Iran's Breaking Point, Trump's Greenland Acquisition, and Solving Energy Costs

All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, your favorite podcast, the All-In podcast. With me again, the core four, the original four, David Friedberg, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks. We're here, and there is a lot going on in the world. Gentlemen, how's everybody's week going? Anybody got big plans for next week?

J-Cal, your ship has finally come in. Your invitation was not lost in the mail. You have been invited to Davos.

What? Really?

Don't blow it now.

What? I've got to get my guitar. Davos Kumbaya.

Don't blow it now.

I'm going to bring my guitar.

Don't blow it now.

Don't blow it? Explain to the audience what's happening here, Sacks. What's happening?

Well, as it turns out, one of the houses there is in need of content, so they've offered All-In a stage to interview people.

All right, so we've got a stage and a microphone. You're going.

I'm going, yeah.

President Trump is giving a major talk there on Wednesday, I understand. There's a stage and microphones, so I canceled my ski trip in Japan to go to Davos.

Even Jason is going to Davos.

Even J-Cal.

Even Jason.

Even J-Cal.

Even J-Cal is at Davos.

Even J-Cal.

It's pretty funny. I was invited to be part of that. You probably got this too, Chamath, back in the day—their young leaders for $50,000 a year. We're going to be doing some interviews, and if you want to be interviewed by me and/or Sacks at the USA House, email jason@allin.com if you're there. If you have ideas for speakers, we're going to be booking in real time.

I haven't been to Davos. I guess the way it works—

Oh.

—is there's a bunch of houses. Countries have houses, and then companies sponsor houses.

Hmm.

And there's stuff happening there. There are stages set up, and there's constant interviewing. I've gotten a bunch of requests. Basically, everyone's interviewing everyone else at Davos.

Yeah.

Does that make sense? It's like all the attendees are just constantly interviewing each other. That's what—

It's like the podcast circuit. All these podcasters now—

Right.

—have run out of guests, so they just interview each other in a giant circle.

Yes. That's what it is.

So it's literally going to be heads of state interviewing heads of state.

Oh, yes. Everyone's just interviewing everybody.

"Hey, welcome to the JD Vance show. I'm JD Vance. With me on the show today is Mondami. Welcome to the show." Everybody's doing collabs there. The snake has eaten its tail.

But I think we'll have a fun time. Sacks and I are going, and we're going to tear it up and have a good time. The USA House, I understand, is on a main street there. My understanding is—I was talking to the CEO of McKinsey, who's one of the partners, I guess, who sponsors a lot of the stuff at Davos—

Look at you rubbing elbows with the global elite, texting with the deep state. This is fantastic.

Yeah, no, I'm going. It's my deep-state era going into 2026. Supposedly, the vibe is that people just walk around the main town and they'll—

Mm-hmm.

—pop into USA House and network, have a coffee. What we've got to do is have producer Lisa say, "Hey, do you listen to All-In? Well, it's great to see you. Would you like to talk to David and Jason? They're going to be sitting over here," and then Dave and I are just going to hold court. It's going to be fun. I'm looking forward to it.

Also, kind of like a little—

We might. I've done a little vox pop in my day, and we might get a wireless microphone and go on the street and see what happens.

This is going to last 5 minutes until people hear that J-Cal is being obnoxious and asking tough questions.

Well, you know, J-Cal, people don't know this, but J-Cal does an incredible Triumph the Insult Comic Dog impression.

Oh, yeah, I do.

Oh, my God. If you went around Davos as Triumph—

Oh, my God. If I did Triumph?

Oh, dude.

Oh, yes. "It looks like it's the prime minister of Germany. I understand you turned off your nuclear at the right time. How's the data center project going? I heard the 15-year-old Greta is doing your energy conservation and your strategy. How's that going for you?"

It's not even going to last half a minute.

Yeah, we're going to be detained at Davos.

1. Iran Regime Change

All right, I guess we've got to talk about what's going on in Iran. Regime change could be happening. There have been massive anti-regime protests over the last month. As everybody listening probably knows, Iran has been ruled by an Islamic dictator since the 1979 revolution. Ali Khamenei has been in power since 1989.

If you want to understand why this is happening, there are probably 2 data points that you should know. In the short term, over the last 6 or 7 years, inflation has been bonkers. If you think 7%, 8%, 9% inflation during COVID was acute, and 2.6% now has people complaining about it, take a look at this chart, boys. It's been 30% on average since 2019 due to sanctions. Obviously, those things can work. There have been food shortages and people in the streets.

Long term, here's a chart, and this is from 2020, so you can add 6 years to the chart you're seeing here. There's a lot of young people in Iran, and the population is made up of a lot of 20-somethings and 30-somethings. They have Starlink, access, and VPNs, so they want to be part of the future. They want to modernize.

Sacks, this was a point of contention last year. We were talking about interventions and foreign wars, and your concerns about that. This one is from the bottom up, so I think that makes it quite different, yeah?

Well, look, this is a highly dynamic situation. I don't really want to comment on it, except to say that I trust President Trump to make the right decision and handle it. As I understand it, the protests are either fizzling out or being cracked down on at this point, and I tend to think it's dying down, but I'm not sure. It's a dynamic situation.

The problem is, whenever I comment on something like this, it ends up being, "Trump adviser David Sacks says whatever," and the reality is I'm only involved on 2 issues, and this isn't one of them, so I don't really think I should be commenting.

Yeah. Friedberg, you've been talking about this, and I think it was part of your predictions from the show last week—the prediction show. Here's your Polymarket, and then I'll let you give your thoughts on it: "Khamenei out as Supreme Leader of Iran by January 31st." That was up around 27% and now has dropped to a 10% chance.

"Will the regime fall before 2027?" There's $2.6 million in volume and a 37% chance. It's been up there as high as, I think, 50-something percent, and this is before the end of the year, so, hmm. Obviously, this is a breaking-news-type situation. By the time we tape on Thursdays and come out on Fridays, this could be radically changing. But just in broad strokes, what are your thoughts here, Friedberg?

I think it's inevitable that there's a break in the country because of the effect of sanctions. The average income is about $200 a month in Iran, and the price of food is roughly the same as in the U.S., maybe a little bit less. A combo meal at McDonald's, I just pulled this up, in Tehran is the equivalent of $4. Again, if you're making $200 a month and it costs $4 to go to McDonald's, costs catch up pretty quickly.

I think that ultimately, what breaks civil society is when people can't afford the things that they need, and people have no choice but to stand up. An oppressive system, an oppressive regime, can keep people down for so long, until they're starving or they can't get access to things like medical care. These are the sorts of things that ultimately lead to these moments.

It seems like it's an inevitability. The United States has put a lot of pressure on the regime in Iran, and it seems to be starting to break. The key question that everyone's asking is, "Is Trump going to act in support of the revolution?" Theoretically, I would imagine that would involve attacking IRGC sites, which are the Revolutionary Guard, the internal security force that maintains the regime's control over the people.

If they take out IRGC sites, will that actually result in the people being free, and what's the transition plan? This is obviously a very messy situation. Reza Pahlavi is in Europe, and he said he's ready to come back. He is the Shah's son, and if he comes back, how are you going to give him influence and control?

