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hey Coleman how's it going hey Coleman welcome to the show hey how's it going pleasure have you ever heard of the
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show yeah I have I I'm actually a fan my girlfriend introduced me to the show like two years ago and I've been a fan
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ever since great to meet you apparently like many women she has like a she has a
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legit concerning obsession with Sachs but also don't say it oh my God what we're tilted this those saxs fans
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are crazy end the episode end the my God oh my God way to Goan fit right in here all right
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here we go let me let me this is are cold open folks I'm sorry I let me just psychologically explore this before we
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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
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guys missed the second half of my statement I said sax and shamama oh okay great let's let's get thank you
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thankk God okay here we go 3 two let your winners ride Rainman David and instead we open source it to
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the fans and they've just gone [Music] crazy all right everybody welcome back to the Allin
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podcast we have a very full docket today I thought we'd start with something pretty crazy there was a really weird uh
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moment last week Ted threw one of its speakers under the bus so we decided to have him on to talk about the experience
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the second time they've done it at least they did to Sarah Silverman for doing comedy at Ted because people at Ted are
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a bunch of virtual signaling lunatics including some of my friends who go but Coleman Hughes if you don't know him is
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a writer and podcaster he has a a pretty popular podcast called conversations with Coleman and he did a talk which I
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encourage everybody to watch at Ted and it's titled a case for color blindness uh we all watched it it's very power ful
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talk and something weird happened Coleman welcome to the program and um maybe you could just share with
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the audience how you wound up speaking at Ted what the content uh of your talk was briefly and then the bizarre
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reaction when they try to ban and kill your talk post you giving it yeah so first really glad to be on guys I'm a
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fan of the Pod so I'll give the short version here if you want long version you can go to the Free Press where I
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wrote a big uh summary of of what happened there basically what happened is Chris Anderson invited me to give a
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TED Talk and uh I chose the subject of my upcoming book which is coming out in February called the end of race politics
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and the argument is just essentially colorblindness this is the idea that you want to treat people without regard to
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race both in your personal lives and in our public policy and wherever we have policies that are meant to collect and
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help the most disadvantaged we we should preferentially use class as a variable rather than race that's that's my talk
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in a nutshell so I prepared the talk with the Ted team I got their feedback edited
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curated Etc got up there in April gave the talk 95% of the people in the audience it was quite well well received
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whether or not they agreed with every point it was they well within the bounds of acceptable discourse there was a very
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small minority on stage I could see that was physically upset by my talk on stage
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I could see this on stage yet in the moment but I mean I'm talking five people in a crowd of almost
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2,000 so I expected that because you know color blindness is not invogue today on on the left amongst
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progressives it's really the idea nonr and so I was expecting to field some push back and I I talked to some critics
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and so forth but what happened is what began as just a few people upset began to spiral into a kind of
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internal staff meltdown at Ted so this group called black at Ted asked to speak with me I agreed and then they said
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actually we don't want to talk to you and they are an employee group at Ted after the conference Chris emailed me
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and said look I'm getting I'm getting a lot of blowback here internally there are people saying we shouldn't release
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your at all and then over the course of the next month they came up with a variety of sort of Creative Solutions
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about how to release my talk in a way that would appease the woke staffers that really didn't want it to be
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released at all and at this point I had to start kind of sticking up for myself so first they wanted to attach uh like a
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debate to the end of my talk and release it as one video which I felt would really send the wrong message it would
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send the message that like this idea can't be heard without the opposing persec did they tell you what was
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problematic about your talk to term well like what was the problem with the talk
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well there are no factual problems at past the factchecking team there were there were no substantive issues with
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the talk the problem was that it op the staff it upset the staff that was the language that was used it upset certain
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people in the staff got and and those people are black um probably most were you know I I
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tried to actually have face to face conversations with uh some of these folks I only got to to uh talk to one
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woman so presumably many of them were black but possibly not all okay what was the what do you perceive was the problem
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with your talk or what they perceived the problem with your talk is so the the last day of the Ted conference they have
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a town hall people from the audience come and give feedback the town hall opened with two people denouncing my
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talk back to back the first said that it was racist and dangerous and irresponsible and the second guy who's
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actually a guy I knew he said that I was willing to have a slide back into the days of separate
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but equal which was totally the opposite of my talk and I I implore anyone to just go online and watch it Go on
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YouTube decide for yourself whether these criticisms bear any resemblance to to reality but that was the idea that
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the talk is racist that you know I'm I'm some kind of pro Jim Crow person is really really deranged kind of
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criticisms your your talk is up on Ted's website and on YouTube right but part of
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the controversy was that the number of views seemed to be pretty suppressed was that discussed with Chris when you
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talked with him or do you have a point of view on the suppression of the promotion of the video even though they
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put it out there and how that's affected you know how widespread the video has been made available to folks yeah so
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in 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
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to amplify my talk which I think was kind of some spin he was in a tough position caught between me and his
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employees we ultimately decided they would release the talk and then two weeks later they'd release a debate
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between myself and this guy Jamal Buie who was a New York Times columnist um so the talk came out on
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Ted's website the debate came out and I kind of mentally uh had about the whole situation until Tim Urban who was a
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popular blogger who's actually given the yeah spoke at all in Summit last year yeah oh that's great yeah Tim is great
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he he's also given the most viewed Ted Talk of all time on YouTube Tim noticed that my talk just
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had a really absurdly low view count like an implausibly low view count on on Ted's website in mid August he tweeted
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this and that he believed they were intentionally under promoting my talk I checked yeah yeah I checked and all of
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the of the five talks surrounding mine they all had between you know 450,000 views and 800,000 views that was the
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full range mine had 73,000 right so 16% of the low end of the range of all the talks released
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around mine so when that happened I I felt that Ted had kind of reneged on its end of our bargain and that's when um
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Barry Weiss got wind of it and I I went public just just to be clear you're saying that the condition for releasing
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your your Ted Talk The Bargain you struck with Chris was that you would do a debate with someone in a separate
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video and that you had to do the debate in order to have your Ted Talk released yes wow so yeah that that's what that
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that was the end of the negotiation the beginning of the negotiation was trying to get me to release those things as one
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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
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cuz that dilutes it and then we agreed on a twoe separation between the two in your experience with Ted and your
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conversations around this matter are you aware of other videos that Ted has refused to put out that were live Ted
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Talk at the Ted conference and they were deemed to be too controversial to be released publicly definitely not this
