TED 趋于觉醒、加拿大纳粹乌龙、AI 获得视觉，以及谁拥有 OpenAI

David Friedberg (00:00:00): Coleman. How's it going? Jason Calacanis (00:00:01): Hey, Coleman. Welcome to the show. David Sacks (00:00:02): Hey. How's it going? Pleasure. David Friedberg (00:00:04): Have you ever heard of this show? Coleman Hughes (00:00:06): Yeah. I I'm actually a fan. My girlfriend introduced me the show, like, 2 years ago, and I've been a fan ever since. David Friedberg (00:00:12): Great to meet. Coleman Hughes (00:00:12): Apparently, like, many women, she has, like, she has a legit concerning obsession with Saks, Jason Calacanis (00:00:18): but Don't say it. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:19): Oh my god. Jason Calacanis (00:00:21): What? Oh, hurt. No. David Sacks (00:00:22): Saks fans are crazy. David Friedberg (00:00:25): And the episode and the episode. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:28): Oh my Coleman Hughes (00:00:28): god. It's all my god. Jason Calacanis (00:00:29): It changes our way to go. Call me. What? It fit right in here. Alright. Here we go. Let me write this. This is your cold open phone. I'm sorry. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:37): I I mean, let me just psychologically explore this before we get into the real substance of it. Well, why does she like him so much? I don't understand Jason Calacanis (00:00:43): By the way, I think you Coleman Hughes (00:00:44): guys missed the second half of my statement. I said Saks and Shamal. David Friedberg (00:00:47): Oh, shit. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:48): Okay. Great. David Friedberg (00:00:51): Thank Jason Calacanis (00:00:51): god. You want to hear we Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:53): go. Take Jason Calacanis (00:00:54): god. 3. David Sanders. Alright, everybody. Welcome back to the All in podcast. We have a very full docket today. I thought we'd start with something pretty crazy. There was a really weird, moment last week Ted threw 1 of 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 TAD are a bunch of virtual signaling lunatics, including some of my friends who go. But Coleman Hughes, if you don't know him, is a writer and podcaster. He has a a a pretty popular podcast called conversations with Coleman, and he did a which I encourage everybody to watch at TED and it's titled a case for color blindness. We all watched it. It's very powerful talk. And something weird happened, Coleman, welcome to the program. And, maybe you could just share with the audience how you wound up speaking at Ted, what the content, of your talk was briefly, And then the bizarre reaction when they try to ban and kill your talk post you giving it. Coleman Hughes (00:02:25): 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 a summary of of what happened there. Basically, what happened is Chris Anderson invited me to give a TED Talk and, I chose the subject of my upcoming book which is coming out in February called the end of race politics. And the argument is just essentially color blindness. This is the idea that you wanna 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 we should preferentially use class as a variable rather than race. That's that's my talk in a nutshell. So I prepared the talk with the TED team. I got their feedback, edited, curated, etcetera. Got up there in April, gave the talk. 90 5 percent of the people in the audience, it was quite well well received. Whether or not they agreed with every point, it was they well within the bounds of acceptable discourse. There was a very small minority on stage. I could see that was physically upset by my talk. On stage. I could see this on stage yet in the moment, but, I mean, I'm talking five people in a crowd of almost 2000. So I expected that because, you know, color blindness is not invoked today on on the left, amongst progressives. It's really the idea non grata. And so I was expecting to field some pushback and I 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 staffs 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 wanna talk to you and they're an employee group at Ted. Coleman Hughes (00:04:22): After the conference, Chris emailed me and said, look. I'm getting I'm 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 kinda sticking up for myself. So first, they wanted to attach, like, a a debate to the end of my talk and release it as one video, which I felt would really send the wrong message. Message that, like, this idea can't be heard without the opposing perspective. Jason Calacanis (00:05:00): Did they tell you what was problematic about your talk? Teasing work term? Well Like, what was the problem with the talk? Coleman Hughes (00:05:08): Well, there are no factual problems. It passed the fact checking team. There were there were no substantive issues with the talk. The problem was that it upset the staff. It upset the staff. That was the language that was used. It upset certain people and the staff. Jason Calacanis (00:05:22): Got it. And and those people are black? Coleman Hughes (00:05:25): Probably most were, you know, I I I tried to actually have face to face conversations with, some of these folks. I only got to to, talk to one woman So presumably many of them were black, but pro possibly not all. Jason Calacanis (00:05:40): Okay. What was the what do you perceive was the problem with your talk? Or what they perceive the problem with your talk is? Coleman Hughes (00:05:47): 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 2 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 person is really, really deranged kind of criticisms. David Friedberg (00:06:34): 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 talk with him, or do you have a point of view on the suppression of the promotion of the video, even though they put it out there and how that's affected know, how widespread the video has been made available to folks? Coleman Hughes (00:06:58): Yeah. So in in my final call with Chris, he sort of presented this idea about how to release it. And he sold it to me as a way 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 2 weeks later, they'd release a debate between myself and this guy, Jamelle Bowie, who was in New York Times, columnist. So the talk came out on Ted's website. The debate came out, and I kind of mentally had forgotten about the whole situation until Tim Urban, who is a popular blogger, who's actually given the yeah. The he's given Jason Calacanis (00:07:35): the well, in Summit last year. Yeah. Coleman Hughes (00:07:37): Oh, that's great. Yeah. Tim is great. He he's also given the most viewed TED talk of all time on YouTube. Tim noticed that my talk just had a really absurdly low view count, like an implausibly low view count on on Ted's website in mid August. He tweeted this and that he believed they were intentionally under promoting my talk. Jason Calacanis (00:07:57): So I checked. Yeah. Yeah. Coleman Hughes (00:07:58): Yeah. I checked. And all of the of the 5 talks surrounding mine, they all had between, you know, 450,000 views and 800,000 views. That was the full range. Mine had 73,000. Right? So 16% of the low end of the range of all the talks released around mine. So when that happened, I 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 I went public. David Friedberg (00:08:27): Just just to be clear, you're saying that the condition for releasing your your TED Talk, the bargain you struck with Chris, was that you would do a debate with someone in a separate video and that you had to do the debate in order to have your TED Talk released Coleman Hughes (00:08:44): Yes. Wow. So, yeah, that that's what that was that was the end in 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 we're gonna release them as separate videos on the same day. I said, hell no, cause that dilutes it. And then we agreed on a 2 week separation between the two. David Friedberg (00:09:04): 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 we're a live TED talk at the TED Conference, and they were deemed to be too controversial to be released publicly. Coleman Hughes (00:09:20): Definitely not this year. I can't I I'm, you know, I don't know the whole history of Ted, but nothing like that this year. For sure. Jason Calacanis (00:09:26): We can go one of two ways with this, Friedberg, do you wanna talk about the substance of the talk or maybe dig into the culture of 10? David Friedberg (00:09:33): I wanna talk about the substance of the talk in a minute, but I think it's worth to 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. It was to kind of, you know, inspire people with new ideas. Over the years that I attended Ted, I began to observe that many of the talks, and I spoke about this very briefly last week as part of my motivation and interest in doing the all in summit this year. But that over time, many of the talks began to take a bit of a social justice turn in the sense that there was almost a lecturing happening as curated by the editorial process at TED. When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, Needless to say most of the audience of Ted was not on that side of the voting block. And what disturbed me the most was that in the 3 years after he was elected, every TED conference had plenty of subject plenty of talks and plenty of conversations about why society is falling apart, why Donald Trump is a key root cause of that why so much of him and what he stands for and the people behind him are unjust and evil in all these ways. There wasn't a single talk that provided a perspective of why anyone voted for him. There was no one that shared a point of view about why this person had come to gather more than half the votes or half the votes in the country. David Friedberg (00:11:24): And I thought that was such an important topic to better understand that I was so shocked that it was never part of the discourse