← Channels with Peter Kafka
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- [00:01]
Peter Kafka
Oh, hey, sorry, love to chat but I'm busy shopping all the rollbacks some more at Walmart. Grab a what?
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Cancel that. I gotta grab these big savings on
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the Walmart app online and in store like right now. See who.
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Ugh.
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Nope. Unavail. The only thing I wanna see are the prices just lowered on tech home
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and all my must haves. Wait, you wanna shop Walmart with me?
- [00:28]
Alrighty, I think I can fit you in. More and more Americans are finding themselves taking care of their kids and their parents at the same time. Well, you know, I joke that there's a dark game which I was playing. Which family member will I disappoint today? How to care for others without burning
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out in the process.
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That's this week on Explain It To Me. Find new episodes Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.
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What are the biggest threats we face today?
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Kara Swisher
And the reason we call it Everything Everywhere all at Once is because the idiosyncratic nature of the threats.
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Peter Kafka
I'm Preet Bharara and this week NYPD's Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism, Rebecca Weiner joins me to discuss the evolving nature of terrorism and targeted violence. The episode is out now. Search and Follow Stay tuned with Preet Wherever you get your podcasts. From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also chief correspondent at Business Insider. I thought this week's episode was going to come to you late and said it's coming to you early because I wanted to get it to you as soon as we can. It's all about OpenAI's Sam Altman and specifically the New Yorker's mega profile of Sam Altman, which documents in great detail the fact that many people who work with Sam Altman no longer trust him. There are lots of important and powerful people in the world who may also be untrustworthy. And one of the key questions I had about this profile is whether Altman's failings are worse or better than any other mega rich tech leader. And also, what are we supposed to do about the fact that we have these mega rich tech leaders who seem to have very, very few guardrail left when it comes to their behavior and to the technology they control. So that's what I'm talking about with Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz, the two men who spent an enormous amount of time compiling this profile for the New Yorker. You should absolutely read this one. I think you'll get more out of the conversation if you have. But even if you haven't you're going to like it, too. Here's me talking to Ronan Farrow and Andrew Morantz. I'm here with the New Yorkers, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Morantz. Half of you know that they have come out with a blockbuster profile of Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. The other half of you are vaguely, maybe aware of that. We're going to try to reach both audiences with this conversation. Like I said, this is a great profile of Altman. It's very in depth. You guys spend a ton of time on it. Hundreds of interviews. And in case anyone's wondering why this is a necessary profile, you spell it out on the headline, Sam Altman may control our future. Can he be trusted? You can kind of leave it there, but tease it out a little bit for me. Why invest this much time and effort profiling Sam Altman as opposed to any other tech titan that has really, really important power over our present and future?
- [03:34]
I think for both of us, the significance of Sam Altman was not just Sam Altman. What we document in here has a lot of new contours to it. Right. You know, the documents people have heard about, the Ilia memos, nobody had reviewed them in full. We did so 70 pa sent as disappearing messages, cell phone images taken to avoid detection on company devices. Same with all of these records related to Dario Amadades. 200 plus pages never disclosed that had been circulated and were sort of whispered about but not reported on. And some of the revelations also to me, were shocking, even as someone who had followed this closely, like the Wilmer Hale revelation. Right. People knew there was an investigation.
- [04:17]
I'm going to pull you back for a second because you're answering a question I was going to ask but hadn't got to yet, which is there's people who are saying, what's the stuff? But if you're saying, why spend time on Sam Altman in particular.
- [04:28]
Well, so it's two. It's two answers. I think this is the point I'm arcing to. I think that what a lot of these new records show, right, and this is why I mentioned Wilmer specifically, is that things were deliberately kept quiet over the course of this story. And so although there has been incredible reporting around this, and I think it's fair to say that a lot of people who were following closely knew some of the contours of the allegations. A lot of the particulars had deliberately been kept away from the public eye. And the specifics that emerged when we did start to get at some of those Answers that hadn't been out there. Right. Because of some of the things we report, the Wilmer report, being kept out of writing, these kinds of things, the stuff that had been kept quiet previously, even with the density of good reporting that's been around. Sam Altman points to an alleged pattern of integrity problems that, again, are not just about Sam. I think the inflection point of Sam Altman being fired over those allegations and then finding his way back, right, marshaling the investment community in Silicon Valley to his cause and essentially overriding the structures that he had created in founding a nonprofit focused on safety. That has signaled what many in the piece argue is something of a race to the bottom, where a lot of different AI leaders are unaccountable in similar ways. So I think my big answer to the question is there were these focal points where the documents hadn't been examined, some of the people hadn't talked, and there were kind of lacunae in our knowledge of this very important thing. And once we started looking, it was clear that those lacunae were significant, not just for Sam, but for the whole industry and the stakes for all of us.
