Hacked - 2025 Chatty Chat Year in Review

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

It’s the 2025 Chatty Chat year in review friends! We’re diving into a big old pile of stories from the past year and speculating on what’s to come in 2026. If you’re wondering where this sits on the "in-depth interview vs. casual chatting" spectrum, just know we spend a considerable amount of time talking about how rad the Switch 2 is. This is not a deep dive, just a good time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What a year, what a year, what a mighty weird year. What are you talking about? It's a standard year these days. Fog standard, typical years. 2025 shrinks to a pinhead in the rearview 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's 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. La Boo Boo's. We bypass that this year. La Booboos.

We look back. We look ahead. You ready, Scott? I'm always ready. This is the year and review chatty chat here on Hacked. Scrabbly theme song. Welcome back. Welcome back. Welcome back. Welcome back. This is our year and review chatty chat. This is, this is just one of those episodes. This is that episode. I don't know when you're going to 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. I have my, my thread of link.

and notes that never made it into an episode. All the stuff we didn't get to talk about. And that should be plenty. 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 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 year personally, Jordan? My year personally was good. It was a very head down and get stuff done type of year. There 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. Let's not jump to me yet. You still got a, 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, I don't wait

to hear you say it. Well, we were in, uh, it's chatty chat episode, everybody. That's right. Welcome to the chat. Welcome to the chat. It's going to be loose. The last two have been like pretty deep interviews and this is going to be the opposite. I really like, so we got to go to Germany for some game stuff. 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 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. Jordan Blumen. Blumen. Blumen. Blumen. That is how you pronounce that. Like the Swedish chef.

from Sesame Street. Yeah, that was a real highlight. Yeah, it was good. I thought you were going to say Mexico City. Because I remember you getting back from 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. It's nice to finish a calendar year and be like, I had a good year. Yeah, not a good year.

It was a really good year. Yeah. Good. Good for you. I, on the other hand, didn't do much traveling. I think 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 there's a really

big surf pool there. Yep. I 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 this shit a Mason would say. This has this monstrous Masonic temple, but I 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. It's a good way to unwind.

Totally. In the larger world, did anything happen? Well, there was a few things. Stock markets up, you know, seeing as we're segueing into our hacked financial analysis show. Yeah, sure. Stockmark has largely been up this year. Not sure where it's going to go next year.

There's some bears, some bulls. AI, I would say AI has underperformed this year expectation, at least for me. Wait, wait, wait. It is economically unperformed or the technology is underperforming? Because I'm like, it is performed so well. It's dangerous how well it's performed. Yeah, I'm going to get lit in the comments for this. But just the pace it was moving at.

The tech. The tech itself. We went from the chat GPT 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 at certain things, but they have new flaws. And it feels like we're really in that plateauy 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 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 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 underdelivered 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 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 remark.

utility this is bringing to people. I think that Microsoft tried to shove it 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 billion partnership between AWS and Open AI 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 is the energy question of just like Google's talking about putting like solar power 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 a tension 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, my Scott the future. 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 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 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 location. So 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 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 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 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 in Airbnb and the LLM can talk to Airbnb. This. is, uh, I have mixed levels of optimism for this because I'm not sure why any of those platforms would want to just become plugins for someone else's chat bot and without that kind of two way consent. It's like, all, you really need to own the market before Airbnb, before Uber is going to decide to be like cool with just being a back end for chat GPT. 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. Mm hmm. Mm. Mm. Mm. 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, like, I think MCPs came out late last year as kind of when Anthropic, because they're the ones that 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 still going to make the margin when the agent books the room on the back end. 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'm curious if any of them are, I'm curious how large the check will have to be to get

them to sign that. They will. You're right. But I don't think you're going to do that because you're like, it seems like a great opportunity. I think you're going to do that because a dump truck of money shows up. See, but I just like the second. 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. 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, 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, 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, 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 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?

It's like most people's money is scarce enough that they want to make the choice themselves. They want some retail satisfaction of making the purchase 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. The thing that remains to be seen for me is how big of the market is. Is that like, spend my money for me? I think that I think the difference is I think there's multiple markets there. Like when you're going to Spain, you're going on an experience and you want to tailor your experience. It's a big deal to me.

