[DELETED ON YOUTUBE] Best Products of 2025 (Apps, Video Games, AI)

0:00In this episode, I share what are my favorite products of 2025. What is the best productivity product of 2025? What is the best product under$100? What is the most hyped product of 2026? This is an award show for some of my favorite products in 2025. And what I'm looking forward to in 2026. I bring on my friend Jonathan Courtney to bring some of his favorite products in 2025. This episode will give you some ideas, physical products, AI products, non-AI products. And it's just kind of a fun conversation that I hope you enjoy because I had a blast doing it. This is called the Sippy Awards of 2025.

0:41Enjoy the episode. And if you don't mind, if you got this far, like and comment so I know that you enjoy this stuff. See you in there.

0:59All right, we are here, Jonathan, Courtney. This is the second annual Sippy Award Show Baby where we are going to give away awards in 2025. What awards are we going to give away, JC? First of all, if anyone hasn't seen this before, this is the most prestigious award ceremony of the year for tech companies, product companies. Everyone's been waiting for this. It's like one of the most hype things on X and getting one of these awards is bigger than getting something like a red dot award or a Nobel Prize, Nobel Peace Prize. Those things are kind of like the kind of low level stuff. And this is the high level stuff.

1:39So I think it's important that people know that this is not just sort of like a, you know, quick, we're just making it up on the fly sort of thing. There's a whole jury like it costs billions of dollars to put this thing together. It's completely objective. And as for the awards that are coming up, just to give a few previews, we have our, I mean, of course, we're going to reveal our favorite product of the year. Both of us will probably have different answers there. Most used product of the year. Best productivity product. I'm just making stuff up now. uh so like oh uh best most um best product for under a hundred dollars like the product that improved our lives the most for under a hundred dollars award um the and also i think one of the rules we have to clarify is that the products don't have to have come out in 2026 they're just like the nobel peace prize the people weren't born in the year they got the peace prize right so So by that logic, we are pulling from products from all through time, but we have to be using them.

2:55We have to have used them this year and benefited from them this year. Also, our most hyped product of 2026. That's a big one. And that's kind of it. Cool. So Nobel Peace Prize for technology, basically. Exactly. exactly yeah we we prepared a ton we aren't doing this on the fly it's gonna get crazier here we go all right where do you want to start favorite product of the year um i think fever best product of the year favorite product of the year might be i mean do we want to start with like the best thing basically no we that'll be the end you know how about most hyped product of 2026 okay let's do Do you want me to go first?

3:44Yeah, go for it. My most hyped product of 2026 is Half-Life 3. It is a video game from the company Valve, who are my favorite video game company in the world. They are also launching three physical products next year in approximately March, which is a new controller, a new product which is called a Steam Machine, and a new VR headset called a Steam Frame, which I'm super excited about. So the whole Steam Machine product launch last week was, in my opinion, a masterclass on launching products. But the rumored but still not confirmed most hyped thing about all of this is the idea that there'll be a new Half-Life game.

4:25And so for me, Half-Life 3, which obviously encompasses all of these products because I'm going to buy all these products. For me as someone who plays video games, that's my most hyped product of 2026. I'm very excited about it. So your most hyped product is Half-Life 3, but you're also excited about Steam Machine? It's the software that's going to play on the Steam Machine I'm the most hyped about. And that all goes together with the whole Steam Machine as a product itself. Okay, and what's the difference between the Steam Deck and the Steam Machine? Yeah, I have a Steam Deck right here, actually, which I love.

5:07uh steam deck is so basically the simple answer to it is that the steam deck is a portable pc video game player basically um a completely customizable open you know product it runs linux but you can also run windows on it um if what people are wondering what's the difference between a steam machine or a steam deck and an uh like a nintendo switch the steam deck is just a completely open platform you can do whatever you want on it the difference between the steam deck and the steam machine is the steam machine is number one it's six times more powerful because it's not a portable product and it's made for playing 4k things on a big screen it can play them natively that's a whole thing but whatever we're all good but the steam deck cannot do that it just doesn't have enough power because it's built to conserve battery so basically it's the same platform running across all of these products, which is called Steam.

6:05By the way, do you know Valve is a private company and has like 300 and something employees and has the highest revenue per employee for almost any company on earth? They make about$16 billion per year. Not only that, did you know that they're bootstrapped? It's insane. Did you know that? Yeah, Gabe Newell basically put all his own money into it. it's insane he just got himself like a massive new yacht by the way he's like the only billionaire that people are okay with having a yacht because this is him yeah this is Gabe Newell this is a valve are my favorite company in the world and if there's any company that I copy and like try to recreate the most for my business it's it's been valve from day one dude is that like is he drinking like a mai tai out of a pineapple right there yes that was like a screenshot from the launch of the steam deck if you want to there this company is like i don't think no it's just there isn't another private company that first of all garners this much attention makes this much crazy amounts of revenue but also then just really pushes the entire industry forward.

