Markets update, crypto collapse, Russia/Ukraine endgame, state of the podcast

The recording opens with rapid-fire teasing between the hosts: one is told he looks "a little grifty" and another is mocked as a "failed hostage taker". A host also hints that other projects of his are about to drop. The mood is jokey, and the self-description of the show as "3 miserable rich bastards" sets the tone.

A host asks why it took a month to produce a new episode, and the others half-jokingly offer a "TLDR": one co-host believed he deserved a larger stake in the podcast. That co-host says, in his own telling, that he had asked to own 6% more. The thread then jumps back to the summit, with several people talking over each other about who was negative toward whom. The ASR transcript is garbled here and speaker attribution is unreliable.

The dispute is described as a falling-out about whether one host should stay on the show. One account holds that if a co-host was unhappy and kept complaining about the show every week, he could do half the shows and let a guest rotate in. The host who was told this asks directly whether it was said that this is one person's show and that he wanted him off. The reply is a flat denial. These are the hosts' own competing accounts, and the transcript does not settle them.

The exchange ends in jokes. One host says nobody is truly replaceable, another cheekily cites view counts of guest-hosted episodes, and a third says to tell his mother and wife that he was thought replaceable.

One host steps in to summarize. According to him, the four had agreed to 25% each, one co-host came to believe he deserved more, and after working through the underlying issues they reached a consensus. He says there is now a signed agreement governing how the show and its offshoots work, with four equal 25% partners, and he asks everyone to move on. The others reply with affectionate sign-offs.

The co-host who wanted more gives his version of events: if the group wanted to turn the show into a media company, he asked for about 10% more equity and would do the daily work while the others simply showed up. His partners declined, and he accepted that, so the group is "back at square 1". The 6% figure mentioned earlier and the 10% figure here are both his own statements and are not reconciled in the transcript.

The co-host then declares that there will be no more summits and no business here, only a weekly podcast, since he runs other events and podcasts elsewhere. He jokes that the intros cost 1% each and that a 2023 summit would cost another, with equity vesting at "a point 8 percent" per month. This is clearly comedic, and the other hosts respond in kind by marvelling that months of not taping and turmoil came down to an extra 1%.

The bit continues with the co-host saying he does this for a living and should get extra if he is the de facto CEO. The others say they do not want that. He answers that it will simply be a weekly project and that anyone's side ventures can be done elsewhere. The skit about whether to do the intro runs on, with the group declaring that intros are out and trying out a casual "Hey, everybody".

A host formally welcomes listeners to episode 84 and greets the co-host introduced as the Sultan of Science. The others check whether the tension is resolved: one says he is fine, another notes that dinner was bought after a Warriors game. Another host says he was only tangentially involved, and is teased for spending 72 hours on a contract he calls fair. He is accused of breaking it within 15 minutes by disparaging him, and the response is that it was good for ratings, with a mention of a two-buttons superhero meme.

After a last joke about breaking a non-disparagement clause, the host greets the co-host joining from an undisclosed European city. He notes that the All-In summit has finished and all its episodes are released, including the one with Palmer Lucky. He then turns to markets: he says one index is down 21% year to date and another down 17%, and that this does not capture what happened to growth stocks. He adds that May CPI came in at 8.6 and that the Fed raised rates by 75 basis points, then asks who wants to begin.

The first host to answer says the story has to start after the great financial crisis. In his account, governments and central banks bought toxic assets to head off contagion, and a group of economists he calls pseudo-scientists then promoted Modern Monetary Theory, the idea that continued money printing could smooth the economy and drive long-term growth. He says officials fell for it, and that by 2022 governments had put roughly 30 to 35 trillion dollars into the economy that should never have been there.

His conclusion is that true supply and demand have been obscured since 2008, not just in the last six to eight months, and that this money has to be destroyed before a real equilibrium appears. He compares 30 trillion dollars against a world GDP he puts at about 85 trillion, almost half a year of global output. He expects the unwinding to take about three years and describes today's asset prices as a small piece of a larger trend of fake money being removed. These are his own estimates and framing, not figures checked in the discussion.

He therefore rejects the hope that one 75 basis point hike ends the pain. He expects 24 to 36 months of adjustment, possibly with no bottom for another 18 months, and a lot of choppy market action.

The host moderating the conversation lists three bubbles under pressure: stocks, crypto, which he calls insane over the past two to three weeks, and housing. He cites record-high inventory, sales falling below the 20-year average, crushed mortgage origination, and mortgage rates around 6% against 2.x% a few months earlier. He asks whether another 18 months of declines is likely or whether markets are now bouncing along the bottom.