- [06:33]
Let me try it this way. And you guys asked the question, the headline, can he be trusted? Over and over and over in your piece, you quote people saying, no, he can't be trusted. He's a liar. He's unconstrained by truth. Multiple people call him sociopaths. There is, I think, a broad acceptance in and out of tech that the men who run these companies and these startup founders, many of whom we end up deifying, often lie and stretch the truth and fib. And. And Steve Jobs, who's the patron saint of. Of this entire worldview, is. Is known for having a reality distortion field. Elon Musk is the richest man in the world, and he says untrue things all the time. People are used to it. Why is it important then Sam Altman also says things that are not true.
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Andrew Marantz
So, I mean, there's a few different ways of getting at this. We actually say in the piece, we, you know, Steve Jobs was a kind of. Was a kind of role model for Sam Altman. And we actually say in the piece, okay, Steve Jobs was a generationally talented pitch man who, you know, had what people called this reality distortion field around him. But even Steve Jobs never said that if you didn't buy the ipod, you and everyone you loved would die. That is what Sam Altman said. And it's not hyperbole. It's not a joke. The pitch for OpenAI originally was AI is going to be the most powerful and most dangerous technology ever invented. Because of the urgency and apocalyptic stakes, we can't entrust it to a big mega corporation profit seeking entity like Google. In fact, it was Google that they were set up to oppose. Therefore, we need it to be us, the good guys, the David versus the Goliath, the nonprofit, small, safety focused research lab. Because otherwise this technology will engulf and destroy the world. So it's not the stakes here, by their own lights, are not the normal stakes of a normal competitive business. They said this can't be a normal competitive business. It can't be a for profit company at all. It can't move quickly, it can't participate in race dynamics, it can't build data centers in autocracies, it can't, you know, so that's why we go down the list of these promises where there seem to be reversals or reneging on those promises. Because these are the standards that Sam Altman and his co founders set up to begin with.
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Peter Kafka
And I think it's important to note, Peter, there's this range of perspectives on this, right? It's absolutely fair to say the entire dynamic of Silicon Valley is everyone in tech exaggerating, right? And massive valuations being inflated on the basis of promise.
- [09:10]
You make it. And the markets are a source of that in the end.
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And I think what's extraordinary about this story is that Sam Altman has a trait that rises so far above that that a significant preponderance of people who walk out of rooms with him, say a range from what Andrew just referred to in the context of this particular existentially significant technology. This man is dangerous because there is no foundation of reality underpinning his different statements to different people to an extent that is above and beyond even those Silicon Valley expectations. And then a more moderate group that is not safety minded. I'm just talking about pragmatic, growth oriented investors. We spoke to, you know, board members we spoke to who are not effective altruists saying even if you don't integrate the safety stakes, this is a level of manipulation and deception, allegedly that is too dysfunctional for the head of a major company. And we have direct quotes from people saying that's the concern, that this creates bad governance and opens them up to liability in material ways.
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Tell me more about Altman as a persuader. Again, the Steve Jobs model is you're this dynamic person on stage. Multiple generations of tech leaders have tried to ape that none of them are successful because there's only one Steve Jobs. But Sam Altman is not a dynamo on stage in public presentations. And then Steve Jobs behind the scenes could be charming and then a terrible bully. So you could sort of see how those two things could work at the same time. What is, what is Altman's special sauce? How, how does he persuade people?
- [10:58]
Andrew Marantz
Yeah, we, we've, we've sort of had a lot of internal discussions about this because, you know, you talk to more than 100 people, a lot of people have different takes on a person. And this sort of, how is he this sort of generational persuader is one thing that comes up again and again from different angles. I mean, I think one useful piece of level setting is basically like the epic stage performer, the kind of, you know, takes all the charisma, energy out of the room type person that works on a certain scale, that works for someone running for president or, you know, someone speaking before the UN or whatever, or giving a big sort of TED Talk or a demo. But Sam's persuasiveness is more tailored to specific groups of people, right? So he arrives at this particular historical moment where in his view, and in the view of Elon Musk and Greg Brockman and a number of other people, AGI could be this nuclear fission like scientific breakthrough with these utopian or dystopian potentials, but there are only a few scientists who are capable of building it. Those scientists are by and large people who are too terrified to want to build it. So his pitch first and foremost is to them because he's not someone with the technical scientific ability to build it. So instead of coming in with this big, blustery, sort of Clintonian, Obama esque energy, he comes in with this kind of like, I'm one of you. I am actually a technical nerd who's just as scared of this stuff as you are. Then at the same time, obviously he's going to investors and speaking the language of rocket ship growth, and then also he's going to the public and saying, unlike those, you know, blustery tech bro CEOs of social media companies who just want, you know, to be unrestrained and unregulated, I actually am conscientious and a furrowed brow guy who really wants to be regulated.
