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

29:09A colorblind selection process. I think Malcolm Gladwell talked about that in Blaine. And your response, and then they said, well, wouldn't be better if we could have some representation in that group. So then we would inspire people to get to the group. Your response to that was... Yeah, my response to that was what you really want to do is if there are reasons why I say black kids aren't getting access to violins at a young age because schools are underfunded or band programs are horrible in inner cities. That's where you want to intervene. You don't want to intervene at the meritocratic end line, racially rigging the very bar that you would use to measure progress on those deeper dimensions.

29:52Have you read this book called Losing Ground by Charles Bury? Yes, I have. I mean, it's very provocative book. I have always thought, and maybe I'll just leave this with you because if you were willing to do it, I for one would love to support you in any way that I could to do it, but we don't have a full accounting of what really happened starting in the late 1960s with LBJ's war on poverty. And I think when you look at racism through the American lived experience, a lot of it goes back to a bunch of economic incentives that were set up to try to do what theoretically seemed at the time the right thing.

30:30We can debate whether that's where LBJ came from or not. But you compound and cascade a bunch of decisions forward and to your point now we're sort of trying to deal with the symptoms without really addressing the root cause. And I think if America wants to really heal and deal with this, what we also need to do is give all those people that have that fight or flight response, the better toolkit to understand what kind of goddess here. Because right now we have a very charged way of viewing these things without actually looking at some of the practical quantifiable details. Thomas Sobel 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.

31:23Because those are structural ways where we can solve it, which ultimately will get to your point, which is great fun to more music in the schools in that example. And right now we're so caught up in all of the labels and the fear mongering that we never get to that. And so I just wanted to put that out there that I think that there needs to be smart brilliant people like yourself, young people who can do a full accounting of like the last 50 or 60 years in a much more structural way that these gentlemen tried to do, but the ideas were just two heterodox at the time. But because of formats like podcasts and like the free press and other things, I think there's a chance that you can actually get these ideas out.

31:58And 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 make this visually react, but the more that we can shift those people away from viscerally reacting to actually tolerating and then thinking and then evolving their point of view you can do some enormous good in the world Just why I just wanted to put that out there. Yeah Yeah, no, I mean that's a huge topic and an understudy topic What was the effect of of the welfare reforms of the 60s and 70s?

32:35I know my mother used to say might 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 boyfriend's, hide their husband's, and the book Black Power by Stokely Carmichael, aka Kwame Ture, which is the manifesto of the Black Power movement, hardly a right -wing source. They made the same point about welfare reform. So there definitely is something to be investigated there. It's not really my point of expertise. I know Glenn Lowry is someone who has really dug into that sort of research, but there's definitely a lot of room for study there.

33:19Go ahead and let me ask you a question about our industry. We've had a lot of hand -ranging and debates about diversity in funding of startups, capital indicators, venture capital firms. And we have limited partners who have a mission to have more diverse general partners, the people at venture firms who invest in startups, invest in more female, let startups, et cetera, because the numbers, frankly, you know, have not been very diverse, historically, in venture, far from it. And we recently had a female, Now, 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.

34:01It's by the same person who sued Harvard. Should there be venture firms specifically designed to change the ratio? Is the language people use and should people with large endowments of capital be backing black venture capitalists to see more of them or female black venture capitalists, Hispanic, etc. or how would you look at that issue, which has been a pretty sticky issue and hasn't changed for a long time. So, prescriptively, I don't want to say much because I don't like to tell people how to run their funds or run their businesses. If you're a Christian and you want to hire only Christian people, if you're a Muslim, you want to hire only Muslims, I think you should frankly be allowed to do that if those are your personal values.

34:44Now, personally, I will tell you, with respect to the people that I would hire to say work on my podcast, I want every single hire to know that I am not hiring them as a result of their skin color or gender or any other contingent feature of their identity. I want them to know that I'm hiring them for what they really bring to the table. Now, I have a very small team. Maybe there's something about how the optics, certain optics are required for a larger firm, But I think it the problems begin when you sort of blessed this idea that race is a super deep feature of who you are right from the start.

35:28When you blessed that idea right from the start, it sends the signal that what people bring to the table is their racial identity, is their gender. Now when you fast forward two years down the line when a company is having some meltdown over a race or agenda 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.

36:03Yeah, that's well said. What would your advice be to institutional leaders that are past that point of no return? The CEOs of big companies and big institutions that are now captive by these ideologies where they are effectively as you say, ultra -sensitive to issues around race and gender and other sort of superficial identities and are challenged often to make decisions or driven to make decisions that their employees and teams demand of them. Do you have advice on how they can rethink their roles as leaders and how to reframe this? I mean, in a word, no, because it's by that point, it's an intractable problem.

36:48I've talked to CEOs that asked this question to me over and over again. What do I do once I'm past the point where I have so many staff and the system is so sprawling that it's no longer under my control? I have so many people with values that I don't share, that I frankly think privately are insane, but I cannot say so publicly because I have higher order commitments to the shareholders, to the board, to steer the ship, right, such as it is. And the ship cannot be changed at this point. I don't have good advice. I'm not going to pretend that I do. Do you think that same problem is inherent in political parties in the United States, states, state governments and other larger social systems that we use to organize ourselves and are now also captive in a point of no return.

