How We Thought the First Year Would Go
Angry Planet
Matthew Gault
4.3 • 882 Ratings
🗓️ 16 January 2026
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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On January 28, 2025, I sat down with Aram Shabanian to talk about how we thought the first year of the Trump administration would go. I put the audio in a vault and didn’t listen to it until now.
We focused on geopolitics and the American military and our hit rate for predictions was about fifty percent. Domestically, it’s been much worse than I expected. Abroad it’s been much weirder than I expected. The bit about America seeking violence though? Right now that feels spot on.
- Hegseth’s reforms got worse for women (vindicated)
- Conscription is not back (wrong)
- The yearning for violence when the gloves come off (vindicated)
- All the episodes that weren’t produced
- Sicarioifciation continues apace
- The bigger problem was that people felt bad
- The dangers of boredom
- “Drugs won the war on drugs and then looted the armories.”
- Against burning it all down
- Greenland is still on the table
- The ceasefire didn’t last and war did not spread to Europe (wrong)
- Elon Musk is out (vindicated)
- X is still around, but it IS producing on-demand CSAM (wrong?)
- WWIII and mass riots didn’t happen (wrong)
- Martin O’Malley 2028?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Love this podcast. |
| 0:01.7 | Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. |
| 0:05.2 | It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. |
| 0:09.1 | Just click the link in the show description to support now. |
| 0:12.6 | Hey there, Angry Planet listeners. |
| 0:14.4 | Matthew here. |
| 0:16.0 | Welcome to 2026. |
| 0:17.7 | It is already off to a start of sorts. |
| 0:23.6 | We've got kind of a weird episode to kick off the year. |
| 0:25.8 | I know there's a lot going on. |
| 0:26.9 | There's a lot that we need to get into. |
| 0:29.2 | Um, |
| 0:31.5 | I mean, if you've been paying attention to the new cycle, |
| 0:35.3 | maybe, |
| 0:36.3 | uh, |
| 0:36.6 | you're finding it a little bit hard to focus just right now. |
| 0:41.7 | I certainly am. |
| 0:44.0 | And we're going to get into all of it. |
| 0:45.9 | But first, I'm going to bust open something from the vault, something that I recorded with Aram Shabhanian in January of last year, January 28th, to be exact. |
| 0:57.8 | It was his idea. |
| 0:58.8 | We sat down and he said, let's make predictions for how we think the first year of this is going to go. |
| 1:06.1 | We recorded it just after the inauguration. |
... |
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