DTNS 2025 Tech News in Review

0:03This is the Daily Tech News Show Year in Review for 2025. 2025, we're going to look back on what the biggest stories of the year were and try to help each other understand why they were. We'll go through four stories or story types we thought were huge in 2025 and then finish what we think the absolute biggest story of the year was. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm Jen Cotter. Let's look back on some of the biggest stories of 2025. All right, Jen, where should we start? I think we should start by having some fun and talking about wearables, because there were a lot more than I thought in the wearables category.

0:45Like, I'm sure everyone remembers, like, oh, like the cool Oakley glasses. Okay, maybe I'm the one who was obsessed with the Oakley glasses. Oh, yeah. Jason Howell liked those, too. He wore them to that Irish event that he went to. Right, right. So we've got that. But there were also things like the rings that I thought would get bigger, but then kind of stalled out. But glasses, glasses were everywhere. Good use cases, less good use cases. What did you really think about this? Yeah, I think I've been saying 2026 is going to be the year of the smart glass because we've been laying the groundwork this year.

1:19Obviously, Meta has a really good take on this and is the first out of the gate. But as Friendster can tell them, being first doesn't always mean you will win the race. Oh, wow. The flashback. So I think we're really setting the groundwork. And of course, Google and Xreal kind of sneaked in under the wire to make a big announcement about Project Aura right at the end of the year with all the details to come next year. Also, I think fitting into the story is the return of Pebble. uh the the core devices from eric mitchikovsky uh got the name pebble back they shipped the pebble duo i'm wearing one right now um it's quite nice if you like that that e-ink screen watch experience and the pebble time is going to be a coloring screen and that one's coming soon uh so yeah i think i think wearables and it's kind of setting the table is what i'd say like Like wearables were setting the table for surpassing the smartphone as the darling device of the technology world.

2:27Yeah, like because of the proliferation of the glasses, obviously I'm more focused on the sports end of it. But the growth of the accessibility features of the translating of the mapping of the this one, I'm less enthused with, but the the face tracking and identification, because like, you know what, I forget names sometimes I just own it and stuff. But I also worry about next year. Are we going to push a little more into the old school glass hole territory? Or do you think everyone's going to be pretty chill about it because they're so used to this technology being everywhere now? Never bet against the Internet getting mad at something.

3:12Well, I think that's going to be a theme through the rest of the story. Yeah, no doubt. But yeah, I think wearables was a big one. And we should also acknowledge VR headsets, you know, because we did get the Samsung Galaxy XR, you know, and the Quest continues to be the leader in that. Didn't get anything new from Apple on that. So we'll have to wait for next year for that. Any other any other thoughts on the wearable story? I do like so people who have glasses like regular glasses might be kind of set on their glasses and not want to have to spend more. people who don't wear glasses may not choose to invest in this if they don't feel enough of use case for it.

3:51I think everyone's pretty happy with where their smart watches are at right now, whether or not it's a Pebble, which I do kind of love the old school screen. It feels retro, even though it's kind of a recent tech. But the rings, like that's a spot that people might have more room on their hands for these days. So I want to see where those are. And Pebble announcing a ring as well a very inexpensive uh you know 99 single it's basically a button that you'll be able to tap to record things that'll get sent to your phone um but then i think the rings that do activity tracking and health tracking are probably the ones that are more popular and getting more attention yeah i always wanted to like what if they do like just earrings as buttons for like your smartphone and stuff and then i realized oh people have that with airpods already i'm okay with putting things like under my ear, but not in.

4:42I wonder if there's some bone conducting earring speaker thing that somebody's developing. Yeah, as long as it works with sensitive skin, I think I want to try it. All right. Well, that was fun. Now let's move to our second story, which is the memory crunch. This has been a slow drumbeat all year long. If you've been paying close attention to Daily tech news show. You will have heard the early stories where companies were starting to prepare, memory companies were starting to say, well, we're expecting larger amounts of influxes of orders, and we're doing this and that. Companies like Lenovo and Apple were stockpiling.

