Made Basecamp and HEY for the underdogs as co-owner and CTO of 37signals. Created Ruby on Rails. Wrote REWORK, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, and REMOTE.
In 2012, the first Danish wolf in nearly two hundred years was discovered in the northwestern part of the country. Their numbers increased slowly in the years that followed, and by 2020, fewer than ten wolves were still being tracked. But then the population began to rise sharply: around 14 in 2021, 30 in 2022, as many as 80 by the end of 2024, and probably close to a hundred today.
At first glance, this is a heartwarming story. The wolf, in the abstract, is a majestic creature. It's great to see a species return after a few centuries of absence. You don't have to be a vegan hippie to find that appealing. But it's still a wolf! There's a reason why the last known wolf in Denmark didn't just wander off, but was shot dead in 1813.
Because as the number of wolves has been rising sharply every year since 2021, so too has the number of dead sheep. In 2021, it was 78, then in the years that followed, it was 162, 336, 521, and last year, it was 1,285! But the official line is still that shooting a wolf without a special permit is strictly prohibited because they're an endangered species, so maybe sheep herders could just try some more fences?
You don't have to be a statistician to see the problem here. When you have a surging wolf population, you'll have the rate of dead sheep following suit. If the only answer to the situation is "maybe try some more fences?", you're going to get more of what you already have: an out-of-control population that's an increasing risk to sheep, livestock, and potentially humans too.
This is the most basic consequence of inaction in the face of a growing threat: the problem just gets worse.
This has predictably led to these foreign vagrants setting up camp in the green areas around some of the city's metro stations to the great dismay of neighbors. The vagrants are literally shitting in the bushes, which obviously stinks, and the area isn't made any more inviting by the open-fire cooking that's also going on.
Copenhagen is the Danish capital. It's repeatedly been named the safest city in the world in recent years. Partly because it didn't tolerate vagrants and homeless people taking over public spaces (as has happened in so many American cities). Previously, police would tell someone they couldn't sleep or camp in the city, and they could go to one of the city-run shelters. But now that this is considered too cruel(?!), the native inhabitants of the city instead have to deal with literal shit on their way to the metro.
These are two situations cut from the same cloth of ideology. Whether it's wolves or gypsies, you can't just let the problems get out of hand. You have to act. You have to protect the sheep. Standing idly by while your livestock is devoured by predators or your neighborhood is taken over by migrants is a pathetic abdication of any functioning society's most basic duty to its citizens.
When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn't hard, it isn't cruel. It's the basic logic of self-preservation.
The decline of Europe is not inevitable, despite how much Americans love to joke/proclaim that the continent is doomed to become an open-air museum. Sure, it's possible that things have to get worse before they get better, but believing that "it's over" is just loser talk. It's never over, but the old world also won't recover by itself.
So here's my pithy prescription for how Europe can find its way back to The Good Times.
#1 End mass migration
No single issue has cost Europe more than mass immigration when you add up the political, social, and economic consequences. You can't save the continent's declining birth rate, growing retiree burden, or even economy as a whole by importing millions of people from a culturally incompatible third world.
I can forgive the original architects of this disaster with the goodwill you should always allow those who dare dream about the future. If you were nurtured on the delusion of blank-slatism, it wasn't much of a stretch to believe the theory that integration and assimilation would correct all immigration ills in a generation or two.
But now that it hasn't, and the evidence is overwhelming that it won't, it's imperative that we collectively update our priors. To some of Europe's credit, this is already happening in places like Sweden, which has been on a fast track to copy many of the restrictive Danish ideas on immigration. But it's far, far from enough.
Because the sacred cow here is not just that mass migration must stop going forward. It's also that millions who are already in Europe must go. Remigration has gone from a fringe concept to the mainstream discourse in record time on account of that realization. The Overton window is swinging wide open, but the cow is still there.
#2 Drop climate austerity
This year has given us yet another installment of the old air-conditioning diaries. Tens of thousands of people die needlessly in Europe every year from something as simple as summer (more than the number of Americans who are killed by guns every year!). The climate catastrophizers have somehow married themselves to the moral argument that air conditioning in itself is a sin (because it uses ENERGY!), and the death of the old and the poor is a simple sacrifice they're willing to make. It's as callous as it is retarded.
But the fight over air conditioning is downstream from the larger delusion about Europe's role in climate change. Setting aside how much of global warming is due to man-made causes, the reality is that Europe is irrelevant to the equation either way. Just 6% of global emissions originate there. So even if the nirvana of net zero could be achieved, it would change nothing, yet cost the continent everything.
Behind this climate hysteria is an even deeper delusion, though: that degrowth will deliver us all from the sins of modernity. That energy use in and of itself is suspect. That salvation will be delivered through abstinence. It's all nonsense.
