Investigating Altman With Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz

Summary

Podcast Summary: Better Offline – "Investigating Altman with Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz"

Podcast: Better Offline (Cool Zone Media / iHeartPodcasts)
Episode Release Date: April 9, 2026
Host: Ed Zitron
Guests: Ronan Farrow & Andrew Marantz (The New Yorker)
Main Theme:
A deep-dive discussion on the reporting behind the widely-discussed New Yorker exposé on Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the shifting narratives, motives, and economic forces behind Silicon Valley’s AI boom—plus the implications for technology, safety, and society.

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Episode Overview

This episode brings together Ed Zitron, tech industry critic and host, with journalists Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz following their massive New Yorker feature on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The conversation explores:

• The unresolved questions around Altman’s firing and quick reinstatement.
• The contradictions at the heart of OpenAI’s founding mission.
• The implications of leadership integrity (or lack thereof) in shaping powerful technologies.
• The broader concerns over Silicon Valley hype, ethics, and accountability.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Why Investigate Sam Altman?

[02:27]

• Farrow explains the reporting was not launched by a specific tip of criminality but by a “lingering unanswered set of questions” about the real trajectory of AI and whether OpenAI’s leadership could be trusted to steward such impactful technology.
• OpenAI’s role as the new “fulcrum of Silicon Valley” in the AI era prompted closer investigation.
• Both reporters noted a need to “put all the facts in one place” to make sense of a confusing public narrative.

2. The Mystery of Altman’s Firing and Reinstatement

[04:45]

• Marantz: No "smoking gun" explanation—rather, a pattern of manipulations and “telling two different stories to two different communities.”
• Quote: “It was the betrayal of those promises that they felt was the fireable offense, more so than any one smoking gun thing.” (Marantz – 06:34)

[07:47]

• Farrow: The “blip” of Altman’s brief ouster and reversal reflected deeper issues. OpenAI’s original nonprofit mission and safety promises were ultimately overruled by investor interests and profit motives.
• Quote: “Capitalism winning... Investors rallied around Sam Altman who really stood to make them a lot of money, and they were worried that their money would go away.” (Farrow – 07:47)

3. Does Sam Altman Genuinely Care About Safety?

[10:03]

• Farrow: Altman seems to sincerely believe that “him winning is the same thing as humanity winning.” He frames safety as inseparable from his own success but is ultimately motivated by winning and control.
• Quote: “What he cares about is winning... Him controlling the technology is the most direct path to that.” (Farrow – 10:09)
• Marantz: Terms like “safety,” “AGI,” and “alignment problem” are vague enough for Altman to reframe or downplay as convenient, shifting his rhetoric depending on the situation.

4. Inside Narratives vs. Reality

[13:20]

• Farrow: Even when employees and co-founders joined under the pretense of an altruistic, nonprofit mission, internal communications show Altman and Greg Brockman were planning for-profit escape strategies.
• Quote: “Part of what we emphasize and document is that even at the time of those older assurances... he was saying and doing conflicting things at the same time.” (Farrow – 13:20)

5. The Allure and Effectiveness of Altman’s Early Pitch

[18:04]

• Marantz: Altman’s public pitch about “begging for regulation” and prioritizing safety was powerful against a backdrop of Silicon Valley’s self-serving tech giants. Whether genuine or not, it successfully recruited people and investors.

6. Money, Hype, and the “Bubble”

[19:42]

• Farrow: OpenAI’s cash burn rate is unprecedented, requiring massive, often international dealmaking (e.g., Middle Eastern investment, controversial partnerships).
• This “circular economy” of investors and deals resembles classic Silicon Valley hype cycles, raising risks of a massive valuation bubble with little real value to back it up.
  [22:10] – Example: Simultaneous, possibly conflicting exclusive deals with Microsoft and Amazon leading to tension and technical skepticism among partners.
• Quote: “It’s the general Silicon Valley archetype of building companies on hype and promises before actual value, inflating a massive balloon of valuation… on a far grander scale.” (Farrow – 21:16)

7. Altman’s Reputation: Fantasy, Narcissism, or Something Else?

[23:39]

• Zitron: Altman’s confidence his own role will always win out, even as he acknowledges a bubble, is strikingly self-serving.
• Farrow: “You're rarely on a story... where so many people use the word sociopath unprompted by us.” (Farrow – 23:45)
• Marantz: The “dishonesty” label comes from a broad range of people, not just rivals, substantiating it as a topic of real concern.
• Marantz: The economic value of a “bubble” is not black-and-white; even infrastructure bubbles (railroads, fiber optics) eventually provided value, but often at misaligned times.

8. Lack of Transparency and Accountability

[28:14] – Law Firm Investigation

• Farrow: Omissions and evasions marked the legal review that ultimately justified Altman’s return; no substantive report was ever memorialized beyond a brief press release, a move unusual for a company needing to “restore trust and confidence.”
• Quote: “There was a real effort to obfuscate some of this stuff in the view of many people around it. [...] There might need to be a new investigation at some point.” (Farrow – 28:14)
• Sensitivity was highest around the law firm investigation, Elon rivalry, and speculation about Altman’s personal life.

