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

I'm your host show we are going to take a little swerve into AI politics with the authors of a New Yorker profile on OpenAI Sam Altman. But first a programming note and a little bit of what's on my mind. It's cross to the Iran Ward. Tonight, next level podcast will be live on Substack and YouTube at uh seven forty five PM Eastern to cover the latest war crime red line from the madman that the American people elected president again. So make sure to tune in from that.

Here's the latest. It was a bleat from his social media account this morning, Tuesday morning. A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have complete and total regime change where a different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen. Who knows? We will find out tonight.

One of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the world, forty seven years of extortion, corruption, and death will finally end. God bless the great people of Iran. You know, treating death of a civilization as some like apprentice reality show thing where there's a cliffhanger. Can't wait to see what happens on next week's episode. Uh it's truly sick. It's truly deranged. It's obviously deranged. And even people who otherwise supported Trump can see that.

We know this morning that Iran recognizes it as completely deranged and they recognize that they have a counterparty that's not rational or worth dealing with. They announced that they're cutting off all negotiations following the threat. So pretty ominous stuff ahead. And we don't exactly know what will happen tonight, but what we do know is that the consequences of his chaos and lunacy are gonna impact people's lives. Not just in Iran, but here at home and around the world.

Uh we saw last night a Saudi petrochemical plant get hit. Uh it's a random attack, but it's gonna create a major supply chain disruption. It's gonna impact the cost and availability of everyday products throughout the world. And if Trump does not turn back on his threat now, this is only just a small sample of what's to come.

And so as people start to feel the damage that Trump's war of choice has wrought, they're gonna be pissed. Right? Some of those that supported him are gonna feel betrayed and As a result, this is the best opportunity for the Democrats to regain credibility with voters that have turned away from them during the Trump area. The human stakes are obviously more important than the political stakes, but it's because the human stakes are so high that it's critical that.

We get the politics right. Right. This relates to something we've been talking about around here all week. I feel like I've said my piece a little bit and the discourse about whether Democrats should engage with anti war streamers on the left, even if they have problematic or bigoted views. Um so I'm gonna leave that be.

on this show, but as I've been thinking through my arguments about that and and why I was making the case that I was making and watching at the same time some prominent Manosphere figures break up with Trump and some prominent MAGA figures break up with Trump. I I started to noodle on like what was underneath all that and what was underneath the argument that I was trying to make. And um there are two topics I wanna get to before we get to our guests. Uh one is

the importance of taking yes for an answer. And the other is how to think about America first. and how to engage with people that see themselves as America first if you're part of the pro democracy coalition. On the first topic of taking yes for an answer, I know I've heard, I think some people might see my argument here as like strategic positioning for the future or a performative bit or a an engagement bait. I I I promise you it really isn't. I'm genuinely

Striving to be a person that takes yes for an answer, like in politics and in life. When people come around. I just think it's important to accept it for what it is. This doesn't mean that we should allow ourselves to be made into a sucker or to be fooled by people that are pretending to be converts, but it does mean that we should be open minded about folks that are changing their point of view. It's important to recognize that a person can be genuinely fooled.

Or they can be blinded by their own motivated reasoning or tribal prejudices. And as a result, they end up participating in something that's true nature they didn't really see. Now I know that might be hard to believe given how obvious

and awful Trump has been for so long now. But you know, compartmentalization is a hell of a drug. Um tribal mindset is a hell of a drug. We all have seen it. And so I I think that In order for us to ever move forward out of this awful place that we're in, we have to accept. that there are people who are genuinely trying to change themselves, their engagement with politics, their engagement with the country, their engagement with their fellow Americans.

and try to do the best we can to foster an environment where they can

Come on over. I'm gonna play a bit from Tim Dillon, is a I think I think it's fair to call him an America first comedian. I don't know that he's MAGA, but if you listen to him he's From a comic standpoint, he sounds a lot like Marjorie Taylor Greene and and has had Marjorie Taylor Green on a show and and given her a love up about how she should run for president. So that's kind of his politics. I want to play a little bit from his show over the past weekend for you.

It's the greatest con in history. By the way, it's the greatest con in history. I mean truly. It's the greatest, it's the and I don't say great in like a good way. It is truly the the most successful con in history. It makes Enron look like a guy doing three card Monty on the street. Um, anything that you can remember and identify as a complete and utter scam.

Um, this is the greatest con in history. To run as an America first and you're gonna take care of America and then turn around and go, you know, all of these things, daycare, Medicare, Medicaid. nothing. Do with that. We're fighting wars. That's what we're here to do. We're here to uh have a defense budget of one point five trillion and we're here to fight wars.

It is the greatest scam in history. You gotta hand it to him. And I mean truly, and not in you know, again, not in like a not in a moral way, but like you gotta hand it to him. Um this is the greatest About face. in political h uh history that I have really ever seen. A lot there. I'm not sure we have to hand it to Trump ever or or to ISIS. And I think that we can on be honest while we're here among friends.

This was not the greatest scam in history, and seventy plus million people, everyone listening to this podcast, easily avoided being scammed by this. Many, many, many, many, many people told the scammees that they were being scammed why it was happening. So for the rest of us it is a little frustrating.

You know, it would be nice, at least if you're gonna call it the greatest scam in history, to give us our flowers on this one. Uh you know, I mean, we must be all geniuses if we avoided getting scammed by this two bit huckster.

And these kind of bro rants, the MAGA Bro rants, where they talk about how mad they are about this. They ne they never do seem to like kinda say, Hey, I do have to hand it to the resist wine moms watching MS Now. It seems like they had this one. Yeah, they don't ever do that. So I get it. I get it. Many of us listening to this want to shout. At Tim Dillon and be like, You're a fucking moron.

All right. I want to do that. I'd love for this entire monologue to have just been about how people who are fooled by Trump have baby brains. And they don't have the ability to abstract and and I worry that I'm being a little ableist when I discuss the manosphere since they haven't achieved object permanence and they're too stupid to understand that one of the stupidest Americans

uh pulled w the rug over their eyes. I I'd love to do that. Find a monologue about that very satisfying. But you know, here we are. We're here. And I think that as satisfying as that is on the surface, I I also fundamentally believe that humans are redeemable, that people are redeemable, that they have good and bad impulses, that they have good and bad judgments that we all do.

