The 2025 Good List

Edition 136: The list of things worth celebrating from the year that was and why I'm very, very hopeful

Every year I sidle up to a big bowl of slop—oh wait that's a uniquely 2025 phenomenon—a big bowl of possibilities and make a list of what I loved in the year that is slipping between our fingers. Hope is always tinged with grief, in part because to move forward we have to let go of where we were, but also because we know the future will never hold up to our ideals. And yet we hope on. In our lives. Our communities. Our ventures we lead.

2025 will go down in history as the year online firmly lost touch with human reality. We crossed that infamous threshold once fantasized as The Dead Internet Theory, where more than half of what is produced is made and put on the internet is made by machines. But the AI slop that overruns Amazon, Etsy, Facebook, Google Search, LinkedIn, or—most critically—the traffic on your website is only part of the issue. The Christian saint Paul said we see the world through a darkened mirror. This is the year that mirror shattered and was replaced with fragments of alternate realities... a trend of digitized "truth" siloes we've been trending toward for at least a decade, and the "engagement algorithms" that encage us ideologies designed to presell us to a set of products and politicians.

And yet, I find myself full of hope. It took me a long time to realize that this thing, this generationally defining thing–the Internet, would only fail me moving forward. I'm not ready for a cave in the woods, but I am aggressively reading Transcendentalists. The more a person accepts the mediated reality of digital life with its AI deep fakes, algorithmic manipulations, alternate realities, and truth decay, the more that person becomes unmoored from what is happening in front of them--with their team, their clients, their family, and their literal community. This is true for individuals as much as businesses.

I saw this in stark forms this year. I saw CEOs who had accepted internet-spewed fantasies about AI that was refuted by the experiences of their own team, disproven by their own internal data. And yet, they persevered with Sam Altman's talk track.

I saw practitioners share with me in private deep doubts they had about the efficacy of their former tactics: social media, SEO, etc. all while refusing to adjust their career path. "I know it isn't what it used to be, and maybe it never was what we said it was, but it's all I've ever known."

Fear's best friend is self-delusion.

I'm empathetic. In many ways I've spent years preparing for this season. I've gone to war with my own dependencies on the tactical hamster wheel, I've designed my business around networks (which actually exist) and not funnels (which don't). And I know what it cost me to get here. But I can say without reservation: this place, unmoored from the digital simulation and finding opportunity in the network of relationships first--this is the Good Place.

I know we don't have to be frozen in time by the economic, political, and social delusions of our age. We don't have to lock up simply because the internet will forever be more lies than truth with fewer and fewer tools to disambiguate the two. We can move forward because as I said in a recent podcast:

The human soul remains undefeated.

As much as I have watched all of the above, I've been in dozens of conversations about people putting down the phone, pivoting to relational growth strategies, re-arranging their existence to be more immune to the extractions that tax us. Inevitably, in any era, foolishness which for a period of time is paraded through the streets as wisdom, crosses the Rubicon and is revealed as foolishness. Eventually the "new clothes" Emperor walks out on the dais buck freaking naked.

From this view, it's been a wonderful year. In no small part because it was also a year where the makers of art and the assemblers of cultural knowledge... those people who have to think and consider, mix and collate contrasts, do something more than pump and dump hot takes... these essential human pillars of economy and culture succeeded in framing the issues like never before. And for those willing to listen, coherent, actionable, and dare I say inspired ways of moving forward are taking shape.

Knowledge + Attention + Experience = Art and Wisdom

We can now see the incumbents with their GenAI and their algorithms try to break this formula. And while they will poison quadrillions of pages of digital content with their obfuscation, they cannot break reality. And it is in the real world that your venture and mine will thrive in the coming year.

So without any further delay, here is The Good List 2025. A bit shorter than in the past, not for lack of options, but because I wanted to model what I've spent all year talking about: focusing attention.

