All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg: E147: TED goes woke, Canada's Nazi blunder, AI adds vision, plus: who owns OpenAI?

00:00:00 - 00:30:00

Coleman Hughes, a writer and podcaster, gave a TED talk titled 'A Case for Color Blindness' that received a negative reaction from some staff members. Hughes refutes accusations of racism and criticizes TED for intentional under-promotion of the talk. They believe TED has become one-sided and lacks diversity of viewpoints. The podcast also discusses institutional capture and the importance of intellectual discourse.

Show more

00:30:00 - 01:00:00

The podcast explores the root causes of racism in America, emphasizing the need for a structural approach to address these issues. It discusses the challenges faced by institutional leaders and political parties when captive to ideologies centered around race and gender. The conversation also criticizes TED for deviating from its original mission and allowing staff with niche views to suppress talks they disagree with. The speaker highlights the lack of professionalism and competence displayed by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The discussion also addresses the presence of neo-Nazi groups within the Ukrainian military and their association with Ukrainian ultranationalism.

Show more

01:00:00 - 01:28:04

The podcast discusses the Ukrainian president's alleged support for Ukrainian nationalism and neo-Nazi groups, as well as Canada's history of accepting former Nazis. OpenAI's plans to collaborate with Johnny Ive and Masayoshi-san to develop an AI consumer device are briefly mentioned. The podcast also explores the development of a consumer product centered around OpenAI, including fundraising rounds and strategies to maximize ownership. It discusses the potential of LLMs as a new type of operating system and the future of phone interfaces, including wearable devices and the convergence of visual and audio interfaces.

Show more

Hey Coleman, how's it going? Hey Coleman, welcome to the show. Hey, how's it going?

Have you ever heard of the show? Yeah, I have. I'm actually a fan. My girlfriend introduced me

to the show like two years ago and I've been a fan ever since. Great to meet you. And apparently,

like many women, she has like a, she has a legit concerning obsession with sex, but also...

Oh, don't say it! Oh my God! What? Oh, her and Gwyneth are tilted.

Those sax fans are crazy. And the episode, and the episode. Oh my God. Oh my God. Jesus.

Oh, where'd it go, Coleman? You're gonna fit right in here. All right, here we go. Let me run this.

This is your cold open, folks. I'm sorry. I need to 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 said,

sax and shaman. Oh, shit. Okay, great.

Okay, great. Let's get in the middle of the issue. Thank you. Thank God. Okay, here we go.

Three, two, one.

All right, everybody. Welcome back to the All in Pod.

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 threw one of its speakers under the bus,

so we decided to have him on to talk about the experience. This is the second time they've done

it, at least. They did to Sara 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 a 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.

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 my talk in a nutshell. So I prepared the talk with the Ted team. I got

their feedback, edited, curated, et cetera, 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 well within the bounds of acceptable discourse. There was a very small minority

onstage I could see that was physically upset by my talk.

I could see this onstage yet in the moment, but I'm talking five people in a crowd of almost

2,000. So I expected that because color blindness is not in vogue today on the left,

amongst progressives. It's really the idea non grata. And so I was expecting to

field some pushback 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 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?

No, in woke term. Well, like what was the problem with the talk?

Well, there are no factual problems. It passed the fact checking team. There were there were no

substantive issues with the talk. The problem was that it upset the staff. It upset the staff.

That was the language that was used. It upset certain people in the staff.

And those people are all black?

Probably most were. 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.

Okay. What was the what do you perceive was the problem with your talk or what they perceive

the problem with your talk is? 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 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. 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 has been made available to folks?

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 the, yeah, the, he spoke at all and summit last

year. 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 Ted's website. In mid August, he tweeted this and that he believed they were

intentionally under promoting my talk. So I checked. Yeah. 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.

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?

Yes. Wow. So yeah, that's what, 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.

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?

Definitely not this year. I can't, you know, I don't know the whole history of Ted,

but nothing like that this year for sure.

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 Ted?