Yes. And it's something I'm not doing off. And it to me costs that cost me money. Like that's. Yeah. But 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 member, by the way, but it just jumped into my mind. 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 it. 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 auto fill 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 auto fillable decisions, what is auto fillable commerce on the internet what is like what else is auto fillable um 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 um but the expanded auto fill thing maybe and maybe that's a distinction without a difference but um that i could see having some some value and being interesting and it be

we keep, but 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, because I'm open to it. Like, you're like, we need dishwasher tabs. Send them on, send them on over. Like, I need toothpaste. Like, get it over here. Yeah, I feel, I feel like, do you remember the Amazon push buttons? That's, I brought those up earlier. Yeah. Like, they had those buttons and no one uses. You bring it up in this episode? I must not have been listening to. It's all good. I was like, funny, you should mention those. And no one really bought them because it just, 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 hitting 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. 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, do do, do, do, do, do, do. And like a palette 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 going to give the chat, bought my credit card information. Just be like, just you cook, just Godspeed little robot. To wrap it back to MCPs and proactive AI. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we're going to see more of that stuff.

Like 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 MCP on the back end. So the locally deployed LLM 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 is going to lead the charge on it because I just can't help it 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. Um, the story for the last three years has been those idiots at Google. Open AI is eating their lunch. And then Sundar Pachai is 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 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. of the press cycle when it came to AI with stuff. There was a couple different stories. There was that, I think it was nanobanana, the small chat like image tool.

There was at a heart of a lot of like me, me stuff that happened on the like normal facing internet. There was a lot of back kind of ground stuff that I think we're going to 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 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. is like a one-to-one competitor with OpenAI's main product. Arguably the best, I think at this point. 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, 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 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, IDEs,

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, 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 back end 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. 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 on the back end, you know, they've been, I remember when Google started

developing their own microcomputers to facilitate their search farms. data centers were actually all entirely custom designed. They started making their own chips. I was going to say, I think their AI centers are running on like tensor processing units, which is their like smartphone 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 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 for 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 and it's not AMD. It's actually Google. That's an interesting take. I think Google is going to strut. I'm trying to think of how to articulate this thought. Google is probably going to 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, um, AI search results, which are it is probably got to 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 rate of hallucinations and made up stuff is higher in that than anything else I use a chat bot for. Like chat bots 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, uh, 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 regular, I'm sort of floored by how often it like, I'm like, that doesn't, 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 want to 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. that website. I think you're in your last one, I think 100%.

I want to jump back to your Google reviews for Mark because I think it's interesting. So when I look at the Google summarizations and the speed that they have to deliver it, there's got to be a pre-processing function that they're looking at. So the second-sum search starts trending, they're probably pre-pulling assets related to that. Yeah, sure. And creating kind of like a retrieval cache so that, when you send in, hey, you know, whenever you start typing the phrase even.

It's like loaded up, load it up, loaded up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But even before then, they're probably just looking at larger, like, 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 mashed 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 preloaded 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 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. Like maybe you don't know. 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. I have to, I have, 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 know, you make it double check its 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 rules. 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 clipy vibes it's giving clipy let's talk about clipy 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 sequel servers being used here erps 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 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 proactive AI, they will be wildly successful because that will be where enterprise started to see massive gains and 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? 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? I know what you're saying. Two things. A, I think that they've had that moment with Xbox. Yeah.

I think that it's 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 ASIS 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 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. I stopped subscribing a while ago, but I think it doubled this year. Yeah, I think it went from 1999 a month to 3999 a month or something. But 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 U.S.D per game for AAA. 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 1299. 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. 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. They're 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 as 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, 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, 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 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

and a distribution thing. 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. 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 billion dollars a year and wait you ready for the real good number guess how much the average the revenue 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 standing in the middle of a commercial transaction and taking 30% of it. A tax? Yeah. Is a massively good business model. That's insane. I knew they were big. Like I knew that Gabe Newell was like, which yacht am I taking today rich? Yeah.

