2025 Chatty Chat Year in Review

Speaker 1: What a year. What a year. What a mighty weird year. What are you talking about? It's a standard year these days. Bog standard. Typical years. 2025 shrinks to a pinhead in the rear view mirror. We kind of hazily feel our way around in the early days of 2026. We think it's time to look back on the year we just had and all the stories we did and didn't get to talk about this year. Like? Land Rover hacks, Nintendo Switches twos, the continued industrialization of AI infrastructure and capital into an economic aurora borers making a suspicious ticking sound.

Speaker 2: The angering of every crypto investor in the world. Labooboos. We bypassed that this year. Luboebus.

Speaker 1: We look back. We look ahead. You ready, Scott?

Speaker 2: I'm always ready.

Speaker 1: This is the year in review chatty chat here on Hacked. Scrambly theme song.

Speaker 2: Welcome back.

Speaker 1: Welcome back.

Speaker 2: Welcome back. Welcome back.

Speaker 1: This is our, year in review chatty chat. This is this is 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 the in between week or the early days of the new year, but we're here right 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, my thread of links and notes that never made it into an episode, all the stuff we didn't get to talk about, and that should be plenty.

Speaker 2: Well, I only read about 400 news articles a day. So it's usually in one ear or the other. So something stuck. And there are there were some themes that I'm excited to talk about because I think they're getting bigger and better and badder. But, all in all, I think we just catch up. How was your how was your year personally, Jordan?

Speaker 1: 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 I I like I like to get to travel around a little bit. It's been generally good. How about yours, Scott?

Speaker 2: Wait. Wait. Wait. Lisette doesn't jump to me yet. You still got out you did a lot of travel. What was your highlight? Give me your highlights.

Speaker 1: Oh, that's a great question.

Speaker 2: I already know what one of them is, so I'm going to I'm waiting to hear you say it.

Speaker 1: Well, we were in, it's chatty chat episode, everybody.

Speaker 2: That's right. Welcome to the chat. Welcome to the chat. It's gonna

Speaker 1: be loose. The last two have been, like, pretty deep interviews, and this is gonna be the opposite. I really like so we got to go to Germany for some game stuff. We were we were hawking our wares with a new, indie game we're working on. 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 homeland, so that was really, really cool to get to see.

Speaker 2: We're in Bloemen.

Speaker 1: Bloemen. Bloemen. Bloemen. That is how you pronounce that. Like, the Swedish chef from Sesame Street. Yeah. That was a real highlight. Yeah. It was good.

Speaker 2: The I thought you were gonna say Mexico City because I remember going back from Mexico City being like, man, that place was amazing. You have to go.

Speaker 1: You you really do. I got to see Mexico City, kind of for the second time in a few years this year, and I 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.

Speaker 2: Good for you. Nice year. Man. It's nice it's nice to finish the calendar year and be like, I had a good year.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Not a good year. It was a good it was a really good year. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Good. Good for you. Yeah. I, on the other hand, didn't do much traveling. I think I, Yeah. You were a lot 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 there's a really big surf pool there.

Speaker 1: Yep.

Speaker 2: Saw one of 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

Speaker 1: this shit a Mason would say.

Speaker 2: Yeah. This, has this monstrous miss Masonic temple, but, Interesting. Went to Waco surfing, had maybe the most relaxing week off I've had in years.

Speaker 1: Heck, yeah.

Speaker 2: 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.

Speaker 1: Rinse and repeat.

Speaker 2: Rinse and repeat.

Speaker 1: Sometimes that's what you want out of a brick. Yeah. It's a good it's a good way to unwind. Totally. In in the larger world, did anything happen?

Speaker 2: Well, there was a few things. Stock market's up, you know, seeing as we're segueing into our hacked financial analysis show. Yeah. Sure. Stock market's largely been up this year. Not sure where it's gonna go next year. There's some bears, some bulls. AI, I would say AI has underperformed this year expectation, at least for me.

Speaker 1: That's Even the Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Is economically unperformed, or the technology is underperformed? Because I'm like, it is performed so well. It it's dangerous how well it's performed.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I'm gonna get lit in the comments for this. But, just the the pace it was moving at. The tech. The tech itself.

Speaker 1: The tech. K. K.

Speaker 2: K. Now we went from like, ChatGPT public launch was, what, November three years ago?

Speaker 1: Yeah. About three years ago.

Speaker 2: 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 at certain things, but they have new flaws. And it feels like we're really in that plateau y thing before we go up again. You know, obviously, vibe coding became, like, a huge thing this year. You know, it blew up, and then, you know, all of the 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 Jira boards, and you can assign them tickets. And all of a sudden, your AI helper is, like, doing replacing a software engineer on your team. The 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.

Speaker 1: 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 around a 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 in at 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 $38,000,000,000, partnership between AWS and OpenAI to, like, supply them compute for the next couple of years, $40,000,000,000 from Google to build a bunch of new, like, data centers for AI, 10,000,000,000 for Microsoft to build a bunch of data centers in Portugal. There is 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.

Speaker 2: Exactly.

Speaker 1: And there's, like, a tension there, I think, that we all kinda feel.

Speaker 2: Well, the 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 gonna make my my Scott the futurist 2026 prediction that 2026 will be the year of proactive AI, not reactive AI.

Speaker 1: Like, it goes and does stuff for you? Yeah. Talk about what that looks like in your head because I I have thoughts about this.

Speaker 2: Well, the I guess, maybe the terming isn't right. I'm calling it proactive because it's proacting me, but it's still reacting. Yeah. It's getting ahead of me, but it it will 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 Go on. Location. So so it's it's still reacting, but it's proacting me. So it's proactive for me. And I think that a lot of the AI tools that will succeed and will see big leaps this coming year will be ones that are proactive for the end user.

Speaker 1: 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 in 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 a 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 I have mixed levels of optimism for this because I'm not sure why any of those platforms would wanna just become plugins for someone else's chatbot. And without that kind of two way consent, it's like, oh, you really need to own the market before Airbn before Uber is gonna decide to be, like, cool with just being a back end for ChatGPT. But putting all that aside, I noticed a really big spike in press emails and CEO outreach emails from companies. They're trying to be like, we'll book it for you.

