E147: TED goes woke, Canada's Nazi blunder, AI adds vision, plus: who owns OpenAI?

(0:00) Bestie intros with Coleman Hughes (1:12) Coleman's experience with TED, Understanding TED's ideological shift (15:11) Focusing on class instead of race when enacting policies, reaction to Coleman's talk, institutional takeovers (44:01) "When Virtue Signalling Goes Wrong": Canadian parliament cheers for a Nazi (1:04:21) OpenAI's big week, informed speculation on Sam Altman's actual ownership of OpenAI (1:12:39) The next evolution of AI: multimodal and consumer hardware Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow Coleman: https://twitter.com/coldxman https://www.youtube.com/@ColemanHughesOfficial Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxB3b7fxMEA https://www.thefp.com/p/coleman-hughes-is-ted-scared-of-color-blindness https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy/status/1691502563571408896 https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1707051830667338170 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/11/opinion/sunday/interracial-friendship-donald-trump.html https://www.amazon.com/White-Fragility-People-About-Racism/dp/0807047414 https://twitter.com/TEDchris/status/1706792437098676224 https://www.amazon.com/Coddling-American-Mind-Intentions-Generation/dp/0735224919 https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Ground-American-Social-1950-1980/dp/0465065880 https://www.amazon.com/Black-Power-Liberation-Kwame-Ture/dp/0679743138 https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-judge-refuses-block-venture-capital-funds-grants-black-women-2023-09-26 https://apnews.com/article/canada-house-speaker-nazi-invite-ukraine-zelenskyy-d4ca05841193409e455cee3b19fcee6b https://www.reddit.com/r/QuotesPorn/comments/lz5o6z/he_who_controls_the_past_controls_the_future_he https://jacobin.com/2015/09/stepan-bandera-nationalist-euromaidan-right-sector https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-738940 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social-National_Party_of_Ukraine https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Brigade https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/neo-nazis-far-right-ukraine https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cohen-ukraine-commentary/commentary-ukraines-neo-nazi-problem-idUSKBN1GV2TY https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/ukraine-has-nazi-problem-vladimir-putin-s-denazification-claim-war-ncna1290946 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/world/europe/nazi-symbols-ukraine.html https://www.ft.com/content/4c64ffc1-f57b-4e22-a4a5-f9f90a7419b7 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-seeks-new-valuation-of-up-to-90-billion-in-sale-of-existing-shares-ed6229e0 https://www.axios.com/2023/09/25/testing-chatgpt-support-images-voice-search https://twitter.com/petergyang/status/1707169696049668472 https://blog.google/products/bard/google-bard-new-features-update-sept-2023 https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1707437820045062561 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.07162.pdf https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6849786 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709 https://reflect.app https://oldcomputers.net/sony-magic-link.html

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hey Coleman, how's it going?

• 0:01Jason Calacanis?

  Hey Coleman, welcome to the show.

• 0:02David Sacks?

  Hey, how's it going?

• 0:03Speaker 03

  My pleasure.

• 0:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Have you ever heard of the show?

• 0:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have. I'm actually a fan. My girlfriend introduced me to the show like two years ago and I've been a fan ever since.

• 0:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Great to meet you.

• 0:12Speaker 03

  Apparently, like many women, she has like, uh, she has a legit concerning obsession with sax, uh, but also-

• 0:18Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, don't say it! Oh my god, what up? Her and Gwen Halter.

• 0:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We're tilted.

• 0:23David Sacks?

  Those sax fans are crazy.

• 0:25Jason Calacanis?

  End the episode, end the episode.

• 0:27David Sacks?

  Shout out Letty, shout out Venus.

• 0:28Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my god, oh my god. She's just where to go, Coleman. You'd fit right in here. Alright, here we go. Let me, let me-

• 0:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Merely.

• 0:35Jason Calacanis?

  This is your cold open, folks.

• 0:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm sorry, I need, let me just psychologically explore this before we get into the real substance of it. Why does she like him so much? I don't understand this.

• 0:43Speaker 03

  By the way, I think you guys missed the second half of my statement. I said sax and Shemar.

• 0:47Jason Calacanis?

  Oh shit, okay, great. Let's get to the, let's get to the meat of the issue. Thank you. Thank god. Okay, here we go.

• 0:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Thank god.

• 0:54Jason Calacanis?

  Three, two-

• 1:00Jason Calacanis?

  Rain Man David Sacks.

• 1:04Speaker 04

  And it said, "We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it."

• 1:08Jason Calacanis?

  Love you, man. Nice queen of Kenwa.

• 1:12Jason Calacanis?

  Alright, everybody, welcome back to the All In Podcast. We have a very full docket today. I thought we'd start with something pretty crazy. There was a really weird, uh, moment last week. Ted threw one of its speakers under the bus, so we decided to have him on to talk about the experience. This is the second time they've done it at least. They did it to Sarah Silverman for doing comedy at Ted. Because people at Ted are a bunch of virtual signaling lunatics, including some of my friends who go. But Coleman Hughes, uh, if you don't know him, is a writer and podcaster. He has a, a pretty popular podcast called Conversations with Coleman. And he did a talk, which I encourage everybody to watch at Ted.

• 1:54Jason Calacanis?

  And it's titled "A Case for Color Blindness." Uh, we all watched it. It's a very powerful talk. And something weird happened-

• 2:04Jason Calacanis?

  Coleman, welcome to the program. And maybe you could just share with the audience how you wound up speaking at TED, what the content of your talk was briefly, and then the bizarre reaction when they tried to ban and kill your talk post you giving it.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, so first, really glad to be on, guys. I'm a fan of the pod. So I'll give the short version here. If you want the long version, you can go to the Free Press where I wrote a big summary of what happened there. Basically, what happened is Chris Anderson invited me to give a TED Talk, and I chose the subject of my upcoming book, which is coming out in February, called The End of Race Politics. And the argument is just essentially colorblindness. This is the idea that you want to treat people without regard to race, both in your personal lives and in our public policy. And wherever we have policies that are meant to collect and help the most disadvantaged, we should preferentially use class as a variable rather than race. That's my talk in a nutshell.

• 3:10Speaker 03

  So I prepared the talk with the TED team. I got their feedback, edited, curated, et cetera, got up there in April, gave the talk. Ninety-five percent of the people in the audience, it was quite well received, whether or not they agreed with every point. It was well within the bounds of acceptable discourse. There was a very small minority onstage, I could see, that was physically upset by my talk.

• 3:35Jason Calacanis?

  Onstage?

• 3:37Speaker 03

  I could see this onstage, yeah, in the moment. But, I mean, I'm talking five people in a crowd of almost 2,000. So I expected that because, you know, colorblindness is not in vogue today on the left, amongst progressives. It's really the idea non grata. And so I was expecting to field some pushback, and I talked to some critics and so forth. But what happened is what began as just a few people upset began to spiral into a kind of internal staff meltdown at TED. So this group called Black at TED asked to speak with me. I agreed, and then they said, actually, we don't want to talk to you. And they are an employee group at TED.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  After the conference, Chris emailed me and said, look, I'm getting a lot of blowback here internally. There are people saying we shouldn't release your talk at all. And then over the course of the next month, they came up with a variety of sort of creative solutions about how to release my talk in a way that would appease the woke staffers that really didn't want it to be released at all. And at this point, I had to start kind of sticking up for myself. So first they wanted to attach like a debate to the end of my talk and release it as one video, which I felt would really send the wrong message. It would send the message that like this idea can't be heard without the opposing perspective.

• 4:59Jason Calacanis?

  Did they tell you what was problematic about your talk?

• 5:04Speaker 03

  No.

• 5:04Jason Calacanis?

  Using woke term?

• 5:05Speaker 03

  Well.

• 5:06Jason Calacanis?

  Like, what was the problem with the talk?

• 5:08Speaker 03

  Well, there were no factual problems. It passed a fact checking team. There were, there were no substantive issues with the talk. The problem was that it upset the staff. It upset the staff. That was the language that was used. It upset certain people in the staff.

• 5:22Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. And, and those people are black?

• 5:24Speaker 03

  Um, probably most were. Uh, you know, I, I, I tried to actually have face to face conversations with uh, some of these folks. I only got to, to uh, talk to one woman. So presumably many of them were black, but possibly not all.

• 5:39Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. What was the, what do you perceive was the problem with your talk? Or what they perceived the problem with your talk is?

• 5:46Speaker 03

  So the, the last day of the TED conference, they have a town hall. People from the audience come and give feedback. The town hall opened with two people denouncing my talk back to back. The first said that it was racist and dangerous and irresponsible. And the second guy, who's actually a guy I knew, he said that I was willing to have a slide back into the days of separate but equal, which was totally the opposite of my talk. And I, I implore anyone to just go online and watch it, go on YouTube, decide for yourself whether these criticisms bear any resemblance to, to reality. But that was the idea, that the talk is racist, that, you know, I'm, I'm some kind of pro Jim Crow

• 6:29Speaker 03

  person is really, really deranged kind of criticisms.

• 6:34David Friedberg?

  Your, your talk is up on Ted's website and on YouTube, right? But part of the controversy was that the number of views seemed to be pretty suppressed. Was that discussed with Chris when you talked with him? Or do you have a point of view on the suppression of the promotion of the video, even though they put it out there? And how that's affected, you know, how widespread the video has been made available to folks?

• 6:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, so in my final call with Chris, he sort of presented this idea about how to release it, and he sold it to me as a way to amplify my talk, which I think was kind of some spin. He was in a tough position, caught between me and his employees. We ultimately decided they would release the talk, and then two weeks later, they'd release a debate between myself and this guy Jamel Bouie, who was a New York Times columnist. So the talk came out on TED website, the debate came out, and I kind of mentally had forgotten about the whole situation until Tim Urban, who was a popular blogger, who's actually given the...

• 7:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, he spoke at a online summit last year.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Oh, that's great, yeah. Tim is great. He's also given the most viewed TED Talk of all time on YouTube. Tim noticed that my talk just had a really absurdly low view count, like an implausibly low view count on TED's website. In mid-August, he tweeted this, and that he believed they were intentionally under-promoting my talk.

• 7:57Jason Calacanis?

  They sandbagged you.

