Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. It is time for me to pay the piper. By that, I mean it's time. That's special time where I look back in an episode I recorded at the end of last year in twenty twenty three, in which I made predictions for what would happen in the world of tech this year in twenty twenty four. Traditionally pretty shaky on these predictions, and it turns out making a really good prediction as hard. I never wanted to do a layup or anything like that, so sometimes I try and stick my neck out. But on top of that, weird stuff just keeps happening in the world, you know, stuff I didn't see coming, and inevitably that has a really big impact on everything else. Like that pandemic thing a few years back, I didn't see that coming, and that shure as heck had a big impact on well everything but including the tech sector. Also, sometimes I make predictions not based on what I think is going to happen, but perhaps on what I hope will happen. So first up, the first prediction I made last year is that X formerly known as Twitter, would finally get it sack together and Elon Musk would step back from the service a little bit more, and Linda Yakarino, who's the actual CEO of X, would have a chance to define a new era at the company, because the perception at least is that anything she does as leader is immediately undermined and reversed by Elon Musk. But I would say that this prediction of mine was a big old swing and a miss. Now, in my own prediction, I admitted that I did not believe X would actually get better. I said that it's quote just going to be a bigger mess end quote. Now that is something we can check. Is X worse off at the end of twenty twenty four than it was at the end of twenty twenty three. Now, keep in mind, Elon Musk himself is on top of the world. He's the richest person on Earth. He's going to be part of Trump's administration. Once Trump takes office on January twentieth, twenty twenty five, he will be co leading a new governmental department on spending I would be shocked if he doesn't try to leverage his wealth and position to get things to turn around for him. For example, I could see him making a real go of punishing all those companies that decided to stop advertising on X, as if somehow there were some sort of mandate in place that requires companies to advertise at specific places. I honestly don't know how you can make that argument that somehow deciding not to advertise on X is illegal. I would imagine it's a First Amendment issue. You know, companies have the right to advertise with whomever they want or not advertise. But what do I know. I'm not a constitutional expert. We also don't know if he will attempt to push through his controversial compensation package over at Tesla. That's something that's been denied him by a court in the past, but I can imagine him using his connections to kind of yeah, that reversed. We'll see. But how is X doing right now? Well, since X is a private company again once Elon purchased it, we don't have SEC filings that we can look at, right They're not obligated to file with the SEC, so analysts have had to make some guesses about this stuff, but they've been saying this year that X is heading toward another yearly loss. Fidelity estimates that the current value of X is somewhere around nine point four billion dollars. Now that's a lot of money, but do keep in mind that US paid forty four billion dollars for Twitter, so yikes. Performance Marketing World predicts that X will bring in around two billion dollars in revenue this year, and that's actually down from two point two billion dollars last year and four point five billion dollars in twenty twenty two. So you could argue X is a bigger mess than it was last year, but maybe not that much bigger. It's just still in decline. There were also stories of hundreds of thousands, or even millions of users ditching X for other platforms like blue Sky and Threads Plus. X changed how blocking users works late this past year. So it used to be that if you were on Twitter and you blocked somebody, that person would no longer be able to see your posts. It would be as if you had disappeared from Twitter to that person. Today, because of the changes that musks Ex has made, the blocked person can continue to see what you post. They just can't interact with it, at least not with the tools that are built into X. You can still directly do something like copy and paste someone's post and then post your own version of it and respond to it that way if you wanted to. Anyway, I'm sad to report X did not transform into a decent platform this past year. I'm still not really sure what Yakarino is actually doing at this point. You don't see her mentioned in the news that much like there are articles about her work at X, but Elon Musk just dominates the news when it comes to stories about X and his other companies, which tells you a lot like it may not be that Elon Musk is essentially still controlling the company from behind Yakarino. It may not be the case, but it appears to be that case because of the way it's reported, and certainly the way that X has performed and the way Elon behaves it all seems to be aligned. But again, I don't know the truth of it now. My next prediction was definitely a GIMMI. I said that quote, We're going to see a lot more AI integration end quote, and we sure did see an awful lot of AI integration. I mentioned that there would be a lot of pressure on businesses to integrate AI into their operations, even if they don't have a fully thought out strategy as to how they should do that, that the whole fear of missing out would drive a lot of corporate implementations of AI, similar to what we saw when the metaverse was first being talked about, or NFTs emerged out of obscurity. Keeping in mind NFTs had been around for a bit before the world went bonkers about them for a little less than a year. I said that I think there was an AI bubble and that it would likely collapse, possibly before the end of twenty twenty four. That has not happened. We have not had a total bubble collapse, or if it is happening, it's a slow enough collapse that's not been noteworthy yet. There have been several think pieces about the possibility of AI advancements kind of slowing down a bit like plateauing, particularly in the field of generative AI, that we might be hitting the limits of what large language models can do, and more folks are seeing AI as something that's interesting and potentially useful, but not quite there yet, that a lot of the hoopla around AI is perhaps ahead of its time, and that we're seeing progress in the field slow down a bit. I'm not sure if that's entirely accurate. That just might be the perception of the industry. Certainly, we're seeing plenty of investors continue to pour truckloads of money into AI research and development. Open AI received more than six billion dollars and investments late this year. That helps stave off the situation in which the company would spend itself out of business because AI is also wicked expensive. I did warn in the Predictions episode that if the bubble burst, that would hurt AI across the board, and by that I meant if there's a collapse or a market adjustment, if you prefer those words, the investors might become a little more conservative with their investments, and the AI field in general would find it harder to get money to do research needed to advance the field. Because, keep in mind, I've said it over and over again, generative AI is not the only kind of AI out there. It is a kind of AI. But the fear is that if generative AI reaches a point where businesses say this is interesting, but it's just not where we need it to be. Like our expectations were at one level and reality is at a different level, and the rug gets pulled out from under generative AI. Figuratively speaking, the fear is that investors would shy away from any AI oriented endeavor, not just the generative AI. And we've seen this kind of stuff happen before. I always think back to the first VR bubble in the nineteen nineties, but so far that has not happened, and it may not happen. According to Ifosa Udenwin of tech Radar, while the hype might be dying down a bit around artificial intelligence, investments have not slacked off so far, so that's good news for all the AI companies out there. I also mentioned that we would see a lot more legislators and regulators attempt to wrap their heads around AI, but we would not get very many meaningful laws or regulations out of it by the end of the year. And hey, here in the United States, I was one hundred percent right. There is no comprehensive federal legislation regarding artificial intelligence here in the United States. There are some individual state laws across our union that do handle AI. But that just means there's no uniform set of rules in the country that companies have to abide by, which actually makes it really darn challenging if you are running an AI company. I mean, you might end up being perfectly in line with the laws of say Massachusetts, but it turns out those laws are not compatible with the laws in I don't know, Arizona, and so it literally becomes impossible to do business in a meaningful way across the country if that's the case, because you're never going to find a way to thread all of those needles. They're just not going to line up properly. So there is a real need for federal rules and laws around AI. It will be interesting to see where laws and regulations around AI develop in the near future. With President Elect Trump back in office starting January twentieth, twenty twenty five. Oddly enough, I actually briefly worked with his pick for AI policy advisor, shreerram Now. I say