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 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 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 a survey response in 2019 after I went to Ted and 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 has 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 closed-minded at Ted. And I sent this note and Chrissy 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 of 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, or 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 Chrissy Anderson

deeply. The Ted Talks changed my life many times along the way over the decade plus that I went

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 take on the Ted organization pre and post having had this experience? I'm

curious. Yeah, what you just said, David, I've heard echoed from at least a dozen people that

have gone to Ted or been 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.

Going with Chris Anderson, I would say no. I agree. So all my private communications with

Chris suggest to me that he is just as alive to this problem of ideological capture of

institutions as anyone. But when it comes to 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, 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, this is not right for you. And my perception is that Ted has been captured from

the bottom up, like many institutions, just from the seeping in of staff that don't share those

values and the inability of the leadership to actually hold the line for those values.

Did they tell you that you made them feel unsafe?

Yes, actually. People said they felt they were attacked in the audience. And my talk was,

again, just look it up on YouTube. It's quite mild.

Can we actually talk about that? Yeah, let's go into this.

What was your take on it? I'll just make a statement, which is, I think that your talk was

superb. And 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 direct it at racism. It would be my sort of safety blanket.

And I would always look at other 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 classist. 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 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 touched. So I just want to say thank you. And I also want to say that to the extent other

people are interested and 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.

Coleman, let me ask you what was the reaction from people of color, people who have 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 to people like

Shamath or yourself, people of color, who maybe have experienced racism on some regular basis,

and this idea of having color blindness when we're operating as a society in 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. Yeah, it is. So the stereotype of the reaction is that white people like my

talk and people of color don't. 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,

Shamath, I have 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 Shamath, 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 have experienced stuff that you haven't. We may have even experienced racial

discrimination. We may have 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 what's more, you know, you've gotten this thing on the

left, you've gotten media institutions that have been taken in by this. So 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 D'Angelo in 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 an 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 with people of all colors.

That I think was one of the most poignant parts of it, sex. 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 want to not use the term rotting 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 non-profit institutions that the individuals that are employed are capturing

the organization's ideals. Obviously, we'll sort of push that from-

Well, that's what I mean by rotting. I mean, it's like it's-

It was such a storied institution in terms of it was a brave institution under Ricky

Saul Warman. I get it, but I think rotting is such a derogatory term in the sense that

some of these institutions evolve to be different, but that's the only thing I don't want to make it.

Yeah. Sacks of rotting, or is it being taken over from the inside out from the bottom up?

What are your thoughts? I think capture is a pretty good word to use. Fever used that word.

Let's remember, Ted's original mission represented in their tagline was ideas worth 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 of ideas is 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 and debate. Maybe get curious. Yeah, get curious.

Exactly. But 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

silence. And as soon as you do that, as soon as you concede that there can be some sort of physical

harm from engaging with ideas, you give the equivalent of a heckler's 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 where we've ended up.

Coleman, can I ask your point of view on institutional capture? Obviously, this is

different than the topics 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? 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 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.

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 mean that it should not be

spread. I think, have you read Jonathan Hates' book, Coddling of the American Mind?

Absolutely. Yeah, great book.

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 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 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

the current kind of main concept that everyone believes.

Here's what I don't understand. So, Coleman, just maybe if you can just guess why when somebody

watches this talk, could they feel genuinely hurt? If we had to

steelman them, let's step in their shoes, what's the cycle that's going on there

that gets them to, oh my God, this is an intolerable point of view?

Yeah, I think there has to be something with, if you're a person that has

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'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 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 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 you feel incredibly

emotional. That's my only guess. 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, when conductors are

looking for a new violinist, they put them behind a shade, and they do a colorblind

selection process, a colorblind selection process. I think Malcolm Gladwell talked about that in

Blink, and your response, and then they said, well, wouldn't it be better if we could have

some representation in that group? So then we would inspire people to get to the group. Your

response to that was? 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 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 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?

Yes, I have. I mean, a 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's 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 two 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.

Yeah. 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 just have stories of when the welfare auditors would come

around and people would hide their boyfriends, hide their husbands, etc. And in the book Black

Power by Stokely Carmichael, aka Kwame Turei, which is 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 dug into that research, but there's definitely a lot of room for study

there. Glenn, 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 that people

have venture firms who invest in startups, invest in more female-led startups, etc. Because the

numbers, frankly, have not been very diverse historically in venture, far from it. And we

recently had a 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 as the language

people use? And should people with large endowments of capital be backing 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?

