this piece, he was again kind of sounding similar notes of, you know, we're all going to be in a super abundant utopia, very, very soon.

And that's consequential in terms of the risks because the whole economy is propped up on some of this promise, you know, and that is an older wider Silicon Valley story, you know, people building companies and inflating valuations on hype and future projections long before they are offering a product to value.

“That's happening now on a massive scale with much higher risks and you don't know if you have any thoughts to add on that.”

That basically seems right. Look, there's so much uncertainty here, including from the people who are building it. They don't really know what it is. They don't really know if we're going to build super intelligence in six months or 60 years, like nobody really knows what's going on. I think the thing I would say is these guys are constantly comparing themselves to the Manhattan Project, right? When you see the Oppenheimer movie, the moment that sticks out to me is, you know, Matt Damon, the general who, you know, is supposedly in control comes in towards the thing and they're about to do a test and they say, oh, just you know, there's a slight chance that when we do this test, it might ignite the atmosphere and destroy the world.

And he's like, wait, there's not a, there's a slight chance, like how slight are we talking and they're like, yeah, well, you know, point zero something and he was like, I was really hoping you would say a zero percent chance. And so I think if there's anything other than a zero percent chance of catastrophe, whether it's, you know, economic catastrophe, material catastrophe, it actually is something that we need people to take seriously and I just don't think we're seeing a high level of seriousness.

And one last thought that on the high level of seriousness, you mentioned the Elon stuff and this kind of mudfight going on behind the scenes reporting on the safety concerns and the allegations of lying and some of these critiques with more substance and getting a full face blast of. I want to imagine the number of people calling with this pedophilia allegation and all this kind of personal stuff, which we spent months looking at and I interviewed, you know, all the people supposedly linked to it and it really does seem to be untrue.

“I think what is significant about that is the people with the fingers on the button.”

So, I have a lot of questions about whether we should trust them with that responsibility. They're engaged in a no holds bar of mudfight. There are very few standards. We don't have the right kind of oversight. And, you know, while there are these existential stakes, they're at each other's throats at times, you know, in my view, like children. So this is something that I want us all to be aware of and tracking more closely than is happening right now. The last thing I apologize, Andrew, it is just for Ron and speaking of existential stakes, it's your mother's role in the 1974 Great Gatsby.

No, it's the Ron threat this morning.

I mean, you worked to the State Department. You wrote about the first Iran deal in your book.

Trump this morning is talking about threatening to kill Iran's whole civilization tonight. Iran, I forgot on, said they're closing all diplomatic and indirect channels of communication. I'm sure you're just watching this with interest. I mean, not as a reporter hat. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts. Yeah, both in my own background at the State Department, and then actually wearing my reporter hat, because I wrote a book where I interviewed at the time every living secretary of state about the decline of diplomacy and militarism taking over American foreign policy making.

So this is an idea of that that I think none of them could have expected at the time. There is a reason why we empower a whole cadre of professionals to study other regions of the world that are geopolitically sensitive to all of our safety to engage delicately to try to come to the table and make deals.

That is still possible actually in this very era of history with Iran. There were deals on the table that were being advanced by other international partners.

And to see the collision of the kind of mania of this administration and those very combustible geopolitical circumstances and the falling away of all of the infrastructure that might save lives in a situation like this.

“Capricious and it's wanton and you don't need me to tell you that. I think everyone is seeing it.”

Well, all right, guys. Well, appreciate all the work you did on this. I believe it's there.

Yeah, you know, just a light fair. You know, this is welcome.

I'm actually in the AI, why two mancheldoin have a food fight about their personal grievances. We're a little, little, little it's helping with with breast cancer diagnosis. You know, we're doing this. We have a little glimmer. Appreciate you guys so much and we'll keep it on the next thing you're a partner. Thank you so much, Tim. Thanks, Tim. Thanks, guys.

Thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Ansley Skipper and with video editing by Katie Lutz and audio engineering in editing by Jason Brown.

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