- [12:54]
Peter Kafka
I'm intentionally putting myself in the middle of the hardcore engineers, the investors and regular people who want to understand this. And, and his Persona sort of works for all three audiences. Is that a calculated Persona, do you think, or is this just who he has always been?
- [13:11]
I think that it's worth noting that in Addition to these people that Andrew is citing, who say, you know, he has this sort of Jedi like, persuasive ability, that his chameleon like nature, his ability to buy into his shifting convictions over time, is really masterful. There's also a contingent of people who have a more mundane rendering of him after working with him closely. We quote this former board member Su Yoon, who. Who has an impression that I thought was measured in a really useful way, where she talks about all these people in Silicon Valley, describing Sam as Machiavellian and some kind of a, like, you know, evil mastermind, but feels like that's overstated. And her impression is she used the word to the point of fecklessness, that he just lacks doubt and completely buys into whatever the thing he is saying, mirroring back the view of the audience that he wants to win over as he's saying those things, and that most people wouldn't be able to do that because they're more connected to reality, but that he, in her words, doesn't live in reality. So I think that that is more, for what it's worth, my experience, over many months of dealings with Sam, that it does not feel, to the point you just raised, always calculated that it feels like a kind of. You could describe it as something of a superpower in terms of rallying different people and convincing them that their cause is your cause. But it is seemingly compulsive at times.
- [14:51]
In the fall of 2023, a lot of this blows up in public. Aye, he's fired by the board, and they eventually say he wasn't trustworthy. It takes them some time to get to that. And then there's this big swing that he helps coordinate. Lots of employees coming out, employees and investors, but employees coming out saying, we love Sam, we want to work with Sam, including some people who had led the coup. Switch sides. Do you interpret that as, oh, we were persuaded by Sam Altman that we actually do like him after all, or we're in a position where we have to align ourselves with someone, and given what we know and what the options are, Sam Altman's our best choice.
- [15:27]
Andrew Marantz
Yeah. I mean, so obviously there were financial stakes here. Right. There was a tender offer in the mix, and it was insinuated or in some cases even said to people, if Sam doesn't come back as CEO, you know, you can't cash out through this tender.
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Peter Kafka
Existing employees could have sold stakes become much, much wealthier than they already were.
- [15:48]
Andrew Marantz
So there's that. And then, you know, often, you know, we don't reach decisive conclusions on this in the piece. But often the way these things work, there's a kind of politics to it, Right. So people are gauging which way the wind is blowing, and once they kind of see where it's going, they don't want to be on the wrong side of it. I mean, this is a sort of obvious comparison, right? But the people who in Congress who felt one way right after January 6th and then they feel a different way tomorrow.
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Peter Kafka
Right.
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Andrew Marantz
I'm not making any direct comparisons here. I'm just saying people's minds can change pretty quickly. It is shocking how, as you say, people who had been instigating this firing of Altman immediately changed sides. But I, I don't think that the reporting suggests that they were recanting in the sense that they were like, oh, we thought we heard that Sam was strangling baby kittens in the break room. And then we realized we were wrong about that. What our reporting suggests is not that they're was a bright line allegation or a smoking gun allegation that was then rescinded. It was more like, we tried, we failed, we shot for the king and we missed. And now we all kind of have to fall in line.
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Peter Kafka
We'll be right back with Ronan Farrow and Andrew Morantz, the New Yorker. But first, a word from a sponsor.
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Mitch
I'm Mitch, first two time indigocelled champion, championship MVP and forward for the US Women's National Team. Before I went pro, I graduated from Harvard with a degree in psychology, which comes in handy more than you think. Any athlete pursuing greatness knows there's a certain mentality you have to have. What people don't know is what that costs. In my podcast, Confessions of an Elite Athlete, I sit down with the best athletes in the world and explore the psychology mindset and unseen battles on the path to greatness. So take a seat and learn from the Confessions of an elite athlete on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Andrew Marantz
From Iran to Venezuela to China, what is driving President Trump's foreign policy?
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Peter Kafka
Both Russia and China are big losers
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if there's a transition in the nature of the of the Iranian government, which again, is why I think we have to see this campaign through Jake.
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Andrew Marantz
I'm Jake Sullivan. And I'm John Finer and we're the hosts of the Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, Trump's former national security advisor, HR McMaster and deputy national Security Advisor Matt Pottinger join us.
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Peter Kafka
The episode's out now.
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Search for and follow the Long Game
- [18:23]
Andrew Marantz
wherever you get your podcasts.
