There's no country on earth that does hype better than America. It's one of the most appealing aspects about being here. People are genuinely excited about the future and never stop searching for better ways to work, live, entertain, and profit. There's a unique critical mass in the US accelerating and celebrating tomorrow. The contrast to Europe couldn't be greater. Most Europeans are allergic to anything that even smells like a commercial promise of a better tomorrow. "Hype" is universally used as a term to ridicule anyone who dares to be excited about something new, something different. Only a fool would believe that real progress is possible! This is cultural bedrock. The fault lines have been settling for generations. It'll take an earthquake to move them. You see this in AI, you saw it in the Internet. Europeans are just as smart, just as inventive as their American brethren, but they don't do hype, so they're rarely the ones able to sell the sizzle that public opinion requires to shift its vision for tomorrow.  To say I have a complicated relationship with venture capital is putting it mildly. I've spent a career proving the counter narrative. Proving that you can build and bootstrap an incredible business without investor money, still leave a dent in the universe, while enjoying the spoils of capitalism. And yet... I must admit that the excesses of venture capital are integral to this uniquely American advantage on hype. The lavish overspending during the dot-com boom led directly to a spectacular bust, but it also built the foundation of the internet we all enjoy today. Pets.com and Webvan flamed out such that Amazon and Shopify could transform ecommerce out of the ashes. We're in the thick of peak hype on AI right now. Fantastical sums are chasing AGI along with every dumb derivative mirage along the way. The most outrageous claims are being put forth on the daily. It's easy to look at that spectacle with European eyes and roll them. Some of it is pretty cringe! But I think that would be a mistake. You don't have to throw away your critical reasoning to accept that in the face of unknown potential, optimism beats pessimism. We all have to believe in something, and you're much better off believing that things can get better than not.  Americans fundamentally believe this. They believe the hype, so they make it come to fruition. Not every time, not all of them, but more of them, more of the time than any other country in the world. That really is exceptional.

According to Statcounter, Linux has claimed 5% market share of desktop computing in the US. That's double of where it was just three years ago! Really impressive. Windows is still dominant at 63%, and Apple sit at 26%. But for the latter, it's quite a drop from their peak of 33% in June 2023. These are just browser stats, though (even if it's backed up by directionally-similar numbers from Cloudflare). There's undoubtedly some variability in the numbers, by the season, and by what lives in the relatively large 4% mystery box of "other". But there's no denying that Linux is trending in the right direction in the US. As a Dane, though, I find it sad that Denmark is once again a laggard when it comes to adoption. Windows is even more dominant there at almost 70% (with Apple at 15%). Linux is just under 2%. Interestingly, though, ChromeOS, which is basically a locked-down Linux distribution, is at almost 5%. I guess I really shouldn't be disappointed because this is how it always was. It was a big reason why I moved to the US back in 2005. When Ruby on Rails was taking off, it was in America first and foremost. Danish companies were too conservative, too complacent, too married to Microsoft to really pay attention. There are early indications that a willingness to change this laggard mentality might be sprouting, but we've yet to see any evidence that a shift has actually taken hold yet. It's hard to change culture! So while the Danes continue to fiddle, the Americans continue to push forward. Linux is on the up and up!

When I drive the 24 Hours of Le Mans, I spend a total of about 6-9 hours in the car, divided into stints of roughly two hours at a time. It's intense. But talking with Lex Fridman in Austin on his podcast? Over six hours straight! We only interrupted the session for five minutes total to take three bathroom breaks. All that endurance training has clearly paid off! But the magic of a good conversation, like the magic of driving at Le Mans, is that time flies by. Those six hours felt more like sixty minutes. This is what flow does: it compresses the moment. Besides, we had plenty to talk about. Lex prepares like no other podcast I've ever been on. Pages and pages of notes. Deep questions, endless attention for tangents. We covered the beauty of Ruby for half an hour alone! But also the future of AI, small teams, why we left the cloud, Elon Musk, fatherhood, money and happiness, and a million other topics (which Lex mercifully timestamps, so listeners without six hours to spare can hop around). It was a privilege to appear. If you're interested, the conversation is on YouTube, on Spotify, on X, and as a regular podcast.

