2025 Chatty Chat Year in Review

- What a year, what a year, what a mighty weird year. (laughing) - What are you talking about? - It's a standard year these days. - Fog standard, typical year is 2025 shrinks to a pinhead in the rear view mirror. We kind of hastily feel our way around in the early days of 2026. We think it's time to look back on the year we just had. At all the stories we did and didn't get to talk about this year. - Like Land Rover Hacks. Nintendo Switches 2s. The continued industrialization of AI infrastructure and capital into an economic aurora boris making a suspicious ticking sound. - The angering of every crypto investor in the world. - Little booboos. - We bypassed that this year. - Little booboos. - We look back, we look ahead, you ready Scott? - I'm always ready. - This is the year in review chatty chat here on HACT. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Scrambly theme song. - Welcome back. - Welcome back. - Welcome back, welcome back. - This is our year in review chatty chat. This is just one of those episodes. This is that episode. I don't know when you're gonna be listening to this if it's in the in between week or the early days of the new year. But we're here recording it at the very bitter end of 2025. We have very little in front of us. But we have a lot of stories from the year. Like I have my thread of links and notes that never made it into an episode. All of the stuff we didn't get to talk about. And that should be plenty. - I only read about 400 news articles a day. So it's usually in one year or the other. So something stuck and there were some themes that I'm excited to talk about because I think they're getting bigger and better and better. But all in all, I think we just catch up. How was your year personally, Jordan? - My year personally was good. It was a very head down and get stuff done type of year. It was a lot of travel this year, which I really like. I like to get to travel around a little bit. It's been generally good. How about yours, Scott? - Wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's not jump to me yet. You still got out. You did a lot of travel. What was your highlight? Give me your highlights. - Oh, that's a great question. - I already know what one of them is. So I'm going to hear you say it. - Well, we were in, yeah, it's a chatty chat episode everybody. - That's right, welcome to the chat. Welcome to the chat. It's gonna be loose the last two have been like pretty deep interviews and this is gonna be the opposite. I really liked, so we got to go to Germany for some game stuff. We were hawking our mirrors with a new indie game we're working on and that was a lot of fun. On the way into that, I would guide to see Amsterdam. I've never been to Amsterdam before. I'm very Dutch and I've never been to my homelands. So that was really, really cool to get to see. - That was in Bloomin. - Bloomin, Bloomin. - Bloomin, that is how you pronounce it. Like the Swedish show from Sesame Street. Yeah, that was a real highlight. Yeah, it was good. - I thought you were gonna say Mexico City. So I remember Mexico City being like man, that place was amazing. You have to go. You really do. I got to see Mexico City kind of for the second time in a few years this year. And I highly recommend Mexico City everyone. It's a great place to take a trip. It's really, really cool. Great food, great culture, great people. Highly recommend it. - Good for you. - Nice year. - I appreciate it. - It's a finish of a calendar year and be like, "I had a good year." - Yeah. - Not a good year. - It was a good year. - It was a really good year. - Good, good for you. Yeah, I on the other hand didn't do much traveling. I think I, I went away to Mexico surfing, got incredibly ill and was sick for like two months. Then on the tail end of that, I went to Waco, Texas surfing, which is strange, but this is a really big circle there. - Yep. - So I wanted the craziest Masonic temples I've ever seen in my life. Not that I'm a Mason, but it just is fascinating that this tiny little city has this. - This shit of Mason would say. (laughs) This has this monstrous Masonic temple, but it went to Waco surfing, had maybe the most relaxing week off I've had in years. - Heck yeah. - Just crawl out of bed, have a bowl of like yogurt, go surfing for an hour, get some lunch, go surfing for an hour, have a nap, go surfing for an hour, go for dinner, go for a drink, go to bed. Do it again the next day. - Rinse and repeat. - Rinse and repeat. - Sometimes that's what you want out of a brick. - Yeah. - It's a good way to unwind. - Totally. - In the larger world, did anything happen? - Well, there's a few things. Stock markets up, you know, seeing as we're segueing into our Hacked Financial Analysis show. - Yeah, sure. - Stock markets largely been up this year. I'm not sure where it's gonna go next year. The sun bears, some bulls. AI, I would say AI has underperformed this year. Expectation, at least for me. - That's the thing. - Even it is economically unperformed. - No, technology is unperformed. - It is performed so well, it's dangerous how well it's performed. - Yeah, I'm gonna get a lid in the comments for this. But just that the pace it was moving at. - The tech. - The tech itself. - The tech, kick it. - You know, we went from the Chatchee PT public launch was what, November, three years ago? - Yeah, about three years ago. And it seemed to be constantly scaling. And it just feels like we're in this arms race to who can make a better version of what we already have. And the new ones come out and they're a little bit better. It's certain things, but they have new flaws. And it feels like we're really in that plateauey thing before we go up again. Obviously, vibe coding became like a huge thing this year. You know, it blew up and then all of the problems with it showed up. You know, you've got full digital agents now that you can employ at your company that will join your Slack and go in your Gira boards and you can assign them tickets and all of a sudden your AI helpers like doing replacing a software engineer on your team. But to me, I think just given the speed that it was scaling up, to me this year under delivered a hair, I thought it would have been a bit bigger. It felt like the story of AI this year shifted from like, what can it do to what does it cost? And that's not a great thing for the sense of excitement and anticipation out of technology. There was a really big shift towards like, who is invested in whom and where are the resources getting moved around and less so about like, what is the remarkable utility this is bringing to people? I think that Microsoft tried to shove it into the OS level and people kind of unanimously were like, we don't think it's that. It's like, oh, it's pretty meaningful. If it's not that. And meanwhile, there was a $38 billion partnership between AWS and OpenAI to like supply them compute for the next couple of years, $40 billion from Google to build a bunch of new like data centers for AI, $10 billion for Microsoft to build a bunch of data centers in Portugal. There was the energy question of just like, Google's talking about putting in like, solar powered data centers in orbit. Like everyone's getting weird when it comes to where does the energy for this come from. And meanwhile, from a consumer facing perspective, my chatbot got a little better and there's like attention there. I think that we all kind of feel. - Well, like you and I have talked about this off, not on the pod, but like even as much as like a year ago, but I'm going to make my Scott the futurist 2026 prediction that 2026 will be the year of proactive AI, not reactive AI. - Like it goes and does stuff for you? - Yeah. Talk about what that looks like in your head, because I have thoughts about this. - Well, I guess maybe the term isn't right. I'm calling it proactive because it's proactive me, but it's still reacting. Yeah, it's getting ahead of me, but it will still be reacting to the context in which it's operating. But you're already seeing this like, Gemini's teased it on some of the new phone things. Like when somebody sends you a message and it's like, hey, where's dinner tonight? It will pre-draft the response. Having looked at your calendar, pulled your location. So it's still reacting, but it's pro-acting me. So it's proactive for me. And I think that a lot of the AI tools that we'll succeed and we'll see big leaps this coming year will be ones that are proactive for the end user. - Interesting. We get a lot of, we get a lot of like promo emails from different technology platforms. And I've noticed a really big spike this year and stuff that is about like, and I think at the heart of this is like a piece of technology called Model Context Protocol, which is just like an AI standard for letting LLMs and natural language AI talk to different like external tools and websites. It would be the mechanism by which you could say, book me an Airbnb and the LLM can talk to Airbnb. This is, I have mixed levels of optimism for this 'cause I'm not sure why any of those platforms would want to just become plugins for someone else's chatbot and without that kind of two-way consent. It's like, all you really need to own the market before Uber is gonna decide to be like, cool with just being a backend for chat GPT. But putting all that aside, I noticed a really big spike in press emails and CEO outreach emails from companies that they're trying to be like, we'll book it for you. We will buy it for you. We will schedule that for you. And again, on the consumer side of things, I'm not using it that way yet. And that feels interesting to me. - You're not. Yeah, the 2025 definitely was, I think MCPs came out late last year. It was kind of an anthropic 'cause they're the ones to develop the protocol. - It's their big one. - Yeah, they released it and it is very functional. And if I was an Airbnb, I would be building MCPs because I'm just still gonna make the margin when the agent books the room on the backend. But it feels like you're giving away the like surface that you own, which is the people going the Airbnb. And then it just becomes a like drive. I'm curious if any of them are, I'm curious how large the check will have to be to get them to sign that. 