The All-In Podcast

Although I’d heard talk of this podcast, I only recently listened in to one or two episodes, where, if I recall, they were shilling for the Israeli government. My initial impression was that there was something a bit creepy about this collective of billionaires (if that’s what they all are), although I think Jason Calacanis was absent for that episode, and he comes across as the most “normal” of them. (Having now got used to their style, I no longer find them as creepy.) The only one I was somewhat familiar with was David Sacks, who pops up occasionally on other podcasts to express his rather sympathetic views on Russia’s tendency to invade its neighbours; and I think I once heard Chamath Palihapitiya speak on someone else’s podcast. I had never heard of Calacanis or David Friedberg previously.

I decided to give it another chance with Episodes 162 & 163. There’s some insight combined with an almost farcical lack of understanding of the real world, if this passage from E163 is anything to go by:

24m: Chamath — The Rachel Maddows, Ben Shapiros and Tucker Carlsons of this world, they may take spicy takes on the truth, but they don’t outright lie… You’re better off trusting a really opinionated articulate person — why? — because the thing that they probably don’t want to lose is their fame. Whereas the anonymous person at Business Insider has gone in a totally different direction — they’ve decided to lie as a service.

27m: Sacks — Insightfully refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

29m: Chamath — Do you think it’s possible to develop a news service where they just write the truth, and make it easy via licencing for others to refer to this truth?

29m: Friedberg — Doesn’t the distributed model (a million voices on Twitter) achieve that?

30m: Chamath — Maybe Twitter should have a new service “Here’s the Truth”.

30m: Friedberg — In Twitter the number of followers is a proxy for the quality of the account.

Maybe this itself illustrates some sort of analogue of the Gell-Mann effect — they clearly know a lot about certain things, such as the niches where they made their money. And they may even know a lot about a lot of things. But that does not prevent them (perhaps Sacks is less susceptible to this) from expressing utterly ignorant views on a bread-and-butter topic, that the average person in the street might be expected to see through immediately.

2024–08–09 update:

At 1h4m, David Friedberg bizarrely claims that The Guardian is usually consider right-wing: