Showing off Our Big Shiny Crystal Balls 🔮🔮

Show Notes

It's a year and five days since Dan and I first sat down to make predictions, and we couldn't resist putting our Swami hats back on and getting out the crystal balls for 2025. We started by grading last year's homework, and the honest verdict is mixed. We'd both called for a rate cut by June; the first one didn't land until September, and then it came in hot — fifty basis points out of the gate followed by two quarter-point cuts, a full point on the year. So: wrong on the timing, wrong on the count, but I'll take partial credit on the magnitude. The one I actually nailed was my joke pick from last year — the carbon-credit cookstove scheme — which ended in a real Justice Department indictment in October. Yay me.

The bigger lesson from grading ourselves was that vague predictions are useless predictions. Dan kept coming back to Polymarket — a contract either resolves yes or no, no wiggle room — and that's the standard we want to hold ourselves to this year. He framed it like being at a trading desk: it's not enough to have a thesis about the world, you have to find a way to express it, somewhere measurable. So our one ironclad commitment for 2025 is almost embarrassingly simple: we're going to do more, and we're going to do better, than last year.

Then we took our swings. I won't spoil the scorecard a year early, but I'll tell you the shape of the calls. I led with one I think is a slam dunk and Dan thinks is a tailwind. He countered with what he calls the best business model ever — a two-headed machine that quietly eats any margin a seller ever manages to claw back. There's a labor call from me with real numbers attached, a back-half-of-the-year worry I keep talking myself into and back out of, and a scandal pick that lives in a corner of the market where the plumbing has gotten weird and nobody's been watching. Dan dropped one prediction so clean I was mad I didn't think of it — three little words about a certain Fed chair and a certain orange coin.

We also wandered into the stuff that isn't quite a prediction yet, more like a thing-on-the-radar. What happens when people start trying to game LLMs the way they gamed Google search — are they even gameable? And the one Dan and I kept circling back to: the "garden refresher" play, where AI makes it cheap enough to rebuild some forgotten, ugly, still-profitable app into something modern. The proof of concept is a teenager out of California whose AI calorie app is reportedly pulling in something like a million dollars a month. We agreed we need to get Anton on to actually kick this one around, because it feels like a space we'd be foolish to ignore.

By the end we'd talked ourselves into a strange, slightly nervous optimism — the kind where you're genuinely excited and also wondering if your own excitement is the top. Dan put it as radical acceptance: he sat out the last go-round, watched everyone else make money, and isn't going to look this gift horse in the mouth twice. I closed us out reading a little post from an executive coach I follow about getting crazy about your own life — committing to yourself, falling in love with your choices. It's a softer note than two finance guys usually end on, but it felt right going into a year we have no idea how to read.

So those are our big shiny crystal balls. Some of these are going to age like fine wine and some are going to age like the milk in the back of my fridge, and the only honest thing I can promise is that we'll come back in a year and laugh at exactly which is which. Let's go kill 2025, everybody — and let's radically accept the punches as they come.

— Sean