37:37I think definitely in the Democratic Party there has been a problem with mistaking the Twitter commentary and the journalistic elite for real life. The truth is the vast majority of even Democrat voters find my arguments around colorblindness totally uncontroversial, whether they may have some agreements or not. But if you ask the elite, there's a meltdown, right? There's this huge, there's just this huge discrepancy. And it can never be hammered enough the extent to which people in politics are operating in a bubble and believe mistaking the elite and the Twitter sphere for the wider population.

38:19I mean, this feels to me like why Donald Trump kind of liked it, but that's another topic. This has been amazing. Everybody take a moment search for Coleman Hughes subscribe to his YouTube channel type Coleman Hughes tech Coleman you do you do a podcast? Yeah, I do a podcast conversations with Coleman actually David Sacks has been on the Podcasts about a year ago. How did he do? How did he do? He did absolutely fantastic. Did he make you feel unsafe? He did actually yes. Yes. Okay. Which was it? Talk about the Ukraine. Talk about Ukraine. Talk to me. Can I be on your podcast? Of course. I would be honored.

38:55Fantastic. There you go. I would be honored. Thank you. I saw you had the Dilbert guy on. That was a pretty engaging, interesting conversation. Yeah, Scott Adams, who is really controversial. And I thought you handled that one really well too. Yeah, thanks. He's an interesting one. So he has a lot of brilliant things to say. But also, he maybe thinks the CIA is going to kill him recently on Twitter. it's a mixed bag. It's a mixed bag would be where I would go with it. All right, listen, this has been amazing. The TED Talk is extraordinary. Everybody should watch it and yeah, ideas worth spreading unless maybe you don't agree with them.

39:35Go to the TED channel and watch it. Sorry, I mean, I don't want to give TED too much of a hard time, but they tried to get me to pay $50 ,000 a year, $25 ,000 a year for like a five -year package to go to the event and how much is Ted? How much is Ted? You regularly take it's 12 or 5500. And then, no, there used to be 7500, then I think they went up to 10K. And then you can do like donor tickets and you get different features and so on. Basically, they're sold out. Remember, it is set up as a nonprofit and there is philanthropic work that's done. And so, you know, the organization is, again, it's not a profiteering media company.

40:11It became a big media company because of the success of the efforts. and the quality of the content that was produced over time. But as we talked about, a lot of media companies and a lot of institutions get captured and the original kind of mission is to paraphrase. To paraphrase Bruce Wilson, Pulp Fiction, Ted's Dad, baby. Ted's Dad. Ted's Dad. A great see to get some of that back on one of his cycle. Ted's Dad, baby. As soon as they allow the staff who have, let's say, highly niche elite views to veto or suppress talks they don't like, then it stops being a platform for ideas. This becomes another left -wing interest group.

40:52What other ideas, what other talks have been canned before they even got to the stage? You have to wonder and we don't know who they're not inviting to. Who are they just not inviting to? Who are they just not inviting to? They just know the tune. And it's the top of the funnel, Jason, exactly. This all, we know that they're not invited. What about the person that's pro -coal? I wonder if the pro -coal person is allowed to presented to. I doubt it. You know, and they had Sarasolverman and she did a comedy set, which was hilarious. And the same people, so this is the thing I find. So the hypocrisy is just so crazy with the Ted people.

41:23And it's a lot of my friends still go is they had Sarasolver come. These people have laughed at Sarasolverman a million times. They've watched Dave Chappelle. They've seen any number of comments, you know, make them laugh with edgy humor. But then when they're in that, you know, Ted audience and they're feeling super precious and that they're very important because they don't need 50 grand a year or whatever Friedberg gave them. I don't know to get in there from the side door. Then they were super offended. So, you know, they're hypocrites and I don't have to say it anymore clearly. They literally, you could pull up Chris Anderson apologizing, not just for - Again, I really apologize for a comedian.

42:05I mean, I hope that this is a learning experience for everyone. I hope that this is a turning point for leadership and institutions like this to take a look at what happened, how it happened, and then hopefully to write the course. Because organizations like Ted, I thought we're very important and should be in the world and should be successful. And I hope that they kind of returned to the original values. And I hope that this is a moment that there's a learning experience in that. We don't just shit on them and say they're awful, they're failed. It's over. Hopefully something comes in this. I do think there is one other potential remedy here, which besides just starting a new TED and the kind of the Barry Weiss point of view, which is just right and off and start over.

42:42Remember what Brian Armstrong did at Coinbase? He basically just said, listen, we have a mission here. It's around crypto. We're going to focus 100 % on this mission. And if you're not on board with this mission or want to capture this institution to promote other missions, this is not the place for you. Go do those missions somewhere else. And it worked. Leadership, we took a hit. They were times wrote there obligatory hit piece. Chris was brave. He would just tell everybody. Oh, no, that's a saying that I would say if Chris has good mentors, as well as a good sounding board, that is the threshold question that should be debated right now is do I walk in the door and do I just give this simple litmus test and have people sign up or not?

43:22And yeah, 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 gonna stay. And this is what it means. And if he doesn't do that, then he's spoken with his actions. And it is what it is. It'll, what is meant to happen exactly then happen. Exactly. And exactly. It's a moment for looking at the internal compass. It's a wholesale leadership reset moment opportunity. See if it happens or not. Or don't go down and keep going. I really appreciate you're being public about all this and talking about it.