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. 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 firm. But I think the problems begin 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. Yeah, that's well said. 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 superficial identities

and are challenged often to make decisions or 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 by that point,

it's an intractable problem. I've talked to CEOs that ask this question to me over and over again.

What do I do once I'm past the point where I have so many staff and 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. 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 in kind of a point of no return? I think definitely in the Democratic Party

there has been a problem with mistaking the Twitter commentary 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 believe mistaking the elite and the Twitter sphere for the wider population.

I mean, this feels to me like why Donald Trump kind of liked it, but that's another topic.

This has been amazing. Everybody take a moment, search for Coleman Hughes, subscribe to his

YouTube channel, type Coleman Hughes 10. Coleman, you do a podcast? Yeah, I do a podcast

conversations with Coleman. Actually, David Sacks has been on the podcast about a year ago.

How did he do? How did he do? He did absolutely fantastic.

Did he make you feel unsafe? He did actually, yes, yes, okay.

Did he talk about the Ukraine? Can I be on your podcast? Oh, of course. I would be honored.

Fantastic, there you go. I would be honored. Thank you. I saw you had the Dilbert guy on,

and I thought that was a pretty engaging, interesting conversation. Yeah, Scott Adams,

who is really controversial, and I thought you handled that one really well too.

Yeah, thanks. He's an interesting one. 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.

A mixed bag would be where I would go with it. All right, listen, this has been amazing,

but TED Talk is extraordinary. Everybody should watch it, and yeah, ideas worth spreading,

unless maybe you don't agree with them. Go to the TED channel and watch it.

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 a five-year package to go

to the event. How much is TED? How much is TED? The regular tickets used to be $7,500,

and then no, they used to be $7,500, then I think they went up to $10,000,

and then you can do donor tickets, and you get different features and so on.

Basically, they're sold out. Remember, it is set up as a nonprofit,

and there is philanthropic work that's done, and so 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 as we talked about,

a lot of media companies and a lot of institutions get captured and the original kind of mission

to paraphrase Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction, Ted's dead, baby. Ted's dead.

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, then it stops being a platform for ideas. This becomes another

left-wing interest group. What other ideas, what other talks have been canned before they even got

to the stage? You have to wonder. Who are they not inviting?

It's the top of the funnel, Jason, exactly. It's all the people that they're not inviting.

What about the person that's pro-coal? I wonder if the pro-coal person is allowed to present it to.

I doubt it. 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 comics, because make them laugh with edgy humor. But then when they're

in that 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, I really... Apologizing for a 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 return to the original values. And I hope that this is a

moment 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.

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 just said, listen, we have a mission

here. It's around crypto. We're going to focus 100% on this mission. And if you're not on board

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. And it worked. He took a hit. New York Times wrote

their obligatory hit piece. If Chris was brave, he would just tell everybody...

I would say if Chris has good mentors, as well as a good 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 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's what is meant to happen exactly then happen.

Exactly. It's a moment for looking at the internal compass. It's a wholesale leadership reset

moment opportunity. See if it happens or not. Or double down and keep going.

I really appreciate your being public about all this and talking about it. It's been a great

conversation. Thank you, Coleman. Everybody. Thanks for having me on, guys.

All right. Thank you. We'll see you soon. Cheers now.

See you, man. 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 a Nazi sympathizer.

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 II. That unit was also known as the Waffen SS, Galicia division,

if I'm pronouncing that 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. Chimoth,

I don't know if you got to see this. You're Canadian, so your thoughts on what we've seen here.

I mean, I'll give you my feedback as somebody who, when I was 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 K-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, moved 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 brown face. Okay, so making fun of people like me

and elected him 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 called 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 had this thing three weeks

ago, 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 is 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 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 these

things need to be questioned and put on the table.

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 Hanka, that was Anthony Rota, resigned on Tuesday. And Trudeau says Rota,

the person who invited the Nazi, is solely responsible.

