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The San Francisco Standard

Emily Dreyfuss brings sharp wit and relentless curiosity to every conversation. As the SF Standard's culture editor and a veteran tech journalist, she's spent years inside the rooms where tech, culture, and power collide. And the more she learns, the more she wants to know. Each week on PST, Emily sits down with the creators, big thinkers, cultural shapers, and political heavyweights who are driving this moment — and the ones trying to make sense of it. From AI to identity, policy to pop culture, these are conversations that start on the West Coast and end up everywhere. New episodes Fridays.

  1. 15 Apr

    Ronan Farrow on the trust issues shrouding Sam Altman and OpenAI

    Ronan Farrow spent 18 months investigating Sam Altman for The New Yorker. This week, he joined us to talk about what he found. Farrow and co-author Andrew Marantz spoke to over 100 people in Altman's orbit for their 16,000-word piece, "Sam Altman May Control Our Future — Can He Be Trusted?" The story landed just days before a Molotov cocktail was thrown at Altman's San Francisco home, amid a national wave of anxiety about AI and the people building it. In this conversation, Farrow talks about the pattern of deception described by Altman's own colleagues and investors, OpenAI's transformation from a safety-first nonprofit into a company racing for profit, and why he sees Altman's story as a window into a much bigger crisis: an industry without guardrails shaping all of our futures. We also get into what it's like to actually sit across from Altman in an interview, how Farrow's #MeToo reporting informs his approach to power, and the uncomfortable parallels between ChatGPT's tendency to hallucinate and people-please — and the personality traits sources attribute to the man who built it. Read the full New Yorker piece: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted Pacific Standard Time is a production of the San Francisco Standard. Produced by Eddie Sun and Tessa Kramer. Edited by Sophie Bearman. Mixing by Michelle Lanz. Video by Morgan Ellis. Art by Jess Hutchinson. Music by Carly Bond and Bear Attack. Hosted by Emily Dreyfuss. Subscribe to The Standard: sfstandard.com/subscriber

    34 min

About

Emily Dreyfuss brings sharp wit and relentless curiosity to every conversation. As the SF Standard's culture editor and a veteran tech journalist, she's spent years inside the rooms where tech, culture, and power collide. And the more she learns, the more she wants to know. Each week on PST, Emily sits down with the creators, big thinkers, cultural shapers, and political heavyweights who are driving this moment — and the ones trying to make sense of it. From AI to identity, policy to pop culture, these are conversations that start on the West Coast and end up everywhere. New episodes Fridays.

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