2025 Faves.
You made it. I made it. We made it.
If you’re reading this, then ~congratulations~ on making it through 2025!, into the second quarter of the 21st Century!… and onto this annual recap of things I enjoyed in the year that was. This is where Today Me indexes what stood out this year for Future Me - and the machines, I suppose. If you find it useful and/or interesting then I am very happy and/or flattered.
I started doing these in 2020 and you can find 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 right here on Substack.
Film and TV
Here more than anywhere else, I’d just like to insert my annual disclaimer that nothing here is supposed to be a Best Of list. I’m not claiming to have taste. By all accounts 2025 seems to have been a great year for ‘good’ film and TV and - perhaps this is indicative of the curse the entertainment industry is facing - I watched less of it than ever. I abandoned good shows I really should have watched (Task, for example) as well as extremely mid and annoying shows no one should have watched (Dept. Q for example) that just couldn’t compete with the attention black hole in my phone at the time. I’m sure Sinners, Weapons, One Battle After Another, and Hamnet, really were terrific. I didn’t quite get there yet. It’s me, I’m the problem, it’s me. I’m sorry.
Apologies made, here’s what I did love:
Everything James Gunn produced (HBO). Gunn’s ascension to helm DC has been one of the best things to happen in entertainment this decade and I loved all three of his major contributions to rebuilding the DC Universe in 2025: Creature Commandos, Peacemaker S2, and Superman were all perfectly great, different, and connected. Gunn’s interaction with fans through social media and podcasts, his music selection, and deep fandom for the subject matter make him not just the best person for this job, but a great example of what’s required to be a leader - in entertainment or any field - today.
Flow (HBO) was on my ‘to watch’ list last year and was one of the first things I actually did watch - and keep rewatching - in 2025. This is a beautiful movie, whether you have it on as a vibe or you’re paying attention to the story. Frankly, it’s the kind of thing I hope we get to see more of as AI makes it easier and easier for people to produce these kinds of films on their own.
A House of Dynamite (Netflix): I think this was the film that had the biggest impact on me in 2025, both for its approach to telling a story from distinct but overlapping perspectives and for the subject matter. I guess people have feelings about the ending but I thought the way Kathryn Bigelow decides to finish it is part of what makes the film so impactful.
F1 (Apple): This has been one of the most rewatchable movies of the year for me. I saw it in the theater and then watched it at home with the sound turned all the way up. A huge amount of creativity and craft went into making the film feel as real as possible for F1 fans, but it’s accessible and fun whether you’re a racing fan or not. Brad Pitt’s wardrobe in the film is also fantastic.
The Perfect Neighbor (Netflix): I was skeptical about this going in given the hollow feeling in my soul that accompanies most Netflix ‘content’ these days, but I thought this documentary told the story of the killing of Ajike Owens - largely through police body cam footage - powerfully and appropriately. Among the many things this film accomplishes is a pretty enlightening look at the challenges of modern policing and how the Marion County Sheriff’s office acquitted itself.
The Thinking Game (YouTube): Google had a huge success with AlphaGo in 2017 and this film from the same director follows on as a sequel of sorts. It tells the story of DeepMind (and founders Demis Hassabis and New Zealand’s own Shane Legg) through the lens of the development of its Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold and in the process provides a compelling articulation of our current moment, the power and potential of AI, and the genuinely positive role Google is playing in applying AI to real and important problems.
Andor (Disney): I’ve disliked pretty much everything about the modern Star Wars universe going all the way back to the Phantom Menace but the sheer volume of positive reviews for Season 2 of Andor overpowered my deeply entrenched cynicism. Andor is a two season limited series that serves as a prequel for the Rogue One movie that came out in 2016, which itself is a prequel for the original Star Wars film A New Hope. And while it takes a few episodes to get going, I’m so glad we stuck with it as it’s one of the best things we watched this year.
Pluribus (Apple): It won’t surprise people to see Pluribus on this list. It’s as good as everyone says and I can’t wait to see where Vince Gilligan and team take it in the seasons ahead. It’s best to watch knowing as little as possible going in, so I won’t do anything to spoil the plot here, but I will say one of the things I love most about the show is its pacing and the luxurious amounts of time Gilligan allows his characters to spend in each scene. I hope other directors are taking notes.
