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an "ACA for All" system would prevent government from operating health insurance while allowing it to regulate and finance health insurance for most Americans. The ACA for All would not be "socialized medicine" -- where government not only finances healthcare but supplies it through public hospitals, clinics, and the direct employment of clinicians. ACA for All would continue to rely on private industry (private doctors and private hospitals) and personal responsibility, and would limit the government's role in healthcare delivery.

A Republican plan for universal healthcare would offer those with non-employer-based coverage an adequately sized tax deduction, big enough to cover the cost of a family health insurance plan. And, for the first time since the 1940s, individuals would pay taxes on the value of employer-based health insurance above a certain threshold (based on the average costopens in a new tab or window of a family health insurance plan).

And yet, when people act as if Mr. Altman has nearly realized his long-held vision, he pushes back.

This past week, more than a thousand A.I. experts and tech leaders called on OpenAI and other companies to pause their work on systems like ChatGPT, saying they present “profound risks to society and humanity.”

As people realize that this technology is also a way of spreading falsehoods or even persuading people to do things they should not do, some critics are accusing Mr. Altman of reckless behavior.

“The hype over these systems — even if everything we hope for is right long term — is totally out of control for the short term,” he told me on a recent afternoon. There is time, he said, to better understand how these systems will ultimately change the world.

Many industry leaders, A.I. researchers and pundits see ChatGPT as a fundamental technological shift, as significant as the creation of the web browser or the iPhone. But few can agree on the future of this technology.

Some believe it will deliver a utopia where everyone has all the time and money ever needed. Others believe it could destroy humanity. Still others spend much of their time arguing that the technology is never as powerful as everyone says it is, insisting that neither nirvana nor doomsday is as close as it might seem.

he is often criticized from all directions. But those closest to him believe this is as it should be. “If you’re equally upsetting both extreme sides, then you’re doing something right,” said OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman.

To spend time with Mr. Altman is to understand that Silicon Valley will push this technology forward even though it is not quite sure what the implications will be

in 2019, he paraphrased Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the Manhattan Project, who believed the atomic bomb was an inevitability of scientific progress. “Technology happens because it is possible,” he said

His life has been a fairly steady climb toward greater prosperity and wealth, driven by an effective set of personal skills — not to mention some luck. It makes sense that he believes that the good thing will happen rather than the bad.

He said his company was building technology that would “solve some of our most pressing problems, really increase the standard of life and also figure out much better uses for human will and creativity.”

He was not exactly sure what problems it will solve, but he argued that ChatGPT showed the first signs of what is possible. Then, with his next breath, he worried that the same technology could cause serious harm if it wound up in the hands of some authoritarian government.

Kelly Sims, a partner with the venture capital firm Thrive Capital who worked with Mr. Altman as a board adviser to OpenAI, said it was like he was constantly arguing with himself.

“In a single conversation,” she said, “he is both sides of the debate club.”

He takes pride in recognizing when a technology is about to reach exponential growth — and then riding that curve into the future.

he is also the product of a strange, sprawling online community that began to worry, around the same time Mr. Altman came to the Valley, that artificial intelligence would one day destroy the world. Called rationalists or effective altruists, members of this movement were instrumental in the creation of OpenAI.

Does it make sense to ride that curve if it could end in diaster? Mr. Altman is certainly determined to see how it all plays out.

“Why is he working on something that won’t make him richer? One answer is that lots of people do that once they have enough money, which Sam probably does. The other is that he likes power.”

“He has a natural ability to talk people into things,” Mr. Graham said. “If it isn’t inborn, it was at least fully developed before he was 20. I first met Sam when he was 19, and I remember thinking at the time: ‘So this is what Bill Gates must have been like.

poker taught Mr. Altman how to read people and evaluate risk.

It showed him “how to notice patterns in people over time, how to make decisions with very imperfect information, how to decide when it was worth pain, in a sense, to get more information,” he told me while strolling across his ranch in Napa. “It’s a great game.”

He believed, according to his younger brother Max, that he was one of the few people who could meaningfully change the world through A.I. research, as opposed to the many people who could do so through politics.

In 2019, just as OpenAI’s research was taking off, Mr. Altman grabbed the reins, stepping down as president of Y Combinator to concentrate on a company with fewer than 100 employees that was unsure how it would pay its bills.

Within a year, he had transformed OpenAI into a nonprofit with a for-profit arm. That way he could pursue the money it would need to build a machine that could do anything the human brain could do.