But I didn't realize it was the per head number is really, really fascinating. Yeah. Huh. So those are those are. or AI stats. So don't hold me a capital. Sure, sure. But it's approximately $50 million per employee.

That's wild. Yeah. And I mean, they make a good product. Like, 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, $100. Game prices have gone up. Of course.

Cost of making games has gone up. Cost of distributing 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. It'll make a AAA game for you using the power of AI. And it's like, well, 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 tree. 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 a digital archive. It's a digital archive.

Some of them cost $10. Some of them cost $50. Some of them cost two. 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 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? 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.

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, right. They could have, they could have 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. Yeah.

Yeah. But the, but I think that they've established and cemented themselves in the market that I think it's going to 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 going to make a handheld gaming computer. And people were like, nah, not going to happen. And they were like, look what we did. And it rips. It's really fun. Yeah, sure. Yeah, it, there is a culture thing. And it almost brings us back to the like, 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 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 great 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. I'm just trying to look at what. So Google, this is approximation, just Googled this AI answer. Believe it or not. I'm going to trust it as far as this. discussion is.

I'm going to trust it with my life. It would trust with my life. So Google's revenue, uh, sorry, Microsoft's revenue, intelligent cloud, so that's probably easier.

Yeah. About a hundred billion a year. Productivity and business process software, office 365, LinkedIn, 50 billion a year. Computer gaming, uh,

Windows Xbox, distribution, etc. Give or take, another 50 billion year. Hmm. So 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 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, like the Windows OEM, like when you buy a PC pre-build and you get OEM model on it, OEMOS on it, it's not that expensive. Like I would say that Microsoft, I'm actually surprised that Microsoft, that I'm actually surprised that Microsoft. Microsoft's business solutions is not higher than 50, 60 billion. 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. Yeah, but that's the hundred billion big chunk of the pie. I'd be really curious to see that business side of things broken down. Because I have,

when you led with Microsoft Office and Office, in 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, like a lot of the other 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.

Minecraft alone has sold over 300 million copies and has 180 million active users. What a stud. What a 300 million copy. 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 for it into 26, we've talked about scene. We've talked about the rise of Linux. I'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. 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 talk about it, I just got to say Nintendo Switch 2 rips and everyone should go buy one. This is just a free plug for the Nintendo Switch 2. Boy, boy, do I like it.

And you're like, do you have any numbers or research to do about that? I mean, 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 cart, the open world Mario card's pretty. 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 3D platform about a big monkey that rocks. You know, 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 well. Something 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. Physics engine. Physics and platinum. Well, I was going to see even the puzzle design. Like you, 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 banans.

I would say that was my personal, um, personal game of the year. Okay. Wow. Well, I haven't traded my Switch in for a Switch 2 yet. Okay. But maybe after this glowing review, maybe I should, isn't it quite, it also went up substantially in price, didn't it? Like it 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 were increasing value for the shareholders, Jordan. good oh great for them hooray but they did make some very good games this year and the system is quite good the other big gaming story was the it was the thing that was not

and is now a prediction for next year is we didn't get grant theft auto six and in 2026 we might get a grand theft auto six I'm 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 I could see it hitting a few hundred million pre-order copies for sure. Yeah. It's either going to be, I heard this take somewhere and I don't remember where. So if I got this from you, a 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 6. 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 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 Grant The F outta 6 is going to be a hit. The entire T. Two share value is based on the prospective 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 like 24 months in the gaming industry, I think how GTA6 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 is like if this game does come out pre-sells 200, 300 million copies at 120 U.S. apiece. Yeah, yeah.

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 know what's going to happen because no game. game has been, I think, ever given this form of, you know, leash to just go. It's been in development for what, like nine years? Like the development budget's well got to be over like billions of dollars. Yeah, I was going to say hundreds of millions, if not billions at this point.

