2025 Derailers of the Year

0:00people are the most consequential and dangerous forces on earth well personality psychology is about the nature of human nature it's about people and wouldn't that be useful to know it seems to me i can't i can't think of a more important problem you're listening to the science of personality podcast brought to you by hogan assessments the global leader in personality and leadership guided by your hosts hogan chief science officer and world-renowned personality psychologist dr ryan sherman alongside hogan's pr manager and

0:35resident storyteller blake lepp this podcast explores the impact of personality on life leadership and the nature of human nature hello everybody and welcome to the science of personality podcast i'm your host ryan sherman along with my co-host as always blake lepp say hello blake hello everybody and welcome back to the science of personality podcast episode 140 today ryan and i are back for our annual derailers of

1:08the year episode where we take a look back at 11 of the world's biggest stories of the year and assign them to each of the 11 scales on the hogan development survey better known as our dark side assessment 2024 gave us the australian olympic breakdancer ray gun in the bold category for her fantasized talent and the fan favorite taylor swift on the diligent scale for her worldwide 149 show eras tour but who made this year's list well buckle up folks you're about to find out

1:40but before we get to that remember if you wish to give us any ideas for upcoming episodes or you want to ask ryan or me a question shoot us an email at hello at the science of personality dot com or follow the science of personality on linkedin we hope to have a new episode with listener questions in the first quarter of 2026 now let's get to it so ryan we're kicking off the derailers of the year we're going to go right in order that you see on your flash report on the hogan development survey and that starts out with excitable and this year's winner for excitable

2:16goes to labubus do you want to talk a little bit about the labubu craze that we saw in 2025 yeah sure of course blake uh look uh the the labubu craze i learned about very late in 2025 in fact i learned about it sort of at the tail end or maybe even as the craze was sort of winding down uh but uh my understanding is that these little uh wide-eyed sort of monster plush toys that were largely based

2:48out of uh um china but uh made by a hong kong artist um and they were sort of i don't know they had out this sort of a creepy feel to some people said that they look creepy or eerie or sort of odd other people described them as looking cute and they were sold by pop mart uh and uh these things were all the rage so if you remember the beanie baby craze of say what was that the late 90s early 2000s right yeah uh yeah the labubu craze was pretty similar where everybody was lining up to get these

3:23labubu dolls um and demand or significantly outpaced supply and so and a part of this was fueled by you social media stars uh you know uh there's been this craze in recent years for sort of unboxing or what they call blind boxes where you don't know what it is and labubus also would were sometimes available in these blind boxes where people could you could buy a labubu in a box you didn't know what one it was you would open it up and and this was super exciting for people but just like the beanie

3:56baby craze over huge lines uh when when i was in china a few months ago people were saying that it was again just like the beanie baby craze you had to know when a store was getting a shipment in you had to be there that day you had to be there when that shipment came in if you wanted any chance of getting one of these labubus uh they were huge resale prices um we looked a few months ago they were even still toward the end of the craze resale prices were in the hundreds of dollars uh for these

4:26labubus yeah and of course naturally uh this led to a whole string of copycat fakes called la foo foos sort of uh uh where people were you know trying to take advantage of of the demand for these um i will say this i have a couple of labubu stories here uh one is that while i was in shanghai last year

4:57this topic of labubus came up and i was at an event where uh one of the other guests at the event had a labubu a little low in this case it was a labubu keychain it wasn't the full size uh labubu doll but a labubu keychain and um one of my colleagues commented on that said hey that's a you've got your labubu there and i said oh that's so cool i know these are so rare and i jokingly said can i have it which i mean the implication being of course that would be crazy nobody would ever ask given the

5:30how rare these were and how hard they were to get no one but the poor this poor person felt so guilty and and said yes you can have it and i said no no no no i absolutely refuse i said no i can't have it i can't and they absolutely insisted that i take this and i was like no i don't even want this i was just joking around like in any case they insisted that by the end of this day at the end of this uh conference that i take this labubu so i was like okay great now i have this thing and i don't know what to do with it so i call my wife and i tell her about this story i said well have you ever heard

6:02of labubus and she goes yeah that's all my daughter that's all augustina wants for christmas i was like well she's got one now because i just got this little um so that was uh i i felt real i still feel really guilty about it i really want to go give this back um because you know that was not not not my intention was not to acquire this little labubu i didn't even know what i would do with it but um but augustina is very happy to have it well yeah i mean people were going crazy for these things

6:33but you know i i want to preface for the listeners this list is kind of tough for a person like me to to work on so we actually kind of uh work with the marketing department then ryan and i we brainstormed these different ideas because i'm i'm very selective in what i'm consuming from a pop culture standpoint so i actually found out about the labubus and the craze for them and how wild people were going for these things uh through the way i find out a lot about a lot of things which is watching south park

7:04and so i think there was an episode where uh if i remember correctly there was a a girl that that the character butters had a crush on and she wanted this specific labubu and like you said there's like the mystery box and i i think he i think this it was a very rare one i think he somehow came across it i don't remember the episode exactly a lot of times that's just background noise for me while i'm doing something else but that's kind of where i learned about it and then also there's a podcast

