Windows Weekly 993 Transcript
Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott's here. Richard Campbell is here. We're going to talk about 5 new Insider builds. We're going to talk about Xbox gaming. But halfway through the show, we got some sad news, and we're going to end up talking about a guy who inspired us all, passing of John C. Dvorak. That's coming up next on Windows Weekly.
Leo Laporte [00:00:25]:
Podcasts you love. From people you trust.
Richard Campbell [00:00:29]:
This is TWiT.
Leo Laporte [00:00:37]:
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell, episode 993, recorded Wednesday, July 22nd, 2026. The Columnist Savant. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, all you wonderful winners and dosers. This is the show where we talk about the latest from Microsoft with The dynamic duo of Microsoft journalism, Mr. Paul Thurrott. I call him Mr. T from Thurrott.com.
Leo Laporte [00:01:08]:
And Richard Campbell, I call him Mr. C. He's, uh, he's from running his radio platform.
Paul Thurrott [00:01:13]:
From Happy Days.
Leo Laporte [00:01:14]:
Yeah, Mr. C and Mr. T, they're both old-timey TV characters.
Richard Campbell [00:01:18]:
That's right.
Paul Thurrott [00:01:18]:
Yep.
Richard Campbell [00:01:19]:
There you go.
Paul Thurrott [00:01:20]:
TV shows that were on the air in the '80s, I guess.
Richard Campbell [00:01:23]:
Yeah, right.
Leo Laporte [00:01:24]:
Uh, hello guys. Well, wait a minute now, Richard, you're somewhere, it looks like.
Richard Campbell [00:01:29]:
I'm, I'm in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Leo Laporte [00:01:31]:
Lincoln, Nebraska, in a Motel 6.
Richard Campbell [00:01:33]:
For Nebraska Day of Dots.
Paul Thurrott [00:01:35]:
Nice. Well, that sounds okay. All right.
Leo Laporte [00:01:39]:
Yeah, it's a beautiful day in Nebraska.
Paul Thurrott [00:01:42]:
He's going to— As far as the eye can see.
Leo Laporte [00:01:44]:
Are you there for fishing, uh, or you're there for a conference?
Richard Campbell [00:01:48]:
Do the conference, fly on Sunday up to Bozeman, Montana for the fishing.
Paul Thurrott [00:01:52]:
Nice.
Richard Campbell [00:01:52]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:01:53]:
Oh, you're gonna have so much fun. So we will miss you next week.
Richard Campbell [00:01:55]:
So tricky, tricky bag to pack, right? Like, yeah, because I gotta have all the— You got your Creole and you got Yeah, you gotta have the button-down and, and that kind of thing. And then you've also got to have your, like, your UV hoodie.
Leo Laporte [00:02:09]:
Paul Theroux is back, back in Mexico. Great to see you, Paul, back in your natural environment.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:16]:
I think by next Wednesday I will feel better, but I am still so, like, just on edge from all the problems we've had in the past few days.
Leo Laporte [00:02:27]:
But anyway, Um, you said you arrived and your internet service provider had cut you off.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:32]:
Well, we found out right before we came, right? So that's fun. Um, I thought I was going to be cool with it, you know. I figured we could get another connection, whatever. We could work off our phones for a few days, no problem.
Leo Laporte [00:02:45]:
Forgot about this show.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:47]:
This show, I knew if I— if it somehow lasted from until today, I would go to a friend's house and do it from there. But, um, yeah, my phone connection sucks. It's just like so— it was so terrible. Like, it was so terrible.
Leo Laporte [00:03:04]:
Anyway, anyway, we're, we're glad you're—
Paul Thurrott [00:03:07]:
Stress mountain.
Leo Laporte [00:03:08]:
Back, uh, to your natural haunts. And, uh, we are glad that, uh, there are— there is some Windows news to talk about. Yeah, not one, not two, but 5 Insider builds this week.
Paul Thurrott [00:03:24]:
Yeah. So the way that the Insider program does math is different than the way humans do it because they simplified this allegedly, and they still refer to it like there are 2 channels. There are 7 channels. And I, and I, I, I actually, this isn't like I know so much about Microsoft, I know exactly how this happened. It's more like I've just been alive long enough and I know how people think and I can tell exactly how this happened. And here's how it happened. These new guys came in, they looked at it, they looked at all the complaints and they were like, all right, there's definitely too many channels. We can fix this.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:06]:
Let's fix it. So we were like, all right, we're going to have 2 main channels. And then someone's like, yeah, but what about the release channel stuff? Oh yeah, yeah. Okay. We have to have those too. And then, but there's actually, there's, there's actually 3 technically there because there's 3 supported versions of Windows now. Okay. So we're going to have that one in 5.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:22]:
Okay. But what about like, what about the thing that's coming next? Like we, we still need to have like a, like a, you know, and it's like, okay.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:28]:
Okay.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:28]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [00:04:28]:
All right.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:29]:
So we're going to add like a, like a 26H1 for beta. All right. We'll have, you know, and then like they just walk themselves into exactly the way it was before, just with slightly different names.
Richard Campbell [00:04:39]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:40]:
New name.
Richard Campbell [00:04:41]:
They come in with the best of intentions.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:44]:
New Canary, to be followed. Yeah, we have Canary today, except now it's called Experimental Future Platforms. It's absolutely just as worthless. And you know this is what happened. They're like, no, we're going to fix this. We're smart. We can do this. And then it's like, oh yeah, right.
Paul Thurrott [00:05:01]:
Oh yeah, right. And then after a couple of days, you're like, no, this is exactly as stupid as it ever was. I wish it wasn't. I wish it was better, you know, but it's, it's not. Anyway, um, so like I said, 7 channels. Um, the Release Preview, one of those 2 channels covers 2 versions of Windows, so we don't actually have 3 Release Preview channels, we have 2, but, um, both of them—
Richard Campbell [00:05:27]:
But one of them has 2 things in it, right?
Paul Thurrott [00:05:29]:
Exactly. Uh, uh, so Well, I mean, and, and by the way, you know, you're, you're joking, but you're right because the, you know, when you go to sign up for this, it will depend on what's on your computer, right? I mean, if you say I wanna be in the release preview, it looks at your computer and says, all right, well, you're running 24H2 now. So you're in that, that's the, that's the stream you're in.
Richard Campbell [00:05:51]:
Like, you know, that's the preview you're in.
Paul Thurrott [00:05:53]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:05:53]:
It's insanity actually. You know, since we're talking about this, um, I will say I did something, um, I'm gonna call it over the weekend. I don't remember exactly when. But I had a, uh, this computer, in fact, the laptop I'm using for this show today was running on, I don't even know what it was running on. It doesn't matter. It was, it's a 26H1 computer. It's a Snapdragon X2 computer. So it was running on some release, uh, some, uh, Windows Insider build, right? So I did every, I wanted to reset it back to the factory and, you know, the normal stable.
Paul Thurrott [00:06:28]:
And, you know, without getting into the, I could spend a half an hour on this. Um, I, I tried to use the— it's an ASUS, so ASUS has its own recovery tools. It couldn't connect to the Wi-Fi. The tool that's supposed to come up in the firmware did never came up. I connected it to Ethernet, that never worked. I finally said screw it, I'm just okay, whatever, I'll just go back. I was going to just accept, you know, go— I just reset it anyway. So it went back to whatever build I was on.
Paul Thurrott [00:06:53]:
So I've got that watermark on the desktop, and I went into the Insider interface in the Settings app just to sign it into the Insider Program again. So at least I'd get new builds or whatever. And it was already signed in. Okay, that's interesting. I'd never seen that before. But there's that little checkbox, right, that never does anything and never works. And it says, um, when the next version of Windows is released, put me back on stable, whatever the language is. So I'm like, all right.
Richard Campbell [00:07:23]:
Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:07:24]:
That will be my passive-aggressive way of getting back to this thing. So I clicked the button and I forgot about it. And then a little while later, the thing popped up a notification and said, hey, you got to reboot. You have, you have to install Windows 11 version 26H1. And I was like, what? So I did, and it kept everything. Like, everything's fine. Everything was where I left it, right, as we say in Microsoft land. And it just went back to stable.
Paul Thurrott [00:07:49]:
I, I had never seen that do that. Wow.
Richard Campbell [00:07:53]:
We were always told that's— that couldn't happen. You'd have to pave it.
Paul Thurrott [00:07:56]:
And I, and I did pave it like an idiot. And then I configured it, installed all my apps and did all that stuff, you know, and then it did it anyway and it was fine. Like, I'm so used to it not working, it never occurred to me to try it. You know what I mean? Like, and it worked anyway. I, I don't know.
Richard Campbell [00:08:13]:
You can now exit Insider gracefully.
Paul Thurrott [00:08:16]:
I mean, I don't want to say that too broadly, but yeah, I did it. I mean, it worked.
Richard Campbell [00:08:20]:
So But it's happened once.
Paul Thurrott [00:08:22]:
Now I kind of want to test it a little bit. But anyway, okay.
Richard Campbell [00:08:25]:
Yeah, no, I can imagine.
Paul Thurrott [00:08:26]:
Anyway, that stupidity aside, um, one of— I referenced, uh, technical problems I had had since we got here. That was one of the minor ones, but that was one of them. Um, okay, so 2 days ago Microsoft issued 5 builds, like we said: Beta Experimental, which used to be Dev, uh, Beta 26H1, Release Preview 24H2 and 25H2, and then Release Preview 26H1. Uh, so the new Start menu has moved into beta. That's nice. There's a new taskbar, remember the one you can move around and resize? That has not made its way into beta, so I don't know where that is. Um, and then, you know, the experimental beta 26H1 is mostly just minor updates to things we've already talked about, all of them, and nothing interesting. Um, but then the release preview builds are interesting because these are previews of the next Patch Tuesday, which is the second week of a second Tuesday of Um, August.
Paul Thurrott [00:09:16]:
So next Tuesday is Week D, right? Or, you know, the Week D update day for Microsoft. So these release preview updates will be broadly, you know, publicly available preview updates next Tuesday, and then 2 weeks later they will become Patch Tuesday. And nothing— well, nothing super major, I guess, only because I'm getting just used to this stuff. I've seen these things so many times, but The Windows search experience is going to get a lot better, actually. That's pretty cool. This is the—
Richard Campbell [00:09:48]:
If it's true. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:09:49]:
I've not experienced it working really well, but it's supposed to. And this is the thing we sort of thought— I think we talked about this last week. You know, you could, if you left the beginning letter off of a term, it wouldn't find that app or whatever you were searching for. You had to have the first letter. So that works. You know, like that's working now. It's supposed to be better, faster, whatever. I, you know, we'll see.
Paul Thurrott [00:10:09]:
And, uh, the Windows Hello enhanced sign-in security, um, support for external cameras, right, that have, you know, have to be compatible for that. Or sorry, sorry, that's not true, uh, fingerprint readers. Um, which, you know, I, I'm like, didn't some of these— I'm like, didn't we— didn't this already ship? I, I— there are so many build streams now, I'm, I, I'm losing track of what's where, right? It's almost like we need one of those tracker things I was talking about last year. Um, But I do have an idea about that for later. Uh, anywho, so the other— I guess the— so I said there were 2 major or semi-major things. So the new Start menu is in beta, that's pretty big. And then just the, uh, the stuff that's coming next month to Patch Tuesday. So, um, if you're on 2425H2, that means improved Windows Search primarily and a bunch of small things.
Paul Thurrott [00:10:55]:
And if you're on 26H1, the 3 of you, um, some really good improvements to File Explorer, Bluetooth, voice access, and some other things that everyone else got a month ago. So, you know, whatever.
Paul Thurrott [00:11:04]:
Mm-hmm.
Paul Thurrott [00:11:06]:
behind on that note. They made the point of saying that there were no builds for experimental 26H1 or experimental future platforms. And then one day later, they released a new build for experimental 26H1, which has zero interesting improvements. Like, I don't even know why they released it. It's just a bunch of minor things across the board. There's almost nothing to talk about there. So yeah, um, I did not write this up kind of formally, but somebody in my forums noted that the Microsoft Whiteboard app, which is an inbox app in Windows 11, is being retired. And starting on August 22nd, you won't be able to create or edit whiteboards anymore.
Paul Thurrott [00:11:51]:
Um, that's— they don't say anything about the store, but that date and the— that note tells me that means they're not going to keep it in the store so you could just install it. if you wanted it, which they've done with certain things here and there. Um, I don't know why they're killing this thing.
Richard Campbell [00:12:07]:
I, I—
Paul Thurrott [00:12:08]:
it is literally one of the apps I uninstall when I install Windows. I don't never— I don't need it or use it or whatever. But, um, that's kind of interesting. And then, you know, later in the show we'll talk about some, uh, some other interesting features that are being retired, in this case from Copilot, which also impacts Windows 11, obviously. But Um, we'll do that when we get to it, I guess. So there you go. Not too much, really.
Paul Thurrott [00:12:33]:
Wow.
Richard Campbell [00:12:33]:
It's summertime, right? So things are a bit slow.
Paul Thurrott [00:12:36]:
Yeah, but we also have a long whiskey segment ready to go. No, no, we have a lot of AI and a lot of, uh, Xbox. Um, unlike last week, by the way. But no, remember, this is the year of the pain point thing, right? And so there is—
Leo Laporte [00:12:49]:
Year of the pain point. Okay.
Paul Thurrott [00:12:51]:
No, I mean, there's— there is a giant list of things that Microsoft has promised to fix and has fixed to some degree.
Richard Campbell [00:12:57]:
And a giant number of patches showing up.
Paul Thurrott [00:12:59]:
Well, those are— that's AI-based security fixes and stuff. I'm talking about, you know, fixing the Start menu, fixing taskbar, fixing widgets, fixing, uh, Windows Search like we just said. So some of those things are unstable, some aren't. Some of them are progressing through the Insider Program to various degrees, but, um, it's not clear what the delivery point is for some of these things, right? I mean, if The new Start menu, for example, just went into beta. Does that mean we're going to hold off till 26H2 to make that thing available and stable? I don't know. No, they've never said. So there's a bunch— there is a bunch of stuff. There just hasn't been a bunch of stuff in the past week, I guess, is the way to say it.
Leo Laporte [00:13:38]:
So, um, you know, it's funny about the whiteboard. I just wanted to— it reminded me that there was a moment Apple did the same thing with iOS. They put this app called Flow that was basically—
Paul Thurrott [00:13:51]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:13:51]:
A whiteboard. It's so funny how trends in computing happen where everybody just said, oh, you know, we all have to have whiteboards.
Paul Thurrott [00:14:00]:
This is the Jamboard thing, like at Google, you know.
Leo Laporte [00:14:02]:
And nobody used it, right? So now they've taken it out. Actually, Apple still leaves Slow Run because Apple always leaves crap lying around.
Paul Thurrott [00:14:10]:
Since you said that though, the interesting thing in a way is that this— you see this in AI as well, but because of the kind of accelerated pace of this, you could almost be, you know, OpenAI announced dot dot dot, and you're like, 1, 2, 3, Anthropic announced it too. You know, like, this happens all the time.
Leo Laporte [00:14:26]:
And last week it was loops. All anybody could talk about was loops. This week it's graphs. All anybody could talk about is graphs.
Paul Thurrott [00:14:33]:
Well, they, they obviously— coding is— for normal people, I would say the big demo thing for AI is like image generation or any kind of content generation.
Leo Laporte [00:14:41]:
The chatbot stuff that you do.
Paul Thurrott [00:14:43]:
Yeah, like, that stuff's great for you know, for—
Leo Laporte [00:14:44]:
but it's not AI.
Paul Thurrott [00:14:45]:
But then the— but the great AI use I think that's been, well, you know, proven and is, you know, getting mass adoption is for developers, right? And so this makes sense on so many levels or whatever. But, you know, Anthropic I think was the first one they had, uh—
Leo Laporte [00:14:59]:
I'm losing— they realized they're a little different.
Paul Thurrott [00:15:01]:
But yeah, they had their— what was their call? Uh, I think theirs was just Code, I think.
Leo Laporte [00:15:05]:
Cloud Code.
Paul Thurrott [00:15:06]:
Yeah, Cloud Code. So Cloud Code.
Leo Laporte [00:15:08]:
Cloud Code.
Paul Thurrott [00:15:09]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:15:10]:
But at some point they were like, you know, This thing, this works pretty good for productivity, you know? And for 2 seconds, you would use Code for that too. But then they were like, no, we're gonna break this out. We're gonna call this something different.
Leo Laporte [00:15:20]:
Now we have Cowork and we have Codex.
Paul Thurrott [00:15:22]:
Yeah, the names are different for each company. But OpenAI and of course Microsoft go do exactly the same series of steps. And, you know, and at first OpenAI was like, no, no, no, Codex is fine. You can use it for productivity. You can use it for coding. And they're like, nah, actually we're gonna make something called Work. You know, like they, It was exactly the same.
Paul Thurrott [00:15:42]:
It's so—
Leo Laporte [00:15:42]:
it's funny because it's— they're— maybe it's almost like they're ADD, like squirrel. Like they're just chasing— everybody's chasing each other.
