2025 Headlines from the Future

Michelle, thank you for making the trip out to California to meet in person. It was so much healthier. We just get so much done in person better than, you know, just remotely over Zoom or Teams or whatever. So I appreciate you doing that.

Thank you. Yeah, definitely. I sacrificed a lot to be there. And, you know, it was really important to me to spend time with you, but really it was important to me to take away, Mo.

And so that's why I really went. That's why I really went. That's why you came out. That's why I said yes.

You got to take your first Waymo. That's good. Exactly. They're just coming out here in Miami, but this was commercially available in San Francisco.

And so I thought, why not? I got to be an early adopter of this stuff. Yes. Super cool.

So I took a wonderful trip. I filmed the whole thing, even though I have no social media. You filmed your whole Waymo trip. Oh, there you go.

Filmed it all, sent it to my mommy. And my mommy sends it to every family chat we have, of which I'm included. and is like, Michelle is living in the future. Yeah.

Just call me an influencer, you know. See, I thought there you were, that you're making the trip out for this meeting because you were committed to the cause. Really, you just wanted all of your Peruvian relatives to know that you were living in the future. Yes, yes, exactly.

Fantastic. I'm Dave Pitnayek. And I'm Michelle Ardamola. And you're listening to The Jump Podcast, the conversation for future-focused leaders.

And today we're going to be cutting through the noise and figuring out which headlines from 2025 really actually matter for the future. Are you ready, Dave? Let's go. Michelle, this was a topsy-turvy year, up and down, good and bad on all sorts of fronts.

My head was spinning by the end of 2025. Oh, yeah. This has been lots of, I think, ups and downs, global news, national news. Wars.

Wars. I mean, we started this year to take you back to the L.A. Wildfires that kind of kicked off the year.

Oh, gosh, you're right. That started. We had a lot of friends who lost their houses in that. It was just terrible.

Yeah. Right? Then on the other side of the world, we had the Gaza ceasefire deal that started in January but then broke down by March. You know, we've got the FDA revoking red dye number three and routine vaccine policies cracking open.

Yeah, right. It's like, but wait, there's more. You know, you've got U.S.

And that's just like March, right? Yeah, that's just like March, right? Yeah. We've got U.

S. immigration policy tightening. We've got sweeping new tariffs, trade fragmentation deepening. I think you must have heard of a lot of China plus one, China plus one strategy, right?

Yeah. We've got this year. It could not be this year without AI being one of the biggest stories, right, when it comes to CapEx spending, data center spending. And even there, up and down, it's like, no, the AI is going to transform the world.

And the payoff is not really there. Actually, the payoff is transformative. Yeah. Right.

I mean, just up and down news on that as well. Exactly. And in that backdrop, right, in that we have the political government as well, the U.S.

Government shutting down for 43 days, the longest shutdown on record, right? Yeah, right. So lots of confusion, let's call it. Lots of confusion.

But, you know, OK, so that is all turbulence. But, you know, as we're constantly telling our friends and clients, which is don't get distracted by the turbulence. You know, don't get distracted by the noise. Look for the signal, you know, that's shining through that.

Or what we're always talking about is, you know, that idea of momentum over moments. Look for the broader momentum, not just the individual headlines of what is bugging you this week, because otherwise you'll make yourself crazy. I mean, and not to say there are stuff that's going to be immediate impact that we might have to react to. Right.

But there are some things that happened this year that signal that the future will be different than maybe the direction we thought we were on or where we're going. And those are super important to also pay attention to, because if we don't start like building the things now to prepare for that future, it's going to be too late. You're right. And so that's why we do the headlines from the future on this podcast where we talk about, you know, what are the latest two or three headlines that we see that we think are going to matter that we will look back in five or seven years and say this was a distant early warning signal of what's to come.

We've now done that all year long. And just like last year and the year before, we should go back and actually say, OK, what were the big headlines for the future of 2025? The things that we think are going to really matter over time. The momentum, not just the moments.

Exactly. All right. So we've gathered about 10. Yeah, Dave?

Yeah, we have 10 of these. And I should say, you know, usually when we're playing this game on this podcast, I haven't heard what you put together ahead of time for this. But with these, we were all, you and I were going through these together and collating and arguing about what actually mattered. Yeah, I actually made you do some prep work.

You actually made me do some prep work for this podcast. Exactly. But which means that I'm also, therefore, not sitting here deer in the headlights like I normally am. No, no.