Mr. Brockman, OpenAI’s president, said Mr. Altman’s talent lies in understanding what people want. “He really tries to find the thing that matters most to a person — and then figure out how to give it to them,” Mr. Brockman told me. “That is the algorithm he uses over and over.”

Mr. Yudkowsky and his writings played key roles in the creation of both OpenAI and DeepMind, another lab intent on building artificial general intelligence.

“These are people who have left an indelible mark on the fabric of the tech industry and maybe the fabric of the world,” he said. “I think Sam is going to be one of those people.”

The trouble is, unlike the days when Apple, Microsoft and Meta were getting started, people are well aware of how technology can transform the world — and how dangerous it can be.

Mr. Scott of Microsoft believes that Mr. Altman will ultimately be discussed in the same breath as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

The woman was the Canadian singer Grimes, Mr. Musk’s former partner, and the hat guy was Eliezer Yudkowsky, a self-described A.I. researcher who believes, perhaps more than anyone, that artificial intelligence could one day destroy humanity.

The selfie — snapped by Mr. Altman at a party his company was hosting — shows how close he is to this way of thinking. But he has his own views on the dangers of artificial intelligence.

In March, Mr. Altman tweeted out a selfie, bathed by a pale orange flash, that showed him smiling between a blond woman giving a peace sign and a bearded guy wearing a fedora.

He also helped spawn the vast online community of rationalists and effective altruists who are convinced that A.I. is an existential risk. This surprisingly influential group is represented by researchers inside many of the top A.I. labs, including OpenAI.

They don’t see this as hypocrisy: Many of them believe that because they understand the dangers clearer than anyone else, they are in the best position to build this technology.

Mr. Altman believes that effective altruists have played an important role in the rise of artificial intelligence, alerting the industry to the dangers. He also believes they exaggerate these dangers.

As OpenAI developed ChatGPT, many others, including Google and Meta, were building similar technology. But it was Mr. Altman and OpenAI that chose to share the technology with the world.

Many in the field have criticized the decision, arguing that this set off a race to release technology that gets things wrong, makes things up and could soon be used to rapidly spread disinformation.

Mr. Altman argues that rather than developing and testing the technology entirely behind closed doors before releasing it in full, it is safer to gradually share it so everyone can better understand risks and how to handle them.

He told me that it would be a “very slow takeoff.”

When I asked Mr. Altman if a machine that could do anything the human brain could do would eventually drive the price of human labor to zero, he demurred. He said he could not imagine a world where human intelligence was useless.

If he’s wrong, he thinks he can make it up to humanity.

His grand idea is that OpenAI will capture much of the world’s wealth through the creation of A.G.I. and then redistribute this wealth to the people. In Napa, as we sat chatting beside the lake at the heart of his ranch, he tossed out several figures — $100 billion, $1 trillion, $100 trillion.

If A.G.I. does create all that wealth, he is not sure how the company will redistribute it. Money could mean something very different in this new world.

But as he once told me: “I feel like the A.G.I. can help with that.”

But to understand why Republicans have died at higher rates, you can’t look at vaccine status alone. Congressional districts controlled by a trifecta of Republican leaders—state governor, Senate, and House—had an 11 percent higher death rate, according to the Lancet study. A likely explanation, the authors write, could be that in the post-vaccine era, those leaders chose policies and conveyed public-health messages that made their constituents more likely to die. Although we still can’t say these decisions led to higher death rates, the association alone is jarring.

One of the most compelling studies comes from researchers at Yale, who published their findings as a working paper in November. They link political party and excess-death rate—the percent increase in deaths above pre-COVID levels—among those registered as either Democrats or Republicans, providing a more granular view. They chose to analyze data from Florida and Ohio from before and after vaccines were available. Looking at the period before the vaccine,  researchers found a 1.6 percentage-point difference in excess death rate among Republicans and Democrats, with a higher rate among Republicans. But after vaccines became available, that gap widened dramatically to 10.4 percentage points, again with a higher Republican excess death rate. “When we compare individuals who are of the same age, who live in the same county in the same month of the pandemic, there are differences correlated with your political-party affiliation that emerge after vaccines are available,”

What’s most concerning about all of this is that partisan disparities in death rates were also apparent before COVID. People living in Republican jurisdictions have been at a health disadvantage for more than 20 years. From 2001 to 2019, the death rate in Democratic counties decreased by 22 percent, according to a recent study; in Republican counties, it declined by only 11 percent. In the same time period, the political gap in death rates increased sixfold.

