In this age of endless expertise, it's easy to be fooled into thinking someone is a true authority until you hear them speak on a topic you know well. There's a certain thrill in getting a glimpse behind the curtain, seeing the man (or woman) behind the rhetoric. While I tell myself that 40% of what they say is just made up or misinterpreted, I can't help but keep listening, captivated by the illusion of insight. Even when we know better, the siren song of perceived wisdom is hard to resist. At the end of the day, true expertise is rarer than we'd like to admit - but the fantasy is always enticing.
I think vibes are underrated. The smart people can easily mislead you because they're smart. So you can cover things up with "official statistics", maliciously or by accident.
For instance, inflation is a big one. I remember during the first spike in inflation (2021 I believe), I started nothing prices have gone up between 25-50%. We've been told at the time inflation was something like 7% but that would mean paying $5.35 for something that used to cost $5, which was obviously not what was happening. In short, they play games with the numbers.
Bezos was on Fridman talking about something similar. He learned that Amazon’s metrics said typical wait time less than 1 min to reach customer service. But everyone complained about how long it took. So in a meeting he called Amazon’s customer service line and was put on hold for over 10 minutes, far exceeding the promised wait time. He stated, “When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right."
All in goes off vibes and try to tie it to reality but sometimes miss the mark. But I think the vibes are often more right than the data.
> I think vibes are underrated. The smart people can easily mislead you because they're smart. So you can cover things up with "official statistics", maliciously or by accident.
> For instance, inflation is a big one. I remember during the first spike in inflation (2021 I believe), I started nothing prices have gone up between 25-50%. We've been told at the time inflation was something like 7% but that would mean paying $5.35 for something that used to cost $5, which was obviously not what was happening. In short, they play games with the numbers.
When there is a mismatch between your personal gut feeling and some official number or alleged fact in the world, there are different ways you can react:
A) You could think "Hmm, that's weird, is it possible that I'm missing something?"
B) You default to thinking that clearly you are right, so this is just another case of those so-called experts lying to you.
Had your response been A), you would have looked a bit more into it and realized that the overall inflation number is not based just on a subset of a few grocery items, but based on all different kinds of living expenses that people have. Many of those prices increased much less in 2021 than the overall 7% inflation rate (e.g., prescription drugs, cell phone plans, airline fares, motor vehicle insurance), so naturally, inflation in other categories was much higher to result in an overall rate of 7%.
If your gut feeling also tells you to doubt the inflation numbers for individual item categories released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics ([1]), you can get the raw data for those too, if I remember correctly.
One problem with your gut feeling is that it's very susceptible to various biases. For instance, the price of one grocery item increasing by 30% will be much more noticeable to you than the price of another item staying the same. It's also very easy to not realize that you are comparing the current price to the one from two years ago or so, thereby dramatically overestimating the yearly inflation rate.
I didn't mean to single you out, but the tendency by so many people to have overconfident knee jerk reactions to various information, instead of at least considering that they might have unknown unknowns or things they don't fully understand, is something that really concerns me.
I consider it the cost of information rather than amnesia.
When I read articles about something that I don't know much about, I usually don't have time to fact-check everything individually if it's not obviously wrong and seems to be plausibly presented, so I use it as a base theory until I receive evidence to the contrary - while knowing that it is likely still full of errors.
These guys are clearly at least somewhat intelligent and have brought up arguments in the past that I, in my infinite wisdom, haven’t considered. It’s up to me whether I take those arguments onboard after a sufficient amount of research. So I don’t think we should not listen at all. We should just not be all-in.
Totally. Combine with a nice sweater, a headset mic, a giant screen behind them, an audience and boom! Insta credibility. Looking like it is a TED talk is just as good as being a TED talk - and of course then all true! Deep expertise.. (maybe not these guys in particular. Just musing on some very good looking disinfi. Same thing as dressing people up in lab coats)
I remember them talking about self driving and the tesla's being so far ahead and then not being able to tell the difference between Cruise and Waymo. Waymo is so far ahead of everyone else as someone that uses them in SF it's not even funny. It definitely was my Gell-Mann amnesia moment with them.
The one that I always remember is how they shilled for Solana immediately before it crashed hard. (I have never had any position in any crypto)
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.