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 someplace unless the office knows who else is going to be there. He knew

that Zelensky was going to be there. He would have known who the guest list was.

Yeah, no. And 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 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

it's a lack of competence. It's a lack of competence. Just so we're clear. Okay.

So I agree with all of that. I think there's also two other dimensions to this back story, 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 present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the

future. The present is Ukraine. It is the current thing. Everybody has to cheer for Ukraine and for

the killing of Russians. The reason why Hanka was cheered with the standing ovation is because

they said that he fought Russians. He was a war hero who fought Russians. All you had to do was 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 whitewash history. So the present 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. Well, they're not whitewashing the past if it was a mistake, that the intellectual

doesn't make sense. No, what they did is what they're saying is- If I'm understanding you correctly.

The present is that we hate Russia so much that we're going to cheer for anybody who killed

Russians. Okay, I understand your point, but 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. It was a huge debacle

and embarrassing spectacle. I think that nobody asked any questions about the past because the

present overrides it. The present need to support the current thing overrides like any sort of

examination of what has happened 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. This occurred

before the current war, so it's not just a marriage of convenience. First of all, if you go back to

war two, the father of Ukrainian nationalism is a guy named Stepan Bandera. 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 Medan coup in Kiev that was backed by Victoria

Newland, one of the key figures in that coup was a guy named Ola Tani Bak, who is the founder of

the Svoboda Party, which is the Social Nationalist Party, which if you know what Nazi stands for,

it's National Socialist. They basically just flipped the name, and the original logo of the

Svoboda Party was the Wolf's Angel, which was a Nazi insignia. This was a far-right party infused

with the racial ideology of Stepan Bandera, who was, again, a Nazi, and they brought this guy in

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 Yats-Zar guy phone call, she says

that Klitsch, meaning Klitschko, and Tani Bak need to remain on the outside, but Yats needs to be

talking to Tani Bak four times a week. He was part of the chess pieces that they were moving

around. After the coup, a civil war breaks out in the Donbas because the ethnic Russians there

are opposed to this new government and the fact that Yanukovych, 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 Azov 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. Azov Battalion becomes a division of the Ukrainian military.

It's shocking. And this goes on from 2014 through 2021.

So you're saying the Ukrainian army, just to be clear here, has Nazis in it, Nazi supporters.

There's no question about that. And there are many people who were concerned about this

in the 2015 to 2020 time frame. 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 Azov Battalion. So it is set.

So it is set. I think the important and obviously that-

Zelensky is a Nazi or a Nazi separatism?

No, no. I don't think he's a Nazi. And to be clear, I don't 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 people have whitewashed 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 violence. Do you think it's any different than the Nazi percentage in, say,

whatever you want to say, white supremacists in the United States or in Germany or

anywhere else?

I do. And I think it's different in the sense that in the United States, 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. And 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 at various points, I think this is in

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 photos of Nazi uniforms?

I don't think New York Times has, but I don't think New York Times has, 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 ultranationalism and neo-Nazi groups. And I think that part of 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 and to turn a blind eye to it. Well, my point is that US policy has been to do this.

In other words, the US... You say our government, yeah. Okay.

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 May Don 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 a sort of an accident. This is the backstory that explains something

like this can happen. Yeah. Okay. Jason, you have any reactions to Trudeau doing this and what it

means or does it mean nothing? Does the backstory I provided give you context on how something like

this can happen that's not just like an accident? Well, I don't think any of us know exactly what

happened here. And it's probably going to be some sort of an 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 anything they can use to make their case stronger. They'll take the

advantage of that. So yeah, sure. And that is Trudeau. Zelensky was pumping his fists and cheering.

Don't you think he knew? He can't not know the history. Yeah. He has to know. He has to know.

If he does, then... That somebody who was fighting the Russian War II was on the German side.

If he did, then you would be saying, if he did know and he was pumping his fists, then you'd be

saying that he was pro Nazi. He was cheering for Nazi knowingly. You know, what I'm saying is,

look, the fact that you've got some Jewish answer street is not, in my view, a get-out-jail-free

card for you making political decisions to align with... Are you saying he knowingly cheered for

a Nazi? You know, one of the big backers of the Azov battalion is a Ukrainian oligarch named

Igor Kolomoisky. Kolomoisky is Jewish. No, he didn't answer my question. He asked me my opinion.