Severance S2 (Apple): We had to wait three long years for the latest installment, but Season 2 was so good as to make the wait worthwhile. The concept, writing, craft, and cast are all exceptional (and enhanced by Ben Stiller and Adam Scott’s companion podcast). One of the things that makes Severance so great is Jessica Lee Gagné’s cinematography and Stiller deserves a ton of credit for elevating her to the director’s chair for Episode 7.
Common Side Effects (HBO/Adult Swim): I loved this animated series from Mike Judge and the illustrator behind Scavenger’s Reign that revolves around the discovery of a magic mushroom and the pharma-govt conspiracy to keep from changing the world.
Slow Horses S5 (Apple): It’s a real credit to the Slow Horses and Apple teams that they’ve managed to keep this show interesting enough that I’ve now recommended it four years running! It’s a fine line to walk, but they manage to balance the tone, humor, and stakes in a way that makes it the best British show on TV for me.
Other shoutouts: For anyone who hasn’t watched it yet, Netflix added both seasons of Pantheon this year and if you have not yet followed last year’s advice for the love of god please drop what you’re doing and watch it. Other 2025 faves included Nobody 2 (not a ‘good’ film but definitely not the point), Season 3 of Blood of Zeus (now you can binge the whole show on Netflix), Season 4 of Hacks, LISTERS (a super fun documentary about birders), and Nightcrawler (yes, the 2014 Gyllenhaal film). Also recommended: The Century of the Self and Man in Search of Man. Every summer we throw on the livestream of Lollapalooza on Hulu, which continues to be great. And finally, I did not get to watch them this year but am looking forward to Prime Minister, Have You Seen Me Lately?, and, of course, PBS’s American Revolution.
YouTube Channels and Podcasts
I’m lumping YouTube creators and podcasts together this year, as podcasts increasingly become video-native and both start to seriously cut into my traditional TV time. Of these, the creators and shows I enjoyed the most this year were:
Jenna Phipps documenting her remodel of an abandoned house in Vancouver.
The Artificial Intelligence Show Podcast (the best weekly AI news podcast imho).
The Bulwark (and particularly The Next Level) (has replaced cable TV political punditry for me).
The Ezra Klein Show (Ezra is doing more than anyone else to evolve the quality of Democratic thinking).
The Dwarkesh Podcast, 80,000 Hours and The Future of Life Institute are the best AI interview shows going. The Trajectory with Dan Faggella is also probably worth adding to this list.
The Long Now Foundation for when you want to feel a whole lot of things at the same time, including really dumb.
The Last Invention (maybe the fastest way to get up to speed on the current AI debate).
Hardcore History (Dan Carlin’s Alexander the Great series ‘Mania for Subjugation’ gained two episodes this year! Episodes 1, 2, and 3 take us through to the Battle of the Granicus.)
Music for your ears
The older I get the more I just want to put John Craigie, Corb Lund, and James McMurtry on repeat, but it’s important to listen to new stuff and there was a ton of new stuff I loved this year.
Petey USA’s The Yips was hands down my favorite end-to-end album, followed pretty closely by The Beths’ Straight Line Was a Lie (particularly No Joy which got a lot of rotation). I also loved the return of The Hives with The Hives Forever Forever the Hives (especially Path of Most Resistance). Perennial Sam Weston faves Your Smith and Now, Now also put out new albums.
For single tracks, it’s hard to argue with Wet Leg’s Mangetout and Catch These Fists, Ber’s Who’s This?, Hannah Grae’s Bitch, Medium Build’s White Male Privilege, Wolf Alice’s White Horses, or Geese’s Au Pays du Cocaine. I also loved the Viagra Boys’ Punk Rock Loser and Man Made of Meat. Jeremy Messersmith’s Boomers, Rachel Lark’s The World is Pretty Fucked and Brian Jackson’s 21st century take on the Revolution Will Not Be Televised were also fun/great.