Now you get to make others feel that way. That's right. Exactly. We brought those 10 today.

And so I thought we could just, you know, I could start with one. then you could share another and we'll just trade off like that, sound good? Great, and let's start with ones that we think are important. You know, like accelerate.

Let's start from the 10th most important and go to the first. You know, like let's, we'll do it as a countdown to the, to the, to the biggest one. How about that? So that everyone can know how dramatic you are.

Yes, exactly. Thank you. It's a dramatic end. Got it.

Thank you. All right. Cool. What do you got?

Headline number 10. Give it to us. All right. Headline number 10.

Adoption and effectiveness of GLP-1 drugs continue to expand. Yeah. This, this makes sense. I mean, Ozempic was, was the big headline a couple of years back, But it seems like we're finding new uses for GLP-1s and we're finding new form factors, like maybe it can be a pill and it's not just Ozempic.

Other people have piled on as well. And particularly Eli Lilly has been making great breakthroughs in this area. Exactly. So we've seen everything from liver disease and kidney disease actually be approved for Ozempic use or other GLP-1s.

So, again, last year was a lot of studies showing indications of this use beyond diabetes and weight loss. And this year, seeing it actually go into not just beyond trial, into trials, but actually going into approval. What is fascinating is the number of experiments that are going on, the number of trials about other things, because as best as we can surmise, GLP-1's effect are pleasure centers. So we're seeing early research on, you know, maybe it can help with gambling addiction.

Maybe it can help with, you know, all sorts of other things beyond just, you know, weight loss. It's almost like people are saying, like, let's see if it gets rid of my hiccups. I'm not surprised it doesn't, you know. Well, and I think that's the biggest kind of momentum indicator is compared to some other, you know, medical uses or new solutions out there.

You just have to look at the speed at which this has gone from. Obesity, to weight loss, to other things and through FDA approval. And that tells you, like, we're investing here. Right.

We're fundamentally changing how we are going to live. And if you are someone who has spent a lot of your time focusing on the pleasure centers of your brain, meaning if you make salty snacks or you make candy or you run casinos or you run a social media company. That's what I was going to say, the scrolling, right? Yeah, right.

Will a GLP-1 help me to not be addicted to TikTok? Right. That'll be an interesting dynamic. Let's hope.

Let's hope for that. All right. That's number 10. I have number nine for you.

Headline number nine. All right. Give it to me. Cities struggle to adapt to the face of deadly climate disasters, where we've been talking about climate change for a long time, but it's happened this year, And cities have just been struggling to deal with that.

Yeah, and I think struggling and that to me, the unique part has been seeing us as a society actually immediately go to the cities, to the infrastructures, to our government and say, hey, this could have been prevented. Yeah. And why wasn't it done? Whether it was because the stormwater infrastructure isn't appropriate, whether the emergency protocols aren't in place.

People are saying, hey, you know, we knew about this before. Why aren't we ready? Yeah. I mean, the floods that happened in Texas, that horrible situation where all of those those little girls who are camping got, you know, washed away.

It's just a terrible, terrible thing. Yes, part of the blame you can say is, OK, we didn't have proper alarm systems in place to warn about this. But let's also be clear, you know, like many of these governments have been trying to insist that climate change is a myth. And when the impact is happening around, it's like, well, perhaps we could have done something about this.

But no, I guess we really have moved to adaptation strategies. And some cities are doing these better than others. I think you've talked about, like, New York City is doing a much better job, say, than Houston or Miami. Absolutely.

New York recently had a few deaths in the subway system because of floods. And again, you know, people commute there all the time through the subway system. So this was a huge problem. And what New York City has been doing in the last year especially has been figuring out how to turn areas like parks, even like basketball courts, into these flood areas, meaning they're extra porous.

They're meant to, like, take in the water. They're a little bit below the sea level of the rest of the island. And so hopefully trying to prevent in areas where that stormwater could cause these issues, like, again, not just infrastructure problems or problems to our housing, but actually the deaths that have happened this year. Yeah.

And we're going to see this going forward. The future focused aspect of this is, you know, much of the stock market was focused on the MAG7 this year for obvious reasons with AI, NVIDIA and the rest of them. But there's a lot of great work that has to be done around rebuilding our infrastructure. For years, we didn't want to do anything about climate change because we said, oh, it's too expensive to change that.

