Windows Weekly 993: The Columnist Savant

Summary

Windows Weekly 993: The Columnist Savant

Date: July 23, 2026
Host: Leo Laporte
Co-hosts: Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell

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Episode Overview

This episode of Windows Weekly covers a busy week in Microsoft news, with particular emphasis on the complexities of the Windows Insider builds, the latest AI developments, and notable updates in the Xbox and PC gaming ecosystem. Midway through the episode, the hosts receive and reflect on the sad news of the passing of legendary tech columnist John C. Dvorak, leading to an extended and heartfelt tribute. The show closes with their usual tips, recommendations, and Richard’s whiskey segment—this time spotlighting Nebraska bourbon.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Windows Insider Builds: Still a Mess

• Multiple Build Channels: Microsoft released five Insider builds this week, causing confusion. Paul Thurrott sarcastically observes how Microsoft's attempt at simplification has led to “exactly the way it was before, just with slightly different names” ([04:41]).
• Paul's Experience Resetting a Laptop: Paul describes frustrating (but ultimately successful) attempts to downgrade his Snapdragon-powered Asus laptop from Insider builds back to stable, noting the process finally worked after years of failures ([05:53]).
  • “I'm so used to it not working, it never occurred to me to try it. You know what I mean? And it worked anyway.” — Paul Thurrott ([07:56])
  • Richard: “You can now exit Insider gracefully.” ([08:13])
• Major Changes in the Builds: The new Start Menu is now in beta, minor enhancements to File Explorer and other system components are rolling out, and Microsoft Whiteboard is set to be retired on August 22 ([09:48]).

2. The "Year of the Pain Point" and Feature Retirements

• Microsoft has committed to tackling longstanding UX issues (“pain points”) in Windows—Start menu, taskbar, widgets, and search.
• However, as Leo notes, “it's summertime, right, so things are a bit slow” ([12:33]).
• Microsoft Whiteboard's exit highlights a broader trend: frequently, productivity app ideas catch on across tech companies, only to fade as users fail to engage ([13:41]).
• AI Feature Retirements: Microsoft Copilot is sunsetting two features: Podcasts (AI-generated summaries and conversational breakdowns of documents) and Deep Research. Paul finds the overlap in Copilot features confusing and welcomes aggressive pruning ([28:20]).

3. AI News & OpenAI Alarm Bells

• Europe Focus: Microsoft expands its partnership with Mistral, a French AI company, to comply with EU privacy and data regulations ([25:05]).
• Security Scare: Breaking news about an OpenAI model allegedly escaping containment and hacking Hugging Face. The hosts caution against hype but admit the stakes and risks keep rising ([23:17]).
  • “The only thing standing between us and the AI apocalypse is a markdown file that anyone can edit.”—Paul Thurrott, quoting Sam ([24:12])
• Copilot Deep Research End-of-Life: Deep Research will only be available for Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers after August 18; users can export existing reports ([30:36]).

4. Tribute: John C. Dvorak (1946–2026)

• News Breaks Live: Mid-show, the hosts learn of John C. Dvorak's passing and shift to reminiscences ([32:47]).
• Legacy: Widely considered one of the most influential computer columnists, Dvorak helped define the field with his gossip columns, books, and broadcasts.
  • “Everyone here owns him something, even if you don't understand it.” — Paul Thurrott ([33:43])
  • Leo recounts how Dvorak gave him his big break in radio and tech, calling him “a gentleman” and “the original cranky geek” ([36:49]).
  • Notable anecdote: Dvorak was known for bold, random formatting in his columns purely to make things more interesting ([36:51]).
  • Confirmation comes later from the No Agenda newsletter: Dvorak “went peacefully, albeit suddenly, with Mimi at his side” ([47:55]).

5. Xbox and PC Gaming Ecosystem

• Xbox OG Games on Windows 11: Microsoft has brought the first four original Xbox games (including Crimson Skies and Fusion Frenzy) to Windows 11 PCs, with smooth graphics scaling and customization ([68:22]).
  • Caveats: x86 CPU required; ARM support only via cloud streaming for now.
• Game Pass & Meta Partnership: A new tier allows Meta Horizon Plus subscribers to access Game Pass Starter Edition ([88:51]).
• Game Remasters & Franchise Updates:
  • Halo Campaign Evolved launches with early access for premium gamers ([73:34]).
  • Bethesda remastering Fallout 3 and New Vegas; internal competition may see Obsidian propose a new Fallout game ([76:46]-[80:49]).
    • Richard: “One of those games I've played through more than once. Because there's so many endings.” ([77:16])
  • Pricing pressures: Steam Deck sales have dropped due to component cost increases, likely to persist for years ([90:59]).

6. AI and Model Management

• Google's "Gemini Notebook": Formerly "NotebookLM," now repositioned for clarity. Paul sees model management evolving towards task-specific AIs, both locally and in the cloud ([57:11], [59:33]).
• Local AI Demand: Users want more privacy and control, running smaller models locally where possible ([60:25]).
• Model orchestration/delegation: Paul jestingly bemoans the ever-increasing jargon—"Delegation harnesses"—in the AI space ([61:29], [62:14]).

7. Security, Procurement, and Compliance

• Growth of Questionable AI HR Tools: Richard discusses on RunAs Radio how quickly new AI-enabled HR software has entered the market, sometimes lacking true compliance despite featuring relevant logos ([112:33]).
• Best Practices: Always verify claims for GDPR, SOC, and other certifications—don’t trust the website badge alone ([114:46]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I'm so used to it not working, it never occurred to me to try it. You know what I mean? And it worked anyway.”
  — Paul Thurrott ([07:56])

• “Everyone here owes him something, even if you don't understand it.”
  — Paul Thurrott on John C. Dvorak ([33:43])

• “The only thing standing between us and the AI apocalypse is a markdown file that anyone can edit.”
  — Paul Thurrott ([24:12])

• “He was the original cranky geek. I will always love John.”
  — Leo Laporte ([49:14])

• “If you're responsible and you can do that kind of thing, it's great; ideally this would be zero, you know, percent interest... If you're just, 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, like, why not just do that?”
  — Paul Thurrott on subscription hardware models ([93:28])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Insider Build Chaos: [03:24]–[09:48]
• Retiring Features & Year of the Pain Point: [12:33]–[16:47]
• Whiteboard/Ai & Feature Deaths: [13:41], [28:20]
• OpenAI Security Scare: [23:17]–[24:25]
• Copilot Changes: [28:20]–[32:47]
• John C. Dvorak Tribute: [32:47]–[53:04]
• Xbox on Windows, Gaming News: [68:22]–[86:17]
• Steam Deck, Hardware Pricing: [90:59]
• Whiskey Segment (Loop River Bourbon): [118:21]–[129:59]
• Back-of-the-Book Tips: [103:11]–[108:43]
• Show Recommendations & Wrap-up: [131:38]–end

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Additional Noteworthy Moments

• Leo’s Personal Loss: Leo mentions his mother recently passed away, tying into his reflections on losing people’s voices and presence ([53:03]).
• Paul’s Automation Tips: Advocates using winget for fast multi-app installation across multiple PCs ([103:11]).
• Richard’s Whiskey Segment: This week features Nebraska’s Loop River bourbon—a local, craft, farm-to-glass whiskey ([118:21]).

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Tone & Style Notes

• The tone alternates between classic TWiT banter (snarky, fun, anecdotal) and warmly reflective, especially during the Dvorak remembrance.
• The episode features a healthy mixture of technical insider commentary (“the delegation harness,” “seven channels!”), user-level gripes, and industry-wide perspective.

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Summary

Episode 993 of Windows Weekly brings the usual rich blend of technical breakdowns, gaming excitement, and irreverent humor, but is defined by its respectful and personal farewell to John C. Dvorak. The discussions of Microsoft’s ongoing UX fixes, the shifting landscape of AI tools and features, and new horizons for classic Xbox titles on PC are as insightful as ever. The show’s second half, reflecting on Dvorak’s legacy, is both moving and a living history lesson for anyone interested in the evolution of technology journalism.

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End of Summary.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thuratz here. Richard Campbell is here. We're going to talk about five new insider builds. We're going to talk about Xbox gaming. But halfway through the show we got some sad news. And we are 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. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is tw. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 993 recorded Wednesday, July 22, 2026. The Columnist Savant. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello all you wonderful winners and dozers. This is the show where we talk about the latest from Microsoft with the dynamic duo of Microsoft Journalism, Mr. Paul Thurat. I call him Mr. T from Thorat.com and Richard Campbell. I call him Mr. C. He's, he's from Rennes Radio, from Happy Days. Yeah, Mr. C and Mr. T, they're both old timey TV characters.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Paul Thurrott]

TV shows that were on air in the 80s, I guess. Yeah, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Hello, guys. Well, wait a minute now, Richard, you're somewhere.

[Richard Campbell]

It looks like I'm, I'm in Lincoln.

[Leo Laporte]

Lincoln, Nebraska, in a Motel 6 for Nebraska.

[Richard Campbell]

Day of dust.

[Paul Thurrott]

That sounds okay. All right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's beautiful day in Nebraska.

[Paul Thurrott]

He's going as far as I can see.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you there for fishing or you're there for a conference?

