I asked my German friend if he knew the square root of 81. He said no.

Fun fact: Not a single mosque was damaged during the riots in France

On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders. And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap. I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece. A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable. Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000. At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation. At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product. Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved. At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper. B. The mechanism: why it's systematic. When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient. In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work. The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in. C. Suffering demands a culprit. A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second. But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat. And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world? D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain. Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem. Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit? No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time. E. One lens, a thousand causes. And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them. F. The perfect inversion. Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second. It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene. G. The ballot box confirms it. In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease. In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state. H. The way out. These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target. The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture. That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.

The great pumpkin escape! 🎃💨 A giant inflatable pumpkin made a run for it in Cary, North Carolina, just outside Raleigh, as strong winds from Isaias sent it rolling away. And yes, the pumpkin made it back home!

To every single Democrat complaining about the investigation into Ilhan Omar… Here is Ilhan herself: “Please investigate all you want." That’s exactly what the DOJ and DHS are doing.

AT&T CEO: Starlink Mobile won’t be able to penetrate walls. SpaceX: We’ve acquired 800 MHz spectrum, which will allow Starlink Mobile to provide better indoor coverage, including signals that can penetrate walls and other obstacles. People are underestimating Starlink Mobile.

In 1984, a German correspondent in Paris shared his unusual advice for safely crossing the chaotic Place de la Concorde: “Walk in a steady pace and never look at the drivers, then they’ll think you need to stop for them”. This classic 1984 archival clip shows a German correspondent in Paris demonstrating his surprisingly simple strategy for surviving the notoriously chaotic Place de la Concorde. Walking confidently into the stream of traffic, he keeps a steady pace and deliberately avoids looking at the drivers, believing that hesitation would only make the crossing more difficult. Surrounded by vintage cars, buses, and nonstop traffic, the journalist calmly makes his way across as if it were completely routine. Decades later, the clip remains both hilarious and fascinating—a memorable glimpse of 1980s Paris and a lesson in how confidence and body language could apparently go a long way when navigating its streets.

Perhaps sky high city (and state taxes), insane real estate taxes passed through on rental rates, punishing regulation and a mayor who has surrounded himself with overt terror supporters, Israel bashers and who disparages business builders has also contributed to the decline in jobs (along with a mass exodus of these cities too tax payers). The reduction of these job opportunities, as evidence by the expansions of Goldman, JP Morgan and Citadel, started long before the impact of AI. These are the very jobs that our financial institution can easily relocate to more business friendly cities and states. Chag Sameach in this Simchat Torah and Sukkot.

🚨EXCLUSIVE: Delta's new ad just dropped.

🚨 BREAKING: Ken Griffin is donating $2 BILLION to launch a Carnegie Mellon University campus in Miami.. the largest individual gift to higher education in U.S. history. The new 35-acre campus will be located in Wynwood and focus on computer science, AI, robotics, technology and innovation. This is a MASSIVE win for Miami’s evolution into a global tech and innovation hub.

Grok 4.7 is now on Amazon Bedrock