at Ted I'm not a Republican. I'm not a conservative, and I'm not against social justice issues. But I saw Ted over time get overtaken with this kind of very 1-sided, almost bullying type of approach to this is the narrative we wanna sell idea on rather than have a true discourse, about the matter. I sent an, a survey, response in 2019 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 Anderson reached out to me and said, well, you have a conversation. I went on a Zoom call with him, and I spoke with him for an hour, and I shared all this. And I said, he's missing so much of what's happening. That's, optimistic about the world. It's optimistic about technology. That's different ways of looking at things. And he's kind of created this very, narrow minded view on the topics that they want to address and how they want to address them. And that was it, and I walked away. So when I saw what happened with your talk, to me, it's almost like the ultimate end game of this process that I've been observing at Ted personally for the last 13 years. And I just wanted to you know, or last 15 years, I guess, share that story with you, and speak publicly about it. Jason Calacanis (00:12:56): I, I, I very much respect the David Friedberg (00:12:57): intention of the people at Ted. I respect Chris Anderson deeply The TED Talks changed my life many times along the way over the decade plus that I went there. There, I have many great friends from TED. I know plenty 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. Jason Calacanis (00:13:30): Coleman, what's your what's your take on the on the TED organization, you know, pre and post having had this experience? I'm curious. Coleman Hughes (00:13:38): Yeah. What you just said, David, I've heard echoed from at least a dozen people that have gone to Ted or or been, you know, in the tech 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 I'm skeptical. Yeah. I see you shaking her head. I I agree. David Friedberg (00:14:03): Only Chris Anderson, I would say no. Coleman Hughes (00:14:05): I agree. So so, like, all my private communications with 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 who literally just don't share that value, you know, it's a very tricky thing with leadership Sometimes you have to simply be the bad guy and say, I'm sorry. These are the values of the institution. And if you're not on board, you're this is not right for you. And my perception is that Ted has been captured kind of from the bottom up, like many institutions, just from the seeping in of staff that don't share those values. And the in, inability of the leadership to actually hold the line for those values. Jason Calacanis (00:14:58): Did they tell you that you made them feel unsafe? Coleman Hughes (00:15:01): Yes. Actually. Actually, yes. Yes. Speech people said they felt they were attacked in the audience. And I'm, you know, my my talk was, again, just look it up on YouTube. It's quite mild. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:15:11): Can we actually talk about that? Yeah. David Friedberg (00:15:12): Let's go into the sum of the chip. Jason Calacanis (00:15:14): What was your take on it, Chamath? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:15:15): 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, has a refugee on welfare, And then to get through every single sort of strat of society, I think when I look back the biggest thing that I struggled with was always confusing when I felt mistreated I would always direct it at racism. It would be my sort of safety blanket, and I would always look at Other people as doing that. And it was only until I met my wife and spending years and years talking about it, where I was able to disarm this and see that out of 100 interactions, a lot of the time just people are having a bad day, some other percentage of the time, people are actually just being very classes. Because racism, it turns out, is like a pretty severe perversion, and it's really crazy when you actually see it play out. And, for me, had I had a framework? If I had your talk when I was in my twenties thirties, I would have spirit myself a lot of self sabotage. Because what that does is when you feel these things and you don't have a framework to interpret it or to tolerate the anxiety, I would internalize that anxiety, and I was a less productive person. And so if the goal was for me on behalf of my family or on behalf of people like me to make it, I would have gotten there much faster had I not gotten in my own way. And when I watched your talk, it was incredibly validating for the work that I had done. And I had thought to myself, man, if I had had him if he had made that for me when I was twenty years old amazing. I would have I could have done so much more because when I think about some of the mistakes I made, 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 in feel like that, you should really listen to what you had to say because I thought it was eloquently addressed. I was a huge, huge, huge fan of what you had to say. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:17:28): And I thought it was extremely well done. And especially for someone as young as you, I thought it was just amazing. Jason Calacanis (00:17:35): 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. David Friedberg (00:17:43): And I and I did look at the Jason Calacanis (00:17:44): comments to Ted's credit. The comments are open. So what was the reaction, you know, to to to people like Shamab or or yourself? People of color who maybe who have experience racism on some regular basis and this idea of having color blindness when when we're, you know, operating as a society and that goal, which I'll just point out when I listen to your talks, seems to be exactly what Martin Luther King said. So go ahead. Coleman Hughes (00:18:09): Yeah. It is So there's the the stereotype of the reaction is that white people like my talk and people of color don't. Yes. So that's the stereotype that my critics would like to believe is the reality because then they don't have to confront my arguments. The reality is that even at the TED Conference, which is a progressive space, many, many people of color black people, South Asian people came up to me saying, that was an excellent talk for this, that, and the third reason. And I think, probably for for reasons, similar to what you were saying, Chamath. I 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 them. Right? Why? It doesn't make sense for instance to strongly feel that your racial identity is an aspect of your core inner self that you ought to judge people on the basis of their racial identity, that you know, if you're a white person that, you know, you don't have a valid perspective to bear on a conversation or you have to, you know, preface every belief by saying, Well, I'm a 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, your Tremoth, your David, etcetera. Let's all talk about this from the point of view of epistemic equals, and have conversations. And, yeah, you you're gonna 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 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 the 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 the left. You you you've gotten media institutions that have been taken in in by this. Coleman Hughes (00:20:29): So you you see New York Times op eds, like, one, I think, 5 years ago that's, can my children be friends with white people? Right? You've got Robin DeAngelo and her book saying things like a white person shouldn't cry around a black person because it triggers us. It's like, this is so the opposite of what it actually feels like to hang out with an interracial and tight knit group of friends. Your race racial identity recedes in importance the more you get to know people. And I think people in interracial relationships know this. People with interracial kids know this. So my message actually resonate resonates with people of of of all colors. Jason Calacanis (00:21:07): Patty was one of the most poignant parts of it, Saks, 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. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:21:24): Jake, I just David Friedberg (00:21:25): I just wanna I wanna I wanna 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 the organization's ideals. Obviously, well, Jason Calacanis (00:21:56): that's what I mean by rotting. I mean, it's like it's it was such a story to institute you know, in terms of it was a brave institution under Ricky Saul Warman. You know? David Friedberg (00:22:05): I get it, but I think I think rotting is such a derogatory term in the sense that some of these institutions evolve to be different, but Okay. Jason Calacanis (00:22:12): I I I and that's the only thing I I just I David Friedberg (00:22:13): I don't wanna make it. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:22:15): Saxon rotting, or is it being taken over, from the inside out from the bottom up. What are your thoughts? David Sacks (00:22:21): I think captured is a pretty good word to use. Treba used 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 gonna 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 wanna go to Chris Anderson's response here. He wrote this long post on x, which is too long to read here. It's a really sort of weasley, mealy mouth defense of what they did. A lot of both sides type language. I think there's really only 1 or 2 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 or ideas is supposed to work is that when you encounter an idea you disagree with, you formulate an equally well thought out response. And you engage in intellectual discourse. