What the All-In Podcast Gets Disastrously Wrong

From Business Perspective to the Woke, the Broke and the Toke.

by Walter Simson

Some people talk about the age of the dinosaurs. Me? I remember the age of unicorns.

You know, those fabulous, sparkling creatures beloved by four-year old girls and forty-year old entrepreneurs? Unicorns are companies with a presumed valuation of a billion dollars, usually without the disadvantage of a deep market to price the shares. Unicorns once preoccupied the community of California VCs, who would get together over lawn bowling to quietly raise the presumed valuation of this or that app.

It was a heady time in the US economy, full of innovation in technology, in how we deploy capital and in how we create value. And the fact that there was a unique social structure in this ecosystem added allure. I, myself an almost-extinct creature could relate. (Truly! I write longhand, using a fountain pen) So I remember wanting to know all about these new Uni-beings.

Where did I turn? The All-in Podcast, a poker table discussion convened by four successful venture capitalists who brought innocent eagerness to being a nerd. All-In grew to be one of the most popular tech podcasts because they brought knowledge, passion, and a finesse to those topics that we all read about at night, under the covers, with a flashlight.

You know: cap tables and options. Mergers, acquisitions and boardroom drama. For fun there were trips to Las Vegas to blow a cloud of cigar smoke and a fortune in blackjack.

The thing about these guys, they brought the details. If you needed to restructure your company, they’d talk about the emotional effect, the economic effect, and the way that the merger landscape would change. Venture capital politics, advanced math, international trade decisions. If you saw these topics in a podcast title, you might pass them by—too dry. But All-In took us into their own well-furnished driveways for a casual, intimate mixture of a business school course and “The House-Husbands of Silicon Valley.” I found the All-In besties to be talented storytellers, holding each topic like a crystal, gathering varied shades of light to create wonderful narratives. They’d mix in enough envy and highlife to make you smile.

Then?

Then they ruined it.

With politics. Gone are the days when they’d take an economic topic and examine it from all sides. Inflation? They once would have talked about the once-in-a-lifetime pandemic distortion; Trump's Fed bashing; Jerome Powell's late “transitory effects” call; and the fiscal fallout of two deficit-loving administrations.

But no-o-o-o. Gone is the jeweler’s tool of analysis. Now there’s a rubber mallet which pounds an unsubtle point of view you can get on that fount of economic wisdom, OAN. They’re talking up Elon and his plans, JD Vance and his critiques, or Mar-a Lago and its decor. Why? Why would I listen to experts on rarified microeconomics repeat tired laugh lines on the woke, the broke and the toke?

If I agree with what they’ve said, it’s repeating what I’ve already heard. And if I don’t agree, I’m mentally rehearsing a conversation that I was saving for Uncle Buck at Thanksgiving.

When it comes to my business commentary, please bring your careful analyses of the economy’s bleeding edge. But do I want an overlay of simplified American politics? No, no, no.

Besties? I’m out.

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