Speaker 2: Mhmm. Mhmm.

Speaker 1: We will buy it for you. We will schedule that for you. And on again, on the consumer side of things, I'm not using it that way yet, and that feels interesting to me.

Speaker 2: You're you're not. Yeah. The 2025 definitely was like, I think MCPs came out late last year. It's kinda when anthropic because they're the ones that developed the protocol. It's their big one. Yeah. They released it, and it it it is very functional. And if I was in Airbnb, I would be building MCPs because I'm still gonna make the margin when the agent books the the room on the back end.

Speaker 1: But but it feels like you're giving away the, like, surface that you own, which is the people going to Airbnb, and then it just becomes a, like, drive. I I'm 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.

Speaker 2: Because they will.

Speaker 1: You're right. But I don't think you're gonna do that because you're like, this seems like a great opportunity. I think you're gonna do that because a dump truck of money shows up.

Speaker 2: 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. No. 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 to book me flights in a hotel

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 2: And and just trust that the robot will get your your preferences right, your etcetera, etcetera. Yeah. So I don't I don't think we're there yet as a as a culture. But as we move towards that goal, having the ability to have like, once you start seeing bookings shifting Mhmm. 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 8% of their bookings are being done by agents and 92% is being done online. Once they start seeing that shift, they'd be silly not to try and facilitate it. Or else somebody else will a competitor in the market will show up and take it from them.

Speaker 1: Interesting. It remains to be seen if that 8% migration happens. I have I have thoughts about whether or not it will as evidenced by, like, Amazon started selling buttons fifteen years ago for just, like, bulk buying your dish pods, and no one bought it. Because I everyone still wants to make the choice about what dish pods 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 so 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 wanna make the choice themselves. Sure.

Speaker 2: They want some retail satisfaction

Speaker 1: or 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 my the thing that remains to be seen for me is how big of the market is that? Like, spend my money for

Speaker 2: me. I think that I think the the the the difference is I think there's multiple markets there. Like Okay. When you're going to Spain Yeah. You're going on an experience, and you wanna tailor your It's a big deal deal. Experience. Yes.

Speaker 1: And it's, it's something I'm not doing often. It to me cost that cost me money. Like, that's yeah.

Speaker 2: 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 am a Marriott Bonvoy member, and I always fly Southwest because this is yeah. Sure. Whatever. I'm not a Marriott Bonvoy member, by the way, but it just jumped into my mind. The, but if if 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.

Speaker 1: I see where you're going with that.

Speaker 2: It's very programmatic. It's very much less a tailored experience and very much 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.

Speaker 1: 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. Mhmm. What is autofillable commerce on the Internet? What is like, what else is autofillable? Mhmm. I still think that the, like, fantasy of you tell the computer what to do, and it will use itself for you is, like, that remains untested to me. But the expanded autofill thing, maybe and maybe that's a distinction without a difference.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: But, that I could see having some some value and being interesting. And it be we keep but we keep waiting for it. It. It keeps not happening. So I'm curious if 2026 I'm curious if I let a robot book or buy something from me in 2026 because I'm open

Speaker 2: to it. Like You're like, we need dishwasher tabs.

Speaker 1: Send them on send them on over. Like, I need toothpaste. Like, get get it over here.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I feel I feel like am do you remember the Amazon push buttons?

Speaker 1: That's I brought those up earlier. Yeah. Like, they they had those buttons, and no one used them. This episode? I might

Speaker 2: not have been listening

Speaker 1: to this. It's all good. I was like, funny. You should mention those. It and no one really bought them because it just it there's something about consumer behavior that is like, if I'm going to buy the thing, I want to choose it. I wanna pick it.

Speaker 2: I wanna make sure I'm not getting hosed. Like, I hit a button, and it's like, oh, supply and demand. All of a sudden, dishwasher tabs are $400 a package, and you hit the button, so you confirm that you wanted to buy them.

Speaker 1: It's also not enough friction. It's not enough friction to spend money. There was the whole thing of people's, like, kids going up and just like,

Speaker 2: do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do. Yeah. Yeah. And, like, a pallet

Speaker 1: of dishwasher pod shows up at the house. Yeah. And it's like, I don't I don't know that I'm at the point yet where I'm gonna give the chatbot my credit card information and just be like, just you cook Just godspeed little robot.

Speaker 2: To to wrap it back to MCPs and proactive AI Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I think we're gonna see more of that stuff. Like, the the Gemini ad that shows that it goes and looks in your calendar, sees where your reservation is for tonight, that's probably using a light m MCP on the back end. So the locally deployed LLM that's running on the phone actually has an MCP into your calendar application that's pulling that information. And I think 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 gonna 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.

Speaker 1: 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. OpenAI is eating their lunch, and then Sundar Pichai

Speaker 2: lose all of search. They're gonna die.

Speaker 1: They're gonna die. We won't even remember like, there there was really shades of that. And then Sundar Pichai 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 they owned a lot of the press cycle when it came to AI with stuff. There there was a couple different stories. There was the I think it was Nano Banana, the small chat, like, image tool that 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. Mhmm. There is this future that it feels like we're working towards where the new version of whatever Siri is 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 chatbots, if you are an iPhone user, that you use on your phone might be provided by Google. Gemini got good as a chatbot just as, like, a one to one competitor with OpenAI's main product.

Speaker 2: Arguably the best.

Speaker 1: I think it's best one. It's really, really strong.

Speaker 2: 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, you know, 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. I think, like, 2 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, I'd integrated development environments, IDE. 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 about Cursor, but but, yeah, Google's very much, you know, sticking out the tentacles into so many of the different pieces, and I think that's gonna be their recipe for success.

Speaker 1: Yeah. They're doing the, like I I they're both providing consumer facing stuff, and they're trying to get in on the back end of 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 gonna provide you these models. We're gonna train this 1,200,000,000,000 parameter model just special for whatever Siri is now gonna be. And, also, you're using Google. You're using Chrome. You're using Gmail.

Speaker 2: Well, that's been been a big thing for them. You know, when you look at Google, like, OpenAI versus Google, OpenAI 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 they need to pay people to deploy it or 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 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.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: But also then on the back end, you know, they've been I remember when Google started developing their own microcomputers to facilitate their search farms. So their data centers were actually all entirely custom designed. They started making their own chips.