7:34i listened to which love him or hate him if you know who i'm talking about it's the tim dylan show but he just cracks me up and he just kept talking about these demon dolls that were just taking over that were all the raves he just he kept screaming about just how how creepy they were and these these little demon dolls that people are carrying around in the airports and things like that so that's how i learned about it but ryan you brought up something else that our listeners kind of need to know about what how is it that whenever you're traveling people just give you things because you

8:06were gifted a watch in the airport correct well okay that was a bit of a different yeah that was a bit of a different uh situation too but yeah this does happen uh look uh you know the part of it is a cultural thing right so in certain cultures particularly in asian cultures it's very common to bring each other gifts when you travel to see each other or if you travel to see someone else for them to give you a gift i will say it's a great uh source of anxiety for me because if you travel with me you know that i travel carry-on only and when you have a carry-on bag and you're on the road for

8:42one two three weeks at a time uh you don't really have space for large gifts to come along so in this case this little booboo was was sort of the perfect thing because i could fit in my bag very easily but uh many times the gifts uh that i get uh are simply too large to bring back and i end up having to have to find some way of shipping them back or i also sometimes i have to give them away to someone else who's who i know in the region just because i simply i can't possibly bring it back with me but uh

9:15uh yes you're right blake i once did uh have someone send me a watch two or three hundred dollar watch um we had a really good conversation on a plane for about four hours and uh he said i'd really like to send you one of my favorite watches and i said okay and so so yeah um i do have a really nice watch from jm mcdowell uh in uh eastern uh tennessee uh and and doing uh excavation kind of

9:47operations there in tennessee and georgia well that's very cool i i figured we had to bring that up because that kind of blew me away whatever you told me that story i'm like people are just giving you watches i mean i wish i could do that i'm starting to get into the watch thing so uh i hope i get as lucky as you on my next travel uh but uh moving on moving on to uh our next scale so the next one is skeptical and our 2025 winner for the skeptical category is the tiktok ban ryan you want to talk

10:18a little bit about this one yeah so uh i think most people probably are familiar with the tiktok ban because it's been going around been talked about for a long time but officially actually tiktok videos maybe people don't realize this are banned in the united states uh and the supreme court as has upheld the ban uh and this is why is this associated with skeptical this is associated with skeptical because uh there's skepticism on the part of the united states government about how the data because the

10:50the tiktok is owned by uh bite dance um uh who's a chinese company and there's concern from the u.s government about what chinese uh companies might be doing the data particularly not really chinese companies but chinese government if you understand how the chinese government works essentially uh if you want to operate a business in china you have to play along with their set of rules which could include things like um grabbing grabbing data from you or you forced to be shared data with them so uh this is uh skeptical the united states government is obviously skeptical but

11:23it's actually a double skeptical uh situation in this in this instance blake because the reaction from people in the u.s was skepticism about the u.s u.s government saying you're trying to control information you're trying to keep information from getting to the public right so there's this double sense of skepticism where the u.s government is skeptical of china the chinese government and uh the u.s citizens are skeptical of their own government and what they're doing so uh ultimately this has led to a situation where tiktok is officially banned but the ban is not being enforced so there's this

11:59nationwide ban in the united states on tiktok but it really hasn't been uh enforced at all yeah and there's still negotiations on u.s like u.s investors purchasing right purchase or at least having control of the u.s side of it i'm not sure exactly how that works but um i'm not sure that china is willing to just hand over the algorithm it's something along those lines where they don't want i mean that would be you know maybe a trade secret that they would not want out there but

12:33you know i was i was just watching this i'm like i don't do tiktok i'm not i'm not into that either but i know how important i mean for lack of a better word it is for people who are just constantly scrolling on that if you take something like that away from people if it just poof goes up and vanishes people are going to lose their minds here in the u.s like my my wife being one of them you

13:04know my my niece my nephew they're all on tiktok so uh i'm ban or not i'm glad they're still able to access it because i'm afraid what will happen if if it just goes away completely so with that we're going to move on to our next derailer of the year which is cautious and for cautious we chose u.s flight cancellations and so ryan do you want to explain why we chose that one yeah so uh you know again cautious has to do with uh you know inability to make a decision and

13:38really this the the may the majority of u.s flight cancellations there were several big periods of u.s flight cancellations this year uh but the biggest one was definitely in the fall of 2025 and this was with the federal government shutdown through basically october and all of november that led to really major flight disruptions luckily none for me somehow i managed to avoid this but uh big percentages of flights around uh 10 percent on some major airlines were canceled uh due to uh the the government shutdown which which created a lack of

14:13employees for the federal aviation administration the faa and uh there was also employees who were just essentially working for free like tsa employees had to work for free now uh i you know after the government reopened presumably they were paid for their for their time same thing for air traffic controllers and there's already a massive shortage of air traffic controllers united states if you're an air traffic controller and the government says hey why don't you go work for free for a couple months well a lot of them did the thing you might think they would do this you know what maybe