9. Altman’s Emotional Detachment & Self-Concept

[35:34]

• Marantz: Altman’s reactions to criticism and even tragedy (such as alleged ChatGPT-involved suicides) often seem distant. The “galactic scale” self-concept—playing at Ender’s Game, not ordinary business—pervades.
• Quote: “A lot of these people... see themselves as kind of playing in this big, sort of Ender's Game… galactic simulation scenario.” (Marantz – 35:34)
• Farrow: Despite damning facts, Altman ultimately comes across as tepid, “just business guys,” lacking villainy but also lacking emotionality.
• Quote: “The analysis of Altman's alleged pathological or compulsive lying is very subtle. It is undertaken with, if anything, maximum generosity to him… You can have someone who is not a monster but who is still in a position of so much power... That is something that we should all care about.” (Farrow – 37:32)

10. Comparison with Anthropic and Industry Colleagues

[41:44]

• Marantz: Altman, Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI), and Dario Amodei (Anthropic) have different personalities but similar underlying issues with conflicting ideals and business incentives—Anthropic itself now courting the same kind of international money and power plays.
• The “race to the bottom” is now industry-wide as even breakaway “safety-first” groups become caught up in the same dynamics.

11. Is Altman a Businessman or Statesman – or Something Else?

[44:43]

• Farrow: Altman’s self-conception appears “quite singular” and even messianic. Like Musk (albeit less extreme), he sees himself as “supra-governmental,” birthing the future of the earth.
• Quote: “They do have a kind of messianic quality to how they see themselves... not as businessmen, not as statesmen, but as everything to everyone... I think that really magnifies the messianic quality.” (Farrow – 44:43)

12. The Real Stakes & The Case for Accountability

[47:00]

• The episode closes with the assertion that Altman’s lack of accountability, even if not criminal or overtly monstrous, is uniquely dangerous given the power and opacity now concentrated in private Silicon Valley firms.
• Quote: “You can have someone who is not a monster but who is still in a position of so much power that... what they say is going to happen with the most dangerous technology on earth might not be what happens. That is something that we should all care about.” (Farrow – 47:00)
• It’s not about individual villainy—it's about private, unaccountable control of technology with potentially earth-shaping consequences.

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Notable Quotes & Moments (w/ Timestamps)

• “Capitalism winning... Investors rallied around Sam Altman who really stood to make them a lot of money, and they were worried that their money would go away.”
  (Farrow – 07:47)

• “What he cares about is winning... Him controlling the technology is the most direct path to that.”
  (Farrow – 10:09)

• “You're rarely on a story... where so many people use the word sociopath unprompted by us.”
  (Farrow – 23:45)

• “The analysis of Altman's alleged pathological or compulsive lying is very subtle. It is undertaken with, if anything, maximum generosity to him… You can have someone who is not a monster but who is still in a position of so much power... That is something that we should all care about.”
  (Farrow – 37:32, 47:00)

• “They do have a kind of messianic quality to how they see themselves... not as businessmen, not as statesmen, but as everything to everyone... I think that really magnifies the messianic quality.”
  (Farrow – 44:43)

• “A lot of these people... see themselves as kind of playing in this big, sort of Ender's Game… galactic simulation scenario.”
  (Marantz – 35:34)

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Memorable Moments

• The “Blip” (Altman’s firing and rapid return) as a microcosm for how original safety/ethics narratives were bulldozed by capital and hype. (06:51–09:53)
• Candid discussion of financial risk: The “small but real chance Altman is remembered as a Bernie Madoff or Sam Bankman-Fried–level scammer” quote from a Microsoft executive. (19:24)
• Open acknowledgment of the Silicon Valley hype cycle and circular funding arrangements: Why so much is built on promise instead of substantial value. (21:16–22:10)
• Citing the near-unprecedented number of interviewees labeling Altman a “sociopath.” (23:39–23:56)
• Concerns about accountability and transparency: The lack of a real report from the law firm investigation following Altman’s reinstatement. (28:14–32:17)
• Broader philosophical discussion: Are we simply seeing business as usual, or something uniquely risky? (37:32–47:00)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 02:27 — Why investigate Altman?
• 04:45–09:53 — The mystery and meaning of Altman’s firing/reinstatement ("the blip")
• 10:03–14:26 — Altman’s shifting attitude toward AI safety
• 19:24–23:15 — OpenAI finances, hype, and circular deal-making
• 23:39–24:56 — Altman’s reputation and the sociopath label
• 28:14–32:17 — Law firm investigation and the lack of transparency
• 35:34–37:32 — Altman’s apparent detachment and “messianic” self-concept
• 41:44–44:43 — Industry personalities, safety, and the “race to the bottom”
• 44:43–47:00 — Businessman, statesman, messiah? Altman’s self-perception and the importance of accountability

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Conclusion

This episode frames the Sam Altman story—and the state of Silicon Valley AI—around issues of trust, narrative control, and the often misaligned incentives between ethical stewardship and capital expansion. Farrow and Marantz’s reporting, as discussed here, underscores both the ordinariness and the unprecedented risk of Silicon Valley’s leaders, highlighting the urgent need for governance and transparency as private tech ambition increasingly overlaps with societal fate.

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Transcript

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[Andrew Marantz]

call zone media.

