New @FREOPP: Our paper on how to end the cycle of tuition hikes and student loan bailouts, and actually reduce the cost of higher education, building on reforms in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

i am so tired of people shit talking texas because "it's too hot." you know what's great about texas? sunshine. water. and this incredible invention called air conditioning. you know what actually sucks? the cold. waking up to gray skies for months on end. shoveling snow. scraping ice off your windshield. putting on 5,000 layers just to walk outside and still feeling like your fingers are going to fall off. i would rather sweat my ass off walking to my air-conditioned car than spend half the year freezing and miserable. and with all the money you're saving on state income taxes, you can afford to take a vacation somewhere cooler when you need a break. i will die on this hill. texas heat is not that bad. winter is infinitely worse.

Fernando Mendoza is starting a series called "Finance with Fernando" to teach Gen Z about finances. "My true passion is fiscal responsibility."

Early takeaways from Austin Deep Tech Week: 1. Austin is a serious f*cking city. SF is still the center of gravity. LA has built an absolute monster around aerospace, defense and industrials. But after spending a few days in Austin, I'm increasingly convinced this city has structural advantages that the coasts underestimate. People I've met here seem to have one primary objective: Build. Heads down. Gas pedal pinned to the floor. Noticeably less obsession with looking important and more obsession with actually making shit work. Deep tech rewards exactly that mentality. 2. Texas being aggressively pro-business isn't some Twitter talking point. It's an actual competitive advantage. Heard versions of this repeatedly from founders and investors this week. Permitting. Regulation. Taxes. Energy. Land. Manufacturing. Expansion. When you're building software, you can abstract yourself away from geography. When you're building atoms, geography becomes part of your cap table. Every additional month waiting on a facility, permit, power connection or expansion is effectively dilution. Texas understand that speed matters. 3. The coastal migration isn't over. SF and LA still have unbelievable technical talent density, particularly at the earliest stages. But the requirements change when a deep tech company starts working. Now you need 100,000 square feet. Power. Testing. Manufacturing. Suppliers. Technicians. Hundreds of employees. Suddenly Texas starts looking a hell of a lot more attractive. And founders here don't seem nearly as worried about convincing talent to follow them as outsiders assume. 4. The next chapter isn't companies moving to Texas. It's companies starting here. Historically the playbook has often been: Coast → prove technology → raise capital → expand into Texas. I think that increasingly becomes: Texas → Texas → Texas. More technical founders will move here before starting the company. More pre-seed and seed companies will originate here. More headquarters will be planted here from Day 1. And that's when the flywheel gets interesting: Talent → startups → capital → exits → experienced operators → new startups. Once that loop starts compounding, ecosystems become very difficult to stop. 5. Austin feels significantly less distracted. There is obviously bullshit everywhere. Startups attract grift like flies to shit. But there's noticeably less keeping-up-with-the-Joneses energy here. Less worrying about who raised what round. Less optimizing for appearances. Less obsession with which VC follows you or which dinner you got invited to. More: Does the thing actually work? That cultural difference matters more than people realize. 6. “But the capital is on the coasts” is becoming a lazy argument. Have you ever heard of a f*cking airplane? It's 2026. If you're building a generational company in Austin and a great investor in SF wants into the round, they're getting on the plane. Great companies don't travel to capital. Capital travels to great companies. Austin already has serious institutional capital on the ground alongside a growing ecosystem of smaller funds. More capital will follow the companies. It always does. 7. Austin increasingly looks built for where deep tech is going, not where venture has been. Deep tech is becoming less about a handful of scientists sitting in a Bay Area lab and increasingly about deploying massive amounts of physical infrastructure. Factories. Energy. Robotics. Defense. Space. Advanced manufacturing. Data centers. Industrial systems. Those businesses eventually collide with the physical world. And the physical world cares about land, power, regulation, labor, logistics and speed. Texas has a lot of all six. SF still has the deepest venture ecosystem. LA has built an extraordinary deep tech machine. But Austin doesn't need to become either of them. It may be building something fundamentally different: A startup ecosystem optimized not just for inventing hard technology — but for actually industrializing it. That's a much more interesting proposition. Came into Austin Deep Tech Week thinking this was an important emerging hard tech ecosystem. Now thinking “emerging” might already be outdated. Ingredients are here. Talent is coming. Capital will follow. Unlike a lot of startup ecosystems I've visited, Austin feels like it actually wants you to build shit here. That's a hell of a tailwind 🏭🇺🇸 Finally - mad props @Andercot, @CaitlinCloud9, @Jason_A_Scharf + many others for putting this together & making this a kickass week!