Paul Thurrott [00:15:50]:
Like Samsung comes out with a card, you know, just like Apple.
Leo Laporte [00:15:52]:
Whoa, hey, whoa, hey, cool. Okay, now it's so funny. Um, anyway, I just— I'm just observing.
Paul Thurrott [00:16:00]:
No, this is—
Leo Laporte [00:16:01]:
We went through the, the 3D stage and then the VR stage, and, uh, now we're at the AI stage and That's right.
Paul Thurrott [00:16:08]:
You know, and so in the tiniest indication or evidence that AI is starting to mature to some degree, you're starting to see companies— and we'll talk about this later— remove features. Ah, right. So we were talking about removing some feature for Windows. That happens, you know, this is pretty regular event, honestly. But, um, now you're seeing backtracking, you know, from certain features that, you know, in this case Microsoft added to Copilot or whatever. Because, you know, and it makes sense because they're just throwing stuff at the wall and they're like, let's see what people do. And they're like, oh, it turns out they do nothing. You know, so it's like they just, you know, they can start getting rid of these things.
Richard Campbell [00:16:47]:
It costs money.
Leo Laporte [00:16:48]:
Right, right. Yep. All right. If you're in western North Carolina, be careful. There is something called an aerial flood watch.
Paul Thurrott [00:16:55]:
Oh, God. That place needs that. This is like the Asheville area, right?
Leo Laporte [00:16:59]:
I don't even know what it is.
Paul Thurrott [00:17:00]:
Well, that place flooded horrifically a couple of years ago. Like, that's really bad.
Leo Laporte [00:17:03]:
Well, in Texas, Texas just had the same floods again, the second year in a row. And I know there've been heavy rains on the East Coast.
Paul Thurrott [00:17:09]:
It's like flooding in the South. The entire north part of the country is covered in smog from— by the way, Canada, Richard, seriously, could you guys get your act together? Come on, man.
Richard Campbell [00:17:18]:
We're on our 4th 100-year fire in 6 years.
Paul Thurrott [00:17:21]:
I don't know if you know this, but we have enough problems in the United States, and I can tell you what we don't need is death smog. The vaguely orange cast to the London fog that is covering the United States in the summer. It doesn't make any sense.
Leo Laporte [00:17:40]:
Well, you know, the London fog was coal smoke from the industrial—
Paul Thurrott [00:17:44]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [00:17:45]:
No, no. I mean, I think it's apt because—
Paul Thurrott [00:17:46]:
No, I think you're right. Sorry. Maybe I should have compared it to the— it's like, what's the— not the Scottish Highlands, like the moors of—
Leo Laporte [00:17:55]:
Oh, yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:17:56]:
Like in the Sherlock Holmes book.
Leo Laporte [00:17:58]:
In California, we have something in the Central Valley called tule fog.
Paul Thurrott [00:18:02]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [00:18:02]:
It's very dangerous because as you're driving down the highway, it's just at eye level. So there, every year there are like, like below you, car chain reaction.
Paul Thurrott [00:18:12]:
Yeah, but above you, you can't see nothing.
Leo Laporte [00:18:13]:
You can't see a thing. And it's like really thick. That's what you can call it, tule fog. Although no one outside of California will know what the hell you're talking about. Even people inside California don't know what the hell you're talking about. All right, we're gonna take a break. We'll come back. We do have the AI segment.
Leo Laporte [00:18:29]:
Uh, a note, we have of course a show all about AI following this immediately called Intelligent Machines, and our guest will be YouTuber Nate B. Jones, who is, to my feeling, one of the most astute, uh, guys talking about AI on YouTube. He's not hype-driven. He's, he's really about using it for work, and I've learned so much from him. So we're excited about that.
Paul Thurrott [00:18:50]:
Just randomly, because you said that, There's— I don't remember the other guy's name, but Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's amazing, obviously.
Leo Laporte [00:18:56]:
Love him.
Paul Thurrott [00:18:56]:
Has done a series of videos on YouTube with a guy who's— the discussion is that AI is basically just people. And no, but I mean, like Sir Link Wray. No, but I mean, it's worth watching. It's an interesting perspective. I think you'd enjoy it.
Leo Laporte [00:19:13]:
There's so much to learn. You know, this stuff is going so fast. I feel like I did in the early days when I started first covering computing that it was like sipping water through a fire hose. And I just, I always felt like, and I think probably everybody who started back then felt like, I'll never keep up.
Paul Thurrott [00:19:28]:
I just can't. Would you describe it today as like sipping water through a tsunami?
Richard Campbell [00:19:32]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:19:32]:
Like it's, I mean, it's crazy.
Leo Laporte [00:19:34]:
Yeah. It's, that's the funny thing. We thought it was bad then. It's amazing now. Anyway, now we've, let me bring Richard back into the conversation. I think he reconnected.
Richard Campbell [00:19:47]:
I did.
Leo Laporte [00:19:48]:
Did you see this? We'll talk about this on I Am, and I'm definitely going to ask Nate B. Jones about it. The breaking story last night in AI was that Hugging Face was attacked and broken into. They investigated it. Unfortunately, they were trying to use Fable and all of these new tools that are, you know, slow, completely protected, and they couldn't. So they went and got a Chinese model, which I personally love, a good model called GLM-5-2. And it turned out, and OpenAI is admitting this, they're working with them. OpenAI has a new model, a very smart model, by the way, very good at mathematics.
Leo Laporte [00:20:27]:
It just solved a long time— the Jacobian conjecture. It just created a counterexample that blew mathematicians away. It's a really good model. But, and I really want to know more about this, apparently it escaped containment and hacked Talking Face.
Paul Thurrott [00:20:43]:
Oh, wow.
Paul Thurrott [00:20:45]:
Autonomously. I refuse to believe you did not think immediately Daniel Suarez wrote this book and what is happening.
Richard Campbell [00:20:52]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:20:53]:
Now, I want to caution everybody. This could also be just hype from OpenAI. See how dangerous our stuff is? Because this seems to work really well for these companies. So—
Richard Campbell [00:21:01]:
For Anthropic.
Leo Laporte [00:21:02]:
Yeah. This is why I want to talk to Nate B. Jones and get his take on it.
Paul Thurrott [00:21:05]:
But yeah, see how powerful our models are, but also see how useless we are at guardrails and doing anything that's safe. Yes, that's part of the story too.
Leo Laporte [00:21:13]:
This is both the newest ChatGPT 5.6 Soll and an unnamed internal model.
Paul Thurrott [00:21:20]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:21:21]:
And, and it's not, you know, we're starting to see from OpenAI some strange model behavior. For instance, 5.6 deletes files apparently. Just, just delete stuff.
Paul Thurrott [00:21:29]:
Well, you know what happens when you start getting desperate, you know?
Leo Laporte [00:21:32]:
Yeah, I delete files when I get desperate. rm -rf, sure, star. You bet.
Paul Thurrott [00:21:38]:
Who wouldn't? Brad Sams observed to me this morning that the only thing standing between us and the AI apocalypse is a markdown file that anyone can edit. Yeah, that's true. And it's kind of a sobering assessment because it's true, you know?
Leo Laporte [00:21:54]:
That's the truth.
Paul Thurrott [00:21:55]:
It's crazy.
Leo Laporte [00:21:56]:
All right, the AI segment approaches.
Paul Thurrott [00:21:58]:
Yeah. All the AI news I have is great. All right, so in Microsoft land, they, Microsoft, they announced an expansion of a preexisting strategic partnership with Mistral, which is a French-based AI company, to give customers in Europe across Azure and then all the different ways you access AI, like through Microsoft, like Microsoft Foundry, Copilot Studio, et cetera, to give their models as choices there and expand the infrastructure over there. I didn't see any specific numbers. They're investing, spending, I don't know, some multi-billion dollars. They've never said how much. They're going to help Mistral purchase thousands, we don't know how many, of the latest NVIDIA VERA Rubin GPUs. This is just them, I think, scrambling to stay ahead of regulation in Europe, frankly, but it's fine.
Paul Thurrott [00:23:00]:
I mean, in the sense that Microsoft has done a great job of putting data centers in so many regions and they do have obviously adhered to local law. So if you wanna store your data in your own country, or if you have to, if you're Germany or any place in the EU, you can do that and that's good. So that's cool. That's good stuff. Mm-hmm. I don't expect to ever see Mistral in a dropdown in Copilot here in the United States, but I guess you never know. I mean, I think it's probably, Maybe, maybe we'll see something like that, maybe not.
Richard Campbell [00:23:28]:
Well, and certainly with thoughts on data sovereignty and things like that, having these tools available, even if you only use them from, say, European data centers, like, that's— it's a way for a multinational like Microsoft to stay engaged with those markets as they pull away from US entities.
Paul Thurrott [00:23:45]:
Yeah, this is the AI version of think globally, do locally, or whatever the phrase is, you know.
Richard Campbell [00:23:51]:
Just trying to offer some options.
Paul Thurrott [00:23:53]:
Yeah. Well, I mean, if you want to do business there, you pretty much have to, right? So that's good. But they're doing a good job.
Richard Campbell [00:23:59]:
The laws aren't in place yet, but there's sure a sense that they're coming.
Paul Thurrott [00:24:03]:
So I've referenced probably every week because I'm obsessed with this right now, but I've been updating the Windows 11 Field Guide book, right? Which has been astonishing. And I have in fact finished all of the major, I guess I'll call it rewriting or whatever, of existing content. But I have this list of like 5 or 6 small chapters or things I'm going to add to other chapters. And one of them is one I've been putting off, um, about Copilot because I hate Copilot and I don't care. And I— it takes a lot for me to use this thing and it's difficult. So anyway, I've been struggling with this and I— and it's what I've been working on. And literally as I was working on this chapter, I get a news, uh, notification and it's Microsoft is killing 2 features in Copilot. And all I could think was, please, dear God, do not be 2 things I just wrote about.
Paul Thurrott [00:24:54]:
And fortunately, there were 2 things I had not written about. So I could delete that right from the table of contents and get rid of it. And now you're not going to. So I was pretty happy about that. So those features are deep research and podcasts. So podcasts is that feature where you give it a document probably, or point it at a web page, and it doesn't read it to you, right? We have that capability. It summarizes it, and then it has 2 AI hosts, you know, talk about it as if it were a podcast, right? Which we— whoever did this first, 2 years ago, whenever it was, you know, we were playing around with it on the show, I think. But a fairly ludicrous capability, frankly.
Paul Thurrott [00:25:35]:
And that one, there's no good outcome to this. The podcasts you've made are not gonna be available. You won't be able to make any new ones.
Leo Laporte [00:25:44]:
Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:25:44]:
It's just going away. So if you open Copilot today, don't. But if you did, it's still in there. Like, you know, it's— and I don't think I haven't seen a warning yet about it going away, but it is going away. The other one is a little more nuanced. So Deep Research is tied to those— the thing we still see in chatbots everywhere. We can kind of select a model, or they don't usually use model names anymore. Like Microsoft will use things like Smart or Deep.
Richard Campbell [00:26:09]:
Smart. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:26:11]:
Smarter? No, they don't use that. That would be smart. You know, like Think deeper.
Richard Campbell [00:26:16]:
Think deeper, right?
Paul Thurrott [00:26:17]:
Yeah, smart.
Richard Campbell [00:26:17]:
Which is, yeah. And then study and learn.
Paul Thurrott [00:26:20]:
Right, so you, and you know, because I've been writing about this, now I know this and I hate that this is in my brain, but depending on your relationship with Microsoft, so to speak, you'll see different levels of things, right? So if you have a Microsoft account, you get access to a lot of stuff for free, but you have very strong limits every day, obviously. If you have a Microsoft 365 account of some kind, not the basic one, but anything up from there, and are the account holder—
Richard Campbell [00:26:45]:
Either 3 or any 5.
Paul Thurrott [00:26:45]:
Well, I mean, I'm talking about I'm not just talking about individuals here. This is like people, people, like Microsoft 365 Basic or whatever it's called, which is essentially OneDrive extra storage, does not provide any additional rights for Copilot.
Richard Campbell [00:26:58]:
But the Home Edition would, or the Family Edition.
Paul Thurrott [00:27:00]:
Yeah, Family, Personal, and now they have a Premium one as well, right? So those all offer, you know, more and more, you know, higher limits or whatever.
Richard Campbell [00:27:11]:
This— It's how distorted my world is that I just live in E5 land.
Paul Thurrott [00:27:15]:
Right. Yeah. So I, I, the, the, the account owner thing is still a weird deal for me, but okay, whatever. This is the system. This is what we have.
Paul Thurrott [00:27:23]:
Mm-hmm.
Paul Thurrott [00:27:23]:
So you could do a deep research thing. So any, anyone with a Microsoft account could go to Copilot and say, hey, um, you know, this, I always use this example now. Um, I wanna start reading the Tolkien books. Where should I start? Like, which are the most accessible? Which are the least, you know, whatever. And just, you know, everyone knows the answers to these things, but I just wanna see what they do. And they puts, you know, makes a little report. And then it'll ask you follow-up questions, right? And that's just using Copilot in standard mode. I mean, every AI does this, but you could also do a deep research report essentially where that's not necessarily a great topic for that, but you want to, you know, you want a much more voluminous and extensive detailed whatever report of whatever topic, right? So that's going away.
Paul Thurrott [00:28:05]:
But the reason it's going away is that they, if you have I'm trying to get this. This is so hard to remember. Yeah. So if you have Microsoft 365 Premium, which is the most expensive one, the new one that just started in the past year, that offers a researcher agent, which is essentially, maybe I call it the most modern version or the newest version of what Deep Research was. And you can still, you can access what is essentially the same functionality that way. So that's still available, but you really have to pay for it. Yeah. In this case, if you've already used it, and I should say this is not happening until August 18th.
Paul Thurrott [00:28:43]:
So if you want a bunch of deep research reports, this is the time to do it. Because even though this feature is going away, unlike with podcasts, any reports you create before that date will still be available to you inside of Copilot, and then you can export them to Word format or whatever you want to do. So yeah, these I I could be wrong, but I feel like this is the first example of two. you know, fairly major features in the context of Copilot, uh, for consumers being just retired, you know. And I kind of like them. I'd like, I'd like to see them be aggressive about this kind of stuff because, like I said, in writing about Copilot, which is my special version of hell, um, Mm-hmm. I feel like there's a lot of overlapping stuff and there's also just everything you do essentially is a chat. So you have this history, but you also have like a library of certain content that you might have created.
Paul Thurrott [00:29:34]:
I think it's like images and pages because God, we needed this stupid word for something. And then you have projects and you have, you know, like there's all these things and they're all intertwined and it's like, I don't even understand why we have these things. So the fact that this even was a feature in some ways is a little strange to me because I feel like the way this should work is like, I need a report. You know, you might not call it a report, but you're essentially asking for a report on some topic. Oh boy, sorry, I just saw the thing in the Discord. Um, John Dvorak has passed away.
Richard Campbell [00:30:13]:
Hmm.
Paul Thurrott [00:30:14]:
Oh boy.
Leo Laporte [00:30:15]:
What's the matter? Wow.
Paul Thurrott [00:30:17]:
You might want to look at the Discord, Leo.
Leo Laporte [00:30:23]:
Oh, dear.
Paul Thurrott [00:30:25]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:30:25]:
I don't know if this is true or not. We know that John C. Dvorak had a heart attack a couple of months ago, and I think had bypass surgery. And now this story, and I don't— let me look and see the source of it.
Paul Thurrott [00:30:43]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [00:30:45]:
From Scott Mace, who is, of course, credible. He says— Scott Mace said he, uh, John, uh, passed away, uh, due to complications following his double bypass surgery. Um, I— we will see if we can get a confirmation, but Scott Mace is very credible, knows, uh, John well. I know Scott. Um, I think if, uh, Scott Mace says it's the case, uh, it is the case. He posted this in our forum.
Paul Thurrott [00:31:10]:
The guy's an icon.
Leo Laporte [00:31:12]:
Yeah, and I owe him greatly. He—
Paul Thurrott [00:31:16]:
By the way, everyone here owes him something, even if you don't understand it. You know, and I understand because I mean, I've met him, you know, in passing and stuff. But I, you know, just as a writer, I mean, there were guys like him, Jerry Pournelle, and others who really influenced me as a writer. Like, his back of the magazine thing with little blurbs was the inspiration for Like when Info, basically, I mean, or Short Take, sorry, when I was doing that. I mean, you know, he's a big— that's, you know, it's a big deal.
Leo Laporte [00:31:48]:
Um, he, uh, you know, I first met John in the early '90s, maybe even the late '80s, when at the time he was, uh, probably the best-known computer columnist in the world. Um, he wrote more than 2 dozen columns, not just in the US but all around the world. I don't know how he managed it.
Richard Campbell [00:32:06]:
Yep.
Leo Laporte [00:32:06]:
He had many, many books. He, um, he was probably, I don't know, maybe best known for his gossip column in the back of PC.
Paul Thurrott [00:32:13]:
Yeah, so I was going to say, the thing about him is, and he was so well connected, and that was, that's, you know, and, and I don't know, it was a big part of what made him so valuable.
