New SEC Chair, Bitcoin, xAI Supercomputer, UnitedHealth CEO murder, with Gavin Baker & Joe Lonsdale

Baker and Lonsdale argue the U.S. is like late‑Ballmer Microsoft: structurally advantaged but mismanaged, with layers of counterproductive regulation preventing infrastructure build‑out (rural broadband, EV chargers) and energy expansion. Lonsdale calls for automatic sunsets and data‑driven renewal for regulations, plus reintroducing rigorous civil‑service testing and accountability to reverse decades of bureaucratic decay. Friedberg ties this to the debt ‘death spiral’: you can’t fix the arithmetic without materially raising GDP growth while restraining deficits.

Friedberg emphasizes China’s planned jump in electricity capacity (roughly 2 to 8 TW vs. 1 to 2 TW in the U.S.) and links cheap power directly to middle‑class prosperity, industrial competitiveness, and AI scaling. Lonsdale and Baker call nuclear the most practical, green baseload option available now, arguing U.S. regulatory barriers—not physics or know‑how—are the main bottleneck. They see rapid nuclear build‑out as essential to avoid ceding manufacturing and AI leadership to China.

Lonsdale, who knows Atkins personally, describes him as fair, rule‑respecting, and innovation‑friendly, in sharp contrast to Gary Gensler’s adversarial ‘gotcha’ enforcement. Baker highlights a 2007 Atkins speech criticizing raising accreditation thresholds, arguing it locks ‘non‑rich’ investors out of upside while protecting them only from downside. While Friedberg defends the SEC as one of the few competent agencies and warns about retail fraud in opaque private markets, others suggest sophistication tests (not wealth tests) and better‑defined rules as a way to expand access without unleashing scams.

Friedberg distinguishes Bitcoin from the broader ‘crypto’ space, casting BTC as digital gold and a safe‑haven asset that ultimately could pressure the U.S. dollar, especially if U.S. deficits remain uncontrolled. He notes the irony of Trump vowing 100% tariffs on BRICS currency experiments while simultaneously celebrating Bitcoin’s rise. Lonsdale argues BRICS currency coordination is an authoritarian threat that should be opposed, whereas Bitcoin is a pro‑liberty check on state overreach. Baker ultimately believes BRICS won’t displace the dollar, but Bitcoin eventually might become a serious competitor, forcing better policy discipline.

Baker explains that no one in the industry believed more than ~30k NVIDIA H100 GPUs could be made coherent (each GPU effectively ‘knowing’ what the others are doing) given current networking limits. By redesigning the data‑center architecture from first principles, xAI reportedly made ~100k H100s coherent in Memphis, with plans for 200k and eventually ~1M GPUs. Grok‑3, now training on this cluster, will provide the first real new data point on whether training‑time scaling laws still hold beyond GPT‑4‑class systems; if they do, Baker expects Grok‑3 to become state‑of‑the‑art and potentially overtake OpenAI’s models.