Speaker 1: I was gonna say, I think their AI centers are running on, like, tensor processing units, which is their, like, smartphone chip, if I remember correctly.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't 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 doesn't actually need NVIDIA. Yeah. Google is 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 to NVIDIA out there, and it's not AMD. It's actually Google.

Speaker 1: That's an interesting take. I think Google is gonna 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 condense it? 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.

Speaker 2: Interesting.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's I've tried to make a habit now of clicking into links to check it, and it's like, I'm I'm I'm regular I'm sort of floored by how often it, like I'm like, that done 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 slammed 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 gonna 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, that website.

Speaker 2: I I I think you're in your last one, I think, a 100%. I wanna jump back to your Google reviews remark. Yeah. I think it's interesting. So the when I look at the Google summarizations, the speed that they have to deliver

Speaker 1: it Yeah.

Speaker 2: There's gotta be a preprocessing function that they're looking at. So the second second some search starts trending Mhmm. They're probably pre pulling assets related to that

Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure.

Speaker 2: Creating kind of like a like a a retrieval cache so that when you send in, hey. You know? But it's sort

Speaker 1: of typing the phrase even. It's like loaded up, loaded up, loaded up.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But even before then, they're probably just looking at larger, like, macro trends encyclopedia of all the things that people search for, and they're probably trying to precache those answers to to make it so that they can facilitate quick quick response.

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 2: But when you ask it something tricky and you're like, yeah, I grabbed three sources and it kinda mashed them together, but it kinda missed what I was trying to get to. That's probably the byproduct of the fact that they had preloaded three those three sources as reputable sources about the topic, but the weird little ancillary question you had wasn't answered in it. So then it starts to just conceive.

Speaker 1: To try and find an answer.

Speaker 2: To try and make an answer.

Speaker 1: To do what these tokenized systems do, which is, like, to provide an answer at all costs Mhmm. Even in the absence of an answer. It's like, I must show him something, and it's like, no. You mustn't. Like You could stay me.

Speaker 2: You don't know.

Speaker 1: You could just serve me 10 links. That was how you built the Roman freaking empire on just serve this guy a bunch of links. And now there is this sort of AI subtext of, like, no, we can't do that. We I have to I 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 wanna serve me an LLM answer, cool. But if you don't know it, don't make it up.

Speaker 2: 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 to to give me citations. You know, you make it double check its work. And I feel like some of the big progress that we're seeing in in platforms, especially like Gemini three, is that it's doing that automatically. They're they're they're pre building the interface that the users are using to speak to these models with a lot of the that encoded rule set that makes them a little bit more trustworthy.

Speaker 1: I wanna pivot off of Google, and so I'm gonna 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 I think they tried to make the my Windows agentic, and it it's very mixed results. And And it it feels it has it's giving clippy.

Speaker 2: It's giving clippy vibes.

Speaker 1: It's giving clippy.

Speaker 2: Let's talk about clippy. The the 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 Server is being used here. ERP is there. You know, they are 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 gonna figure the AI stuff out at some point.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: It might be giving Clippy vibes today, but when they start listening to me and building proactive 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 that will be the the roller coaster to success for them.

Speaker 1: Do you think that that roller coaster, requires a thriving consumer facing business? Because 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, where they're 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 because it's the thing that makes money. Do you know what I'm saying?

Speaker 2: I I know what you're saying. I two things. A, I think that they've had that moment with Xbox. Yeah. I I think that

Speaker 1: it's that's not behind us.

Speaker 2: They're yeah. They're not having it. I think they've had that. You know, we 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 there's 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. Yeah. 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

Speaker 1: subscriber to it. It I I've stopped subscribing a while ago, but it I think it doubled this year.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I think it went from $99.09 a month to $39.09 9 a month or something. But 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 to 89 USD per game

Speaker 1: For sure.

Speaker 2: Triple a. If you're 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 wanna 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.

Speaker 1: Barry's boot camp? Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Specific. What? That's No. I know exactly what I know exactly what you're saying. It's it feels like there's a fork kinda coming down the road in terms of gaming where it's like, there are going to be subscription passes, and there's gonna be Nintendo, and there's gonna be Steam libraries. And then there's gonna be this weird ancillary world of games so big they're pop culture things that can force you to install a third port 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 gonna 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.

Speaker 2: Mhmm. I don't

Speaker 1: know if you followed that one.

Speaker 2: I I did follow it, but feel free. I know you love it probably.

Speaker 1: I'm pretty stoked on it. So I'm a big, Steam Deck guy. I love love my Steam Deck. Steam Deck, for anyone who is unfamiliar, is a 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. Turned 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 a a thing next year. It's 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. A Linux machine that runs PC games on it that you play in the living room, priced 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.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I I I don't disagree. That's essentially a roundabout way again of 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 storefront to the distribution thing. As it's interesting you brought up, like, Steam being the obvious to talk about, but let's talk about Valve and

Speaker 1: Steam for

Speaker 2: a second. Please. Because they did this pivot. You know, 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 $16,000,000,000 a year. Wait. You ready for the real good number? Guess how much the average the rev the estimated revenue per employee is?

Speaker 1: Oh, that's gonna be insane.

Speaker 2: 50,000,000 US dollars.

Speaker 1: Oh, bonus time better be good for those folks.

Speaker 2: So it turns out just standing in the middle of a commercial transaction and taking 30% of it The tax? Yeah. Is is a massively good business model.

Speaker 1: That's insane. I knew they were big. Like, I I knew that Gabe Newell was, like,

Speaker 2: which Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yacht rich. Which yacht which yacht am I taking today rich? Yeah. But I didn't realize it was the the per head number is really, really fascinating.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So so I those are those are are AI stats. So don't hold me accountable, but it but it's approximately $50,000,000 per employee.

Speaker 1: That's wild. Yeah. And, I mean, they they make a good product. Like, Steam 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, a $100. Game prices have gone up.

