I've also seen how politicians lie and tell half truths about stuff, where I know the full story like them.
I feel like their show has an implicit subtext where you’re expected to understand when they are lying. You get to feel smart by recognizing when they’re just talking their book.
The tricky question is whether there is any value in the podcast besides understanding their book.
If one them sees this, I hope they take it kindly. The podcast has gone downhill drastically. The level of discourse has dropped considerably. They make all sorts of claims with very little evidence.
Recently they have all agreed that voter ID laws "just make sense." But they don't even bring up any of the unpleasant history around IDs.
When DeSantis was running, they didn't ever talk about him flying immigrant around as a horrible political stunt.
They've been leaning closer and closer to anti vax stances.
I still listen.. but I'll probably stop soon. It's becoming a bro podcast.
David Friedberg has the best mind for evidence, and he speaks less and less.
This perspective is coming from someone who largely agrees with their ultimate conclusion that we should have Voter ID laws, but there were legitimate counter-points that got missed which should be addressed before implementing voter-id laws.
In a recent episode they went off for quite a while about selling off UHF and VHF frequencies which was also a pretty clueless claim. Sacks thinks they should auction them more frequently and allow startups to buy them for new technologies. I sort of get what he is saying, but how does that change anything? You are just trading one problem for another. You have all the same ownership problems we currently have but you are using it for something with arguably less public good, which is used strictly for profit. How would selling off the frequencies to Microsoft, Apple, and Google (since let's be honest they would have the most money to buy into these experimental land grabs, not some small startup) be any different than ABC, NBC, and CBS owning the airwaves? Yet somehow the group just kind of followed along with this groupthink concept like tech bros.
I do think that they have a bit of a responsibility to fact check and do some due diligence on these types of topics, because as OP's article points out, there are a huge majority of their listeners who will blindly trust anything this panel says as gospel and truth. Many people idolize them since they have made a lot of money and are successful businessmen that they don't make mistakes. Granted that is a larger debate on how society is too trusting of their heroes or leaders, but it is still the current situation nonetheless.
I used to listen to the podcast diligently. I now listen to between 1/3 - 1/2 of the episodes. Basically if I have extra time or the topics are of particular interest to me. But I will no longer make time for the podcast like I used to, I only use it to fill time I might otherwise have if I am caught up on other podcasts.
IMO Chamath and Jason are probably the best of the group. With Chamath being the most informed. I have to give Jason credit because he seems to be the one most willing to bring up counter-arguments. Without Jason this podcast would just devolve into utter nonsense. Sacks' rants about conspiracy theories used to be entertaining, and I love to hear opposing opinions on things to better expand my awareness, but they are so constant and extreme now, that they are just annoying at this point. Friedberg is mostly a background character IMO which is a shame since he tends to be the most centralist and evidence-based of the group. But as is normal in this world, those level-headed opinions get drowned out by the loud people shouting conspiracies and anger fueled rants.
The group clearly has potential as we have seen them hitting the potential. But they are pretty confident with their position as the number one podcast in the world (no idea if that is true or not, but that's their claim) and they seem to be flying pretty close to the sun as a result. It might be going to their heads.
If they see this I would recommend they hire a research team to fact check them throughout the episode or to inject opposing opinions on things. They can afford it and if they are the top podcast in the world than one could argue that they have an ethical obligation to do so. Also limit Sacks' talking. Sometimes I feel like he talks for 1/2 the episode and that's usually when the podcast goes off the rails.
Best of luck to them either way. I don't really care. There is a lot of great content out there that I can listen to besides them (and I have already started shifting towards). But I enjoyed them enough at their peak that if they can bring it back I'd be happy too.
I don't know if IDs are free in all states, but if they are, I would be more inclined to support it as a requirement for voting.
I also would want to get an objective handle on how the IDs are treated. I have had friends get questioned because "Their signature didn't match the ID." I can see how that would quickly get perverted.
How do you feel about their revisionism around Jan 6?
> I don't know if IDs are free in all states, but if they are, I would be more inclined to support it as a requirement for voting.