• 7:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. I checked, and all of the five talks surrounding mine, they all had between 450,000 views and 800,000 views. That was the full range. Mine had 73,000. Right? So 16% of the low end of the range of all the talks released around mine. So when that happened, I felt that TED had kind of reneged on its end of our bargain, and that's when Barry Weiss got wind of it and I went public.

• 8:27David Friedberg?

  Just to be clear, you're saying that the condition for releasing your TED Talk, the bargain you struck with Chris, was that you would do a debate with someone in a separate video, and that you had to do the debate in order to have your TED Talk released?

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:45David Friedberg?

  Wow.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  So yeah, that was the end of the negotiation. The beginning of the negotiation was trying to get me to release those things as one video, and I said, "Hell no." And then next, "We're gonna release them as separate videos on the same day." I said, "Hell no, because that dilutes it." And then we agreed on a two-week separation between the two.

• 9:03David Friedberg?

  In your experience with TED and your conversations around this matter, are you aware of other videos that TED has refused to put out that were live TED Talk at the TED conference, and they were deemed to be too controversial to be released publicly?

• 9:19Speaker 03

  Definitely not this year. I can't, I, you know, I don't know the whole history of TED, but nothing like that this year, for sure.

• 9:26Jason Calacanis?

  We can go one of two ways with this, Friedberg. Do you want to talk about the substance of the talk? Or maybe dig into the culture of TED?

• 9:33David Friedberg?

  I want to talk about the substance of the talk in a minute, but I think it's worth just sharing my experience with you. I started going to TED as an attendee around, I believe, 2007. And I went every year until 2019. I got a lot from the community. I got a lot from the conference every year. It was an incredible week of my life every year. It was a big deal for me. In the early days, I would go there and I saw new perspectives on technology, on the environment, on social change, on all these like topics that were not in my day to day, that I thought were really exciting and awe inspiring. And that really was kind of this ethos of TED back in the day before Chris Anderson took it over, was to kind of, you know, inspire people with new ideas.

• 10:15David Friedberg?

  Over the years that I attended TED, I began to observe that many of the talks, and I spoke about this very briefly last week as part of my motivation and interest in doing the All In Summit this year. But that over time, many of the talks began to take a bit of a social justice turn, in the sense that there was almost a lecturing happening as curated by the editorial process at TED. When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, needless to say, most of the audience of TED was not on that side of the voting block. And what disturbed me the most was that in the three years after he was elected, every TED conference had plenty of subjects, plenty of talks, and plenty of conversations about

• 11:00David Friedberg?

  why society is falling apart, why Donald Trump is a key root cause of that, why so much of him and what he stands for and the people behind him are unjust and evil in all these ways. There wasn't a single talk that provided a perspective of why anyone voted for him. There was no one that shared a point of view about why this person had come to gather more than half the votes or half the votes in the country. And I thought that was such an important topic to better understand, and I was so shocked that it was never part of the discourse at TED. I'm not a Republican, I'm not a conservative, and I'm not against social justice issues. But I saw TED, over time, get overtaken with this kind of very

• 11:41David Friedberg?

  one-sided, almost bullying type of approach to this is the narrative we want to sell society on, rather than have a true discourse about the matter. I sent a survey response in 2019 after I went to TED, and I said, "I'm never coming back again. This year did it for me. I'm over it." And there was such a lack of diversity of points of view at this conference, and so much of this has veered away from inspiring topics and inspiring talks, and it became all about fear of technology, it became about social injustice caused by one side of the political spectrum, and it really angered and upset me that everyone had become so close-minded at TED. And I sent this note, and Chris Anderson reached out to me and said, "Well, you have a conversation." I went on a Zoom call with him, and I spoke

• 12:24David Friedberg?

  with him for an hour, and I shared all this, and I said, "He's missing so much of what's happening that's optimistic about the world, that's optimistic about technology, that's different ways of looking at things." And he's kind of created this very narrow-minded view on the topics that they want to address and how they want to address them. And that was it, and I walked away. So when I saw what happened with your talk, to me, it's almost like the ultimate endgame of this process that I've been observing at TED personally for the last 13 years. And I just wanted to, you know, or last 15 years, I guess, share that story with you and speak publicly about it. I very much respect the intention of the people at TED. I respect Chris Anderson deeply. The TED Talks changed my life many times along the way, over the decade-plus that I went there. I have many great friends

• 13:07David Friedberg?

  from TED. I know plenty of people that have worked there. Everyone has the right intention. But I think it's such a microcosm and a reflection of what's broadly been going on, which is it's either my opinion or not, and everyone coalesces around people with the same opinion. And then you magnify it, and you concentrate it, and we have no discourse. And TED used to be a place for discourse, and it's lost that, as have so many other forums for conversation in the society and country today.

• 13:30Jason Calacanis?

  Coleman, what's your take on the TED organization, you know, pre and post having had this experience? I'm curious.

• 13:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, what you just said, David, I've heard echoed from at least a dozen people that have gone to TED or been, you know, in the TED community for 10 years or more. They've noticed the exact change that you noticed. The question is, what has driven that? Is it actually coming top down from the leadership? I'm not sure. I'm skeptical. Yeah, I see you shaking your head. I agree.

• 14:03Jason Calacanis?

  Only Chris Anderson, I would say no.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  I agree. So like, all my private communications with Chris suggests to me that he is just as alive to this problem of ideological capture of institutions as anyone. But when it comes to, you know, his own staff who have really strong feelings, who are not pro free speech, who are not pro heterodox beliefs and open discourse, who literally just don't share that value. You know, it's a very tricky thing with leadership. Sometimes you have to simply be the bad guy and say, I'm sorry, these are the values of the institution, and if you're not on board, this is not right for you. And my perception is that TED has been captured kind of from the bottom up,

• 14:48Speaker 03

  like many institutions, just from the seeping in of staff that don't share those values and the inability of the leadership to actually hold the line for those values.

• 14:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Did they tell you that you made them feel unsafe?

• 15:01Speaker 03

  Yes, actually. Yes, yes. People said they felt they were attacked in the audience. And I'm, you know, my talk was, again, just look it up on YouTube. It's quite mild.

• 15:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can we actually talk about that?

• 15:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, let's go into the substance. What was your take on it, Chamath?

• 15:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'll just make a statement, which is, I think that your talk was superb. And just to give you my journey, as a kid that grew up as a refugee on welfare.

• 15:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then to get through every single sort of strata of society. I think when I look back, the biggest thing that I struggled with was always confusing. When I felt mistreated.

• 15:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I would always direct it at racism. It would be my sort of safety blanket and I would always look at. Other people as doing that and it was only until.

• 15:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I met my wife. And spending years and years talking about it where I was able to disarm this and see that out of a hundred interactions. A lot of the time just people are having a bad day. Some other percentage of the time, people are actually just being very classist. Because racism, it turns out, is like a pretty severe perversion and it's really. Crazy when you actually see it play out. And. For me, had I had a framework, if I had your talk when I was in my twenties and thirties, I would have spirited myself a lot of self sabotage. Because what that does is when you feel these things and you don't have a framework to interpret it or to tolerate the anxiety. I would internalize that anxiety and I was a less productive person.

• 16:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so if the goal was for me on behalf of my family or on behalf of. People like me to make it. I would have gotten there much faster had I not gotten in my own way. And when I watched your talk. It was incredibly validating for the work that I had done. And I had thought to myself, man, if I had had him, if he had. Made that for me when I was 20 years old. Amazing, I would have, I could have done so much more because when I think about some of the mistakes I made, they were rooted in this specific issue that you touched. So I just want to say thank you. And I also want to say that to the extent other people are interested and feel like that. You should really listen to what you have to say because I thought it was eloquently.

• 17:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Address, I was a huge, huge, huge fan of what you had to say and I thought it was. Extremely well done and especially for someone. As young as you, I thought it was just. Amazing.

• 17:35Jason Calacanis?

  Coleman, let me ask you, what was the reaction from people of color, people who've experienced racism, perhaps, to your talk? Because you must have gotten a tremendous amount, and I did look at the comments. To Ted's credit, the comments are open. So what was the reaction, you know, to people like Chamath or yourself, people of color, who maybe who have experienced racism on some regular basis? And this idea of having colorblindness when we're, you know, operating as a society in that goal, which I'll just point out when I listened to your talk, seems to be exactly what Martin Luther King said. So, go ahead.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is. So, there's the stereotype of the reaction is that white people like my talk and people of color don't.

• 18:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  So that's the stereotype that my critics would like to believe is the reality, because then they don't have to confront my arguments. The reality is that even at the TED conference, which is a progressive space, many, many people of color, black people, South Asian people, came up to me saying, "That was an excellent talk for this, that, and the third reason." And I think probably for reasons similar to what you were saying, Chamath.

• 18:49Speaker 03

  I have found that oftentimes immigrants of color really resonate with my message. I have many, for instance, Jamaican friends that, you know, they view themselves as Jamaican. They come to America, and our conversation about race doesn't make very much sense to them. Right?

• 19:08Jason Calacanis?

  Why?

• 19:09Speaker 03

  It doesn't make sense, for instance, to strongly feel that your racial identity is an aspect of your core inner self, that you ought to judge people on the basis of their racial identity, that, you know, if you're a white person, that, you know, you don't have a valid perspective to bear on a conversation, or you have to, you know, preface every belief by saying, "Well, I'm a dumb white guy, what do I know?" This kind of routine that we've gotten into in spaces, rather than just confronting each other as, "Hey, you know, I'm Coleman, you're Chamath, you're..." David, et cetera, let's all talk about this from the point of view of epistemic equals

• 19:50Speaker 03

  and have conversations. And yeah, you're going to know about stuff I haven't known because of your individual life story. I'm gonna, I'm gonna have experienced stuff that you haven't. We may have even experienced racial discrimination. We may, we may have stories to tell. But we are starting out fundamentally from the framework of all being human beings that can talk to each other and you know, we, we don't have to sort of play act these racial roles that have become increasingly in vogue in woke spaces. And a lot of people resonate with that. And, and, and, and what's more, you know, you, you've gotten this thing on, on the left, you, you, you've gotten media institutions that have been taken in, in by this. So you, you see New York Times op-eds like one, I think, five years ago, that's

• 20:33Speaker 03

  can my children be friends with white people? Right? You've got Robin D'Angelo and her book saying things like a white person shouldn't cry around a black person because it triggers us. It's like, this is so the opposite of what it actually feels like to hang out with an interracial and tight-knit group of friends. Your race, racial identity recedes in importance the more you get to know people. And I think people in interracial relationships know this, people with interracial kids know this. So my message actually resonate, resonates with people of, of, of all colors.

