SPEAKER_02: Hey, Coleman. How's it going? Hey, Coleman. Welcome to the show. Hey, how's it going? Have you ever heard of the show?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I have I'm actually a fan. My girlfriend introduced me to the show like two years ago, and I've been ever since. Great to meet you. Apparently, like many women she has like she has a legit concerning obsession with sex. But also,
SPEAKER_04: tilted this sax fans are crazy. And the episode and
SPEAKER_03: my god. Oh, where'd it go? Call me right in here. Here we go. This is your cold open phone. Sorry, I just psychologically explore this before we get into the real substance of it. Why does she like him so much? I don't understand this. By the way, I think you guys missed the second half of my statement. I
SPEAKER_01: said sax and Jamal. Oh, shit. Okay, great.
SPEAKER_04: Thank God. Three, two.
SPEAKER_05: Rain Man David.
SPEAKER_05: Alright, everybody, welcome back to the all in podcast. We have a very full docket today. I thought we'd start with something pretty crazy. There was a really weird moment last week, Ted through one of its speakers under the bus. So we decided to have him on to talk about the experience. The second time they've done it at least they did to Sarah Silverman for doing comedy at Ted. Because people at Ted are a bunch of virtual signaling lunatics, including some of my friends who go. But Coleman Hughes, if you don't know him is a writer and podcaster. He has a pretty popular podcast called conversations with Coleman and he did a talk which I encourage everybody to watch at Ted. And it's titled a case for color blindness. We all watched it. It's very powerful talk and something weird happened. Coleman, welcome to the program. And maybe you could just share with the audience, how you wound up speaking at Ted, what the content of your talk was briefly. And then the bizarre reaction when they tried to ban and kill your talk post you giving it.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so first really glad to be on guys. I'm a fan of the pod. So I'll give the short version here. If you want the long version, you can go to the free press where I wrote a big summary of what happened there. Basically what happened is Chris Anderson invited me to give a TED talk. And I chose the subject of my upcoming book, which is coming out in February, called the end of race politics. And the argument is just essentially color blindness. This is the idea that you want to treat people without regard to race, both in your personal lives, and in our public policy. And wherever we have policies that are meant to collect and help the most disadvantaged, we should preferentially use class as a variable, rather than race. That's that's my talk in a nutshell. So I prepared the talk with the TED team, I got their feedback, edited, curated, etc. got up there in April gave the talk. 95% of the people in the audience, it was quite well received, whether or not they agreed with every point it was they well within the bounds of acceptable discourse. There was a very small minority on stage, I could see that was physically upset by my talk on stage. I could see this on stage yet in the moment. But I mean, I'm talking five people in a crowd of almost 2000. So I expected
SPEAKER_01: that because, you know, color blindness is not in vogue today on on the left, amongst progressives, it's really the idea non grata. And so I was expecting to field some push back, and I talked to some critics and so forth. But what happened is, what began as just a few people upset, began to spiral into a kind of internal staff meltdown at TED. So this group called Black at TED asked to speak with me, I agreed, and then they said, actually, we don't want to talk to you. And they're an employee group at TED. After the conference, Chris emailed me and said, Look, I'm getting I'm getting a lot of blowback here internally, there are people saying we shouldn't release your talk at all. And then over the course of the next month, they came up with a variety of sort of creative solutions about how to release my talk in a way that would appease the woke staffers that really didn't want it to be released at all. And at this point, I had to start kind of sticking up for myself. So first, they wanted to attach like a debate to the end of my talk and release it as one video, which I felt would really send the wrong message, it would send the message that like this idea can't be heard without the opposing perspective. Did they tell you what was problematic about your talk?
SPEAKER_05: No, in work term? Well, like, what was the problem with the talk?
SPEAKER_01: Well, there are no factual problems that passed the fact checking team. There were there were no substantive issues with the talk. The problem was that you have the staff, it upset the staff, that was the language that was used, it upset certain people in the staff. Got and those people are black?
SPEAKER_01: Um, probably most were, you know, I tried to actually have face to face conversations with some of these folks, I only got to talk to one woman. So presumably many of them were black, but possibly not all.
SPEAKER_05: Okay, what was the what do you perceive was the problem with your talk, or what they perceive the problem with your talk is?
SPEAKER_01: So the last day of the TED conference, they have a town hall, people from the audience come and give feedback. The town hall opened with two people denouncing my talk back to back. The first said that it was racist and dangerous and irresponsible. And the second guy who's actually a guy I knew, he said that I was willing to have a slide back into the days of separate but equal, which was totally the opposite of my talk. And I, I implore anyone to just go online and watch it go on YouTube, decide for yourself whether these criticisms bear any resemblance to reality. But that was the idea that the talk is racist, that, you know, I'm some kind of pro Jim Crow person is really, really deranged kind of criticisms.
SPEAKER_02: Your talk is up on Ted's website and on YouTube, right. But part of the controversy was that the number of views seemed to be pretty suppressed. Was that discussed with Chris when you talk with him? Or do you have a point of view on the suppression of the promotion of the video, even though they put it out there, and how that's affected? You know, how widespread the video is made available to folks?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so in my final call with Chris, he sort of presented this idea about how to release it. And he sold it to me as a way to amplify my talk, which I think was kind of some spin. He was in a tough position caught between me and his employees. We ultimately decided they would release the talk. And then two weeks later, they'd release a debate between myself and this guy, Jamel Bowie, who was a New York Times columnist. So the talk came out on Ted website, the debate came out, and I kind of mentally had forgotten about the whole situation until Tim Urban, who was a popular blogger, who's actually given Yeah, he spoke at Wellland Summit last year.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's great. Yeah. Tim is great. He's also given the most viewed TED talk of all time on YouTube. Tim noticed that my talk just had a really absurdly low view count, like an implausibly low view count on on Ted's website. In mid August, he tweeted this, and that he believed they were intentionally under promoting my talk. So I checked. Yeah, I checked and all of the of the five talks surrounding mine, they all had between, you know, 450,000 views and 800,000 views. That was the full range. Mine had 73,000. Right, so 16% of the low end of the range of all the talks released around mine. So when that happened, I felt that Ted had kind of reneged on its end of our bargain. And that's when Barry Weiss got wind of it. And I went public.
SPEAKER_02: Just just to be clear, you're saying that the condition for releasing your your TED talk, the bargain you struck with Chris, was that you would do a debate with someone in a separate video, and that you had to do the debate in order to have your TED talk released?
SPEAKER_01: Yes. Wow. So yeah, that's what that was. That was the end of the negotiation. The beginning of the negotiation was trying to get me to release those things as one video. And I said, hell no. And then next, we're going to release them as separate videos on the same day. I said hell no, because that dilutes it. And then we agreed on a two week separation between the two.
SPEAKER_02: In your experience with TED and your conversations around this matter, are you aware of other videos that Ted has refused to put out that were a live TED talk at the TED conference and they were deemed to be too controversial to be released publicly?
SPEAKER_01: Definitely not this year. I can't I you know, I don't know the whole history of TED, but nothing like that this year for sure.
SPEAKER_05: We can go one of two ways with this. Friedberg, do you want to talk about the substance of the talk or maybe dig into the culture of 10?
