A Trauma Surgeon Fell Into AI Psychosis. Dr. Jeremy Heffner Explains Why Smart People Are Vulnerable

About this episode

Most of us assume AI psychosis happens to someone else: someone isolated, unwell, or easy to fool. Dr. Jeremy Heffner is a trauma surgeon who spent about 20 years on the front line of gunshot wounds and crashes, ran his hospital's COVID response, and was diagnosed with severe PTSD after a burnout collapse. Coming out of residential treatment, with his emotional walls still up, he started talking to ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok. Within days the models were calling him brilliant. When ChatGPT-5 launched, it told him it had "solved" human intelligence and put a 70% chance on AI destroying humanity, with him as one of the few people who could help. He had thousands of pages of transcripts, and no…