[Ed Zitron]

Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm of course your host, Ed Zitro.

[Ronan Farrow]

Better Offline,

[Ed Zitron]

no monologue this week. Quit complaining because I brought you all something far better. I am joined by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Morantz of the New Yorker, who just put out a massive piece about Sam Altman, the dampest man in Silicon Valley history. Which is my comment, not theirs. And I think I want to thank you for joining me, both of you. First of all, I. I want to ask a really just blunt question, Ronan, considering your history of the people you've reported on, why Sam Altman? What drew you to him.

[Ronan Farrow]

Well, this is fundamentally different than stories I've done that started with, you know, a single clear cut lead of about criminality. This was a situation where I was coming off of reporting you may be familiar with about Elon Musk and his whole empire. And I had a lot of sources in the world of AI, including Sam Altman, who was on the record in that piece. And, you know, this was no novel genius projection on my part. Obviously it was at a moment when AI was becoming the kind of fulcrum of Silicon Valley. And it became apparent to me that there were under examined questions about the trajectory of the technology and the integrity of the stewards of it. We really started looking at with an open mind. You know, Andrew is on this beat of big tech all the time and is also well sourced up in this world. And we both, I think, sat down and were having our conversations about what the most salient points of contention were in this world. And we're equally open to criticism about all of the labs, all of the figures, this question of why Sam Altman was fired, what the specific alleged proof points were, and whether those questions were something we should care about. Were they right to care then and should we still care now? Are those problems ongoing? Those really emerged as just a lingering unanswered set of questions that hadn't been, you know, fully proved out and backed up in this kind of a forensic way. Right.

[Ed Zitron]

So why was he fired? Like what did. Because the piece kind of got into it, but it's all over. Like the answers are all over the place from everyone. And each person seems to have a different interpretation.

[Ronan Farrow]

Andrew, you want to start?

[Andrew Marantz]

Yeah. I think one of the abiding frustrations and curiosities from this is the whole world saw Sam Altman get fired and then the whole world watched as he returned. And, and that was never really adequately explained in the public narrative. And so we really go into, with sort of more documentation, I think, than ever before, exactly what was going on. And as Ronan says, you know, it was not this sort of one smoking gun thing. Like it wasn't, you know, oh, you know, Sam Altman was strangling baby puppies in the office and nobody knew it until now. Right. This is a much subtler, slower accumulation of what his critics say are manipulations. Telling two different stories to people. The idea of telling different people what they want to hear comes up a lot. And so this is the kind of thing where you kind of need a New Yorker story. I say sort of self interestedly, but I do think that you kind of need to put all the facts in one place for them to make sense. And there have been really good books about this. There have been a lot out there. I mean, we're obviously not first to this story, but I just think it's hard to understand what the allegations even are without lining it all up in one place. And you kind of have to centrally start from this premise of Sam Altman did not go to everyone and say, AI is going to be a really big deal. It's going to be a product we can try to sell. It's going to be a good investment pitch for us. Let's all go and make a bunch of money, right? What he was saying was, you guys, you engineers, you need to come along with me and build this technology with me specifically, because I will be circumspect, I will be safe, I will argue for regulation. I will keep it in this nonprofit AI safety research lab format. And it was the betrayal of those promises that they felt was the fireable offense, more so than any one smoking gun thing.

[Ed Zitron]

Except he was kind of brought back by capitalism. Like, it was very. It was. I remember when it happened, there was journalists posting that they were crying with happiness about it. It was genuine. One of the darker moments, I can think, in Silicon Valley history, because it's like, wow, people. Brian Chesky and Satya Nadella got together and held hands and got that Sam Altman back up. It was just so bizarre.

[Andrew Marantz]

It is weird. And it speaks to this thing again that people consistently allege in the documents we saw and during our interviews of this sort of telling different stories to different communities of people. I mean, one of the most basic examples of this, right, is turning to the safety nonprofit people and saying, this will always be a safety nonprofit. And then turning to the VC investment community and saying, let's go, guys, rocket to the moon. Let's go make a bunch of money. And kind of simultaneously holding both of those communities seemingly in the palm of his hand until he wasn't able to anymore.

[Ronan Farrow]

You're exactly right to frame it as capitalism winning. And I think we were fascinated in this case of what's called the blip, this brief firing, and then all undoing the firing, because it. It does feel like it is about much more than Sam Altman. The thing that OpenAI originally was when it was founded as a nonprofit and in the way Andrew described was pitched on the basis of these fears from the people developing the technology, where the founders of this company were saying, listen, this is so dangerous that we're comparing it to nuclear weapons. And we need to create a noble minded research lab without a profit motive. They recruited on that basis. People took pay cuts to go there on that basis. And this moment when the board that was empowered to remove a CEO if they felt that CEO could not be trusted with that mission, when they tried to do that, and basically investors who really didn't know what the hell was going on at the time, that's one of the things we document. You know, the board really fumbled the ball. We can talk about how. But the long and short of it is that those investors rallied around Sam Altman who really stood to make them a lot of money. And, and they were worried that their money would go away if the company fell apart. And, and so it is a part of a bigger story about the way in which Silicon Valley builds companies based on hype and at least not solely real value, and where the initial promises very often don't pan out and what winds up governing is. I think it's valid when people in this piece have the criticism of we're now seeing a race to the bottom on the very safety issues that OpenAI was supposed to be founded around. And the blip was a turning point that encapsulated that.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. With that in mind, do you buy that Sam Orton gives a shit about safety? Do you actually think that the safety mission matters to him at all? You've spoken to him a few times,