Uh the people like Tim Dillon or Margie Taylor Green can move forward now and use their skills of podcast ranting while bimbo fying themselves for good. Maybe Tim Dylan can use his skills for good now. It seems like he is. And so let's let's accept it. Let's take yeah. If the bulwark is about anything, it should be about welcoming converts. We started as a bunch of converts. So even if you refuse to give me that, you're like, Tim, you're just being a softie, you know.

We need to be more hard nosed about all this. Okay. Just looking at this from a Machiavellian perspective. The more people who bail on Trump, the better, right? And if the people who bail on Trump can come into an uneasy alliance with the Democrats, even temporarily, in for this midterm, but even better for the next presidential election.

Better still, like Trump's power in domestic affairs is fading. This is why he's doing the insane wheels-off threats about Iran. He feels like he has control in Venezuela and Iran. He's losing his ability to bully people here. I just look at the difference between April of twenty twenty five and twenty twenty six and the way that all of these institutions in the country were cowering to him then. They're stopping that now. People are standing up to him. People were in the streets.

And so the more people that jump off the Trump train and the the more people who oppose him and the more commentators who oppose him and the more content creators who oppose him, the the weaker he is. the lower his numbers get, the harder it's gonna be for him to fuck with the midterms or the twenty twenty eight elections. You know, you can only do so much when it comes to chicanery around

an election system that, sorry, buddy, isn't nationalized. So this is good. We want this. Like this weakens him, the more people who c who come along. And so as far as I'm concerned, For now, I don't really care how fucking looney tunes these people are. I d I don't care what gross comments they've made in the past. If they want to turn over a new leaf and oppose Trump in this moment, as far as I'm concerned, the water's warm.

And that takes us to the I think bigger question of like how to then build a viable coalition for defeating MAGA, which might have to include some of these people, which will have to include some of these people. And let's be honest, the more I think about this, the more convinced I am. that for the Democratic Party to have an actual majority, a real majority, where they're winning all over the country, not just in blue enclaves, they're gonna have to speak to America First Voters.

All right, this is gonna be a tough pill for some people to swallow. But there is areas of common ground between Democrats and American first voters. So I wanna just talk about who I'm not talking about and what I'm not talking about first. I don't want the Democrats to become America first in the branding sense in the sense of Lindbergh and Trump.

I I don't want anti Semitism. I don't want them pretending like the US can just act as if the rest of the world doesn't exist. I I don't mean we should zero out aid to the poorest people in the world or For some reason America first always seems to coincide with siding with the fascists in other countries. Like I'm not

For all that. And I also don't think that Democrats are going to get the America first capital AF, the America First is fuck people, the ones with the red hats. Like they're not going to be gettable, most of them. Okay. Like we can just acknowledge that. But there's another category of people. out there, a couple of different categories of people really, overlapping, that are gotta be

And they just don't believe that politicians cared about people like them. And so they were attracted to these anti establishment figures, whether it be in the manosphere or on the far left or in some cases on the far right. They thought that the like political class in both parties had screwed them over. There are leaders cared more about their donor friends and foreign entanglements and corporate interests and Georgetown cocktail parties and getting

medals and going to conferences and Davos. They cared about all that shit more than they cared about the average Joe or Jaden out there in the country. A person that has that worldview is ripe for the taking right now because they have legitimate grievances and Trump sold them out. You heard the case from Tim Dill.

They don't like this war. They're unhappy about the economy. They don't understand why they're spending money in Iran. And let me tell you, things are about to get a lot worse on one or both counts when it comes to this war or their economic standings. Probably both.

And once the economic struggles really start hitting home, not not like what we're seeing right now, which is gas prices up a little bit, which sucks. But once we get into recession territory, or once the supply chains get so fucked up, we get into like real twenty twenty two style inflation, once we have stagflation like the late seventies, these people are going to be more pissed than ever.

And guess what? When they learn about the corruption, because they're not hearing about it from their outlets, when they learn about how rich the Trump kids and the other insiders are getting, they're not gonna like that too much either. So the Democratic Party right now has to credibly make the case The complaints for these voters are being hurt, that their grievances are being hurt. They should not be dismissed.

They should not be attacked in this moment. Democrats should be telling Americans who are upset about. Trump's focus on his ballroom and the stupid war and all the stuff that they don't care. Democrats need to tell those voters that they will prioritize American interests first. Once they take back the j majority, they will be the ones that care about the forgotten man. They need to fashion a lowercase America first of their own. One that's in line with liberal values.

Uh, that talks about economic opportunity, that talks about the common good. And make a pitch to America First Voters that's about something other than demonizing brown people. But to do that in a way that's credible, they need to be doing it loudly right now, maniacally really, right now. They need to be a little bit more than a little bit. opposing Trump and talking to the disaffected Trump voter, the disaffected America First voter, about how they are going to respond to their priorities.

I I just have to say it. The left bank of this party seems to get it right now. The the people that are doing this best mostly come from the left flank of the Democratic Party. Some for the middle are a little slow on the uptake. I I've liked what I've seen from Ruben Gallego as one prime example. So if you're a regular old Democrat in the main body of the Democratic Party and you're looking at what you should be doing, look at look at what Ruben's been doing.

They're pissed for good reason. Democratic politicians should be channeling their pain, Bill Clinton style, channeling their rage, and trying to repurpose it for good. Now, right now, this moment, during this war, during this economic crisis, is the time for people who want to save the country from MAGA to jump into battle. They have to be unapologetically anti stupid war of choice, anti corruption, anti Trump too.

And committed to putting Americans first and making sure that the American voter realizes that they care about them and their concerns. That's the job. And I think that right now trying to come up with trying to fashion a credible message. That takes from America first. That's simple for people to understand, that breaks through the bubble, that goes out and reaches out to people who are in different media environments. Like this is the job right now for all of us. So

That's what I'm gonna be doing. That's what the Democratic politicians should be doing too. All right. So if you have a new house, you're doing a remodel or you're trying to prevent your neighbors from peeping in your windows, um, maybe one of the most annoying things to have to shop for is blinds.

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

The first guy I think you might have heard of, uh he's an investigative reporter and contributing writer to the New Yorker. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Harvey Weinstein. It might be right behind him there on his me wall. Uh it's it's Ronan Farrow, and alongside him it's a very good thing.