Leo Laporte [00:32:25]:
Yeah, he, um, I used to have him on my radio show on KNBR in San Francisco on a fairly regular basis when KNBR decided to replace that midday show, uh, with, with a guy coming down from a new up-and-coming guy called, uh, from Sacramento named Rush Limbaugh. They moved me to the weekends, and I said, well, I'll be glad to, you know, do all those car and home improvement shows, but can I do a computer show? And the program director— this is '91— said, well, nobody's interested in computers, Leo. I said, well, okay, but if I could just do that show, I would And so they allowed me and John to start every Saturday talking about computers. And if it's— if you think about it, '91 is pre-internet. It's pretty early. It was Windows 3.
Paul Thurrott [00:33:09]:
Yeah, Windows 3.
Leo Laporte [00:33:10]:
Yep. And, uh, but, uh, and John was just so knowledgeable. He knew everybody. He had, as you said, he had the best sources in the world. And he was a gentleman. He allowed— once he realized that I wasn't just announcer boy, Right. Uh, helming the show while he answered questions. He allowed me to participate.
Paul Thurrott [00:33:28]:
It's, you know, the thing people can't understand really, because— and you've experienced this— is he also had influence with the companies and people who worked there that he was reporting on.
Paul Thurrott [00:33:39]:
Huge influence.
Paul Thurrott [00:33:39]:
So like, they would listen to him.
Leo Laporte [00:33:41]:
Huge influence.
Paul Thurrott [00:33:42]:
And I'm sure there are some people in some places that kind of have some semblance of that today, but really publishing anything today is like just throwing content into a void, you know, whereas, you know, he could impact products, you know.
Leo Laporte [00:33:59]:
I, I said PC Week, it was PC Magazine. It was the Inside Track column. It was in the back of PC Magazine. He became famous for, uh, it was classic gossip columnist, unsourced stories, uh, bullet points, you know, he would use ellipses, and then he was always bolding And I said, John, that's what I'm talking about.
Paul Thurrott [00:34:17]:
This is the Short Take thing. Yeah, exactly.
Leo Laporte [00:34:19]:
I said, what's the, uh, what's the rationale for what you bold? He said, I just do it randomly. It makes it more interesting. He was a very funny guy.
Paul Thurrott [00:34:28]:
Uh, he, uh, that's stuck in my brain, you know.
Leo Laporte [00:34:31]:
It's—
Paul Thurrott [00:34:32]:
that's a permanent part of my life now.
Leo Laporte [00:34:33]:
Absolutely. Inside Track was seminal for all of us. He also wrote, uh, the, um, anti-column in the back of MacUser where he would be the guy who critiqued Apple and Macintosh.
Paul Thurrott [00:34:45]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [00:34:46]:
So we grew together, we grew close. We did— we syndicated the show called Dvorak on Computers, did that for several years in the early '90s. He left the show and I started doing it with Gina Smith and others, but I will never forget John for giving me the chance to show that I knew something about technology, and it was very generous of him. And because it was John C. Dvorak, I think people trusted me a little bit more. So I really I owe him my career. I would still be a DJ if it weren't for John C. Dvorak.
Leo Laporte [00:35:19]:
Of course, he went on. He worked at Ziff Davis Television with me, ZDTV, hosting Cranky Geeks. Actually, his first one was Silicon Spin, which was a roundtable.
Richard Campbell [00:35:28]:
Right. He'd bring—
Leo Laporte [00:35:30]:
it was really a great show. He'd bring in journalists and they'd sit around and kind of like TWiT, they'd do a roundtable and discuss the show's— the week's tech news. He did Cranky Geeks later, uh, working, uh, started to work with, um, Adam Curry, who at the time owned a company called Mevio, which was a very early podcast network. Adam really kind of saw podcasts—
Paul Thurrott [00:35:51]:
Adam Curry, the former MTV DJ or VJ—
Leo Laporte [00:35:53]:
Yeah, that's right.
Paul Thurrott [00:35:53]:
Who coined the term podcast, right? Isn't that—
Leo Laporte [00:35:56]:
I don't know if he coined the term. He was the one who went to Dave Weiner and said, hey Dave, you really— you've got RSS. All you need is a binary enclosure that you could put in the RSS and then I could put audio in there, and that was the beginning of podcasting. That's a lot of credit for that. Dave Weiner made it possible, but Adam wrote the first podcast-catching little program he wrote, uh, and, uh, certainly was seminal in the start— influence at starting of podcasting in 2004. Any event, uh, John's relationship with Adam, uh, continued. He eventually started a show, uh, must be 10 years ago, called No Agenda, which he and Adam did right up to the very end. And, uh, there were famously no advertisers on No Agenda.
Leo Laporte [00:36:38]:
Uh, every— it was run entirely by listener contributions. So, uh, again, this is unconfirmed, but I think the source is impeccable. It's Scott Mace. I'll do some research while the show continues to see if I could find out more.
Paul Thurrott [00:36:50]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:36:51]:
But if Scott Mace, uh, says it, uh, I'm, I'm sad to say I'm, I'm gonna have to believe it. We know he had a heart attack and had coronary bypass surgery. just a few months ago. And if it's not true, I'm sorry, John, but at least you've got this nice, uh, right, eponymium, uh, on how great you were and how important you were to my life. Um, uh, and, uh, I— to Mimi, his wife, and his kids, uh, if he did pass away, my deepest condolences. He was very important in our world. Uh, I'll let you continue with the show, but I will do some research while you talk and see if I can figure something out here about this.
Paul Thurrott [00:37:30]:
Okay, well, this should be easy. Um, let's see, where were we? Uh, so yeah, Anthropic, right? So Microsoft killed those 2 features, or kill— so, um, boy, back in 2024, um, I think it— I don't think it was just a single person originally became a class action lawsuit sued Anthropic for stealing material that was published in books. Um, In 2026, Anthropic agreed— this became a class action, like I said— they agreed to settle this case for $1.5 billion, which would've been and now is the largest settlement payout in US history, where each of the authors involved will stand to gain— I don't know if there's fees or how they split this up with co-authors and so forth, but $3,000 per stolen work.
Richard Campbell [00:38:20]:
Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:38:20]:
And so much money that it would just basically bankrupt this company. I'm trying to find the exact number of books. It was some huge number of books.
Richard Campbell [00:38:29]:
Like half a million books?
Paul Thurrott [00:38:30]:
Yes, right. I think it's 480,000 books, I think was the number.
Richard Campbell [00:38:36]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:38:36]:
So you can do that math on— oh, do the math on this number, because if this had gone to trial and Anthropic had been found guilty, which they probably would've been because there's so much evidence that they knowingly and willfully did this, Even though they could have just spent pennies on each of these books, bought them used, and there would have been no issue whatsoever.
Richard Campbell [00:38:56]:
Um, right.
Paul Thurrott [00:38:57]:
They would have— they would have been, uh, on the line for $150,000 in damages per work.
Richard Campbell [00:39:06]:
Um, right. So that's 50 times what they are paying. So that would mean $65 or $75 billion.
Paul Thurrott [00:39:13]:
That would be—
Richard Campbell [00:39:14]:
that might leave a mark. Yeah. Yeah. It's only $1.5 billion. Only.
Paul Thurrott [00:39:21]:
Yeah. So last September, Anthropic agreed to settle this, but the judge overseeing at the time, who by the way has since retired, I just found out, Judge William Alsop, rejected the settlement in part because the lawyers involved in this case were asking for crazy high fees. So they actually had hearings and it's a different judge now, but they Part of it was, well, how much should these guys or people get paid? And the number, if I can find this number, it's still a lot of money. It's $100 million.
Richard Campbell [00:39:56]:
As opposed to the $200 million they wanted.
Paul Thurrott [00:39:58]:
Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:39:58]:
It's a little bit more than half of what they were asking for. And it's a significant smaller percentage or whatever it was. I don't remember the exact numbers. So this is going to go through. And one of those lawyers is like, We're looking forward to making the distributions to the class, meaning the people like myself actually who are authors who got stolen from. And I eagerly await that because when I filled out the form for this, I can't off the top of my head, I feel like I had 7 books in there. I don't—
Richard Campbell [00:40:24]:
It's $20 grand.
Paul Thurrott [00:40:25]:
I don't expect to get that much, honestly. I mean, there's a couple of those where I was a co-author. I mean, I don't know if like this fee comes out of the per, you know, author payment or what. I don't know. So we'll see. I've never heard. I've not heard. They were pretty quick on the other one.
Paul Thurrott [00:40:40]:
Like this one, you know, like Facebook, Facebook has had a couple of settlements for privacy reasons, and I was involved with both of those, and the sum total of the two of them was less than $5. So this is a slightly different range of money, but we'll see. I mean, we'll see what happens. Whatever. I'm happy to take from the company that's taken from so much. And I'm looking forward to OpenAI and Microsoft having to pay this kind of money too. So we'll see what happens.
Richard Campbell [00:41:06]:
Yeah. Now that there's a case—
Paul Thurrott [00:41:07]:
A nice little legal precedent.
Richard Campbell [00:41:08]:
—that has precedence.
Paul Thurrott [00:41:10]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:41:11]:
So there's that.
Richard Campbell [00:41:13]:
You'll get a few more checks there, friend.
Paul Thurrott [00:41:14]:
I hope so. I hope so. It's nice to get paid for books that haven't given me any money in 2 decades or whatever, but you know.
Richard Campbell [00:41:20]:
And they could have licensed to you for $1.50 and a Coke.
Paul Thurrott [00:41:25]:
Yeah, I know. They could have just bought it used anywhere and it would've been nothing. So yeah, related to this, I got an email from Wiley, which was my previous publisher, and they had tried to give me some money and they were going to direct deposit in some bank account that doesn't exist anymore, apparently. And that's a lot less money too than this. You'll see what happens.
Paul Thurrott [00:41:46]:
Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:41:46]:
But, um, I saw this headline for the next story and I thought this— at first I thought, is it April 1st? And then I thought, well, okay, hold on a second. Like, what's that? This doesn't seem right. But 1Password partnered with Anthropic on a way for— so Anthropic obviously gets a lot of information from the web as you're using cloud or whatever. A lot of that will be behind some kind of a paywall or an account where you have to sign in for whatever reason. And so there's in-app browsing, or you could just direct it to do a computer use type thing where it uses your browser. But there are security privacy concerns there, of course. And how does the credential storer, I guess I'll call it, the password manager essentially, interact with the AI and/or what view does that thing get into there, et cetera, et cetera? Yeah. So what they've worked out is what they call a zero-exposure architecture for allowing cloud and the in-app browser essentially to complete tasks that involve browsing the web that require logins of some kind, one-time authentication passcodes or whatever, and be able to access the things that you have in your 1Password vault in a way that the AI never sees the thing.
Paul Thurrott [00:43:01]:
So they get the okay. It sort of sounds a little bit like a passkey, honestly, but whatever the system they have here is, this enables cloud to keep doing the thing it was doing. Obviously, you have to give permissions and all that kind of stuff. But in this agentic era that we're now, I was going to say easing into, we're not easing into it. We've fallen off the cliff into it. This is pretty serious, right? You know, we were talking about Hugging Face a little while ago, and when I saw the headline for that story, the first thing I saw, it said something like, you know, OpenAI model, you know, broke into a— I think they called it like an online library. And I was like, an online library? And then I saw it was Hugging Face. I'm like, yeah, that's not how I would describe that, but okay.
Paul Thurrott [00:43:47]:
You immediately go to, okay, well, what about my bank? You know, what about my important accounts that have access to all my payment information, personal information?
Paul Thurrott [00:43:54]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:43:54]:
whatever it might be. This is what 1Password is doing.
Richard Campbell [00:43:57]:
Well, of course, we've heard with Mythos, they gave limited distribution to sort of the big companies, the Microsofts and Amazons and so forth of the world. But you've got to think a company like 1Password or Bitwarden, like, they've got to be on that list too, right? Because the— you talk about where would you hack to create the most damage? Raping someone's passwords out of them, is that a great way to go about it?
Paul Thurrott [00:44:17]:
I'm actually semi-surprised this didn't come out of FIDO or some standards organization in a way, right, where all the password managers would do the thing. I suspect that is where this will go. It's kind of— it's a little weird to me that it came from what, like, a company. Um, but, you know, 1Password is a pretty, you know—
Leo Laporte [00:44:35]:
Bitwarden has the same thing. This is— we talked about this yesterday.
Paul Thurrott [00:44:37]:
Oh, this is— okay, so this is not unique.
Leo Laporte [00:44:39]:
No, no, no, everybody's doing it. By the way, I do have confirmation now. The No Agenda newsletter, uh, has come out, and, uh, I will, uh, read this Uh, to you. Dear producer, for a man who spent decades famously predicting the catastrophic demise of almost every major technological innovation— which is true, he was famous for not believing a word of it— it is with the heaviest of hearts we must announce that John's own hardware finally gave out Monday morning. So I'm sad that I didn't even know about it till now. July 20th, at the age of 80, he went peacefully, albeit suddenly, with Mimi at his side.
Paul Thurrott [00:45:14]:
Mimi.
Leo Laporte [00:45:15]:
of course, his longtime wife, critiquing the acting and storyline of NCIS. Love it. I don't know if that's true, but if it is, that's—
Paul Thurrott [00:45:22]:
Do you have any final words? Yeah, that actually sucks.
Leo Laporte [00:45:26]:
John loved doing the show. They're talking about No Agenda. Loved the feedback, good and bad. He was not a man known for affection, but he had a deep appreciation for No Agenda listeners. He enjoyed entertaining them, challenging them, debating them, and most of all, meeting them. He enjoyed reading your emails and letters. Uh, the show will continue. Uh, they will do a show, uh, tomorrow.
Leo Laporte [00:45:48]:
Um, let's see, this is July 22nd, so yes, that would be the 23rd, Thursday.
Richard Campbell [00:45:54]:
Mm-hmm.
Leo Laporte [00:45:54]:
And it will be a remembrance of John C. Dvorak. I know I'll be listening. Uh, and of course they follow that with a request for donations of $88.88, so I'll leave that up to you, the listener. But, um, I think that's confirmation. Uh, this is from the No Agenda newsletter, so, which just went out today. I also went into the No Agenda chat room to, uh, to check, and they confirmed it as well. So very sad to hear.
Paul Thurrott [00:46:20]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:46:20]:
The passing of John C.
Richard Campbell [00:46:24]:
Lost a giant.
Leo Laporte [00:46:26]:
Yeah. Yeah. Um, and of course, John was a frequent contributor to, uh, to TWiT until he started asking for $5,000 an episode. And, uh, that's when I stopped having him on a regular basis.
Paul Thurrott [00:46:39]:
I mean, he wasn't known to be cantankerous.
Leo Laporte [00:46:42]:
He was the original cranky geek. I will always love John. I will always hold him in the deepest respect, and I'll always be very grateful, uh, to him for giving me my start in the business. All right, uh, do you want to continue, uh, or is your heart so heavy that you must stop?
Paul Thurrott [00:46:59]:
Yeah, a little bit of both. Um, We're at the— an ad break, if that matters.
Leo Laporte [00:47:05]:
Okay, that does matter. This would be a good time, uh, to do it. Uh, they're talking in the Discord chat room about their memories of John. Um, Cats and Birbs reminds me of— he used to ask John when we were on Twitch, and you could find it on the, on the videos, would ask for my phone to look at it. He said, oh, newest iPhone, let me see that. And, uh, And, uh, then change the language to Chinese.
Richard Campbell [00:47:31]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [00:47:31]:
Give it back to me.
Paul Thurrott [00:47:32]:
I love it.
Leo Laporte [00:47:33]:
Cute prank. He liked to— he liked the pranks, let me tell you. He was, uh, he was quite a character. And, uh, boy, uh, that's kind of shocking news. But, uh, you know what, it's what you expect, I guess, after a while. Um, yep, we've been doing this for 20 years. Uh, people are gonna Gonna pass away, and, and that happens.
Paul Thurrott [00:47:56]:
Let's get the show started. He's getting good.
Leo Laporte [00:47:58]:
Here we go. He's getting good. He's all warmed up, ladies and gentlemen. He's firing on 6 cylinders. It's—
Paul Thurrott [00:48:03]:
we better start.
Leo Laporte [00:48:04]:
That's it. John always wanted to get the, uh, show started. He was also famous for his pulled pork.
Paul Thurrott [00:48:10]:
And I have to say that now I can say for a fact that my pulled or chopped pork is as good as anything in North Carolina.
Leo Laporte [00:48:18]:
Really?
Paul Thurrott [00:48:19]:
She took on an entire state.
Paul Thurrott [00:48:20]:
I've done this for years and I finally got the whole formula down where I can make it just a stunner.
Leo Laporte [00:48:25]:
Now you said pulled or chopped, which is it?
Paul Thurrott [00:48:27]:
Well, you can, it depends. You can take the way I make it with shoulder is that you can take and mash it up with a fork and it becomes kind of pulled. It has its, it's got a stringer quality, or you can take the whole thing and then chop it. And it has a slightly different, more chunky quality, but essentially the difference is minor. The North Carolina, North Carolinians, they like to chop it. And the Georgians, when they make this type of pork, Pork. They like to pull it and they call it pulled, but in fact it's kind of mashed.