43:54It's been a great conversation. Thank you, Coleman. Everybody has a chance to have me on your desk. Yeah, all right. Thank you. We'll see you soon. Cheers now. See you, man. Thanks. All right. Listen, it's a new segment we have here when Virtua signaling goes wrong. If you missed it, the Canadian Parliament gave a standing ovation to a Nazi, not like a new Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer. One of the few actual Nazis still alive. Here we see just the crowd going wild. Less Friday, Ukrainian's president Solinsky gave a speech at the Canadian House of Commons, and Canadian House Speaker Anthony Rota introduced a 98 -year -old Yaroslav Hunk as a Ukrainian war hero, and then the Canadian Parliament proceeded to give him a standing ovation, and it turns out that this person first fought for the first Ukrainian division in World War II.

44:54That unit was also known as the Waffen SS, Galicia division, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, which was a voluntary unit under Nazi command. So the Canadian Parliament apparently gave a standing ovation to Nazis. They have apologized for this and said it was a mistake. Chimoff, I don't know if you got to see this, your Canadian. So your thoughts on what we've seen here. I mean, I'll give you my feedback as somebody who, when I was, you know, in 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 wokism, which Which I think look at some level was rooted in something very important, which was how do you get marginalized folks to be seen?

45:54But unfortunately along the way just got perverted by folks that just use it as a cudgel to censor people, to make other people feel guilty, to judge people. And so I think we all would agree that it's kind of become this virus. The thing that it masks are all of these other really bad things that come along with it. And one of them in Canada, which Justin Trudeau is K -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 for 25 or 30 years in a vacuum of leadership, what basically happened, we picked this guy, who was up until that point of substitute teacher, and the other claim to fame was appearing twice in brown face.

46:50Okay, so making fun of people like me, and elected in Prime Minister. And what happened was he became the sort of like virtue signaler and chief of this very important and G .A. 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 frism is how you can see what happens if a country doesn't draw a line and finally take a stand. So we had this guy who was ill -qualified and way over his head who shouldn't have been in this role as prime minister, get put in that position.

47:34When finally a group of people in Canada push back, in this case, the truckers, he and the entire government explicitly labeled them as Nazis, right, and said, these people need to be put down and completely dismantled. It didn't seem like it was right. We called that out. We all talked about it. And we said, this doesn't smell right on the surface. These are really seems like good -earned as people that are just trying to make a point and are not being heard. Then you had this thing three weeks ago, two or three weeks ago, where he actually had a speech in front of the entire parliament where he accused the largest democracy in the world, India in this case, of coming into Canada, Canadian soil and assassinating a Canadian citizen, which is an enormous allegation to Levy.

48:23And what was important to know about that allegation was that it was done without the explicit vocal support of either Britain or the United States, which would be the two most natural allies that Canada would present that information to. And instead of doing it behind a closed door to Modi, he did it on live stage like it was like some theatrical performance. Then India follows up and says, this guy is kind of known to be a little bit of a drug addict. It was on a two day bender and the Indian drug dogs smelled a bunch of cocaine on the plane, then they have this thing from Vladimir Zelensky, where everybody was there to sort of like virtue signal this war, and then they actually invited Anatsi and then gave him a standing ovation.

49:09So when you put it all together, I think what it shows is just the lack of professionalism, which also belies just the lack of experience and capability. And so I think what it shows is just like, isn't this enough? Like, have we not seen enough of these examples where you can actually start to ask yourself, why can't we just get really good competent people to do these jobs? Why can't we actually embrace free speech and all of what it means and explore that? Why can't we have people that don't need to theatrically perform on stage because eventually you're going to make these mistakes and you're going to embarrass your entire country and then you're going to imperil relations with some really important allies.

49:48And I think this is a moment in time where all of those things need to be questioned and put on the table. You're clearly questioning his confidence 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 Binazzi is solely responsible. Well, then he blamed Russian misinformation on top of that. But Jason, you don't, you don't, the prime minister who is the most important politician in the country doesn't show up someplace unless the office knows who else is going to be there.

50:28He knew that Zelensi was going to be there. He would have known who the guest list was. Yeah, no, this was clearly going to cover it up. But, but the bigger issue is just - Well, I just be clear, you're not saying that they invited a Nazi on purpose and cheered for a Nazi on purpose. Nobody's saying that. You're saying there's a lack of care here. And it's a lack of confidence. It's a lack of confidence. Just so we're clear. Yeah. Okay. So I agree with all of that. I think there's also two other dimensions to this back story, if you will. I think first in terms of how does a mistake like this happen, I think it was Orwell who said that he who controls the present controls the past and he controls the past controls the future.

51:09The present is Ukraine. It is the current thing. Everybody has to cheer for Ukraine and for the killing of Russians. The reason why Hongka was cheered with the standing ovation is because they said that he fought Russians. He was a war hero who fought Russians. All you have to do is do a little bit of math to realize the guy's 98 years old. When was there a war against Russia? Who could he possibly have been fighting for? But to accept people did that they sort of airbrushed it or whitewash history. So the president controls the past to ensure a vision of the future which Trudeau laid out in this speech he gave recently where he became so ardent in his support for Ukraine.

51:50He was almost yelling at the podium saying that Canada had to make all these economic sacrifices to win the war. So that's point number one is I think that the the woke mind virus almost requires this white washing of the past, but it's done for a specific purpose, which is to control the future. Well, they're not white washing the past if it was a mistake. That the intellectually doesn't make sense. No, what they did is what they're saying is - If I'm understanding you correctly, yeah. The present is that we hate Russia so much that we're going to cheer for anybody who killed Russians. Okay, I understand your point, but you're agreeing that they did not knowingly put a Nazi on there.