• 21:07Jason Calacanis?

  That I think was one of the most poignant parts of it, Sax. You got to watch the talk as well, I believe. So your thoughts on maybe institutions rotting from the inside and maybe even one that's supposed to support ideas, ideas that matter. Clearly, this is an idea that matters. I'm curious.

• 21:24David Friedberg?

  Jake, I just, I just wanted, I want 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 necessarily the case because the point is there's institutional capture that's happened. And that institutional capture is almost like a democratic process that we're seeing at companies, that we're seeing at government agencies and that we're seeing in private and nonprofit institutions that the individuals that are employed are capturing.

• 21:54David Friedberg?

  The organization's ideals.

• 21:56Jason Calacanis?

  Well, that's what I mean by rotting. I mean, it's like it's it was such a storied institution, you know, in terms of it was a brave institution under Ricky Saul Warman, you know?

• 22:05David Friedberg?

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

• 22:08Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 22:08David Friedberg?

  some of these institutions evolved to be different. But I I and that's the only thing I I just I I don't want to make it. Yeah.

• 22:14Jason Calacanis?

  Saxon rotting, or is it being taken over from the inside out from the bottom up? What are your thoughts?

• 22:21David Sacks?

  I think captured is a pretty good word to use. If you were to use that word. Just remember Ted's original mission represented in their tagline was ideas worth spreading. So there's supposed to be a forum for interesting worthy ideas that they're going to spread. And here they're doing the opposite. They're basically sandbagging the views. And they didn't want to publish it at all. And then when they did agree to publish it, they basically subjected that to a new requirement of putting a rebuttal right by it. So this is not living up to the original mission. Now, why did this happen? I want to go to Chris Anderson's response here. He wrote this long post on X, which is too long to read here.

• 23:03David Sacks?

  It's a really sort of weasely, mealy mouthed defense of what they did. A lot of both sides type language. I think there's really only one or two sentences that are relevant in terms of explaining this whole thing. What he says is that many people have been genuinely hurt and offended by what they heard you say. So he's addressing this to Coleman. This is not what we dream of when we post our talk. So I think this is really the key intellectual mistake that Chris Anderson's making is that he believes that people can be genuinely hurt by encountering well reasoned ideas they disagree with. I think the way that the marketplace of ideas is supposed to work

• 23:48David Sacks?

  is that when you encounter an idea you disagree with, you formulate an equally well thought out response. And you engage in intellectual discourse.

• 23:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, maybe get curious. Yeah, get curious.

• 23:59David Sacks?

  Exactly. But, you know, I think these words are really significant because he's saying not just that the objectors here were offended. He was saying that they were hurt, genuinely hurt. So he's buying into this idea that hearing ideas you disagree with is somehow a threat to your safety.

• 24:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 24:17David Sacks?

  And as soon as you do that, as soon as you concede that there can be some sort of physical harm from engaging with ideas, you give the equivalent of a heckler's veto to the people who don't like these ideas. It's almost like a crybaby's veto. So there's no way you can function as a marketplace of ideas and certainly a platform for ideas worth spreading if you're going to give a veto to people who can claim that their subjective emotional reaction to well-thought ideas should trump the right of the speaker to put out that idea.

• 24:57David Friedberg?

  Or the broader audience to hear it.

• 24:59David Sacks?

  Right, exactly. And I think that's, and I think that's where we've ended up.

• 25:02David Friedberg?

  Coleman, can I ask your point of view on institutional capture? Obviously, this is different than the topics you've been, you've spoken about. But as you've gone through this experience with TED and as you think more broadly about what's going on, do you have a point of view on the capture of institutions from the bottom up that's happened and how that's affected some of these topics like free speech, sharing of ideas, open discourse, all these foundations that made kind of a free and open society work effectively for so long?

• 25:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, it's a very difficult problem because, you know, it's easy for me from the outside, not being the leader of a major institution, to say, well, this is just what you have to do. Obviously, it's more psychologically difficult to go to your own staff that you have to metaphorically live with every day and really shake things up. And many people aren't willing to do that. Someone like Barry Weiss, who used to be at the New York Times, you know, her point of view on it is, look, you've just got to start your own institutions. You have to start your own institutions with the right ethos from day one. And that's what she's tried to do with the Free Press, rather than try to reform institutions that have a lot of unhealthy inertia.

• 26:17David Sacks?

  That Chris could have stopped this very easily. I mean, this is a failure of leadership. What he needed to tell these employees is, look, our mission is to be a platform for spreading interesting ideas. And we can't treat this speech differently than any other speech, just because you disagree with it. That's all he had to do.

• 26:35David Friedberg?

  And by the way, just because an idea may be offensive, does not mean that it should not be spread. I think, have you read Jonathan Haidt's book, Coddling of the American Mind?

• 26:44Speaker 03

  Absolutely, yeah, great book.

• 26:46David Friedberg?

  And I think that speaks, and that was the book I gave away in our gift bag at the All In Summit this year. Because I thought it was such like, an important and kind of prescient point of view on what's going on right now, that we assume that if something is offensive by some, some group, could be a large group or a small group, it needs to be suppressed. And obviously, as you extend that concept to its extreme, you end up losing many ideas that challenge, you know, the current kind of main concept that everyone believes.

• 27:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Here's what I don't understand. So Coleman, just, maybe if you can just guess, why, when somebody watches this talk, could they feel genuinely hurt? Like what, like if we had to steel man then, let's step in their shoes. Like, what is the, what's the cycle that's going on there? That gets them to, oh my God, this is an intolerable point of view.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think there has to be something with, if you're a person that has, you know, staked your life or your career out on the concept of sort of race-based diversity, equity and inclusion, explicitly taking race into account in policies. And, you know, you're someone that's been working in that domain for 30 years. And you see someone like me come up there and just argue against that whole approach, there may be some severe threat mechanism that comes on board where you actually don't have a rational argument that, that easily debunks what I'm saying, because what I'm saying is very reasonable.

• 28:28Speaker 03

  And so, in the absence of a great rational argument. When the stakes are high, all the, you know, primal animal emotions sort of come out, your, your whole limbic system. And you feel like you're kind of in a fight or flight situation and you, and you, and you feel incredibly emotional. That's my only guess.

• 28:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, they're hurt and it's scary to think, what if you win the argument? And if you win the argument, it means certain things might go away. And, and I think the two examples they gave you, Chris Anderson came on stage and said, oh, you know, when conductors are looking for a new violinist, they put them behind a, you know, a shade and they, and they do colorblind selection process, a colorblind selection process. I think Malcolm Gladwell talked about that in Blink. And your response, and then they said, well, wouldn't it be better if we could have, you know, some representation in that group? So then we would inspire people to get to the group. Your response to that was?

• 29:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, my response to that was, what you really want to do is if there are reasons why, say, black kids aren't getting access to violins at the same, at a young age, because schools are underfunded or band programs are horrible in inner cities, that's where you want to intervene. You don't want to intervene at, at the point, at the, at the meritocratic end line racially rigging the very bar that you would use to measure progress on those deeper dimensions.

• 29:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Have you read this book called Losing Ground by Charles Murray?

• 29:57Speaker 03

  Yes, I have.

• 29:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, it's a very provocative book. I have always thought, and maybe I'll just leave this with you, because if you were willing to do it, I for one would love to support you in any way that I could to do it, but we don't have a full accounting of what really happened, starting in the late 1960s with LBJ's war on poverty. And I think when you look at racism through the American lived experience, a lot of it goes back to a bunch of economic incentives that were set up to try to do what theoretically seemed at the time, the right thing. We can debate whether that's where LBJ came from or not. But you compound and cascade a bunch of decisions forward. And to your point, now we're sort of trying to deal with the symptoms without really addressing the root cause.

• 30:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I think if America wants to really heal and deal with this, what we also need to do is give all those people that have that fight or flight response, a better toolkit to understand what kind of got us here. Because right now, we have a very charged way of viewing these things without actually looking at some of the practical, quantifiable details. Thomas Sowell has talked about it, Charles Murray talks about it.

• 31:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But these are unfortunately such heterodox ideas that they just don't get enough mainstream discussion. And if you then compound that with this institutional capture, they get buried. And so the answer may actually be sitting right in front of our face, where it was the welfare reform system that we implemented in the late 1960s on down the line. Because those are structural ways where we can solve it, which ultimately will get to your point, which is great. Fund more music in the schools in that example. And right now, we're so caught up in all of the the labels and the fear mongering that we never get to that. And so I just wanted to put that out there that I think that there needs to be smart, brilliant people like yourself, young people, who can do a full accounting of like the last 50 or 60 years in a much more structural way that these

• 31:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  gentlemen tried to do. But the ideas were just too heterodox at the time. But because of formats like podcasts and like the Free Press and other things, I think there's a chance that you can actually get these ideas out. And I think it's important because I think folks like me or the people that approached you, there's not enough of us that came from this background that are open minded or at a point where we can tolerate the anxiety to listen to your ideas. There's a lot of people that may just viscerally react. But the more that we can shift those people away from viscerally reacting to actually tolerating and then thinking and then evolving their point of view, you can do some enormous good in the world. Just why I just wanted to put that out there.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, that's a huge topic and an understudied topic. What was the effect of of the welfare reforms of the 60s and 70s? I know my mother used to say, she grew up in the South Bronx, I'm half Hispanic, half black American. And she used to say, she used to just have stories of, you know, when the welfare auditors would come around and people would hide their boyfriends, hide their husbands.

• 32:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Exactly, hide their husbands, exactly.

• 32:50Speaker 03

  And the and in the book Black Power by Stokely Carmichael, aka Kwame Ture, which is, you know, the manifesto of the Black Power movement, hardly a right wing source, they made the same point about welfare reform. So there definitely is something to be investigated there. It's not really my point of expertise. I know Glenn Lowry is someone who has really, you know, dug into that sort of research. But there's definitely a lot of room for study there.

• 33:19Jason Calacanis?

