- Sam Altman said he was in an "adrenaline-charged state" when he was ousted as OpenAI's CEO.
- Altman said he didn't eat or sleep much and wasn't fazed by texts he received from world leaders.
- His takeaway from the experience is the "remarkable" human ability to adapt to new circumstances.
As the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman has had a whirlwind past couple of years.
Following the release of ChatGPT, Altman has been at the forefront of the artificial-intelligence race. He's met with world leaders, feuded with Elon Musk, and joined the billionaires club — and was fired from the company he cofounded before quickly securing his return.
If he had "a little bit more mental space to step back," there would be something crazy to note from every day, Altman said recently on the tech podcast "The Logan Bartlett Show."
But if he had to choose a surreal moment that stuck out to him, he said it would be the four-day period when he was ousted from OpenAI — and not because of the ousting itself. The time was surreal because of how he navigated what, in hindsight, was a very unusual series of events.
Altman described it as an "insane, superjammed" 4 ½ days where his body was in an "adrenaline-charged state."
Within a day of his ousting, Altman said he received 10 to 20 texts from presidents and prime ministers from around the world. At the time, it felt "very normal," he said, and he responded to the messages and thanked the leaders without being fazed.
"It was just, like, weird," Altman told the podcast's host, Logan Bartlett, "like not sleeping much, not really eating, energy levels, like, very high, very clear, very focused."
Once he secured his reinstatement as CEO a few days later, he said he stopped at a diner on the way to Napa the day before Thanksgiving and realized he hadn't eaten in days. So naturally, he ordered four "heavy" entrées, as well as "two milkshakes just for me," he said.
Altman said the celebratory meal was "very satisfying."
But the CEO said the situation still didn't really hit him until he received a text from a president who said they were happy everything was resolved.
"Then it hit me that, like, oh, yeah, like, all of these people had texted me and it wasn't weird," Altman said.
He added that the odd part was realizing that it should've been weird to have multiple world leaders texting him during this situation — but it wasn't.
The CEO said it made him realize humans' ability to adapt to any circumstance.
"My takeaway is human adaptability to almost anything is just, like, much more remarkably strong than we realize," Altman said on the podcast. "And you can get used to anything as the new normal, good or bad, pretty fast."
He said this wasn't the first time he learned that lesson and that he'd learned it many times over the past couple of years.
"But I think," he added, "it says something remarkable about humanity and good for us and good as we stare down at this, like, big transition."
Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, has a global deal to allow OpenAI to train its models on its media brands' reporting.