Staff writer at the New Yorker. He writes about technology and politics. He's the author of Antisocial Online Extremists, Techno Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. It's Andrew Morance. Hey guys, you have a piece out. Yesterday titled Sam Altman May Control Our Future. Can he be trusted? question mark.

That seems like a Bettridge's rule of headlines kind of covers that one, you know? Any any headline with the question mark, the answer is no no. But uh I'm wondering what your top takeaways were. You got you sat with him, I think you said ten times.

And uh I'll we'll get into the backstory and all that, but just at the top level, like why does it matter whether he can be trusted? What was your sense of him? I assume a lot of CEOs can't be trusted. More than a dozen times. Andrew, you want to tackle that?

Well, I mean, I I think this raises actually an important point, which is, you know, yes, a lot of CEOs in corporate America uh are not, you know, beacons of moral responsibility. Um, but The thing about Sam Altman is not that, you know, we went out looking for the person who, you know, inspired the most, you know, divisive opinions or who had the most critics.

The thing about Sam Altman is that the standard by which he asked to be judged from the beginning was I'm not gonna act like a normal corporate CEO. And in fact, OpenAI will not be a normal kind of company. In fact, it won't be a company at all. So You know, this is feels like ancient history now, but we go back to the founding of the company, which is just about a decade ago. And he emails Elon Musk out of the blue and says, AI is gonna be so existentially dangerous.

Like literally existentially, like it will kill everyone on Earth unless it's handled properly. And the way to do that is to not leave it to the evil mega corporation Google or to leave it to China or some American competitor, but to have us, the good guys, start an AI safety nonprofit research lab. And the key component, among others, is we're gonna try to ask for all regulation that we can from the US government.

We're gonna try to share information openly and it's gonna be run by people of the utmost, highest integrity. And if you sense any slipperiness or any untrustworthiness or any power seeking behavior, we need a nonprofit board who's empowered to fire that person. So those were the standards that he laid out at the beginning.

I think that was the most interesting thing. I also talked to Karen Howe, who wrote a book about Sam, I don't know, a couple of months ago now. Um, people can go check out as well if they want. And You know, as an outsider, it didn't occur to me the degree to which he doesn't like really have technical skills with regards to AI and that he was he's kind of the front man and and the salesman uh for this and uh

Executor, really, of the of the program. And, you know, it also didn't occur to me like kind of what you laid out, like the degree to which. I I the central pitch of open AI was that this is dangerous and you need to have this in the hands of responsible people. And I think that to me you know, sort of shines a light on like why this is why this is so relevant. So so talk to us kind of about that, like uh a little bit more about that origin story at the the start the beginning of the company.

Well we should and uh Ronan, I want you to jump in uh in a sec, but just to finish that thought, like There basically is this kind of basic inductive logic problem here, right? Where it's like, were you telling the truth then or are you telling the truth now? Because if you fast forward to now, all this safety talk, all this, you know, doomer hysteria. is very derided in Silicon Valley and in Washington and including by Sam Altman.

But what is sort of lost in that is that we quote Sam Altman himself extensively in this piece, being the doomeriest of the doomers. And saying if we don't solve the alignment problem, which is this basic unsolved problem in AI research that, you know, what if the machine's interests are not aligned with our interests? Um great book by uh Brian Christian called The Alignment Problem.

Sam Altman, among others, was one of the loudest proponents of how dangerous this problem was, and we have people in the piece. who say that Sam Altman went out of his way to cold call them and say, You are a researcher in this tiny field of AI alignment. I need you to come on board so I can endow a billion dollar prize to solve this problem.

You know, you have to read the piece to get the full details, but basically that doesn't happen, right? Um, the prize slips away, the problem goes unsolved, and today you have Sam Altman saying the alignment problem remains unsolved, but like don't worry about that whole it might kill us thing. Like that was that was then, this is now, without saying that the problem is solved. So either it was not true then or it's not true now.

And I'd point out that th there are m immediate concerns That e even people who are kind of pragmatists, business people, have uh about Altman. It's not just the doomer set. We explore a range of opinions in this piece and a range of anecdotes that support those opinions.

Uh on the one end of the spectrum you have people who say, you know, uh one board member said he has two traits, a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given situation, uh, and an uh a sociopathic almost is the quote. lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone. So you have people like that who are saying there is a pattern of serial deception here that is untenable even for just uh the chief executive of any major business.

Then you have people who say, look, as Andrew is alluding to, this is different. AI has real existential stake. And it doesn't have to be the it's gonna kill us all Skynet Terminator scenario. There's the way in which our entire economy has tilted into dependency on AI and economists are warning of a recession if open AI and other major uh companies go under, underperform, a lot is at stake here.

millions of jobs exposed to disruption. We see how it's being used to very rapidly and effectively devise bioweapons, how it's being deployed on battlefields. How it's now increasingly integrated in our medical and our financial infrastructures.

So the scenarios that the so called doomers warned about are less airy and ethereal with each passing year. And meanwhile you have what we document about Sam Altman, yes, but I think the reason we looked at it is These questions about integrity and the level of integrity we should demand with the people who, in the words of one person we quote in the article, have their fingers on the button.

That is a big question. It goes beyond Sam Altman. And he is a particularly extreme case where even against the baseline of people expect dishonesty from Silicon Valley executives who build businesses on hype. People come out of rooms with him commenting on this, and we uncover these reams of documents about this and efforts across his career to kind of force him out over this.

But the problem is not just Sam Altman. The question of integrity is something that I think we both felt deserved to be front and center as this technology is accelerating and and it's fallen away in too many cases.

I want to get to kind of the present day stuff in a second, but but just going back,'cause I think that h that Sam uh being a pitch man and him being in conflict with the folks who are actually working on the technology, I I think is a pretty important part of the origin story because it ties together like the integrity element with the technology element. And the two fo people you focus on in the

And the article. Um, one is Ilya Sutzkever. Am I saying that right? Ilya Sutzkever, who was, it seems like the first. Genius person that Sam and Elon recruited to actually like work on the technology, selling him on the importance of you know doing this.

ethically and for good. Another uh character is is Dario Amade, who ends up leaving and and and running Anthropic, uh, the competitor AI company right now. You have from both of them like memos that were taken at the time, at the beginning of the company, where they're starting to sense that like Sam can't be trusted.