I think you’re exactly right, it’s a show for insiders to know what these 4 people think so the next time they directly or indirectly encounter them they are known quantities. Its masked as news & informative media but its principally brand marketing for these 4 people and their funds & companies.
> I think you’re exactly right, it’s a show for insiders to know what these 4 people think so the next time they directly or indirectly encounter them they are known quantities. Its masked as news & informative media but its principally brand marketing for these 4 people and their funds & companies.
I use it as a 'weight' of sorts when dealing with topics i know about, mainly Bitcoin and AI since I'm involved both those spaces--they really have a limited grasp about some basic concepts, and when you realize that Chamath (the biggest winner of the 4) has a very limited grasp about bitcoin, and admitadly cannot even grasp basic things like how to self-custody you start to realize why these guys are so scummy and him being called the SPAC-King is not a highly regarded moniker at all.
Admittedly, they did call the top on the '22 crypto winter, mainly becauwe I think they had already sold all f thier holdings and were looking for a sale--see Chamath's portfolio where BTC and Grok are his best performers
I don't want to to talk about Sacks or Kraft because his proximity to trump will now make him a defacto king-maker and make everything he touches seem like it was a well thoughout plan, as he was the one who ushered the SV/VC crowd to embrace Trump after Theil et al had laid the ground in true Paypal mafia style.
They are entertainment, the same way Cramer from MSNBC is, but what it does reveal is the narrative they want to push: what you glean from that is entirely up to you, inverse Cramer made a real killing for a bit on WSB. My real questions is what the depth will these Musk boot-lickers go, and who buys 1k+ tickets in order to go to these events? It's probably teh smae who will lie to your face that Twitter was a wild success despite having lost almost all of it's vaklue when this 'genius' CEO (who is now supposed to be in Government in the Trump cabinet) exposed himself to be the absolute incompetent fraud that he is.
They are standard VCs who constantly hype the latest fads. I remember when the Apple Vision Pro was going to change the world overnight, according to All-In. Currently jcal loves to talk about forcing all his employees to use chatgpt as their default search engine. I'd be willing to bet that won't be the case anymore in 6 months. Still, I listen to them regularly because now and then I learn something genuinely useful.
What is something useful you have learned? It has been ages since I listened, but I stopped because I felt like I wasn't gaining any insight from it. Maybe I'm missing out now?
I don’t think it’s fully returned to the level it was at when the episode aired (I forget the exact episode so I can’t say for sure), but you do have a point.
Certainly anyone who bought Solana after it crashed did very well:
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.
> 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.
There was the opendoor ipo, there was Jason Calacanis "sharpening the knives" ahead of the Twitter acquisition, there was what David Sacks did to Zenefits, and there's more. People are going to keep trusting these guys, simply because they have a hard-on for charismatic people with a lot of money, an extremely short memory, and refusal to believe that they will be the next ones to be scammed.
> People are going to keep trusting these guys, simply because they have a hard-on for charismatic people with a lot of money, an extremely short memory, and refusal to believe that they will be the next ones to be scammed.
What a perfect week for people to read this line and go "well that doesn't mean me, nah!"
This thread is literally CHALKED FULL of people being like "but I like the vibes despite the obvious signs of charlatanism".
Hacker News: a website where the founders fight the founders, the investors argue with investors, and engineers look on in complete and abject contempt, wondering who gave all these morons money and how they can get their cut.
I find these guys are pretty insightful when discussing tech and VC news. The politics talk is awful. Chamath is a lightweight who doesn't know anything about how our government works but speaks confidently -- I remember one time he was talking about how raising the debt ceiling will allow the President to spend more money. Sacks is a partisan hack who will spin everything as a positive for Trump and MAGA politics. That's after he was a hack for Desantis.
I find that I listen to them mainly for the tech and VC discussion as you said. The politics conversations are very drowning and I am gladly looking forward to not having to hear as much of this given the election is over.
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
"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."
> these guys are pretty insightful when discussing tech and VC news
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.
Likewise for VC/tech. I started listening for those topics and in those days that used to be almost entire show then they slowly started pivot to politics & social commentary which I dont care much for (from them). they are a bunch of centi/billionaire and should stick to that lane but I feel now they have become the podcast arm of RW. I have to say I find myself skipping lots of portions now, its almost not worth it but I still do it to catch up on the dog-whistle to other closeted republican tech/VC/leadership but then WSJ does that better than them.