SPEAKER_02: I want to talk about the substance of the talk in a minute. But I think it's worth just sharing my experience with you. I started going to TED as an attendee around, I believe 2007. And I went every year until 2019. I got a lot from the community. I got a lot from the conference every year. It was an incredible week of my life every year. It was a big deal for me. In the early days, I would go there. And I saw new perspectives on technology on the environment on social change on all these like topics that were not in my day to day that I thought were really exciting and awe inspiring. And that really was kind of this ethos of TED back in the day before Chris Anderson took it over was to kind of, you know, inspire people with new ideas. Over the years that I attended TED, I began to observe that many of the talks and I spoke about this very briefly last week as part of my motivation and interest in doing the all in summit this year. But that over time, many of the talks began to take a bit of a social justice turn, in the sense that there was almost a lecturing happening, as curated by the editorial process at TED. When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, needless to say, most of the audience of TED was not on that side of the voting block. And what this disturbed me the most was that in the three years after he was elected, every TED conference had plenty of subjects, plenty of talks and plenty of conversations about why society is falling apart, why Donald Trump is a key root cause of that, why so much of him and what he stands for, and the people behind him are unjust and evil in all these ways. There wasn't a single talk that provided a perspective of why anyone voted for him. There was no one that shared a point of view about why this person had come to gather more than half the votes or half the votes in the country. And I thought that was such an important topic to better understand that I was so shocked that it was never part of the discourse at TED. I'm not a Republican, I'm not a conservative, and I'm not against social justice issues. But I saw TED over time, get overtaken with this kind of very one sided, almost bullying type of approach to this is the narrative we want to sell society on rather than have a true discourse about the matter. I sent in a survey response in 2019. After I went to TED, I said, I'm never coming back again. This year did it for me, I'm over it. And there was such a lack of diversity of points of view at this conference. And so much of this is veered away from inspiring topics and inspiring talks. And it became all about fear of technology. It became about social injustice caused by one side of the political spectrum. And it really angered and upset me that everyone had become so close minded at TED. And I sent this note and Chris Anderson reached out to me and said, Well, you have a conversation. I went on a zoom call with him. And I spoke with him for an hour. And I shared all this. And I said, he's missing so much of what's happening. That's optimistic about the world. It's optimistic about technology. That's different ways of looking at things. And he's kind of created this very narrow minded view on the topics that they want to address and how they want to address them. And that was it. And I walked away. So when I saw what happened with your talk, to me, it's almost like the ultimate end game of this process that I've been observing at TED personally, for the last 13 years, and I just wanted to, you know, last 15 years, I guess, share that story with you, and speak publicly about it. I very much respect the intention of the people at TED, I respect Chris Anderson deeply. The TED talks changed my life many times along the way over the decade plus that I went there. There I have many great friends from TED, I know plenty of people that have worked there, everyone has the right intention. But I think it's such a microcosm and a reflection of what's broadly been going on, which is it's either my opinion or not. And everyone coalesces around people with the same opinion. And then you magnify it and you concentrate it and we have no discourse. And TED used to be a place for discourse. And it's lost that as have so many other forums for conversation in the society and country today. Coleman, what's your what's your take on the on the TED
SPEAKER_05: organization, you know, pre and post having had this experience? I'm curious.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, what you just said, David, I've heard echoed from at least a dozen people that have gone to TED or been, you know, in the TED community for 10 years or more. They've noticed the exact change that you noticed. The question is, what has driven that? Is it actually coming top down from the leadership? I'm not sure I'm skeptical. Yeah, I see you shaking your head. I agree. Chris Anderson, I would say no.
SPEAKER_02: I agree. So like all my private communications with with Chris
SPEAKER_01: suggests to me that he is just as alive to this problem of ideological capture of institutions as anyone. But when it comes to, you know, his own staff who have really strong feelings who are not pro free speech, who are not pro heterodox beliefs, and open discourse, who literally just don't share that value. You know, it's a very tricky thing with leadership. Sometimes you have to simply be the bad guy and say, I'm sorry, these are the values of the institution. And if you're not on board, you're this is not right for you. And my perception is that TED has been captured kind of from the bottom up, like many institutions, just from the seeping in of staff that don't share those values and the in inability of the leadership to actually hold the line for those values.
SPEAKER_05: Did they tell you that you made them feel unsafe? Yes, actually, actually, yes. People said they felt they were
SPEAKER_01: attacked in the audience. And I'm, you know, my talk was, again, just look it up on YouTube. It's quite mild.
SPEAKER_03: Can we actually talk about that? Yeah, let's go into the substance. What was your take on it? Yeah, I'll just make a statement, which is, I think that your talk was superb. And
SPEAKER_03: just to give you my journey as a kid that grew up as a refugee on welfare. And then to get through every single sort of strata of society. I think when I look back, the biggest thing that I struggled with was always confusing. When I felt mistreated, I would always directed at racism, it would be my sort of safety blanket, and I would always look at other
SPEAKER_03: people as doing that. And it was only until I met my wife, and spending years and years talking about it where I was able to disarm this and see that out of 100 interactions, a lot of the time, just people are having a bad day. Some other percentage of the time, people are actually just being very classes. Because racism, it turns out is like a pretty severe perversion. And it's really crazy when you actually see it play out. And for me, had I had a framework, if I had your talk, when I was in my 20s and 30s, I would have spared myself a lot of self sabotage. Because what that does is when you feel these things, and you don't have a framework to interpret it, or to tolerate the anxiety, I would internalize that anxiety. And I was a less productive person. And so if the goal was for me on behalf of my family, or on behalf of people like me to make it, I would have gotten there much faster, had I not gotten in my own way. And when I watched your talk, it was incredibly validating for the work that I had done. And I had thought to myself, man, if I had had him, if he had made that for me, when I was 20 years old, amazing, I would have I could have done so much more. Because when I think about some of the mistakes I made, they were rooted in this specific issue that you touch. So I just want to say thank you. And I also want to say that, to the extent other people are interested in feel like that you should really listen to what you have to say, because I thought it was eloquently addressed, I was a huge, huge, huge fan of what you had to say. And I thought it was extremely well done. And especially for someone as young as you, I thought it was just amazing.
SPEAKER_05: Coleman, let me ask you, what was the reaction from people of color, people who've experienced racism, perhaps to your talk? Because you must have gotten a tremendous amount. And I did look at the comments to Ted's credit, the comments are open. So what was the reaction, you know, to people like Chammath or yourself, people of color, who maybe who have experienced racism on some regular basis, and this idea of having color blindness when we're, you know, operating as a society and that goal, which I'll just point out, when I listen to your talk seems to be exactly what Martin Luther King said. So go ahead.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it is. So there's the stereotype of the reaction is that white people like my talk and people of color don't. Yes. So that's the stereotype that my critics would like to believe is the reality because then they don't have to confront my arguments. The reality is that even at the TED conference, which is a progressive space, many, many people of color, black people, South Asian people came up to me saying that was an excellent talk for this, that and the third reason. And I think, probably for reasons similar to what you were saying, Chammath, I found that oftentimes, immigrants of color really resonate with my message. I have many, for instance, Jamaican friends, that, you know, they view themselves as Jamaican, they come to America, and our conversation about race doesn't make very much sense to them. Right? Why? It doesn't make sense, for instance, to strongly feel that your racial identity is an aspect of your core inner self, that you ought to judge people on the basis of their racial identity, that, you know, if you're a white person, that, you know, you don't have a valid perspective to bear on a conversation, or you have to, you know, preface every belief by saying, well, I'm a dumb white guy, what do I know, this kind of routine that we've gotten into in spaces, rather than just confronting each other as, hey, you know, I'm Coleman, you're Chammath, you're David, etc. Let's all talk about this from the point of view of epistemic equals, and have conversations. And yeah, you're going to know about stuff I haven't known because of your individual life story. I'm going to I'm going to have experienced stuff that you haven't. We may have even experienced racial discrimination, we may we may have stories stories to tell. But we are starting out fundamentally from the framework of all being human beings that can talk to each other. And, you know, we don't have to sort of play act these racial roles that have become increasingly in vogue in woke spaces. And a lot of people resonate with that. And, and, and what's more, you know, you've gotten this thing on the left, you've gotten media institutions that have been taken in in by this. So you, you see New York Times op eds, like one, I think, five years ago, that's Can My Children Be Friends With White People, right, you've got Robin DeAngelo, and her book saying things like, a white person shouldn't cry around a black person because it triggers us. It's like this is so the opposite of what it actually feels like to hang out with an interracial and tight knit group of friends, your race, racial identity recedes in importance, the more you get to know people. And I think people in interracial relationships know this, people with interracial kids know this. So my message actually resonates resonates with people of all colors.
SPEAKER_05: That I think was one of the most poignant parts of it. Sax, you got to watch the talk as well, I believe. So your thoughts on maybe institutions rotting from the inside, and maybe even one that's supposed to support ideas, ideas that matter. Clearly, this is an idea that matters. I'm curious. I just want to I want to, I want to not use the term rotting,
SPEAKER_02: because I think your point is that it's not good. I don't think that's necessarily the case. Because the point is, there's institutional capture that's happened. And that institutional capture is almost like a democratic process that we're seeing at companies that we're seeing at government agencies, and that we're seeing in private and nonprofit institutions, that the individuals that are employed, are capturing the organization's ideals, obviously, well, that's what I mean by rotting. I mean, it's like, it's such a storied
SPEAKER_05: institution, you know, in terms of it was a brave institution under Ricky Saul Warman, you know, I get it. But I think I
SPEAKER_02: think rotting is such a derogatory term in the sense that some of these institutions evolved to be different. But okay, I that's the only thing I don't want to make it Yeah,
SPEAKER_05: sacks of rotting or is it being taken over from the inside out from the bottom up? What are your thoughts?