T talk about those sets of memos a little bit. To Ronan's point, these are both individual and structural concerns, right? So the individual part has to do with this mistrust. And I think a lot of people understandably have skepticism of people like Ilya Sutzkiver and Dario Amada, because in the present day they run competitor companies to open AI, right? So there's reason to be skeptical. But I think the ske the the structural thing that really is undeniable here. Is that

Again, it's hard to imagine how much these people were in this unique situation, right? They're constantly comparing themselves to the Manhattan Project. to Robert Oppenheimer. And the reason they're doing that, A, is that they think the thing they're building has massive utopian potential, you know, to power the world, to create unlimited energy, and massive dystopian potential to literally destroy the world.

And the few scientists who are capable of building it, right? As you pointed out, Tim, Sam Altman is not one of them, right? People like Ilya Sutzgiver and Dario Amadi and others are capable. And so in order to harness that talent, There's a a major obstacle. One is these people all have lucrative jobs at places like Google. So you need to tell a story. that gets someone like like Ilya in his case to turn down a six million dollar a year counter offer from Google and go work for this scrappy

nonprofit safety lab called OpenAI. But another thing is that these people disproportionately were terrified of building this thing, of bringing it into existence, right? You have all these you know, atomic scientists who are like, I don't want to build the atom bomb. And so in order to get them to build it by their lights, this, you know, potentially most dangerous invention in human history,

Part of the pitch man's job is to tell them a compelling story about you not only need to build it, but you need to build it for us and not for the other guy. And so that has to do with, you know, this game theory of if we don't get it first, the bad guys will get it first.

But step one of that logic is to convince each individual discrete group of people, I'm actually one of you. So one thing we document over and over in the piece is that someone like Altman, because he is a really good pitch man, according to these documents, which are Uh most of them uh uh meant never before seen by the public, never before reported on.

It really gets into this granular detail of how that pitch can land, right? There are other people out there like Elon Musk who are maybe a little more ham-fisted in the way they try to approach this rhetorically. But what we keep seeing in these documents and hearing from interviews is that Altman is able to get into these groups and say to the safety obsessed kind of Doomer people, I'm really one of you, and then turn around to investors and say, actually, let's go make a ton of money.

The problem is a and this is what emerges in these documents and accounts from you know, these more than a hundred people we talk to here. Up to a point, right? If you're telling everyone that your agenda is their agenda, even if those agendas conflict, you can accumulate a lot of money and you can rev up a lot of growth. But then in a lot of these cases across his career, there there are just uprisings of colleagues.

Who say enough is enough and feel like the conflicting assurances to different people. And we document a lot of different examples of it across the piece.

just create too much chaos. And as as Andrew is pointing out, in this particular case, with these particular stakes. There is the existential problem of the pitch is about we've got to go slow. That's the mission statement. We're building a nonprofit. That's what OpenAI again originally was. And then a situation where over time it seems that Sam Altman was telling other constituencies that wanted growth.

that wanted profit, that wanted to a framework who uses a lot win. No, we're gonna go as fast as possible. So for example, We look at internal documents from the early days of OpenAI in periods where Their explicit pitch was, look, we don't have the money and resources that Google has, but we're the good guys. We're a nonprofit. That's how we're gonna stay.

People were taking pay cuts to join and many of them feel burnt by that now. They feel they joined something that we document looking at these communications internally. even at the time, the co founders were frustrated with, were stepping away from. Greg Brockman, uh Altman second in command, in one of his diaries, talks about it being potentially a lie. that they were, you know, pitching this as a nonprofit and then turning around uh and spinning it into a for-profit.

And so some of these memos, particularly what Ilya wrote, turn into the basis of this period where Sam gets pushed out uh as the head of the company for what, five days by the board doing what? you know, that the charter had set up to do, which is, you know, ensure that, you know, if somebody got gained too much power was power hungry.

uh we're just gonna use this technology the wrong way. You know, they could be removed. Uh he gets removed for a short period of time. Maybe I'm just getting hung up on this because of what we've learned immediately, but I do think it's pretty telling as he tries to as he you know, wiggles his way back in, you know, he hires Crisis comms guys with reputations for being hard nosed, like Chris Lahane. And then he pushes his way back in and he replaces the board and he brings in Larry Summers.

I'm just like I think that that like little anecdote tells you a lot about, you know, the tight the mindset of of Sam Altman in this period. The ultimate l legitimizer, Larry Summers, Christine of reputation. Yeah. When you're looking at somebody you're like, you're gonna just I just wanna demonstrate.

that, you know, I'm not doing this um in order to gain power, but I'm I'm you know, I'm doing this because I want to bring in a moral arbiter who can be a judge here. We're gonna bring in Larry Summers. So uh anyway, just talking about anything else that struck you about uh about the research on that. that period. I I think when it comes to Sam unraveling the effort to fire him, right? Having pitched a company where there was this specific shape to it, where the mission was not about growth.

where normal for profit imperatives didn't govern, uh, and where aboard with a nonprofit mission about protecting humanity from this technology. could fire a CEO at their discretion in the interest of that mission. And then just made that all go away. That is significant in this story, right? Because it says a lot about Sam Altman. But more than that, it's another moment that feels like an inflection point in the AI business.

That is a moment where the convictions of these early AI founders who all said that they cared about safety were tested. And what was proved out is when the rubber meets the road, the money talks, you know. Uh there were a lot of investors who had put a lot of money into open AI. In this particular case, the board badly fumbled the ball. This was a board of, in the words of one former member, JV people who really were not cut out for this cutthroat corporate warfare.

And they uh uh did the firing and and this is the first piece that I think really documents in meticulous detail why and what their proof points were. A reader can decide do they think it was enough lying? Do they think that Sam dissembling about, you know, whether a model had been tested, whether a model had been leaked?

what requirements were in place for safety testing, does that matter enough? But they had their reasons. They didn't express them adequately. They didn't make the case in the public arena the way Sam was. And there was a ready audience of investors who were thinking about the bottom line. Um, and you know, uh none of these people are are uh villains. They were also flummoxed. They were saying, what the hell happened?

