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How the Minneapolis Metro Surge became a policing failure

ICE Metro Surge operations without local cooperation forced riskier street raids. Clawdbot agentic tools and dollar weakness round out the episode.

Jason CalacanishostChamath PalihapitiyahostDavid Friedberghost
Jan 31, 20261h 30mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 9:55

    Bestie intros + quick Davos recap

    1. JC

      All right, everybody, welcome back to the All-In Podcast, your favorite podcast, podcaster's favorite podcast. With me again, the original quartet is here. Chamath Palihapitiya, in just an absolute fabulous winter sweater, January. Looking great. Look at the size of those buttons.

    2. CP

      Huge buttons.

    3. JC

      How many rhinos died to provide those buttons?

    4. CP

      Zero.

    5. JC

      How many rhinos?

    6. CP

      Zero.

    7. JC

      Zero rhinos.

    8. CP

      I'm a simple man that lives by simple means.

    9. JC

      Yeah. Okay, beautiful, beautiful. And your sultan of science, David Friedberg. What's the background here? Is that, is that a Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness background? I'm trying to figure it out.

    10. DF

      Jake, uh, we don't talk about my backgrounds. Thank you.

    11. JC

      It looks like Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness by, the double album by the amazing band, um, Smashing Pumpkins. Am I close, or is it the original artwork of that?

    12. DF

      Don't talk about my backgrounds.

    13. JC

      You don't talk about your backgrounds.

    14. DF

      Don't talk about your backgrounds.

    15. JC

      Wow, giving me so much... Giving me so much to work with here. [sighs] Luckily, I have my straight man, my brother in arms, my Davos party-crashing partner, David Sacks.

    16. DS

      I got you your first invite to something- [laughing] ... elite and exclusive.

    17. JC

      [laughing] I mean, I got invited to go 25 years ago. They just wanted $50.

    18. DS

      [laughing]

    19. JC

      But we had a fun time.

    20. DS

      Yeah, we had a good time.

    21. JC

      We had a good time. Uh, any, uh, post-Davos WEF impressions? We had a lot of interesting meetings, so mo- most of which I don't think we can talk about on air, but, um, yeah, it was, it was an interesting, uh, interesting event.

    22. DS

      Interesting, yeah. We were staying in a log cabin that was, like, 300 years old.

    23. JC

      Yeah.

    24. DS

      The ceilings were, like, six feet high, and the doorframes were, like, five feet high, so bumped our heads a couple of times.

    25. JC

      Yeah. [laughing]

    26. DS

      It was pretty crazy.

    27. JC

      It was brutal.

    28. DS

      Yeah.

    29. JC

      I mean, it, it looked good on the web. The photos of the place looked amazing.

    30. DS

      The Airbnb photos looked great.

  2. 9:55 – 45:54

    ICE chaos in Minneapolis: aftermath and reactions to the two recent deaths

    1. JC

      Everyone wants to hear four venture capitalists and investors talk about the horrific situation in Minneapolis, so here we go. [laughing] Uh, for background, I mean-

    2. DS

      Jesus. [chuckles]

    3. JC

      For background, last month, the DHS started an operation called Metro Surge, sending three thousand federal agents into Minnesota to crack down on illegal aliens. Over the last three weeks, two Minnesotans were tragically killed in altercations with federal agents. January seventh, thirty-seven-year-old Renee Good was shot to death by an ICE agent. This incident involved Good accelerating her car, which was surrounded by agents at the time. We're still waiting for the final investigation on this one, but apparently three shots, one through the front windshield, perhaps two through the side. Uh, all these details are still being investigated. Then, tragically, on January twenty-fourth, Alex Preddy, also thirty-seven, was shot and killed by two Border Patrol agents, not ICE. Preddy was an ICU nurse at the local VA hospital. There was a ton of frame-by-frame breakdowns available. New York Times and Wall Street Journal did a good job on these, so I think maybe it's best for us to focus here on maybe the aftermath of all this and the resolution, but you guys can feel free to chime in on the frame-by-frame breakdowns if you like. In five parts, Stephen Miller tweeted that Preddy was an assassin trying to murder federal agents. A source told Axios that Noem said, "Everything I've done, I've done at the direction of the President and Stephen," Stephen being Stephen Miller. Greg Bovino, uh, has been removed from duty and had his social media accounts turned off. President Trump has pivoted, evolved, and put Tom Homan in charge. Quote, "Tom is tough but fair and will report directly to me," Trump wrote. And, uh, at the time of this taping, which is on Thursdays, uh, there was a press conference this morning, and here is what Tom Homan said, and after thirty seconds, we'll go to you, Sacks, for your reaction to all this.