  Coleman, let me ask you a question about our industry. We've had a lot of hand wringing and debates about diversity in funding of startups, capital allocators, venture capital firms, and we have limited partners who have a mission to have more diverse general partners, the people at venture firms who invest in startups, invest in more female-led startups, etc., because the numbers frankly, you know, have not been very diverse historically in venture, far from it. And we recently had a female, a black female venture firm, I think it's called Fearless Founders, get sued. I'm not sure if you're aware of that

• 34:01Jason Calacanis?

  lawsuit. It's by the same person who sued Harvard. Should there be venture firms specifically designed to change the ratio, is the language people use, and should, you know, people with large endowments of capital be backing, you know, black venture capitalists to see more of them, or female, black venture capitalists, Hispanic, etc.? Or how would you look at that issue, which has been a pretty sticky issue and hasn't changed for a long time?

• 34:28Speaker 03

  So, prescriptively, I don't want to say much because I don't like to tell people how to run their funds or run their businesses, right? If you're a Christian and you want to hire only Christian people, if you're a Muslim, you want to hire only Muslims, I think you should frankly be allowed to do that if those are your personal values. Now, personally, I will tell you, with respect to the people that I would hire to, say, work on my podcast, I want every single hire to know that I am not hiring them as a result of their skin color, or gender, or any other contingent feature of their identity. I want them to know that I'm hiring them for what they really bring to the table. Now, I have a very small team. Maybe there's something about how the optics, certain optics are

• 35:12Speaker 03

  required for a larger, a larger firm, but I think it, the problems begin when you, when you sort of bless this idea that race is a super deep feature of who you are right from the start. When you bless that idea right from the start, it sends the signal that what people bring to the table is their racial identity, is their gender. Now, when you fast forward two years down the line, when a company is having some meltdown over a race or a gender issue, you have to understand that it's possible you made this bed... By signaling from the very beginning that what's important about the people you're bringing in is their race, is their gender, and that you are vulnerable to the kinds of appeals

• 35:57Speaker 03

  that can be made purely on the basis of what are ultimately superficial features of our identity. Yeah, that's well said.

• 36:05David Friedberg?

  What would your advice be to institutional leaders that are past that point of no return? The CEOs of big companies and big institutions that are now captive by these ideologies, where they are effectively, as you say, ultra-sensitive to issues around race and gender and other sort of, you know, superficial identities, and are challenged often to make decisions or driven to make decisions that their employees and teams demand of them? Do you have advice on how they can rethink their roles as leaders and how to reframe this?

• 36:40Speaker 03

  I mean, in a word, no, because it's by that point, it's an intractable problem. I've had, I've talked to CEOs that ask this question to me over and over again, you know, like, what do I do once I'm past the point where I have so many staff and it's, you know, the system is so sprawling that it's no longer under my control? I have so many people with values that I don't share, that I frankly think privately are insane, but I cannot say so publicly because I have higher order commitments to the shareholders, to the board, to steer the ship, right, such as it is. And the ship cannot be changed at this point. I don't have good advice. I'm not going to pretend that I do.

• 37:21David Friedberg?

  Do you think that same problem is inherent in political parties in the United States, states, state governments, and other larger kind of social systems that we use to organize ourselves and are now also captive and in kind of a point of no return?

• 37:37Speaker 03

  I think definitely in the Democratic Party, there has been a problem with mistaking the Twitter commentariat and the journalistic elite for real life. The truth is, the vast majority of even Democrat voters find my arguments around colorblindness totally uncontroversial, whether they may have some agreements or not. But if you ask the elite, there's a meltdown, right? There's this huge, there's just this huge discrepancy. And it can never be hammered enough, the extent to which people in politics are operating in a bubble and believe mistaking the elite and the Twitter sphere for the wider population.

• 38:19David Friedberg?

  Hmm. I mean, this feels to me like why Donald Trump got elected, but that's another topic.

• 38:25Jason Calacanis?

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

• 38:32David Friedberg?

  Coleman, you do, you do a podcast?

• 38:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do a podcast, Conversations with Coleman. Actually, David Sacks has been on the podcast about a year ago.

• 38:39Jason Calacanis?

  How did he do? How did he do?

• 38:40Speaker 03

  He did absolutely fantastic.

• 38:42Jason Calacanis?

  Did he make you feel unsafe?

• 38:43Speaker 03

  He did, actually, yes.

• 38:45Jason Calacanis?

  Russ, okay.

• 38:46Speaker 03

  Was it, did he talk about the Ukraine?

• 38:48Jason Calacanis?

  Talk about Ukraine?

• 38:50David Friedberg?

  Wait, can I, can I be on your podcast?

• 38:52Speaker 03

  Oh, of course. I would, I would be honored.

• 38:55Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, great. I'd love to. Fantastic. There you go.

• 38:56David Friedberg?

  I would be honored. Thank you.

• 38:58Jason Calacanis?

  I, I, I saw you had, um, the Dilbert guy on, and I thought that was a pretty engaging, interesting conversation. Yeah, Scott Adams, who is, you know, really controversial. And I thought you handled that one really well, too.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks. He's an interesting one. It's like, he has a lot of brilliant things to say, but also he maybe thinks the CIA is going to kill him recently on Twitter. It's, it's a mixed bag.

• 39:20Jason Calacanis?

  It's, I would, mixed bag would be where I would go with it. All right. Listen, this has been amazing. The TED Talk is extraordinary. Everybody should watch it. And yeah, ideas worth spreading, unless maybe, uh, you don't agree with them. Go to the TED channel and watch it. Sorry. I mean, I don't want to give Ted too much more time, but they tried to get me to pay $50,000 a year, $25,000 a year for like a five-year package to go to the event. And I was like, yeah.

• 39:47David Friedberg?

  How much, how much is Ted?

• 39:48Jason Calacanis?

  How much is Ted?

• 39:49David Friedberg?

  The regular tickets used to be seventy five hundred and then, no, they used to be seventy five hundred. Then I think they went up to ten K. And then you can do like donor tickets and you get different features and so on.

• 39:59Jason Calacanis?

  Basically, they're sold out.

• 40:01David Friedberg?

  Remember, it is set up as a nonprofit and there is philanthropic work that's done. And so, you know, the organization is, again, it's not a profiteering media company. It became a big media company because of the success of the efforts and the quality of the content that was produced over time. But, you know, as we talked about, a lot of media companies and a lot of institutions get captured and, you know, the original kind of mission.

• 40:27David Sacks?

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

• 40:33Jason Calacanis?

  Ted's dead. A great scene where you get something back on a motorcycle. Ted's dead, baby.

• 40:38David Sacks?

  As soon as they allow the staff who have, let's say, highly niche, elite views to veto or suppress talks they don't like, then it stops being a platform for ideas. This becomes another left-wing interest group.

• 40:52Jason Calacanis?

  What other ideas, what other talks have been canned before they even got to the stage, you have to wonder and.

• 40:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But we don't know.

• 40:59David Sacks?

  Who are they not inviting?

• 41:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You just know the two. And it's all the, it's the top of the funnel, Jason, exactly. This is all the people that they're not inviting. What about the person that's pro coal? I wonder if the pro coal person is allowed to present it, Ted?

• 41:12Jason Calacanis?

  I doubt it. You know, and they, they had Sarah Silverman and she did a comedy set, which was hilarious. And the same people, so this is the thing I find so, the hypocrisy is just so crazy with the Ted people, and it's a lot of my friends still go, is they had Sarah Silverman come. These people have laughed at Sarah Silverman a million times. They've watched Dave Chappelle. They've seen any number of comics, you know, make them laugh with edgy humor. But then when they're in that, you know, Ted audience and they're feeling super precious and that they're very important because they donate fifty grand a year or whatever Friedberg gave them, I don't know, to get in there from the side door.

• 41:51Jason Calacanis?

  Then they were super offended. So, you know, they're hypocrites and I don't know how to say it anymore clearly. They literally, you could pull up Chris Anderson apologizing, not just

• 42:02David Friedberg?

  Again, again, I really

• 42:03Jason Calacanis?

  Apologizing for a comedian.

• 42:06David Friedberg?

  I hope that this is a learning experience for everyone. I hope that this is a turning point for leadership in institutions like this to take a look at what happened, how it happened, and then hopefully to right the course. Because organizations like TED, I thought, were very important and should be in the world and should be successful. And I hope that they kind of return to the original values. And I hope that this is a moment that there's a learning experience and that we don't just shit on them and say, "They're awful, they're failed, it's over." Hopefully, something comes of this.

• 42:31David Sacks?

  I do think there is one other potential remedy here, which besides just starting a new TED, and the kind of the Barry Weiss point of view, which is just write it off and start over. Remember what Brian Armstrong did at Coinbase? He basically just said, "Listen, we have a mission here. It's around crypto. We're going to focus 100% on this mission. And if you're not on board with this mission, or want to capture this institution to promote other missions, this is not the place for you. Go do those missions somewhere else."

• 42:58David Friedberg?

  Wholesale leadership reset.

• 42:59David Sacks?

  He took a hit. The New York Times wrote their obligatory hit piece.

• 43:03Jason Calacanis?

  If Chris was brave, he would just tell everybody.

• 43:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Instead of saying that, I would say if Chris has good mentors, as well as a good sounding board, that is the threshold question that should be debated right now, is do I walk in the door? And do I just give this simple litmus test and have people sign up or not? And it's quite, and it's quite easy, because to your point, it's not like he's inventing something new. He's saying, "This is where we started, and this is where we're going to stay. And this is what it means." And if he doesn't do that, then he's spoken with his actions. And it is what it is. What is meant to happen, will then happen.

• 43:40David Friedberg?

  Exactly. Exactly. It's a moment for looking at the internal compass. It's a wholesale leadership reset moment opportunity. See if it happens or not.

• 43:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Or double down and keep going.

• 43:50David Friedberg?

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

• 43:55Jason Calacanis?

  Thank you, Coleman. Everybody search Coleman on TED.

• 43:58David Sacks?

  Yeah, thank you.

• 43:58Jason Calacanis?

  We'll see you soon. Cheers now.

• 44:00David Friedberg?

  See you, man. Thanks.

• 44:01Jason Calacanis?