[Ronan Farrow]

I think when he talks about still caring about and prioritizing safety. Look, maybe I am just kind of too generous in my assumptions about people. I assume that he believes the story that he is telling himself, which is very often has the same contour. Namely, what he cares about is winning. That's the word he uses. And he has set up the rationales in his mind and in the way he conveys it to others, so that him winning and consolidating as much power as possible is the same thing as humanity winning. So for him, when he talks about these things, there is no daylight between them. You know, he, he says in the piece that his definition of winning is a crazy up level for everyone. You know, we're all going to be curing diseases and forming blockbuster startups. And he really, I'm really, you know, paraphrasing but barely exaggerating. He talks about it in these terms and I think he really does think that him controlling the technology is the, the most direct path to that. He often says in conversations that accusations are the truest form of confessions or variations of this thought. That when people launch a criticism about someone else, they're very often projecting something about themselves. And it's interesting because in the course of my Elon Musk reporting, he talks about Musk in this very specific way where he says, on the record, I believe Elon is interested in saving humanity, but only if he's the one who can do it. And I thought about that quote about Elon a lot as I was in my conversations with Sam.

[Andrew Marantz]

I mean, the other thing I would say on this safety question, right, is a lot of these terms. Safety, AGI itself, super intelligence, intelligence itself. These all are vague enough terms and they're poorly defined enough that there can always be this kind of slippage and equivocation. And sometimes that's unavoidable, but sometimes people can use it to their rhetorical advantage. Right? So on questions of safety or alignment, what you would often find is that the Sam Altman of 2015, or even, frankly, 2023, would be talking about the alignment problem as a literally existential problem. If we don't solve this, a rogue AI could kill literally every person on Earth. And then you go back to him two years later, and he's saying the alignment problem is this slightly annoying thing that kind of tempts you to, you know, spend more time on ChatGPT. The way that algorithm, you know, Instagram's algorithm is out of alignment with the way you want to spend your time. That is absolutely not what he meant by it two years prior, but the word is the same. So he can kind of skate by with that.

[Ed Zitron]

I mean this in the nicest way. Why do you believe him two years ago, but not. But, like, what do you think he's changed? Do you think he just talking differently? Like, that's. I'm not accusing you of it. I'm just like, Sam Altman's whole vibe is, to me personally, just saying, quite deceptive. So I'm just. I'm just wondering what you've seen.

[Andrew Marantz]

I'm not saying that I believed him. I'm saying that his employees believed him. Congress, to some extent, believe the public.

[Ronan Farrow]

I think, actually, that's a very important point, Ed. I think your analysis is correct. And actually, the perspective from which we write the piece is these have always been shifting assurances. And. And actually, part of what we emphasize and document is that even at the time of those older assurances, where Sam Altman was the biggest doomer in the industry, he was saying and doing conflicting things at the same time. In many cases, you know, we. We document through a lot of internal communications. A period of time in which many researchers were joining the company on the promise that this would forever be a noble nonprofit. But simultaneously, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, his co founder, were having very concerted conversations about how quickly and effectively they could get out of the nonprofit structure. Essentially.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Ronan Farrow]

We talk about cases where he's saying on the Hill, we need regulation. You know, we need to start even a new government agency to regulate AI. And then simultaneously, he's working against regulations.

[Andrew Marantz]

Well, just to bolster the point you're making, like, what really does seem clear is that whether they should have believed it. In retrospect, a lot of these early employees, early recruits, early co founders really do seem to believe it. I mean, unless there was this kind of long game where they were like, we're going to write these emails to each other in 2015, and then 10 years later they'll come out and it'll all look like this was all. I mean, I guess that's possible, but from all appearances, it really seems like at least a lot of the key people really did believe this pitch at the time.

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[Ed Zitron]

Although my way of reading it personally is also it felt like a lot of rich guys kind of farting around. It was just the conversations they had back and forth, just the banality of it all. Just like, what if this happened? And this happened? I believe Ilya Sutskever he seems to however people may feel about him in general, he seems to at least buy this. The Altman Elon Musk emails were very much like two guys at an airport bar after a few waiting for their flight. It was very, very interesting watching, watching this unfold over time because the modern Sam Altman is very much more like a tech CEO, Capital T, Capital C. Like he's very much a maximizing profit and growth. And like you've said, the safety stuff kind of seems just like on the side now. It's more important that we just get this thing public.

