Learning not to trust the All-In podcast
passingtime.substack.com
passingtime.substack.com
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.
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-...
But if you want to get into it, sure. The inflation numbers are not a fixed basket of goods. They take into account elasticity and shifts the basket to weight less expensive items more as inflation goes up.
For instance, suppose you have only two goods, bread and butter. Bread costs $5 and butter costs $10, and suppose the inflation numbers are based off 50% bread and 50% butter. Now suppose both these prices double. What happens to inflation? The naive response is inflation is 100%. But no, the BLS in its infinite wisdom realizes that if butter doubled, you'd likey consume less of it and opt for more bread! So maybe now the breakdown would be 75% bread and 25% butter, so your basket that cost you $7.5 now costs you $12.5 (0.75 * 10 + 0.25 * 20). Inflation is only 67% compared to 100%. Trillions of dollars of government spending tied to inflation (e.g. pensions, wage increases, etc) has been saved!
In some respects its true, consumption will obviously shift to the cheaper items. But on the other hand, I want a simple objective measure of what increased money supply is doing to the price of goods. I'll figure out myself how much bread and butter I should buy.
So hence, I don't exactly "trust the experts" especially when there is trillions at stake.
But they would never play games right? The BLS is above reproach. What percentage of Americans can name anyone at the BLS or the methodology? Doesn't matter. Obviously the relative importance of Cakes, cupcakes, and cookies is 0.113, shifting from 0.188 just last month. Pretty obvious objective move.
CPI's methodology is transparent and the data is available if you wish to reproduce it. They aren't playing games with the data. There are all kinds of reasons your personal inflation rate might differ from CPI but it's not because BLS is putting their thumb on the scale to try and show less inflation.
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.
Leads? How many Musk corps have you worked at? I have been at 2 of Elon's and one of Kimbal's, I can tell you from from first hand experience, neither of them 'lead' anything there and their titles are merely on paper.
They were merely figureheads, who came in for photo ops and to be seen on occasion (especially when things went wrong) and made their presence felt but that is the extent of it. Elon didn't sleep on the factory floor during Model 3 hell, he was shit posting photos of himself at Sparks in NV at the time: Panasonic was having major issues and was a major choke point for the battery packs all the while the assembly lines for M3 were being revised without his 'insight' at all.
I'm convinced it was him who did the whole crowdfund Elon a couch non-sense, despite him being a damn billionaire who can buy the entire work force a couch without noticing in his bank account, the whole thing smelled of a typical Elon clout chasing tactic.
(All he does is shit post all day on Twitter, how can he lead anything with his posting history?!)
Rather they both rely on an extensive team to handle day to day operations, and a deep pool of exploitable talent to achieve the goals: who eventually burn out in the process after countless iterations before things work correctly.
Go look at the average lifespan of workers at Tesla/SpaceX. It's incredibly short, in the best case of both it's only long enough to vest (the pay is horrible, but the stock options make up for it if you make it that long) but often layoffs or targeted firings (union threats) are often the cause for premature terminations as well.
It's really not hard to see that SpaceX is run by Shotwell, even as an outsider, and I wish she would stage a coup already as she has the loyalty of the rank and file there, unfortunately Elon's title as 'chief engineer' there remains and the way he has structured these companies post-paypal means he cannot be ousted.
That doesn't mean he shouldn't be, as he does more harm than good at this point.
Again, people want to simp for Elon having no first-hand experience and posting behind throwaways online is the extent of his marketing prowess (the only thing I think he really excels at) which makes him like a modern PT Barnum.
Certainly anyone who bought Solana after it crashed did very well:
(adjust the time range to “all”) https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/solana/
It's now at 180-ish.
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
[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)
I feel like I should get that tattooed on my hand, next to one saying, "It's not about you."
For example?
It was one of his worst books but not due to his evaluation of the science world. Just way too heavy-handed. He usually had a far lighter touch.
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.
This is a really great point I completely hadn’t considered.
Maybe sometimes there's an evolutionary advantage in prejudice?
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".
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.
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 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.
Notice how there’s no cries of election integrity problems for this election? Because the “right” party won.