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:23:58): Maybe get curious. Yeah. Get curious. David Sacks (00:23:59): Exactly. But, you know, I think these words are really significant because he's saying not as that the objectives 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. Coleman Hughes (00:24:17): Yeah. David Sacks (00:24:17): And as soon as you do that, as soon as you concede that the 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 gonna 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. David Friedberg (00:24:57): Or the broader audience to hear it. David Sacks (00:24:59): Right. Exactly. And I think that's and I think that's where we've ended up. David Friedberg (00:25:02): Coleman, can I ask your point of view on institutional capture? Obviously, this is different than the topics you've been you've spoken about. But as you've gone through this experience with Ted and as you think more broadly about what's going on, Do you have a point of view on the capture of institutions from the bottom up that's happened and how that's affected some of these topics like free speech, sharing of ideas, open discourse, all these foundations that made kind of a free and open society work effectively for so long. Coleman Hughes (00:25:33): Yeah. Well, it's 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 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 mo 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 just gotta start your own institutions. You have to start your own institutions with the right ethos from day 1 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. David Sacks (00:26:17): That Chris could have solved this very easily. I mean, this is a failure of leadership. What he needed to tell these employees is, look, our mission is to be a platform for spreading interesting ideas. And we can't treat this speech differently than any other speech just because you disagree with it. That's all you had to do. David Friedberg (00:26:35): 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 a Jonathan Hates book, Coddling of the American mind, Colin? Coleman Hughes (00:26:44): Absolutely. Yeah. Great book. David Friedberg (00:26:46): And I think that speaks and and that was the book I gave away in our gift bag at the Holland 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. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:27:17): 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 steal men 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. Coleman Hughes (00:27:44): 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 Jason Calacanis (00:27:54): sort of Coleman Hughes (00:27:54): race based Chamath Palihapitiya (00:27:54): diversity, equity, and inclusion. Coleman Hughes (00:27:59): Explicitly taking race into account in policies. And, you know, you you're someone that's been working in that domain for 30 years. And you see someone like me come up there and just argue against that whole approach, there may be some severe threat mechanism that comes on board where you actually don't have a rational argument that that easily debunks what I'm saying because what I'm saying is very reasonable. And so in the absence of a great rational argument, when the stakes are high, all the, you know, primal animal emotions sort of come out, your 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 it incredibly emotional, that's my only guess. Jason Calacanis (00:28:47): 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, you know, a shade and they and they do color blind selection process, a color blind selection process. I think Malcolm Gladwell talked about that in and your response to and then they said, well, it wouldn't be better if we could have, you know, some representation in that group. So then we would hire people to get to the group. Your response to that was. Coleman Hughes (00:29:24): Yeah. My response to that was what you really wanna do is If there are reasons why, say, black kids aren't getting access to violins at the at at a young age because schools are underfunded, our banned programs are are horrible. In inner cities, that's where you wanna intervene. You don't wanna 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. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:29:52): Have you read this book called Losing ground by Charles Brewing? Coleman Hughes (00:29:57): Yes. I have. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:29:58): 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 19 sixties with LBJ's war on poverty. And I think when you look at racism, through the American lived experience. A lot of it goes back to a bunch of economic incentives that were set up to try to do what theoretically seemed at the time the right thing. We can debate whether that's where LBJ came from or not. But you compound and cascade a bunch of decisions forward and to your point now we're sort of trying to deal with the symptoms without really addressing the root cause. And I think if America wants to really heal and deal with this, what we also need to do is give all people that have that fight or flight response, the better toolkit to understand what kind of goddess here. Because right now, we have a very charged way of viewing these things without actually looking at some of the practical quantifiable details. Thomas Sowell has talked about it. Charles Murray talks about it. But these are unfortunately such heterodox ideas that they just don't get enough mainstream discussion. And if you then compound that with this institutional capture, they get buried. And so the answer may actually be sitting right in front of our face where it was the welfare reform system that we implemented in the late 1960s on down the line because those are structural ways where we can solve it, which ultimately will get to your point, which is great. Fund more music in the schools in that example. And right now we're so caught up in all of the, the labels and the fear mongering that we never get to that. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:31:36): And so I just wanted to put that out there that I think that there needs to be smart brilliant people like yourself, young people who can do a full accounting of like the last 50 or 60 years in a much more structural way that these gentlemen tried to do, but the ideas were just two header dots 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 is 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 visually react But the more that we can shift those people away from visually reacting to actually tolerating and then thinking and then evolving their point of view, you can do some enormous good in the world. Jason Calacanis (00:32:25): That's why Chamath Palihapitiya (00:32:25): I just wanted to put that out there. Coleman Hughes (00:32:27): Yeah. Yeah. No. I mean, that's a huge topic and an an understudy topic. What was the effect of of the welfare reforms of the sixties seventies? I know my mother used to say, my 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 Chamath Palihapitiya (00:32:48): husbands, hide their husbands. Exactly. Coleman Hughes (00:32:50): And the, and the in the book, Black Power by Stokley Carmichael, AKA Kwame Tourette, which is, you know, the manifesto of the black power movement, hardly a a right wing source, they 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 a a lot of room for study there. Jason Calacanis (00:33:19): Coleman, let me ask you a question about our industry. We've had, a lot of hand ringing 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 to people at venture firms who invest in startups invest in more female led startups, etcetera, 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 lawsuit. It's by the same person who sued Harvard. Or firms specifically designed to change the ratio as the language people use and should, you know, people with large endowments of capital be backing, you know, Black Venture Calacanis to see more of them or female Black Venture capitalist Spanish, etcetera, or or how would you look at that issue, which has been a pretty sticky issue and hasn't changed for a long time. Coleman Hughes (00:34:30): So prescriptively, I don't wanna say much because I don't like to tell people how to run their funds or run their businesses. Right? If you're a and you wanna hire only Christian people. If you're a Muslim, you wanna 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 of their identity. I want them to know that I'm hiring them for what they really bring to the table. Now I have a very small team. Maybe there's something about how the optics certain optics are required for a larger, a larger firm, but I think it it the problems begin when you when you sort of bless this idea that race is a super deep feature of who you are right from the start. When you bless that idea right from the start, it sends the signal that what people bring to the table is their racial identity, is their gender, Now when you fast forward 2 years down the line when a company is having some meltdown over a race or a gender issue, you have to understand that it's possible you made this bed by signaling from the very beginning that what's important about the people you're bringing in is their race, is their gender, and that you are vulnerable to the kinds of appeals that can be made purely on the basis of what are ultimately superficial features of our identity. Jason Calacanis (00:36:03): Yeah. It's well said. David Friedberg (00:36:04): 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 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? Coleman Hughes (00:36:40): I mean, in a word, no. Because it's by that point, It's, it's it's an intractable 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 past the point where I've I I have so many staff, and it's it's, you know, the system is so sprawling that it's no longer under my control. I have so many people with 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 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 gonna pretend that I do. David Friedberg (00:37:21): 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 and kind of a point of no return. Coleman Hughes (00:37:37): I think definitely in the Democratic party, there has been a problem with mistaking the Twitter commentary and the journalistic elite for real life. The truth is the vast majority of even Democrat voters find my arguments around color blindness, 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. David Friedberg (00:38:20): I mean, this feels to me, like, why Donald Trump got elected, but that's another topic. Jason Calacanis (00:38:24): This has been amazing. Everybody take a moment search for Coleman Hughes. Subscribe to his YouTube Chamath. Type Coleman Hughes. Coleman, you do you do a podcast? Coleman Hughes (00:38:33): Yeah. Do a podcast conversations with Coleman, actually, David has been on the protests about a year ago. How did he do? Jason Calacanis (00:38:39): How did he do? Coleman Hughes (00:38:40): He did? Absolutely fantastic. Did he make Jason Calacanis (00:38:42): you feel unsafe? He did. Coleman Hughes (00:38:44): Actually, yes. Jason Calacanis (00:38:45): West. Okay. David Friedberg (00:38:46): Was was it you talked about Jason Calacanis (00:38:47): the Ukraine? Talk about Ukraine. Talk David Friedberg (00:38:49): to her. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:38:50): Yeah. Wait. Can I can I Jason Calacanis (00:38:51): be on your podcast? Coleman Hughes (00:38:52): Oh, of course. Jason Calacanis (00:38:53): I would Coleman Hughes (00:38:54): I would be honored. Jason Calacanis (00:38:55): Oh, great. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:38:55): I'd love to. Jason Calacanis (00:38:55): Fantastic. There you go. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:38:56): I would be honored. Thank you. Jason Calacanis (00:38:58): Let's do it. I I saw you had, the Dilbrook guy on, and I Yes. Pretty engaged interesting conversation. Yeah. Scott Adams who is, you know, really controversial. And I thought you handled that one really well too. Coleman Hughes (00:39:10): 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 gonna kill him recently on Twitter. It's it's a mixed bag. Jason Calacanis (00:39:20): It's oh, it's mixed would be where I would go with it. Alright. Listen, this has been amazing. But TED Talk is extraordinary. Everybody should watch it and yeah, ideas worth spreading unless maybe, you don't agree with them. Go to the tech channel and watch it. Problem. Sorry. I mean, I don't wanna give Ted too much more time, but they tried to get me to pay $50,000 a year, 20 $1000 a year for, like, a 5 year package to go to the event. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:39:46): And I was like, how much How much is Ted? David Friedberg (00:39:48): How much is Ted? Used to be 75100. And then, no, they used to be 75100. Then I think they went up to 10 k, and then you can do, like, donor tickets and you get, different features and so on. Jason Calacanis (00:39:59): Basically, there's sold out. David Friedberg (00:40:01): Remember, it it is set up as a nonprofit and there is philanthropic work that's done. And so, you know, the the organization is again, it's not a profiteering media company. It it it became a big media company because of the success of the the efforts and the 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 have the original kinda missing David Sacks (00:40:27): the phrase? To paraphrase, Bruce Willis and Polk fiction. Ted's dad, baby. Ted. Jason Calacanis (00:40:33): Ted Ted's Chapman. A great statement to get something back on the motorcycle. Ted's dead, baby. David Sacks (00:40:38): As soon as they allow the staff who have let's say highly niche elite views to veto or suppress talks they don't like, that has stops being a platform for ideas. This becomes another left wing interest group. Jason Calacanis (00:40:52): What other ideas? What other talks have been canned before they even got to the stage? You have to wonder and Well, we don't know. David Sacks (00:40:59): Who are they not inviting? Jason Calacanis (00:41:00): You just know the tune. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:41:01): And it's all the it's the top of the funnel, Jason. Exactly. This also is all that we know that they're not invite. What about the person that's pro coal? I wonder if the pro coal person is allowed to present it to. Jason Calacanis (00:41:12): I doubt it. You know, in the 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 the hypocrisy is just so crazy, with the Ted people. It's a lot of my friends still go, is they had Sarah Silver come. These people have laughed at Sarah Silverman a million times. They've watch Dave Chappell. They've seen any number of comets, 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 $50 a year or whatever Friedberg gave them. I don't know. To get in there from the side door, then they were super offended. So it you know, they're hypocrites, and and and I don't know how to say it anymore clearly. They they literally you could pull up Chris Anderson, apologizing, not just for Again, Chamath Palihapitiya (00:42:02): again, I really apologize for the work comedian. Jason Calacanis (00:42:06): I I I hope that this David Friedberg (00:42:07): is a learning experience for everyone. I hope that this is a turning point for leadership in in institutions like this to take a look at what happened. How it happened. And then hopefully to write the course, because organizations like Ted, I thought were very important and should be in the world and should be successful. And I hope that they kind of returned to the original values I hope that this is a moment that that there's a learning experience in it. We don't just shut on them and say, they're awful, they're failed. It's over. Hopefully, something comes in this David Sacks (00:42:31): I do think there is one other potential remedy here, which besides just starting a new TED, and kind of the 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 gonna focus a 100% on this mission. And if you're not on board with this mission or wanna capture this institution to promote other missions, This is not the place for you. Go do those missions somewhere else. Jason Calacanis (00:42:58): Holy work. You took you took a hit. David Friedberg (00:43:00): Yeah. David Sacks (00:43:00): He they their times wrote their ligatory headpiece. Jason Calacanis (00:43:03): If Chris was great, he would just tell everybody. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:43:05): Oh, no. Yeah. 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 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. David Friedberg (00:43:37): It'll what'll Chamath Palihapitiya (00:43:38): what is meant to happen. Exactly. Exactly. David Friedberg (00:43:41): It's a it's a it's a moment for looking at the internal compass. It's a wholesale leadership reset moment opportunity. See if it happens or not. Forward down and keep going. I really appreciate you're being public about all this and talking about it. It's been it's been a great conversation. Thank Jason Calacanis (00:43:55): you, Coleman. Coleman Hughes (00:43:56): Everybody's Yeah. Thanks for having me on, guys. Yeah. David Sacks (00:43:58): Alright. Thank you. Jason Calacanis (00:43:58): We'll see you soon. Cheers now. David Friedberg (00:44:00): See you, man. Thanks. Jason Calacanis (00:44:01): Alright. Listen, it's a new segment we have here when VirTra signaling goes wrong. If you missed it, the Canadian parliament gave a standing Ovation To a Nazi, not like a new Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer. One of the few actual not is still alive. Here we see, just the crowd going wild, last Friday, Ukrainians president Zelensky gave a speech at the Canadian House Collins, and, Canadian House Speaker Anthony Rota introduced a ninety eight year old Yaroslav Hanke as a Ukrainian war hero. And then the Canadian parliament proceeded to give him a standing Ovation And it, turns out that this person first fought For the 1st Ukrainian division in World War 2, that unit was also known as the Woffen 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. Shamoff, I don't know if you got to see this. You're Canadian. So your thoughts on what we've seen here. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:45:20): 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 WOCism, which I think look at some level was rooted in something very important, which was how do you get marginalized folks to be seen? But unfortunately, along the way, just got perverted by folks that just use it as a cudgel to censor people to make other people feel guilty to judge people. And so I think we all would agree that it's kind of become this virus. The thing that it masks are all of these other really bad things that come along with it. And one of them in Canada, which Justin Trudeau is case 0 of is also when nepotism goes bad. His father was an incredible exemplary prime minister in Canada. Set the benchmark on all dimensions was just incredible. Cool, composed, moved the country forward, brought the country together, And then fast forward 25 or 30 years in a vacuum of leadership, what basically happened, we picked this guy who was up until that point a substitute teacher and the other claim to fame was appearing twice in brown face. Okay. So making fun of people like me, and elected in Prime Minister. And what happened was he became the sort of like virtue signaler in chief of this very important GA country. And it was all kind of bumbling along, and in the absence of anybody else that was able to step up and offer an alternative, he got reelected barely, but he did. Then these things happened in the last year. And when you look through that prism is how you can see What happens if a country doesn't draw a line and finally take a stand? So we had this guy who was ill qualified and way over his head who shouldn't have been in this role as prime minister get put in that position. When finally a group of people in Canada pushback 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. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:47:52): 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 have this thing 3 weeks ago to or 3 weeks ago where he actually had a speech in front of the entire parliament where he accused the largest democracy in the world India, in this case, of coming into Canada Canadian soil and assassinating the Canadian citizen, which is an enormous allegation to levy, And what was important to know about that allegation was that it was done without the explicit vocal support of either Britain or the United United States, which would be the 2 most natural allies that Canada would present that information to. And instead of doing it behind a closed door to Modi, He did it on live stage like it was like some theatrical performance. Then India follows up and says, this guy is kind of known to be a little bit of a drug addict and was on a 2 day bender and the Indian drug dog smelled a bunch of cocaine on the plane. Then they have this thing for Vladimir Zelensky where everybody was there to sort of like, virtue signal this war, and then they actually invited Anazi and then gave him a standing ovation. So when you when you put it all together, I think what it shows is just the lack of professionalism, which also belies just the lack of experience and capability. And so I think what it shows is just like Isn't this enough? Like, are are have we not seen enough of these examples where you can actually start to ask yourself 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. Jason Calacanis (00:49:53): You're clearly questioning his competence here because to not have the care to check who is going to speak in front of parliament is crazy. And just to make it super clear, the speaker that invited Hunka that was Anthony Rota resigned on Tuesday. And Trudeau says Rota, the person who invited the Nazi, is solely responsible. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:50:17): Well, then he blamed Russian misinformation on top of that. But, Jason, you don't you don't, the prime minister who is the most important politician in the country doesn't show up some place unless the office knows who else is going to be He knew that Zelensky was going to be there. He would have known who the guest list was. So this was this was just he is going to cover it up, but But the bigger issue Jason Calacanis (00:50:36): Well, but I can see clear, you're not saying that they invited a Nazi on purpose and cheered for a Nazi on purpose. Where nobody saying that. You're saying there's a lack of care here, and it's it's a lack of confidence. It's a lack of confidence. Yeah. Yeah. Just so we're clear. Yeah. Okay. David Sacks (00:50:51): So I agree with all of that. I think there's also 2 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 Hanke 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 ninety eight years old. When was there a war against Russia? Who could he possibly have been fighting for? But to the extent people did that, they sort of airbrushed it or whitewash history. So the president controls the past to ensure a 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 1 is I think that the woke mind virus almost requires this whitewashing of the past but is done for a specific purpose, which is to control the future. Jason Calacanis (00:52:08): They're not white washing the past if it was a mistake that intellectually doesn't make sense. David Sacks (00:52:12): No. What they did is what they're saying is Jason Calacanis (00:52:14): If I'm understanding you correctly, no. David Sacks (00:52:16): The present is that we hate Russia so much that we're gonna cheer for anybody who killed Russians. Jason Calacanis (00:52:24): Okay. I understand your point, but you're you're agreeing that they did not knowingly put a Nazi on there. So it was a mistake. Got it. David Sacks (00:52:29): I don't think they they knowingly did it. It was a huge debacle and embarrassing spectacle. I think that nobody asked any questions about the past because the president overrides it. Jason Calacanis (00:52:39): Okay. Sure. David Sacks (00:52:40): At present need to support the current thing overrides, like, any sort of example. Historically. Yeah. 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 the current war. So it's not just a marriage of convenience. First of all, if you go back to war 2, the the father of Ukrainian nationalism is a guy named Stepan Bandara. And today in Ukraine, he has 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 collaborate with Nazis. If you Fast forward to the more recent past to 2014 when we had this, meidan coup in Kiev that was backed by Victoria Newland. One of the key figures in that coup was, a guy named Ola Taneybach, 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, this voboda party, was the wolf's angel, which was a Nazi and Signia. This was a far right party infused with the racial ideology of Stephan Bandera, who was, again, a Nazi. And they brought this guy in and and his party as the muscle in this coup. If you could look at the Victorian Newland phone call, the infamous phone call where she is picking the new Ukrainian government in. The the yachts is our guy phone call. She says that Klitch, meaning Klitch, go and and, Tony need to remain on the outside, but Yas needs to be talking to Tanya Buck 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. David Sacks (00:54:49): What happens then is a war breaks out where far right paramilitary organizations like right sector and like the infamous Azov battalion, start killing these ethnic Russian separatists. And a full blown civil war breaks out thousands of people get killed. Does the Kyiv government suppress these neo Nazi groups? No. They bring them under the formal command structure. Of the Ukrainian military. Azop Italian becomes a division of the Ukrainian military. It's shocking. And this goes on from 2014 through 2021. Jason Calacanis (00:55:26): The Ukraine army, just to be clear here, has Nazis in it, Nazi supporters. David Sacks (00:55:30): There's no question about that. And there are many people who are concerned about this in the 2015 to 2020 time frame. There were many articles written about it the nation had an article about it. There were efforts in Congress at various points to try and ensure that the aid that we were giving to the Ukrainian government did not go to Jason Calacanis (00:55:46): the South Italian. So So let's get to it. David Sacks (00:55:50): Set. So it is set. Okay. I think the important and and and, obviously, that Zelensky is a Nazi or a Nazi citizen? No. 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 What percent? 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. Jason Calacanis (00:56:20): Yeah. Different than the Nazi percentage and, say, weren't whatever you wanna say white supremacists in the United States or in Germany or anywhere else? David Sacks (00:56:29): I do. And I think it's different in the sense that in the United States, for sure, we have Neonazi 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 and Sydney 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 and Signia 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. Jason Calacanis (00:57:05): But I David Sacks (00:57:06): 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. Jason Calacanis (00:57:18): Now Uh-oh. The the New York Times says airbrush photos of not seeing any news. David Sacks (00:57:22): Times as, but I I don't think New York Times has, but I think they talk about dis thorny problem of not wanting to show these photos. With respect to the the Zelensky being Jewish. So what I'd say about that is that Zelensky only came on the scene quite recently. He got elected in 2019. And, again, I don't think the majority of people in Ukraine are Nazis. Okay. So I'm not saying that. But just because Zelensky came on the scene in 2019 and was elected president, doesn't mean there's a long and I would say disturbing history and association between Ukrainian ultranationalism and neo Nazi groups. And I think that part of the the woke thing and part of this Orwellian desire where control of the president gives you the ability to rewrite the past is that there's been a deliberate effort to cover up this problem and to pretend it doesn't exist to to turn a blind eye to it. Well, my point is that US policy has been to do this. In other words, the US Jason Calacanis (00:58:20): You're saying our government. Yeah. Okay. David Sacks (00:58:22): 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 Madon coup in 2014. From 2015 to 2021, we could have gone along with efforts under the Minska courts to resolve this conflict in the Donbas peacefully, but we never did that. We never gave it any support. And instead, we gave support to the Kyiv 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 not cease? No. Does that make the Canadian parliament Nazis? No. What I'm saying is that in both cases, a blind eye was turned to this disturbing idiology and past and associations of these people, because it's politically in our interest to do business with them. And that's the problematic thing about it. So I don't think in that sense, this was just a sort of an accident. This is the backstory that explains, like, something like this can happen. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:59:22): Yeah. Okay. Jason, you have any reactions to Trudeau doing this and what it means, or does it mean nothing? David Sacks (00:59:28): Does the Baxter I provided give you context on how something like this can happen. That's not just like an accident. Jason Calacanis (00:59:36): Well, I don't think any of us know exactly what happened here, and probably gonna be some sort of investigation, but I don't think they knowingly put a Nazi up there. I think they are pro the war, and that probably Could that have blinded them to do deeper research? Sure. People are political. Politicians, most of all. And, people probably take facts or you know, any kind of anything they can use to to, make their case stronger. They'll take the advantage of that. So, yeah, sure. And is Trudeau a David Sacks (01:00:07): Zelensky is Zelensky was pumping his fist and cheering. Don't you think he and you? He can't. I don't know the history. He has to know he has to know Jason Calacanis (01:00:15): If he does, then That somebody was finding the question. David Sacks (01:00:18): War too. Jason Calacanis (01:00:19): Good question. If he did David Sacks (01:00:20): On the German side. Jason Calacanis (01:00:21): 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. David Sacks (01:00:31): You know, what I'm saying is, look, the fact that you've got some Jewish answer street is not, in my view, a Getagio free card. No. Jason Calacanis (01:00:38): No. I'm not saying that. Making political decisions. Are you saying he knowingly are you saying he knowingly cheered for a Nazi? David Sacks (01:00:45): You know, one of the big backers of the Azov battalion is a Ukrainian oligarch named Igor Kala Muoske, Colmoiskey is Jewish. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:00:53): No. He didn't he didn't ask me Jason Calacanis (01:00:54): my opinion. I'm just saying, do you do you think he knowingly cheered for Nazi? Is that what you're insinuating? David Sacks (01:00:59): I think he knowingly cheered knowing that this Ukrainian nationalists who fought in World War 2 must have been on the German side because there was only one Jason Calacanis (01:01:06): side that was fired from Russians. Okay. I'm just clarifying you. Don't actually have an opinion. Thanks for, clearing me, John. David Sacks (01:01:12): 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. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:01:23): Do you guys do you guys Let David Sacks (01:01:24): me finish my point about the Azov battalion. The Azov battalion is undeniably the neo Nazi group. It was funded by Igor Kalamowski who's a Ukrainian oligarch who is Jewish, who lives in Israel. Why would Kalamowski do that? Because the Azov battalion believes that every interview crane, 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. Jason Calacanis (01:01:55): Yeah. Pretty cool to say, actually. Yeah. David Sacks (01:01:57): So I'm not saying that Zelensky or Kalamazky or anybody else is a Nazi because they align 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 wanna 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. Jason Calacanis (01:02:25): I think it's when you say you, do you mean me or do you mean the United States? David Sacks (01:02:30): I'm saying if you want to have a highly moralistic foreign policy, let's say if one wants to have Jason Calacanis (01:02:35): I would use the word. Yeah. If you're gonna be principled, you need to keep them. You need to not support Nazis. We're in agreement. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:02:41): What do you, Jason and Freebrook? 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. Jason Calacanis (01:02:57): I don't I don't know enough about Canadian politics, really, but Trudeau does not seem to be super qualified. Yeah. So but I don't know enough about it. David Sacks (01:03:07): I mean, 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 19 forties, 1950s, Canada took in a large number of former Nazis. Many of him were SS veterans. People like hunka because they were good anti communist. 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 2. So the point is Wasn't Jason Calacanis (01:03:39): aware of that? David Sacks (01:03:40): Yeah. Exactly. Look, there's no way that any semi intelligent person who knows the history of war 2, especially the Ukrainian involvement in war 2, wouldn't know that Ukraine was on the German side in World War 2, and Hanke volunteered for the SS. He was a volunteer for the SS Galicia division. So, look, did the speaker of the house? No. Probably not. I think Wokeness makes people stupid, where they just think about the current thing, and it won't ask too many questions about the past. But There's a lot more to it than just like this innocent mistake. Jason Calacanis (01:04:15): And this has been your update on this week in Ukraine and Locness Alright. 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 Ives of Iphone fame, Steve Jobs's long term collaborator and Masayoshi san of SoftBank to raise more than $1,000,000,000 to build the iPhone of AI. And so the idea would be, Johnny Ives got a design firm called love from, and they would help Open Eye design their first consumer device. Via the Feet sources, financial times that is. Altman and I have have been, having brainstorming sessions, and I have San Francisco's studio about what a consumer product centric around OpenAI would look like. It's very early stages. And Son has pitched a role for arm in the development his chip company that he recently took public. They also, discuss Masa and Altman, creating a company that would draw on talent and tech from their 3 groups with SoftBank, putting in a $1,000,000,000 in seed. And then also OpenAI is discussing a secondary share sale that would value the company at between $80,000,000,000 90,000,000,000. This should be 3x, the most recent valuation, reportedly, though, to their credit, they are on track to generate $1,000,000,000 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 Waltman has personally has stated multiple times now that he has no equity, so he would be getting 0 dollars of this. I, 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, Tamara? Those are those are Those are just details, but node is the goat. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:06:23): Sand is the closest thing that we have to an emergent mobile intact. And the reason is because if everything sits on the substrate, You're gonna need to get a license. You're gonna want to get access to whatever developer program, whatever beta, that OpenAI has. And so as a result, Jason Calacanis (01:06:46): he already happened, by the way. Well, so Chamath Palihapitiya (01:06:48): I was just gonna say, so he'll be in the cap bird 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. David Sacks (01:06:59): By the way, I have a take on that whole claim that Sam doesn't own any part of OpenAI. Alright. Jason Calacanis (01:07:04): Let's hear it. Go ahead, Colombo. Explain to us the details. Yeah. It's what we would think there, ma'am. Well You said you don't own any she has an OpenAI, but you started OpenAI. David Sacks (01:07:15): Right. Well, then who does? Jason Calacanis (01:07:17): Yeah. That's the thing. David Sacks (01:07:18): What I think is really interesting about what OpenAI has done in its fundraising rounds is that each round has been a capture turn model. So Chamath Palihapitiya (01:07:27): Explain that is to do a David Friedberg (01:07:28): 100 x. 100 x. Right? Everyone. Jason Calacanis (01:07:30): Well, I David Sacks (01:07:30): think some of the very early people got capped at a 100 x. I think maybe the $30,000,000,000 round was capped at 10 So I think the $30,000,000,000 rounds capped at a $300,000,000 valuation. Meaning, if you're an investor, your shares go up in value till the company hits a market cap a 300,000,000,000 and then basically you're effectively cashed out. It's like you bought a share, but sold a call back to the company That's how it would be. Jason Calacanis (01:07:54): There will be industry works this way. Right? You invest in a film. They tell you you can make 3 acts and then it's over, right, something like that. I've I've seen that in the independent film business. Yeah. David Sacks (01:08:01): Yeah. So so in any event, and I think people invested. Like, the $2,000,000,000 valuation were capped at, like, a 100,000,000,000. I heard that employees who were getting stock options are capped at a 100,000,000,000 or they were, way back when they started granting these Jason Calacanis (01:08:13): things. Okay. David Sacks (01:08:13): So my point is that if OpenAI turns into one of these companies like a Google ends up in the $1,000,000,000,000 club, then nobody's gonna own anything because they will have already long ago. David Friedberg (01:08:26): Well, they'll they'll keep selling new interests. Like, the new interests will end up being, like, 8% because what'll happen at the end is the new people that buy in at that higher price that that buy out the early investors, they're getting effectively things like 8% return. It turns into debt eventually. Turns into some David Sacks (01:08:43): I think what's really going on here is somebody has to own the residual value of the company called the far out of the money. David Friedberg (01:08:50): 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 corporate. Yeah. David Sacks (01:08:57): But I think David Friedberg (01:08:57): I think what's so brilliant David Sacks (01:08:58): about it is. Okay. So, look, Sam set up this foundation. It's a nonprofit, but he controls that effectively. Right? David Friedberg (01:09:05): Yep. David Sacks (01:09:06): So, yes, he technically is not an owner of the shares. The foundation is, but what can't you do with the foundation? That you could do with personal ownership other than maybe buying a personal residence. I mean, you can buy a plane, I think. Look at the church of Scientology. They own a lot of real estate. So my point is not only do I think that Sam really owns open AI Jason Calacanis (01:09:26): through the fig leaf of this David Sacks (01:09:26): foundation, I think he owns a 100% of it. In the event that the call option is struck, meaning it ends up being a $1,000,000,000,000 