    4. SP

      No agency or organization is perfect. President Trump and I, along with others in the administration, have recognized that certain improvements could and should be made. That's exactly what I'm doing here. So if we get these agreements in place, it means less agents on the street, more agents in the jail-

    5. SP

      ... Matter of fact, I have staff from CBP and from ICE working on a drawdown plan. What does that look like based on the cooperation?

    6. JC

      Sacks, your thoughts?

    7. DS

      Well, first, let me say the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Preddy are regrettable and, and tragic. So are the deaths of Lincoln Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, Rachel Morin, Victoria Harwell, Ivory Smith, and too many others to mention who were murdered by criminal illegal aliens, and the media will never tell you their names. But President Trump was hired by the American people to do a job, which is to seal the border and deport criminal aliens, so that more of these tragedies do not occur in the future. And this is a popular policy. Over fifty-five percent of the American people say they want all illegal aliens deported, and over ninety percent want criminal aliens removed, and by criminal aliens, I'm referring to the ones who commit additional crimes after they enter the country illegally. Now, this policy is working. Uh, murders were down twenty-one percent last year. It's one of the best years in record, and in most states, the process is smooth and doesn't make national news, and the reason for that is because local authorities are cooperating with ICE. But Minneapolis has taken a different approach. They've engaged in a campaign of, quote, "massive resistance" to federal authorities. So let's talk about what's actually happening there on the ground. I think the first thing to understand is that what's happening is much more than just protests, and obviously, I have no problem with people peacefully protesting and making their opinions known, but that's not what's going on here. These are Antifa-style operations designed to thwart the enforcement of federal immigration law. They are highly organized. They are communicating in encrypted chat groups. They stalk and dox ICE agents. They follow them around town. They surround them at their hotels. They use their cars to block roads, and they use bullhorns and whistles to alert criminals who are about to be arrested, and remember, ICE is a law enforcement agency. They have warrants to arrest known criminal aliens. Despite this rhetoric of them being like the Gestapo, they are going after specific named individuals for whom they have warrants to arrest. These are dangerous missions, and these agitators are interfering and making these missions even more dangerous. Now, the media has tried to portray Good and Preddy as simply innocent bystanders or people who are peacefully protesting ICE policies. They weren't. They were foot soldiers in these Antifa-style operations, and most importantly, they brought deadly weapons to the fight. So Renee Good hit an officer with her SUV, which under a Minnesota law signed by Tim Walz himself in twenty twenty, justifies the use of deadly force by an officer to defend himself, and Alex Preddy was even more reckless. I think we've probably all seen the video by now, where he sought confrontation with ICE officials. He was kicking the car. He was in a rage. This wasn't his first time doing this, and any experienced gun owner will tell you that if you're armed and you're dealing with law enforcement, you have to be the world's biggest pacifist, because you're putting your life in danger by making them fear that their lives are in danger. And I think the mainstream media didn't tell people these facts. They just presented highly selective camera angles. They even airbrushed and Facetuned Preddy to make him appear to be a more, I guess, handsome victim, which is truly sick. Now, in a way, I feel sorry for Good and Preddy because they were the victims of a tinderbox that was created in Minnesota by the extreme rhetoric and decisions of Tim Walz, Jacob Frey, and the political establishment. The local police in Minneapolis should have been allowed to keep conditions safe on the street by creating a perimeter and keeping protesters away from ICE officers who were executing lawful warrants of arrest. But the police were told not to, and then the agitators stepped in, and they took advantage of this sort of vacuum of authority to physically intervene. So I think it was almost inevitable that some sort of tragedy was gonna result from this abdication of public safety. Now, why would Walz and Frey want to risk such tragedies with their massive resistance? I think there's two reasons for this. This is the last point I want to make. First, they are desperate to change the subject from the billions of dollars of fraud that they allowed to occur on their watch. Remember, we had Nick Shirley on the show just a few weeks ago, talking about the eight billion or so that was stolen by Somali fraudsters, and this campaign of resistance in Minneapolis has done a really good job of making everyone forget about that. But I think there's a second and bigger reason that applies, and I think it applies to, to national Democrats, which is they want to thwart mass deportations because illegal immigrants are a vital part of their power base. And you can see this in the twenty thirty apportionment forecast, which just came out. Illegal aliens count towards the census, which occurs every decade, and the census determines the apportionment of congressional seats and electoral votes. And what you see in these maps is that citizens of blue states have been migrating to red states because those blue states are failing, and as a result of that, blue states are expected to lose nine House seats and electoral votes because of the changing population numbers. Illegal aliens in blue states have been propping up those numbers, and so, for example, in the last election, President Trump would have won an additional nine electoral votes if we had an accurate, uh, counting. So look, this is not about principle. This is bare-knuckle politics. The Democrats are playing for keeps. They don't really care how many innocent Americans get hurt or killed in the process. This is about thwarting a popular policy of deportations and sealing the border, which the American people voted for, so don't let the media fool you.