Books

Best Business Non-Fiction: Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris – I did a deep dive this year on the structure, history and incentives of the Silicon Valley cabal that runs our digital existence, and nothing was more useful to that study than this book. It's a bit of a beast but worth every minute. It sprints out of the gate and doesn't stop until it's dismantled everything you think you knew about the technological takeover of American life and economy.

Best Business Non-Fiction Runner-Up: Enshittification by Corey Doctorow – Corey said everything but better that I've been trying to express for two years on why nothing works the way it used to and why there's no reason for anything digital to get better. All economic realities are based on games of incentives and resistance and millions, including many readers of this publication, are selling 10-15% of their revenue every year into a black hole that gives no signs of giving much of anything back.

Best Non-Fiction: One Day Everyone Will Have been Against This by Omar El Akkad – This is book will make almost everyone uncomfortable. Mostly it is an invective at the Neo-liberal attempt at allyship and pin-wearing, how we pick sides in global conflicts based on political convenience, and how over time eventually we must face the horrors. It's not easy. And it's framed in a Palestinian man's experience, which will for some alone be a bridge too far. But it is the book that has lived with me the most in 2025.

Best Non-Fiction Runner-Up: Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson – It's become a little big gauche to reference Ezra Klein, he's been an elephant in the room on politics and media since he was an early spokesperson for removing Biden from the Democratic ticket. But in a time where there is almost no courage to project a vision of the future (rather than one of the past or of the current dystopia) worthy of debate, Abundance dares to put a stake in the ground about the kind of country this could and should be in the next decades.

Best Fiction: Audition by Katie Kitamura - This brief and tightly written novel is everything we needed in 2025. Exemplifying the obfuscation of reality in the self-deluded experiences of a single unreliable narrator, using a structural technique I've never seen, I felt its ungrounding on every page.

Best Fiction Honorable Mention: Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner - Another unreliable narrator and main character making questionable choices, in this case set in a pseudo spy thriller / eco terrorism plot? So much fun on every page and again reflecting the moment perfectly.

From the Backlist: Bright Lights, Big City by Jay MacInerny in tandem with Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger: Two tales about a young man in crisis (another 2025 theme) written by two masters of story and sentence-craft. I make sure every year to read a few classics (I'm on my third re-read of my beloved Brothers Karamazov now) and these were both new to me in 2025. I was ashamed it took me this long to find them. The titular line drop for Catcher in the Rye is legendary.

Media

Newsletter: Puck/The Town by Matt Beloni et al: I along with about a million other people discovered the Puck newsletter this year, a hub of news on media, politics, an everything in between. Alongside Semafor (a past Good List member) it's the go-to text for a year in media chaos that just won't let go. Only Matt Beloni (and his companion podcast The Town) could help me hold me back from despair as Warner Bros was sold for parts.

Podcast: Book Riot I completely reworked by podcast listening in 2025, dropping some old favorites and adding a lot of new. Did I listen to some Good Hang with Amy Poehler? C'mon who didn't. She's about to win the first ever Podcasting Golden Globe. But in the end, I found a longstanding show that finally does books right in the podcast space. Book Riot and its companion podcast Zero to Well-Read, did exactly what I needed it to do – put up a firewall from "reading as self-indulgence" to reading as self-actualization and I'm the better for it. And it's where I get almost all my fiction recs now.

TV Comedy: The Studio (AppleTV) Comedies are on hard times everywhere as our brains are rotted by vertical video shorts but The Studio managed to break through the noise. It is so in its moment, so auteur (in a good way) and Seth Rogen (doubly nominated for his hilarious work in Platonic is single-handedly trying to save comedic television. Bonus: There hasn't been a murderers row of cameos like this since the original run of Will & Grace. (Shoutout Matt Belloni of The Town, again.)

TV Drama: Task (HBO) I am never above having a deeply spiritual moment while watching television and what Mark Ruffalo did with Task sat with me for hours. The story of an ex-priest turned alcoholic FBI agent facing down a drug bust gone wrong in every possible way was so deeply specific in its sense of place and story that it did what specificity always does – calls us into the human and the universal.