There are pretty strong arguments that many states illegally (according to their own rules) expanded the scope of postal ballots in 2020, added people to the voter rolls without adequate checks that resulted in people getting added who shouldn't have, etc., which could very plausibly have added up to enough to tip the knife-edge election.
> Notice how there’s no cries of election integrity problems for this election? Because the “right” party won.
I don't think anyone seriously disputes that the civil service has a partisan imbalance. If (and it's a big if) the "deep state" were to cheat, it's pretty clear which side they would cheat for. Well before the results came out this time, it was widely reported that the Republicans had filed hundreds of lawsuits questioning various election irregularities and the Democrats... hadn't. So yeah, only one party doubts the integrity of the election (or, if you want to be more cynical, only one party cares whether it's being rigged, since both parties know which way any rigging is going). That's exactly what we'd expect, whether it's being rigged or not?
Also consider that maybe only Republicans filed suits because their presidential candidate lost.
But more direct to your point: No consequential voting irregularities were found, and this time around the Democrats arguably had an even stronger incentive to commit widespread voter fraud than before, while the current President is a Democrat, and yet somehow all the fraud from 2020 is now just gone. That stretches credibility, to say the least.
The top LGBT-friendly employer these days is Raytheon. Even pre-Trump the Dems were the party of big government, unions, urbanity, education...; now they're also the party of military interventionism, the media, and really most of the establishment.
> Also consider that maybe only Republicans filed suits because their presidential candidate lost.
I'm talking in the run-up to this election before the outcome was known.
> No consequential voting irregularities were found
Now you're subtly narrowing the goalposts a whole lot. Voting irregularities, no (other than that ballot box getting set on fire, but I guess you're saying that's not "consequential"), but plenty of potential crime in the overall process (lists of names being added to the rolls at the last minute, that sort of thing). The legal challenges will likely be dropped, if they haven't already, because the Republicans won the election anyway, so what relief could they possibly ask a court to grant?
> the Democrats arguably had an even stronger incentive to commit widespread voter fraud than before, while the current President is a Democrat, and yet somehow all the fraud from 2020 is now just gone
Some of the alleged misdeeds of 2020 were only possible because the pandemic created an excuse - rapid expansion of postal voting in violation of the law and/or under "creative" executive orders was something that could happen in plain sight then, but would be rather harder to brush under the carpet now. But, again, a lot of the same allegations were being made in the run-up to this election - we're only not hearing so much about them because the Republicans won.
The what? Slapping a pride flag on a jet engine isn't exactly a political bias, it's a marketing / reputation-washing gimmick.
> Even pre-Trump the Dems were the party of big government, unions, urbanity, education
"Even pre-Trump"? This goes back to the 1950s.
> now they're also the party of military interventionism, the media, and really most of the establishment.
You are implying that the Republican party is not also this. That implication is utter nonsense beyond what can be excused by ignorance.
> Now you're subtly narrowing the goalposts a whole lot. Voting irregularities, no (other than that ballot box getting set on fire, but I guess you're saying that's not "consequential"), but plenty of potential crime in the overall process (lists of names being added to the rolls at the last minute, that sort of thing). The legal challenges will likely be dropped, if they haven't already, because the Republicans won the election anyway, so what relief could they possibly ask a court to grant?
Voting or voter registration -- citation needed. Voter fraud is a criminal offense, the courts can do plenty.
> Some of the alleged misdeeds of 2020 were only possible because the pandemic created an excuse - rapid expansion of postal voting in violation of the law and/or under "creative" executive orders was something that could happen in plain sight then, but would be rather harder to brush under the carpet now. But, again, a lot of the same allegations were being made in the run-up to this election - we're only not hearing so much about them because the Republicans won.
You don't think the Democrats would love to make a stink about it if there was any hint of real irregularities? Or are you claiming that the irregularities only were irregular in the Democrats' favor, and that they lost in spite of committing widescale voter registration fraud?
Oat milk lattes and pride parades were your chosen example. Raytheon is there.
> You are implying that the Republican party is not also this.
In the Trump era they're not - the media/establishment has been firmly anti-Trump, and he's been loudly calling for scaling back overseas military activity.
> Voting or voter registration -- citation needed.