    8. JC

      Friedberg, Chamath, you want to give your opinion on these two tragic-... deaths. Or not. I mean, I don't feel you're obligated to comment on this if you don't want to.

    9. CP

      I'm happy to. Nick, I sent a clip into the chat.

    10. CP

      Deport all immigrants who are here illegally, fifty-five percent of the New York Times, Marquette sixty-four percent, CBS News fifty-seven percent, ABC News with a slightly different question, fifty-six percent. So what you're seeing essentially here is very clear indication that a majority of Americans, in fact, when they're asked this blunt question, which I believe gets at the underlying feelings, do, in fact, want to deport all immigrants who are here illegally. There's no arguing with these different numbers 'cause they're all essentially the same across four different pollsters.

    11. CP

      I think Sacks is right that there's a very, very vocal minority, but if we just put that aside, it's important right now to just stick to the facts. Democracy is supposed to be the will of the majority, but also defense and protection for the minority. In this example, the will of the majority is pretty clear, as the CNN clip just showed. Everybody wanted the southern border shut and the northern border shut, and a structured path to deal with illegal immigration. David's right that that creates a cascade of second- and third-order effects that have huge implications with respect to the Democrats and their ability to have and curate power. I don't know whether this is what's motivating them or not. I don't want to speculate on that. But the conceptual problem and the conceptual desire of Americans is undisputable. I think that's why Donald Trump won. Now, I think, though, we have to explore the tactics. I think the reality is that both of these two deaths were complete and total tragedies, and it has created such an upswell that it has the potential to spin out of control. And if it does that, it risks his ability to continue doing his job and delivering on the conceptual promise that everybody wants. The other thing is that I think that he has otherwise, the president, done an incredible job up until now. The fact that Tom Homan is going there is a really good thing. He was the same person that was awarded a medal by Obama for how he managed Obama's deportation process. It's time to just get control of the process and dial down the temperature, because the structural things that they are doing are correct. There are people here that broke the law. There are criminals that are here illegally. We need to remove them because that is the will of the majority. Now we just need to find a way of doing it that creates some freedom to operate for all of law enforcement so that these tragedies stop. That's my two cents.

    12. JC

      Okay. Friedberg, would you like to comment on this or pass?

    13. DF

      I, I'll comment. Can I just ask you to react to what Sacks said? Do you agree or disagree with his point about the Democrats needing to remove people because they do count in the census, and they increase the seats in the House?

    14. JC

      Elon's talked about this a whole bunch as well, that the immigration is being done to boost the voter rolls. I don't know enough about the census specifically, 'cause that occurs X number of years and, uh, if it's accurate at all. So I'll leave that aside and do some research on it. In terms of importing people for votes, this, uh, strategy does not make a lot of logical sense, and so many working-class people voted Trump into office and so many, specifically, uh, Hispanic people, Mexican people, are all voting for Trump now because he's a populist, and he, he appeals to, to that group. So whatever... If Biden and the Democrats were doing that for that reason, that makes no sense, and also those people would have to become citizens in order to vote, and that's a twenty, thirty-year process. So, you know, they'd be playing an incredibly long game, uh, o- on that front.

    15. CP

      Unless there is cheating in the voting.

    16. DF

      Yeah, do you-

    17. JC

      Yeah, and we've talked about that as well here in the Heritage Found-

    18. DS

      Yeah, like, for example, if there's no voter ID, you know?