As previously stated, big fan of everything James Gunn did this year, so much so that I became a convert to the Foxy Shazam Oh Lord Peacemaker 2 theme. And I will be forever grateful to Gunn for capping the best fight sequence featuring an eagle swallowing an eyeball this year with Ida Maria’s Dirty Money.
The Olympians’ California and Honey Bea, The Sparks’ 1956 Cannes Film Festival, Odesza’s Music to Refine to, Imperial Orchestra’s rendition of Interstellar, and Lucola’s Deveraux were all excellent productivity jams. Also, shout out to man of great music taste Patrick Coffee for assembling the perfect party hosting soundtrack in his Patrick Has Such Great Taste playlist.
You can listen to all these tracks and a few more in a 2025 playlist on Spotify here.
Books you should read and/or listen to
One of my goals in 2026 is to spend more time with physical books to get me off my phone, but in 2025 I got through most of my reading thanks to Spotify’s inclusion of audiobooks with Spotify Premium. Of everything I ‘read’ my favorites were:
There is No Antimemetics Division, qntm - my absolute favorite fiction this year. The original was appropriately impossible to find, but thankfully a mass market version was published toward the end of the year. I hope this becomes a film, it’s terrific.
Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading, Nadia Asparouhova - highly recommend this to anyone who works in communications or marketing to get you thinking about how ideas really move these days and what kinds of opinion matter and how best to shape them going forward.
Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson - the most important contribution to ‘the dialog’ this year and hopefully the cornerstone of much political debate and policy for years to come.
Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Aaron Bastani - the concentrated version for true Abundance heads. Written several years ahead of its time, now right on time.
White Mirror, Tinkered Thinking - what if science fiction but the opposite of Black Mirror?
Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality, Renee DiResta - published last year, this book has only become more and more relevant.
The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, Chris Hayes - this book should probably become required reading in schools. There’s plenty in here that will be interesting, if familiar, to folks working in marketing and advertising, but its true value is in understanding what’s now required to break through from a messaging and leadership standpoint. Chris’s conversation with Ezra Klein about the book from earlier this year is a useful summary.
Interviews/Articles/Op-Eds/Papers/Talks
Throughout the year, I try to keep track of the talks, articles, and papers that look the most interesting and that have the biggest impact on my thinking. Full disclosure, there’s probably plenty of POV validation bias knocking around in here as well as some amount of overlap with the links I shared earlier this year. This section is longer than I’d like it to be, but there’s a lot going on right now and it’s probably the most valuable because it all comes from people who are much smarter than me. You can also explore the NotebookLM notebook I pulled together using most of the following sources here and listen to the audio overview here.
On AI generally
An enormous amount of seminal writing about AI was published this year, much more than I’m going to do justice to here. AI-2027 was probably the most influential (this Dwarkesh interview with the authors is also good). I also recommend AI as Normal Technology and Superhuman AI in a Normal Age as chasers, as well as the AI-2027-inspired Android Dreams on robotics timelines, as the promise of embodied intelligence moves to the forefront of everyone’s attention in 2026.
The newly constituted Forethought Institute produced an excellent Intelligence Era curtain raiser ‘Preparing for the Intelligence Explosion’. I also recommend Paul Roetzer’s Move 37 for Knowledge Workers talk about some of the nearer term professional implications as well as Dwarkesh Patel’s essay on the fully automated firm. Mechanize’s Matthew Barnett, Tamay Besiroglu, Ege Erdil’s piece on technological determinism is also an interesting piece of automation morality hand washing. I also recommend Alex Danco’s first piece in his new A16Z role: Prediction: the Successor to Postmodernism.
Luke Drago and Rudolf Laine published a comprehensive look at the Intelligence Curse and how to avert it. And to keep things in perspective I also recommend spending time with this 2022 report on the superintelligences we already rely on.
Excepting Eliezer Yudkowsky’s contributions, existential concerns about AI safety seem to have faded somewhat this year. I loved Richard Ngo’s matrix for understanding AI through political coordination preferences. I thought Séb Krier’s Prescriptions & Predictions arguing for preserving a plurality of good world models and simulators and a plurality of prescriptions and dispute resolution mechanisms was good - as was Team DeepMind on Distributional AGI Safety and Meta’s Cultivating Pluralism In Algorithmic Monoculture: The Community Alignment Dataset.