  All right, listen, it's a new segment we have here, when virtue signaling goes wrong. If you missed it, the Canadian Parliament gave a standing ovation. Two, a Nazi, not like a new Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer. One of the few actual Nazis still alive. Here we see just the crowd going wild. Last Friday, Ukrainians President Zelensky gave a speech at the Canadian House of Commons. And Canadian House Speaker Anthony Rota introduced a 98-year-old Jaroslav Hunka as a Ukrainian war hero. And then the Canadian Parliament proceeded to give him a standing ovation.

• 44:43Jason Calacanis?

  And it turns out that this person first fought for the First Ukrainian Division in World War II. That unit was also known as the Waffen SS, Galicia Division, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, which was a voluntary unit under Nazi command. So the Canadian Parliament apparently gave a standing ovation to Nazis. They have apologized for this and said it was a mistake. Chamath, I don't know if you got to see this. You're Canadian, so your thoughts on what we've seen here?

• 45:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, I'll give you my feedback as somebody who, when I was, you know, in Canada, was a pretty ardent liberal. I grew up in a liberal household. My father canvassed religiously for the liberals. And I think that at some point after I moved to the United States, they took woke-ism, which I think, look, at some level, was rooted in something very important, which was, how do you get marginalized folks to be seen? But unfortunately, along the way, just got perverted by folks that just use it as a cudgel, to censor people, to make other people feel guilty, to judge people.

• 46:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so I think we all would agree that it's kind of become this virus. The thing that it masks are all of these other really bad things that come along with it. And one of them in Canada, which Justin Trudeau is case zero of, is also when nepotism goes bad. His father was an incredible exemplary prime minister in Canada. Set the benchmark on all dimensions was just incredible. Cool, composed, moved the country forward, brought the country together. And then fast forward 25 or 30 years in a vacuum of leadership, what basically happened? We picked this guy who was up until that point, a substitute teacher. And the other claim to fame was appearing twice in brown face.

• 46:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, so making fun of people like me and elected him prime minister. And what happened was he became the sort of like virtue signaler in chief of this very important GA country. And it was all kind of bumbling along. And in the absence of anybody else that was able to step up and offer an alternative, he got reelected barely, but he did. Then these things happened in the last year. And when you look through that prism is how you can see what happens if a country doesn't draw a line and finally take a stand. So we had this guy who was ill qualified and way over his head, who shouldn't have been in this role as prime minister, get put in that position.

• 47:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  When finally a group of people in Canada pushed back, in this case, the truckers, he and the entire government explicitly labeled them as Nazis, right? And said, these people need to be put down and completely dismantled. It didn't seem like it was right. We called that out. We all talked about it and we said, this doesn't smell right on the surface. These are really, seems like good, earnest people that are just trying to make a point and are not being heard. Then you had this thing, three weeks ago, two or three weeks ago, where he actually had a speech in front of the entire parliament, where he accused the largest democracy in the world, India in this case, of coming into Canadian soil and assassinating a Canadian citizen,

• 48:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  which is an enormous allegation to levy. And what was important to know about that allegation was that it was done without the explicit vocal support of either Britain or the United States, which would be the two most natural allies that Canada would present that information to. And instead of doing it behind a closed door to Modi, he did it on live stage, like it was like some theatrical performance. Then India follows up and says, um, this guy's kind of known to be a little bit of a drug addict and was on a two-day bender and the Indian drug dog smelled a bunch of cocaine on the plane. Then they have this thing for Vladimir Zelensky, where everybody was there to sort of like virtue signal this war

• 49:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  and then they actually invited a Nazi and then gave him a standing ovation. So when you, when you put it all together, I think what it shows is just a lack of professionalism, which also belies just a lack of experience and capability. And so I think what it shows is just like,

• 49:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  isn't this enough? Like, have we not seen enough of these examples where you can actually start to ask yourself, why can't we just get really good, competent people to do these jobs? Why can't we actually embrace free speech and all of what it means and explore that? Why can't we have people that don't need to theatrically perform on stage? Because eventually, you're going to make these mistakes and you're going to embarrass your entire country and then you're going to imperil relations with some really important allies. And I think this is a moment in time where all of those things need to be questioned and put on the table.

• 49:53Jason Calacanis?

  You're clearly questioning his competence here because to not have the care to check who is going to speak in front of parliament is crazy. And just to make it super clear, the speaker that invited Hanka, that was Anthony Rota, resigned on Tuesday. And Trudeau says Rota, the person who invited the Nazi, is solely responsible.

• 50:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, then he blamed Russian misinformation on top of that. But Jason, you don't, you don't, the prime minister, who is the most important politician in the country, doesn't show up someplace unless the office knows who else is going to be there. He knew that Zelensky was going to be there. He would have known who the guest list was. So this was just scapegoating to cover it up. But, but the bigger issue is just-

• 50:37Jason Calacanis?

  Well, but to be clear, you're not saying that they invited a Nazi on purpose and cheered for a Nazi on purpose. Nobody's saying that. You're saying there's a lack of care here, and it's unforgivable.

• 50:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's a lack of competence. It's a lack of competence.

• 50:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, just so we're clear. Yeah. Okay.

• 50:51David Sacks?

  So I agree with all of that. I think there's also two other dimensions to this, backstory, if you will. I think first, in terms of how does a mistake like this happen? I think it was Orwell who said that he who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future. The present is Ukraine. It is the current thing. Everybody has to cheer for Ukraine and for the killing of Russians. The reason why Hanka was cheered with a standing ovation is because they said that he fought Russians. He was a war hero who fought Russians. All you had to do was do a little bit of math to realize the guy's 98 years old. When was there a war against Russia? Who could he possibly have been fighting for? But to the extent people did that, they sort of airbrushed

• 51:36David Sacks?

  it or whitewashed history. So the present controls the past to ensure a vision of the future, which Trudeau laid out in this speech he gave recently, where he became so ardent in his support for Ukraine, he was almost- Yelling at the podium, saying that Canada had to make all these economic sacrifices to win the war. So that's point number one is, I think that the woke mind virus almost requires this whitewashing of the past, but it's done for a specific purpose, which is to control the future.

• 52:08Jason Calacanis?

  But they're not whitewashing the past if it was a mistake. That intellectually doesn't make sense.

• 52:12David Sacks?

  No, what they did is, what they're saying is-

• 52:15Jason Calacanis?

  If I'm understanding you correctly, yeah.

• 52:16David Sacks?

  The present is that we hate Russia so much that we're gonna cheer for anybody who killed Russians.

• 52:24Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, I understand your point, but you're agreeing that they did not knowingly put a Nazi on there, so it was a mistake. Got it.

• 52:29David Sacks?

  I don't think they knowingly did it. It was a huge debacle and embarrassing spectacle. But I think that nobody asks any questions about the past because the present overrides it.

• 52:39Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, sure.

• 52:40David Sacks?

  The present need to support the current thing overrides like any sort of examination of what has happened historically. There's one other way, which I think this wasn't an accident, Jason, is that if you look at US policy towards Ukraine, we have made common cause with a number of these far-right ultra-nationalist groups, frankly neo-Nazi groups. And this occurred before the current war, so it's not just a marriage of convenience. First of all, if you go back to war II, the father of Ukrainian nationalism is a guy named Stepan Bandera. And today in Ukraine, he is seen as some sort of hero, and there are streets named after him, and there are streets named after some of his co-conspirators who collaborated with Nazis.

• 53:25David Sacks?

  If you fast forward to the more recent past, to 2014, when we had this Maidan coup in Kiev that was backed by Victoria Nuland, one of the key figures in that coup was a guy named Ola Tannenbach, who is the founder of this Voboda party, which is the Social Nationalist Party, which if you know what Nazi stands for, it's National Socialist. They basically just flipped the name. And the original logo of this Voboda party was the Wolf's Angel, which was a Nazi insignia. This was a far-right party infused with the racial ideology of Stepan Bandera, who was, again, a Nazi.

• 54:10David Sacks?

  And they brought this guy in and his party as the muscle in this coup. If you look at the Victoria Nuland phone call, the infamous phone call where she is picking the new Ukrainian government, the Yatsizharkai phone call. She says that Klitschko, meaning Klitschko, and Tony Bach need to remain on the outside, but Yats needs to be talking to Tony Bach four times a week. Okay. He was part of the chess pieces that they were moving around. After the coup, a civil war breaks out in the Donbass because the ethnic Russians there are opposed to this new government and the fact that Yanukovych, who they voted for, was deposed in an insurrection. What happens then is a war breaks out where far-right paramilitary organizations like

• 54:54David Sacks?

  Right Sector and like the infamous Azov Battalion start killing these ethnic Russian separatists. And a full-blown civil war breaks out, thousands of people get killed. Does the Kiev government suppress these neo-Nazi groups? No, they bring them under the formal command structure of the Ukrainian military. Azov Battalion becomes a division of the Ukrainian military. It's shocking. And this goes on from 2014 through 2021.

• 55:25Jason Calacanis?

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

• 55:30David Sacks?

  There's no question about that. And there were many people who were concerned about this in the 2015 to 2020 timeframe. There were many articles written about it. The Nation had an article about it. There were efforts in Congress at various points to try and ensure that the aid that we were giving to the Ukrainian government did not go to Azov Battalion. So, so it is said, so it is said. I think the important, and obviously that is-

• 55:54Jason Calacanis?

  Do you think Zelensky is a Nazi or a Nazi separatist?

• 55:56David Sacks?

  No, no, I don't think he's a Nazi. And to be clear, I don't think most Ukrainians are Nazis, and I don't even think that most Ukrainian nationalists are Nazis. What I'm saying is that there is a Nazi element in Ukraine that people whitewashed over. Well, here's the thing about it. I don't think it's a huge percentage, but I think they have outsized influence due to their willingness to use violence, due to their extremism and their willingness to use violence.

• 56:20Jason Calacanis?

  Do you think it's any different than the Nazi percentage in, say, whatever you want to say, white supremacists in the United States or in Germany or anywhere else?

• 56:29David Sacks?

  I do. I think it's different in the sense that in the United States, for sure, we have neo-Nazi groups. They're not brought into the military. We don't have streets named after their patriarchs. Furthermore, we don't have members of our military with Nazi insignia on them. There was a New York Times article just a few months ago, talking about the fact that, embarrassingly, a lot of these Ukrainian soldiers are being photographed with Nazi insignia on their uniforms. Now, the New York Times is framing this as a problem because it was a propaganda coup for Putin. And presumably it was.

