To my American friends, part two. Last time I talked about France. This time I want to talk about something bigger than France, bigger than any midterm you've ever voted in: who will control artificial intelligence. You carry a responsibility no other people on earth carries right now. The most powerful technology in human history is being built in your country, under your laws. Whatever rules you choose will become the rules for the world. If Democrats retake Congress, here is the playbook I see coming, because in Europe we've already watched the first chapters. It starts with a beautiful promise. Superintelligence will bring abundance. Cures for every disease, free education, the end of scarcity. And it might. But then comes the sentence that always follows: "This is too important to be left to the market." Then comes regulation. It won't be one law. It will be a thicket of them: licenses to train a model, mandatory audits, compliance offices, approved datasets, safety boards staffed by people who have never shipped anything. Each rule sounds reasonable on its own. Together they build a wall. Who can climb that wall? Not the kid in a garage in Ohio. Not the two-person startup. Only the giants with armies of lawyers and lobbyists. Some of the biggest AI companies have already gone to Congress asking for a licensing regime. When incumbents beg to be regulated, it's not because they love rules. It's because rules are a moat. So you end up with two or three approved AI companies sitting next to the government, dressed up as competition. They would share the same values, the same filters, and the same red lines, all decided in the same rooms. Europe just did this with the AI Act. The result is that we barely build anything. We regulate what Americans and Chinese create. Now think about what that means once AI is everywhere. It will decide what information you see, what loans you get, which jobs you're screened for, and what speech gets flagged. A small class of officials and their partner corporations would hold the master switch on human knowledge. That is a new nomenklatura. The Soviet apparatchiks needed millions of informants to control what people thought. This one would need a few data centers and a compliance policy. Orwell imagined a telescreen in every room. We're building something far more intimate. This is exactly what your Founding Fathers feared. They had just escaped a distant power that decided everything for them, so they designed a country where power could never concentrate in one place. They split it, checked it, and handed the most important guarantees directly to the people: the right to speak and the right to bear arms. Those rights were never gifts from the state. They were limits on the state. Free speech came back to life the day X stopped being a censorship machine. But a Constitution is only as strong as the citizens who defend it at the ballot box. If AI gets centralized in a handful of approved hands, those rights become words on old paper. Have you watched Altered Carbon? In that world, the ultra-rich live for centuries by buying new bodies. Everyone else gets one life, rents their existence, and dies. Society hasn't collapsed. It works perfectly for the people at the top. That's the real horror: it's stable. No amount of work, talent or merit can lift someone from the bottom, because the ladder itself is owned. That's what a captured AI economy looks like. It won't be chaos. It will be a permanent ceiling. America has always been the opposite: the one country on earth where a nobody with a laptop can become somebody. I build my company between Paris and San Francisco. I know which side of the Atlantic still lets you try. So before you vote, ask every candidate one simple question: will your AI policy let a 19-year-old in a dorm room compete with the giants, or will it protect the giants from that 19-year-old? Keep AI open. Keep power distributed. Keep the ladder. Stay American.

Hey everyone, As you know, October 7 is tomorrow. I prepared a song to commemorate the day, to remember, and to express how I feel about what happened and about what we should carry forward from it. I think the most important thing we can do is simply stop for a moment. Have a moment of silence. Remember those who paid the heaviest price for the hatred and cruelty directed against us. Shed a tear if you need to. Say their names. Hold them in your heart. They are now forever part of Jewish history. And as Jews, we have always known how to take moments that began in darkness, hatred and destruction, and somehow carry them forward into memory, meaning and light. That is what we will do again. We will remember October 7. We will remember every life. And in time, we will turn their memory into light — through who we are, through what we build, through what we teach our children, and through the way we continue to live. We know how to do this. We have done it before. And we will do it again.

In February 2021, Texas froze solid. Four million people lost power. Pipes burst, roofs collapsed, and families were shivering in minus-two-degree dark homes with nowhere to turn. You know what a Houston furniture store owner did? Jim McIngvale—known across Texas as “Mattress Mack”—owns Gallery Furniture, a massive luxury furniture showroom with millions of dollars of handcrafted beds and sofas. When the grid failed and hypothermia began killing elderly residents, Mack didn't lock his doors to protect his inventory. He turned on his private backup industrial generators, unlocked every door, and posted a video online: “If you are cold, if you need heat, if you need a place to sleep, come to Gallery Furniture. We got heat, we got food, we got beds. Everyone is welcome.” He didn't ask for credit cards. He didn't ask for identification. He didn't put plastic covers over his $5,000 mattresses. Over a thousand cold, desperate strangers poured through the front doors. Mack let mothers and babies sleep on luxury king-sized beds. He let homeless men curl up on designer sofas with their dogs. He brought in catering trucks and paid out of his own pocket to serve hot chili, brisket, and breakfast to hundreds of people every day. Critics asked him: “Aren't you worried people will ruin your expensive furniture?” Mack looked the reporter straight in the eyes: “Furniture is just stuff. You can replace mattresses. You can replace wood. You can't replace human lives.” He did the same thing during Hurricane Harvey. He did it during Tropical Storm Imelda. This isn't corporate philanthropy. This is raw American neighborly love. When you wonder what makes America great, don't look at Washington. Look at men like Mattress Mack. 🇺🇸🛋️

