2024 & 2025 - Looking Back, Looking Forward
What were the big themes last year? What will this year's be? Predictions incoming!
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It’s New Year’s Eve, 2024, and it’s time once again to look back before looking ahead.
I did this last year too, and it’s interesting to compare notes.
How was your year? Did you hit your goals? Did you remember to make goals at all? (I didn’t!)
Did the year go the way you thought it would? Was it full of big surprises?
On a personal level, 2024 was a very weird, difficult, and unexpected year. It absolutely had some good things — I saw my daughter graduate with honors from a very difficult high school and we finally left Arizona and moved to North Carolina, which is somewhere we’ve long thought about living (and we absolutely love it!) — but I didn’t see as much progress in other areas as I expected.
I increased my posting here by 63% over 2023, grew my free subscribers by nearly 700, and my paid subscribers by 85. I’ve gained over 20,000 followers on X, and had over 103 million impressions on that platform this year, most of those coming in the month of December.
As a guy who creates and sells content online for a living, these metrics are all trending in the right direction, but I have a lot of work to do in 2025 to get to where I want to be. I feel strongly like I’m on the cusp of a breakthrough, but the real results remain to be seen.
I have some additional ideas in store that I’ll be revealing soon — hopefully in January — but until then, let’s take a look back at the biggest themes of 2024:
#5: AI development continues to astound
This is a theme that is going to top lists for several years. We’ve gotten used to the advances in AI images and the conversational and helpful nature of ChatGPT and Grok, but this year we saw an exponential improvement in AI video. And that’s only going to accelerate in 2025.
Example 1:
Example 2:
Example 3:
This is how far we’ve come in a year. Expect next year’s developments to happen just as fast, if not faster.
#4: We’re WAY Too Close to World War III
This one is evergreen. Nobody can say for sure what will happen, but there are legitimate concerns. While everyone is distracted with politics, immigration, AI, and other issues, Russia continues its war in Ukraine, North Korea appears to have allied itself with Russia, China is agitating near Taiwan, European communications cables continue to be cut, and Russia has actually deployed an ICBM.
I don’t want to dig any further into this. I just want to put a pin in it.
#3: The Israeli/Palestinian Conflict Continues
We all know the score here. We all have our opinions. This is a major destabilizing conflict in the region, and Trump has said he wants it over by his inauguration and all hostages returned, or he’s going to drop the hammer from the top rope.
#2: Trump’s Election and the Return of Free Speech
This is the biggest political story of 2024, and it could turn into the biggest story of 2025. It wasn’t just that Trump won, but that he won with a mandate. The Democratic party has been forced to regroup, because the defeat they were handed was decisive. Now, insiders are revealing the truth about Biden’s cognitive decline going back his entire term. Meanwhile, the coalition that Trump has built has taken him out of “main character” position and begun a foundation for the future of the party.
The American people want their country back. The next four years are going to show us whether that’s possible.
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the restoration of free speech in the online public square have made it all possible.
Legacy media is taking a shellacking.
Old paradigms are breaking down. Gatekeepers are losing control. A new order is emerging.
#1: The Emergence of High Strangeness as a Publicly Acknowledged Phenomenon
High strangeness is everywhere.
Multiple UAP/UFO hearings in Congress.
Books about the same topic coming out from whistleblowers.
A possible select committee on UAPs.
The New Jersey “drones,” which have no explanation, and were not just in New Jersey, haven’t actually stopped. There’s something more going on here. The question is whether we’ll ever be allowed to know what.
The Telepathy Tapes displaced Joe Rogan as the #1 Podcast in America. This signals a major shift in our interest in and understanding of human consciousness.
We are seeing a paradigm shift where the weird, the woo, and the unexplained are becoming part of the pop culture lexicon.
Atheistic materialism and its effect on science are being shoved aside as phenomena that are harder to measure and explain are coming into focus.
The human mind is not nearly as limited as we once thought. Quantum Physics, machine learning, and Large Language Models are taking over the scientific landscape and winning Nobel prizes. Elon Musk is advancing the program of making the human race multiplanetary.
Looking Forward to 2025 - Some Predictions:
I have a feeling that 2025 is going to be a very weird year. The specifics that follow are all based on my own intuition, so take these predictions with the appropriate grain of salt:
2025 will likely bring a great deal of prosperity back, but it’s also going to include mind-bending developments and revelations that will amp up our collective ontological shock.
The UAP issue is about to become much more significant and public. Catastrophic disclosure is not off the table.
There are warning signs that not just Artificial General Intelligence, but Artificial Super Intelligence, are on the imminent horizon.
The democratization of speech, while chaotic now, will coalesce into something more formal and intelligible as the traditional media dies under the weight of its own deceptions and gaslighting.
The trans issue and gender ideology in general will become increasingly unpopular, and the pushback this coming year is likely to intensify.
There is a convergence coming between quantum physics, AI, UAPs, the unknown human abilities revealed by the Telepathy Tapes, and the general search for an understanding of the nature of human consciousness. I don’t know what shape it’s going to take yet, but the emerging patterns are pointing to the whole becoming greater than the sum of their parts.
The beginning of the death of globalism, as predicted by geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan in his book, The End of the World Is Just The Beginning, will come into clearer focus under an “America First” Trump administration. Domestic oil and gas production and manufacturing will increase, and global imports begin to diminish. Conflict with China is not off the table.
The Russia Ukraine war will reach an uneasy resolution, as will the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Some of the criminal activities of the political Left — including their potential involvement in the multiple Trump assassination attempts — will very likely come to light. Corruption and lawfare stories are likely to become big issues.
I would not take another new global pandemic off your bingo cards. I would also not take a revolutionary resistance to overreaching public health protocols off either.
There will likely be unanticipated scientific breakthroughs this year that will be heralded as groundbreaking. The use of AI in achieving these breakthroughs will be central to the discoveries. An increasing emphasis on “personal AI” that helps people to organize and facilitate their daily lives is on the horizon.
We are on the cusp of a renaissance of nuclear power. The electricity demands presented by these new AI systems will necessitate a sea change in our approach to power generation.
Extreme weather events will become a major theme of 2025 as the causes of climate change are debated, but felt. January’s record-setting cold temperatures due to the polar vortex is a story that will dominate the beginning of the year. Summer storm and later hurricane activity are likely to also make headlines.
The magnetic pole shift will become a bigger story than it currently is. The world will continue to experience auroras far below northern latitudes.
Keep an eye out for some kind of confirmation of the discovery of life, no matter how primitive, elsewhere in the universe.
That’s all I have for now, but I intend to explore these issues more in the coming year.
Until I see you again, Happy New Year’s! I hope your 2025 is your best and most prosperous year yet!
Happy New Year Steve!
I got a wild hair to take up kayaking!
Incidentally, I was sure the idiom would have been "to get/catch a wild hare," but it's not April 1 and the internet is telling me "wild hair," so I'm going with it.
One of the most magical books I know opens with our philosopher floating in a small boat on the River Nile (Plotinus: A Visionary Recital aka The Kingfisher's Wing). And I just got to the part in Mr. Drear's new book where good Christian folk are living in wonder by developing a relationship with nature and place. I want to drift about on the local bay and recite poetry and get a little workout while doing it.