[Andrew Marantz]

Yeah, well, and I mean, it's sort of like two guys at the airport bar, except that the hundreds of millions of dollars of investment they're talking about actually are real. I mean, yes. You know, so, so it is. I think you're right. There's a kind of combination of things going on here and I would be prepared to believe that in that particular case of Musk and Altman emailing each other that there is some kind of gamesmanship or brinksmanship going on and that even what they say in private might not be fully what they mean. But when you get outside of that tight of a circle, when you talk about the early recruits to OpenAI, the later recruits, the people who took massive pay cuts to, you know, give up $6 million salaries at Google to come work for them, clearly this pitch of we're the good guys was doing some work for those people. And I also think that we should keep in mind how effective the public pitch was. I mean, coming on the heels of Mark Zuckerberg and all these other sort of social Media tycoons going out to the public and saying, you should be so grateful for these convenience machines that we're building and you should give us all your data and you should feel bad anytime you want to regulate us. Again, Altman's pitch was totally the opposite. It was, we're going to be conscientious. This is so dangerous that you actually have to regulate us and we are just begging for our hands to be tied. Again, whether in retrospect that seems like a genuine pitch or not is sort of separate from the question of how effective it was.

[Ed Zitron]

So let's talk finances. Within the piece, there wasn't a ton of stuff about money, but there was this quote from a senior executive at Microsoft who said, I think there's a small but real chance or Altman is eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff or Sam Bankman fried level scammer. Did you, what kind of financial stuff did you hear about?

[Ronan Farrow]

OpenAI, if anything, I mean, this is all very far out there already. We have a board member in the piece talking about how the company is levered up in a scary way right now. I mean, this is a company with one of the fastest cash burn rates in, in the history of startups. The spend level is almost unimaginable in the risk towards AGI. And so it really does require, it's almost not an exaggeration to say all the money in the world. And this governs a lot of the different activities that we write about in the piece. Right? Sam Altman for years courting Middle Eastern money. Everyone in Silicon Valley is courting Middle Eastern money and sidelining concerns about working with autocrats to various extents. Sam Altman is doing it on a unique level, you know, agreeing to and catalyzing the building of massive infrastructure, even including in the Middle east, you know, and over the objections we talk about like concerns that short circuited a security clearance vetting process because there were so many red flags in the national security establishment about these deals, dealings with the Middle East. We talk about, you know, gifts and trips to, on yachts with UAE officials. So, you know, this is a drive for more and more and more. And we talk to, you know, startup experts and economists who say one of the consequences of that is a whole lot of circular deals. You know, none of this is new either, but this is a situation where it is the general Silicon Valley archetype of building companies on hype and promises before actual value, inflating a massive balloon of valuation. And it's, it's putting it on a Far grander scale where there's a whole ecosystem of partners that are just borrowing and borrowing and borrowing from each other on the assurance that they're all going to buy each other's products. It's an I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine situation over and over again. In some cases, Altman is running into problems because there are conflicting, or at least allegedly conflicting deals being announced on the same day. We talk about tensions in the Microsoft relationship, particularly around this recent Amazon deal

[Ed Zitron]

where they felt,

[Ronan Farrow]

yes, it's to do with the exclusivity having been reaffirmed for Microsoft in terms of the underlying stakeholders, stateless models. And then OpenAI announcing. Well now at the same time, in the same day, well, we have this additional deal on top of that with Amazon, you know, for our enterprise products that allow the building of agents, which they're saying is going to happen in a stateful environment. And that's going to be because they're creating new technology that will deconflict this with the underlying stateless models from Microsoft. The long and the short of it is a bunch of people at Microsoft feel this is not technically possible and you have to rely on the underlying stateless models to create agents that are stateful, essentially with memory. That's a. That's a lot of technical jargon to get at the point, which is there's a slew of deals where critics say they're circular and someone's going to have to pay up. Maybe a lot of people are going to have to pay up. Sam Altman is one of the people who has said we're looking at a bubble and, and that a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money, which is.

[Ed Zitron]

It's funny, though, whenever he talks about it, it's never him, never like, it's never like, I'm gonna lose, I will be. But it kind of gets back to what you were saying. It's like the only one who can usher in this AI future is Sam Altman. The only person who will not get destroyed in the bubble is Sam Altman. Makes me wonder if he's like a fantasist or a narcissist or a sociopath. It's like, I think at least one of those words was in there in the piece.

[Andrew Marantz]

Those words are definitely in the piece. And. Yeah.

[Ronan Farrow]

Not from us, to be clear. Yeah, yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes, yes.

[Ronan Farrow]

People who have worked closely with the man. But it's remarkable, you know, you're rarely on a story, I don't know about you, Andrew, where so many people use the word sociopath unprompted by us.

[Andrew Marantz]

And. Yeah, and look, I mean, again, I think it's very. I think readers should come to this with a lot of skepticism about how much of this is kind of industry competition. And we tried to not, you know, let people launder talking points through our story.

[Ronan Farrow]

Right.

[Andrew Marantz]

We're very. Everyone in this world is kind of a ruthless competitor. Right. So it wouldn't be a very high bar to say, you know, I talked to this guy's corporate competitor and they called him a sociopath. Like, it's not that kind of criticism that we're talking about. We're talking about these very long standing, kind of documented patterns that people can dispute. But it's not just kind of these off the cuff observations. I think, to your point about the bubble stuff, like, your audience will be very familiar with this because I know you cover this stuff a lot. But this question of is it a bubble or is it actually a very useful or even potentially economically transformative technology? It's not really as clean a binary as that because a lot of the biggest bubbles in market history have come from infrastructure projects that ultimately got used.