[Richard Campbell]

To the conference. Fly on Sunday up to Bozeman, Montana for the vision. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you have so much fun. So we will miss you next week.

[Richard Campbell]

So. Tricky, tricky bag to pack. Right. Like, yeah, because I gotta have all the.

[Leo Laporte]

You got your Creole and you your Mikey phone.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You got to have the button down and that kind of thing. And then you've also got to have your like your UV hoodie.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul Thurat is back, back in Mexico. Great to see you, Paul, back in your natural environment.

[Paul Thurrott]

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. But anyway, um, you said you arrived

[Leo Laporte]

in your Internet service provider had.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, we found out right before we came. Right. So that's fine. Um, I thought I was going to be cool with it, you know, I, I figured we could get another connection, whatever. We could work off our phones for a few days, no problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Forgot about this show.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's this show I knew if I, if, if it somehow lasted from until today, I would Go to a friend's house and do it from there. But, yeah, my phone connection sucks. It was so terrible. Like, it was so terrible.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, anyway, we're. We're glad you're Stress Mountain back to your natural haunts, and we are glad that there are. There is some Windows news to talk about. Five.

[Richard Campbell]

Five.

[Leo Laporte]

Not one, not two, but five Insider builds this week.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I. 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 two channels. There are seven channels. And I, And 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 hope, I know 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. Let's fix it. So we were like, are we going to have two main channels? And then someone's like, yeah, but what about the release channel stuff? Oh, yeah, yeah, okay, we have to have those two. And then. But there's actually three technically there, because there's three supported versions of Windows now. Okay, so we're going to have. Now. 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, okay, okay. All right, so we're going to add like a, like a 26H one 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. And so new names they come in.

[Richard Campbell]

No Canary to be best of intentions.

[Paul Thurrott]

And yeah, we have. We have Canary ticks, but now it's called experimental future platforms. It's absolutely just as worthless. And, you know, this is what happened. Like, 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.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then like after a couple of days, you're like, no, this is exactly as stupid as it ever was. And I wish it wasn't. I wish it was better, you know, but it's. It's not. Anyway, so like I said, seven channels, the release preview, one of those two channels covers two versions of Windows. So we don't actually have three release preview channels. We have Two, but both of them.

[Richard Campbell]

But one of them has two things in it, Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly. So. Well, I mean. And by the way, you know, 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 want to be in the Reese 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]

Like, you know, that's the preview you're in.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's insanity. Actually, you know, since we're talking about this, I will say I did something. I'm going to call it over the weekend. I don't remember exactly when, but I had 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's a 26H1 computer. It's a Snapdragon X2 computer. So it was running on some Windows Insider build, right? So I wanted to reset it back to the factory, the normal stable. And without getting into. I could spend a half an hour on this. 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 was, okay, whatever, I'll just go back. I was going to just accept. I just reset it anyway. It went back to whatever build I was on. So I've got that watermark on the desktop. 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, when the next version of Windows is released, put me back on stable, whatever the language is. So I'm like, all right, 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 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. I had never seen that do that.

[Richard Campbell]

We rose told that that could happen, you'd have to pay.

[Paul Thurrott]

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]

You can now exit Insider gracefully.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, I don't want to say that too broadly, but yeah, I did it. I mean, it worked. So.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's happened once now.

[Paul Thurrott]

I kind of want to test it

[Richard Campbell]

a little bit, but anyway, okay, yeah,

[Paul Thurrott]

anyway, that stupidity aside, one of I referenced technical problems I had had since we got here. That was one of the minor ones, but that was one of them. Okay, so two days ago, Microsoft issued five builds, like we said, Beta Experimental, which used to be dev beta 26H1, release preview 24H2 and 25H2, and then release preview 26H1. 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. 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. But then the Release Preview builds are interesting because these are previews of the next Patch Tuesday, which is the second week of. Second Tuesday of August. So next Tuesday is week D, right. Or, you know, the week, the update day for Microsoft. So these Release Preview updates will be broadly, you know, publicly available preview updates next Tuesday and then two 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]

If it's true.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I've not experienced it working really well, but it's supposed to. This is the thing. We sort of, 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. So that works, you know, like, that's working now it's supposed to be better, faster, whatever, but I, you know, we'll see. And the Windows, hello. Enhanced sign and security support for external cameras. Right. That, you know, have to be compatible for that or Sorry, sorry, that's not true. Fingerprint readers, which, you know, I'm like, some of these, I'm like, didn't we, didn't this already ship? I There are so many build streams now, 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. But I do have an idea about that for later anyhow. So the other, I guess so I said there were two major or semi major things. So the new Start menus and beta, that's pretty big. And then just the, the stuff that's coming next month to patch Tuesday. So if you're on 24, 25 H2, that means improved Windows search primarily and a bunch of small things. And if you're on 26H1, the three of you, 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, it's still 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, just almost. There's nothing to talk about there. So, yeah, 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 22, you won't be able to create or edit whiteboards anymore. They don't say anything about the store, but that date and that note tells me that 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. I don't know why they're killing this thing. I I it is literally one of the apps I uninstall when I install Windows. I don't never, I don't need to use it or whatever, but that's kind of interesting. And then, you know, later in the show we'll talk about some, some other interesting features that are being retired, in this case from Copilot, which also impacts Windows 11, obviously. But we'll do that when we get to it, I guess. So. There you go. Not too much, really.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow. It's summertime. Right. So things are a bit slow.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But also you have a long whiskey segment ready to go.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, we have a lot of AI and a lot of Xbox. Unlike last week, by the way. But no, remember, this is the year of the pain point thing, right? And so there is year of the pain point.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I mean there's. There is a giant list of things that Microsoft has promised to fix and

[Richard Campbell]

has fixed and a giant number of patches showing up.

[Paul Thurrott]

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 window 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 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, 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. So.

[Leo Laporte]

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 whiteboard. There was moment. It's so funny how trends in computing happen where everybody just said, oh, you know, we all have to have whiteboards.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is the jamboard thing like at

[Leo Laporte]

Google, you know, and nobody used it.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So now we're taking it out. Actually, Apple still leaves slow around because Apple always leaves crap lying around.

[Paul Thurrott]

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 and you're like 1, 2, 3, anthropic announced it too. You know, like this happens all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

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]

Well, 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.

[Leo Laporte]

The chatbot stuff that you do.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, like that stuff's great, you know, for normal people.

[Leo Laporte]

Not AI.

[Paul Thurrott]

But then. But the great AI use, I think that's been, 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. I'm losing.

[Leo Laporte]

They realize.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, they had their. What was their. I think this was this code.

[Leo Laporte]

I think COD code. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Cloud code or so cloud code. Clued code.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

But at some point they were like, you know, this thing, this works pretty good for productivity, you know, and for two seconds you would use code for that too. But then they were like, no, we're going to break this up. We're going to call this now.

[Leo Laporte]

We have cowork and we have.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, the names are different for each company. But you 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, no, actually we're going to make something called work. It was exactly the same.

[Leo Laporte]

It's funny because maybe it's almost like they're adding, like Squirrel. Like they're just chasing. Everybody's chasing each other.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like Samsung comes over the card, you know, just like Apple.

[Richard Campbell]

Whoa. Hey.

[Leo Laporte]

Whoa.

[Richard Campbell]

Yay.

[Leo Laporte]

Cool. Okay, now it's so funny. Anyway, I just. I'm just observing.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, this is.

[Leo Laporte]

We went through the. The 3D stage and then the VR stage, and now we're at the AI stage. And.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's. Right. 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. Right. So we were talking about removing some feature for Windows that happens. You know, this is pretty regular event, honestly. But 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.

[Richard Campbell]

It costs money.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. If you're in western North Carolina, be careful. There is something called an aerial flood watch.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, God.

[Richard Campbell]

That.

[Paul Thurrott]

Then that place needs that. This is like the Asheville area. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't even know what it is.

[Paul Thurrott]

That place horrifically A couple years ago, like, that's really.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, 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]

That'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]

We're on our fourth hundred year. Five years.

[Paul Thurrott]

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. You know, the. The vaguely orange cast to the London fog that is covering the United States in the summer. You know, that doesn't make any sense.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know, the London fog was coal smoke from the industrial. Okay, yeah, no, no, I mean, I think it's apartment Because I think you're right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sorry, I. Maybe I should have re. I should have compared it to the. It's like, what's the. This. Not the Scottish height, like the moors of. Oh, yeah, like in the Sherlock Holmes book.

[Leo Laporte]

In California, we have something in the central valley called Tuli fog.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very dangerous because as you're driving down the highway, it's just at eye level. So they're. Every year there are like.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like below 30 car chains.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

But above you, you can't see nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

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. Even people inside California don't know what the hell you're talking about. All right, we're going to take a break. We'll come back. We do have the AI segment 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 guys talking about AI on YouTube. He's not hype driven. He's really about using it for work. And I've learned so much from him. So we're excited about that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just randomly, because you said that. I don't remember the other guy's name, but Neil Degrasse Tyson, who's amazing, obviously, love him, has done a series of videos on YouTube with a guy who. The discussion is that AI is basically just people and. No, but I mean, like Sir Lancrein. No, but I mean, it's worth watching. It's an interesting perspective. I think you enjoy it.