I'm just saying, do you think he knowingly cheered for a Nazi? Is that what you're insinuating?

I think he knowingly cheered knowing that this Ukrainian nationalist who fought in World War II

must have been on the German side because there was only one side that was fighting the Russians.

Okay. I'm just clarifying here. I don't actually have an opinion. Thanks for

querying me, Chama. I'm not saying that he cheered for Nazism. What 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...

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 is 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 Donbas, which has enormous energy

reserves, belongs to Ukraine. So it serves the business interests of the energy magnates in

Ukraine to support these people. And that, look, politics makes for strange bedfellows.

Yeah, that's what I'm going to say, actually. Yeah.

So I'm not saying that Zelensky 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 you say you, do you mean me or do you mean the United States?

I'm saying if you want to have a highly moralistic foreign policy, let's say if one wants to have

a... I would use the word, yeah. If you're going to be principled, you need to keep them,

you need to not support Nazis. We're integrated. Jason and Fieber, what do you guys think of

just like 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. 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 just in terms of the Canadian part of this, there's a writer named Jeet here who's a left-wing

writer, but he posted something very interesting here, where he explained that in the late 1940s

and 1950s, Canada took in a large number of former Nazis. Many of them were SS veterans,

so people like Honka, because they were good anti-communists. And then these Nazis proceeded

to 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 II.

So the point is... Wasn't aware of that. Yeah, exactly. Look, there's no way that any semi-intelligent

person who knows the history of World War II, especially the Ukrainian involvement in World

War II, wouldn't know that Ukraine was on the German side in World War II. And Honka volunteered

for the SS. He was a volunteer for the SS Galicia division. So look, did the speaker of the house

know? Probably not. I think wokeness makes people stupid, where they just think about the current

thing and don't ask too many questions about the past. But there's a lot more to it than just

like this innocent mistake. And this has been your update on this week in Ukraine and wokeness.

All right, there's a bunch of news about OpenAI this week. Just very quickly,

OpenAI is in advanced talks according to the Financial Times with Johnny Ive of iPhone fame,

Steve Jobs' 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 Ive's got a

design firm called Love From, and they would help OpenAI design their first consumer device

via the FT sources, Financial Times that is. Altman and Ive have been having brainstorming

sessions and Ive San Francisco studio about what a consumer product centered around OpenAI would

look like. It's very early stages and San 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 $1 billion in seed. And then also OpenAI is discussing a secondary share sale

that would value the company at between $80 billion and $90 billion. This would be 3x,

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.

That would be pretty extraordinary if that was those personal subscriptions.

This would be a massive gain on paper for Microsoft. OpenAI 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. And of course, we know that OpenAI started as a non-profit

before switching. And our friend Vinod Kosla told us very clearly that those are just details.

What happened there? Those are just details. Vinod is the goat.

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 OpenAI has. And so as a result,

that's already happened, by the way. Well, I was just going to say, so he'll be in the

capper seat. So even if he doesn't have any equity in OpenAI, he'll get, he'll just put

his money into the best startups that it's like Y Combinator on steroids.

By the way, I have a take on that whole claim that Sam doesn't own any part of OpenAI.

All right, let's hear it. Go ahead, Colombo. Explain to us the details. It's one more thing

there, ma'am. You said you don't own any shares in OpenAI, but you started OpenAI.

Right. Well, then who does?

Yeah, that's the thing.

What I think is really interesting about what OpenAI has done in its fundraising rounds is that

each round has been a capped return model. So, for example-

Explain what that is to the audience.

100X, 100X, right?

Well, I think some of the very early people got capped at 100X. I think maybe the $30 billion

round was capped at 10X. So I think the $30 billion round is capped at a $300 million

valuation, meaning if you're an investor, your shares go up in value until the company hits

a market cap of $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 at the $300 billion valuation.

The movie industry works this way, right? You invest in a 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.

Yeah, so in any event, I think people who 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. 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 going to own anything because they will have already long ago been capped out.

