Peter Thiel (one of capitalism's biggest winners) has said that capitalism isn't working for young people. Mamdani's recent win underscores that point. The rise of the groyper is primarily economic too. So many things point to something in the system either breaking or being misunderstood.

So I spent 30 days traveling across DC, Baltimore, New York, Florida, New Hampshire, Prague, and Ireland to try to figure out what's happening. The problem seems to be that America's enormous prosperity is invisible - hidden in AI data centers that sit empty or in all sorts of financial markets.

It seems to be that economies that invest in visible competence generate trust. When prosperity hides behind chain-link fences and algorithm feeds while everything visible (think infrastructure) decays, people stop believing the system works for them.