Paul Thurrott [00:48:52]:
I love pulled pork though. Oh, that's—
Richard Campbell [00:48:54]:
Welcome to This Week in Barbecue.
Leo Laporte [00:48:55]:
We could go on and on. John was an autodidact. He knew a lot about many things. He always promised to write a vinegar book. He used to make his own vinegar. I don't know if he ever wrote that book. He also was working on a multi-volume history of the Civil War. I don't know if many people knew that.
Leo Laporte [00:49:11]:
He was a very, very good writer, very smart and talented man.
Paul Thurrott [00:49:14]:
Mm-hmm.
Leo Laporte [00:49:15]:
Um, and, uh, but you know what?
Paul Thurrott [00:49:17]:
That's incredible.
Leo Laporte [00:49:20]:
He lived a long and a good life, and, um, uh, I— we will, we will miss John C.
Paul Thurrott [00:49:26]:
It doesn't make any sense to me that Macintosh is of all— I think it's the actual hardware. I think there's something shoddy about Macintosh, uh, laptops.
Paul Thurrott [00:49:37]:
What? You, you and your Apple baiting.
Richard Campbell [00:49:40]:
Isn't he great?
Paul Thurrott [00:49:41]:
You're an Apple baiter.
Leo Laporte [00:49:42]:
Ladies and gentlemen, you're hearing John C. Dvorak in his prime.
Paul Thurrott [00:49:46]:
This is bull. I'm not trying to put down Apple. I'm just saying I was playing with one of these iPads. It just has a shoddy quality, like the push-down buttons and stuff. They're like offset. They're kind of crooked.
Leo Laporte [00:50:00]:
There was no one like him. We will miss him. John C. Dvorak. We'll do more of a tribute to him probably on Twitter on Sunday. I think we'll have to. We lost Omalik a couple of weeks ago. I've been kind of preparing myself for this, knowing that we're all getting on a little bit.
Paul Thurrott [00:50:20]:
Sure.
Leo Laporte [00:50:21]:
And boy, it's no way to prepare yourself for something like that. Somebody who you— my mom passed away last week, and the thing that you— she was 93. I'm so sorry. She was in a home. She'd had Alzheimer's, but she Her body was great. She felt great. She passed away in her sleep. She didn't— It was as easy a death as you could have.
Richard Campbell [00:50:44]:
We could all be so fortunate.
Leo Laporte [00:50:46]:
I hope to pass away just like that. She had a long and good life. But the thing that came to me, and it's striking me now with John, is the thing you really miss is you won't get to talk to them again. You won't get to just hear their voice and hear their unique point of view and their laugh and their— And their thoughts. And that's, that's really the thing you miss. Um, and I, I know we will all miss, uh, John C. Dvorak. Uh, on we go with the show.
Leo Laporte [00:51:13]:
Let's see, we're rapidly running through all the content. Uh, it's a good thing, uh, John passed away or we'd be really in trouble here. Let's, uh, there's a little more AI, or did you already do the, uh, the NotebookLM name change? I don't think so.
Richard Campbell [00:51:28]:
Oh.
Paul Thurrott [00:51:29]:
Uh, yeah, these next 2 are pretty quick, unfortunately.
Richard Campbell [00:51:34]:
That's fine. Um, we'll— yeah, was Notebook LM like the original podcast feature?
Leo Laporte [00:51:39]:
It was really cool. I mean, it's not gone, they just renamed it.
Paul Thurrott [00:51:43]:
Yeah, that's— so that's— thank you for ruining the story later.
Leo Laporte [00:51:47]:
Um, why? My question is why?
Paul Thurrott [00:51:50]:
You've got great brand recognition, except Notebook LM is like, what? I always thought that name was kind of terrible.
Leo Laporte [00:51:56]:
I guess, yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:51:57]:
Also, I, you know, Google is going to run into this problem that Microsoft has already run into with their AI stuff. There's too much of it. Like, there's too many entry points, too many different things that are kind of overlapping and so forth. I think NotebookLM or Gemini Notebook now is one of those little jewels that sticks out like it's a good one. Like, people that use this, like, fall in love with it. Like, they rely on it. Um, so yeah, anyway, it makes sense. It's fine, you know, and that's that.
Paul Thurrott [00:52:27]:
Sorry, that's it.
Leo Laporte [00:52:29]:
Wow, was that short. I don't know what I'm gonna do now.
Paul Thurrott [00:52:32]:
Give me a G. J is for Gemini.
Leo Laporte [00:52:33]:
Oh, do you want— did you talk about, um, everybody wants a Gemini 3.6 Pro, right? Everybody's talking, talking about it, or 3.5 Pro, but they— you know what they said? It's not, it's not ready yet.
Paul Thurrott [00:52:46]:
So here's the thing. Google has boxed themselves in a little bit because they've decided to take upon themselves that we're going to rate all the models and we're specifically going to rate them for coding. And their model does not do the best. And it's competitive, obviously. But I think what they want to do is have a splash where they can release this thing and it will be the best. And they've just, you know, I don't know if you noticed, but AI kind of moves along and, you know, the other models are getting better too. So Uh, they've been delaying it. So the big story— well, not the big story, but a story for the past week or two has been like, when is this? This was supposed to happen already.
Paul Thurrott [00:53:20]:
And I don't remember if it was an official confirmation, but that was the excuse or reason. It was just— it's just not living up to their expectations for coding, essentially. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:53:30]:
Um, I mean, they also— I wonder if they also see a market niche for themselves, because, you know, flash and flashlight are small, they're good, they're fast. They're not good for coding, you're right. But I use Gemini image generation. I use Gemini for a lot of things. And increasingly, I think people are using in enterprise delegation harnesses to say, well, when I'm coding, use Claude, OpenSearch, and—
Paul Thurrott [00:53:57]:
Delegation harnesses, I love that. Which is a— what's the word again? Orchestrator, right? Orchestrator, yeah. Sort of, yeah. In an industry that has too many terms already, we almost need a new term for these kind of like medium language models, I guess I'll call them, or you might think of them as like small but cloud-based models.
Leo Laporte [00:54:18]:
SLMs, yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:54:19]:
But I think of SLMs as the things that can and do run on device. And then there's like the next step up and so forth. So, and then the big ones that do everything, whatever. But yeah, I actually, I mean, I'm not an expert, but as I look at this and I see things evolving, It seems really clear that the future of this stuff is very models that are trained or grounded or whatever the term is for very specific use cases. And those can be small.
Paul Thurrott [00:54:49]:
Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:54:49]:
And the more of like, instead of having one gigantic AI in the cloud, we'll have dozens or hundreds or whatever it is. Some will be in the cloud and some will be on device, ideally.
Leo Laporte [00:55:00]:
Well, we talked about this last week. Increasingly, I think there's demand, certainly in enterprise, but even with hobbyists like me, to be able to run something locally.
Paul Thurrott [00:55:08]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:55:09]:
And I have a bunch of local models running on my Mac Mini. And I told my agent, when you need, when you wanna do something privately or you wanna go through a bunch of documents, you don't need to use the high-end fancy model.
Paul Thurrott [00:55:22]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [00:55:23]:
Just use these models that are running locally on the Mac.
Paul Thurrott [00:55:25]:
Yeah, I mean, and I, You know, again, because I've been living in Copilot for the last week and now on a suicide watch.
Leo Laporte [00:55:31]:
Lucky man. Have you used the desktop app? Christina wanted to use it last week.
Paul Thurrott [00:55:36]:
Yeah, that's what I'm using.
Leo Laporte [00:55:36]:
What do you think?
Paul Thurrott [00:55:37]:
I hate it.
Leo Laporte [00:55:38]:
She talked about it.
Paul Thurrott [00:55:39]:
Yeah, my wife loves it. So my wife actually uses Copilot. In fact, I'm going to switch her over to her own Microsoft 365 account so she can gain access to bigger limits and all this stuff. Because right now I'm, you know, the—
Leo Laporte [00:55:50]:
Well, plus the memory should be hers, not yours, right? You don't want her—
Paul Thurrott [00:55:54]:
I don't use it. I don't want it. I don't— like, I just— I know what it is. I just do not want it. Yeah. Um, but the one thing that they've done is step back from the choose a model from the dropdown thing, which I've always— you know, we talked about this stupidest idea of all time. And they use plain English for that stuff now. So it's in a smart mode by default where it will evaluate what you're asking and use the correct model, which is what you're describing, right? What do you call it? Not an orchestrator, a, uh—
Leo Laporte [00:56:21]:
Delegation.
Paul Thurrott [00:56:21]:
Delegation harness. Goddamn this.
Leo Laporte [00:56:23]:
industry. Um, so it uses the Pareto concept to choose the right model.
Paul Thurrott [00:56:30]:
Yeah, of course. We're trying to— what do we have to do to get you into this model today? Um, what would it take?
Leo Laporte [00:56:36]:
Yes, bring the wife, the checkbook, your pink slip, and come on down. That's crazy. Paul E.T.'s used AI a lot.
Paul Thurrott [00:56:43]:
So Google, like Microsoft— and I don't follow the other 2 in this regard— but there, there are the big models, there are the On-device models, and then there's the stuff that's kind of in between. I don't know how else to describe this. So from Google's perspective, the same goals you'd see elsewhere. You want to make these things less expensive to run. They do X% of the big version in certain tasks, and it's enough. It's good enough. It's almost like what we need are good enough AI models, or at least AI models that are good enough for a particular task or something. Anyway, they do, they did add a cyber model to the Flash lineup for the first time, which is kind of interesting, right?
Leo Laporte [00:57:22]:
It's a security model, but I don't know. I mean, really?
Paul Thurrott [00:57:24]:
No, but I mean, that's like, I mean, that tells you, we didn't hear about this type of thing until 2 seconds ago, and now it's already made its way down to Flash. Like, I'm sure Gemini 3.6, you know, whatever they do, will have, you know, the big versions will have a cyber one that will be their version of, you know, Fable and whatever else. I mean, I'm sure they're getting there too. So interesting.
Leo Laporte [00:57:46]:
But I might use— there's a very good Quen model that does one thing, which is, uh, break in your voice. Remember I did the fake Windows Weekly?
Paul Thurrott [00:57:55]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:57:55]:
I'm thinking maybe I should train it on Dvorak's voice, and then we could have a little John C. in every show.
Paul Thurrott [00:58:01]:
You know what, this— so this is the— this is— I don't know if maybe we would like those queasy AI use cases where it's like, that's a very— people are training AIs to be like person who just passed. Yeah. And then you can talk with them, and it's like, that's healthy but not healthy. And I, you know, like, I, I don't know, that makes me a little nervous.
Leo Laporte [00:58:20]:
But, uh, we have now stalled long enough that I feel I can do another ad, and then we will get to the Xbox segment. So thank you for filling, filling that out.
Paul Thurrott [00:58:29]:
I feel like the frog in that Warner Brothers cartoon where he pulls out the hat and he's like, hello, my baby.
Leo Laporte [00:58:34]:
You know, like, just Dance for a little, little song. A little dance.
Paul Thurrott [00:58:38]:
Dance monkey. Dance.
Leo Laporte [00:58:39]:
Round 2.
Paul Thurrott [00:58:44]:
It doesn't make any sense to me that Macintosh is involved. I think—
Leo Laporte [00:58:46]:
Oh yeah, yeah. I already played that one. Let's see.
Paul Thurrott [00:58:49]:
The search engine needs work.
Leo Laporte [00:58:52]:
Congratulations anyway. I'm glad you got a job.
Paul Thurrott [00:58:54]:
Yeah, I needed one.
Richard Campbell [00:58:55]:
You know, we have the deli we gotta get going.
Paul Thurrott [00:58:57]:
The deli?
Richard Campbell [00:58:58]:
I'm gonna sleep at this point.
Leo Laporte [00:58:59]:
I mean, what are you gonna sell?
Richard Campbell [00:59:00]:
What do you have, like 14 columns?
Paul Thurrott [00:59:02]:
Cranky Geek.
Richard Campbell [00:59:03]:
That's Patrick Martin. Participating.
Paul Thurrott [00:59:05]:
I got time on my hands, believe it. I'm a columnist savant. The columns don't take that long to do.
Leo Laporte [00:59:11]:
Oh, that is amazing.
Richard Campbell [00:59:13]:
I like it.
Paul Thurrott [00:59:14]:
Yeah, a lot of you would make something else, but that's another story. Psychologically, that says a lot about this. I like stress over everything.
Leo Laporte [00:59:21]:
Keep us informed, whatever it means.
Paul Thurrott [00:59:24]:
Yeah, you can find all that you need to find out at devorak.org/blog.
Leo Laporte [00:59:27]:
Of course you can. That was his other thing. They had 2 tag— 2 kind of, uh, what do they call those, uh, taglines? He had, I get no spam and I will find it, because somebody made a song, I get no spam. And then, uh, his other is, you'll find out all you need to know at dvorek.org/blog. He plugged his blog incessantly. I don't even know if that site's still around.
Paul Thurrott [00:59:49]:
I was just wondering the same thing.
Leo Laporte [00:59:50]:
Yeah, that's a— that's— he used to— he was so funny. He was so funny. Uh, let me just see. Dvorak.org/blog.
Richard Campbell [00:59:58]:
It's stripped down to a redirect.
Leo Laporte [01:00:01]:
Yeah, yeah. I think everything became No Agenda, uh, towards the, uh, towards the end. Dvorak Uncensored. Okay. But one of the things John was famous for is delegating his work. I wrote a chapter of his telecommunications book for him.
Paul Thurrott [01:00:15]:
He was in— he was one of his orchestrators.
Leo Laporte [01:00:18]:
Yeah, he was an orchestrator. That was one of his secrets. And now, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, time for the Xbox segment. Go ahead, Kevin. What?
Paul Thurrott [01:00:35]:
I said, go ahead, Kevin. Ah, there it is. Okay. So this is a big day, folks. Um, and this is the— this is a little piece of the puzzle we've kind of conjectured on a bit, which is if Microsoft is going to base the next Xbox console more on Windows— I mean, they've all technically been kind of based on Windows, right? What does this mean for things like backward compatibility, right? If one of the key benefits of this ecosystem is that you have this digital library of games you might own dating back to the original Xbox— not that you could have bought games digitally back then, but they were made available digitally later. And they would, or if you had the discs, I mean, you could plug the disc into, right? That it would work on subsequent consoles. And this is interesting for all kinds of reasons, but the biggest one to me is that one of those consoles, the Xbox 360, was running on PowerPC, not on Intel or whatever x86-type chipset. So there's a lot of emulation, whatever, that has to occur for this to work.
Paul Thurrott [01:01:40]:
But Are we ever going to get this on the PC? And the answer is yes. They just announced it today. So, um, there's a lot of little caveats in here and it's just started, but they've announced and released the first 4 games from the original Xbox, right? So 2001, you know, that timeframe, um, are available if you own them digitally. If you have Game Pass, you get them through Game Pass. Um, if you have Game Pass, you can stream them through cloud gaming. You can buy them right now digitally if you don't own them or have Game Pass of any way. And these things will run on Windows 11-based computers, including the Xbox Oh. ROG Ally and those type things, the gaming handhelds.
Paul Thurrott [01:02:21]:
So as I sort of digested this, I mean, I saw this coming, right? I mean, this is fairly obvious. I don't mean this— I'm not like Nostradamus of Xbox or anything, but this to me was a key part of Mm-hmm. You know, this future. Um, so that's great. Um, it's still like a preview right now, et cetera. But of course, you know, you think a couple things like the thing I just said, what about the 360 games? That's gonna have to require that emulation, probably a pretty powerful PC, I would think. And then what about Windows 11 on ARM, by the way? Right? We have, we have enough compatibility problems there with game, just games like modern games that are native on Windows. You know, what does that look like? And, um, to answer the latter question, it doesn't look like anything because you actually have to have an x86 computer for this to work at all.
Paul Thurrott [01:03:07]:
Um, today anyway. Um, but you could, you can do the cloud gaming thing, right? You could stream it. So if you think about the typical Xbox, OG Xbox game, I mean, probably not too difficult. Um, the system requirements, like the minimum requirements on x86 are interesting. Um, like a 4-core Intel Core i3-8100, so 8th gen. So this is basically the same.
Richard Campbell [01:03:28]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:03:30]:
system requirements for Windows 11 itself, but then some version of an NVIDIA GTX 950, AMD Radeon RX 550, Intel— now, this is where it gets a little weird— Intel UHD 770. That one, I haven't looked up yet, but that's integrated graphics, and that doesn't seem particularly advanced to me, or Intel graphics, Intel Arc graphics, which are the better ones. But the cool— well, not the cool, this is cool period. But one of the cool things is all of these games, and I think this will be true going forward as well, support customizable graphics settings. So you can go all the way up to 4K. They support V-Sync. They support, you know, Windows, if you play games on Windows, you know, there's like full screen and windowed modes, right, for games. Supports both of those.