Well, they'll keep selling new interests. Like the new interest will end up being like

eight percent. 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 eight percent

return. It turns into debt eventually. It turns into some...

I think what's really going on here is somebody has to own the residual value of the company.

Call it the far out of the money call option.

That's how they get around the IRS problem of it being non-equity. That's how they say that

it's not equity in a private corporation. Yeah, but I think what's so brilliant about it is,

okay, so look, Sam set up this foundation. It's a non-profit, but he controls that effectively,

right? 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 it ends up being a trillion-dollar company.

Are you saying Sam is Alron Hubbard in this example?

Let's not speculate too much. Oh, it's just details. Right. As Vinod said, those are just

details. I am speculating, but I think it's informed speculation. If you wanted to become

the world's first trillionaire and you were extremely premeditated about it,

clever and premeditated 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.

So it's called 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. 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 options. 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 defense. I love this conspiracy theory. Where did you

come up with this? Is this genius? This is genius. You and Peter Teal talk about this over

chess or something. How did you construct this? And you're saying this is informed.

I love financial conspiracy corner. I think it rivals science corner.

Let's get the tinfoil hats out. It's really freaking Friedberg out that we're even doing this.

Diometrically opposite to science corner. Is it a conspiracy or is it just reality?

I think if you are even 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.

That seems like a lot easier. But what have I said other than the fact that it was sort of

premeditated, which that's not the right word, that premeditated sounds to nefarious.

No, no, no. 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.

I just think that it'll amplify the pressure for actors inside of those organizations to

take their shot. That's just going to be financially the right thing to do for a lot

of people if what you're saying is true. We know the investments have been made under

our cap return model. I think that's fact. That's fact, yes.

We know the nonprofit foundation owns the shares. That's fact.

And then just to put the 800-pound gorilla on the table, what's Elon 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?

Zero.

That's a zero.

I mean, but after our lawsuit, how much does he own? I don't know. I'm just speculating.

So can we talk about the technology point?

Yes, I'll tee it up for you.

Here we go. So OpenAI released some new chat GPT features. The key point here is they're doing

what's called multimodal. 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 4 p.m. 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 4 p.m. What this means is the output or the input could be in any of those modalities,

modalities, fancy word for an image, a video, et cetera. 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 barred and

Sandeep Madra and I played with this on this week in 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 multimodal exactly. But you could do things like ask Google flights, hey, what is the best

nonstop between New York City and Dubai or from an East Coast destination that has laydown flat

seats, et cetera. 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. Freeberg, when you look at these two,

which one is the more important announcement? And what do you think about the pace? Because

here we are, we're about to hit the one year anniversary of ChadGPT 3.5. I've been using

a 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 Carpati, 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, and 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 that 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 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 and

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 that'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 Carpathian's tweet 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 seems

to be pretty substantial. And just using a bunch of tools myself, I'm blown away every single time

with what you can do. Yeah, I mean, right now, I would agree with you, strongly agree, because

this was magic links, vision for the future, which is you would talk to agents, as they called 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 the early work in this area. And I think this is going to become the interface,

and LMS talking to each other. Then the question becomes, who owns this? How many of these are

there? Are they verticalized? So what do you think the game on the field is here, Sak?

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've ever done.

At a minimum, it's a nerd corner. Yeah, it's a nerd corner.

I'm trying to go a science corner into an intersecting realm so we can all be involved.

Yeah. I don't know how we crowbar an Uranus joke into this, but let's keep our eyes wide open here.

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,

and you tap an app to go into the app, and then you interact with it.

You're talking about replacing all of that with basically voice.

So imagine a serial or visual, if you connect like glasses to it or something.

And rather than double click on an app, the app developers, as they're called today,

are basically building in-screen utilities that are part of the chat interface that is the phone

itself. And that's what's going to be so compelling. We used to write websites,

then we wrote apps, and now we're going to write these kind of in-stream services, these plugins.

Alexa was going to do this, yeah. Well, Alexa or Siri, but Siri kind of sucks. It just doesn't

work that well. It doesn't work. 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 you would just instruct it.

It's like in that movie, was it her? The Joaquin Phoenix movie?