I mean the 70+ lawsuits are widely reported.
> Voter fraud is a criminal offense, the courts can do plenty.
Against an individual who voted fraudulently, if they can prove it was wilful and if they can even find the person, sure. Against an official who "forgot" to make a required check, or "accidentally" allowed someone to register past the deadline, or didn't manage to connect up a database that was supposed to be connected up? Very hard to prove anything, and hard to get past qualified immunity too.
> Or are you claiming that the irregularities only were irregular in the Democrats' favor, and that they lost in spite of committing widescale voter registration fraud?
No fraud of the sort that you'd find a smoking gun for - no-one directly lying, no orders to break the law in so many words. Just a bunch of procedural errors and mishaps, probably not even coordinated, that add up to nudge the vote a few tenths of a percentage point in one direction. Not enough to tip the balance when the margin is as big as it was this time around.
... that the federal "deep state" doesn't matter, since elections are handled at the lowest level by state authorities - which are tightly controlled in red states, as much as in blue states (if not more, arguably), by the locally-dominant party. This is just how business has always been done in good ol' Murica.
Writing sweeping statements like the one you make, indicates that one lives in a partisan bubble.
The whole point of the "deep state" concept is that it's not controlled by the formal political structures at all - yes the state bureaucracy is nominally accountable to the elected executive, but in practice it's made up of humans who are unlikely to be 100% loyal to their boss or their organisation's stated mandate (and with the chain of command being pretty long, there's plenty of room for small disalignments to compound). Even in red states (and red counties), the offices of the state bureaucracy are, systematically, often in blue islands. It's got nothing to do with state vs federal, because it's the same kind of people who work in government jobs[1] either way.
[1] OK, "government office jobs" or something, yes the typical military employee is quite different from the kind of people I'm talking about. But you know what I mean.
If true, that obviously cuts both ways.
But really I think you're just being paranoid and somehow biased against state employees - who are definitely not all "blue" by any stretch, particularly in red states. If you really think any low-level minion, or even middle-manager apparatchik, will risk their jobs by substantially fiddling numbers against the will of their boss, there is no argument that will ever cut through your ideological lenses.
It does, but ultimately it adds up to a drift towards what a typical government employee would want to do rather than what the elected representatives decided - and government employees are not a representative sample of voters.
> If you really think any low-level minion, or even middle-manager apparatchik, will risk their jobs by substantially fiddling numbers against the will of their boss
What's "substantial" though? There are a lot of things that are just a nudge at any given layer. Your boss tells you that there's some new bullshit requirement that says you have to check voter rolls against the juror database, but he doesn't sound particularly enthusiastic about it, and the department's already understaffed. So maybe you stick it on the pile, or you send an email to your subordinates late on Thursday afternoon, and maybe your boss never follows up on it and neither you do, and maybe the end result of that is that the checking never happens and your state's election laws are perhaps violated (and maybe some people who shouldn't have been able to vote got to do so), but even if the Reps win their lawsuit against your department the chance of anything getting pinned on you is essentially nil.
Maybe, but I do think it's a worsening of partisanship - time was when the civil service felt a responsibility to remain strictly neutral and implement the policies of our elected leaders, right or wrong. Now people put their personal morals first and are less willing to implement a law they disagree with, and while there are good sides to that, it's also reducing trust in government services.
> they're definitely not something that can substantially and continuously influence a presidential election in a single direction in a country of 400millions.
Could they overwhelm a popular landslide? No. Could they nudge the vote enough to tip the balance in a knife-edge election? Perhaps.
Ironic though because lefty social media just spent a solid year telling people that both candidates were trash and Gaza would suffer regardless of who got elected.
We have multiple sitting Congressmen and other government officials still refusing to admit Trump lost in 2020.
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...
The ID check is presumably still attached to the envelope rather than the ballot, right? (Otherwise you have massive deanonymity problems). If there is fake voter registration happening, presumably obtaining fake IDs by the same methods is just as easy.
I'm sure a certain amount of e.g. individuals submitting their dead relatives' ballots happens - but anyone doing that can probably grab their relative's ID too, and go to two polling stations. I doubt any large-scale partisan fraud via in-person submission at polling stations is going on, because it's impractical to make that happen while keeping it secret - the only way it could happen would be with widespread official collusion, and again in that case an ID check wouldn't move the needle.