5:23Some were reported on more than others. And then if you weren't following, it seemed like all at once in November, everybody was talking about the memory crunch. But the memory crunch is caused by the demand for RAM for data centers. As all these companies are expecting huge demand for their generative model services, they are putting in orders for huge data centers and those people building huge data centers are putting in orders for all the equipment. And one of the biggest needs they have is RAM. It's not the same RAM that goes into your game console or your PC or your phone, but it is made on the same factories.

6:04And if you've got one factory and everybody wants the more expensive data center RAM, you're probably going to have your factory mostly make the data center RAM because you're going to sell it for more money and you've got all these contracts and you want to fulfill them. So we are right now seeing the rise in the prices of RAM. And I think next year we'll see the effects of the shortage of them in consumer products. So right now, if you want to buy RAM for something that's really expensive, next year, when you get a new product, it may only have 12 gigs of RAM instead of 16 or 24 or something bigger.

6:41Yeah. So the last two years, I couldn't buy a graphics card because they were all gone. You can buy all the graphics cards you want. Good news, Jen, for now. It's great. And, you know, people are concerned about SSD prices as well. Yeah, that's a secondary concern. That might materialize. It's not quite at the problem of RAM yet. but it's one to keep an eye on. It's keeping an eye on. But, oh, it hurts. I've needed a new machine for a while, and I regret waiting. I regret waiting so much. Because you also run into where are you ordering from, what's the shipping cost going to be. This may be a Canadian problem as to when you're bringing stuff back and forth over through the U.S.

7:23And then even for a bunch of well-known pre-builds, they're like, hey, well, if you want, we'll do you a pre-build and ship it to you and you can use your existing RAM because you may not want to spend the money on this. And I saw that everywhere right now. People are like, oh, and for gaming, even though it's more specific parts, people are thinking like, oh, is there going to be another bump in price next year for the PlayStation, for the Switch, for people who are still playing Xbox? And then there's the Steam console, which does not have a price yet. And it's probably really good that they didn't announce that.

7:56Yeah, because they haven't locked down their RAM price yet is my guess exactly so uh this is not going to clear up soon uh yes we mentioned gpus uh gpus have ram built in uh and right now that ram is plentiful for the gpus uh but that may not stay the same uh and that could drive up the price of gpus obviously can drive up the price of cpus that also often we'll have on-die RAM. So this is going to be a problem all through 2026 as well. And nobody actually knows when it will ease up because you could bring on more capacity. I mean, obviously the way markets work, when you have huge demand for something, then it incentivizes you to build more capacity to meet that demand, right?

8:45And then that will bring the price back down. The problem with RAM is there are delays in bringing on new capacity. It's not easy to spin up a new factory. It takes a while. And there are concerns about whether the demand for the data center RAM will stay, will stick. And companies don't want to build a bunch of factories to meet demand and then eventually have that data center demand die out. And so they're being a little cautious about that. Yeah. For my friends who are not gamers, who are not doing anything that they need more than a laptop for, they were asking me, well, how would you explain this?

9:21And I was like, well, you know how you've been looking for wood sticks and nobody makes wood sticks anymore because you're the last person on earth who buys wood sticks? Because they're making more money, as you said, selling composites. So that's why the things you want are less important than the things that everybody else needs. And yeah, like NHL-er type sticks are going to win over your straight wood stick, which I got to post a picture of at some point because this is - You're talking about hockey sticks, not like just sticks in the forest. I'm talking about hockey sticks. Yeah. Well, okay.

9:49You know what? Honestly, there's so much of a tree in some of these old Sherwood classics that you could probably just go out and make your own. Just start whittling. You'll be done by next playoffs. Anytime you're a purchaser of something and it suddenly becomes popular, the price goes up because now there are more people wanting to buy it than there are things. I'm trying to think of an example of anything that I've liked like that. But I'm sure you can think of brands that maybe you were into before anybody else was or it had a resurgence. Miller High Life is one that actually came to mind where I used to drink Miller High Life when no one drank Miller High Life.