I've never seen so many developers curious about leaving the Mac and giving Linux a go. Something has really changed in the last few years. Maybe Linux just got better? Maybe powerful mini PCs made it easier? Maybe Apple just fumbled their relationship with developers one too many times? Maybe it's all of it. But whatever the reason, the vibe shift is noticeable. This is why the future is so hard to predict! People have been joking about "The Year of Linux on the Desktop" since the late 90s. Just like self-driving cars were supposed to be a thing back in 2017. And now, in the year of our Lord 2025, it seems like we're getting both! I also wouldn't underestimate the cultural influence of a few key people. PewDiePie sharing his journey into Arch and Hyprland with his 110 million followers is important. ThePrimeagen moving to Arch and Hyprland is important. Typecraft teaching beginners how to build an Arch and Hyprland setup from scratch is important (and who I just spoke to about Omarchy). Gabe Newell's Steam Deck being built on Arch and pushing Proton to over 20,000 compatible Linux games is important. You'll notice a trend here, which is that Arch Linux, a notoriously "difficult" distribution, is at the center of much of this new engagement. Despite the fact that it's been around since 2003! There's nothing new about Arch, but there's something new about the circles of people it's engaging. I've put Arch at the center of Omarchy too. Originally just because that was what Hyprland recommended. Then, after living with the wonders of 90,000+ packages on the community-driven AUR package repository, for its own sake. It's really good! But while Arch (and Hyprland) are having a moment amongst a new crowd, it's also "just" Linux at its core. And Linux really is the star of the show. The perfect, free, and open alternative that was just sitting around waiting for developers to finally have had enough of the commercial offerings from Apple and Microsoft. Now obviously there's a taste of "new vegan sees vegans everywhere" here. You start talking about Linux, and you'll hear from folks already in the community or those considering the move too. It's easy to confuse what you'd like to be true with what is actually true. And it's definitely true that Linux is still a niche operating system on the desktop. Even among developers. Apple and Microsoft sit on the lion's share of the market share. But the mind share? They've been losing that fast. The window is open for a major shift to happen. First gradually, then suddenly. It feels like morning in Linux land!

Consent morality is the idea that there are no higher values or virtues than allowing consenting adults to do whatever they please. As long as they're not hurting anyone, it's all good, and whoever might have a problem with that is by definition a bigot.  This was the overriding morality I picked up as a child of the 90s. From TV, movies, music, and popular culture. Fly your freak! Whatever feels right is right! It doesn't seem like much has changed since then. What a moral dead end. I first heard the term consent morality as part of Louise Perry's critique of the sexual revolution. That in the context of hook-up culture, situationships, and falling birthrates, we have to wrestle with the fact that the sexual revolution — and it's insistence that, say, a sky-high body count mustn't be taboo — has led society to screwy dating market in the internet age that few people are actually happy with. But the application of consent morality that I actually find even more troubling is towards parenthood. As is widely acknowledged now, we're in a bit of a birthrate crisis all over the world. And I think consent morality can help explain part of it. I was reminded of this when I posted a cute video of a young girl so over-the-moon excited for her dad getting off work to argue that you'd be crazy to trade that for some nebulous concept of "personal freedom". Predictably, consent morality immediately appeared in the comments: Some people just don't want children and that's TOTALLY OKAY and you're actually bad for suggesting they should! No. It's the role of a well-functioning culture to guide people towards The Good Life. Not force, but guide. Nobody wants to be convinced by the morality police at the pointy end of a bayonet, but giving up on the whole idea of objective higher values and virtues is a nihilistic and cowardly alternative. Humans are deeply mimetic creatures. It's imperative that we celebrate what's good, true, and beautiful, such that these ideals become collective markers for morality. Such that they guide behavior. I don't think we've done a good job at doing that with parenthood in the last thirty-plus years. In fact, I'd argue we've done just about everything to undermine the cultural appeal of the simple yet divine satisfaction of child rearing (and by extension maligned the square family unit with mom, dad, and a few kids). Partly out of a coordinated campaign against the family unit as some sort of trad (possibly fascist!) identity marker in a long-waged culture war, but perhaps just as much out of the banal denigration of how boring and limiting it must be to carry such simple burdens as being a father or a mother in modern society. It's no wonder that if you incessantly focus on how expensive it is, how little sleep you get, how terrifying the responsibility is, and how much stress is involved with parenthood that it doesn't seem all that appealing! This is where Jordan Peterson does his best work. In advocating for the deeper meaning of embracing burden and responsibility. In diagnosing that much of our modern malaise does not come from carrying too much, but from carrying too little. That a myopic focus on personal freedom — the nights out, the "me time", the money saved — is a spiritual mirage: You think you want the paradise of nothing ever being asked of you, but it turns out to be the hell of nobody ever needing you. Whatever the cause, I think part of the cure is for our culture to reembrace the virtue and the value of parenthood without reservation. To stop centering the margins and their pathologies. To start centering the overwhelming middle where most people make for good parents, and will come to see that role as the most meaningful part they've played in their time on this planet. But this requires giving up on consent morality as the only way to find our path to The Good Life. It involves taking a moral stance that some ways of living are better than other ways of living for the broad many. That parenthood is good, that we need more children both for the literal survival of civilization, but also for the collective motivation to guard against the bad, the false, and the ugly. There's more to life than what you feel like doing in the moment. The worst thing in the world is not to have others ask more of you. Giving up on the total freedom of the unmoored life is a small price to pay for finding the deeper meaning in a tethered relationship with continuing a bloodline that's been drawn for hundreds of thousands of years before it came to you. You're never going to be "ready" before you take the leap. If you keep waiting, you'll wait until the window has closed, and all you see is regret. Summon a bit of bravery, don't overthink it, and do your part for the future of the world. It's 2.1 or bust, baby!