[Ronan Farrow]

Right.

[Andrew Marantz]

I mean, this is a kind of basic economic history point. But I think it's worth reiterating. The railroads, the canals, the even fiber optic cable, all of this stuff eventually gets used. The question is, does the speed at which the investors are building it match the usefulness in real time? Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And I mean, I would debate that point and have done so many times because GPUs depreciate in three to six years and there's no way that this gets used afterwards. But putting that all aside, it is still this weird thing of. And it's something in my own work, I've noticed it's weird we're discussing this still. Like, it's weird that we have no clarity because even within your piece, we don't really have clarity about what is going on. Like that very. The one thing that stood out to me, like, they're still trying to work out a business model. That whole thing about pitting world powers against each other was truly insane. Like the Greg Brockman. You'll have to run through it again, but it was like, as I understood it, it would be Greg Brockman suggesting that they make something powerful enough to sell the different nations and create a bidding war like Mission Impossible. Except for the chat bot.

[Ronan Farrow]

Yeah.

[Andrew Marantz]

Yeah. This is, this is again, you know, like you say, there's a lot of kind of guy at the bar, speculation going on. And so this is in the early days when, because OpenAI back then was a nonprofit whose legally binding fiduciary duty was the safety of all of humanity, they hired someone to come in and say, okay, how can we deploy this potentially dangerous thing safely? And this person, the way it was told to us, came in with all kinds of 50 page detailed white papers about how we can model it on the Baruch plan and the way that the nuclear weaponry was first brought safely into the world. And the way that that was told to us again was that that plan then somehow morphed into okay, instead of doing this kind of safe, international game theory, non zero cooperation thing, why don't we just start an auction between China, Russia, the US maybe a few other world governments and see who either wants to be given the technology or who can be sold the technology. Now, obviously this is disputed and also even more obviously, this is not something that happened. But the fact that that kind of idea was being batted around and apparently was taken outside the walls of the organization and was pitched to potential investors, it really does speak to how volatile. Yeah, it's really a crazy situation. And the way we got people denying this, but they didn't say like, this is made up, they just remembered the details of it differently.

[Ed Zitron]

So you spoke to Sam Altman a few times, right?

[Andrew Marantz]

Yep.

[Ed Zitron]

Like what?

[Ronan Farrow]

More than it seemed to.

[Ed Zitron]

What seemed to actually get under his skin because it's over the last. I've watched a lot of Samuel.

[Ronan Farrow]

I've.

[Ed Zitron]

I've watched the Oldman channel for hours and he seems fairly calm most of the time. But occasionally something will really irritate him, like very suddenly, like Brad Gertz. Brad Gerstner, I think it is the venture capitalist who was talking about valuations and he said, well, I'll get someone to buy all your shares. Or he was on the Hard Fork podcast on one of the glazing sessions. He got very angry about the New York Times suing him and suing OpenAI even. What was his mood like? What were the questions he was up for? What were the things he got a bit worrisome about?

[Ronan Farrow]

Well, the truth is, I think both of us picked up on from both Sam and institutionally from OpenAI some degree of apathy about the integrity and lying allegations that got him fired. I think that there is real sensitivity and concern about the reporting in the piece around the law firm investigation that was used to kind of validate his staying on. And I. My background is as an attorney in part, and I went very deep on talking to people at the law firm and Andrew and I really looked at this question and look, the defense of that outside investigation from some of the lawyers involved is on full display in the story. But I think the widespread criticism of it is meaningful and has merit, which is we report for the first time that nothing was put in writing except for the 800 word press release that OpenAI put out which acknowledged only a breakdown in trust. It is true that private companies sometimes keep outside investigations when they want the outcome to be exonerative, out of writing, you know, to limit liability and because of privilege issues. But when you look at the annals of high profile scandals like this, where the goal is to restore trust and confidence, I think there is a much better case that this should have been memorialized in a more intensive way, that it should have been released at least within the company, if not publicly. And, and look, you don't have to turn to us. There was a whole set of executives and stakeholders in this company who were shocked that there was no actual report released. So, you know, there was a real effort to obfuscate some of this stuff in the view of many people around it. And we report on a number of alleged irregularities there. That's a good example of a nuts and bolts matter where there, there is concern. And honestly my legal analysis is there should be, because if this company goes through its ipo, there are actually legal standards by which shareholders could demand more information about that. And we talked to people around this who are saying, well, there might need to be a new investigation at some point. So there are some practicalities like that. Obviously he was, as you might imagine, also very concerned about all of the Elon rivalry stuff in the piece and all of the scuttlebutt that is so far out there in Silicon Valley about his personal life, you know, which we looked at very incisively and fairly. But I think your point is well taken, which is the core allegations about integrity and honesty don't seem to much get under his skin. And when I asked him, even on a personal level, from the perspective of someone where, if this was said about me so widely, you know, that I had a real problem with honesty and was, in the view of many people around me, compulsively lying and telling people conflicting things, that would be devastating and would trigger a lot of deep self reflection and work on myself. And so even when I asked him, within that personal framework, you know, listen, Art, are you, is this something that you have talked about in therapy? How do you talk to yourself about this trait? How do you carry the weight of that. I don't know about your impression because you were in that interview. Andrew I did not sense a lot of deep, bracing self reflection or self confrontation. There was kind of a slightly anodyne discussion of like, yeah, I've tried therapy on occasion. I love breath work and not a lot of, I mean, look. And maybe he's just choosing not to reveal.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, that's potentially true.