'Cause they will, you're right. But I don't think you're gonna do that 'cause you're like, this seems like a great opportunity. I think you're gonna do that 'cause a dump truck of money shows up. - See, but I disagree, like the second, I disagree with you. The second that people start using agents to facilitate their life in that way. And there's not very many people, I would say these days that do that. I don't think like we still have the emergency stop button in the elevator. Like nobody wants to just be like, hey, I'm going to Dallas this weekend. Book me flights in a hotel. - Sure. - And just trust that the robot will get your preferences right, your, et cetera, et cetera. - Yeah. - So I don't think we're there yet as a culture. But as we move towards that goal, having the ability to have like once you start seeing bookings, shifting. So like the surface that Airbnb owns, let's call it 100. If once eight of those go to agents and all of a sudden eight percent of their bookings are being done by agents and 92% being done online, once they start seeing that shift, they'd be silly not to try and facilitate it. Or else somebody else, well, a competitor in the market will show up and take it from them. - Interesting. It remains to be seen if that 8% migration happens. I have thoughts about whether or not it will, as evidenced by like Amazon started selling buttons 15 years ago for just like bulk buying your dishpods and no one bought it 'cause everyone still wants to make the choice about what dishpods they get this time. I think that most shoppers aren't the kind of executive class that is having these products being made who is like, my time is simply still valuable. I pay someone to make that choice for me. Why couldn't it be a robot? Like most people's money is scarce enough that they want to make the choice themselves. - They want some retail satisfaction. - And they want the retail. And just the autonomy to spend their far more limited, like our far more limited money than someone else going and spending it for them. So if 8% of the market migrated to that way of using the internet, totally they would have a big incentive. My, the thing that remains to be seen for me is how big of the market is that? Like spend my money for me. - I think the, I think the, the, the, the difference is I think there's multiple markets there. Like when you're going to Spain. - Yeah. - You're going on an experience and you wanna tailor your experience. - Yes. - And it's something I'm gonna do often. It to me cost, that cost me money like that's. - Yeah. - But if I'm a, if I'm a commuter that works out of Chicago and I have to fly to our office in Dallas for two days a week and I always stay at the Marriott because I have my Marriott Bonvoy member and I always fly south west because this is, yeah, sure, whatever. (laughing) I'm not a Marriott Bonvoy member by the way, but it just jumped into my mind. But if you, but if you're a part of a loyalty program for rental cars, you're part of a loyalty program for flights and you do those same flights and same hotels and same car rentals every week. - I see where you're going with that. - It's very programmatic. It's very much less a tailored experience and very much a utilitarian like, oh, I just need to go. I used to tell my executive assistant to book it for me and now I just push a button on my phone and it knows that I prefer to fly in the morning on the way there and on the evening on the way back. - When you were talking earlier about the autofill on the phone that instead of just guessing based on an LLM is looking at your calendar and looking at your email and making those informed decisions that I'll still put under the umbrella of autofillable decisions. What is autofillable commerce on the internet? What else is autofillable? I still think that the fantasy of, you tell the computer what to do and it will use itself for you as like that remains untested to me. But the expanded autofill thing, maybe and maybe that's a distinction without a difference. But that I could see having some value and being interesting and we keep waiting for it. It keeps not happening. So I'm curious if 2026, I'm curious if I let a robot book or buy something for me in 2026, 'cause I'm open to it. - You're like, we need dishwasher tabs. - Send them on over, like I need toothpaste, like get it over here. - Yeah, I feel like Am, do you remember the Amazon push buttons? - That's, I brought those up earlier. Yeah, like they, they had those buttons and no one uses them. - Yes, it's not a bit listening to it. - It's all good. (laughing) It's like funny, you should mention those. - And no one really bought them because there's something about consumer behavior that is like if I'm going to buy the thing I want to choose it, I want to pick it. - I want to make sure I'm not getting hosed. Like I hit a button and it's like, oh, a supply and demand. Obviously dishwasher tabs are $400 a package and you hit the button so you confirm that you wanted to buy them. - It's also not enough friction. It's not enough friction to spend money. There was the whole thing of people's kids going up and just like, and like a palette of dishwasher pods shows up at the house. - Yeah. - And it's like, I don't know that I'm at the point yet where I'm going to give the chat bought my credit card information. Just be like, you cook with just God speed, little robot. - To wrap it back to MCPs and pro-activate I think, we're going to see more of that stuff. Like the Gemini add that shows that it goes and looks in your calendar sees where your reservation is for tonight. That's probably using a light MCP on the back end. So the locally deployed LLAM that's running on the phone actually has an MCP into your calendar application is pulling that information. And I think this is the year that we see a lot more of those. And if I had to put a bet down, I would bet that Google's going to lead the charge on it because I just can't help but feel like Google and their integrated platform, their massive amounts of deployment, the mobile operating system, they just control the entire horizontal and vertical. And I think that they have the best chance of making the products and the AI solutions that are really going to be life changing for people. - Yeah, let's chat about Google because they had a really good year for this kind of thing. The story for the last three years has been those idiots at Google. Open AI is eating their lunch and then Sundar Patrye's all of search, they're going to die. They're going to die. We won't even remember, like there was really shades of that. And then Sundar Patrye just started like John Wick training. And this year just like punched his way through and the giant kind of lumbered back ahead. And they owned a lot of the press cycle when it came to AI with stuff. There was a couple different stories. There was that, I think it was Nano Banana, the small chat like image tool. There was at a heart of a lot of like Mimi stuff that happened on the like normal facing internet. There was a lot of back kind of ground stuff that I think we're gonna see a lot of fallout from in 2026. The thing that comes to mind for me is their integration with Apple. There is this future that it feels like we're working towards where the new version of whatever series is rebuilt in some way on this giant trillion parameter Google model that they've been working in concert with. It evokes the relationship that we see between Apple and Search where there is a business deal to provide a service between the two companies. And it's looking like the chat bots. If you are an iPhone user that you use on your phone might be provided by Google. Gemini got good as a chat bot just as like a one-to-one competitor with open AI's main product. - Arguably the best, I think it's quite good. It's really really strong. - Well they, like aside from the base LLMs, they were one of the first people that were coming out with like the creative suite of tools, be it video production, image editing, which you mentioned in the software development space. You know, Google didn't quote unquote buy windsurf, but they hired the founders and paid them a few billion dollars for some of their software assets, think like two and a half billion. And since then Google has released anti-gravity, which is essentially a cursor competitor. If you don't know what cursor is, a cursor is like one of the first AI integrated development environments ID, something where you write code but the AI is completely integrated into how you're doing it. It's reading your files. It knows the code specifications. It's kind of facilitating. You can also chat with it, give it orders. It has agents that will do stuff in the background for you. Anyway, this isn't about cursor, but yeah, Google's very much, you know, sticking out the tentacles into so many of the different pieces. And I think that's going to be their recipe for success. - Yeah, they're doing the like, they're both providing consumer facing stuff and they're trying to get in on the backend and being a provider for people, which for a long time kind of felt like Microsoft's split, they're like, we make stuff for the people and you can do your gaming PC with Windows. And also Azure is just makes money infinitely in the way that Google Adsense does. And Google is this year really like, they're doing a very good job of being that again, except for AI. They're saying, okay, we're going to provide you these models. We're going to train this 1.2 trillion parameter model, just special for whatever series now going to be. And also you're using Google, you're using Chrome, you're using Gmail. - Well, that's been a big thing for them. You know, when you look at Google, like open AI versus Google, open AI is a vertical silo. You know, they just make AI stuff. They don't have a lot of landscape to deploy it. They need to partner with people. They need to buy chips from Nvidia. You know, every little piece of it is kind of with partnerships and they need to pay people to deploy it or get paid to deploy it. Where Google has this massive, you know, field of tools, utilities, enterprise software, email capacities, cell phone operating systems, search bars, like, I can't search anything anymore without getting a Gemini response. And that's by design. They're just getting people used to the feeling of using AI to do their search and summarize their searches, which I think is brilliant. It cuts a lot of time out of my day. - Yeah. - But also then in the back end, you know, they've been, I remember when Google started developing their own micro computers to facilitate their search farms. So their data centers were actually all entirely custom