And it's been like two or three consul generations have come and gone. Yeah. Well, this thing has been in development. And it was, they were able to do that because Grant Theft Auto 5 was. Is still. is still like one of the biggest things in gaming. It's, 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 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 it's, I think it's going to be, 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. Like 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. I love my Steam Deck. It is not the system for a Grand Theft Auto 6.

But Nintendo Switch 2, maybe. I would be shocked if it wasn't. 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, high-nPC gaming rigs, you know, next-gen-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 preview stuff that's been leaked. Sure. looks amazing. I imagine the writing's been criticized and, you know, edited so many times. Like, I'm expecting, like, GTA 5 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. That it's not, that it's not like, well, you know, we had a lot of fights about that. The director left 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 I'm looking forward to it.

It's always been, you know, as Canadians, it's such a game about America. And this one being set in Florida is like it's just, it's, I'm, I'm very excited. I think it's going to be a fun, a fun experience. I'm most intrigued, I think, to see how long the campaign is. Yeah. Like when you take this long to bake a game, I'm hoping it's not like a 40-hour play-through. 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, 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 this, 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 could. 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 going to be interactable with hopefully like 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. Expans. Expansiveness. Expansiveness.

I am more expansiveness. Think about the last time you heard a breach story on this show. It always starts the same way. Someone somewhere saw something too late. An alert buried, a signal missed, an SOC that just couldn't keep up. Arctic Wolf set out to solve that problem by rebuilding security operations from the ground up for a world where attackers are already using AI. They created the Aurora superintelligence platform, a fully agentic system powered by the swarm of experts.

Instead of single-purpose bots or lucky-guess LLMs, this swarm is full of deterministic agents that handle whole entire workflows. Humans stay in the loop and on the loop to validate the critical decisions and keep everything trustworthy. And all of this is just off running on their secure operations graph. A constantly updating intelligence engine fueled by more than 9 trillion telemetry events every week and over a decade of real-world incident response. The system reasons on real signals and real context not synthetic training data. and the result is the new Aurora Agent SOC. It's the first SOC that is agent led by design. You get agents that coordinate, agents that investigate,

agents that respond at machine speed, and hundreds more that automate the repetitive work that normally buries human analysts. Arctic Wolf didn't try and bolt AI onto an old model. They rebuilt the model entirely. What makes it even more effective is how it works with Arctic Wolf's concierge experience. The team brings customer-specific context directly into the platform

so every AI-driven decision reflects your environment instead of generic assumptions. The automation frees your concierge security team to focus on higher value strategy and proactive risk reductions while the agents handle the grind. If you want to see what trustworthy, production-ready AI and security operations actually looks like, go to arcticwolf.com slash hacked. Ever feel like cyber threats are evolving faster than anyone can keep up? Last year, 2025 was nothing short of a record-breaking year. year for major breaches, from sophisticated ransomware operators to AI-enabled attacks that

turned defenses on their head. Organizations around the world saw headlines they never expected and cybersecurity teams were tested like never before. But here's the thing. These incidents aren't just news headlines. They're learning opportunities. And that's why Arctic Wolf is hosting a live webinar on February 5th diving the most impactful breaches of 2025. Their field CTO and security leaders are going to unpack not just what happened, but why these attacks succeeded. And most importantly, what businesses can do to fortify their defenses for it's too late. You're going to walk away with real insights into how threat actors are evolving, how defenders are responding, and what strategies can help you stay ahead of the next big breach. It's not fear mongering.

It's practical, actionable, intelligence from experts in the trenches. Register now at arcticwolf.com slash hacked. A story we didn't to hard pivot. It's a security thing. Why don't we talk about security things? Our bread and butter. Um, 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. Um, this happened a couple months ago. We had other interviews sort of in the buckets and we never ended up chatting about

this. September 2025, Jaguar Land Rover suffered, uh, it's the costliest cyber attack 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 Jaguar Land Rover won, this big systemic breach ended up, it started with Jaguar and it cascaded through like the British automotive supply chain.

The direct attack, it's a hundred 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 a, it was the hailwood production plant starts by preventing retailers from registering new vehicles during September, this peak month for UK car sales during due to like when license plates get shifted over. Lapsis 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 back end 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. Yeah. So they suspect it's a collaboration between three separate groups, scattered spider,

Lapsis 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 are like, we're just going to Bob Dylan get in here.