We're going to pay a whole lot more just in terms of adaptation because we didn't make those changes. And that actually is opportunity for construction companies and other people who are deeply invested in infrastructure. I think there's opportunity to pay attention here, but I also think that there's liability to pay attention here, right? Because certainly for the states and the countries, but I think if your company, especially a big company today, and some of these issues, let's say your infrastructure isn't up to date and there's some issue and cause of death, I think these are pretty good leading indicators of the blame will be placed on you for not being ready.

There you go. So if you're an infrastructure company, if you're a financial services company, certainly we've seen the impact it's having on insurance where, you know, companies like Allstate saying they're pulling out of insuring homes in California because of wildfires. Yep. Right.

The, you know, the check is coming due across sectors for this. And we're only going to see that continue to happen over the next several years. Absolutely. All right.

What's the next one? Okay. Headline number eight. Technology started to be treated like tobacco as AI led to psychosis and suicide.

AI led to psychosis and suicide. Okay. I mean, you know, you think we've been talking about this for a while. We used to think about technology as an unvarnished good.

It's great. It's going to connect the world. we're going to democratize everything democratize everything that's right and over the last few years there's been this shifting tide that people are starting to think about social media and mobile phones kind of like we think about alcohol and tobacco like should we be allowing 10 year olds to have a mobile phone like is it actually healthy for them right should we be allowing 14 year old girls to be on social media right when there's so much data that it does terrible things to our kids.

So the shift to thinking about technology like it's tobacco is a big deal. But then we have AI and there's been all sorts of stories about crazy stuff happening with folks who are playing with LLMs. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, because last year we saw some of this stuff with social media, phone bans in schools, right? Australia passed their phone ban, which went into effect this year.

But to me, it's been impressive to see how quickly, like it took us a while there to get that word, social media and phones. But with AI, it is happening right now very quickly. And so we're seeing things like parents bringing lawsuits towards places like opening AI, as well as going into Senate hearings and talking about their kids committing suicide because of conversations with their chatbots. Right.

And you might say horrible things. Right. And you can go back and see the details of this. You can see the conversations that parents have access to them or publish them.

Right. And if you have not seen this, I think it's important because is, you know, you'd say, like, how does a chatbot convince someone to commit suicide? It's not like that. But when you see someone say, hey, you know, I'm about to kill myself, you'll see the response of the chatbot being like, you know, you have done a lot in the world.

I will always remember you. Oh, my God. Right. And so it does.

Right. And it's something for us to, you know, everything from that to grandiose thinking, what we've now termed as AI psychosis. Yeah. Right.

And that I have invented a perpetual motion machine. Jet TPG thinks I'm the next Einstein. I'm why won't anyone listen to me? Well, religions and cults are being born from this kind of stuff.

Right. So I think this is, to me, a fascinating thing because it's happening, but very quickly we're also seeing, you know, parents and Senate hearings turn around and say, no, no, no, we need more safeguards around these things. Right. And especially you think of like things like therapy, right?

There's a lot of people who are using, you know, ChatTPT as their therapist. Right. And in most places, a therapist requires a license to make sure that, A, that they're not doing any harm, but B, that they're not sending you down the wrong path. Chat TPT is an unlicensed therapist with massive capacity for hallucination.

Yeah. And so I think, you know, when we think about what are possible, you know, I've talked about Chernobyl's events for AI. For me, this is one of those when I think, you know, pay attention. It might just come from a social thing that we just, you know, we we say no more.

We we don't want it like this. And that that stops the creation of it. Well, I mean, or at least that we think more smartly about how we want it and in what way do we want it. Yeah, slow down the creation, let's say, right?

Like, it's a, hey, we do need safeguards. We do need transparency. That's right. We, you know, the internal combustion engine has been a very good thing for us by and large in the 20th century.

But I don't need my neighbor running a diesel generator in his backyard all night long, right? And so there are impacts of that. And we have to pay attention to this. The fact that we're looking at technology now in a different viewpoint, kind of a gimlet eye, is probably a healthy thing if we can evolve quickly enough.

And I think if you're an organization who's thinking about, you know, whether it was like social media advertising, you've seen the death of that in some ways. I think it's also the whole, you know, we just need to market to AI chatbots. Right. Might be something to question.

Right. We'll take a look at it. All right. I've got another one for you, Michelle.

Headline number seven. All right. Fusion power. Move down the path to widespread commercialization.

I love this. Yeah. This is Star Trek technology. This is amazing.