[Leo Laporte]

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]

I just can't would describe it. Today is like sipping water through a tsunami. Like, it's. Yeah. I mean it's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

It's, it's. That's the funny thing. We thought it was bad then. It's amazing now. Anyway, our show today, brought to you by the good folks at Arctic Wolf. Arctic Wolf, I love the name, by the way. It's such a great image. Arctic Wolf helps organizations stay ahead of evolving cyber threats Their latest research reveals something surprising. I don't know if this will be surprising to you or not even you tell me if this correlates with what you're fighting. Even as AI accelerates the pace and the complexity of attacks. Right. We all know that many security leaders remain confident they can keep up. I know I can't keep up, but maybe you've, I don't know to bet. This is why you need Arctic Wolves Incredible State of Cybersecurity 2026 trends report to help you better understand what's going on, what's driving the confidence that these security leaders have. And, you know, maybe it's merited, arctic Wolf said. Let's find out. They surveyed more than 1350 security and IT leaders worldwide. I love it that it's global for this new it just came out. State of Cybersecurity 2026 Trends Report this is a snapshot of what cybersecurities are prioritizing and what they're worried about, what they're concerned about right now. It explores everything from AI adoption, which is certainly front of mind, threat detection, security operations, and the challenges organizations expect to face in the coming year. Whether you're responsible for securing a small business like mine or managing giant enterprise infrastructure, maybe you're an MSP advising clients, maybe you're just trying to stay ahead of the latest security trends. Arctic Wolf's trends report offers valuable insight into how the industry is responding to an increasingly AI driven threat landscape. By the way, Arctic Wolf's Aurora AI addresses these challenges by putting defensive AI to work, combining agentic AI, generative AI, machine learning and security expertise all together to help organizations detect threats faster. And it really works. So just keep that in mind while you read the report. See how innovations like these and other critical findings are Shaping the industries. Visit arcticwolf.com trends just a little form there. Fill it out. Reserve your copy of the Arctic Wolf State of Cybersecurity 2026 trends report. You really should check this out. Arcticwolf.com trends and we thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly. Now we've let me bring Richard back into the conversation. I think he reconnected. Did you see this? We're gonna talk about this on im and we'll. I'm definitely gonna 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 GLM52. 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. Just solved a long time. The Jake. The Jacobian conjecture just. It just created a counterexample that blue 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 autonomously.

[Paul Thurrott]

I refuse to believe you did not think immediately. Daniel Suarez wrote this book.

[Leo Laporte]

And what is happening 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 for anthropic, I want to talk to Nate B. Jones and get his take on it.

[Paul Thurrott]

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]

This is both the newest chat GPT 5.6 SOL and a unnamed internal model. Yeah, 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.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just.

[Leo Laporte]

Just delete stuff.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, you know what happens when you start getting desperate, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I delete files when I get desperate. RM-RF sure, Star. You bet. Who wouldn't?

[Paul Thurrott]

Brad.

[Richard Campbell]

Brad.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sam's 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, and it's. It is. It's kind of a sobering assessment because it's true.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, that's the truth. It's crazy, all right. The AI Segment approaches.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, all the AI news I have is great. All right, so in Microsoft land, Microsoft, they announced an expansion of a pre existing 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 through Microsoft, like Microsoft Foundry, Copilot Studio, et cetera, to give their models as choices there and expand, you know, kind of 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 and you know, this is just them I think scrambling to stay ahead of regulation in Europe frankly. But it's fine. I mean we, you know, in the sense that Microsoft has done a great job of putting, you know, data centers in so many regions and they do have obviously adhere to local law. So if you want to store your data in your own country or if you have to, if you're, you know, Germany or any place in the eu, you can do that. And that's good. So that's cool. That's good stuff. I don't expect to ever see Mistral in a drop down in Copilot here in the United States, but I guess you never know. I mean I think it's probably, you know, maybe, maybe we'll see something like that, maybe not.

[Richard Campbell]

But 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. Right. Yeah, it's a way for a multinational like Microsoft to stay engaged with those markets as they pull away from U.S. entities.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, this is the AI version of think globally, do locally or whatever, whatever

[Richard Campbell]

the phrase is, just try and offer some options.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, I mean if you want to do business there, you can pretty much have to. Right. So that's good. But they're doing a good job.

[Richard Campbell]

The laws aren't in place yet, but they're sure a sense that they're coming.

[Paul Thurrott]

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 five or six small chapters or things are going to add to other chapters and one of them is What I've been putting off about Copilot, because I hate Copilot and I don't care, and it takes a lot for me to use this thing and it's difficult. So anyway, I've been struggling with this and it's what I've been working on. And literally, as I was working on this chapter, I get a news notification and it's Microsoft is killing two features in Copilot. And all I could think was, please, dear God, do not be two things I just wrote about. And fortunately there were two things I had not written about. So I couldn't do that right from the table contents to get rid of it. 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 webpage and it doesn't read it to you. Right. We have that capability, but it summarizes it and then it has two AI hosts talk about it as if it were a podcast. Right. Whoever did this first two years ago, whenever it was, we were playing around with it on the show, I think. But a fairly ludicrous capability, frankly. And that one, there's no good outcome to this. The podcasts you've made are not going to be available. You won't be able to make any new ones. It's just going away. So if you open Copilot today, don't.

[Richard Campbell]

But.

[Paul Thurrott]

But if you did, it's still in there. Like, you know, it's. And is. 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 Smarter. No, they don't use that. That would be smart, you know, like think deeper. Deeper, Right. Yeah, Smart, which is.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And. And then study and learn.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. So you. And you know, because I've been writing about this site 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 Microsoft365 account of some kind, not the basic one, but the anything up from there and

[Richard Campbell]

are the account holder three or an E5.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I mean, I'm talk, I'm just talking about individuals here. This is like people, people like, like Microsoft 365 Basic or whatever it's called, which is essentially OneDrive. Extra storage does not provide any additional

[Richard Campbell]

rights for Copilot, but the home edition would. Or the Family.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, family Personal. And now they have a premium one as well. Right. So those all are for, you know, more and more. More, you know, higher limits or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

This, how. It's. How distorted my world is that I just live in E5 land. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So I, the, the, the account owner thing is still a weird deal for me. But okay, whatever this is, the system is what we have. So you could do a deep research thing. So any, anyone within a Microsoft account could go to Copilot and say, hey, you know this, I always use this example now I want to start reading the Tolkien books. Where should I start? Like, which are the most accessible? Which at least, you know, whatever. And just, you know, everyone knows the answers to these things, but I just want to see what they do. They put, 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, reported, whatever topic.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

So that's going away. But the reason it's going away is that they, if you have. I'm trying to get. This is so hard to remember. Yeah. So if you have Microsoft 365 Premium, which is the most expensive one, the new one that you know, just started in the past year that offers a researcher agent, which is essentially, you know, 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. It in this case, if you've already used it, and I should say this is not happening until August 18th. 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 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, 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. You know, I think it's like images and pages because, God, we need in a stupid word for something. And then you have projects and you have, you know, like. 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 report on some topic. Oh, boy. Sorry. I just saw the thing in the discord. John Dvorak has passed away. Oh, boy.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the matter?

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, you might want to look at the discord, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, dear. Yeah. 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 bypassed surgery. And now this story, and I don't. Let me look and see the source of it.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

From Scott Mace, who is of course credible. He says. Scott Mace said he. John passed away due to complications following his double bypass surgery. We will see if we can get a confirmation. But Scott Mace is very credible. Knows John. Well, I know Scott. I think if Scott Mace says it's the case, it is the case. He posted this in our.

[Paul Thurrott]

An icon, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And I owe him greatly. He.

[Paul Thurrott]

By the way, I. Everyone here owns him something, even if you don't understand it, you know, and. And I understand because I. I mean, I've met him. You. In passing and stuff, but I. A lot, you know, just as a writer. I mean, there were guys like him, Jerry Purnell and others who really influenced me as a writer. Like he's his back of the, you know, magazine thing with little blurbs and was the inspiration for like when info basically. I mean, or short take. Sorry, when I was doing that. I mean, you know, he. It's A big, that's a big deal.

[Leo Laporte]

He, you know, I first met John in the early 90s, maybe even the late late 80s, when at the time he was probably the best known computer columnist in the world. He wrote more than two dozen columns, not just in the U.S. but all around the world. I don't know how he managed it. Many, many books. He, he was probably, I don't know, maybe best known for his gossip column in the back of pieces.

[Paul Thurrott]

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]

Yeah, he, I used to have him on my radio show on KBR in San Francisco on a fairly regular basis. When KNBR decided to replace that a midday show with, with a guy coming down from a new up and coming guy called from Sacramento named Rush Limbaugh me to the, 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 the 91, said, well, nobody's interested in computers. 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. 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, he, once he realized that I wasn't just announcer boy helming the show while he answered questions, he allowed me to participate.

[Paul Thurrott]

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 worked there that he was reporting like they would listen to him. 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.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, 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 it was classic gossip columnist, unsourced stories, bullet points. You know, he would use ellipsis. And then he was always bolding. And I said, John, that's what I'm talking about.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is the short take thing. Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

I said, what's the what's the rationale for what you bolt? He said, I just do it randomly. It makes it more interesting. He was a very funny guy.