14:45i'm sick maybe it's time to put in some of my sick time and didn't come in so this created a pretty large scale uh shutdown all right basically there were just too much traffic for the for the uh airports and and um airlines to handle so um all of these uh all the major airlines in the u.s american airlines delta airlines united southwest were all affected by this uh but there were other shutdowns as well and other things sort of related to u.s flights this year where there's been some

15:19in early 2025 way way way back in january there's a big winter storm uh which had a pretty big impact i think 1300 flights were canceled in the u.s on a single day um as there's also been some uh other flight issues in the u.s spirit airlines has gone bankrupt there was an attempt for spirit to merge with another airline but ultimately they had to file for bankruptcy and this has caused additional cancellations and delays and then of course there was the really tragic way back again

15:49in january um airline uh collision the midair collision over the potomac river between the uh u.s american eagle flight and a u.s army helicopter there uh and i think all of those kinds of things uh sort of characterize sort of being cautious being careful not wanting to commit too much to making a decision and and ultimately leaving people waiting leaving people stranded waiting for for things to happen yeah and i don't want to be the downer here but yeah i actually i actually did

16:23uh grow up with uh a woman who was on the plane that that you know had the collision in in dc and that was just a you know it was a bad deal you know just learning about that but you know that really just started off the year with just a lot of issues on the flight front and then as you mentioned you know we're not going to play you know partisan politics here and you know blame one side or the other for who was responsible for the government shutdown but you know think about that if you're a tsa employee

16:54um you're not getting paid i mean you get to a point for a government shutdown of that length i mean you got to worry about people just trying to fill their gas tank to get to work you know some people might not they might have been calling in sick because they couldn't get there you know that's you know that's uh that's the reality of the situation but thankfully there was a you know they had some resolution there and uh you know again we're not going to blame one side or the other

17:25it's just it is what it is and i'm glad we're we're back on track now and and hopefully uh we don't see these types of issues again in 2026 but uh moving on to our next category is reserved so for reserved we chose king charles the third ryan do you want to explain this one yeah and this is a bit of a tough one blake because i think as we get into this we'll see that there's some reasons for it but essentially reserved is about pulling away and i think as far as the royal family is concerned we've seen

18:00less uh attention uh on the royal family since king charles the third's ascension to the throne uh there's been royal family attention but not so much on him right typically the head of the royal family would receive quite a bit of attention but not so much on him and he has really pulled back to some degree uh on some of the appearances you might see or i would i would actually say i would describe it better is he's been carefully managed right his his appearance schedule in 2025 was pretty uh what

18:33was managed pretty uh carefully and part of that was due to and and you know not i don't know that this is necessarily his own personality that that's what we're seeing here but part of it was due to a cancer diagnosis in 2024 and some treatment through 2025 some hospitalization also in 2025 um and then there were a few other political events that i think he sort of uh you know made some appearances at um there was a general election in the uk in 2025 um and so uh in any case um he's uh made

19:08some appearances at these sort of critical events um and made most of the appearances at typical royal traditions but um there is some concern about uh his health and his and his uh physical well-being more recently and i think that that's that's part of what's going on here so i don't know that it's this is uh uh king charles is being reserved because he um because he want he's trying to avoid the spotlight or because that's sort of his personality but i think that it's just more of attempts to manage

19:43health concerns well and there were other family issues that uh of course that's right we don't need to get into all of that but if you if you know you know type situation that uh the the family has dealt with from a uh a crisis management standpoint i would i would say as as a pr person that's the best way i can put it but but yeah king king charles the third as our as our winner this year for the reserve category whether it was intentional or unintentional uh it just seemed

20:14like the best fit for for this year and then moving on to our next category which is leisurely and for this one this is this is a newer one for me i learned about it but uh it is uh six seven being chosen as the word of the year by dictionary.com do you want to do you want to dive into this one rhyme yeah well of course this is another new one for me in 2025 much like la boo boo's uh this was not something i was really aware of and became aware of it only through uh my children and and how they

20:48were they were using using this uh but yeah even more remarkably this became the word of the year and i think the the thing most associated with this is uh the term brain rot and that's because uh there's no real meaning to this term the term is sort of meaningless it's sort of uh meant to be hey i'm in on the joke you're in on the joke we're in on the joke together but it has led to a huge number of um very strange seeming reactions uh from people i remember early in the early in the year

21:24watching a women's uh college basketball game and the team that the team uh had 65 points and they made a two-point shot to go to 67 points and the crowd just went absolutely crazy they were up by 20 points or something like this yeah ask it didn't matter at all i saw the same thing i think it was actually i think it was a uh they were it was a one point thing and they were at the free throw okay maybe that was yeah i saw the crowd went nuts yeah that's right and you just go wait what could

21:55this possibly be um and the answer is it actually doesn't mean anything it's just this um kind of crazy reaction there there are details on the history of this where it came from why it became popular um but really i think the thing that for that caught our attention in terms of leisurely is that this doesn't really mean anything right it's this sort of uh a useless kind of phrase it's a phrase that um it's sort of uh in the sense it has the spirit of it's not really passive aggressive