10:27And then it became retro and cool. And suddenly the price went up, right? That's what's... Yeah. If you wanted to find a DDR pad, because a lot of people got into that during early COVID to do workouts and stuff. And the... Oh, my gosh. The ring fitness thing for the Switch, that was going everywhere. But now also, like, you have a lot more intentions to buy than you have people buying. I can find a Switch 2 literally everywhere. Staples has them. I half expect them to see in the grocery store. There are Switch 2s literally everywhere and a couple of the OLED Switch ones that are not the best idea to buy.

11:03But the intention versus the actual bank account levels of people might also be affecting things. All right. Any other thoughts on the memory crunch? I'm very sad for the state of my PC. Yes. I feel very selfish about it. I'm sad for other people too. I'm sad for mine. All right. That takes us through our first couple of stories. But hang on. Hang on. There's more. All right, Tom, what do we have next? We would be remiss if we didn't talk about antitrust. There were loads of antitrust cases this year involving Apple and Epic, Google and Epic, the United States against Google, the EU against Google.

11:48There were some in Russia against Google. But the thing I think is the big takeaway from this is not so much what those antitrust cases had as their results, because some of those are still being appealed. Some of them were even still waiting for sentencing. But the ones that have had results and will no longer be appealed are having an effect. And some of them that are even still going to be appealed have an effect. and that effect is that mobile app stores from Apple and Google both have begun to open up. Not everywhere, not always in the same way, but in the United States, for example, you can now link out from your app store app on iOS to say like, hey, you can subscribe to us over here at this website.

12:37Like that has been confirmed by the court. You have to allow that. Now, Apple can charge a fee for letting you do that if you're in the app store in the US. So that's yet to be determined. We also have sideloading in the EU and Japan and Korea and a few other places. And that applies to both the Android store and the iOS store. And I wonder if this will just be an anomaly of like, well, 2025, that was the year when a bunch of things happened and then that was it. They stopped. Or whether this is a widening crack that will start to cause these mobile app stores to be like, OK, fine. We're just going to let people link out and do sideloading the way they can on their laptops.

13:19Well, I would love for it to widen to Canada, let me tell you. I've been very jealous of the other districts who are getting this already. And in the U.S. specifically, Jason and I did a huge thing on this earlier about what constitutes a reasonable fee for Apple to be charging, for Google to be charging to open up these app stores. Because they're stressing the privacy. They're stressing the security. How much of it is fear-mongering right now? We don't know because there have been shady apps on the official stores too. So how much are you really losing out here? And also, how big is this market they're going for?

14:01Like, I agree they should go for it. I would love to be able to sideload things and control my phone the way I want to. But I'm just one of those people on that. My parents aren't going to sideload. My teammates aren't going to sideload. Most people aren't. They're not interested in that. Yeah. But I also kind of want Fortnite on my phone, and I still can't do that. Yeah. I have been an opponent of these restrictive app store rules from the beginning. I loved when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone and said, you don't need an app store. We'll just do web apps. I think maybe if he had been around longer, he could have figured out how to make that work.

14:40Maybe not, but app stores became the way everybody does things. And web apps, while great, have not caught on for various reasons. There's some real reasons why a web app isn't as good as a native app. But I've never understood why. Well, let me say this. I totally understand why, but I don't understand the logic for defending why it is important for us to get you to pay to maintain the app store. That's the argument, right? This app store provides security. It's a safe place for people to get, and it's not free to run. So of course we need to collect money. I'm fine with that until it's like, if you're selling digital goods, if you're a furniture store, no problem.

15:22Or if you're a bank app, which deals only in money, no problem. We're not going to take a cut of any of that because we know that we would get in way more trouble if we did that. But if you're selling a digital good Netflix, Patreon, well, guess what? We're not going to allow you to do that. And it just doesn't make sense to me. I think it's perfectly fine to say, hey, we need to make money off of the App Store. The way they decided to do it is clearly tinted by anti-competitiveness to say like, well, Wayfair doesn't compete with Google or Apple, but Netflix does. So let's charge them instead.