• 57:04Jason Calacanis?

  Definitely problematic.

• 57:05David Sacks?

  But I think it's a problem because it's a problem, not because of just the PR optics of it. And, you know, at various points, I think this is in the New York Times article as well, Western media has had to airbrush these photos to hide this fact. Now-

• 57:18Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, the New York Times has airbrushed photos of Nazi uniforms?

• 57:22David Sacks?

  I don't think the New York Times has, but I don't think the New York Times has, but I think they talk about this thorny problem of not wanting to show these photos. With respect to Zelensky being Jewish, so what I'd say about that is that Zelensky only came on the scene quite recently. He got elected in 2019. And again, I don't think the majority of people in Ukraine are Nazis. Okay, so I'm not saying that. But just because Zelensky came on the scene in 2019 and was elected president, doesn't mean there's a long, and I would say disturbing, history and association between Ukrainian ultra-nationalism and neo-Nazi groups. And I think that part of the woke thing and part of this Orwellian desire, where control of the president gives you the ability to rewrite the past, is that

• 58:07David Sacks?

  there's been a deliberate effort to cover up this problem and to pretend it doesn't exist, to turn a blind eye to it. Well, my point is that US policy has been to do this. In other words, the US-

• 58:20Jason Calacanis?

  You're saying our government, yeah, okay.

• 58:22David Sacks?

  The US State Department, and presumably CIA, made common cause with these far-right groups because we thought it was beneficial to be aligned with them. And so, we did it in the Maidan coup in 2014. From 2015 to 2021, we could have gone along with efforts under the Minsk Accords to resolve this conflict in the Donbass peacefully. But we never did that. We never gave it any support. And instead, we gave support to the Kiev regime's attempt to violently suppress these Russian separatists. And again, the suppression was being done by these right-wing groups. Look, does that make our State Department Nazis? No. Does that make the Canadian Parliament Nazis? No. What I'm saying is that in both cases, a blind eye was turned

• 59:04David Sacks?

  to the disturbing ideology and past and associations of these people because it's politically in our interest to do business with them. And that's the problematic thing about it. So I don't think in that sense, this was just sort of an accident. This is the backstory that explains like something like this can happen.

• 59:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, okay.

• 59:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jason, you have any reactions to Trudeau doing this and what it means, or does it mean nothing?

• 59:28David Sacks?

  Does the backstory I provided give you context on how something like this can happen? That's not just like an accident.

• 59:36Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I don't think any of us know exactly what happened here. And there's probably going to be some sort of investigation, but I don't think they knowingly put a Nazi up there. Um, I think they are pro the war and that probably- Could that have blinded them to do deeper research? Sure. People are political, politicians most of all. And, um, people probably take facts or, you know, any kind of- Anything they can use to, to, um, make their case stronger. They'll take the advantage of that. So, yeah, sure. And is Trudeau a-

• 1:00:07David Sacks?

  Zelensky was pumping his fist and cheering. Don't you think he knew? He can't not know the history. He has to know. He has to know-

• 1:00:15Jason Calacanis?

  If he does, then-

• 1:00:16David Sacks?

  That somebody was fighting the Russians in World War II-

• 1:00:19Jason Calacanis?

  Good question. If he did-

• 1:00:20David Sacks?

  On the German side.

• 1:00:21Jason Calacanis?

  If he did, then you would be saying- If he did know and he was pumping his fist, then you'd be saying that he was pro-Nazi. He was cheering for a Nazi knowingly.

• 1:00:32David Sacks?

  No, what 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.

• 1:00:38Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, I'm not saying that. I never even brought up the Jewish part. I just said, are you saying he knowingly, are you saying he knowingly cheered for a Nazi?

• 1:00:45David Sacks?

  You know, one of the big backers of the Azov Battalion is a Ukrainian oligarch named Igor Kolomoisky. Kolomoisky is Jewish.

• 1:00:53Jason Calacanis?

  No, you didn't answer my question. You asked me my opinion. I'm just saying, do you, do you think he knowingly cheered for a Nazi? Is that what you're insinuating?

• 1:00:59David Sacks?

  I think he knowingly cheered, knowing that this Ukrainian nationalist who fought in World War II must have been on the German side. Because there was only one side that was fighting the Russians.

• 1:01:07Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:01:12David Sacks?

  I'm not saying that he cheered for Nazism. What I'm saying is he cheered for Ukrainian nationalism and he knows that Ukrainian nationalism is bound up and tied up with this disturbing history, which he is willing to ignore. Do you guys, do you guys? Let me finish my point about the Azov Battalion. The Azov Battalion is undeniably a neo-Nazi group. It was funded by Igor Kolomoisky, who's a Ukrainian oligarch, who is Jewish, who lives in Israel. Why would Kolomoisky do that? Because the Azov Battalion believes that every inch of Ukraine, including Crimea and Donbass, which has enormous energy reserves, belongs to Ukraine. So it served the business interests of the energy magnates in Ukraine to support these people. And that, look, politics makes for strange bedfellows.

• 1:01:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's what I was gonna say, actually, yeah.

• 1:01:57David Sacks?

  So I'm not saying that Zelensky or Kolomoisky or anybody else is a Nazi because they aligned with these people. I'm saying they found it politically expedient and useful to align with these groups, just like the US State Department did, quite frankly. I don't think we should do that. If you want to go around the world, Jason, saying that we're the champions of freedom and democracy and having this moralistic, almost virtue signaling foreign policy, I don't think we should be in business or aligned with these neo-Nazi groups, wherever the hell they are.

• 1:02:25Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's, when you say you, do you mean me? Or do you mean the United States?

• 1:02:30David Sacks?

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

• 1:02:35Jason Calacanis?

  I would use the word, yeah, if you're going to be principled, you need to keep them, you need to not support Nazis. We're in agreement.

• 1:02:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What do you, Jason and Freebro, what do you guys think of just like the breadcrumbs in Canada? I'm just curious whether you guys care about this whole vein of just like competent leadership nepotism, if you have a view, or it's like, that is just what it is and whatever.

• 1:02:57Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know enough about Canadian politics really, but Trudeau does not seem to be super qualified. Yeah, so.

• 1:03:06Jason Calacanis?

  But I don't know enough about it.

• 1:03:07David Sacks?

  So just in terms of the Canadian part of this, there's a writer named Jeet here, who's a left-wing writer, but he posted something very interesting here, where he explained that in the late 1940s, 1950s, Canada took in a large number of former Nazis, many of whom were SS veterans. So people like Hanka, because they were good anti-communists. And then these Nazis proceeded to terrorize anti-Nazi Ukrainian Canadians. There was this Ukrainian hall was bombed here in 1950. So Canada has a weird history of bringing in some of these people after World War II. So the point is, look, yeah, exactly. Look, there's no way that any semi-intelligent person who knows the history of World War II, especially the Ukrainian involvement in World War II, wouldn't know

• 1:03:50David Sacks?

  that Ukraine was on the German side in World War II. And Hanka volunteered for the SS.

• 1:03:59David Sacks?

  He was a volunteer for the SS Galicia Division. So, look, did the Speaker of the House know? Probably not. I think wokeness makes people stupid, where they just think about the current thing and don't ask too many questions about the past. But there's a lot more to it than just like this innocent mistake.

• 1:04:15Jason Calacanis?

  And this has been your update on this week in Ukraine and wokeness. All right, there's a bunch of news about OpenAI this week. Just very quickly, OpenAI is in advanced talks, according to the Financial Times, with Johnny Ive of iPhone fame, Steve Jobs's long-term collaborator, and Masayoshi Son of SoftBank, to raise more than $1 billion to build the iPhone of AI. And so the idea would be Johnny Ive's got a design firm called LoveFrom, and they would help OpenAI design their first consumer device. Via the FT sources, Financial Times, that is,

• 1:04:59Jason Calacanis?

  Altman and I have been having brainstorming sessions in I have San Francisco studio about what a consumer product centered around OpenAI would look like, it's very early stages, and Sun has pitched a role for ARM in the development, his chip company that he recently took public. They also discussed Masa and Altman creating a company that would draw on talent and tech from their three groups with SoftBank putting in a billion dollars in seed. And then also, OpenAI is discussing a secondary share sale that would value the company at between 80 billion and 90 billion. This would be 3X, the most recent valuation. Reportedly, though, to their credit, they are on track to generate

• 1:05:41Jason Calacanis?

  $1 billion in revenue in 2023. I'm not sure how much of that is the $20 a month subscription. You know, that'd be pretty extraordinary if that was those personal subscriptions. This would be a massive gain on paper for Microsoft. OpenAI is 49% owned by Microsoft. And Sam Altman has personally, has stated multiple times now that he has no equity, so he would be getting $0 of this. And of course, we know that OpenAI started as a nonprofit before switching, and our friend Vinod Khosla told us very clearly that those are just details. What happened there, Chama? Those are, those are, those are just details. Vinod is the goat.

• 1:06:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sam is the closest thing that we have to an emergent mogul in tech. And the reason is because if everything sits on this substrate, you're going to need to get a license, you're going to want to get access to whatever developer program, whatever beta that OpenAI has. And so as a result,

• 1:06:46Jason Calacanis?

  That's already happened, by the way.

• 1:06:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, I was just going to say, so he'll be in the catbird seat. So even if he doesn't have any equity in OpenAI, he'll get, he'll just put his money into the best startups that it's like Y Combinator on steroids.

• 1:06:59David Sacks?

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

• 1:07:04Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's hear it.

• 1:07:06David Sacks?

  Well.

• 1:07:06Jason Calacanis?

  Go ahead, Columbo. Explain to us the details. There's one more thing there, ma'am.

• 1:07:10David Sacks?

  Well.

• 1:07:11Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:07:15David Sacks?

  Right, well, then who does?

• 1:07:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's the thing.

• 1:07:18David Sacks?

  What I think is really interesting about what OpenAI has done in its fundraising rounds is that each round has been a capped return model. So.

• 1:07:27Jason Calacanis?

  Explain what that is to the audience.

• 1:07:28David Friedberg?

  Hundred X, hundred X, right? Every round.

• 1:07:30David Sacks?