22:26but it's sort of like a passive way of saying something without really saying what you're what you're trying to say at the same time so um so that's why i think it makes sense to me to say you know six seven uh represents the sort of leisurely kind of nature again not necessarily in an aggressive way but in a way that's sort of avoiding uh doing any real work avoiding really doing anything uh important and again it represents the sort of brain rot uh which i think is uh why

22:57part of why it was chosen as the word of the year in 2025 well i so this is actually one that i've kind of adopted but not not for the the cool points or whatever the the kids are are doing it for these these days i do it because it people who know me know that this would not be something i would ever be clued into but again thanks to south park i i watched that episode that they did on this and what i found is it drives people crazy in my in my inner circle whenever i i do anything six seven

23:32related because they just kind of know how ridiculous it is that i would be saying that uh and it actually i even found myself doing it on a call on a on a on a work call um so uh this is one of those things that really took off but for the fact that it's dictionary.com's word of the year yeah i mean come on let's you know well i mean i've seen a number of other incidents the most recent one was a sort of a personal one i was um at the kansas city chiefs okay so as some of our

24:06listeners know we've been working with the kansas city chiefs for a number of years a great partner of ours uh they invited me up last weekend to go to a football game on saturday they invited us to go do a tour of the stadium i took my son with me so we went and did a tour of the stadium and in the tour of the stadium you can go into the ring of honor room which is where these members uh of the kansas city chiefs football history uh were or had been inducted into uh into the ring of honor

24:37and uh we went in there and max my son was deciding he was going to take some photos of the different things well at least i thought that's what he was going to do and he went up and took a photo of a player i'd never heard of i thought well who why and he goes oh this is my favorite player right here and the player is art still and i'm like art still i don't know who this is why did you go take a picture of this photo and he said well look at the number it was of course he's number 67 oh my gosh there you go and what was that this last weekend or was this past weekend it was so you

25:10were there for the yes yep okay we won't we won't even we won't bring it up ryan maybe well it was a great i'll say this was a great game the final two minutes were really tough as patrick mahomes suffered unfortunately a season ending injury um but we're wishing him and the chiefs a full recovery uh and and uh better luck in the draft this year and next season well okay moving away from the moving away derailers let's go into the moving against derailers and the next one for that

25:44is bold and for bold we chose amazon workspaces ryan why did we do that yeah so this is an interesting one and of course you know blake we we debated several different things for this we talked about we looked at people you know uh as some of the answers for some of these and i know in the past we have listed people i think we've got i don't want to spoil too much but we do have some people on our list uh coming coming here we've already done mentioned king charles the third of course but in this case we decided to go with amazon workspaces i found something really interesting

26:17blake and doing some research around what what happened with amazon workspaces in 2025 uh and and we're going to get to that in a second because that happened and this happened in october 2020 of 2025 but one thing i did learn is that amazon workspaces which is this you know uh basically uh ways that people can can do a lot of computing uh uh sort of powerful kind of servers for uh that lots of companies run on lots and lots of companies run on these that uh they made

26:51uh gartner's magic quadrant for 2025 as a desktop service in august so they were announced as making this magic quadrant of being sort of visionary and also executing right that's what it takes to be in the magic quadrant you have to have this great vision and the ability to execute and they were seen as having this and i think that's really funny because that was in august and then in october of 2025 actually october 20th um there was a 15 hour global outage of amazon workspaces and this

27:27ultimately shut down all kinds of uh there's a huge domino effect on basically everything that relies on these services so this is where it sort of fits in the bold category this is one of those sort of you know too big to fail kind of scenarios where um it touches so many things um that that you can sort of create this overconfidence that it must always work and i think it's not so much that amazon webs web spaces or sorry i said web spaces workspaces is uh high bold but our reliance

28:02as as uh as people and corporations and organizations on amazon workspaces is uh so bold that it caused massive disruptions for things like netflix snapchat all kinds of banks um uh i think several airlines there are all kinds of issues associated uh with uh amazon web services or workspaces going down for 15 hours and i have to admit blake i tried to understand and i have no idea what exactly happened

28:33but my understanding is that there are basically two automatic uh processes or automated programs that tried to update something at the same time and that caused some critical failure and outside of that i don't really know what happened but i do know that amazon workspaces says that it is uh fixed so that's it i mean you're kind of at the mercy of of their word here because so many people have put their eggs in this basket and so whenever something like this an outage like that happens i mean it can

29:08it can really kind of you know for lack of a better term bring the world to its knees you know for with so many people operating on this so you know i hope it's it's fixed um i think i think a lot of people who use this in their day-to-day life uh at work also hope that it's fixed so we'll see what happens moving forward but well the the other thing the other reason i think blake's associated with bold is because it's just says it shows us how dependent we are um on on very few uh major cloud providers

29:42amazon's one of the biggest um but also you know microsoft uh but there are only so many major cloud providers there are lots of smaller cloud providers but um these major ones uh what we're also dependent on those that when they go down it really has a massive impact yeah it really does okay moving on to my personal favorite um not just the scale but also i think this is my personal favorite on the entire list it was the you know for our listeners as we brainstorm this list um you're you're trying