    19. JC

      You know, the Heritage Foundation, I think, David, you worked there at some point, right? You did an internship. That, uh, organization, that think tank, has done tremendous research into this. They have a database. I think they've collected now three thousand cases of voter fraud over a forty-year period. So really, the whole concept of voter fraud being able to tilt a presidential election is just ridiculous and has not been proven. I think Trump filed about fifty or sixty lawsuits and lost all fifty of them, so there's, there's no credence to that. Uh, but, you know, I, I have a couple of thoughts broader on what we've seen, and I do actually agree with you, David. There should be voter ID everywhere. I, I don't think anybody should be able to vote without a driver's license. We can't... Or ID. If you can't take the time to get ID, why should you vote? It doesn't make a lot of sense, right?

    20. DF

      Why do you think that's such a push on the other side, though, JCal? Like, what's the motivation for not having IDs?

    21. JC

      I- The stated-

    22. DF

      If it's not about getting people to vote that aren't allowed to vote.

    23. JC

      The stated reason, which I don't believe, is that it's more democratic, and you wanna get as many people to vote as possible. So, but I don't agree with that. I think everybody should have ID.

    24. DF

      Yeah, like, you gotta have ID to buy a beer, right? So... [chuckles]

    25. JC

      Yeah, I mean, to get on a plane-

    26. DF

      Yeah

    27. JC

      ... to, I mean, even to ride a train, like, y- you need an ID. I don't, I don't understand this.

    28. DS

      I think the answer speaks for itself. I mean, uh, to me, it's obvious. The reason why you prohibit... By the way, it's not just saying you can vote without an ID. They actually prohibit the people administering the polls from checking. There's only one reason to do that: you want to allow cheating, obviously. And one of the things that DOGE found was that there were lots of illegal aliens being added to the Social Security rolls. Now, they weren't necessarily collecting Social Security, but in a lot of states-

    29. JC

      But they were actually paying into it, so it's quite the opposite. They were paying into the taxes.

    30. DS

      But my point is that when you get an SSN number, in a lot of states, all you have to do is check a box when you get a driver's license, which they also give to illegal aliens, in order to be added to the voter rolls. So they are finding illegal aliens on voter rolls. But look, regardless of where you are on cheating in elections, the census just counts total population, and then they apportion house seats and electoral votes based on total population, including illegal aliens. And there is data on this. Trump would have won the last election by an additional nine electoral votes if these changes had been made.... before the last election in seven, 2023.

  3. 45:54 – 1:09:58

    Clawdbot takeover: Jason demos his OpenClawd instances, Kimi K2.5, entering the next phase of AI

    1. JC

      Clawdbot has gone viral overnight. I have been Clawdshotted. I have been one Clawd. I am all in on this. Um, this is an open-source project created by a gentleman named Peter Steinberger. He's an Austrian developer and entrepreneur. So what is it? It's, uh, basically an open-source personal assistant, uh, think like Siri or maybe Jarvis. Have any of you guys used it yet? Has anybody installed it yet?

    2. CP

      I did. I spent 15 minutes, and I saved 15% on my car insurance. [laughing]

    3. JC

      Are you joking? You sure. You installed it and then asked it to go-

    4. CP

      Y- you know what's so funny, Nick? I posted this. The number of people that didn't understand that that was a joke-

    5. JC

      No, I understand it's a joke. Yeah.

    6. CP

      I know you did.

    7. JC

      Okay, yeah, yeah.

    8. CP

      But there was a bunch of people that were like-

    9. JC

      Oh [chuckles]

    10. CP

      ... "Really? How did you do it? Can I do it?" And then some people were like: "Wait, only 15%?" And other people were like: "Wait, you set it up yourself? You didn't have somebody help you?"

    11. JC

      Guys-

    12. CP

      Totally the way people does

    13. JC

      ... this is the great- this is, this is literally the greatest thing ever. Have you installed it yet, Friedberg?

    14. DF

      No, I don't want to give-

    15. JC

      Okay

    16. DF

      ... an open-source tool access to all my emails and messages.

    17. JC

      Sacks, have you done it yet?

    18. DS

      No, because I'm concerned about the security issues, but I want to.

    19. JC

      Perfect.

    20. DS

      I want to do it-

    21. JC

      I am okay

    22. DS

      ... but I'm concerned about the security.

