LOOK BACK 👁️ LOOK FORWARD

I stumbled upon this old interview from 2015.

Now over ten years ago.

https://www.howdidshegetthere.com/katie-dreke

Back when I used to visit the barbershop instead of the hair salon. (2015)

It’s wild to read what was going on in my mind then.

A small portal into a fluid moment in time.

You can never cross the same river twice, and much has changed in the world (and in my life) over the past decade, here is what stands out to me today:

⧉ From 2015 to 2024, the S&P 500 returned 178%, but the "Magnificent Seven" (Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Tesla) returned 697% over the same period. 7 companies now drive roughly a 1/3 of the entire US market.

History has no precedents for the world we are grappling to understand.

⧉ In 2015 my children were age 9 and 12. On the precipice of their teens. Still children, and blissfully without mobile phones for a brief moment. Now they are 20 and 23. Both on the precipice of their adult lives. My youngest just wrapped his freshman year at university and is wildland firefighting again this summer. My eldest just graduated from university, already working at a marine biology lab on the coast. Still children, but with grown up pressures, complex relationships, sincere concerns for the future.

Sev & Ella (2015)

Wildland Firefighter & Marine Biologist (2026)

⧉ Gen AI didn't exist as a mainstream category in 2015. ChatGPT didn't launch until November 2022. Now 71% of organizations use generative AI in at least one business function, and US private investment hit $109 billion in 2024, nearly 12x China's $9 billion. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude combined now draw roughly 2.42 billion MAUs.

If you go back to the post-WWII era, the total human population of planet Earth sat right around 2.42 billion.

⧉ The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index fell to a historic low of 5.17 in 2024. Layer on Brexit (2016), two non-consecutive Trump terms, Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine (2022), the Iran-Israel-US conflict (2026), and 2015's optimism about steady democratic progress hasn't held.

The Index reached its all-time highest mark in 2006, the inaugural year of the report, when the global index peaked at 5.52 (0 to 10 scale). Since that time, the overall index has steadily declined.

⧉ The 2024 Paris Olympics achieved full gender parity for the first time in history. Women's World Cup viewership went from 750 million worldwide viewers in 2015 to roughly 2 billion in 2023. The WNBA's media rights deal, signed in 2024, is worth about $200 million a year, more than 3x the prior deal. And the broader economics shifted fast: women's elite sports revenue crossed $1 billion globally for the first time in 2024, and is projected to reach $3 billion in 2026, a 340% increase since 2022.

And, if we can get the global sport brands to innovate the hell out of their women’s product creation — consistently, relentlessly, season in and season out, starting with woman athletes insights (vs. mens insights ported over) — THEN we’d really cooking!

⧉ The Paris Agreement was signed in December 2015 with a goal of holding warming "well below" 2°C. A decade later, the trajectory is behind that pace: 2024 was the first calendar year to average more than 1.5°C, the hottest year on record. The 1.5°C threshold is arriving faster than expected, current data suggests 2029, 13 years earlier than hoped.

None of these options are good. Full stop. But at the 1.5°C threshold at least we have a narrow opportunity for some reduction and mitigation of global suffering to humans, animals, and the ecology. There is no avoiding what is already coming.

⧉ My Mom was still alive in 2015, and we had an amazing life together until December 2025. Our last decade she was mostly healthy, happy, traveling to visit us when our family moved abroad to Sydney and Tokyo, calling me on my birthday every year to tell me my birth story over the phone. I won’t receive that call ever again.

Susan Margaret Thompson Goodman • April 28, 1946 - December 23, 2025

Nothing lasts.
Change is constant.
The future is always unwritten.

And it is our responsibility to put our hands into the work of the world. To shape it. To demand that it works more, for more people, more often.

I’m actively seeking clients who aren’t afraid of doing this work. If this is you, deal me in.

Lastly, in the end, after re-reading the interview from 2015, only one small thing remains constant from this 2015 article: I still want to be an astronaut.
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