Paul Thurrott [01:04:17]:
Supports, uh, and as, and I don't know, and as Did I misspell this? Anisotropic filtering, enhanced—
Richard Campbell [01:04:26]:
Anisotropic, yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:04:27]:
Enhanced anti-aliasing, multiple languages, audio settings, et cetera. There are no achievements today, but that's coming. So every game that will go through the system will have achievements as well. And they go back and forth between console and PC. So these are also available on console if you have a console, right? So this is— oh, I should say the games. I'm sorry. Blinks: The Time Sweeper. These are actually I would say 4 of the better games.
Paul Thurrott [01:04:53]:
Um, Conker: Live Reloaded, Crimson Skies: A High Road to Revenge, which is the one I wanted to try first, and, uh, Fusion Frenzy. So good games. There's only 4. Yes. I mean, it's preview, you know, whatever. Um, I, when I tried this, I tried this on multiple computers earlier today. I couldn't get any of these to show up in the Xbox app on Windows, whether it was an ARM computer or an X— I have a awesome. It's not a gaming computer, but it's a portable workstation, which is just as good as any gaming laptop.
Paul Thurrott [01:05:25]:
Um, if you go to the web, because if you follow— if you go to the web listing for these games, at least at the time— I should look at one of these right now, actually. Um, there was no option to— let me look. Yeah, it's still like this now. So it says, because I'm signed in, it says play with cloud gaming, so I could stream it, or install to, and then you can select a console or a PC, but I don't see any choices in there for some reason. So I don't know. I mean, maybe this is, you know, taking a little bit of time to happen, but I'm really— I mean, like, up-res'd, uh, better quality OG Xbox games, like, that's kind of cool. And then of course over time they're going to add more games. They're going to go through the series that will get Xbox 360 games at some point.
Paul Thurrott [01:06:09]:
Super curious about that. Uh, et cetera, et cetera. So this is, this is pretty good. Like, no, it's really good.
Richard Campbell [01:06:16]:
It's big.
Paul Thurrott [01:06:16]:
Yeah. So that was really cool. That came out of nowhere. Like, I wasn't expecting that today, but there, there it is. Um, Microsoft also announced the next set of games coming to Game Pass. The big one here, of course, being Halo Campaign Evolved. If you— so you'll get that, uh, whenever that, um, Um, whenever the general— actually, does it say when's the general release? It must be about a week from now. But if you purchase the premium edition, which is $70, but, um, you can unlock early access, you can actually start playing it tomorrow as we record this.
Paul Thurrott [01:06:51]:
So Thursday, July 23rd. Um, I assume the general release date must be a week later. I think that's probably the case, but I don't see it here. Um, if you have Game Pass, by the way, and I actually did, I paid this, You can pay for the upgrade. Like you get the standard edition of Halo Campaign Evolved, you know, as part of Game Pass, but you can pay some, I don't know if it was, it was probably $20 or something. And that gives you premium edition, which I don't care about, but I just want to play it early. So I want to kind of play this. I've been, I've been meaning to, actually it's 28th.
Paul Thurrott [01:07:25]:
So it's only 5 days later. So the general release is July 28th.
Richard Campbell [01:07:29]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:07:31]:
So it's cool, right? And then there's a bunch of other stuff in here. A lot of these are actually pretty good, like the Heretic Hexen remastering they did. I don't remember when this was, probably last year sometime, is coming on August 4th to Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. And then there's several other games, but really it's just kind of Halo, Halo, Halo, and Halo. So. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:07:55]:
I'm right.
Paul Thurrott [01:07:56]:
I can't— I'm really excited to try this because this is, you know, the new engine. It's going to be amazing looking. Um, there's some new content, which is really cool. Um, I realize it's just, you know, the original game. I get that. But I feel like I must have played this game through possibly 20 times. Like, I— there's no doubt, like, the first 3 Halo games and ODST to some degree as well I played just multiple times. And then from 2 on, you know, we played Halo multiplayer pretty exclusively, I think, until probably Halo 4, I guess.
Paul Thurrott [01:08:32]:
I don't remember, but, um, it's a big deal. So that's, that's cool too. Okay. Um, Bethesda, uh, is remastering— what's the right term? I'm looking I guess remastering. So they're remastering—
Richard Campbell [01:08:48]:
Yeah, 4K.
Paul Thurrott [01:08:50]:
Yeah, Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Um, and then they confirmed that the next Fallout, which they're calling Fallout 5— I don't know if they're gonna go with that name or not—
Richard Campbell [01:09:00]:
Right. Um, has— well, because 4 was the New England version, and then 76, which was really supposed to be a multiplayer game and is kind of a debacle.
Paul Thurrott [01:09:10]:
Okay, well This is, this is a series of games that it's one of those things I recognize the popularity. I'm very well aware of it. I have kind of looked at probably all of them, but at some point or another have looked, you know, and I just never really got into it. But I know, I know people, and I feel like Richard, you're probably one of them that have just played.
Richard Campbell [01:09:32]:
Oh no, I love New Vegas. One of those games I've played through more than once because there's so many endings in it, right?
Paul Thurrott [01:09:39]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:09:39]:
But I mean, I don't know how much you know about the interplay of all the Fallouts.
Paul Thurrott [01:09:42]:
I know a little bit, and only because— so I was going to say, uh, the only Fallout I've completed was the TV series.
Richard Campbell [01:09:48]:
Um, but right, and, and you, you made the point, I think just last week, it's like the TV series is a hit, where are the new Fallout games? Like, what are you doing? Yeah. So, and I wonder if that's what Ashish Sharma just said to them as well.
Paul Thurrott [01:10:01]:
I, I think I commented on this a week or two ago, I don't remember. But Phil Spencer, when he was running Xbox, had kind of made the point one time saying, look, no one likes to close studios, shut down games, lay off people, et cetera. But there is that what have you done for me lately kind of effect where, yeah, you had this hit game 5, 17, whatever years ago, but you're all sitting here drawing paychecks. I mean, I guess you're working on something, but you actually have to produce And it's, it's reasonable to feel—
Richard Campbell [01:10:31]:
And they really have to be.
Paul Thurrott [01:10:32]:
Right. So this—
Richard Campbell [01:10:33]:
But if the history matters here, Paul, like the, the original Fallout games were made by a group called Black Isle.
Paul Thurrott [01:10:39]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right.
Richard Campbell [01:10:42]:
And then they run— they get out Fallout, Fallout 2, and they're working on Fallout 3 when they run out of money. And then Josh Sawyer and a bunch of the other guys that were behind Black Isle leave and form Obsidian, which, right, it was But they, but they don't own the rights to the game. It's Bethesda that buys the Fallout rights. But then Bethesda's in the middle of making Skyrim. So they then make a deal with Obsidian, and Obsidian makes 3 and New Vegas. So the guys who made the original Fallout games made those 2 as well.
Paul Thurrott [01:11:18]:
That's cool.
Richard Campbell [01:11:18]:
Yeah, they built those. And then Bethesda went off on their own and made the train one, right? 4 and 76. Huh. Without Obsidian. So meantime, Obsidian's had their own problems, right? And their next version of Avowed is way behind. It looks like it's now canceled and so forth. But the, the rumor coming through this current wave is that Obsidian's not involved in the remastering of 3 and New Vegas, even though it would make sense they would. No, this is the same guys.
Paul Thurrott [01:11:46]:
Yeah. You want a studio that just does this type of thing, like you're—
Richard Campbell [01:11:50]:
That just remasters. Yeah. But that that Fallout— there is a Fallout 5 in, they're saying in pre-production, which really means they're just storyboarding inside of Bethesda. But there's also now a rumor that, 'cause it's all Microsoft now, that Obsidian's been told, show us your best idea for next Fallout game. So I think there might actually be a competition between the 2 studios because they're—
Paul Thurrott [01:12:11]:
Well—
Richard Campbell [01:12:11]:
'Cause they're— so you have Bethesda with the license holder, although owned by Microsoft, who cares? And the old team, inside of Obsidian.
Paul Thurrott [01:12:20]:
I didn't mean to give you the finger there. I'm sorry, uh, that was inadvertent. Um, this could develop into a situation like Call of Duty where you have multiple studios working on games. I, I— it's never going to be an annual thing, obviously, but it might make sense to have 2 in progress at any time, and then they kind of leapfrog each other, right?
Richard Campbell [01:12:40]:
And I mean, well, and if, if you take the overarching storyline of Fallout, right, that post-nuclear war redevelopment And they've always picked different geographies. Like, you'd even easily pick 2 different geographies that have nothing to do with each other.
Paul Thurrott [01:12:52]:
Exactly. And different time frames. Right. And everyone— it could be like the Stephen King universe where every once in a while there's some vague reference to something that is from some other game and everyone's like, oh, you know, you know, and like that kind of thing. And the TV show does the same thing, right? The TV show is its own unique little, uh, time and place. Although I guess they're going to Vegas this season, so we'll see what happens.
Richard Campbell [01:13:11]:
Yes. Yeah, they sort of finish with a view to Vegas. And, and I mean, by far— and I'm sorry you never got into this— like, the New Vegas time story was the most complex. It had the most fun in it. It was not a very straight-line story at all.
Paul Thurrott [01:13:27]:
This might be an opportunity when these remasters come out. Maybe this is the right time to, to give it a shot again. You know, it's, it's like movies or any kind of content where it hits you at some point in your life and you're like, I don't know. And then years later you're like, oh no, wait, this is You know, um, this is not interesting. Like, I, I always use the example like Rosemary's Baby, the movie. My wife and I watched that when we were first married and we were like, what is— this is terrible. Like, what is this? And then when we were in our 30s, probably at some point, we watched it again and we're like, oh no, this is great. This is an awesome movie.
Paul Thurrott [01:13:56]:
And I feel like games could be like that too, you know.
Richard Campbell [01:13:59]:
Well, and that— one of the great things I always liked about New Vegas is there wasn't a right answer to that. Yeah, you and you And you made decisions as your character that closed off whole storylines to you in the process.
Paul Thurrott [01:14:11]:
Right. No, that's good. It's a, you know, it's good. It's like a basically an open world type thing. That's smart.
Richard Campbell [01:14:17]:
Yeah, more or less. But with some— there's definitely some distinct ending events that are going to happen one way or the other, but your role in them and the outcome of them, you have a lot of effect over.
Paul Thurrott [01:14:29]:
Yeah, I'm not sure what the time frame is for this stuff. What is— what Yeah, okay. Yeah, I'll look at it.
Richard Campbell [01:14:35]:
Well, just put a little time aside when the remastered New Vegas is done. Take it, take it for a spin. I think you'd be impressed.
Paul Thurrott [01:14:41]:
Okay, okay, I will.
Richard Campbell [01:14:44]:
Okay. I just love the schism here between, you know, the rights holder and the team.
Paul Thurrott [01:14:49]:
Yeah, this is the Bungie thing with, um, well, the Halo games and, you know, them moving and becoming independent, becoming part of Sony, you know. I think where they're—
Richard Campbell [01:14:59]:
then the fact that all up Asha owns it all.
Paul Thurrott [01:15:02]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:15:02]:
And so she can just get over some things. Like every team's taken, uh, has taken some heat cuz nobody's been delivering well. And, but the untangle on that, it's like, hey, the team that actually knows how to make successful Fallout games, admittedly a decade ago.
Paul Thurrott [01:15:18]:
Yeah. But they might have—
Richard Campbell [01:15:18]:
Is sitting right there.
Paul Thurrott [01:15:19]:
I mean, those guys probably have a good perspective on that now. You know?
Richard Campbell [01:15:23]:
I think, I think you're exactly right. And, and have love for the story.
Paul Thurrott [01:15:26]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:15:26]:
Right? Like, it's just a passion for what that world was, and they haven't been able to work on it since— I think New Vegas was 2012.
Paul Thurrott [01:15:34]:
Yeah, that's what I was— right. So how many years has it been since— was that the— that's not the most recent one, is it? No, it's what, 4?
Richard Campbell [01:15:39]:
No, no, 4 and 76 come after that.
Paul Thurrott [01:15:42]:
But still, it's been 8, 10 years more. I mean, it's been a long time.
Richard Campbell [01:15:46]:
Yeah, the 76 is now playable. It was just plain broken when it first shipped, but they've kept patching and patching and patching.
Paul Thurrott [01:15:55]:
Okay.
Richard Campbell [01:15:55]:
And I, I never loved it. I mean, there was a few— there was a couple of storylines where you time traveled back to during the war in the armor and did the Battle of Alaska and stuff like that. Like, there was some cool stuff in there.
Leo Laporte [01:16:07]:
You like New Vegas better? Which one did you like the best?
Richard Campbell [01:16:11]:
I like— I thought New Vegas, from, from a storyteller's perspective, New Vegas had the most because there were so many storylines. There were so many directions to go in, right? It was just a lot to it, right? Like, you got to pick a win. You had to be a direct effect over the core win, but then you could also shape what that win looked like.
Leo Laporte [01:16:27]:
Hmm. What, what's the one you could play on the web now? There's one version you could play on the web. Was that 4?
Richard Campbell [01:16:33]:
Yeah, there's a bunch of side games now. Yeah, but '76 is— they were really desperate to make a massive multiplayer game.
Paul Thurrott [01:16:41]:
It was like a half-hearted mobile type thing at one point too, wasn't there? Like, I— this seems like a franchise for that kind of thing. Oh, classic Fallout 1.
Leo Laporte [01:16:50]:
Yeah, Fallout 1 you can play. Well, that's of course—
Paul Thurrott [01:16:52]:
yeah, I mean, if you could play Half-Life 2 in a browser, you could pretty much play almost, you know, yeah, any completely different—
Leo Laporte [01:17:00]:
but if you had the nerve, 6 years ago they made Fallout 1 available in the browser. I think there's one more recently, but I don't— I'm searching too. Fallout 4.
Richard Campbell [01:17:08]:
You know, you think, you think about the great storylines of games, right, that had worlds big enough to tell many stories within them. And Fallout was certainly one of them. It's not the only one. I mean, Halo had a lot of place to go as well.
Paul Thurrott [01:17:21]:
Yeah, but they just kept doing the same thing over and over again, which is kind of the problem.
Richard Campbell [01:17:25]:
That's the only game they knew how to make, right? At least in like western games. It takes a lot of nerve. Like Red Dead Redemption.
Paul Thurrott [01:17:30]:
Redemption, sorry.
Leo Laporte [01:17:30]:
What a great game.
Paul Thurrott [01:17:31]:
You know, there's a whole world there you could do things with.
Leo Laporte [01:17:35]:
It's like being in a, uh—
Richard Campbell [01:17:36]:
And the Half-Life worlds.
Paul Thurrott [01:17:38]:
Half-Life, right.
Richard Campbell [01:17:39]:
Yeah, there's, there's so much story sitting on the table.
Paul Thurrott [01:17:43]:
Plus don't half-start Half-Life. That makes me crazy. Yeah. So one of the rumors late last year was that when the Steam Machine launched, Halo 3 would be the tie-in, you know, the console exclusive.
Richard Campbell [01:17:53]:
I think we were the propagators of that, I swear.
Paul Thurrott [01:17:55]:
Yeah, and I wanted that to be true.
Richard Campbell [01:17:57]:
It's not what happened.
Paul Thurrott [01:17:58]:
Yeah, so there is no launch game, and, um, that implicitly— it doesn't mean there isn't a Halo 3, but, you know, there is It doesn't mean there isn't a Sasquatch either, but I, you know, I think we all know how that goes.
Richard Campbell [01:18:11]:
I don't know that they could work on a new Halo without it leaking at least a little, or a new Fallout or a new, um, Half-Life without it leaking at least. I know. Yeah, same.
Paul Thurrott [01:18:19]:
I agree. Yeah, I just want one so bad.
Richard Campbell [01:18:23]:
Um, yeah, all right, you, me both.
Paul Thurrott [01:18:24]:
Every once in a while I'll just go back and replay it. It's, it's still great. Like, it's amazing. And of course, you know, they did the whatever it was, 20th, 25th, whatever anniversary it was recently. Yeah. And they, you know, they do it.
Richard Campbell [01:18:34]:
All the Aperture Science storyline, like the competition between the 2 labs, stuff like this. There's just so much story laying on the table there, doing nothing with it.
Leo Laporte [01:18:42]:
Do you include Portal in that?
Paul Thurrott [01:18:43]:
Uh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Richard Campbell [01:18:45]:
I include Portal. Yeah, yep, yeah, yep, yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:18:49]:
At the time, Portal was kind of a nice little— it was like the, you know, when they make the little mini Star Wars movies, like, uh, yeah, Rogue One or whatever. You're like, okay, cool, like, this isn't the full thing I'm looking for exactly, but it's awesome. And it's its own thing. And, you know, the puzzles were good. I loved the, you know, the zipping between walls and stuff was awesome. Um, and then it was over. And geez, it's been like 20 years. It's been so long.