16:02and then they subsidize everybody else. And I just, it doesn't make any sense, especially when I look at my laptop and I'm like, I can install whatever I want here and you have an app store that I can use. And sometimes I use that app store. Sometimes I buy things to that app store and you get a cut for it. Like, why do you need to shut down the rest of the phone? I just don't understand it. Yeah, I have, in fair criticism, people have said like, well, if you're so picky about like what you do and do not want on your systems, how come you have an iPhone? And I can tell you why I have an iPhone.

16:32Because way back in the day, I had bought an Android from Rogers, and I put on a custom firmware on it. And Rogers decided that for all of the people who were running custom firmware, you were no longer able to call 911. There are rules you can't break, and blocking 911 access is one of them. So Rogers got me an iPhone. Because sometimes you do want something that just works as much as I want the control over it. So having the option to sideload, I have older iPhones running other OSs that have way better themes, that have things that I still can't do on my current iPhone. And I would love for that kind of stuff to be opened up.

17:13But also, yeah, especially with all of the spyware and malware out there, I do also want to be a little protective of my phone. So I would only likely be installing stuff from, say, Epic. I feel pretty confident about that as long as their anti-cheat isn't too insane. Just like your laptop. You don't install from unsafe sources on your laptop, but you will install things, right? And say like, well, I trust this open source project or I trust this place. Yeah, I wonder if maybe they should just make an unsafe mode for phones and say like, look, the phone's going to work the way it works right now unless you agree to go into unsafe mode and then you release us from liability for things and then you can install whatever you want have at it it's all yours yeah well wasn't that windows 10 right now if you're on the esu you're on your own yeah good luck with that all yours exactly uh obviously there has to be some security uh patches for running it safely on a carrier network because it's a phone uh but beyond that you could just say like it's unsafe mode so if you install something it's on your own head enjoy all right well since we're already talking about phones do you want to talk about foldable oh yeah this became a real category this year i uh i had to look it up i was like oh like how many foldables were there in 2025 and i was like oh there's this one and this one and this one and like obviously samsung's uh big on it motorola was very early on this and uh i was also really surprised at uh some of the prices these days.

18:45So you can get a kind of base Motorola Razr for like 600 bucks. That's kind of crazy. It's the flip format, not the book format, but still it's foldable. Yeah. Yeah. And like, so foldables these days, like you have like the standard flip where you've got your two screens inside and then you have the screen on the outside, which is like, okay, that's really clever. Even though I am terrified of foldables and outside screens, even though technically my regular phone has a screen facing out all of the time. So I don't know why my brain is just particularly paranoid about this. And like, that's a me problem.

19:18I'm not blaming any of the companies for this. So you're not scared of the hinge anymore? I'm not scared of the outside screen. I'm still very scared of the hinge. Okay. Because the hinge actually has become less of a problem as we've seen the life cycle of these. You're not having them crack in half like everybody was sphering and the hinges have gotten better. Yeah, I'm not seeing the viral shorts of like, oh, look what happened after I bent this a couple of times. And I've had my Pixel Fold for a year and a half now, I think. And it's fine. Granted, I don't use it all. I don't unfold it and fold it as much as some people do, but it's great.

19:56If you have one, you just don't see the crease anymore. It just goes away. It'll be cool when somebody comes up with a creaseless one and that'll be impressive but honestly that's not a real uh problem the biggest problem with foldables has been the price uh and so like you said the flips are in a manageable uh close to mid-range price the book foldable ones those those are still way too expensive so it's a little chicken and egg game of like can they sell enough to be able to get a big enough market to bring the price down when the price is so big that not that many people want to pay for it yeah like looking right now the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 seems to be around two grand US.

20:35But that's also sizable. That's not something I'd be able to fit in a pocket, which is the other reason I was like, oh, like with the foldables getting thinner, it's like, okay, is that actually going to be easier for me to put in women's pockets? And I will be angry about this till the day I die. But, you know, because I always have to put things in a bag or use a chest pocket and then have it sit awkwardly against my chest. Well, yeah, because they're making the trifolds now, which are as thick as the original foldables, which means the foldables are getting thinner. So we're getting closer to the point.