briefly because our working relationship only lasted a few months, but our contact with each other was pretty limited in that time as well. However, it's wild to me that my path crossed with someone who ends up being the Advisor to the President on an issue. It's also a little strange because last I heard, he had relocated to London, and from what I understand, that's where he still is. So for the US advisor to AI policy to be living in London now, grant he is an American citizen, but he's living in London, it's just kind of weird. Anyway, I know Shreroan is very pro AI. He's also very pro Elon Musk, So I suspect for the next few years we're not going to see any really restrictive laws around AI's development or deployment, assuming that his vision for how AI should develop moves forward. So I think it's safe to say that my AI predictions for twenty twenty four turned out to be just how I anticipated. Whether that changes next year will have to see. I think there's a good chance we will not get a bubble bursting situation considering how favorable the US government will likely be to the sector. So, in other words, maybe there would be a bubble burst if it weren't for the fact that you're going to have a very pro AI push from the government, is my guest. I mean, with Elon Musk and with folks like Shum in charge of advising the president. It would shock me if the government became a little more critical or cautious around AI. But who knows, certainly not me. I also said that there would be a lot of misinformation campaigns last year or this past year because the United States was in an election cycle, and that a lot of those misinformation campaigns would be augmented or entirely powered by AI. And again that was a gimme. We've been seeing an increase in misinformation and disinformation campaign out of places like China and Russia, primarily Russia, if we're being honest, but also other regions of the world, and they aim to disrupt the normal democratic process and sow seeds of doubt and confusion, and generally either try to discourage people from participating in the democratic process at all, which a lot of that happened this past cycle, or trying to sway people to support particular candidates or policies that ultimately align with say Russia's own policies and philosophies, or the very least do not stand to be an impediment to the disruptor. Now, I mentioned that we'd likely see calls to put pressure on various online platforms out there to identify and remove cases of misinformation, which did happen a lot, but that the real issue that stopping the campaigns in the first place, would largely be ignored because it turns out it's very hard to enforce those kinds of rules because the people who are breaking them live in other countries. So this comes down to a shoot the messenger kind of thing. But then a lot of these platforms have been fairly laxed when it comes to acting quickly with regard to misinformation campaigns. One perspective on disinformation campaigns that you can read up on is Darryl M. West's piece on Brookings. It's titled how Disinformation to Find the twenty twenty four election Narrative. Check that out if you have a few minutes. It's a great piece. Okay, we're going to take a quick break to thank our sponsors. When we come back more predictions and how I did. We're back, and my next prediction is that we would see even more opposition to TikTok here in the United States, and golly, we sure did. Congress passed a bill this year that says TikTok's parent company, Byte Dance, which is located in China, must divest itself of TikTok, or else the app would be banned in the United States. And that bill passed into law. President Biden signed it into law, and now Byte Dance has a deadline of January nineteenth, twenty twenty five to divest itself of the company or face this ban in the US. Currently, Byte Dance and TikTok are challenging the new law, or at least trying to get the deadline extended so that President elect Trump can weigh in, because again, Trump doesn't come into office until January twentieth, one day after the ban is supposed to take place. So far, there's been very little movement from the Supreme Court that would indicate that they will push back the deadline. But we'll see. Maybe by the time you hear this that will have changed. I don't think anything is off the table at this point anyway. In my prediction, I said what I always say that I'm not a fan of TikTok, but I think going after TikTok is a myopic move that doesn't really address the underlying problem. If you're concerned about China, siphoning data from the US. There are plenty of ways the country is doing that without using an app like TikTok. I mean, China's got infiltrated systems like in the United States, a lot of our our infrastructure has been infiltrated by Chinese espionage agents over the course of years. They didn't use TikTok to do it, So that problem's there. There are data brokers out there that you can buy information from that have nothing to do with TikTok. And as far as propaganda goes, there are lots of other platforms out there that have served very well as being a way to get propaganda in front of US viewers, like you know, things like Facebook and Instagram have done that, or x for that matter. So what I'm saying is that getting rid of TikTok doesn't actually address the underlying problem. It's like a symptom of a disease. It's not dealing with the actual disease. So I think lawmakers are going to have a lot to answer for if they ban TikTok and suddenly China is not magically cut out from all that information and propaganda stuff. But what do I know, Maybe they won't face any consequences at all, apart from all the young people being really ticked off that the government has banned TikTok. As for Trump, he's the one who got this started. He's the one who argued that we should ban TikTok years ago, back in like twenty twenty. He even signed an executive order to that effect. But in subsequent years he has reversed his position for reasons I'm not going to go into here, or at least his reasons that he stated is that young people seem to really like the platform, which doesn't seem like it's an actual reason young people like it, so why should we get rid of it? That doesn't make any sense at all. What might make more sense is that someone who has invested literally billions of dollars in companies, including stuff like ByteDance, also happened to be a big campaign contributor to Trump. But hey, maybe I'm just way off base. My next prediction was that the Apple Vision Pro, the mixed reality headset from Apple, would be a commercial failure in twenty twenty four. It had not yet launched in twenty twenty three when I made these predictions, and I said, I don't think it's going to be the runaway success that it needs to be, and I'm pretty much right on about that. The vision Pro headset cost thirty five hundred dollars upon launch, crazy expensive. Moreover, there were a limited number of experiences and applications for the technology, so it was a really huge request to get customers to dole out thirty five hundred dollars for something that only had limited applicability. In June, Jonathan Reichenthall of Forbes had an article that's titled Apple's Vision Pro is amazing, but nobody wants one. So In that piece, he said that Apple's target for the year was to sell around eight hundred thousand units by the end of twenty twenty four. However, by midyear, Apple had adjusted that to four hundred and fifty thousand units. That's a big wolf, you know, going down to a little more than than half of what you had originally anticipated. That's tough. As Reichenthall pointed out, it's a rough comparison to the iPad, which sold seventy three million units in its first year. What a huge contrast. There are rumors that Apple will stop offering the Vision Pro entirely and instead focus on a slimmed down model that would cost somewhere in the one thousand, five hundred dollar neighborhood in the new year. That might help the technology gained subtraction, though I imagine the people who tried out the vision Pro model may end up being disappointed that some of their favorite features are not there in the slimmed down version. Apple CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly stated that the Vision Pro is not and was never intended to be a mass market product. It was rather an early adopter product, and I believe him. I think that's true. But I think it's also true that Apple nearly had its expectations on how many units it would sell then, and that's a discouraging message. Like if you are in Apple and you're told, hey, we were hoping to sell eight hundred thousand units, but now we're marking it down to four hundred and fifty thousand, that's not great news. Like that's telling you, Okay, well, the demand for this particular technology is not as high as what we had hoped, and the price tag is probably too high for more people to jump on board. But I don't think that Apple's journey into mixed reality is over just yet. Okay, next up, we have predictions about quantum computing. I said quantum computing was going to be much bigger news in twenty twenty four, But considering all that did happen in twenty twenty four and how much stuff took up space in the news cycle, I think calling it big news in the sense of a lot of people hearing about quantum computing that was a bit off. That's not to say there weren't really important advancements and big news within the quantum computing world this past year. There certainly were. I just don't think it broke through to the headlines for a lot of other people outside the field to really learn about it. So, for example, recently Google