7:23Like the fact that, you know, Sony, which is so much bigger, Nintendo, which are so much bigger, Microsoft, which are like billions of times bigger, can't create as much excitement or as much love as a very tiny company as Valve, even though they still are huge. It's they're so impressive to me. Gabe Newell caps off Steam Machine Week by taking delivery of a new$500 million super yacht with a submarine garage, onboard hospital, and 15 gaming PCs. Fuck yeah. Yeah. Fuck yeah. Yeah. I mean, he's doing it right. He's doing it right. He's got the pink t-shirt with the pink sunglasses with the Mai Tai.

8:07He's doing it right. And one of the things I really respect about this company and the Half-Life 3 meme, if you go on X right now and type in Half-Life 3, This is the most hype that's ever happened around this product. You'll see a lot of people posting this meme called Hopium. It's a picture of the main character getting, yeah, there you go. The hope, he's getting like injected with hope. That's the meme. So because everyone basically, so this game came out 20 something years ago. And the rumors for the third, Half-Life 2 came out 20 something years ago. and the rumors that a third one will come out have been going on for well since uh 2017 or 2007 or something and this week a lot of different things have happened including the announcement of the steam machine and and a lot of insiders it's the first time it actually feels like it's going to happen yeah this guy's been posting every day for eight years about whether there's news for half-life 2 it's i've been showing my girlfriend the whole half-life 2 thing because i've been I've been looking at this for years I've been waiting for this for years and she's just so into it now and she's asking me did Half-Life 3 get announced?

9:19I'm like don't worry if it does I'll be on top of it so anyone else in your audience if you're waiting for Half-Life 3 like me if you've got hope if you're excited let me know in the comments This is a good one I will never forget the time I saw the Half-Life 2 video before it came out do you remember that? the leak the leak oh man there's a there's a whole two-hour documentary which goes into like how how damaging this leak was to the company and their morale um it was a german guy who leaked the game i think he's in prison for leaking he didn't just so he downloaded it so he hacked it to get the game then he also like hacked loads of other companies like banks and stuff and he was doing like fraud stuff um i know he got charged and like caught in germany for this so i remember the leak it was huge i you know it was like in high school i think and um it was such a big deal because of the physics yeah the physics of half-life 2 so crazy it was crazy like the idea of real physics in game didn't really exist back then and that was such a big deal Half-Life 3, I don't know what will be that equivalent.

10:41So that's my only kind of question I'm thinking about. That's the exciting part about it because Gabe Newell, the CEO, specifically said the reason they're not going to release another Half-Life. Half-Life games are like, what he says is like, they're products that can show off a new innovative way of playing games, like a new way to interact with the video game world. and the last Half-Life game was this VR game called Half-Life Alyx which was a prequel so it still wasn't Half-Life 3 but it was a prequel it's still the only triple A VR game there isn't another VR game with this level of quality and also the length of it and just the detail it's amazing but why everyone's excited about Half-Life 3 is that if Valve is launching a game under the Half-Life brand it means something really big for the gaming industry I mean, they always come up with crazy shit like Portal, the Portal guns.

11:33That was just such a cool, crazy, weird innovation. So I'm just excited to see. I mean, more than anything right now, I'm just enjoying the silliness of being on X during this week. Well, everyone thought it was going to release on Tuesday and it didn't. Now everyone thinks it's going to release during the Game Awards, which is in a couple of weeks. So yeah. Cool. So I mean I could speak about Half-Life for an entire episode. This episode should just be about Half-Life. Because it's so good. But I'll give my sort of most hyped product to 2026. It's also in the gaming sector. And it's also kind of a meme.

12:15Could you guess what it is? GTA 6. GTA 6. Aha, of course. I mean, these are the two most hyped video games of all time ever. Right, so I think what's interesting about GTA 6 is it's been delayed so much, right? How many years has it been delayed? Has it been like, well, how long has it been since GTA 5? Is it like over 10 years now? I would say it's around 10 years. Yeah, 2013, so 12 years. still not half-life 3 levels but yeah it's crazy i think it's going to be i mean the cool thing about valve or rockstar who's making this game is that also everyone expects them to not release something unless it's essentially the best game of all time and there are not so many there are not so many franchises where you just the expectation is so high i think zelda and like mainline Mario games and mainline Zelda games from Nintendo have the same general thing where if it were not to get a nine out of 10 in all of the at least a nine out of 10 people would consider it to be a massive failure they're just they GTA Half-Life Zelda Mario these all have very different standards to everybody else and I mean Red Dead Redemption 2 I don't if you played that.