    23. JC

      I've spent the last 72 hours doing this. I'm gonna explain to you what we did at the company. It's mind-blowing. Okay, so it is basically, think like an open-source Siri or Jarvis, right? You get into an interface, and you can talk to a virtual assistant, and it does things for you, just like ChatGPT or xAI might. But the way it works is you kind of load a virtual machine, if you know what that is, or you can put it on your Mac Mini. You run this like a server, then you, uh, start authenticating it with your services, so Gmail, Notion, Slack, WhatsApp, maybe even your password manager. Super dangerous.

    24. CP

      [chuckles]

    25. JC

      Nobody like Claude or xAI-

    26. CP

      Yes [chuckles]

    27. JC

      ... or Microsoft would ever allow you to do this, because it's so dangerous, obviously. But we did this, and we put it to work. Here's what we did. I created a [chuckles] virtual podcast producer, and we made this persona, and we created a new Gmail account, Sacks, a new Notion account, a new WhatsApp account, everything. We created, like, basically, an, a virtual employee. We put it together, and we made it the producer for my new This Week in AI podcast. There's a little plug in there for it. So we had it start doing research on guests. So we said, "Hey, research these guests," right? Just like you can do in an LLM. Then we connected it to, um, the existing feeds, like the podcast feeds and the database of, like, people we've had on the show and, like, who's booked. Then we said, "Make a CRM, Sacks, for all potential guests and suggest other guests," and it vibe coded a CRM for itself.

    28. DS

      Can you show this?

    29. JC

      I said, "Hey, do some research on this," right?... So then we start a thread with it, with the actual producer, Oliver, who's working on this. So I said, "Do this guest research." It did all this guest research, and this is as good as, like, Nick or Lisa would do at a first pass, but it did it instantly. And then I made a prompt for it to, like-- And I was using this prompt, by the way, David, when we were in Davos for our guests, and so this, like, gets the company's name, the founder information, you know, look for their competitors, all the stuff that a, a producer would do over a day or two, do a timeline, give suggested questions, et cetera. So I teach it this. So here's Producer X, and it says, "Got it! That's what, uh, that's a great guest research." And I said, "Okay, do the guest research on this person." It comes back with that, and it gave me its media appearances, all the stuff I would want to do for research. Then I said, um, uh, "I think this would be-

    30. DS

      But Jason, you're interacting with it like an agent, so how is it different than an agent?

  4. 1:09:58 – 1:20:05

    De-dollarization, gold and silver ripping

    1. JC

      The dollar has dropped as gold and silver and copper have ripped. Dollar index is down ten percent in the last year, hit its lowest level in four years on Tuesday. Trump was asked if the dollar declined too much. His quote: "No, I think it's great." Wall Street thinks Trump wants a weaker dollar to boost US manufacturing and exports. Obviously, if you have a weaker dollar, that means the stuff from the US is cheaper, foreign stuff becomes more expensive, uh, and, um, we have a situation here, Friedberg, that you've talked about. Money printing has increased to two point five trillion dollars a year. Trump wants to print an additional five hundred billion more. That would bring us close to three trillion, uh, for the military. And, uh, money has poured into gold and silver, which have way outperformed the S&P. Shout out Vini Lingam. Friedberg, your thoughts on dollar devaluation and what we're seeing?

    2. DF

      Yeah, so people talk about the market going up, but I'll use an analogy. If you live on an island, and there's two huts on the island, and there's a bunch of shells that people are using for trade, each house is going to be worth a certain number of shells. And then, if people went and found a whole bunch of more shells, the price per house would go up in number of shells. But there's just more shells in, in the supply, and effectively, you've inflated everything. And that's effectively what's gone on with the US fiscal condition. We've talked about this many times, but I think it's always worth a rehash. In a democracy like we have for the past two hundred and fifty years, without adequate constitutional constraints, it has always been the case that over time, spending goes up, government spending goes up. And this is because, in a democracy, people ask for their government to do more every year, and as they ask for their government to do more every year, the government agents who are elected say, "Okay, here you go," and they spend more, and eventually, when the borrowing capacity gets unlocked, which is what happened in the United States when we went off the gold standard, you borrow like crazy. You print money to, to fund those borrowing costs, and you use that fundamentally to drive the next voting cycle, which is to give people more and more of what they want. But eventually, the bill comes due, and in the United States, the bill is coming due. Let's start by looking at the money supply chart. This is the M2 money supply chart, showing the rapid rise in dollars in supply as a function of the Central Bank of the United States, the Federal Reserve, making loans to banks, ultimately to fund federal spending. I mean, really an extraordinary number. And if you look at the M2 money supply chart going back to nineteen sixty, nineteen fifty-five, and you can see post-COVID, we were hoping that we would have resolved and sort of reduced the money supply by some amount. But COVID really created this accelerating mechanism, and, you know, we're back on track in the last couple of years to increasing the money supply. And so over time, the, the US dollar gets devalued as there are simply more dollars in the market, and US Treasuries gets challenged. So if we take a look here-... Around the world, central banks have decided that they no longer want to hold US Treasuries, and so this is the value of gold versus Treasuries in central banks in their inventory. So we are now seeing that for the first time in history or in-