Europe can't be a competitive part of the global economy if its energy costs are several times those of its commercial counterparts. And if you combine uncompetitive industries with a naive free-trade posture toward the likes of China, you'll not only get a dirtier planet, but also a hollowed-out economic bloc.
#3 Stop fighting success
The best part of the American ethos is the belief that we can build our way out of anything. Behind China on chips and fabs? Let's build. Challenged by BYD? Let's build. Catch a glimpse of a future massively accelerated by AI? LET'S BUILD.
Europe needs to shamelessly copy this aspect of the American ethos. It might not be able to match those crazy dreamers across the Atlantic, but it can give them a much, much better run for their money than it does today.
This is the part that the European establishment already acknowledged with the Draghi report. This is what the seeds of promise from the Europe Inc initiative need to grow. But we need much more, much faster.
And a big part of that is making peace with success. I know, this is perhaps the hardest ask of all. A generational skepticism of capitalism and the institutional inertia that supports it means we probably need a deeper crisis before the ship can be turned around. But Germany is on a fast track to deliver a sequel to the economic dismantling of Britain, so perhaps that example can provide the ignition.
Now do it all at once
This pithy prescription is not meant to be applied sequentially. First we fix this, then we fix that. No, we have to fix all of it at once: remigration, energization, and entrepreneurialism.
It's all interconnected, but that actually makes the whole endeavor easier to pull off, not harder. Momentum in one area will feed momentum in the others. Europeans can rediscover their roots, their ancestry, their ingenuity, and choose to channel all those healthy national feelings toward a grand revival.
But first, we need to sacrifice these holy cows and prepare the feast. How is next Thursday for you?
We've been buying servers from Dell since the 2000s at 37signals, but I was never too impressed with their personal computers. They either felt cheap or enterprisey to me. Like they were made exclusively for people who are handed standard-issue laptops by corporate, and not something discerning techies would buy with their own money. But the new XPS line has completely changed my perception.
I've now spent several months with the 2026 XPS 14 and 16, and last week I added the MacBook Neo-fighting XPS 13, and all I can say is that these machines are fantastic! Great chips, great screens, great build quality. Superb packages.
Which is very satisfying to see because there are few American business leaders I respect more than Michael Dell. He's been running his company for over forty years now, and he's still calling the shots! So to see the company pull a turnaround like this, so many years into its run, is very inspiring.
I've written about the XPS 14 before, and as I noted back in April, a good portion of the credit for these new Dell machines being really good belongs to Intel. The 18A process is paying big dividends for both companies (and the rest of the PC makers).
But Dell could still have stuck these chips into forgettable machines, and I wouldn't have had any interest. In fact, they did! Just last year, for the 2025 model year, they shipped new XPS machines with awful capacitive-touch function and esc keys. Two years after Apple had finally thrown in the towel on the ill-fated Touch Bar on their MacBooks!
Dell also killed the XPS branding last year, and went with the truly uninspired Plus/Premium/Pro copycat branding. Like some cheap Chinese knockoff. It was embarrassing, to be honest.
But unlike Apple, which introduced that cursed Touch Bar back in 2016, and then crammed it down everyone's throat for seven long years, Dell rebooted this nonsense almost immediately. Gave us back real function and esc keys, and revived the XPS branding.
You could argue that they should have learned from Apple's mistakes to avoid their own, but the next best thing is surely a quick reversal. And what a reversal it's been.
As I said, I've spent months using an XPS 14 as my main machine. It's been so good I even gave up on using a dedicated desktop machine. Now I just run everything off the XPS 14, connected to an Apple XDR 6K 32" (nobody has yet managed to beat this, and I've owned it for years). It's a great, simple setup.
The XPS 14 is an expensive machine, though. Not more so than its direct competitors, but still, at $2,799 for the 358H/32GB/1TB/OLED unit, it's a lot. I'd spend that in a heartbeat, but not everyone is going to drop that kind of cash on a laptop. Especially if they already have a powerful desktop.
That's where the new XPS 13 comes in. It's part of the PC industry's answer to Apple's new MacBook Neo, which analysts all thought would catch the other side flat-footed. Well, surprise, it didn't! Apple charges $699 for an 8GB RAM/256GB SSD Neo, whereas Dell wants $699 for 8GB RAM/512GB SSD, and even offers a 16GB RAM/512GB SSD version for $899 (there's no RAM upgrade possible for the Neo).
But matching Apple on specs and price wasn't the surprise; it was besting them with a nicer screen and keyboard, and meeting them on build quality. The XPS 13 has a great 120Hz screen (something you don't even get on a MacBook Air at twice the money!), a superb keyboard w/ backlighting (also missing on the Neo!), and weighs 20% less at just 1 kg with every bit as nice an aluminum chassis.