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.
Former Zenefits employee, present for both Parker + Sacks eras. I'm with you, and I'd like to add additional color to David Sacks time as CEO.
David Sacks was uninspiring and aloof. As Zenefits CEO, he worked remote from his office at Craft Ventures. When he rarely appeared on-site, he was escorted around by handlers. On top of everything Zenefits was going through, it didn't help morale having an absentee leader. In retrospect, the guy lacks charm and charisma, so in a way it was a blessing not having him around.
Before the major 2017 layoffs, Sacks held an all-hands announcing a new CEO had been found. His impending departure was explained by repeating that he never intended to be CEO, and only took on the role because he felt obligated. What is more, he admitted he was upset over his long working hours, saying he had been sacrificing time to be at home with his family for quite some time. He even shared that his newborn didn't recognize him or his face, to illustrate how long he had been away. Home for him was roughly 3 miles away. Remarkably pathetic.
Couple points in retrospect:
1. Back in 2016, Sacks created "The Offer", an agreement where Zenefits paid a severance to employees to quit voluntarily. About 10% did. It was clear later that Sacks wasn't all-in as CEO or previously COO. Perhaps he should have taken "The Offer" himself?
2. Remote work vs RTO. Given productivity data on remote work, combined with his personal story about his newborn, you'd think Sacks would be an advocate of remote work. Yet he's hardline RTO. He also gets memmed on by other pod hosts who tease him with questions, like if he can remember his kids' names.
One of the effects of a successful grift is that contrary facts don’t matter — in fact contrary facts just reinforce the grift by strengthening the us against them dynamic.
When the pandemic started, I really enjoyed the podcast. They seemed to have some good insights, and I found them funny. It was a vibe that I sorely missed being home alone.
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.
I actually was of the impression that David Friedberg got a decent amount of speaking time in the last few episodes, especially in that recent one that he moderated, which I enjoyed since he's the most level headed, least partisan and most evidence based as you said of the bunch.
If we could get a Dave Friedberg spinoff that would be a big win. The exposed ignorance during the whole nuclear plant debate was so incredibly frustrating. I can think of 4 plants within 100 miles of where I live on Chicago and Sacks wouldn't DARE live within 200 miles of a newer safer smaller model. And chamath doesn't understand the difference between fusion and fission.
I agree completely. It was a fun listen a few years ago. One day I realized it was rarely ever fun or insightful anymore.
It's totally subjective but David Sacks lost me completely around the time Ukraine was invaded. That's roughly when I gave up on the podcast. He had major I'm Very Smart syndrome and it seemed almost hair-raisingly embarrassing that anyone took him seriously. To each their own, though. I know a lot of people respect his opinions.
Drivers license or a hunting license are acceptable but student ID is not acceptable to vote does not make sense.
Further, it is a superficially reasonable solution to a non-problem.
Fwiw: "time and time again, voter photo ID laws are proven to be ineffective tools to fight voter fraud — in the rare instances it does take place. While voter photo ID laws aim to prevent in-person voter impersonation, an almost non-existent form of voter fraud, other types of voter impersonation are similarly rare and not cause for significant concern. According to the Brennan Center, the rate of in-person voter impersonation is extremely low: only 0.00004% of all ballots cast. It’s worth noting that this rate is even significantly lower than other rare forms of voter fraud, such as absentee ballot fraud, which voter photo ID laws do not address."
"Voter fraud is so extremely rare. Out of 250,000,000 votes cast by mail between 2000 and 2020, there were 193 criminal convictions. By those numbers, a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than they are to commit voter fraud. Further, there are already measures in place to detect irregularities and investigate potential cases of voter fraud, making the need for further legislation even smaller."
problem is now that the election is over no one will take about voter id anymore. for a large population base the time to do it in good faith is now when you have most chance of uptake. but the way id laws get brought up is basically near the finish line so the only conclusion that can be drawn is they are there to discourage voting by 'undesirable' groups.
The voter id laws conversation is an excellent example of one where they seemed to be largely off the mark. Jason tried to bring up some of the concerns at first, was immediately shot down by the co-hosts, and they never revisted the legitimate debates against voter ID laws.
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.