Speaker 2: Of course. Cost of making games has gone up. Cost of just beating

Speaker 1: games is not weird because for the last three years, we've been hearing stories about how, like, you're gonna be able to wink at the computer. It'll make a AAA game for you using the power of AI, and it's like, what? It's like, okay. 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 sorta it's like a a collection, and you just sort of, like, funnel games into it.

Speaker 2: Digital archive.

Speaker 1: 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 in 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 wanna talk about Nintendo. It's it's Steam. And I'm like, yeah. I I I see a hardware play here. I I 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?

Speaker 2: The reality is, though, I don't even know if they needed to make the hardware play.

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 2: Like, I think they're doing it almost out of, like, entertainment for themselves at this point. Yeah. Because this is a reality where now that they could've they could've technologically solved the problem and then just passed it up the up the chain. So there's talk of the next generation of Xboxes will have a Steam store. They will have an Epic store. They will have a, you know, pick one of the other 300 that people have tried to make because it's so profitable.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2: But the but I think that they've established and cemented themselves in the market that I I think it's gonna be really hard to deceit 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 gonna make a handheld gaming computer. And people were like, no. Not gonna happen.

Speaker 1: And it ripped.

Speaker 2: Like, look what we did. And it rips.

Speaker 1: It's really fun. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. It it there is a culture thing, and it almost brings us back to the, like, the what 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 learn 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, like, consumer acquisition sense almost.

Speaker 2: That I'm just trying to look at what so Google has approximation just Google this AI answer, believe it or not. Yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna trust it as far as this this discussion is.

Speaker 1: I'm gonna trust it with my life. Yeah.

Speaker 2: I'm gonna trust it with my life. So Google's revenue, or sorry, Microsoft's revenue, intelligent cloud, so this probably is your Yeah. About 100,000,000,000 a year. Productivity and business process software, Office three sixty five, LinkedIn, $5,050,000,000,000 a year. Computer gaming, Windows Xbox distribution, etcetera, give or take another 50,000,000,000 a year. So So

Speaker 1: they're they're they're 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 it is not I I have to think that the lion's share of that is the PC gaming market. That's just a gut hunch.

Speaker 2: Yeah. But even then, like, the Windows OEM, like, when you buy a PC prebuilt, you get OEM model on it, OEM OS on it. It's not that expensive. Like, I would say that Microsoft Interesting. I'm actually surprised that Microsoft's business solutions is not higher than $6.50, 60,000,000,000. Because I would have assumed Microsoft SQL Server, you know, Microsoft, all of the massive enterprise grade stuff was where they made most of their money aside from Azure. Like, Azure, obviously.

Speaker 1: Yeah. But that's the that's the 100,000,000,000 big chunk of the pie. I'd be really curious to see that business side of things broken down because I I have when you led with Microsoft Office and Office March or whatever it was called, I was like, I've used that software. It shouldn't earn them a nickel. Enterprise grade software, like, a a lot of the others the server grade stuff that they do, yes, that would print money, because, like, cities run on it. Like, that's an infrastructure kind of thing, but that's so interesting.

Speaker 2: Minecraft alone has sold over 300,000,000 copies and has 180,000,000 active users. What a stud. What is 300,000,000 copies? That's a lot.

Speaker 1: They they bought Lego, basically, which is if you can go back and buy Lego, buy Lego. Other big gaming stories since we're here of 2025 and I think looking forward into 2026. We've talked about Steam. We've talked about the the rise of Linux. I'll I'll be talking to you on your Linux machines next year. The other two big gaming stories were the the Nintendo Switch two of it all. 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 pocket. It's gotta say Nintendo Switch two rips, and everyone should go buy one. This is just a free plug for the Nintendo Switch two. Boy boy, do I like it. And you're like, do you have any numbers or research to do about that? I'd be 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're just on, like, a heater run of great games on a cool console. Yeah.

Speaker 2: I I did hear that the Mario Kart, the open world Mario Kart's pretty

Speaker 1: It was a weird first title to launch with. I think if they had launched with Donkey Kong Bonanza, it would have been, like, inarguable that this thing is just straight fire. Like, a destructible three d platform about a big monkey that rocks. You know? Yeah. 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.

Speaker 2: Wow.

Speaker 1: It's so

Speaker 2: Something from somebody that makes platformers.

Speaker 1: It it really is, like, beautifully designed when you consider the like, the whole crux of that game, sorry, everybody, is the entire world 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

Speaker 2: Physics engine. Physics

Speaker 1: engine. Well, I was gonna say even the puzzle design. Like, you you take a 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 a plethora of of great answers. So I highly recommend Donkey Kong Bonanza. I would say that was my personal, personal game of the year.

Speaker 2: Okay. Wow. Yeah. Well, I I haven't traded my Switch in for a Switch two yet. K. But but maybe after this glowing review, maybe I should isn't it quite it it also went up substantially in price, didn't it? Like, it doubled in price?

Speaker 1: They they saw the money and they ran with it. Nintendo, I'm I'm not gonna stand by Nintendo as a a company that is doing pro consumer stuff necessarily in terms of pricing because I would lose that argument.

Speaker 2: They are increasing value for the shareholders, Jordan.

Speaker 1: Good. Oh, great for them. Hooray. But they did make some very good games this year, and this and the system is quite good. The other big gaming story was the was the thing that was not and is now a prediction for next year is we didn't get Grand Theft Auto six. And in 2026, we might get a Grand Theft Auto six.

Speaker 2: I'm the thing that I'm most intrigued for is when they do eventually open preorders for this. Cause at some point they're just gonna turn it on just to see, and we'll see if it beats Minecraft. Like, I can see it hitting a few 100,000,000 preorder copies for sure.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's either gonna be. I heard this take somewhere and I don't remember where. So if if if I got this from you, poorly attributed credit where it's due, that it is either going to be the, like, pop culture event of the next several years. Like, it is going to just dominate so aggressively all of culture or, like, video games as a genre will collapse on the back of Grand Theft Auto six. Like, 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 gonna 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 I'm betting, bold take. I think Grand Theft Auto six is gonna be a hit.

Speaker 2: The the entire taste two share value is based on the perspective future revenue of one game. I think 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, like, twenty four months in the gaming industry, I think how GTA six comes out delivers its story and and what it looks like is gonna be really indicative of what games will look like in the next five years.