And acting on I think many of them now in retrospect admit poor legal advice. They were afraid Sam was gonna sue them, and so they released this kind of mealy mouthed statement that didn't clarify anything, uh, saying that he had lacked candor. So Satya Nadella, we have, you know, uh him in this piece calling Reed Hoffman and saying what happened? And then they're all calling around trying to figure out, you know, it was it s uh sexual misconduct, was there embezzlement?

But this was a different kind of critique and and it was a critique that really requires the kind of gradual accumulation of wrongs that we document in this piece. Um what the market proved out is People, at least with the amount of information that was available at the time, didn't care enough. Now I I would point out one last thing.

There are some people who at the time talk about having given Sam Altman the benefit of the doubt and even helped him come back in that investor community, who now tell us looking back and seeing how in their view the alleged lying has persisted since then. that they're not sure they would have done that again and that even if they ha wouldn't have fired him at the time or allowed the firing to go down.

There would have been much more severe warnings. They would have done more to ascertain that this wasn't a staple trait that was going to cause future problems. Because since then, There have been a lot of cases where even outside of open AI and these smaller examples about the safety of their products and so on.

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

A lot of the people now say the same thing about themselves. Like a lot of people who we've spoken to say in retrospect, yeah, I I guess I was naive, but I really believed it at the time. I mean the piece does, I don't know if you guys did this intentionally, kind of lay out the ways in which Sam at times, you know, lies or evades the truth. I mean, as you guys kind of go through the history with him in the various of inter interviews, I notice there's a lot of times where

Sam doesn't recall that, or Sam thinks it went a different way than somebody else said. It seems like that was a trend in your conversations with him. No. Yeah. I I mean I I think we we both cared very much about getting his and open AI's responses to everything, Andrew. Yeah, I mean the thing is when you go back through this stuff, we we do actually have a very meticulous Fact checking process. And, you know, one thing that when you're dealing with the daily news cycle of

you know, TV, newspapers, whatever, you're not often asked to account for like, did you say this thing in a closed door SCIF meeting with intelligence agencies in twenty seventeen? Right. So the the the fact check that we came to them with and also before the fact check the interview stuff that we came to them with I think it's just not the level of detail that you're used to being asked to account for. But the fact is, you know.

The pitch over the whole decade, taken as a whole, has all these inconsistencies in it that really are just hard to account for. So I think often you would get from an executive an in the moment um explanation, and then later they'd say, Oh, did I say that? I meant something different. I don't know about you, but I like to keep my money where I see it. And if you look at the big wireless carriers, there are all kinds of fees and junk that you don't expect.

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I want to go to present day. One thing that I struggle with reading both Karen's book and your piece about this is um I I've never met Sam, but he's pitched by all these other people as like this. Very convincing, charismatic Jedi feel like wins people over. And I d I don't know, I've consumed a ton of his interviews now and and I find him to be like

robotic and like devoid of human feeling or touch. And so you guys were with them a dozen times. Like help me like with that disconnect. Like there are a lot of people I don't like particularly, but I understand that they're charismatic. I mean our current president For example. But like I don't get that at all with him. We obviously capture a range of opinions on this. Yeah. And Andrew and I have had this conversation internally too.

In the piece, we have people who are very convinced and wowed by his persuasive powers and much less so. I had this conversation with my mom last night. She read the piece and she called me and she was like, Oh, you know, I I just I see him in interviews and I think he has this vulnerability and I have kind of my mom instincts kick in.

Um so I see why uh you know he is so persuasive to people. I know, I know. I will say when I look at the range of perspectives in the the piece, clearly the man is an incredibly savvy pitch man, as we've been discussing. And I I think There is a through line of character analysis from people close to him where they talk about him really being void of doubt in the moment, as he is telling you that the thing you care about most. is the thing that he cares about.

he's saying something that it feels like he believes. And I don't think there's a lot of sort of follow-up or self-questioning. And according to many of these critics, there really is no true North that that provides a baseline of consistency or facts underneath all of that. There is a portrait of him From a former board member who's on the record in the piece, Sue Yoon, that I find very measured and interesting, where she says,

There's a lot of people in Silicon Valley who look at this trait and this kind of dissembling on things small and big. It's everything from in the piece we talk about.

at one of his earlier startups, uh him supposedly claiming to colleagues that he was a champion ping pong player and then turning out to be one of the worst ping pong players in the office. And he says he was probably joking. Um but there's small stuff like that. And then there's, you know, the the bigger showdowns where we talk about like he's calls uh Daniela and Dario Amade into a room

um and accuses them of plotting a coup against him and he attributes it to another executive who's told him this and then they call the executive in and that executive says, I didn't say that. And then Sam in the moment says, Well, I never made this claim either. And they're like, You just said it. Yeah. Um, and this is another one where Sam says, you know, it's not quite how he remembers it. He has differences. You can read the piece for more.

But this board member Sue Yoon talks about look, people see all of that and they say he's Machiavellian, he's some villain. But she pushes back on that and says, look, having dealt with the guy, I think he is, she uses the word to the point of fecklessness, just convinced of the shifting realities of his sales pitch. Um, it goes back to this lack of of doubt. And so therefore he says things that people wouldn't say in the real world if they're connected to the real world.

Yeah. And the other thing to remember about this pitch man charisma question is who the audience is, right? So you mentioned Tim, you know. Trump has a charisma, you know, Obama has a charisma, right? But that's not the kind of charisma that would necessarily work in these rooms of engineers. Sure. Or even with regulators, right? So if you're an engineer, what you want is someone who's really kind of

Thoughtful, humble, conscientious. Right. Or looks like it. And if you're a regulator, actually, a big part of this is the public piece. coming on the heels of, you know, the tech lash and the social media boom.

Uh it seems to me anyway as an observer of this stuff that what the public wanted and what Congress wanted was someone who did not come off as really, you know, blustery and charismatic, but someone who would come to them and say, I'm terrified of this thing I'm building. Please put me in regulatory handcuffs. One thing that I was marinating on as I was reading it, thinking about his traits, he's a pleaser, extreme self confidence.

What was other traits? Sociopathic lack of concern for consequences that may come from deceiving someone. These are quotes from other people to be clear. Yeah. Yeah. The chat has all those. The LLM has all those traits. The L M is a big is a pleaser. and irrational confidence and randomly hallucinates lies. I and I don't uh maybe there's no connection there at all, but I felt like I wanted to at least mention it. I you know, sometimes You know, the creation reflects the the creator.