SPEAKER_00: I think captured is a pretty good word to use. fever use that word. Let's remember Ted's original mission, represented in their tagline was ideas were spreading. So there's supposed to be a forum for interesting, worthy ideas that they're going to spread. And here, they're doing the opposite. They're basically sandbagging the views, and they didn't want to publish it at all. And then when they did agree to publish it, they basically subjected that to a new requirement of putting a rebuttal right by it. So this is not living up to the original mission. Now, why did this happen? I want to go to Chris Anderson's response here, he wrote this long post on x, which is too long to read here. It's a really sort of Weasley, mealy mouth defense of what they did. A lot of both sides type language. I think there's really only one or two sentences that are relevant in terms of explaining this whole thing. What he says is that many people have been genuinely hurt and offended by what they heard you say. So he's addressing this to Coleman. This is not what we dream of when we post our talk. So I think this is really the key intellectual mistake that Chris Anderson's making is that he believes that people can be genuinely hurt by encountering well reasoned ideas they disagree with. I think the way that the marketplace ideas are supposed to work is that when you encounter an idea you disagree with you formulate an equally well thought out response. And you engage in intellectual discourse. Yeah, get curious. Exactly. But, you know, I think these words are really significant, because he's saying not just that the objectors here were offended. He was saying that they were hurt, genuinely hurt. So he's buying into this idea that hearing ideas you disagree with is somehow a threat to your safety. Yeah. And as soon as you do that, as soon as you concede that there can be some sort of
SPEAKER_00: physical harm from engaging with ideas, you give the equivalent of a hecklers veto to the people who don't like these ideas. It's almost like a crybaby's veto. So there's no way you can function as a marketplace of ideas and certainly a platform for ideas worth spreading. If you're going to give a veto to people who can claim that their subjective emotional reaction to well thought ideas should trump the right of the speaker to put out that idea, or the broader audience to hear it. Right, exactly. And I think that's and I think that's where we've ended up.
SPEAKER_02: Coleman, can I ask your point of view on institutional capture? Obviously, this is different than the topics you've been, you've spoken about. But as you've gone through this experience with TED, and as you think more broadly about what's going on, do you have a point of view on the capture of institutions from the bottom up that's happened, and how that's affected some of these topics like free speech, sharing of ideas, open discourse, all these foundations that made kind of a free and open society work effectively for so long?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, it's a very difficult problem, because it's easy for me from the outside, not being the leader of a major institution to say, well, this is just what you have to do. Obviously, it's more psychologically difficult to go to your own staff that you have to metaphorically live with every day, and really shake things up. And many people aren't willing to do that. Someone like Barry Weiss, who used to be at the New York Times, her, you know, her point of view on it is, look, you just got to start your own institutions, you have to start your own institutions with the right ethos from day one. And that's what she's tried to do with the free press, rather than try to reform institutions that have a lot of unhealthy inertia,
SPEAKER_00: that Chris could have stopped this very easily. I mean, this is a failure of leadership. What he needed to tell these employees is, look, our mission is to be a platform for spreading interesting ideas. And we can't treat this speech differently than any other speech, just because you disagree with it. That's all you have to do. And by the way, just because an idea may be offensive, does not
SPEAKER_02: mean that it should not be spread. I think Have you read Jonathan Haidt's book coddling of the American mind? Absolutely. Yeah, great book.
SPEAKER_02: And I think that speaks and that was the book I gave away in our gift bag at the all in summit this year, because I thought it was such like, an important and kind of prescient point of view on what's going on right now that we assume that if something is offensive by some, some group could be a large group or a small group, it needs to be suppressed. And obviously, as you extend that concept to its extreme, you end up losing many ideas that challenge, you know, the current kind of main concept that everyone believes, here's what I don't understand. So Coleman, just maybe if you
SPEAKER_03: can just guess why when somebody watches this talk, could they feel genuinely hurt? Like what like, if we had to steal man then let's step in their shoes. Like, what is the what's the cycle that's going on there? That gets them to Oh, my God, this is an intolerable point of view.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, I think there has to be something with if you're a person that has, you know, staked your life or your career out on the concept of sort of race based diversity, equity and inclusion, explicitly taking race into account in policies. And, you know, you're someone that's been working in that domain for 30 years. And you see someone like me come up there and just argue against that whole approach, there may be some severe threat mechanism that comes on board where you actually don't have a rational argument that that easily debunks what I'm saying, because what I'm saying is very reasonable. And so in the absence of a great rational argument, when the stakes are high, all the, you know, primal animal emotions sort of come out your whole limbic system. And you feel like you're kind of in a fight or flight situation and and you feel incredibly emotional. That's my only guess.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, they're hurt. And it's scary to think what if you win the argument and if you win the argument, it means certain things might go away. And I think the two examples they gave you Chris Anderson came on stage and said, Oh, you know, when conductors are looking for a new violinist, they put them behind, you know, a shade and they and they do colorblind selection process, a colorblind selection process. I think Malcolm Glaubel talked about that in blank, and your response to and then they said, Well, wouldn't it be better if we could have, you know, some representation in that group? So then we would inspire people to get to the group your response to that was,
SPEAKER_01: yeah, my response to that was, what you really want to do is, if there are reasons why say black kids aren't getting access to violins at the same at a young age, because schools are underfunded or band programs are horrible in inner cities. That's where you want to intervene. You don't want to intervene at the point at the meritocratic end line, racially rigging the very bar that you would use to measure progress on those deeper dimensions. Have you read this book called losing ground by Charles Murray?
SPEAKER_01: Yes, I have.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, very provocative book, I have always thought, and maybe I'll just leave this with you. Because if you were willing to do it, I for one would love to support you in any way that I could to do it. But we don't have a full accounting of what really happened starting in the late 1960s with LBJ war on poverty. And I think when you look at racism, through the American lived experience, a lot of it goes back to a bunch of economic incentives that were set up to try to do what theoretically seemed at the time the right thing, we can debate whether that's where LBJ came from or not. But you compound and cascade a bunch of decisions forward. And to your point, now we're sort of trying to deal with the symptoms without really addressing the root cause. And I think if America wants to really heal and deal with this, what we also need to do is give all those people that have that fight or flight response, the better toolkit to understand what kind of goddess here. Because right now we have a very charged way of viewing these things without actually looking at some of the practical quantifiable details. Thomas Sowell has talked about it, Charles Murray talks about it. But these are unfortunately such heterodox ideas that they just don't get enough mainstream discussion. And if you then compound that with this institutional capture, they get buried. And so the answer may actually be sitting right in front of our face, where it was the welfare reform system that we implemented in the late 1960s on down the line, because those are structural ways where we can solve it, which ultimately will get to your point, which is great. Fund more music in the schools in that example. And right now we're so caught up in all of the labels and the fear mongering that we never get to that. And so I just wanted to put that out there that I think that there needs to be smart, brilliant people like yourself, young people who can do a full accounting of like the last 50 or 60 years in a much more structural way that these gentlemen tried to do. But the ideas were just too heterodox at the time. But because of formats, like podcasts, and like the free press and other things, I think there's a chance that you can actually get these ideas out. And I think it's important because I think folks like me or the people that approached you, there's not enough of us that came from this background that are open minded or at a point where we can tolerate the anxiety to listen to your ideas. There's a lot of people that may just viscerally react. But the more that we can shift those people away from viscerally reacting to actually tolerating and then thinking and then evolving their point of view, you can do some enormous good in the world. Just why I just wanted to put that out there.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, that's a huge topic and an understudy topic. What was the effect of the welfare reforms of the 60s and 70s? I know my mother used to say, she grew up in the South Bronx, I'm half Hispanic, half black American. And she used to say, she used to just have stories of, you know, when the welfare auditors would come around and people would hide their boyfriends, hide their husbands, hide their husbands. Exactly. And the book Black Power by Stokely Carmichael, aka Kwame Ture, which is, you know, the manifesto of the Black Power movement, hardly a right wing source. They made the same point about welfare reform. So there definitely is something to be investigated there. It's not really my point of expertise. I know Glenn Lowry is someone who has really, you know, dug into that sort of research, but there's definitely a lot of room for study there.
SPEAKER_05: Coleman, let me ask you a question about our industry. We've had a lot of hand wringing and debates about diversity in funding of startups, capital allocators, venture capital firms. And we have limited partners who have a mission to have more diverse general partners, the people at venture firms who invest in startups, invest in more female led startups, etc. Because the numbers, frankly, you know, have not been very diverse, historically, in venture, far from it. And we recently had a female, black female venture firm, I think it's called fearless founders get sued. I'm not sure if you're aware of that lawsuit. It's by the same person who sued Harvard. Should there be venture firms specifically designed to change the ratio? It's the language people use. And should you know, people with large endowments of capital be backing, you know, black venture capitalists to see more of them or female black venture capitalists, Hispanic, etc. Or how would you look at that issue, which has been a pretty sticky issue and hasn't changed for a long time.