And they start a new band. We saw quite a lot of that this year. If you haven't listened to the last episode in which we interview Ford Marable, but the smishing triad, the other story that kind of evoked that another ransom. It was a ransomware cartel as opposed to a smission 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 one of these giant companies that owns like a million alcohol and beverage brands underneath it.

And they felt victim to the kill and 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 bogstand ransomware stuff, a bunch of encrypted files across a bunch of live servers. they had to disconnect its networks to spend all their operations. Killinixle traded like 27 gigabytes of data, exposed 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 cartel 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 wouldn't have to be very successful. for very long. Yeah, sure. He's got to 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 was like a phrase that I started hearing murmured in 2024 that actually came to ahead in 2025 was like this was sort of the first year of agentic malware. Mm-hmm. Which for anyone who was. 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 identical stuff powered by AAA models, little like custom specialized LLMs that give it a little bit more autonomy once it infects the end user's system.

It has a goal, you know, get financial data. And then instead of. Wallets. 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 it 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. 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 identified these two different strains of agentic malware that were using, I think it was the Gemini API to like zag on antivirus stuff once it got 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 extolrate data on the fly. So we saw more of these things kind of like lurking around at the edges. And we're going to see more. We're going to see a lot more than the 2026. I was like, it all started happening right at the end of 2025. I was like, oh, it was going to be a real, real problem next year. Well, if you think about it, too, like cell phones have long since been pretty secure devices,

apples anyways. Google's done a pretty good job there as well. They've looked it down the last couple years. I feel like they closed that gap. Yeah, but they're about to have like local micro models running on them. So that's an entirely new attack surface for the cell phone that will occur. So, yeah, it'll be a lot of, a lot of things will be coming in that space. The one thing I will say, too, from a fishing, 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 deep-seated fears about aging people and the internet. So the, 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, you know,

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. life in my immediacy.

Yeah, sure. I think that everybody needs to be a bit more high alert. Hold some stats at the, I think one of the last posts. Go check out the Twitter thread. It's on X, a hack podcast. The numbers don't lie. I think it was post 10 of the 11 that are in the thread. There's $4.9 billion were stolen from senior citizens last year as an average

exfiltration of about 83,000. US per person. The average was 83K. 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 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 heard 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, a fide 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. skin. So I think that there's like kind of that two-prong thing of like, are you in any of those dodgy text messages? Let's go check what your eye cloud is logged into.

And I want to 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.

Or transferring your money onto a. new investment platform that's unheard 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. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, we've been learning technical analysis.

I was like, oh, what's the, like, where's the, like, show it to me. And they opened a WhatsApp group. And I was like, oh. No one ever learned anything in a WhatsApp group. And I was like, so what is this? And they're like, oh, there's like 140 of us. in this like course and it's run by this person who's this like yeah CEO of an investment bank yeah I bet they're great and I was like so you're just sending DMs on what's app 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 sounds suspicious no I was like this person has one of a very very powerful important and taxing job and you think that they're just available on what's up 24 hours a day. Anyway, they would send out nightly news posts, which actually had some real information in them. Like, there was no act of scamming going on, but you could tell that they were setting the table for the scam to hit.

Yeah. 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. Yeah. I was I had this conversation with my wife afterwards. We were talking about it kind of debriefing on 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, is this new investment platform you should check out, move your money over here and buy this? Sure. 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, doesn't it seem a little fishy? And then, you know, engage every user in the group separately in like individual conversations 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 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. I'm not sure what we're following fellowship. 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. Yeah. You should 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 cloud flare like incident, 20% of like internet traffic just sort of like kicked off line. functionally for a period of time. 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 preinstalled 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 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. In the last few months, you know, at the end of, end of 2025, 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's happening to me enough that it's becoming a bit of a pattern. And I'm like, wow, like this is like 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. Like we're going to get a lot more of these stories in 2026. Like the idea of the global data power outage, just becoming 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 charter 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, those things follow from one another. Totally. Totally.