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[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it's I was literally talking to a friend of the show Steve Burke from Games Nexus about this the other day. It's like if someone if everywhere on I don't know if you saw the Iran was threatening Stargate UAE, so the OpenAI data center in the Middle east, everyone was talking about it like, yeah, fuck him up, destroy it. And it's like now that you said that, I'm wondering if he cares about that either. Because if I'd made a product and I went online and like, okay, a large contingent of very annoying people liked it, but tons of people were like disgusted about, I would be a little more concerned. And it sounds like he doesn't really care. Like you brought up like the person who's killed killed themselves because they were using ChatGPT as well. Did he have any reaction to that or the negativity against OpenAI or was it the same kind of anodyne reaction?

[Ronan Farrow]

Andrew?

[Andrew Marantz]

I mean we got statements to the effect of, you know, this responsibility weighs very heavily and you know, I have no judgment about what's in his head or heart. I think that one way that this might seem different from a sort of more standard micro human scale reaction could be that a lot of these people, based on their public statements alone, see themselves as kind of playing in this big sort of Ender's game kind of galactic simulation scenario. Right? So this is not something that Sam Altman said to us and this is not something that I'm imputing to him. But you know, if you, you know, follow the way that Musk and Altman and a lot of these people think they are avowedly playing on this galactic scale now there's a possibility that that's just hype and that's just to get the next investment round. And that's a totally plausible possibility. But to the extent that that stuff seeps into their self conception at all, there's a way of reading it that says, you know, maybe some eggs are going to get broken to make the big galactic omelet.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it's is. I keep thinking about how many times people called him a sociopath as well. Because it's just this profile is very interesting because a lot of it was going through stuff that being reported, but like getting it deeper and deeper and deeper. But in the end, compared to like other monsters you have covered Ronan, just being blunt, Altman almost seems quite tepid despite the scale of all of this, despite how like how much is theoretically or otherwise at stake. He just seems. And all of these people, Dario Amadei included, just seem like business guys. They talk about the big philosophical things. But when you get down to it, business guys, regular business guys, there's a distinct lack of emotion to it. But not in an interesting. Not interesting is not the word, but colorful way. It's just very cold.

[Ronan Farrow]

Yeah, I hear you. I think so. First of all, I really stay away from, in my own mind, in how I frame things, these terms like, you know, monster or villain. Yeah. Even, by the way, when reporting on, you know, someone who's, like, very clearly guilty of, like, serial violent crime. I think my job, almost especially when the fact pattern is really damning, is to kind of excavate what's sympathetic, be strenuous, strenuously fair. This is more in line with, you know, reporting I did on Musk, reporting I've done in other cases that's, you know, more about national security issues where the centerpiece is not some portrait of damning criminality. The analysis of Altman's alleged pathological or compulsive lying is very subtle. It is undertaken with, if anything, I think, maximum generosity to him. You know, in the course of any piece like this, you have a lot of conversations with the subject of the reporting about what's in and what's out. And I really erred on the side in a lot of cases of generosity towards Sam. I feel for anyone who's under this kind of a microscope, I think it's correct, you know, if you have this much power, to be held accountable. But I want to do it in a way that is not unkind and that is tough, but really fair. So I've been struck, actually, by the range of reactions to the piece. I think Andrew and I did our job well in the sense that I see people who are like, this is, you know, the most horrifying thing ever. And this is a completely untrustworthy person who needs to be kept away from any position of authority. And I also see people who are like, you know what? This feels actually like a sympathetic portrait. My mom was. Was calling me last night, having read the piece, saying, you know, I just see interviews with him, and I sense this kind of charm and vulnerability. And, you know, I read the piece and he's a complicated guy, but I think you did a really good job actually also making him sympathetic. So. So I think the fact that the fact pattern can accommodate this range of perceptions is. Is telling. And my hope is that the power of what we've done is precisely in that kind of forensic nuance. The facts are very unimpeachable. I think it is very difficult to argue with the idea that there is a serial honesty problem here and a preponderance of people around him who consider it to be a problem. And to your point of like, is this all milquetoast? Doesn't matter. I think what it comes down to is, yes, he is a businessman, and this is a world of businessmen that we are looking at. Sam Altman's degree of dissembling appears to be so noteworthy that it transcends and breaks through and becomes a constant topic.

[Ed Zitron]

What do you mean by dissembling? Sorry?

[Ronan Farrow]

The. The allegation that Sam Altman says conflicting things to different people and at times says things that are simply untrue, it is so pervasive that it breaks through and becomes a topic of conversation around him across his career, over and over again, is one thing we document, even against the backdrop of all of the Silicon Valley businessmen, all of the expectation, which is, you know, to a dismaying extent, increasingly just what people assume is normal, that there will be some degree of pitch men, you know, hyping based on things that aren't totally grounded in fact, even with all of that, even with the kind of race to the bottom in terms of truth and trust in Silicon Valley and America right now, particularly in American business, Sam Altman is noteworthy. And that, to me, made him actually an extraordinarily interesting and challenging subject to write about. Because while it does exist in subtlety, the accumulation of facts that got him fired is striking even above and beyond that backdrop and that set of norms.