  I think some of the very early people got capped at a hundred X. I think maybe the thirty billion dollar round was capped at ten X. So I think the thirty billion dollar round's capped at a three hundred million dollar valuation, meaning if you're an investor, your shares go up in value till the company hits a market cap of three hundred billion, and then basically you're effectively cashed out. It's like you bought a share but sold a call back to the company at the three hundred billion dollar valuation.

• 1:07:54Jason Calacanis?

  The movie industry works this way, right? You invest in a film, they tell you you can make three acts and then it's over, right? Something like that. I've seen that in the independent film business, you know?

• 1:08:01David Sacks?

  Yeah, so in any event, I think people invested, like the two billion dollar valuation were capped at like a hundred billion. I heard that employees who were getting stock options are capped at a hundred billion, or they were way back when they started granting these things.

• 1:08:13Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:08:13David Sacks?

  So my point is that if OpenAI turns into one of these companies, like a Google ends up in the trillion dollar club, then nobody's gonna own anything because they will have already long ago been capped out.

• 1:08:27David Friedberg?

  They'll keep selling new interest, like the new interest will end up being like eight percent. No, because what will happen at the end is the new people that buy in at that higher price, that buy out the early investors, they're getting effectively things like eight percent return, it turns into debt eventually, turns into some.

• 1:08:43David Sacks?

  I think what's really going on here is somebody has to own the residual value of the company, call it the far out of the money call option.

• 1:08:51David Friedberg?

  That's how they get around the IRS problem of it being non-equity. That's how they say that it's not equity in a private corporation.

• 1:08:57David Sacks?

  Yeah, but I think, I think what's brilliant about it is, okay, so look, Sam set up this foundation, it's a nonprofit, but he controls that effectively, right?

• 1:09:05David Friedberg?

  Yep.

• 1:09:06David Sacks?

  So, yes, he technically is not an owner of the shares, the foundation is, but what can't you do with the foundation that you could do with personal ownership, other than maybe? Buying a personal residence. I mean, you can buy a plane, I think. Look at the Church of Scientology. They own a lot of real estate. So my point is, not only do I think that Sam really owns OpenAI through the fig leaf of this foundation, I think he owns a hundred percent of it. In the event that the call option is struck, meaning it ends up being a trillion dollar company.

• 1:09:36Jason Calacanis?

  Are you saying Sam is Al Ron Hubbard in this example?

• 1:09:40David Friedberg?

  Let's not speculate too much.

• 1:09:42Jason Calacanis?

  Why? Oh, it's just details. Right. As Verneau said, those are just details.

• 1:09:46David Sacks?

  I am speculating, but I think it's informed speculation. If you wanted to become the world's first trillionaire and you were extremely premeditated about it, clever and premeditated about it, what would you do? Number one, you would want to choose a moonshot type of area that was a world changing technology. AI certainly qualifies. So does cold fusion. Maybe crypto does. As I understand it, Sam has bets in all three of those areas. Number two, you would want to figure out a way to own as much of it as you could, really a hundred percent if you could. And that's a very hard thing to do when you're running a capital intensive startup, but investors tend to underestimate the power law and the value of the far out of the money call option. So maybe you can

• 1:10:30David Sacks?

  get them to sell that back to you really cheaply. And third, if you're really far sighted, you would want to insulate yourself against populist anger from being the world's first trillionaire. So you would basically put your shares in a nonprofit foundation where you're not really sacrificing that much of control or the ability to control the asset, but it gives you tremendous.

• 1:10:53Jason Calacanis?

  I love this conspiracy theory. Where did you come up with this? Is this like, this is genius? This is genius. Did you, you and Peter Thiel talk about this over chess or something? How did you construct this? And you're saying this is informed?

• 1:11:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I love Financial Conspiracy Corner. I think it rivals Science Corner.

• 1:11:09Jason Calacanis?

  Let's get the tinfoil hats out. It's really freaking Friedberg out that we're even doing this. Diometrically opposite to Science Corner.

• 1:11:15David Sacks?

  Is it a conspiracy or is it just reality?

• 1:11:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think if you are even 1% right, the combination of lawyers and accountants that would leak this and the number of people that were part of the origination of the foundation that would want to sue will be very high. That's just the natural state of things in these kinds of things.

• 1:11:37Jason Calacanis?

  There seems like a lot easier way.

• 1:11:38David Sacks?

  But what, but what have I said other than the fact that it was sort of premeditated, which that's not the right word. The premeditated sounds too nefarious.

• 1:11:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, no, I'm just saying whenever, whenever, I'm just saying whenever money is made at this quantum and at that scale, everybody wants a piece because they know that that's their one shot. So I just think that it'll amplify the pressure for actors inside of those organizations to take their shot. And that's just going to be financially the right thing to do for a lot of people if, if what you're saying is true.

• 1:12:11David Sacks?

  We know the investments have been made under a cap return model. I think that's fact.

• 1:12:15Jason Calacanis?

  That's fact, yes.

• 1:12:16David Sacks?

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

• 1:12:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then just to put the 800 pound gorilla on the table, like, what's Elon thinking? Because he was the one that really got this thing off the ground because that critical investment made the whole thing come to life. He could have done this on his own.

• 1:12:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. How much does he own?

• 1:12:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Zero.

• 1:12:33David Sacks?

  Zero.

• 1:12:34Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:12:39David Friedberg?

  So can we talk about the technology?

• 1:12:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, I'll tee it up here. Here we go. So OpenAI released some new chat GPT features. The key point here is they're doing what's called multimodal. Multimodal is the big innovation. What does that mean? That means the input could be voice, the input could be code, the input could be data. It could be a picture. Here's a picture. If you're watching along on the YouTube channel, do a search for All In Podcast on YouTube, hit subscribe, hit the bell. And it's a classic picture of one of those no parking signs where there's four different ones. You take a picture of that, that's the input. And you say, it's Wednesday at 4:00 PM. Can I park in the spot right now? Tell me in one line. It comes back and says, yes, you can park for up to one hour starting at 4:00 PM. What this means is the output or the input could be in any of those modalities, modalities fancy word for an image, a video, et cetera.

• 1:13:25Jason Calacanis?

  So you're going to be able to say, hey, give me the poster for the All In Conference of Bestie Runner. And I want it to be these things. And here are the pictures of the boys and then make it and go back and forth and back and forth. And this is really groundbreaking. At the same time, last week, Google Bard and Sandeep Madra and I played with this on this week in startups. You now have Google Flights, Google Docs, Gmail, and a number of the other core Google services are now in Bard. So that's not multimodal exactly, but you could do things like ask Google Flights, hey, what is the best nonstop? You know, between New York City and Dubai,

• 1:14:07Jason Calacanis?

  or from an East Coast destination that has lay down flat seats, et cetera. And it really does, it's starting to work. So this idea that Google is going to be displaced or they're moving slow, that might be antiquated information. So those are the two big, big monumental announcements just in the last 10 days. Friedberg, when you look at these two, which one is the more important announcement? And what do you think about the pace? Because we, here we are, we're about to hit the one year anniversary of ChatGPT 3.5.

• 1:14:34David Friedberg?

  I've been using a lot of different tools the last couple of months. And I'm kind of getting to the point that I feel that much of what's happening is underhyped rather than overhyped. There's some really incredible potential emerging. Um, I'll, I'll give a couple of examples and then I'll talk about the mobile phone. First is Andre Karpathy, as you guys see in the tweet that I just posted in the chat, made a point today that LLMs are emerging not just as a chatbot, but as a kernel process, meaning a new type of operating system that can do input and output across different modalities, can interpret code, can access the internet and information, and then can render things in a visual way

• 1:15:18David Friedberg?

  or in an audio way that the user wants to consume it. So as a result, LLMs become the core driver to a new type of computing interface. There was a paper published, and I'll share the link to this paper here as well. We can put it in the notes, it's not worth pulling up on the screen, that showed that using LLMs in autonomous driving can actually significantly improve the performance of the neural nets that the autonomous cars are trained on. So the autonomous car is typically trained on a bunch of sensor data that comes in. And then that sensor data determines what sort of action to take with the car. And what this team showed is that if you actually put in a communication layer that thinks and talks like a human in between the sensor data and the action data,

• 1:16:01David Friedberg?

  it can do really wide ranging interpretations of the data that otherwise would not be apparent from the data set it was trained on. So for example, you can see a person down the road and ask it, what do you think that person's gonna do next? And the L L M, because it's trained on a much larger corpus of data than just sensor data from cars, it can make a really good, human-like interpretation of that, feed that decision back into the control system of the car and have the car do something more intelligently than it otherwise would have been able to do. So these L L M's are becoming a lot more like a software operating system. And you can kind of extend that into mobile phones. Mobile phones originally were just voice, and then they were single lines of text in the form of S M S. Then you were able to browse the web, and then the app revolution came about where

• 1:16:45David Friedberg?

  all of this information emerged through apps. What L L M's now allow, perhaps, is that the entire operating system of the phone can run and render any sort of application or any sort of service or product you might want to use on the fly in screen. So the input to the phone can be voice, it can be visual, it can be video, and the output can be rendered by perhaps a bunch of what might otherwise be called apps, but call it third-party developers that build in-stream into that chat that's no longer looks like a chat interface like we see on Chat G P T, but can be rendered visually, can be rendered with audio, can be rendered a bunch of different ways. So if mobile really is the dominant tech hardware platform that humans are using for computing today, L L M's and these sorts of tools can become the dominant operating system on that hardware.

• 1:17:30David Friedberg?

  And you can totally rethink the modality of how you use computing through applications today. We have an app store and we download apps and use them, and that all becomes in-stream in an L L M or chat-type interface that can be accessed in a bunch of different ways. So for me, there's a really bigger thing that's happening that's not just about making smarter tools and increasing productivity, but a real revolution in computing itself that seems to be emergent. And I think Karpathy's tweet this morning, some of the stuff I've been playing with, some of the papers I've been reading, and some of the speculation around a mobile hardware start to support that thesis, and I think it's gonna be really significant. It's a wholesale rewriting of computing, computing interfaces, human-computer interaction that's gonna rethink everything, and it seems to be pretty substantial.

• 1:18:12David Friedberg?

  And just using a bunch of tools myself, I'm blown away every single time with what you can do.