This is the same question that recently came up in Venezuela. There is a very large infrastructure of government agencies that needs to be overseen, and you can't bring an outsider in and just plug them right in to take over everything. It's a very difficult transition, and that's when things fall apart—when people steal stuff and when things get turned off.

So how do you maintain the core functioning of society without breaking it by bringing someone new in from the outside? That's where this gets very messy.

So I don't know what's ahead.

Yeah, and the strikes didn't happen last night. Bessent announced some increased sanctions. That always seems to be one of the best ways to handle this, as you pointed out, Friedberg: increase the economic pressure.

For people who are not familiar, Iran is a large country. It's the 2nd largest in the Middle East behind Egypt, I believe, and close to 100 million people. 95 million people, I think, live in Iran. This would have a dramatic impact on the region if there were a transition here.

Obviously, you've heard about the Houthis and Hezbollah being supported, funded, and housed in Iran. This would be quite dramatic, Chamath, if this were to turn over. Even if there's a 10% to 30% chance this were to happen, any thoughts on what that would mean? We've been watching this modernization of the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar—everybody having a seat at the table, increasing influence and increasing modernization in those countries. What would this do in the region?

It's really hard to tell. They're an incredibly vibrant people. If you look at the Iranian diaspora, they're really a dynamic part of every culture they join. If you know Persians in LA, they're—

I mean, you and I play poker with the diaspora in LA. These are the most fun people in Westwood.

They're incredible people.

They're the greatest.

They're the greatest people.

They're shutting the club down, the last people out at the game. Yeah.

They're really great. The thing that I would say is that I don't think you can paint the Middle East with a broad brush here. It's a very different culture than the other Middle Eastern countries. It's a fundamentally different religion. It's a fundamentally different language.

I would just say that I don't know what's actually going on in Iran. There's been so much information containment that I take Sacks' point of view, which is that I think the only people in the United States right now who have an accurate sense are probably the military and intelligence apparatus of the United States. The rest of us are underreacting or overreacting to small pieces of information without really knowing the context and the mosaic of the whole.

In a breaking-news environment, it's best to do some research and be humble and thoughtful. Guard your positions.

But by the way—

Guard your positions.

2. The Information Warfare Era

The crazy thing about this, if you shift away from Iran specifically, is that the information-warfare game is totally different. What did you have? You had SpaceX enable Starlink over Iran, and then there was the attempt to use that mechanism to get information out, to fill in the mosaic, right?

Yeah.

Was what was happening 90%? Was what was happening 10%? Were there counter-revolutions that were supportive of Khamenei? None of us knew anything because you would see these snippets, and it was very hard to actually triangulate.

Then you had this entire information channel get shut down, and you had all kinds of blocking mechanisms that essentially drove packet loss down to, like, 80, 90%. It's just important to understand that this is the generation of information warfare we're going to see in every conflict going forward, especially when you have something as ubiquitous as Starlink and other things in the sky to help you get the information out. You're just going to see these tactics increase.

And I don't know if you guys ever saw it, but Anthony Bourdain—rest in peace—did a really great Parts Unknown in 2013 or 2014.

That's the best Anthony Bourdain I've ever watched.

Yeah, yeah.

If you want to see Iran, it looks so amazing.

Yeah.

Look at Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown—

Yeah.

—in Tehran. It looks like a party.

Well, yeah, and young people there.

Total vibe there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The young people are really living their lives under this oppression, and you really get the sense that they're not much different from us or any other folks in the world. The journalists who took him around were later detained, and I really respect Anthony Bourdain for even doing that episode. He took a lot of risk doing that.

Remember there was a period when one of the most popular accounts on Instagram was Rich Kids of Tehran.

Right, yeah.

And if you followed them, you'd be like, “Man, this looks like LA or New York.”

Yeah, Hong Kong. Yeah, London.

Yeah.

Yeah. Dubai. Great potential there.

We're rooting for the people of Iran to have their freedom. I'll say this, Sacks: I trust Trump in his targeted neocon era. I'm trying to phrase it properly here to not offend anybody, but I think he's really—

Trump doctrine.

Well, I think he doesn't have a problem using our military and the force we have to take a dictator out if it doesn't cause World War III. And if 2 dictators and 2 societies are freed in the 1st quarter of 2026, what does that even mean for his legacy? This could be the defining—

It means there's only a few of us left, Jason.

Dictators, yes. He'll be coming for you, Chamath.

3. Microsoft Pays Its Share

All right, Microsoft is going to pay its own way on data centers. We've been talking about the energy needs for AI data centers for a long time now, and there's been this theme: “Hey, if the data centers are going to take all this energy, it's going to spike local power consumption.” We saw a number of data centers, gentlemen, maybe pull out of projects where there was local pushback on them.

On Monday, President Trump addressed this PR crisis on Truth Social, calling out Microsoft: “I never want Americans to pay higher electricity bills because of data centers.” Two words: data centers. I added the last part.

Microsoft will make major changes beginning this week to ensure that Americans don't pick up the tab for their power consumption. Microsoft President Brad Smith announced they will pay higher electricity rates where they are building data centers to cover the cost of the new power generation and grid upgrades.

Seems like a pretty simple idea, and they're also going to pay to replenish the water that they draw from the reservoirs. That issue has also been a little bit overblown. Chamath, you probably know a lot about that, and you can explain the data-center water-recycling issues and the misperceptions.

Microsoft has announced they're not going to accept any tax breaks or electricity-rate discounts, so that era seems to have ended. Chamath, you're involved in a number of data centers, and obviously, David Sacks, you're involved in this as our AI czar and civil servant. Chamath, why don't you start us off here?

You guys can find the clip, but we talked about this a few weeks ago, that these kinds of things were in the offing. I really like it. It's a very good first-order set of things to do, which is to step into a local area and take all of these energy issues off the table—

Mm.

—at least to the extent that you're contributing to it.

The problem is that the data centers are only part of the problem. The reality is that we have a whole new way of living that's drawing more and more electrons. We are at a shortage for what we need. The reaction of the utilities is to now build, which is the right reaction. The problem is that for the last 20 years, they've been under-building.

So as they catch up, even if you have the data centers that are willing to pay their fair share, rates will still go up. What do we need to do that is beyond what Microsoft just announced? I think all the hyperscalers should copy what Microsoft did. I think it's great that the president was able to get these guys to the table to agree to it.

What is the next major thing? The next major thing is when you actually create a $100 billion or $200 billion tax-equity vehicle and have them completely subsidize and pay for the electricity costs of homeowners. How do you do that? You do that by paying for them to get solar and storage.

Why would they do that? They would do that for 2 reasons. No. 1, and the most important, is that it will give them a social license to operate throughout the country. The second reason is that the president preserved the ability to make those kinds of investments and be tax-advantaged for doing it in the One Big Beautiful Bill.

So if you put these 2 things together, I think step 1 is you go into a local area and tell the local residents, “We'll pay for the water, we'll make sure there's minimal noise, and we will make sure that we take absolutely no discount. We pay our fair share, even if it means paying more than you do for electricity.”

That's step 1. But now I think we need to go in with step 2: Here's a bunch of money that we have allocated to fit your house out with solar, with storage, with next-generation heat pumps, with a modern set of infrastructure, so that you are totally resilient and now completely ambivalent to what the grid has to do in reaction to all the demand that's coming.