over the decades, state policy decisions on health issues such as Medicaid, gun legislation, tobacco taxes, and, indeed, vaccines have likely had a stronger impact on state health trajectories than other factors

the long-term decline of health in red states indicates that there is an ongoing problem at a high level in Republican-led places, and that something has gone awry. “If you happen to live in certain states, your chances for living a long life are going to be much higher than if you’re an American living in a different state,”

o acknowledge how many Republicans didn’t have to die would mean giving credence to scientific and medical expertise. So long as America remains locked in a poisonous partisan battle in which science is wrongly dismissed as being associated with the left, the death toll will only rise.

“It’s shoot first, ask questions later,”

Each one of these incidents resulted from unique events. But activists and researchers say they stem from a convergence of bigger factors — increased fear of crime and an attendant surge in gun ownership, increasingly extreme political messaging on firearms, fearmongering in the media and marketing campaigns by the gun industry that portray the suburban front door as a fortified barrier against a violent world.

“The gun lobby markets firearms as something you need to defend yourself — hammers in search of nails,”

The perception that crime, especially violent gun crime, has increased is not a manufactured myth. National murder rates have climbed by about a third since 2019, according to government data, even accounting for modest declines in fatal shootings over the past 18 months.

Gun purchases rose during the pandemic and the unrest and racial-justice protests after the murder of George Floyd. Nearly 20 percent of American households bought a gun from March 2020 to March 2022, and about 5 percent of Americans bought a gun for the first time,

More than 30 states also have “stand your ground” laws. Some have recently strengthened their “castle doctrine” laws, making it more difficult to prosecute homeowners who claim self-defense in a shooting.

“People become paranoid and over-worried — and then comes an unannounced knock on their door,”

But several large-scale studies have suggested that the laws have few benefits, increase the likelihood of gun violence and might discriminate against minority groups, especially Black people.

The effect of self-defense laws protecting homeowners and gun owners is fiercely debated, with proponents arguing that their mere presence deters criminal behavior or civil disorder

shootings in which white people shot Black people were nearly three times as likely to be found “justified” compared with cases where white people shot other white people.

A 2023 analysis of recent academic research by the nonpartisan RAND Corporation found no evidence that such laws had the deterrent effect that their sponsors claimed, and there was some indication, while not conclusive, that the laws might account for some increases in gun violence.

weapons were actually more likely to be used in suicides, discharged accidentally, stolen or brandished in domestic disputes, than used to fend off an external attack.

The National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups have long disputed such assessments, citing surveys that show far greater use of weapons for legitimate self-defense.

About a third of the roughly 16,700 gun owners surveyed in a study led by William English, a Georgetown University business school professor, said they had used their guns for self-defense, prompting Mr. English to estimate that as many as 1.6 million people in the country had defended themselves with a weapon that year.

Some of Trump’s Christian followers do appear to have grown to see him as a kind of religious figure. He is a savior. I think it began with the sense that he was uniquely committed to saving them from their foes (liberals, Democrats, elites, seculars, illegal immigrants, etc.) and saving America from all that threatens it.

In this sense, Gushee continued, “a savior does not have to be a good person but just needs to fulfill his divinely appointed role. Trump is seen by many as actually having done so while president.”

This view of Trump is especially strong “in the Pentecostal wing of the conservative Christian world,” Gushee wrote, wherehe is sometimes also viewed as an anointed leader sent by God. “Anointed” here means set apart and especially equipped by God for a holy task. Sometimes the most unlikely people got anointed by God in the Bible. So Trump’s unlikeliness for this role is actually evidence in favor.

The prosecutions underway against Trump have been easily interpretable as signs of persecution, which can then connect to the suffering Jesus theme in Christianity. Trump has been able to leverage that with lines like, “They’re not persecuting me. They’re persecuting you.” The idea that he is unjustly suffering and, in so doing, vicariously absorbing the suffering that his followers would be enduring is a powerful way for Trump to be identified with Jesus.

Robert P. Jones, the founder and chief executive of P.R.R.I. (formerly the Public Religion Research Institute), contends that Trump’s religious claims are an outright fraud:Trump has given us adequate evidence that he has little religious sensibility or theological acuity. He has scant knowledge of the Bible, he has said that he has never sought forgiveness for his sins, and he has no substantive connection to a church or denomination. He’s not only one of the least religious but also likely one of the most theologically ignorant presidents the country has ever had.