announced a new quantum chip called Willow, and the hope is that this will allow for more real world applications of quantum computing in the near future. So quantum computing has been a revolutionary field of research, but the practical applications have been limited, partly because of the power limitations of quantum computing, because it's just hard to build a really powerful one. Quantum computers are extremely delicate, if you like to think of it, that way, like the quantum nature can collapse easily if not handled properly. On top of that, the algorithms you need to build, the programs you need to build to run on quantum computers are really complicated. So we've had a lot of progress on the hardware front, and often the progress on the software side is not mentioned nearly as frequently. But the potential for quantum computing is absolutely incredible. Quantum computing has the potential to tackle certain subsets of computational problems in a fraction of a fraction of the amount of time it takes a classical computer to do it. Like, there's some computational problems that are so difficult that a classical computer could take billions or trillions of years before it could complete it, whereas a quantum computer of sufficient power and with the right algorithm could potentially solve it in just a few minutes. I like the analogy that Tam Hallabeek, who is a strategist with the company Digi Sert, has said. He says, imagine that you have a typical maze puzzle. Now your classical computer will try to solve this puzzle by taking each path in turn, like all right, Well, let me follow this path. Okay, that led to a dead end. So let me now follow this path that led to a dead end. Let me follow this path, et cetera, et cetera. Now imagine if the computer were able to take every path at the same time and then come back with the answer as to which path was the best one. That speeds up the solution considerably. And that's how quantum computers work from a very abstract level. So, in compaired with the right algorithms and you have sufficient cubits or quantum bits in your quantum computer, the computer could potentially make previously safe encryption methods a breeze to decrypt. That's because the quantum computer, assuming it's powerful enough and the algorithm works, can solve for all potential pathways that led to the encryption at the same time and then reverse it. So assuming you've got the right program to run with the right quantum computer, decrypting stuff would be a breeze. That also means that potentially you could tackle the tough challenge of bitcoin mining and break proof of work systems, which is what bitcoin is. It's a proof of work system, So a proof of work cryptocurrency system essentially creates a really tough math problem for computers to solve. And this is the mining part of bitcoin mining. So you've got a block of transactions bitcoin transactions, and they need to be verified. So the verification process involves solving a really challenging math problem, or kind of guessing at the solution of a math problem. So the way this typically works with bitcoin is you have a really huge number. This really huge number was generated by multiplying two other really huge prime numbers together. So in order to solve the problem, you have to come up with what those two prime numbers were. Your classical computer is the way they do this as they start going through every potential prime number and saying, hey, is this it? Hey? Is this it? Hey? Is this it? Until they get to the right one. Whereas a quantum computer could solve for all the potential prime number factors that are used to create this number and find the right pair much faster in theory, which could be an incredible disrupt for bitcoin mining. Right now, you have these massive computer networks that are running in places like defunct power plants that are just churning and churning and churning all these numbers trying to be the first one to get to the correct one in order to mine the next block of bitcoin. So if you were able to do this in a fraction of the amount of time, you would completely upset that entire ecosystem, which would not necessarily be a bad thing because these computer networks are often drawing huge amounts of electricity from fossil fuel sources, so they can have a big impact on climate and other issues like pollution and things like that. So being able to do so much faster with much less power would be a game changer, but it would totally upset the way bitcoin works. Right now, however, we are years away from that becoming a thing because it's all theoretical. You need to have the quantum computer be powerful enough, and as I said, like creating a quantum computer that has sufficient number of cubits to do these kind of things is a non trivial challenge, and you need the right algorithm to be able to go about this as well, and that's just not something that we have access to and probably won't for several years, maybe many years. It may be quite some time before this is a reality, but it's a possibility. Meanwhile, the cryptography world has been hard at work designing new methods that will confound quantum computers so that stuff like security and privacy can still be a thing in a post traditional encryption world. So that's good because you would hate to find out, like you'd wake up one morning and just say, hey, no more secrets, because, as it turns out, this quantum computer can decrypt anything that's been encrypted. Ever, that would be terrifying because think of all the stuff out there. It could be your personal finances, it could be medical records, it could be state secrets, it could be all sorts of stuff, and being able to suddenly get access to all of that would be pretty terrifying. But Yeah, while there were impressive developments in quantum computing in twenty twenty four, I think those achievements were largely overshadowed by all the other chaotic stuff on fire going on around the world this past year. So I'm going to say I was not right about this one, only because I don't think we saw enough news about quantum computing hit the mainstream to justify a check mark for me. Okay, one prediction I did not make because at the time I thought it was a sure thing was that Nintendo would announce its next console before the end of the year. I said, I'm not going to predict that that's definitely going to happen. Nintendo will say it, so there's not even a prediction here, and that was a big old whoop see because that did not happen. There were a lot of rumors and leaks about the next Nintendo console. Most of those are calling it the Switch to and apparently some leaked images back that up, saying that yeah, that's what Nintendo's calling it too, and it suggests that it'll just be an upgrade to the Switch, but it'll have some serious new features in it, such as potentially the ability to create four K visuals when docked with the television. That's not announced, so maybe it'll happen. We are still waiting on that official announcement, which Nintendo said is going to happen before the end of its current fiscal year. Nintendo's fiscal years end in March and then the new one starts in April, so it's possible we won't hear anything until Spring twenty twenty five, or who knows, maybe Nintendo has announced something between when I recorded this on December twenty third, and when you hear it, that would be fun. You know what's also fun If we take a quick break to thank our sponsors, we'll be right back. We're back. And you know another thing I said I would not bother making a prediction about was that electric vehicles would have a really big year in twenty twenty four. And the reason why I said that was because so many different parts of the world have been passing laws that are looking into phasing out internal combustion engines over the next few years. But then Trump won the election this year and he is not that keen on electric vehicles. He seems to be far more interested in fossil fuels for some reason. Whether Elon Musk's presence on Trump's team will change that, at least for Tesla, I don't know, but it's possible that we will actually see electric vehicle support in the United States lag behind other parts of the world for the next few years now. I also predicted another chaotic year for streaming services in twenty twenty four. I mentioned that the streaming business is a really tough one or to make a profit, right, you're competing for customers, so you've got all these other competitors on the market. That means you have to market aggressively to your customers or your potential customers, and you have to pour a lot of money into original content or purchase lots of exclusive media libraries or both. That's really expensive, so your operating costs are incredibly high. You can't charge too much for your service or else no one's going to sign up for it. And you need to get to a certain number of subscribers in order for it to be sustainable, and your revenue streams tend to be pretty limited. Usually we're talking about subscriptions and maybe advertising, right you might get some ad support in there too, And consumers are absolutely flooded with different options. I mean you've got your netflixes, your Hulus, your Amazon Primes, your Maxes, your Disney pluses, your Paramount pluses, your Peacocks, et cetera, the Apple TV pluses. I mean, there's so many. There was some consolidation this year, but mostly in the form of companies entering into partnerships to offer bundled services, where for a flat subscription fee you get access to multiple services. So like with Disney Plus, it's Disney Plus, ESPN Plus and Hulu, right, I have the Disney Plus and Hulu one. I didn't bother with