God, that should have been my background today. What am I thinking?

You've disappointed all the science corner fans. I think it's a Spike Jonze movie. He did a really

good job with that, man. That movie is looking more and more like it's going to happen.

We got to do a rewatchable on that. Yeah, we should rewatch it.

You won't even really need the paint of 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

openly I showed this week is it has video and it has camera integration.

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. We will 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. Sam, apparently, talking about the ecosystem he's trying to create,

Sam apparently invested in a company that was hardware plus software for

like journaling, like you would hang like a necklace around your neck, a camera type device.

A wearable device. A wearable device. Okay, and it would record everything,

and it would be like your memory backup, and you'd be able to query it.

That was 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. Do you 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 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,

oh, poker group says this. Oh, 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 be better.

Didn't Facebook announce a new pair of glasses today?

Yeah, those are like their spectacle kind of things. These are the light AR glasses where

you could take pictures. Just meant to say everything's converging a lot faster than we all

know. Yeah, it is. So I started using a new note-taking app called Reflect. Do you guys

heard of this? It's... You're reflecting on things? Whoa, this is progress. Tell us more.

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 backlinks so that it starts to link together the people on concepts or whatever.

And so the use case that I think it's quite useful for once you've been using it for a while

is, okay, I'm meeting with this person. When's the last time I saw them? What do we talk about then?

So it gives you context, right? Chief of staff. Yeah. That's awesome. I really like this.

It's external memory, right? Because I'm deluged with so much stuff now. I can't even...

I forget people's names sometimes if I've only met them once or twice.

His name is Freeper. David Freeper. Not you guys, but...

No, it's also getting old. It's a function of how much input is coming at you. There's just

so much coming at us today. But just having a short log of who I've met with 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 take the time to enter all this stuff

and it's kind of a pain. If it just be done for me automatically, like a true external

hard drive to my brain, then that would be very powerful. It'll authenticate with Slack and Gmail

and do that automatically and then it'll be otherworldly. It 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 and really that's it. The main thing I want is if I could just know

everyone I talk 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 with this person

and here's the topic. That's it.

Sacks, have you gone to the... Have you Bill Clintonized your greetings now?

It's great to see you. It's great to see you.

That's the great thing. It's great to see you so that you know you preserve

optionality for the people you have met.

They do the same thing.

They do the same thing.

Always so good.

It's great to see you. We've never met, but it's great to see you.

Great to see you. It's such a banger.

It's such a banger.

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 is standing there and he walks up to me like three steps.

Oh, Jake, it's great to see you and he grabs your elbow. He's shaking.

I am so happy for what you did to help Hillary win and Jason, we're so appreciative.

And then you walk into the room and I'm like, oh my God, Bill Clinton knows my name.

Then I look behind me and I see the next person.

I see a woman come out with a clipboard, whisper in his ear,

the next person's name coming out of the elevator.

He's waiting. That person disappears.

Oh, David Sacks, it's so great to meet you.

Really appreciate everything you've done for Hillary.

You know, that role of whispering the name of a person in the politicians ear goes all the way

back to Roman times. It was called the nomenclatura.

The nomenclatura.

Nomen is the Latin word for name.

How often do you think about the Roman Empire?

Just probably speaking.

Was that a gratuitous reference? I thought that was.

I don't know. Yeah, it's pretty great. It's pretty great.

I'm just glad that the rest of the world is catching up to our obsession with Gladiator.

Oh, listen, this has been an amazing episode for the dictator himself,

Chamath, Polly Hoppitya, and Rain Men.

Yeah, definitely Burn Baby, David Sacks, 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.

I love you, boys.

Love you, boys.

All in. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Love you.

Ted's dead.

Ted's dead.

Ted's dead, baby.

Ted's dead, baby.

Oh, man.

Oh, man.

We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy,

because they're all just useless.

It's like this, like, sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

What? You're a bee.

What? You're a bee.

What?

You're a bee.

We need to get merchies.

I'm doing all this.

I'm doing all this.

You

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.