30:18to fill in you know you know here and there for each scale like get a few options for each one this one we did not have a second or third or fourth option to consider and this is also the first one that we filled because it was so obvious but for mischievous this year we chose the louvre heist so ryan do you want to explain that well you know one of the things that i noticed uh blake about our list is a whole lot of things happened in either early in 2025 or uh here in like october of 2025 and

30:56this was another one of those october incidents uh so this was uh in late october october 19th uh several thieves and so of course this is why it's tied to mischievous right i mean mischievous is uh is about breaking the rules uh and uh stealing from a major art museum certainly counts as breaking the rules so several thieves uh disguised as construction workers uh stole uh eight pieces i think it was actually nine pieces but only but only they only got away with eight i think one of them was dropped

31:29uh of the french crown jewels uh they were approximately valued at 88 million euros uh from the louvre uh and the whole thing happened in eight minutes in only four minutes they were actually inside uh actually inside the the museum and then four minutes to escape and so this was all done while it was open uh and so in that sense it was also a very bold move right um but when i first heard this

32:00story blake my first thought was this sounds like a movie exactly real like what when are we going to see the movie about this um but but here's the other thing that's interesting to me is there still doesn't seem to be any conclusiveness on the case some folks have been arrested uh some folks were detained and then later let go um i haven't seen any evidence that they have uh made any convictions around this and of course the pieces uh are still missing and presumed uh completely uh destroyed or

32:33broken down and and sold for for probably far less than 88 million euros well it i mean there's eventually going to be a movie about this i mean i think without without question but how do you make the movie if you really have no resolution yet i mean right now it can only be kind of a documentary um but the fact that i mean this this really does sound like reminding me of like oceans 11 um and you know in that franchise of just i'm like i'm curious how long did they have to plan this

33:11you know what what did this involve and also who's behind the scenes because i you know i guarantee you there were a lot more than probably just these people who did it like how did how did they do this especially while the museum was open it's just a wild story well it also suggests and i think this was one of the first reactions was that maybe security there wasn't really quite up to part now my understanding is they did threaten security guards with some of the power tools they'd use some power tools to actually cut through the glass window because they came up on a second floor uh window uh using a

33:48lift to get up there and um cut through the glass now in some ways it's very psychological uh if you've ever seen the film catch me if you can if you've ever read about a fred demura jr uh you know that when people look the part uh people often give them credit for what they're doing and so it was intentional that they just they dressed in construction gear because they wanted to look like they were doing construction outside so a lot of people wouldn't come up and ask them questions uh so so in some ways it's very psychological so in some ways they suggest there was definitely

34:20some planning this just wasn't you know the night before they decided hey let's go do this um but uh but yeah you have to wonder you know to what extent did they scope out the place to what extent did they know security routines to what extent might it been an inside operation or were they tipped off by someone on the inside i think all that is still yet to be known well we will stay tuned for this one i'm curious to see you know hopefully in 2026 we see something come about but then also there's that part of you of course you know we don't condone you know this type of behavior in any way but

34:53you know there's that part of me where it's like it'd be kind of neat if this just remains a mystery um but you know i we'll we'll see what happens and hopefully we'll see something more come up in 2026 but moving on to our next scale which is colorful for colorful in 2025 we chose the northern lights why do we do that ryan well i mean in some ways it's right in the name or right in if you know what the northern lights are if you've seen pictures of the northern lights before and this really is

35:26colorful now maybe it's not colorful in the psychological term the way we describe it at hogan in terms of uh being dramatic uh but certainly it is attention grabbing in fact that 2025 is one of the most uh promising years for viewing the northern lights that we've seen this has to do with how the the sun i i am not uh this kind of dr blake but uh i'm told that the sun is approaching something called solar maximum which uh creates this uh widespread number of these sort of auroras and

35:57the northern lights are also referred to as aurora borealis um and uh there's been apparently some just excellent days to see that this year particularly in northern parts of of the world scandinavia canada but i've even seen photos from friends of mine in illinois who actually have pretty good photos of the northern lights and illinois is just you know it's not nearly as far north as canada and scandinavia and iceland but so the point is um there have been some really excellent times

36:31to to see those this year and of course you know it's just a really beautiful attractive attention grabbing kind of thing to see so um yeah i think it makes a lot of sense as our pick for colorful in 2025 well ryan i mean it even went further south in illinois because um i remember my my wife and i we actually hopped in the car to see if we could find a good spot unfortunately in tulsa i think the light pollution is a little too too heavy but you know you know ryan you being from illinois maybe you don't have quite as many uh friends on facebook as in oklahoma as someone like me who's from oklahoma

37:07but i was seeing people just north of tulsa in small towns like uh pa huska you know up in osage county which is if you're familiar with uh killers of the flower moon it's kind of in that area where it took place people were posting incredible pictures of the northern lights it was a specific two days or so i believe last month or in october again finding a theme here for some of ours but yeah people here in oklahoma were actually getting pretty good uh visuals of it if they were

37:41enough outside of city limits to to not allow the light to affect it so that that's really cool to see okay moving on to our next one is imaginative and for this one we chose potential life on k2 18b am i am i saying this correctly ryan i've only read this i've never actually heard anyone say k2 uh 18b i don't know you you you explain to our listeners what we why we chose this one