And as we look to what happens next in AI development, Dwarkesh had a lot to say about continual learning, as did Ilya Sutskever on the need for new research. I think Context Is All You Need as well as Sam Altman’s musings on memory are also important to the next set of capability breakthroughs. This Google paper on Virtual Agent Economies is also interesting as agents evolve from bilateral to multilateral actors.
On AI’s impact on the economy and Post Labor Economics
As the likelihood of AI’s disruptive impact on the economy becomes more apparent, this is a subject capturing much more serious attention. I think some of the most important writing done on this topic this year has been by David Shapiro. I first learned about Shapiro when I heard him talk about decoupling labor from capital on the London Futurists podcast and this led me to his Theory of Economic Agency which well articulates things that have been on my mind over the last decade. David has a book on post-labor economics coming out next year but has already shared a lot of his thinking in a six part Substack series although the YouTube version is probably easier to digest. I think his proposal for creating an Ownership Economy and general frame for thinking about what’s happening is exciting and I’d very much like to see it make an Abundance level impact in 2026.
Among economists, Anton Korinek continues to do foundational work on this subject and I appreciated HBR’s interview with him about what happens when AI replaces every job. Also worth reading are Simon Taylor’s perspective on how AI will rewire the economy, these papers and presentations from NBER’s Economics of Transformative AI Workshop, Erik Brynjolfsson, Anton Korinek, and Ajay K. Agrawal’s Research Agenda for the Economics of Transformative AI and this Economics of Transformative AI curriculum. Over on Substack, Alex McCann wrote a three parter about the death of the corporate job and Michael .W Green also published an influential two part series on the poverty line in America.
On the future more broadly
While there’s no shortage of reasons to fear the moment, it’s a great time to be thinking ambitiously about the future as well. On this front I appreciated Forethought’s Better Futures series, The IFP’s Launch Sequence and Jason Crawford’s Unlimited Horizon in two parts.
There was also a lot written this year about the future of society and governance. On this front I recommend this perspective on Societal and Technological Progress as Sewing an Ever-Growing, Ever-Changing, Patchy, and Polychrome Quilt, The Cosmos Institute’s Coasean Bargaining at Scale, Derek Cheng on Forging a New AGI Social Contract, Justin B. Bullock, Samuel Hammond, and Seb Krier’s paper on AGI, Governments, and Free Societies, Richard Ngo’s 21st Century Civilization Curriculum, Vitalek’s Let a thousand societies bloom, and Dan Williams’ Is Social Media Destroying Democracy - Or Giving It To Us Good And Hard? I also came across Princeton’s Innovations for Successful Societies - a useful and inspiring resource as we think about the future.
On attention, information, memetics, and communications:
How information and AI intersect is a fascinating and rapidly evolving field of deep professional relevance to me. Here there appears to be some very interesting work being done by an organically assembled rag tag team of internetters like Defender - whose writing I recommend on Bootstrapping the Open Research Institute (as well as The Open Research Institute itself and this talk on the anatomy of an internet argument) and Guy, Socatique, and Xiq, resulting in things like The Epistemic Garden.
I also appreciated Marshall McLuhan’s grandson Andrew McLuhan on the Laws of New Media and Ezra Klein’s previously mentioned interview with Chris Hayes on attention dynamics was one of the most memorable interviews of the year. Alongside Nadia Asparouhova’s ‘Antimemetics’ book, Sriram Krishnan’s Group Chats Rule the World was also influential in the way I now think about how ideas move.
More traditionally, I thought this from Derek Thompson on why everything is now a conspiracy, a myth, or a leak was great as was Richard Ngo on Underdog Bias. Lulu Cheng Mersevey continued to lead the way in communications thinking in conversations about going direct with Palmer Lucky and interviews with Jack Altman, the Knowledge Project, and Yasha Mounk. I also kept returning to this well headlined 2016 piece from Andrew Boswoth: Communication is the Job.