TV Drama #2: Pluribus (AppleTV) If you have to have one streamer, make it AppleTV. Even the weak sauce stuff on there is on par with 95% of what's on Netflix or Peacock. And their top tier stuff is the best television of the last decade. Pluribus's infamous logline is "The worst person you ever met tries to save the world from happiness." It is XFiles meets Better Call Saul meets Severance meets Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. And probably its the best TV show you're not watching as it explores isolation, human agency, what we'll do to retain our identity, and how the distance between utopia and dystopia is in the eye of the beholder. It's doing work I've never seen done on television.

TV Backlist: Peaky Blinders and Stranger Things (Netflix) Ted Sarandos, CEO of Netflix, has gone to great lengths to single-handedly destroy the movie-going experience, but I gotta give the guy credit, he knows how to be the basic cable of the 21st century. I finally got into Peaky Blinders, binge-watching multiple seasons and convinced my boys to rewatch the first four seasons of Stranger Things in the lead up to the new season. Make your kids watch old TV with you. My 12-year-old is on his third watch through of Friends and Black-ish and he's the better for it.

Film Drama: One Battle After Another, Eddington, and Sinners – I loved this year in film. It was a year where writers and directors and the studios that bankroll them got courageous, pushing the boundaries of questions worth asking and ways of telling the story. While Wicked: For Good turned into an abject disappointment, elsewhere movies that I will watch a dozen times over were made, defining how we look at the question of our moment. And these three did it in legendary ways, all in conversation with each other. Two of the three were made by Warner Bros, no small irony in the year that its likely to head down the path to being dismantled by Netflix or the Ellisons and their state-run media operation funded by the Saudis. One battle after another... indeed.

Film Comedy: One Battle After Another (yes, again.) This movie is fifteen things at once, an one of them is laugh out funny. Benicio del Toro for the win. But confused, floppy Leo DiCaprio is the best Leo DiCaprio. Titanic be damned.

Stuff still to see, so it didn't make the list but might have: Marty Supreme, Hamnet, The Lowdown (drama series on FX), Train Dreams

Moments

The Trust-Made Guild – I made the decision to do something I've never done before and launch a community to put my time and money where my mouth is. Building a space where people can connect, get support, and receive training on how to push back against the extraction elements of this economy, whether they are in house or consultants has been some of the most fulfilling work I've done in a long time. When one participant called it an "outright rebirth and a skin-shedding process," I knew we'd made something special.

Yo-Yo Contests - I went to two regional yo-yo contests this year as my youngest son has decided to be a competitive yo-yoer. (Seriously, look it up on YouTube.) Letting him teach me something he's put hours of self-directed work into had been a real gift, and TBH, the yo-yoing is good too.

The Lincoln Center performance of Ragtime – I have loved the musical Ragtime and the book it was based on since I was in high school. The story of the early 20th century and the making of the American melting pot and what it cost the makers has always moved me, but this staging at Lincoln Center literally took my breath away. One of the best things that has ever happened to me in a theater. They allowed subtle shifts in the performance and the staging to remind you how unfinished and unfulfilled the American project remains... begging all of us to keep on.

Going Analog - From buying my son his first record player (shhhh don't tell him) at his request this Christmas, to DVD 4k viewings of great films, to meeting online friends in person, to watching another of my sons figure out how to Brick his phone and learn how freeing it is to be without it, to pivoting marketing strategies off the algorithmic extraction, I along with millions of others took more and more steps away from the noise machines and lie factories. I slowly turned my LinkedIn personality into an evangelist for leaving LinkedIn and had more fun on the platform as a result. I heard a podcast guest this year say "Everything that's real is analog." And enjoying that reality, my business and life have never felt healthier or more elastic with possibility.

I hope and plan for more of the same in 2026. Anytime someone reads your words it's a gift. So if you made it this far, or to the bottom of any of my Damns Given editions this year, I'm grateful. Forward this one on to a friend, reply back with your own recommendations, or just keep showing up with me in 2026. And we'll keep making a better world together.

Forward, forward,

Nick