What was 2025 like?

Everybody experienced 2025 differently.

Here’s how it felt to me.

Comedy

The core engine of comedy starts with a character. They have a flaw which inhibits the them from achieving a goal. The flaw is obvious to the audience. The character is oblivious to it. The more the character wants the goal, the greater their agony. The greater their agony, the greater the comedic effect. The whole idea that they don’t know any better drives the struggle and the delight in watching the struggle.

All the classic archetypes of comedy precipitate out of this solution.

I love comedy for its truth.

And I love that sometimes…the character wins!

In W1A, Ian wants to talk about Valuing Values. However he’s been hired into a PR-Crisis role. Ian’s inability to understand his situation is the core driver of his suffering and our enjoyment of the comedy.

I was the comedy.

It wasn’t about valuing values.

It was about valuing value.

The problem of value

You shift from labour to owner by creating a system that builds value. But how?

Have you seen Earth? It’s a mess! You’re spoiled for choice. There’s a lot you could do. Capital is pretty clear that it wants to replicate. Infinite Growth Forever! So get replicating!

Value is tied to Willingness To Pay. Any gap between Willingness to Pay and Ability to Pay is closed with debt. The interest rate is the bluntest instrument the Central Bank has to change the Ability to Pay. The acuity of the problem as it related to the value proposition is incredibly predictive of the outcome, including rallying the resources to realize the value proposition.

I heard a lot of problems.

Most were not acute.

Some people did not share an acute problem. There are lots of rational and emotional reasons for that. Some reasons remain hidden, mysterious, and elude me (comedy gold!).

I’m thankful for the politesse. It’s information. And I gathered a lot of it.

I listened. I agitated.

Until I found a market segment that agitated back.

The solution of solutions

Some people will cause confusion purely to fence.

Others to induce a state of susceptibility or suggestibility.

I don’t intend either to cause confusion.

Cue the laugh track.

Even though the problem space is far more interesting, because it is a signal for value, it can be vexing and frustrating to talk about it. The vocabulary one uses in drawing distinctions among problems, risks, and uncertainty can appear to be more abstract than discussing a solution, or, more specifically, a feature.

And most people prefer the concrete over the abstract.

Builders love talking about concrete features. It confirms what Claude C. Hopkins experienced at Bissell. Inventors want to talk about the rotary action of their sweeper. Consumers want to know how fast their floor will get cleaned and how the device will look in their home. I’m interested in the problem of dust as a starting point.

The problem with only talking about features is that it’s left to the listener to make the connection between a feature and their gain. Or worse. Sometimes the listener has to infer the connection between a feature, a quality attribute of the solution, and then imagine how they may gain from it.

Most people can understand extremely short causal statements. Of these: “Dryer sheets smell nice” and “15 minutes can save you 15% or more on car insurance” are tight, small, single link chains. But when those causal chains start lengthening, more people get lost. The intuition for speed limits on highways is one of those things. Most people assume that because they control their car, they control the risk. In reality, they’re taking the risk of the ability of other people around them to control their vehicle. It’s a dynamic system. Try explaining that to somebody who either doesn’t understand systems or is overestimating their skill in response to situations caused by the bottom percentile driver on the road.

Comedy. Gold.

The solution to talking about problems is to talk about solutions with short causal chains with big gains.

Let’s give people what they like.

It’s still coming together.

Running

I ran a lot. I went hard.

Too hard.

I ran in the snow. I ran my first 42 km in February. I ran over uncleared snowbanks on sidewalks in Mississauga. There are sidewalks over the bridge that connect Toronto and Mississauga that are especially uncleared. There are sidewalks in Mississauga that are cleared and then covered by snow from the road.

What the hell was I doing? On the way back from a particularly long run, on the last 3 km, near the slope on Lakeshore by the Legion, the ligament in my knee tasked with stabilization had a rather strong opinion about the situation.

I didn’t recover in time for the Toronto Marathon. I didn’t run the full. I finished the half-marathon. I limped across that finish line. I suffered. Did I ever suffer.

I took care to recover over the summer and finished the waterfront half marathon with a good time. What a thrill it was to run right down the centre of Bathurst Street! And, having tasted quite a few Alberta Clippers on the Martin Goodman Trail, the 50km/hr wind gusts on the last stretch felt like a kiss. But the cruelty of that turn onto Bay Street, with 1.1 km left and a heart exceeding 180 BPM was a different level of pain. I groaned. And I suffered. Did I ever suffer.

The running in 2025 was fantastic and frustrating and fun and another word starting with f.

The 12 Year Old Theory

At some points during the year it seemed like people were making decisions as though others didn’t get to reply. For instance, some folk cheered on the harming of “the right people”, and debates about who is less of a human than others flourished.

It’s silly.

Somebody asked me to imagine that everybody was a 12 years old.

It saddens me to report that an awful lot of behaviour just made a lot of sense.

Sometimes, people manage to accrue just enough power to do a lot of damage. They’re blundering. Do you remember the first time you encountered a chess board? Do you remember learning that the horsey could jump over other pieces? Imagine, then, people somehow making it to the game and not knowing that the horsey can jump? Or worse, jump to places where it can hurt you in ways you couldn’t have imagined.

Get forked!

People are capable of some pretty incredible strategic miscalculation. Especially when it comes to the weaponization of fear. With respect to some of the earlier works in political science, it’s easy to not fully metabolize some lessons. We don’t talk about it.

It’s as though Pareto Optimality isn’t obvious.

And maybe because it’s a relatively novel, recent, development in human development?

We all get more when we cooperate.

Brain Rot

A bet on convenience is always a great bet.

