2025 in review

News Stories

• Syria regime change solidifies (al-Assad flees end of Dec ‘24)
• Big tech bends the knee at inauguration
• Congestion pricing
• DOGE and the destruction of USAID
• New Pope
• Tariffs
• ICE
• Gold and silver markets
• Rare earth metals?
• One Big Beautiful Bill
• Trump tit-for-tat
• Epstein
• Zohran
• Longest government shutdown in history
• Death of late night
• Trudeau steps down, carney wins in an upset
• India-Pakistan conflict
• Israel hamas ceasefire
• Houthi’s in yemen
• Iran gets bombed
• Nepal revolution
• Charlie Kirk
• Death of the penny and the metrocard
• Plane crashes

Trends

• Chinese electric tech stack: solar, batteries, EVs, and drones are CHEAP
• Crypto goes straight
• The ”vibecession” continues
• AI Slop/brainrot
• Matcha
• TACO
• Prediction markets and gambling apps
• GLP-1’s
• Trump v higher ed
• Young people smoke instead of drink
• Netflix and YouTube win the streaming wars, hollywood consolidation
• Governments start legislating social media
• Affordability messaging emerges
• Romance novel get smuttier

Funny Little Stories

• Louvre heist (and flood)
• Coldplay concert CEO
• 6 7
• Girlboss space trip
• Katy Perry Justin Troudeau
• Ariana grande wicked interviews
• The Atlantic Editor gets added to Department of War bombing group chat
• Doncic trade
• Kawhi Leonard clippers salary cap scandal
• Diddy
• Labubu

Top 10 Albums

1. Getting Killed — Geese
2. moisturizer — Wet Leg
3. SABLE, fABLE – Bon Iver
4. viagr aboys – Viagra Boys
5. Let God Sort Em Out – Clipse
6. Virgin – Lorde
7. DON’T TAP THE GLASS – Tyler, The Creator
8. NEVER ENOUGH – Turnstile
9. caroline 2 – caroline
10. Cancionera – Natalia Lafourcade

AI

• DeepSeek
• MCP and other standards
• Deep Research and agentic tool use
• Chinese labs take over open source
• GRPO and RLVR environments
• Llama Fail -> zuck bucks -> Meta Superintelligence Labs
• Consolidation on MoE
• Inference-time scaling and tool use
• “Wrappers” have moats
• Big data deals
• SSI, Thinking Machines
• Benchmaxxing
• Gold on IMO
• Acquihires and absurd salaries
• xAI Ani
• Datacenter buildout reaches 2%+ of GDP

2026 Predictions

1. Phone cleanses go mainstream
2. College attendance drops in major way because of AI and worsened job market
3. Stagflation
4. Sports betting counter reaction
5. Analog is the major trend: big brands start making zines, pen pals
6. “Reach across the aisle” in politics for the country’s 250th
7. Minecraft has a quiet year
8. Matcha is out. Ube is in
9. GLP-1 drugs get cheap
10. Reps disappoint slightly during midterms
11. Major IPO from 300B+ market cap startup (SpaceX)
12. Job of the year: AI Infosec
13. Middle East tourism goes through the roof
14. European car manufacturers go up market, ceding value cars to China
15. Tech companies unite to make a more formalized “digital ID”
16. Jacked women as body trend
17. No AI bubble burst
18. Worsening Sovereign Debt problems
19. Big lapels?
20. AI will noticeably improve for end consumer, but the improvement will come from better UX and app-side harnesses rather than substantial training innovations
21. NVLink cluster scaling slows down grace blackwell deployments
22. Nvidia stock down YoY
23. Big year for birding