If people wanted to make him out to be savior, anointed one and agent of God, he would not object

Lacking any inner spiritual or moral compass that would seek to deflect overinflated or even idolatrous claims about himself, he instead reposted their artwork and videos and so on. Anyone truly serious about the Christian faith would deflect claims to being a savior or anointed one, but he did not have such brakes operating.

there are evangelicals of the charismatic and Pentecostal variety — the so-called New Apostolic Reformation or Independent Network Charismatics — who believe that Donald Trump is an agent of God to rescue the United States from the atheistic, even demonic, secularists and progressives who want to destroy the country by advancing abortion, gay marriage, wokeness, transgenderism, etc.

“This whole movement,” Fea wrote,is rooted in prophecy. The prophets speak directly to God and receive direct messages from him about politics. They think that politics is a form of spiritual warfare and believe that God is using Donald Trump to help wage this war. (God can even use sinners to accomplish his will — there are a lot of biblical examples of this, they say.)

As far as Trump goes, Fea continued, “he probably thinks these charismatics and Pentecostals are crazy. But if they are going to tell him he is God’s anointed one, he will gladly accept the title and use it if it wins him votes. He will happily accept their prayers because it is politically expedient.”

The more interesting case, Gushee wrote,is Trump himself. I accept as given that he entered politics as the amoral, worldly, narcissistic New York businessman that he appeared to be. Like all G.O.P. politicians, he knew he would have to win over the conservative Christian voting bloc so central to the party.

Trump, Jones added in an email, “almost certainly lacks the kind of religious sensibility or theological framework necessary to personally grasp what it would even mean to be a Jesus-like, messianic figure.”

According to Jones, in order to rationalize this quasi-deification of Trump — despite “his crassness and vulgarity, divorces, mocking of disabled people, his overt racism and a determination by a court that he sexually abused advice columnist E. Jean Carroll” — white evangelicals refer not to Jesus but the Persian King Cyrus from the book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible.”

Cyrus is the model of an ungodly king who nonetheless frees a group of Jews who are held captive in Babylon. It took white evangelicals themselves a while to settle on an explanation for their support, but this characterization of Trump was solidified in a 2018 film that came out just before the 2018 midterms entitled “The Trump Prophecy,” which portrayed Trump as the only leader who could save America from certain cultural collapse.

According to Jones, “White evangelicals’ stalwart, enduring support for Trump tells us much more about who they see themselves to be than who they think Trump is. As I argued in my most recent book, ‘The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy,’” Jones continued in his email, “the primary force animating white evangelical Protestant politics — one that has been with us since before the founding of the Republic — is the vision of America as a nation primarily of, by and for white Christians.”

“a majority (56 percent) of white evangelical Protestants, compared to only one-third of all Americans, believed that ‘God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.’”

Jones argued that Trump’s declaration on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021 — “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore” — was a direct appeal “to this sense of divine entitlement of those who believed this mythology strongly enough to engage in a violent insurrection.”

“White evangelicals,” Guth found, “are invariably the most populist: more likely to favor strong leadership (even when that means breaking the rules), to distrust government, to see the country on the wrong track and to think that the majority should always rule (and minorities adapt).”

Guth also found thatanother salient trait of populist politics is the willingness to ignore democratic civility. We constructed a “rough politics” score from three A.N.E.S. items: whether protesters deserve what they get if they are hurt in demonstrating, whether the country would be better off if it got rid of rotten apples and whether people are “too sensitive” about political discourse. Here the usual pattern recurs: Evangelical affiliation, evangelical identity and biblical literalism predicts agreement with those assertions, while religious minorities, secular folks and progressives tend to demur.

Guth wrote that his “findings help us understand what many have struggled to comprehend: How can white evangelical Protestants continue to provide strong support for President Donald Trump, whose personal values and behavior trample on the biblical and ethical standards professed by that community?”

The most common explanation, according to Guth,is that white evangelicals have a transactional relationship with the president: As long as he nominates conservative jurists and makes appropriate gestures on abortion and sexual politics, they will support him.

“The evidence here,” he wrote, “suggests a more problematic answer”:White evangelicals share with Trump a multitude of attitudes, including his hostility toward immigrants, his Islamophobia, his racism and nativism, as well as his political style, with its nasty politics and assertion of strong, solitary leadership. Indeed, Trump’s candidacy may have “authorized” for the first time the widespread expression of such attitudes.

