2025 Tech Predictions Results - DTNS 5175

0:01This is the DTNS 2025 Tech Predictions Results show for Tuesday, December 30th, 2025. From Studio Animal House, I'm Sarah Lane. From Studio 7 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. From chilly Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. From deep in the heart of Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Also joining us, producer and host of the CISO series, David Spahr! Yay! Always sunny San Diego. Fantastic. We are gathered together again almost a year to the day from when we gathered last year when our panel gave us two predictions each, but we added two elements to our scoring last year.

0:46One, the other panelists came up with a difficulty rating for each prediction. So for instance, if one of them predicted that Apple will release a new iPhone next year, they got a 0.1 rating, meaning you only get 0.1 credit. But if you predicted AGI would arise in January, maybe we gave you a 10-point multiplayer. Second, each panelist got to add a plus one on another panelist prediction one time and then also get credit if they got that right. And that's why we're here today to check our predictions and find out how many points we scored and which ones we got right. We are going to start with you, Sarah Lane.

1:25Hold on. Can I just pause and say I want to just say kudos that this show even exists. because the number of prediction shows that I've seen that people just make the predictions and there's no reference to the fact whether they got it right or wrong. It's all the other ones. And this is the only one that I know of that actually holds us to our predictions and finds out how right or wrong we are. And I will just ask this. Is partial credit going to be given? Because some of these seem like they were half right. We always end up doing partial credits, sometimes quarter credits. All right. Sarah, your first prediction was that Apple would release a much cheaper version of the Apple Vision Pro to better compete with the MetaQuest and maybe call it the Apple Vision SE, as well as continuing development for the Vision OS.

2:17And this was a five-point multiplayer? No? Is that what that says? Wow. That's what it says. Yeah, five points. That's what it says. Sub$1 ,000, you predicted. now okay it is sub$1 ,000 because it doesn't exist sure and they did continue development of the vision os with a minor point upgrade and there still is quite a bit of chatter about a cheaper uh a vision pro product but let's just be honest i was wrong not only were you wrong they didn't change it by a dollar no no no it's it's it's it is what it is it's still$3 ,500 dollars uh the meta quest at three hundred dollars i thought you know they're not going to bring it down to three hundred dollars that that would be that would be but sub 1000 would make a lot of sense for apple and supposedly they've been working on one so well yeah no no no i don't think i'm wrong i am wrong in 2025 yeah exactly i'm wrong in 2025 and it's also not going to be called the apple vision se because all the naming conventions over at apple are different anyway which i didn't know a year ago.

3:23So I'm going to go ahead and take this one to the chin and say, no, I did not get this right. No points. Let me ask a question of everybody else. This is close to a 12X difference in price to the competition. Have we seen this ever play out where one competitor is 12X more expensive than the next competitor? Is the MetaQuest the competition? Because the Samsung Galaxy XR did come out and it's cheaper like at half the price i feel like that's more equivalent x is insane yeah yeah yeah but nobody thought i mean look the the famous steve bomber uh uh chuckle about nobody's going to spend that much money on a on a cell phone yeah you know defined the iphone so it's like that that you can go 12x the price you just got to deliver the goods and right the goods remain undelivered.

4:15Yeah, our delivery has been delayed. The driver will contact you with more information soon. I think we give you one point for continuing development of the Vision OS. Okay. Because you had a five-point multiplayer. So you could have... The multiplayer thing is slightly confusing to me, but I will take a point. We're giving you point two of a point, and then there's a five-point multiplayer, which makes it a full point. Okay. All right. Yeah. You guys just really wanted to complicate this show, didn't you? I hope somebody's tracking the score. I'm tracking it. All right. Waymo. You're on. We'll move on.

4:50It's got one question. Oh, sure, Rob. Do we think that Vision Pro will be a thing in 2026? No. No. I think they're done with it. Nobody wants to take an extra beat on that? Maybe 2027. I think as Cook wanes, we will see – there are higher priorities for Apple. Yeah, they're going to change a lot. Especially with new leadership coming in. I don't know. I don't know. There's going to be a new Cook in the kitchen. I wouldn't be super surprised if they came out with a lower-cost Vision Pro because that would have been already in the works. and maybe just sort of see what you sell and try to bundle that into other initiatives.

5:39We'll see. All right. Your second prediction was that Waymo, Zooks, Tesla, and Uber would all continue to expand service areas for robo-taxis because of positive feedback from riders. And by the end of 2025, having a human driver taking you somewhere will still be possible, but waning. Waning, kind of the word of the day, huh? All right. So I may have been a little ambitious with this one, but I don't think I'm off at all. I think by the end of 2025, we have seen huge expansion with Waymo, certainly Uber, Tesla, you know, and Zooks are in the mix as well in various markets. Obviously, in the US, it's kind of Waymo, depending on where you live, but quite a few expansions.