In the spirit of everything being information and communication, Benjamin Bratton’s Philosophy of Planetary Computation and Sara Imari Walker’s Informational Theory of Life were two deeply engaging lectures that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
Finally, those who know me know I love a good manifesto and 2025 was also a great year for manifestos and manifesto-adjacent writing. I liked Leisure: A Manifesto, The Resonant Computing Manifesto (to which I’m a signatory), and Fidji Simo’s AI as the Greatest Source of Empowerment for All welcome letter upon joining OpenAI, as well as Bryan Johnson’s biological vibrancy manifesto and Mechanize’s Life After Work.
Everything Else
James Taylor Foreman’s The Disenchantment of the Modern World Is a Myth was one of my favorite pieces of writing this year.
Alex Komoroske’s Bits and Bobs is still the highest return on investment for sparking inspiration.
‘What’s up with men?’ continued to be a running theme and on this I recommend Derek Thompson’s ‘Monks in the Casino’ as well as Jacob Savage on ‘The Lost Generation’ and Matt Bruenig’s counter analysis. But also consider that Nothing Looks Cooler Than Not Caring You’re Balding.
Reggie James on being made for the moment.
Ana Andjelic’s guide to choosing the right merch strategy (related: supply.openai.com).
Mike Levin: Are we too part of a greater collective intelligence? How would we know?
Antikythera’s History of Now and David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto’s Constructor Theory of Time.
Cate Hall’s 50 Things she wishes she’d known sooner and Learn to Love the Moat of Low Status.
Zhen Dong Wang’s best facts of 2025.
Hugh White’s 80,000 Hours interview on the post American world.
The Pod people on the scourge of Democratic fundraising texts.
Dwarkesh’s interview with Lewis Bollard on factory farming and artificial meat and Andy Masley on animal suffering.
Gurwinder on how social media shortens your life.
Recipes
This was a light year for new recipes in the Weston household, so cooking more new things from more new people is going on the 2026 resolution list. Wins from 2025 included:
The U.S. Senate Dining Room’s Slow Cooker Senate Bean Soup and Dan Pelosi’s Chicken Stew.
Rita Kokshanian Mashkova’s Orange and Rosemary Braised Pork (which I recreated on ChatGPT here)
Alison Roman’s pasta with sausage, browned butter, and broccoli rabe. Alison’s new book ‘Something from Nothing’ is a must for all AR fans btw. Her best yet.
Websites/Platforms
ChatGPT (including ChatGPT Schedules) and NotebookLM were my go-to AI tools throughout the year although Gemini and Claude are hard to ignore and I’m keen to try Google’s new Illuminate tool.
I installed Quartr and love it as a way to keep track of public companies
eBay made a big comeback in my life this year. More on that below.
Every Noise as the most comprehensive index of music genres.
Idea Browser - dangerously tempting these days thanks to tools like Replit and Claude Code.
Paper Trails as a ‘Good Reads’ for papers and Consensus as a LM for scientific research.
Turbli to anticipate turbulence on your flight.
Every, Asterisk Magazine, Noema Magazine, FreeThink, and The Cosmos Institute as homes for writing about AI and the future.
Wikipedia’s Signs of AI Writing page.
Twitter/X as the place I still spend way too much of my time and of course Substack where I’m writing and you’re reading this.
Products and Purchases
The product that made the most profound impact on my life this year was Zepbound. Since agreeing with my doctor to try it out over the summer, I’ve lost nearly 30 pounds and feel better about myself and my health than I have in years.
In clothing, Instagram Ads introduced me to 3am Latte socks which I now strongly endorse and an Instagram influencer introduced me to Cornier’s incredible Silk Nep denim which made me a believer in wide leg trousers.
In food this year I learned to love Fairlife’s Protein Shakes. Minnesota finally solved its bagel problem with the introduction of ElMar’s Pizza. Fruit Riot became a staple.
Oh - and Crest’s sensitive white strips work!
Highlights and Milestones
I had a big birthday in October which I won’t bore you with because I’ve already written about the importance of that milestone in my life. But turning 45 wasn’t the only thing I did this year.
