Transcript
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Is it really true? Has another year passed? I cannot believe it. That song is right. The years keep coming and they don't stop coming. I guess we have a bit of a tradition with 2026 looming ahead. I want to take a little time and reflect on the past year. I posted 87 videos in 2025 including this one. Some of them did very well views wise. The obvious winner launched back in March 2025. What happened to the capacitors in 2002? I knew that I always wanted to do that one. Lots of people had written in to ask me about it. I just was not sure whether or not that I had enough or a video. Anyway, is there another capacitor type situation out there? I don't know, but if you have one, let me know. Next after that we have the Indomie video and how it got to be so popular in Nigeria. Let me confess a bit. I've never actually tried Indomie, mostly because I am on a long running and suffering diet. I did hear that it has a lot of MSG in it. The third highest performer is the video about Compaq. That one was actually released in November 2024 and just happened to get very popular throughout 2025. When I started on the video, I knew just a few things about Compaq. It surprises me to think that so many people remember this company today. After that is the end of Nissan video. That one went a bit weird because by the time the video came out, the Nissan Honda deal was already on the verge of collapse and it indeed collapsed. Nissan is still shuffling around, but again, so do zombies. To round out the top five, we have the Japanese Rice Price Crisis video. This caught my eye during my last trip to Japan and I was fortunate to find that other people cared for Japanese rice policies as much as I did. I do think food prices and food systems are things that I will spend more time on in 2026. It's just something that I've been thinking a lot about recently. Things just feel so pricey now in the US and European. But cutting prices on food is nowhere near as easy as I generally have expected it to be. And as the Singapore 30x30 video seems to imply, policy goals like food self sufficiency may lead to higher prices which can be politically unpopular. Let me shout out a bit of my personal favorites that I worked on during the year. There's the Mini Mill video Disrupting Big Steel. This one dove into the rise of the mini mill business model that disrupted the old integrated steel plants. A friend of mine reached out to me to say that it was the quintessential agenometry video. And for some reason that makes me feel really proud. The funny thing about that video was how much it blew out of scope. The original plan had been to just profile Nippon Steel's acquisition of US Steel, but while doing research for that, I went down the rabbit hole and realized that I had done too much, deciding that the viewers would hate me if I produce an hour plus long video and I split it in half. I've been doing that a lot recently. And then while working on part one, which would cover the fall of US Steel, I decided midway to switch it into being a video about mini mills because that was what called out to me more Another video series that was kind of like this was the one about PowerPC. As soon as I started on it, I knew that it was going to be fun, so I spent an extended period of time on it, going through all the Risk stuff. As the video got longer and longer, I decided again that this was way too much. And so I split it up into two episodes, the PowerPC video and another on the Risk wars. And then funnily enough, this new second part got so long that I decided to split off the story about the company Power Computing, the macOS Clone King, and make it into its own video. So this single work session turned into three videos. Wow. Another personal favorite of mine was the one about Picos. I recall it being suggested to me by multiple viewers and then wondering, who on earth is going to watch this? I do this sometimes as I'm working on a video and getting really deep on it. I just kept thinking to myself, nobody's gonna watch this random video about a freaking operating system. And yet somehow it became quite popular. Maybe in 2026 I'll do a few more operating system profiles. And of course I want to give a thumb to one of the top winners of the year, Toshiba's Nuclear Annihilation. It was one of the longest videos that I ever did. Up until then, the story wasn't just amazing, the whole thing was also super educational. The weirdest thing about YouTube is that you can never predict what might or might not get popular. There were plenty of videos that I worked on during 2025 that I thought were going to be sure fire hits but ended up flopping. Two in particular stood out to me. The top disappointment for me was the Chinese Hamster video which discussed the line of CHO cells. Such CHO cells help manufacture the antibody drugs that today are some of the hottest things in medicine. And the story of how Dr. Robert Briggs Watson brought 20 Chinese hamsters and drove his way across mainland China through bandit infested territory and huge storms in the waning days of the Civil War was amazing. I even left a lot on the cutting room floor as I managed to get a hold of the oral histories of Dr. Robert Briggs Watson and read his experiences in the flesh. A maybe disappointment was the 45 nanometer node video. As I was working on it, I got the sense that maybe this one might be a little too niche for the general public, but just in terms of sheer educational value for me personally, it was great. I have no regrets. Travel wise 2025 was an interesting year. I was honored to have the opportunity to spend so much time on the road. Some of this was tied to work. I went to Semicon west, did my vibe checks in the Silicon Valley, went to Semicon Korea and other places. A particularly fun trip was the one to visit various data centers in Malaysia and Singapore along with the firm semianalysis. And the experience of traveling with friends and good people was huge. Especially for this YouTuber who spends most of his time alone. I do want to spend more of 2026 traveling to various museums and interesting exhibitions. Some of these turn into ideas for videos or become usable stock footage. A big thing for me in 2025 was trying to build up my own private image library, but a lot of the travel was just enjoying time off with family and friends. I got to travel to Alsace in France, drink egg coffee in the city of Saigon and experience Phuket for the first time. The travel will continue next year and I hope to attend ITF World 2026 and do another trip to the Netherlands. If you live there, please let me know. I would love to say hello. As always, I want to thank you guys for watching the channel. Can you believe that I've been posting since 2017? We're coming up on 10 years. Meaning that for 10 years of my life I've been researching, writing and recording videos. Something that began as a way to kill time during the lonely weekend mornings has turned into a full time gig. How much longer is this going to last? I don't know. I'm getting older, I have back pain, my eyes hurt when I work too long, I don't have as much energy as I used to, and my voice has definitely changed over the years. There's that quote from the office. I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them. That's so true. In so many ways. How long can the channel keep on in its good old days like it has, like it is? I don't know. Sometimes I feel like the world is passing me by. The new things arising every day around the world every day. New creators, new formats, new hits. And throughout all that, AI is constantly getting better. On one hand, on one level, I love it. The world is so rich. Yet at the same time, where does this leave me? I don't know. All I can do is to try to keep doing this for as long as I can. In the year ahead, I have a bunch of interesting videos waiting to be made or released. There's so many exciting ideas out there that I want to do. Next year, expect to see videos on Tandem, nonstop, Westinghouse antibiotics again, Space Fabs, Diamond Transistors and Sasol. And of course, I'm still planning on making that Australia cochlear implant video. To all of you out there, I care for you and wish you the best. Life is short. Be good, everyone. All right, that's it for tonight. Thanks for watching. Subscribe to the channel. Sign up for the Patreon, and I'll see you guys next year.