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year I can't I I you know I don't know the whole history of Ted but nothing like that this year for sure we can go
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one of two ways with this freedberg do you want to talk about the substance of the talk or maybe dig into the culture
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of Ted I want to talk about the substance of the talk in a minute but I think it's worth just sharing my
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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
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lot from the community I got a lot from the conference every year it was an incredible week of my life every year it
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was a big deal for me um in the early days I would go there and I saw New Perspectives on technology on the
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environment on um social change on all these like topics that were not in my day-to-day that I thought were really
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exciting and a inspiring and that really was kind of this ethos of Ted back in the day before Chris Anderson took it
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over was to kind of you know inspire people with new ideas over the years that I attended Ted I began to observe
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that many of the talks and I spoke about this very briefly last week as part of my motivation and interest in doing the
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all-in summit this year but that over time many of the talks began to take a bit of a social justice turn
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in the sense that there was almost a lecturing happening as curated by the editorial process at Ted
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When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 needless to say most of the audience of Ted was not on that side of
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the voting block and what dis Disturbed me the most was that in the three years after he was elected every Ted
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conference had plenty of subjects plenty of talks and plenty of conversations about why Society is falling apart why
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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
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and evil in all these ways there wasn't a single talk that provided a perspective of why anyone voted for him
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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
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the votes in the country and I thought that was such an important topic to better understand that I was so shocked
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that was never part of the discourse at Ted I'm not a republican I'm not a conservative and I'm not against social
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justice issues but I saw Ted over time get overtaken with this kind of very one-sided almost bullying type of
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approach to this is the narrative we want to sell Society on rather than have a true discourse uh about the matter I
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sent an um a a survey a response in 2019 after I went to Ted and I Saidi never coming back again this year did it for
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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
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veered away from inspiring topics and inspiring talks and it became all about fear of Technology it became about
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social injustice caused by one side of the political spectrum and it really angered and upset me that everyone had
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become so close-minded at Ted and I sent this note and Chris Anderson reached out
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to me and said will you have a conversation I went on a zoom call with him and I spoke with him for an hour and
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I shared all of this and I said he's missing so much of what's Happening that's optimis about the world it's
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optimistic about technology that's different ways of looking at things and he's kind of created this very
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narrow-minded view on the topics that they want to address and how they want to address them and that was it and I
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walked away so when I saw what happened with your talk to me it's almost like the ultimate endgame of this process
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that I've been observing at Ted personally for the last 13 years and I just wanted to you know or last 15 years
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I guess share that story with you and speak publicly about it I I I very much respect the intention of the people Ted
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I respect Chris Anderson deeply the TED Talks changed my life many times along the way over the decade plus that I went
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there there I have many great friends from Ted I know plenty of people that have worked there everyone has the right
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intention but I think it's such a microcosm and a reflection of what's broadly been going on which is it's
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either my opinion or not and everyone coalesces around people with the same opinion and then you magnify it and you
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concentrate it and we have no discourse and Ted used to be a place for discourse
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and it's lost that as have so many other forums for conversation in the society and Country today col what's your what's
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your take on the on the Ted organization you know pre and post having had this experience I'm curious yeah what you
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just said David I've heard echoed from at least a dozen people that have gone to Ted or or been uh you know in the Ted
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Community for 10 years or more they've noticed the exact change that you noticed the question is what has driven
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that is it actually coming top down from the leadership I'm not sure I I'm skeptical I yeah I see you shaking your
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head I I agree Chris Anderson I would say no I agree so so like all my private Communications with with Chris suggest
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to me that he is just as alive to this problem of ideological capture of Institutions as anyone but when it comes
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to you know his own staff who have really strong feelings who are not pro Free Speech who are not pro um heterodox
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beliefs um and Open disc course who who literally just don't share that value you know it's a very tricky thing
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with leadership sometimes you have to Simply Be the bad guy and say I'm sorry these are the values of the institution
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and if you're not on board you're this is not right for you and my perception is that Ted has been captured kind of
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from the bottom up like many institutions just from the seeping in of staff that don't share those values and
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the in uh inability of the leadership to actually hold the line for those values
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they tell you that you made them feel unsafe Yes actually actually yes yes people said they felt they were attacked
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in the audience and I'm you know my my talk was again just look it up on YouTube it's quite mild can we actually
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talk about that let's go into the substance what was your take on it Jamia I'll just make a statement which is I
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think that your talk was superb and just to give you my journey as a kid that grew
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up as a refugee on welfare and then to get through every single sort of strata of
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society I think when I look back the biggest thing that I struggled with was always
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confusing when I felt mistreated I would always direct it at racism it would be my sort of safety
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blanket and I would always look at other people as doing that and it was only until I met my wife and spent spending
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years and years talking about it where I was able to disarm this and see that out
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of a 100 interactions a lot of the time just people are having a bad day some other
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percentage of the time people are actually just being very classist because racism it turns out is
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like a pretty severe perversion and it's really crazy when you actually see it play
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out and for me had I had a framework if I had your talk when I was in my 20s and
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30s I would have speared myself a lot of self-sabotage because what that does is when you feel
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these things and you don't have a framework to interpret it or to tolerate the anxiety I would internalize that anxiety
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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
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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
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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
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for me when I was 20 years old amazing I would have I could have done so much more because when I think
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about some of the mistakes I made they were rooted in this specific issue that you touched so I just want to say thank
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you and I also want to say that to the extent other people are interested and feel like that you should really listen
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to what you had to say because I thought it was eloquently addressed I was a huge
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huge huge fan of what you had to say and I thought it was extremely well done and
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especially for someone as young as you I thought it was just amazing Coleman let
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me ask you what was the reaction from people of color people who've experienced racism perhaps to your talk
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because you must have gotten a tremendous amount and I did look at the comments to Ted's credit the comments
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are open so what was the reaction you know to to to people like shath or yourself people of color who maybe have
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experienced racism on some regular basis and this idea of having color blindness
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when when we're um you know operating as a society and that goal which I'll just
