The first time we had to evacuate Malibu this season was during the Franklin fire in early December. We went to bed with our bags packed, thinking they'd probably get it under control. But by 2am, the roaring blades of fire choppers shaking the house got us up. As we sped down the canyon towards Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), the fire had reached the ridge across from ours, and flames were blazing large out the car windows. It felt like we had left the evacuation a little too late, but they eventually did get Franklin under control before it reached us. Humans have a strange relationship with risk and disasters. We're so prone to wishful thinking and bad pattern matching. I remember people being shocked when the flames jumped the PCH during the Woolsey fire in 2017. IT HAD NEVER DONE THAT! So several friends of ours had to suddenly escape a nightmare scenario, driving through burning streets, in heavy smoke, with literally their lives on the line. Because the past had failed to predict the future. I feel into that same trap for a moment with the dramatic proclamations of wind and fire weather in the days leading up to January 7. Warning after warning of "extremely dangerous, life-threatening wind" coming from the City of Malibu, and that overly-bureaucratic-but-still-ominous "Particularly Dangerous Situation" designation. Because, really, how much worse could it be? Turns out, a lot. It was a little before noon on the 7th when we first saw the big plumes of smoke rise from the Palisades fire. And immediately the pattern matching ran astray. Oh, it's probably just like Franklin. It's not big yet, they'll get it out. They usually do. Well, they didn't. By the late afternoon, we had once more packed our bags, and by then it was also clear that things actually were different this time. Different worse. Different enough that even Santa Monica didn't feel like it was assured to be safe. So we headed far North, to be sure that we wouldn't have to evacuate again. Turned out to be a good move. Because by now, into the evening, few people in the connected world hadn't started to see the catastrophic images emerging from the Palisades and Eaton fires. Well over 10,000 houses would ultimately burn. Entire neighborhoods leveled. Pictures that could be mistaken for World War II. Utter and complete destruction. By the night of the 7th, the fire reached our canyon, and it tore through the chaparral and brush that'd been building since the last big fire that area saw in 1993. Out of some 150 houses in our immediate vicinity, nearly a hundred burned to the ground. Including the first house we moved to in Malibu back in 2009. But thankfully not ours. That's of course a huge relief. This was and is our Malibu Dream House. The site of that gorgeous home office I'm so fond to share views from. Our home. But a house left standing in a disaster zone is still a disaster. The flames reached all the way up to the base of our construction, incinerated much of our landscaping, and devoured the power poles around it to dysfunction. We have burnt-out buildings every which way the eye looks. The national guard is still stationed at road blocks on the access roads. Utility workers are tearing down the entire power grid to rebuild it from scratch. It's going to be a long time before this is comfortably habitable again. So we left. That in itself feels like defeat. There's an urge to stay put, and to help, in whatever helpless ways you can. But with three school-age children who've already missed over a months worth of learning from power outages, fire threats, actual fires, and now mudslide dangers, it was time to go. None of this came as a surprise, mind you. After Woolsey in 2017, Malibu life always felt like living on borrowed time to us. We knew it, even accepted it. Beautiful enough to be worth the risk, we said.  But even if it wasn't a surprise, it's still a shock. The sheer devastation, especially in the Palisades, went far beyond our normal range of comprehension. Bounded, as it always is, by past experiences. Thus, we find ourselves back in Copenhagen. A safe haven for calamities of all sorts. We lived here for three years during the pandemic, so it just made sense to use it for refuge once more. The kids' old international school accepted them right back in, and past friendships were quickly rebooted. I don't know how long it's going to be this time. And that's an odd feeling to have, just as America has been turning a corner, and just as the optimism is back in so many areas. Of the twenty years I've spent in America, this feels like the most exciting time to be part of the exceptionalism that the US of A offers. And of course we still are. I'll still be in the US all the time on both business, racing, and family trips. But it won't be exclusively so for a while, and it won't be from our Malibu Dream House. And that burns.