6:25And there are other companies doing it as well. The whole idea of autonomous vehicles taking over for not just – it's like not that people aren't going to own cars and drive cars themselves, but hailing an Uber or a taxi or whatever it is, point A to point B, I got to go to the airport type thing. It is not the thing that it used to be. Now, I must say in the area of Los Angeles that I live in, we are way more crazy around here. They're all over the place. So I may have a somewhat distorted view of, of how other people feel. You're way more exposed to it. I'm way more exposed. Yes. Very good. But I do feel like once they can tackle a variety of other kind of urban and suburban areas, this is the future.

7:17Can I say you are right if you are in Austin, Texas, because I have seen way more self-driving cars that I ever have before in my life. It is actually crossed the threshold where I don't, they're not odd to me anymore. Like I see them. I was at a four way stop in South Austin with two Waymos and a robo taxi. And I was like, that is crazy. And I had a thought in my mind, like, I wonder when it's going to stop being odd. And it happened like a month afterward. I saw him like, Oh, how they in Columbus there, Rob non-existent. We don't see them here. So because of that, I think that the first half of your prediction, absolutely right.

7:59But the other side of the prediction, do I see human drivers waning? No, I see them actually increasing as well. Because in a place like here in the Midwest, everybody has cars. You just drive everywhere. That's just the way that the cities are set up. So what you're starting to see is Uber and Lyft move out into the suburbs more than they ever have been before. So it is definitely an increase of Ubers in my area. If I go back a year, if I want to get an Uber, it might be at my house, it might be 45 minutes to get one. During the week, you can definitely get one within 15, 20 minutes. There's just more people up this way that are driving that are outside of the city.

8:42Even though I live in the city, I am 10 miles outside of the city. Where I live was annexed back to Columbus because they built a billion dollar mall 20 years ago. So, um, the thing is that it's going to be also cost beneficial in the suburbs and once it's really, it's going to be the young people, whether they're getting their driver's license or not, whether they're going to want to get a car or not, that's going to determine whether there is a more greater movement of these, uh, vehicles, both autonomous and, you know, uh, human driving of whether there's going to be more. I think it's really – it's not the people who already own cars and are driving like myself.

9:19It's going to be the people like my kids, whether they're going to be doing that. They're thinking, well, it's far more cost-efficient. I don't have to buy car insurance, which for a teenage boy is extraordinarily expensive, way cheaper to call a car. If that demand increases, then the supply will increase. It's not you, David. It's your kids that are taking on taxes. taxes. As my friend Steve Rosenfield would say, kids are our future and there's not a damn thing we can do. Unfortunately. Okay. So if you had stopped at continue to expand service areas, you would have absolutely nailed this. How much of credit do we want to give Sarah?

9:58That felt too vague. That felt too vague. So I wanted to shoot my shot. I think at most a half a point, I think on this, but I would be, I'd be comfortable with the half a point yeah i'll go i'll go with the half a point let me also just say this with a lot of these waymos and rubber taxis out here in in austin the what i think will be the defining reputation of these cars has settled in which is boy are they fun to write in but they're slow because they have to obey all the laws yeah there was a big article recently about Waymo tweaking things to not follow the rules so strictly. To not be aggressive, but to be more human-esque.

10:41Human driver. Ah, now there is some utility. That'll get me there quick. Somebody who knows how to fudge the law a little bit. Like nobody drives 55 on the highway. Talk to Sammy about it. Yeah. All right, let's get to you, Rob Dunwood. Your first prediction for 2025 was that we would see a massive return to office initiative for companies. I think I nailed that one. I'm just looking here. Amazon, AT &T, Disney, Google, Microsoft, Starbucks, JP Morgan, Chase, State Farm, Kroger. The list just goes on and on and on. Companies, you know, by large and part, they have instituted some type of back to office, whether it be full blown Amazon, where you're back in the office five days a week.

11:28Most companies didn't do that. Most went three to four days a week or some are like a flex schedule where you come in one week and then you're off a week. But I think back to office is just the way things are going to continue going forward. I thought that it was a pipe dream to think that there's literally trillions of dollars of commercial real estate in downtown areas of large cities that was just going to go vacant because people didn't like going to work or going back to work. that just wasn't tenable for all that real estate. So I think that this one got nailed. I will give you credit too, Rob, on this one.

