Happy almost New Year! This is a year-in-review episode, but we’ll save you the usual LinkedIn end-of-year pablum.

Some things about 2025 were hard. Andrew Phelps shares how he dealt with unexpected business pressure; McGill talks about his “duck months” — calm on the surface, paddling like hell underneath. Some of you might have felt the same way?

But 2025 also gave us some incredible gifts. Clarity! Some really important work! And of course, this podcast and community. You are one of the best things that happened this year. Thank you for being with us.

On to 2026. We’ve got predictions for the year, and we’re doing our best Polymarket impression and applying confidence intervals to each. For instance, we’re 90% sure that if you listen and leave a review on Apple Podcasts, we’ll write you a personalized limerick. But we’re only 10% sure our poetry will be any good.

Mentioned in this episode:

Honestly, so many things, but here are some of the more unusual suspects:

* MS NOW (née MSNBC)

* Parent company Versant

* The Walt Disney Company

* Nano Banana Pro

* And ofc Gemini/ChatGPT/Claude et al

* Perplexity

* That time Phelps’ flight almost crashed

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Getting Real About 2025 (And Our Bets For 2026)