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point out when I listen to your talk seems to be exactly what Martin Luther King said so go ahead yeah it is so
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there's the The Stereotype of the reaction is that white people like my talk and people of color don't yes so
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that's the stereotype that my critics would like to believe is the reality because then they don't have to confront
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my arguments the reality is that even at the Ted conference which is a progressive space many many people of
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color uh black people South Asian people came up to me saying that was an excellent talk for this that and the
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third reason and I think uh uh probably for for reasons uh similar to what you were
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saying chth I I found that often times immigrants of color really resonate with my message uh I have many for instance
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Jamaican friends that you know they view themselves as Jamaican they come to America and our conversation about race
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doesn't make very much sense to them right why it doesn't make sense for instance to strongly feel that your
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racial identity is an aspect of your core inner self that you ought to judge people on
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the basis of their racial identity that you know if you're a white person that you know you don't have a valid
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perspective to bear on a conversation or you have to you know preface every belief by saying well I'm a I'm a dumb
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white guy what do I know this kind of routine that we've gotten into in spaces rather than just confronting each other
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as hey you know I'm Coleman you're chth you're David Etc let's all talk about this from the point of view of epistemic
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equals and have conversations and yeah you you're going to know about stuff I haven't known because of your individual
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life story I'm going to I'm going to have experienced stuff that you haven't we may have even experienced racial
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discrimination we may we may have stor stories to tell but we are starting out fundamentally from the framework of all
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being human beings that can talk to each other and you know we we don't have to sort of playact the these racial roles
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that have become increasingly in Vogue in woke spaces and a lot of people resonate with that and and and and
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what's more you know you've gotten this thing on the left you you've gotten media institutions that have been taken
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in in by this so you you see New York Times op-eds like one I think five years ago that's can my children be friends
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with white people right you've got Robin D'Angelo in her book saying things like
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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
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actually feels like to hang out with an interracial and tight-knit group of friends your race racial identity
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recedes in importance the more you get to know people and I think people in interracial relationships know this
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people with interracial kids know this so my message actually res resonates with people of of of all colors that I
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think was one of the most poignant parts of it saxs um you got to watch the talk
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as well I believe so your thoughts on maybe institutions rotting from the inside and uh maybe even one that's
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supposed to support ideas ideas that matter clearly this is an idea that matters I'm curious I I just want I want
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to I want to not use the term rotting because I think your your point is that it's not good I don't think that's
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necessarily the case because the point is there's institutional capture that's happened and that institutional capture
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is almost like a democratic process that we're seeing at companies that we're seeing at government agencies and that
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we're seeing in private and nonprofit institutions that the individuals that are employed uh are capturing the
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organization's ideals obviously we that's what I mean by rotting I mean it's like it's such a stored institution
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you know in terms of it was a brave institution under Ricky saw Warman you know I get it but I think I think
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rotting is such a derogatory term in the sense that some of these institutions evolve to be different but and that's
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the only thing I I just I don't want to make it yeah sax of rotting or is it being taken over uh from the inside out
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from the bottom up what are your thoughts I think captured is a pretty good word to use Freer use that word
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just remember Ted's original Mission represented in the tagline was ideas wereth spreading so there's supposed to
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be a forum for interesting worthy ideas that they're going to spread and here they're doing
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the opposite they're basically sandbagging the views and they didn't want to publish it at all and then when
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they did agree to publish it they basically subjected that to a new requirement of putting a rebuttal right
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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
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response here he wrote this long post on X which is too long to read here it's a
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really sort of weasly mey mouth defense of what they did a lot of both sides type language I
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think there's really only one or two sentences that are relevant in terms of explaining this whole thing what he says
00:23:20
is that many people have been genuinely hurt and offended by what they heard you
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say so he's a addressing this to Coleman this is not what we dream of when we post our talk so I think this is really
00:23:33
the key intellectual mistake that Chris Anderson's making is that he believes that people can be genuinely hurt by
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encountering well-reasoned ideas they disagree with I think the way that the marketplace of ideas is supposed to work
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is that when you encounter an idea you disagree with you formulate an equally wellth thought out
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response and you engage in intellectual discourse maybe get curious yeah get curious exactly but you know I think
00:24:02
these words are really significant because he's saying not just that the objectors here were offended he was
00:24:07
saying that they were hurt genuinely hurt so he's buying into this idea that hearing ideas you disagree with is
00:24:14
somehow a threat to your safety yeah and as soon as you do that as soon as you concede that there can be some sort of
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physical harm from engaging with ideas you give the equivalent of a heckler's veto to
00:24:31
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
00:24:38
Marketplace of ideas and certainly a platform for ideas worth spreading if you're going to give a veto to people
00:24:44
who can claim that their subjective emotional reaction to well-thought ideas should
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Trump the right of the speaker to put out that idea or the the broader audience to hear it right exactly and I
00:25:00
think that's and I think that's where We've Ended up Coleman can I ask your point of view on institutional capture
00:25:06
obviously this is different than the topics you've been you've spoken about but as you've gone through this
00:25:13
experience with Ted and as you think more broadly about what's going on do you have a point of view on the capture
00:25:19
of Institutions from the bottom up that's happened and how that's affected some of these topics like free speech
00:25:25
sharing of ideas open discourse um all these foundations that made kind of a free and open Society work
00:25:31
effectively for so long yeah well it's it's a very difficult problem because you know it's easy for me from
00:25:38
the outside not being the leader of a major institution to to say well this is just what you have to do obviously it's
00:25:45
more psychologically difficult to go to your own staff that you have to metaphorically live with every day and
00:25:51
really shake things up um and mo many people aren't willing to do that someone like Barry Weiss who used to be at the
00:25:57
New York Times you know her point of view on it is look you just got to start your own institutions you have to start
00:26:05
your own institutions with the right ethos from day one and that's what she's tried to do with the Free Press um
00:26:12
rather than try to reform institutions that have a lot of unhealthy inertia bet Chris could have stopped this very
00:26:18
easily I mean this is a failure of leadership what he needed to tell these employees is look our mission is to be a
00:26:25
platform for spreading interesting ideas is and we can't treat this speech differently than any other speech just
00:26:32
because you disagree with it that's all he had to do and by the way just because
00:26:36
an idea may be offensive does not mean that it should not be spread I think have you read Jonathan hates book
00:26:43
coddling of the American mind absolutely yeah great book and I think that speaks
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and that was the book I gave away in our gift bag at the all-in summit this year
00:26:51
because I thought it was such like an important and kind of preent point of view on what's going on right now that
00:26:58
we assume that if something is offensive by some some group could be a large group or a small group it needs to be
00:27:04
suppressed and obviously as you extend that concept to its extreme you end up losing many ideas that
00:27:12
challenge you know the current kind of main concept that everyone believes here's what I don't understand so
00:27:19
Coleman just maybe if you can just guess why when somebody watches this talk could they feel
00:27:28
genuinely hurt like what like if we had to steal man them let's step in their shoes like what is the what's the cycle
00:27:37
that's going on there that gets them to oh my God this is an intolerable point of
00:27:44
view yeah I mean I think there has to be something with if you're a person that has you know St your life or your career
00:27:53
out on the concept of sort of race-based divers iversity equity and inclusion explicitly taking race into account in
00:28:02
policies and you know you're someone that's been working in that domain for 30 years and you see someone like me
00:28:09
come up there and just argue against that whole approach there may be some severe threat mechanism that comes on