13:40It was pretty amazing. Pretty crazily detailed. I'm really looking forward to seeing what they do. I'm also excited. I've never finished a GTA game, but I'm always excited to play them. Same here. The type of games I love is actually I love my Switch too. I love the idea of it's just no murder, no violence, just like good music, happy, warm, fuzzy, cozy games. And so this is the opposite of that, obviously. So I don't know if I would play it to the end, but I'm just hyped to actually just see how do they push the envelope forward? And what does it look like? Yeah, you want to see what does a company that's obsessed with perfection has crazy high standards and an infinite budget what does a company like this do um actually maybe one of the awards should be our game of the year for 2025 since we went in a gaming direction okay like most played game maybe yeah go for it i can go my most played game of 2025 is called ball x pit um which i've been playing on the steam deck It is a kind of like a very fun combination of about 10.

15:08It's like a Frankenstein of about 10 different games pushed into one. All X pit.

15:18It's so addictive, so much fun. The mechanics of this game are just perfect. And yeah, this game is super addictive, really easy, especially, I mean, if you've got a kid just to pick it up and pay for 10 minutes, play for 10 minutes or 15 minutes. If you don't have time to get into some big story, this is a great game to just play on the couch. On the Switch 2, it's also on Switch 2. Bollex Pit, super fun. And shout out to Amar at AJ and Smart who recommended that I check it out. It's really great. So what's the concept here? What is the gameplay? Honestly, it's really hard to describe. So you're a little dude in the middle and all of these things are coming towards you a little bit like Space Invaders.

15:59All of these things are getting closer and closer, these enemies, and you're shooting balls at them. As you shoot balls at them, you're sort of upgrading your balls as you do. There you go. It's just this very satisfying ball management game. Kind of like normal life, but the balls are even more fun. It's very like the art style, everything, the music is is great. It is a combination of a couple of different games. It's like a roguelike, it's a puzzle game. It's really addictive, really fun. For people who listen to my Logan Kilpatrick Gemini 3 episode, we talked a lot about building video games and how you can use Gemini to build video games.

16:49So people listening, go and play some of these games, get inspiration, and then go build your own video games. another thing just on that Gemini thing if you're looking for video games that like GTA 6 would probably be a hard game to replicate and and learn about how to how to build games using something like Gemini 3 but Ball X Pit being one of these indie games that's a little bit more confined I can imagine that that's if you're looking to replicate something looking for ideas of things to try out that's probably a better starting point than trying to make a massive open world crazy thing. Love it.

17:25Okay, on my end, I've been playing the most a game called a Zelda game that I think is underrated. Can you guess which one it is? Underrated, okay. An underrated Zelda game. The only underrated Zelda game I can think of would be like Skyward Sword. No, not close, but it's Wind Waker. Oh, Wind Waker's not underrated. That's one of my favorite. That's one of the best ones ever. Are you playing it on the GameCube emulator thing? Yeah. Did you get the GameCube controller? No, I didn't know they had that. You can get the GameCube controller to play along with it. Wind Waker is really great. Yeah. So, okay.

18:12So I played it when it first came out. We've got the graphics on screen. This was a game changer. And you're sensing a theme. I love games that push it to the limit, that show something new. This was a cell-shaded video game. That was the visual design style. And when it first came out, people hated this game. Yeah, they were so angry about it. So angry, right? Because they were used to Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, realistic Zelda. And this felt super kiddy, right? People were super, super annoyed about it. and I remember they were also irritated that you were playing as the young Link because they wanted the story to continue after Majora's Mask and people thought it was going to stay as adult Link and dark adult themes.

19:02But then it went to this and yeah, people were so irritated. So irritated. And I just remember playing the full game and being like, wow, what an incredible experience and so bold of the team to actually produce something like this. Now, over time, people realized, wow, this is actually an incredible game. And it was brilliant that they actually explored the visual design style this way. So now, yes, I agree. I wouldn't say it's underrated. It's probably not one of the most well-loved. But if people listen to music, the way I think about it is Weezer came out with an album called Pinkerton. When it first came out, people hated it, but now it's like a cult classic.