21:08And then the iPhone Air, which is clearly preparing the ground for Apple to create a foldable, is half the width of some of the old iPhones. So there is hope on the horizon for you, Jen. Yeah. And at least for those, I also understand why there's no headphone jack, but I will also be bitter about that. But as you get too thin, like, is it going to start bending? Like, never mind. I'm not too worried about it, like, cracking horribly. But like, yeah, little bends. I'm like, my phone should be straight, right? I imagine if you keep it folded, that would keep it straight. But it's a fair concern.

21:43And they will address that. Apple has addressed that with the iPhone Air. So I imagine they'll continue to address that with other foldables out there. I think we're also going to see a lot of - I'm sure consumers will let them know. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think we'll see a lot of other takes on this as well as the category starts to grow. We've seen the trifold this year, right? Which is kind of the first big innovation since we had the flip and the book style fold. So yeah, I'm curious what other form factors we might start to see people try. Like happened with laptops when they started to create all of the yogas and the three-in-ones and all of that.

22:22We might get that kind of thing happening in phones soon. It's like, yes, I do want a foldable second screen for my monitor. Let's go. Yeah, yeah. I saw a review of a projector that is marketed as a portable monitor because the projector is small and then they sell you a big tent to put over it. So it's projecting from inside and then you can collapse the tent, which I thought. And then you could use it as a projector too, if you've got a wall nearby you as well. But I was like, oh, that's pretty clever. But yeah, foldable. Tent is an interesting take on a privacy screen. Yeah, yeah. I think a foldable works better for me, which is what Samsung's really building with its decks to say like, hey, you can just unfold it and use it as a monitor with your keyboard mouse.

23:10Boom. You've got a full on computer. So yeah. Yeah. And when it's big enough, you don't even need an e-reader. It's everything in one. Just in time for wearables to take over. Foldables have arrived. All right. Anything else on foldables? No, I'll keep looking and you'll be the first to know if I decide to go forward. Something to look forward to. Okay. We will finish with what we think the biggest story of the year was.

23:42I imagine that everyone can guess what the two letters are in the biggest story of 2025. Put your money down now. But it involves power. It involves debt. It involves productivity. It involves jobs. Of course, it is not even the rise of AI, but the sort of domination of the news of AI to the point where I'm like, I don't even think people complain about like, why is all the news about AI anymore? They're just complaining about different aspects of it. And I try really hard not to use the word AI unless I'm using it the way I am right now for a huge collection of a number of things. Because there's machine learning and there's large language models and there's chatbots and there's agents and there's so many different implementations of this.

24:32And I think we're sort of stuck in the feeling that LLMs are the be-all and end-all. And like that's AI and that's what AI will be. And I don't think that's true. I don't know if it'll happen in 2026 or later, but there is going to be another model that does something differently but also better than the current models do. And that's going to change this whole discussion. But this year, the discussion was all about, is it taking our jobs? Is it violating copyright? Is it using all the power? Is there enough power? Is there real demand for it? And how much does it actually help or hinder our productivity?

25:10Yeah. And with AI being ubiquitous, and I'm using the broad category of AI here, a lot of people have lost that granularity or were not aware of the granularity to start with. And you're seeing the pushback. You are seeing a much louder anti-AI contingent that's like not just artists and authors. A lot of people are like, they open their browser and like, what is this new stupid button that is in my way? What is this thing on my phone? And like now that that's hitting the people who are not frequent listeners of shows like ours, they're just really frustrated by all of these things that are all of a sudden in their way.

25:52But some people also really love them. They love touching up their photos. They love using Nano Banana to make their pet a superhero, which is a weirdly common thing. Yeah. But and then you have workers who have been forced to use AI. And I am using the word force in this very specific thing where they're being told, you need to use this tool, we will measure how much you use this tool. You as part of your job performance review, we are going to include how much you use this tool. And some people find it works. Like I am not going to stand here and pretend that AI has not helped people, whichever version of it they're using.