NOBODY tells Americans this part of the story. March 11, 2011. A black, 30-foot wall of ocean swallowed Northeast Japan. Our government froze. The Pentagon had no orders. Communications were dead. You know what Captain Thom Burke and Rear Admiral Robert Girrier did on the USS Ronald Reagan? They didn't wait for the White House. They didn't wait for paperwork. They looked at the TV screen, saw their friend drowning, and committed the ultimate military sin: UNAUTHORIZED ADVANCE. “We’re going. NOW.” They turned the massive nuclear carrier full throttle straight into the disaster zone. Then came the hydrogen explosions at Fukushima. Radiation plumes drifted across the Pacific. Every foreign embassy told their citizens: RUN. The US Embassy ordered an evacuation zone: STAY 50 MILES AWAY. Did the Ronald Reagan turn around? DID YOUR SAILORS RUN? NOT. ONE. INCH. Nineteen-year-old kids from Texas and Ohio stood on a freezing flight deck, radiation detectors in hand, launching helicopters into blizzards. They hovered over submerged rooftops, pulling shivering mothers and babies out of the black water. When Japanese refugees were brought aboard shivering in shock, your sailors gave up their own warm bunks and slept on the cold steel floor. While the rest of the world ran away from Japan, AMERICA CHARGED STRAIGHT INTO THE FIRE. You didn't do it for a treaty. You didn't do it for politicians. You saw your friend bleeding, and you kicked the doors down to save us. Happy 250th, America. Japan will remember your boys forever. 🇺🇸🤝🇯🇵

One month after September 11, workers clearing the rubble at Ground Zero found something alive. A tree. Eight feet of blackened stump. Roots snapped. Every branch broken but one. They could have thrown it away with the rest. Nobody would have noticed. They did not. It was a Callery pear. Nobody had ever paid attention to it. It had been planted in the 1970s in the plaza between Buildings 4 and 5 of the World Trade Center, one of dozens of ornamental trees the Port Authority put in to make the concrete feel less like concrete. Office workers ate lunch under it. Tourists walked past it on their way to the observation deck. On the morning of September 11, a hundred and ten stories fell on it. Twice. In October, on the pile, someone saw a single living branch sticking out of the wreckage. Green. Still trying. A decision was made on the spot. They dug it out. The city's Parks Department took the stump to a nursery in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. The horticulturists there looked at it and were not optimistic. The trunk was charred. The root system was mostly gone. Trees in that condition do not usually come back. They went to work anyway. They cleaned the burns. They trimmed the dead wood. They set it in good soil. They watered it. And they waited. That first spring, in 2002, against everything the experts expected, the stump put out blossoms. Small white flowers, on a tree that had been under the World Trade Center six months earlier. It stayed in the Bronx for nine years. Relearning how to be a tree. Growing new branches out of the old scarred wood. Getting taller. Filling out. In 2010, weeks before it was finally scheduled to go home, a storm tore through the nursery and ripped it out of the ground. The people who had been nursing it for nine years came out the next morning and found it on its side, roots exposed again. They stood it back up. They repacked the soil. It survived that too. On December 22, 2010, it was replanted at the 9/11 Memorial in lower Manhattan, a few steps from where the South Tower had stood. Where it had been found. The eight-foot stump is now more than thirty feet tall. Walk up to it and look at the trunk. There is a line on it. Below the line, the bark is dark and gnarled and twisted. That is the wood from 2001. Above the line, the bark is smooth and pale and new. That is everything that grew after. The tree does not hide the line. It does not cover it over. The scar is right there, and the whole rest of the tree grows up and out of it. People tie tags to the railing around it. Prayers. Names. Messages to the dead. Every spring it is the first thing on the entire plaza to bloom. It goes white before the other trees have even leafed. In 2013, the Memorial started a program. They gathered seedlings from the Survivor Tree, and every year they sent them to a community that had just had its own worst day. Newtown, Connecticut, after Sandy Hook. Orlando, after Pulse. Puerto Rico, after Maria. Paris. Manchester. London. A small tree from the rubble of the World Trade Center, planted in the ground of the next place that thought it would never grow anything again. Twenty-five years ago this month, a hundred and ten stories of steel came down on a pear tree and someone on the pile saw one green branch and said, not that one. Not that one. The last living thing pulled out of Ground Zero has children now, growing all over the world. It did not survive by being untouched. It survived by growing out of the wound. 🌸