Yeah. I had Zach Dow from Base Power on This Week in Startups, I don't know, a year ago now, and we were talking about this. I said, “Why wouldn't you just—?” What they do is not solar, because solar takes time.

You've got to rip up your roof. There are just some complications with solar. You need to have the space for it. It's expensive to install. They just put a battery, like a little R2-D2, outside your house. They fill up that battery when energy is cheap and plentiful, and deploy it when it's expensive and the grid has challenges. He said those kinds of deals were in the works, or that discussions were happening, and that was back then.

This is a really easy win-win-win type situation, Chamath, that you're describing. Sacks, this feels like proactive, thoughtful ways to communicate to the populace: "Hey, the AI boom is here, and you have concerns. We're going to get ahead of them." Have you been involved in any of these discussions? Are you talking with Chris Wright and overlapping in terms of the communication here, or is it just a free-market solution?

Well, Jason, the president has been ahead of the curve on this issue really since the beginning of the administration. I don't know if you recall, but he said that he was going to make AI companies into the biggest power companies because he understood that the data centers they needed required a lot of power, but they were going to stand up their own power generation and wouldn't just draw off the grid.

I think this understanding has always been there. When I've talked to the hyperscalers, they also tell me that their plan is not to draw from the grid. It's to basically set up their own power generation behind the meter. It's called co-location.

In fact, I think ultimately this will bring down rates for residential consumers for 2 reasons. One is that when the data centers create their own power, they can sell back or donate back to the grid when they connect. They don't have to connect to the grid, but once they do, they can donate back. Second, there are a number of fixed costs in power generation. It's not just variable, right? There are these large fixed costs, and as you increase scale, those fixed costs get amortized over a greater amount of supply. That brings down the variable rate, basically the metered rate, for everybody. Scale is good.

I think the deceptive nature of the criticism here by Bernie Sanders and people like that is what they say: "Well, we just have to shut down all the data centers, period." The real problem here is that he and others like him have overregulated power generation to death, so it's too hard to set up net-new power. If power generation were easier, there wouldn't need to be a limit on what the data centers could use. They could just bring their own power. That is the obvious solution here, and it's good to see Microsoft make this pledge and formalize it.

I think all the other hyperscalers will do that. Again, it was never part of their plan, I think, to draw on the grid for their power needs. They always understood that they'd have to stand up their own power, and the issue is just regulations getting in the way of that.

One final point on this is that there are a bunch of regulations by FERC, for example, that interfere with the ability to do co-location. Co-location is when you put a data center and the power generation next to each other, or you do them together. Chris Wright, the secretary of energy, has directed FERC to make a bunch of changes to make behind-the-meter generation and co-location easier so that these data centers can stand up their own power. The only reason that hasn't happened is because of the usual bureaucratic delays, but that is well on its way to happening.

All right.

Does that make sense?

Yeah. It makes total sense. If we start thinking about incentives, incentives obviously matter. I don't think a lot of people know this, but I think I talked about it when we were talking about nuclear, Friedberg. In France, the people who live near the Tavanne reactor—I think that's how it's pronounced—pay 0.1% tax versus the 12% regional average. They give people a discount to incentivize and reward them, giving them free local electricity, et cetera, for living near a nuclear power plant. I think the U.K. has also talked about these sorts of danger-zone proposals and payments.

That hasn't come up here in the United States. There's been a lot of FUD—fear, uncertainty, and doubt—around these data centers, with people throwing around a lot of talking points. I think you and I discussed offline the misperceptions about water usage and that the water usage is largely recycled in these data centers. If you know about that, would you inform the audience about that piece of data?

Well, we've got a lot of water. It just goes around in a circle, so I don't think that's an issue.

But the issue is clean water and the increasing cost of clean water for a local population—

Yeah, but what Friedberg's referring to is that the modern cooling systems in these data centers recirculate the water and transport the heat out of the data center, so it's not like the water is used up. I guess there's a separate type of evaporative cooling that does use up some water, but modern data centers don't use that.

The water issue is really a total hoax, and it's really kind of a sub-hoax of this larger affordability issue. I'm not saying that affordability isn't an issue, but it was caused by Biden's 9% inflation, and now Democrats are trying to make it an issue. When it comes to the power for data centers, again, this all comes back to the fact that the regulations make it too hard to generate net-new power. Scaling demand on its own is not a problem if you also scale the supply of electricity. In fact, it brings down prices for everyone because scale creates economies of scale.

Yeah. And 90% of that water is reused, and there are closed-water-loop systems in each one.

Here's my pitch.

Yeah.

I think the president should try to create a $300–$500 billion tax-equity fund and help eliminate the electricity costs of 50 to 100 million American households.

Amazing.

Well, let me give you the math. We consume in this country about 4 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity. The average price is 18 cents per kilowatt-hour, so it's about—call it—$750 billion of spending on electricity every year. One-third of that, $250 billion, is residential consumption. Two-thirds of that, $500 billion, is industrial and commercial consumption.

Theoretically, you could increase the price on industrial and commercial consumption by, call it, 50% and make all residential electricity in the United States free. If you're a residential user, you get a cap of free electricity every month. If you use more than that cap, you get charged, but below that cap, it's free based on the square footage of your house.

On the commercial and industrial side, the reason you would then have an incentive to build private power systems would be that you can bring your cost down. Instead of centralizing all of this with the utilities, what it can do is force a market demand for industrial and commercial users to build their own power systems, which would increase overall electricity supply in the United States. The data centers are the tip of the iceberg, but if you make this a pan-industrial problem, then all of the industrial companies would have to take this path.

The problem is that it doesn't change the net-consumption model. If you actually go to solar and storage for every 15 million homes, you take a terawatt-hour of demand off the grid. That's an extra terawatt-hour that you don't need to build, but you can't build that quickly. The reason why I like solar and storage is that you make these folks so self-reliant. Now, all of a sudden, we're actually catching up to China faster than we would have otherwise.

You're talking about residential users?

Yeah. Your idea, which is a good one—the problem is that they're still using grid services.

Right. Or they don't have to. That's the point.

It could be industrial users.

Well, the industrial users will then invest in solar systems.

You don't know that for sure.

They'll invest in industrial solar systems.

My point is that today, homeowners are using the grid. There is no solution to not using the grid.

Well, if the industrial price goes up by 50%, you've now created a market force to drive them to make the investment, particularly if you've deregulated the market.

No, no, I understand.

... particularly if you've, if you've deregulated—

I, I understand the math.

But my point is—

And you get this first-year CapEx depreciation, so they actually get a benefit.

Hold on, guys. You're talking through each other. Chamath's point is that you're still taxing the grid. His proposal adds another layer to what you're saying, so he's in agreement with you, Friedberg. Let's have the businesses pay a little extra—and, not or, and—let's have them also—

Take them off the grid.

Take them off the grid to reduce it.

Take all the homes off the grid.

Well, there are 80 million freestanding homes in the United States, and it's about $15,000 to put these battery packs in, like Base Power's. You could probably get it down to $10,000.

And if you just do back-of-the-envelope math, you're talking about $1 trillion. So basically, for $100 billion, you could do 10% of the country. If you were to do that over some time period, we would stop worrying about the grid, I think that's Chamath's point. And you could do it with batteries, you could do it with solar.