company. Jason Calacanis (01:09:36): Are you saying Sam is that Ron Hubbard in this example? David Friedberg (01:09:40): Let's not speculate too much. Oh, it's just details. Right? As Renaud said, Jason Calacanis (01:09:44): those are just details. David Sacks (01:09:46): I am speculating, but I think it's informed speculation. If you wanted to become the world's 1st trillionaire and you were extremely, perpetrated it about it, clever and premeditated about it. What would you do? Number 1, you would wanna choose Jason Calacanis (01:10:00): a moonshot type area that David Sacks (01:10:00): was a world changing technology. AI certainly qualifies. So does cold fusion. Maybe crypto does. As I understand that Sam has bets in all three of those areas. Number 2, you would wanna figure out a way to own as much of it as you could, really a 100% if you could. And that's a very hard thing Jason Calacanis (01:10:19): to do when you're running David Sacks (01:10:20): a capital intensive startup, but investors tend to underestimate the power law and the value of the far out of the money call option. So maybe you can get them to sell that back to you. Really cheaply. And third, if you're really farsighted, you would want to insulate yourself against populist anger from being the world's first truly here. So you would basically put your shares in a Jason Calacanis (01:10:42): nonprofit foundation where you're not really sacrificing David Sacks (01:10:42): that much of control or the ability to control the the asset, but it gives you tremendous. Jason Calacanis (01:10:53): I love this conspiracy theory. Where did you come up with this? Is this like this is genius This is genius. It just you and Peter Tiel talk about this over chess or something. How did you construct this? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:11:03): And you're saying this is in 4 little conspiracy corner. I think it's a science Jason Calacanis (01:11:08): corner. Let's get the tinfoil hats out. It's really freaking Friedberg out that we're even doing this. David Friedberg (01:11:13): Strictly opposite to science corner. David Sacks (01:11:15): Is it a conspiracy or is it just reality? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:11:17): I think if you are even 1% right, the combination of lawyers and Jason Calacanis (01:11:22): accountants that would leak this and the number of people that were Chamath Palihapitiya (01:11:23): part of the origination of the foundation that would want to sue will be very Jason Calacanis (01:11:32): high. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:11:33): That's just the natural state Jason Calacanis (01:11:34): of things in these kinds of things. That seems like a lot David Friedberg (01:11:37): easier way. Jason Calacanis (01:11:38): What what have I said other than David Sacks (01:11:40): the fact that it was sort of premeditated, which, that's not the right word. That premeditated sounds too nefarious. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:11:45): No. No. No. I'm I'm just saying whenever 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 gonna be financially the right thing to do for a lot of people if if what you're saying is true. David Sacks (01:12:11): We know the investments have been made under a capital model. I think that's fact. Jason Calacanis (01:12:15): That's fact. Yes. David Sacks (01:12:16): We know the nonprofit foundation owns the shares. That's fact. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:12:19): And then just to put the £800 gorilla on the table, like, what's Elon thinking? Because he was the one that really this thing off the ground because that critical investment made the whole thing come to life. He could have done this on his own. Jason Calacanis (01:12:30): Yeah. How much does he own? 0. 0. I mean, but after a lawsuit, how much does he own? I don't know. I'm I'm just speculating. David Friedberg (01:12:39): So can we talk about the technology? Jason Calacanis (01:12:41): Let's talk to you. Here we go. So OpenAI release some new chat cheap and T 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 Chamath, 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 4 different ones. You take a picture of that That's the input. And you say it's Wednesday at 4 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 1 hour starting at 4 PM. What this means is the output or the input could be in any of those modalities modalities fancy word for an image of video, etcetera. So you're gonna be able to say, hey. Give me the post 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, we were barred and 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 of the other core Google services are now in barred. So that's not multi model, exactly. But you could do things like ask Google flights, hey, what is the best nonstop you know, between New York City and Dubai, or from an East Coast destination that has lay down flat seats, etcetera. And it really does, it's starting to work. So this idea that Google is gonna be displaced or they're moving slow, that might be antiquated information. So those are the 2 big big monumental announcements just in the last 10 days. Jason Calacanis (01:14:24): Friedberg, when you look at these 2, which one is the more important announcement And and what do you think about the pace? Cause we here we are. We're about to hit the 1 year anniversary of Chad JPT 3.5. David Friedberg (01:14:34): I've been using a lot of different tools the last couple of months, and I'm kind of getting to the point that I feel that much of what's happening is underhyped rather than overhyped. There's some really incredible potential emerging I'll, I'll give a couple of examples, and then I'll talk about the mobile phone. First is, Andre, Karpati, as you guys see in the tweet that I just posted in the Chamath, 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 or in an audio way that the user wants to consume it. So as a result, LOMs become the core driver to a new type of computing interface. There was a paper published, and I'll, share the link to this paper here as well, and we can put it in the the notes. It's not worth pulling up on the screen. That showed that using LLMs in autonomous driving can actually significantly improve the performance of the neural nets that the autonomous cars are trained on. So the autonomous car is typically trained on a bunch of sensor data that comes in, and then that sensor data determines what sort of action to take with the car. And what this team showed is that if you actually put in a communication layer that thinks and talks like a human, in between the sensor data and the action data, it can do really wide ranging interpretations of the data that otherwise would not be apparent from the data set it was trained on. So for example, you can see a person down the road and ask it, what do you think that person's gonna do next? And the LLM, because it's trained on a much larger corpus of data, than just sensor data from cars, it can make a really good human like interpretation of that, feed that decision back into the control system of the car and have the card do something more intelligently than it otherwise would have been able to do. So these LLMs are becoming a lot more like a software, operating system. And you can kind of extend that into mobile phones. Mobile phones originally were just voice, and then they were single lines of text in the form of SMS. Then you were able to browse the web. David Friedberg (01:16:44): And then the app revolution came about where all of this information emerged through apps. What LOMs 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 wanna 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 3rd party developers that build in stream into that chat that's no longer looks like a chat interface, like we see on Chamath, GPT, but can be rendered visually, can be rendered with audio, can be rendered in a bunch of different ways. So if mobile really is the dominant tech hardware platform that humans are using, for computing today, LOMs and these sorts of tools can become the dominant operating system on that hardware. And you can totally rethink the modality of how you use computing Through applications today, we have an app store and we download apps and use them, and that all becomes in stream in an LLM or 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 Carpati's tweaked this morning. Some of the stuff I've been playing with some of the papers I've been reading and some of the speculation around a mobile hardware start to support that thesis, 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's it seems to be pretty substantial and and just using a bunch of tools myself. I'm blown away every single time with what you can do. Jason Calacanis (01:18:17): Yeah. I mean, right now, I would agree with you. I strongly agree because This was some this was MagicLinks. Vision for the future, which is you would talk to agents as they called them. This was a a company that existed in the nineties 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 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 David Friedberg (01:18:49): From general magic. Right? General magic. Right. Yeah. Right. Right. Jason Calacanis (01:18:53): And there is 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 gonna become the interface and LMs talking to each other. Then becomes who owns this? How many of these are there? Are they verticalized? So what do you what do you think the game on the field is here, Zach? David Sacks (01:19:13): Well, I 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 Jason Calacanis (01:19:20): have right now. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:19:20): At minimum, it's Jason Calacanis (01:19:20): a nerd corner. Yeah. It's a nerd I'm trying David Friedberg (01:19:22): to turn science corner into into an intersecting realm so we can all be involved. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:19:26): I don't know how we crowbar and Uran is joking to this, but let's let's let's Keep our eyes wide open here. David Sacks (01:19:32): Okay. So on the phone, I think what's interesting there, just to boil it down, is you're talking about replacing the main interface, which is currently a wall of apps. Right? And Jason Calacanis (01:19:42): Yep. David Sacks (01:19:43): You push you tap an app to go into the app and then you interact with it. You're talking about replacing all that with basically voice. So imagine it's David Friedberg (01:19:50): visual. Yeah. David Sacks (01:19:51): Visual. If you connect, like, glasses to it or something. So David Friedberg (01:19:56): rather than double click on an app, the Jason Calacanis (01:19:59): app developers as they're called today are basically building David Friedberg (01:19:59): in screen utility that are part of the chat interface that that is the phone itself. And that's what's gonna be so compelling. You have to re like, we, we used to write websites, then we wrote apps, and now we're gonna write these kind of in stream services, these plugins. Jason Calacanis (01:20:15): Alexa was gonna do this. Yeah. David Sacks (01:20:18): Well, Alexa never got Siri kind of sucks. It just doesn't work that well. 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 Jason Calacanis (01:20:29): you would David Sacks (01:20:30): just instruct it. David Friedberg (01:20:31): Precisely. Coleman Hughes (01:20:31): It would David Sacks (01:20:32): be it's like in that movie, was it her? Her. The the Joaquin Phoenix movie. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:20:36): Got that. That should have David Friedberg (01:20:37): been my background today. What am I thinking? Jason Calacanis (01:20:39): You've disappointed the science corner fans. David Sacks (01:20:41): He has a spike Jones movie. He did do a really good job with that, man. That one, that movie is looking more and more. David Friedberg (01:20:45): Great job. David Sacks (01:20:46): Like, it's gonna happen. Jason Calacanis (01:20:47): We gotta do a rewatchable on that. Yeah. We should rewatch it. David Sacks (01:20:50): You won't even really need the paint of glass if you can just talk to it with an earpiece. Now I think you're right that the phone needs to know what you're looking at, or it can do so much more if it has all those senses. David Friedberg (01:21:02): That's part of the multimodal demo that that OpenAI showed this week is it has video and it has camera inter integration. And remember, in human computer interaction, It's often a lot easier for a human to interact with a a visual representation of stuff on a screen than to hear stuff in audio. So we we will still still need some sort of visual display, whether it's a screen or an eye glass or something that shows us a a bunch of information in a way. David Sacks (01:21:29): 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. Wearable wearable dashcam. Okay. And it would record everything. And it would be like your memory backup and you'd be able to query it. Jason Calacanis (01:21:51): Mhmm. So That was William Gibson's, plot line in one of his where he had a little zipline that would follow people around, and record everything. And then you'd have a DVR of your entire life, and that would be completely in and then you could we the AI would know your entire life and be able to advise you. Do you guys use the feature on your Air where if you leave them in, it will read you the messages from your signal or your incoming notifications where it reads them to you. Obviously, you don't. So there's a new feature on the in the AirPods. You leave them in. And if you're working, you're walking around the house, or you're walking around Manhattan like I am these last couple of days, it will stop the podcast I'm listening to and just say, you know, oh, poker group says this, oh, you know, your wife just texted you this. And it reads it to you. And then you can say reply. So eventually if Siri works and then you have those Apple goggles on, I think that that is gonna 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. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:22:52): Didn't Facebook announce a new pair of glasses today. Jason Calacanis (01:22:55): The the yeah. David Friedberg (01:22:55): Those are like Jason Calacanis (01:22:56): their spectacle kind of things. These are the light AR glasses where you could take pictures. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:23:00): Just meant to say everything's converging a lot faster than we all did. David Sacks (01:23:03): Yeah. It is. So I I started using a new note taking app called reflect. Have you guys heard of this? Coleman Hughes (01:23:08): It's Jason Calacanis (01:23:09): You're reflecting on things? Woah. This is progress. David Sacks (01:23:12): Tell us more. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:23:13): I'm just trying David Sacks (01:23:14): I'm just trying to play with it, but what it does is you keep, like, a a daily law 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 like, the use case that I think it's quite useful for, and once you've been using it for a while, is, okay, I I mean with this person, when's the last time I saw them, what do we talk about then? Mhmm. So it gives you, like, context. Right? Jason Calacanis (01:23:38): She's a staff. Yeah. David Friedberg (01:23:39): Yeah. That's awesome. I really David Sacks (01:23:41): like this. It's external memory. Right? Because, like, I can't I'm like, I'm still used with so much stuff now. I can't even I forget people's names sometimes if I've only met him once or twice. Jason Calacanis (01:23:50): So His name is Freightberg. David Freightberg is his name too. David Sacks (01:23:53): Not you guys, but Jason Calacanis (01:23:55): No. It's also getting old. You're sure. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:23:56): It's not true. I mean, it's Jason Calacanis (01:23:58): a function of how much input is coming at you. There's just so much coming at us today. Right. David Sacks (01:24:02): But but just but just having a short log of who I've met with and 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. It'll affect just being with Slack. Automatically. Jason Calacanis (01:24:18): Like, a David Sacks (01:24:19): true external hard drive to my brain, then that would be very powerful. Jason Calacanis (01:24:23): I don't authenticate with slack and Gmail and do that automatically. And then you'll it'll be otherworldly. David Sacks (01:24:29): 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. Coleman Hughes (01:24:37): Right? David Sacks (01:24:38): And really, that's it. Like, the 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. Jason Calacanis (01:24:46): Just so David Sacks (01:24:47): I can remember. Because I just need the prompt 6 months from now. I just need a prompt that I met with this person, and here was the topic. Jason Calacanis (01:24:53): That's Chamath Palihapitiya (01:24:54): Sachs, have you gone to the, have you built Clintonized your greetings now? It's great to see you. That a 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 to do the same thing. Jason Calacanis (01:25:08): To see you. We've never met, but I could trade Chamath Palihapitiya (01:25:10): great to see you. Great to see you. Great to see you. David Friedberg (01:25:11): Great to see you. Great Chamath Palihapitiya (01:25:13): to see you. Jason Calacanis (01:25:13): Great to see you. Great to see you. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:25:14): Great to see you. Jason Calacanis (01:25:16): When I met, 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, you get off the elevator, and Bill Clinton's standing there. And he walks up to me, like, three steps. Oh, Jay Cal. It's great to see you and he grabs your elbow. He's patron. I am so happy for what you did to help Hillary win and, you know, Jason, we're so appreciative. And then, you know, you walk into the room. And I'm like, oh my god. Bill Clinton knows my name. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:25:47): Totally. Jason Calacanis (01:25:48): Then I look behind me, and I see the next person I see a woman come out with a clipboard, whispering is here, 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 anything you've done for Hillary. David Sacks (01:26:04): You know, that role of whispering the name of a person in the politician's ear goes all the way back to Roman It was called the nomenclature. Jason Calacanis (01:26:12): The nomenclature. David Sacks (01:26:14): Nomen is the Latin word for name. It's a Jason Calacanis (01:26:17): How often? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:26:18): I call it the name Jason Calacanis (01:26:19): Hey, Sucks. I missed questions. How often do you need to think about the Roman Empire? Just broadly speaking. How's that a good tune as reference? David Sacks (01:26:26): I thought that was Jason Calacanis (01:26:27): I out. 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. Or, listen, this has been an amazing episode for The dictator himself, Chamath, Palihapitiya, and rain man, yeah, definitely burn baby, David Sachs, and the sultan of science, the queen of Kinois, 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. David Sacks (01:27:01): Love you. Ted's dead. Ted's dead. Dead, baby. David Friedberg (01:27:04): Ted's dead, baby. Jason Calacanis (01:27:07): We'll let your winter's ride. Rainman David Sachs. And it said we open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy lately. Besties are gone. I You should all just get a room and just have one big huge order because they're all just useless. It's like this, like, sexual friendship, and they just need to release them now. You're a beep beep.