Speaker 1: Interesting.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So I think there's gonna be an interesting cultural piece there. But also at the same time is, like, if this game does come out presales 200, 300,000,000 copies at 120 US a piece,

Speaker 1: like Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2: If it's garbage Yeah. It will like, Rockstar will have and takes you will have all the money in the world from the single sale, but I don't I don't know what's gonna happen because no game has been, I think, ever given this form of Yeah. You know, leash to just go. It it's been in development for, what, like, nine years? Like, the development budget's well gotta be over, like, billions of dollars.

Speaker 1: Of yeah. I was gonna say hundreds of millions, if not billions at this point. And it's been, like, three comp two or three console generations have come and gone Yeah. While this thing has been in development. And it was they were able to do that because Grand Theft Auto five was Is is still is still, like, one of the biggest things in gaming. It's a Yeah. It it's they they're the biggest thing until the next one comes out. And in the interim, we've gotten, like, 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 gonna rip, and it's gonna make all the money in the world. And I'm gonna spend many, many hours of my life in it. But it's I think it's gonna be again, it's not a shocking take. It's gonna be a really big deal. Totally. Yeah. Totally. I'm curious if it's gonna run on, well, Linux. Steam machine. It's Nintendo's like, the two the two areas of the game platform ecosystem. I'm I'm most intrigued by weird Linux machines and the Nintendo Switch two. Like, am I gonna be able to play it on either of them? I do not wanna play it on the Steam Deck. I love my Steam Deck. It is not the system for a Grand Theft Auto six, but but Nintendo Switch two maybe.

Speaker 2: I would be shocked if it wasn't if it didn't support some of the handheld gaming just given that trend.

Speaker 1: I think so too.

Speaker 2: But I think the the PlayStation six or whatever this thing ends up launching on, High end PC gaming rigs, you know, next next gen consoles, will be probably a 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 three d engine, the graphics, any of the previous stuff that's been leaked Sure. Looks amazing. I imagine the writing's been criticized and, you know, edited so many times. Like, I said, I'm I'm expecting like, GTA five was a near perfect game. Yep. And they've had way more time and money to make six. I'm hoping that this is their opus.

Speaker 1: And it's

Speaker 2: not that it's not like a, well, you know, we had a director left, and we rewrote this. And we decided we didn't wanna say that. And and so I'm hoping that this is a really great game.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I'm I'm looking forward to it. It's always been you know, as Canadians, it's it's such a game about America.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: And this one being set in Florida is like, it's just it's I'm I'm I'm very excited. I think it's gonna be a fun a a fun experience.

Speaker 2: I'm 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 forty hour playthrough.

Speaker 1: I'm betting that world is so full of stuff we're gonna be finding things for months, if not years. Yeah. Like, people people are good at peeling those games open and finding everything, but then there'll 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 in the scope of a development this long, the story, no matter how long it is, if it was an eighty 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 had all you you made the whole world. Like, you've had all the time in the world to fill this thing out. I should everyone is gonna be interactable with, hopefully. Like, I'm curious to see if they, I have a feeling that's gonna be what the money and the time went into. Totally.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Expans expansiveness. Expansiveness. I'm more expansiveness.

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Speaker 1: A story we didn't to hard hard pivot.

Speaker 2: To security things. Weird.

Speaker 1: Why don't we talk about security things? Our bread and butter. We've covered a lot of the big stories over the this past year. One story that popped into my mind that we never actually chatted about was the Jaguar Land Rover breach. This happened a couple months ago. We had other interviews sort of in the buckets, so we never ended up chatting about this. September 2025, Jaguar Land Rover suffered, the it's the costliest cyberattack in 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, like, a much smaller hack sort of explodes out into the world. And the 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 is a £100,000,000 cost according to the UK cyber monitoring center. The larger wider economic impact was 1,900,000,000. So we see how, like, a very a really serious localized thing becomes a much larger structural thing. The breach, like, started at a it was the Halewood production plant, starts by preventing real retailers from registering new vehicles during September, this peak month for UK car sales during due to, like, when license plates get shifted over. Lapsus was involved. We've talked about them a great deal on the show, but it ends up, like, branching out into all of UK cars based on this, like, infrastructure back end and costing, like, the British economy billions of pounds. Wild. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I think the the group that had claimed, responsibility was called Scattered Lapsus Hunters. Yep. So they they suspect it's a collaboration between three separate groups, Scattered Spider, Lapsus, and the Shiny Hunters.

Speaker 1: We've talked about all three on the show before. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's like the era of supergroups. It's like when all the old members of a band come together and they're like, we're just gonna 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 interviewed Ford Maribel about the Smishing Triad, the other story that kind of evoked that, another ransom it was a ransomware cartel as opposed to a Smishing cartel. It was the Japanese Asahi group. The beer hack was what I had it labeled as in my notes for when we didn't talk about it. Asahi is a one of these giant companies that owns, like, a million alcohol and beverage brands underneath it. And they fell victim to the killing 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're recording this, and it was just kind of bog standard ransomware stuff, a bunch of encrypted files across a bunch of live servers. They had to disconnect its network, suspend all their operations. Kilonix filtrated, like, 27 gigabytes of data, exposed the personal information of 1,900,000 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 cartel with a very well polished product that they license out to people takes down a giant thing you've heard of.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I looked up some stats on ransomware this year, and, global ransomware damages were expect to reach 57,000,000,000 in 2025, breaking down to approximately 6,500,000 per hour or $109,000 per minute. We're the wrong business, Jordan. Every year, we do one

Speaker 1: of these. That we should be in the crime business?

Speaker 2: Yes. We should be in the crime business. $109,000 per minute. We wouldn't have to be very successful for very long.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure. You just gotta clock in for one good shift.

Speaker 2: One good day, and you'd be pretty good for the rest of your life.

Speaker 1: That is that's wild. Mhmm. 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, was, like, a phrase that I started hearing murmured in twin twenty four that actually came to a head in 2025 was, like, this was sort of the first year of agentic malware

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: Which for anyone who is unfamiliar, is just, you know, instead of malware following a pre prescribed, script for lack of a better word, like precoded in instructions. If this file exists, then delete this file, then do this, then do this. 2025, we got iGentic stuff powered by AI models, little, like, custom specialized LLMs that give it a little bit more autonomy once it infects the end users, system. It has a goal, you know, get financial data. And then instead

Speaker 2: of wallets.