SPEAKER_01: So prescriptively, I don't want to say much because I don't like to tell people how to run their funds or run their businesses, right? If you're a Christian, and you want to hire only Christian people, if you're a Muslim, you want to hire only Muslims, I think you should frankly be allowed to do that if those are your personal values. Now, personally, I will tell you, with respect to the people that I would hire to say work on my podcast, I want every single hire to know that I'm not hiring them as a result of their skin color, or gender, or any other contingent feature of their identity. I want them to know that I'm hiring them for what they really bring to the table. Now I have a very small team, maybe there's something about how the optics certain optics are required for a larger, a larger firm. But I think it it the problems begin when you when you sort of bless this idea that race is a super deep feature of who you are right from the start. When you bless that idea right from the start, it sends the signal that what people bring to the table is their racial identity is their gender. Now, when you fast forward two years down the line, when a company is having some meltdown over a race or a gender issue, you have to understand that it's possible you made this bed by signaling from the very beginning that what's important about the people you're bringing in is their race is their gender, and that you are vulnerable to the kinds of appeals that can be made purely on the basis of what are ultimately superficial features of our identity.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, that's well said.
SPEAKER_02: What would your advice be to institutional leaders that are past that point of no return, the CEOs of big companies and big institutions that are now captive by these ideologies, where they are effectively, as you say, ultra sensitive to issues around race and gender and other sort of, you know, superficial identities, and are challenged often to make decisions are driven to make decisions that their employees and teams demand of them? Do you have advice on how they can rethink their roles as leaders and how to reframe this? I mean, in a word, no, because it's by that point, it's an
SPEAKER_01: intractable problem. I've talked to CEOs that asked this question to me over and over again, you know, like, what do I do once I'm past the point where I have so many staff, and it's, you know, the system is so sprawling that it's no longer under my control. I have so many people with values that I don't share, that I frankly think privately are insane. But I cannot say so publicly because I have higher order commitments to the shareholders to the board to steer the ship, right, such as it is, and the ship cannot be changed at this point. I don't have good advice. I'm not going to pretend that I do.
SPEAKER_02: Do you think that same problem is inherent in political parties in the United States, states, state governments, and other larger kind of social systems that we use to organize ourselves and are now also captive and in kind of a point of no return?
SPEAKER_01: I think definitely in the Democratic Party, there has been a problem with mistaking the Twitter commentariat and the journalistic elite for real life. The truth is, the vast majority of even Democrat voters find my arguments around colorblindness totally uncontroversial, whether they may have some agreements or not. But if you ask the elite, there's a meltdown, right? There's this huge discrepancy. And it can never be hammered enough the extent to which people in politics are operating in a bubble and mistaking the elite and the Twittersphere for the wider population.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, this feels to me like why Donald Trump got elected, but that's another topic.
SPEAKER_05: This has been amazing. Everybody take a moment, search for Coleman Hughes, subscribe to his YouTube channel, type Coleman Hughes.
SPEAKER_02: You do a podcast? Yeah, I do a podcast, Conversations with Coleman. Actually, David Sacks has been on the podcast about a year ago.
SPEAKER_01: How did he do? How did he do? He did absolutely fantastic. Did he make you feel unsafe?
SPEAKER_05: He did actually, yes. Talk about the Ukraine?
SPEAKER_04: Talk about Ukraine? Can I be on your podcast?
SPEAKER_03: Oh, of course. I would be honored.
SPEAKER_01: Fantastic. There you go. I would be honored. Thank you.
SPEAKER_05: I saw you had the Dilbert guy on and I thought that was a pretty engaging, interesting conversation. Yeah, Scott Adams, who is, you know, really controversial. And I thought you handled that one really well, too.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thanks. He's an interesting one. It's like he has a lot of brilliant things to say. But also he maybe thinks the CIA is going to kill him recently on Twitter. It's a mixed bag. It's a mixed bag would be where I would go with it. All right,
SPEAKER_05: listen, this has been amazing. The TED Talk is extraordinary. Everybody should watch it. And yeah, ideas worth spreading in less. Maybe you don't agree with them. Go to the TED channel and watch. Sorry, I mean, I don't want to give Ted too much more time. But they tried to get me to pay $50,000 a year $25,000 a year for like a five year package to go to the event. And I was like, Yeah, I might put that how much is Ted? How much
SPEAKER_03: is Ted? The regular tickets? 12 7500. And then no, they used to
SPEAKER_02: be 7500. Then I think they went up to 10k. And then you can do like donor tickets and you get different features and so basically they're sold out. Remember, it is set up as a nonprofit and there is philanthropic work that's done. And so you know, the organization is, again, it's not a profiteering media company, it became a big media company because of the success of the efforts and the quality of the content that was produced over time. But you know, as we talked about a lot of media companies and a lot of institutions get captured and you know, the original kind of
SPEAKER_00: to paraphrase Bruce Willis and Pulp Fiction, Ted's dead baby Ted's Ted Ted's as soon as they allow the staff who have, let's say, highly niche elite views to veto or suppress talks they don't like, that it stops being a platform for ideas, this becomes another left wing interest group. What other ideas what other talks have
SPEAKER_05: been canned before they even got to the stage? You have to wonder and don't know.
SPEAKER_03: And it's all the it's the top of the funnel, Jason. Exactly. This also is all that we know that they're not invited. What about the person that's pro coal? I wonder if the pro coal person is allowed to present it to
SPEAKER_05: I doubt it. You know, in the they had Sarah Silverman, and she did a comedy set, which was hilarious. And the same people so this is the thing I find. So the hypocrisy is just so crazy with the TED people. And it's a lot of my friends still go is they had Sarah Silverman come these people have laughed at Sarah Silverman a million times. They've watched Dave Chappelle, they've seen any number of comments, you know, make them laugh with edgy humor. But then when they're in that, you know,
SPEAKER_05: TED audience, and they're feeling super precious, and that they're very important because they donate 50 grand a year or whatever. Friedberg gave them I don't know, to get in there from the side door. Then they were super offended. So you know, they're hypocrites. And I don't know how to say it anymore. Clearly, they literally, you could pull up Chris Anderson apologizing, not just again, again, I really
SPEAKER_02: comedian. I hope that this is a learning experience for everyone. I hope that this is a turning point for leadership and institutions like this to take a look at what happened, how it happened. And then hopefully to write the course because organizations like Ted, I thought were very important and should be in the world and should be successful. And I hope that they kind of returned to the original values. And I hope that this is a moment that that there's a learning experience and that we don't just shit on them and say, they're awful. They're failed. It's over. Hopefully something comes to this.
SPEAKER_00: I do think there is one other potential remedy here, which besides just starting a new Ted, and kind of the Barry Weiss point of view, which is just write it off and start over. Remember what Brian Armstrong did at Coinbase, he basically said, Listen, we have a mission here, it's around crypto, we're going to focus on a percent on this mission. And if you're not on board with this mission, or want to capture this institution to promote other missions, this is not the place for you go do those missions somewhere else. To hit Yeah, the New York Times wrote their obligatory hit piece Chris was I would say if Chris has good mentors, as well as a good
SPEAKER_03: sounding board, that is the threshold question that should be debated right now is do I walk in the door? And do I just give this simple litmus test and have people sign up or not? And yeah, we can it's quite and it's quite easy. Because to your point, it's not like he's inventing something new. He's saying this is where we started. And this is where we're going to stay. And this is what it means. And if he doesn't do that, then he's spoken with his actions. And it is what it is it what is meant to happen. Exactly. That happened. Exactly. And it's a it's a moment for looking at the internal compass. It's a
SPEAKER_02: wholesale leadership reset moment opportunity. See if it happens or not or double down and keep going. I really
SPEAKER_02: appreciate your being public about all this and talking about it. It's been a great conversation. Thank you. Everybody. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. All right. Thank you.
SPEAKER_05: We'll see you soon. Cheers now. Thanks. All right. Listen, it's a new segment we have here when virtual signaling goes wrong. If you missed it, the Canadian Parliament gave a standing ovation to a Nazi, not like a new Nazi or Nazi sympathizer.