The IDs being free is good, but not sufficient. The ID issuing organization also must be funded sufficiently to provide comprehensive access to ID-related services to all citizens, regardless of disability, population density, cost of provision, etc.
Elsewhere in the thread is mentioned the predominantly-Black county that has a DMV only open one day a month. Why do you think that is?
In recent years we've seen where the loyalties lie for the likes of Sacks and Calacanis. You see this as various SV movers have fallen in line politically in a way that alienates the majority of the workers that created their wealth.
Go back 10-20 years and there was a lot of delusion in the tech space that companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Netflix or whoever that are somehow "different" to Corporate America. Since the pandemic, I think all of these companies have gone fully mask off.
You, as a tech worker, as a nuisance to these people. You cost money. They are doing their utmost to suppress your wages and create fear and uncertainty through permanent, rolling layoffs. It's a constant effort to get you to do more work for less money.
The likes of Calacanis, Sacks, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Pichai and so on are united in one thing: solidarity with the billionaire class. So maybe All-In is entertaining but you should never forget it has an agenda to serve the billionaire class.
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Edit: I tried to be civil, but people here are clearly ideological & want to commit voter fraud to empower themselves at the expense of everyone else. It's obvious. Go ahead & downvote. You cannot escape the fact that we know the truth behind your empty rhetoric. You might as well give it up because it only makes you look bad.
Let's be honest here. For all of the highfalutin rhetoric of curiousity on this site, there are many ideologues who wish to narrow the discourse. To ignore reality. Y'all are doing great! Keep it up! Go ahead & bash the "All In Podcast", Trump, Republicans, the American People, or whoever inconveniences your plans at this moment. Please keep on doing what you are doing. You do you! America voted resoundingly against you. They don't like your agendas. Neither does most of the world's population. Now go buzz off into the dustbin of history.
I cannot think of any legitimate reason other than maintaining control over phony democratic rituals using voter fraud. To gaslight people into a totalitarian system. The disadvantage of this technique is an overwhelming popular mandate, like we saw in this election is impervious to plausible deniability. The vampires would need to come out into the sunlight...
Do you have any legitimate reason for the anti-voter id position to present? Of all the people here, nobody can present one single legitimate reason for the anti-voter id position?
The sentiment on this topic's comment section is overwhemling anti-voter id. Yet after reading though these discussions, not one single valid reason was presented. I cannot think of any legitimate reason given the current context.
This year is the 80th anniversary of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, do they really need to go through the history of IDs? We need to rebuild confidence in the integrity of elections, Voter ID, which most democratic countries require, seems like an incredibly modest step.
The states that historically had the worst race issues all have voter id anyway, it is the Northeast and West coast that are refusing.
People didn't lose confidence in the integrity of elections because our elections lack integrity, they lost confidence because they were told in a way that resonates with them that our elections lack integrity.
Voter ID would just be security theater in that it's an onerous rule that does nothing to help any actual problem aside from making things look better to some people.
It doesn't even matter if you agree with the claims that were made about voter fraud, I can't think of any good faith argument by literally anyone on the political compass that it didn't cause people to lose faith in electoral process.
Maybe people shouldn't have faith in the electoral process, and the way to rebuild confidence in the integrity of the electoral process is to rebuild the integrity of the electoral process first and tell people about it second.
Against that we have people saying we need Voter ID? Is there any more better time to use the "arranging deck chairs on the Titanic" analogy, except for perhaps on an actual sinking ship?
I've heard those arguments, but the thing is there are several cases around the country right now where ballot-level fraud _was_ caught[1].
Without doing any research I'll say that while it's easier to generate a bogus ballot than it is to generate a bogus hundred dollar bill, it just doesn't scale to the point where it's useful. It's a pain in the ass to get your hands on enough ballots, fill them out, and deliver them to a drop box or whatever. You can't just pull up with a wagon full of ballots and drop them off.
How much is it worth to somebody to flip a county? Which county do you flip? How many ballots will you need to flip it? What's the risk/reward ratio like?