52:28So it was a mistake. I don't think they they knowingly did it was a huge debacle and embarrassing spectacle. Yeah, I think that nobody asked any questions about the past because the president Overrides it. Okay, sure the president need to support the current thing Overrides like any sort of examination of what happened historically There's one other way which I think this wasn't an accident Jason is that if you look at US policy towards Ukraine we have made common cause with a number of these far -right ultra -nationalist groups, frankly neo -Nazi groups. And this occurred before the current war, so it's not just a marriage of convenience.

53:08First of all, if you go back to war two, the father of Ukrainian nationalism is a guy named Stepan Bendera. And today in Ukraine he is seen as some sort of hero, and there are streets named after him, and their streets named after some of his co -conspirators who collaborated with Nazis. If you fast forward to the more recent past to 2014, when we had this Meydanku in Kiev that was backed by Victoria Newland, one of the key figures in that coup was a guy named Ola Tanibok, who is the founder of the Svoboda Party, which is the social nationalist party, which if you know what Nazi stands for, it's national socialists, they basically just flipped the name.

53:54And the original logo of the Sivabota party was the Wolf's Angel, which was a Nazi insignia. This was a far right party infused with the racial ideology of Stephen Banderra, who was again a Nazi. And they brought this guy in and his party as the muscle in this coup. If you look at the Victorian Newland phone call, the infamous phone call where she is picking the new Ukrainian government The the Yats is our guy phone call. She says that Clitch meaning Clitch go and Tony Bach needs to remain on the outside, but Yats needs to be talking to Tony Bach four times a week Okay, he was part of the chess pieces that they were moving around After the coup a civil war breaks out in the Donbass because the ethnic Russians there are opposed to this new government and the fact that Yanukovych, who they voted for, was deposed in an insurrection.

54:49What happens then is a war breaks out, where far -right paramilitary organizations like Wright sector and like the infamous Azov battalion start killing these ethnic Russian separatists. And a full -blown civil war breaks out thousands of people get killed. Does the Kiev government suppress these neo -Nazi groups? No, they bring them under the formal command structure of the Ukrainian military. Aizopitalian becomes a division of the Ukrainian military. It's shocking. And this goes on from 2014 through 2021. The Ukrainian army just to be clear here has not seen it, not seen supporters. There's no question about that.

55:31And there are many people who were concerned about this in the 2015 to 2020 timeframe. There were many articles written about it, the nation had an article about it. there were efforts in congress at various points to try and ensure that the a that we were giving to the Ukrainian government did not do the issue. So let's say what is said? So it is said. Okay. I think the important and obviously that still ends case a Nazi or a Nazi said that I know I don't think he's a Nazi and to be clear I don't think most Ukrainians are Nazis and I don't even think that most Ukrainian nationalists are Nazis.

56:04What I'm saying is that there is a Nazi element in Ukraine that we have white washed over. Well, here's the thing about it. I don't think it's a huge percentage, but I think they have outsized influence to their willingness to use violence due to their extremism. And their willingness to use violence. They make it so many different than Nazi percentage and say, whatever you want to say, white supremacists in the United States or in Germany or anywhere else. I do. I think it's different in the sense that in the United States, for sure, we have Nazi groups. They're not brought into the military.

56:36We don't have streets named after their patriarchs. Furthermore, we don't have members of our military with Nazi insignia on them. There was a New York Times article just a few months ago, talking about the fact that embarrassingly, a lot of these Ukrainian soldiers are being photographed with Nazi insignia on their uniforms. Now, the New York Times is framing this as a problem because it was a propaganda coup for Putin. And presumably it was. But I think it's a problem. But I think it's a problem because it's a problem not because of just the PR optics of it and You know at various points. I think this is the New York Times article as well.

57:13Western media has had to airbrush these photos To hide this fact now. Oh the New York Times is airbrushed photos of not seeing Times as but I don't think it your time says but I think they talk about This thorny problem of not wanting to show these photos with respect to the Zelensky being Jewish So what I'd say about that is that Zalinsky 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 Zalinsky 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.

57:59And I think that part of the woke thing and part of this Orwellian desire where control of the present gives you the ability to rewrite the past is that there's been a deliberate effort to cover up this problem and to pretend it doesn't exist, to turn a blind eye to it. Well, my point is that US policy has been to do this. In other words, the US. You say our government, yeah. Okay. The US State Department and presumably CIA, made common cause with these far right groups because we thought it was beneficial to be aligned with them. And so we did it in the May, donku in 2014. From 2015 to 2021, we could have gone along with efforts under the Minsk Accords to resolve this conflict in the Donbass peacefully.

58:42But we never did that. We never gave it any support. And instead we gave support to the Kiev regime's attempt to violently suppress these Russian separatists. And again, the suppression was being done by these right -wing groups. Look, does that make our State Department Nazis? No, does that make the Canadian Parliament Nazis? No. What I'm saying is that in both cases, a blind eye was turned to this disturbing ideology and past and associations of these people because it's politically in our interest to do business with them. And that's the problematic thing about it. So I don't think in that sense, this was just sort of an accident.

59:18This is the backstory that explains something like this can happen. Yeah. Jason, you have any reactions to Trudeau doing this and what it means or does it mean nothing? Does the backstory provided give you context on how something like this can happen? That's not just an accident. Well, I don't think any of us know exactly what happened here. There's probably going to be some sort of investigation, but I don't think they know we 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 Make their case stronger.