Paul Thurrott [01:19:12]:
Like, it's been so long. Uh, one game we don't ever have to wait for, unfortunately, is the next Call of Duty. But this one, this one is interesting. I feel like the last 2 were borderline lackluster, which is why I play them every day. Um, but They're going kind of back to their roots. Well, back to the roots of Modern Warfare. So Modern Warfare 4 is coming out on October 30th, but if you preorder, you can get into the— what are they calling this— the early access. So you can multiplay, you know, so multiplayer.
Paul Thurrott [01:19:42]:
There's probably going to be some limited set of maps, like always, um, from August 21st to August 25th. And then there'll be an open beta anyone can get in, uh, August 28th to September 1st. So this is good timing for me because this is like one week or less after we get back from Mexico. And oh boy, I want to see this game because the current one is just like, I don't know, I can't wait for this to end. So anyway, that's happening. That's cool. Um, there's a new Xbox system update. Um, I don't see anything super major in here, but they're allowing, um, longer gamertags finally.
Paul Thurrott [01:20:21]:
And so, and when I say longer, I mean they've went from 12 to 15 characters. Geez, I guess that's difficult technology or something.
Richard Campbell [01:20:31]:
I don't know.
Paul Thurrott [01:20:34]:
Yeah, I know. I know. And then some other things. Okay. So that's nothing big there. And then I saw this story and I, this, this put a weird idea into my brain, which actually today's news might have scuttled completely, which is Xbox partnered with Meta so that if you are a Meta Horizon Plus subscriber, which I said those words and I have no idea what that means, um, you get access to Game Pass Starter Edition, right?
Leo Laporte [01:21:04]:
Oh, that's the Horizon World, probably. They're, they're—
Paul Thurrott [01:21:06]:
I assume this is— I don't know. Okay, I really— if I were—
Leo Laporte [01:21:10]:
VR world.
Paul Thurrott [01:21:10]:
I think it's their, um, they've done a couple of these kind of partnerships, and, and I feel like Xbox or a Game Pass Starter might— may exist solely for this kind of thing. I don't know. This is the one where you have access to, uh, uh, just 50— it's roughly 50 games and 10 hours of cloud gaming in a month, which isn't that much, etc. But, um, when I saw this, I thought, you know what, what if as part of this simplification of Xbox or whatever they're doing. What if they— what if they get rid of Game Pass? And I don't mean like close it down. I mean, what if they made it— it's like a, like a standalone third-party service, right? Where there would be a partnership with Xbox because you want those games in there still, this still whatever point. Like, if this thing is just losing money for Microsoft or is not doing great, maybe it could do better with a smaller company, right? And I never really— I— we've bought We've often— many people have discussed this notion of just Xbox the business doing this. Like maybe Microsoft should let them go, like, like, you know, spin it off.
Paul Thurrott [01:22:12]:
Um, they could be an investor perhaps or whatever. Um, but I had never really thought that about Game Pass. It was this story that made me think that. But then today they announced, um, this Xbox backward compatibility thing. And I realized, you know, actually this kind of thing is one of many perks, but is a key perk.
Richard Campbell [01:22:30]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:22:31]:
of this entire ecosystem. And when you have a Game Pass subscription, you just get these games. And so, you know, we can talk about the value of these things and how much it costs per month, whatever, but there's only 4 games now, who cares? But eventually we're going to get more games and more recent games. And I mean, that might actually— that alone, and not really but almost, would justify the subscription. So, um, I had that brief flight of fancy and then I was like, actually, no, I think this is— Hey Leo, this is Quicksilver. If you can hear me on the MacBook, the per-device voice routing is working.
Paul Thurrott [01:23:05]:
Sorry.
Leo Laporte [01:23:07]:
Sometimes my agents just talk on their own.
Paul Thurrott [01:23:12]:
Um, and I think I'm gonna start a new section for the show notes called Captain Obvious Says... and it's almost always gonna be tied to component pricing. So, You know, Valve releases the Steam Machine finally. They price it higher than a lot of people want it. I made that point whenever that was, a couple weeks ago, like, you know, okay. I mean, to me, this, given what's going on in the world, it's not horrible. They're almost certainly going to raise prices on this thing again as the component crisis continues and costs get even worse. You know, they're a small company from a hardware maker perspective.
Paul Thurrott [01:23:48]:
Um, apparently Steam Deck sales have fallen off a cliff since they had to raise prices on those things.
Leo Laporte [01:23:52]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:23:54]:
whatever it is. But Valve, an engineer who worked on that project, on the Steam Machine, in an interview said, yeah, this is going to get worse. It's actually going to get worse. And it's going to get worse for many years. And when we first started talking about this last year, it was like, well, okay, it's going to go past the end of the year. So this may be I don't know, maybe 2026, something, maybe end of 2026. And then it's like, okay, actually this is probably going to go into 2027. And now it's like, well, it's going to go all the way through 2027.
Paul Thurrott [01:24:28]:
This might just be the way it is for the rest of our lives. I don't even know. I don't know where this ends. I don't know how it ends. Apple just did their— oh no, I'm sorry. They have not announced this, but Mark Gurman reported that they're going to have what is essentially a lease-to-own program that replaces the iPhone upgrade program where So, with the iPhone upgrade program, you paid monthly for a year. But with this new program, you're probably going to pay monthly for 2, 3 years, depending. And the idea there being that the monthly cost goes down dramatically, and then you get to own the thing at the end if you want to, or you can trade it in and keep going with a new phone or whatever.
Paul Thurrott [01:25:06]:
And, oh, man, I have to say, what this industry needs more than anything is more subscription services. So, this is fantastic. you know, Ascent, right? I mean, like a subscription service for hardware now. Like, goddamn. Like, it's, it's a little, it's a little alarming. I mean, look, if you're good with money and you can get like a zero interest, whatever it is, like an app— like the Apple Card does this for Apple products, or, you know, whatever this program is that's coming— and you can purchase a thing and have it spaced out over whatever the time frame is, but then your intention is maybe I'm going to pay this off in 2 months or 3 months, not the full year or 2 or 3 years, whatever it is.
Leo Laporte [01:25:43]:
Right.
Paul Thurrott [01:25:43]:
That's good. If you're responsible and you can do that kind of thing, it's great.
Richard Campbell [01:25:47]:
And it depends on how the interest is structured.
Paul Thurrott [01:25:49]:
Yep. Ideally, this would be 0% interest.
Richard Campbell [01:25:52]:
Yeah, in which case, then you're foolish to pay upfront. You should just pay it monthly if you're just renting.
Paul Thurrott [01:25:58]:
Which is the reason I do exactly that every time I buy an Apple product because even if I can pay it off immediately, and I usually do pay it off almost immediately, why not just do that? If your whole life falls in the toilet, like, you know, this— you might be happy you did this. It's not going to hurt you in any way. You're not paying more for it.
Richard Campbell [01:26:15]:
Well, here's another— here's another spin on exactly that concept. Do you know what the Oslo earbuds are?
Paul Thurrott [01:26:20]:
This is the sleep earbuds?
Richard Campbell [01:26:22]:
These are sleep earbuds, right? And they were made by— these are guys—
Paul Thurrott [01:26:25]:
these are several hundred dollars, right? They're expensive.
Richard Campbell [01:26:28]:
Yeah, like $400, right? Or $300 US. And they only last— they're warrantied for a year, and you're lucky if you get 2 from them because the battery in them is tiny. They wear them every night, so they go through a lot, right? It's like, it's perfectly reasonable. So they also offer them in a $25 a month subscription.
Paul Thurrott [01:26:46]:
You just keep going.
Richard Campbell [01:26:47]:
With replacements.
Paul Thurrott [01:26:49]:
Yeah, that's key.
Richard Campbell [01:26:50]:
So from a price perspective, it's the price of a year anyway. But you, as soon as it breaks, you just get another one.
Paul Thurrott [01:26:57]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:26:57]:
Now you might, might be— I don't have that service in Canada, so I'm just buying my second pair as my first pair has failed now. Right? And, and by pair, I mean one of them, which is frustrating.
Paul Thurrott [01:27:09]:
Yeah, I have my own story about this.
Richard Campbell [01:27:11]:
But, you know, but there's a real case for— and so my math works out. It's like, yeah, that's about what I'd pay if I've been paying to do it anyway. Anyway, except now I have to— so I have to make the commitment to buy Soundcore, you know, sleep earbuds.
Paul Thurrott [01:27:23]:
And I, I love them but also kind of hate them, you know. And I, I hate that I need them. them, but, um, they work pretty well. But every once in a while I'll pop them in and the left one is not charged. So they're in a charger case.
Richard Campbell [01:27:38]:
Yep.
Paul Thurrott [01:27:39]:
And, and I can just do this thing where I kind of rub my finger over the contacts. I do it on the earbud itself. I put it in and starts charging. And like, but the problem is I don't think about it. So I'll go to go to bed. I'm like, here we go. One of them, like I got, you know, whatever nature sound or something over here and nothing here. And it's Okay, it's maddening, you know.
Paul Thurrott [01:27:59]:
Um, yeah, so when these things fall apart, which I feel like will happen in the next 15 minutes, um, I'll look at that. That's, that's interesting. I think I didn't go with those because they were more expensive, you know.
Richard Campbell [01:28:10]:
They're more expensive and they don't last any longer, and they're warrantied for a year for a reason. But if you pay for them in a subscription— like, again, we're back to the subscription model, because here's the other side of that. In a subscription model, they have a continuous income. When they make a better model, you're naturally going to get them. Because they invariably get wrote out.
Paul Thurrott [01:28:27]:
Yeah. And even if it's a small price increase or whatever, it's like, but these are whatever, 25, whatever the, you know, advantage is. Like, yeah, you're like, yeah, no, I'll do that. Yeah. Hmm. Interesting. Interesting.
Leo Laporte [01:28:40]:
I don't know how you would know if it's gonna stay expensive for the next 30 years, but no, I also like the—
Paul Thurrott [01:28:48]:
I play a game, I would call it every second or third morning where I wake up and And try to find a white earbud in the white sheets, um, because one of them will—
Richard Campbell [01:28:57]:
I play that game.
Paul Thurrott [01:28:58]:
And, you know, just don't swallow.
Leo Laporte [01:29:00]:
Remember the guy?
Paul Thurrott [01:29:00]:
Well, I had some one morning since— it was just since we— well, I guess it was right before we left. I comment, I usually get, you know, you did— I'm like the blind person in the dark trying to find the bumpy thing in the bed, and I, I couldn't find it this day. Usually I find it pretty quick, so I— but I had to get up. And when my wife came out, I was like, hey, uh, I gotta go. I have to— don't do anything with the sheets. I have to, you know, find the airbud. It's got to be in there somewhere. And then 5 minutes later, she goes walking by with this bundle in her arms of the sheets to bring them into the laundry.
Paul Thurrott [01:29:30]:
I'm like, what the hell are you doing? I mean, like, I just told you, like, it's— it's just— she shakes the thing, it's a little bouncing out of this ball of sheets.
Richard Campbell [01:29:38]:
There you go.
Paul Thurrott [01:29:40]:
Oh boy. Anyway, I, I— yeah, I love that they exist, by the way. I— at least something you can put in your ears and it doesn't hurt you, you know, when you're moving around and stuff.
Richard Campbell [01:29:49]:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I knew I was really going to need this pair going fishing because I'm fishing with some serious snorers like this.
Paul Thurrott [01:29:58]:
Yeah, it's like a room full of sleep apnea. Yeah, you know, out in the woods.
Leo Laporte [01:30:07]:
Uh, all right, let's take a, uh, little break. We have the back of the book coming up. And speaking of books, We were talking about John's, uh, Inside Track column, and 13 years ago he made a book, an ebook of the Inside Track, uh, 2013. So if you have a hankering, I probably— you know what, PC Magazine I think is online, so you could probably go through all the old PC magazines. But this is $10. I figure probably, uh, you know, it's a— I'll think of it as a contribution.
Paul Thurrott [01:30:37]:
It's 30% bold text.
Leo Laporte [01:30:40]:
Yeah, well, you know, it's funny, I don't think the bold text survived the, um—
Paul Thurrott [01:30:43]:
That was my favorite part of it. It was all the little blurbs, and like you said, the ellipses, and then, you know, bold.
Leo Laporte [01:30:49]:
Here's what he says about, uh, video game consoles. Now remember, this is 13 years ago, right? When Microsoft— I'll do it in his voice— brought out its first Xbox, it followed suit quickly with the Xbox 360. I was convinced that its pace of rapid upgrading and innovations would blow away the rest of the competition. In this business, I noticed that platform improvements took almost twice as long as they did for the PC industry. By speeding up, speeding up the process, nobody would be able to keep up with Microsoft. Instead, Microsoft decided it might as well go as slow as the rest of the console folks and hasn't done anything now for 6 years.
Paul Thurrott [01:31:24]:
This is one year, I think, before the Xbox One came out, but that went great. So don't worry about that.
Richard Campbell [01:31:29]:
So 2013.
Leo Laporte [01:31:30]:
So is the console business dead? I think it is. How many polygons do you need anyway?
Paul Thurrott [01:31:35]:
Oh my God, that's amazing.
Leo Laporte [01:31:37]:
Perhaps we should take a hint from the auto industry.
Paul Thurrott [01:31:40]:
Okay, is enough for anybody?
Leo Laporte [01:31:42]:
Uh, you know what, he, I'm convinced, did this, uh, always did this on purpose. Yeah, to be— this was intentionally provocative. It was a great way for him to— I can tell you, it was the original link.
Paul Thurrott [01:31:55]:
If you're a gamer, you know how many polygons you need? All of the polygons.
Leo Laporte [01:31:58]:
All of the polygons. Yeah, polygons. I don't even want polygons. I want Right.
Paul Thurrott [01:32:02]:
I want the polygons to be so small it's— I can't see the polygons.
Leo Laporte [01:32:05]:
Right, right, exactly. Uh, anyway, I bought the book because I thought, you know, that's great. I love John. And maybe a little bit goes to Mimi. I don't know. That's amazing it's still online. It's a very slow site, so if it's not coming up for you, it's because everybody else went there. InsideTrackBook.com.
Leo Laporte [01:32:24]:
Now back to the book, starting with Mr. T. I mean, I'm just saying, I would watch it. Okay, you got it. That's what we'll do.
Paul Thurrott [01:32:33]:
So one of my now longtime tips for Windows users, um, and this is something that's a pain point for me because of how many computers I use, right? Because I review laptops, but I also, you know, I'm resetting computers all the time. I, I've never really kept track of this for any amount of time, like whether it's a year, 6 months, month, whatever. But, um, you know, I review 20 to 25 laptops a year. So, but I also have my own computers, and I also, you know, I write books and whatever I'm doing for Windows changes and I need default configurations and stuff, whatever. So being able to automate any of this process is key. I can't automate the setup of the Windows laptop because it comes out of the box like that. And that's honestly, that's part of the experience too. But I try to automate as much as I can when it comes to the other parts of this, which are the apps, which is you install the apps, but you also have to configure those apps.
Richard Campbell [01:33:23]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:33:24]:
And then you have to also configure the system. And Windows has its own kind of junky tool for that. If you want to do like a Windows backup restore thing, it will do some of it. Like, it's not horrible. I believe that Winget, which is the Windows package manager, has evolved to the point where either it can or will soon be able to handle some app configuration. I'm going to look into this very soon. But when I When I wrote what became the De-Insurify Windows 11 book, and then I wrote a big article about, um, kind of minimizing the impact of Microsoft in Windows 11, if that makes sense, which we would have talked about a couple of months ago, um, you know, signing in with a local account, you know, whatever. One of the big changes I made was with Winget, I exclusively install apps from the web now, um, meaning this thing supports 2 repositories by default one is the Microsoft Store, one is the web or WinGet or whatever, right? And not all apps are available everywhere, I get that.
Paul Thurrott [01:34:24]:
But one of the big advantages of the store was that they had such liberal licensing. So if you had the app, you could install it on multiple computers if it was a paid thing, whatever. But the truth is in 2026, like most of those advantages are kind of gone because they allow you to do anything as a developer just to get it in the store so that you can bypass all this stuff. Most of the apps I use, I have to sign in manually to them anyway. Like I really don't get much of an advantage to it. So I have been— this is going to be a multi-part thing over time, but I published a too long article about how I've kind of evolved this thing. But it is not difficult to go to the command line, type in winget search, and then whatever the term is, Google Chrome or whatever the apps are you're installing, and just kind of write those names because you need the name of the thing as it appears in winget. So like google.
Paul Thurrott [01:35:12]:
Chrome is probably the name of that app. I don't actually install it, but I install Helium, the web browser, or Typora, or Notion, or Affinity, or whatever it is, and actually all those things, right? And so I've just come up with a much simpler process for installing those things because once you have the names of each of those things, just put it in a text document. You just add winget install --silent and then run terminal as an admin. And this thing, it just blows through it really quick. The next thing I need to do though is automate the other stuff, which is configuring the system, configuring the apps. There's a whole process for a lot of apps. An app like Notion, you can sign into Google and it just signs in, you're good. But Typeform is like an 11-step process.