>>>>they went off for quite a while about selling off UHF and VHF frequencies which was also a pretty clueless claim....how does that change anything? You are just trading one problem for another.
Our entire free market economy operates on this premise. Govt auctions certain exploitation rights, the rights go to the highest bidder which is presumably the one that can exploit the resource for the most value. VHF UHF frequencies were not auctioned, they were instead handed out to well-connected aristocracy, such as when Senator Edwin Johnson (D-Colorado) lobbied and got a band for Denver within 10 days [1]
Are you saying patronage is superior to the free market ? Or is there a better system I'm not aware of ? I'd love to hear it.
I think that voter ID laws are probably fine. I'm in a state that has them, and I suspect that I would feel weird if the requirement were repealed.
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?
What you have to realize is that many of these podcasts and forums and so on are marketing tools. Any honesty or insight is either accidental or incidental. I mean even HN is the marketing arm for YC.
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.
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.
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.
> We need to rebuild confidence in the integrity of elections, Voter ID, which most democratic countries require, seems like an incredibly modest step.
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.
'its old so we can assume everyone shares the same information and perspective' is a bad way to do decision making and argumentation full stop. Topic and perspective independent.
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.
> Voter ID, which most democratic countries require, seems like an incredibly modest step.
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.
I think part of All-In's success is that it has the vibe of a group of friends sitting around and shooting the breeze. It's way less academic than something like the Ezra Klein Show, but that's the point. Is there bloviating involved? All the time, especially from Chamath. Are there bad takes? Certainly. But it's entertaining.
Being confidently wrong about matters of public policy in front of a large audience is more than just an incidental bad take. It pollutes the public well of information and thereby does a disservice to society. You do not have a right to entertain yourself with something that damages the ability of society to make decisions and govern itself.
People in this “large audience” are listening voluntarily to a bunch of guys talking about similar interest points. Some of those points they will have credibility others no; and that’s the beauty of to live in an almost free information society.
The problem with the “something that damages the ability of society to make decisions” it’s with who establishes that and what’s the self correct mechanism those institutions that establishes that has.
You actually do have a right to that, and to suggest otherwise is a much worse stance on public policy than someone incorrectly describing a quarter's GDP growth.
They didn't start off with a large audience and they weren't granted one by having something like a channel reserved on the airwaves. They gathered a large audience organically because people just wanted to watch. They have no obligation to be PBS.
> I think part of All-In's success is that it has the vibe of a group of friends sitting around and shooting the breeze.
imho that's the dangerous part, same with Rogan, it's mostly for entertainment but they slowly lost that part and somehow gained authority. Now you have stuff like Musk saying absurd shit such as: animal farming has 0 impact on the greenhouse effect "because you can't measure it" even though you very well can measure it. It's like getting stoned with your bros on a friday night and discussing the world and politics but they have XX millions of view
-David Sacks bankrolled a company called Done Global. The "CEO" Ruthia He is a Chinese national with absolutely no medical experience. Very quickly, this turned into prescriptions for dead people, medspas doling out Adderall, the Chinese sharing health data about Americans as the whole back office was in China. Plenty of these narcotics ended up on the street, which was always the goal.
The CEO and several others are awaiting trial. They caught David Sacks-backed Ruthia He trying to flee to China about a month ago, and now she's back in jail.
-David Sacks had a whole money laundering operation set up around Eaze. His guy Keith McCarty left Eaze to found a payments system company (to support Eaze) and they have Keith McCarty with crack cocaine, prostitutes, and firearms rooming with a guy named Hamid Arkhavan involved in the Wirecard fraud, running up transactions to facilitate money laundering through porn sites. Eaze was a big advertiser on these sites to clear money laundering transactions.
-Earlier this year, conservative influencer Dave Rubin was caught up in a money laundering racket after he and his people were receiving payments from Russian assets, and the Russian fled the US overnight. Dave Rubin is another David Sacks-backed founder. Rubin was co-founder of the company Locals, which is extremely crappy Web 1.0 software used to facilitate payments to influencers. David Sacks sold this Locals plus his other company Callin, to Rumble $RUM and took a Board seat at Rumble.
There. Right there you have 3 David Sacks-backed founders all directly tied to money laundering and/or drug trafficking. Ruthia He. Keith McCarty. Dave Rubin.