19:49You're touching on something that I'm a really big fan of, which is, so what Nintendo does and what Weezer did in that case is something that people, there's different ways of saying it, but the audience is always last. Like designing things, ignoring the audience and basically ignoring their wishes is one of the only ways to actually make innovative things that are special that people are excited about. I think like, you know, the Henry Ford thing is if I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. And I think the extension of that is being willing to make things that you are excited about and want to come out of you versus making things that are, you know, people will like.

20:35And I think like Radiohead in a music example, one of the biggest albums of all time one of the most famous albums of all time OK Computer was Radiohead's it was crazy everyone loved them, they were the biggest band in the world it was like the best reviewed rock album it's always in the top 100 best albums of all time and then instead of doing what you would expect which would have been making a follow up album that was also an amazing rock album Radiohead just were like we don't do that anymore and their next album was Kid A which barely had guitars, barely had drums, barely had vocals, barely had any normal verse chorus structure.

21:14A lot of people were super pissed when they did this. And now it's seen as like, you know, a cult classic and Kid A is one of, also now in those lists of best albums of all time. But Radiohead, Nintendo, Valve, they keep doing that over and over again. They keep subverting expectations. like Breath of the Wild which was the big new Zelda kind of format when that came out people were like there's no dungeons like we have this big open world game and now there's no dungeons and dungeons were always the core of a Zelda game and Nintendo was like yeah we're just we're just trying to we're just we want to do something else and I think thinking about building businesses thinking about making art thinking about making things and producing things the best companies the best bands which have the most longevity are absolutely not the ones who care about their customers and obsess about their customer obviously care about the customer service but they don't care and obsess about they try to insulate themselves from what the customers want and are asking for so that they don't end up just making something that they want or doing the even more stupid thing which you saw with maybe the ending of game of thrones where the showrunners were reading all the reddit posts about what's going to happen and they were like we're just going to do the opposite so without thinking about something better or without thinking about something special they just did the opposite which also nobody liked so i think that's a really creating something creating something and hideo kojima the game designer also says this he doesn't want his video games to be loved immediately.

22:56He wants them to grow on people. And I'm a big fan of creating things that people don't immediately love and grow on them because usually my favorite albums, favorite movies, I didn't maybe love them or even understand them the first time. I mean, Elden Ring is one of my favorite games of all time. I hated the first 10 hours. I thought it was a stupid, crappy video game. so yeah I'm really the cult classic thing it's a huge thing it always starts out with something that's just a little bit too far ahead of its time and then everyone else catches up like the iPhone with no buttons yeah I will say for people listening one of the takeaways I have is if you're building anything, you're building a product you're building art, you're building a mobile app you're building software, you're building a Mac app if you dare to be different, in this case, like a Wind Waker, a Pinkerton, a Kid A, especially visually, and you post it to social, you're more likely to be scroll stopping if it's just a completely different visual language.

24:06I think one of the reasons why even you had success on your IRL event series, what was it called? AlreadyThere.com. Yeah, it completely hurts people. When people look at it, they're either disgusted and intrigued or disgusted and not intrigued.

24:32I know you. You're one of my good friends and you sent me this link and I almost didn't want to click show me over here because I was scared. but that was kind of like a part of the brand I felt like, right? You're supposed to feel a little bit scared. I have companies that are very easy to digest like facilitator.com and I wanted to make something that was harder to digest but really just like, I don't want this to sound too woo-woo but like coming from my soul I just sat down and I was just making it in the middle of the night, I was just writing the stuff and I was just like, this is the vibe I want to go for.

25:17And my sense was that it was going to turn a lot of people off. But the goal for that was to be also a thing that sort of grows on people and maybe the second version of it, people are talking about it more. And the third version, people are talking about it even more. I want to go to the next category. but before we move on how much did you pay for alreadythere.com? Alreadythere.com it wasn't that expensive I think I paid $12 ,500 maybe I did it on a whim I was just sitting there sitting, journaling and then I was like Laura, alreadythere.com that's something isn't it and I always ask her first and she was like yeah, already there, that's something I gotta get it and I just like immediately started negotiating and bidding using GoDaddy or whatever and yeah they asked for like 30 something K first but I got it down to like 12 something that's nothing dude that's like a price of a latte the funny thing is I'm using already there.com for this one off funnel

26:32oh man you're so relatable you know $12 ,500. I'm using the money generated by my businesses. I'm not just pulling$12 ,500 out of my pocket and paying for it. It's part of the holding company machine, the reservoirs. I think the way to think about it is, will you make an additional$12 ,500 from having a great domain and great brand? I think so. Yeah, I think so too. I think it gives you, it makes, for anyone who knows how expensive domain names are, like with facilitator.com, I know that just by somebody seeing that they're on that website, facilitator.com, they kind of know that must have been expensive.