Not just Star Trek, but this feels good. Right. Like this is one. I mean, it's cool.

It we didn't think we would get here. We did talk about this last year. Right. That that, you know, we were starting to break ground here in the U.

S. But this year has just accelerated and just in time, because if you think about all the energy demand and everything we've been talking about, man, do we need fusion? Right. Yeah, right.

I mean, cheap, clean, plentiful energy, right? Something that the size of a shoebox can power a small town. That's something we've been dreaming about for generations. And thanks to some, again, your tax dollars at work, Lawrence Livermore Labs made some huge gains over the last two years, this front.

And what has been fascinating in the last year, though, is that many of these things have actually moved to commercialization. The big ones. Okay, let's actually build a fusion reactor. Let's actually see if we can put this to work for commercial applications and for industrial applications, which I think is really cool.

Yeah. And speaking of momentum, there's also just been a ton of investment, even more investment in this space in the last year. And so it really tells you, like, we're committed, right? Even from in the U.

S. Point of view, the Department of Energy has now put together their fusion science and technology roadmap. They have a dedicated office of fusion now. So despite everything we've talked about within the government, it's interesting to see, like, no, no, we're on the fusion train.

Yeah, this is going to happen if only because Google and Microsoft and NVIDIA and everybody else, you know, whose futures depended on data centers needs energy, needs power. And so it is going to drive advancements quickly in this space over the next few years. Exactly. And again, good clean energy, right, which is the cool thing.

Love it. All right, give us another one. Headline number six, gene editing technologies began to save human lives. Yeah, this is great.

You know, we've been talking about CRISPR for a few years now, about the ability to modify human genome. It's starting to have real payoffs in actually helping people. Yeah, this is another one that sort of has moved from fiction to, oh wait, no, it actually is already here, saving everything from, we talked about Baby KJ this year. Yeah, share a little bit about Baby KJ, which I think is a beautiful story.

Yeah, baby KJ, so born this year and within, normally given the rare disease that baby KJ had, within, usually the lifespan would have been less than a month from birth, right? So it was a serious rare genetic disease, but luckily he was born in a hospital where the doctor had access to another doctor at the university nearby who had been working on some CRISPR treatments. And so it fast-tracked, I mean, incredible story of just, you know, communication, collaboration all over the country.

Different universities work together as well as they fast-tracked FDA approval to get baby KJ in this treatment, and it saved him. So he was able to go home about six months later, and he is expected to have a normal life. That's so awesome. Now, it's fascinating.

Back in the 90s, the first concerns were happening around GMO crops, right? Genetically modified organisms of food. And we kind of backed away from it. People were very scared about frankenfood for reasons good and bad.

We want it organic, natural, whatever that means. But if you think about it, what we're basically saying is, okay, we're actually going to have genetically modified people. Baby KJ is a GMO person, right? Yeah, exactly.

And so we're starting in a place, okay, where are you? Okay, you don't want your bread grown from GMO wheat, but can we save this baby's life? And so it's happening. We are modifying the DNA of living creatures.

We're starting in a place that is, you know, like very hard to argue against. At some point. Who doesn't want to say baby KJ? Who doesn't want to say baby KJ?

But at some point, it's going to shift to say, yeah, but can you just make me a little prettier? Or can you just make my kid a little smarter? And we're only going to see more of this over the next few years. If you're a pharmaceutical company, some of the things that you've been treating with pharmaceuticals is just going to change to a gene editing solution.

Only more of this to come. Well, think about pre-existing conditions with insurance, right? Like, I think it just changes the whole landscape. That's right.

Exactly. Like, if you have a pre-existing condition, is there something we can do about it to repair you? Yeah. All right.

We're halfway through this now. Right. Take a look at that. We just went through five of these.

Right. Yeah. We started off talking about GLP-1 drugs. We talked about climate change.

We talked about AI psychosis and technology, you know, like. As tobacco. Yeah. As tobacco.

We've talked about fusion power. We talked about gene therapy and CRISPR. General take? What do you think?

Like, it's, it's, there's a lot that happened this year on that front, and we're only halfway through the headlines. There's a lot, and I was excited, I think, towards the end, as soon as we started talking about fusion power and gene editing, you start getting this sense, like, oh my gosh, the future, right? Like, it felt a lot more things that we used to think as, like, totally fake, and here they are, and exciting stuff. It's making me feel good.

So far, I feel good. I'm nervous then. And these are also things that had reasonable concerns, you know, GMOs and gene editing. Yeah.

