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Learning not to trust the All-In podcast

https://passingtime.substack.com/p/learning-not-to-trust-the-all-in
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.
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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.

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Voter ID laws do, in fact, just make sense.
Voter ID laws don't make sense if you benefit from voter fraud. I have a hard time steel manning the anti-Voter ID stance. Especially considering that an ID is needed for most aspects of modern living. Don't believe me? Just ask someone who does not have an ID living in the Las Vegas tunnels. Life is extremely difficult without an ID. These people are stuck in a Catch-22 where they could get housing with an ID but need an address to get an ID.

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Edit: I tried to be civil, but people here are clearly ideological & want to commit voter fraud to empower themselves at the expense of everyone else. It's obvious. Go ahead & downvote. You cannot escape the fact that we know the truth behind your empty rhetoric. You might as well give it up because it only makes you look bad.

Let's be honest here. For all of the highfalutin rhetoric of curiousity on this site, there are many ideologues who wish to narrow the discourse. To ignore reality. Y'all are doing great! Keep it up! Go ahead & bash the "All In Podcast", Trump, Republicans, the American People, or whoever inconveniences your plans at this moment. Please keep on doing what you are doing. You do you! America voted resoundingly against you. They don't like your agendas. Neither does most of the world's population. Now go buzz off into the dustbin of history.

"I tried to be civil, but people didn't like what I had to say. Rather than asking why they disagree, I'm going to assume they're evil criminals."
Why ask downvoters why they downvoted me? It is a cowardly way of suppressing discussion. If someone had a legitimate reason to why voter ID should not be used, they would have expressed it. Before I added the Edit.

I cannot think of any legitimate reason other than maintaining power over a phony democracy using voter fraud. To gaslight people into a totalitarian system. The disadvantage of this technique is an overwhelming popular mandate, like we saw in this election is impervious to plausible deniability. The vampires would need to come out into the sunlight...

Do you have any legitimate reason for the anti-voter id position?

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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.
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.
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"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."

– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

It's fascinating that Michael Crichton would have a quote like that when he's been guilty of falling into the same trap himself. It really shows how difficult it is for the human mind to have perspective on itself.
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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.
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Please don't beat me up too much on this.

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.

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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.
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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.

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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.

Anybody who is going to be shocked at what happens as far as aggressive policies aimed at women, minorities, immigrants, the elderly, and the lower income brackets really has no excuse. They haven't been shy in stating their intentions. You can say you made a choice to support it, but don't hide and say you didn't know.
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They won't be shocked, it's literally what they wanted and why people voted the way they did. You can't just blame corruption or something anymore. It's what people want.
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