ESPN because there are only two sports that I really follow, and I don't even follow them. There are only two sports that I actually like to see, and only then if I'm there in person, and those are baseball and hockey, and otherwise I just don't have any interests, so I don't bother subscribing to ESPN. But yeah, there wasn't that many cases of companies going like belly up or getting out of streaming entirely in this past year. There are a lot of talks of mergers and acquisitions that didn't happen, and lots of movement that mostly was involved with shuffling things around, so things didn't really get upset too much. So I don't think things got as messy as I had anticipated last year. There's still lots of stories about companies struggling to find a path toward profitability, so that's still a thing. But in a large part, twenty twenty four I feel has been a year of treading water in the streaming media space. Maybe we'll see it change more in the next couple of years, but yeah, I feel like this wasn't as chaotic as I was anticipating, all right. Also, last year I predicted that Google would come out of the anti trust case more or less okay. I thought that they wouldn't get away scott free. I thought they would be found guilty of engaging in anti competitive behaviors, And in fact they did. A court did find Google guilty of practicing anti competitive policies. But I thought Google wouldn't be punished too hard. It would kind of get the equivalent of a slap on the wrist. It might get a really big fine, but that's not nearly as intense as, say, being forced to break up. Now, we don't know what's actually going to happen with Google's anti trust case. Like it has been found. The company's been found guilty of practicing this anti trust behaviors, but a judge next year will actually decide what the punishment is going to be. So the question of what happens to Google technically remains unanswered. The Department of Justice right now has sent a list of suggestions that include Google having to sell off its Chrome business, that's the browser. But you know, Google obviously has protested that saying no, that doesn't make any sense. It doesn't fix any problems. That's not the issue it any way. And plus you will ruin the world economy if you do this, among other things. I am paraphrasing, and I'm being a little facetious here, So that's not exactly what Google's saying. It's just kind of how I walk away feeling about it. But we don't know what's going to actually happen with this judge next year. It could be that the judge does command Google to sell off some of its businesses. We'll have to see, but we don't know for sure. For one thing, the Department of Justice itself is going to be different once Trump takes office, and so there's some question as to whether or not the DOJ will back off a bit once that happens. However, Trump has also had a really contentious relationship with big tech companies, particularly Google, but also some other ones as well, and he seems to feel like there's a perceived bias in these different platforms against him like him personally, and at least that seems to be the case. Again, this is all me kind of drawing conclusions based on what I have read and what I've seen, But yeah, there seems to be at least some speculation that the DOJ will still be going after Google, it just may not be at the same level. Like the anti competitive stuff. May be one of the arguments the DOJ makes against big tech, but not because of a renewed interest in trust breaking in the government, but rather it's a tactic that might work in order to punish companies that have been perceived to be anti Trump. We'll see that that might be an unfair assessment. I don't want to just be hardheaded and say this is definitely the way it is. I don't I don't know, but uh yeah, I don't think Google is going to be forced to sell anything off. I think that my prediction from twenty twenty three is going to hold for twenty twenty five. But we'll see. I don't you know, I could be wrong. I also said that startups would find it harder to get funding in twenty twenty four, which is kind of true. Crunch Base found that the big five tech companies, which are Meta, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, invested at least a million dollars into one hundred and forty nine different startups this year. I was like, I mean a million apiece right, like saying a million dollars or more into one hundred forty nine startups. That's actually slightly up from twenty twenty three. Back that year, it was just one hundred and thirty one startups. However, even with one hundred and forty nine, that's still the second lowest number in the last five years for these companies to invest in. So I would say it wasn't harder than twenty twenty three, at least by going by what the Big five were doing, But it wasn't that much easier either. Joe Procopio of ink as An Incorporated, not as in Tattoos wrote a piece that's titled The Future of Starting a Business Looks drastically Different in twenty twenty four, and it goes over some of the challenges that startups face these days, and it mentions that a lot of investors are far more cautious about pouring money into companies than they used to be. AI has been going fairly strong, though Procopia argues that expectations and reality aren't exactly matching up, and that investors may find themselves reluctant to risk money in those ventures before too long. So I think This is sort of a partial correct answer for yours. Truly, It's not like a solid win, but I feel like I was more right than wrong. Oh. I also predicted that we would see a slow down in podcasting, with fewer new shows premiering in twenty twenty four, particularly at the network level. I got that wrong. That's just flat wrong. Podcasting has been year over year at increase, over and over and over again, whether that's a number of listeners, number of shows, number of new shows, that kind of thing. Video podcasting has also made a huge impact. There are more video podcasts out there. That has changed things, not just in how podcasts are produced, but also how they're monetized. Because if you're hosting your video podcast on something like YouTube, well then you're kind of beholden to YouTube's monetization approach unless you're doing like sponsored episodes or something that's slightly different, right, But if you're doing ad supported shows, then you don't have nearly the same level of control as you would on other platforms. But YouTube is kind of the place for online video for the most part. So yeah, things did not slow down the way I anticipated. I thought we would enter into kind of a more conservative year for new shows, simply because the shows that exist they're all bad for listeners. And it's not a zero sum game. Lots of people listen to lots of different shows, but it's hard, it's very challenging, and you spend a lot of money developing these shows, particularly if it's like a prestige show, if it's a show that has recognizable names on it, you're probably spending a guaranteed amount of money just to make the show, and whether that show actually makes its money back or not, that's a totally different thing. And if you're competing against everybody else, My thought was that we would see companies kind of ease off a little bit on that and try and not spend quite so much money in development. But that's not been the case. It has continued to be very competitive, with big companies spending lots of money to get different shows on their networks or developed on their networks. So I was wrong about that. I will say, however, that both twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four twenty twenty two in fact saw a huge dip from twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, but that shouldn't be a surprise, right twenty twenty, everybody was stuck at home, so lots of people turned to making podcasts because it was one way to try and stay sane and stay busy. For a lot of people in the entertainment industry, it was a way to stay creative, to stay in front of fans, to stay busy when the rest of the industry was shut down due to COVID. So, yeah, there was a huge dip after that, but that's no surprise, right that was bound to happen, just like all the other boom moments we saw out of COVID kind of went bust after a couple of years. Thus we have really sad stories about like massive layoffs in the tech sector and in other industries as well. But yeah, that's it. That's how I did in my predictions for twenty twenty four. I actually think I did better this year than i'd most years. I think that I was pretty on track for a lot of these, with the exception of notable outliers like X getting its act together, but again that was more aspirational than based in reality. I hope all of you out there have had an amazing twenty twenty four. I hope you have an even better twenty twenty five. I am not making predictions about twenty twenty five this year, because, as I'm sure most of you know, I am stepping down from Tech Stuff on January tenth. You'll have a brand new episode with your brand new hosts, whom you'll going to meet very soon, and that will be exciting. It'll be an all new year of tech Stuff. I'm really eager to listen to that and to hear what happens. I think it's going to be an amazing year for the show and for all of you listeners out there. And I'll miss doing this. I got a couple more in me before I head off into the sunset. But yeah, this has been a real treat. I mean, I've been doing sixteen and a half years. You figure I'm gonna miss it. But in the meantime, you'all take care of yourselves, hold your loved ones close, have the happiest of New years, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. It