What’s in This Week’s Issue…

Good morning. In America today, everything feels like a gamble.

Buying a house, trading stocks, and even shopping online for clothes or toys. What used to be ordinary choices have been redesigned to mimic the slot machine: fast, addictive, and stacked against the player.

And it’s not just about casinos anymore. Gambling has quietly infiltrated every corner of the economy. It is normalized, glamorized, and weaponized until risk-taking itself becomes the business model of America.

So this week…

• 🏆 The Big Play: How gambling became the operating system of American life

• 💪 The Power Move: How you can save yourself in a casino economy

• 💵 Follow the Money: Is ICE’s Hyundai plant raid driving foreign investment away?

-GEN

🏆 The Big Play

The biggest money power story of the week.

The Casino Economy: How Gambling Took Over America

To see where we are now, you have to look at where it started.

Once, gambling was something you did in a casino, in Vegas or Atlantic City, surrounded by neon lights and blackjack tables.

But when the U.S. began legalizing state lotteries in the 1960s, and expanded into online betting in the 1990s, and sports betting after 2018, gambling escaped its old boundaries.

Today, the casino isn’t just a place. It’s a system. It’s been rebuilt into retail apps, sports broadcasts, financial platforms, video games, and even shopping carts.

This transformation took place in three stages:

1. From Vice to Everyday Life

The first shift was cultural when gambling stopped being taboo and became normal:

• Lotteries were sold as “funding schools,” embedding gambling in civic life.

• Sports leagues that once banned betting now take billions in sponsorships from DraftKings and FanDuel, making gambling part of the game itself.

• Investing apps like Robinhood gamified trading with confetti animations and push notifications, turning the stock market into a casino on your phone.

• Shopping apps like Shein and Temu use spin-the-wheel games, countdown timers, and mystery boxes designed to mimic slot machines and hook customers into buying.

And then came the most powerful accelerant: the normalization of gambling for children.

• Video game loot boxes and blind box toys are structured exactly like slot pulls. You pay for a chance, get a random reward, and chase the rare jackpot.

• By 2025, loot boxes were a $20 billion market, and 90% of the revenue came from “whales”, a small group of compulsive spenders who can’t stop.

The effect is also generational.

Kids raised on loot boxes turn to sports betting apps as adults, while women targeted with “social casino” games transition into higher-stakes platforms.

That means gambling is no longer an activity. It’s a habit, designed to follow you from childhood to adulthood, from entertainment to every transaction.

And once gambling was normalized, the next stage began: extraction.

2. The Extraction Machine

Traditional gambling had limits. The house could only make money when players sat at the tables.

But digital gambling erased those limits. Now every click, swipe, and purchase can be optimized for maximum profit:

• Algorithms monitor behavior and serve bonus offers when players are about to quit, keeping them in the game.

• Rent-seeking now extends to renters in corporate-owned housing through layered fees and to consumers through loyalty programs that mimic microtransactions.

• Sports betting fragments games into thousands of micro-bets. So it is not just who wins, but how many rebounds in the second quarter, or who scores first.

And the most dangerous version of all? Prediction markets that let people bet on politics, economics, and even social chaos.

From NBA players caught rigging prop bets to online markets that reward spreading misinformation, the logic is always the same: turn every human action into a wager.

For the corporations running this machine, gambling isn’t risky. It’s guaranteed income. The risk is outsourced to the customer, the worker, and the entire community.

Which leads to the final stage: protection.

3. How the System Protects Itself

Every wealth extraction system needs a moat. Gambling is no different:

• In California, efforts to regulate sports betting ads have been crushed by billion-dollar lobbying campaigns.

• At the federal level, gambling firms have benefited from favorable tax regulations, including loopholes that preserve billions in potential tax revenue, which could otherwise support addiction treatment programs.

• Regulators who investigate predatory platforms often take jobs in the same industry, reinforcing the cycle.

• And in 2024 alone, gambling companies poured over $200 million into lobbying and campaign contributions, ensuring politicians look the other way.

Meanwhile, the human cost is invisible. Over 2 million Americans suffer from gambling addiction, and another 4–6 million are at risk.

But fewer than 10% ever get treatment, because gambling disorder has no dedicated federal funding, even though gambling revenue is one of the fastest-growing sources of state income.

So, at this point, gambling isn’t an activity. It’s reshaping housing, healthcare, investing, shopping, and even politics into games designed for the house to win.

And that brings us to the real question: in a casino economy, what can you do to avoid being the product?

💪 The Power Moves

Playbook for understanding the game of power.

How to Live in a Casino Economy Without Becoming the House’s Product

The lesson of the casino economy is brutally simple: when everything turns into a gamble, you either play by someone else’s rules or you build your own.

That means recognizing where the odds are stacked against you, and refusing to be the mark:

• Stop chasing meme stocks, loot boxes, sports prop bets, and retail “mystery rewards” that are designed to drain you, not build you.

• Focus on building assets like skills, businesses, and investments with long-term compounding advantages.

• Most importantly, shift your mindset: in today’s economy, every transaction is either extraction or investment. If it’s not building you, it’s draining you.

The Takeaway:

In America’s casino economy, the house always wins, unless you stop playing their game. The future will belong to those who can recognize when they’re being turned into gamblers, and instead position themselves as owners of assets that compound.

So, the goal is not to avoid risk altogether. It’s to take risks where the odds tilt in your favor.

💵 Following the Money

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

#1 - Trump tries to assure foreign investors following the Hyundai plant raid 

#2 - ABC pulls ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ off air indefinitely following remarks on Charlie Kirk

#3 - The US wants power plants to reuse plutonium from nukes. Is that safe?

✨ Poll time!

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