- [18:27]
Kara Swisher
Hi everyone. Kara Swisher here. We just won the Webby Award for the best interview show in news, business and society. And I've had some great guests on my podcast on with Kara Sw. Here are some you don't want to miss. Tristan Harris, the co founder of the center for Humane Technology. I talked to him about his biggest worry when it comes to development and deployment of AI. Hinted it has something to do with the CEOs and how they stand to profit. I interviewed documentarian Louis Theroux. His latest documentary, into the Manosphere, focuses on the incredible and horrifying influence this group of individuals has, especially on young men and boys. And recently I caught up with Katie Couric, Amy La Rocca and my brother Jeff Swisher to debunk some of the fads and misinformation behind the billion dollar wellness industry. And we talked about the important medical tests that are actually worth your while. All of these conversations are available now. You can find them on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. And we've got plenty more lined up for the summer, so be sure to subscribe to on with Kara Swisher to catch them all.
- [19:30]
Peter Kafka
And we're back. You persuade me that he is persuasive. You also say he doesn't have any particularly mind blowing technical skills. What else is he good at? Is he a good manager? Does he have good product sense? What else? Because just being persuasive should not allow you to run OpenAI along with his other track record. Or maybe it does.
- [19:51]
I do think there's a fair case that this character trait that we're talking about and that he's grappling with on the record for the first time in this piece, by the way, you know, the conversation is no longer does this trait exist to some extent, it's how much do we care about it? And even his ardent defenders are not saying Sam does not make these conflicting statements at time. Sam Altman is not responding in that way. He's saying, I have had a problem with this in the past. I have this aggressive people pleasing trait. He views it as a trait that has empowered him in some ways as a founder, but also acknowledges the issues around it and sort of presents it as something that he is working past this conflict aversion. And you know, I don't dismiss that. I think that there is some reality to the idea that this is a foundational part of his personality. We actually, we report on a call where the board is pressing him after the firing to Talk about this. And he says, I can't change my personality. Now. I think that is fair. His point that that can be a power to harness. And I think it kind of has tendrils into all the different things he does. To your point, it's not just about persuading people. It's when he presents visions in all the different areas of the company. You know, the products, the existential transformations, this kind of utopian future that he talks about. And right around the launch of this piece, he's been very aggressively talking about again, that, that everyone is in words he uses in the piece, going to crazy up level through this technology. That when faced with criticism, his response is often, well, ChatGPT will solve it all essentially. You know, I'm barely paraphrasing there, that everyone's going to have the capacity to form a startup and that this is going to address all of the attendant economic policy issues, safety issues. I think that that makes this trait actually something that's at the center of both the success and the problems.
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Is there something to the fact that, you know, a bunch of folks were working on this technology and what really changed in the fall of November 2022 was that OpenAI took this technology and put it into a chatbot that a normal person who had zero technical ability could start using. And it strikes me that that is both, obviously it's a complicated thing, but both a simple idea and a really important one. Does Sam Altman get credit for that?
- [22:30]
Andrew Marantz
He gets credit and he also gets a lot of blame for that because again, you know, it's hard to keep this in mind, but truly the people who were involved in the founding of these companies did not want them to act like normal companies and were thought that the stakes could be apocalyptic if they did. So a huge part of that was not exacerbating race dynamics. So actually a lot of the people we spoke to for the piece think that doing things like launching ChatGPT, while a brilliant, you know, product move in terms of getting first mover advantage and getting name recognition for your company, is precisely the thing that they feared most,
- [23:06]
Peter Kafka
which is putting not have been turned into something that a normal person can access.
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Andrew Marantz
Exactly, because what it did was cause Google to start a code red, accelerate, start a race to what they say is a race to the bottom. And, and again, like we can think that all these people were being cynical and lying about this the whole time, but that just is not what the reporting bears out. They really believed that they were building the equivalent of nuclear weapons. And so if you are Robert, Robert Oppenheimer, and you're like, actually, I'm a really good product guy, I'm going to build this cool thing where it makes everyone really excited about having a pocket nuke, and they really want to have one in their own backyard. The people who are scared of nukes are going to be mad at you for that.
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Peter Kafka
When that race kicked off in November 2022, when they introduced ChatGPT, I would talk to various people involved in tech, and on the record, they would all say the same thing, which is when you'd ask them about, you know, all this power, who's going to be in control of it, they'd say, well, we believe there should be smart regulation, and we really are looking forward to that. And there was sort of the idea that, all right, we've been thinking about how we, we regulate or don't regulate social media. That's going to influence how we think about AI and we're going to head down that direction. Then Donald Trump gets elected in November 24, and some of his biggest boosters, Marc Andreessen, David Sachs, say, essentially, there should be no guardrails on this tech at all. And any guardrails we have are going to come back and bite us in the ass, and they're going to allow China to leap ahead of us. Does that influence Altman's thinking, or was he already there? Did Altman look around and say, there's a new political landscape and I'm going to change the way that I've been talking about this? Or was he. Was he already at that point?