[1] https://www.cpr.org/2024/11/06/mesa-county-mail-ballots-frau...
One of the things I used to see pushed back on, but it seems to have gone by the way side recently, is not citing the original source but rather citing the someone saying something about the source. Its increasingly pervasive in all types of research adn contributes to a giant and slow moving slide of meaning creep.
The OP mentions that reviewing the history would inform the discussion. You dismissed being informed and simply provided a truism - specifically accepted a truism common from oen side. If the issue is confidence in integrity, but there never was an integrity issue, then fixing an integrity issue is neither possible nor a solution to the confidence problem.
Again, I see this everywhere - from polite conversation to academic discourse adn it troubles me about the larger state of knowledge and knowing in the world.
I'm sorry, but saying "review the history," without specifically referring to things that happened in history and why they are relevant today, is absolutely worthless and a copout. If you have a reason why voters can't use ID today, say it, this "educate yourself" crap is a weaselly way to get out of defending your position while looking down your nose at the same time.
You can't work without ID. Surely that's worse than not being able to vote, not being able to eat?
As always, you should ask "what purpose does this serve?" Do we need voter ID laws? Well, is there a widespread voter fraud problem? No [1].
When you declare something to be "common sense", you betray either a lack of knowledge of why something is the way it is, you know why it's like that but you're willing to lie about it to push an agenda or you have a position of privilege where something doesn't affect you so you just don't care.
So if voter fraud isn't a widespread problem, you should then ask who is pushing for this and why? Also, why are things the way they are?
A big part is that as many as 7% of Americans don't have the documents required to prove their birth or citizenship [2]. So Voter ID laws disenfranchise a right (voting) to millions of people.
Voter ID is really about voter suppression. Why? Because you need ID to register and vote. If you don't have it, you lose that right. If you think those people are more likely to vote against your interests, you do what you can do make sure they can't vote.
As a real example, Alabama has Voter ID laws but in certain counties that have a large black population, the DMV (where you would have to go to get a valid ID) was only open one day a month [3].
That's entirely intentional. Make it difficult to get an ID then it's less likely you'll vote.
[1]: https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american-c...
[2]: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/mill...
[3]: https://www.governing.com/archive/drivers-license-offices-wi...
[0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chamath-palihapitiya-crumblin...
They seem insightful. They’re generally behind the curve and remind of Stratfor.
If anything, All In is better connected on politics. But that may be my Gell-Mann amnesia at play because I know the finance side of tech very well, and they’re not only frequently but paradoxically consistently wrong on it in ways that one sees institutional-versus-retail flows profit off.
"In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
I feel like I should get that tattooed on my hand, next to one saying, "It's not about you."
some observations, IDK if others have noticed: - chamath always speaks last as if he is some kind of village elder, I think it allows him to present a better pov than he actually has - sacks is good at logic/debating and It seems they use that to push a RW pov without sounding like they are endorsing it by presenting a weak/half baked opposition to it.
overall I find hard to take them seriously outside of core tech/VC stuff. the science guy is okay but meh.
This is a really great point I completely hadn’t considered.
Maybe sometimes there's an evolutionary advantage in prejudice?
He seemed wildly unclear about how leasing that space by the FCC has worked until now and pitched it as a "fixing the woke media" solution.
Yes, Linux has bugs.
They correctly stated that the job numbers always get revised down not up.
They also correctly stated that the GDP growth in the last quarter was largely driven by government spend, and if you take out the private sector, there was little growth.
The entire article is pointing out quite clearly that this, in fact, not correct.
> They correctly stated that the job numbers always get revised down not up.
This is also demonstrably false with like 5 minutes of research. This is all a matter of public record https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm
These guys are charlatans. These lying idiots have absolutely no shame in misleading you, and you are falling for it.
“Oh, it’s just entertainment. Oh, it’s just opinion. Oh, you shouldn’t take them seriously.”
No. Absolutely not. I refuse to give them a pass. We have to stop normalizing this behavior. Ethics matter. Character matters. The truth matters.