When I think about a a topic that I want to spend a year and a half of my life on, and this one in particular, I think for both of us had a lot of, you know, sweat and Almost, or perhaps even literally, tears into it. It's incredibly complex, and you can imagine how pressurized the environment around this is.

and you know, the amount of pushback and just a piece like this is is a heavy lift and incredibly detailed and ambitious. And we both wanted to get it really right and fair. For me, all of that flowed from the fact that this again felt like a bigger inflection point. that the critics who allege that these things we document in Sam Altman are actually signifiers of a wider race to the bottom on safety and and maybe on honesty in general in American business and in Silicon Valley in particular.

That felt important to me. And I think the way in which the development of these large language models has progressed, where they're trained based on human feedback. And human beings like frictionless responses that mirror back what they have said better than responses that challenge them and say,

No, that's incorrect. So you wind up with these two phenomena which we talk about in the piece of sycophanti, you know, these models just parroting back things that you're gonna like hearing, and hallucination, where they fill in gaps by making stuff up. And these are traits that, you know, are very troublesome to root out of the technology. And in the case of sycophanti especially, you know, we've talked to computer scientists who really frame this as

it's accepted as a necessary cost of of doing business. Um there's a feeling that these frictionless answers help retain users and keep them on the hook. So I I do think that that is a metaphor of some consequence.

I mean it works. We all know people like this. Like I know pleasers. There's no shortage of people that have these traits.

No, in gay in the gay life I guess. You're right to point it out, Tim, because uh you know, I I will say Andrew pointed out, you know, we we didn't go into this looking at some in some pieces I've done it's I have a a specific lead about criminal activity um and the kind of moral shape of the piece is clear fairly early on, um even if of course then I'm I'm testing those assumptions all the way through.

This was a case where we really like we parachuted in and looked at what are the biggest unanswered questions and can we examine them forensically and fairly. And further to that, as I was dealing with Sam over and over again in this, I really felt a a great duty of care to be incredibly fair to him. And part of that was because I did feel, you know, a kinship in many ways. Some of the traits you talk about

I really get as a gay man. He talks about this in in the piece and to be clear, he's very quick to dismiss any link between his gayness and this kind of like best little boy in the world phenomenon that we all know about in the gay community. Sure. But he fit an archetype that is familiar to many of us. You know, he was hyper, hyper ambitious, hyper focused on winning.

Um that can come from a number of places, but uh he does in one moment talk about uh having been beaten up uh as a kid. We couldn't find, you know, records of this. He didn't report it to anyone, but um he does mention it. And then he kind of

wheels back and says, Well, maybe that gave me a a an enduring desire to to please in a way that I haven't examined uh and don't get the significance of but I'm sure not. You know? Uh I dismiss the significance of this. So we we relate all of that in the piece. But I think it's telling. Uh the portrait of him in this is actually undertaken with a lot of sympathy and care. And I think it's reflected in their response. You know, they

are are in this position right now of doing kind of two things. They're trying to obviously downplay the piece, um, but they're doing it softly'cause they're also relying on the piece in legal filings now. They're In their fight with Elon Musk, relying on it on a number of assertions about Musk's competitiveness.

This is a Since Food Politics podcast. So I've got a whole section of politics topics uh as it intersects with uh with Sam, but also just AI broadly and Elon. The first Is um what he said after Trump won, which was watching at POTUS more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him. Parentheses, I wish I had done more of my own thinking.

You know, that struck me as somebody really trying hard to appeal to Trump and people around Trump, like this notion that you know, he got caught up in the woke mind virus and he just as long like once he started using his own thoughts, he really he realized he saw the genius of Trump

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

Well first of all I notice you only asked Ronan for his thoughts about the gay community, but I'd like to offer some of my No, I'm just kidding. Oh please Um No, I'm just I'm I'm Let's get some straight commentary. Yeah, exactly. I'd like to straight Yeah, we can we can we want to know how allies see us from the Exactly, exactly. That's what I'm here for. No, I I actually think that the Trump stuff is a key example of this, right? Like you have someone who and this is not unusual for his milieu.

very stalwart donor to Democrats and Democratic Pacts for many years. He has you know, says milieu also a gay commentary or is there some some other some other part of his milieu? That's that's that's actually Silicon Valley liberals who were uh, you know, a a a thing until a couple of years ago. Yeah. And he says actually in the piece, you know

I am very worried about the rise of autocracy, which he says that's not a gay thing, that's a Jewish thing. But then suddenly his fears about Trump, who he has alluded to as, you know, compared to Hitler and all these things in the past.

as you say, they kinda go away after it seems like Trump is gonna win. And there's just something about this specific I'm sorry I'm caught up on it. I know you discussed it at length, like his relationship with Trump. We can talk about it more, but there's something that just really, I guess, really get caught up with because it ties to his

personality, just this notion that like he's really changed his perspective on him. Like he's watched him closely. Like that's like Tim Cook has shown sycavency to Trump. Right, but like in a more I see what you're saying. I don't know. Normal way. I see what you're saying. I don't know. Just and I'm more like, Hey, we can do b I can do deals with him, I can work with him.

Like this was he was trying to say that like he really had changed his like that that he had thought about it and he'd been wrong about something and that Trump had won him over. The rest of that tweet which we left out'cause it wasn't worth sort of explaining to the New Yorker audience was

I've thought about it more and I realized I really fell into the NPC trap, right? Which is this kind of meme speak for like I was acting as this non player character. So it's exactly what you're saying. Yeah, the guy that created the biggest AI company in the world. Right. compares himself like like tries to diminish himself and be like nah I was just

I you know, an NPC. I was just a mindless person who went along with the crowd. Like that's a pretty concerning trait that he about himself that he self analyzed, by the way. Um, but anyway, like to go into that with Trump I mean, that is just a level of succupitude that is I I think even a little bit higher than we've seen from other people.

Obviously we're all witnessing what is happening in Silicon Valley right now, right? At a time when Silicon Valley is the center of gravity in the economy, has essentially all of the levers of power in Washington, uh with AI specifically AI money is flooding politics. Little surprise that we see such anemic pushes for federal re regulation on this that could actually meaningfully slow development in the name of safety in the way OpenAI initially committed to.