Well, you would not stop worrying about the grid, but Jason, just to refine what you're saying, because you're directionally very right, the consumers would feel less of these issues. Instead of all of us worrying about how to underwrite terawatt-hours to catch up to China, we actually get a 2-for-1. The consumer homes don't have that anxiety anymore. They don't have the bill. And because they're generating their own power, they're off the grid, and now what that means is that extra terawatt-hour can actually go to the commercial and industrial applications, including these data centers. And you're right, Friedberg, we should raise their tariffs.

I just think it's a lot more complicated and a lot more expensive to add solar to everyone's roof.

No, your method is way more complicated.

No, okay, listen.

Let the market figure it out.

None of this is free. However, we have such an amazing opportunity with AI that it makes sense to do this. That, I think, is the big picture. AI is such a huge opportunity. There's so much invested. Why wouldn't you do this? That's the question. And if we want to live in the age of abundance, and we want to bring the bottom half of the country up, and we want affordability, where do people spend their money? Food, groceries, their rent, and their electricity—

Utilities.

—and the utilities.

Exactly.

So if we want to figure out a direct way to do this, and for all the hippie-dippies who care about the environment and clean energy, this is a win there as well. And it doesn't come out of Americans' pockets and their taxes. It comes out of corporations, which are printing money. If you want to talk about redistribution of wealth, this is a way for the great American Magnificent 7 corporations to give something back to Americans. And you talked about this, right, Chamath, maybe 3 or 4 weeks ago, that maybe there would be some way for great corporations to do great things for Americans. The fact that Americans don't think about their water bill that much is a mitzvah. It's a great thing. Now, if they didn't have to think about electricity, wow, amazing.

We will look back, and I think that we will want to have seen these big companies, who are unbelievably profitable, step up more on behalf of American homeowners—

Yeah.

—more.

Some might say obscenely profitable.

I just think—

Yeah.

I just think it's a great mission-to-the-moon-style framing to say, what if we could make all residential electricity free in the United States?

Absolutely.

And over the next decade, if we can do that, not only do we help Americans with their wallet, but we actually can enable a distributed investment scheme in American energy production, and we force the corporations to step up and do their part rather than centralize it. So I just like the framing of making this whole thing free, making residential electricity free in the U.S. as a core benefit.

The other thing is, we've talked about this. I've mentioned this a couple of times before. I think the single biggest dollar short will be on these utilities. Because if any version of what we just talked about happens, and all of a sudden you have private homeowners that are their own utility, and then Friedberg, C&I being their own power utility, what do the utilities do? What does all this CapEx go to? How do they pay back their bonds? What happens to their rate base? This is a huge economic question that I think will come up if even a small modicum of what we just talked about materializes.

Yeah, and people having their first X number of kilowatt-hours a year free—obviously, you're not going to have unlimited free—is going to be pretty transformative for America. It's aspirational. We all like the idea.

Mm-hmm.

I like it. Okay. OpenAI has struck another compute deal. This one's worth over $10 billion. OpenAI is buying compute capacity from Cerebras. That's C-E-R-E-B-R-A-S. They've committed to purchase up to 750 megawatts over 3 years. Cerebras, like Roc, makes specialized chips for AI inference. Cerebras is in talks to raise $1 billion at a $22 billion valuation, according to reports, and they're expected to IPO this year, potentially in the next couple of months. Sam Altman's an investor in the company, so he knows it well.

Is he really? Stop. Don't say—

It's in the notes. Take it out and post if it's not. I reported the misinformation.

Oh, my God.

I don't know. It could be information, it could be misinformation. Shout-out to our friends at The Information. These were your competitors at Roc, right, Chamath?

They were.

Contemporaries, yeah?

They're fantastic. We both started at the same time. We took slightly different technical approaches. The big difference is what Cerebras said initially from the start, and this is my friend Andrew Feldman, so I'll give him a shout-out. He's a very smart guy. If you were to see a chip, what you actually see is a wafer, and a wafer is full of little chips, right? And you literally tear them off. That's why they're called chips. Andrew was like, "No, I'm just going to make 1 ginormous chip the size of a wafer." And so if you look at it, Nick, maybe you can find a picture of it. These things are huge, and at the time, people were like, I don't think they really understood the power of what Cerebras was building and what Andrew was building.

And then the first folks that really got on board were the Emiratis, so MGX and G42, and you started to run these models, and what you started to see was, man, their inference is blazing fast. Again, back to what we talked about last week, because when you have the compute and the memory in the same place, physical distances are now minimized, and the complexity is minimized, so you just have incredible speed. What I can tell you is that OpenAI is aggressively trying to diversify so that they have multiple paths of inference available. They have a huge deal with AMD. They have a huge deal with NVIDIA. They now have a huge deal with Cerebras.

If you look at the trail of breadcrumbs, my belief is there's going to be a renaissance in silicon. Young, small teams building decode silicon can make a fortune over the next 10 to 20 years. It's a huge opportunity. It's going to be like the PC wars, Dell versus Compaq versus all of these companies. It's super exciting. Congrats to Cerebras. They deserve it.

Is there any argument that compute needs will level off in some way? We'll have built so much capacity, and the software will get better. There's been some talk about Anthropic being resource-constrained as a contemporary to OpenAI, and I think there's pretty much uniformity amongst elite AI users that Claude is a much better product now than OpenAI's. The models are better, the applications are better, but they're doing it with less. So could the build-out slow down? Is that a scenario that's out there, or is this always going to be up and to the right for the next 5 to 10 years? What's your crystal ball say? Sacks, are you still there?

I'm here.

Oh, okay.

Why is his video off? Turn it on.

I mean, you can turn it back on, and then when you talk, we'll just—

Oh, Jesus.

—go back and forth.

Texas still has a ways to go, I have to say.

Yeah. All right, there you go. All right.

This is your best internet?

It's an outside link.

Texas infrastructure is—

Oh, my God, Sacks is going to do the Texas bounce back.

Don't worry, I just tweeted Abbott. Abbott will send someone over immediately. They're pretty responsive in Texas.

My prediction is there'll be a big meme by the end of this year called the Texas Bounce Back, and it's a bunch of billionaires. They do a little jiggy as they dance back from Texas to California.

No. No.

It ain't happening.

You're there for good, huh?

Well, here's the thing.

Okay.

4. California Wealth Tax Battle

Well, maybe we should just talk about BTA, because this is where this is going.

Well, you move houses, so you could have a little internet issue. It's okay.

Well, I'd rather have an internet issue and keep 100% of my money than—

Lose 5%.

—lose 5% plus 13.3% per year, and it's not going to be—

Yeah.

—a one-time tax. That's the biggest lie.

Oh.

Yeah.

It's 5% now, 5% later, 10% after that.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

Then it'll be an exit tax.

Yeah, mansion tax.

They're coming for all of it.

Yeah.

So the internet can get fixed. The internet—

Yeah.

Let's put it this way.

My internet can get fixed a lot more easily than California can.

What are the 10 states that constitutionally ban asset taxes?

Yes, so it's direct and implicit in those states' constitutions, or they have an amendment to the Constitution that makes it direct or implicit that you can't do a wealth tax or an asset seizure tax.