00:28:18
board where you actually don't have a rational argument that that easily debunks what I'm saying because what I'm
00:28:26
saying is very reasonable and so in the absence of a great rational argument when the stakes are high all
00:28:34
the you know Primal animal emotions sort of come out your your whole lyic system
00:28:40
and you feel like you're kind of in a fight ORF flight situation and and you and you feel incredibly emotional that's
00:28:46
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
00:28:53
means certain things might go away and and I think the two examples they gave you Chris Anderson came on stage and
00:28:59
said oh you know when conductors are looking for a new violinist they put them behind a you know a shade and they
00:29:06
and they do colorblind selection process a color blind selection process I think
00:29:10
Malcolm Gladwell talked about that in blink and your response to and then they said well wouldn't be better if we could
00:29:17
have you know some representation in that group so then we would inspire people to get to the group your response
00:29:23
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
00:29:31
getting access to violins at the at a young age because schools are underfunded or ban programs are are
00:29:37
horrible in inner cities that's where you want to intervene you don't want to intervene a at the point at the at the
00:29:44
meritocratic endline racially rigging the very bar that you would use to measure progress on those deeper
00:29:51
Dimensions have you read this book called losing ground by Charles Marine yes I have I mean a very provocative
00:30:00
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
00:30:06
would love to support you in any way that I could to do it but we don't have a full
00:30:11
accounting of what really happened starting in the late 1960s with lbj's war on poverty and I think when you look
00:30:19
at racism through the American lived experience a lot of it goes back to a bunch of economic incentives that were
00:30:26
set up to try to what theoretically seemed at the time the right thing we can debate whether that's where LBJ came
00:30:32
from or not but you compound and Cascade a bunch of decisions forward and to your
00:30:36
point now we're sort of trying to deal with the symptoms Without Really addressing the root cause and I think if
00:30:42
America wants to really heal and deal with this what we also need to do is give all those people that have that
00:30:46
fight ORF flight response a better toolkit to understand what kind of godess here because right now we have a
00:30:52
very charged way of viewing these things without actually looking at some of the
00:30:56
practical quantifiable details Thomas so has talked about it Charles Murray talks
00:31:01
about it but these are unfortunately such heterodox ideas that they just don't get
00:31:06
enough mainstream discussion and if you then compound that with this institutional capture they get buried
00:31:13
and so the answer may actually be sitting right in front of our face where it was the Ware reform system that we
00:31:19
implemented in the late 1960s on Down the Line because those are structural ways where we can solve it which
00:31:25
ultimately will get to your point which is great fund more music in the schools in that example and right now we're so
00:31:32
caught up in all of the the labels and the fear mongering that we never get to that and so I just wanted to put that
00:31:37
out there that I think that there needs to be smart brilliant people like yourself young people who can do a full
00:31:44
accounting of like the last 50 or 60 years in a much more structural way that these gentlemen tried to do but the
00:31:49
ideas were just too heterodox at the time but because of formats like podcast and like the Free Press and other things
00:31:55
I think there's a chance that you can actually to get these ideas out and I think it's important because I think
00:32:01
folks like me or the people that approached you there's not enough of us that came from this background that are
00:32:06
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
00:32:13
just viscerally react but the more that we can shift those people away from viscerally reacting to actually
00:32:19
tolerating and then thinking and then evolving their point of view you can do some enormous good in the world just why
00:32:25
I just wanted to put that out there yeah yeah no I mean that's a huge topic and an understudied topic what was the
00:32:32
effect of of the welfare reforms of the' 60s and70s I know my mother used to say
00:32:36
she grew up in the South Bronx I'm half Hispanic half black American and she used to say uh she used to just have
00:32:43
stories of you know when the welfare Auditors would come around and people would hide their boyfriends hide their
00:32:48
husbands hide their husbands exactly and the um and in the book Black Power by stokeley carmichel um AKA quame té which
00:32:56
is is uh you know the manifesto of the Black Power movement hardly a a right-wing Source they they made the
00:33:03
same point about welfare reform so they definitely is something to be investigated there um it's not really my
00:33:09
point of expertise I know Glenn Lowry is someone who has really you know dug into
00:33:14
that sort of research but there's definitely a a a lot of room for study there Colman let me ask you a question
00:33:20
about our industry we've had um a lot of hand ringing and debates about diversity
00:33:27
in funding of startups uh Capital allocators Venture Capital firms and um we have limited partners who have a
00:33:36
mission to have more diverse uh General Partners the people at Venture firms who
00:33:41
invest in startups invest in more female lead startups Etc because the numbers frankly you know have not been um very
00:33:49
diverse uh historically inventure far from it and we recently had a female a black female Venture firm I think it's
00:33:58
called Fearless Founders get sued I'm not sure if you're aware of that lawsuit it's by the same person who sued
00:34:04
Harvard should there be Venture firms specifically designed to change the ratio is the language people use and
00:34:12
should you know people with large endowments of capital be backing you know black Venture capitalists to see
00:34:19
more of them or female black venture capitalist Hispanic Etc or how would you look at that issue which has been a
00:34:26
pretty sticky issue and hasn't changed for a long time so prescriptively I don't want to
00:34:32
say much because I don't like to tell people how to run their funds or run their businesses right if you're a
00:34:36
Christian and you want to hire only Christian people if you're a Muslim you want to hire only Muslims I think you
00:34:41
should frankly be allowed to do that if those are your personal values now personally I will tell you with respect
00:34:47
to the people that I would hire to say work on my podcast I want every single hire to know that I am not hiring them
00:34:54
as a result of their skin color or or gender or any other contingent feature of of their identity I want them to know
00:35:04
that I'm hiring them for what they really bring to the table now I have a very small team maybe there's something
00:35:10
about how the Optics certain Optics are required for a larger um a larger firm but I think it it the problems begin
00:35:20
when you when you sort of bless this idea that race is a super deep feature of who you are right from the start when
00:35:28
you bless that idea right from the start it sends the signal that what people bring to the table is their racial
00:35:35
identity is their gender now when you fast forward two years down the line when a company is having some meltdown
00:35:41
over a race or a gender issue you have to understand that it's possible you made this bed by signaling from the very
00:35:48
beginning that what's important about the people you're bringing in is their race is their gender and that you are uh
00:35:54
vulnerable to the kinds of appeals that can be made purely on the basis of what are ultimately superficial features of
00:36:02
our identity yeah it's well said what would your advice be to institutional leaders that are past that point of no
00:36:09
return the CEOs of big companies and big institutions that are now captive by these ideologies where they are
00:36:18
effectively as you say Ultra sensitive to issues around race and gender and other sort of you know superficial
00:36:25
identities and are challenged often to to make decisions or driven to make decisions
00:36:31
that their employees and teams demand of them do you have advice on how they can
00:36:37
rethink their roles as leaders and how to reframe this I mean in a word no because it's by that point it's uh it's
00:36:45
it's an intract intractable problem I've had I've talked to CEOs that asked this
00:36:50
question to me over and over again you know like what do I do once I'm past the point where i' I have so many staff and
00:36:56
it's it's you know the system is so sprawling that it's no longer under my control I have so many people with
00:37:02
values that I don't share that I frankly think privately are insane but I cannot
00:37:07
say so publicly because I have higher order commitments to the shareholders to the board to to steer this ship right
00:37:15
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
00:37:20
do do you think that same problem is inherent in political parties in the United States states St governments and
00:37:28
other larger kind of social systems that we used to organize ourselves and are now also captive and in kind of a point
00:37:35
of no return I think definitely in the Democratic party there has been a problem with mistaking the Twitter
00:37:44
commentariat and the journalistic elite for real life the truth is the vast majority of even Democrat voters find my
00:37:53
arguments around colorblindness totally uncontroversial whether they may have some agreements or
00:37:59
not but if you ask the elite there's a meltdown right there's this huge there's just this huge discrepancy and it can
00:38:08
never be hammered enough the extent to which people in politics are operating in a bubble and believe mistaking the
00:38:15
elite and the Twitter Sphere for The Wider population I mean this feels to me like
00:38:21
why Donald Trump got elected but that's another topic this has been amazing uh everybody take a moment search for
00:38:27
Coleman Hughes subscribe to his YouTube channel type Coleman Hughes Ted Coleman you do you do a podcast yeah I do a
00:38:34
podcast conversations with Coleman actually David saaks has been on podcast about a year ago how did he do how did
00:38:39
he do he did absolutely fantastic did he make you feel unsafe he did actually yes was it talk about the Ukraine talk
00:38:48
about UK talk wait can I can I be on your podcast I of course I would I would be honored oh great fantastic there you
00:38:56
go I would be honored thank you I I I saw you had um the Dilbert guy on and I thought that was pretty engaging
00:39:04
conversation yeah Scott Adam who is you know really controversial and I thought you handled that one really well too
00:39:10
yeah thanks he's an interesting one it's like he has a lot of brilliant things to
00:39:14
say but also he maybe thinks the CIA is going to kill him recently on Twitter it's it's a mixed bag it's I would
00:39:20
mixbag would be where I would go with it all right listen this has been amazing the Ted Talk is extraordinary everybody
00:39:26
should watch it and yeah ideas worth spreading unless maybe uh you don't agree with them go to the Ted Channel
00:39:35
and watch it stop sorry I mean I don't want to give Ted too much of a hard time but they tried to get me to pay $50,000
00:39:43
a year $25,000 a year for like a fiveyear package to go to the event and I was like how how much is Ted how much
00:39:49
is Ted reg tickets used to be 7500 and then no they used to be 7500 then I think they went up to 10K and and then
00:39:56
you can do like donor tickets and you get different features and so on basically they're sold out remember it
00:40:01
it is set up as a nonprofit and there is philanthropic work that's done and so you know the organization is again it's
00:40:09
not a profiteering media company it it it became a big Media Company because of the success of the the efforts and the