Because if you are running for office in this country right now, you know, you're contending with a whole new economy of AI driven pack money. We talk to people even in the camp of Altman's defenders. who really just said it, I think, what the reality is, which is like, Sam isn't actually Trumpy. Come on, you know, this this is a guy who wants to win. And right now the w as you put it, succupitude. is an avenue for winning. And I I think it's just, you know, it is

uh understandably dismaying. Doesn't show great judgment, maybe though. Yeah. Well, and the other thing about the material consequences of it, um yeah, we couldn't get succopitude past our copyers, unfortunately. But the but the the other the material consequence of this is directly tied to the thing we were talking about before.

Do we proceed with caution and sort of tie our hands regulatorily, if that's a word, or do we kind of go full speed ahead? This transition from Biden to Trump, it's not only about the rhetoric and how he justifies it. He spent according to our reporting.

All four years of the Biden administration working in public and behind the scenes to say, you guys are doing a lot, but you're not doing enough to regulate us. You need to be more aggressive with your EOs and all this stuff. And then literally on the first full day of the Trump presidency. all the shackles are off and they announce this plan to launch, you know, the most in

in infrastructure investment in history and and his line since then has been what a refreshing change, what a pro business president. You know, I'm so glad that the woke regulator And this is, you know, I I think that the crack's problem, uh Tim, uh um It it is a situation that we're witnessing now where the organizations that are best positioned to understand the danger. And it seems when they were talking about the danger, we're saying we've got to go slow and prioritize safety.

um are also the ones with the financial incentives to downplay that danger and rush past it and ask for forgiveness, not permission. So there it is really truly a situation where strong governance And a a meaningful regulatory framework is needed. And the environment for that just doesn't exist right now. Yeah. A couple of political thoughts related to that. So one is so now they're d giving a ton of money. I mean, just in addition to Sam

now like big friends, like uh pretending to be friends with Trump, traveling with him, talking about how he's seen the light. Greg Brockman, you mentioned his second command, donated twenty five million to Trump super PAC, fifty million to a separate super PAC, going after anti AI candidates.

Uh maybe this is the naivete of a former Republican who didn't come up in democratic world to think that this might be possible, but I don't like this feels risky as far as backfire is concerned. I I mean I I just think that the potential backlash against these guys. uh in this moment. Um

you know, as Trump's popularity is fading, uh, seems like it has to be real. And they don't s I I don't know, maybe they're just like, Hey, we're living this one day at a time and we'll deal with we'll deal with the future when the future comes in twenty twenty nine, but But it's a pretty s significant gamble and bet, it seems like they're making, particularly in the context of what you see is happening with Dario with Claude and with Dario.

Well t yeah, I mean you're already seeing some consumer backlash, right? After the Pentagon thing, which we can get into in detail, but after um uh anthropic kind of emerge from the Pentagon thing, I think to many people looking better and and OpenAI emerged looking worse. You did see a a big sort of deleting Chat GPT moment. I I I have to say, like A lot of these people, I think, take their own rhetoric seriously enough.

that they think after twenty twenty nine the world will be permanently altered by superintelligence and all of this will be different.

So to the extent that you see people going all in now, I think it's because they really think like this is the decisive time and whoever grabs the ring now will own it forever. There are people around Sam Altman who also make the same argument that you make that some of these moves are strategically risky.

And I think when you talk to particularly the set of people who maybe aren't safety pilled, um, and they're not uh rendering this in apocalyptic apocalyptic terms, but they still think that the amount of dissembling on evidence in Altman's record is a problem. One of the ways in which they consider it a problem is i if you have that trait, there can be a lot of rationalizing and a lot of not reflecting on whether your assumptions are right. Right. You see over and over again

Sam Altman seemingly uncritically believing these conflicting things as he's saying them. Um and, you know, when he talks about these alliances with Trump uh with some of these uh Middle Eastern autocrats, you know, with MBS. Um, we have uh a whole tranche of reporting about his geopolitical activities where people around him were saying, like, hey, you know, MBS just chopped up a a journalist with a bone saw. Um, you can't like be on a a board associated with him.

Um, but he's single minded about his mission. He wants that Middle Eastern money, as many in Silicon Valley do. W what is distinctive to Sam is he I think is very resistant to those cautionary notes around him because when he says he believes a thing, um, even if it conflicts with other points of evidence. He shows over and over again that he runs with that. So on Trump, uh and and with some of these other uh alliances, he makes the argument that.

That provides him more access and that that's useful and the old uh chestnut of, you know, it's better to be on the inside uh to try to help. And I think he's able to convince himself uh of that. Yeah, also in business with Sheikh Tanoon, the UAE. uh family member of the autocrat, um, uh, who uh bought into Trump coin. Famous this is a big story about the amount of money that he put into the Trump family. I just part of me would be there's a consumer backlash, but you might look at this and say

You know, hey, if the Democrats take back control, there's gonna be investigations into this type type of stuff into the nature of my relationship here. And and this could be risky. Maybe though there's reason for him not to worry about that, looking at how toothless the Democrats were and looking into the last generation of tech leaders and then then the

Uh, with regards to the regulation bill in California. I was I was interested in that. I didn't follow that story that closely, which where it seemed like There was a popular piece of AI regulation in California that that Newsom ends up vetoing. What like what happened? What happened there? I mean we have reporting suggesting that a lot of investors. You know, we we uh have Ron Conway uh people in our piece say uh who's a a powerful Silicon Valley investor, who's a an Altman loyalist.

We have people in the piece saying that he lobbied Newsom and Pelosi to come out against that bill. This is

the standard stuff of politics, but again, the thing that makes it unusual is that the public posture of Altman and OpenAI is we support all regulation. And then behind the scenes we document a lot of cases where they're doing precisely the opposite. I mean A kind of middle path, I think, between the most sci-fi, you know, the universe will be tiled with supercomputers and will take over galaxies, and the most mundane

Okay, you know, business is full of dissembling, what did you expect? I think this regulatory stuff and geopolitical stuff really is kind of the middle ground between the two because the amount of power internationally and domestically that you can consolidate in the next couple of years.

even if you do that in a way that causes your core audience to have all these doubts about you. And even if you kind of are, you know, unmasked to a certain audience as, you know, seeming to be hypocritical, I think the bet of a lot of these guys, and this is not just open AI, but a lot of them is if we have direct deals with the Emiratis, the Saudis, to some extent with the US government.