38:11well to be fair blake i've only read about it as well so i don't even know if that's how pretty people pronounce it either but that that is how i would pronounce it i do think we could be a little bit more creative with our uh naming conventions i mean right i just i mean it it used to be you could name you know if you discovered something you would get you to name it after you but i don't think uh k2 18b discovered uh discovered this but uh the excitement uh was around some uh telescope data

38:44from the james webb telescope that showed uh hints possible hints of dimethyl sulfide in the atmosphere now you can find dimethyl sulfide in the atmosphere around earth which suggests that it comes from life or there's there's some indication that this is a gas that is produced by life so of course this led to excitement that maybe there's evidence there's life on k2 18b because uh there is this gas however unfortunately um we we don't really know if that's true there is um there there's no

39:23confirmation that this is the case there's been some speculation that maybe the data was really just noise uh and that there needs to be some more evidence uh if there's even for example water on this planet or if there are oceans there um but it's still a long ways away from staying that there is extraterrestrial life on this planet but certainly this falls into the high imaginative category i mean maybe it's true right these are these are the kinds of big ideas that we associated associate with imaginative and so uh maybe uh this is the case but uh we don't really know for sure you know there's

40:04the part of me i think i mentioned this whenever we talked about bigfoot earlier this year on the spooky season episodes i just kind of want it to exist you know i think it would be neat but uh for now we're just gonna have to speculate and uh see if anything comes about you know we'll just we'll i guess we'll we'll learn more maybe uh maybe elon musk or jeff bezos can send a rocket ship to go find out and investigate a little further for us so yeah and again in in particular my understanding is that um that that they think that these this uh dimethyl sulfide or dms is comes from sort of marine life

40:38so again this this suggests that there's ocean that there's water uh on the planet much like you know earth has lots of water which again would indicate potential habit habitability for humans um so i don't know maybe it's just um high imagination for something else for us to uh as humans to go conquer and ruin i don't know okay well moving away from the moving against uh cluster of the derailers let's move towards the moving towards uh which the first one of that is

41:10diligent and for diligent we chose the uh mayor-elect soon to be mayor of new york city zoron mom donnie do you want to explain why we chose zoron for this uh well yeah as again i think we had a two-year streak i think we're finally breaking the taylor swift streak of diligent for for this one um yeah so i mean uh i think that the the main reason for this is that it's just incredibly it was sort of an outside story right i mean uh mom donnie was not seen as a favorite

41:46cuomo was seen as the favorite for a really long time to win this election and if you actually look back on mom donnie's story i think he was born in south africa and then um at some point actually i mean that might even be right i think he may have grew up in his early years in south africa might have been born somewhere else maybe uganda i want to say um but then uh grew up through his uh elementary and teenage years through in new york city so he's been in new york city for a really long time but i think the big part that makes it consistent with diligent is just how uh diligent he's been

42:19in his political career so going up through the ranks and then of course um you know uh fighting his way back from uh an underdog position to ultimately be the favorite and winning the uh the first the democratic primary and then of course the mayoral election in new york city um an interesting set of policies of course as well really detailed in the sort of policies that he suggested things about rent freezing things about free city buses he's even talked about opening up uh different grocery

42:51stores one in each borough of new york city to try to drive down grocery prices uh universal health care for for children um and uh minimum wage requirements of 30 that's just a whole number of policies that are really sort of you know pretty detailed uh and almost like and i think the other reason i think this fits with diligent is that sort of perfectionism kind of notion right this idea of building a perfect city i mean that's the sort of idea that we see coming out of monday will it work

43:22i don't know uh but uh i think that's why we think this represents diligent well i've got a little bit different take on on why i think zoron is uh fits diligent and so i mean it you know having having a little bit more um ammo to to make this case but he just started off like a year ago talking on the streets nobody knew who he was i mean he was he was he had been a uh i don't know if it was some kind

43:52of a counselor or you know some it was a pretty short campaign yeah it was it was a short campaign that started literally with him like talking to one or two people on the streets uh of new york city and then people started listening and then more and more people started listening and then people started thinking hey maybe this guy's on to something and he he has that kind of that flair and that charisma that people gravitate towards but i think it's the why i like him for diligent is the way he just

44:28built it from nothing into this machine that was unstoppable i mean he got what almost like 51 of the the final vote over um another democratic candidate and a republican candidate that he was going against and that was kind of that threshold where they were like we really have to kind of buy in if he gets over that 50 threshold going against these two candidates yeah and doing it from nothing that's just really incredible so i mean the props to him i i'm anxious to see how this because

45:02this is kind of an experiment that we're going to see it in the most powerful one of the most powerful if not the most powerful uh cities in the world and he seems to be attracting some i mean he's nothing like donald trump but donald trump sure did enjoy the the time that they had together so you know it's just right he seems to be an attractive figure for people so looking forward to seeing what what comes about on 2026 let's see if he makes this list but in a different category