Americans often laugh when they see how often Danes will patiently, obediently wait on the little red man to turn green before crossing an empty intersection, in the rain, even at night. Nobody is coming! Why don't you just cross?! It seems silly, but the underlying philosophy is anything but. It's load bearing for a civil society like Denmark. Because doing the right thing every time can be put on autopilot, and when most people follow even the basic norms consistently, the second-order effects are profound. Like the fact that Copenhagen is one of the absolute safest major cities in the world. But the Danes also know that norms fray if they're not enforced, so they vigorously pursue even small infractions. The Danish police regularly celebrating ticketing bicyclists making even minor mistakes (like driving instead of dragging their bike on the sidewalk). And the metro is constantly being patrolled for fare evaders and antisocial behavior. It's broken windows theory on steroids. And it works. When we were living in the city for three years following the pandemic, the most startling difference to major US cities was the prevalence of unattended children everywhere, at all hours. Our oldest was just nine years-old when he started taking the metro alone, even at night. How many American parents would feel comfortable letting their nine-year old take the L in Chicago or the subway in Manhattan? I don't know any. And as a result, you just don't see any unattended children do this. But in Copenhagen it's completely common place. This is the prize of having little tolerance for antisocial behavior in the public space. When you take away the freedom from crackheads and bums to smoke up on the train or sleep in the park, you grant the freedom to nine-year olds to roam the city and for families to enjoy the park at dusk. This is the fundamental error of suicidal empathy. That tolerance of the deranged and dangerous few can be kept a separate discussion from the freedom and safety of the many. These are oppositional forces. The more antisocial behavior you excuse, the further families will retract into their protective shell. And suddenly there are no longer children around in the public city space or any appetite for public transit. Maybe you have to become a parent to really understand this. I admit that I didn't give this nearly the same attention before coming a father of three. But the benefit isn't exclusively about the freedom and safety enjoyed by your own family, it's also about the ambient atmosphere of living in a city where children are everywhere. It's a special form of life-affirming luxury, and it's probably the thing I've missed most about Copenhagen since we went back to the US. What's interesting is how much active effort it takes to maintain this state of affairs. The veneer of civil society is surprisingly thin. Norms fray quickly if left unguarded. And it's much harder to reestablish their purchase on society than to protect them from disappearing in the first place. But I also get that it's hard to connect the dots from afar, though. Many liberals in America keep Denmark as some mythical place where all their policy dreams have come true, without ever wrestling much with what it takes to maintain the social trust that allows those policies to enjoy public support. The progressive Nirvana of Denmark is built on a highly conservative set of norms and traditions. It's ying and yang. So if you're committed to those progressive outcomes in America, whether it's the paternity leave, the independent children, or the amazing public transit system, you ought to consider what conservative values it makes sense to accept as enablers rather than obstacles.

Trump is back at the helm of the United States, and the majority of Americans are optimistic about the prospect. Especially the young. In a poll by CBS News, it's the 18-29 demographic that's most excited, with a whopping two-thirds answering in the affirmative to being optimistic about the next four years under Trump. And I'm right there with them. The current American optimism is infectious! While Trump has undoubtedly been the catalyst, this is a bigger shift than any one person. After spending so long lost in the wilderness of excessive self-criticism and self-loathing, there's finally a broad coalition of the willing working to get the mojo back. This is what's so exhilarating about America. The big, dramatic swings. The high stakes. The long shots. And I like this country much better when it's confident in that inherent national character. Of course all this is political. And of course Trump is triggering for many. Just like his opponent would have been if she had won. But this moment is not just political, it's beyond that. It's economic, it's entrepreneurial, it's technological. Optimism is infectious. As someone with a foot on both the American and European continent, I can't help being jealous with my euro leg. Europe is stuck with monumental levels of pessimism at the moment, and it's really sad to see. But my hope is that Europe, like usual, is merely a few years behind the American revival in optimism. That it's coming to the old world eventually. This is far more an article of faith than of analysis, mind you. I can also well imagine Europe sticking with Eurocrat thinking, spinning its wheels with grand but empty proclamations, issuing scorning but impotent admonishments of America, and doubling down on the regulatory black hole. Neither path is given. Europe was competitive with America on many economic terms as recently as 15 years ago. But Europe also lacks the ability to change course quite like the Americans. So the crystal ball is blurry. Personally, I choose faith. Optimism must win. Pessimism is literally for losers.

