What does $25 buy you these days? The world.

The mother of geopolitical deals: I’m giving you the world for my birthday.

I’ve written to you before about the community we’re building at Cosmopolitics. So I want to be straight with you about where things stand.

I’m not taking what I’m about to say as some verdict on the quality of this publication. I know Cosmopolitics is resonating. I can see it in the open rates, the engagement, how many of you watch the interviews and join me and Danielle Pletka each week for Hot Takes Happy Hour. You write to me about things I’ve written. You argue with me. Sometimes someone will mention a piece months later.

That said, fewer than 1 percent of you are paid subscribers.

I get it! Everything is more expensive and we are all inundated with people asking us to pay for things. I have a ridiculous number of subscriptions myself. And I’ve kept most of Cosmopolitics open because I want people to read it. I don’t want someone to see an interesting piece or interview and hit a paywall and leave.

But that also means this isn’t sustainable. And it isn’t only happening to me. Some of the top performers on these platforms are confronting the same problem. The economics are tough. And reporting, interviews, travel, production — all of it costs money.

I hate asking for money. I’d rather negotiate the Iran ceasefire. It might be less awkward.

The irony is it wouldn’t actually take that much to make this profitable. If even half of you contributed a few dollars a year, it would make a huge difference. I could write full-time, keep most of the work open, keep the price accessible and, ideally, not have to go find some soul-crushing day job to keep the lights on.

So let’s try an experiment

My birthday is August 15. Between now and then, an annual Cosmopolitics membership is $25. If you sign up during that window, you can keep that rate forever.

Call it my birthday present to myself..and to you.

It goes without saying if you would like to contribute more by becoming a founding member or making a one-time donation, that would be amazing. I’m certainly not going to talk you out of it. It gives me more resources to report, travel, do more interviews and build this into what I think it can become.

But mostly I’m asking more of you to throw a little something into the pot because I do think what we’re doing here matters.

The world is beyond chaotic, bordering on insane. Wars that once seemed far away are affecting the global economy in ways that are increasingly impossible to ignore. Geopolitics is showing up in markets, energy prices, technology, supply chains and the things we buy. China and the United States are competing over everything from minerals buried in the ground to chips, AI and space.

This is not just foreign policy anymore. It’s life and I try to make sense of it without making it feel like homework.

I want Cosmopolitics to be informative and serious about the things that deserve to be taken seriously, but also irreverent, engaging and occasionally a little provocative. I want to question conventional assumptions. I want you to read something here and think, “huh, I hadn’t thought about it that way.”

I’m also writing more about the frontier industries that I think are going to determine whether the United States remains competitive — critical minerals, energy, space, technology, advanced manufacturing and whatever comes next. Because increasingly those stories are geopolitical stories too.

There are a million places to find out what happened. I’m much more interested in what it means for you.

So if you value Cosmopolitics and want me to keep doing it, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber. Twenty-five bucks. For a year. Forever. That’s just over $2 a month. I honestly can’t think of anything you can still buy for $2. And judging by how much you read, watch, share and argue with me, I will go out on a limb and say you’re getting your money’s worth here

Whether you become a paid subscriber or not, thank you for being part of this community — for reading, watching, arguing with me, pushing back and supporting what we are trying to build here. I don’t take any of it for granted.

I want to prove journalism like this doesn’t have to cost hundreds of dollars or disappear behind a hard paywall to survive. Maybe it just needs enough people who value it to throw a few bucks in the pot.

That’s the experiment. And happy birthday to me.