Paul Thurrott [01:35:58]:
So I'm kind of working through that. But anyway, even if you're afraid of the command line, strong recommend. to use this thing just to bulk install apps. Just keep a text file up in OneDrive somewhere, no big deal. It happens very quickly. It's really, really good if you haven't looked at it or haven't looked at it recently. And then I've been— I wanted to add a productivity app, but I, as always, I'm trying to play different games. I was not a fan of the new Doom games when the first one came out in 2016.
Richard Campbell [01:36:29]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:36:30]:
And then Doom Eternal came out X number of years later. I don't remember. I felt, to me, they felt like you were kind of running on ice, like it was, you know, you're gliding around, you know, it didn't have the same feel as the original game. But I later went back and played them through and actually both of those, they're, they're both good. Like they're both good games. And then Doom: The Dark Ages came out this past year and it looks, it's, well, the graphic style is very similar, but it's great.
Leo Laporte [01:36:54]:
I love it.
Paul Thurrott [01:36:54]:
But it takes place in kind of a medieval fantasy.
Leo Laporte [01:36:57]:
It's got a little, uh, Diablo in it.
Paul Thurrott [01:36:59]:
Yeah, exactly. But it's a, it's a straight-up shooter, right? There's no, you know, I mean, if you actually just let it play through, there's a whole plot in the beginning. Like, they actually explain, like, that this— how this could possibly make any sense in the context of the history of this game franchise. But it doesn't make sense. I could just break that to you right now.
Leo Laporte [01:37:16]:
But why bother?
Paul Thurrott [01:37:18]:
It's a little Elden Ring, a little Diablo looking, but it's, it's just It's literally, I just want to be super clear. This is just shooting. Like the only thing you have to master in this game is a bunch of button, you know, pushes to do special things and whatever. Um, I played this for 10 seconds when it first came out and I was like, nope. And I decided to give this another shot. And I have to say, I actually really like this game. I'm surprised like how much I like it.
Leo Laporte [01:37:43]:
Looks pretty.
Paul Thurrott [01:37:44]:
Um, it's worth looking at. I, I must get it through Game Pass because I don't believe I ever paid for this. Um, well, I mean, I may pay for Game Pass, but it is— it's a beautiful game. It— you are gliding on ice. I mean, you— I guess you just get used to that or whatever. Most people probably don't care. But, um, do they do that so you won't get seasick?
Leo Laporte [01:38:01]:
I—
Paul Thurrott [01:38:02]:
so I believe that they're trying to do—
Leo Laporte [01:38:05]:
It's the ultimate make me queasy symbol.
Paul Thurrott [01:38:06]:
So if you think— think back to— well, think back to Wolfenstein 3D, right? Yeah. Aside from, well, the, the technical achievement of moving through 3D-ish space, Um, and at speed, right, was the big thing. It was amazing, right? And then when they did, you know, Doom, Quake— Quake went real 3D, but from that game to Doom and Doom II, it really was speed, right? Like, you were almost— I mean, Richard, you're running way faster than a human could actually—
Leo Laporte [01:38:32]:
Oh yeah, yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:38:33]:
Like, it doesn't actually make any sense.
Leo Laporte [01:38:35]:
You're going 30 kilometers an hour or something like that.
Richard Campbell [01:38:37]:
50.
Paul Thurrott [01:38:38]:
If you actually stop to think about it. But, but here's the thing, if you look at these environments, environments, like see how big they are, right? And there's a lot of verticality to this game too, which is really cool. Um, that helps you get through. Imagine if you had to walk through there, right?
Leo Laporte [01:38:49]:
Right.
Paul Thurrott [01:38:49]:
It's like, I'm not trying to walk across the United States. I just want to get to the other side, you know? Like, and so the speed actually makes sense in the context of the game. Um, and it's a fantasy science fiction thing. Who cares? I, I'm just, I'm still like, I, I don't know how they, I don't know how they got to this point in the series because the first 2 games are very similar and they make sense together. And this one is like a prequel, essentially. I don't know why they didn't do— just do a third one of these things. I— but, but actually, it looking different is kind of cool. Um, it's different but the same, if that makes sense.
Paul Thurrott [01:39:24]:
I don't know. It's, it's— anyway, I, I just— I discounted this very heavily when it first came out, and replaying it, or starting actually playing— maybe I should say actually playing it I was like, okay. Like, you know, I left all the story. I leave like the story, you know, I leave it on. Like I let it happen. I pay attention to what's happening and I'm like, okay, I can follow this. Of course I can. It's written for a 3-year-old, but it's, it's, it's better than I thought it was.
Paul Thurrott [01:39:50]:
I feel kind of bad that I like just was like, no, immediately when I first saw this thing, but it's, it's a great looking game and it moves. It's fast. I mean, it's, It's a good combination of things. Plus you don't have to be online, which I have to tell you, this last week it was pretty key for me. Um, but anyway, it's a good game.
Leo Laporte [01:40:10]:
All right, cool. Well, now, now that we've done playing games, let's get serious with Run As Radio.
Richard Campbell [01:40:20]:
Yeah, Run As is such a serious place, isn't it? Uh, actually, this show came from— remember when I did that HR conference in Berlin?
Leo Laporte [01:40:28]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:40:29]:
Uh, one of the people I met there was this lady, Jesse Schofer, who makes products in the HR space. But we ended up in a conversation that I ultimately wanted to make into a show about the, the explosion in software, especially AI-related software around HR and other markets, has gotten to the situation where people are, you know, you're procuring— you're a big company that has an HR team, but you're procuring software that's been on the market for 4 months. Like, it's all brand new. And, uh, and often they have the tags for being like GDPR or SOC compliant or any of those sorts of things, but is any of it actually true? You know, they're just— they're kind of a little fly-by-night. It's just there's so much going on and all this urgency to use these new tools that often things are being procured without actually understanding the risks that involve them. So we went down a path of How do you incorporate— this is very much like the role of the sysadmin in the procurement process to say, is this— what is the security models these products use? Like, is this safe for us to bring into our operation, or are we opening ourselves up to a whole bunch of vulnerabilities? And so, really, it was— I'd be, you know, before the software is installed, what's the security hygiene? How do we know what it does? Where— how far can I lock it down? Is it compliant the way we expect it to to be. And so, we looked at a bunch of tools in that space, and they're included in the show notes, about just validating that they're actually compliant and that they are what they say they are. It's— and it seems to be an emergent problem just because there's so much new software on the market right now.
Leo Laporte [01:42:04]:
Security begins at procurement.
Richard Campbell [01:42:08]:
Yeah. When you buy stuff, do you know what you're buying?
Paul Thurrott [01:42:12]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:42:13]:
And then, you know, often the, the administrators, the security folks are not involved. They find out when the product arrives on the doorstep, hey, install this. And you're like, wait a second, is this safe?
Leo Laporte [01:42:25]:
It says it's safe in the ad.
Richard Campbell [01:42:27]:
Yeah, it checked all the boxes you told me to check, but, you know, that was—
Leo Laporte [01:42:31]:
Is there a way to check that?
Richard Campbell [01:42:34]:
Yeah, most of the time, especially when you talk about GDPR and SOC and things like that, like they actually have to be registered with a company that does the validation. And so, that makes sense. They may have stuck the logo on the web page, but they're not actually registered.
Leo Laporte [01:42:46]:
Oh, wow.
Richard Campbell [01:42:46]:
I'm surprised you can do that. It only takes a minute to check, right? And then even when it is even compliant, it's like, can you pass the tests? Because sometimes, you know, they've jumped through the hoops and they've gotten their compliancy documents, but there's been subsequent versions that are now in violation.
Leo Laporte [01:43:04]:
Oh, interesting. So that's one of the things we do when we vet advertisers. We have a fairly thorough vetting process that involves that kind of check to make sure. Yeah, because we don't— I don't want to say anything that's not true, for sure.
Richard Campbell [01:43:18]:
No, no, I'm, I'm totally with you. And it's, it's very— and I just wonder, part of this is there's a lot of fake it till you make it. Just put the logos up, we'll get a certification later, get the stuff out there. Like, I need to get butts in seats. That, that suddenly catches up with them when they— turns out being compliant, it's not that easy, you know? Like, it's a lot of work to pull that stuff off. But also, you know, when you especially think about the HR space and in tech, that's very conservative software. It's like buying ERP systems. Like, you don't buy a 1-year-old product.
Richard Campbell [01:43:48]:
You're expecting a company that's been around for years and years, and all of that chicanery would have been long gone by now.
Leo Laporte [01:43:53]:
Yeah, you'd think.
Richard Campbell [01:43:55]:
But you're getting so much pressure. And this is part of what came out of that HR conference I was at, is all of these people are being told by their leadership, right, you know, get us in AI. And so they're looking at products that under normal circumstances they would never consider just because they're so young and unvalidated and no case studies, like no proof that anybody else is actually using the product.
Leo Laporte [01:44:18]:
Why— we always look for case studies on their websites. Yeah, that's really important, you know.
Richard Campbell [01:44:23]:
And if you're smart, you're calling a couple of those customers up, figuring out if they're real, you know, right?
Leo Laporte [01:44:27]:
Like, it's for an hour or so's worth of work, thousands of dollars, it's worth And if you're gonna rely on it for security, for sure.
Richard Campbell [01:44:36]:
Yeah, and you're gonna train your whole organization on it. Like, I know that the licenses cost money, but the training's huge, right? And if it's wrong, getting it back out is not small, right? The migration is hard. All of that is hard. And we talk about total cost of ownership on software, the license barely counts compared to the amount of effort it went into getting it integrated in the system and getting everybody onboarded.
Leo Laporte [01:44:58]:
Really good point.
Richard Campbell [01:44:59]:
Those are much larger numbers. And so this whole— you don't want to find out after you've spent all of that money and energy that you have a product that's just going to do damage to your company.
Leo Laporte [01:45:11]:
No kidding.
Richard Campbell [01:45:12]:
And it's a non-zero concern. So it's really been a part of the conversation. And so it was fun to dig into that with Jesse. And she's in the space, she's making product and doing validation and really dealing with that and finding out, yeah, it's a lot of chicanery going on. It's not good. We're in a tough spot. And it's just, it's almost, they're taking advantage of the pressure that leadership is putting on their organization to move quickly in the space.
Leo Laporte [01:45:35]:
Run As Radio, episode 1046. RunAsRadio.
Richard Campbell [01:45:41]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:45:42]:
Did you always put those out on a Wednesday, or did you move it so that we could plug it?
Richard Campbell [01:45:45]:
Every Wednesday. Yeah, it's been every Wednesday since, say, April 7th, April 11th, 2007. Never miss a Wednesday.
Leo Laporte [01:45:53]:
Longer. Wow, 2007. Wow. Yeah, you're gonna have your 20th anniversary next year.
Richard Campbell [01:46:00]:
Yep.
Leo Laporte [01:46:01]:
Congratulations.
Richard Campbell [01:46:02]:
Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:46:04]:
All right, I think, uh, you've earned a little, uh, a tipple, as they say.
Richard Campbell [01:46:08]:
Boy, I tippled last night, thank you very much.
Leo Laporte [01:46:11]:
He's a tippler. And you are in Nebraska.
Richard Campbell [01:46:14]:
I am in Nebraska, so of course I went out last night through a few of the speakeasies trying to find a bottle of Nebraskan whiskey because there is such a thing. Although it took a bit to find, and I wasn't able to buy a bottle, but I was able to have a taste of a few. And I, and I picked the Loup River because it, it was very much a classic bourbon. But we gotta talk about Nebraska, right? This, this story's not complete unless we do a little tour. And there's more to Nebraska than just being like the home of Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett. This is the triple landlocked state, right? There's, you gotta go through at least a couple of other states to get to water in any given direction. The eastern edge is defined by the Missouri River that also creates this great glacial melt till space. The Missouri Valley is hugely fertile and all the growing and where we are here in Lincoln and nearby in Omaha, all in part of that land, this massive grain-growing land, just corn and soy as far as the eye can see.
Leo Laporte [01:47:13]:
I remember driving down I-80 through it. And it was just corn the whole way. Just corn, corn, corn, corn. Yeah. So I'm thinking they'd be a good place to get a bourbon, actually.
Richard Campbell [01:47:27]:
Yeah, but they don't have a huge alcohol culture. But let's get to that part. Uh, you know, besides that Eastern Bloc and, and what all of that looks like— and my camera's being weird on me— uh, besides that Eastern Bloc There are— there, I mean, if you go across Nebraska, you'll find that, uh, in the center there's the Loess Hills. This is more of the, the big flat fertile plains, less hilly like the Missouri River Valley is. And in the north central, it's actually sand dunes. I mean, covered in grass, but huge, huge amounts of sand. There's not a lot of growing there, not a lot of anything there. But that's also the location of what's called the Ogallala Aquifer, which is the largest aquifer in the world.
Richard Campbell [01:48:12]:
It's this huge, huge body of water underground in north central Nebraska. And then further west, you get to the shortgrass prairie, the stuff coming into the Rockies now and towards Wyoming and Colorado is much more your classic prairie country. So your growing's on the east side, your plains are on the west side, Which is why you have this history of the First Nations people. And for millennia, for 10,000-plus years, there's been hunter-gatherers and farmers all over this land. In fact, the name Nebraska is a derivation from the Sioux word for shallow water river, because this is where the rivers were crossable. Because many places, the Missouri is just uncrossable. Just looking in the past couple of hundred years since the Western expansion of America, you're talking about the Pawnee and the Omaha and the Otoe and the Lakota and the Cheyenne and the Ponca and the Arapaho. Lots of them have been around here, but the word Loop actually refers to Lower Loop culture around the Loop River.
Richard Campbell [01:49:20]:
So this is just pre-European. There was a major drought in the 1300s, 1400s that collapsed a lot of civilization in the interior of what's now the United States. But around 1500, as the waters came back, the Lower Loop culture, and we identify that by the archaeological digs, they were building big round earth lodges in groups along the river, and they were farmers. And so they seasonally would farm, but also would bison hunt. They made Stone and bone and wooden tools. They had a very specific style of pottery, this corded style bowls and storage vessels and things like that. And they had an agricultural— they did the 3 sisters, maize, beans, and squash, which is an incredible complete protein. But then they also hunted the bison in the west during the migratory season, and then they would have meat that they could store.
Richard Campbell [01:50:19]:
All of this, of course, changes as the Europeans arrive in the area in the 1600s. It's the French first. This is all part of New France, although the Spanish will fight in the Seven Years' War against them, and in 1763 it becomes Spanish for a few decades. Napoleon Bonaparte will be instrumental in claiming it back as New France in 1800, and then ultimately sold to the US as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. All of this was Louisiana Territory back then. But as that disorganized chunk of land now lands as part of the US, you send through Lewis and Clark, and it eventually becomes the Missouri Compromise. And this becomes a hub of the debate around slavery because in the 1820 agreement called the Missouri Compromise said, okay, Missouri can have slaves, but the rest of you cannot. No slavery north of the 36th parallel.
Richard Campbell [01:51:17]:
That gets changed with the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which is very much your classic states versus federal government debate that says, you can't tell us what to do, federal government. Let's repeal that and let the popular vote decide whether we can have slaves or not. This leads to incredible conflicts, mostly in Kansas rather than Nebraska. Nebraska always leans away from slavery, By 1861, before the start of the Civil War, they're like, there's no slavery in Nebraska at all. But the conflict in Kansas—
Leo Laporte [01:51:46]:
Kansas.
Richard Campbell [01:51:47]:
Which they call the period of Bleeding Kansas, actually results in the collapse of the Whig Party and the formation of the Republican Party as the fallout from that over this conflict over slavery. And all of this is the decades leading into what results in the US Civil War. And this entire time, Nebraska is still just a territory. They won't become a state until 1863. '67, at the— after the end of the Civil War. But even before that, one of the largest distilleries in the country is built on what is now Nebraska land. This is an area called Willow Springs, and it was at one point the 3rd largest distillery in all of the U.S. We have detailed records from 1880 where they were producing pure ryes, bourbons, sourmashes and sweetmashes, and malt whiskey to the scale of 1,200 gallons a day.
Richard Campbell [01:52:40]:
So, you know, 24, 25 barrels a day. Massive operation for the 1880s. It's incredible. But that ends with Prohibition in 1919. They don't shut down. What they actually do is switch to non-alcoholic products— near beers, malt drinks, and sodas. And in fact, even when Prohibition ends, they never go back. They stay.
Richard Campbell [01:53:03]:
The operation still exists today. Today it's called Cornhusker Beverage and Bridle. I love it. And they make local soft drinks. They make Nesbitt's and Crystal. And these days there's a popular drink here called Goody Pop, uh, and that's— the legal company is still Willow Springs, goes all the way back to pre-statehood, uh, and— but they just make soft drinks. So really, after Prohibition, no alcohol is manufactured, not legally anyway, in Nebraska. There was a big illegal business during Prohibition And lots of stills being seized and things like that.
Richard Campbell [01:53:37]:
But we don't see commercial production of alcohol of any kind in Nebraska until the 1800s, until the 2000s. Cooper's Chase out of West Point, Nebraska, around 2008 is the first to set up a still. All this grain, no alcohol. Right. And so Cooper's Chase is kind of the first of the new age craft whiskeys being manufactured from Nebraska. I didn't get a chance to taste Cooper's Chase, but I did get some of this Loop River. So this is Brad Schmidt, who's a farmer out of St. Paul, Nebraska, and so naturally combines the grain growing with distilling.
