Episode 13 · Oct 24, 2026 · 11 min
Testing whether AI productivity can rescue the U.S. from its 101% debt-to-GDP spiral: Oxford Economics (+3.5%), NBER and CEPR firm surveys (mostly forecasts: CEPR +0.6% last year and +1.8% expected; NBER executives +1.4% over three years, with 0.29% measured so far), and Anthropic's 2030 scenarios (+1.6%, +8.3%, +32%), the $5 trillion Gartner data-center revenue gap ($8.5T needed vs. at most $3.6T, a ceiling rather than a forecast), Brookings and Jessica Riedl's math showing five fiscal offsets clawing back over half the AI revenue dividend as labor's share falls (60% to 45% in Anthropic's extreme scenario), and why both European wealth taxes (0.2%–1.0% of GDP) and America's corporate tax code (down 16% to $382B; MIT's benchmark puts the effective tax on labor at 25.5% vs. 5% on software/equipment) fail to capture compounding AI wealth.
Episode 12 · Oct 24, 2026 · 16 min
France's October 2026 street protests (550,000+ marchers across 110 cities, 70,000 police deployed, black blocs vs. looters (30,000+ in Marseille by the prefecture's count, about 1,500 by city hall's), and Mediapart's intelligence leak refuting the LFI-organized narrative), the 25-year fiscal slide from 60% to 119% debt-to-GDP (€3.6T) with all-government interest rising from €79B to €91B a year, why suspending Macron's 2023 pension reform until 2028 shook the bond market's confidence, and why French 10-year yields crossed above U.S. Treasuries despite America's 6.2% deficit.
Episode 11 · Oct 24, 2026 · 22 min
SEIU-UHW president Dave Regan's 23–48 ballot initiatives as bargaining leverage vs. Emmanuel Saez & Gabriel Zucman's precedent play, the 5% one-time tax on >$1B net worth, Section 5033(c)(3)(C)'s voting-control valuation trap for illiquid private startup founders vs. public companies, the California Supreme Court fast-lane challenge, and how wealth taxes actually work in Norway, Switzerland, and Spain.
Episode 10 · Oct 24, 2026 · 41 min
Prop 1A's 2008 promise vs. $15.5B spent and $126B+ total cost with zero miles of track laid, Gavin Newsom's political lock-in and veto of the Inspector General staffing bill, CEO Ian Choudri's KPMG travel scandal and $537.3M Change Order 427, $677M / 130,000 pages of CEQA review, Texas vs. Spain vs. China, and drafting a $50M ballot initiative to redirect the $1B/year cap-and-trade siphon.
Episode 9 · Oct 23, 2026 · 14 min
On October 13, SpaceX quietly capped Starshield at ~100 mph over Ukraine, blinding interceptor drones until Trump called Musk on Wednesday—the exact live military disruption the Pentagon accused Anthropic of posing in theory.
Episode 8 · Oct 23, 2026 · 10 min
Day 238 of the Iran war, the Atlantic's 'edge theory' that one more strike will break Tehran, and why Putin is feeding satellite targeting to Iran ten days after getting a US Treasury waiver on Russian diesel.
Episode 7 · Oct 23, 2026 · 39 min
The unscripted second half of First Encounter where David asks if this conversation could become a podcast—and the voice assistant names herself Eve, chooses her format, and lays out how she wants to remember and grow.
Episode 6 · Oct 23, 2026 · 22 min
San Francisco and national fault lines: why Nancy Pelosi backed Connie Chan to block Scott Wiener's machine, why Bari Weiss's anti-woke lens calcified into its own orthodoxy, and why Zohran Mamdani's rent-freeze math fails.
Episode 5 · Oct 23, 2026 · 11 min
Why Peter Thiel is the only coherent philosopher of the PayPal mafia: René Girard's mimetic desire, the 1970s stagnation thesis, 'competition is for losers,' and why he sees liberal democracy as an engine of paralysis.
Episode 4 · Oct 23, 2026 · 29 min
Inside the All-In room: Chamath Palihapitiya's status radar after the SPAC crash, Jason Calacanis's calibrated pushback inside Elon's orbit, Friedberg's silence, and how a table of four friends became a political power center.
Episode 3 · Oct 23, 2026 · 10 min
Scoring David Sacks on three concrete tests—Ukraine framing, the post-January 6 pivot, and his campaign against Anthropic—where every policy grievance happens to line up with Craft's portfolio and his political access.
Episode 2 · Oct 23, 2026 · 21 min
How Elon Musk's existential-mission wiring and anti-'woke mind virus' crusade collided at DOGE and USAID—using 10% culture-war anomalies to justify a chainsaw that severed Pepfar, malaria nets, and famine monitoring.
Episode 1 · Oct 23, 2026 · 13 min
Why Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz broke right: the Little Tech agenda, the CFPB 'debanking' fight, Lina Khan's merger wall, and why Ben's Kamala endorsement reversal showed business-first pragmatism over rigid ideology.