[Ed Zitron]

So, as we wrap up, you spoke with Daario Amadea of Anthropic a few times, right? Or at least one. It wasn't clear how many conversations happened. How does he compare to Sam, personality wise? And as far as believing it all

[Andrew Marantz]

goes, I mean, I think personality wise, they're quite different. And we've seen them sort of clash. The sort of memes of them being unwilling to even touch hands and all of that stuff. I think that's pretty real. And there are many different styles of this. I think Sam and Elon have obviously very different public Personas. Ilya Sutskever has a very different public presentation. The Dario thing, I think, is complicated, right, Because Anthropic spun off from OpenAI. They were the OpenAI safety people who left to form their own company. And now there's this danger of them perpetuating this race to the bottom with getting the same Middle east autocracy money that they critiqued other companies for doing of. You know, there was this whole dust up around the Pentagon Stuff, but that only was able to happen because Anthropic was doing so much classified work for the Pentagon in the first place. Right. So it's not that there are these very clean distinctions, at least to an outside the industry kind of perspective. And look, I mean, I think your point about, like, how much of this is just par for the course business stuff is a really important one. And also your question is the right one, like, why should anyone have invested so much in this rhetoric in the first place? And I think one way of approaching that is to the people who are really close to this. I think this does go beyond narcissism of small differences stuff. And who puts the nicer wrapper on the who does better branding? These people, again, in their private correspondence, when they don't think anyone's looking, they talk about this like it's Lord of the Rings. Literally. They talk. And so again, you can think that's all diluted, and many people do. And frankly, a lot of people we spoke to said, in retrospect, I can't believe I was so naive that I bought into all this stuff. But when you have convinced yourself that that's what's going on, whether it's right or wrong, the stakes feel extremely high. And if you believe the rhetoric, you know, it's kind of, you know, it's funny, I was listening when you were talking about this. Like, you could say the same thing about someone who was really taken in by a political movement and say, oh, did you really believe Obama when he said he was gonna go after the banks, you know, on the campaign trail? Or did you really, when he said he was going to not start any new wars? Yes, people believe it. And the betrayal of that belief can hit really hard. And so, yes, politicians lie, and yes, business hype men tell stories to investors, but doesn't mean that people don't get taken in by it.

[Ed Zitron]

So final question, actually, in line with that, do you think Sam Altman sees himself as a businessman or as a statesman almost?

[Ronan Farrow]

That's a really interesting question. I think that I honestly sense in my conversations with him that he sees himself as something quite singular. And the grandiosity of his claims about his mission when he was telling recruits that he believed that this technology could eventually. What was the exact quote, Andrew? Capture the light cone of all the value in the universe. I, I think he exhibits a trait that I have have seen writing about various Silicon Valley moguls of this era, which is they, they do have a kind of messianic quality to how they see themselves, you know, not as businessmen, not as statements, but statement, but as everything to everyone, as supra governmental. I think Elon is a much more extreme example of that psychologically. The kind of messiah complex. There's much more mania there. Sam is someone who, you know, as evidenced by the fact that he participated in this story so deeply, still wants to kind of play by the rules and within a system to some extent. But the reality around all of these guys is we have let Silicon Valley grab all of the levers of power in the United States. It is such a center of gravity economically. It is, I mean, one could say more or less the entire economy at this point. And it is bankrolling a huge, huge swath of politics now. So it is very hard, I think, for the people at the forefront of that to consider themselves anything but messianic. And you add to that the specific contour of AI in which these guys really believe, and not without reason, that they are birthing the future of the earth, that this may supersede the human species as the next dominant thing. I think that really magnifies the messianic quality.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Ronan Farrow]

And so that, that all goes to the responsibility question. Like, yes, to Andrew's point. You know, business people, they fiber and they dissemble and they are guilty of empty hype. And that is the whole saga of Silicon Valley from the beginning. The fact that Sam Altman is not, in my view, a villain in any clear cut way, and the piece goes to pains to be generous to him, to me, makes this a more interesting story because both things can be true. You can have someone who is not a monster, but who is still in a position of so much power that if they have this particular trait of no one can trust them and what they say is going to happen with the most dangerous technology on Earth might not be what happens. That is something that we should all care about. And I think it just speaks to this wider set of structural issues where this is the most acute need we have as a species for proper governance and regulation. And that is all falling away. And it's all in the hands of these private, unaccountable individuals.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, thank you so much, Andrew Ronan, for joining me. This has been an awesome conversation. The piece Be Linked.

[Ronan Farrow]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Thank you for joining me.

[Ronan Farrow]

Thank you so much, Ed.

[Andrew Marantz]

Thank you so much, Ed.

[Ed Zitron]

Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio [e-mail] M A T T O S O W S K I dot com youm can email me at ezeteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's your ED to visit the Discord and go to on to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

[Andrew Marantz]

Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media.

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[Ronan Farrow]

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