is time for me to pay the piper. By that, I mean it's time. That's special time where I look back in an episode I recorded at the end of last year in twenty twenty three, in which I made predictions for what would happen in the world of tech this year in twenty twenty four. Traditionally pretty shaky on these predictions, and it turns out making a really good prediction as hard. I never wanted to do a layup or anything like that, so sometimes I try and stick my neck out. But on top of that, weird stuff just keeps happening in the world, you know, stuff I didn't see coming, and inevitably that has a really big impact on everything else. Like that pandemic thing a few years back, I didn't see that coming, and that shure as heck had a big impact on well everything but including the tech sector. Also, sometimes I make predictions not based on what I think is going to happen, but perhaps on what I hope will happen. So first up, the first prediction I made last year is that X formerly known as Twitter, would finally get it sack together and Elon Musk would step back from the service a little bit more, and Linda Yakarino, who's the actual CEO of X, would have a chance to define a new era at the company, because the perception at least is that anything she does as leader is immediately undermined and reversed by Elon Musk. But I would say that this prediction of mine was a big old swing and a miss. Now, in my own prediction, I admitted that I did not believe X would actually get better. I said that it's quote just going to be a bigger mess end quote. Now that is something we can check. Is X worse off at the end of twenty twenty four than it was at the end of twenty twenty three. Now, keep in mind, Elon Musk himself is on top of the world. He's the richest person on Earth. He's going to be part of Trump's administration. Once Trump takes office on January twentieth, twenty twenty five, he will be co leading a new governmental department on spending I would be shocked if he doesn't try to leverage his wealth and position to get things to turn around for him. For example, I could see him making a real go of punishing all those companies that decided to stop advertising on X, as if somehow there were some sort of mandate in place that requires companies to advertise at specific places. I honestly don't know how you can make that argument that somehow deciding not to advertise on X is illegal. I would imagine it's a First Amendment issue. You know, companies have the right to advertise with whomever they want or not advertise. But what do I know. I'm not a constitutional expert. We also don't know if he will attempt to push through his controversial compensation package over at Tesla. That's something that's been denied him by a court in the past, but I can imagine him using his connections to kind of yeah, that reversed. We'll see. But how is X doing right now? Well, since X is a private company again once Elon purchased it, we don't have SEC filings that we can look at, right They're not obligated to file with the SEC, so analysts have had to make some guesses about this stuff, but they've been saying this year that X is heading toward another yearly loss. Fidelity estimates that the current value of X is somewhere around nine point four billion dollars. Now that's a lot of money, but do keep in mind that US paid forty four billion dollars for Twitter, so yikes. Performance Marketing World predicts that X will bring in around two billion dollars in revenue this year, and that's actually down from two point two billion dollars last year and four point five billion dollars in twenty twenty two. So you could argue X is a bigger mess than it was last year, but maybe not that much bigger. It's just still in decline. There were also stories of hundreds of thousands, or even millions of users ditching X for other platforms like blue Sky and Threads Plus. X changed how blocking users works late this past year. So it used to be that if you were on Twitter and you blocked somebody, that person would no longer be able to see your posts. It would be as if you had disappeared from Twitter to that person. Today, because of the changes that musks Ex has made, the blocked person can continue to see what you post. They just can't interact with it, at least not with the tools that are built into X. You can still directly do something like copy and paste someone's post and then post your own version of it and respond to it that way if you wanted to. Anyway, I'm sad to report X did not transform into a decent platform this past year. I'm still not really sure what Yakarino is actually doing at this point. You don't see her mentioned in the news that much like there are articles about her work at X, but Elon Musk just dominates the news when it comes to stories about X and his other companies, which tells you a lot like it may not be that Elon Musk is essentially still controlling the company from behind Yakarino. It may not be the case, but it appears to be that case because of the way it's reported, and certainly the way that X has performed and the way Elon behaves it all seems to be aligned. But again, I don't know the truth of it now. My next prediction was definitely a GIMMI. I said that quote, We're going to see a lot more AI integration end quote, and we sure did see an awful lot of AI integration. I mentioned that there would be a lot of pressure on businesses to integrate AI into their operations, even if they don't have a fully thought out strategy as to how they should do that, that the whole fear of missing out would drive a lot of corporate implementations of AI, similar to what we saw when the metaverse was first being talked about, or NFTs emerged out of obscurity. Keeping in mind NFTs had been around for a bit before the world went bonkers about them for a little less than a year. I said that I think there was an AI bubble and that it would likely collapse, possibly before the end of twenty twenty four. That has not happened. We have not had a total bubble collapse, or if it is happening, it's a slow enough collapse that's not been noteworthy yet. There have been several think pieces about the possibility of AI advancements kind of slowing down a bit like plateauing, particularly in the field of generative AI, that we might be hitting the limits of what large language models can do, and more folks are seeing AI as something that's interesting and potentially useful, but not quite there yet, that a lot of the hoopla around AI is perhaps ahead of its time, and that we're seeing progress in the field slow down a bit. I'm not sure if that's entirely accurate. That just might be the perception of the industry. Certainly, we're seeing plenty of investors continue to pour truckloads of money into AI research and development. Open AI received more than six billion dollars and investments late this year. That helps stave off the situation in which the company would spend itself out of business because AI is also wicked expensive. I did warn in the Predictions episode that if the bubble burst, that would hurt AI across the board, and by that I meant if there's a collapse or a market adjustment, if you prefer those words, the investors might become a little more conservative with their investments, and the AI field in general would find it harder to get money to do research needed to advance the field. Because, keep in mind, I've said it over and over again, generative AI is not the only kind of AI out there. It is a kind of AI. But the fear is that if generative AI reaches a point where businesses say this is interesting, but it's just not where we need it to be. Like our expectations were at one level and reality is at a different level, and the rug gets pulled out from under generative AI. Figuratively speaking, the fear is that investors would shy away from any AI oriented endeavor, not just the generative AI. And we've seen this kind of stuff happen before. I always think back to the first VR bubble in the nineteen nineties, but so far that has not happened, and it may not happen. According to Ifosa Udenwin of tech Radar, while the hype might be dying down a bit around artificial intelligence, investments have not slacked off so far, so that's good news for all the AI companies out there. I also mentioned that we would see a lot more legislators and regulators attempt to wrap their heads around AI, but we would not get very many meaningful laws or regulations out of it by the end of the year. And hey, here in the United States, I was one hundred percent right. There is no comprehensive federal legislation regarding artificial intelligence here in the United States. There are some individual state laws across our union that do handle AI. But that just means there's no uniform set of rules in the country that companies have to abide by, which actually makes it really darn challenging if you are running an AI company. I mean, you might end up being perfectly in line with the laws of say Massachusetts, but it turns out those laws are not compatible with the laws in I don't know, Arizona, and so it literally becomes impossible to do business in a meaningful way across the country if that's the case, because you're never going to find a way to thread all of those needles. They're just not going to line up properly. So there is a real need for federal rules and laws around AI. It will be interesting to see where laws and regulations around AI develop in the near future. With President Elect Trump back in office starting January twentieth, twenty twenty five. Oddly enough, I actually briefly worked with his pick for AI policy advisor, shreerram Now. I say briefly because our working