Speaker 1: Get crypto wallets. And then instead of following an if this, then that kind of script, it can kinda, like, for lack of a better word, figure out how to achieve it on its own. It can reason. It can it can do a little bit of that good good reasoning we all see in our in our favorite chat bots. Yep. 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 identified 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 it got into a system. And then prompt steal, which was it would, like, query a hugging face model to generate, like, little instructions in the command line in order to exfiltrate data on the fly. So we saw more of these things kind of, like, lurking around at the edges. And I And we're gonna see more of it. See a lot more than 2026. I was like, it all it all started happening right at the end of twenty twenty five. I was like, oh, it's gonna be gonna be a real real problem next year.

Speaker 2: If you think about it too, like, cell phones have have long since been pretty secure devices. Apple's anyways. Google's done a pretty good job of theirs as well.

Speaker 1: They've locked it down the last couple of years, I feel like. They closed that gap.

Speaker 2: Yeah. But they're about to have, like, local local micro models running on them. So that that's an entirely new attack surface for the cell phone that will occur. So, yeah, it'll be a a a lot a lot of things will be coming in that space. The the one thing I will say too from a phishing, you know, pig butchering, scamming kind of way is the ability for AI to just auto generate, you know, credible looking websites Right. Is really playing into, you know, my my deep seated fears about aging people and the Internet. So the I'll I'll I'll give this I put a 11:11 post thread on Twitter the other day that I think I kinda wanna hit here just quick because a Christmas message is as 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, you know, just little things that are indicative of

Speaker 1: Oh, that's a good note.

Speaker 2: Are they being scammed? Are they actively being pig butchered? Do you know? So there's so many it's it's come up in my life in in my immediacy.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure.

Speaker 2: I think that, I think that everybody needs to be on a bit more high alert. Pulled some stats, the I think one of the last posts go check out the Twitter thread. It's on x, hacked podcast. The the numbers don't lie. I think it was post 10 of the 11 that are in the thread. There's $4,900,000,000 were stolen from senior citizens last year as an average exfiltration of about $8,083,000 US per person.

Speaker 1: The average was 83 k?

Speaker 2: Yeah. God damn. So watch out watch out for your relatives who might not be as sophisticated and is maybe sophisticated is not the right word, as as critical to the motivations of other people on the Internet.

Speaker 1: Yeah. So I feel like this has been such a year for is anything on the Internet real.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: And while this is a version of that, it it feels like at times we can forget that, like, still the 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 fireified 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 your 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 wanna see all the devices on the screen to make sure, oh, that one's in there. Okay. 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 or going to a crypto ATM side of things.

Speaker 2: Or or transferring your money onto a new investment platform that's unheard of by yeah. The, 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. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, we've been learning technical analysis. Let's go. What's the like, where's the course? What's like, show it to me. And they opened a WhatsApp group. And I was like, oh.

Speaker 1: No one ever learned anything in a WhatsApp group. And I was

Speaker 2: like, so what is this? And they're like, oh, there's like a 140 of us. We're in this, like, course, and it's run by this person who's this, like

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: CEO of an investment bank. 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.

Speaker 1: That sounds suspicious. No? It's

Speaker 2: it's like this person has one of a very, very powerful, important, and taxing job, and you think that they're just available on WhatsApp twenty four hours a day. Anyway, they would send out nightly news posts, which actually had some real information in them. Like, there there was no active scamming going on, but you could tell that they were setting the table for the scam to hit.

Speaker 1: It's I think that's what's interesting about it is that, like, 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 for a and just let them get value out of that ecosystem as you just sort of, like, construct a guillotine over their head very patiently and, like, tie the big blade to a rope and tie build the frame. Take all the time you want while they're getting real value out of this thing, and then you pull it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I was I had this conversation with my wife afterwards. We were talking about it, kinda debriefing of it, and I was like, it would be so easy to do this. Like, if you like, if you're like a gamer, and I don't mean that like a video gamer, but somebody that likes, like, puzzles and thought exercises and, you know, 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. This is new investment platform you should check out, move your money over here, and buy this.

Speaker 4: Sure.

Speaker 2: I I would I would be 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 get you like does that seem a little fishy? And then, you know, engage every user in the group separately in, like, individual conversations and and eventually pull their develop trust with them by being the person that also identified that it was fishy. And then I would leverage that trust to then just for us to scam them. I was like, like, you don't even need to do, like, the the big commercial. Like, there's a 140 people in here. I'm gonna try and steal all your money. But instead, I'm gonna 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.

Speaker 1: And if you're interested in stuff like this, you should listen to our episode on Andrew Tate's The Real World.

Speaker 2: I'm

Speaker 1: not sure when we publish it, but you should 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, allegedly. You should go listen to that episode. Yeah. The other big story from this past year and and we we talked about this one on the show, but I I think it's worth talking about, was the CloudFlare, like, incident 20% of, like, Internet traffic just sort of, like, kicked offline functionally for a period of time. These sort of like this was a big year for supply chain stuff. And for us, we talk about that a lot in the context of I mean, it means so many things now. It means supply chains of physical products coming preinstalled with malware. We talked about that a couple episodes ago. Go listen to that interview. And 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 blah blah blah blah blah, 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.

Speaker 2: In the last few months, you know, at the end of end of twenty twenty five, October, 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. Yeah. That it it's it's happening to me enough that it's becoming a bit of a pattern. And I'm like, wow. Like, this is like, the the cloud is cloud is shaking right now. So it feels like

Speaker 1: I think that we're I think this is gonna be another one of those. Like, we're gonna get a lot more of these stories in 2026. Like, the idea of the global data power outage just becoming a a slightly more common thing that we all experience as, like, this infrastructure coalesces around a smaller and smaller handful of of businesses. You know, when the pie chart of who provides a big chunk of our technical infrastructure is just getting like, the pieces of the pie chart are all getting bigger, it's like, well, knock one of those down and more of it goes down. I don't know what to tell you. It's like it's that that that those things follow from one another.