1:00:03They'll take the advantage of that. So yeah, sure and it is true. Do you think he knew? He can't know the history. He has to know. He has to know. If he does then somebody was following the question. Good question. If he did, then you would be saying, if he did know and he was pumping his fists, then you would be saying that he was pro Nazi. He was cheering for Nazi knowingly. You know what I'm saying is look, the fact that you've got some Jewish answer street is not in my view a Gaddajil free card. No, I'm not saying that. I never even remember that. I don't know what you're saying. I just said, I'm not saying he knowingly cheered for a Nazi.

1:00:45You know, one of the big backers of the A's off Italian is a Ukrainian at Logark named Igor Kalamoisky. Kalamoisky is Jewish. He has been asked a lot of questions. He asked me in my opinion. I'm just saying, do you think he knowingly cheered for a Nazi? Is that what you're insinuating? I think he knowingly cheered knowing that this Ukrainian nationalists who fought in World War II must have been on the German side. Because there was only one - He knew I would cheer for a Nazi. Okay, I'm just clarifying here. I don't actually have an opinion. Thanks for querying me. I'm not saying that he cheered for Nazism.

1:01:14What I'm saying is he cheered for Ukrainian nationalism and he knows that Ukrainian nationalism is bound up and tied up with this disturbing history, which he is willing to ignore. Do you guys, do you guys, let me finish my point about the Azov battalion. The Azov battalion is undeniably a neo -Nazi group. It was funded by Igor Kalamoysky, who is a Ukrainian logarch, who is Jewish, who lives in Israel. Why would Kalamoysky do that? Because They as off battalion beliefs that every interview crane including Crimea and Dodbas 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 Yeah, actually.

1:01:56Yeah, so I'm not saying that Zelensky or Kalamoisky or Anybody else is a Nazi because they aligned with these people I'm saying they found it politically expedient and useful to align with these groups just like the US State Department did quite frankly I don't think we should do that if you want to go around the world Jason saying that we're the champions of freedom and democracy and having this moralistic Almost virtue signaling foreign policy. I don't think we should be in business or aligned with These neo -Nazi groups wherever they are. I think it's when you say you do you mean me or do you mean the United States?

1:02:29I'm saying if you want to have a highly moralistic foreign policy, let's say if one wants to have a problem. Yeah, if you're going to be principled, you need to keep them. You need to not support Nazis. We're integrated. Jason and Freiber, what do you guys think of just like the the bread crumbs in Canada? I'm just curious whether you guys care about this whole vein of just like competent leadership, nepotism. If you have a view or it's like that is just what it is and whatever. I don't know enough about Canadian politics really, but Trudeau does not seem to be super qualified. Yeah. So. But I don't know enough about it.

1:03:07And 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 puts something very interesting here, where he explained that in the late 1940s and 1950s, Canada took a large number of former Nazis, many of whom were SS veterans. So people like Hunka because they were good anti -communists and then these Nazis proceeded to terrorize anti -Notsu 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 war two So the point is yeah, exactly look there's no way that any semi -intelligent person who knows the history of war two especially the Ukrainian involvement in War II wouldn't know that Ukraine was on the German side in War II and Hanka volunteered for the SS.

1:03:58He was a volunteer for the SS Galicia division. So, look, did the Speaker of the House know? Probably not. I think Wochnice 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 your update this week in Ukraine and Wokeness. All right, there's a bunch of news about OpenAI this week. Just very quickly, OpenAI is in advanced talks according to the financial times with Johnny I, of iPhone fame, Steve Jobs is a long -term collaborator and Masayoshi -san of SoftBank to raise more than $1 billion to build the iPhone of AI.

1:04:44And 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. The Vi of the FT sources, Financial Times, that is. Alotman and I have been having brainstorming sessions and I have San Francisco studio about what a consumer product centered around Open Eye would look like. It's very early stages. and Son has pitched a role for ARM in the development. His chip company that he recently took public. They also discussed Mosa and Oatman creating a company that would draw on talent and tech from their three groups with SoftBank, putting in a billion dollars in seed.

1:05:27And then also OpenAI is discussing a secondary share sale that would value the company at between 80 billion and 90 billion. This would be three X, the most recent valuation. reportedly though to their credit, they are on track to generate $1 billion in revenue in 2023. I'm not sure how much of that is the $20 a month subscription. That would be pretty extraordinary if that was those personal subscriptions. This would be a massive gain on paper for Microsoft. Opening I is 49 % owned by Microsoft. And Sam Altman has personally has stated multiple times now that he has no equity. So he would be getting $0 of this.

1:06:03And of course we know that opening I I started as a non -profit before switching and our friend Venote Kosola told us very clearly that those are just details. What happened there, Tremont? Those are just details. Venote is the goat. Sam is the closest thing that we have to an emergent mogul in tech. And the reason is because if everything sits on the substrate, You're going to need to get a license. You're going to want to get access to whatever developer program, whatever beta that OpenAI has. And so as a result, that's already happened, by the way. Well, I was just going to say so he'll be in the cap -board seat.

1:06:50So even if he doesn't have any equity in OpenAI, he'll just put his money into the best startups that it's like, why Compinator on steroids? By the way, I have a take on that whole claim that Sam doesn't own any part of open AI. All right, that's her. Well, go ahead, Colombo. Explain to us the details. As well within their mammoth. Well, you said you don't own any shares in open AI, but you started open AI. Right. Well, then who does? Yeah, that's the thing. Well, I think it's really interesting about what open AI has done in its fundraising rounds is that each round has been a capture turned model.