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Andrew Marantz
Yeah, well, he definitely shifted. He was one of the doomeriest of doomers from not just 2015, when he's sort of courting, you know, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who was then interested in these arguments. But up until, you know, 2023, he was going around saying, this technology could be lights out for all of us. Going to Congress and saying, please tie my hands. And then, as you say, the wind starts to shift. These safety doomer arguments start to go out of favor. Trump comes back for a second term, and then the rhetoric shifts very abruptly. And so we don't know what was in his mind or in his heart at the time. Unlike Greg Brockman, he doesn't write down all of his thoughts in a, in a digital diary that later comes out through discovery. So we don't know. But the rhetoric, publicly and privately, definitely changes dramatically over the last year.
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Peter Kafka
Really. Last six months, last three months. There's a whole sort of Bunch of storm clouds around OpenAI, anthropic, maybe, maybe surpassing them. Anthropic has gone after the enterprise market. That's. And they're doing really well. And OpenAI had sort of turned itself into a consumer facing organization. And they've, they've, they've launched products like Sora too, and then canceled them and said they're going to do adult erotica and said, no, actually not. And they went and bought a streaming talk show for some reason. Does, does anything you, you, you learned about Sam Altman over the last year and a half you're doing the story. Does any of that reflected in sort of the ups and downs they're going through right now? Or do you think this is just happens to be what happens to any tech company that starts out really strong and then has to face headwinds?
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I think this is sui generis in some ways. You know, we talked about before the baseline expectation that people don't really care that much about lying in Silicon Valley. And yet there is this huge preponderance of sources around Sam who just can't stop talking about it. And I think that is precisely because of the ramifications for the company. I'm not going to play stock analyst, but what I can say from the reporting is that this management pattern and all of the implications of it siloing information and sidelining dissenters and making different promises to different factions, apparently this creates an environment of dysfunction and the unbridled optimism and this, this thing that the former board member I quoted earlier talked about of him believing the shifting sales pitches all the time, it leads to the kind of mission creep that you're talking about. Right? You know, you've got all, you tell
- [27:29]
one group, yes, pursue that, and then actually another group, no, you should pursue that instead. And those things are going to conflict,
- [27:34]
yes, but also in terms of the company's direction and the product announcements, you can see echoes of that same trait. Right. You know, we're going to do this Disney deal, we're doing this Amazon deal. Sometimes since I mentioned the Amazon deal, it's deal announcements on the same day where different companies are saying, hey, these things are in conflict. You know, there's a day where they announce, they reaffirm their exclusivity on stateless models with Microsoft and then they turn around and they announce this new Amazon deal which is to do with agents and stateful models in their enterprise solutions. And the importance there was, Microsoft was
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their first big corporate backer, sort of solidified their lead.
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Microsoft is their Big backer. And there are Microsoft executives saying, without getting into the technicalities too much, that basically this whole concept of building stateful agents relies on the underlying stateless models that Microsoft has exclusivity with respect to. So, you know, there are people saying that's where you get the Microsoft executives in this piece saying he's reneged on deals, he's made conflicting announcements. And I think that that goes to the question you just posed. What does it mean for the company? There are people within this company that feel like there is a practical inability to govern. You can see in the news cycle that the CFO is publicly at odds with the CEO on the IPO timing. You know, the person we report was
- [29:03]
the pretty, pretty important conflict. Yeah, if you're. Yeah, because the CFO is the one who's going to take you public. And if they're the ones saying we shouldn't go public this year, that's a problem.
- [29:12]
And there was a huge concentration of somewhat chaotic seeming announcements around the launch of this piece. For what it's worth, you know, we have all this new reporting about them reneging on some of their safety commitments. There's an announcement the day we launch our piece of a new safety fellowship that's very sort of airy and ethereal and doesn't really commit them to much. There's all these implications in the piece about their potentially chaotic geopolitical plans and employees threatening to quit over some of those. A plan to auction AGI to the highest bidder amongst world powers. They dispute this characterization, but it really does appear to have been considered at a high level for some time. These are all things that seem to tie into them announcing this sort of new deal for AI policy. And like we talk about how a lot of this has caused spasms of doubt in Altman's leadership in the present day and in recent history. And that Fiji Simo was recently sort of floated as a successor. She's now going on leave for medical reasons. So it's a lot of the COO also just got moved to special projects. That is a lot of churn for a company preparing for a trillion dollar ipo.