designed. They started making their own chips. - I was gonna say, I think their AI centers are running on like tensor processing units, which is their like smart phone chip. If I remember correctly. Yeah, I don't know the details of it, but I know that they, it just, even in the last few months, it's come out that like, hey, Google does naturally need Nvidia. - Yeah. - Google's actually a competitor to Nvidia. They've been making low power, high processing efficiency chips for their search forever. And it turns out that they can repurpose some of that research and some of those knowledge pieces into building high volume data centers for AI. And that was a huge spike in their stock price because they were like, oh my God. Like, there's a real competitor to Nvidia out there. It's not AMD. It's actually Google. - That's an interesting take. I think Google is gonna strut, I'm trying to think of how to articulate this thought. Google is probably gonna end up having a like tension between being an information and content provider and being an AI service infrastructure provider. And the two things that sort of like heat up when I think about that in my head are the Google AI search results, which are, it is probably gotta be one of the hardest problems to solve in AI is just like, how do we in a split second find accurate information and have an LLM condensate? And the like rate of hallucinations and made up stuff is higher in that than anything else I use a chatbot for. Like chatbots have largely, have gotten really good at nipping certain hallucination problems in the butt a little bit like it's improved. I very regularly just get like objectively wrong stuff from AI, Google AI search summaries. - Interesting. - Yeah, it's, I've tried to make a habit now of clicking into links to check it. And it's like, I'm sort of floored by how often it like, I'm like that, that didn't really capture the spirit of what this actually said. But you took three different sources to try and make it accurate and slam them together and you got something that maybe the truth sort of whistled down the middle of. The other thing for Google, I just wanna bring up really quickly, is that Google owns YouTube. And I think that there is going to be at a certain point a conflict there between this idea of the future of YouTube is AI generated, is woven into AI. And the fact that it has become the biggest entertainment surface in the world on the backs of human creators. I think there's going to be a, if I had to make a prediction about 2026, it's that a prominent voice or voices of YouTubers gets in some kind of a beef with parent company alphabet about the way AI is being woven into that website. - I think you're, in your last one, I think 100%. I wanna jump back to your Google reviews to remind you, I think it's interesting. So when I look at the Google summarizations, the speed that they have to deliver it, there's gotta be a pre-processing function that they're looking at. So the second sum search starts trending, probably pre-pulling assets related to that. - Yeah, sure. - And creating kind of like a retrieval cache so that when you send in, hey, whenever you're typing the phrase even, it's like loaded up, loaded up, loaded up. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. But even before then, they're probably just looking at larger macro trends in search and what people are looking for. They probably have some form of encyclopedia of all the things that people search for. And they're probably trying to pre-cash those answers to make it so that they can facilitate quick response. - Sure. - But when you ask it something tricky, and you're like, yeah, grab three sources and it kind of mash them together, but it kind of missed what I was trying to get to. That's probably the byproduct of the fact that they had pre-loaded those three sources as reputable sources about the topic, but the weird little incillary question you had wasn't answered in it. So then it starts to just conceive. - To try and find an answer, to try and make an answer. - To do what these tokenized systems do, which is like to provide an answer at all costs, even in the absence of an answer. It's like, I must show him something and it's like, no, you mustn't. - Baby, you don't know. You could just serve me 10 links. That was how you built the Roman frickin' empire on just serve this guy a bunch of links. And now there's this sort of AI subtext of like, no, we can't do that. I have to, the robot has to answer the question for the person and it's like, no, if you don't know, it's really okay if you just give me some links. And I could see that being a design balance maybe as we move forward is like, you don't have to give me an AI answer. If you have it and you can find a way to make the economics of keeping the websites that gave you the information in the first place alive viable and you want to serve me an LLM answer, cool. But if you don't know it, don't make it up. - Totally. Well, I've even found like six months ago, anytime that I would ask an AI a question, I would be, I would give it explicit instruction to give me citations. You make it double check, it's work. And I feel like some of the big progress that we're seeing in platforms, especially like Gemini 3, is that it's doing that automatically. They're pre-building the interface that the users are using to speak to these models with a lot of that encoded rule set that makes them a little bit more trustworthy. - I want to pivot off of Google and so I'm going to go back to Microsoft because I think they're a good way over to a totally different topic to briefly glance off them. Just in terms of like technology culture, not a great year for Microsoft, I would say. I think they tried to make the Windows agentic and it's very mixed results and it feels it has, it's giving Clippy, it's giving Clippy vibes, it's giving Clippy, let's talk about Clippy. The thing with Microsoft for me is they're similar to Google in the sense that they have a lot of surface, you know? Number one, deployed operating system in the world, enterprise servers, you name it. They're a part of everything. SQL servers being used here, ERPs there, you know, they are the quintessential enterprise computing software company of the world. - Yes. - They're also quite smart. And the person who made Azure is running the company now and Azure is a great product. - Yes. - I assume that they're going to figure the AI stuff out at some point. It might be giving Clippy vibes today, but when they start listening to me and building pro-active AI, they will be wildly successful because that will be where enterprise start to see massive gains in efficacy of their employees from Microsoft products. And that will be the roller coaster to success for them. - Do you think that that roller coaster requires a thriving consumer facing business? 'Cause I can almost see a world in which Microsoft almost has this coming to God moment about like, it feels like they're about to have it with Xbox. Whether like maybe Xbox doesn't matter to us as long as we own PC gaming. And I wonder if at some point they go, maybe Windows for consumers isn't that important to us as long as we still have Azure, 'cause it's the thing that makes money. - You know what I'm saying? - I know what you're saying. I do things. A, I think that they've had that moment with Xbox. - Yeah. - I think that it's not-- - That might be behind us. - Yeah, they're not having it. I think they've had that, you know, I think we saw that with the Xbox handhelds being coming out as a co-branded ASUS product. And they're moving away from the lost leader model of the console, understanding now that there are so much competition in that model, that there's no longer a reason to do it. They figured out that the game distribution piece is actually the biggest cash cow. So that's why you're seeing Xbox Game Pass becoming such a staple. And they also like what doubled the price of it this year? I'm not a subscriber to it. - Yeah, I've stopped subscribing a while ago, but I think it doubled this year. - Yeah, I think it went from $19.99 a month to $39.99 a month or something. But when games, when games are also moving to the, you know, I'm talking in Canadian dollars, I need to start talking in American dollars, but games are now pushing into that $79.89 USD per game. - For sure. - Okay, if you're a gamer, you know, you're essentially getting a free game every other month for the price of a subscription. If you're a gamer that's enough that you're playing a new game every month or you want to pick up a game, try it, put it down more than just a trial. If there is a trial even available, it still provides a decent amount of value. Like when we look at entertainment expenses these days, like I remember when doing a drop in at a gym was like $12.99. Now it's like if I go to like a Barry's boot camp class, it's 39 bucks. - Barry's boot camp. - Yeah, you know what I'm saying. - So specific. - No, I know exactly what you're saying. It feels like there's a fork kind of coming down the road in terms of gaming where it's like, there are going to be subscription passes and there's going to be Nintendo and there's going to be steam libraries. And then there's going to be this weird ancillary world of games so big, their pop culture things that can force you to install a third, like get you to put Epic store on your computer so help you God, because otherwise you wouldn't. But it seems like there's going to be maybe a little bit of a contraction in the console space. And maybe excitement, like I think that an interesting thing this year in PC gaming had nothing to do with Microsoft and it was the announcement of the steam machine. I don't know if you followed that one. - I did follow it, but feel free. I know you love it probably. - I'm pretty stoked on it. So I'm a big steam deck guy. I love my steam deck. Steam deck for anyone who is unfamiliar is a portable gaming console made by the Valve Corporation. They make steam the storefront in which people buy PC games on the large. It's huge. Turn them into a massive, massive, massive company. It's Linux based. So it's Linux with like a little layer on top that lets it play the vast, vast majority of PC games built originally for Windows. They run great. It's really, really good. Unless the game has some sort of custom installer that requires root access to prevent anti-cheating stuff. Most games just work on steam deck and by extension on Linux. And so