Those are just the main ones with some amount of legal/media coverage on them, but there are more.
You still think Sacks is "just" a VC? The VC stuff is a front.
This isn't tech. This is the Mafia. Sacks just throws the word "software" over it to obfuscate it, but too many people have figured this out now.
He got too cocky after he and Lonsdale "lost" a bunch of foreign money with Hyperloop.
His prancing around is like watching an animal in a cage. He's got to negotiate his way out of this regardless.
Incidentally: Chamath plays a fair amount of high stakes poker recreationally, including on various streams and/or filmed poker content. I forget if it was on twitter or a Reddit AMA or what, but he once gave a blurb about what he had learned playing the game for some time, and he said something to the effect of "Poker is a fundamentally defensive game", which is an absurd statement. There is no strategic bias towards offense or defense in poker, there is only EV maximization, which you would think a VC would be able to wrap their head around, but he has managed to fundamentally misunderstand the game.
With investing you can make 1000x your money if you bet right. Your returns are determined by your best bets. You can be spewy and it doesn't matter much. Or you can wait for aces and then bet big. It's up to you.
With poker it's not like that. Blinds force you to play mediocre hands and make bets when you're weak. Minimizing your losses with correct play is essential, otherwise you'll bleed out. You can only make money in poker when your opponent makes mistakes (good opponents don't make many) but you can lose money in every hand you play. That's why it's a defensive game.
Minimizing your losses is essential; so is maximizing your gains. TBF, in a tournament there is something to be said for biasing towards loss minimization because of the need to preserve your tournament life resulting in chip value being non-linear. But, in cash games (which ironically is what Chamath mostly plays), there is no such bias. Most amateur players arrive incorrectly at that bias over time because frequently miss thin value themselves, and also miss on value when they have the nuts because they don't bluff enough, while also often giving up value incorrectly to better players who are exploiting them, so their experiential bias tells them to err on the side of playing it safe and waiting for a set up in their favor to realize most of their EV, not realizing they are bleeding it away on the margins in countless other spots.
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For instance, inflation is a big one. I remember during the first spike in inflation (2021 I believe), I started nothing prices have gone up between 25-50%. We've been told at the time inflation was something like 7% but that would mean paying $5.35 for something that used to cost $5, which was obviously not what was happening. In short, they play games with the numbers.
Bezos was on Fridman talking about something similar. He learned that Amazon’s metrics said typical wait time less than 1 min to reach customer service. But everyone complained about how long it took. So in a meeting he called Amazon’s customer service line and was put on hold for over 10 minutes, far exceeding the promised wait time. He stated, “When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right."
All in goes off vibes and try to tie it to reality but sometimes miss the mark. But I think the vibes are often more right than the data.
> For instance, inflation is a big one. I remember during the first spike in inflation (2021 I believe), I started nothing prices have gone up between 25-50%. We've been told at the time inflation was something like 7% but that would mean paying $5.35 for something that used to cost $5, which was obviously not what was happening. In short, they play games with the numbers.
When there is a mismatch between your personal gut feeling and some official number or alleged fact in the world, there are different ways you can react:
A) You could think "Hmm, that's weird, is it possible that I'm missing something?"
B) You default to thinking that clearly you are right, so this is just another case of those so-called experts lying to you.
Had your response been A), you would have looked a bit more into it and realized that the overall inflation number is not based just on a subset of a few grocery items, but based on all different kinds of living expenses that people have. Many of those prices increased much less in 2021 than the overall 7% inflation rate (e.g., prescription drugs, cell phone plans, airline fares, motor vehicle insurance), so naturally, inflation in other categories was much higher to result in an overall rate of 7%.
If your gut feeling also tells you to doubt the inflation numbers for individual item categories released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics ([1]), you can get the raw data for those too, if I remember correctly.
One problem with your gut feeling is that it's very susceptible to various biases. For instance, the price of one grocery item increasing by 30% will be much more noticeable to you than the price of another item staying the same. It's also very easy to not realize that you are comparing the current price to the one from two years ago or so, thereby dramatically overestimating the yearly inflation rate.
I didn't mean to single you out, but the tendency by so many people to have overconfident knee jerk reactions to various information, instead of at least considering that they might have unknown unknowns or things they don't fully understand, is something that really concerns me.
