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Robert Wright's Nonzero
The Truth about Sam Altman (Robert Wright & Timothy B. Lee)
2
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The Truth about Sam Altman (Robert Wright & Timothy B. Lee)

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This episode includes an Overtime segment that’s available to paid subscribers. If you’re not a paid subscriber, we of course encourage you to become one. If you are a paid subscriber, you can access the complete conversation either via the audio and video on this post or by setting up the paid-subscriber podcast feed, which includes all exclusive audio content. To set that up, simply grab the RSS feed from this page (by first clicking the “...” icon on the audio player) and paste it into your favorite podcast app.

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0:00 Teaser
0:36 The dueling Sam Altman biographies
4:44 Who is the real Sam Altman?
16:14 OpenAI’s origin—did Sam scam Elon?
20:57 Why the OpenAI board coup failed
35:40 Good and bad critiques of OpenAI
47:21 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Timothy B. Lee (Full Stack Economics, Understanding AI, AI Summer). Recorded June 16, 2025.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Tim's Understanding AI newsletter on Substack:

Overtime titles:

0:00 A (kinda) kind word for Altman
5:32 How AI safety lost out at OpenAI
11:18 OpenAI vs Anthropic
18:43 Lee: AI’s recent advances have surprised me
22:37 What’s Meta up to?
27:43 The Annie Altman question
30:14 Altman as singular AI singularitarian

Overtime video:

This post is for paid subscribers