How does checking an ID ensure eligibility better than what's already done? And similarly for ballot casting - how would IDs make a better uniqueness/registration check than what we have?
> a) id requirements disenfranchise voters and b) official collusion is the “only way” are structurally and by evidence unfounded
It's well documented that many legitimate voters do not have IDs. And it's widely accepted that large-scale in-person voter fraud is not happening and there's no real plausible way for it to happen; if you want to claim that it is or it can, the onus is on you.
> In your argument they provide only hand-wavy service for an otherwise unsupported conclusion.
Please grow up. The over-the-top rhetoric doesn't make you more convincing, quite the opposite.
Papers referring to voter ID disenfranchisement rest almost entirely on address-field-correctness deficiency (people move), which is a minimal problem other fields requiring human resolution.
To nurture your aside: People who achieve things identify the factual and structural nature of problems. Articulation is a scale factor. Good luck!
OK, and what is it that ID checking would change about this?
> Papers referring to voter ID disenfranchisement rest almost entirely on address-field-correctness deficiency (people move)
And? Supposing that's so, what difference does it make?
B) It’s administrative and readily-solved.
So what is the concrete difference an ID check makes to the process, and what concrete attack does it prevent? You already get your name checked and crossed off the list, in a world with an ID check you would... get your name checked and crossed off the list?
> It’s administrative and readily-solved.
Then why hasn't it been?
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...
https://electionfraud.heritage.org/
Is the above site BS?
I don't think anybody thinks there is zero voter fraud.
The position of OP was that there is not widespread voter fraud.
- felon (this appears to be far & away the most common)
- moved
- shouldn't have even been allowed to register
- voted twice
- illegally delivered absentee ballot for another person (while not claiming to be that person)
- etc.
The common theme, aside from the absolute rarity of these events (e.g. 36 total in GA over perhaps 40 million votes over ~25 years), is that none of them would be addressed by more stringent identity verification checks at either registration or at the polls.
Clicking through the site, I actually am unable to find a single instance where enhanced ID would have helped. Not saying they aren't in there, just that apparently they are very rare events, even in a dataset of extremely rare events.
Yes and no. Mostly yes [1].
The first thing to note is that it comes from the Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 [2] comes form the Heritage Foundation. Trump's 3 Supreme Court nominees were chosen from a Heritage Foundation list [3][4]. The Heritage Foundation is largely responsible folr the 50 year Republican project to turn the USA into (quite literally) a white theocracy.
Now that doesn't mean they're necessarily wrong. it's just like a reverse appeal to authority fallacy. But you should be immediately skeptical and scrutinize everything they say because there is obvious and historic bias.
Nobody, including myself, has calimed there is zero voter fraud. There are isolated cases and that's impossible to prevent. Interestingly, if you look into those individual cases, it's largely right-leaning people doing things like being registered in two states and voting twice or filling in their ailing parents' absentee ballots.
So the Heritage Foundation is just blowing isolated cases of voter fraud to imply it's a widespread problem in order to push an agenda aimed at voter suppression.
[1]: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/peop...
[2]: https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FUL...
[3]: https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/cre...
[4]: https://www.heritage.org/impact/supreme-court-nominee-brett-...
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?
This is a massive trope some people bring up all the time. Please show credible data that this is true and I'll happily admit I'm wrong.
About 10% of eligible voters don't have the ID they would need. The people most likely to lack proper ID for voting are young, Black or Hispanic, and poor.
Lots more details in the report!
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...
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."
Drivers licenses are issued by a single state-wide government agency in each state and there are national standards for their security.
Student IDs are issued by thousands of educational institutions, both public and private, and they don't have the same security standards.
It is much easier for election officials to distinguish genuine from fake drivers licenses than genuine from fake student IDs, so it actually makes a lot of sense to accept the former as voting ID but not the latter.
I know less about hunting licenses, but if they are issued by a statewide agency, they would be closer to drivers licenses than student IDs, so accepting them but not student IDs makes sense too.
