If the upcoming French election doesn’t scare you, you’re in for a shock.

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.

While bond market dooming is in vogue, the reality is most of the US yield move has come in response to stronger than expected economic surprises. A dynamic that could easily reverse given how high forward expectations have become. h/t @thedailyshot

Balkans this week: 🇽🇰 Kosovo elected first Catholic President 🇷🇸 Serbia got first Lesbian President 🇧🇦 Bosnia elected 3 Presidents (2 female) 🇦🇱 Albanian capital Tirana’s mayor will run the city as an AI avatar from prison

Yes. I’ve seen footage from one of the factories doing this in South America. It looks like a slaughter house.

I think we have to admit to ourselves at this point that AI writing is generally very appealing to people who haven't been exposed to a ton of it: they prefer it to human writing and react super positively on exposure.

EXCLUSIVE: AI actress Tilly Norwood glitches and starts speaking CHINESE during her interview with Piers Morgan and real-life actor Tom Conti... Watch the full interview at 7pm (BST)👇 📺 youtube.com/piersmorganuncen… @piersmorgan | @TillyNorwoodX

Market sniffing out a debt spiral. France has no growth while the rest of Europe runs hot enough to force the ECB into raising rates. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out what that does to the fiscal arithmetic...

Thank you. This was a terrific interview, glad I could explain my thesis that Europe in 2026 is Japan in 2012: only massive devaluation will save Europe, and it will be more painful than Japan's beautiful de-leveraging!

JPMorgan’s commodities team: “For the first time since the start of the Iran conflict, we don’t have a baseline view. We simply don’t know how to model the endgame.”

Once humans developed agriculture and political systems capable of organizing societies at scale, we broke free of the natural constraints that had shaped human evolution for millions of years. From that point on, the selection pressures driving human evolution have been largely social constructs — communally constructed institutions, cultural norms, and social practices that shape behavior and determine who is rewarded, who thrives, and ultimately who reproduces. The more likely existential consequence of AI is not that it "kills everyone" but that it reshapes these selection pressures and, through them, who we become by shifting agency from humans to machines. This is already happening. AI is rewriting the cultural artifacts through which we form desires, identities, and expectations. And given the trajectory of progress in genomic science and gene editing, this selective pressure could begin acting on humanity at a speed that evolution by natural selection never could. Putting aside the more acute risks of misalignment that could lead to discrete, catastrophic outcomes, the more likely result of superintelligence seems to be artificial selection or outright reengineering of the human genome and all forms of organic life.

Everyone on here is so insanely hyper charged on their various AI predictions, and there’s so much niche factionalism going on, but if you’re able set that aside, I thought this was kind of an interesting conversation. (I only watched about a third of it)

FRENCH GOVERNMENT PREDICTS 2026 BUDGET DEFICIT WILL EXCEED 5% GOAL.