1:07:26So for example, That is to the 100x, 100x, right? Well, I think some of the very early people got capped at 100x. I think maybe the $30 billion round was capped at 10x. So I think the $30 billion round's capped at a $3 billion valuation, meaning if you're an investor, your share of go up in value to the company he hits a market cap, a $300 billion, and then basically you're effectively cashed out. It's like you bought a share, but sold a call back to the company at the $3 billion valuation. The movie industry works this way, right? You invest in a film, they tell you you can make three acts and then it's over, right?

1:07:58Something like that. I've seen that in the independent film business. Yeah, so, so, so, not even. I mean, I think people who invested like the $2 billion valuation were capped at like 100 billion. I heard that employees who were getting stock options are capped at 100 billion, or they were way back when they started granted these things. So my point is that if open AI turns into one of these companies like a Google and it's up in the trillion dollar club, then nobody's gonna own anything because they will have already long ago. Well, they'll keep selling you interest. Like the new interest will end up being like eight percent.

1:08:30No, because what'll happen at the end is the new people that buy in at that higher price that buy out the early investors, they're getting effectively things like eight percent return. The turns into debt eventually turns into some. I think what's really going on here is somebody has to own the residual value of the company, call it the far out of the money. Call it. That's how they get around the IRS problem of it being non equity. That's how they say that it's not equity in a private corporation. Yeah, but I think because there's always a kind of... Brilliant about it it is. Okay, so look, Sam set up this foundation.

1:09:01It's a nonprofit. But he controls that effectively, right? So yes, he technically is not an owner of the shares. The foundation is, but what can't you do with the foundation that you could do with personal ownership other than maybe buying a personal residence? I mean, you can buy a plane, I think. Look at the church of Scientology. They own a lot of real estate. So my point is not only do I think that Sam really owns open AI through the fig leaf of this foundation, I think he owns 100 % of it. In the event that the call option is struck, meaning answering a trillion dollar company. Are you saying Sam is out of our company?

1:09:37Are you saying Sam is out on Hubbard in this example? Let's not speculate too much. Oh, it's just details, right? As Bruno said, those are just details. I am speculating, but I think it's informed speculation. If you wanted to become the world's first trillionaire and you were extremely Convertited about it clever and premeditated about it. What would you do number one? You would want to choose a moonshot type area that was a world -changing technology AI certainly qualifies So it's called fusion Maybe crypto does as I understand the same as bet's in all three of those areas number two you would want to figure out a way to own as much of it as you could really 100 % if you could and And that's a very hard thing to do when you're running a capital intensive startup, but investors tend to underestimate the power law and the value of the far out of the money call option.

1:10:29So maybe you can get them to sell that back to you really cheaply. And third, if you're really far -sighted, you would want to insulate yourself against populist anger from being the world's first trillionaire. So you would basically put your shares in a nonprofit foundation where you're not really sacrificing that much of control Or the ability to control the asset, but it gives you tremendous. I love this very Where did you come up with this is this like this is genius? This is genius. You and Peter Tiel talk about this over jazz or something. How did you construct this and you're saying this is in I love financial conspiracy corner.

1:11:07I think it's right. Science corner. Let's get the tinfoil hats out. It's really freaking Friedberg out that we're even doing this. Diometrically opposite to science corner. Is it a conspiracy or is it just reality? I think if you are even 1 % right, the combination of lawyers and accountants that would leak this and the number of people that were part of the origination of the foundation that would want to sue will be very high. That's just the natural state of things in these kinds of things. It seems like a lot easier way. But what are I said other than the fact that it was sort of premeditated, which that's not the right word, that premeditated sounds to nefarious?

1:11:45No, no, no. I'm just saying whenever, whenever, I'm just saying whenever money is made at this quantum and at that scale, everybody wants a piece because they know that that's their one shot. So I just think that it'll amplify the pressure for actors inside of those organizations to take their shot. And that's just going to be financially the right thing to do for a lot of people if what you're saying is true. We know the investments have been made under a cap return model. I think that's fact. That's fact, yes. We know the nonprofit foundation owns the shares. That's fact. And then just to put the 800 pound grill on the table, like, what's Elon thinking?

1:12:23because he was the one that really got this thing off the ground because that critical investment made the whole thing come to life. He could have done this on his own. Yeah, how much does he own? Zero. Fast and zero. But after I lawsuit how much does he own? I don't know. I'm not just speculating. So can we talk about the technology? Let's talk about the technology. There we go. So OpenAI released some new chat, GPT features. The key point here is they're doing what's called multi -modal. Multi -modal is the big innovation. What does that mean? That means the input could be voiced, the input could be code, the input could be data.

1:12:56It could be a picture. Here's a picture. If you're watching along on the YouTube channel, do a search for all -in podcast on YouTube, hit subscribe, hit the bell. And it's a classic picture of one of those no parking signs where there's four different ones. You take a picture of that, that's the input. And you say, it's Wednesday at 4 p .m. Can I park in the spot right now? Tell me in one line, it comes back and says, yes, you can park for up to one hour starting at 4 p .m. What this This means is the output or the input could be in any of those modalities, modalities, fancy word for an image of video, et cetera.