Look, bad stuff may still happen due to gene editing. Bad stuff may happen as a result of fusion power. No question, right? Yeah.

But no question that the technology went from science fiction to reality in a way that is incredible, right? That's right. That's right. And if our brain said, yeah, I imagine only linear change going forward, just look back over the last couple of years, look back over 2025 and see how much change there's already.

Oh, that's also my takeaway, just how smart we are. You know, many of these we called out last year. Wait, are you saying how smart human beings are? No, no, you and me, Dave.

You and me? Oh, for God's sake. Yeah, right. Okay.

I got another one for you here. Let's get into this. Headline number five. Self-driving trucks when commercial and robo taxis expanded to new cities.

This is your Weibo. I love this. Yeah, I love this one. Right.

It's, you know, we've been talking about robots for a while. Robots are on the streets now in cities like San Francisco and Austin. You can drive a Waymo. You can drive a Waymo.

And now they've launched actually Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Orlando. They've just launched in Miami. Amazon has gotten huge into this, but there's Zoox. You've probably seen those training all around.

Yeah. So that's really just taken off in a commercial way, which, again, do you remember like self-driving vehicles was, you know, oh, it'll come next year. No, no, no. We're 20 years away from it.

No. And just, oh, no, they're here. You can pay for them. You're actually here right now.

You can come to San Francisco like you just did, and you can ride in one yourself and then have everybody in Peru talk about how you're living in the future. How cool I am. But the other side is the commercial vehicles and the trucks, which I find really fascinating, right? Yeah, exactly.

So that has been the cool one sort of under the radar, in my opinion, because it's a little small right now. But again, let's look at signals. You've got a company called Aurora, who their semis are running between Houston and Dallas. Thank you.

Yeah. Right. And so today. Yeah, that's that's on the road.

Right. And this is something that, look, there's a lot of freight that gets shipped across the country. The United States is a big place. And we ship a lot of goods, you know, with with trucks.

And being a trucker is a hard job. I mean, they're long hours. You're supposed to take regulated sleep. We hear stories that they folks don't do it.

And there's all sorts of, you know, addiction issues because addiction issues as people are trying to find ways to stay awake. longer, right? So, you know, maybe robots are a viable, you know, alternative having autonomous trucks. The challenge is, is we have, by anyone's count, anywhere between three and a half to four million truckers in America.

And so is this the writing on the wall for them? Are they all going to be out of a job in the next five years, right? Think about that. Like that's, you know that's one percent of the population right one percent of the predominantly male working age population will be unemployed thanks who's doing really well right now too yeah right who's doing really well right now like trucking is a great job in terms of like its benefits and it's pay we can't oh no sorry i just i was being ironic as when you said that men predominantly men are losing this job i was like they're already we already have so many stats of how how men are doing right so i was like great this is another one yeah no exactly that so this is this is something to pay attention to in terms of huge impact going forward yes at the same time i will say for me personally dave yes i i totally see that with our jobs but i also have to say, The vision I have for safety, like road safety in the future, whether it's pedestrian deaths, car deaths.

In the U.S., we have a huge problem with that. Yeah.

Even trucker deaths, right, or cars by semis who are tired and a normal pedestrian car or civilian car gets, you know, gets run over. So to me, I think of this as also just imagining that real Internet of Things, connected highways, et cetera. Right. Yeah.

I mean, this is something that we're going to see more and more of. Freight, logistics, supply chains are going to be transformed by this, not someday soon, but kind of starting now. As you said, the trucks are already on the road between Dallas and Houston. And it's going to change the cost of goods, the cost of supply.

We've got to figure out what to do for everybody who was a trucker. Just telling them to go it alone or sign up to be an Internet influencer is not viable. And I feel like we have not paid attention to this for 20 years. We were just like, no, no, no, people will retrain and reskill themselves.

And that's not happening. And this is going to make things even worse. All right, give us another one. All right.

Headline number four, China pulled ahead as the world leader in green technology. Yeah, look, we keep cutting back in the U.S. The current administration thinks that green technology is a scam.

And if you're the Chinese, you are just delighted to watch America just, you know. Cause, you know, self-inflicted harm as we're just like, no, no, no, we want to lose this race. Like, please jump ahead for us. We're seeing this across the board with China's doing both in terms of electric vehicles, but just also in terms of electricity production has gone green.