Speaker 2: Totally. Totally. Just it just it's the feeling I'm getting is that it's becoming more and more and more, and that's not good. I hope the I hope they manage to lock that stuff down.

Speaker 1: One of

Speaker 2: 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. You know, people putting root kits in them, people putting AI enhanced, malware. There's been so much stuff happening in the development supply chain than there was a few years ago. The open source community is like I don't wanna 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

Speaker 1: of stuff happened in 2025 and that we're gonna be seeing more of in 2026 is to go back to AI is on the regulatory side. I think this was, like, 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 approach to regulating a AI, which is 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, like, 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 AI, like, and 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 multiyear rollout. We're gonna be seeing more of this stuff in 2026.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I and and, AI labeling? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's I'm hoping that they're quicker to respond to it than they were with social media and crypto.

Speaker 1: Great analogies. Both.

Speaker 2: Thank you. I'm hoping the government does their job and duty in putting in regulatory frameworks, listening to both industry and the people as well as privacy proof. Like, I I I think it is it could be such a win for society and mankind or or person kind that I don't wanna stifle it, but at the same time, it does need to be built, trained, deployed in an ethical manner. And and and I think that I don't know. I'm not I haven't seen anything that's really scaring me yet. I coming out of North America.

Speaker 1: I haven't seen anything it's like there's no new there's nothing new under the sun, but all the stuff that was curdling and negative about social media, it, like, it was an amplifier on that. And in the absence of, like, we gotta get on labeling. Like, we we need to get on, is it real? As a as a society, that's gonna be a question of, like, do I know what I'm looking at occurred and is exists? Because prior to, like, three years ago, that cost

Speaker 2: Question mark.

Speaker 1: Tens of thousands of dollars in, like, CGI budgets, and now it's trivial. So labeling of whether or not we're looking at things. Transparency on training datasets. 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 it I I hope can maybe prior to something becoming politicized, it is by definition not yet politicized, and I hope we're still in the 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 I hope we're still in that era for a little bit longer.

Speaker 2: Every every time we talk about stuff like this, it always reminds me about the iPad launch when even Apple was like, these things are terrible for kids.

Speaker 1: Interesting.

Speaker 2: And now they're babysitters for kids. Yeah. Right. You're watching Korean animated YouTube for hours or playing silly games. The but to speak like, let's talk social media for a bit because this is a few interesting things I'm gonna take us to segue down under on this one. But the, 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, you know, mental health and and personal confidence in people. Like, it has so many impacts. Like, I am and you will tell if you were a follower of the show in any social media platform. I don't use social media.

Speaker 1: We make this podcast, and neither of us are big posters anywhere else. Like

Speaker 2: Yes. Correct. Yeah. My Instagram feed has, I think, a few photos from, like, 2016, and my Twitter and Facebook have been deleted, essentially. The 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 the by this. And, so it would be nice to hit them hit have them hit that because I'm not sure if you've been following what's going on in Australia. But as of December 10, they have banned social media access for anybody under the age of 16, identifying that it is bad for their house.

Speaker 1: The show submitted. I won't say their name because I don't know if they want us to, but someone submitted a story to us. And this is we're starting to see this in a bunch of jurisdictions around the world is 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 a pack of cigarettes.

Speaker 2: We just Yes.

Speaker 1: We've decided.

Speaker 2: So, 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 the I think with Australia pulling the trigger on it, the rest of the world is leaning back and watching to see how it goes. And if it goes well, I think we're gonna see the same thing come up in many other jurisdictions. So the list of the services is currently banned in Australia. Major age restricted. They're not banned. They're age restricted. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, x, Reddit, Twitch, YouTube. Exemptions for messaging apps, WhatsApp Messenger, Google Classroom, and YouTube Kids.

Speaker 1: Oh, that exemptions list is fascinating. YouTube Kids. Okay.

Speaker 2: There's there's been a lot of discussion around online multiplayer gaming. Yeah.

Speaker 1: I was gonna say if they pass the thing saying you can't go on Roblox, Roblox will go to literal war with you. I For sure.

Speaker 2: They're currently excluded. Roblox, Fortnite, Call of Duty. Yeah. But, I I assume they're probably gonna have a knock on set of regulations that apply to them.

Speaker 1: I would 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 wanna register an account, we have the same age verification stuff. But if you wanna 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 wanna 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 maybe a potentially a way of doing it.

Speaker 2: Interesting that Discord caught a caught a pass on this. Not listed

Speaker 1: as a

Speaker 2: 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 is 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 restrict in the other platforms, TBD.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, the the effect that banning social media for folks 16 is probably gonna have is, like, in a weird way, a return to, like, like, when all you 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 is like, well, they're going to.

Speaker 2: A 100%. Whatever they could have. Whatever.

Speaker 1: Whatever they were doing on Instagram, now they're gonna do it on Discord. Whatever they're doing on Twitter, now they're gonna do it on Discord. You wanna not you're curious about what kind of videos they were watching on YouTube, not kids? They're gonna be sharing them on Discord. It's like that's just all that all that heat's just gonna move. A 100%.

Speaker 5: When you finally find your thing, you want the whole world to know about that thing. So you use a thing called Canva to make it an even bigger and better thing. Whether you want to create flyers for that thing, make presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing, you can do anything. So people can see your thing, feel your thing, love your thing. The next thing you know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing.

Speaker 2: And we're back.

Speaker 1: We've talked about security. We've talked about gaming. We've talked about AI. Moving into 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?

Speaker 2: Man, that's a great question. It's a big one. We

Speaker 1: because we've already teased on it as, like, I'm very excited for some of the stuff we're gonna be seeing in gaming. I think it's gonna be exciting year in gaming. I'd say that's probably my answer. I think this is a cool year in gaming.

Speaker 2: I think the thing I'm most excited for, living in a city that has, what I would say, underwhelming public transit. Okay. Is the robotaxi automated vehicle? I've always thought that was a better system. So the city that I we 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. Yeah. And ten, fifteen 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 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 on the road, to optimize the routing, etcetera, etcetera. And I think that we're just starting to see that stuff cracking in. Like, there's a few 100 of them in California, a few 100 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.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: I think that that would be important for me.