RT @dhume: Bigoted attacks on Indian-Americans by a section of MAGA signal a deeper problem for the GOP. The multiracial coalition that pow…

Strategy built the blueprint for digital credit, Strive followed it, and right now Strive's product $SATA is the one holding par. Here's how Phong Le sees it:

So great to spend time tonight with the #bitcoin man of the year, @Rob1Ham, at @PubKey DC! Go Red Team!

JUST IN: Strategy $MSTR CEO Phong Le just said, "Strive has built up a #Bitcoin treasury company the way it should be, and what they have done in the treasury space has been pretty impeccable." "$SATA is an incredible innovation." 🔥🙌

If normies are forced to choose between socialism and national socialism, I suspect many will choose the former.

I know X is a form for clever clap backs. But I want to have a real conversation on this. You see, Lincoln had to answer the same objections about the Americanness of recent immigrants. Back then, many claimed that those with French and German and Scandinavian blood were not American because their family did not fight in the Revolution. How can you be an American if no one in your family, not a great grandfather or great uncle, spilled blood fighting for this country? Today the question is put to those of us of Indian heritage, or Mexican, or Chinese, to Hindus and Muslims, Jews and Buddhists. What did your family do in this country’s wars? What did they build? Where do you sit in the hierarchy of Americans? Some tech barons would count your votes by your net worth, as if the only value that matters is what wealth you produce. The heritage school answers with a different ledger. Your standing as an American should be measured by how much your family has bled or sacrificed. Lincoln answered the heritage school in some of the most beautiful words ever written in the English language. His speech for July 4, 1858 has more wisdom than everything collectively ever written on X, or for that matter, social media. Lincoln said that if you believe in the Constitution, if you believe in the Declaration of Independence, then there is an electric chord that links your heart to the hearts of the men who fought in the Revolution for those principles, and that you are blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of our founders. He articulated why our nation, unique in the history of the world, is constituted based on a devotion to a common set of ideals and principles. I attach the text below. If even a few who engaged with my tweet read it, well, then our country would be a little better for it. Dinesh the irony is that the President you worked for --Ronald Reagan --who gave an Indian immigrant with a thick accent a job in his White House knew this Lincoln passage very well.

The @bofrench freakout about assimilated Indian-Americans reminds me of this piece John Yoo and I wrote for @NRO in 2019 on how Asians are a natural conservative constituency: link.nationalreview.com/clic…

UT’s Turning Point USA chapter releases a statement on Bo French’s recent tweets. “TPUSA UT rejects identity politics in all forms and believes every Longhorn should be judged by their character, their values, and their actions — not their ethnicity.”

For the last month, I've been working on tying together the white nationalists, Christian nationalists, and neo-Nazis rising on the right. They not only have common sources of funding, but they are taking over portions of the conservative movement. Finally hitting "publish" in the morning. ewerickson.substack.com

And another one from @RobertDownen_ : texasmonthly.com/news-politi…

For the national folks learning today who Bo French is. A worthwhile read: texasmonthly.com/news-politi…

I've seen a lot of people still struggling with understanding what happened at the end of the UM WMU game. With the release of what I consider to be the best angle (shows both the play and the in-stadium clock in HD), I did my best to provide context surrounding the play.

Since we’re all obsessed with clock protocol and every single second, what’s supposed to happen after a first down in the final two minutes of a half? Should Michigan appeal for the nearly two seconds that came off the “official” clock after JJ Buchanan's first down? Because if the clock stops when it’s supposed to, there’s no end-of-game controversy in the first place... right? Should we go through the entire game tape and account for every missed second/missed call and issue appeals? I actually respected the way Western Michigan and the MAC handled the brutal loss afterward. They heard the Big Ten’s explanation, accepted it, released their statements and said they were moving on. Then, two days later, apparently that explanation is no longer good enough, and now they want the NCAA and College Football Playoff to recognize WMU as the winner? That’s an incredibly soft move. Yes, Michigan got one second put back on the clock. And guess what? Both teams lined up and played it. Michigan had to attempt a 60-yard Hail Mary. Western Michigan had to defend it. Michigan made the play. Western Michigan didn’t. If that ball hits the ground, nobody is still talking about this. The ONLY reason that second has become a national controversy is because Michigan actually converted it.

Here's recorded video of the penultimate Hail Mary attempt in the Michigan-WMU game. It clearly shows that the clock was at 0:01 when the ball was touched. Not sure what @NBCSports was doing with its feed.

Never ever, under any circumstances, wear the banana ball uniforms ever again. Forever cursed.