27:24And that already does some of the trust building for us without them even having to know us. Yeah, cool. By the way, for 2026, I want to buy some baller dot coms. My thesis is that dot coms are just going to... What I'm going to say isn't rocket science, but dot coms are only going to get more and more value because it's waterfront property of the internet. Dot com is the best. And I think that when you're trying to get people to scroll stop and you're trying to get people to trust your brand, a dot com just is a little more of, it's a little more trust. It's a little more, you just, yeah, people trust it more.

28:17So I think when you look at, especially I would say$2 ,500 to$15 ,000, that range, if you can get a one or two word domain that rips, it's worth it. I also think there's another side of it and that when I buy an expensive domain name, I mentally commit myself to the project. So when I bought alreadythere.com, I was like, okay, I have to do this now. even though it was going to be easy for me to not take on that project because it's not as big as the other things I'm doing but just by buying that domain name I was like, you know what, fuck it, I'm going all in this is me mentally committing to making this happen so yeah, there's that element as well of your own confidence and your own energy being put into something yeah, and by the way A lot of people don't know this, but you can lease to buy domains.

29:16Oh, I didn't know that. You can lease a domain name? I'm on this website, and I've never been on it, Adam.com. No affiliation, but you can pay in installments, right? It's a new thing. Even GoDaddy, I think on some of them, have it. Makes sense. I almost lost already there.com because I bought it from some dude, and then the transfer kind of broke and there was like two months where I had no access to it and I was like, oh come on. I still have a lot of unused domain names. A lot. .coms. Well, let's move on to the next category. All right, what is the next best productivity product of 2025? I think that's a good one.

30:05You want to start? I'll start because I have a boring and obvious one Are you going to say ChatGPT? I actually am.

30:14ChatGPT is my most used productivity product of all of 2025. I wanted to choose something more niche and that would prove that I'm really more into the AI topic. But the true answer to the question is ChatGPT. and do you use chat gpt like do you have like gpt set up or are you kind of just brute forcing it i am like boomer level i just use chat gpt raw i mean i downloaded their browser i'm testing out all the agent stuff etc etc but most of the time i'm just going even though i have the desktop app i'm going to chat gpt straight to the website typing in my query mostly on my phone um and And I just, it is just the most useful tool ever.

31:07It's amazing. Even just in its replacement of Google's simplest format. Even just like the voice mode. Sometimes when my daughter has a question for me that I'm kind of not able to answer and we can talk to it back and forth and it has this natural sort of sounding voice. I think chat GPT is just excellent and we've probably all become very accustomed to it. I'm using the other ones. I'm using Gemini, I'm using Claude and I just keep coming back to chat GPT maybe just because I'm used to it. But I've heard Gemini 3 is better but in the whole year if you just look at the pure amount of hours that I've put into chat GPT that is my most used productivity product of the year.

32:01Have you looked at ChatGPT Atlas, their new browser? Yes, yes. I've used it and it's cool but it's slow. I think these companies need to be better by the way at showing use cases because the use case that I needed when I showed it to people they were like, holy shit, now I get it. I needed to find a gluten-free, a restaurant that serves gluten-free stuff on their menu that was available for a specific date, for a specific time, for a specific amount of people in Berlin. And even though it took long, it took like 15 minutes, I was able to just walk off and do something else while the agent went around and clicked shit.

32:40And that was a huge aha moment for me. or like also just for other people who I was trying to show it to. That's an amazing functionality. It's really cool. I think it's cool. Also, by the way, the setup, the animation, they created this like weird visual when you're setting it up on the Mac before you install it, like the installation screen. I don't know. No one's talked about that on X, but when you move around the little installation box before you install it, it like warps your screen with like this kind of rainbow effect. and I've never seen that while installing a product. That was really cool.

33:19I didn't see that. I feel like no one's talking about that. You have to write installing chat or Atlas. It's like light coming through a glass rainbow effect. There's no way that this is how to download. Maybe it's in here. Yeah, I saw nobody talking about it at all. Yeah. so it's it's the next step i guess no it's here isn't it yeah uh no just maybe it's only on certain i think it was this i think it was the screen where you like drag the little that thing into the mac folder you sure you weren't on drugs i promise you i I wasn't done drugs. It was like a really beautiful animation that was very confusing because I've never seen one of those.