The pervasive populism of white evangelical laity not only helps explain their support for President Trump but suggests powerful barriers to influence by cosmopolitan internationalist evangelical elites, who want to turn the community in a different direction. As hostile responses to efforts of antipopulist evangelicals like Michael Gerson, Russell Moore, David Platt and many others indicate, there is currently a very limited market for such alternative perspectives among the rank and file.

Nor does cosmopolitan or cooperative internationalism find much purchase among local evangelical clergy. Analysis of the 2017 Cooperative Clergy Survey shows that ministers from several evangelical denominations, especially the large Southern Baptist Convention and Assemblies of God, exhibit exactly the same populist traits seen here in white evangelical laity, but in more pronounced form: strong Islamophobia, Christian nationalism, extreme moral traditionalism, opposition to trade pacts, militaristic attitudes, resistance to political compromise and climate change denial, among others.

In other words, conservative populism, with all its antidemocratic implications, has taken root in America. What we don’t know is for how long — or how much damage it will do.

Nothing in his background seems to have brought him to this troubling point. Mr. Bechtolsheim was one of those who gave Silicon Valley its reputation as an engineer’s paradise, a place where getting rich was just something that happened by accident.

“He cared so much about making great technology that he would buy a house, not furnish it and sleep on a futon,” said Scott McNealy, who joined with Mr. Bechtolsheim four decades ago to create Sun Microsystems, a maker of computer workstations and servers that was a longtime tech powerhouse. “Money was not how he measured himself.”

researchers who analyze trading data say corporate executives broadly profit from confidential information. These executives try to avoid traditional insider trading restrictions by buying shares in economically linked firms, a phenomenon called “shadow trading.”

“There appears to be significant profits being made from shadow trading,” said Mihir N. Mehta, an assistant professor of accounting at the University of Michigan and an author of a 2021 study in The Accounting Review that found “robust evidence” of the behavior. “The people doing it have a sense of entitlement or maybe just think, ‘I’m invincible.’”

He went to Stanford as a Ph.D. student in the mid-1970s and got to know the then-small programming community around the university. In the early 1980s, he, along with Mr. McNealy, Vinod Khosla and Bill Joy, started Sun Microsystems as an outgrowth of a Stanford project. When Sun initially raised money, Mr. Bechtolsheim put his entire life savings — about $100,000 — into the company.

“You could end up losing all your money,” he was warned by the venture capitalists financing Sun. His response: “I see zero risk here.”

An impromptu demonstration was hastily arranged for 8 a.m., which Mr. Bechtolsheim cut short. He had seen enough, and besides, he had to get to the office. He gave them a check, and the deal was sealed, Mr. Levy wrote, “with as little fanfare as if he were grabbing a latte on the way to work.

Mr. Page and Mr. Brin couldn’t deposit Mr. Bechtolsheim’s check for a month because Google did not have a bank account. When Google went public in 2004, that $100,000 investment was worth at least $1 billion.

It wasn’t the money that made the story famous, however. It was the way it confirmed one of Silicon Valley’s most cherished beliefs about itself: that its genius is so blindingly obvious, questions are superfluous.

The dot-com boom was a disorienting period for longtime Valley leaders whose interest in money was muted. Mr. Bechtolsheim’s Sun colleague Mr. Joy left Silicon Valley.

“There’s so much money around, it’s clouding a lot of people’s ethics,” Mr. Joy said in a 1999 oral history

Mr. Bechtolsheim didn’t leave. In 2008, he co-founded Arista, a Silicon Valley computer networking company that went public and now has 4,000 employees and a stock market value of $100 billion.

Mr. Bechtolsheim was chair of Arista’s board when an executive from another company called in 2019, according to the S.E.C. Arista and the other company, which was not named in court documents, had a history of sharing confidential information under nondisclosure agreements.

immediately after hanging up, the government said, he bought Acacia option contracts in the accounts of a close relative and a colleague. The next day, the deal was announced. Acacia shares jumped 35 percent.

Arista’s code of conduct states that “employees who possess material, nonpublic information gained through their work at Arista may not trade in Arista securities or the securities of another company to which the information pertains.”

Mr. Levy, the “In the Plex” author, said there were plenty of legal ways to make money in Silicon Valley. “Someone who is regarded as an influential funder and is very well connected gets nearly unlimited opportunities to make very desirable early investments,”