Welcome to the Virchcast, the flagship podcast of time travel, but only in very small increments.

I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am sitting here making plans for 2026.

So there's a thing that I like to do near the end of every year.

Sometimes it's December 31st.

Sometimes it's like December 6th.

But I try to sit down and sort of take stock

of the stuff that I did this past year and then think of some stuff that I want to do next year.

This is like a yearly review cadence that lots of people really recommend and it's a really good

like goaling exercise. For me, honestly, I just enjoy the process of sitting down and being like, okay, what happened

this year?

And sometimes I'll do it with my calendar next to me so I can actually see the stuff.

One of my favorite things to do is open up Google Photos, which is where all my photos

is, open up a document and just sort of journal out the year as I scroll through my photos.

Big stuff that happens,

important things that I totally forgot about that happened as I was going through the year,

just a sort of brain dump as I scroll through 12 months of photos.

Sometimes I'll even pull the photos that I care the most about into that doc.

And just in the course of one sitting put together this very informal, messy, I don't know, document about the year that I just had. I don't know if it actually accomplished as much. And to be honest, I don't often find myself going back and like reading old ones. But I really enjoy the process. So I keep doing it. And then at the end, I try to just sit down and be like, okay, what are some actual things I would like to do next year? Sometimes they're big, sometimes they're small, sometimes they're like bucket listy type things. Sometimes it's just like, I would like to, I don't know, learn how to play the recorder again because I was sick at it in third grade and I want to see if I can get it back. That's a thing that has been on the list in the past and I didn't do it and it won't be on the list again. But anyway, that's not what we're here to talk about. What we're here to talk about on the show today is predictions. Joanna Stern and Neilie Patel are going to join me as they did last week to talk about what happened in 2025,

and we're going to talk about what happens in 26. We did this last year where we made

mild, medium, and spicy predictions. We're going to do the same thing this year. We're going to

go through our old predictions. We're going to make some new ones. And we're going to see if we

can figure out what's coming. This is a complicated business in which to figure out what

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