12:03And I think the key word was you put the word initiative in there. If you just said, we'll see a massive return to office, that you wouldn't have succeeded as much. But the initiative is key because while the initiative is there, not a lot of people are accepting it. That's the other issue. But I think it wouldn't be because of that. That is a big part of it. A lot of people are very upset about it but i think what you're seeing because of that what companies are doing is like oh you're making it really easy for me to lay you off um well there's that too and somebody's saying like i can go no problem i'll find something well in this market i mean like this is this currently yeah yeah this this i mean like honestly that's that was an attitude that very much three years ago i think people had which it's like like yeah you know i'll value my freedom i'll try my hand on the open market, but there's been a lot, especially in the tech field, man, I've known a lot of people on the beach for a lot longer than they were expecting to be.

12:59Yeah. I caution young millennials like my oldest daughter. I caution them to say, you know, they came up, they were in college when we were in the shutdown and they really have never had that first real job outside of college. And they just got used to, oh, let's just go here because everybody was hiring for people to work remote. And this group of people are saying, I'm never going to go into an office. And I just say, be very, very careful with that because never is not really that long. Never was about a year and a half, two years. And I think that you're going to even see more of it in 2026.

13:34I think that this is just, we're going back to pre-pandemic for the most part. I think that there will still be companies that do flex, But it's not going to be unheard of that you actually go to an office, sit down in a cubicle or in an office in an office building and work there for 40, 50 hours a week every single week. I just I don't think that is a thing that we will get an eye lift, you know, an eyelid at in two, three years from now. I agree with you. I think that it's largely going to come when we do see the next big hiring boom. whenever that happens, when rates come down and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, the tectonic plates will align, there'll be more jobs, but those jobs will come with a string, which is you got to show up in the office, where I think the new baseline is going to settle, because I don't think everything's going to go back to exactly the way it was, is kind of where things were in tech.

14:25I think this will be just kind of general office stuff. But in tech, leading up to the pandemic, you were, If you could make a persuasive case why you needed to go and you were valuable enough to your team, then they would allow you to work remote. It just wasn't an everybody thing. It was you had to prove yourself a little bit. You had to be valuable to the company for you to extract a little bit of that value back out. And I do think what's changing is that that's not going to be for everybody anymore, and that's not going to be a baseline. I think the tide's going out and leaving a watermark in a little different place, though.

15:03We are, I think in the future, you're going to have companies that are, you're going to say, what kind of company do you work for? Is it an in-office, hybrid, or remote company? Because there's still plenty of companies that advertise themselves as remote. And that is something that you didn't see a lot of. I think you're going to continue to see more of them than you did in 2019, but less of them than you did in 2021, if that makes sense. All the job listing services have that as an option. As an option. Yeah, you can filter it out. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I signed up for like just, you know, Podcaster on LinkedIn however long ago.

15:40And, you know, just to kind of see what sort of stuff comes up. And there are quite a few jobs now. Many of them would not apply to any of us. But, you know, remote, hybrid, on-site. Remote, hybrid, on-site. There's quite a few companies that are like, no, it's on site in Philadelphia. So I'm like, okay, well, I can't do that. By the way, for anybody who's looking for jobs on LinkedIn, it is a lost cause. And I'm going to tell you why, as someone who has posted this stuff, LinkedIn has a process where it shuts it off after 50 resumes get submitted. Those come in literally within minutes. So it's bots.

16:16Then they charge you an exorbitant fee daily to keep your job up. Well, people like me, I don't want to pay an exorbitant fee daily to just keep a listing up. So I don't put it up. So what happens is nobody essentially sees it at all. So I'll tell people who are looking for jobs on LinkedIn, probably only the big companies have the money to keep job listings going on a daily basis are the ones that are going to be paying for that. All right. That's a three-point multiplier for Rob. We're giving them all three points, sounds like. Good job, Rob. So let's go to number two. apple intelligence flops much like the metaverse did which also recently wow so eight point multiplier by the way i can't believe you gave them that many points i mean you gave them that many points too you were there when we assigned these multipliers i don't know why i agreed to this so here's my thought on this i think it's even worse for apple than i thought it was going to be because at least with meta you got it wrong it tried for like meta tried for four years better tried for four years apple's like nah google you could take this you're saying flops wasn't strong enough of a word so you should only get seven points i think he gets even more points because earlier in december uh met is quitting on the metaverse um which which actually closed the gap a little so i don't know i yeah are we we're giving you all eight points on that one oh all all eight in fact i i i agree with david i don't know how this got up to eight that's some inflationary yeah points but like but that being said no you absolutely nailed it in fact you know are we talking about a succession in leadership at apple if it didn't flop as hard as it has over the past two years would we be talking about would wall street journal have run a story earlier this month about how many people have left apple over the past 12 months yeah Yeah, probably not.