00:40:16
the quality of the content that was produced over time but you know as we talked about a lot of media companies
00:40:22
and a lot of Institutions get captured and you know the original kind of Mission to paraphrase to paraphrase uh
00:40:29
Bruce Willis and Pulp Fiction Ted's dead baby Ted's dead Ted's dead a great SC you gets on the back of the motorcycle
00:40:37
de's dead baby as soon as they allow the staff who have let's say highly Niche Elite views to veto or suppress talks
00:40:47
they don't like then it stops being a platform for ideas this becomes another leftwing interest group what other ideas
00:40:53
what other talks have been canned before they even got to to the stage you have to wonder and we don't know who are they
00:40:59
not inviting and it's all the it's the top of the funnel Jason exactly that's all
00:41:04
that's all the people that they're not invited what about the person that's Pro Cole I wonder if the pro Cole person is
00:41:10
allowed to present it to I doubt it uh you know and the they they had Sarah Silverman and she did a comedy set which
00:41:17
was hilarious and the same people so this is the thing I find so the hypocrisy is just so crazy uh with the
00:41:23
Ted people and it's a lot of my friends still go is they had Sarah Silverman come these people have laughed at Sarah
00:41:29
Silverman a million times they've watched Dave Chappelle they've seen any number of comments you know make them
00:41:36
laugh with edgy humor but then when they're in that you know Ted audience and they're feeling super precious and
00:41:43
that they're very important because they donate 50 Grand a year or whatever fredberg gave them I don't know to get
00:41:48
in there from the side door then they were super offended so it you know they're Hypocrites and I don't
00:41:55
know how to say it anymore clearly they they literally you could pull up Chris Anderson apologizing not just again
00:42:03
again I really apologizing for a comedian I mean I I I hope that this is a learning experience for everyone I
00:42:09
hope that this is a turning point for leadership and in institutions like this to take a look at what happened how it
00:42:14
happened and then hopefully to write the course because organizations like Ted I
00:42:17
thought were very important and should be in the world and should be successful and I hope that they kind of return to
00:42:22
the original values and I hope that this is a moment that that there's a learning
00:42:25
experence that we don't Just sh on them and say they're awful they're failed it's over hopefully something
00:42:31
comes of this I do think there is one other potential remedy here which besides just starting a new Ted um and
00:42:38
the kind of the Barry Wise point of view which is just write it off and start over remember what Brian Armstrong did
00:42:43
at coinbase he basically said listen we have a mission here it's around crypto we're going to focus 100% on this
00:42:49
Mission and if you're not on board with this Mission or want to capture this institution to promote other missions
00:42:55
this is not the place for you go do those missions somewhere else he took a hit the New York Times
00:43:01
wrote their obligatory hit piece Chris was tell everybody no instead of saying that I would say if Chris has good
00:43:09
mentors as well as a good sounding board that is the threshold question that should be debated right now is do I walk
00:43:16
in the door and do I just give this simple litmus test and have people sign up or not and yeah Rec and it's quite
00:43:24
and it's quite easy because to your point it's not like he's inventing something new he's saying this is where
00:43:29
we started and this is where we're going to stay and this is what it means and if
00:43:34
he doesn't do that then he's spoken with his actions and it is what it is it'll what what is meant to happen will then
00:43:39
happen exactly exactly it's it's a it's a moment for looking at the internal Compass it's a wholesale leadership
00:43:45
reset moment opportunity see if it happens or not down and keep going I really appreciate you're being public
00:43:52
about all this and talking about it it's been it's been a great conversation everybody
00:43:57
for we'll see you soon cheers now see you man thanks all right listen it's a new segment we have here when virture
00:44:03
signaling goes wrong if you missed it the Canadian Parliament gave a standing ovation to a Nazi not like a new Nazi or
00:44:12
a Nazi sympathizer uh one of the few actual Nazis still alive uh here we see uh just the crowd going wild uh last
00:44:21
Friday uh ukrainians president zinsky gave a speech at the Canadian House of Commons
00:44:27
and um Canadian house Speaker Anthony Rota introduced a 98-year-old [Music] yaroslav hunka as a Ukrainian war hero
00:44:37
and then the Canadian Parliament proceeded to give him a standing ovation and it uh turns out that this person
00:44:49
first fought for the first Ukrainian division in World War II that unit was also known
00:44:56
as the Waffen SS Galicia Division if I'm pronouncing that cor correctly uh which was a
00:45:03
voluntary unit under under Nazi command so the Canadian parment apparently gave a standing ovation to
00:45:10
Nazis they have apologize for this and said it was a mistake chth I don't know if you got to see this you're Canadian
00:45:17
uh so your thoughts on what we've seen here I mean I'll give you my feedback as somebody who when I was you know in
00:45:27
Canada was a pretty Ardent liberal I grew up in a liberal household my father canvas religiously for the
00:45:37
Liberals and I think that at some point after I moved to the United States they took wokeism which I think
00:45:45
look at some level was rooted in something very important which was how do you get marginalized folks to be
00:45:53
seen but unfortunately along the way just got perverted by folks that just use it as a cudel to censor people to
00:46:01
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
00:46:10
thing that it masks are all of these other really bad things that come along with it and one of them in Canada which
00:46:17
Justin Trudeau is case Zero of is also when nepotism goes bad his father was an incredible Exemplar prime minister in
00:46:26
Canada set the Benchmark on all Dimensions was just incredible cool composed moved the country forward
00:46:35
brought the country together and then fast forward 25 or 30 years in a vacuum of leadership what basically happened we
00:46:42
picked this guy who was up until that point a substitute teacher and the other claim to fame was appearing twice in
00:46:49
brownface okay so making fun of people like me and elected him prime minister and what happened was he became the sort
00:46:58
of like virtue signaler and chief of this very important GA country and it was all kind of bumbling
00:47:07
along and in the absence of anybody else that was able to step up and offer an alternative he got reelected barely but
00:47:14
he did then these things happened in the last year and when you look through that
00:47:19
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
00:47:28
who was Ill qualified and way over his head who shouldn't have been in this role as prime minister get put in that
00:47:33
position when finally a group of people in Canada push back in this case the truckers he and the entire government
00:47:41
explicitly labeled them as Nazis right and said these people need to be put down and completely
00:47:49
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
00:47:55
right on the surface these are really seems like good Earnest people that are just trying to make a point and are not
00:48:00
being heard then you had this thing three weeks ago two two or three weeks ago where he actually had a speech in
00:48:09
front of the entire Parliament where he accused the largest democracy in the world India in this case of coming into
00:48:16
Canada Canadian soil and assassinating a Canadian citizen which is an enormous allegation to Levy and what was
00:48:24
important to know about that allegation was that it was done without the explicit vocal support of either Britain
00:48:30
or the United United States which would be the two most natural allies that Canada would present that information to
00:48:36
and instead of doing it behind a closed door to Modi he did it on live stage like it was like some theatrical
00:48:45
performance then India follows up and says um this guy's kind of known to be a little bit of a drug addict and was on a
00:48:51
two-day bender and the Indian drug dog smelled a bunch of cocaine on the plane then they have this thing for
00:48:59
Vladimir zalinski where everybody was there to sort of like virtue signal this war and then they actually invited a
00:49:06
Nazi and then gave him a standing ovation so when you when you put it all together I think what it shows is just
00:49:12
the lack of professionalism which also belies just the lack of experience and capability
00:49:19
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
00:49:27
can actually start to ask yourself why can't we just get really good competent people to do these jobs why can't we
00:49:33
actually embrace free speech and all of what it means and explore that why can't
00:49:36
we have people that don't need to theatrically perform on stage because eventually you're going to make these
00:49:41
mistakes and you're going to embarrass your entire country and then you're going to imperil relations with some
00:49:47
really important allies and I think this is a moment in time where all of those things need to be questioned and put on
00:49:52
the table you're clearly questioning his com competence here because to not have
00:49:59
the care to check who is going to speak in front of parliament is crazy and just
00:50:04
to make it super clear the speaker that invited hunka that was Anthony Rota resigned on Tuesday and tro says Rota
00:50:13
the person who invited the Nazi uh is solely responsible well then he blamed Russian misinformation on top of that
00:50:20
but Jason you don't you don't the Prime Minister who is the most important politician in the country doesn't show
00:50:25
up place unless the office knows who else is going to be there he knew that zeni was going to be there he would have
00:50:30
known who the guest list was this was just scaping to cover it up but but the bigger issue to be clear
00:50:37
you're not saying that they invited a Nazi on purpose and cheered for a Nazi on purpose where nobody's saying that
00:50:43
you're saying there's a lack of care here and it's it's a lack of confidence it's a lack confidence yeah yeah just so
00:50:50
we're clear yeah okay so I agree with all of that I think there's also two other dimensions to this backstory if
00:50:56
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
00:51:04
controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future the present is Ukraine it is
00:51:12
the current thing everybody has to cheer for Ukraine and for the killing of Russians the reason why hunka was
00:51:18
cheered with a standing ovation is because they said that he fought Russians he was a war hero who fought
00:51:24
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
00:51:29
against Russia who could he possibly have been fighting for but to the extent people did that they sort of airbrushed
00:51:36
it or whitewash history so the present controls the past to ensure a a vision of the future which Trudeau laid out in
00:51:44
this speech he gave recently where he became so Ardent in his support for Ukraine he was almost yelling at the
00:51:53
podium saying that Canada had to make make all these economic sacrifices to win the war so that's Point number one
00:51:59
is I think that the woke M virus almost requires this whitewashing of the past but it's done for a specific purpose
00:52:07
which is to control the future well they're not whitewashing the past if it was a mistake that intellectually
00:52:11
doesn't make sense no what they did is what they're saying is if I'm understanding you correctly yeah the
00:52:17
present is that we hate Russia so much that we're going to cheer for anybody who killed Russians okay I understand
00:52:25
your point but you're you're agreeing that they did not knowingly put a Nazi on there so it was a mistake got it I
00:52:29
don't think they they knowingly did it it was a huge debacle and embarrassing spectacle I think that nobody asks any