• 1:18:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, right now, I would agree with you, strongly agree, because this was some, this was magic links. Vision for the future, which is you would talk to agents, as they called them. This was a company that existed in the 90s before smartphones existed. It was a physical device. Sony made the device. And the operating system, the concept was you would say, I'm looking for a flight to go to this place. The agent would go out, it would do a bunch of work and then come back to you with the options. So not just a Google search coming back with 10 blue links, but actually just solving your problem. And if the interface is-

• 1:18:49David Friedberg?

  From General Magic, right?

• 1:18:51Jason Calacanis?

  General Magic, right.

• 1:18:52David Friedberg?

  Yeah, right, right.

• 1:18:53Jason Calacanis?

  And there's a movie, General Magic, the movie. You can look at the Wikipedia company, but this was a lot of like the early work in this area. And I think this is going to become the interface and LMs talking to each other. Then the question becomes, who owns this? How many of these are there? Are they verticalized? So what do you think the game on the field is here, Zach?

• 1:19:13David Sacks?

  Well, I think this is super interesting. I don't know if this qualifies as a science corner, but this is the most interesting science corner you've ever done.

• 1:19:20Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:19:22David Friedberg?

  I'm trying to get the science corner into an intersecting realm so we can all be involved, yeah.

• 1:19:26Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:19:32David Sacks?

  Okay, so on the phone, I think what's interesting there, just to boil it down, is you're talking about replacing the main interface, which is currently a wall of apps, right?

• 1:19:42David Friedberg?

  Yep.

• 1:19:43David Sacks?

  And you push, you tap an app to go into the app and then you interact with it. You're talking about replacing all of that with basically voice. So imagine if Siri-

• 1:19:50David Friedberg?

  Or visual, yeah.

• 1:19:51David Sacks?

  Or visual, if you connect like glasses to it or something.

• 1:19:55David Friedberg?

  So rather than, rather than double click on an app, the app developers, as they're called today, are basically building in-stream utilities that are part of the chat interface that, that is the phone itself. And that's what's going to be so compelling. You have to re, like, we, we used to write websites, then we wrote apps, and now we're going to write these kind of in-stream services, these plugins.

• 1:20:15Jason Calacanis?

  Alexa was gonna do this, yeah.

• 1:20:18David Sacks?

  Well, Alexa or Siri, but Siri kinda sucks. It just doesn't work that well.

• 1:20:21Jason Calacanis?

  Doesn't work.

• 1:20:23David Sacks?

  But imagine if the phone perfectly understood what you were saying, then you would just say, call me an Uber, order me food, whatever, and-

• 1:20:29David Friedberg?

  Precisely.

• 1:20:30David Sacks?

  You would just instruct it.

• 1:20:31David Friedberg?

  Precisely.

• 1:20:32David Sacks?

  It's like in that movie- Was it her?

• 1:20:34David Friedberg?

  Her.

• 1:20:35David Sacks?

  The Joaquin Phoenix movie?

• 1:20:36David Friedberg?

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

• 1:20:39Jason Calacanis?

  You've disappointed all the Science Corner fans.

• 1:20:41David Sacks?

  It's a Spike Jones movie. He did a really good job with that, man. That movie's looking more and more like it's gonna happen.

• 1:20:47Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:20:49David Sacks?

  You won't even really need the pane of glass if you can just talk to it with an earpiece. Now, I think you're right that the phone needs to know what you're looking at. Or it can do so much more if it has all those senses.

• 1:21:02David Friedberg?

  That's part of the multimodal demo that OpenAI showed this week is it has video and it has camera integration. And remember, in human-computer interaction, it's often a lot easier for a human to interact with a visual representation of stuff on a screen than to hear stuff in audio. So we will still need some sort of visual display, whether it's a screen or an eyeglass or something that shows us a bunch of information in a way.

• 1:21:29David Sacks?

  Sam, apparently, talk about the ecosystem he's trying to create. Sam apparently invested in a company that was hardware plus software for like journaling, like you would hang like a necklace around your neck, a camera-type device.

• 1:21:43Jason Calacanis?

  Wearable.

• 1:21:44David Sacks?

  Wearable, okay. And it would record everything. And it would be like your memory backup and you'd be able to query it. So...

• 1:21:52Jason Calacanis?

  That was William Gibson's plotline in one of his books where he had a little Zeppelin that would follow people around and record everything. And then you'd have a DVR of your entire life and that would be completely indexed. And then you could, the AI would know your entire life and be able to advise you. Do you guys use the feature on your AirPods where if you leave them in, it will read you the messages from your signal or your incoming notifications where it reads them to you? Obviously, you don't. So there's a new feature on the AirPods. You leave them in. And if you're working, you're walking around the house, or you're walking around Manhattan like I am these last couple of days, it will stop the podcast I'm listening to and just say, you know, "Oh, poker group says this. Oh, you know, your wife just texted you this."

• 1:22:36Jason Calacanis?

  And it reads it to you. And then you can say "reply." So eventually, if Siri works and then you have those Apple goggles on... I think that that is going to be the eventual interface, which is you'll hear certain things, you'll see certain things. Some things will be better visually, other things will be better.

• 1:22:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 1:22:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, those are like they're spectacle kind of things. These are the light AR glasses where you could take pictures.

• 1:23:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I was about to say, everything's converging a lot faster than we all thought.

• 1:23:03David Sacks?

  Yeah, it is. So I started using a new note taking app called Reflect. Have you guys heard of this?

• 1:23:08Jason Calacanis?

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

• 1:23:14David Sacks?

  I'm just starting to play with it, but what it does is you keep like a daily log of who you've met with and what meetings were about. So it's basically a note taking app, but it does backlinks. So that it starts to link together the people and concepts or whatever. And so like the use case that I think it's quite useful for, once you've been using it for a while, is, okay, I'm meeting with this person. When's the last time I saw them? What did we talk about then? So it gives you like context, right? Yeah.

• 1:23:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's awesome. I really like this.

• 1:23:41David Sacks?

  It's external memory, right? Because like I can't, I'm like, I'm delus with so much stuff now, I can't even, I forget people's names sometimes if I've only met them once or twice. So.

• 1:23:50Jason Calacanis?

  His name is Friedberg, David Friedberg is his name.

• 1:23:53David Sacks?

  Not you guys, but.

• 1:23:55Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's also getting old. You're sure. It's a function of how much input is coming at you. There's just so much coming at us today.

• 1:24:02David Sacks?

  Right, but it's having a short log of who I've met with and briefly what the meeting was about. So I can go back and check it and at some point in the future, I've searched against it. But the only problem with it is I do have to like take the time to enter all this stuff and it's kind of a pain.

• 1:24:16Jason Calacanis?

  It'll authenticate with Slack.

• 1:24:17David Sacks?

  Automatically, like a true external hard drive to my brain, then that would be very powerful.

• 1:24:23Jason Calacanis?

  It'll authenticate with Slack and Gmail and do that automatically and then you'll, it'll be otherworldly.

• 1:24:29David Sacks?

  It already connects with Google. I don't want my Slack in my Reflect. What I want is my meetings, which they do, they integrate with Google Calendar.

• 1:24:37Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 1:24:38David Sacks?

  And really that's it. Like the main thing I want is if I could just know everyone I talk to, and I don't need a transcript, I just need the log line, just so I can remember. Because I just need the prompt. Six months from now, I just need a prompt that I met with this person and here was the topic. That's it.

• 1:24:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sax, have you gone to the, have you Bill Clintonized your greetings now?

• 1:24:58Jason Calacanis?

  It's great to see you. Great to see you. That's the great, that's the great thing. Like, it's great to see you, so that you know you preserve optionality for the people you have.

• 1:25:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I do the same thing.

• 1:25:06Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, it's so good. It's great to see you. We've never met, but it's great to see you. Great to see, great to see you.

• 1:25:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I always say, "Great to see you."

• 1:25:12Jason Calacanis?

  Great to see you. I'm gonna adopt that. It's such a banger. Um, I, uh, when I met, uh, Clinton, I was at a Hillary Clinton fundraiser when she was a senator here in New York, and they sent you up an elevator to this fundraiser, and, uh, you get off the 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 he grabs your elbow, he shakes your hand, "I am so happy for what you did to help Hillary win, and, uh, you know, Jason, we're so appreciative," and then, you know, you walk into the room. And I'm like, "Oh, my God, Bill Clinton knows my name."

• 1:25:47David Sacks?

  Totally.

• 1:25:48Jason Calacanis?

  Then I look behind me, and I see the next person, I see a woman come out with a clipboard, whispering in his ear the next person's name coming out of the elevator, he's waiting, that person disappears, "Oh, David Sacks, it's so great to meet you. I really appreciate everything you've done for Hillary."

• 1:26:04David Sacks?

  You know, that role of whispering the name of a person in the politician's ear goes all the way back to Roman times. It was called the nomenklatura.

• 1:26:12Jason Calacanis?

  The nomenklatura.

• 1:26:14David Sacks?

  Nomen is the Latin word for name. It's a-

• 1:26:17Jason Calacanis?

  How often, I call it the name vaper. Hey, Sacks, let me ask you a question. How often do you think about the Roman Empire? Just broadly speaking?

• 1:26:25David Sacks?

  Was that a gratuitous reference? I thought that was-

• 1:26:27Jason Calacanis?

  I thought so, yeah. It's pretty great. It's pretty great. I'm just glad that the rest of the world is, is catching up to our obsession with Gladiator. All right, listen, this has been an amazing episode for the dictator himself, Chamath Palihapitiya, and Rain Man, yeah, definitely Burn Baby, David Sacks, and the Sultan of Science, the Queen of Kinwa, the Prince of Panic Attacks, and the heir to the TED throne, the creator of the world's greatest conference, David Friedberg. I am the world's greatest moderator. We'll see you next time. Love you, boys. All in. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Love you, dudes.

• 1:27:02David Sacks?

  Ted's dead.

• 1:27:02Jason Calacanis?

  Ted's dead.

• 1:27:03David Sacks?

  Ted's dead, baby.

• 1:27:04Jason Calacanis?

  Ted's dead, baby.

• 1:27:27Speaker 04

  Besties are gone.

• 1:27:30Speaker 04

  That is my dog taking a piss in your driveway.

• 1:27:38Speaker 06

  We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this like sexual tension but they just need to release somehow.

• 1:27:46Speaker 04

  What your beak? What your beak? What your beak? Beak? What? We need to get merch. Besties are back.