- [30:25]
Right. And again, you could say Lexin, we. Mark Zuckerberg fired a million people when he started Facebook. And, and, and all those guys left and, and he melted down in front of Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher when they asked him a marginally difficult question. And certainly he couldn't be the CEO of a publicly traded company and that wasn't going to work. And he just blustered his way through it and we know what happened and it has worked out for him. There could be an argument says, look, this is just the. This is a super fast growing company. And even though Sam Altman is not a child, he's an adult man. He's never had a position like this. He can also learn and work his way through this.
- [31:05]
Yeah, and the piece, for what it's worth, is this is not like a monolithically negative hit piece. I've actually been really encouraged by the range of reactions. There are people who read this and say, Sam Altman is a monster. He needs to be kept away from authority, rules. And there are people who read this and say, like, I find Sam Altman likable. And I understand where this trait is comes from. That flows from a very deliberate approach we took. It's a product of deep conversations with him about this trait. It allows for optimism about all of our ability to grow in the face of criticism. I think you can read the piece and judge for yourself whether this is someone who seems to be reflecting and growing. And for what it's worth, there are people in the non safetiest, nuts and bolts but pragmatic investor community that I referred to earlier who talk about having given Sam the benefit of the doubt around the time of the blip, this episode where he was fired, and who now say that they look back and think that he should have been dealt with more harshly because it seems like this alleged dishonesty trait has now become stable and that there hasn't been the kind of growth that you are talking about. So that's one opinion and those are
- [32:18]
capitalists saying he's breaking the rules of capitalism and we can't abide by that.
- [32:22]
Exactly.
- [32:23]
We'll be right back. But first, a word from a sponsor.
- [32:30]
I'm Asted Herndon and this is America. Actually, we're all talking to each other to see what did we do wrong, what did we not see? I'm in Washington D.C. this week to interview Ruben Gallego. He's a Democratic senator from Arizona and he's been thinking openly about running for higher office. But he's recently run into some hot water because of his connection to Congressman Eric Swalwell. I have to learn from this and
- [32:52]
Andrew Marantz
I will learn from this.
- [32:53]
Peter Kafka
But you know, for me, it's not a 2028 question. It's about what it means to be a better first boss in my office and also a better senator to my constituents. This week on America actually, we asked Gallego about predatory behavior in Washington. His plans for immigration reform and more
- [33:16]
Mitch
this week on Net Worth. And chill. I'm breaking down the institution everyone's talking about right now, but nobody actually understands the Federal Reserve. With all the drama happening between Trump and Fed Chair Jerome Powell, you're probably seeing headlines and wondering what any of this has to do with your money. Spoiler alert. It's everything. I'll explain what the Fed actually is, why it exists, and how this one institution controls the interest rates on your mortgage, credit cards, student loans, and more. We're diving into why raising or cutting rates isn't just boring policy talk. It's the difference between affording a house or watching prices spiral out of control. Plus, I'm breaking down the current controversy over firing Fed board members and why both Republicans and Democrats are freaking out about it. Because this fight isn't just political theater. It could mean real chaos for your wallet. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com YourRichBFF.
- [34:16]
Peter Kafka
And we're back. You mentioned the interviews you did. You said you did more than a dozen interviews with him. You guys are from the New Yorker. You're not doing puff pieces. Ronan is celebrated for bringing down Harvey Weinstein. Why? How do you convince Sam Altman to sit for one interview with you? And why does he do it a dozen times? What does he think is coming out of this?
- [34:37]
Well, I think a couple of things. One is the trait that we're talking about that Sam genuinely believes he can persuade anyone of anything that includes reporters. He's out there in the press a lot, and he was generally cooperative, often charming, clearly thought he could help shape the story. And for what, it's worth credit to him for engaging because a lot of people in his position would have lawyered up and gone silent. And I do think it's.
- [35:09]
I see that in the first setting. And maybe he believes you're like one of the many interviews he does with people who fawn over him or don't ask him a difficult question. But sometimes he have to get pretty gnarly.
- [35:18]
Yeah, no, no, no. He knew very clearly because also I made a point of him knowing this kind of a long lead investigative piece has no gotcha component. Right? You're checking basically every sentence with the people affected. The volume of responses from OpenAI, the hours and hours on the phone with Sam as we were finishing this out, it was a lot. And those conversations were at times contentious, as you might imagine. But they were also really geared towards fairness. And I was really listening deeply. And if there was anything where I felt like Sam was making a decent case. Hey, this might be true, but also it could be taken as sensationalist. That stuff went out. This is truly a generous piece of reporting to him in many ways, despite the fact that it carries this really bracing criticism. And how I rendered it to him was, this is going to be tough. Right. The design of the enterprise is to zero in on the biggest points of contention and criticism and inspect them. He got that. And I think he still felt it was in his interest, A, to shape it and B, there's another dimension, which is there is a specific incentive for him to engage on some of the personal aspects. You know, you may have seen they're invoking this piece in court now. They sent a letter to relevant attorneys general.