00:52:36
questions about the past because the present overrides it sure the present need to support the current thing
00:52:43
overrides like any sort of examination what has happened historically there's one other way in which I think this
00:52:50
wasn't an accident Jason is that if you look at us policy towards Ukraine we have made common cause with a number of
00:52:58
these far-right Ultra nationalist groups frankly Neo-Nazi groups and this occurred before the the current War so
00:53:06
it's not just a marriage of convenience first of all if you go back to War I the
00:53:10
the father of Ukrainian nationalism is a guy named stepen Bandera and today in Ukraine he is seen as some sort of hero
00:53:18
and there are streets named after him and their streets named after some of his co-conspirators who collaborated
00:53:23
with Nazis if you fast forward to the more recent past to 2014 when we had this uh maidon coup in
00:53:33
Kiev that was backed by Victoria Newland one of the key figures in that coup was
00:53:40
a guy named Ola tonbach who is the founder of the soda party which is the social nationalist party which if you
00:53:49
know what Nazi stands for it's National Socialist they basically just flip the name and the original logo of this Vota
00:53:56
party was the wolf's Angel which was a Nazi Insignia this was a far right party infused with the racial ideology of
00:54:06
Stephan Bandera who was again a Nazi and they brought this guy in and and his party as the muscle in this coup if you
00:54:15
look at the Victoria nulan phone call the infamous phone call where she is picking the new Ukrainian government the
00:54:21
the yats is our guy phone call she says that klitsch meaning klitch and and tonbach need to remain on the
00:54:28
outside but yats needs to be talking to tonbach four times a week okay he was part of the chess pieces that they were
00:54:35
moving around after the coup a civil war breaks out in the dabass because the ethnic Russians there are opposed to
00:54:43
this new government and the fact that yanukovich who they voted for was deposed in an Insurrection what happens
00:54:50
then is a war breaks out where farri paramilitary organizations like right sector and like the infamous aoff
00:54:57
Battalion start killing these ethnic Russian separatists and a full-blown Civil War breaks out thousands of people
00:55:04
get killed does the Kiev government suppress these Neo-Nazi groups no they bring him under the formal command
00:55:12
structure of the Ukrainian military AO Battalion becomes a division of the Ukrainian military it's
00:55:21
shocking and this goes on from 2014 through the Ukraine Army just to be clear here
00:55:28
has Nazis in it Nazi supporters there's no question about that and there are many people who were concerned about
00:55:34
this in the 2015 to 2020 time frame there were many articles written about it the nation had an article about it
00:55:40
there were efforts in Congress at various points to try to ensure that the aid that we were giving to the Ukrainian
00:55:45
government did not go to the a off Italian so so it is said so it is said okay I think the important and and and
00:55:54
obviously is a Nazi or a Nazi symp no no I I don't think he's a Nazi and to be clear I don't think most ukrainians are
00:56:00
Nazis and I don't even think that most Ukrainian nationalists are Nazis what I'm saying is that there is a Nazi
00:56:06
element in Ukraine that people have whitewashed over well here's the thing about it I don't think it's a huge
00:56:12
percentage but I think they have outsid influence due to their willingness to use violence du due to their extremism
00:56:19
and they're willingness to use it's any different than the Nazi percentage in say what whatever you want to say white
00:56:25
supremacist in the United States or in Germany or anywhere else I do and I think it's different in this sense that
00:56:31
in the United States for sure we have Neo-Nazi groups they're not brought into the military we don't have streets named
00:56:38
after their Patriarchs furthermore we don't have members of our military with Nazi
00:56:44
Insignia on them there was a New York Times article just a few months ago talking about the fact that
00:56:51
embarrassingly a lot of these Ukrainian soldiers are being photographed with Nazi Insignia on their uniforms now the
00:56:58
New York Times is framing this as a problem because it was a propaganda coup for Putin and presumbly it was I think
00:57:06
but I think it's a problem because it's a problem not because of just the pr Optics of it and you know at various
00:57:11
points I think this is in the New York Times article as well Western media has had to airbrush these photos to hide
00:57:17
this fact now oh the New York Times has airbrushed photos of Nazi I don't think New York Times has but I don't think New
00:57:23
York Times has but I think they talk about this thorny problem of not wanting to show these photos with respect to the
00:57:29
the zalinsky being Jewish so what I'd say about that is that zilinsky only came on the scene quite recently he got
00:57:37
elected in 2019 and again I don't think the majority of people in Ukraine are Nazis
00:57:44
okay so I'm not saying that but just because zalinsky came on the scene in 2019 and was elected president doesn't
00:57:49
mean there's a long and I would say disturbing history and Association between Ukrainian ultr nationalism and
00:57:57
Neo-Nazi groups and I think that part of the the woke thing and part of this orwellian desire where control of the
00:58:04
present gives you the ability to rewrite the past is that there's been a deliberate effort to cover up this
00:58:09
problem and to pretend it doesn't exist to turn a blind eye to it well my point is that US policy has been to do this
00:58:18
and other words the US saying our government yeah okay the US state department and presumably CIA
00:58:25
made common cause with these far-right groups because we thought it was beneficial to be aligned with them and
00:58:31
so we did it in the maanu in 2014 from 2015 to 2021 we could have gone along with efforts under the minska cords to
00:58:39
resolve this conflict in the dbass peacefully but we never did that we never gave it any support and instead we
00:58:46
gave support to the Kiev regime's attempt to violently suppress these Russian separatists and again the
00:58:51
suppression was being done by these right-wing groups look does that make our state department Nazis no does that
00:58:58
make the Canadian Parliament Nazis no what I'm saying is that in both cases a blind eye was turned to the disturbing
00:59:06
ideology and past and associations of these people because it's politically in our interest to do business with them
00:59:13
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
00:59:18
the backstory that explains like something like this can happen yeah okay Jason you have any re actions to Trudeau
00:59:26
doing this and what it means or does it mean nothing does the backstory I provided give you context on how
00:59:32
something like this can happen that's not just like an accident well I don't think any of us can know exactly what
00:59:38
happened here and there's probably going to be some sort of Investigation but I don't think they knowingly put a Nazi up
00:59:42
there um I think they are pro the war and that probably could that have blinded them to do deeper research sure
00:59:50
people are political politicians most of all and um people probably take facts or
00:59:57
you know any kind of anything they can use to to um make their case stronger they'll take advantage of that so yeah
01:00:05
sure and is truee do zinski zalinsky was pumping his fist and cheering don't you
01:00:10
think he knew he can't not know the history he has to know he has to know if he does then that somebody who was
01:00:17
fighting the Russians in World War II good question on the German side if he did then you would be saying if he did
01:00:25
know and he was pumping his fist then you'd be saying that he was pro-nazi he was cheering for Nazi knowingly no what
01:00:32
I'm saying is look the fact that you've got some Jewish answer street is not in my view a get out of jail free card you
01:00:39
making political decision je part are say are you saying he knowingly cheered for a Nazi you know one of the big
01:00:46
backers of the aoff Battalion is a Ukrainian olar named Igor kosi kosi is Jewish you ask me my opinion I'm just
01:00:55
saying do you do you think he knowingly cheered for a Nazi is that what you're insinuating I think he knowingly cheered
01:01:00
knowing that this Ukrainian nationalist who fought in World War II must have been on the German side because there
01:01:05
was only one side F Russians okay I'm just clarifying here I don't actually have an opinion thanks for uh quering me
01:01:12
J I'm not saying that he cheered for Nazism what I'm saying is he cheered for Ukrainian nationalism and he knows that
01:01:17
Ukrainian nationalism is bound up and tied up with this disturbing history which he is willing to ignore do you
01:01:23
guys do you guys let me finish my point about the ASO Battalion the AO Battalion
01:01:27
is undeniably a Neo-Nazi group it was funded by eor Ki who's a Ukrainian oligarch who is Jewish who lives in
01:01:34
Israel why would kaloi do that because the aof Battalion believes that every inch of Ukraine including cria and
01:01:41
donbass which has enormous energy reserves belongs to Ukraine so it served the business interests of the energy
01:01:48
magnates in Ukraine to support these people and that look politics makes for strange bed fellows yeah what I was
01:01:55
going to say actually yeah so I'm not saying that zalinski or Ki or anybody else is a Nazi because they aligned with
01:02:03
these people I'm saying they found it politically expedient and useful to align with these groups just like the US
01:02:09
state department did quite frankly I don't think we should do that if you want to go around the world Jason saying
01:02:14
that we're the champions of freedom and democracy and having this moralistic almost virtue signaling foreign policy I
01:02:20
don't think we should be in business or aligned with these Neon groups wherever the hell they are I think that's when
01:02:26
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
01:02:33
policy let's say if one wants to have I would use the word yeah if you're going to be principled you need to keep the
01:02:39
you need to not support Nazis we're in agree what do you Jason and freeberg what do you guys think of just like the
01:02:44
the breadcrumbs in Canada I'm just curious whether you guys care about this whole vein of just like competent
01:02:51
leadership nepotism if you have a view or it's like that is just what it is whatever I I don't know enough about
01:02:58
Canadian politics really but Trudeau does not seem to be super qualified yeah um
01:03:05
so but I don't know enough about it I mean so just in terms of the Canadian part of this there's a writer named Jeet
01:03:10
here who's a left-wing Rider but he posted something very interesting here where he explained that in the late
01:03:15
1940s and 1950s Canada took in a large number of former Nazis many of whom were SS veterans so people like hunka because
01:03:23
they were good anti-com and then these Nazis proceed to terrorize anti-nazi Ukrainian Canadians
01:03:28
there was this Ukrainian Hall was bombed here in 1950 so Canada has a weird history of bringing in some of these
01:03:36
people after World War II so the point is was aware of that yeah exactly look there's no way that any semi-intelligent
01:03:43
person who knows the history of World War II especially the Ukrainian involvement in World War II wouldn't
01:03:50
know that Ukraine was on the German side in World War II and hunka volunteered for the
01:03:58
SS he was a volunteer for the SS gesia division so look did the Speaker of the House know probably not I think wokeness
01:04:05
makes people stupid where they just think about the current thing and I don't ask too many questions about the
01:04:10
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
01:04:19
Ukraine and wokeness all right there's a bunch of news about open ey this week just very quickly openai is in advanced
01:04:26
talks according to the financial times with Johnny I of iPhone Fame Steve Jobs's long-term collaborator and masi
01:04:37