And which are they? Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas.

According to Roc, only Texas explicitly bans wealth taxes.

Hmm.

Yes, that is correct, but because of some of the other state constitutions, it's implicit. So Texas has, in its Constitution, a prohibition on a “tax on wealth or net worth.” Washington has a uniformity clause that treats income as property, which bans nonuniform rates. Florida's Constitution bans any sort of personal tax.

Pennsylvania has a strict uniformity clause, which would make it impossible to have graduated tax rates or distinct tax rates among populations. Illinois has a strict constitutional mandate for a flat, nongraduated tax rate, so you cannot have that separation. Asset seizure is referred to as civil asset forfeiture, which is a separate legal issue, but it implies that in states like New Mexico, Nebraska, and North Carolina, you cannot actually have an asset taken from you by the state. So there are a bunch of states where this would be constitutionally protected against.

Friedberg, has your mind changed since last week about whether this is gonna make the ballot?

I don't think it's gonna make the ballot. I mean, look, I'm not saying 100%; I'm saying there's a slight overweight that it's not gonna get there.

So nothing has changed in your perspective?

I think we're going through the rolling wake-up process right now, where people are waking up to the fact that the asset seizure tax is an elimination of private property rights. Fundamentally, what you're saying—and I wrote this in my tweet—is that private property now becomes public property.

As soon as you give the government the right to collect your post-tax assets through a legislative vote, you are basically saying that you no longer have private property, because at any point in the future, the government can vote to say, “I'm gonna take your private property.” That's different from an income tax, which is when you earn something that you didn't have before and they take a percentage of your earnings, of your income.

The statement now is that after you've made your income, it's your private property, and they can come and take it. That is a distinction that has never existed in the United States. I will make the retort right now to property tax, because people always say to me, “Well, what about property tax?”

A property tax is a service fee on a particular, specific asset. The money that is collected provides services for that asset to make it more valuable. So you get roads, infrastructure, policing—

Schools.

—fire, healthcare, schools, all the stuff that comes with property tax makes that asset more valuable. You have the option at any point you want to sell that property and stop paying that property tax. You have the option at any point to downgrade your property, get a cheaper property, and pay less.

Here's the other important point about property tax: it's uniform. Uniform means that everyone pays the same percentage, the same property tax rate, in a county.

This asset seizure tax that's being proposed is a demographic tax, meaning that the state or the legislature defines a specific group of individuals. In this case, they're saying anyone with a net worth over $1 billion, and then they can go and take assets from only that group. That is nonuniform taxation.

It means that for the first time, we're saying that based on the demographics of a person—meaning whatever you want to use to define that person, in this case their wealth—you are going to be treated differently. That is different from an income tax, because remember, when you have graduated income tax rates and you say high earners get taxed more, what you're taxing is the earnings, not the individual.

You're not looking through to the individual to determine whether or not they're wealthy. All you're doing is looking at the independent earnings amount that's coming in. A uniformity clause is supposed to protect people from being demographically discriminated against.

You may roll your eyes and be like, “Oh, who cares about the billionaires? Eat the rich.” That's great. But fundamentally, you're giving the government—the legislature—the ability to, in the future, take any demographic definition they want and go in and take any percentage they want of after-tax property from you.

That is why this is so troubling. We can harp all day long about “eat the rich,” and obviously this group is biased, but the general population should be very much aware of the fact that as soon as you give a legislature the ability to discriminate against a group and take whatever percentage they want—

You've set a precedent. Yeah.

You've set a precedent, and it's over. Now what you've done is you've made all private property public property, because the government is simply giving you permission every year to keep your stuff.

And the government shouldn't even know. It's like they're coming onto your ranch and calculating how many tractors you got, how much that old Corvette is worth, what's your old roadster worth?

What's your Grand Marquis worth?

It's ridiculous.

How much is Moose worth?

Moose is—yeah. They could take 5% of Moose.

Very valuable thoroughbred there.

He absolutely is. There'll be a new job category: tax appraiser.

Tax appraisers, and then you don't know whether the person paid—

They're knocking on your door: “I'm here to walk around your ranch and calculate everything.”

And it doesn't solve the geometric debt problem, right? We have a problem where every year, if we keep funding things with a deficit, in California we're looking at a $30 billion-a-year deficit. We've got $500 billion of debt, and we have a nearly $1 trillion pension obligation that is not funded.

Yes.

That money is going to come from somewhere, or it is not gonna get paid. It is more likely that they're gonna do everything they possibly can to get that money from somewhere rather than not pay it.

Someone.

The same is true for all pension obligations across the country. Illinois has a big problem like this as well.

5. The Ballot Fight

Well, can I take the other side of that bet you mentioned about it not getting on the ballot?

Please, go for it.

Well, I've never understood why this wouldn't get on the ballot, and I've never understood why, once it's on the ballot, it wouldn't pass, which is why I left. So let's take the first one, in terms of it getting on the ballot.

You only need about $8 million to collect the signatures—850,000 signatures. It's not that many in California. There are definitely millions of people in California who would love to stick it to billionaires. So they're gonna gather the signatures.

SEIU has the money. The only way that it wouldn't therefore make the ballot is if Gavin Newsom and the political machine bribe the SEIU with enough political benefits that they'll withdraw it. But what the SEIU is asking for is whatever it is, $30 billion, and I don't know if Gavin Newsom has that much money laying around somewhere that he can just give them.

Furthermore, if you're the guy running the SEIU, I understand his name is Dave—

Reagan.

You gotta be looking at what's happening on X right now, and you gotta be gleeful. All these billionaires are panic-tweeting all day long.

It's not all day long. I tweet in the morning from the bathroom.

Well, we're all doing it.

Morning constitutional.

I went on a based-tweeting spree this morning. So if you're this guy, Reagan, you're like, “Oh my God, look how much leverage I've got.”

Yeah.

“Twist a pig's ear, watch him squeal.” He's twisted these billionaires' ears, and they're all squealing. So why wouldn't you increase your leverage by spending the $8 million, putting it on the ballot, and then negotiating with Newsom?

Was that a Deliverance reference? I hope not.

No, it's just an expression.

Oh, okay.

In any event, I don't know why your mind's going to Deliverance, but—

I know. You squeal louder, bitch.

Maybe you got Deliverance on the brain.

Maybe I do. Sacks, I'll tell you why. I've obviously been a believer in the long cycle, and I've said this for a long time. We are gonna end up in either a socialist or some sort of fascist system. Either way, it's a tyrannical system to get us out of the death spiral that we've been in for some time.

So that is true, but I still wanna retain my sense of individual agency. I do think that those of us who are in California who actually care should retain some sense of agency rather than suspend our ability to have an influence on the outcome here.

I think we need to speak openly and honestly about where this leads, let people hear it, and let the people in California decide. Frankly, if we've done our job, we've spoken loudly, we've spoken clearly, we've revealed to people where a private property seizure tax leads for everyone in this country, and the deletion of private property rights in this country—

Okay.

Well, look—

And they still sign up to it, then I'm out.

Yeah.

You're out.

I mean, if it was a centimillionaire tax, you would've been out.

Okay, I get it. And I think—

Okay.