18:13This is this is a gigantic miss for Apple. And I've been saying this since last year. I think they're so far behind. It doesn't really matter what they do. They cannot catch up just because of the nature of Apple. They are so into this is going to sound weird because it's not like the other companies are not into security, but they are not into it like Apple is. And because of that, I don't think Apple can ever catch up. I don't know anyone that's like, man, I really want the phone that I have to do AI stuff on the phone because I care so much about security. I'm just not hearing those kind of conversations.

18:50What I'm hearing is that this stuff that if you are an AI person, the stuff that you can do on someone else's server that probably has an NVIDIA GPU in it is is freaking awesome. And that's just not where Apple is. So they're going to work with with Google this year or into next year. They'll work with other companies. But I just don't see Apple in the AI space in any real way other than they make it secure on their device and they try to make it secure for the companies that they are contracting with. I will say don't say never say never because Apple is in the media business now. Apple and as is Amazon, companies cross over all the freaking time.

19:34and it would just take talent and heck buying somebody else. So it could happen, but you were right on this and it hurts that you're getting eight points. I'm angry. And right now, I'm angry about this. I'm upset about this. And I'm putting in my formal protest. I didn't give myself an eight point multiplier. I don't know how the heck. I'm not being drunk last year. I don't know what I was thinking. All right. Let's check in on the scoreboard. Sarah has 3.5. Rob has 11. Gee, I wonder if I'll win. If you want to discuss what Sarah's chances were at this point in the show, you can do so in our Discord, which you can join by linking a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS.

20:20All right, let's check in on how David Spark did with his predictions for 2025. The first one was high profile social engineering with AI generated voice and video said we're just waiting for this to happen. there's going to be a CEO impersonated, a political leader impersonated, or something that's going to create a massive news event, and it's going to cause a major disruption three-point multiplier. I mean, we're definitely seeing this. I don't know if I can think of a major disruption that happened as a result. We have not had a major disruption, but there's definitely been significant plays, and it's happened.

20:58And I mean, my feeling is this is if it didn't happen this year, you don't get the point. If it didn't happen, you know, it's going to happen damn soon. I think you're early. I think you're early. I think that this is not a this was clearly not a 2025 thing. It might be a 2026 thing, but it is definitely a end of this decade. I'm going to be surprised. Yeah. So I'll be shocked if this doesn't happen. Well, I mean, the other thing is – I mean, a year ago I would have agreed with you, David, 100%. I would be like there's going to be – somebody is going to have the president say something and it's going to be so believable that the stock market crashes.

21:39People have tried and continue to. It turns out everyone is too skeptical. I can't think of – right. Yeah. We just don't believe anything anymore. Which is great. Yeah, the question to the idea of like a big security breach or something that would be a business scandal is this may well have happened. There are a lot of various different ransomware or attacks and stuff like that that wind up just getting settled quietly. So this may well have happened. But part of it is it being covered. We did have this happen with ransomware. Well, we did a very recent story of Jaguar Land Rover had a ransomware attack, and it actually moved the GDP of the UK market by 0.2%.

22:290.2 of a percent. 0.2 of a percent. Yeah, yeah. That is huge. Then one incident moved GDP for a country. Now, it wasn't – Yeah, but it was the UK. Yeah, it was Europe. Like there's like 11. Like if one has a bad day, you know, it's going to tank their market. But I'm just saying one incident, one company affected GDP. So is that a massive news event with major disruption? That is, but it's not deep fake. That has to do with ransomware. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I don't win on that. All right. Any points for David on this one? Going on? I don't know. I think he gets at least a point. I want to give some points because I think David is right.

23:14No one can name the story. That's the problem. But the thing is, there have been tons of deep fakes that have fooled people. And we have seen, I'm sorry, we've definitely seen hiccups around deep fakes, but we've definitely seen hiccups in the market where you see the major disruptions around the dinner table. Yeah, people are fighting. I'm sorry. I can't name it here, David. No, I'm sorry. No, going once, going twice. All right. One point multiplier for the next one. So we all were like, yeah, this is going to happen. AI backlash against audio and to a lesser extent video. Maybe you got it wrong because I think it might have been worse for video.

23:55We're all dazzled by what AI can do with audio and video. And audio AI is indistinguishable from the real thing. But as we find out a piece of audio or podcast is generated, we turn it off. While it sounds perfect, it puts us at an unease, kind of akin to what the Uncanny Valley does. we'll see the same with video, but only if there are talking heads involved, which there were, will still be dazzled by small doses, but won't accept it for long periods of time. Hmm. Well, it really depends on who you talk to. I just asked the audience, I asked you, when have you listened to, let's say, five minutes or more of any AI-generated audio or video?