Now I'd forgive anyone their skepticism about 8GB RAM and Windows. Microsoft isn't exactly known for creating a responsive operating system on modest specs these days, but who cares, we have Linux!
Of course, I've been running Omarchy on this thing for the past week, and it's frankly fantastic. As long as you understand the limitations! The Intel Wildcat CPU uses the same performance cores as the full Panther Lake chip, so single-threaded snappiness is all there, but it only has two of those, and then another four low-powered cores. So six total, but not a mix that's conducive to running big multi-core workloads, like local CI.
This is where the XPS 13 meets the moment. As the agent craze has been taking over software development, you might have seen any of the many memes about half-cracked laptops, just so the agents won't halt with a closed lid. The obvious answer is of course to run these agents off a home server in the closet, connect them to something as slim and light as an XPS 13 over Tailscale, and then control it all over SSH.
Used like this, you get a machine that runs a browser as fast as anything on the PC (thanks to those full-speed performance cores) while costing a fraction of a new top-spec machine, and having better close-the-lid ergonomics. Win-win-hurray.
When I posted my enthusiasm on X about this new XPS 13, I got at least three replies with "Is this an ad???". No. This is not an ad. I bought the XPS 13 with my own money, and frankly, you couldn't pay me any sum to use a laptop I didn't like. I did try Dell's laptops a few years back, didn't like what I saw, and ended up spending a few years using Framework computers instead (they're still great too).
I'm simply excited that the PC isn't giving up without a fight. That Linux has been on a run among early adopters. That companies like Intel and Dell are here to keep Apple honest. Competition is great. It was Apple's M chips that rejuvenated the laptop market, and they held a supreme lead for years. So it's lovely to see Intel, Dell, and others actually being ready to meet the challenge from the low-cost Neo right out of the gate.
So I tip my hat, once again, to Michael Dell. Forty-plus years at the helm, not too proud to pivot quickly, and now the maker of my favorite Linux laptops. Well done, sir.
In the 1980s, France started 43 nuclear reactors across 14 sites. On average, each reactor took just seven years to build. Forty years later, all but one of these reactors are still running, and they continue to produce nearly half of France's electricity.
Can you imagine France doing something like this today? Or any other country in the West for that matter? The past is a foreign country. But why is this? Why did the West lose the will to power?
A popular meme would explain it as the inescapable good-times-hard-times circle: Hard times (WWII) create good men, good men create good times (Les Trente Glorieuses), good times create weak men (The End of History), weak men create hard times (now).
The Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe offers a theory for this wheel of time by tracing the last five centuries to the same four recurring phases: High, Awakening, Unraveling, Crisis.
It was the good men of France's hard times who planned the country's incredible nuclear build out. This hero generation, as Strauss and Howe calls them, planted the trees of power that would provide shade for several generations to come. It seems inconceivable to expect similar bold plans and action from the current cohort of the European political establishment.
But The Fourth Turning argues this was ever thus. The decline that always sets in once we enter the unraveling phase of the century (or saeculum, as the book calls it) inevitably leads to a crisis. We're on the cusp/in one of those right now. So pessism is perhaps a rational response.
And yet, the night is darkest before the dawn, and the current Crisis is likely to lead to another High, if the past five centuries and Strauss and Howe's theory are any guide. If so, we should expect the next hero generation to reject this managed decline of our present turning, and once again taking up the mantle of ambition.
The circle of the saeculum is both a prophecy and a roadmap. We're not supposed to live like this forever: weak, ineffectual. This too shall pass. And when it does, once the Crisis becomes another High, we'll marvel at the time wasted, but with the pity due a pathetic period of the past, not from within an eternal prison of decline.
We just have to make it out of the current Crisis alive. The last one brought us a total war. Would be nice if we could get back to the High without something quite as devastating, but don't bet on it.
It's no mystery to me why the Tesla Model Y is the world's best-selling car. As a total package, I could make a fair argument that it's simply because it is the world's best car.
I'm no stranger to Teslas at this point. We've owned a Model S Plaid, the Model X we traded in on the Y, and we still have the Cyberbeast too. But as impressive as all those cars are, the Y towers above them in several key respects, but first and foremost, value.
The premium all-wheel-drive white-on-white seven-seater we just got was right around $55,000. That's not exactly cheap, but it's less than half of what we spent on any of the other Teslas. It's a quarter of what we spent on the Porsche Taycan Turbo S. It's a sixth of what a new Aston Martin DBX would set you back. And, if I could just have one car, I'd pick the Y over all of them.