this year, Valve announced that they were going to be making a thing next year. It's, you can tell it's designed for the home console kind of space. It's meant to be plugged into a television. It's meant to sit on a shelf. And it's going to be basically just a really, really, really comparatively powerful steam deck. Linux machine that runs PC games on it that you play in the living room, price somewhere between a console and a PC. And I wonder if that is the beginning of something where it's just like, do you, all you're doing is playing video games on this. It seems like a crazy notion, but do you need Windows? Like, do you really need it? And for a lot of people, the answer is still yes because there are certain games that require that access. But for a lot of people who just have like crazy, big steam libraries and aren't playing those other games, answer might be yes. Yeah, I don't disagree. That's essentially a roundabout way again. I'm talking about Xbox and how they've kind of realized that maybe they don't need to have a console. They should just be a sore front to the distribution thing. As it's interesting, you brought up like steam being the obvious thing to talk about, but let's talk about Valve and steam for a second. Please. Because they did this pivot. Valve used to make games. They made Half-Life. And then bang, they were like, hey, let's just get into the distribution space. There's no good online shop. As the internet is speeding up, a lot of the game distribution will go from physical media to digital media. Now Valve makes over $16 billion a year. Wait, you ready for the real good number? Yes, how much the estimated revenue per employee is? Oh, that's going to be insane. $50 million US dollars. Oh, bonus time better be good for those folks. So it turns out to scamming in the middle of a commercial transaction, taking 30% of it. A tax? Yeah. Is a massively good business model. That's insane. I knew they were big. I knew the Gabe Newell was like, which yacht am I taking today? Rich. But I didn't realize it was the per-head numbers really, really fascinating. Yeah. So those are AI stats. So don't hold me. Sure, sure. But it's approximately $50 million per employee. That's wild. Yeah. And I mean, they make a good product. The steam is-- and it's-- what's interesting about steam is I would say the like culture of game buying is so different there than anywhere else. Like you mentioned that a game now costs-- choose your currency $70 or $100. Game prices have gone up. Of course. Cost of making games has gone up. Cost of just beating games. Which is weird, because for the last three years, we've been hearing stories about how like, you're going to be able to wink at the computer, and it'll make a AAA game for you using the power of AI. And it's like, well, it's like, OK. Funny. Anyway, still takes a lot of talented people working real hard to make a thing. But meanwhile, over on steam, for anyone who's unfamiliar steam does annual sales, they do a winter and a summer sale. And the culture of buying games on steam is like, well, I'll just throw a couple in the cart for a treat later back when we're at home. Like it's this culture of like, you just sort of-- it's like a collection. And you just sort of like funnel games into it. It's an archive. It's a digital archive. Some of them cost $10, some of them cost $50, some of them cost $2. And you just sort of like, you add them to your wish list all year and you wait for the big sale to come. They've cultivated a culture and gaming that is totally its own weird thing. It's different than console games. It's different than the weird silo that is Nintendo. And I want to talk about Nintendo. It's steam. And I'm like, yeah, I see a hardware play here. I get trying to own more of this. Do the children need windows? Or can they all just come up on Linux? And it can play all their favorite games. The reality is, though, I don't even know if they needed to make the hardware play. Sure. I think they're doing it almost out of entertainment for themselves at this point. Because this is a reality where now they could have-- they could have technologically solved the problem and then just passed it up the chain. So there's talk of the next generation of Xboxes who will have a steam store. They will have an Epic store. They will have a pick one or the other to make the people who have tried to make, because it's so profitable. But I think that they've established and cemented themselves in the market that I think it's going to be really hard to de-seat them. And I literally think the hardware is probably just for fun. They're probably just trying to push the limits of gaming to be like, no, no, we're going to make a handheld gaming computer. And people were like, no, not going to happen. And they were like, look what we did. Yeah. It's really fun. Yeah, sure. Yeah, there is a culture thing. And it almost brings us back to the-- what does Microsoft need out of Windows that it isn't getting out of the money printer that is Azure? And it's like a toehold. In the culture, in people's workflow, your first computer was what, you're familiar with it, you've learned how to use it. There's like a-- it's where you connect with individuals. And then way up the line, there's the enterprise-grade stuff. Having a box and having a little deck in your hand that gets you using this stuff is another surface is really powerful for Valve. Totally. Just in a cultural and consumer acquisition sense almost. I'm just trying to look at what. So Google-- this is approximation. Just Google this AI answer. Believe it or not. I'm going to trust it as far as just this discussion is. I'm going to trust it with my life. So Google's revenue-- sorry, Microsoft's revenue, Intelligent Cloud. So that's probably Azure, about 100 billion a year. Productivity and business process software, Office 365, LinkedIn, 50, 50 billion a year. Computer gaming, Windows Xbox, distribution, et cetera. Give or take another 50 billion a year. So there's selling a lot of copies of Windows to people with gaming PCs is what I have to take from that. Xbox makes the money, but I have to think that the lion's share of that is the PC gaming market. That's just a gut hunch. Yeah, but even then, Windows OEM, when you buy a PC pre-built and you get OEM on it, OEM OS on it, it's not that expensive. I would say that Microsoft-- Interesting. I'm actually surprised that Microsoft's business solutions is not higher than $6.50, $60 billion. Because I would have assumed Microsoft SQL server, Microsoft, all of the massive enterprise grade stuff was where they made most of their money, aside from Azure. Like Azure, obviously. Yeah, but that's the 100 billion big chunk of the pie. I'd be really curious to see that business side of things broken down, because when you led with Microsoft Office and Office 365 or whatever it was called, I was like, I've used that software. It shouldn't earn them a nickel. Enterprise grade software, a lot of the other server-grade stuff that they do, yes, that would print money, because cities run on it. That's an infrastructure kind of thing, but that's so interesting. Minecraft alone has sold over 300 million copies and has 180 million active users. What a stud. But it's 300 million copies. Oh, wow. That's a cool one. They bought LEGO, basically, which is-- Yeah, a lot too. If you can go back and buy LEGO, buy LEGO. Other big gaming stories, since we're here of 2025, and I think looking for it into 2026, we've talked about scene. We've talked about the rise of Linux. We'll all be talking to you on your Linux machines next year. The other two big gaming stories were the Nintendo Switch two of it all, of it all. I don't really have any news here. And I know that this is a technology show that sort of vaguely touches on gaming sometimes. So this is out of focus. I just got to say the Nintendo Switch two rips. And everyone should go buy one. This is just a free plug for the Nintendo Switch two. Boy do I like it. And you're like, you have any numbers or research? To do about that, I'm like, I do not. I just really like mine. And I've been playing Metroid beyond. And it's really good. And so was Donkey Kong Bonanza. And they were just on like a heater run of great games on a cool console. Yeah. I did hear that the Mario Kart, the Open World Mario Kart, is pretty weird. It was a weird first title to launch with. I think if they had launched with Donkey Kong Bonanza, it would have been inarguable that this thing is just a straight fire, like a destructible 3D platform about a big monkey. The rocks, you're like, that's great. Like if you like video games, if you don't like video games, use the marker thing to skip to the next section. But if you like video games, go play Donkey Kong Bonanza. It is a impossibly well made platformer. Wow. It's so old. Somebody from somebody that makes platformers. It really is like beautifully designed when you consider the like the whole crux of that game. Sorry, everybody. Is the entire world is basically the entire world is destructible. And you play a big monkey that smashes everything. And that is just like a Mario jump level of like satisfying core interaction that they have then wrapped in really lusciously designed. Plotting in physics and flattening. Well, I was going to see even the puzzle design. You take a monkey that's fun to smash stuff with. And then you give it to Nintendo designers to be like, what would be fun to do with smashing monkey? And they came up with a plethora of great answers. So I highly recommend Donkey Kong Bonanza. I would say that was my personal game of the year. OK. Wow. Well, I haven't traded my switch in for a switch to yet. OK. But maybe after this glowing review, isn't it quite-- it also went up substantially in price, didn't it? Like a doubled in price? They saw the money and they ran with it. Nintendo, I'm not going to stand by Nintendo as a company that is doing pro-consumer stuff necessarily in terms of pricing, because I would lose that argument. They are increasing value for the shareholders starting. Good go. Great for them. Hurray. But they did make some very good games this year. And the system is quite good. The other big gaming story was the thing that was not and is now a prediction for next year. We didn't get Grand Theft Auto 6. And in 2026, we might get a Grand Theft Auto 6. The thing that I'm most intrigued for is when they do eventually open pre-orders for this. Because at some point, they're just going