"If you keep telling people it's bad to lie, I'm going to change my political views! *harumph*" is an impressive self-own.
I take everything they say with a huge grain of salt. It is incredible how confidently they talk about certain topics where it’s clear even to an uneducated listener that they only have a surface level understanding.
Their flip-flopping on AI - from it being the best thing ever to being completely overhyped and underperforming - and then back again - has been amusing.
I enjoy their insights on slightly less hyperbolic topics like SaaS business models and other more mundane things. There can be some genuine nuggets of wisdom there.
Jason sometimes pushes back on the political stuff and attempts to be a voice of reason (relatively speaking - though I’m revealing my bias there) and that can sometimes prompt some actual interesting debate. I probably wouldn’t be able to bear listening at all without him on it.
Mainly though I think it can be good to listen to people you don’t agree with every so often.
One could tell they had no idea what they were discussing on many occasions, specifically on AI.
Jason and Chamath said AI prompted them to start "coding" again while entertaining the notion that AI will eventually replace all programmers in a matter of months. One day, AI will help the best to become "10 X" engineers. Another day, AI is a dud.
Friedberg said multiple times that everybody would create their Hollywood movie thanks to AI when there is little to no indication people would ever do this, leaving aside the production capability of LLMs to do so.
He has no problem with large language models trained on copyright data but didn't even consider the ethical implications, conflating how humans and machines learn, which is rather simplistic for such an intelligent person to say. He then retro-pedaled in a later episode, not on that specific point exactly, but when he realized he would prefer his businesses and investments to keep their proprietary licenses and hard-earned know-how.
I also find it useful to compare/calibrate how much about finance that's not VC specific (i.e. macro economics, interest rates, commodities, etc.) I know relative to ultra high net worth people.
It does require active listening to spot the subtle/not subtle bias, errors in logic etc.
It's often infuriating to listen to someone being confidently wrong, but occasionally there are some good insights.
I 100% agree. However I don't think it's valuable to get information from people who misrepresent data like All-In. In fact it can be counterproductive to listen to people who are misinforming you. If I can't trust my sources then it hurts more than it helps. This goes the other way too - you should fact check the people who are on your side. In my experience though, when I try sampling new content from people who are biased towards Trump, it's easy to find hypocrisies and misinformation.
That said - this was a great breakdown - thanks to the author!
Here’s episode 191 Aug 9, 2024 where Chamath is talking about a Google breakup possibility:
“The big O outcome though is more if you go back to the Ma Bell kind of thing where the company gets broken up. I think that the odds of that are extremely unlikely. I think the big O outcome is probably something that you can pretty safely take off the table.”
And here’s episode 199 Oct 11, 2024 where the host rewrites history:
“We have an update on the DOJ's antitrust suit with Google. It looks like they're going for the break up as Chamath predicted”
What??
Even if their faulty assumption was true, wouldn't that just be a Keynesian approach to solving a recession? I though Keynes approach was that the government should step in a spend more to prevent a recession, essentially equalling what is lost in the free market.
Fully admit could be totally wrong on this. Just curious.
The problem with Keynesian economics is that no one wants to turn off the money printer when the times are good.
That's what central bank independence is for. Raising interest rates is effectively the same thing.
Besides that it has been turned off for three years:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS
But the US population is getting increasingly older so there will be increasing pressure on welfare for them.
https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-the-us-federal-go...
*What he did to open source while CEO at Microsoft is atrocious - but he’s putting his money to some good content and I’m all for that
We can start with not alienating the millions of people who enjoy listening to Joe Rogan and like him as a person.
What do you even mean by grifter and how is Joe Rogan a grifter? We can go back and forth on here until you are shown to have a very shallow understanding of Joe Rogan and the history of his podcast and yet feel comfortable in calling him a grifter - a derogatory and inflammatory term that is completely unnecessary in a fact based conversation.