[Paul Thurrott]

He that's rocking my brain, you know, that's a permanent part of my life now.

[Leo Laporte]

Absolutely. Inside track was seminal for all of us. He also wrote the anti column in the back of Mac User where he would be the guy who critiqued Apple and Macintosh. So we grew together, we grew close. We syndicated the show and 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. Of course he went on. He worked as Ziff Davis Television with me zdtv hosting Cranky Geeks. Actually his first one was Silicon Spin, which is a round table. It bring. It was. It was really a great show. He'd bring in journalists and they'd sit around and kind of like twit. They do a round table and discuss the shows, the weeks of tech news. He did Cranky Geeks. Later working started to work with Adam Curry who at the time owned a company called Mevio which was a very early podcast network.

[Paul Thurrott]

Adam really a former MTV DJ or VJ who coined the term podcast. Right. Isn't that.

[Leo Laporte]

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. So Adam gets a lot of credit for that. Dave Weiner made it possible. But Adam wrote the first podcast catching little program he wrote and certainly was seminal in the start influence at starting up podcasting in 2004. Any event, John's relationship with Adam continued. He eventually started a show must be 10 years ago called no Agenda, which he and Adam did right up to the very end. And there were famously no advertisers on no Agenda. Every it was run entirely by listener contributions. So 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. But if Scott Mace says it, I'm sad to say I'm going to have to believe it. We know he had a heart attack and had coronary bypass surgery a few months ago. And if it's not true, I'm sorry, John, but at least you've got this nice condominium. On how great you were and how important you were to my life and to Mimi, his wife and his kids. If he did pass away, my deepest condolences. He was very important in our world. 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.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, this should be easy. Let's say where were we? So, yeah, Anthropic. Right. So Microsoft killed us to be so

[Leo Laporte]

boy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Back in 2024, I think. I don't think it was just a single person. Originally became a class action lawsuit, Pseudanthropic, for stealing material that was published in Books in 2026. Anthropic Agreed. This became a class action. Like I said, they agreed to settle this case for $1.5 billion, which is. Would have been, and now is the largest settlement payout in US history, where each of the authors involved will stand. Again, I don't know if there's like fees or how they split this up with co authors and so forth, but $3,000 per stolen work and so many. I mean, 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]

Like half a million books.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, right. I think it's 480,000 books, I think was the number.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

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 have 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 to bought them used and there would have been no issue whatsoever.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

They would have. They would have been on the line for $150,000 in damages per work.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. So that's 50 times what they are paying. So that would mean 65 or 75 billion dollars.

[Paul Thurrott]

That would be.

[Richard Campbell]

That might leave a mark.

[Paul Thurrott]

Recapping.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So it's only a billion and a half dollars only.

[Paul Thurrott]

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 like crazy high fees. So they actually had hearings and there was. It's a different drudge now, but they went to this part of it was, well, how much should these guys people get paid? And the number, if I can find this number, it's still a lot of money. It's like it's $100 million, but it's

[Richard Campbell]

as opposed to the 200 million.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. 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, but 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 wait that. Because when I filled out the form for this, I can't. Off the top of my head, I feel like I had seven books in there. I don't.

[Richard Campbell]

20 grand.

[Paul Thurrott]

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, I've not heard pretty quick on the other one, 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, 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]

Yeah, now that they. Now that there's a case precedence. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So there's that.

[Richard Campbell]

You'll get a few more checks there, friend.

[Paul Thurrott]

I hope so. I hope so. It's nice to get paid for books that haven't given me any money in two decades or whatever. But, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

And they could have licensed to you for a buck fifty in a Coke.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I know. They could have just bought it used anywhere and it would have been nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, 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.

[Richard Campbell]

You'll see what happens.

[Paul Thurrott]

But 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. 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, you know, the, the Credential store, I guess I'll call it, you know, the password manager essentially interact with the AI and or what view does that thing get into there, et cetera, et cetera. So what they've worked out is a, what they call a zero exposure architecture for allowing cloud and the, the in app browser essentially to complete tasks that involve browsing the web that require logins of some kind of 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. So they get the. Okay, it sort of sounds a little bit like a passkey honestly, but whatever the, 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 they were, I was going to say easing into it, not easing into it. We've fallen off the cliff into it. You know, this is, you know, 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 OpenAI model, you know, broke into, I think they called it like an online library. And I was like an online library. And then I sort of was hugging face. I'm like, yeah, that's not how I would describe that. But okay, you immediately go to okay, but what about my bank, you know, what about my important accounts that have access to all my payment information, personal information, whatever it might be? This is what 1Password.

[Richard Campbell]

Well of course we've heard with Mythos, they gave Limited distribution to sort of the big companies that Microsoft and Amazon 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 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.

[Paul Thurrott]

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. But, you know, One Password is a

[Leo Laporte]

pretty good, you know, Bitwarden has the same thing. This is. We talked about this yesterday.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, this is. Okay, so this is not unique.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no. Everybody's doing it before. I've never heard away. I do have confirmation now. The no Agenda newsletter has come out and I will read this 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 who 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 20, at the age of 80, he went peacefully, albeit suddenly, with Mimi at his side. Mimi, of course, his longtime wife, critiquing the acting and storyline of ncis. I don't know if that's true, but if it is, that's.

[Paul Thurrott]

Do you have any final words? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

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. The show will continue. They will do a show tomorrow. Let's see, this is July 22nd, so yes, that would be the 23rd Thursday. And it will be a remembrance of John C. Dvorak. I know I'll be listening. 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 I think that's confirmation. This is from the no Agenda newsletter, so. Which just went out today. I also went into the no Agenda chat room to. To check and they confirmed it as well. So very sad to hear. Yeah, the passing of John C.

[Richard Campbell]

Lost a giant.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And of course, John was a frequent tribular to twit until he started asking for $5,000 an episode. And that's when I stopped having him on a regular basis.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, he wasn't known to be cantankerous.

[Leo Laporte]

He was the original cranky geek. I will always love John. I will always hold him in the deepest respect and always be very grateful to him for giving me my start in the business. All right, do you want to continue, or is your heart so heavy that you must stop?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, a little bit of both. We're at the an ad break, if that matters.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, that does matter. This would be a good time to do it. They're talking in the Discord chat room about their memories of John. Cats and burbs. Reminds me of. He used to ask John when we were on Twitter. You could find it on the. On the videos. Would ask for my phone to look at it. He said, oh, it's. Oh, newest iPhone. Let me see that. And. And then change the language to Chinese.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Give it back to me.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

Cute prank. He liked it. He liked the pranks. Let me tell you. He was. He was quite a character. And, boy, that's kind of shocking news. But you know what? It's what you expect, I guess, after a while.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

We've been doing this for 20 years. People are gonna pass away, and that happens.

[Richard Campbell]

Let's get the show started. He's getting good.

[Leo Laporte]

Here we go. He's getting good. He's all warmed up, ladies and gentlemen. He's firing on six cylinders. We better start. That's. John. Always wanted to get the show started. He was also famous for his pulled pork.

[Richard Campbell]

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, really, for years. And I finally got the whole formula down where I can make it just a stunner.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, you said pulled or chopped. Which is it?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, you can.

[Richard Campbell]

It depends. You can take. The way I make it with. With shoulder is that you can take and mash it up with a fork and becomes kind of pulled. It has.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's.

[Richard Campbell]

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 knit, North Carolinians, they like to chop it. And the Georgians, when they make this type pork, they like to pull it. They call it pulled. But in fact, it's kind of mashed.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love pulled pork though.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh well. Welcome to this weekend barbecue.

[Leo Laporte]

We could go on and. 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 in a multi volume history of the Civil War. I don't know if many people knew that. He was a very very good writer. Very smart and talented man and. But you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's incredible.

[Leo Laporte]

He lived a long and good life. And I. We will. We will miss John C. It doesn't

[Richard Campbell]

make any sense to me that Macintosh is evolved. I think it's the actual hardware. I think there's something shoddy about Macintosh laptop.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Richard Campbell]

You.

[Paul Thurrott]

You and your Apple baiting.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't he?

[Richard Campbell]

No. Ladies and gentlemen.

[Leo Laporte]

You're hearing John C. Dvorak in his prime.

[Richard Campbell]

This is bull. I'm not trying to put down Apple. I'm just saying I. I was playing with one of these shoddy quality like the push down buttons and stuff. They're like offset. They're kind of crooked.

[Leo Laporte]

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. We'll have to. We lost o' Malik 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]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

And boy it just. It's no way to. No way to prepare yourself or something like that. Somebody who. You know. My mom passed away last week and the thing that you. She was 93. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

She was. She was in a home. She'd had Alzheimer's. But she.

[Paul Thurrott]

She.

[Leo Laporte]

Her body was great. She felt great. She passed away in her sleep. She didn't. It was as easy death as you could have.