[1]: https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2022/consumer-price-index-2021-...
I've also seen how politicians lie and tell half truths about stuff, where I know the full story like them.
When I read articles about something that I don't know much about, I usually don't have time to fact-check everything individually if it's not obviously wrong and seems to be plausibly presented, so I use it as a base theory until I receive evidence to the contrary - while knowing that it is likely still full of errors.
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.
I use it as a 'weight' of sorts when dealing with topics i know about, mainly Bitcoin and AI since I'm involved both those spaces--they really have a limited grasp about some basic concepts, and when you realize that Chamath (the biggest winner of the 4) has a very limited grasp about bitcoin, and admitadly cannot even grasp basic things like how to self-custody you start to realize why these guys are so scummy and him being called the SPAC-King is not a highly regarded moniker at all.
Admittedly, they did call the top on the '22 crypto winter, mainly becauwe I think they had already sold all f thier holdings and were looking for a sale--see Chamath's portfolio where BTC and Grok are his best performers
I don't want to to talk about Sacks or Kraft because his proximity to trump will now make him a defacto king-maker and make everything he touches seem like it was a well thoughout plan, as he was the one who ushered the SV/VC crowd to embrace Trump after Theil et al had laid the ground in true Paypal mafia style.
They are entertainment, the same way Cramer from MSNBC is, but what it does reveal is the narrative they want to push: what you glean from that is entirely up to you, inverse Cramer made a real killing for a bit on WSB. My real questions is what the depth will these Musk boot-lickers go, and who buys 1k+ tickets in order to go to these events? It's probably teh smae who will lie to your face that Twitter was a wild success despite having lost almost all of it's vaklue when this 'genius' CEO (who is now supposed to be in Government in the Trump cabinet) exposed himself to be the absolute incompetent fraud that he is.
Certainly anyone who bought Solana after it crashed did very well:
(adjust the time range to “all”) https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/solana/
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.
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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
Yes, Linux has bugs.
What a perfect week for people to read this line and go "well that doesn't mean me, nah!"
This thread is literally CHALKED FULL of people being like "but I like the vibes despite the obvious signs of charlatanism".
[0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chamath-palihapitiya-crumblin...
"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)
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.
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.
David Sacks was uninspiring and aloof. As Zenefits CEO, he worked remote from his office at Craft Ventures. When he rarely appeared on-site, he was escorted around by handlers. On top of everything Zenefits was going through, it didn't help morale having an absentee leader. In retrospect, the guy lacks charm and charisma, so in a way it was a blessing not having him around.
Before the major 2017 layoffs, Sacks held an all-hands announcing a new CEO had been found. His impending departure was explained by repeating that he never intended to be CEO, and only took on the role because he felt obligated. What is more, he admitted he was upset over his long working hours, saying he had been sacrificing time to be at home with his family for quite some time. He even shared that his newborn didn't recognize him or his face, to illustrate how long he had been away. Home for him was roughly 3 miles away. Remarkably pathetic.
Couple points in retrospect:
1. Back in 2016, Sacks created "The Offer", an agreement where Zenefits paid a severance to employees to quit voluntarily. About 10% did. It was clear later that Sacks wasn't all-in as CEO or previously COO. Perhaps he should have taken "The Offer" himself?
2. Remote work vs RTO. Given productivity data on remote work, combined with his personal story about his newborn, you'd think Sacks would be an advocate of remote work. Yet he's hardline RTO. He also gets memmed on by other pod hosts who tease him with questions, like if he can remember his kids' names.
Maybe sometimes there's an evolutionary advantage in prejudice?
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.
It's totally subjective but David Sacks lost me completely around the time Ukraine was invaded. That's roughly when I gave up on the podcast. He had major I'm Very Smart syndrome and it seemed almost hair-raisingly embarrassing that anyone took him seriously. To each their own, though. I know a lot of people respect his opinions.
Further, it is a superficially reasonable solution to a non-problem.
Fwiw: "time and time again, voter photo ID laws are proven to be ineffective tools to fight voter fraud — in the rare instances it does take place. While voter photo ID laws aim to prevent in-person voter impersonation, an almost non-existent form of voter fraud, other types of voter impersonation are similarly rare and not cause for significant concern. According to the Brennan Center, the rate of in-person voter impersonation is extremely low: only 0.00004% of all ballots cast. It’s worth noting that this rate is even significantly lower than other rare forms of voter fraud, such as absentee ballot fraud, which voter photo ID laws do not address."