Keywords

TED, Canadian parliament, OpenAI, Sam Altman, AI evolution, Multimodal AI, Consumer hardware, Nazi blunder, Race-based policies

People

Anthony Rota, Justin Trudeau, Zelensky, Hanka, Stepan Bandera, Victoria Newland, Ola Tani Bak, Klitschko, Yats, Yanukovych, Barry Weiss, Jonathan Haidt, Charles Murray, Bruce Willis, Sarah Silverman, Chris Anderson, Brian Armstrong, Jamel Bowie, Tim Urban, Coleman Hughes, David Sacks, Scott Adams, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sandeep Madra, Andrej Karpathy, Joaquin Phoenix, Spike Jonze, William Gibson, LBJ, Thomas Sowell, Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King, Shamath, Ricky Saul Warman, Sam Altman, Vinod Kosla, Igor Kolomoisky, Johnny Ive, Masayoshi-san

Companies

Apple, Facebook, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Softbank

Organizations and Institutions

Black at Ted, Canadian Parliament, United States, Britain, India, Modi, Vladimir Zelensky, New York Times, Ted, X, Ted conference, US State Department, CIA

References

Warning: Undefined variable $clean_references in /srv/www/podtranscript.com/app/podcast_episode.php on line 376

(0:00) Bestie intros with Coleman Hughes

(1:12) Coleman's experience with TED, Understanding TED's ideological shift

(15:11) Focusing on class instead of race when enacting policies, reaction to Coleman's talk, institutional takeovers

(44:01) "When Virtue Signalling Goes Wrong": Canadian parliament cheers for a Nazi

(1:04:21) OpenAI's big week, informed speculation on Sam Altman's actual ownership of OpenAI

(1:12:39) The next evolution of AI: multimodal and consumer hardware

Follow the besties:

https://twitter.com/chamath

https://linktr.ee/calacanis

https://twitter.com/DavidSacks

https://twitter.com/friedberg

Follow Coleman:

https://twitter.com/coldxman

https://www.youtube.com/@ColemanHughesOfficial

Follow the pod:

https://twitter.com/theallinpod

https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast

Intro Music Credit:

https://rb.gy/tppkzl

https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg

Intro Video Credit:

https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect

Referenced in the show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxB3b7fxMEA

https://www.thefp.com/p/coleman-hughes-is-ted-scared-of-color-blindness

https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy/status/1691502563571408896

https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1707051830667338170

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/11/opinion/sunday/interracial-friendship-donald-trump.html

https://www.amazon.com/White-Fragility-People-About-Racism/dp/0807047414

https://twitter.com/TEDchris/status/1706792437098676224

https://www.amazon.com/Coddling-American-Mind-Intentions-Generation/dp/0735224919

https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Ground-American-Social-1950-1980/dp/0465065880

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Power-Liberation-Kwame-Ture/dp/0679743138

https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-judge-refuses-block-venture-capital-funds-grants-black-women-2023-09-26

https://apnews.com/article/canada-house-speaker-nazi-invite-ukraine-zelenskyy-d4ca05841193409e455cee3b19fcee6b

https://www.reddit.com/r/QuotesPorn/comments/lz5o6z/he_who_controls_the_past_controls_the_future_he

https://jacobin.com/2015/09/stepan-bandera-nationalist-euromaidan-right-sector

https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-738940

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social-National_Party_of_Ukraine

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Brigade

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/neo-nazis-far-right-ukraine

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cohen-ukraine-commentary/commentary-ukraines-neo-nazi-problem-idUSKBN1GV2TY

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/ukraine-has-nazi-problem-vladimir-putin-s-denazification-claim-war-ncna1290946

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/world/europe/nazi-symbols-ukraine.html

https://www.ft.com/content/4c64ffc1-f57b-4e22-a4a5-f9f90a7419b7

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-seeks-new-valuation-of-up-to-90-billion-in-sale-of-existing-shares-ed6229e0

https://www.axios.com/2023/09/25/testing-chatgpt-support-images-voice-search

https://twitter.com/petergyang/status/1707169696049668472

https://blog.google/products/bard/google-bard-new-features-update-sept-2023

https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1707437820045062561

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.07162.pdf

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6849786

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709

https://reflect.app

https://oldcomputers.net/sony-magic-link.html