to turn it on just to see. And we'll see if it beats Minecraft. Like interesting. I can see it hitting a few hundred million pre-order copies, for sure. Yeah. It's either going to be-- I heard this takes somewhere, and I don't remember where. So if I got this from you, poorly-attributed credit where it's due, then it is either going to be the pop culture event of the next several years. Like it is going to just dominate so aggressively all of culture or video games as a genre. We'll collapse on the back of Grand Theft Auto 6. It either will make all of the money in the world, or games will never be the same. And I guess in both cases, games will never be the same. But something's going to happen when this either does or doesn't make more money than anything's ever made. I'm betting it's the more money. I'm betting bold take. I think Grand Theft Auto 6 is going to be a hit. The entire taste to share value is based on the perspective future revenue of one game. I think it's undeniably going to make all the money. I think it's given some of the culture wars that have gone on the last 24 months in the gaming industry. I think how GTA VI comes out delivers its story and what it looks like is going to be really indicative of what games will look like in the next five years. Interesting. Yeah, so I think there's going to be an interesting cultural piece there. But also at the same time, it's like if this game does come out pre-cells, 200, 300 million copies at 120 US a piece. If it's garbage, it will-- like Rockstar will have and takes you. We'll have all the money in the world from the single sale. But I don't know what's going to happen. Because no game has been, I think, ever given this form of leash to just go. It's been in development for, like, nine years. The development budget's well got to be over billions of dollars. Yeah, I was going to say hundreds of millions, if not billions, at this point. And it's been two or three console generations have come and gone. Well, this thing has been in development. And they were able to do that because Grand Theft Auto 5 was still one of the biggest things in gaming. The biggest thing until the next one comes out. And in the end term, we've gotten a whole fortnight as a culture. Like, things come and go, came and go. And then this thing is just always persistently in the background. And now it's set in Florida. And it's going to rip. And it's going to make all the money in the world. And I'm going to spend many, many hours of my life in it. But I think it's going to be-- OK, it's not a shocking take. It's going to be a really big deal. Totally, totally. I'm curious if it's going to run on-- Well, Linux. Steam machine. It's Nintendo. Like, for two, the two areas of the game platform ecosystem, I'm most intrigued by weird Linux machines and the Nintendo Switch, too. I'm like, am I going to be able to play it on either of them? I do not want to play it on the Steam Deck. It is not the system for a Grand Theft Auto 6. But Nintendo Switch, too, maybe. I would be shocked if it didn't support some of the handheld gaming, just given that trend. I think so, too. But I think the PlayStation 6 or whatever this thing ends up launching on. Hi, NPC gaming rigs. Next Gen consoles will be probably a miraculous gaming experience I would expect. That's where my expectation is. So we'll see if they meet that. But I suspect the 3D engine, the graphics, any of the previous stuff that's been leaked. Sure. Looks amazing. I imagine the writings been criticized and edited so many times. I'm expecting GTA V was a near-perfect game. And they've had way more time and money to make six. I'm hoping that this is their opus. It's not that it's not like, well, we had a lot of fights about that with the director laughed, and we rewrote this. And we decided we didn't want to say that. And so I'm hoping that this is a really great game. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. It's always been as Canadians, it's such a game about America. And this one being set in Florida is like, I'm very excited. I think it's going to be a fun experience. I'm most intrigued, I think, to see how long the campaign is. Yeah. Like, when you take this long to make a game, I'm hoping it's not like a 40-hour playthrough. I'm betting that world is so full of stuff we're going to be finding things for months, if not years. Yeah. Like, people are good at peeling those games open and finding everything, but then there will still be a trickle of stuff being discovered for a long period of time. And I'm like, I get the sense that in the scope of a development this long, the story, no matter how long it is, if it was an 80-hour campaign, excessively long, it could still be polished to within an inch of its life. And it is just sort of like the through line in the middle of this thing that still needs to go off in all the other directions and just be like a fully realized city that you can do stuff in. It's-- we've been living in the era of open-world games for a while now. And this is kind of the, like, you made the whole world. Like, you've had all the time in the world to fill this thing out. Everyone is going to be interactable with, hopefully. I'm curious to see if they-- I have a feeling that's going to be what the money and the time went into. Totally. Yeah. Spans, expansiveness. Spans. I am more expansiveness. 2026 is right around the corner. Coming up quick. Coming up quick. You know what I'm thinking, Jordan? What do you think? E-commerce. Damn right. Dropshipping. Channel that fresh start energy of the New Year and finally launch your business with Shopify. 2026 is the year you rewrite your story. Own your future and make your entrepreneurial dreams come true. Start your business with Shopify. 2026. Become what you're meant to be. Shopify gives you everything you need to sell online and in person. There are millions of us entrepreneurs that have already made this leap. Household names to first-time business owners, just getting started. And that could be you this year. Shopify gives you all tools you need to easily build your dream store. Choose from hundreds of beautiful templates that you can customize to match your brand. Set up as fast. Shopify has built an AI tools that help write the descriptions, make the headlines, and help you edit product photos to look their best. The marketing built right into creates email, social campaigns that reach out to customers wherever they are scrolling. As you grow, Shopify grows with you. Handle more orders, expand any markets, and do it all from the same dashboard. In 2026, stop waiting. Start selling with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com/hacked. Go to Shopify.com/hacked. One more time for the people in the back. That's Shopify.com/hacked. Here you're first to ching. This new year was Shopify by your side. A story we didn't-- hard pivot. To study things. Why don't we talk about security things? Our bread and butter. We've covered a lot of the big stories over this past year. One story that popped in my mind that we never actually chatted about was the Jaguar Land Rover Breach. This happened a couple months ago. We had other interviews in the buckets and we never ended up chatting about this. September, 2025, Jaguar Land Rover suffered. It's the costliest cyber attack in UK history. And I find this interesting because it felt like it was one in an instance of something like, we'll call it the poly crisis. In which one crisis echoes out and ripples into some supply chain or some larger part of business and culture based on an initial-- a much smaller hack sort of explodes out into the world. And the Jaguar Land Rover one, this big systemic breach, ended up-- it started with Jaguar and it cascaded through like the British automotive supply chain. The direct attack was 100 million pound cost according to the UK Cyber Monitoring Center. The larger wider economic impact was 1.9 billion. So we see how like a very a really serious localized thing becomes a much larger structural thing. The breach like started at-- it was the Hillwood production plant starts by preventing retailers from registering new vehicles during September, this peak month for UK car sales during due to like win license plates get shifted over. Lapsus was involved. We've talked about them a great deal in the show. But it ends up like branching out into all of UK cars based on this like infrastructure backend and costing like the British economy billions of pounds. Wild. Yeah. Yeah, I think that the group that had claimed responsibility was called scattered Lapsus Hunters. So they suspected the collaboration between three separate groups scattered Spiderman Lapsus and the shiny Hunters. We've talked about all three on the show before, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, it's like the era of super groups. It's like when all the old members of a band come together and they're like, we're just going to Bob Dylan get in here and they start a new band. We saw quite a lot of it that this year. If you haven't listened to the last episode in which we interview Ford Marable, but the Smashing Triad, the other story that kind of evoked that. Another ransom-- it was a ransomware car tell as opposed to a Smashing Cartel who was the Japanese Asahi group. The beer hack was what I had labeled as in my notes for when we didn't talk about it. Asahi is one of these giant companies that owns like a million alcohol and beverage brands underneath it. And they felt victim to the kill in ransomware. September, same kind of general time. It's been going since then like they've still been cleaning up this mess all the way into like December when we were recording this. And it was just kind of bog stand ransomware stuff. A bunch of encrypted files across a bunch of live servers. They had to disconnect its network, suspend all their operations. Kill and X will trade at like 27 gigabytes of data, expose the personal information of 1.9 million people. It halted financial reporting and distribution logistics for months. They've like done the thing that a company does after this, which is a pivot towards zero trust. But it's just another one of these like big crime cards sell with a very well polished product that they license out to people takes down a giant thing you've heard of. Yeah, I looked up some stats on ransomware this year. And global ransomware damages were expect to reach 57 billion in 2025, breaking down to approximately 6.5 million per hour or $109,000 per