26:29But there are some people who are like, I have to do twice as much work now to fix this, but I can't do it from scratch because I'll get dinged on my job review and jobs kind of suck right now because there are job losses, whether they want to attribute it directly to AI or not. I'm going to use a gaming example because of course I am, but Square Enix had a job cut of several hundred people. And in their mid-short-term goal report, they include rolling out further promotion of initiatives to improve productivity by utilizing AI. And to be specific of that, they are looking for by the end of 2027 to have 70 % of QA automated with AI.

27:13And there's no way that's not going to impact jobs in the near and future term. So there is so much fear and uncertainty and doubt around this stuff that it is easy to find these examples. But I'll push back on the Square Enix one just a little for the sake of our conversation here and point out that they reduced jobs, which they may have done anyway, and also said they are going to use generative models, which is something that I think every company should be examining. Like, where can we use these? How can they help? Because like you said, there is a reality here and it's hard to see because everyone's so emotional about it.

27:52And it's probably true that they can automate 70 % of QA with it. Let's just assume it's true for this. That may or may not mean they lose jobs. It certainly would mean they don't need as many people to do QA. But what's unclear is, is that just like cost savings that they cash? Or is it that they will be able to take those QA people and have them do things they couldn't get them to do before? We've all worked in jobs where somebody says, why don't we do this? And somebody says, because there's no time, because there's no people. Yes, it probably would be worth it, but how will we ever get it done?

28:32And those are the kinds of things that when you automate some process, you can then go do. That is why we have product managers. That's why we have most of the jobs we have today, because we automated all of these other things that clerks were doing in the past. So that could happen. I'm not trying to be Pollyanna and sell you something and say it will happen. But I am trying to pull people back from the brink to be like, well, if 70 % of QA, that obviously they're just going to throw people out of work and there'll be QA engineers. engineers panhandling all sides of the streets. Because the other avenue is maybe they do not need QA people for anything anymore, but they will now be able to do another aspect of their job.

29:14They'll now be able to take that money and say, you know what, while we were paying the QA people, we can develop a new product line. We can develop a new technology. We can do things that we couldn't do before. And I think that gets lost in this as well, is everyone assumes that every company is going to be greedy and just cash the savings. And if every company does that, every company will die because there will be some company that says, well, instead of cashing their savings, what if we use that money to get ahead of our competitors by employing people to do this other thing? And they will get out-competed when they do that.

29:45If there's no competition, that's a different issue, right? And that is an issue that's being discussed as well. So I don't see entire doom and gloom on this sort of thing. I think it's really difficult to talk about sometimes though, because a lot of people are so invested in seeing it as doom and gloom that when they hear you go like, well, it might not be doom and gloom. They're like, oh, so you're on their side. And the fact of the matter is it's just a piece of technology and it has caused so many people to get so emotional about it that it's actually difficult to talk about as a piece of technology because everyone's projecting something on it.

30:28And I'm not saying you were doing that, Jen. I'm just talking about when you bring this stuff up, it causes people to get their hackles up. Yeah. For the medical field, whenever I see a medical story about AI, I kind of brace myself because I know they're going to talk about like, oh, now that AI is deciding insurance things, this is bad and like okay i agree that part of is bad but all ai in medical isn't evil like some of the ai stuff with proteins and medicine development is amazing it is time-saving it is showing avenues that we're not necessarily being explored right now and in gaming it is any word of ai means the pitchforks and torches are out immediately you've already covered a lot of this stuff exactly uh so the story literally as we're recording this about more battlefield stuff being AI generated, the Fortnite music, some of the new music jam tracks and more stickers and the emotes that you can hold up are kind of, yeah, they are a bit clearly AI, but some people are going way, way, way too far.

31:38Again, I understand the emotional investment. I am one of those people emotionally invested in games uh if there is art you don't like that does not necessarily mean it's a like a lot of people are being painted with that brush uh because it's such an easy way to get i don't want to say a mob again but to get opinions to sway to be like oh maybe it is ai and i'm like okay like not everything on earth is ai at least not yet yeah i i think this is the worst it will be. Because the thing that drives people crazy is that there is a section of the populace that are very loud and a section of the industry that is self-interested, which are promising that these tools can do things that they probably can't.