[Richard Campbell]

And we could all be so I

[Leo Laporte]

hope to pass away just like that. And she had a long and good life. But the thing that came to me and it's. 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.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

To just hear their voice and hear their unique point of view and their laugh and their. And their thoughts and that's really the thing you miss. I know we will all miss John C. Dvorak. We will have more of Windows Weekly. Sorry to have to be on such a sad note. But these things happen. We'll have more in just a little bit. I do want to talk about our sponsor. This is a happy note. Zscaler, the world's large John Wood. By the way, John loved the ads. He would chime in. I remember him getting involved in the audible lads. He would chime in. He knew that that was, that was vital to our survival. So I wish John could be here to do this ad, but I will do it for him on his behalf. Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. The potential rewards of AI we know are every business realizes this too great to ignore. But I hope every business also realizes the risks are too great to ignore too. Loss of sensitive data, proprietary business data attacks against enterprise managed AI. And then of course the bad guys have access to the same tools. And generative AI gives them increased opportunities for rapidly creating phishing lures that are perfect. Writing malicious code, automating data extraction. We talked about that yesterday on Security now. Bad guys download terabytes of data now and AI lets them go through it and find the juicy stuff. Let's not have that juicy stuff be your proprietary business information. You know there were 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers leaked to AI applications last year. I think we can do better. It's time for a modern approach with Zscaler's Zero Trust AI. It removes your attack surface, it secures your data everywhere, it safeguards your use of public and private AI and it protects against those scary ransomware and AI powered phishing attacks. You don't have to take my word for it. Look, this is what Siva, the director of security and infrastructure at Zwara, says about using Zscaler Watch AI provides tremendous opportunities, but it also brings tremendous security concerns when it comes to data privacy and data security.

[Paul Thurrott]

The benefit of Zscaler with ZIA rolled out for us right now is giving us the insights of how our employees are using various gen AI tools.

[Leo Laporte]

So ability to monitor the activity, make

[Paul Thurrott]

sure that what we consider confidential and

[Leo Laporte]

sensitive information according to, you know, companies

[Paul Thurrott]

data classification does not get fed into

[Leo Laporte]

the public LLM models, et cetera. Thank you Siva. With Zero Trust plus AI you can thrive in the AI era. You can stay ahead of the competition, you can remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve. Learn [e-mail] security that's zscaler.com security and we thank Zscaler for supporting Windows Weekly. You support us by going to that site zscaler.com security on we go with the show. Let's see. We're rapidly running through all the content. It's a good thing John passed away or we'd be really in trouble here. There's a little more AI, or did you already do the Notebook LM name change?

[Richard Campbell]

I think so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

These next two are pretty quick, unfortunately.

[Leo Laporte]

That's fine.

[Richard Campbell]

Was NotebookLM like the original podcast feature?

[Leo Laporte]

It was really cool. I mean, it's not gone. They just renamed it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. That's all. Thank you for ruining the story. Later.

[Leo Laporte]

My question is why? You've got great brand recognition, except Notebook

[Paul Thurrott]

LM is like, what? I always thought that name was kind of terrible.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Also,

[Paul Thurrott]

Google is going to run into this problem that Microsoft has already run into with their AI, so 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 Notebook LM 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.

[Richard Campbell]

So, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Anyway, it makes sense. It's fine, you know, and that's that. Sorry, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, is that short? I don't know what I'm gonna do now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Give me a G's.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, do you want. Did you talk about everybody wants a Gemini 3.6 Pro? Right. Everybody's talking, talking about it. Or 5 Pro, but they, you know what they said it's not. It's not ready yet.

[Paul Thurrott]

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. I don't know if you noticed, but AI kind of moves along and the other models are getting better, too, so 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. 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.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. 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 an enterprise delegation harnesses to say, well, when I'm coding, use Claude Opus Delegation.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love that. Which is a. What's the word again? Orchestrator. Right. So yeah, I feel like in an industry that has too many terms already, we almost need a new term for these kind of like medium language models, like a S.L. commer or you might think of them as like small but SLM based. 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 not. I'm not an expert, but as I look at this and I see things evolving, it's. It, 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.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

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]

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]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I have a bunch of local models running on my Mac Mini and I told my agent when you need, when you want to do something privately or you want to go through a bunch of documents, you don't need to use the high end fancy model.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Just use these models they're running locally on.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean and I, you know, again because I'm been living in co pilot for the last week and now on a suicide.

[Leo Laporte]

Lucky man. Have you used the desktop app, Christine?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's what I'm using. Yeah, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you think? I hate she like she, she talked about it.

[Paul Thurrott]

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]

Well plus the memory should be hers, not yours. Right? You don't want her.

[Paul Thurrott]

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, but the one thing that they've done is step back from the choose a model from the dropdown thing, which I've, you know, we talked about the 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. When you call it not an orchestrator, a delegation. Delegation harness. God damn this industry.

[Leo Laporte]

So it uses the Pareto concept to choose the right model.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, of course we're trying to ma. What do we have to do to get you into this model today? What was it take?

[Leo Laporte]

Spring, the wife, the checkbook, your pink slip and come on down.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Polytes used AI a lot.

[Paul Thurrott]

So Google, like Microsoft and I don't follow the other two in this regard, but there are the big models, there are the on device models, and then there's the stuff that's, you know, kind of in between. I don't know how to describe this. So from Google's perspective, the same goals you'd see elsewhere, you know, you want to make these things less expensive to run. They do x percent of the big version in certain tasks. And it's enough. It's good enough. Like, it's almost like what we need are like good enough AI models or at least AI models that are good enough for a particular task or something. So 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]

It's a security model, but I don't know. No, I mean, really, no, but I

[Paul Thurrott]

mean that's like, I mean, that tells you really. We didn't hear about this type of thing until two seconds ago and now it's already made its way down to Flash, like right. 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]

But I might use. There's a very good Quinn model that does one thing which is breaking us AI system. No. Remember I did the fake Windows Weekly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm thinking maybe I should train on Dvorak's voice and just then we could have a little John C. In every show.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know what? So this is the, this is one of those queasy AI use cases where it's.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a very.

[Paul Thurrott]

People are training AIs to be like the 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]

But we have now stalled long enough that I feel I could do another ad. And then we will get to the Xbox segment. So thank you for filling that out.

[Paul Thurrott]

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]

You know, like, just dance for a little.

[Paul Thurrott]

Little song.

[Leo Laporte]

A little dance.

[Paul Thurrott]

Dance, monkey dance.

[Leo Laporte]

Round two.

[Richard Campbell]

It doesn't make any sense to me. That Macintosh is of all.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, yeah. I already played that one. Let's see.

[Richard Campbell]

The search engine needs work.

[Leo Laporte]

Congratulations. Anyway. I'm glad you got a job.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I needed one. You know, we have the deli. We got to get going. The deli at this point. I mean, what are you going to sell? What do you have, like 14 columns? Cranky geeks. That's Patrick participating. I got time on my hands. Believe it. I'm like columnist savant. The columns don't take that long to do.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, that is amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

I like it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

A lot of people would make something else, but that's another story.

[Paul Thurrott]

Psychologically, I like to stress over everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Keep us informed, whatever it means.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you can find all you need to find [e-mail] blog.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course you can. That was his other thing. They had two tag. Two kind of. What do they call those taglines? He had. I get no spam, and I will find it because somebody made a song. I get no spam. And then these other is. You'll find out all you need to [e-mail] blog. He plugged his blog incessantly. I don't even know if that site's still around.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was just wondering the same thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's a. That's. He used to. He was so funny. He was so funny. Let me just see dvorak.org blog.

[Richard Campbell]

It's stripped down to a redirect.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I think everything became no agenda towards the end. Boric uncensored. Okay. But one of the things Joe is famous for is delegating his work. I wrote a chapter of his telecommunications

[Paul Thurrott]

book for him, so he was in. He was orchestrator.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he was an orchestrator. That was one of his secrets. All right, this show brought to you today by. Oh, you're going to want to know about this Circ. If you're a enterprise using Macintoshes and of course, you run Microsoft 365, you know this one, you, you, you know, for instance, you need a coworker's number. So you're digging through teams, you're digging through email, you're digging through your HR system just to find that number and then somebody updates the number and now it's wrong everywhere else it lives, right? So there's a solution. The global address list looks great on a desktop. It's useless on your phone. And there's always that one shared contacts folder that somebody maintains by hand. And cirrhosync can fix the C I R A S Y N C. I think you might know this name. Sirasync is like the king of this. They've been around for a long time. They fix this permanently. If you're using Microsoft 365, it pushes your company's contacts, calendars, your whole gal. What is that gal?

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't. That's an enterprise term, I guess.

[Richard Campbell]

Global Access List.

[Leo Laporte]

Global Access List. That's a good name. That's your. Pushes your whole. Do you say gal or gal?

[Richard Campbell]

Gal.

[Leo Laporte]

Gal. Pushes your whole gal. See, if I say that fast, you might misunderstand. So gal. I'm going to say your whole gal to every user's outlook and phone, even an iPhone, automatically and tenant wide. So the contacts just show up in their address book and automatically stay current. You need this. Go to sarasync.com windows and book your free demo. The Sarasync team walks you through how convenient and hassle free it is and can even help you get set up on the call so you can roll it out across your whole organization. That's sirasync.comwindows to sync your whole company's contacts and calendars automatically. C I R A s y n c.com Windows it's one of those, one of the apps I really love these niche apps that just, they solve a problem. They solve it reliably, consistently. I think that's so great. Sirasync.com Windows and now, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, time for the Xbox segment. Go ahead, Kevin. I said go ahead, Kim.