24:33That I knew about? Yes, that you knew. I knew this is AI-generated. Oh, yeah, many times on Sora. You do? Yeah. When? When I'm using Sora, just looking through all the stuff that people have created. But those are little blips. Those are one-minute blips apiece. I'm talking about one continuous. Oh, one continuous. Okay. Yeah, something that's more, like, I don't know, akin to what we're doing right now. I actually listen to Su-Nose. Rather than, like, Exploding Kittens. Yeah. I listen to Su-Nose radio for, like, an hour and a half. And that's an AI-generated voice, and you listen to that regularly?

25:06No, not a voice. it was music that's so i'm talking about a person talking i think you're getting this one i think i know i get my whopping point yay me if you yeah if you if you want an example of that i've actually we've used so when we edit world's greatest con the podcast that i do with brian brushwood and will sadelberg will and i will try to workshop the script but podcast script editing is a lot easier to do when you're hearing it than when you're reading it. And what we have done in the past, and we did this year several times, was to run the script, what we call a garbage script. It's our first stab at it.

25:49First draft. We'll run it through Eleven Labs and have our host, Brian Brushwood's voice, read it. And so I will listen to an hour-long podcast that is there. Now, it is there so I can analyze the structure of the story and see what I like and what I don't like, and we can go forward with it. But that is a thing that I have listened to hours of audio-generated voice podcasting. As a tool for what will eventually still be a human voice. Yes. No one's enjoying this, I will just say. I'll point to Tilly Norwood, the supposed virtual actor that made a huge controversy on Variety and Deadline when the company that generates that character said they were going to get her an agent.

26:36And all the backlash and Sturman drawing about something that still hasn't happened yet, or at least it hadn't the last I checked. There's backlash. There's backlash against this. Oh, yeah. That's the one thing I saw. I think a lot of people feel the way I do on this. i'm i'm looking at uh who is it i heart radio they just recently banned um ai generated music on their platform i mean and i you know they're not the first either there have been some smaller platforms too but they're one of the biggest yeah there are a lot of people myself included i am not a fan of the ai generated uh you know music because it displaces what real people are doing And I will say that some of it out there is actually compelling.

27:19There are these channels where they're taking AI and they're using it to take like rap songs and like take a 50s song and then make it like a 60s blues song. Yes. And if you listen to it, it's like that actually didn't sound that bad. But then it's like, wait a minute. This is you took somebody else's work and you have put all kind of A.I. to it to create something else from it. I want to make sure that those artists are absolutely being paid for that if that's happening to their music. And it's like, you know, even though it does sound good and it's only going to sound better, I'm just not a fan of that because I think you're taking someone else's work and you are, you know, you're repersoning in a way that they didn't necessarily intend.

28:08Well, that's the call to cover. And we have a system for that, the mechanical royalty system. And AI shouldn't be an exception to that. They should have to pay that just like anything else. over on um just just you know while we're still on the subject uh uh ai i don't listen to a lot of ai generated content whether it you know be news or music every so often yeah you know there's a funny instagram account where there's like a cat who's always like launching grenades out off the driveway it's very funny but um it's not a real cat but uh but over on dig uh which is relaunching it's still in beta right now but you know dig is is re-emerging they've got something called dig daily which is it's basically a tech headlines podcast two hosts they're both ai it's very obvious that they're ai you know the first time i listened to it because of course i'm always i'm always curious like what's my competition and i was like this is awful like on it like i think they must be able to afford someone like me you know and but there's like there's like a backstory Kevin.

29:11Right, yeah, exactly. I know how you actually talking about this. You got my number, Kev. Yeah, but there's like a backstory how the AI hosts are apparently learning over time. Uh-huh. So that, I was like, oh, that's kind of clever. I still don't like it, but it's kind of clever. Yeah. So I don't think it's all bad. I would make the argument I would make against this prediction is that I think that we have seen more AI-generated content acceptance this year and not less. Well, there's just more content. There's a lot of backlash against it. Yeah, you're right. Maybe there is more acceptance. I found a list of the top 100 AI generated podcasts.

29:53I mean, they're garbage. Nobody seems to like them, but it exists. It's just there's more there. Of course, they're easy to make, hard to make good, but you can. All right, that gets you a point. So nobody's pointless yet. Let's move on to Justin Robert Young. You can get them. Wait a minute. Justin's first prediction was a company will announce AGI, AKA artificial general intelligence. So that didn't happen. The reason why I said this did happen, which was I believed open AI was going to announce AGI because they were coming to a fork in the road with their deal with Microsoft and the way that they would be able to essentially divest themselves from Microsoft would be to announce that they had achieved AGI and that because it's a weird, slippery definition, they can just declare it and have the metrics by which they say that it happened, and that would be that.