45:34next year so we'll have to wait and see and then for our final one uh it's the dutiful scale and for that one you know we don't get to we don't get to uh you know we don't get a new pope every year um so for this one we have pope leo would it be the 14th um ryan i am terrible at roman numerals that was yeah you got it right you got it right so ryan why do we choose uh pope leo the 14th yeah so a pope leo the 14th or as previously he was known robert francis uh prevost uh we we chose

46:11him for dutiful because uh well i we think that in part uh i think a lot of popes are are dutiful but i think if you look at his career uh and the dedication to the catholic church particularly the order of saint augustine there was a number of firsts for this pope right it's the first pope who was born in the united states uh first pope to hold either u.s or peruvian citizenships of which he holds both uh the first from the as i mentioned the order of saint augustine uh but uh if you again if

46:44you go back and look deep at his career here and he has a doctorate of canon law uh he was one of only 13 graduates of a particular uh of this uh training in in the order of saint augustine that he went to uh he's been on many missions all over the world uh he was a bishop in peru from 2015 to 2023 uh and then he uh was a sort of a dark horse candidate joined uh only became a a bishop in rome uh or sorry one of the cardinals in rome i think in 2023 uh and so uh hasn't really been a

47:21cardinal for that long and so was not really seen as a front-runner candidate but it was really well liked by the previous pope pope francis and i think part of it was that it was just this sort of commitment to uh continuing the traditions of the church continuing the message that the previous pope had uh that pope francis had i feel like to me that's pretty high dutiful um i also think this has got to be one of the hardest jobs in the world to get i mean i think on the one hand you have

47:52to be incredibly ambitious and hard-working but on the other hand you have to be incredibly humble and you can't show just how ambitious you are and so i think that that's part of what we mean when we see dutiful this is a person who um has risen to the top by following the rules by by waiting their turn yeah and you know this was also it was such a a popular story and you see and i work with um an external pr firm on um in europe and in here in the americas and you know this was one where we

48:26sometimes whenever things like this happen we try to insert hogan into the conversation whenever it makes sense and for this one we actually uh we got some uh good traction on both sides of the atlantic um kind of looking at this through the lens of succession planning and uh i i think you know that was that was something that we could speak to so we try to find ways to insert ourselves into that conversation when it makes sense we don't try to force it but but this this was somewhere where

48:58you can see hogan talking about this and and it played out well for us but uh but no i think pope leo the the 14th um which you know my seventh grade math teacher would be hitting me over the head right now um about my roman numerals but uh that that that wraps up our our derailers of the year for 2025 but ryan i do have one last question before we we get out of here and i'm not sure if we've done this uh in the previous years but any predictions for who will be on next year's list or what will be

49:32on next year's list yeah i don't know if we've done it in previous years either blake and uh if we have i sure hope nobody goes back to look and listen to what i had to say in those previous years to point out that i was completely wrong uh and that's always the problem with these kind of predictions if i was any good at this i would probably be uh in in a very different line of work or pretty good at predicting how people are going to behave at work but in terms of predicting what's going to happen on a global scale in 2025 turns out that's that tends to be a whole heck of a lot harder

50:05um but uh a couple of things that maybe stand out to me and that might make the list uh it's interesting because we didn't have it on our list this year uh would be something around artificial intelligence this continues to be a major topic um i would also be surprised if something uh of a sort of a global conflict didn't make the list next year i think in previous years we've had global conflicts on our list and we really didn't you know name one as coming out new or anything like

50:39that this year uh i say this i don't i don't think i'm really happy about making a prediction that there will probably be a global conflict but there continues to be rising tension between for example uh the the the prc uh in china and uh the government in taiwan uh there continues to be rising tension um between uh russia and ukraine and russia in europe uh we're seeing growing rearmament in europe uh i think it's

51:12quite fascinating um that when as we look at germany uh adding to its military stockpile uh i think if you are a student of history or have been around long enough in europe you might uh raise an eyebrow of concern about what that might mean and what that's meant in the past now maybe things are very are different now and have changed uh and part of that is in is in reaction to u.s policy right so u.s policy has decided to to not contribute as much military funding to to europeans defense and

51:48saying europe has to defend itself well the largest or one of the largest economies in europe is in germany and so europe is really dependent on on germans for for self-defense there as well so which of course requires rearmament so um again i don't like to make those kind of predictions but i have a feeling something in that sort of global conflict space uh maybe in the cards for 2026 well mine is around artificial intelligence but i'm gonna apply it to the same one where we chose

52:25amazon workspaces um i think i hope i'm wrong i hope i'm wrong i'm not in any way saying artificial intelligence is going away by any means no i don't i don't think that at all i think it's still um an industry that's going to continue moving forward i think it's the way that it is very much made the the stock market top heavy with um you know a lot of people a lot of money is going into

52:56the to ai and there's concern about a bubble and if that bubble burst you know i mean because think of the dot-com time i mean it didn't mean the internet went away i mean it just means you know there i i feel like a lot of people are putting money into this market and if something if the bottom falls out in any way then we could we could see some type of of global recession that is my concern and that's why i would say i'd put it as bold because i feel like again we're putting a lot of