In February, Christine, Madeline and I spent two amazing weeks in New Zealand for my brother’s wedding. Pete had a pretty unfair shake of things in his twenties and early thirties and being able to celebrate him - and see him deeply happy - was one of the most meaningful and happy moments for my family in quite a while. We also road tripped down to see my dad’s sister in Taupo, took Madeline down the Luge, hit the beach in Tauranga, and I took Pete out to Muriwai on an insanely fun ATV safari.
NZ wasn’t the only place we packed into the car. In April, we drove from DC to Lynchburg, VA for a family reunion followed by a thorough family exploration of DC and I got my own family reunion with fellow Greenberg Quinlan Rosner alums Clark Jennings and Jim Secreto. Then in June we drove to NJ and back, making stops at the Medieval Times in Schaumburg, IL (surreally receiving push notifications about Trump bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities while booing the blue knight and feasting on chicken with my hands), Pittsburgh PA, and Niagara Falls on the way out and South Bend Indiana on the way home. Yes these were all highlights.
Penelope and Will turned 16, and both are now driving and rocking their first adult (New Zealand) passports. All parenting cliches are cliches for a reason. Nothing prepares you for how fast your kids grow up.
On the home front, I had big landscaping plans that were derailed by a lesson in Cormac McCarthy’s “you don’t know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” In this case, our bad luck having my landscaping budget gobbled up by our insurance company’s insistence we significantly prune back the tree branches hanging over our roof, leading to us having to take down our beloved back yard Locust tree. The worse luck turning out to be finding out the same tree was rotting from within due to a fissure in the trunk and that we were a strong storm away from a very large, very heavy, very beautiful tree crashing down on our bedroom.
Lastly, the project I had the most fun with this year was a real life You-Can-Do-It-Too application of AI to my wardrobe. After I started losing weight in the summer, I decided to evaluate my closet - which frankly had not received a lot of attention over the last decade. I asked ChatGPT to do a personal color analysis and then assess every piece of clothing I owned based on color and fit to identify the gaps. As it turned out, pretty much everything I owned was suboptimal for a ‘Light Spring’.
Because it’s not easy to just go on your favorite menswear site and buy what you need in ‘butter yellow,’ or ‘geranium,’ I started using eBay search alerts for specific Light Spring colors. This not only gave me access to the best colors for my palette, it allowed me to find premium items at much more affordable prices. Best of all, it has made shopping a fun, proactive adventure instead of the usual experience of being worn down by instagram ads.
A few final thoughts and observations
If you’ve made it all the way here then I guess I really owe you A Take on Our Present Moment and What Happens Next.
Of course I don’t know. I’ve never been less sure about what happens next. Earlier this year I ventured a few thoughts about where things might be going with comms and the future more broadly and hopefully whatever I’m about to write will be somewhat consistent with those.
When I wrote the 2024 version of this note, I said it felt like we were finally leaving the 20th century behind us and boy did 2025 feel like the first real year of the 21st. Some of this is due to the shock and awe of a new administration in the US doing… new… kinds of things, but of course, what I really mean is that this is the year the AI conversation went mainstream.
Here, I think OpenAI deserves serious credit for the work they’ve done to force AI onto the agenda at all levels and for their approach to continuous co-evolution/adaptation. Their success shaping the public policy agenda and getting people into the same book, if not yet the exact same page, has been a public service. I certainly hope this approach keeps working as capabilities continue to advance because now we’ve started I’m not sure anyone knows how to stop.
I believe it’s important to try to keep the AI tent as big and apolitical as possible for as long as possible. So I’m going to go ahead and credit the Trump administration for (opportunistically) leaning into the opportunity. And it’s been encouraging to see Democratic voices from Barack Obama to Pete Buttigieg, Mark Kelly, Bernie Sanders, and The Third Way weigh in with constructive takes that largely avoid force fitting AI into traditional left/right politics.