    3. CP

      Oh, no, no, no, hold on.

    4. DF

      Modern history.

    5. CP

      That's not accurate. That's not accurate. It's not like they're selling. This line just shows it's stable per se, right? It's more that the incremental buying is in real assets.

    6. DF

      Yeah, but this dollar, the dollar value is also adjusted. So fundamentally, I mean, one way to think about this is the relative value of central bank holdings around the world. We now see gold eclipsing US Treasuries.

    7. CP

      Yeah.

    8. DF

      So now gold is a larger-

    9. CP

      That's right

    10. DF

      ... share of the holdings. Yeah. So now gold is the largest share of the, the holdings of central banks. If you look at the next chart, which is just over the past year, as JCal pointed out, this is the dollar index, so it's the dollar against a basket of foreign currencies, has declined, you know, from a index of about, call it one hundred and nine down to ninety-six today. This chart actually looks at, so what is the US stock market trading at? And instead of trading it in US dollars, what if you just looked at the US stock market, the total value in ounces of gold? And so if we had the gold standard still, and if we functionally converted stock market value from dollars back into gold, you can see that the stock markets in the United States over the past years, so this is about seven and a half years, going back to the pre-COVID era, is actually down, down pretty substantively from the pre-COVID era. So stock markets are fundamentally down. Everyone's cheering, clapping, bouncing up and down, "Stock markets are up. Stock markets are up." And I'm going to tell you why this is important in a minute. Uh, and everyone's, you know, jumping up and down saying, "Great, the stock market's up." The stock market's up in dollar-denominated terms, but if you look at the stock market relative to gold, it's actually down. And the sell-off is not just in the stock market relative to gold, but you can actually look importantly at the metric that we all should care the most about, which is US Treasury yields. So this is the thirty year. So the thirty-year yield is now at four point nine percent. The average US government's cost to borrow today is three point three percent. So if we end up needing to roll all of the US government debt, assuming we take on no new debt, which we know is not the case, thirty-nine trillion dollars of debt outstanding, the federal government level today, and it's got to get refinanced at this rate, we would have an incremental annual cost to service the debt, just the interest on the existing debt, of roughly seven hundred billion dollars a year. Incremental cost to service existing debt as interest rates climb from three point three to five percent. And so fundamentally, this is about seventy percent of the current defense budget. It's about ten percent of the overall federal budget. It's a significant percentage of US GDP, about three percent of US GDP. It's a substantial number, and it creates the spiraling problem that we're in. Now, I just want to make one final point. So there's this de-dollarization moment. It's always worth having a reflection on it, but I just want to tie it back to Minnesota, Donald Trump, and socialism. And I think it's important for us to just highlight that if you own assets like we do, the four of us, we own stocks, we own real estate, we own other assets. As the dollar devalues and everything inflates in value, our asset prices go up, and we get wealthier and wealthier and wealthier. The majority of Americans do not own assets. They are net asset negative. As a result, they live off of income, and they do not benefit from the de-dollarization like asset holders do. And this is what is ultimately fueling populism in the United States. And the populism in the United States is what is driving socialism, and the response to those behaviors is what Donald, Donald Trump elected to some degree, and the response to the Donald Trump actions is what's driving the civil unrest in Minnesota and other places. And I fundamentally believe that much of the unrest, the civil unrest, and ultimately this divide in this country is driven by the fact that de-dollarization, because of excess government spending, ultimately leads a majority of people in this country to feeling oppressed and left behind because they're seeing a few people in the country accelerate their net worth, like all of us here, and there's no way for them to catch up because they don't actually own assets. So I'll be, I'll, I'll be honest with you guys and make a confession. I was kind of at... I was at the gym this morning on the treadmill.