The first thing you notice coming from earlier Tesla models is just how well-built the new Model Y is. The gigapress process that produces these new cars results in a package that feels reassuringly solid: no squeaks, no rattles, no flex. This couldn't be said about any of the earlier S and X models we had.
But compared to other makes, it's not exactly revolutionary that a brand-new car feels well put together. Many other makes have managed to perfect that process over the decades. Tesla has now merely leapfrogged itself to the front of the class. But what very much is revolutionary is just how effortless owning the Y feels.
It starts with entry and exit. Once you've paired your phone, you never think about keys or starting or stopping the car again. It just happens. There's no on/off button, no starter, no unlock. Again, other makes have made attempts at this, but none that I've tried is even close to the effortlessness that Tesla's superior software stack is able to deliver.
Speaking of software: It just works. Every time. Going anywhere. You don't miss Apple CarPlay or Android Auto for a second. The navigation, the Spotify integration, the setup. Everything feels like it was written by a leading American software company. Not subcontractors out of India or firmware developers forced to deal with user interfaces.
But where everything comes together is FSD. The self-driving technology that Tesla pushed against all odds for over a decade is finally here in an utterly magical incarnation. The car not just drives itself anywhere, it drives better than almost any human I've ever been driven by has been able to do. Its ability to anticipate traffic patterns, hit the perfect deceleration curve towards a light, slow down for even minor speed bumps, and gracefully curve around pedestrians or cyclists is nearly unbelievable.
As in, you'd be forgiven the suspicion that there must be a human driver hidden somewhere controlling the car over the internet. But it's just AI, and it's gotten fiendishly better over just the past year or so. All in service of that effortless experience.
In fact, I'd go so far as to call it a luxurious experience. Like you're being escorted by the Queen's own driver to your desired destination. The Queen wouldn't bother with keys or rattles or driving. She'd just get in, be driven, and arrive fresh for a waive. This is the best approximation you can buy for mortal money today.
But then, unlike the old X, it's actually also surprisingly delightful to grab the wheel yourself, hustle it down a hill, lean it into some fun corners, and surge out on that wave of endless torque that electric motors always deliver so well.
No, it's not a Porsche 911, but I'd say it's 90% as fun as a Taycan, at a fraction of the price, in a package that's endlessly more practical, and — did I mention this already? — can drive itself once you're done with the spirited part of the journey.
The Tesla Model Y is a triumph of capitalism. Making the best self-driving technology available to the masses at a price that's accessible to the middle class in a car that even billionaires would appreciate.
Andy Warhol captured this egalitarian celebration well with this sentiment: “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.”
The Tesla Model Y is an incredible car for nearly everyone.
Europe is finally waking up from many decades of naive pacifism. While the continent is loath to give America credit, this is largely where it's due, as Trump has pulled back on blanket security guarantees. Well, that and a major war on its doorstep going on four years now.
That's the thing about delusions. Their upkeep seems free until reality intrudes. And that reality has finally gate-crashed the European continent with all the tact and timing of a drunken sailor. So now what?
"Buy, buy, buy" was what the Danish prime minister declared last year, as she committed another 50 billion kroner to buy weaponry in that year and this. But buy what and from whom? Sadly, there aren't many top European weapon and equipment makers ready, as the continent's defense industry has been starved of investment for thirty years.
As late as 2018, nearly two-thirds of European investors excluded companies involved in conventional weapons production due to ESG considerations, per Eurosif. And this has been going on since the early 1990s.
As always, the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is now. And this also applies to the tech industry because the next war will depend on it more than ever.
Like drones. They've become the main vector in the war in Ukraine. Fiber-optic cables have covered the battlefield like a spiderweb, and many of the recent advances on the Ukrainian side have been attributed to their superior drone operations.
We need drones in Europe. Lots of them. In all shapes and sizes. Made by European companies, built on open-source platforms, and with local supply chains. And that's exactly what the Danish startup Upteko has been working on for nearly a decade, and is now ready to scale up.
So I invested in Upteko. It's outside my normal, boring invest-in-what-you-know strategy of putting money in Danish SaaS startups, but also not that far away. The future of drones is as much in software as in propulsion. And I know something about that.
But really, it wasn't so much about knowledge as it was motivation. And nobody has brought more of a motivating example to the tech-meets-defense question than Palmer Luckey. His Anduril company is infusing modern weapon-making with the zest and innovation of a Valley startup. It's sorely needed, and deeply inspiring.
Europe needs its own Andurils. Not because it can't also continue to buy systems from the Americans, but because a good ally is self-sufficient, equally inventive, and armed to the teeth with a diverse fleet of awesome, native weapons.