Thankfully, we also have Ezra Klein making the case that progressive causes should embrace technology in the pursuit of building better futures for everyone. Progress is uniquely possible in this moment because the politics have yet to be defined. As we go into the 2026 midterms, I expect there will be strong temptation to score easy political points by turning AI and tech billionaires into boogeymen and making promises to protect jobs from disruption. But this is a moment for us to transcend old ideologies and forge a new politics with a much more ambitious vision for the future - and for people. This is why I’m so excited about the power of ideas like Shapiro’s Ownership Economy and ‘Abundance’ to create new alliances and a new, future-facing issue agenda.
In AI circles, much of this year’s conversation seemed to focus on whether AGI will arrive by 2027, 2028, or somewhere in the 2030s-40s. It has been fascinating to watch the goalposts shift from the pursuit of AGI to superintelligence (perhaps best represented by the journey from Sam Altman’s three observations to his Gentle Singularity and Intelligence Age). But it really is striking how much progress has been made in a year. At the end of 2024 I was still grappling with how advanced Open AI’s 3o model was. As Julian Schrittwieser points out, a lot of us are simply failing to grasp what exponential growth feels like.
Singularity timelines are important, of course, in the same way that you might want to know when the aliens are due to arrive or an asteroid is scheduled to hit the planet. But today’s AI models are already powerful enough to transform how our world works. Debate over whether AI will eliminate all jobs is similarly unfocused. AI is already powerful enough to dislocate significant portions of the workforce in the coming years and this will have a profound impact on many of us.
As an aside, I think we should all be paying a lot more attention than we do to public opinion on all topics, but especially here. Interestingly, while people in the US are evenly split between the 50% who say they are more concerned than excited about AI and the 50% who are either equally concerned and excited or more excited than concerned, the potential for serious job loss only ranks 5th among people who think there are serious risks. I expect that number will change over the next 12 months, but let’s see.
As for what happens next, I expect we’ll see agents capable of making decisions and taking actions become more prevalent in the workforce and society (although they would benefit from much more usable interfaces and control dashboards) and that robots of all kinds will become more visible. This likely starts with seeing and interacting with self-driving cars beyond San Francisco which will get people much more comfortable with autonomous AI. “When the future arrives, it just feels like the present.”
2026 will also be a year of existential reckoning for a lot of companies. Here I think Google serves as a critical lesson and inspiration in meeting the moment, having singularly refocused its culture and assets without amputating its core business in 2025. The company is not only a leader from a frontier capabilities standpoint, it continues to be a responsible actor in its development and application of AI and unselfish in the way it is working to ensure everyone from historians to animal linguists are benefitting from its tools.
No doubt, 2026 will also be a year of reckoning for those of us already feeling nostalgic about the end of institutions that have defined our identities - whether those institutions are the very act of writing things ourselves or professional storytelling or music.
But for everything set to fade into history, there are so many new things to be excited about. Robotic construction! Super wood! Flying cars! This was also an incredibly exciting year in Space. Starship seems to be on its way to becoming viable, Rocket Lab continued to mature, and outer space seems to ready to explode as a new economic frontier, with moon bases being planned and companies like Google validating the idea of building off world data centers. Closer to home - as someone who has benefited from both mRNA covid vaccines and the GLPs in recent years - I can’t wait to see what AI is going to unlock in medicine, wellness, and science more broadly in the coming months.
While it really does feel like we’re entering a moment of enormous scientific progress, the move to alternative meats has been frustratingly slow, and hampered by the inevitable reactionary, short sighted politics. Lewis Bollard clearly spells out the challenges to overcome in his TED talk on factory farming. If there is one area that marketers - especially those who care about climate - can make a truly positive impact on the world, it’s in figuring out how to make this transition go smoothly and much faster.
12 months ago I said I expected 2025 to be even crazier than 2024. I think I got that one right and predicting more of the same in 2026 seems like a safe bet. Not only will we have elections in ~50 countries - including the US and New Zealand - 2026 will also mark the 250th anniversary of America’s declaration of independence. I expect this to create a certain amount of drama, but what an opportunity to contemplate what we want the next 250 years to look like. What values and principles do we want to bring into the future with us? My hope for next year is that we take as serious a look at how we’re set up for the future as America’s founders did.
If you read all of this, thank you. I hope it was worth it and I hope to see you here again at the end of 2026.
Love this. Thanks for sharing
FALC forever