53:30eggs in in one basket um so i hope i hope you're keeping that in mind for your stock portfolio well i i i hate to say it blake but i think you may be right about this because um i mean if you look at that 2025 has largely been uh well recent weeks notwithstanding but as largely been a pretty high growth year when and when you look at things like index funds or the the total stock market or any kind of stock market market indices uh but to your point most of that if almost all of that has been powered

54:05by ai most other businesses that aren't ai are adjacent or connected with artificial intelligence haven't really done that well financially so much of the stock market boost in 2025 has been driven by ai so to your point should there be some uh loss of enthusiasm around ai or some ai fallout that could lead to um some pretty major sell-offs in the stock market and and again recent weeks or months uh for

54:36those who follow closely may suggest that that's already happening not to panic anyone although i don't think uh our few thousand listeners are gonna uh cause a major stock market panic but but blake i think that's a good good uh good prediction well i uh as of yesterday i offloaded all of my anything i had it in ai related i i i dumped it so so i'm already getting i'm trying to get ahead of it i may be wrong i this may be an idiotic move because this is the first year i've really tinkered with the

55:08stock market and i did okay and i was just like well i'm gonna cash in my chips because i'm leaving the casino so uh well ryan okay this has been a great conversation but uh you know you know i i think we have some some thanks that we need to give out there so ryan you want to start that yeah absolutely well first and foremost i have to thank our listeners blake i mean uh at like in previous years everywhere i go i run into people who say how i listen to you on the podcast gosh it's so awkward blake we hire interns and some of these interns come on they say oh yeah i listen to your

55:42podcast oh geez you want to make me uncomfortable right away but no i i love when i'm out on the road and get to meet some of our podcast listeners uh get to take a photo with them get to spend some time hearing what they think uh getting their feedback on the podcast and hearing what they like about the podcast and trying to bring more of that to to what we bring every couple of weeks here uh and and of course blake uh it would go i couldn't go a year without saying thanks to you for all of your work

56:12and making this podcast happen uh you know i it is a team effort but i think it's more like an 80 20 effort with you really uh you know keeping me on the ball and in terms of what we've got to do next what's coming in up next getting the schedule getting the recording set up um could not do it without you and uh and i really appreciate it well i want to thank you too ryan because i mean your schedule uh from a travel standpoint especially in the second half of this year and and just your willingness to

56:47to those who are are listening right now we're we're ryan and i are technically off for the holidays you know but we we you know ryan you make time whenever we need to because you know that this is a priority so even whenever it's not i know i know that sometimes our listeners i he's coming back he just gets back from a two-week trip to you know tokyo and china and then next thing you know he has to get back on monday and get ready to record a new episode that we can put out uh so so thanks for

57:19being flexible with your schedule even though it's quite the demanding schedule that you have um pretty much every year so uh but we but we somehow figure out how to make it work but um i also want to thank some of the people who are involved in the production of this because it's not just it's not just ryan it's not just me um you know for those who who take a look at our blog on a weekly basis i'd like to thank kelly ledbetter on our marketing team who puts together those blogs and and aaron robinson who she works with who does the editing of the blog so we can get those out and

57:52give you a written recap for people who can't necessarily listen to the episode i want to uh thank uh real tros on our marketing team she is um anything you see on social media any of the posts all that stuff she is the one who is putting that stuff out there and sharing that from the hogan accounts and the science of personality uh linkedin account um accompanying those social media posts uh a lot of you see the the graphics that we put the little animated graph or the little graphics that

58:23have the the audio clip and and and they're really well done and so neele patel who's one of our you know top graphic designers uh he he puts those together i want to thank jeremiah hadock who is uh not on the hogan uh team but uh he is uh he we outsource our editing to him because he's a actually a trained musician and so he does a lot of editing from a music standpoint he actually created uh from scratch

58:54the the music that you hear in our intro uh he he did all of that um and especially listen to the the october episodes where he added the spooky element to those those episodes it's really neat so thanks to him uh thanks to uh his wife who is my boss uh valerie who you all got to enjoy uh interview both ryan and myself so you all could learn a little bit more about us uh we want to thank danielle thompson on the marketing team she handles the website and also we got to give a shout out to

59:28jackie som uh who uh is our vp of integrated solutions uh you hear her voice in the intro uh for every episode so we just wanted to give a shout out to all those people who make this work so yeah absolutely i mean we we cannot do it without without this whole team i mean i you know you you look back on i guess what are we about five five and a half years but you said 140 episodes right into doing this and and and we really have grown not just on the on our technology

1:00:00and the platforms we use but also in the size of the team and the number of people involved to make this production um as high quality as we can and i know we have some uh continued production uh efforts and improvements coming in 2026 as well yep uh so i i guess i'll tease this out that that we will see you all in 2026 and you will see us as well so uh ryan appreciate the conversation

1:00:31and uh hope hope you and every one of our listeners has has a great holiday season and we look forward to coming back in 2026

1:00:41and that does it for the science of personality podcast episode 140 and our 2025 derailers of the year ryan and i are off to enjoy the holiday season but we'll be back on january 13th for our first episode of 2026 cheers everybody

1:00:59this has been the science of personality podcast brought to you by hogan assessments you can access all episodes on our website thescienceofpersonality.com or on the streaming service of your choice see you next time

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