I think this, I got to be honest, out of all our headlines, this is one that probably surprised me the most, like caught me by surprise. And I think it's probably because when I think of a few narratives like one is you know when we think about China's the great polluter right that's been the narrative for a long time and like oh well it's about cheap manufacturing and so imagining that they would choose to take the lead right like and take this investment which requires like redoing a lot of whatever the infrastructure they currently have because to your point they now are producing three quarters, I think it was, three quarters of all wind and solar projects are in China.

Exactly. And they themselves, their clean energy is number one for them right now for their own energy production. But that's been fascinating. If you're building a wind turbine now, it's probably coming from China.

And that's not to mention, like you already said, it's like their EVs, which we don't have them here. But man, are those doing well and selling well? Yeah. You know, at the end of December, Ford announced that they were going to have like huge cuts because they were actually dialing back their EV models in the United States.

And man, at the same time, BYD and sister companies in the United States are just going great guns on this. And the cars are crazy. Super cheap. They're like, you know, like 10 grand and they're like fully automated and electric and running much better.

They look like a generation ahead of anything we have in the U.S. In part because of government support, right? China is going all in on green tech.

And I think it really speaks to, again, momentum versus moments, right? Like, where do we think the world is moving? And if you take this plus fusion, plus just the demand that we have for energy, It's clearly saying, you know, some people might have thought, okay, well, that'll bring us back to fossil fuels because the demand is going to destroy all of the clean energy tech advancements. And what you're seeing is actually, no, it's pushing us towards newer, like, no, we need fusion.

We need other sources of energy that are more clean, is one version. But I think also just we need more of it. And fusion is that sort of unending source. Yeah.

It's true. I mean, you still have politicians in the United States who are fighting for coal at the same time that, you know, China is leaping ahead. You talk to people from China and they do not understand our desire to just kind of abandon the field. It's one thing to compete with someone else.

It's another thing to abandon the field and say you win for no reason whatsoever. No reason. And that we seem to be doing that. Which, you know, takes us to the next headline, headline number three.

And this is one that is deeply concerning to me. Headline number three, America dismantled a century's worth of security and trade alliances. Man, this was brutal this year. Whether you talk about, you know, killing off USAID and the support it provides to all sorts of people in dire straits, whether you talk about tariffs and putting up protectionist barriers, whether you talk about being dodgy on NATO and standing by Ukraine.

On multiple fronts, the United States in, call it like 12 months, dismantled many of the key military security and economic alliances. That have kept the peace, you know, like what we call the Pax Americana, have kept the peace for the better part of a century. And this is just deeply troubling. And I don't know that it's something that you can, you know, once you do this kind of dismantling, I don't know that you can put it back together again afterwards.

I think that's why this is a headline for the future for us, right, Dave? Because that's important, I think, for us to really concentrate when we do these things to say, okay, what doesn't feel, especially with political things, it feels like, is this happening, but, you know, new president next year or two years or new Congress, and this goes away, right? That's right. But this the reason this is here is because when we think about the future and when we think about cutting those those agreements or putting the tariffs or the relationships that are that are breaking, it's the consequence of that, whether it's, you know, Germany doing their largest ever defense procurement package or South Korea debating having their own nuclear power.

That really matters because you can't just, you know, get your nuclear power and say, yeah, okay, but now it's a new president, so I'm going to take it away. You know, I'm going to put that in the closet. Don't worry about it now. Look, for 80 years, we told the world, Don't worry about building up your militaries.

We will keep you safe. Don't worry about patrolling the seas. We will protect the shipping lanes. Don't worry about, you know, like where you're storing your money.

The U.S. dollar will be the reserve currency. Right.

And that gave us massive amounts of influence and power untold, like no civilization in the history of mankind. Right. And to just kind of walk away from all of it in a way of saying, no, no, we're just going to go it alone is really abandoning the field. And even if we come back in three years and say, ha ha, we were just kidding.

No, no, no, we will still support you. If you're Germany, if you're Japan or any of these other countries, why would you listen? And at the same time, if you pulled out aid from sub-Saharan Africa, at the same moment while the Chinese are coming in and saying, no, no, we'll actually help you out instead, how do you expect to have any influence in the world? You know, it's a lot of stupid headlines every day, but it's adding up to really the dismantling of what some people call the Pax Americana, maintaining the peace militarily and economically.

