Learning not to trust the All-In podcast

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.

"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)