AI Sovereignty Wars, Palantir-Nvidia Deal, SCOTUS Birthright Ruling, Newsom's CA Budget Lie

The episode closed with two major civic topics. First, the Supreme Court’s close ruling on birthright citizenship was parsed: hosts noted the majority opinion (Chief Justice Roberts joined by three liberal justices), Justice Cavanaugh’s invitation to Congress to legislate, and the figure of ~255,000 U.S.-born children a year with non-citizen parents. The panel emphasized the constitutional/textual vs. intentionalist interpretive divide and urged Congressional policy answers for edge cases. Second, the hosts savaged California’s fiscal posture after Governor Newsom touted a roughly $351B balanced budget through 2028: Friedberg supplied detailed numbers (budget grew from $215B in 2019 to ~$355B today; personal income tax receipts $142B of ~$211B revenue; top 1%—~150,000 people—pay ~$70B; public debt ~$1.4T; reported unfunded pension liabilities $664B; projected $40B annual deficits by 2028–29). They criticized accounting moves (debt, temporary brackets made permanent) and new levies (software sales tax ~ $1B/year; health-insurance tax ~ $2B/year), warned of taxpayer pain if migration of high earners and corporate HQs continues (2,100 mid/large firms moved out since 2019; 15 Fortune 500 relocations noted), and predicted political and fiscal turmoil ahead unless corrective reforms occur. Overall, the episode threaded technical, commercial and civic strands — from model weights and on‑prem GPUs to export controls, constitutional law and state finance — with repeated emphasis that control of data, models and compute will be the defining enterprise and national-security issue in the near term.