All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

Listening to four billionaires chat might seem like an odd premise for a show, but wow are they interesting. They have different perspectives on politics and will freely argue with each other. They have the most amazing guests and are outstanding interviewers (particularly David Friedberg). Chamath Palihapitiya has an outstanding ability to move the conversation from the weeds to the higher level real problem. Having David Sacks serving in the government gives his comments amazing context. Jason Calacanis is basically the left-center cat herder who holds the whole thing together. Really an amazing show and I look forward to every episode.

Sacks is good, Chamath is awful, the other two are meh… The guests are great, but I’d find the conversations more interesting if they didn’t constantly veer into tired old political platitudes (“The liberals hate entrepreneurs and want to make everyone woke!”), especially Chamath who sounds like he’s had some sort of middle school trauma at the hands of a left of center woman (likely his ex-wife) who encouraged him to examine his beliefs about wealth and power. Just because you’re rich, you’re not automatically an expert on everything under the Sun.

This reminds me of cable news shows when they have the one, over the top, person on the “other side” who plays stupid and makes nonsensical comments about everything. That’s “Jcal’s” role here with the exception of i think he actually believes the nonsense he spews. Cut that clown lose and you have a winner on your hands.

Decided to start listening to your podcast and it happened to be the Buttigieg episode. So far so good. Enjoyed it. I was a little disappointed that Buttigieg was allowed to position income inequality and tax policies as he was. To me there are three simple questions that might help everyone understand. Would you rather people have a bigger piece of pie or a more equal piece? Do you understand that the founders are rich because they have created companies that have created tremendous value for many (consumers, suppliers, workers, investors, etc) and the founders are rich because they share in only a portion of the value created? The rich get the largest absolute benefits from tax cuts because they pay bay far the largest amount of taxes. Top 1% of households pay 35% of all taxes and make 16% of all income. The bottom 20% make 7.4% of all income and pay negative 1.8 of all taxes.(2021 CBO Distribution of household income)