Light at the flick of a switch is more convenient than gaslight which beats a candle which beats a torch which beats a campfire with wood. Bicycles beat horses for medium-distance trips because you don’t need to feed a horse. And the sidewalks of Toronto are filled with tired young men riding tired electric bikes carrying tired food from tired line cooks to tired customers’ doors’. Convenience wins.

If, in doing sportsbook betting on the big game, you want to ask ChatGPT on how much to wager, well, that sure is convenient then isn’t it? Convenience wins? Somebody wins.

Brain rot is caused by consuming long strings of easy, unchallenging, short form video and memes. It’s just more convenient to scroll than it is to read. It may also be caused by relying on LLM’s for all critical reasoning functions.

Maybe it’s always been this way?

Is the nutritional value of 44 minutes of Ancient Aliens is about on par with 44 minutes of YouTube Shorts scrolling? People are still consuming the same number of hours of content as they were in the past. They’re just consuming it on different platforms. And that’s fine.

It hit me that maybe it’s exactly as it appears though. The reason why it doesn’t seem like people don’t read anything new is because they aren’t reading? Maybe the reason why nobody seems to know what the hell I’m talking about is because nobody knows what the hell I’m talking about.

Comedy. Gold.

Eh Aye

Society’s interaction with AI was vexing.

If you use the tools to help out in a field that you’re an expert in, then you know. You know what its capabilities are. You know where they can get lost. You know how to work with them when they derail. You know just how much supervision they need. You know how they can lead you astray. You know the limits. Because you have prior knowledge of a field.

If you don’t know, you don’t know. And a lot of people sure do say a lot of things as though they know. If they’re prone to HARKing, Hypothesizing After Results Known, or if it’s convenient to engage in post-hoc justification, then they’ll just continue to do it. HARKers gonna HARK.

Capital got frustrated with Labour back in 2023. It’s just from what I gather from those well capitalized people on X. This was in part a backlash against DEI and WFH. There’s no fury like a feudal lord scorned. There was a kind of surprise about the reputation risk of celebrating cruelty, and there was some minor correction. And so, in that spirit of vengeance, many have used AI to justify their dissatisfaction.

And maybe it wasn’t purely vengeance driven? Maybe they wanted greater gains and they figured they finally had leverage over labour, those opinionated software engineers that know how the machines work better than management or capital does? Maybe they’re merely behaving the way they did in 1809? Maybe they’re forgetting that they need to maintain alignment to maximize returns?

And productivity has increased. And AI helped. But that isn’t quite the full story.

There’s a lot of capital riding on the idea that it’s caused entirely by AI.

So it’s a narrative that a lot of people have an interest in promoting. So it gets promoted and repeated.

Every bubble in history has been fuelled by the hot air pumped from the lungs and out pursed lips. This one isn’t any different.

It all has a Banque Royale kind of feeling to it. French investors were ultimately right. The Mississippi River is indeed insanely powerful and core part of American power. They got the timing wrong.

If you’ve been through previous technical innovations, you know that there’s a lag between the technological trigger, it’s adoption, the scale out and the inevitable consolidation. There are gains left to be made from AI. There’s a ways to go.

The application of AI to creative industry is creative. It relies on creative people. Creativity doesn’t exactly flourish under threat. We should, by now, have the intuition as to why it doesn’t produce compound growth. And so, if we continue on this path, we’re going to destroy the foundation of compound growth. It’s in the selfish self-interest to operate that way, which fuels a realism that the winners are going to find it.

There are so many gains to be made just from absorbing the scientific gains from 2012-2022, and the more recent ones from 2023-2025.

Some people will be surprised.

2026

If present trends continue: 2026 will be dumber, nastier, and ultimately funnier.

Dumber because convenience and corruption trends are only intensifying. It’s almost as though some people don’t update their priors! It is unlikely that the liberty to believe in falsehoods will diminish in 2026. And it is very unlikely that the liberty to perpetuate frauds on those who retain the liberty to believe falsehoods will diminish in 2026. The incentives for platforms to promote falsehoods that reinforce belief-speaking are so strong, and the consideration of social welfare so weak, that it’s bound to intensify.

Nastier because we’re far from peak rage-farming. Just as recent advancements in technology have increased consumer demand, the same technology is used to elicit fear. Fear responses continue to be unreasonably effective to disempower, deflect, and motivate. The power to induce fear in large segments of the population has become ever more concentrated, and the propensity to be fearful has increased. Those who find themselves the most victimized by the trend can then be selectively activated. Not all of them. But some. And it doesn’t take many to perpetuate more nastiness.

And funnier because there’s that gap again.

It’s as though many games are designed to appear zero-sum. (It may be that not all games are designed and that the zero-sum appearance spontaneously emerges from a stance!). Most games have hidden layers. Some more than others. If one accepts the framing of a game as zero-sum then that’ll certainly induce specific behaviours that may be leveraged. One of those classic games is insider-outsider. There’s no rule that any insider-outsider distinction is essential. And yet, that framing can be used to generate a red-queen race condition, often to devastating effect.

If everybody had a little self-esteem printer between their ears, they wouldn’t need monopoly or corporate script to tell them that they have esteem. And yet, precisely because esteem appears to be scarce, there’s the appearance that it is. And so, you get some truly brutally hilarious behaviour.

If there’s hope, it’s in that there’s some early evidence that corruption, crookedness, and thoughtlessness, having become common, will be appropriately devalued. Some people imitating the worst of us, seeing it everywhere, may decide to start imitating more pro-social values. I don’t have a solid grip on how rapidly that stance will diffuse. But I’m realistic in the sense that people are novelty seeking and differentiate to compete. If they figure they can get esteem somehow, they will.

And yet, even reflecting on this analysis, this kind of belief that virtue can be fashionable, is pretty funny.

Let’s just laugh and have some fun with it.