SEIU-UHW will spend the requisite amount of money—$8 million—

That's right.

$10 million, $12 million, whatever, to gather the signatures. And we've heard they have the money, right? So why wouldn't they? It only increases their leverage to demand more concessions.

They have $14 million to gather the signatures. The estimate was that they'll need somewhere between $5 million and $15 million, so they have the cash they need to gather the signatures.

It's a good bet.

And they have roughly $10 million to run an ad campaign, and their estimate is that they need between $50 million and $100 million to run an ad campaign.

Sounds like a good investment.

So the next step will be that they'll try and get this thing signed up. Now, the polling data shows that there's room for influence, Sacks. So I do think that if people can understand where this is headed—

And look, if America wants to sign up to this, Godspeed, man. That's where America's going to end up, in the socialist death spiral loop. Good luck. Have a good time. I'm going to Terminus to start the foundation. I don't know where the hell that is, but I'm out.

You're out.

And—

I'm out.

In the meantime, all we can do is speak truth to it, try and shine a light on it, and see where it goes.

Hey, maybe the 51st state: Greenland. Maybe we'll just do the 51st state. Look, I'm not saying it's going to pass, although I do think it's probably slightly more likely than not to pass—

Point is.

Once it's on the ballot. I just don't understand why it's not going to be on the ballot. And once it makes the ballot in, let's say, April, I think there's going to be a big freakout and rush for the exits, because there are a lot of people—

You're right.

Who—

You're right.

My theory is that I'm going to beat the rush—

And it's not billionaires.

Before the end of the party.

It's not billionaires. People don't realize this. I've received dozens of texts, emails, and calls from people—founders, business leaders, CEOs—that are out. If in April this thing ends up on the ballot, they're like—

Right.

"The writing's on the wall. If no politicians in California are willing to stand up and talk about private property rights, and no one's willing to say, 'This leads to a death spiral for the state and potentially for the country,' and no one's going to say that, then it's only a matter of time before this happens, and it's only a matter of time before it hits me."

Right.

And so everyone—

Well—

Is looking for a place to go.

Let me give you a data point on that. There are other unions that weren't part of this ballot initiative that are preparing similar ones for 2028, and those ballot initiatives are going to be more bulletproof. They're going to be better lawyered, all that kind of stuff, and more likely to survive constitutional challenges.

The only reason there is political opposition, I believe, to the BTA is because it was done by only 1 union, SEIU-UHW. This guy did it on his own, and the loot—all the proceeds from this confiscation—would go, almost all of it, just to this 1 union or its causes. So they didn't cut in the other unions on the loot. They didn't wet—

That's right.

The other unions' beaks.

Mm.

As a result of that, the other unions are actually against it, and this is why Newsom and the other politicians feel relatively unconstrained in saying they're opposed to it. And that's why I think that if we defeat this in '26, it doesn't mean it's dead for good; it just means it's going to come back in a new form in '28, but with much more broad-based union support.

Yeah.

All the unions are going to do it together. So I just think this is inevitable, and I think that—

Yeah.

For all the founders, whether you're pre-exit, post-exit, or on your way to an exit, my advice would be, to quote Maya Angelou, "When a state shows you who they are, believe them the first time."

Hmm.

This is the direction of travel in California, and whether it's SEIU or whatever they do in—

Teachers' union.

'28—

Mm.

This is where it's going.

They'd love to see something. Sacks, you said something that resonated with me, which is that the next versions of this will be better lawyered and more bulletproof. I've had a team of people looking at this. The thing that is the biggest weakness here is the fact that this is a wholly new tax that is applied retroactively. When you look at the Supreme Court at the federal level and the case law on this, this is the strongest challenge that people will have, and this is where—

There is a preponderance of evidence in favor of people saying that this is unjust and this is a taking, and people will be able to use the Supreme Court to bat this back. Now, that'll take 5 to 10 years to litigate because it'll be dragging itself through the courts forever. But when you look at the fact that that will be the angle of attack that people will take if this passes, I 100% agree with you, Sacks.

If this union were smart enough, what they would have done is say, "This is going to start January 1, 2027." It probably would make the ballot, it probably would pass, and they would get all the loot, and it would be very difficult to legally challenge this thing. It was a huge miscalculation by that union, but in '28 or '30 or '32, this will rear its ugly head. It will be better architected, and there will be no way around it. And at that point, why create an artificial line at $1 billion? Why?

Yeah.

Why?

And by the way—

It's stupid. Go to $100 million. Get everybody.

Whoa, whoa. Let's move that number up a little bit. Let's get it to $250 million.

And if what we're saying is right, then why would it not happen at a national level? Of course it will. Yes, they're going to start chasing you around the country. It's disgrazio.

Well—

And the—

Because I'll tell you why.

Go ahead.

Because we still have plenty of conservatives in the rest of the country. California is screwed, but we've got to start stacking sandbags around the rest of the states.

Freeberg, you said something that I really liked in your post, which is it begs the question: What will happen when California goes BK?

Dark.

And then they go to the feds, and it doesn't actually matter who is in charge at that time, but let's think about it if Trump were in charge for a second. California knocks and says, "Hey, I need you to bail us out." The deal that California would need to make with the president for that to even be palatable, so that he could build a coalition of Republicans around it—man, California will go through—

Austerity—

Tremendous pain—

Measures.

But then go through the other side. So now imagine AOC is president. AOC is president. She says, "I have to do this." And then when it goes to Congress, how does this actually happen? This is again where I think Sacks is right. As long as there is a 49/51 kind of a balance, I don't think anything can really happen without meaningfully deep austerity in California.

I think there's a way out for these—

Now, if the filibuster's gone by that time—

Yeah.

And it's a simple majority, and then if there's a Democrat in the Oval Office plus a Democratic Congress—

Yep.

David, you're right, because that is the 1 shot on goal that they have a 2-year window to run at the federal level, and they will be able to get it done.

Now ask yourself the question: What happens to the citizens of Florida, the citizens of Texas, the citizens of North Dakota, and the citizens of all these states that pay federal taxes, have not had this problem in their state, and are basically paying—

Dude, Alaska has a surplus.

To bail out all these states.

Alaska has a surplus.

Yeah, but why should we bail out—

So what do you do? What do you think will happen?

California?

Why should—

Why would all those citizens— And this is where the union starts to unravel, and that's where I get very concerned about where this leads. As soon as you allow this asset seizure tax to pass, even on a state level, the economic ramifications—or on a national level, the economic ramifications—are inevitable. Some states are going to have to bail out other states, and that's where things get very ugly. The bill will come due at some point.

There's a super-easy out here for the Democrats or people who are supporting this: Just go after fraud first, taxes second.

That's got to be the mantra going forward. We're going to eliminate fraud and waste, and then we'll have a discussion about taxes. That's the only way for them to find an escape hatch here. Okay, we've beaten this to death.

Well, it's how you win the moderates.

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

We have beaten it to death, but just some interesting stats here. California collects roughly double per capita what Texas and Florida do. California collects about $10,319 per taxpayer, whereas Texas collects $5,469 and Florida collects $4,914. So there's not an issue here of California not collecting enough taxes.

The issue is all on the spending. On that front, the California budget has doubled over the past decade while the population stayed flat.

And services got worse.