relationship only lasted a few months, but our contact with each other was pretty limited in that time as well. However, it's wild to me that my path crossed with someone who ends up being the Advisor to the President on an issue. It's also a little strange because last I heard, he had relocated to London, and from what I understand, that's where he still is. So for the US advisor to AI policy to be living in London now, grant he is an American citizen, but he's living in London, it's just kind of weird. Anyway, I know Shreroan is very pro AI. He's also very pro Elon Musk, So I suspect for the next few years we're not going to see any really restrictive laws around AI's development or deployment, assuming that his vision for how AI should develop moves forward. So I think it's safe to say that my AI predictions for twenty twenty four turned out to be just how I anticipated. Whether that changes next year will have to see. I think there's a good chance we will not get a bubble bursting situation considering how favorable the US government will likely be to the sector. So, in other words, maybe there would be a bubble burst if it weren't for the fact that you're going to have a very pro AI push from the government, is my guest. I mean, with Elon Musk and with folks like Shum in charge of advising the president. It would shock me if the government became a little more critical or cautious around AI. But who knows, certainly not me. I also said that there would be a lot of misinformation campaigns last year or this past year because the United States was in an election cycle, and that a lot of those misinformation campaigns would be augmented or entirely powered by AI. And again that was a gimme. We've been seeing an increase in misinformation and disinformation campaign out of places like China and Russia, primarily Russia, if we're being honest, but also other regions of the world, and they aim to disrupt the normal democratic process and sow seeds of doubt and confusion, and generally either try to discourage people from participating in the democratic process at all, which a lot of that happened this past cycle, or trying to sway people to support particular candidates or policies that ultimately align with say Russia's own policies and philosophies, or the very least do not stand to be an impediment to the disruptor. Now, I mentioned that we'd likely see calls to put pressure on various online platforms out there to identify and remove cases of misinformation, which did happen a lot, but that the real issue that stopping the campaigns in the first place, would largely be ignored because it turns out it's very hard to enforce those kinds of rules because the people who are breaking them live in other countries. So this comes down to a shoot the messenger kind of thing. But then a lot of these platforms have been fairly laxed when it comes to acting quickly with regard to misinformation campaigns. One perspective on disinformation campaigns that you can read up on is Darryl M. West's piece on Brookings. It's titled how Disinformation to Find the twenty twenty four election Narrative. Check that out if you have a few minutes. It's a great piece. Okay, we're going to take a quick break to thank our sponsors. When we come back more predictions and how I did. We're back, and my next prediction is that we would see even more opposition to TikTok here in the United States, and golly, we sure did. Congress passed a bill this year that says TikTok's parent company, Byte Dance, which is located in China, must divest itself of TikTok, or else the app would be banned in the United States. And that bill passed into law. President Biden signed it into law, and now Byte Dance has a deadline of January nineteenth, twenty twenty five to divest itself of the company or face this ban in the US. Currently, Byte Dance and TikTok are challenging the new law, or at least trying to get the deadline extended so that President elect Trump can weigh in, because again, Trump doesn't come into office until January twentieth, one day after the ban is supposed to take place. So far, there's been very little movement from the Supreme Court that would indicate that they will push back the deadline. But we'll see. Maybe by the time you hear this that will have changed. I don't think anything is off the table at this point anyway. In my prediction, I said what I always say that I'm not a fan of TikTok, but I think going after TikTok is a myopic move that doesn't really address the underlying problem. If you're concerned about China, siphoning data from the US. There are plenty of ways the country is doing that without using an app like TikTok. I mean, China's got infiltrated systems like in the United States, a lot of our our infrastructure has been infiltrated by Chinese espionage agents over the course of years. They didn't use TikTok to do it, So that problem's there. There are data brokers out there that you can buy information from that have nothing to do with TikTok. And as far as propaganda goes, there are lots of other platforms out there that have served very well as being a way to get propaganda in front of US viewers, like you know, things like Facebook and Instagram have done that, or x for that matter. So what I'm saying is that getting rid of TikTok doesn't actually address the underlying problem. It's like a symptom of a disease. It's not dealing with the actual disease. So I think lawmakers are going to have a lot to answer for if they ban TikTok and suddenly China is not magically cut out from all that information and propaganda stuff. But what do I know, Maybe they won't face any consequences at all, apart from all the young people being really ticked off that the government has banned TikTok. As for Trump, he's the one who got this started. He's the one who argued that we should ban TikTok years ago, back in like twenty twenty. He even signed an executive order to that effect. But in subsequent years he has reversed his position for reasons I'm not going to go into here, or at least his reasons that he stated is that young people seem to really like the platform, which doesn't seem like it's an actual reason young people like it, so why should we get rid of it? That doesn't make any sense at all. What might make more sense is that someone who has invested literally billions of dollars in companies, including stuff like ByteDance, also happened to be a big campaign contributor to Trump. But hey, maybe I'm just way off base. My next prediction was that the Apple Vision Pro, the mixed reality headset from Apple, would be a commercial failure in twenty twenty four. It had not yet launched in twenty twenty three when I made these predictions, and I said, I don't think it's going to be the runaway success that it needs to be, and I'm pretty much right on about that. The vision Pro headset cost thirty five hundred dollars upon launch, crazy expensive. Moreover, there were a limited number of experiences and applications for the technology, so it was a really huge request to get customers to dole out thirty five hundred dollars for something that only had limited applicability. In June, Jonathan Reichenthall of Forbes had an article that's titled Apple's Vision Pro is amazing, but nobody wants one. So In that piece, he said that Apple's target for the year was to sell around eight hundred thousand units by the end of twenty twenty four. However, by midyear, Apple had adjusted that to four hundred and fifty thousand units. That's a big wolf, you know, going down to a little more than than half of what you had originally anticipated. That's tough. As Reichenthall pointed out, it's a rough comparison to the iPad, which sold seventy three million units in its first year. What a huge contrast. There are rumors that Apple will stop offering the Vision Pro entirely and instead focus on a slimmed down model that would cost somewhere in the one thousand, five hundred dollar neighborhood in the new year. That might help the technology gained subtraction, though I imagine the people who tried out the vision Pro model may end up being disappointed that some of their favorite features are not there in the slimmed down version. Apple CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly stated that the Vision Pro is not and was never intended to be a mass market product. It was rather an early adopter product, and I believe him. I think that's true. But I think it's also true that Apple nearly had its expectations on how many units it would sell then, and that's a discouraging message. Like if you are in Apple and you're told, hey, we were hoping to sell eight hundred thousand units, but now we're marking it down to four hundred and fifty thousand, that's not great news. Like that's telling you, Okay, well, the demand for this particular technology is not as high as what we had hoped, and the price tag is probably too high for more people to jump on board. But I don't think that Apple's journey into mixed reality is over just yet. Okay, next up, we have predictions about quantum computing. I said quantum computing was going to be much bigger news in twenty twenty four, But considering all that did happen in twenty twenty four and how much stuff took up space in the news cycle, I think calling it big news in the sense of a lot of people hearing about quantum computing that was a bit off. That's not to say there weren't really important advancements and big news within the quantum computing world this past year. There certainly were. I just don't think it broke through to the headlines for a lot of other people outside the field to really learn about it. So, for example, recently Google announced a new quantum chip