To your point of how official they are to obtain: "Hunting licenses can generally be purchased at any retail outlet that deals in hunting and fishing equipment, such as sporting goods stores." [1]
University ID cards are generally hard to get, and significant if forged. Let's not gloss over the other side of this coin where this type of fraud that is prevented by voter id is vanishingly small. To be blunt, it really is just a modern poll tax, a way to disenfranchise specific demographics.
[1] https://www.fws.gov/initiative/hunting/purchase-hunting-lice...
It’s kinda like the DNSSEC of politics.
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.
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.
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.
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 seem to imply that this is some metaphysical discussion on the nature of "truth" itself or who gets to be the arbiter of that - but I feel this is a dishonest digression here. Yes, truth can never be truly established - but both you and I know that Chamath's take on All-In for this particular claim was clearly false.
I agree with the poster you replied to. I guess you have a point in that there is no law that can tell Chamath to shut up and only open his mouth when he is talking about something with high confidence - but when you are speaking to a large audience on matters of economic policy with some implications as to what people believe then YES - you have a responsibility! The punishment to which breaking it should be (for people with a huge outreach like Chamath) being shamed online for it. People should learn the fact that Chamath is a man who chronically opines constantly about things he has no basis for having an opinion on. He is a chronic borderline liar.
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.
Most of the people that I know that consumes a blend between MSm, independent media, and citizen journalism would not expect the victory of the former POTUS.
It tells a lot about the level of alienation and narrative entertainment that our public media became.
I maintain that you should not get a free pass to consume bullshit just because you personally find it entertaining, regardless of whether it comes from CNN or a podcast or a Tiktok account.
Libertarians might recognize this as the "harm principle" that they so often like to talk about, and then conveniently ignore when it doesn't turn out to align with the political right wing.
I am not saying anything about what we as a society should do about it. I have no idea what we should do about it. Attempting to censor all liars sounds like a catastrophe waiting to happen, for example.
This is the whole point of libertarianism. No one thinks lying is morally good.
Point is, everyone has biases, and everyone makes mistakes. We're only human. I think we should judge an information channel by the way they self-correct for those mistakes. That tells a lot about character and values, and whether or not to trust the source. So I believe we desperately need a meta layer on the Internet, much like X introduced with community notes, but on a larger scale. Open source, fully auditable, immutable (append-only and decentralized, so probably on a blockchain cause of the Byzantine Generals problem) - but I'll admit, that's just the tech geek in me trying to find a practical tech solution to a complex social problem.
Let's also be clear: the people crying "it's entertainment stop taking it so seriously!" are probably just unwilling to admit that they didn't realize they were being lied to. This is a common phenomenon.
No it hasn't, except for specific enumerated circumstances
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.
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.
It's often infuriating to listen to someone being confidently wrong, but occasionally there are some good insights.
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.
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.
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 used to listen more but I agree with this point.
The most fundamental insight that I took from the show was in the episode 80 when Chammath talked about the “hard conversations” between founders of late stage companies and employees about liquidity.
At that time I was working in a late stage SaaS company and after some research I just discovered that our stock options were not only underwater but the founders screwed most of the early employees.
Honestly I started to lost interest mostly cause of the focus about US politics and Ukraine.
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.
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.
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.
"Don't tell people not to lie or I'll become an extreme right winger" is a bad idea. It's a stupid thought. If you share that thought, you will be made fun of. But it's not because you shared it in a bad way. It's because it's a bad idea.
I think that it's more important to cultivate media literacy and critically examine "what is the author doing", not just "what is the author saying".
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 :)
That said - this was a great breakdown - thanks to the author!
And I believe he is one of the scummiest people in journalism. There are very, very few people I think are genuinely malicious and entirely self interested, but he is one.
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.
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.
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.cnbc.com/2023/01/13/matt-yglesias-got-confused-a...
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.
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.
This equation is tautologically true. It is not some “almost always wrong” blah blah. People here know almost nothing about economics and are vulnerable to the most specious of arguments.
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.
It's great for following the techniques of grifter speech and influencing, but it's not a source of good information.
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
(sounds like you're repeating a talking point of the left of calling everyone on the right a fascist..)