Services got worse, test scores got worse, crime—

Yeah.

Prevention got worse.

Where's the money going?

Enforcement got worse.

Where's it going?

They let convicts out of jails. Everything's gotten worse.

Where's the money going, Sacks? Say the word.

It's going to these government worker unions.

Okay.

They have accumulated too much political power. Look, you go all the way back to FDR, and even though he was pro-union, he was opposed to government workers' unions because he thought they would accumulate too much political power. They elect the politicians, and then the politicians are the ones paying them. So they just end up extracting more and more and more iteratively with every election cycle.

It's the same as an antitrust monopoly in a corporation. It's the same ultimate dynamic as having a monopoly in private industry, in corporations. It basically gives you a monopoly on political power, and it gives you the ability to monopolize assets. That's effectively where we are. Now they're at the point where one union is saying, "I'm going to take the assets—$100 billion of assets—from a small minority of people in the state."

The reality is that a lot of it is the pension obligations. You can work for the state for 20 years, retire in your 40s, and basically, what? You get 90% of—

It's got to go. You can't have it.

Your wage for the rest of your life. For the rest of your life.

It just doesn't work. It doesn't pencil out. It's got to end.

Yeah. They use your last year's W-2, so you stuff it with overtime your last year, and you end up retiring with 150% of your annual salary for life. It doesn't even apply to your spouse, too.

But, Sacks, this was the promise—

So it's like, as you—

This was the promise that was given in order to get the votes that have gotten us to the point we're at today. Because that is how the unions operate, right? It is a system that drives political influence by making these sorts of benefits law and brings them to bear.

If the average retirement age is 50 and your lifespan is 80, this is not how it was intended. People used to—

No, JCal—

Get these at 60, and they would die at 68. It was like—

It was meant for a decade or less.

You start working for the state at 22 and you can retire at 42. Actually, what a lot of people do is they'll go and take a second government job, and they'll stack a second pension. But yeah, you could retire at 42 if you stuff it with overtime.

Yes, of course.

You can stuff it with overtime, and I think it applies to your spouse as well. Fact-check me on that.

Wow.

I'm aware of it in New York, where a little bit of this stuffing on the margins does occur, I've heard.

I'm not against police officers, teachers, and people getting reasonable—

You need to do superannuation funds. You have to have people buying into the market over time, and the government shouldn't be managing this. The government is terrible at whatever it does, and there's too much for it to do. Let it stand alone. Take it out. Carve it out.

You're forced to put 12% into this, or your employer puts a little bit into it, and then we'd have a very happy society with more participation in the market. It would solve so many problems.

6. Trump Targets Greenland

Okay, I just want to hit one last topic. Congratulations to Greenland on accepting a very generous offer from President Trump. We welcome you as the 51st state. Maybe that'll be happening any day now.

US officials met with representatives from Denmark and Greenland at the White House on Wednesday to discuss how the US could take control of Greenland. This has been something Trump has been talking about for years. Remember my rule number one of President Trump: He says a lot of things.

"One way or another, we're going to get it," March 4, 2025. "I need it for psychological reasons, to actually own it," he said in 2021. "We're going to do something with Greenland, either the nice way or the more difficult way," January 9, 2026.

Denmark doesn't seem to want to play ball. They say they have a fundamental disagreement about this. That being said, there's only 50,000 people there, and Polymarket has it at a 17% chance that we acquire it, which is significant as a starting point. Fifty thousand people getting $500,000 or $1 million each would probably be a pretty good deal.

It's a very strategic piece of land. If you look at what's happening with the ice caps melting and Russia positioning a lot of its ships up in the Arctic, there's a pretty clean shot going past Greenland to the northeast of America. So maybe you could just talk about why this is—and again, you're not speaking for the administration, and it's not your lane—but why is Greenland so important?

Well, it is becoming more significant from a national security standpoint as that Arctic ice melts and new shipping lanes open up. So it is important on that dimension.

But look, American politicians have wanted to acquire Greenland for a long time. The great Secretary of State William Seward wanted to acquire it. He acquired Alaska, and he wanted to get Greenland, too, but he was unable to make that deal. FDR and Truman were both interested in acquiring Greenland. It didn't work out, obviously.

So this is an old idea that's new again, thanks to President Trump. I think he makes a great point: Why does it belong to the Danes? It's a small country in Europe. It's not part of North America. I think if we can acquire it for national security reasons and resource reasons, we should. I think the odds of him pulling this off are much greater than 17%.

Chamath or Friedberg, do you have any thoughts on the 51st state?

I don't know anything about it.

Yeah.

They don't have to become a state, to be clear. What I mean—

No, no, I know.

They can become a protectorate.

No, that's what he's saying. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, territory. Whatever it is. It could be like a country club, whatever. It's important that we get it and get memberships.

This is a huge piece of real estate in the Western Hemisphere.

Yeah.

It doesn't really make a ton of sense for Denmark to own it. It makes a lot more sense for it to be part of the US.

And?

We're willing to pay for it, and I think that we can make them an offer that they can't refuse.

Absolutely. And it has—

We're going to send Luca Brasi over there.

I thought Luca Brasi… Yeah, you make him an offer he can't refuse. It's got a lot of rare-earth minerals. There's a lot of oil offshore. Their big export now is fish, obviously. But this has lots of potential, Friedberg, in terms of the resources. Why not get it done?

Trump loves real estate. We've got him for another 3 years. I say let President Trump cook. If he wants to buy some other land, I'm here for it. I love building the empire. This is my favorite Trump. Friedberg, do you love this Trump or not?

Yeah, look, the old adage is there's always a deal, there's always a price, except when you're negotiating with a government. So I don't know how that's going to go.

My understanding and my experience is that they do not want a deal. They're not interested. There's a whole bunch of national pride associated with that. You can't break national pride. As we know, as patriots of America, it is very hard to fight national pride.

I don't know if the economics are really going to play out, but security guarantees, maybe other benefits for the great Kingdom of Denmark—there could be a strong alliance and partnership for the United States.

I think it could be important for the US to have a new frontier. Maybe what we can do is send all these progressive socialists—

Hmm.

Off to Greenland to tame this new frontier.

I want to go.

Yeah.

We need that spirit.

Send Mondame there. They get that grit.

We need that spirit of the frontier, of cowboys—

Yeah, send Mamdani. He seems like a very—

He's a resilient, gritty guy. He'll come with his whole crew, the socialist Ro Khanna. Let him set up there. Let's see what they build.

I think the idea of having what's called a freedom province, or freedom state, or freedom city is—

Economic free zone, yeah.

Yeah, and I do think if we are looking down the barrel of socialism in the United States, which I think socially leads to a destruction of individual liberties and a degradation of the social fabric in America, before that happens, it's important that those who are on the other side, before they get overwhelmed with the votes and the elected officials that will fight against them, think about carving out a legal territory.

Before this all happens, it's important to set something up. That legal territory should allow for the resurrection of the great American union, of the great American spirit, and we should find a place within our sphere of influence, before we get overwhelmed, to set something up.

It's called Texas, dude. It's called Texas. Remember the Alamo.

Yeah.

We're making our last stand here.

Absolutely. The 50 calibers are up on the ranch.

Welcome to the sound.