- [36:32]
Yeah, we should pause for a second. The OpenAI official response to your story that they gave me on Monday does not say this is not true. In fact, it doesn't specifically take aim at any of your reporting. And I'll be. You guys have very. A rare and super diligent fact checking process in journalism. But at no point does OpenAI say this is not true. And you're saying not only that, but they're using it in a separate court case.
- [36:54]
Yeah, that's exactly right. And obviously we can't control what people do with the information we surface after the fact. This is an interesting one where OpenAI is relying on this as reliable information in their letter to these AGs saying, you know, look at this and the way it documents the way Elon is going up against Sam. They're accusing Elon of anti competitive behavior. This is all germane to their long and winding lawsuit with Elon Musk. On the other hand, Elon Musk is simultaneously, you know, pushing this through his various, you know, Twitter channels and posting a lot of interviews with us and so on. So that's all out of our.
- [37:32]
Stephen Miller's wife, Katie Miller, retweeted my tweet that had the OpenAI response. You can sort of see the. You can see how, who, who might have a problem with Sam Altman in the current moment.
- [37:43]
Yeah, you know, the information is going to go into the bloodstream and people are going to use it how they may. I think for, for me, the important thing here is the way in which this describes problems that are in some way uniquely extreme with Sam, but that also do open up a window into a wider set of questions about accountability for AI labs and AI leadership.
- [38:07]
One more process journalism question for you. You guys mentioned this. Dario Dacia, Dario Modi one of the many people who worked with Sam Altman, who no longer works with them and in fact is one of his main rivals. Co CEO of Anthropic. You say there's this 200 pages of documents, internal emails, memos, et cetera, have been circulated by colleagues in Silicon Valley but never been disclosed publicly. I was astonished to read that there is that a file that big that is circulating wildly that hasn't leaked out WikiLeaks style. How could this both circulate widely and be kept under wraps? How do you think about that?
- [38:44]
I think that's true of a number of documents in this story. Right. I mean, the Ilia memos are another great example where like, they're at the heart of a contentious legal case. They were at the heart of this firing. People knew they existed. There has been incredible reporting on this subject by Keech Hagee, Karen Howe and a slew of other people. And we talk about the books about Altman. A lot of the general themes have been excavated, but it is just a familiar reality for me of many stories that it takes. I mean, to use the cliche, it does take a village and a community of reporters chipping away over time to. To more actively surface some of those particular.
- [39:23]
I guess I would think that. That. That some one of Altman's many, many enemies would wanted to get this out sooner. If the document is. If these documents are circulating that wildly, that someone would have dropped this somewhere and said, hey, look at all this shit.
- [39:37]
Andrew Marantz
Yeah, there's a lot of things in this story that you would think. I mean, the. The amount of speculation around the firing was so intense that the number of things that are only coming out now, it is kind of surprising. And look, I think it speaks to like, a lot of the people in this industry are very calculated and very pragmatic. Yes, there are these wild, ruthless rivalries, of course, and we go into great depth about that in the piece. But a lot of people think this through and I think fairly come to the conclusion, like, okay, if. If Sam Altman isn't the AGI dictator, you know, do we want Elon to be the AGI dictator? Do we want it to be Ilya? Do we want it to be Greg Brockman? Do we want it to be Mira? And I think it's really crucial that, yes, this is a piece that is using one person as a lens. Yes, it has his name in the headline, so I'm not disputing that. But I do think that when you come away from it, hopefully you don't come away thinking, wow, I have problems with Sam. I really hope someone else becomes AGI dictator. Right? The problem is structural here.
- [40:44]
Peter Kafka
That's Andrew. You brought me right back to where I, where I wanted to go for, to wrap this up. So like you say, there's, there's Sam Altman, but there are several other men who aren't. It's not just that they're billionaires, not just they're wealthy. You see a lot of people saying people are complaining about billionaires, but they don't understand that they, they earn their wealth honestly and they're, it's not just they're billionaires. They have enormous power. They have enormous power of their companies. Whether these are publicly traded companies or not, they, they control them and their wealth and power. We used to say this all the time about big tech companies. They're essentially nation states. And now these individual men are that way and they can try to use that power to colonize space. They can use that power to try to influence elections in the US and abroad. So I'm wondering how you think about that structural issue which you just brought up, Andrew. What should a normal person think about that and what, if anything, should we be doing about that?