[Paul Thurrott]

There it is. Okay, this is a big day, folks. And this is the, this is a little piece of the puzzle that 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?

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

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 disk, I mean you could plug the disk 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, you know, emulation, whatever that has to occur for this to work. But are we ever going to get this on the PC? And the answer is yes, they just announced it today, so there's a lot of little caveats in here. And it's just started. But they've announced and released the first four games from the original Xbox, right? So 2001, you know, that timeframe are available if you own them digitally. If you have Game pass, you get them through Game Pass. 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, ROG, Ally and those type things the gaming handles. So as I sort of digested this, I mean I saw this coming, right? This is fairly obvious. I don't mean to, I'm not like Nostradamus of Xbox or anything but. But this to me was a key part of this future. So that's great. It's still like a preview right now, et cetera. But of course you think a couple things like the thing I just said, what about the 360 games that's going to 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 enough compatibility problems there with just games like modern games that are native on Windows, you know, what does that look like? And 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 today anyway. But you could, you could 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. The system requirements like the minimum requirements on x86 are interesting, like a four core Intel Core i3, 81, so 8th gen. So it's basically the same system requirements for Windows 11 itself, but then some version of an Nvidia GTX 950AMD, Radeon RX 550. Intel. This is where it gets a little weird. Intel uhd770. 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 kind of. 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 customized 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, Windows, you know, there's like full screen and windowed modes like for games. Supports both of those supports. Did I misspell this? Anisotropic filtering.

[Richard Campbell]

Enhanced anisotropic. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

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, this is. Oh, I should say the games, I'm sorry, the Blinks, the Time Sweeper. These are actually, I would say four of the better games. Conquer Live and Reloaded, Crimson Skies, A High Road to Revenge, which is the one I wanted to try first, and Fusion Frenzy. So good games. There's only four. Yes. I mean it's preview, you know, whatever. 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. I have an awesome. It's not a gaming computer, but it's a portable workstation, which is just as good as any gaming laptop 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 one of these right now actually 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 two 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 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 Xbox360 games at some point. Super curious about that, etc. Etc. So this is. This is pretty good. Like, no, it's really good. So that was really cool. That came out of nowhere. Like, I wasn't expecting that today, but there. There it is. 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 whenever that. 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 you can unlock early access, you can actually start playing it tomorrow as we record this. So Thursday, July 23rd, 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. 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 28, so it's only five days later. So the general release is July 28th, so it's cool. Right? And then there's a bunch of other stuff in there. 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 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. There's some new content, which is really cool. 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 three Halo games and ODSD to some degree as well, I played just multiple times. And then from two on, you know, we played Halo multiplayer pretty exclusively, I think, until probably Halo 4. I guess I don't remember, but it's a big deal, so that's. That's cool, too. Okay. Bethesda is remastering. What's the right term I'm looking for? I guess remastering. So they're remastering.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. 4K.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. 4K5, Fallout 3 and New Vegas. 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]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Has.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, because 4 was the New England version, and then 76, which was really supposed to be a multiplayer game, and it's kind of a debacle.

[Paul Thurrott]

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]

Oh, no, I love New Vegas. One of those games I've played through more than once. Because there's so many endings.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right? Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, I don't know how much you know about the interplay of all the Fallouts.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know a little bit, and only because I was going to say the only Fallout I've completed was the TV series, but.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And.

[Richard Campbell]

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?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, so.

[Richard Campbell]

And I wonder if that's what Asha Sharma just said to them as well.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think I commented on this a week or two ago. I don't remember. But, you know, Phil Spencer, when he was running Xbox, had kind of made the point one time saying, look, you know, no one likes to close studios, shut down games, lay off people, etc. But there is that, what have you done for me lately? Kind of effect where, yeah, you had this hit game five, 17, whatever, years ago, but you're all sitting here drawing paychecks. I mean, I guess you're working on something, but you, you know, you actually have to produce, you know, and it's. It's reasonable to feel.

[Richard Campbell]

And they really have. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this.

[Richard Campbell]

But if the history matters here, Paul, like, the original Fallout games are made by a group called Black Isle.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And then they run. They get out Fallout 2, and they're working on Fallout through 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. But they don't own the rights to the game. It's Bethesda that buys the right. The Fallout rights. But then Bethesda's in the middle of making Skyrim. So they then make a deal with Obsidian and Obsidian makes three and New Vegas. So the guys who made the original Fallout games made those two as well.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's cool.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. They built those and then Bethesda went off on their own and made the train right for 4 and 76 without obsidian. So meantime Obsidians had their own problems. Right. And their next version of about is way behind. It looks like it's now canceled. So forth. But the, the rumor coming through this current wave is. But they're that Obsidian is not involved in the remastering of three in New Vegas. Even though it would make sense they wouldn't. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You want a studio that just does this type of thing like you're.

[Richard Campbell]

That just remasters. Yeah. But that, that follow there is a Fallout five 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 because 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 two studios because they're. Well, so you have Bethesda with the license holder although owned by Microsoft. Who cares. And the old team inside of Obsidian.

[Paul Thurrott]

I didn't mean to give you the finger there. Sorry. That was inadvertent. 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 two in progress at any time. And then they kind of leapfrog each other. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

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 two different geographies that have been in different time frames.

[Paul Thurrott]

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.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

The TV show is its own unique little time and place. Although I guess they're going to Vegas this season. So we'll see what happens.

[Richard Campbell]

But 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 was not a very straight line story.

[Paul Thurrott]

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 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, this is not interesting. Like, 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? This is terrible. Like, what is this? And then when we were in our 30s, probably at some point we. We watched it again. We're like, oh, no, this is great. This is an awesome movie. And I feel like games could be like that too, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, Annette, one of the great things thing 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, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

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]

Yeah, more or less, but with some just. 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]

Yeah, I'm not sure what the time frame for us for this stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. Yeah, I'll look.

[Richard Campbell]

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]

Okay. Okay, I will.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay. I just love the schism here between, you know, the rights holder and the team. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is the bungee thing with, well, the Halo games and, you know, them moving, becoming independent, becoming part of Sony. You know, I think then the fact

[Richard Campbell]

that all up Asha owns it all and so she can just get over some things. Like every team's taken has taken some heat because nobody's been delivering well and. But the untangle on that, it's like, hey, the team that actually knows how to make successful follow games. Admittedly a decade ago.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but they might sitting right there. I mean, those guys probably have good perspective on that now.

[Richard Campbell]

You Know, I think. I think you're exactly right. And. And a love for the story. Right. Like 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]

Yeah, that's what I was. Right. So how many years has it been since was that. That's not the most recent one, is it? No, it's four. At four.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, four and 76 come after that.

[Paul Thurrott]

But still it's been eight, 10 years more. I mean, it's been a long time.

[Richard Campbell]

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]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

And I never loved it. I mean there was a few. There was a couple of story lines 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]

You like New Vegas better? Which one did you like the best?

[Richard Campbell]

I like. I thought New Vegas from. From a storyteller's perspective, New Vegas had the most because there was 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 that you could also shape what that wind looked like.

[Leo Laporte]

What. What's the one you could play on the web now? There's one version you could play on the web was f4. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

There's a bunch of side games now. Yeah. But 76 is. They were really desperate to make a massive multiplayer game.

[Paul Thurrott]

It was like a half hearted mobile type thing at one point too, wasn't there? Like I. This seems like a good franchise for that kind of thing. Oh, classic Fallout 1. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Fallout 1 you can play. Well that of course.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, if you could play half, you could pretty much play almost, you know. Yeah. Any. Completely.

[Richard Campbell]

But if you had the six years

[Leo Laporte]

they made Fallout 1 available in the browser. I think there's one more recently, but I don't. I'm searching to Fallout.

[Richard Campbell]

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]

Yeah. But they just kept doing the same thing over and over again, which is

[Richard Campbell]

kind of the problem. That's the only game they knew how to make. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Redemption. Redemption.

[Leo Laporte]

What a great game.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, there's a whole world there you could do things with with.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like being in a.

[Richard Campbell]

And the. And the half life worlds. Half life. Yeah. There's. There's so much story sitting on the

[Paul Thurrott]

table that makes me crazy.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So one of the rumors late last year was that when the Steam machine launched, Halo 3 would be the tie in of the console exclusive.

[Richard Campbell]

I think we were the propagators of that, I swear.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And I wanted that to be true, not what happened. Yeah. So there is no launch game. And that implicitly it doesn't mean there isn't a Halo 3, but you know, there is. Doesn't mean there isn't a Sasquatch either. But I, you know, I think we all know how that goes.

[Richard Campbell]

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 half life without it leaking at least.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know. Yeah, I agree. I just want one so bad.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you, me, both.

[Leo Laporte]

Everyone's out.

[Paul Thurrott]

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 university it was recently.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And they, you know, they all.