30:56That did come to pass. They did hit that fork in the road, but they decided to make a deal with Microsoft as part of their reconfiguring into a company that can eventually IPO. So no. And also, I kind of feel like the AGI conversation is sort of even losing steam as it almost clearly has happened. The things that we would consider AGI five years ago are at our fingertips now, But I think that's kind of losing. The needle's moving constantly. Yeah. Also, I don't think – here's what I've noticed with all the AI. There isn't – it's moving at a very rapid clip, but there isn't a situation where one company's here and all of a sudden jumps light years ahead of everybody else.

31:49Everyone's moving at the same speed. And it's moving very, very fast, but it isn't the one is just leapfrogging miles ahead of the others. Because it's very, very easy to replicate the thing. Well, relatively easy. Well, not very, very easy. It's relatively easy to replicate what the other labs are doing. So that's the reason why you don't see a tremendous separation. And that's the reason why they try to do whatever they can secret, secret. Well, what I'm seeing is just what everyone is sort of pointing to is the interface, depending on what you're using. One interface is better than the other in terms of generating the data, in terms of refining the data.

32:31Like that's where it's all coming. They're all kind of working in the same space because if you look at it like AI image generation programs two, two and a half years ago as compared today, you know, it's light years ahead. But again, similarly, they were all kind of moving at the same pace. The differentiators were the user interface and how easy or difficult it was to refine what you wanted. I think it says something that it turned out that it was easier to renegotiate an entire contract with Microsoft than to declare AGI. Than to declare AGI. And declare themselves an enemy of Microsoft, which is going to be the other side.

33:08Why did Justin only get a four-point multiplier, yet ask yourself. Well, I've got an eight-point multiplier on an Apple intelligence block. That is a big controversy. If I remember back to last year, the reason is because I was adamant that Apple intelligence was dead in the water. And all of you folks who I assume use iPhones were like, I don't know. I was on your side. I was on your side. Check the tape. I have nagged on Apple's AI stuff from the jump. All right. I joined Justin's wrong prediction for AGI, which reminded me that, David, you joined Rob's correct prediction about return to office.

33:51So you get an extra three points because you joined that. We gave it three points. So I get nothing for joining Justin's prediction. I'm bouncing back in. Nobody joined any of my stuff. No, I don't think they joined. All right. Your second prediction, Justin, was that CNN will be sold and be a tile on another service. And you came darn close. So Netflix agreed to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, but they left CNN out of that deal. So CNN not yet sold. Well, and they're not going to be a tile, you know. Yeah. I mean, look, I feel like I was pretty. You were close. The tectonic plates, I had guessed correctly, their movements.

34:40The exact examples to show their movement, I was off by. But yeah, I've been a believer that Warner Brothers Discovery was more up for sale than they were certainly saying a year ago. They went from kind of up for sale to definitely up to sale to now earlier this month, for which we don't know anything else after earlier this month for some puzzling reason. and we all got knocked on the head and have amnesia. Too much eggnog. Exactly. I think Justin should get something for this because this was, again, No. Why? It was very specific and it didn't happen. No, but because it was a major player getting bought.

35:22And again, he shouldn't have just received a three-point mark. Justin was saying CNN specifically would be sold, too. Jason shorted CNN. That was the wrong play. Yeah. Well, the other problem is that - You should have just said some kind of major media outlet was going to get. No, in general, the one thing that I got very wrong is that I thought that live news would be more valuable than it is. But nobody I keep thinking there's going to be some player, Netflix, Apple, Paramount, somebody maybe Paramount wanted to do it. Right. But like they were going to look at live matters and when news breaks, live news really matters.

36:09That's a reason why you should have whatever subscription. And they were going to snap up a solution to that, which is CNN. CNN is – if there's one thing that no matter what, if live news is breaking, people tend to go to CNN. And yet nobody has done that. The entire live news industry has done nothing but crumble since I have made that prediction. CNN is less valuable than it was a year ago. MSNBC had to do a name change because NBC wanted to get away from it. It's not news that people want. It's opinion. So how many people do you hear, you know, my favorite news source? It's AP and Reuters. Nobody says that at all.

36:52I do, but. Well, yeah. I mean, I think – but that's the thing is I think opinion is very saturated in other places. Yeah, but that's what people want. That's what drives the – Yes, I know. But they'll serve that. Yeah. My point is that if it lives as a tile somewhere, you strip it down. They're not in seven studios. They're in two studios. And you don't pay the big talent what the big talent gets. You have a few people that are your trusted anchors, and they are doing more live coverage than they are doing opinion coverage. but you do it a lot cheaper. Nobody in the media world agrees with me, and I am loud wrong.

