Learning not to trust the All-In podcast

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 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...

> 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.

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?

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...

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?

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.

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.

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."

https://www.lwv.org/blog/whats-so-bad-about-voter-id-laws

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 it makes sense to treat them more like the former than like the latter.