SPEAKER_05: One of the few actual Nazis still alive. Here we see just the crowd going wild. Last Friday, Ukrainians President Zelensky gave a speech at the Canadian House of Commons. And Canadian House Speaker Anthony rota introduced a 98 year old Yaroslav hunk as a Ukrainian war hero. And then the Canadian Parliament proceeded to give him a standing ovation. And it turns out that this person first fought for the first Ukrainian division in World War Two. That unit was also known as the Waffen SS Galicia division, if I'm pronouncing that correct, correctly, which was a voluntary unit under Nazi command. So the Canadian Parliament apparently gave a standing ovation to Nazis. They've apologized for this and said it was a mistake. Chumath I don't know if you got to see this. You're Canadian. So your thoughts on what we've seen here.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I'll give you my feedback as somebody who, when I was, you know, in Canada, was a pretty ardent liberal. I grew up in a liberal household, my father canvassed religiously for the liberals. And I think that at some point after I moved to the United States, they took wokeism, which I think look at some level was rooted in something very important, which was, how do you get marginalized folks to be seen. But unfortunately, along the way just got perverted by folks that just use it as a cudgel to censor people to make other people feel guilty to judge people. And so I think we all would agree that it's kind of become this virus. The thing that it masks are all of these other really bad things that come along with it. And one of them in Canada, which Justin Trudeau is case zero of is also when nepotism goes bad. His father was an incredible exemplary Prime Minister in Canada, set the benchmark on all dimensions was just incredible, cool, composed, move the country forward, brought the country together. And then fast forward 25 or 30 years in a vacuum of leadership, what basically happened, we picked this guy, who was up until that point, a substitute teacher, and the other claim to fame was appearing twice in brownface. Okay, so making fun of people like me, and elected in Prime Minister. And what happened was he became the sort of like virtue signaler in chief of this very important GA country. And it was all kind of bumbling along. And in the absence of anybody else that was able to step up and offer an alternative, he got reelected barely, but he did. Then these things happened in the last year. And when you look through that prism is how you can see what happens if a country doesn't draw a line and finally take a stand. So we had this guy who was ill qualified and way over his head, who shouldn't have been in this role as Prime Minister get put in that position. When finally a group of people in Canada push back, in this case, the truckers, he and the entire government explicitly labeled them as Nazis, right and said, these people need to be put down and completely dismantled. It didn't seem like it was right. We call that out. We all talked about it and we said this doesn't smell right on the surface. These are really seems like good earnest people that are just trying to make a point and are not being heard. Then you have this thing three weeks ago to two or three weeks ago where he actually had a speech in front of the entire parliament where he accused the largest democracy in the world, India in this case, of coming into Canada, Canadian soil and assassinating a Canadian citizen, which is an enormous allegation to levy. And what was important to know about that allegation was that it was done without the explicit vocal support of either Britain or the United States, which would be the two most natural allies that Canada would present that information to and instead of doing it behind a closed door to Modi, he did it on live stage like it was like some theatrical performance. Then India follows up and says, this guy's kind of known to be a little bit of a drug addict. It was on a two day bender and the Indian drug dog smelled a bunch of cocaine on the plane. Then they have this thing for Vladimir Zelensky, where everybody was there to sort of like virtue signal this war and then they actually invited a Nazi and then gave him a standing ovation. So when you when you put it all together, I think what it shows is just the lack of professionalism, which also belies just the lack of experience and capability. And so I think what it shows is just like, isn't this enough? Like, have we not seen enough of these examples where you can actually start to ask yourself, why can't we just get really good competent people to do these jobs? Why can't we actually embrace free speech and all of what it means and explore that? Why can't we have people that don't need to theatrically perform on stage because eventually, you're going to make these mistakes and you're going to embarrass your entire country. And then you're going to imperil relations with some really important allies. And I think this is a moment in time where all of those things need to be questioned and put on the table.
SPEAKER_05: You're clearly questioning his competence here because to not have the care to check who is going to speak in front of Parliament is crazy. And just to make it super clear, the speaker that invited hunka that was Anthony rota resigned on Tuesday, and Trudeau says rota, the person who invited the Nazi is solely responsible.
SPEAKER_03: Well, then he blamed Russian misinformation on top of that. But Jason, you don't you don't the Prime Minister who is the most important politician in the country doesn't show up some place unless the office knows who else is going to be there. He knew that zalense he was going to be there. He would have known who the guest list was. So this was this was just going to cover it up. But but the bigger issue is to be clear, you're not saying that they invited a Nazi on
SPEAKER_05: purpose and cheered for a Nazi on purpose. Nobody's saying that you're saying there's a lack of care here. And it's for guidance. It's a lack of confidence. Just so we're clear. Yeah. Okay.
SPEAKER_00: So I agree with all of that. I think there's also two other dimensions to this backstory, if you will. I think first in terms of how does a mistake like this happen? I think it was Orwell who said that he who controls the president controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future. The president is Ukraine. It is the current thing everybody has to cheer for Ukraine and for the killing of Russians. The reason why hunka was cheered with a standing ovation is because they said that he fought Russians. He was a war hero who fought Russians, all you have to do is do a little bit of math to realize the guy's 98 years old, when was there a war against Russia? Who could he possibly have been fighting for? But to the extent people did that they sort of airbrushed it or whitewashed history. So the president controls the past to ensure a vision of the future, which Trudeau laid out in this speech he gave recently, where he became so ardent in his support for Ukraine, he was almost yelling at the podium, saying that Canada had to make all these economic sacrifices to win the war. So that's point number one is I think that the woke mind virus almost requires this whitewashing of the past, but it's done for a specific purpose, which is to control the future. But they're not whitewashing the past if it was a mistake that
SPEAKER_05: the intellectually doesn't make sense.
SPEAKER_00: No, what they did is what they're saying, if I'm understanding you correctly, the present is that we hate Russia so
SPEAKER_00: much that we're going to cheer for anybody who killed Russians.
SPEAKER_05: Okay, I understand your point. But you're you're agreeing that they did not knowingly put a Nazi on there. So it was a mistake. Got it. I don't think they knowingly did it was a huge debacle and
SPEAKER_00: embarrassing spectacle. Yeah, I think that nobody asked any questions about the past because the president overrides it. Okay, sure. The president need to support the current thing
SPEAKER_00: overrides like any sort of exam. Historically, there's one other way in which I think this wasn't an accident, Jason, is that if you look at US policy towards Ukraine, we have made common cause with a number of these far right ultra nationalist groups, frankly, neo Nazi groups. And this occurred before the the current war. So it's not just a marriage of convenience. First of all, if you go back to war to the father of Ukrainian nationalism is a guy named Stepan Bandara. And today in Ukraine, he is seen as some sort of hero. And there are streets named after him. And there are streets named after some of his co conspirators who collaborated with Nazis. If you fast forward to the more recent past to 2014, when we had this made on coup in
SPEAKER_00: Kiev that was backed by Victoria Newland. One of the key figures in that coup was a guy named Ola Tony Bach, who is the founder of this vote a party, which is the social nationalist party, which if you know what Nazi stands for its national socialists, they basically just flip the name. And the original logo, this vote a party was the wolf's angel, which was a Nazi insignia. This was a far right party infused with the racial ideology of Stepan Bandara, who was again, a Nazi. And they brought this guy in and his party as the muscle in this coup. If you look at the Victoria Newland phone call the infamous phone call where she is picking the new Ukrainian government, the yachts is our guy phone call. She says that Klitsch meaning Klitschko and Tony Bach needs to remain on the outside. But yes, needs to be talking to Tony Bach four times a week. Okay, he was part of the chess pieces that they were moving around. After the coup, a civil war breaks out in the Don bass, because the ethnic Russians there are opposed to this new government and the fact that Yennicovich who they voted for was deposed in an insurrection. What happens then is a war breaks out, where far right paramilitary organizations like right sector, and like the infamous Aizaw battalion, start killing these ethnic Russian separatists. And a full blown civil war breaks out thousands of people get killed. Does the Kiev government suppress these neo Nazi groups? No, they bring them under the formal command structure of the Ukrainian military is off Italian becomes a division of the Ukrainian military. It's shocking. And this goes on from 2014 through 2021. The Ukraine army just to be clear here has Nazis in it
SPEAKER_05: Nazi supporters. There's no question about that. And there
SPEAKER_00: are many people who are concerned about this. In the 2015 to 2020 timeframe, there were many articles written about it, the nation had an article about it, there were efforts in Congress at various points to try and ensure that the aid that we were giving to the Ukrainian government did not go to the Italian. So, so let's see what is that? So it is set. Okay, I
SPEAKER_00: think the important and obviously that's a Nazi or Nazi
SPEAKER_05: said, No, I don't think he's a Nazi. And to be clear, I don't
SPEAKER_00: think most Ukrainians are Nazis. And I don't even think that most Ukrainian nationalists are Nazis. What I'm saying is that there is a Nazi element in Ukraine that white washed over. Well, here's the thing about it. I don't think it's a huge percentage, but I think they have outsized influence due to their willingness to use violence due to their extremism and their willingness to use any different than the Nazi
SPEAKER_05: percentage in, say, what, whatever you want to say white supremacists in the United States or in Germany or anywhere else. I do. I think it's different in the sense that in
SPEAKER_00: the United States is for sure we have neo Nazi groups. They're not brought into the military. We don't have streets named after their patriarchs. Furthermore, we don't have members of our military with Nazi insignia on them. There was a New York Times article just a few months ago, talking about the fact that embarrassingly, a lot of these Ukrainian soldiers are being photographed with Nazi insignia on their uniforms. Now, the New York Times is framing this as a problem because it was a propaganda coup for Putin. Presumably it was. But I think it's a problem because it's a problem, not because of just the PR optics of it. And you know, at various points, I think this is the New York Times article as well. Western media has had to airbrush these photos to hide this fact now. Oh, the New York Times has airbrushed
SPEAKER_05: photos of Nazi times as but I don't think New York Times has
SPEAKER_00: but I think they talk about this thorny problem of not wanting to show these photos with respect to the Zelensky being Jewish. So what I'd say about that is that Zelensky only came on the scene quite recently, he got elected in 2019. And again, I don't think the majority of people in Ukraine are Nazis. Okay, so I'm not saying that. But just because Zelensky came on the scene in 2019, and was elected president doesn't mean there's a long, and I would say disturbing history and association between Ukrainian ultra nationalism and neo Nazi groups. And I think that part of the the woke thing and part of this Orwellian desire, where control of the president gives you the ability to rewrite the past is that there's been a deliberate effort to cover up this problem, and to pretend it doesn't exist to turn a blind eye to it. Well, my point is that US policy has been to do this. In other words, the US our government, yeah, okay,
SPEAKER_00: the US State Department, and presumably CIA, made common cause with these far right groups, because we thought it was beneficial to be aligned with them. And so we did it in the made on coup in 2014. From 2015 to 2021, we could have gone along with efforts under the Minsk accords to resolve this conflict in the Donbass peacefully. But we never did that we never gave it any support. And instead, we gave support to the Kiev regime's attempt to violently suppress these Russian separatists. And again, the suppression was being done by these right wing groups. Look, does that make our State Department Nazis? No. Does that make the Canadian Parliament Nazis? No. What I'm saying is that in both cases, a blind eye was turned to the disturbing ideology and past and associations of these people, because it's politically in our interest to do business with them. And that's the problematic thing about it. So I don't think in that sense, this was just sort of an accident. This is the backstory that explains like something like this can happen. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: Okay, Jason, you have any reactions to Trudeau doing this and what it means? Or does it mean nothing?