It's 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 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, 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 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.

Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of stuff happened in 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 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 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 in dy like in dy be in 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 AI labeling. 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. Great analogies. Both. 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. Like, I, I think it is, it could be such a win for society and mankind or person kind that I don't want to sifle 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, coming out of North America.

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 got to get on labeling. Like we, we need to get on. Is it real? As a, as a society, that's going to be a question of like, do I know what I?

what I'm looking at occurred and exists. Because prior to like three years ago, that cost 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 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 it, 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 hope we're still in that era for a little bit longer. Every time we talk about something like 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 YouTube for hours. You're playing silly games. But to speak like, 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 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 personal confidence in people. Like, it has so many impacts. Like I am, and you will tell if you were a follower of this show in any social media platform, I don't use social media. We make this podcast and either of us are big posters anywhere else. Yes, correct. Yeah. My Instagram feed has, I think, a few photos from like 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. 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 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. Yes. We've 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 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, okay. There's been a lot of discussion around online multiplayer gaming. Yeah, I was going to say, if they pass the thing saying you can't go on Roblox. Roblox will go to literal war with you. For sure. They're currently excluded Roblox Fortnite, call it duty. But I assume they're probably going to have a knock-on set of regulations that apply to those.

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 to register an account, we have the same age verification stuff. But if you want to 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 maybe a potentially a way of doing it. Interesting. The Discord caught a pass on this.

Not unless it is a, 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 your 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, 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. A hundred percent. 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're 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%.

And we're back. 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? 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. Is it 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. Okay. Is the Robotaxi 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. Yeah. 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 on 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 that would be important for me. It was a big year. It's interesting.

The Tesla Roboto actually got announced, but it was a big year at say for Waymo. Yeah, like Wayne. One of the ones. I think Waymo was in Cali, right? They're the one in California. Yeah, Ramo. And I think they're in Phoenix now, too. Like they're running fully operational in a measure cities.

Like people use them in those cities. They don't have them up here in Canada. And I'm, 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. And it is 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. Like 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 to 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 going to 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. True. 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 reroute dynamically the removal of signaling from roadways because they'll be able to do it automated. Anyway, 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. 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 a cultural fallout of like the three and a half million truck drivers and the three million drive like all of these people and all of that like economic you know output just being like a now the robots the Google Google and Tesla have that but it's such a

giant computing problem. It's not like a thing that you can 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. You need 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 impacted this? How? on the like shocking like if five percent 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 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 going to have to answer that question yeah I don't disagree with you but I 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 will be a short-term shock, 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 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 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 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. Like, oh, no, yeah, that's just a, 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.

That's a good. Neither can I. Optimistically optimize our utility. Optimistically optimize our utility. Proactive AI and optimize utility. I think that's my big. The things that I'm most excited for. What a year, man.

What a year? We made some, we made some episodes that I'm like quite pleased about in the past year. I highly recommend just if I'm 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 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. A little foreign reporter. I had a lot of fun making that one.

Totally. Me too. Yeah. That one was good. I really liked our interview with Adam from Push. That was a lot of fun. Yeah. a 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 patreon we we appreciate and every single one of you um merch store store dot hackpodcast dot com go go buy a hat um happy holidays 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, let's look forward for the show. My 2026 goals, and I've talked about this with you for, with you is to decide very intentionally to not know what this show is.

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. Who, with that mandate, who would we interview? What would we talk? about it's still going to be the two of us talking and doing interviews. Like its basic format is going to change.

But I want to get weird with it in 2026. I want to broaden 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 that we can have way more fun on YouTube. And it would give us a little bit more of that game's commie vibe where we can jump on a lane, go meet up with somebody who's a really interesting interview, interview them, turn it into YouTube and social content. Be a little bit more intentional with the video side of the podcast.

I like that too. 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 if you want to point your eyeballs at us, maybe you can do that too. Well, prove to you that we are not AIs. 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 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 this 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. year. I'm ready for the end of the year to begin in 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.