TR.BIZ: 2.17.2026
From Obama's aliens to a new trending animal, this is your early-mid-week check-in ✨
Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition™, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Report™. Today, we’re diving into American aliens, James Van Der Beek’s “alternative medicines,” why love holidays may have a moment, and the virality of Punch the monkey.
🏛️ Politicultural: Why don’t aliens stories “stick”?
A late-last-week thing that bobbed above and below the cultural surface was Obama talking with progressive creator Brian Tyler Cohen where he dug into “the truth” about aliens. “They’re real, but I haven’t seen them,” he said. “They’re not being kept at Area 51. There’s no underground facility — unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the President of the United States.” He’s of course talking about how confirmation of aliens being real pops up every other every other year in the 2020s and…no one seems to care! Yes, noted alien hunter and Blink182 member Tom Delonge has been vindicated but this news never seems to “stick.” Why? Well, we live in an episode of Black Mirror and everything sucks, which means no one cares about no god damned aliens unless they’re coming to save us or knock us out of our misery. This is a modern truism I wrote about in 2023, after getting high on fucking crazy pills from this information being true and everything in the world around us being ass. As a species, we seem to have lost the joy that once inspired things like the 2019 Area 51 raid, which itself felt like a leftover from 1990s culture. Now? We’re on a need-to-know basis with information as such, our relationship to extraterrestrials much like that one friend from an old job that we just don’t have time to grab drinks with, the person you perpetually “Can we reschedule?” until something interesting happens for either of you. Unsurprisingly, Obama has since “clarified” what he meant by his alien thoughts. “Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” he posted to Instagram. “But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!” It’s okay, Barry: you can admit this was a move to drum up Dem love, which really didn’t work.
💊 Hell Care: James Van Der Beek’s ministry of “alternative medicine”
James Van Der Beek’s death last week was a shock, not because of Alfonso Ribeiro’s weirdmaxxing but because his family fundraised more than a million to pay for the treatment of his cancer. It’s sad! But why a fundraiser? Isn’t he a rich celebrity with SAG healthcare? As has been reported by places like the BBC, the thought is “cancer treatment can prove extremely costly for those in the US.” True but also…huh? Something deeper is happening and it might be that the tragic death may have a MAHA lining, playing into a celebrity “alternative medicine” trend that is why people like Farrah Fawcett, Ananda Lewis, and Steve Jobs died of similar diagnosis, dabbling in misinformation that people like Suzanne Somers and Elle Macphereson champion, enabling “non-traditional routes” for severe illnesses that then become a deadly TikTok trend. James Van Der Beek was notoriously cagey about his treatments, describing them as “various” but not quite ever saying chemotherapy. Sure, anything’s possible, but given the actor’s wife’s very vocal anti-vax positioning, you see the math problem ain’t that hard to figure out. “Don’t take advice about serious illnesses and treatment — especially cancer — from celebrities or influencers,” Dr. Michael Richman explained on TikTok recently, mapping out this situation and how this thinking and promotion causes unnecessary deaths. “You can say chemo is poison…But this other stuff doesn’t work.” Clearly this story isn’t quite over yet.
🔮 Prediction: Will love holidays lead to more kids?
I was talking with Olivia Choi last week, who brought up an interesting fact about Valentine’s Day in Korea: there’s not one, not two, but three holidays in the country to celebrate love. Here’s her breakdown —
Love is celebrated across three distinct holidays spanning from February to April. Valentine’s Day on February 14th has a unique twist where women traditionally give chocolates to men, though the custom has become more mutual in recent years. Then there’s White Day on March 14th, which was originally called Marshmallow Day and is when men return the gesture with gifts like chocolates, sweets, jewelry, and flowers. Black Day on April 14th is for the singles who didn’t receive anything on the previous holidays, where they gather to eat jjajangmyeon and embrace their independence together.
Fascinating, not because a very Americanized holiday breached containment to be practiced in Korea (It’s barely practiced here, in Spain, for what it’s worth.), only made the more fascinating that the country’s very public, very tortured relationship to relationships, as evidenced by the gender battles of the 4B movement and ongoing plunging birth rates (despite a brief 2024 uptick). Olivia offers more texture to the issue —