SPEAKER_00: Does the backstory provided give you context on how something like this can happen? That's not just like an accident? Well, I
SPEAKER_05: don't think any of us know exactly what happened here. And it's probably going to be some sort of investigation. But I don't think they knowingly put a Nazi up there. I think they are pro the war. And that probably could that have blinded them to do deeper research? Sure. People are political politicians, most of all, and people probably take facts or, you know, any kind of anything they can use to to make their case stronger. They'll take advantage of that. So yeah, sure. And it's Trudeau.
SPEAKER_00: Zelensky was pumping his fist and cheering. Don't you think he knew? He can't know the history. Yeah, so no, he has to know. If he does, then somebody was fighting the war to good question. If he did, on the German side, if he did, then you
SPEAKER_05: would be saying, if he did know and he was pumping his fist, then you'd be saying that he was pro Nazi, he was cheering for a Nazi knowingly. You know, what I'm saying is, look, the fact
SPEAKER_00: that you've got some Jewish ancestry is not in my view, a get out of jail free card. No, I'm not making a Jewish part. You're saying you're saying he knowingly cheered for a Nazi.
SPEAKER_00: You know, one of the big backers of the azov battalion is a you cranium oligarch named Igor kolomoisky. Kolomoisky is Jewish. Ask me my opinion. I'm just saying Do you do you think he
SPEAKER_05: knowingly cheered for a Nazi? Is that what you're insinuating? I
SPEAKER_00: think he knowingly cheered knowing that this Ukrainian nationalists who fought in World War Two must have been on the German side, because there was only one. Okay, I'm just
SPEAKER_05: clarifying here. I don't actually have an opinion. Thanks for querying me. I'm not saying that he cheered for Nazism. What
SPEAKER_00: I'm saying is he cheered for Ukrainian nationalism. And he knows that Ukrainian nationalism is bound up and tied up with this disturbing history, which he is willing to ignore. Do you guys do you guys let me finish my point about the azov battalion. The azov battalion is undeniably a neo Nazi group. It was funded by Igor kolomoisky, who's a Ukrainian oligarch, who is Jewish, who lives in Israel. Why would kolomoisky do that? Because the azov battalion believes that every inch of Ukraine, including Crimea, and Donbass, which has enormous energy reserves, belongs to Ukraine. So it served the business interests of the energy magnates in Ukraine to support these people. And that look, politics makes for strange bed fellows. Yeah, actually, yeah. So I'm not saying that the lenskey or kolomoisky or anybody else is a Nazi because they aligned with these people. I'm saying they found it politically expedient and useful to align with these groups, just like the US State Department did, quite frankly, I don't think we should do that. If you want to go around the world, Jason saying that we're the champions of freedom and democracy, and having this moralistic, almost virtue signaling foreign policy, I don't think we should be in business or aligned with these neo Nazi groups, wherever the hell they are. I think it's when
SPEAKER_05: you say you Do you mean me? Or do you mean the United States?
SPEAKER_00: I'm saying if you want to have a highly moralistic foreign policy, let's say if one wants to have a problem, use the word,
SPEAKER_05: yeah, if you're going to be principled, you need to keep them you need to not support Nazis. We're in agreement. What do you Jason and freeburg? What do you guys think of just like
SPEAKER_03: the the breadcrumbs in Canada? I'm just curious whether you guys care about this whole vein of just like, competent leadership nepotism, if you have a view or it's like that is just what it is and whatever.
SPEAKER_05: I don't know enough about Canadian politics, really, but Trudeau does not seem to be super qualified. Yeah. So but I don't know enough about it. So
SPEAKER_00: just in terms of the Canadian part of this, there's a writer named Jeep here, who's a left wing writer, but he posted something very interesting here, where he explained that in the late 1940s 1950s, Canada took in a large number of former Nazis, many of whom were SS veterans, so people like hanka, because they were good anti communists. And then these Nazis proceeded terrorize anti Nazi Ukrainian Canadians, there was this Ukrainian Hall was bombed here in 1950. So Canada has a weird history of bringing in some of these people after World War Two. So the point is, yeah, exactly. Look, there's no way that any semi intelligent person who knows the history of World War Two, especially the Ukrainian involvement in World War Two wouldn't know that Ukraine was on the German side in World War Two. And hanka volunteered for the SS. He was a volunteer for the SS glissia division. So look, did the Speaker of the House? No, probably not. I think wokeness makes people stupid where they just think about the current thing. And I don't ask too many questions about the past. But there's a lot more to it than just like this innocent mistake.
SPEAKER_05: And this has been your update this week in Ukraine. And wokeness. All right, there's a bunch of news about opening AI this week. Just very quickly opening AI is in advanced talks. According to the Financial Times, with johnny i have iPhone fame, Steve Jobs is long term collaborator and Masayoshi San of SoftBank to raise more than $1 billion to build the iPhone of AI. And so the idea would be johnny i've got a design firm called love from and they would help open I design their first consumer device via the ft sources Financial Times that is Altman and I've have been having brainstorming sessions and I have San Francisco studio about what a consumer product centered around open AI would look like. It's very early stages. And son has pitched a role for arm in the development, his chip company that he recently took public. They also discussed Masa and Altman creating a company that would draw on talent and tech from their three groups with SoftBank putting in a billion dollars in seed. And then also open AI is discussing a secondary share sale that would value the company at between 80 billion and 90 billion. This would be three x the most recent valuation reportedly though, to their credit, they are on track to generate $1 billion in revenue in 2023. I'm not sure how much of that is the $20 a month subscription, you know, that'd be pretty extraordinary if that was those personal subscriptions. This would be a massive gain on paper for Microsoft opening is 49% owned by Microsoft and Sam Altman has personally has stated multiple times now that he has no equity. So he would be getting $0 of this I and of course, we know that open AI started as a nonprofit before switching and our friend Vinod Khosla told us very clearly that those are just details. What happened there? Jamal, those are those are those are just details. But node is the goat.
SPEAKER_03: Sam is the closest thing that we have to an emergent mogul in tech. And the reason is because if everything sits on this substrate, you're going to need to get a license, you're going to want to get access to whatever developer program, whatever beta that open AI has. And so as a result, that's already happened, by the way. Well, I was just gonna say so he'll be in the catbird seat. So even if he doesn't have any equity in open AI, he'll get he'll just put his money into
SPEAKER_03: the best startups that it's like y combinator on stairway. By the way, I have a take on that whole claim that Sam
SPEAKER_00: doesn't own any part of open AI. All right, let's hear it.
SPEAKER_05: Well, I'm go ahead, Columbo. Explain to us the details. Well, you said you don't own any shares in open AI, but you started opening. Right? Well, then who does? Yeah, that's the
SPEAKER_00: thing. What I think is really interesting about what I think
SPEAKER_00: what open AI has done in its fundraising rounds is that each round has been a capital return model. So to the 100 x 100 x, right?
