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.
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.
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.
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 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.
-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.
All-In is one of the few podcasts I listen to where I don’t exactly like the hosts and disagree with a high percentage of what they say. But I find them interesting, and their recent shilling for Trump gave me a bit more of a nuanced insight into what they see as Trump’s strengths.
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.
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.
“ In my first and only 15 minutes of watching, Chamath’s confidence in making this false claim, coupled with his co-hosts’ complete lack of critical pushback, suggests to me that these kinds of mistakes happen often enough to where these guys’ content isn’t worth consuming.”
This is what I call “anti-credibility.” Where credibility increases the likelihood of belief in subsequent claims, anti-credibility increases the belief that subsequent claims are false. This is subtly distinct from decreasing the likelihood of belief, which would merely result in more skepticism: You say “A is true”, so folks think “A might not be true.” Anti-credibility means if you state “A is true” people think, “oh, A is false.”
This phenomenon has played a large role in politics and social movements over the past several years.
If you make investment decisions based on podcast called all-in then yes you should not watch it. It is a entertainment/ news podcast, treat it as such.
Thank you so much for this analysis, even as a person with layman's grasp on economics you made the deception in host's apparent off the cuff assertion very obvious. I think a big part of the problem that we have in America (and the rest of the world) right now is that it takes these charismatic individuals (All-in, Joe Rogan, etc.) 10 seconds to confidently make these false claims based on personal bias and vibes. Then it takes 10 minutes (or more) by someone with a background in the underlying maths looking at the issue in-depth to rebut. The information landscape is heavily weighted towards these grifters, and I am not sure how we can fix that.
It's probably best not to trust _any_ podcast until you do a bit of investigation. That way you won't run into the "learning not to trust" problem and you can write a "why I trust the X podcast" article.
That said - this was a great breakdown - thanks to the author!
One of those guys needs to be fined for the pump & dump scheme (with SPCE: Virgin Galactic), and the other one should be investigated if he was receiving money from the Russian government or influence agents.
Misinterpreting data is easy. To be clear -- I think the All In podcast is frequently flagrantly wrong, but basically all podcasts that try to foretell events are.
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’m glad this author wrote this up. The guys in All-In really need to be called out for all their bs.
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”
"But I know that I won’t be tuning in for the next episode of All-In to find out. I will not fall prey to Gell-Mann Amnesia."
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.
Unfortunately I don’t think you can trust any particular podcast or news source to be completely perfect. The author did a great job of self investigation which is what we should all do before forming strong opinions about anything.
I was by a few right leaning friends that All-In presented neutral perspectives to political issues but after having tried a few different episodes, I felt that they were pretty biased for Trump. I heard several things which I knew were true but Sacks dismissed them or simply ignored them and continued with his circumlocution on the topic.
Leading off the article with Yglesias shows the guy has little idea what he’s proposing to discuss. Imports can reduce GDP because the import is imported and not domestically produced. The formula identifies specifically: that which is consumed domestically but not produced domestically is not part of domestic production. There is no inconsistency here at all with revised trade policy increasing GDP. 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.
The All-In podcast should not be listened to as a reliable source of news, but rather as a data point providing insight into the perspectives and attitudes of Silicon Valley's leadership class.
If one finds their views to be objectionable/incorrect, then that means that the hosts' peers are likely also holding objectionable/incorrect views of a similar form.
One person made a mistake once, so everything they ever say is useless. Got it. Now I can discredit and ignore anyone I want to, because everyone has made a mistake at some point.
All-in podcast is very pro Trump and Elon. I listened to their conference series.
Some made sense, some didn’t. But kudos to Trump. He painted himself as the progressive. Embracing crypto and AI. He got the tech bros vouching for him in big numbers.
Even my hairdresser said he listened to All-in podcast and brought some Trump coins. It’s gonna go up he said. He voted so his coins go up.
I have news for you. Don't trust anyone with data. Mistakes are made. Biases are confirmed. Reproducibility & criteria for falsifiability are not proven. Unknown unknowns exist. There are different ways of categorizing & counting things. Abstraction is a lie (the map is not the territory).
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors...
Well he doesn't know how to divide. If private sector does 2% and government does 1% then government is 50% not 33%. Similarly he displays the level of government spending, not the change. If government is 30% of GDP, then automatically its 30% of GDP growth no matter what. And again 30% is really 50% of the private sector. Now if the government grows from 30% to 35% like it shows on that chart, in addition to few quarters of 50%, thats how you get to government being 100% of the growth. Just use $, the % is clearly too hard for HN.
Economy was 100. Government 30, private sector 70. Economy grew to 105, government 35, private sector 70. So 100% of the growth was government.
I hope the author reads this comment, HN is being a weird echo chamber. Bayesian probability people, what is the chance that All In is actually wrong based on a random blog post.
I watched their election result livestream last night. They had some notable guests, like Donald Trump Jr. and Steve Bannon. Bannon was excited about the prospect of deporting 15 million people. Jason seemed shocked, as if this wasn't what he's been supporting all along. Does he not realize that he's in bed with fascists? Or he's just a fascist too?
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.
Note all the comments in this thread about how bad the show is and how they don't trust it... but gee golly it sure is good and you should check it out!
Learning not to trust the All-In podcast
(passingtime.substack.com)460 points by paulpauper 6 November 2024 | 279 comments
Comments
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.
-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.
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.
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.
This is what I call “anti-credibility.” Where credibility increases the likelihood of belief in subsequent claims, anti-credibility increases the belief that subsequent claims are false. This is subtly distinct from decreasing the likelihood of belief, which would merely result in more skepticism: You say “A is true”, so folks think “A might not be true.” Anti-credibility means if you state “A is true” people think, “oh, A is false.”
This phenomenon has played a large role in politics and social movements over the past several years.
That said - this was a great breakdown - thanks to the author!
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
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.
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??
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.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/secs-coates-tells-investor...
If one finds their views to be objectionable/incorrect, then that means that the hosts' peers are likely also holding objectionable/incorrect views of a similar form.
Some made sense, some didn’t. But kudos to Trump. He painted himself as the progressive. Embracing crypto and AI. He got the tech bros vouching for him in big numbers.
Even my hairdresser said he listened to All-in podcast and brought some Trump coins. It’s gonna go up he said. He voted so his coins go up.
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors...
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.
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.