yoshian of SoftBank to raise more than $1 billion dollar to build the iPhone of AI and so the idea would be uh Johnny
01:04:46
Ives got a design firm called love from and they would help open ey design their
01:04:52
first consumer device via the Ft sources Financial Times that is Alman and I have been having
01:05:01
brainstorming sessions and I of San Francisco Studio about what a consumer product centered around open AI would
01:05:07
look like it's very early stages and son has pitched a role for arm in the development uh his chip
01:05:14
company that he recently took public they also uh discussed Masa and Alman uh creating a company that would draw on
01:05:20
talent and Tech from their three groups with SoftBank putting in a billion dollars in seed and then also openi is
01:05:29
discussing a secondary share sale that would value the company at between 80 billion and 90 billion this should be 3x
01:05:36
the most recent valuation reportedly though to their credit they are on track to generate $1 billion in Revenue in
01:05:42
2023 uh I'm not sure how much of that is the $20 a month subscription you know that' be pretty extraordinary if that
01:05:48
was those personal subscriptions uh this would be a massive gain on paper for Microsoft open a is 49% owned by
01:05:54
Microsoft and Sam malman has personally has stated multiple times now that he has no equity so he would be getting
01:06:02
zero dollars of this I and of course we know that open AI started as a nonprofit before switching and our
01:06:10
friend Veno kosla told us very clearly uh that those are just details uh what happened there
01:06:17
Jam those are those are those are just details bod is the goat Sam is the closest thing that we
01:06:26
have to an emergent Mogul in Tech and the reason is because if everything sits on this
01:06:33
substrate you're going to need to get a license you're going to want to get access to whatever developer program
01:06:40
whatever beta that open AI has and so as a result that's already happened by the way well
01:06:48
I was just going to say so he'll be in the cap bir seat so even if he doesn't have any equity in open AI he'll get
01:06:54
he'll just put his money into the best startups that it's like why combinator on steroid by the way I have a take on
01:07:00
that whole claim that Sam doesn't own any part of open AI all right let's hear it go ahead Columbo explain to us the
01:07:09
details one more thing there ma'am you said you don't own any shares in open AI but you started open AI right well then
01:07:16
who does yeah that's the thing what I think is really interesting about what open AI has done in its fundraising
01:07:22
rounds is that each round has been a cap return model so explain what that is to
01:07:28
the 100x 100x right every round well I think some of the very early people got capped at 100x I think maybe the $30
01:07:34
billion round was capped at 10x so I think the $30 billion rounds capped at a $300 million valuation meaning if you're
01:07:40
an investor your shares go up in value till the company hits a market cap at 300 billion and then basically you're C
01:07:46
effectively cashed out it's like you bought a share but sold a call back to the company the movie industry works this
01:07:55
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
01:07:59
seen that in the independent film business yeah yeah so so in any event and I think people who invested like the
01:08:04
$2 billion valuation were capped at like 100 billion I heard that employees who were getting stock options are capped at
01:08:10
100 billion or they were way back when they started graning these things so my point is that if open AI turns into one
01:08:17
of these companies like a Google ends up in the trillion dollar Club then nobody's going to own anything because
01:08:24
they will have already long ago well they'll keep selling new interest like the new interest will end up being like
01:08:29
8% no cuz what'll happen at the end is the new people that buy in at that higher price that that buy out the early
01:08:36
investors they're getting effectively things like 8% return it turns into debt eventually turns into some I think
01:08:43
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
01:08:50
call that's how they get around the IRS problem of it being not Equity that's how they say that it's not equity in a
01:08:56
private Corporation yeah but I think I's so brilliant about it is okay so look Sam set up this Foundation it's a
01:09:02
nonprofit but he controls that effectively right y so yes he technically is not an owner of the
01:09:08
shares the foundation is but what can't you do with the foundation that you could do with personal ownership other
01:09:15
than maybe buying a personal residence I mean you can buy a plane I think look at
01:09:19
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
01:09:27
through the Fig Leaf this Foundation I think he owns 100% of it in the event that the call option is struck meaning
01:09:34
it ends up being a trillion dollar company are are you saying Sam is elron hubber in this example let's not
01:09:41
speculate too much oh it's just details right as V said those are just details I
01:09:46
am speculating but I think it's informed speculation if you wanted to become the
01:09:50
world's first trillionaire and you were extremely uh premeditated about it clever and
01:09:56
premeditated about it what would you do number one you would want to choose a moonshot type area that was a world
01:10:03
changing technology AI certainly qualifies ultimate so does cold fusion maybe crypto does as I understand it Sam
01:10:09
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
01:10:16
really 100% if you could and that's a very hard thing to do when you're running a capital intensive startup but
01:10:23
in vors tend to underestimate the power law and the value of the far out ofthe money call option so maybe you can get
01:10:30
them to sell that back to you really cheaply and third if you're really farsighted you would want to insulate
01:10:36
yourself against populist Anger from being the world's first trillionaire so you would basically put
01:10:42
your shares in a nonprofit Foundation where you're not really sacrificing that much of control or the ability to
01:10:49
control the asset but it gives you tremendous I this conspiracy theory where did you come up with this is this
01:10:56
like this is genius this is genius did just you and Peter teal talk about this over chess or something how did you
01:11:02
construct this and you're saying this is informed I love Financial conspiracy corner I think it's rival science Corner
01:11:09
let's get the tinfoil hats out it's really freaking Friedberg out that we're even doing this diametrically opposite
01:11:14
to science corner is it a conspiracy or is it just reality I think if you are even 1% right the combination of lawyers
01:11:23
and accountants that would leak this and the number of people that were part of the origination of the foundation that
01:11:30
would want to sue will be very high that's just the natural state of things in these kinds of things it seems like a
01:11:37
lot easier way but what what but what have I said other than the fact that it was sort of premeditated which that's
01:11:42
not the right word that premeditated sounds too nefarious no no no I'm I'm just saying whenever I'm just saying
01:11:48
whenever money is made at this Quantum and at that scale everybody wants a piece because they know that that's
01:11:54
their one shot so I just think that it'll amplify the pressure for actors inside of those
01:12:03
organizations to take their shot and that's just going to be financially the right thing to do for a lot of people if
01:12:10
if what you're saying is true we know the Investments have been made under a capit return model I think that's fact
01:12:15
that's fact yes we know the nonprofit Foundation owns the shares that's fact and then just to put the 800B gorilla on
01:12:21
the table like what's Elon thinking because he was the one that really got this thing off the ground because that
01:12:26
critical investment made the whole thing come to life he could have done this on
01:12:29
his own yeah how much does he own zero zero I mean but after a lawsuit how much does he own I don't know uh I'm just
01:12:39
speculating so can we talk about the technology I'll te here we go so open a released some new chat GPT features the
01:12:45
key Point here is they're doing what's called multimodal multimodal is the big innovation what does that mean that
01:12:52
means the input could be voice the input could be code the input could be data uh
01:12:56
it could be a picture here's a picture if you're watching along on the YouTube channel do a search for Allin podcast on
01:13:01
YouTube hit subscribe hit the bell and it's a classic picture of one of those no parking signs where there's four
01:13:06
different ones you take a picture of that that's the input and you say it's Wednesday at 4m. can I park in the spot
01:13:12
right now tell me in one line it comes back and says yes you can park for up to 1 hour starting at 4m. what this means
01:13:18
is the output or the input could be in any of those modalities modalities fancy word for an image a video Etc so you're
01:13:25
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
01:13:32
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
01:13:37
really groundbreaking at the same time last week goard and S deep modra and I played with
01:13:44
this on this week in startups um you now have Google flights Google Docs Gmail and a number of the other core Google
01:13:52
services are now inard so that's not multi- uh modal exactly um but you could do things like ask Google flights hey
01:14:01
what is the best non-stop you know between New York City and Dubai or from an East Coast
01:14:08
destination that has laid down flat seats Etc and it really does uh it's starting to work so this idea that
01:14:14
Google is going to be displaced or they're moving slow that might be Antiquated information so those are the
01:14:19
two big big Monumental announcements just in the last 10 days freeberg when you look at these two which one is the
01:14:26
more important announcement and and what do you think about the pace because we here we are we're about to hit the
01:14:31
one-year anniversary of Chad GPT 3.5 I've been using a lot of different tools the last
01:14:38
couple of months and I'm kind of getting to the point that I feel that much of what's happening is underhyped rather
01:14:46
than overhyped there's some really incredible potential emerging um I'll I'll give a couple of examples and then
01:14:53
I'll talk about the mobile phone first is uh Andre kpi as you guys see in the tweet that I just posted in the chat
01:15:01
made a point today that llms are emerging not just as a chatbot but as a kernel process meaning a new type of
01:15:08
operating system that can do input and output across different modalities can interpret code can access the internet
01:15:15
and information and then can render things in a visual way or in an audio way that the user wants to consume it so
01:15:22
as a result llm become the core driver to a new type of computing interface there was a paper published and I'll uh
01:15:29
share the link to this paper here as well and we can put it in the the notes it's not worth pulling up on the screen
01:15:34
that showed that using llms in autonomous driving can actually significantly improve the performance of
01:15:41
the neural Nets that the autonomous cars are trained on so the autonomous car is
01:15:45
typically trained on a bunch of sensor data that comes in and then that sensor data determines what sort of action to
01:15:51
take with the car and what this team showed is that if you actually put in a communication layer that thinks and
01:15:57
talks like a human in between the sensor data and the action data it can do really wide raging interpretations of
01:16:04
the data that otherwise would not be apparent from the data set it was trained on so for example you can see a
01:16:09
person down the road and ask it what do you think that person's going to do next
01:16:13
and the llm because it's trained on a much larger Corpus of data than just sensor data from Cars it can make a
01:16:20
really good humanlike interpretation of that feedb decision back into the control system of the car and have the
01:16:26
car do something more intelligently than it otherwise would have been able to do