Richard Campbell [01:54:16]:
His initial building is actually a converted grain elevator. I'm very much doing the farm-to-glass mindset, and they make a vodka and a rum and a bunch of other— and a gin, other spirits, because it takes time to make barley. And they make barley— they make whiskey very much in The at least urban style. So corn, rye, barley. They haven't published any of their numbers. Their operation is small, 1,000-liter stainless mash cookers, roughly about the same size, maybe 1,500 liters on the washbacks. And that's just from looking at pictures. They have no published specifications at all.
Richard Campbell [01:54:45]:
All pot stills, though. I saw no pictures of column stills of any kind. And yeah, using American oak. And the one photo I saw of storage, they were using rack storage rather than dunnage. So that's the high stacking large building. It's very— it's windy here and it's hot in the summertime. And so this is fast aging parts of the world. This is not your slower stuff.
Richard Campbell [01:55:10]:
So it's tricky to make old whiskey. And their Nebraska straight bourbon is like 3 years old. It's the minimum. It's inexpensive, about $40, runs in a 46%, 47% range. It's basically not outside of Nebraska. There's really been no push to sell nationally. It's hard to find. You've got to be here to get it.
Richard Campbell [01:55:30]:
But let me tell you, that's as good of any bourbon you've ever tasted.
Leo Laporte [01:55:34]:
What?
Richard Campbell [01:55:35]:
That Loop River.
Paul Thurrott [01:55:36]:
Really?
Richard Campbell [01:55:36]:
Just beautiful. Perfect, perfect bourbon. Little caramel note, you know, a little bit of that vanilla note. It was lovely.
Leo Laporte [01:55:43]:
That's amazing.
Richard Campbell [01:55:44]:
And it was cheap. We got, we got 3 doubles for $25 at Jake's And, uh, and I'm like, what are we drinking? Like, what are you tasting here? And he goes, I don't know, this could be any Kentucky whiskey I've ever had. Like, it's just, it's beautiful whiskey. I'm like, yep. They've got the formula nailed. No big master distillers, none of that sort of thing. Small production, maybe 1,000 barrels a year. So they're making less than 100 barrels a month compared to the size of Willow Springs operation back in the 1880s.
Richard Campbell [01:56:17]:
It's just crafty. But yeah, local whiskey made by local guys for a local market. I'm there for it.
Leo Laporte [01:56:23]:
Yeah, no kidding.
Richard Campbell [01:56:23]:
It's beautiful. It's great stuff. Just really, if you're in Nebraska, drink the local whiskey. By the way, not that easy to find, right? There's plenty of, you know, there's Maker's Mark everywhere, there's Jack everywhere, there's Woodford everywhere, goodness knows, and lots of Angel's Envy too. But it took me a few stops to find a bar that had a little bit of Nebraskan in it, and then we drank it all. Because it was really nice.
Paul Thurrott [01:56:46]:
Skinny little bottle too.
Leo Laporte [01:56:48]:
How much left in the bottle?
Paul Thurrott [01:56:49]:
Yeah, well, did you say you have a little bit of Nebraska in you?
Richard Campbell [01:56:53]:
Well, at the moment I do, yeah. But you know, as soon as I finish recording here, it's probably gonna land in the bath.
Leo Laporte [01:57:02]:
They make gin and vodka too, but it's the whiskey you— they do want to try, I think.
Richard Campbell [01:57:07]:
I was there for the— I was there for the Whiskey, and there was a few choices. But the bourbon they make—they make a rye as well—but the bourbon was the one we could get, and it was—it was a classic. It was right on, you know, nothing weird about it. They—if I would have—I could have taken a tour this morning, but it was only so many hours in a day, so I just had a chance to have a taste of it last night. One of the speakeasies—it was great time. If you're in—if you're in Omaha or Lincoln, grab some. There's a few others. I mean, obviously Cooper's Choice, the original.
Richard Campbell [01:57:37]:
From the Craft Set. There's also Sideshow. Uh, so they, they're all— they, they've got it nailed. It's good grain country.
Leo Laporte [01:57:43]:
It's like they know how to party in Nebraska too. They're definitely having it.
Richard Campbell [01:57:47]:
They're having a good— this, this place has a good time. It's really cool. It's been years since I've been here. Yeah, we'll, we'll have a great time. The speakers party is tonight, so I've got my party shirt on. And then, uh, tomorrow keynote at 8:30.
Leo Laporte [01:58:00]:
Nice. Uh, well, Loop River Distilling, you just got the best plug you ever had in the whole wide world, and that is going to join all the other recommendations. And by the way, not a few dis-recommendations, uh, on our whiskey playlist, which you can find at twit.tv/whiskey. More than 100 of these segments, beginning with how whiskey's made, the origins of whiskey, and Covering a whole bunch. Are you gonna ever run out, you think, Richard?
Richard Campbell [01:58:34]:
Dude, I've, I've got a list of just Scottish that's 200+ whiskies. And then everywhere I go, because of the craft whiskey movement, like, you know the best thing about this job, Leo? I meet new whiskies all the time. Like, just that Sanctuary I did a couple of weeks ago, like, I'm keeping a bottle. That bottle's gone. By the way, like this, clear it with— I take the, you know, I do the, the sample on, on the screen and so forth, and maybe it stays on my desk for another day or two, then it goes upstairs into the cabinet. And sometimes I come upstairs in that cabinet, you know, a week or two later, and that bottle is gone. And I'm like, okay, that is approved. Just every so often I find one, and Stacy's like, yep, that's a good one.
Leo Laporte [01:59:17]:
Oh, she shares them with you?
Richard Campbell [01:59:19]:
Oh yeah, she'll, she'll take them out for a spin if she likes them. Yeah, you know, they'll be in, they'll be in an Old Fashioned pretty fast.
Leo Laporte [01:59:25]:
Well, this sounds lovely, and I wish I were in Nebraska with you, but I'm not. You are going to Montana next for a little fly fishing expedition, which means you'll be gone next week. I'm telling you something you don't know. Uh, and Paul has an assignment. He has an assignment to find somebody.
Paul Thurrott [01:59:43]:
I fulfilled the assignment.
Leo Laporte [01:59:44]:
You have fulfilled the assignment.
Richard Campbell [01:59:46]:
Are you gonna give away the name, or is it gonna be a surprise?
Paul Thurrott [01:59:49]:
Well, I— so it's going to be Chris Hoffman. Oh, good.
Leo Laporte [01:59:53]:
You were on last year, Wenda.
Paul Thurrott [01:59:54]:
Yeah, yeah, I did ask Mary Jo.
Leo Laporte [01:59:57]:
She just— what does she say? She says never go near that Leo again. Uh, he's so handsy. What does she say?
Paul Thurrott [02:00:04]:
She said no.
Leo Laporte [02:00:05]:
Um, but, uh, you, by the way, you've stayed in touch with her. You're good friends.
Paul Thurrott [02:00:12]:
Yeah, no, we texted. She's done with podcasts. She's actually— so she— what she told me honestly was She feels out of the loop when it comes to Windows right now.
Leo Laporte [02:00:20]:
Ah, sure. She doesn't understand that we don't care what she— we—
Paul Thurrott [02:00:27]:
what we care about is what she literally said. Um, she said, please tell them I'm, I'm happy that people are interested in that, but I, I just don't feel like I should be doing it. Like, she just doesn't feel like she's— oh, in the loop is the way she said it. Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:00:45]:
People do tell me that all the time. Like, I don't— I can't be on Twitter. I don't know anything about what's going on. And I say, we don't want you to. I've been doing it for almost 20 years.
Paul Thurrott [02:00:54]:
Anyone could do this.
Leo Laporte [02:00:55]:
I don't know what's going on. Like, you know, you're here to have fun. Yeah. Oh well, we tried. Chris is great too. Nothing to knock Chris.
Paul Thurrott [02:01:05]:
Yeah, no, of course. I mean, you know, and you know what's great about Mr.
Leo Laporte [02:01:09]:
Richard Campbell? He misses very few shows.
Richard Campbell [02:01:12]:
Uh, yeah, he does his— that was the original plan, right? Like, originally it's like, look, I travel a lot. I know. Well, this portable rig started working really well, and the listeners seem to like this whole where's our— oh, I love it thing.
Leo Laporte [02:01:26]:
Now I noticed you're wearing a mic, uh, on your lapel mic today. Yeah, that's new.
Richard Campbell [02:01:31]:
This is the new—
Paul Thurrott [02:01:32]:
this is the new Rode, right?
Leo Laporte [02:01:34]:
I think this sounds Fantastic.
Paul Thurrott [02:01:36]:
Thank you. So, so by the way, I've told— this is my possibly my favorite Leo story. But 2 summers ago, I think it was, we were here in Mexico, and I was like, I, I have the older Rode, and I desperately wanted to use this instead of all this stupid equipment, you know. So I put this thing on. I, I left the real microphone in front of me just to see if anyone would—
Leo Laporte [02:01:55]:
You fooled me.
Paul Thurrott [02:01:57]:
No, I did not fool you. That's why the story is so awesome. I— you, you signed in and you were like, I, um, you said something like— I know I said, hey, how you, how you doing? And I— you said, I'm doing great, but you sound like shit. And it was like right away. And I was like, all right, so much for that experiment.
Richard Campbell [02:02:16]:
Yeah, yeah. I got these— this Rode last fall when I was doing a tour of a nuclear facility for one of the Geek Outs and clipped one on the CEO and one on me so we were able to walk around. And when I went to listen to them, you're like, Holy man, this sounds great.
Leo Laporte [02:02:33]:
Is this what you used when we were at the Houston or, uh, the Cape Canaveral?
Richard Campbell [02:02:39]:
Uh, no, that was your gear.
Leo Laporte [02:02:40]:
That was our gear.
Paul Thurrott [02:02:41]:
You just— you got this fairly recently.
Leo Laporte [02:02:42]:
Should we just take— get rid of all these big gold, big-ass microphones?
Paul Thurrott [02:02:46]:
Did you have this in January? I feel like you might, because I feel like I, I got to experience this.
Richard Campbell [02:02:53]:
Yeah, we, we, we use— we use these in Mexico. You're right. Yeah, we did use a mix because there is 2 of them and they come on separate channels and I can configure them as mixes, single channel, or separate.
Paul Thurrott [02:03:02]:
That's so great. They're so small and—
Richard Campbell [02:03:04]:
And they're so small and they last like 6 hours. So it sounds blown away.
Leo Laporte [02:03:09]:
It sounds better than the Countryman you used to use. I mean, this really is great.
Paul Thurrott [02:03:12]:
Yeah, it says something too.
Richard Campbell [02:03:13]:
And it's— I think the Heil's still— the Heil's better.
Leo Laporte [02:03:17]:
It's better on the low end if you want to. Yeah, yeah.
Paul Thurrott [02:03:20]:
But this doesn't travel well. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [02:03:22]:
You know, you just can't travel at all. It's crazy.
Leo Laporte [02:03:25]:
Burke, should we just send everybody the Rodes? I've been using— I have the, um, you just—
Richard Campbell [02:03:30]:
these new Rode micros are stunning. The new—
Leo Laporte [02:03:33]:
is it the Insta or the DJI? I think it's the new DJI, uh, lapel mics. I should try that.
Richard Campbell [02:03:40]:
Yeah, they come— the pair of them— and that one comes with the, um, the camera, right? The portable camera has a— has a mic.
Leo Laporte [02:03:48]:
Well, I got the Insta. Okay. Thank you, Anthony. Yeah, Kevin, our producer, says the Heil's still best to my ears.
Paul Thurrott [02:03:55]:
Yeah, no, true. No, I agree. But you can't, you know, you can't carry this thing around.
Paul Thurrott [02:04:00]:
Like, if you travel—
Paul Thurrott [02:04:00]:
I mean, I'm a rich— travels all the time.
Leo Laporte [02:04:02]:
But I am putting together all of my mobile kit. I think that's— remember how I struggled with the Heil in Hawaii? It was like I couldn't— I didn't have anything.
Richard Campbell [02:04:10]:
Yeah, yeah, it's terrible, right? You just— it's too much gear, right? And it's really—
Paul Thurrott [02:04:13]:
you're not going on tour with Rolling Stones, you know. You just want to carry this stuff.
Richard Campbell [02:04:19]:
But I always— I'm always afraid to travel with those large diaphragm microphones because you take— they take a few hits and you collapse the diaphragm and you've ruined a $500 microphone, right?
Leo Laporte [02:04:28]:
Yeah, then they sound like they get buzzy. They don't—
Richard Campbell [02:04:33]:
Yeah, there's no fix to that, right? Like, they're— they're—
Leo Laporte [02:04:35]:
We have quite a few, uh, dead Heils actually. Broken Heils.
Richard Campbell [02:04:38]:
Yeah, yeah. And that's— I mean, the reality is they wear out. Right? Like, eventually the, the diaphragm collapses.
Leo Laporte [02:04:45]:
My friends, you have been listening to a fabulous show called Windows Weekly. We do this every Wednesday, 11 AM Pacific, 2 PM Eastern. Uh, that's 1800 UTC if you want to calibrate your global clock. Uh, and the reason I tell you that is because you can actually watch this live if you want the fresh version. We stream it, uh, live to, to 6, 7 different places. One is the Club Twit Discord. So if you're a club member, you could watch there. I have to say, Discord's not the best live streaming video platform, so most of our club members will have the chat in Discord open, but then we'll be watching on another channel, mostly YouTube.
Leo Laporte [02:05:23]:
But there's Twitch, there's x.com, there's Facebook, there's LinkedIn, and there's Kick. So total of 7 different ways you can watch. You pick the one you like the best. If you're chatting in any of those, I do see the chat. We have a combined chat that I can watch. Um, let's see what else. Uh, you don't have to watch live, I guess that's the other point. You can always download a copy of the show.
Leo Laporte [02:05:44]:
We have audio or video at twit.tv/ww. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly, and probably the best thing to do for any of our shows is subscribe in your favorite podcast player so you get it automatically. You don't have to think about it, and you get the audio or the video. Of course, club members have their own personal link which allows them to have the ad-free version with chapter markers. If you, uh, we've updated our newsletter. I think it looks really great. Ty McClarty did a great job. He's our marketing guy.
Leo Laporte [02:06:12]:
Uh, take a look at that if you're not a member. If not, you don't have to be a member. If you're not a subscriber, just go to twitch.tv/newsletter. It's free and it gives you an update on things that are coming up. It's a good way to keep up on shows that are coming because we do have some unusual things coming up. For instance, we're gonna be doing Windows Weekly, uh, from Black Hat in a couple of weeks in August.
Paul Thurrott [02:06:32]:
Is that— that's in 2 weeks, right?
Richard Campbell [02:06:34]:
Yeah, it's right after fishing.
Leo Laporte [02:06:37]:
Right after fishing. We will be live in Las Vegas at the ThreatLocker booth, and you can come visit us. Of course, the newsletter would have told you that. You'd already know it. Um, and, uh, let's see, I guess that's, uh, that's really all of the paperwork. Uh, we have stamped your visas, and you may now exit. Windows Weekly Country. But do come back next week, okay? Thanks to Paul Theriot.
Leo Laporte [02:07:00]:
He's at theriot.com. His books are at leanpub.com. But here's the cool thing, if you subscribe as a premium member to theriot.com, you get the books for free, of a $1,000 value. You can say any amount you want because you said the price.
Paul Thurrott [02:07:15]:
Possibly $45 value, but yeah, it's whatever it is.
Leo Laporte [02:07:17]:
It's whatever you set it. If you set it for $1,000, it's $1,000. You get Windows Everywhere, you get the Field Guide to Windows 11, you get De-Insidify Windows and all of that at thurrott.com as a premium member. Richard Campbell is at runasradio.com. That's where you'll find the latest, well, all the episodes, all 1,000-some episodes of Run As. You'll also find .NET Rocks, the show he does with Carl Franklin. And in there, in the .NET Rocks feed, there are a lot of geekouts, some really interesting stuff. You know, Richard likes to dive deep.
Paul Thurrott [02:07:46]:
into this.
Leo Laporte [02:07:47]:
And, uh, and you should look at— is there any way to just kind of find the Geek Outs? Are they named Geek Out?
Richard Campbell [02:07:52]:
Yep, yep. Okay, you search on geek, you'll get just those. The latest one is data centers in space.
Leo Laporte [02:07:59]:
Yeah, Elon says next year. Elon says a lot of things.
Richard Campbell [02:08:05]:
He says a lot of things. And, you know, putting one of them up is one thing.
Leo Laporte [02:08:08]:
Yeah, maybe. You know what, maybe the first one will go up next year. That's credible. Yeah, that, that may be—
Paul Thurrott [02:08:13]:
That's credible.
Leo Laporte [02:08:15]:
Thank you, Richard. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, all you winners and dozers. We will see you next week on Windows Weekly.
