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

The episode opens with Coleman Hughes, a writer and podcaster, joking about a fan's crush on Sacks before the hosts turn to his TED Talk, titled A Case for Color Blindness. Hughes says Chris Anderson invited him, and he chose the subject of his book The End of Race Politics, due in February. His argument is that people should be treated without regard to race, and that where policy aims to help the most disadvantaged it should use class rather than race.

Hughes estimates 95 percent of the audience received the talk well, with about five people in a crowd of almost 2,000 visibly upset. He says an employee group, Black at TED, first asked to speak with him and then declined. Anderson later emailed that internal blowback was strong and some wanted the talk withheld. The final town hall opened with two speakers denouncing it, one calling it racist and dangerous, the other saying it would return the country to "separate but equal". Hughes says the second claim is the opposite of his talk and calls such criticisms "deranged".

It passed the fact checking team.

Hughes says the problem was that the talk upset staff, not factual error. He describes a negotiation. TED first proposed attaching a debate to one video, then two videos on the same day, and he refused both. They settled on a two-week gap before a debate with New York Times columnist Jamelle Bowie.

In mid-August, Tim Urban noticed the talk's view count looked implausibly low. Hughes says the five surrounding talks had 450,000 to 800,000 views against his 73,000, about 16 percent of the low end, so he felt TED had reneged and went public after Barry Weiss heard of it. The account is Hughes's alone, and nothing here establishes whether the gap was deliberate.

Friedberg says he attended TED from about 2007 to 2019 and valued it for new ideas. He says that over time talks took a social-justice turn that felt like lecturing. In the three years after Trump's 2016 election, he says, there were many talks on why Trump was a root cause of social decline, but none explaining why people voted for him. He says he is neither Republican nor conservative, told Anderson he would not return, and had an hour-long call with him.