The biggest buzzword in tech and business from 2025 was “AI”.

There were lots of claims made about how AI would progress during 2025, and AI would be taking a huge number of white-collar jobs during this past year.

Obviously that didn’t happen, but there was a lot of AI talk – a big question a lot of people have is how much of that is just marketing and how much is genuinely true.

I watched this YouTube video of Cal Newport (author of books like Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, etc) interviewing Ed Zitron (author of the Where’s Your Ed At newsletter, and host of the Better Offline podcast).

Cal spends a lot of time thinking and writing about productivity – not just getting more things done, but how to live a balanced life. Ed is a critic of big tech in general and AI in particular, but this is still a good conversation if you’re buying into the fear or hype about how AI will change the world in the next X months.

Both Cal and Ed are good people to follow to keep informed in a non-sensationalist way about technology (and its pros and cons).

Cal Newport’s podcast is Deep Questions, he also has a weekly newsletter, and many books.

Ed’s podcast is Better Offline, he also has a weekly newsletter, and there is also r/BetterOffline on reddit.