Brad Gerstner: Market slide continues, and how to address Uvalde

The episode opens with a look back at the All-In Summit. One host explains that David Friedberg could not join because of personal matters, so Brad Gershner is back as a guest. The hosts count this as his fourth appearance, about 5% of episodes, and the guest jokes that he is an unworthy replacement. A host answers that nobody can replace Friedberg.

Going around the table, the hosts ask for favorite moments on and off stage and general impressions of the 2022 summit. Short scraps of crosstalk surround this question, and they carry no argument.

One speaker praises the people they met and the organizers' work, but says their enjoyment was limited by worry about catching COVID and passing it to their 81-year-old mother, who was attending. They report that their family turned out fine, though the person closest to them got a bad flu-like illness, and that several people they know tested positive after the event.

Others trade their own cases. One says that after a Christmas party where every guest was tested at the door, they were still blamed for a super-spreader. Another says their parents and an aunt in Miami caught COVID at the conference. They describe it as an Omicron illness that was bad for about two days, and one host's brother and other relatives also fell ill, with some taking an antiviral. The speaker adds that many attendees were out in public for the first time in a long while, which made the event emotional.

The banter then turns to whether the organizer should have tested attendees. One speaker says testing 850 people would be impractical and would deter people, and another says it would not have cost much because attendees could share their own results. A host adds that nobody on the flights to Miami wore masks. One speaker accuses another of hypocrisy, comparing the situation to politicians who blame others when COVID spreads but not when it spreads at their own event. The hosts joke that AIS now stands for 'all-in super spreader' and blame Florida. One speaker adds that their own event was tested and may not have been a super-spreader at all. This is joking, and none of these claims is supported with evidence.

Asked again for a favorite moment, a speaker praises one session and calls the Palmer Lucky session incredible. The hosts say the recording will be released and that it is eye-opening. One host who was not present for that portion asks what happened and gets a short summary.

In the summary, a host says Lucky gave a motivating account of American defense and of his company, noting he is a 29-year-old who has started two multibillion-dollar unicorns. After the applause, the host says, Lucky said he had something else to get off his chest. By this account he named a person who had been hard on him, tried to ruin his life and attacked his family, and he criticized cancel culture and a strain of influential people in Silicon Valley. This is one host's retelling, and the transcript does not show the stage remarks themselves.

The host adds that the person he named walked on stage, shook Lucky's hand, and that they talked and later hugged, though parts were heated and traumatic. Another speaker says the surprising part was that someone as important as Lucky felt the need to get back at a person they called unimportant. Two speakers say they first feared he meant them, and one recalls him saying his career was stopped in its tracks and that he had to claw his way back. The hosts say the episode will come out the following week.

A host thanks Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibi and Antonio Garcia Martinez for appearing. There were two panels, one on domestic politics with Glenn and Taibi, and a debate on Ukraine between Glenn and Antonio that has since been published. The moderator says it ended up a little like two against one, which was not the intention, and that he has his own views but tried to stay restrained and even-handed.

Speakers say the debate should have run longer than its roughly 30 minutes. They call it a good example of listening to a completely opposed view while staying respectful, and one suggests that two hosts moderating people on different sides could be a format for future events.

The guest says the podcast has taken criticism, perhaps rightly at times, for being a group of men in a 'bro culture', and that the effort to build authentic community and diversity in the room stood out to him compared with other conferences. He describes attendees from many backgrounds and places, including Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia, at startups of many sizes. A host puts the share of women at roughly 40%, a figure given from memory.

He also recalls that after coming off stage, a group of founders told him they were the company he and another speaker had called screwed. They said they had raised $100,000,000 the previous November from Tiger at a hundred times ARR and asked what to do. He says they are not screwed and the company is interesting, and that this kind of real exchange in the crowd, at parties and in between sessions is what made the event more than talking heads.

A speaker says the Ask Me Anything sessions were among the best parts and should be held on both days of a two-day conference. The organizer explains the audience curation as a playbook others could copy: attendees chose what to pay according to their station in life, with a scholarship tier, and the team sorted applicants by how much they loved the show and what attending would mean to them. By the organizer's telling, about 300 people were in the audience.

The organizer says he told the team to prioritize scholarship tickets for builders and artists, and not for real estate brokers, money managers, sales executives or business development people, who tend to come to sell. He thinks the absence of press also helped the mood, since nobody was criticizing every panel. Hosts thank the team, and the organizer jokes about the event, while another host jokes that no accounting of where the money went has been seen. These are jokes and not findings.

Asked what he would change, the organizer says his team writes a lessons-learned document after each event. About 26 people from his team helped staff this one, 21 from Launch and about 5 from Inside. He would want more time to work on speakers and the agenda, for example drawing five or ten speakers or topics from each host and working backward, and more time to experiment with the format.

Continuing the lessons-learned answer, the organizer says the summit mixed solo, TED-style talks with guests joining the hosts for discussions. Having all the hosts on stage all the time is hard on everyone, he says, and he understands that David prefers to focus on a couple of things, while others like to be on stage for everything.

He singles out the moments when guests overlapped, naming Nate Silver with Keith, the session with Bill Gurley, and Tim Urban, and calls them magical. He would like to weave individual talks and data points together with the hosts and hand off to the next speaker, and he wishes he had had more time to refine that format. The names are as they appear in the transcript, which is rough in places.

A speaker asks whether the Palmer Lucky session was planned or a plant. The organizer says he had invited Lucky many times before the show took off and was rebuffed bluntly, with Lucky saying he disliked him. Once the show launched, the organizer says, Lucky became a fan, particularly of one host, and the investor circles overlapped.

The organizer says he invited Lucky sincerely, telling him that most people in Silicon Valley do not believe in building weapon systems but that he is with him on this, and that the mission mattered more than their old disagreement from the Hillary Clinton versus Trump period. He adds that Lucky agreed, in what he describes as a plot to dunk on him, and that he does not mind being criticized because the point of the show is to learn.

The hosts ask whether intros are allowed this week, and one reads comedic ones. They tease one host about spending on food and wine at the summit and taking hundreds of selfies, and tease the guest about being the fifth bestie and a crossover fund manager with 'BDE'. They also jab at another host for a portfolio that has been down 35 straight days. These are jokes at the hosts' own expense, with no factual weight.