Fast shuts down, board culpability, Elon buys 9% of Twitter, deplatforming's evolution & more

The episode opens with off-air joking. One host is teased for sounding hung over, like an old man who has been smoking for weeks, and the group riffs on a mock scale that runs "from one to Charlie Sheen" to rate a night out. A six is likened to Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan in their heyday, with jokes about rehab. None of it carries any substance; it is pure banter.

The now-recurring rhyming introductions follow, with insult-laden nicknames for each host: Rainman David Sacks, the Sultan of Science David Friedberg, and Chamath billed with crude wordplay. One host objects to being called a name, and the writer jokes that the bit has become an anticipated weekly feature he can barely keep up with.

A programming update notes the All-In Summit is sold out, with about a dozen speakers and three themed parties: a Goodfellas/Godfather poker night, a Havana white party, and a Miami Vice 1980s closing party. A host jokes that a large number of listeners do not care about the party talk, and the others estimate roughly 700 tickets with about 400 people at the parties.

The stated conference theme is the problem each speaker most wants to see solved in the world, and one host jokes his own talk would be that the world needs more parties. They tease each other over the WeWork TV series and Jared Leto's performance, drawing a comic parallel to "elevating the world's consciousness" while throwing parties. One host says the summit will not make a profit and any profit would fund a separate smaller conference under the All-In brand.

A running gag imagines a Friedberg-branded weight-loss program built on a vegan chef who refuses to leave your house, tempeh and vegan shakes, versus another host's preference for "olive-infused beef" from cattle fed only olives. The exchange is comic and carries no analysis.

The banter turns to morel mushrooms and the start of morel season, with a claim that tempeh is more expensive than both quinoa and morels, and a passing jab about how much "chemical nonsense" is listed on a carton of oat milk. The hosts then signal they are about to turn to the week's news. The source breaks off here.

The food banter continues. A speaker complains that alternative milks are full of additives like soy lecithin and xanthan gum, and that almond milk at the store is loaded with sugar; he argues that trashing dairy and switching to these substitutes makes little sense unless one is lactose intolerant. The others tease Sacks about once eating an entire wheel of brie, said to date from his Stanford days. It is comic back-and-forth with no analysis.

After a few more jokes, including one about a drink being mistaken for kombucha when it is plain iced tea, the hosts say they have work to do and turn to the news.

A host frames the week around a contraction in tech, with growth-stock multiples compressing and large companies starting layoffs, something the hosts say they predicted months earlier. The main example is Fast, a one-click checkout startup (fast.co) that announced it was shutting down on Tuesday after growing to 450 employees while generating, by reported figures, about $600,000 in revenue.

According to reports the host cites, Fast was burning about $10 million a month at its peak against roughly $50,000 a month in revenue, had raised a $102 million Series B led by Stripe in January 2021, and raised about $124 million in total. These are the reported figures as relayed on the show, not independently verified here.

Other examples follow. Better.com, cited for an earlier Zoom mass-layoff, cut employees across several dates and offered remaining corporate, product-design and engineering staff voluntary resignation with 60 days of severance and health coverage; the host reads a line attributed to CEO Vishal Garg about an uncertain mortgage market creating a challenging environment. Gopuff is described as making a modest 3% cut of its roughly 15,000 staff, which the host calls reasonable, while noting its valuation had reached about $40 billion in December. The figures are as read on the show.

Asked where the cycle stands, a speaker identified as Chamath starts at the macro level, describing a dangerous game of chicken with the Fed: markets stayed so resilient that the Fed grew more aggressive, signaling 50-basis-point hikes for the next few meetings and the start of quantitative tightening. He explains that where buying securities injected cash and inflated asset prices, tightening reverses it, letting roughly $95 billion a month of maturities roll off and pulling money out of the system.

He argues the Fed looks at broad indices, not single stocks, and those indices have held up partly because a large share of the S&P is concentrated in names like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Tesla. In his view the Fed will keep ratcheting up until it sees the equity market crack, which he pegs around the mid-3,000s on the S&P. For startups, he says this means planning for an 18-month stretch where you cannot raise on your own terms and should get your balance sheet in order to wait it out. These are his own predictions and figures, not verified here.