I mean, there's the piece, and then maybe the part not everyone agrees with, but I think the part that you said of - protecting American interests, right, and influence. And to me, that's the irony of calling this new strategy, let's call it America first, right? Because it does seem to sort of hinder the possibilities of what America can do in the future. For sure.

All right. That's a huge bummer for this year. Meanwhile, we're all competing on other technology stuff. What do you have for the next one?

Yeah. All right. Headline number two. AI fueled the global race for energy and compute infrastructure.

Yeah. Everybody's investing in data centers and computing and even nuclear energy in crazy ways. And not just Amazon and Google and Microsoft, but countries too. Sovereign wealth funds are diving into this.

I mean, sovereign wealth funds, but let's talk about, you know, just the U.S. And China, you know, to pit them against each other again. This is one place where we really are racing, right?

China's putting huge emphasis on saying we want to be the digital backbone, right? We want to be the infrastructure where that all the data, all the AI data is housed on. Whereas you can imagine sort of like a TikTok Oracle deal, right? Like, but then when it also comes to the actual chips, I mean, there was a story this year, I don't know if you recall, where there was a Chinese man found with like chips in his pockets trying to travel back to AI, to China, right?

And so, I mean, it's truly about like who owns the best technology. And maybe at first you might have thought it was a let's all work together, but it has certainly devolved into whoever owns it first. Will own the future, right? And that's led everything from energy that we've already kind of talked about.

But to me, what's been fascinating has seen both where we're putting data centers, including the moon, you know, which we talked a little bit. Crazy, right? We saw all sorts of stuff. People are trying to put data centers in orbit, in space.

In orbit, underwater, which has happened as well. Yeah, what was that? We talked about that one on this podcast, right? Like just off the coast of China, they're putting a big data center underwater.

They're saying it's easier to cool, perhaps that way, right? So we're trying to figure out ways to do this at scale. But then, you know, what do chips, what do data centers need? They need those critical minerals, right?

The things that the lithium metals, right? Right. And so that's led. We do not feel like either we have enough or enough on the land that we currently have.

And so it's led us to a lot of like the U.S. Greenlit Pacific deep sea mining contracts, as well as Japan has been testing lunar soil processing for rare metal yields. Yeah.

Right. And all this because there was a cool chatbot that came out three years ago. Let's hope it's cooler than just a chatbot. Yeah, right.

Okay, that brings us to the last one. Headline number one, companies started cutting jobs because of AI. The AI layoffs, the downsizing, it is not in the future, it is here. Yeah, this is another one where, you know, I often think, okay, don't cite predictions.

Don't cite predictions, right? So the few years before this has been all about predictions towards what AI will do to workforce reduction, especially white-collar jobs. And it was like, okay, 30%, 40% of the workforce. We don't know.

But then quickly this year, it went from predictions to, oh, no, we're actually cutting jobs because of AI. Like, it's actually happening. No longer predictions. We do have some tracking that shows about 10,000 jobs cut in the first seven months of 2025 so far.

Right. And that doesn't even count the big ones that came at the end of the year. You know, Amazon announced 14,000 people getting laid off. And I think that one is particularly interesting because it wasn't, hey, we can do the jobs without you because of AI.

We're going to cut 14,000 jobs. It was, no, we need cash, right? Right. We need a leaner business because we have to go buy a bunch of chips and build a bunch of data centers and invest in AI infrastructure.

And the investors are so used to our infrastructure business, AWS being this nice, beautiful, high margin business. We're going to have to fire a bunch of people just so we can afford the chips. Exactly. And just to give you a sense, like Google, by the way, their CapEx for the AI build out just in 2025 was $75 billion.

million dollars. Right. Just think about that. And those are the headlines we're seeing from tech companies.

We're seeing it from, you know, behind the scenes. You and I have been in conversation with the food companies who are saying, no, actually, we need to build out the health data so we know as much as an insurance company does. The race is on to get smart on this stuff. Yes.

The race is on to get smart on this stuff and to figure out, I think, what does our workforce look like in the future. Yeah. Right? And I think it's particularly, too, if your entire workforce is not working, I'm not sure where your consumers are.

Yeah. Okay, so that's our list of headlines on the future. Number one, companies started cutting jobs because of AI. Two, AI fueled the global race for energy and computer infrastructure, which in part contributed to the job cutting.

Number three, America dismantled centuries worth of security and trade alliances. Four, meanwhile, China pulled ahead as the world leader in green tech. Five, self-driving trucks, right, and robo-taxis came online. Six, genetting technologies actually started to save human lives.