"Voter fraud is so extremely rare. Out of 250,000,000 votes cast by mail between 2000 and 2020, there were 193 criminal convictions. By those numbers, a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than they are to commit voter fraud. Further, there are already measures in place to detect irregularities and investigate potential cases of voter fraud, making the need for further legislation even smaller."
https://www.lwv.org/blog/whats-so-bad-about-voter-id-laws
It’s kinda like the DNSSEC of politics.
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So, not listening is actually being a cool kid.
I really can't wait for when kids will find Rogan "passé", and talk about the next history book they're reading for fun with friends.
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.
Our entire free market economy operates on this premise. Govt auctions certain exploitation rights, the rights go to the highest bidder which is presumably the one that can exploit the resource for the most value. VHF UHF frequencies were not auctioned, they were instead handed out to well-connected aristocracy, such as when Senator Edwin Johnson (D-Colorado) lobbied and got a band for Denver within 10 days [1]
Are you saying patronage is superior to the free market ? Or is there a better system I'm not aware of ? I'd love to hear it.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20090804163725/http://dumonthist...
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?
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.
As an aside, I do agree it's crazy to be nickel-and-dimed for things by gov't agencies that my tax dollars have already funded.
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.
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.
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...
The problem with the “something that damages the ability of society to make decisions” it’s with who establishes that and what’s the self correct mechanism those institutions that establishes that has.
Why would they have the right to broadcast misinformation, and popular podcasters not?
The answer to this isn't censorship. It's in education and teaching people to think critically.
imho that's the dangerous part, same with Rogan, it's mostly for entertainment but they slowly lost that part and somehow gained authority. Now you have stuff like Musk saying absurd shit such as: animal farming has 0 impact on the greenhouse effect "because you can't measure it" even though you very well can measure it. It's like getting stoned with your bros on a friday night and discussing the world and politics but they have XX millions of view
-David Sacks bankrolled a company called Done Global. The "CEO" Ruthia He is a Chinese national with absolutely no medical experience. Very quickly, this turned into prescriptions for dead people, medspas doling out Adderall, the Chinese sharing health data about Americans as the whole back office was in China. Plenty of these narcotics ended up on the street, which was always the goal.
The CEO and several others are awaiting trial. They caught David Sacks-backed Ruthia He trying to flee to China about a month ago, and now she's back in jail.
-David Sacks had a whole money laundering operation set up around Eaze. His guy Keith McCarty left Eaze to found a payments system company (to support Eaze) and they have Keith McCarty with crack cocaine, prostitutes, and firearms rooming with a guy named Hamid Arkhavan involved in the Wirecard fraud, running up transactions to facilitate money laundering through porn sites. Eaze was a big advertiser on these sites to clear money laundering transactions.
-Earlier this year, conservative influencer Dave Rubin was caught up in a money laundering racket after he and his people were receiving payments from Russian assets, and the Russian fled the US overnight. Dave Rubin is another David Sacks-backed founder. Rubin was co-founder of the company Locals, which is extremely crappy Web 1.0 software used to facilitate payments to influencers. David Sacks sold this Locals plus his other company Callin, to Rumble $RUM and took a Board seat at Rumble.
There. Right there you have 3 David Sacks-backed founders all directly tied to money laundering and/or drug trafficking. Ruthia He. Keith McCarty. Dave Rubin.
Those are just the main ones with some amount of legal/media coverage on them, but there are more.
You still think Sacks is "just" a VC? The VC stuff is a front.
This isn't tech. This is the Mafia. Sacks just throws the word "software" over it to obfuscate it, but too many people have figured this out now.
He got too cocky after he and Lonsdale "lost" a bunch of foreign money with Hyperloop.
His prancing around is like watching an animal in a cage. He's got to negotiate his way out of this regardless.
With poker it's not like that. Blinds force you to play mediocre hands and make bets when you're weak. Minimizing your losses with correct play is essential, otherwise you'll bleed out. You can only make money in poker when your opponent makes mistakes (good opponents don't make many) but you can lose money in every hand you play. That's why it's a defensive game.