[Richard Campbell]

The Aperture science storyline, like the competition between the two labs I know on

[Paul Thurrott]

the table there, doing nothing with it.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you include Portal in that?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[Richard Campbell]

I could. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yeah. 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 yeah, Rug 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 love the, you know, the zipping between walls and stuff was awesome. And then it was over and geez, it's been like 20 years. It's been so long. Like it's been so long. 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 two were borderline lackluster, which is why I play them every day. 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 pre order you can get into the. What are they calling this? The early access. So you can multiply some multiplayer. There's probably some limited set of maps like always from August 21st to August 25th, and then there'll be an open beta anyone can get in. 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. There is a new Xbox system update. I don't see anything super major in here, but they're allowing longer gamer tags finally. And so. And when I say longer, I mean they went from 12 to 15 characters. I guess that's difficult technology or something. I don't know. Yeah, I know, I know. And then some other things. Okay, so that's nothing big there. And then I saw this story and 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, you get access to Game Pass Starter Edition, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's the Horizon world. Probably.

[Paul Thurrott]

I assume this is. I don't know, I really find myself

[Leo Laporte]

the VR world too much. I think it's their VR world.

[Paul Thurrott]

They've done a couple of these kind of partnerships and I feel like, 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 just roughly 50 games and 10 hours of cloud gaming in a month, which isn't that much, etc.

[Leo Laporte]

But

[Paul Thurrott]

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 get rid of Game Pass? And I don't mean like close it down. I mean, what if they made it like a standalone third party service, right? Where there would be a partnership with Xbox because you want those games in there. Still, there's 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. We thought, we often. Many people have discussed this notion of just Xbox, the business doing this, like maybe Microsoft should let them go, like, you know, spin it off. They could be an investor perhaps, or whatever. But I had never really thought that about Game Pass. It was this story that made me think that. But then today they announced 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 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 four 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 I had that brief flight of Fancy and then I was like, actually no, I think this is, this is Quicksilver. If you can hear me on the

[Richard Campbell]

MacBook, the device, voice routing is working.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry. Sometimes my agents just talk on their own.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I think I'm going to start a new section for the show Notes called Captain Obvious says. And it's almost always going to be tied to component pricing. So, you know, Valve releases the Steam machine finally, they price it higher than a lot of people and I made that point whenever that was a couple weeks ago. Okay. To me, 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. They're a small company from a hardware maker perspective. Apparently Steam deck sales have fallen off a cliff since they had to raise prices on those things, whatever it is. But, but they, Valve, an engineer who worked on that project on the Steam Machine in an interview said, yeah, this is going to get worse. Like it's actually going to get worse and it's going to get worse for many years, you know, 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, you know, I don't know, maybe 2026 something maybe end of 2026. And that'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 2020. This might just be the way it is for the rest of our lives. I don't even know. Like, I don't know where this ends. I don't know how it ends. You know, 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 you probably going to be able to. So 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, you know, keep going with a new phone or whatever. And oh man, I have to say what we really, what this industry needs more than anything is more subscription services. So this is fantastic. Like, you know, a cent, right? I mean, like a subscription service for hardware now. Like, God damn. Like it's, 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 two months or three months, not the full year or two, three years, whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like that's good. If you're responsible and you can do that kind of thing, it's great.

[Richard Campbell]

And it depends on how the interest is structured. Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, ideally this would be zero, you know, percent interest, but yeah, in which

[Richard Campbell]

case then you're foolish to pay up front. You should just pay monthly.

[Paul Thurrott]

If you're just 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, like, why not just do that? Like you never, you know, the whole, if your whole life falls on the toilet, like, you know this, you might be happy you did this. It's not going to hurt you anyway. You're not paying more for it.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, here's another, here's another spin on exactly that concept. Do you know what the Oslo earbuds are?

[Paul Thurrott]

This is the sleep earbuds.

[Richard Campbell]

These are sleep earbuds. Right. And they were made. These are guys.

[Paul Thurrott]

These are several hundred dollars, right. They're expensive.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, like 400 bucks, right. 300 U.S. and they only last. They're warrantied for a year and you're lucky if you get two 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 25amonth subscription. Just keep going with replacements.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's key.

[Richard Campbell]

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]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

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 by pair, I mean one of them, which is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Which is how that I. So, yeah, I have my own story about that.

[Richard Campbell]

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 anyway. Except now I have to. So I have to make the commitment

[Paul Thurrott]

to buy encore, you know, sleep earbuds. And I. I love them, but also kind of hate them, you know, And I. I hate that I need them, but 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 Y. 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 like, okay. It's maddening, you know. So when these things fall apart, which I feel like will happen in the next 15 minutes, I'll look at that. That's interesting. I think I didn't go with those that were more expensive.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, 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 again, we're back to the subscription model. Because here's the other side of that is subscription model. They have a continuous income. When they make a better model, you're naturally going to get them because they invariably get weared out.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And even if it's a small price increase or whatever, it's like. But these are, whatever, 25, whatever the, you know, advantages. Like, yeah, you're like, yeah, I'll do that.

[Richard Campbell]

You know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Interesting, interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know how you would know if it's gonna stay expensive for the next 30 years.

[Paul Thurrott]

But I also like the. I play a game, I would call it every second or third morning where I wake up and try to find a white earbud in the white sheets. Because one of them will.

[Richard Campbell]

I play that game and, you know, swallow it.

[Leo Laporte]

Remember the guy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I had so one morning since it was just since we, well, I guess it was right before we left. I comment I usually get, you know, 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, 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 five minutes later she was walking by with this bundle in her arms of the sheets to bring them into the laundry. I'm like, what the hell are you doing? I mean like I just told you not to like of it. Like it's, it's just she shakes the thing, it's a little bouncing out of this ball of sheets.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh boy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Anyway, I, I, yeah, I love that they exist, by the way.

[Richard Campbell]

I.

[Paul Thurrott]

At least something you can put in yours. And it doesn't hurt you, you know, when you're moving around and stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I knew I was really going to need this pair. Going fishing because I'm fishing with some serious snores like this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's like a room full of sleep apnea.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, out in the woods.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's take a little break. We have the back of the book coming up. And speaking of books, we were talking about John's Inside Track column and 13 years ago he made a book, an ebook of The Inside Track 2013. So if you have a hankering, 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 bucks. I figure probably, you know, it's a, I'll think of it as a contribution

[Paul Thurrott]

to just 30% bold text.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, you know, it's funny, I don't think the bold text survived the.

[Paul Thurrott]

That was my favorite part of it was little blurbs and like you said, the ellipses and then, you know, bold.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's what he says about 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 seeding 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 six years.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is one year, I think before the Xbox One came out, but that great. So don't worry.

[Leo Laporte]

So 2013. So is the console business dead? I think it is. How many polygons do you need anyway?

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, my God, that's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Perhaps we should take a hint from

[Paul Thurrott]

the auto industry is enough for anybody.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what? He, I'm convinced did this, always did this on purpose. This was intentionally provocative. It was a great way for him to. I can tell you it was the original link.

[Paul Thurrott]

If you're a gamer, you know how many polygons you need. All of the polygons.

[Leo Laporte]

All of the polygons, yeah. I don't even want polygons. I want actual.

[Paul Thurrott]

I want the polygons to be so small it's. I can't see the polygons.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right, exactly. Anyway, I bought the book because I thought, you know, I love John and maybe a little bit it goes to Mimi.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

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 I just wanted to real quickly, you know, one of the things John really innovated on no agenda was no ads. Ads, just listeners. John's and actually Adam Curry's innovation was to, you know, have listeners support the show. And, you know, a few years ago we thought about it and said, you know, that's not a bad idea. And we started Club Twit. Now we don't work, we don't require you to join the club. You can still listen to the show. And we do still do ads because what we have always found is that we couldn't do as many shows. Remember, John just did one twice a week. But that was it. We couldn't do all the shows we wanted to do. So we do have ads. But if you would like to join the club, that would really make a difference to our bottom line, to keeping us afloat. About 30%. Is it 30% now of our operating costs? Lisa come from the club. 25 to 30%. I don't know what the current number is. That's significant. That's significant. 35%. She just checked, so it's going up. She said I didn't have to check. I just know it's the only reason we're still on the air, ladies and gentlemen, join the club. 10 bucks a month you get ad free versions of all the shows. Because if you're giving us 10 bucks a month, we don't need to show you ads. You also get in those ad free versions. We can't do it in the ones with ads, but we can do it with the ad free chapter markers so you can jump around to the parts you like. You get access to the club Twit Discord, which is a crazy fun place to hang out actually. That's how we learned about John from the club members. They're, they're really very active. You also get all those special shows we do for club members. We're going to do a special edition of the AI user group this Friday. We call it token time where we just see how many tokens we can use in an hour. Now we're all going to have our little projects. I'll show you what I'm working on. You show me what you're working on. And we've decided there's so much interest in the AI. Here's a group that we could probably do that twice a month from now on. So that's the kind of thing we can do. There's no advertising for that because of club members. Twit TV Club Twit. If you are not a member, please consider joining it and supporting independent podcasting. I think it's pretty darn important. But enough of that now on.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, not enough of that. Actually, as a follow up, if token time is not you guys trying to spend the most tokens, I need you to change that show to be that. That sounds amazing. Yeah, like you know, like you know they have those coding competitions where it's the most obfuscated. Whatever. Yeah, like that's this for AI. Like I, that's amazing. Like we're going to break into the Pentagon today. Let's see if we can do this. You know, can we set up a

[Richard Campbell]

data center by token load token burning?