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

I want to talk about Elon being awful, but we're running out of time and I think we should focus on more important things. We all know that Elon is awful. I should just mention that the probably the grossest behavior in the profile after we spent all this time talking about Sam was the way Elon seems to be spreading lies about Sam and and you guys debunk some of that um in the piece, which uh folks could go read. I'm just more curious, like since you did all these interviews.

You know, I'm I moved from the Bay, so I'm here in New Orleans. I'm not around these guys anymore, so I'm not hearing the scuttle butt as much. Like what do these guys all really think, do you think, about the the tech? I I cause on the one hand I look at it and I'm like, you know

These are pitchmen, they're PR folks, like talking about the catastrophic risks and talking about all the jobs going away is also a way to get investment. And I had Reed Hoffman on. Like he thinks that this is a great product that has some downsides, but like also there's all these opportunities. On the other hand, the safety guys, when they quit, there's this trend of them like writing

notes that seem like dystopian kind like makes them turn like sound like they're dystopian prophets who are planning to live out their days in monkish solitude. And like that's a little alarming for some of us when you see like a sequence of those. resignations from safety guys. So how did you guys, when you're actually interviewing the safety guys, interviewing the executives, like how do you make how do you balance that in your head?

We document this range of opinions, right? And in some ways this reflects the collision of businessmen and scientists in this arena. There are the safetyists who leave and write these doomy notes as you talk about, and they're really scared. There are the business people who are full accelerationists. And there are people on both sides of the the business and science aisle who have a range of these opinions.

I tend to find very sober appraisals, some of which have been made in public, so we can talk about them from people like Demis Hisabas, who talk about, you know, the immense potential, both in terms of dangers and in terms of upside. Uh right, this i isn't totally vaporous. This is already technology that is changing medical diagnosis, you know, it's helping catch cancers earlier.

Um it's helping with weather warnings, uh, you know, that can save lives. There's nuts and bolts things happening that are material. Hasabas is one of the people who says, yes, both the potential and the risk are real, but also some of these uh projections are way farther out. And I there's a a significant contingent of scientists we talk to who share that view, you know, that the the kind of pitch man hype machine that you get from some of these leaders in the field

Is talking about certain kinds of developments. You know, when when Sam Altman says, we're almost there, we've cleared the horizon, we're gonna be on other planets, we're gonna cure all forms of cancer. Um in recent days around the launch of this piece, he was again kind of sounding similar notes of, you know, we're all gonna be in a superabundant uh utopia very, very soon.

I think the more sober folks in the industry tend to say that even if some of the these potentials exist or some degree of those potentials, it may be farther out. That's consequential in terms of the risks because the whole economy is propped up on some of this promise, you know? And that is an older, wider Silicon Valley story, you know, people building companies and inflating valuations on hype and future projections.

long before they are offering a product of value. That's happening now on a massive scale with much higher risks. Andrew, I don't know if you have any thoughts to add on that.

That basically seems right. Look, th there's so much uncertainty here, including from the people who are building it. They don't really know what it is. They don't really know if we're gonna build superintelligence in six months or sixty years. Like nobody really knows what's going on. I I think the thing I would say is. These guys are constantly comparing themselves to the Manhattan Project, right?

When you see the Oppenheimer movie, the the the moment that sticks out to me is, you know, Matt Damon, the the general who, you know, is supposedly in control, comes and tores the thing and they're about to do a test. And they say, Oh, just so you know, there's a slight chance that when we do this test it might ignite the atmosphere and destroy the world. And he's like

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

And one last thought uh the on the high level of seriousness. You mentioned the Elon stuff and this kind of mud fight going on behind the scenes. Reporting on the safety concerns and the allegations of lying and some of these critiques with more substance and getting a full face blast of You cannot imagine the number of people calling with this pedophilia allegation and all this kind of personal stuff.

Um, which we spent months looking at and I interviewed, you know, all the people supposedly linked to it, and it really does seem to be untrue. I think what is significant about that is the people with the fingers on the button There are valid questions about whether we should trust them with that responsibility. They are engaged in a no holds barred mud fight. There are very few standards. Um we don't have the right kind of oversight.

And, you know, while there are these existential stakes, they're at each other's throats. Um, at times, you know, in my view, like children. So this is something that I want us all to be aware of and tracking more closely than is happening right now.

All right. I do have one last thing. I apologize, Andrew. It is just for Ronan. Um speaking of existential stakes at your at your mother's role in the nineteen seventy four Great Gatsby. No, um I it's the Iran threat this morning. I mean you worked at the State Department, you wrote about The first Iran deal in your book Trump This Morning is um Talking about threatening to kill Iran's whole civilization tonight.

Uh Iran right before we got on said they're closing all diplomatic and indirect channels of communication. I'm sure you're just watching this with interest, maybe not as a reporter hat. Um I'm wondering if you have any thoughts. Yeah, both in my own background at the State Department and then actually wearing my reporter hat'cause I wrote a book where I interviewed at the time every living Secretary of State.

uh about the decline of diplomacy and militarism taking over American foreign policy making. This is an idea of that that I think none of them could have expected at the time. Um, there is a reason why we empower a whole cadre of professionals to study other regions of the world that are geopolitically sensitive. to all of our safety, to engage delicately, to try to come to the table and make deals. That is still possible.

Actually, in this very uh uh era of history with Iran, there were deals on the table that were being advanced by other international partners. And to see the collision of the kind of mania of this administration um and those very combustible geopolitical circumstances. and the falling away of all of the infrastructure that might save lives in a situation like this. Um it's capricious and it's wanton. Um and you don't need me to tell you that. I think everyone is seeing it.

Whoof. Um all right, guys. Well, appreciate all the work you did uh on this. Yeah, you know, just some light fare, you know. This global annihilation via AI, why why two man children have a food fight, um about their personal grievances. We're doing the best. Appreciate guys so much. And um I we'll keep an eye on the next thing you're reporting on. All right. Thank you so much, Tim. Thanks. Thanks, Tim. Thanks, guys.

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