For decades, the debate in Denmark around  problems with mass immigration was stuck in a self-loathing blame game of "failed integration". That somehow, if the Danes had just tried harder, been less prejudice, offered more opportunities, the many foreigners with radically different cultures would have been able to integrate successfully. If not in the first generation, then the second. For much of this time, I thought that was a reasonable thesis. But reality has proved it wrong. If literally every country in Europe has struggled in the same ways, and for decades on end, to produce the fabled "successful integration", it's not a compelling explanation that it's just because the Danes, Swedes, Norweigans, Germans, French, Brits, or Belgians just didn't try hard enough. It's that the mission, on the grand and statistical scale, was impossible in many cases. As Thomas Sowell tells us, this is because there are no solutions to intractable, hard problems like cultural integration between wildly different ways of living. Only trade offs. Many of which are unfavorable to all parties. But by the same token, just because the overall project of integrating many of the most divergent cultures from mass immigrations has failed, there are many individual cases of great success. Much of the Danish press, for example, has for years propped up the hope of broad integration success by sharing hopeful, heartwarming stories of highly successful integration. And you love to see it. Heartwarming anecdotes don't settle trade offs, though. They don't prove a solution or offer a conclusion either. I think the conclusion at this point is clear. First, cultural integration, let alone assimilation, is incredibly difficult. The more divergent the cultures, the more difficult the integration. And for some combinations, it's outright impossible. Second, the compromise of multiculturalism has been an abject failure in Europe. Allowing parallel cultures to underpin parallel societies is poison for the national unity and trust. Which brings us to another bad social thesis from the last thirty-some years: That national unity, character, and belonging not only isn't important, but actively harmful. That national pride in history, traditions, and culture is primarily an engine of bigotry. What a tragic thesis with catastrophic consequences. But at this point, there's a lot of political capital invested into all these bad ideas. In sticking with the tired blame game. Thinking that what hasn't worked for fifty years will surely start working if we give it five more.  Now, I actually have a nostalgic appreciation for the beautiful ideals behind such hope for humanity, but I also think that at this point it is as delusional as it is dangerous. And I think it's directly responsible for the rise of so-called populist movements all over Europe. They're directly downstream from the original theses of success in cultural integration going through just-try-harder efforts as well as the multicultural compromise. A pair of ideas that had buy-in across much of the European board until reality simply became too intolerable for too many who had to live with the consequences. Such widespread realization doesn't automatically correct the course of a societal ship that's been sailing in the wrong direction for decades, of course. The playbook that took DEI and wokeness to blitzkrieg success in the States, by labeling any dissent to those ideologies racist or bigoted, have also worked to hold the line on the question of mass immigration in Europe until very recently.  But I think the line is breaking in Europe, just as it recently did in America. The old accusations have finally lost their power from years of excessive use, and suppressing the reality that many people can see with their own eyes is getting harder. I completely understand why that makes people anxious, though. History is full of examples of combative nationalism leading us to dark edges. And, especially in Germany, I can understand the historical hesitation when there's even a hint of something that sounds like what they heard in the 30s. But you can hold both considerations in your head at the same time without losing your wits. Mass immigration to Europe has been a failure, and the old thesis of naive hope has to get replaced by a new strategy that deals with reality. AND that not all proposed fixes by those who diagnosed the situation early are either sound or palatable. World history is full of people who've had the correct diagnosis but a terrible prescription. And I think it's fair to say that it's not even obvious what the right prescription is at this point! Vibrant, strong societies surely benefit from some degree of immigration. Especially from culturally-compatible regions based on national and economic benefit. But whatever the specific trade-offs taken from here, it seems clear that for much of Europe, they're going to look radically different than they've done in the past three decades or so. Best get started then.