1:13:25So you're going to be able to say, hey, give me the poster for the all in conference of Bestie Runner. And I want it to be these things. And here are the pictures of the boys and then make it and go back and forth and back and forth. And this is really groundbreaking at the same time. Last week Google BARD and Sendip, Modra and I played with us on this week in startups. You now have Google flights, Google docs, Gmail, and a number of the other core Google services are now in BARD. So that's not multi -modal exactly, but you could do things like ask Google flights, hey, what is the best non -stop between New York City and Dubai or from an East Coast destination that has lay down flat seats, etc.

1:14:10and 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 two big, big monumental announcements just in the last 10 days, Freeberg, when you look at these two, which one is the more important announcement? And what do you think about the pace? Because we here we are, we're about to hit the one year anniversary of Chad's APT 3 .5. I've been using a lot of different tools the last couple of months, and I'm kind of getting to the point that I feel that much of what's happening is underhyped rather than overhyped.

1:14:47There's some really incredible potential emerging. I'll give a couple of examples and then I'll talk about the mobile phone. First is Andre Carpati as you guys see in the tweet that I just posted in the chat, made a point today that LLMs are emerging not just as a 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, LLMs become the core driver to a new type of computing interface.

1:15:27There was a paper publish and I'll share the link to this paper here as well and we can put it in the notes. It's not worth pulling up on the screen that showed that using LLMs in autonomous driving can actually significantly improve the performance of the neural nets that the autonomous cars are trained on. So the autonomous car is typically trained on a bunch of sensor data that comes in and then that sensor data determines what sort of action to take with the car and what this team showed is that if you actually put in a communication layer that thinks and talks like a human, in between the sensor data and the action data, it can do really wide -raging interpretations of the data that otherwise would not be apparent from the data set it was trained on.

1:16:08So, for example, you can see a person down the road and ask it, what do you think that person's going to do next? And the LLM, because it's trained on a much larger corpus of data than just sensor data from cars, it can make a really good human -like interpretation of that, feed that decision back into the control system of the car and have the car do something more intelligently that it otherwise would have been able to do. So these LLMs are becoming a lot more like a software operating system and you can kind of extend that into mobile phones. Mobile phones originally were just voice and then they were single lines of text in the form of SMS.

1:16:42Then you were able to browse the web and then the app revolution came about where all of this information emerged through apps. What LLMs now allow perhaps is that the entire operating system of the phone can run and render any sort of application or any sort of service or product you might want to use on the fly in -stream. So the input to the phone can be voiced, it can be visual, it can be video, and the output can be rendered by perhaps a bunch of what might otherwise be called apps, but call it third party developers that build in -stream into that chat that's no longer looks like a chat interface like we see on chat GPT, but can be rendered visually, can be rendered with audio, can be rendered in a bunch of different ways.

1:17:19So if mobile really is the dominant hardware platform that humans are using for computing today, LLMs and these sorts of tools can become the dominant operating system on that hardware, and you can totally rethink the modality of how you use computing through applications today. We have an app store and we download apps and use them, and that all becomes in -stream in an LLM or chat type interface that can be accessed in a bunch of different ways. So for me, there's a really bigger thing that's happening that's not just about making smarter tools and increasing productivity, but a real revolution in computing itself that seems to be emergent.

1:17:53And 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. And I think it's going to be really significant. It's a wholesale rewriting of computing interfaces, human computer interaction. That's going to rethink everything. And it seems to be pretty substantial. And just using a bunch of tools myself, I'm blown away every single time. What do you can do? Yeah, I mean, right now I would agree with you, strongly agree, because this was magic lengths vision for the future, which is you would talk to agents as they called them.

1:18:28This was a company that existed in the 90s before smartphones existed. It was a physical device, Sony made the device. And the operating system, the concept was you would say, I'm looking for a flight to go to this place. The agent would go out, it would do a bunch of work and then come back to you with the options. So not just a Google search coming back with 10 blue links, but actually just solving your problem. And if the interface is from general magic, right? General magic, right? Yeah, right. Right. And there's a movie, general magic, the movie. You can look at the Wikipedia company. But this was a lot of like the early work in this area.

1:19:00And I think this is going to become the interface and LMS talking to each other. Then the question becomes, who owns this? How many of these are there? Are they verticalized? So what do you think the game on the field is here? here, uh, uh, sex. 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 ever got. At a minimum, it's a nerd corner. Yeah. It's a nerd corner. I'm trying to find a science corner into an intersecting realm so we can all be involved. Yeah. I don't know how we crowbar and Uranus joke into this, but let's, let's keep our eyes wide open here.

1:19:32Okay. So on the phone, I think what's interesting there, just to boil it down, is you're talking about replacing the main interface, which is currently a wall of apps, right? And you push, you tap an app to go into the app and then you interact with it. You're talking about replacing all of that with basically voice. So imagine a serial, yeah, if you connect like glasses to it or something. So rather than double click on an app, the app developers, as they're called today, are basically building in -stream utilities that are part of the chat interface that is the phone itself. And that's what's going to be so compelling.

1:20:09You have to read, like we used to write websites, then we wrote apps, and now we're going to write these kind of in -stream services, these plugins. Alexa was going to do this, yeah. Well, Alexa or Siri never got a job. It kind of sucks. It just doesn't work that well. It doesn't work. But imagine if the phone perfectly understood what you were saying, then you would just say call me an Uber, order me food, whatever. And precisely. You had just instructed it. It would be, it's like in that movie, was it her? or the Joaquin Phoenix movie. God, that should have been my background today. What am I thinking?