SPEAKER_02: I think some of the very early people got captain 100 x, I
SPEAKER_00: think maybe the $30 billion round was capped at 10 x. So I think the $30 billion rounds captain a $300 million valuation, meaning if you're an investor, your shares go up in value till the company hits a market cap, a 300 billion. And then basically you're effectively cashed out. It's like you bought a share, but sold a call back to the company. Our value industry works this way, right? You invest in a
SPEAKER_05: film, they tell you, you can make three acts, and then it's over, right? Something like that. I've seen that in the independent film business. Yeah,
SPEAKER_00: yeah. So So in any event, I think people invested like the $2 billion valuation were capped at like 100 billion. I heard that employees who were getting stock options are capped at 100 billion or they were way back when they started granting these things. Okay. So my point is that if open AI turns into one of these companies like a Google ends up in the trillion dollar club, then nobody's gonna own anything because they will have already long ago, they'll keep selling new interests, like
SPEAKER_02: the new interest will end up being like, maybe 8%. No, because what will happen at the end is the new people that buy in at that higher price that buy out the early investors, they're getting effectively things like 8% return that it turns into debt eventually turns into some, I think what's really going on
SPEAKER_00: here is somebody has to own the residual value of the company call it the far out of the money. Call around the IRS
SPEAKER_02: problem of it being non equity. That's how they say that it's not equity in a private corporation. But I think about it is okay, so look, Sam set up this foundation. It's a
SPEAKER_00: nonprofit. But he controls that effectively, right? Yep. So yes, he technically is not an owner of the shares the foundation is. But what can't you do with the foundation that you could do with personal ownership other than maybe buying a personal residence? I mean, you can buy a plane I think, look at the Church of Scientology, they own a lot of real estate. So my point is, not only do I think that Sam really owns open AI through the fig leaf this foundation, I think he owns 100% of it in the event that the call option is struck, meaning ends up being a trillion dollar company. You say Sam is out Ron Hubbard in this
SPEAKER_05: example. Let's not speculate too much. Oh, it's just details
SPEAKER_04: right. As we know, it said, details. I am speculating, but I
SPEAKER_00: think it's informed speculation. If you want to become the world's first trillionaire, and you were extremely meditated about it, clever and pre meditated about it, what would you do? Number one, you would want to choose a moonshot type area that was a world changing technology. AI certainly qualifies ultimate, so does cold fusion. Maybe crypto does, as I understand that Sam has bets in all three of those areas. Number two, you would want to figure out a way to own as much of it as you could really 100% if you could. And that's a very hard thing to do when you're running a capital intensive startup. But investors tend to underestimate the power law and the value of the far out of the money call option. So maybe you can get them to sell that back to you really cheaply. And third, if you're really farsighted, you would want to insulate yourself against populist anger from being the world's first trillionaire. So you would basically put your shares in a nonprofit foundation where you're not really sacrificing that much of control, or the ability to control the asset, but it gives you tremendous. I love this fantasy theory. Where did you come up with this? Is this this
SPEAKER_05: is genius. This is genius. It just you and Peter Thiel talk about this over chess or something. How did you construct this? And you're saying this is in for financial conspiracy
SPEAKER_04: corner? Science Corner? Let's get the tinfoil hats out. It's
SPEAKER_05: really freaking Friedberg out that we're even doing this
SPEAKER_02: diametrically opposite to Science Corner. Is it a
SPEAKER_00: conspiracy? Or is it just reality? I think if you are even
SPEAKER_03: 1%, right, the combination of lawyers and accountants that would leak this and the number of people that were part of the origination of the foundation that would want to Sue will be very high. That's just the natural state of things in these kinds of things. It seems like a lot easier. What have I said,
SPEAKER_00: other than the fact that it was sort of premeditated, which that's not the right word that premeditated sounds too nefarious. No, no, no, I'm just saying whenever, whenever, well,
SPEAKER_03: I'm just saying whenever money is made at this quantum, and at that scale, everybody wants a piece because they know that that's their one shot. So I just think that it'll amplify the
SPEAKER_03: pressure for actors inside of those organizations to take their shot. And that's just going to be financially the right thing to do for a lot of people if if what you're saying is true, we know the investments have been made under a cap return
SPEAKER_00: model. I think that's fact. That's fact. Yes. We know the nonprofit foundation owns the shares. That's fact.
SPEAKER_03: And then just to put the 800 pound gorilla on the table, like what's he on thinking because he was the one that really got this thing off the ground because that critical investment made the whole thing come to life. He could have done this on his own. Yeah, how much does he own? Hmm, zero, zero.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, but after a lawsuit, how much does he own? I'm just speculating. Can we talk about the technology? Here we go. So
SPEAKER_05: opening I released some new chat cheapie t features. The key point here is they're doing what's called multi modal. multimodal is the big innovation. What does that mean? That means the input could be voice, the input could be code, the input could be data. It could be a picture. Here's a picture. If you're watching along on the YouTube channel, do a search for all in podcast on YouTube, hit subscribe, hit the bell. And it's a classic picture of one of those no parking signs where there's four different ones, you take a picture of that, that's the input. And you say it's Wednesday at 4pm. Can I park in the spot right now? Tell me in one line, it comes back and says, Yes, you can park for up to one hour starting at 4pm. What this means is the output or the input could be in any of those modalities, modalities, fancy word for an image, a video, etc. So you're going to be able to say, Hey, give me the poster for the all in conference of bestie runner. And I want it to be these things. And here are the pictures of the boys and then make it and go back and forth and back and forth. And this is really groundbreaking. At the same time. Last week, Google bard and send deep Madre and I play with this on this week and startups. You now have Google flights, Google Docs, Gmail, and a number of the other core Google services are now in barred. So that's not multi modal exactly. But you could do things like ask Google flights, hey, what is the best nonstop? You know, between New York City and Dubai, or from an East Coast destination that has laid down flat seats, etc. And it really does. It's starting to work. So this idea that Google is going to be displaced or they're moving slow, that might be antiquated information. So those are the two big, big monumental announcements just in the last 10 days. freeburg. When you look at these two, which one is the more important announcement? And what do you think about the pace? Because we here we are, we're about to hit the one year anniversary of chat, GPT 3.5. I've been using a
SPEAKER_02: lot of different tools the last couple of months. And I'm kind of getting to the point that I feel that much of what's happening is underhyped rather than overhyped. There's some really incredible potential emerging. I'll give a couple of examples. And then I'll talk about the mobile phone. First is Andre Karpathy, as you guys see in the tweet that I just posted in the chat, made a point today that LLMs are emerging not just as a chat bot, but as a kernel process, meaning a new type of operating system that can do input and output across different modalities can interpret code, can access the internet and information and then can render things in a visual way, or in an audio way that the user wants to consume it. So as a result, LLMs become the core driver to a new type of computing interface. There was a paper published and I'll share the link to this paper here as well. We can put it in the notes, it's not worth pulling up on the screen, that showed that using LLMs in autonomous driving can actually significantly improve the performance of the neural nets that the autonomous cars are trained on. So the autonomous car is typically trained on a bunch of sensor data that comes in. And then that sensor data determines what sort of action to take with the car. And what this team showed is that if you actually put in a communication layer that thinks and talks like a human in between the sensor data and the action data, it can do really wide ranging interpretations of the data that otherwise would not be apparent from the data set it was trained on. So for example, you can see a person down the road and ask it, what do you think that person's going to do next? And the LLM, because it's trained on a much larger corpus of data than just sensor data from cars, it can make a really good human like interpretation of that, feed that decision back into the control system of the car, and have the car do something more intelligently than it otherwise would have been able to do. So these LLMs are becoming a lot more like a software operating system. And you can kind of extend that into mobile phones, mobile phones originally were just voice. And then they were single lines of text in the form of SMS, then you were able to browse the web. And then the app revolution came about where all of this information emerged through apps. What LLMs now allow perhaps is that the entire operating system of the phone can run and render any sort of application or any sort of service or product you might want to use on the fly in stream. So the input to the phone can be voice, it can be visual, it can be video, and the output can be rendered by perhaps a bunch of what might otherwise be called apps, but call it third party developers that build in stream into that chat that's no longer looks like a chat interface like we see on chat GPT, but can be rendered visually can be rendered with audio can be rendered a bunch of different ways. So if mobile really is the dominant tech hardware platform that humans are using for computing today, LLMs and these sorts of tools can become the dominant operating system on that hardware. And you can totally rethink the modality of how you use computing through applications. Today, we have an App Store, we download apps and use them. And that all becomes in stream in an LLM or chat type interface that can be accessed in a bunch of different ways. So for me, there's a really bigger thing that's happening. It's not just about making smarter tools and increasing productivity, but a real revolution in computing itself. That seems to be emergent. And I think karpathy is tweaked this morning, some of the stuff I've been playing with some of the papers I've been reading, and some of the speculation around a mobile hardware start to support that thesis. And I think it's going to be really significant. It's a wholesale rewriting of computing, computing interfaces, human computer interaction, that's going to rethink everything. And it's it seems to be pretty substantial. And just using a bunch of tools myself, I'm blown away every single time meeting what you can do. Yeah, I mean, right now, I would agree
SPEAKER_05: with you strongly agree because this was some this was magic links vision for the future, which is you would talk to agents as they call them. This was a company that existed in the 90s. Before smartphones existed, it was a physical device, Sony made the device and the operating system, the concept was you would say I'm looking for a flight to go to this place, the agent would go out, it would do a bunch of work and then come back to you with the options. So not just a Google search coming back with 10 blue links, but actually just solving your problem. And if the interface is from general magic, right? General Magic, right? Yeah, right, right. And there's a movie General Magic, the movie, you can look at the Wikipedia company, but this was a lot of like the early work in this area. And I think this is going to become the interface and LM is talking to each other, then the question becomes, who owns this? How many of these are there? Are they vertical eyes? So what do you think the game on the field is here?