Mark Zuckerberg just announced a stunning pivot for Meta's approach to social media censorship. Here's what he's going to do: Replace third-party fact checkers with community notes ala X. Allow free discussion on immigration, gender, and other topics that were heavily censored in the past, as well as let these discussions freely propagate (and go viral). Focus moderation on illegal activities, like child exploitation, frauds, and scams, instead of political transgressions. Relocate the moderation team from California to Texas to address political bias from within the team. This new approach is going to govern all the Meta realms, from Facebook to Threads to Instagram. Meaning it'll affect the interactions of some three billion people around the globe. In other words, this is huge. As to be expected, many are highly skeptical of Zuckerberg's motives. And for good reason. Despite making a soaring speech to the values of free speech back in 2019, Meta, together with Twitter, became one of the primary weapons for a political censorship regime that went into overdrive during the pandemic. Both Meta and Twitter received direct instructions from the US government, among other institutions, on what was to be considered allowable speech and what was to be banned. The specifics shifted over those awful years, but everything from questioning the origins of the Covid virus to disputing vaccine efficacy to objections on mass migration to the Hunter Biden laptop leak all qualified for heavy-handed intervention. The primary rhetorical fig leaves for this censorship regime was "hate speech" and "misinformation". Terms that almost immediately lost all objective content, and turned into mere descriptors of "speech we don't like". Either because it was politically inconvenient or because it offended certain holy tenants of the woke religion that reigned at the time. But that era is now over. Between Meta and X, the gravity of the global discourse has swung dramatically in favor of free expression. I suspect that YouTube and Reddit will eventually follow suit as well. But even if they don't, it won't really matter. The forbidden opinions and inconvenient information will still be able to reach a wide audience. That's a momentous and positive moment for the world. And it's a particularly proud moment for America, since this is all downstream from the country's first amendment protection of free speech. But it's also adding to the growing chasm between America and Europe. And the United Kingdom in particular. While America is recovering from the authoritarian grip on free speech in terms of both social media policies and broader social consequences (remember cancel culture?), the Brits are doubling down. Any post on social media made in Britain is liable to have those cute little bobbies show up at your door with a not-so-cute warrant for your arrest. The delusional UK police commissioner is even threatening to "come after" people from around the world, if they write bad tweets. And Europe isn't far behind. Thierry Breton, the former European Commissioner, spent much of last year threatening American tech companies, and Elon Musk in particular, with draconian sanctions, if they failed to censor on the EU's behest. He has thankfully since been dismissed, but the sentiment of censorship is alive and well in the EU. This is why the world needs America. From the UK to the EU to Brazil, China, Russia, and Iran, political censorship is very popular. And for a couple of dark years in the US, it looked like the whole world was about to be united in an authoritarian crackdown on speech of all sorts. But Elon countered the spell. His acquisition of Twitter and its transformation into X was the pivotal moment for both American and global free speech. And if you allow yourself to zoom out from the day-to-day antics of the meme lord at large, you should be able to see clearly how the timeline split. I know that's hard to do for a lot of people who've traded in their Trump Derangement Syndrome diagnosis for a Musk Derangement Syndrome variety (or simply added it to their inventory of mental challenges). And I get it. It's hard to divorce principles from people! We're all liable to mix and confuse the two. And speaking of Trump, which, to be honest, I try not to do too often, because I know how triggering he is,  credit is still due. There's no way this incredible vibe shift would have happened as quickly or as forcefully without his comeback win. Now I doubt that any of his political opponents are going to give him any credit for this, even if they do perhaps quietly celebrate the pivot on free speech. And that's OK. I don't expect miracles, and we don't need them either. You don't need to love every champion of your principles to quietly appreciate their contributions. Which very much reminds me of the historic lawsuit that the Jewish lawyers at the ACLU (in its former glory) fought to allow literal nazis to match in the streets of Skokie, Illinois. That case goes to the crux of free speech. That in order for you to voice your dissent on Trump or Musk or whatever, you need the protection of the first amendment to cover those who want to dissent in the opposite direction too. That's a principle that's above the shifting winds and vibes of whoever is in power. It's entire purpose is to protect speech that's unpopular with the rulers of the moment. And as we've seen, electoral fortunes can change! It's in your own self interest to affirm a set of rules for participation in the political debate that live beyond the what's expedient for partisan success in the short term. I for one am stoked about Meta's pivot on censorship. I've historically not exactly been Mark Zuckerberg's biggest fan, and I do think it's fair to question the authenticity of him and this move, but I'm not going to let any of that get in the way of applauding this monumental decision. The world needs America and its exceptional principles more than ever. I will cheer for Zuckerberg without reservation when he works in their service. Now how do we get the UK and the EU to pivot as well?