minute. We're in the wrong business Jordan. Every year we do one of these-- that we should be in the crime business. Yes, we should be in the crime business. $109,000 per minute. We would not have to be very successful or very long. Yeah, sure. He's got a clock in for one good shift. One good day and you'd be pretty good for the rest of your life. That is-- that's wild. I feel like the other big story on the security side of things. And we can talk about some of the episodes that we-- the stories that we did cover. It was like a phrase that I started hearing murmured in 2024 that actually came to a head in 2025 was like this was sort of the first year of agentic malware. Which for anyone who's unfamiliar is just, you know, instead of malware following a pre-prescribed script for lack of a better word, like pre-coded in instructions. If this file exists, then delete this file, then do this, then do this. 2025, we got agentic stuff powered by AI models, little custom specialized LLMs that give it a little bit more time, once it infects the end user's system. It has a goal, you know, get financial data. And then instead of get crypto wallets, and then instead of following, and if this then that kind of script, it can kind of like for lack of a better word, figure out how to achieve it on its own. It can reason. It can do a little bit of that good, good reasoning we all see in our favorite chatbots. Yeah. This was, it was just an interesting year for this kind of thing. We saw prompt flux and prompt steel, covered a lot of like Google reported on stories, but their intelligence group, I don't identify these two different strains of agentic malware that we're using. I think it was the Gemini API to like, Zag on antivirus stuff once they've gone into a system. And then prompt steel, which was, it would like, query a hugging face model to generate like little instructions in the command line, in order to expel trade data on the fly. So we saw more of these things kind of like lurking around at the edges. And I'm going to see more and see a lot more than 2026. I was like, it all started having right at the end of 2025. I was like, oh, it's going to be a real problem. Well, if you think about two like cell phones have long since been pretty secure devices, apples, anyways, Google's done a pretty good job of theirs as well. They've locked it down the last couple years. I feel like they close that gap. Yeah, but they're about to have like local micro models running on them. So that's an entirely new tax surface for the cell phone that will occur. So yeah, it'll be a lot of things will be coming in that space. The one thing I will say too, from a fishing, pig butchering, scamming kind of way, is the ability for AI to just auto generate credible looking websites is really playing into my deep-seated fears about aging people and the internet. So I'll give this-- I put a 11 post thread on Twitter the other day that I think I kind of want to hit here. Just quick, as a Christmas message is as we're all going home to be with our aging relatives for the Christmas holidays, it's a good idea to just check in on them and see if they're in any WhatsApp groups that are a little odd or have a text message buddy from abroad. If there is piles of gift cards next to the home computer, just little things that are indicative of-- Oh, that's a good note. Are they being scammed? Are they actively being pig butchered? Do you know? So there's so many-- it's come up in my life in my needy, I think that everybody needs to get a bit more high alert. Pull some stats. I think one of the last posts. Go check out the Twitter thread. It's on @hackpodcast. The numbers don't lie. I think it was post 10 of the 11 that are in the thread. There's $4.9 billion we're stolen from senior citizens last year as an average expiltration of about 83,000 US per person. The average was 83K. Yeah, goddamn. So watch out for your relatives who might not be as sophisticated and as maybe sophisticated as not the right word, as critical to the motivations of other people on the internet. Yeah. I feel like this has been such a year for is anything on the internet real. And while this is a version of that, it feels like at times we can forget that like still the best old fashioned way that people get hurt on the internet is just a person lying to them in a WhatsApp thread in an email over a text message. And all that stuff has been like gasoline on a fire affide by AI, it's vastly easier to translate thing. It's vastly easier to mask a voice. It's vastly easier to mask a face at this point four years ago. We were covering this stuff. And it was like, you can kind of change a voice. And now it's like, you can wear another person's skin. So I think that there's like kind of that two-pronged thing of like, are you in any of those dodgy text messages? Let's go check what your iCloud is logged into. And I want to see all the devices on the screen to make sure, oh, that one's in there. OK, you don't live there. Let's go do something about that. There's the device security. There's the-- you're not sending gift cards to people. There's the no one talked to you into opening a crypto wallet. We're going to a crypto ATM side of things. Or transferring your money onto a new investment platform that's not heard of. Yeah, I was at a family dinner the other day. And somebody was like, hey, Scott, like I've been taking this course on investing. And I was like, great, let's talk about it. Yeah, well, you know, we've been learning technical analysis. Oh, where's the course where it's like show it to me? And they opened a WhatsApp group. And I was like, oh, no one ever learned anything into WhatsApp group. And I was like, so what is this? And they're like, oh, there's like 140 of us were in this course. And it's run by this person who's this like CEO of an investment bank. Oh, yeah, but they're great. And I was like, so you're just sending DMs on WhatsApp to this CEO of this massive investment bank. And he's replying to your dumb questions about investing. And they're like, yeah. And I was like, yeah, that's suspicious, no. Like this person has one of a very, very powerful, important and taxing job. And you think that they're just available on WhatsApp 24 hours a day. Anyway, they would send out nightly news posts, which actually had some real information in them. There was no act of scamming going on. But you could tell that they were setting the table for the scam to-- I think that's what's interesting about it is that with a little bit of gumption and LLM butter, you can really rig together something that does provide people a little bit of value inside of a WhatsApp group. And just let them get value out of that ecosystem as you just sort of construct a guillotine over their head very patiently and like tie the big blade to a rope and tie it, build the frame, take all the time you want while they're getting real value out of this thing. And then you pull it. Yeah. I had this conversation with my wife afterwards who we were talking about a kind of debriefing of it. And I was like, it would be so easy to do this. If you're like a gamer, and I don't mean that like a video gamer, but somebody that likes puzzles and thought exercises and somebody that's into that. Constructing a scenario, like if I was to be doing that as fraud, I wouldn't try to defraud the entire channel openly. Like I wouldn't be like, oh, guys, is this new investment platform? You should check out movie money over here and buy this. Sure. I would have the channel. It would be operating as it does. Everybody would be chatting about investments. It would be going, well, you would be this knowledge thing. And then as another user in it, I would send them a message and be like, does this group that you like, doesn't it seem a little fishy? And then engage every user in the group separately in like individual conversations. And eventually pull their developed trust with them by being the person that also identified that it was fishy. And then I would leverage that trust to then to scam them. I was like, you don't even need to do like the big commercial. Like there's 140 people in here. I'm going to try and steal all your money. But instead, I'm going to do a little quality over quantity game, develop the trust a little deeper, get into it a little more one-on-one with people. And that's when I would strike. If I was to do something like that. And if you're interested in stuff like this, you should listen to our episode on Andrew Tates, The Real World, the publisher. I'm not sure what to publish it, because you-- go look that episode up if you find this kind of, how can a person do massive harm at scale inside of a small, insular community that they built on the internet digitally? If you go listen to that episode. Yeah. The other big story from this past year-- and we talked about this one in the show, but I think it's worth talking about was the Cloudflare incident, 20% of internet traffic just sort of kicked off line functionally for a period of time. These sort of like-- this was a big year for supply chain stuff. And for us, we talked about that a lot in the context of-- I mean, it means so many things now. It means supply chains of physical products coming pre-installed with malware. We talked about that a couple episodes ago. Go listen to that interview with human security. It was a really fascinating one. But then there's also just the supply chain of digital infrastructure, where way down the line, somewhere, there is a thing plugged into a thing at some company on which Amazon and Netflix and all these different things we use. This big chunk of our economy is sort of plugged into this link in a chain, and that thing gets broken. And everything falls apart. In the last few months, at the end of 2025, October and November, December, anecdotally, it feels like every day, but I know it's not every day. But it's routine enough that online services are having experience issues because the Cloud Service providers are down. It's happening to me enough that it's becoming a bit of a pattern. And I'm like, wow, the Cloud is shaken right now. So it feels like-- I think that we're-- I think this is going to be another one of those. We're going to get a lot more of these stories in 2026. The idea of the global data power outage, just becoming a slightly more common thing we all experience as this infrastructure coalesces around a smaller and smaller handful of businesses. When the pie chart of who provides