37:31All right. So Justin has no points on the board. By the way, I was lobbying for you, Justin, to get something because the major media play. No, no, no, no, no. Look, I like to consider all those moral victories, but for the love of the game, I will not give myself real victories. So Rob is leading with 11. David has four. Sarah has 3.5 and Justin has nothing. Let's see how few points I get. I spoke, I think I just wrote too much with this one. My first prediction was agentic AI. Most of us will have used or be using at least one agent to speed up part of our day, most likely for some kind of work thing, but could also be for something like personal finance or even shopping.

38:14I think you only gave me a one point multiplier. So you all pretty much agreed, but we're not quite there yet. i don't well most of us most of us on yeah that's i said too many words yeah yeah most of us on earth we're not there yet but i would say most of us on this podcast i don't use an agent every day i do don't use it every day what do you use every day okay i'll take it uh well i mean not for something repetitive not not using chat gpt to do something i mean an agent where it's like go do this and then it goes out and it executes multiple i would say yeah no i mean honestly i'm in experimental phase i'm not every day okay i have that i have i go to orange theory and i'll have an agent check there's a reddit that posts what the workout's going to be the next day okay so i'll have it scrape that and then interpret it for me um and then i have pulse i have the chat GPT personal assistant that will give me things and read my calendar every day.

39:23So what you're saying is I get zero points. I think that you should get more. Look, there's enough agentic stuff out there that, again, this is another problem that we have with the AGI thing, where it's like what we have now, what we interact with now, would be considered agentic like three years ago. Sure. But now it's like, ah, whatever. I mean, this goes back to just product development in general. What's happening is all these people have these amazing capabilities and tools in their hand. And what they're just doing is proving things it can do. What they're not doing is listening to the users and saying, what is your problem?

40:04Let's actually look at the process of your problem, create the product for the process of your problem. So the choice to actually deploy it becomes instantaneous. And us all talking about it proves that not only is it not instantaneous, nobody can deploy the damn thing. I don't agree with that. If I had written most companies will market at least one agent to speed up a day, I'd have nailed it. You'd have nailed it a little early. And I'm trying to think, am I using agents daily? And I don't think they're agents because it's just like Zapier. It's just Zaps. That's what I get. We use Zapier for little reminders, and that's about it.

40:44Yeah, pull this data out of this, combine it with this data, massage it this way, stick it into Airtable, then send me an email with a formatted output. But that's not agentic. That's just, you know, if this, then that type. Sure, yeah. Sounds like you're talking dirty, Rob. Yeah, but hold on. What would you consider agentic then? if I hadn't built these apps four or five years ago, and I would have built them today, and they're now using agentic stuff to actually do it. I think some of the things that I'm doing with Zapier very well could be done with agents. They're just not yet. So I don't want to say that I am absolutely using agents.

41:27I could be. There's no business reason for me to go and go through the work of taking a process that already works and converting it into something that also will work and give me the same output because i would make the argument that what we understand as just ai generated search is far more agentic than we are giving it credit oh yeah deep research whether whichever version of it you're using open ai google whatever like that is an agent right it is going out and doing looking at sources and compiling making intelligent decisions along the But I discount that one. I use deep research all the time, but I'm like, wow, that's not an agent, right?

42:06But the thing is, sometimes the research can be multiple levels when you make the request on formatting. So a perfect example, one of the things that we use AI for is, hey, we want to make a game on such and such. Create a game with three options and 10 questions. So what it has to do is do the research, collect the information, format it in a level that is agentic right there because it's doing multiple steps. Yeah. And making decisions at each step. Like counting the number of agents on a pin is interesting if it gets me a point. Otherwise, it's like, yeah, it's going to key. The definition is going to keep changing.

42:41I think, however, I may get some points. Well, thank you, Justin. For people will complain constantly about passkey because it's used a lot and people complain about everything. And y 'all gave me a six-point multiplier on this. I submit. I mean, Ron Richards complains about Passkey almost every week on Android Faithful. And I hear people write into me and are like, you keep saying Passkey is great. But when I tried to use it on this thing, it was confusing. So I'll leave it up to you. But I feel like maybe I get at least partial credit for this one. I have never heard anyone complain about Passkey in my life.

43:19I think, again, this is sort of like... Is it Ron Richards and a couple people that emailed you? Or is it a lot of people? I think that's where you either get points or you don't. I think Ron Richards himself is a lot of people. Ron Richards, he contains multitudes. He wears many hats. He wears so many hats. I don't use a passkey. I don't know if it's a lot. I can't say this a lot, but there are people that I hear who complain about passkey. But it's not so much about passkey. It's about the fact that you're using something like passkey and still have passwords around that invalidate all the great things about passkey.