- [41:38]
Andrew Marantz
Well, I mean, I think Ronan also has a lot of thoughts about this. I mean, I'll just briefly say, like I, I think we're well past the time when people can kind of think, oh, maybe this is sort of a parlor trick. Maybe these are sort of stochastic parrots and they, they don't affect my life in any way. Like whether your concern is this sort of existential sci fi stuff or not, which I think is worth thinking about personally. But even if that's not your bag, right, if you're worried about the economic bubble that could cause potentially a, a market panic or a recession, if you're worried about, you know, slop, you know, choking off all of your information points, if you're worried about copyright stuff, I mean, you know, you, you, you know, the whole list. I just think we're well past the point when we can say, like, I wonder if some future this will start to affect my life. It's, it's clearly already affecting all of us. And I think one point that Altman does make that I think is really legitimate in his piece, the Gentle Singularity, is that because this stuff is happening so quickly but just slow enough that we can sort of accommodate and adapt to it, we sort of don't notice even when we're past a number of singularities, which I Think we kind of already are.
- [42:48]
Peter Kafka
And I think to go back to a point that I was making earlier, a lot of what's new here in this piece is actually about what was omitted and about lack of past transparency and accountability. So, like, with respect to this pivotal law firm investigation that was part of rubber stamping, Sam, coming back, people knew there was an investigation. They didn't know that there was no written report. They didn't know that the decision to not write it down was made on the advice of the lawyers of two new board members that Sam had been personally involved in picking to oversee this and steer it in this direction. You know, they didn't know that. That Altman has been claiming that all new board members, after he came back, got oral briefings on this unreported report that wasn't in writing, and that then we really learned that's not the case. And we have one of the people overseeing it saying there was no need for a written report. And we get into all the details of that legal analysis. There's a number of cases like that. There's a case where we didn't know before that a board member wanted to vote, it appears, against the nonprofit conversion into a for profit. When OpenAI was doing that, and we have a lawyer for the board saying, oh, well, if we record it that way, it could raise questions about the legitimacy of this in the future. And they record it as an abstention. You know, OpenAI disputes this, but these are all examples of failures of structures and accountability. And so when I look at the central question, Andrew is exactly right in laying the foundation of people need to care about this because they're not just building any widgets. Their own pitch is that this could endanger all of us in all these different ways. Many people's.
- [44:31]
But let's say we had another blip and you swap out Sam Altman with the Daario emote or just whatever, your fantasy person is a responsible human being who believes in the greater good and is super responsible. Is that adequate that we just put all our hope in?
- [44:47]
No, there is no fantasy person. And that's part of what I'm getting at with the bigger point. This is about structural failures. We are in this sort of post Citizens United landscape where money from the private sector and specifically Silicon Valley has flooded Washington, where the hopes for meaningful guardrails through regulation and legislation are dim in the view of many of the critics who raise these concerns, and where there are specific steps that we could take that could apply those kinds of guardrails to any deficient leader in this field. That is the point. Sam Altman is a uniquely extreme example of some of these allegations around lack of integrity. But the problem is that any of these guys could failure. You talk about Anthropic, just look at the recent history of Anthropic's leaks. There's source code going out all over the place. The question raised about Sam is by one colleague, you know, do we want this guy to be the one with his finger on the button? Any of these people with the finger on the button, they are private companies that are really unaccountable. Sam Altman is one of the people who actually very actively made the argument, you know what, the government may need to take control of this. That's not the policy proposal I'm making. The point I'm making is we need guardrails on whomever it is leading this technology. We need oversight. This is not a pipe dream, right? We do this with pharmaceuticals, we do this with food. There are policy steps being taken in regulatory and legislative environments elsewhere. Europe has much more mandatory pre deployment safety testing for AI models already. You could have written public record requirements for internal investigations like the one that I mentioned. You could have more robust required national security reviews of the kinds of infrastructure projects and autocracies that we talk about in this piece. You could have whistleblower protection specific to the AI industry. Right. People were very fearful to talk to us in many cases. There right now is no federal statute protecting AI company employees who disclose these kinds of safety concerns about frontier models. That's easy to solve, right? You have Sarbanes, Oxley for financial fraud. You can put in place protections and we need those protections regardless of who it is.
- [47:10]
These things are all possible. They seem impossible in America in 2026, but things could change. Andrew Ronan, thank you for your work. Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.
- [47:21]
Yeah, thank you, Peter.
- [47:22]
Andrew Marantz
Thank you. This was great.
- [47:24]
Peter Kafka
Thanks again to Ronan Farrow. Thanks again to Andrew Morantz. Really good to talk to him. Thanks to Charlotte Silver who produces and edits this show. Thanks. Thanks to our advertisers who bring it to you for free. Thanks to you guys for listening. We have another podcast for you next week. I'm not sure exactly what day it's going to come out. Maybe Monday, maybe Wednesday. We'll see. See you soon.
- [47:51]
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