Russia had everything—resources, education, strategic power. Yet its GDP per capita is one-sixth of America's. Four centuries of autocracy taught Russians nothing but control, corruption, and hardship. When you've never known trust-based institutions, you can't imagine building them. Seventy years of choices compound. Some nations built prosperity. Russia chose nothing.
We beat fascism not by shrinking from fear but by building through it. Today’s panic over AI isn’t new; it’s historical amnesia. Humanity has survived greater threats and emerged stronger each time. The question isn’t whether AI will destroy us — it’s what kind of civilization we’re willing to build with it.
2025 won’t just be a milestone year—it will be remembered as the moment the world pivoted. As artificial intelligence becomes infrastructure, clean energy reaches abundance, and biology goes programmable, the systems we’ve relied on for centuries are being redesigned. This is not evolution. It’s reinvention—at civilizational scale.
Fewer than 15 million people, yet over half the world’s billionaires. The story of the Jewish people isn’t just one of survival—it’s a masterclass in resilience, strategy, and generational wealth-building. From expulsions to empires, this piece unpacks how a persecuted people turned history’s cruelty into a blueprint for thriving.
Josh Nash 