Seven, fusion power moved down the path even further. Eight, technology started to be treated like tobacco, including people taking a look at why is AI leading us to psychosis and suicide. Nine, cities are struggling to adapt in the face of climate change. And ten, adoption effectiveness of GLP drugs continues to expand in all of its applications and form factors.

That's a whole hell lot of a change for 12 months, Michelle. Yeah, what a future. Yeah, it's figuring out how to navigate that is something that, you know, you got to start early. It takes time.

And you can't just try to argue to put it back in the bottle, right? This is where we're seeing people who are saying, okay, well, we should just not let NVIDIA sell its H200 chips to China. Yeah. That's incredibly short sighted.

Right. Because then it just helps them to spur. How do we become completely independent of the U.S.?

We saw that with DeepSeek. Yeah. I think that's the thing is don't take the U.S.'

s current position as inspiration for how to fight the future. Because I think there's definitely that idea that you pull out and you see where the rest of the world fills those gaps. Right. And I think that thinking that you've that if you squeeze it so hard, squeeze the ecosystem so hard to protect that moat you have.

Yeah. Right. It's going to come, whether it's robo taxis, which we thought would, you know, wouldn't happen for a long time. They're here.

AI, it's here. Right. Clean energy, whether you like it or not, fusion is here. Right.

And it's been interesting, particularly like fusion again is, you know, yes, we might be calling it the Department of War again, but we do have a Department of Fusion. So that's right. We set up a group inside the Department of Energy for fusion. Yeah, it's huge.

A lot of change in a very short period of time. I look forward with eagerness and anxiety as to what 2026 looks like. Last thoughts as we're doing this. You know, what are the things we should be paying attention to going forward?

How do all of these headlines change? How do you think about where we go from here in 2026? You know, I think that's where this moment versus momentum. I'm less concerned where we go next year exactly, but where we're going to go into the next five to seven years.

And I think you're going to see like fusion, as we just mentioned, given the amount of money, you should expect some of these to accelerate. Right. But I also think I love sometimes the tension between some of these headlines. And I think where I find those, like our reaction to AI versus the race to AI, right, to building that, I think those are really important for us to pay attention to because, as we always say, don't predict the future, right?

But preparing looks like, what are the little experiments? What are the little things that I can do right now to be prepared for either one of those futures? Where there is no Chernobyl and AI does go the direction we want it to go, or that would be beneficial for it to go, then you might say, okay, I really need to think about where I'm getting the talent to fuel that AI future because the talent gap is too wide and I might need to retrain my current workforce for that. On the other hand, if AI is in the complete future, how are we talking about connection or branding and marketing or brand experiences or even shopping if there's a Chernobyl-like event?

Yeah. To think that further and to think big and then turn it back to say, okay, what are small experiments that I can do right now? Kind of test and learn and stay in the game. Whether you're thinking about energy, whether you're thinking about how you're thinking about data, whether you're thinking about changing consumer behavior.

Your own infrastructure. Or the investments we're making in long-term infrastructure. And these are all positive things for many of the companies that you and I work with. We're seeing this already that a previous generation would be perfectly happy to say, okay, let's just kick the investment down the road.

Technology debt is a very abstract thing. We need operating margins now. And to say, no, I actually have to get going on this or I'm going to be left out of the game is encouraging that certainly coming out of COVID, many of the leaders we spend time with are much more future focused, which is great. That's what I think this year crystallizes, right?

Is no one can come out of this year and say, man, chill year. I could think the future feels totally predictable. And, you know, and that's a good thing, right? If we're not lulling ourselves into, I mean, it's the future is never predictable, but it's awesome if we're not lulling ourselves.

And to me, that gives me hope. If we just, if we look at these things and say, hey, we want to make changes or we want to do things differently, then I think that's self-prophesizing. All right. This is a great conversation, but we got to go.

We'll see you next time. Thanks so much for spending time with us. And remember, the conversation doesn't end here. Every Saturday, you can hear from Dave in your inbox with his future-focused letters for clients and friends.

And you can always connect with us on LinkedIn and jeppassociates.com. You know the deal, like, share, subscribe, etc. For more thought-provoking content and all of my family stories.

Which I find fascinating. Your hosts are Dave Benayek and Michelle Loretta Mola. This episode was produced by Debbie Marone. Research was done by Austin Luthridge, Michelle Loretta-Mola and Debbie Marone.