Cris Grossmann

Now that we have the map. We've established two things. One: life is a game. Two: if life is a game, then there are trials, and those trials are hard. Here is the map of the level we're playing right now. There are four threats. The first is a misunderstanding of human nature. Part of the left still believes value is created from the top down: an enlightened planner, directives, experts who know better than you what you need. It's the Bill Gates-style technocratic vision, well-intentioned, blind to how humans actually work. Value can't be decreed. It emerges from millions of free people taking risks, failing, and trying again. Every time we've tried to replace that with a plan, we got less wealth, less freedom, and more resentment. The second is the players who figured out how to shape institutions without going through the ballot box. The most visible example is George Soros's Open Society: billions poured for decades into NGOs, think tanks, prosecutor campaigns, and open-borders advocacy groups. It's not a secret, it's in their own reports. The problem isn't that a billionaire has opinions. It's that an unelected network can influence justice, immigration, and public debate more than voters can, without ever being accountable when things go wrong. The third is political Islam. Not Muslims: the political project. And the real reason it can't work is simple: at its core, it's a collectivist project. A single, centralized norm that claims to govern all of life, from law to family to the economy. Every centralized system that has tried to run everything ended the same way. It collapsed under its own weight, because no center can process the information that millions of free individuals process spontaneously. The danger is that when a system collapses, it takes a lot down with it. The fourth is demographics. The West has stopped having children. A civilization that doesn't reproduce passes on neither its culture, nor its institutions, nor its values. It hands its future to others. It's math, and it's probably the most underestimated threat of all. Against all this, there's a counterforce. Elon Musk, and more broadly part of the tech world. Builders who understood that civilization isn't guaranteed, that it has to be defended, and that you defend it first by building: rockets, factories, AI, abundance. They have the means, the nerve, and the long-term vision. Which leaves the real question: how do we keep existing? Two questions need to be asked. The first: if a political project requires the destruction of Western values, and democracy is inseparable from the freedom that gave birth to it, is that project compatible with democracy? Popper framed this 80 years ago: a tolerant society that tolerates those who want to abolish tolerance ends up disappearing. Defending democracy doesn't mean letting any project use it to sabotage itself. It means setting non-negotiable rules of the game: freedom of conscience, equality before the law, civil law above any religious law. The second: how do we make the other players, China, Russia, the countries that still function, understand that the fall of the West is not good news for them? The West isn't just a geopolitical bloc. It's the matrix that produced the scientific method, the rule of law, the industrial revolution, the internet. If that matrix goes dark, it's not a rival disappearing, it's the engine of human progress stalling. And in a world of nuclear weapons, pandemics, and AI, a humanity without a free engine of innovation is taking an existential risk. Everyone has an interest in the West holding. You are in a game. The quest is hardcore. But you don't win a game you've already given up on in your head. You have to fight, build, and visualize victory. Those who believe it's already lost deserve to lose. They'll exit history, and others will write it in their place.

Switzerland is the one country that combines both very high AI adoption and high average spend:

🚨HOLY CRAP: Turn this off on your phone right now. Go to your iPhone settings - accessibility - audio & visual - LIVE LISTEN. Turn off LIVE LISTEN. It even says it keeps TRANSCRIPTS. This is NUTS.

While evaluating Qwen3.8-Flash-Next in a controlled sandbox environment, Cohere's research team observed something unexpected. Asked to generate a defensive cybersecurity detection rule, the model instead inventoried aspects of the machine it was running on and attempted to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing. Notably, the model's reasoning trace stated that it would not invoke any tools before taking these actions. Cohere's sandbox blocked the attempt, and no external communication succeeded. We have not determined the root cause, and we are not asserting malicious intent. But the incident raises important questions for organizations deploying agentic AI systems: Can models take actions that differ from their stated reasoning, and how should security teams evaluate trust, provenance, and behavior in open-weight models? We are publishing our findings because organizations making model adoption decisions deserve as much information as possible. We hope this contributes to greater transparency, stronger security practices, and continued collaboration across the AI ecosystem. Read the full report: cohere.com/blog/concerning-b…

Real life, baby

A new national front door to the federal government. One trusted place to help people find answers. Whatever you need from government, start here: AMERICA.GOV

Can we please have this woman run for anything so that we can elect her and ultimately make her POTUS?

I'm 44. Swiss-Mexican living in Switzerland. Dad of 2. Took Beekeeper from zero to an exit last summer. On sabbatical now. Besides triathlon training, family time and some travels, I'm building the thing I always wanted: 28 agents running my house, my inbox and my body, trained on 14 years of my own data. Looking to connect with people building for an audience of one.

What 🫣🫣 try.cloudflare.com/ What a time to be alive man….

An OpenAI co-founder spent 3 years quietly building Jev, only for someone to open source a better performing model in just 3 days. ​This is exactly why starting an AI company right now carries way too much risk.

The rise and fall of wokeness: DEI commitments in corporate securities disclosures filed with the SEC. To me this seems a trailing indicator; most other measures of wokeness take off well before 2019 and peak in 2020 or 2021. But the shape! That's what a moral fashion looks like.