32:31And I'm not even talking about OpenAI and Anthropic. I feel like Google and Anthropic and OpenAI and Mistral are actually fairly circumspect in their promising, right? They've gotten the message and know, like, they can't just say this will solve all the ills of the world because people will come for them. So they're a little more moderate. But there are other startups and people out there that are fueling like, yeah, you got to have AI. And that's the kind of thing that causes what you were talking about earlier, where a boss says, I don't care how you use it, but use the AI. And you're like, boss, what AI are you talking about?

33:03Don't ask questions, just make it happen. right? And it's like, well, what do you mean? I could use an LLM to do this and that, I guess, but I think we're getting out of that. I think people are starting to actually use the tools and there's less fear when you start to use them and understand them than there is when you're worried about what they may or may not do. And you start to see, oh, it's actually really helpful for me with this thing. But also this thing it does is really bad. And I was worried about that and it's hilariously bad, so I'm not going to worry about that anymore. And you start to narrow down and become manageable the things that you actually are concerned about.

33:41And you can start to push back and say, hey boss, we tried that and this is what happened. So maybe we could use it for this because it's really good at this one little thing, but not for everything. And I expect that in the coming year, this isn't going to go away, but we're going to reach a simmer instead of continuing to boil, I guess, if that makes sense. Okay. Well, speaking of concerns, how do you feel about the debt thing? Like, from my perspective, so my mom started her career as a bookkeeper and ended it as a CFO. So I was like, hey, how do you feel about this? So I was like, what do you think about like, so SoftBank and Oracle and NVIDIA and OpenAI and all this stuff?

34:23Like, is this something that you would have signed off of? Like, would your risk management assessment, how would you feel about this? And then she left for a very, very long time. So she's in the no camp. She does not think that all of this money trading is going to end well. Again, that is one person's opinion who has been retired for years. So do not go on betting markets and put your money down in my mom's opinion. But as someone who is less financially educated than her, yeah, some of those graphs and some of those circles look weird. But I am also not educated enough in this sense to know how many circles like this have existed in the past that maybe did not end in chaos.

35:09I know some of them have, but is there a chance this works? Many of them don't. And those don't get covered because they're either perfectly acceptable or they just don't end in anything damaging. And that's not a story. A story that somebody loaned some money to somebody and then it went well doesn't light up the Financial Times front page. Front page. A1. Let's go. I think it is – I try to be careful not to fall into the trap of new industry is doing a thing I've never heard of, so sounds like it's a new and bad idea, when it's actually new industry is using a very tried and true thing. But the industry itself is risky, so tried and true thing might not work the way it is.

35:55And I kind of get the feeling that that's what we're dealing with here. I mean, at a certain point, the debt circle is all of our economy, right? We all use a credit card. Well, maybe if you don't use a credit card, you're exempted. But most people in the world use a credit card, which is borrowing money and then agree to pay it back later. And money just goes around in a circle, right? Some of that money is loaned to somebody who uses it to buy another thing on credit, which like that, that is all of humanity. So just because there is a debt circle doesn't mean it's bad. I think a lot of people say, well, that's a horrible thing.

36:32I'm like, well, we wouldn't have an economy if you didn't have money circulating in a debt. Is it a risky one though? Is it someone saying, uh, I, I, is it a Ponzi scheme where the money doesn't actually exist? Well, it's not, it's not a Ponzi scheme. Go, go listen to world's greatest con. You'll actually get the most recent episode is about Ponzi and how he actually created the Ponzi scheme. These are not Ponzi schemes, but they are risky. And so then the question becomes, do we actually get the stuff profitable, right? Does Oracle make enough money that it can pay back that debt? Generally speaking, the markets don't lend the money if they don't think there's a good chance they're going to get it back, especially at these levels.