a big chunk of our technical infrastructure is just getting the pieces of the pie chart are all getting bigger, it's like, well, knock one of those down. And more of it goes, I don't know what to tell you. It's like those things follow from one another. Totally. It's just the feeling I'm getting is that it's becoming more and more and more. And that's not good. I hope they managed to lock that stuff down. One of the other things that I've been seeing a ton of-- because I'm a developer is like packages, package managers, NPM, Python, package index. There's been so many more malware installations into these development kits. People putting root kits in them. People putting AI enhance malware. There's been so much stuff happening in the development supply chain. Then there was a few years ago, the open source community is like, I don't want to say they're under attack, but it's definitely been exposed as a surface where if you can get in and make one small change, that change then replicates across every installation and usage of that package. So-- Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of stuff happened in 2025, and that we're going to be seeing more of in 2026, is to go back to AI is on the regulatory side. I think this was a really fascinating year for how different jurisdictions have been approaching the question of regulating AI, what you do with it, what it's for, what you're allowed to train them on in a copyright sense. And we're starting to see kind of like forks. The American Approached Regulating AI, which has concentrated very much this year on the federal level and pulled away from the state level, very different than what we're seeing in Europe, implementation of the AI Act, and like an outright ban on this category of unacceptable risk type behaviors with AI, like social scoring, biometric surveillance. We're seeing different sort of like geographic approaches to regulating this technology, trying to balance like, wanting it to advance and be thriving, especially given how much of the economy is dependent on it, and like not having gene surveillance empowered by like a dystopian shit over here. So it's been a very interesting year. And a lot of these plans, I know the EU one is like a multi-year rollout. We're going to be seeing more of this stuff in 2026. Yeah, and the AI labeling, yeah. Yeah, it's I'm hoping that they're quicker to respond to it than they were with social media. And crypto, great analogies, both. Thank you. I'm hoping the government does their job and duty in putting in regulatory frameworks, listing to both industry and people, as well as privacy. Like I think it is, it could be such a win for society and mankind or person kind, that I don't want to stifle it, but at the same time, it does need to be built, trained, deployed in an ethical manner. And I think that, I don't know, I'm not, I haven't seen anything that's really scary me yet. I mean, out of North America. I haven't seen anything. It's like there's nothing new under the sun, but all the stuff that was curdling and negative about social media, it was an amplifier on that. And in the absence of like, we got to get on labeling. Like, we need to get on, is it real? As a society, that's going to be a question of like, do I know what I'm looking at occurred and exists? Because prior to like three years ago, that cost, tens of thousands of dollars and like CGI budgets and now it's trivial. So labeling of whether or not we're looking at things, transparency on training data sets. Like, there's just some things that we can all kind of agree on that like can make all of this less potentially catastrophic. Yes. And I hope can maybe prior to something becoming politicized, it is by definition not yet politicized. And I hope we're still in early enough days that we can just have like nonpartisan discussions about like, that's bad, right? And do something about it before it becomes like, no, my team thinks it's good. I hope we're still in that era for a little bit longer. Every time we talk about something this, it always reminds me about the iPad launch. When even Apple was like, these things are terrible for kids. Interesting. And now they're babysitters for kids. Yeah, right. You're watching Korean animated videos for hours or playing silly games. But let's talk social media for a bit because this is a few interesting things. I'm going to take us to segue down under on this one. But we didn't really know the impact of social media on the long-term impact of social media until it was well and ingrained in our behaviors. And now we're kind of looking backwards being like, oh, my God, maybe this was. And I'm not just talking about misinformation. I'm talking about mental health and personal confidence in people. It has so many impacts. And you will tell if you were a follower of the show on any social media platform, I don't use social media. We make this podcast either of us or big posters anywhere else. Yes, correct. My Instagram feed has, I think, a few photos from 2016. And my Twitter and Facebook have been deleted, essentially. But yeah, so I'm hoping with AI that they get this-- they perceive some of these risks in a little bit more of an expedited fashion and do something about it before we're like, oh, an entire generation of people have been destroyed by this. And so it would be nice to have them hit that. Because I'm not sure if you've been following what's going on in Australia. But as of December 10th, they have banned social media access for anybody under the age of 16, identifying that it is bad for their health. I'm a friend of the show submitted. I won't say the name because I don't know if they want us to. But someone submitted this story to us. And we're starting to see this in a bunch of jurisdictions around the world as this idea that like, no. A 14-year-old doesn't go on these platforms in the same way that a 14-year-old, you can't sell them at pack of cigarettes. We just decided that we decided that for their health, we will not let them do this. The-- yeah, it's pretty wide-sweeping. Australia, I think, is the only one currently that has an official ban. I know it's being discussed, even in our home country of Canada. I think with Australia pulling the trigger on it, the rest of the world is leading back and watching to see how it goes. And if it goes well, I think we're going to see the same thing come up in many other jurisdictions. So the list of the services that's currently banned in Australia, major age restricted. They're not banned. Age restricted, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, X, Reddit, Twitch, YouTube. Exemptions for messaging apps. WhatsApp, Messenger, Google Classroom, and YouTube Kids. Oh, that exemptions list is fascinating. YouTube Kids, OK. There's been a lot of discussion around online multiplayer gaming. Yeah, it was going to say, if they pass the thing saying, you can't go on Roblox. Roblox will go to literal war with you. They're currently excluded. Roblox for a night call the duty. But I assume they're probably going to have a knock on set of regulations that apply to them. I could imagine parental controls could be like a middle ground that you create in that type of thing where it's like, if you want a register and account, we have the same age verification stuff. But if you want a register account for a person under that age, there's a plug for another account to be able to see everything that account is doing. So if you want to hang out inside of the nebulous pit that is Roblox, there's a paper trail. And a grown-up can see that. That could be potentially a way of doing it. Interesting. The Discord caught a pass on this. Not necessarily. Because I feel like so much of the iPad generation is moved to Discord as like a primary social. And I don't know what you call it. It's a primary social media. But it does have much more social elements to it, but whether those elements are the same ones that they're trying to prevent by banning or age restricting the other platforms, TBD. Yeah. I mean, the effect that banning social media for folks under 16 is probably going to have is like, in a weird way, a return to like, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It's like, when all you have is a Discord, social media becomes a newsletter. And it's like, what social media can communities of young people create inside of these messaging platforms? It's like, well, they're going to whatever they could have, whatever they were doing on Instagram. Now they're going to do it on Discord, whatever they're doing on Twitter. Now they're going to do it on Discord. You want to not, you curious about what kind of videos they were watching on YouTube, not kids? They're going to be sharing them on Discord. It's like, that's just all that, all that heat's just going to move. 100%. Have you noticed how everything seems more expensive these days? Boy how? It's, it's easy to overestimate how much things cost because the price is to seem to be constantly going up. 72% of Americans overestimate the actual cost of getting life insurance. What's a banana cost? 20 bucks? Who knows? But policy genius helps you compare your options by getting quotes from America's top insurers in just a few clicks to find coverage that fits your needs and your budget. Talk to a team of licensed agents who will walk you through the process step by step. They answer questions, handle paperwork, and advocate for you throughout the process. Life insurance is a form of financial planning, and policy genius is the country's leading online insurance marketplace. Secure your family's future with policy genius head to policygenius.com to compare life insurance quotes from top companies and see how much you could save. That's policygenius.com. And we're back. We've talked about security. We've talked about gaming. We've talked about AI. Moving into the 2026, what are you excited about this year? What are you looking forward to in the weird big world of technology that we get to talk about on this show in 2026? Man, that's a great question. It's a big one because we've already teased on it as like I'm very excited for some of the stuff we're going to be seeing in gaming. I think it's going to be an exciting year in gaming. I'd say that's probably my answer, because again, it's going to be cool year in gaming. I think the thing I'm most excited for living in a city that has what I would say underwhelming public transit. OK. Is the Robo Taxi Automated Vehicle? I've always