The Exchanges

Q Okay, what was the, what do you perceive was the problem with your talk, or what they perceive the problem with your talk is?

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

AI assessment note: “The first said that it was racist and dangerous and irresponsible”

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

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

AI assessment note: “There may be some severe threat mechanism that comes on board”

Q institutions that are now captives 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?

A I mean, in a word, no, because it's by that point, it's, uh, it's, it's an intractable, intractable problem. I've had, I've talked to CEOs that asked this question to me over and over again, you know, like, what do I do once I'm past the point where I've, 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 going to pretend that I do.

AI assessment note: “in a word, no, because it's by that point, it's, uh, it's, it's an intractable”

Q 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, um, all these foundations that made kind of a free and open society work effectively for so long.

A 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. Um, and most, 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 got to start your own institutions. You have to start your own institutions with the right ethos from day one. And that's what she's tried to do with the free press, um, rather than try to reform institutions that have a lot of unhealthy inertia.

AI assessment note: “her point of view on it is, look, you just got to start your own institutions.”

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

A So prescriptively, I don't want to say much because I don't like to tell people how to run their funds or run their businesses, right? If you're a Christian and you want to hire only Christian people, if you're a Muslim, you want to hire only Muslims, I think you should frankly be allowed to do that if those are your personal values. Now, personally, I will tell you, with respect to the people that I would hire to, say, work on my podcast, I want every single hire to know that I am not hiring them as a result of their skin color or gender or Any other contingent feature of, 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, um, 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 two years down the line, when a company is having some meltdown over a race or a gender issue, you have to understand that it's possible you made this bed by signaling from the very beginning that what's important about the people you're bringing in is t…

AI assessment note: “I am not hiring them as a result of their skin color or gender”

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

A 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 two weeks later, they'd release a debate between myself and this guy, Jamel Bowie, who was a New York Times columnist. Um, so the talk came out on Ted's website, the debate came out, and I kind of mentally, uh, had forgotten about the whole situation until Tim Urban, who was a popular blogger, who's actually given the-

AI assessment note: “he sort of presented this idea about how to release it and he sold it”