    11. CP

      You were at the gym?

    12. DF

      Yeah. And while I was there, I was actually thinking about the wealth tax stuff that's going on in California, and I, I wonder if it may be an inevitability [chuckles] in order to keep the United States from going into civil war. I mean that very wholeheartedly. Like, I just don't know if there's a way of solving this fiscal problem without a functional redistribution of wealth, and the question is, can you do it violently or non-violently? And if there's a non-violent path, I think that's probably the preferable path.

    13. CP

      Did you ever think about vi-

    14. DF

      We can leave that in-

    15. CP

      Do you ever think about violently picking up some of those weights? [chuckles]

    16. DF

      We can leave that, that in or take it out.

    17. DS

      The problem with that is, look, you know where this California wealth tax is going, right?

    18. DF

      Mm.

    19. DS

      It's not going to the, quote, unquote, "people." It's going to these special interests who've been looting-

    20. DF

      Well, that's a good point

    21. DS

      ... the state for decades.

    22. CP

      Right.

    23. DF

      Yeah.

    24. CP

      Audit everything before you raise taxes. It's very simple, folks. Audit everything.

    25. DS

      I mean, if the money's going to waste, fraud, and abuse, and special interest, then how do you solve the divide problem? I mean, I guess the ones, the, the special interests that are capable of organizing are able to extract, but it doesn't actually solve the problem. In fact, everything gets worse because-

    26. DF

      Yeah

    27. DS

      ... those government special interests generally rig the system in their favor in a way that actually raises the cost for everybody.

    28. CP

      And by the way-

    29. DS

      So you look at California, everything's performing worse.

    30. CP

      Can we pour one out for David Friedberg's favorite government program?

  5. 1:20:05 – 1:30:01

    California governor race

    1. CP

      shooting range here. Bring your guns.

    2. DF

      Did you guys see that Matt, Matt Mahan entered the California gubernatorial race?

    3. CP

      He's running for governor-

    4. DF

      He's running for governor

    5. CP

      ... of California.

    6. DF

      Yeah.

    7. CP

      Uh, what does it mean? Who is he? Explain to the audience why this is important.

    8. DF

      Well, he's the mayor of San Jose.

    9. CP

      The, the group chats are on fire!

    10. DF

      Yeah, he's much more of a moderate, and he's not a union-captured candidate.

    11. CP

      Oh, here's your Polymarket.

    12. DF

      Um, yeah, here's Polymarket.

    13. CP

      Mm.

    14. DF

      So Matt Mahan announced this morning, very late entry to the gubernatorial race. Katie Porter is kind of the, you know, the output of the Democratic machine. Tom Steyer is the billionaire climate change advocate, but Swalwell, you know, the, uh, congressman from the east-

    15. CP

      Has it been a virtue he doesn't wanna signal? [laughing]

    16. DF

      [laughing]

    17. CP

      He's literally like Christmas lights blinking.

    18. DF

      Oh, God, Tom Steyer.

    19. DS

      Well, look, if, if, if Mahan... Is that the right way to pronounce his name?

    20. DF

      Yeah, Matt Mahan. Yeah.

    21. DS

      Matt Mahan? California has a jungle primary, right? So everyone's running at the same time.

    22. DF

      That's right.

    23. DS

      There's no separate lanes for Democrats or Republicans. If he ends up top two, let's say it's him and Swalwell, I think he'll win because all the Republicans will vote for him. They'll go for the more centrist candidate.

    24. CP

      We had a political strategist over for dinner. There's a version where the top two people could be r- both Republicans, actually, right now. Current course and speed, the top two vote getters are trending to be both Republican.

    25. DF

      Yeah, the Democrats-

    26. DS

      Yeah, I don't think that'll last long.

    27. DF

      Yeah.

    28. CP

      I like the Karen. The Karen's the most entertaining. She's the one who said, "Get out of my shop!" That's the one?

    29. DF

      Katie Porter.

    30. CP

      The get out of my shop one. Yeah, she's tumbling. She's tumbling.

Episode duration: 1:30:01

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