37:15So the market does think it's going to get it back, but is the market confused? Is the market buying into the hype too much because it is run by people and it could be. So I can't tell if this is something that's not going to be a problem at all. This is a surefire industry and most of these companies are going to show like, hey, we were right. You all wanted this and we got better and better. That's the argument is, yes, these tools aren't perfect yet, but they're getting better so fast that by the time these new data centers come online, they will be able to make them work so much better. you'll be able to do so many things that the demand will meet the expectation.

37:56That's possible. That could happen. I don't discount that. I think probably more likely is we're in some kind of dot-com boom scenario where there will be winners. You know, Amazon, Netflix, Google, we're all dot-coms, right? They are now the biggest companies in the world because they survived. They were forged in the fire. But the pets.coms and the floozes are the ones that we always talk about. Those are the ones that just died and were ridiculous. And you're giving me a look about flooze that tells me everything. Yeah, I don't know that one at all. Flooze was an internet currency that Whoopi Goldberg was the front person for.

38:39And it's perfectly emblematic of the dot-com bust of a company that just had an idea and threw it out there and raised a bunch of money, but it didn't actually have a product that could be useful. There's a lot of those right now. I have a feeling we're headed for a bust, but the bust will leave behind a lot of infrastructure that will continue to work. And I don't think the bust hits the biggest companies. Maybe it does hit one or more of the biggest companies, but I think you're going to have a lot of these current companies like Anthropic and Mistral and OpenAI that will become the Amazons and the Netflixes and the Googles of this particular bubble.

39:17So I think there is a bubble. It's just who does it splash on when it either deflates or pops? Yeah, people are watching SoftBank specifically to see what they are investing in and what they are moving their investments in and out of to do that as some kind of read of the market. So whatever SoftBank does do the opposite? Is that what they're saying? Yeah, well, again, 50-50, everything's betting now. I was once a soft bank employee. But that's what investments are. So I've seen their crazy maneuvers and been affected by them in the past. Sometimes they get it very right. So, you know, I'm not going to say they never do.

39:54And like you said, circles are everywhere. It's who's buying what channel and what network now in the entertainment industry. Well, yeah, that one confuses me. That's a sub story that we didn't touch on. But like there is more competition than ever. There are more movie studios than we've had in a long time. because people forget that Netflix, Apple, and Amazon were not movie studios 20 years ago, and now they are. And so when Netflix buys Warner, it's a new movie studio merging with an old one, which I don't know that it materially gets rid of competition. That seems like a market that's ripe for consolidation.

40:34And it is a market that might be instructive in understanding the future of the AI market in that we had the streaming boom, right? Everybody was like, oh, build streams. Everybody tried building streams. And now we kind of are starting to see which ones are the successful ones, which are the ones that people want. And the consolidation phase is happening where companies are like, okay, maybe we need to merge our two together to make sure that it works. We'll have a certain number of genre ones that are small and we'll have a certain number of big ones. you usually end up with about three or four competing in a healthy market.

41:14You usually end up with three or four big names. And that's kind of where we're headed now. Yeah. Well, we'll see next year if there's going to be any consolidation in the AI space. Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic. Will it be one of those goes bust? Will one of them get out of the business? Will Microsoft just leave the AI business? Maybe. Who knows? Who knows? but we want to know what you think. Do you have your thoughts on the biggest stories of the year? Do you think we're right? Do you think we're wrong? Even if you think we are the wrongest of the wrong, we want to hear about it.

41:47So please send us your thoughts at feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Yes, and thanks to you for being along for Daily Tech News Show all year long. You are the folks that keep us in business. If you're a patron, we sincerely thank you for giving value back to this show for the value you get. patreon.com slash DTNS. Patrons, you are going to get ad free versions of the show continuing through the rest of the year. We've got our predictions show. We've got our best of show. So thank you again. And Jen Cutter, thank you for a wonderful year. Been a great time. See you all next year. Bye everybody.

42:26Happy New Year.

42:37Happy holidays and sending good vibes to the DTNS extended family. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this broker.