Speaker 1: It was a big year. It's interesting. It was the Tesla robot actually got announced, but it was a big year, I'd say, for Waymo.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Waymo. They're like Waymo. Ones I think Waymo's in Cali. Right?

Speaker 1: They're the ones in California. And I think they're in Phoenix now too. Like, they're they're running fully operational in major cities. Like, people use them in those cities. They don't

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: You don't have them up here in Canada. And I'm I'm I'm a transit booster. I love me a train. You know you you know how I feel about a train, Scott.

Speaker 2: It's because you have functional ones where you live now.

Speaker 1: We do have a functional train here,

Speaker 2: and it is

Speaker 1: sick as hell. Yeah. But I'm fascinated by Waymo. I think it's gonna be an interesting year for Waymo as they get enough surface area that, like, stuff starts to happen that becomes big international news stories. Mhmm. Like, I think that we're gonna have at a certain point, like, these cars are gonna start doing stuff. They're gonna start having, like, incidents and things like that. We saw a bit of that in 2025, and those are gonna become big, like, flashpoint stories for how do we respond to all this. I know that the, like, the way it's looking right now from the numbers is that the response is probably gonna be these companies buy insurance the same way car drivers buy 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.

Speaker 2: True.

Speaker 1: That's probably where this goes, which means we're gonna need to have a conversation about, like, insurance for robots. Like, we're just not talking about that currently, and that's gonna probably be a big discussion in 2026. There's all these, like when these things reach scale Totally. How does the existing safety and automotive infrastructure respond

Speaker 2: to it? The 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 gonna 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 within 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 reroute to dynamically the removal of signaling from roadways because they'll be able to do it automated. Anyway, I've I'm 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.

Speaker 1: Yeah. There's gonna be this is, like, the downer note of that is, like, we're also gonna have to figure out the, like and and this is the same thing we've talked about with AI for years is, like, what is the economic fallout? And Of course. Another cultural fallout of, like, the three and a half million truck drivers and the 3,000,000 drive like, all of these people and all of that, like, economic, you know, output just being like a now

Speaker 2: The robots.

Speaker 1: The Google Google and Tesla have that. But because it's such a giant computing problem. It's not like a thing that

Speaker 2: you can

Speaker 1: quickly spin up. Like, it's not we can't it's not even like AI where it's like, how much does it cost to train a deep seek versus a chat GPT? It's like Totally. Car infrastructure and training data that requires physical cars driving around. It's like the moat 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 impact did this have on the, like, shocking, like if 5% of jobs involve

Speaker 2: driving Transportation. Yeah. It's more than that, I think. But yeah.

Speaker 1: It's like that's a catastrophe, just economically. That's that's huge. Yeah. And I think that as Waymo gets more popular, which it will because it's, by all accounts, like a really good service, we're gonna have to answer that question.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I I don't disagree with you, but I and, I'm also a optimistic believer that, like, excess human capacity and utility gets utilized by humanity. 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 gonna 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, etcetera. I think that us transitioning as a society from human driven vehicles to automated vehicles is probably a fifteen to twenty year process. And and, so I think that we'll be able to adapt. The other thing is, though, is, 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 any 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 of 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

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Tomorrow every taxi.

Speaker 1: It's like Uber

Speaker 2: Uber is bankrupt tomorrow because everything is automated now.

Speaker 1: Yeah. There's no amount of optimism that offsets 10% of the workforce just being like Overnight.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Of course.

Speaker 1: Like, oh, no. Yeah. It's just a that you're you're gonna get a big problem there.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. 2026, maybe optimize our utility and per I can't remember what you said. But That's a good

Speaker 2: Neither can I? Yeah. Optimistically optimize our utility.

Speaker 1: Optimistically optimize our utility.

Speaker 2: Proactive AI and optimize utility. I think that's my big, the things that I'm most excited for.

Speaker 1: What a year, man. What a year.

Speaker 2: A year.

Speaker 1: We made some we made some, we had some episodes that I'm, like, quite pleased about in the past year. 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, I just feel like a little more hacked and there's not another one coming out for another two weeks, the bad box episode from November, I highly recommend that one. I think it's a really, really cool one. I'm partial to it, but our Gamescom episode, like a little travel episode, I think, was a lot of fun. I had a quarter. I had a lot of fun making that one.

Speaker 2: Totally. Me too.

Speaker 1: Yeah. That one was good.

Speaker 2: I really liked our interview with Adam from Push.

Speaker 1: That was a lot of fun.

Speaker 2: Yeah. He was

Speaker 1: a great interview.

Speaker 2: Great interview. Great guy.

Speaker 1: Yep. No. It's been a fun year here on Hacked. Are we missing anything? Is there anything else we need to talk about before we, before we close this thing up?

Speaker 2: Thank the patrons. Patreon, we we appreciate, and every single one of you. Merch store, store.hackpodcast.com.

Speaker 1: Go go buy a hat. Happy holidays. Happy holidays to everyone who has been reaching out about hotline hacks. We're gonna be doing some of those in the new year. My yeah. It's look forward for the show. My twenty twenty six goals, and I've talked about this with you for with you, is to decide very intentionally to not know what this show is.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: I wanna go into 2026 knowing that we make a technology show

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: About all the weird ways people hack things together and hack them apart, and other than that, to go into a blank. Okay. You know, who with that mandate, who would we interview? Who what would we talk about? It's still gonna be the two of us talking and doing interviews. Like, it's it's basic format is gonna change, but I wanna I wanna get weird with it in 2026. I wanna I wanna broaden the the net.

Speaker 2: My 2026 goals for the show would be to figure out what to do with YouTube and do it. I like that. Because That's a good one. 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 commie 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 social content, Be a little bit more intentional with the video side of the podcast.

Speaker 1: 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 listening to us, you can keep listening to us. But you wanna point your eyeballs at us, maybe you can do that too.

Speaker 2: We'll prove to you that we are not AIs. Yeah. Honestly, like,

Speaker 1: 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, AI. And we have faces, so maybe you get to see him in 2026.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Love it. So

Speaker 1: 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.

Speaker 2: I hope it's been restful. Hope you're feeling relaxed. Absolutely. Happy holidays. Take care.

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