called Willow, and the hope is that this will allow for more real world applications of quantum computing in the near future. So quantum computing has been a revolutionary field of research, but the practical applications have been limited, partly because of the power limitations of quantum computing, because it's just hard to build a really powerful one. Quantum computers are extremely delicate, if you like to think of it, that way, like the quantum nature can collapse easily if not handled properly. On top of that, the algorithms you need to build, the programs you need to build to run on quantum computers are really complicated. So we've had a lot of progress on the hardware front, and often the progress on the software side is not mentioned nearly as frequently. But the potential for quantum computing is absolutely incredible. Quantum computing has the potential to tackle certain subsets of computational problems in a fraction of a fraction of the amount of time it takes a classical computer to do it. Like, there's some computational problems that are so difficult that a classical computer could take billions or trillions of years before it could complete it, whereas a quantum computer of sufficient power and with the right algorithm could potentially solve it in just a few minutes. I like the analogy that Tam Hallabeek, who is a strategist with the company Digi Sert, has said. He says, imagine that you have a typical maze puzzle. Now your classical computer will try to solve this puzzle by taking each path in turn, like all right, Well, let me follow this path. Okay, that led to a dead end. So let me now follow this path that led to a dead end. Let me follow this path, et cetera, et cetera. Now imagine if the computer were able to take every path at the same time and then come back with the answer as to which path was the best one. That speeds up the solution considerably. And that's how quantum computers work from a very abstract level. So, in compaired with the right algorithms and you have sufficient cubits or quantum bits in your quantum computer, the computer could potentially make previously safe encryption methods a breeze to decrypt. That's because the quantum computer, assuming it's powerful enough and the algorithm works, can solve for all potential pathways that led to the encryption at the same time and then reverse it. So assuming you've got the right program to run with the right quantum computer, decrypting stuff would be a breeze. That also means that potentially you could tackle the tough challenge of bitcoin mining and break proof of work systems, which is what bitcoin is. It's a proof of work system, So a proof of work cryptocurrency system essentially creates a really tough math problem for computers to solve. And this is the mining part of bitcoin mining. So you've got a block of transactions bitcoin transactions, and they need to be verified. So the verification process involves solving a really challenging math problem, or kind of guessing at the solution of a math problem. So the way this typically works with bitcoin is you have a really huge number. This really huge number was generated by multiplying two other really huge prime numbers together. So in order to solve the problem, you have to come up with what those two prime numbers were. Your classical computer is the way they do this as they start going through every potential prime number and saying, hey, is this it? Hey? Is this it? Hey? Is this it? Until they get to the right one. Whereas a quantum computer could solve for all the potential prime number factors that are used to create this number and find the right pair much faster in theory, which could be an incredible disrupt for bitcoin mining. Right now, you have these massive computer networks that are running in places like defunct power plants that are just churning and churning and churning all these numbers trying to be the first one to get to the correct one in order to mine the next block of bitcoin. So if you were able to do this in a fraction of the amount of time, you would completely upset that entire ecosystem, which would not necessarily be a bad thing because these computer networks are often drawing huge amounts of electricity from fossil fuel sources, so they can have a big impact on climate and other issues like pollution and things like that. So being able to do so much faster with much less power would be a game changer, but it would totally upset the way bitcoin works. Right now, however, we are years away from that becoming a thing because it's all theoretical. You need to have the quantum computer be powerful enough, and as I said, like creating a quantum computer that has sufficient number of cubits to do these kind of things is a non trivial challenge, and you need the right algorithm to be able to go about this as well, and that's just not something that we have access to and probably won't for several years, maybe many years. It may be quite some time before this is a reality, but it's a possibility. Meanwhile, the cryptography world has been hard at work designing new methods that will confound quantum computers so that stuff like security and privacy can still be a thing in a post traditional encryption world. So that's good because you would hate to find out, like you'd wake up one morning and just say, hey, no more secrets, because, as it turns out, this quantum computer can decrypt anything that's been encrypted. Ever, that would be terrifying because think of all the stuff out there. It could be your personal finances, it could be medical records, it could be state secrets, it could be all sorts of stuff, and being able to suddenly get access to all of that would be pretty terrifying. But Yeah, while there were impressive developments in quantum computing in twenty twenty four, I think those achievements were largely overshadowed by all the other chaotic stuff on fire going on around the world this past year. So I'm going to say I was not right about this one, only because I don't think we saw enough news about quantum computing hit the mainstream to justify a check mark for me. Okay, one prediction I did not make because at the time I thought it was a sure thing was that Nintendo would announce its next console before the end of the year. I said, I'm not going to predict that that's definitely going to happen. Nintendo will say it, so there's not even a prediction here, and that was a big old whoop see because that did not happen. There were a lot of rumors and leaks about the next Nintendo console. Most of those are calling it the Switch to and apparently some leaked images back that up, saying that yeah, that's what Nintendo's calling it too, and it suggests that it'll just be an upgrade to the Switch, but it'll have some serious new features in it, such as potentially the ability to create four K visuals when docked with the television. That's not announced, so maybe it'll happen. We are still waiting on that official announcement, which Nintendo said is going to happen before the end of its current fiscal year. Nintendo's fiscal years end in March and then the new one starts in April, so it's possible we won't hear anything until Spring twenty twenty five, or who knows, maybe Nintendo has announced something between when I recorded this on December twenty third, and when you hear it, that would be fun. You know what's also fun If we take a quick break to thank our sponsors, we'll be right back. We're back. And you know another thing I said I would not bother making a prediction about was that electric vehicles would have a really big year in twenty twenty four. And the reason why I said that was because so many different parts of the world have been passing laws that are looking into phasing out internal combustion engines over the next few years. But then Trump won the election this year and he is not that keen on electric vehicles. He seems to be far more interested in fossil fuels for some reason. Whether Elon Musk's presence on Trump's team will change that, at least for Tesla, I don't know, but it's possible that we will actually see electric vehicle support in the United States lag behind other parts of the world for the next few years now. I also predicted another chaotic year for streaming services in twenty twenty four. I mentioned that the streaming business is a really tough one or to make a profit, right, you're competing for customers, so you've got all these other competitors on the market. That means you have to market aggressively to your customers or your potential customers, and you have to pour a lot of money into original content or purchase lots of exclusive media libraries or both. That's really expensive, so your operating costs are incredibly high. You can't charge too much for your service or else no one's going to sign up for it. And you need to get to a certain number of subscribers in order for it to be sustainable, and your revenue streams tend to be pretty limited. Usually we're talking about subscriptions and maybe advertising, right you might get some ad support in there too, And consumers are absolutely flooded with different options. I mean you've got your netflixes, your Hulus, your Amazon Primes, your Maxes, your Disney pluses, your Paramount pluses, your Peacocks, et cetera, the Apple TV pluses. I mean, there's so many. There was some consolidation this year, but mostly in the form of companies entering into partnerships to offer bundled services, where for a flat subscription fee you get access to multiple services. So like with Disney Plus, it's Disney Plus, ESPN Plus and Hulu, right, I have the Disney Plus and Hulu one. I didn't bother with ESPN because there are only