1:20:39Do you've disappointed all the science -coner fans? I think it's a Spike Jones movie. He did a really good job with that man. That movie's looking more and more like it's gonna happen. We gotta do a rewatchable on that. Yeah, we should rewatch it. You wouldn't even really need the pain of glass if you can just talk to it within your piece. Now, I think you're right that the phone needs to know what you're looking at, or it can do so much more if it has all those senses. that's part of the multimodal demo that that openly I showed this week is it has video and it has camera integration and remember in human computer interaction it's often a lot easier for a human to interact with a visual representation of stuff on a screen than to hear stuff in audio so we will still need some sort of visual display whether it's a screen or an eyeglass or something that that shows us a bunch of information in a way.

1:21:29Sam 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 had hang, like a necklace around your neck, a camera type device. A wearable, wearable door. A wearable, okay. And it would record everything and it would be like your memory backup and you'd be able to query it. That was William Gibson's plotline in one of his books where he had a little zeppelin that would follow people around and record everything, and then you'd have a DVR of your entire life, and that would be completely indexed, and then you could...

1:22:05The AI would know your entire life and be able to advise you. I do guys use the feature on your AirPods, where if you leave them in, it will read you the messages from your signal or your incoming notifications, where it reads them to you. Obviously, you don't. So there's a new feature on the AirPods, you leave them in. And if you're working, you're walking around the house, 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.

1:22:37And 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 get I didn't Facebook announce a new pair of glasses today. Yeah, those are like their spectacle kind of things. These are the light AR glasses where you could take pictures. Just meant to say everything's converging a lot faster than we all know. Yeah, it is. So I started using a new note taking app called Reflect. Do you guys heard of this?

1:23:09It's reflecting on things? Whoa. This progress. I just started I'm just starting to play with it. But what it does is you keep like a daily log of who you've met with and what meetings were about so it's basically a note taking out but it does back links so that it starts to link together the people and concepts or whatever and so like the use case that I think it's quite useful for once you've been using it for a while is okay I'm meeting with this person once last time I saw them what do we talk about then so it gives you like context yeah yeah that's awesome I really like this is a journal 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 name sometimes if I've only met them once or twice.

1:23:50So his name is Fredler. David. Hi. Not you guys, but. No, it's also getting old. It's a bunch of how much input is coming at you. There's just so much coming at us today. But just having a short log of who I've met with and briefly what the meeting was about. So I can go back and check it. And at some point in the future, I've searched against it. But the only problem with it is I do have to like take the time to enter all this stuff and it's kind of pain. If it could just be done automatically, like a true external hard drive to my brain, then that would be very powerful. It'll authenticate with Slack and Gmail and do that automatically, and then it'll be otherworldly.

1:24:29It already connects with Google. I don't want my Slack in my reflect. What I want is my meetings, which they do, they integrate with Google Calendar. Great. And really, that's it. Like the main thing I want is, if I could just know everyone I talk to, And I don't need a transcript. I just need the log line Just so I can remember I just need the prompt six months from now I just need a prompt that I met with this person and here is the topic that's it Sacks have you gone to the have you built lintinize your greetings now? It's great to see you That's the great that's the great thing like it's great to see you so that you know you preserve optionality for the people You have the same thing It's great to see you we've never met but I it's great to see I just use that always say great to see you great I'm not going to shut you up.

1:25:13I'm not going to shut you up. It's such a vanger. I'm high. When I met Clinton, I was at Hillary Clinton fundraiser when she was a senator here in New York. And they sent you up an elevator to this fundraiser and you get off the elevator and Bill Clinton standing there. And he walks up to me like three steps. Oh, J .K. It's great to see you and he grabs your elbow. He shakes me. I am so happy for what you did to help Hillary win. and you know, Jason, we're so appreciative. And then you walk into the room. And I'm like, oh my God, Bill Clinton knows my name. Totally. Then I look behind me and I see the next person, I see a woman come out with a clipboard.

1:25:52Whisper in his ear, the next person's name coming out of the elevator, he's waiting, that person disappears. Oh, David Sacks, it's so great to meet you. I really appreciate it. Well, well. Anything you've done for Hillary. You know that role of whispering the name of a person in the politicians ear goes all way back to Roman times. It was called the Nomenclatura. The Nomenclatura. Nomen is the Latin word for name. It's a... I call it the name, man. It sucks. I'm in question. How often do you think about the Roman Empire? Just broadly speaking. How's it going to be that it's reference? I thought that was...

1:26:27I don't know. Yeah. It's pretty great. It's pretty great. I'm just glad that the rest of the world is catching up to our obsession with Gladiator There are less than this has been an amazing episode for the dictator himself, Chimoff, Polly Hoppeteer, and Rainman, yeah definitely burn baby, David Sacks, and the Sultan of Science, the Queen of Kinwa, the Prince of Panic attacks, and the heir to the Ted Throne, the creator of the world's greatest conference, David Freiburg. I am the world's greatest moderate. We'll see you next time. Love you boys. All in. Bye bye. Bye bye. Love you Ted's dad Ted's dad.

1:27:03Ted's dad baby. Ted's dad baby. What are you doing? Well let your winners ride. Bring man David's side. And it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. I'm going to be a queen of kinwap I'm going to a lady What? What?

1:27:27Besties are gone Go thrifty That's my dog taking a wish to drive away So, wait a minute Oh, man My ham is a bit asher when we eat We should all just get a room and just have one big huger Because they're all just like this like sexual tension But we just need to release that out What? You're B. What? You're B. You're B. B. What? We need to get merch. I'm going on leave.

1:28:00I'm going on leave. I'm going on leave.