43:57It's like that we have to pull the, you know, rip the bandaid off and go completely in the passkey and not still have that password around. That's usually the complaint that I hear. I didn't say a lot of people. I just said people will complain constantly about that. Well, I mean. Then you just need two and then you win. Yeah. So, yeah. So there are folks who are complaining about passkey and implementation of it regularly. Probably not as much as I was predicting, honestly. So I'll take, but I'll take partial credit. You all want to give me partial credit? I'll give you partial credit. But I will say this.

44:26I was just at a conference called Authenticate, which is pretty much – it's all about authenticating individuals online very heavily on passkeys. I swear, I think in one day I heard passkeys 950 times. They are high on passkeys. Everybody's high on their passkey supply. Well, it's run also by the Fido Alliance who's really pushing all this. Yeah. How many points out of six? Six-point multiplier. Whatever makes me ahead of Tom. Two at most. Three would keep me behind you, Sarah. I mean, give him a three, though. All right. Three it is. And that brings us to the final standings in first place. Rob Dunwood with 11.

45:12Ran away with it. I'm blaming all of us for giving him that multiplier. David Spark with the silver at four points. I can't believe I did that. Sarah Lane with the bronze, 3.5. I'm on the podium. and standing below the podium, looking up and applauding Tom with three and Justin with zero. Well done, everybody. You all win. I'm like, I'm like, I'm like Pennywise in the gutter. Like I'm not even on the street. No, I appreciate your bravery though. You had big swings, you know, you know, if you swing. That's what prediction shows are all about. I have no, I have no, I have no shame in my game. Shoot or shoot, dude.

45:50That's right. That's right. You're not going to sink any threes if you don't shoot them from behind the line. So one suggestion from folks, multiple folks suggested this was they noticed that sometimes we'll make a prediction and we'll say, and we said it a couple times this show, well, we were close. That's probably going to happen next year. And so they suggested, can you look at an old predictions episode from maybe five years ago and look and see if any of those predictions maybe weren't true the year later, but have become true in the intervening five years. so we did we looked at our predictions that were made in december 2020 for the year 2021 scott johnson predicted nintendo would release a full generational sequel to the switch with a couple of big nintendo titles didn't happen in 2021 but it did happen in 2025 that's true yeah yeah rob dunwood predicted mobile payments finally become mainstream in the u.s definitely mainstream now in 2025 oh yeah yes even earlier than this year lamar wilson predicted disney would fold hulu into the disney plus app didn't happen in 2021 definitely happened in 2025 yeah well it's not over 100 million subscribers no he did get that part of it wrong you're right yeah uh i predicted antitrust suits against amazon and apple from the united states uh that's happened multiple times uh and sarah predicted bitcoin would get back into the mix uh because the price had fallen a lot in 2020 uh and people had stopped believing in it and i i barely remember predicting this but yes we are in a very different situation right now it's been dropping like this last month is probably not the best for this prediction but the intervening five years it It went on a big old bull run.

47:40So we are predictors of the future, just not our timing. Yeah. Well, we're trendsetters. Indeed. We're ahead of the game. Indeed. So listen to us and then head your bets. David Spark, so good to have you on the show today. Let folks know. Thank you very much. Keep up with all the stuff that you do. We all know, but we'd love to have people know more about the CISO series. Well, I want to give you credit. For those of you who don't know, who haven't made the leap of, if you are a lover of Sarah Lane, you love hearing her voice, loving her wisdom around news, maybe even specifically cybersecurity news, you should be listening to our new show, Cybersecurity Headlines.

48:25Actually, what am I saying, new show? It's been around for more than five years. Actually, six years, whatever. New to me. She is a regular reporter on the show. We love having her on. Thank you very much, Sarah, for being a spectacular reporter. But if you're not familiar with the CISO series in general, we have five shows in our network. We drop 10 episodes every single week. And you can hear a lot of Sarah on cybersecurity headlines. So please tune in. And we love having you on our programming. Well, we love the CISO series as well. So everybody check out CISOseries.com. Justin and Robert Young, you are a busy bee, as always.

48:59Heading into the holidays, where can people find your latest? well i'll tell you what go go download the most recent world's greatest con episode uh the original ponzi scheme what was it and why do we still call everything in this incredibly simplistic scheme by one man's name the answer might surprise you it surprised me uh i still remember where i was in my backyard when that episode dropped and i listened to it uh go check that out patrons thank Thank you so much for supporting us. We could not do the show without your help. We completed our 12th year. We will tomorrow complete our 12th year of Daily Tech News show.

49:38Big, big thanks to every single one of you at patreon.com slash DTNS. And we are going to roll into 2026 with another round of new predictions. We will see you tomorrow for the last show of 2025 with our tech predictions for 2026. Scott Johnson will be there. Ron Richards will be there. the one who hates Bowskis. Rob Dunwood will be there. Tom will be there. And I will be there as well. We'll see you then.

50:09The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.