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Hello and welcome to Better Offline.

I'm, of course, your host, Ed Zittron.

Better Offline. Yeah. No monologue this week. Because I've brought you all something far better.

I am joined by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Morance of the New York who just put out a massive

piece about Sam Altman, the dampest man in Silicon Valley history, which is my comment, not

theirs. And I think I want to... Thank you for joining me, both of you, first of all. I want to ask a

really just blunt question, Ronan. Considering your history of the people you've reported on,

why Sam Altman? What drew you to him? Well, this is fundamentally different than stories I've done that started with, you know,

a single clear-cut lead about criminality.

This was a situation where I was coming off of reporting you may be familiar with about

Elon Musk and his whole empire.

And I had a lot of sources in the world of AI, including Sam Altman, who was on the record in that piece.

And, you know, this was no novel genius projection on my part.

Obviously, it was at a moment when AI was becoming the kind of fulcrum of Silicon Valley.

And it became apparent to me that there were under-examined questions about the trajectory of the

technology and the integrity of the stewards of it.

We really started looking at that with an open mind.

Andrew is on this beat of big tech all the time and is also well sourced up in this world.

And we both, I think, sat down and were having our conversations about what the most salient points of contention were

...