What’s in This Week’s Issue…

Good morning and Happy New Year. Every year, America tells itself a story about what just happened. And every year, that story is usually wrong.

Scroll through 2025 in headlines, and it looks like chaos masquerading as progress: institutions breaking down, power concentrating, culture wars eating everything in sight, and a political system that felt permanently stuck in fight-or-flight mode.

But beneath the noise, something else was happening at the same time.

While we were busy arguing about personalities, vibes, and scandals, the underlying system was quietly shifting. Some parts cracked, some consolidated. And some even, unexpectedly, started healing.

So this week…

• 🏆 The Big Play: What 2025 actually changed in America beneath the headlines

• 💪 The Power Move: Why 2026 may look very different from what the media is preparing you for

• 💵 Follow the Money: Will AI supercharge surveillance in 2026?

-GEN

🏆 The Big Play

The biggest money power story of the week.

What 2025 Actually Changed, and What It Revealed

2025 will be remembered as a loud year.

Not because more things happened than usual, but because the distance between what was visible and what actually mattered grew wider than at any point in recent memory.

Headlines jumped from crisis to crisis, social media flattened everything into outrage, and politics felt like a permanent emergency.

But if you step back and trace the year carefully, a different picture emerges.

2025 wasn’t a year of collapse. It was a year of exposure:

1. 2025 Was the Year the Mask Slipped

Across institutions, markets, and culture, 2025 forced realities into the open that had been quietly building for years:

• The end of USAID: It was stripped back after its incentives stopped making sense

• DEI: It didn’t fail morally. The collapse was imminent once legal, financial, and political costs converged

• DOGE’s rise and fall showed how thin the line now is between finance, memes, and legitimacy

• The growth of Online gambling was not sudden. It filled a vacuum left by economic stress and digital escapism

• Big Pharma didn’t become greedy, it continued optimizing patents over patients, exactly as designed

• And by taking over nearly every aspect of American society, private equity simply finished a long consolidation cycle that started with the 2008 crisis.

None of these were surprises in isolation.

What made 2025 different is that too many of them happened at once.

The system ran out of room to hide its contradictions.

And when that happens, people start noticing patterns instead of events.

2. The Same Incentives Were Breaking Everything at Once

Once you connect the dots, 2025 becomes easier to understand.

The same incentive structure kept repeating across completely different domains:

• Short-term financial optimization replacing long-term stewardship
• Power concentrating because scale now beats trust
• Institutions prioritizing survival optics over public legitimacy
• Platforms turning citizens into users, voters into segments, culture into content

This is why the year felt so emotionally exhausting.

You weren’t reacting to ten separate crises. You were watching one system express stress in ten different places.

Government shutdowns, culture wars, media consolidation, gambling, drugs, meme politics, and ideological whiplash weren’t disconnected failures.

They were symptoms of the same underlying shift: America moving from an institutional trust-based model to a platform-and-incentives-based one.

That transition is messy by definition.

But here’s the part most coverage missed: while institutions were wobbling at the top, something else was happening underneath.

3. While the System Strained, Society Quietly Adjusted

The most important story of 2025 didn’t live in Washington, Wall Street, or Silicon Valley.

It showed up in behavior.

Across the country, trends that had been deteriorating for decades quietly began to reverse:

• Crime fell sharply

• Overdose deaths declined

• Teen suicide is on a decline

• Life expectancy rebounded

• Obesity rates stabilized and began falling

• Dating apps lost relevance as people moved offline

• Social media may have peaked, as people prefer more private spaces

• Religious participation stabilized after years of decline

None of this felt dramatic.

That’s why it didn’t trend.

But taken together, it suggests something important: after years of artificial pressure ( social, digital, economic), people began recalibrating.

Not because leaders told them to. But because the old ways stopped working.

If anything, this suggests that we have a lot more to be hopeful about in 2026!

💪 The Power Moves

Playbook for understanding the game of power.

Why 2026 May Reward the Quietly Prepared

Here’s the trap heading into 2026: most people will extrapolate fear forward. They’ll assume institutional weakness means social decay must follow.

But history usually moves differently.

When systems over-centralize, resilience doesn’t disappear, it decentralizes.

2025 showed us both sides of that equation at once: brittle institutions under stress and adaptive individuals changing behavior in real time

That combination matters. Because the people who do best in transitional periods aren’t the loudest, angriest, or most certain.

They’re the ones who:

• Read incentives instead of headlines

• Adjust before narratives catch up

• Build stability where institutions no longer provide it

The Takeaway:

2026 won’t feel optimistic in the news. But beneath the noise, the conditions for renewal are already forming.

If you’re paying attention to behavior instead of rhetoric, you can see them.

And if you position yourself accordingly, you don’t need the system to feel healthy to move forward with confidence.

💵 Following the Money

Three of the wildest financial and corruption stories from around the world.

#1 - Privacy in 2026: Will AI further supercharge surveillance?

#2 - Forget California, billionaires could leave the US entirely amid wealth tax talk

#3 - Student loan garnishment starts Jan. 1, here’s what that means

✨ Poll time!

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