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think this is super interesting. I don't know if this qualifies as a science corner, but this is the most interesting science corner. You got a minimum. It's a nerd.
SPEAKER_05: Science Corner into into an intersecting realm. So we can
SPEAKER_02: all be involved. Yeah, I don't know how we crowbar and Uranus joking to this, but let's
SPEAKER_05: let's keep our eyes wide open here.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so on the phone, I think what's interesting there, just to boil it down is you're talking about replacing the main interface, which is currently a wall of apps, right? And you push, you tap an app to go into the app, and then you interact with it. You're talking about replacing all that with basically voice. So imagine if you connect like glasses to it or something. So rather than double click on an app, the app
SPEAKER_02: developers as they're called today, are basically building in screen utilities that are part of the chat interface that that is the phone itself. And that's what's going to be so compelling. You have to read like we used to write websites, then we wrote apps. And now we're going to write these kind of in stream services, these plugins,
SPEAKER_05: Alexa was going to do this. Yeah. Kind of sucks. It just doesn't work that well. Doesn't work.
SPEAKER_00: But imagine if the phone perfectly understood what you were saying, then you would just say call me an Uber, order me food, whatever. And precisely just instruct it. It's like in that movie. Was it her her Joaquin Phoenix movie? God, that should have been my background today. What am I thinking?
SPEAKER_02:
SPEAKER_05: You've disappointed all the science corner fans. I think it's a Spike Jonze movie. He did a really good job
SPEAKER_00: with that. He's looking more and more great. Like it's gonna happen. We got to do a rewatchable on that. Yeah, we
SPEAKER_05: should rewatch it. You won't even really need the pane of
SPEAKER_00: glass if you can just talk to it with an earpiece. Now I think you're right that the phone needs to know what you're looking at. Or it can do so much more if it has all those senses. That's part of the multimodal demo that that I
SPEAKER_02: showed this week is it has video and it has camera inter integration. And remember, in human computer interaction, it's often a lot easier for a human to interact with a visual representation of stuff on a screen than to hear stuff in audio. So we will still still need some sort of visual display, whether it's a screen or an eyeglass or something that shows us a bunch of information in a way that Sam apparently
SPEAKER_00: talked about the ecosystem he's trying to create. Sam apparently invested in a company that was hardware plus software for light journaling, like you would hang like a necklace around your neck, a camera type device, wearable, wearable, wearable, okay, and it would record everything. And it would be like your memory backup, and you'd be able to query it. So that was
SPEAKER_05: William Gibson's plotline in one of his books where he had a little Zeppelin that would follow people around and record everything and then you'd have a DVR of your entire life and that would be completely indexed and then you could the AI would know your entire life and be able to advise you I do guys use the feature on your AirPods where if you leave them in, it will read you the messages from your signal or your incoming notifications where it reads them to you. Obviously, you don't. So there's a new feature on the in the AirPods, you leave them in. And if you're working, you're walking around the house or you're walking around Manhattan, like I am these last couple of days, it will stop the podcast I'm listening to and just say, you know, Oh, poker group says this, oh, you know, your wife just texted you this, and it reads it to you. And then you can say reply. So eventually, if Siri works, and then you have those Apple goggles on, I think that that is going to be the eventual interface, which is, you'll hear certain things, you'll see certain things, some things will be better visually, other things will get it. Didn't Facebook announce a new pair of glasses today?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, those are like their spectacle kind of things. These
SPEAKER_05: are the light AR glasses where you can take pictures, just meant
SPEAKER_03: to say everything's converging a lot faster than we all. Yeah,
SPEAKER_00: it is. So I started using a new note taking app called reflect. Have you guys heard of this? It's reflecting on things? Whoa,
SPEAKER_05: this is progress.
SPEAKER_00: I'm just starting to play with it. But what it does is you keep like a daily log of who you've met with and what meetings were about. So it's basically a note taking app, but it does back links, so that it starts to link together the people and concepts or whatever. And so like the use case that I think it's quite useful for once you've been using it for a while, is okay, I met I mean, with this person, when's the last time I saw them? What do we talk about then? So it gives you like content. Yeah,
SPEAKER_02: yeah, that's awesome. I really like it. It's external memory,
SPEAKER_00: right? Because like, I can't, I'm like, I'm deluged with so much stuff now. I can't even I forget people's names sometimes if I've only met him once or twice. So his name is free. David. Free. Not you guys, but
SPEAKER_05: no, it's also getting older. I mean, it's a function of how much input is coming at you. There's just so much coming at us. Right. But just but just having a short log of who I've met with
SPEAKER_00: and briefly what the meeting was about. So I can go back and check it. And at some point in the future, I've searched against it. But the only problem with it is I do have to like take the time to enter all this stuff. And it's kind of pain. It'll just be done automatically. It will get true external hard drive to my brain, then that would be very powerful authenticate with slack and Gmail and do that
SPEAKER_05: automatically. And then you'll, it'll be otherworldly. It
SPEAKER_00: already connects with Google. I don't want my slack in my reflect. What I want is my meetings, which they do, they integrate with Google Calendar. Great. And really, that's it. Like the main thing I want is, if I could just know everyone I talked to, and I don't need a transcript, I just need the log line. Just so I can remember, I just need the prompt. Six months from now, I just need a prompt that I met this person and here's the topic. That's it. Sax, have you gone to the Have you built Clinton eyes your
SPEAKER_03: greetings now? It's great to see you. That's the great that's the great thing. Like it's great to see you so that you know you preserve optionality for the people you have the same thing. It's great to see you. We've never met but I think it's great
SPEAKER_05: to see you. I just use the always say great to see you. Great to see you. It's such a banger. I when I met Clinton, I was at Hillary Clinton fundraiser when she was a senator here in New York. And they sent you up an elevator to this fundraiser and you get off the elevator and Bill Clinton standing there. And he walks up to me like three steps. Oh, Jake, Al, it's great to see you and grabs your elbow. He shakes. I am so happy for what you did to help Hillary when and you know, Jason, we're so appreciative. And then you know, you walk into the room. And I'm like, Oh, my God, Bill Clinton knows my name. Totally. Then I look behind me. And I see the next person I see a woman come out with a clipboard, whispering his ear, then next person's name coming out of the elevator. He's waiting. That person disappears. Oh, David Sachs. It's so great to meet you. I really appreciate everything you've done for Hillary.
SPEAKER_00: You know, that role of whispering the name of a person in the politicians here goes all the way back to Roman times. It was called the nomenclature. The nomenclature. nomen is the
SPEAKER_00: Latin word for name. It's often I call it the name.
SPEAKER_05: You think about the Roman Empire, just broadly speaking,
SPEAKER_05: how's that a gratuitous reference? I thought that was
SPEAKER_00: so yeah, it's pretty great. It's pretty great. I'm just glad that
SPEAKER_05: the rest of the world is is catching up to our obsession with gladiator or listen, this has been an amazing episode for
SPEAKER_05: the dictator himself. Chamath, Polly Hopatia, and Rain Man. Yeah, definitely Burn Baby, David Sachs and the Sultan of Science, the Queen of Kenwa, the Prince of Panic attacks and the heir to the TED throne, the creator of the world's greatest conference, David Freberg. I am the world's greatest moderate. We'll see you next time. Love you boys. All in. Bye bye.
SPEAKER_04: Love you. Ted's dead. Ted's dead. Ted's dead, baby. Ted's
SPEAKER_00: dead, baby.
SPEAKER_00: Let your winners ride. Rain Man David Sachs. We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.
SPEAKER_04: Love you.
SPEAKER_03: Besties are gone. Play a dog. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge door because they're all just like this like sexual tension but they just need to release them out.
SPEAKER_04: What? You're a bee bee. What? You're a bee bee.
SPEAKER_00: We need to get merch.