thought that was a better system. So the city that I live in, the Jordan used to live in, has a pretty bare bones transit system. So really, it's a driving city. It's like a Dallas, Texas. You need a car. And 10, 15 years ago, I remember I was talking about how we should just become the center for automated vehicles, because that is the real solution to communities and areas that have bad transit. I would love to see automated vehicle networks that functioned essentially as transit to reduce the amount of people in the road, to optimize the routing, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that we're just starting to see that stuff cracking in. Like there's a few hundred of them in California, a few hundred of them in Texas. And I would like to see in the year of 2026, us move to an automated vehicle, like for that trajectory to take off. I think that would be important for me. It was a big year, it's interesting. The Tesla Robota actually got announced, but it was a big year at Safer Waymo. Yeah, way more than once. I think Waymo is in Cali, right? They're the ones that are in California. And I think they're in Phoenix now too. They're running fully operational in major cities. People use them in those cities. They don't have them up here in Canada. And I'm a transit booster. I love me a train. You know how I feel about a train, Scott? It's because you have functional ones where you live now. We do have a functional train here in this sick as hell. Yeah. But I am fascinated by Waymo. I think it's going to be an interesting year for Waymo as they get enough surface area that like stuff starts to happen that becomes big international news stories. I think that we're going to have, at a certain point, like, these cars are going to start doing stuff. They're going to start having like incidents and things like that. We saw a bit of that in 2025 and those are going to become big like flashpoint stories for how do we respond to all this. I know that the way it's looking right now from the numbers is that the response is probably going to be these companies by insurance, the same way car drivers by insurance because the performance of the car is so good, safety wise, that the insurance, even if there was some weird robot premium, would still be cheaper than a human driver. Sure. That's probably where this goes, which means we're going to need to have a conversation about like insurance for robots, like we're just not talking about that currently and that's going to probably be a big discussion in 2026 is all these like, when these things reach scale, how does the existing safety and automotive infrastructure respond to it? Yes. I've been great, great, great theory. I think that that conversation will start seeing a lot. I've been a long time believer that a network of intelligent automobiles, agentic automobiles will be better drivers than a system of human driven automobiles. So there's going to be a really interesting and it's not this year and it's probably not even this decade. But as we transition from elevators with an attendant in them to elevators that don't even have an emergency stop button in them as a society in relation to the automotive vehicle thing, you know, how many years away we are where all cars on the road are controlled by an AI, they're all intercommunicating. They're letting each other know about, you know, incidents and garbage on the road or whatever. And being able to re-root dynamically, the removal of signaling from roadways because they'll be able to do it automated. Anyway, I've always been fascinated with this topic and I'm hoping that this year is one of the years that we see a step forward in progress for that. We see more agentic vehicles on the road and we see more jurisdictions dip their toe in the water, hopefully Canada. Yeah. There's going to be, this is like the downer note of that is like we're also going to have to figure out the like, and this is the same thing we've talked about with AI for years is like what is the economic fallout, and of course, the cultural fallout of like the three and a half million truck drivers and the three million, like all of these people. And all of that, like economic, you know, output just being like, now robots, Google, Google and Tesla have that because it's such a giant computing problem. It's not like a thing that you quickly spin up. Like it's not, we can't, it's not even like AI where it's like, uh, how much does it cost to train a deep seek versus a chat GPT? It's like, only car infrastructure and training data that requires physical cars driving around. It's like the mode around this is so massive and the economic fallout for normal people is huge. And I could see that as, especially as Waymo starts expanding into more cities, just like really honest conversations about like what did, what impacted this have on the like shocking like if 5% of jobs involve driving transportation, yeah, it's more than that, I think, but yeah, it's like that's a catastrophe just economically. That's, that's huge. Yeah. Um, and I think that as Waymo gets more popular, which it will, because it's by all accounts like a really good service, uh, we're going to have to answer that question. Yeah. I don't disagree with you, but I, uh, I'm also an optimistic believer that like excess human capacity and utility gets utilized by humanity. Uh, this is more of my optimistic perspectives on the world. And I know that there'll be a short-term shock, but I, but the truth of it is, I don't think it's going to be a short-term conversion, like I don't think that, you know, Waymo, like Uber showed up and killed the taxi industry instantaneously, because it was a direct replacement for that industry, cheaper, better, more personal, et cetera. I think that us transitioning as a society from human driven vehicles to automated vehicles is probably a 15 to 20 year process. And, and uh, so I think that we'll be able to adapt. The other thing is I was like, I give a lot of credit to human ingenuity. Like I could already see, like I don't know if you get grocery delivery, if you do anything like that, but it's like those are things that the robot cars can't do. But like, you know, all of a sudden, you've got extra people working inside a Costco loading baskets that get shoved into the back of a Waymo that shows up at your house. Like, I just think that we'll, we'll utilize that extra capacity to increase the utility for society, assuming it's not a shock event. Like if Waymo's like, yeah, tomorrow every taxi, Uber is bankrupt tomorrow because everything is automated now. Yeah. There's no amount of optimism that offsets 10% of the workforce just being like overnight. Yeah, of course. Oh, no, yeah, that's just a, that you're, you're going to get a big problem there. Yeah. Yeah. 2026 maybe optimize our utility in person. I can't remember what you said, but it's a good neither can I. Yeah. Optimistically optimizer utility. Optimistically, optimizer proactive AI and optimize utility. I think that's my big, the things that I'm most excited for. Uh, what a year, man. What a year. We made some, uh, we had some episodes that I'm like quite pleased about in the past year. Um, I highly recommend just if I'm just going through some ones that I really liked from this past year that I would recommend. If you're just like, it's feel like a little more hacked and there's not another one coming off for another two weeks. Uh, the bad box episode from November. I highly recommend that one. I think it's a really, really cool one. Um, I'm partial to it, but our games calm episode like a little travel episode. I think it was a lot of fun. A lot of fun. A lot of fun. I had a lot of fun making that one. That'll let me see. Yeah. But that one was good. Um, I really liked our interview with Adam from push. That was a lot of fun. Yeah. Great interview. Great guy. Yeah. No, it's been a fun year here on hacked. Um, are we missing anything? Is there anything else we need to talk about before we, uh, before we close this thing up? Uh, thank the patrons. Thank you. We appreciate it. And every single one of you, um, merch stores store dot hack podcast dot com, go, go buy a hat. Um, happy holidays. To everyone who has been, um, reaching out about hotline hacked, we're going to be doing some of those in the new year. My, yeah, it's look forward for the show. My 2026 goals, and I've talked about this with you for you is, um, to decide very intentionally to not know what this show is. Hmm. I want to go into 2026 knowing that we make a technology show about all the weird ways people hack things together and hack them apart and other than that to go into a blank, okay, with that mandate, who would we interview, who, what would we talk about? It's still going to be the two of us talking and doing interviews like it's, it's basic format is going to change. But I want to, I want to get weird with it in 2026. I want to, uh, I want to broaden the, the net. My 2026 goals for the show would be to figure out what to do with YouTube and do it. I like that because I think, I think that we can have way more fun on YouTube. And it would give us a little bit more of that games, comby vibe where we can jump on a plane, go meet up with somebody who's a really interesting interview, interview them, turn it into, into YouTube and social content, be a little bit more intentional with the video side of the podcast. I like that too. Yeah. Keep, keep our, keep our bump in community that we've had on the audio only. Make sure that if you just like listen into us, you can keep listening to us. But if you want to point your eyeballs at us, maybe you can do that too. We'll prove to you that we are not AI's. Yeah. Honestly, like we've been uploading the episodes to YouTube for the last little while. And every so often there will be a person being like, is this AI? And it's like, no, just because it's two voices and you can't see their faces doesn't mean it's, it's a AI and we have faces. So maybe you get to see them in 2026. Yeah. Love it. Okay. Well, everybody, thank you so much for spending the year with us. It means a lot to us. We've had a lot of fun making the show. Hopefully you have had a lot of fun listening to it. I am ready. You'll be listening to this at the end of the year. I'm ready for the end of the year to begin in the little, the little break that we get. And I hope yours has been good. I hope it's been restful. I hope you're feeling relaxed. Absolutely. Happy holidays. Take care. [MUSIC]