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

**David Friedberg** (0:00)
Hey Coleman, how's it going?

**Jason Calacanis** (0:01)
Hey Coleman, welcome to the show.

**David Sacks** (0:02)
Hey, how's it going?

**David Friedberg** (0:04)
Have you ever heard of the show?

**Coleman Hughes** (0:06)
Yeah, I have. I'm actually a fan. My girlfriend introduced me to the show like two years ago, and I've been a fan ever since.

**David Friedberg** (0:12)
Great to meet you.

**Coleman Hughes** (0:12)
And apparently, like many women, she has like a legit concerning obsession with Sacks, but also Quint.

**David Friedberg** (0:21)
Her and Quint are tilted.

**David Sacks** (0:23)
Those Sacks fans are crazy.

**David Friedberg** (0:25)
End the episode. End the episode.

**David Sacks** (0:27)
Shout out, Letty.

**David Friedberg** (0:27)
Oh my God, oh my God. Jesus, horrible.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:31)
Way to go, Coleman, you're gonna fit right in here. All right, here we go.

**Coleman Hughes** (0:34)
Let me read this.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:35)
This is your cold open, folks.

**David Friedberg** (0:36)
I'm sorry, let me just psychologically explore this before we get into the real substance of it.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:40)
Why does she like him so much?

**David Friedberg** (0:42)
I don't understand this.

**Coleman Hughes** (0:43)
By the way, I think you guys missed the second half of my statement. I said Sacks and Chamath.

**David Friedberg** (0:47)
Oh shit, okay, great. Thank God.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:52)
Okay, here we go.

**Coleman Hughes** (0:53)
Thank God.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:12)
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 one of its speakers under the bus, so we decided to have him on to talk about the experience. This is the second time they've done it at least. They did it to Sarah Silverman for doing comedy at Ted because people at Ted are a bunch of virtual signaling lunatics, including some of my friends who go. But Coleman Hughes, if you don't know him, is a writer and podcaster. He has a pretty popular podcast called Conversations with Coleman and he did a talk which I encourage everybody to watch at Ted and it's titled, A Case for Color Blindness. We all watched it, it's a very powerful talk and something weird happened.
Coleman, welcome to the program and maybe you could just share with the audience how you wound up speaking at Ted, what the content of your talk was briefly and then the bizarre reaction when they tried to ban and kill your talk post you giving it.

**Coleman Hughes** (2:25)
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 summary of what happened there. Basically what happened is Chris Anderson invited me to give a Ted talk and I chose the subject of my upcoming book, which is coming out in February called The End of Race Politics. And the argument is just essentially colorblindness. This is the idea that you want to treat people without regard to race, both in your personal lives and in our public policy. And wherever we have policies that are meant to collect and help the most disadvantaged, we should preferentially use class as a variable rather than race. That's my talk in a nutshell.
So I prepared the talk with the Ted team. I got their feedback, edited, curated, et cetera. Got up there in April, gave the talk.
95% of the people in the audience, it was quite well received. Whether or not they agreed with every point, it was well within the bounds of acceptable discourse. There was a very small minority 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 2,000.
So I expected that because colorblindness is not in vogue today on the left amongst progressives, it's really the idea non grata. And so I was expecting to field some pushback and I talked to some critics and so forth. But what happened is what began as just a few people upset began to spiral into a kind of internal staff meltdown at TED.
So this group called Black at TED asked to speak with me. I agreed. And then they said, actually, we don't want to talk to you. And they're an employee group at TED.
After the conference, Chris emailed me and said, look, I'm getting a lot of blowback here internally. There are people saying we shouldn't release your talk at all. And then over the course of the next month, they came up with a variety of sort of creative solutions about how to release my talk in a way that would appease the woke staffers that really didn't want it to be released at all. And at this point, I had to start kind of sticking up for myself. So first they wanted to attach like a debate to the end of my talk and release it as one video, which I felt would really send the wrong message. It would send the message that like this idea can't be heard without the opposing perspective.