Derek Barris, Matthew Remsky, and Julian Walker dissect a damning New Yorker investigation portraying OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as deceptive and opportunistic. They detail his history of exaggerating achievements, lying about safety measures to prioritize profit, and shifting political allegiances from Democrat to MAGA courter while securing ties with Peter Thiel and Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman. The hosts analyze his lobbying against regulation, failed security clearance, and the controversial Stargate project in the UAE, contrasting these actions with OpenAI's original 2015 nonprofit mission. Ultimately, the discussion reveals how Altman's drive for speed and financial gain has eroded safety protocols, fueled voter suppression, and betrayed humanity's best interests. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, Qwen/Qwen3-ForcedAligner-0.6B, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Launching Hyperfixed Podcast00:03:42
Hi, I'm Alex Goldman.
You may know me as the host of Reply All, but I'm done with that.
I'm doing something else now.
I've started a new podcast called Hyperfixed.
On every episode of Hyperfixed, listeners write in with their problems, and I try to solve them.
Some massive and life altering, and some so minuscule it'll boggle your mind.
No matter the problem, no matter the size, I'm here for you.
That's Hyperfixed, the new podcast from Radiotopia.
Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.
Learning English is hard.
That's why I make Easy Stories in English, where you can have fun while you learn.
You can listen to stories full of action, romance, and mystery.
Each episode, I tell stories for beginner, intermediate, and advanced learners, and there's a story for every mood.
Whether you want something to wake you up or relax before going to bed, Easy Stories in English is the podcast for you.
Spirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can find us on Instagram and threads at Conspirituality Pod, as well as individually over on Blue Sky.
You can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon at patreon.comslash conspirituality.
You can also grab our Monday bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
As independent media creators, we really appreciate your supports.
And we have a couple of book announcements today because Derek and I have both come out with books this week.
I'll just go first.
I'm really lucky that North Atlantic Books has published Anti Fascist Dad this week.
I'm happy to say that here because it's really a consequence of doing all this work with you both, toiling in the right wing extremism minds.
When Trump locked in that second term, You know, and our slack was burning up.
Our then 12 year old came to me and said, Well, what will happen now?
And I had nothing in the moment.
But of course, it wasn't long before I thought that as a parent, I have to spend less of my extremely limited time on the details of fascist entrenchment and insanity and more on how this stuff has been fought through the ages.
I think next week we're going to interview each other about these books.
And over the next couple of weeks, we'll publish sections of the audiobooks on the feed here.
But Derek, you've got a book too.
I do.
It came out on Monday.
Purely coincidentally, a day before yours, but I decided to publish mine that day because it's my favorite holiday 420.
Exactly.
The book is called Well Enough Finding Health Despite the Wellness Industry.
And after we published collectively our 2023 book, Conspirituality, I wanted to write a memoir about my decades in the wellness industry leading up to the creation of the podcast and sort of go more in depth about the history of what led there.
So it's half memoir, half sort of the work I do on this.
Podcast, and we'll put links in the show notes to both my book and to Matthew's book.
Congratulations to you both!
Thanks, Julian.
Thank you, Matthew.
OpenAI Profit Shift00:09:28
American Spirituality 305, AI's cultish leader.
Ronan Farrow is at it again.
The reporter who launched the Me Too movement has a new feature in The New Yorker, written alongside staff writer Andrew Marentz, about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
In many ways, the 16,000 word investigation is a meditation on the existential risks of AI being placed in the hands of a few powerful men, and in this case, a possible sociopath.
Today, we discuss the article.
And then zoom out on broader questions in AI.
Who is it for?
How's it being used?
And can it be reined in?
On April 6th, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marins published an article in The New Yorker titled, Sam Altman May Control Our Future Can He Be Trusted?
The writers spent 16,000 words unfolding the story of Sam Altman's career in tech, culminating in his current tenure as CEO of OpenAI.
They used interviews, internal company documents, and notes and memos from former associates to paint a portrait of Altman as deceptive, dishonest, And opportunistic.
Central to that story is how Altman has claimed to prioritize guarding against the potential dangers that generative AI poses to humanity while lying about the measures he was implementing to do so.
It's a story of an archetype now emblematic of our times the tech innovator and entrepreneur who surfs the colliding waves of creative ideas, market trends, public image management, and investor confidence, always with an eye on the prize of immense wealth, power, and personal glory.
In a clever wink to the subject matter, the article ran alongside a creepy, high res AI generated animated GIF of Sam Altman from the waist up.
He's looking straight at us as he tries on different masks that all bear different facial expressions.
And those heads are kind of hovering alongside him as replacements for whatever expression he's wanting to convey.
I don't know if it's actually AI generated.
I mean, that's the thing about.
This.
We now see everything as AI generated.
But remember, so much of design is not that.
It could have been a suite of tools that we used to create it because that sort of image that they used or moving image that they used, we've seen stuff like that for years, if not decades.
But it is very creepy.
Yeah.