01:16:30
so these llms are becoming a lot more like a software um operating system and you can kind of extend that into Mobile
01:16:36
phones mobile phones originally were just voice and then they were single lines of text in the form of SMS then
01:16:42
you were able to browse the web and then the app Revolution came about where all
01:16:45
of this information emerged through apps what llms now allow perhaps is that the
01:16:50
entire operating system of the phone can run and render any sort of application or any sort of service or product you
01:16:56
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
01:17:04
output can be rendered by perhaps a bunch of what might otherwise be called apps but call it third party developers
01:17:09
that build in stream into that chat that's no longer looks like a chat interface like we see on chat GPT but
01:17:15
can be rendered visually can be rendered with audio can be rendered in a bunch of
01:17:18
different ways so if mobile really is the dominant Tech Hardware platform that humans are using uh for computing today
01:17:26
llms and these sorts of tools can become the dominant operating system on that hardware and you can totally rethink the
01:17:31
modality of how you use Computing through applications today we have an app store and we download apps and use
01:17:36
them and that all becomes instream in an llm or or chat type interface that can be accessed in a bunch of different ways
01:17:43
so for me there's a really bigger thing that's happening that's not just about making Smarter Tools and increasing
01:17:48
productivity but a real revolution in Computing itself that seems to be emergent and I think kpa's tweet this
01:17:54
morning some of the stuff I've been playing with some of the papers I've been reading and some of the speculation
01:17:59
around a mobile Hardware start to support that thesis and I think it's going to be really significant it's a
01:18:03
wholesale rewriting of computing Computing interfaces human computer interaction that's going to rethink
01:18:09
everything and it's it seems to be um pretty substantial and and just using a bunch of tools myself I'm blown away
01:18:14
every single time with what you can do yeah I mean right now I would agree with you strongly agree because this was some
01:18:22
this was magic links vision for the future which is you would talk to agents as they called them this was a a company
01:18:29
that existed in the '90s before smartphones existed it was a physical device Sony made the device and the
01:18:34
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
01:18:40
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
01:18:45
Links but actually just solving your problem and if the interface is from General magic right General magic right
01:18:52
yeah right right and there's a movie General Magic the movie you can look at the Wikipedia uh company but this was a
01:18:58
lot of like the early work in this area and uh I think this is going to become the interface in lm's talking to each
01:19:04
other then the question becomes who owns this how many of these are there are they verticalized so what what do you
01:19:10
think the game on the field is here uh sack well I I think this is super interesting I don't know if this
01:19:16
qualifies as a science corner but this is the most interesting science Corner you've ever done at a minimum it's a
01:19:20
nerd Corner yeah it's a nerd corner science Corner into into an intersecting realm so we can all be involved yeah I
01:19:26
don't know how we crowbar an Uranus joke into this but let's let's keep our eyes
01:19:31
wide open here yeah okay so on the phone I think what's interesting there just to
01:19:35
boil it down is you're talking about replacing the main interface which is currently a wall of apps right and yep
01:19:43
you push you tap an app to go into the app and then you interact with it you're talking about replacing all that with
01:19:48
basically voice so imagine if visual yeah or visual if you gles to it and ra rather than double click on an
01:19:58
app the app developers as they're call today are basically building instream utilities that are part of the chat
01:20:05
interface that that is the phone itself and that's what's going to be so compelling you have to re like we used
01:20:10
to write websites then we wrote apps and now we're going to write these kind of instream services these plugins Alexa
01:20:16
was gonna do this yeah Siri kind of sucks it just doesn't work that well but imagine if the phone
01:20:24
perfectly understood what you were saying then you would just say call me an Uber order me food whatever Andis you
01:20:30
would just instruct it precisely it it's like in that movie was it her her the wae Phoenix movie God that that should
01:20:37
have been my background today what am I thinking you've disappointed all the science Corner fans I think it's a Spike
01:20:41
Jones movie he did a really good job with that man that movie is looking more and more like it's going happen we got
01:20:47
to do a rewatchable on that yeah we should rewatch it you won't even really need the pain of glass if you can just
01:20:53
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
01:20:59
so much more if it has all those senses that's part of the multimodal demo that Che that open I showed this week is it
01:21:06
has video and it has camera inter integration and remember in human computer interaction it's often a lot
01:21:13
easier for a human to interact with a visual representation of stuff on a screen than to hear stuff in audio so we
01:21:21
we will still need some sort of visual display whether it's a screen or an eyass or something that shows us a bunch
01:21:27
of information in a way Sam apparently talk about the ecosystem he's trying to create Sam apparently invested in a
01:21:35
company that was Hardware plus software for like journaling like you would hang like a necklace around your neck a
01:21:42
camera type device a wearable a wearable device a wearable okay and it would record everything and it would be like
01:21:48
your memory backup and you'd be able to query it so that was William Gibson's uh
01:21:54
plotline in one of his books where he had a little Zeppelin that would follow people around uh and record everything
01:22:00
and then you'd have a DVR of your entire life and that would be completely indexed and then you could the AI would
01:22:06
know your entire life and be able to advise you do you guys use the feature on your airpods where if you leave them
01:22:11
in it will read you the messages from your signal or your incoming notifications where it reads them to
01:22:18
you obviously you don't so there's a new feature on the the airpods you leave them in and if you're working you're
01:22:24
walking around the house or you're walking around Manhattan like I am these last couple of days it will stop the
01:22:28
podcast I'm listening to and just say you know oh poker group says this oh you know your wife just texted you this and
01:22:36
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
01:22:43
think that that is going to be the eventual interface which is you'll hear certain things you'll see certain things
01:22:48
some things will be better visually other things will be better uh didn't Facebook announce a new pair of glasses
01:22:54
today the yeah those are like their spectacle kind of things these are the light AR glasses where you can take
01:22:59
pictures just meant to say everything's converging a lot faster than we all yeah
01:23:03
it is Con so I I started using a new note-taking app called reflect have you guys heard of this it's um reflecting on
01:23:10
things whoa this is progress tell more I'm just start I'm just starting to play with it but what it does is you keep
01:23:16
like a a daily log of who you've met with and what meetings were about so it's basically a not taking app but it
01:23:21
does backlinks so that it starts to link together the people and Concepts or whatever and so
01:23:27
like the use case that I think it's quite useful for once you've been using it for a while is okay I I'm meeting
01:23:33
with this person when's the last time I saw them what do we talk about then so it gives you like context yeah yeah
01:23:40
that's awesome I really like it's external memory right because like I can't I'm like I'm deluged with so much
01:23:45
stuff now I can't even like I forget people's names sometimes if I've only met him once or twice so his name is
01:23:50
freberg David freeberg name yeah not you guys but no it's also getting old you're
01:23:56
sure it's a function of how much input is coming at you there's just so much coming at us today right but but just
01:24:03
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
01:24:09
at some point in the future I've search against it but the only problem with it is I do have to like take the time to
01:24:14
enter all this stuff and it's kind of a pain it it could just be done for me automatically like a true external hard
01:24:20
drive to my brain then that would be very powerful it'll authenticate with slack and Gmail and do that
01:24:25
automatically and then you'll it'll be otherworldly it already connects with uh Google I don't want my slack in my
01:24:33
reflect what I want is my meetings which they do they integrate with Google Calendar great and really that's it like
01:24:39
the the main thing I want is if I could just know everyone I talk to and I don't
01:24:44
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
01:24:50
need a prompt that I met with this person and here was the topic that's it SX have you gone to the uh have you Bill
01:24:56
clintoned your greetings now it's great see you great to see you that's the great that's the great thing like it's
01:25:02
great to see you so that you know you preserve optionality for the people you have do the same thing so good it's
01:25:08
great to see you we've never met but it's great to great to see great to see you is they always say great to see you
01:25:13
adop that it's such a banger to I when I met uh Clinton I was at a Hillary Clinton fundraiser when she was a
01:25:21
Senator here in New York and they sent you up an elevator to this fundraiser and uh you get off the
01:25:26
elevator and Bill Clinton is standing there and he walks up to me like three steps oh J Cal it's great to see you and
01:25:34
he grabs your elbow he shakes I am so happy for what you did to help Hillary win and uh you know Jason we're so
01:25:40
appreciative and then you know you walk into the room and I'm like oh my God Bill Clinton Knows My Name totally then
01:25:48
I look behind me and I see the next person I see a woman come out with a clipboard whisper in his ear the per
01:25:53
next person's name coming out of the elevator he's waiting that person disappears oh David Sachs it's so great
01:26:00
to meet you ah really appreciate everything you've done for Hillary you know that role of whispering the name of
01:26:08
a person in the politician's ear goes all the way back to Roman times it was called the nomenclatura the nomenclatura
01:26:14
Gomen is the Latin word for name sure it's a how often I call it the name hey sex let me ask a question how often do
01:26:21
you about the Roman Empire just broadly speaking was that a grous reference I thought that was I thought so yeah it's
01:26:28
pretty great it's pretty great I'm just glad that the rest of the world is is catching up to our obsession with
01:26:33
gladiator or listen this has been an amazing episode 4 the dictator himself jamath potia and Rainman yeah definitely
01:26:42
burn baby David Sachs and the Sultan of science the queen of quinoa the prince of panic attacks and the heir to the Ted
01:26:51
Throne the cre creator of the world's greatest conference David freeberg I am the world's greatest moderator we'll see
01:26:57
you next time all in byebye bye bye love you Ted's dad Ted's dead Ted's dead baby
01:27:04
Ted's dead baby let your Winner's ride Rainman David we open source it to the fans and
01:27:17
they've just gone crazy with it love you queen of K going [Music] besties are that's my dog taking
01:27:34
driveway oh man myit will meet me at we should all just get a room and just have
01:27:39
one big huge orgy cuz they're all this useless it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release
01:27:45
[Music] somehow your we need to get [Music] mer going all [Music] in