Assuming you are wrong in calling him a grifter - what gave you the utmost confidence to do so and is that not the exact problem you decry Joe Rogan and these other 'grifters' of being guilty of? Of just saying shit based on personal bias and 'vibes'?
Anyhoo :)
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/secs-coates-tells-investor...
Not sure if the author - Michael Bateman - will ever see this but if he does - just a thought - it could be an interesting and fertile genre/substack niche to do follow analysis of their claims/discussions in more detail regularly as a counterpoint to their podcast.
I found his analysis compelling and it could be popular among HNers.
Chamath mistaking 0.85 absolute as 0.85 relative is fairly easy to do.
Even the critique's interpretation is very shallow -- things like second order effects, like the fiscal multiplier contribution, aren't considered. But macro is an art more than a science, and what people interpret as 'true' depends immensely on their assumptions about how the world actually works.
I would disagree. If you're actually looking at the data, then anyone with a high school education should know that you don't take percentages of percentages like this. I still think it's ignorance more than malice, but I can't trust someone who would make a simple mistake like this to prove a point. I need my sources of information to at least be unbiased in how they view facts of data.
You can represent those facts differently. For example, he might think that 30% of growth being tied to government spending is high and I can follow his reasoning based on that. However if he claims that the actual figure is 85% then the starting point itself is incorrect.
The moon base example I think makes the argument very clearly. If you have an economy which produces nothing then it has a GDP of 0. If the increase imports for whatever reason, their GDP is still 0, which means that imports doesn't subtract from GDP, otherwise their GDP would be negative which is nonsensical.
But all this is sort of beside the point because arguments from accounting identities are almost always nonsense.
It's technically true that imports don't decrease GDP, but that's only true if there's no substitution effects. But for most goods substitution effect does exist, and therefore we should expect a GDP drop from imports.
1. domestically imported goods can have imported inputs.
2. reduced competition from the external good means the internal ones will be worse.
> It should be totally obvious and intuitive that if the same good is consumed domestically, producing it domestically rather than importing it will increase GDP, all other externalities and second-order impacts aside.
There's no situation where those can be put aside, and since GDP is an artificial formula you shouldn't Goodhart it like that.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/13/matt-yglesias-got-confused-a...
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors...
They hinted at knowing who will be the secretary of state and treasury secretary, like it was somebody in their circle. Seemed like Elon Musk will be Trump's righthand man, the way they were acting. They were hyper-fixated on DEI and "woke" in politics. They think the government should be run like a CEO, obviously influenced by Moldbug ideas. Sure, they might be very skilled at becoming rich, but these are not the people we want in government.
I think they would be shocked if they understood what kind of operation it would take to deport 15 million and what the side effects would be. For comparison, the entire (huge) prison population is 1.9 million.
I think some terrible things will happen to immigrants (and people suspected of being immigrants), but this scale doesn't seem possible and will be fought against by powerful interests (businesses employing them, etc).
Wonder how they will feel being constantly asked for papers lest they be thought of as undocumented and discriminated against.
> Asked for comment, the Trump campaign said in a statement that only after "the most aggressive vetting process in U.S. history" would "the most skilled graduates who can make significant contributions to America" be able to stay.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-foreign-college-...
Of course, no one was surprised by the reversal.
(sounds like you're repeating a talking point of the left of calling everyone on the right a fascist..)
I agree. It was a livestream last night and there were a couple slight slip ups that you could notice such as this, and Chamath being drunk causing his wife to take his wine glass away from him.
That seems like what Musk is angling for. I wonder what Trump will do. He could easily backstab people who helped get him elected if he feels they are too famous and taking some of his spotlight (Musk, RFK Jr). I suppose more likely, he just gives them everything they want and goes golfing.
They will believe and say whatever accrues power to them. That's their nature.
What would change if they take the podcast more seriously and hire fact checkers for every segment that they do? Would that make it all a-okay? Shrugs
To me, the fact that they don't feel the need to be accurate is telling. I don't want anyone helping someone that acts in bad faith to do it better.
The better bad faith actors get at persuasion, the worse it is for everyone else. Look at Obama.