I mean, it seems like any impressive looking new piece of digital media, we're like, ah, that's AI, right?
Yeah.
It's like, well, how is that sausage made?
And yeah, in this case, it's a particularly creepy one.
The article outlines Altman's journey from dropping out of Stanford at 19 in 2005 to work on his startup called Looped, and how even that early on, he reportedly exaggerated trivial things.
Like he falsely claimed to everyone who worked there that he was the high school Missouri state champion ping pong player, and then turned out to be pretty terrible at the game.
Yeah, because that was me.
I was the champion.
We should have checked.
He then sold that company in 2012 and oversaw hugely a whole Litany of hugely successful startups at venture capital company Y Combinator, from where he appears to have then been ousted for prioritizing his own investments over those of other partners.
As of 2024, reporting puts his investment portfolio at worth about $2.8 billion.
So, whatever he was doing, it was working.
And this includes several companies that are also in business with OpenAI currently.
So, that raises questions about conflicts of interest.
Much of the money Altman used.
For personal investment in those Y Combinator companies came from his main funder and mentor in Silicon Valley.
And all roads always lead back to this.
That little known and quite cuddly expert on the Antichrist named Peter Thiel.
Now, Derek, you're going to give us more detail about OpenAI and how it factors into all of this in a minute.
The short version that I'll just ping right here is that Altman was initially very focused on safety, centering these concerns in the 2015 founding documents of what was at first a nonprofit company, set up purportedly to be an ethical competitor to Google in the space, but then over time, Failed promises, lies, and his prioritizing of speed and profit over safety,
especially while negotiating that huge investment from Microsoft, led to internal pressure to have him fired.
And that actually happened in November of 2023, but it only lasted a few days.
And then he aggressively found his way back into being at the helm of the company.
Over time, Altman has also shed his image as protector of humanity and become increasingly tech optimist in his blog posts about AI, writing things like, We will all build ever more wonderful things for each other.
Despite appearing to call for greater oversight and regulation of AI when testifying before the Senate, behind the scenes, the writers allege he actually lobbied to make sure that those things didn't happen.
And these types of duplicitousness and self interested reversals are also exhibited in his political opinions and his donations to political parties.
And he steadily shifted, perhaps predictably, from being pro Democrat.
And anti Trump to flipping toward currying favor like a lot of tech oligarchs with MAGA in the time we're in now.
This is consistent with early ideas floated by Altman and others at OpenAI about setting up an investment bidding war for their technology between global governments because of the military edge the technology will provide.
After abandoning that idea, Altman instead began going behind the board's back to court Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman for investment and then to the UAE, deflecting ethical or geopolitical concerns as mere inconveniences to be negotiated.
That aside, during the Biden administration, Altman also sought and failed to get security clearance for classified AI policy discussions.
Skeptical about his trustworthiness in this area, staffers at the Rand Corporation cited extremely expensive.
Gifts that he apparently has gotten from foreign governments.
But as Trump was starting his second term, UAE National Security Advisor and Altman Business Associate Sheikh Tahun delivered a half billion dollar investment in a cryptocurrency company.
And then from the White House's Roosevelt Room, Altman, standing alongside Trump and other tech CEOs, announced a massive project called Stargate that will build AI infrastructure across the entire U.S.
A few months later, the Trump administration rescinded export restrictions on AI technology, and then the Saudis announced their plans to build a data center seven times larger than Central Park in the UAE.
It will use about as much electricity as the city of Miami.
By February of this year, Altman had maneuvered himself into position to be able to announce a partnership to deploy its models on U.S. military classified networks.
I should also note if anyone remembers the Stargate announcement, Trump took All credit for it, even though it had been in progress for months before Trump even knew about it, really.
Didn't it also prompt an explosion amongst the sort of channeler crowd of like, oh, Stargate is coming because it just sounded so cool?
It was like that was a Lori Ladd wet dream kind of thing, right?
Yeah, you would think so.
We'd have to go back.
I think I remember that.
Yeah.
Oh my God.
The Stargate is finally here.
It's opening, right?
You can go through it.
I know a lot of people who say that every single month when the moon moves into a new star site.
The Stargate is opening.
Okay.
OpenAI has now shuttered many of their safety focused departments.
And it actually ceased listing safety protocols and expenses as one of their most significant activities on their most recent IRS disclosure form.
Meanwhile, AI slop, AI voter suppression efforts, and seven wrongful death lawsuits against the company involving chatbots.
All validate the predictions that Altman and others, ironically, were making over a decade ago.
Speaking briefly about their business, OpenAI, they follow a lot of rhetoric from tech companies that realize eventually that they have to earn a profit, that all that investment money wasn't just for philanthropic means.
I mean, remember the commercial where Facebook promised to connect the world and Google said, do no evil, or they won't ever do evil?
OpenAI had its own Facebook moment.
So they were founded in 2015 as a nonprofit with the stated Goal of advancing digital intelligence, quote, in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.