I think it would be helpful to get something that's federally set up, Sacks, that you could have untouchable legislation that says, “This is not to be touched. This is pioneering,” whatever it is. And maybe—

Friedberg, join the militia. We got a militia.

And maybe Greenland is the place, but it's something that feels difficult, something that feels open, something that feels a little bit untouched, and it's regionally encased with a set of legislated things, like Guam or Puerto Rico or something, where you set it up and you're like, “Look, this is untouchable. It takes a big action to change it.” Something where people can have protection against the socialist milieu that's on the way.

Well, it is kind of interesting. As I remember from my high school history, I think the frontier was officially over by 1910. I think that was when every latitude and longitude had been sort of settled.

And that is when the Progressive Era kind of began, and I do wonder whether the frontier was this escape valve for pressure that builds up, resentments that build up in the economy. People could always just go west and become pioneers—

That's right.

—and find new territory.

That's right.

And in a way, that's what America was for Europe, right? Europe was sort of this overcrowded place. It was oppressive, and people just left. They could opt out by going to America and settling in what would become the United States, and I wonder whether maybe we need something like that again—

And by the way, I think the digital frontier—

—as an escape valve for all the discontents—

You're right.

—so they don't become Democratic socialists in America.

And for a while, the digital frontier became that escape valve, but now that's being shut off, and it's being closed down, and the place where it's been run from is being subjugated to the socialists. So the question is, what's next? And I think it's a very good question.

Well, the problem is that the socialists, they're not explorers. They're not pioneers. They don't create anything. They're not builders. What they are is, they're really good at hijacking existing institutions.

Mm-hmm.

And that's what they do. They take things that were created by great people, and they subvert them, and they seize control, and that's what they're going for: total control—

All right.

—first in California and then in Washington. But I do wonder whether the existence of some sort of release valve might defer—

That's right.

—that day, right? Because you get less pressure building up in the system.

Yeah.

All right. Another amazing episode, and just want to give a shout-out. Chamath did an amazing interview with my guy Howard Lutnick. That was fun, huh, yeah, Chamath?

That was awesome. He's awesome.

Yeah. I'm really impressed by him. And Friedberg, on a bit of a heater here, today we dropped an incredible interview with FDA commissioner Marty Makary. Am I pronouncing correctly?

Makary.

Makary. Great job there. And, uh, also, you're, you got to hang out with your childhood hero. We grew up on Howard Stern on the East Coast, but you grew up with Adam Carolla, and you got to interview him. You were fanboying, fangirling a little bit there at the start, weren't you?

Well, it was great. I'd never met him, so it was great to interview him. I mean, he has a lot of interesting ideas.

Yeah.

I got a lot of texts about his, uh, coined term gynofascism, which I think some people took to be offensive.

Explain to the audience what gynofascism—

Well, watch, watch the interview and learn about gynofascism.

Okay, yeah, watch the interview. We don't want to get a... He was great. You had to see the start of this interview, Chamath. Friedberg's like, "Oh, Mr. Carolla, I used to watch you and Dr. Drew, uh, talking on Loveline, and it really was formative in my years as a broadcaster, and now I too am a broadcaster." And he's... It was really cute. It was really cute.

I'm, I never said, "I'm a broadcaster." I would never, ever—

You were like, "Hi, I do a little summer stock."

I would never, I would never degrade myself like that, JCal.

I actually am doing random acts of broadcasting. The sun never sets on the All-In empire. And, uh, I also did a, a fun, uh, CES interview with the CEO of McKinsey, Bob Sternfels, and, uh, Hemant from General Catalyst, and, uh, that's up on the feed. So four. Four. One, two, three, four interview shows waiting for you in your feed. And to the mainstream media trying to keep up with this, GFY. GFY. Good for you. Have fun trying.

Can you guys believe that JCal has been invited to Davos?

Davos.

Yes.

I can't wait to see this.

I'm bringing my acoustic guitar.

I can't wait to see this.

I'm gonna tear it up. We're gonna have fun. Did you guys see me rage-bait Twitter 2 days ago?

What'd you say?

No, what did you do?

I put this thing where—

You showed your legs?

No. Remember when we did the interview at the All-In Summit where Tulsi talked about the Obama documents?

Yeah.

Well, this guy did a rant. I thought the rant was great. But I just retweeted it, and people lost their mind, basically.

For real?

Why?

He was calling for Obama's arrest.

Oh, God.

Oh, gosh.

I said very casually, “Gosh, this is a really underreported story.”

Oh, I saw that one.

Hmm.

I was wondering who that guy was, though. Hmm.

Did Nat make you take it down?

No, it's still up there.

Too late.

Still up, yeah.

Wait, wait. Who is that streamer?

I don't know who he is.

It's some guy saying—

Could be AI.

—Obama's gonna go to jail.

Could be AI. Yeah. I think he said he met Obama.

7. Minnesota Fraud Exposed

Did you guys watch Nick Shirley's new video?

Oh, no.

He goes looking for the transportation companies—

He's gonna get himself killed.

—so check this out. There are these transportation companies; they get $10 million a day in Minnesota.

A day?

A day, for non-emergency medical transportation. So the state will pay if you transport someone who's autistic to Target to get them groceries, 50 bucks a ride. And there's a website where the transportation company gets to log into the website, and they're registered as one of the transportation companies, and they're like, “I took someone from this place to Target.” You fill out all these forms, and then you get a check immediately.

On the trust system?

See, in Minnesota—

It's a trust system?

They never investigate, they don't audit, they don't check anything. So Nick Shirley starts going around looking for the transportation companies, and it's like a liquor store, and he's like, “Where's the transportation company?”

Yeah.

The liquor store guy's like, “There's no transportation here.” It's like a burrito place—

What are we doing, folks?

—or the deli. All of these places are transportation companies. Tens of millions of dollars a week are just being given out. And by the way, this is not a race thing. It does no one any good to cast this as being a Somali thing, and that, I think, is what's getting everyone in trouble.

No, yes.

And by the way, it's what shuts off a lot of people from actually being able to look at the fraud. And it's not about the Somali people; it's about the fact that fraud is allowed by the government, and it's about the fact that the government either is implicit or complicit in this fraud.

And I think that that's what people need to pay attention to, and ignore all of the rantings about what community or what group or who's doing it, and just focus on the fact that the government lets this happen.

If you think about the state of California spending $350 billion a year, and you ask yourself the question, “Are those government agencies and the agents in those agencies doing their job of making sure that there’s no fraud taking place?” there’s no way anyone’s going to raise their hand and say, “Yes, they’re great fiduciaries of taxpayer money.”

That’s what we should all be paying attention to. Get out of the political divide on all this, the racism, and all that, and focus on the fact that the government does this.

All right, everybody, another amazing All In episode. Thanks, thank you for tuning in. Like... Oh, by the way, guys, we hit a million subs on YouTube. They sent me a gorgeous plaque. I'm putting it up in my office. It's amazing.

Wait, what? Where's my—

Yeah, they sent a million plaque. It's great. All the team autographed it and wrote me a really nice note.

Can I say something?

Yeah.

You're welcome.

You're welcome. Chamath would like to say you're welcome.

Chamath said you're welcome.

All right, see you at Davos. Kumbaya, Davos. We'll see you there.