two sports that I really follow, and I don't even follow them. There are only two sports that I actually like to see, and only then if I'm there in person, and those are baseball and hockey, and otherwise I just don't have any interests, so I don't bother subscribing to ESPN. But yeah, there wasn't that many cases of companies going like belly up or getting out of streaming entirely in this past year. There are a lot of talks of mergers and acquisitions that didn't happen, and lots of movement that mostly was involved with shuffling things around, so things didn't really get upset too much. So I don't think things got as messy as I had anticipated last year. There's still lots of stories about companies struggling to find a path toward profitability, so that's still a thing. But in a large part, twenty twenty four I feel has been a year of treading water in the streaming media space. Maybe we'll see it change more in the next couple of years, but yeah, I feel like this wasn't as chaotic as I was anticipating, all right. Also, last year I predicted that Google would come out of the anti trust case more or less okay. I thought that they wouldn't get away scott free. I thought they would be found guilty of engaging in anti competitive behaviors, And in fact they did. A court did find Google guilty of practicing anti competitive policies. But I thought Google wouldn't be punished too hard. It would kind of get the equivalent of a slap on the wrist. It might get a really big fine, but that's not nearly as intense as, say, being forced to break up. Now, we don't know what's actually going to happen with Google's anti trust case. Like it has been found. The company's been found guilty of practicing this anti trust behaviors, but a judge next year will actually decide what the punishment is going to be. So the question of what happens to Google technically remains unanswered. The Department of Justice right now has sent a list of suggestions that include Google having to sell off its Chrome business, that's the browser. But you know, Google obviously has protested that saying no, that doesn't make any sense. It doesn't fix any problems. That's not the issue it any way. And plus you will ruin the world economy if you do this, among other things. I am paraphrasing, and I'm being a little facetious here, So that's not exactly what Google's saying. It's just kind of how I walk away feeling about it. But we don't know what's going to actually happen with this judge next year. It could be that the judge does command Google to sell off some of its businesses. We'll have to see, but we don't know for sure. For one thing, the Department of Justice itself is going to be different once Trump takes office, and so there's some question as to whether or not the DOJ will back off a bit once that happens. However, Trump has also had a really contentious relationship with big tech companies, particularly Google, but also some other ones as well, and he seems to feel like there's a perceived bias in these different platforms against him like him personally, and at least that seems to be the case. Again, this is all me kind of drawing conclusions based on what I have read and what I've seen, But yeah, there seems to be at least some speculation that the DOJ will still be going after Google, it just may not be at the same level. Like the anti competitive stuff. May be one of the arguments the DOJ makes against big tech, but not because of a renewed interest in trust breaking in the government, but rather it's a tactic that might work in order to punish companies that have been perceived to be anti Trump. We'll see that that might be an unfair assessment. I don't want to just be hardheaded and say this is definitely the way it is. I don't I don't know, but uh yeah, I don't think Google is going to be forced to sell anything off. I think that my prediction from twenty twenty three is going to hold for twenty twenty five. But we'll see. I don't you know, I could be wrong. I also said that startups would find it harder to get funding in twenty twenty four, which is kind of true. Crunch Base found that the big five tech companies, which are Meta, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, invested at least a million dollars into one hundred and forty nine different startups this year. I was like, I mean a million apiece right, like saying a million dollars or more into one hundred forty nine startups. That's actually slightly up from twenty twenty three. Back that year, it was just one hundred and thirty one startups. However, even with one hundred and forty nine, that's still the second lowest number in the last five years for these companies to invest in. So I would say it wasn't harder than twenty twenty three, at least by going by what the Big five were doing, But it wasn't that much easier either. Joe Procopio of ink as An Incorporated, not as in Tattoos wrote a piece that's titled The Future of Starting a Business Looks drastically Different in twenty twenty four, and it goes over some of the challenges that startups face these days, and it mentions that a lot of investors are far more cautious about pouring money into companies than they used to be. AI has been going fairly strong, though Procopia argues that expectations and reality aren't exactly matching up, and that investors may find themselves reluctant to risk money in those ventures before too long. So I think This is sort of a partial correct answer for yours. Truly, It's not like a solid win, but I feel like I was more right than wrong. Oh. I also predicted that we would see a slow down in podcasting, with fewer new shows premiering in twenty twenty four, particularly at the network level. I got that wrong. That's just flat wrong. Podcasting has been year over year at increase, over and over and over again, whether that's a number of listeners, number of shows, number of new shows, that kind of thing. Video podcasting has also made a huge impact. There are more video podcasts out there. That has changed things, not just in how podcasts are produced, but also how they're monetized. Because if you're hosting your video podcast on something like YouTube, well then you're kind of beholden to YouTube's monetization approach unless you're doing like sponsored episodes or something that's slightly different, right, But if you're doing ad supported shows, then you don't have nearly the same level of control as you would on other platforms. But YouTube is kind of the place for online video for the most part. So yeah, things did not slow down the way I anticipated. I thought we would enter into kind of a more conservative year for new shows, simply because the shows that exist they're all bad for listeners. And it's not a zero sum game. Lots of people listen to lots of different shows, but it's hard, it's very challenging, and you spend a lot of money developing these shows, particularly if it's like a prestige show, if it's a show that has recognizable names on it, you're probably spending a guaranteed amount of money just to make the show, and whether that show actually makes its money back or not, that's a totally different thing. And if you're competing against everybody else, My thought was that we would see companies kind of ease off a little bit on that and try and not spend quite so much money in development. But that's not been the case. It has continued to be very competitive, with big companies spending lots of money to get different shows on their networks or developed on their networks. So I was wrong about that. I will say, however, that both twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four twenty twenty two in fact saw a huge dip from twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, but that shouldn't be a surprise, right twenty twenty, everybody was stuck at home, so lots of people turned to making podcasts because it was one way to try and stay sane and stay busy. For a lot of people in the entertainment industry, it was a way to stay creative, to stay in front of fans, to stay busy when the rest of the industry was shut down due to COVID. So, yeah, there was a huge dip after that, but that's no surprise, right that was bound to happen, just like all the other boom moments we saw out of COVID kind of went bust after a couple of years. Thus we have really sad stories about like massive layoffs in the tech sector and in other industries as well. But yeah, that's it. That's how I did in my predictions for twenty twenty four. I actually think I did better this year than i'd most years. I think that I was pretty on track for a lot of these, with the exception of notable outliers like X getting its act together, but again that was more aspirational than based in reality. I hope all of you out there have had an amazing twenty twenty four. I hope you have an even better twenty twenty five. I am not making predictions about twenty twenty five this year, because, as I'm sure most of you know, I am stepping down from Tech Stuff on January tenth. You'll have a brand new episode with your brand new hosts, whom you'll going to meet very soon, and that will be exciting. It'll be an all new year of tech Stuff. I'm really eager to listen to that and to hear what happens. I think it's going to be an amazing year for the show and for all of you listeners out there. And I'll miss doing this. I got a couple more in me before I head off into the sunset. But yeah, this has been a real treat. I mean, I've been doing sixteen and a half years. You figure I'm gonna miss it. But in the meantime, you'all take care of yourselves, hold your loved ones close, have the happiest of New years, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.