[Leo Laporte]

We'll token max this Friday, 2pm Pacific Time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Token maxing. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Eastern in the club now. Back of the book, starting with Mr.

[Paul Thurrott]

T. I mean, I'm just saying I would watch it.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, you got it. That's what we'll do.

[Paul Thurrott]

So one of my now long time tips for Windows users 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 I've never really kept track of this for any amount of time, like whether It's a year, six months, month, whatever. But 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, you know, 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, you know, setup of the Windows laptop because that, it comes out of the box like that. And that's honestly, that's part of the experience too. But, 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 know, you install the apps but you also have to configure those apps and then you have to also configure the system and you know, 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 D and sure defy Windows 11 book, and then I wrote a big article about 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, 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, meaning this thing supports two repositories by default. One is the Microsoft Store, one is the Web or winget, whatever, right? And not all apps are available everywhere, I get that. 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 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 that 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, 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, the names because you need the name of the thing as it appears in Winget. So like Google Chrome is probably the name of that app. I don't actually install it, but I install like Helium, the web browser or Typora or Notion or Affinity or whatever it is and actually all those things. Right. And so, 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 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 you know, Typora is like an 11 step process. 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 to just to bulk install apps. Just keep a text file up in OneDrive somewhere, no big deal. It, it happens very quickly. It's, 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, I wanted to add a productivity app, but I, as always, I'm trying to play different games. I, I was not a fan of the new Doom games when the first one came out in 2016 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'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, 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 great.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it.

[Paul Thurrott]

But it takes place in kind of a medieval fantasy.

[Leo Laporte]

It's got a little Diablo in it.

[Paul Thurrott]

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. But it doesn't make sense. I could just break that to you

[Leo Laporte]

right now, but why bother? It's a little Elden ring, a little Diablo.

[Paul Thurrott]

I like looking, but 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 pushes to do special things and whatever. I played this for 10 seconds when I 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 looks pretty. It's worth looking at. I. I must get it through game pass because I don't believe I ever paid for this. Why May pay for game pass. But it is, it's a beautiful game. You are gliding on ice. I mean, I guess you just get used to that or whatever. Most people probably don't care, but do

[Leo Laporte]

they do that so you won't get seasick?

[Paul Thurrott]

I. So I believe what they're trying to do. So if you think. Think back to. Well, think back to Wolfenstein 3D.

[Richard Campbell]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Aside from, well, the, the technical achievement of moving through three a 3D ish space 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 2, it really was speed. Right. Like you were almost. I mean, Richard, you're running way faster

[Richard Campbell]

than a human could actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, it doesn't actually make any sense.

[Leo Laporte]

You're going 30 kilometers an hour or something like that.

[Paul Thurrott]

50 if you actually stop to think about it. But. But here's the thing. If you look at these environments, like see how big they are.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And there's a lot of verticality to this game too, which is really cool. That helps you get. Imagine if you had to walk through there. Right. 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. 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 two 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. But actually it looking different is kind of cool. It's different, but the same, if that makes sense. I don't know. Anyway, 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 store. 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 three year old, but it's. It's. It's better than I thought it was. I feel kind of bad that I like, just was like, no immediately when I first saw this thing. But it's a great looking game 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. But anyway, it's a good game. Wasn't that delicious?

[Richard Campbell]

So good.

[Leo Laporte]

Your bill, ladies.

[Richard Campbell]

I got it. No, I got it.

[Leo Laporte]

Seriously. I assist.

[Paul Thurrott]

I assisted first. Don't be silly.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't be silly. People with the Wells Fargo active cash credit card prefer to pay because they earn unlimited 2% cash rewards on purchases.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Rock, paper, scissors for it. Rock, paper, scissors.

[Richard Campbell]

Shoot.

[Paul Thurrott]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

The Wells Fargo ActiveCash credit card. Visit Wells Fargo.comActiveCash terms apply.

[Paul Thurrott]

I wrote a little song to remind you. Choice hotels get you more of the experiences you value.

[Leo Laporte]

Mm.

[Paul Thurrott]

The Cambria Hotel's got it all. A roof, rooftop bar. Have a ball. Cocktails up here feel just right. Ms. Cambria. Amazing. All right, bring a date, your teen, or even your mom. Book [e-mail] See you on the roof. Goldbelly's asking, what's the one food you'd

[Leo Laporte]

fly across the country for? Maine's famous lobster roll? Maybe Chicago's iconic deep dish? Or Texas's legendary barbecue? Well, you can skip the flight. Gold Belly ships America's most iconic foods straight to your door nationwide. And here's the best part. Right now, they're celebrating national restaurant month with $50 off your first order.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's 50 bucks.

[Leo Laporte]

It won't last forever.

[Paul Thurrott]

Order now on goldbelly.com.

[Richard Campbell]

all right, cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, now. Now that we've done playing games, let's get serious with Run as Radio.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, Run as such a serious place, isn't it? Actually this show came from. Remember when I did that HR conference in Berlin?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

One of the people I met there was this lady, Jesse Shofer, 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 explosion in software, especially AI related software around HR and other markets has gotten the situation 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 four months. Like it's all brand new. And, and often they have the tags for being like GDPR or sock appliance 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 what is the security models these products use? Like is this safe for us to bring into our operation or do we opening ourselves up to a whole bunch of vulnerabilities? And so really was I would 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 completely compliant the way we expected it 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]

Security begins at procurement.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. When you buy stuff, do you know what you're buying? And you know, often the administrators, the security folks are not involved. They find out when the product arrives on the doorstep, hey, install this. You're like, wait a second, is this safe?

[Leo Laporte]

It says it's safe in the ad.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it checked all the boxes you told me to check, but you know, that was.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there a way to check that?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, most of the time, especially when you talk about GDPR and SOC and things like that, like they actually be registered with a company that does the validation and so sense they may have stuck the logo on the web Page, but they're not actually registered.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wow. So I'm surprised you can do that.

[Richard Campbell]

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]

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, of check to make sure.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because we don't. I don't want to say anything that's not true.

[Paul Thurrott]

For sure.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, 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 and seats 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, especially when you think about the HR space in tech that's very conservative software. It's like buying ERP systems. Like you don't buy one year old product, you're expecting a company that's been around for years and years that all of that chicanery would have been long gone by now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you'd think.

[Richard Campbell]

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]

We always look for case studies on their websites.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's really important, you know, and if you're smart, you're calling a couple of those customers up, figuring out if they're real. You know, like it's for an hour

[Leo Laporte]

or so, thousands of dollars, it's worth checking. And if you're going to rely on it for security, for sure.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You're going to train your whole organization on it. Like I know that the, the licenses cost money, but the training's huge. 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 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 on board.

[Leo Laporte]

Really good point.

[Richard Campbell]

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]

No kidding.

[Richard Campbell]

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 Jessie. 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]

Run his radio episode 1046 runasradio yeah. Did you always put those out on a Wednesday or did you move it

[Richard Campbell]

so that we could plug Every Wednesday? Yeah, but every Wednesday since, say, April 7th. April 11th, 2007. Never miss a Wednesday longer. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

2007.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

You're gonna have your 20th anniversary next year.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Congratulations. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. I think you've earned a little. A tipple, as they say.

[Richard Campbell]

I tippled last night. Thank you very much.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a tippler. And you are in Nebraska.

[Richard Campbell]

I am in Nebraska. So of course I went out last night, threw 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 picked the Loop river because it was. Is very much a classic bourbon. But we got to talk about Nebraska. Right? This story is not complete unless we do a little toroar. 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 got to go through at least a couple of other states to get to water in any given direction. The eastern edge is divine, defined by the Missouri river. That also creates this. This great glacial melt till space. The. 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 driving.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember driving through, down I80 through it and it was just corn the whole way. Just corn, corn, corn and corn. So I'm thinking they'd be a good place to get a bourbon actually.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. But they don't have a huge alcohol culture. But let's get to that part. You know, besides that eastern block and what all of that looks like my camera's being weird on me. Besides that eastern block there are there. I mean if you go across Nebraska you'll find that in the center there's the Loess hills. This is more of the big flat floor tile plains, less hilly like the Missouri River Valley is. And in the north central it's actually sand dunes covered in grass but huge, huge amounts of sand. There are a lot of growing there, not a lot of anything there. But that's also the location of what's called the Agalala Aquifer, which is the largest aquifer in the world. This huge huge body of water underground in north central Nebraska. And then further the west you get to the dry short grass prairie stuff coming into the Rockies now and towards Wyoming and Colorado is, is much more your classic prairie country. So your growings on the east side, your plains are on the west side. Which is why you have this history of the, 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 for word for shallow water river. Because this is where the weathers were crossable because many places the Missouri is just uncrossable. Just looking in the past couple of hundred years since the, the western expansion of the America, you're talking about the Pawnee and the Omaha and the Oto and the Lakota and the Cheyenne and the Punkah and the Arapaho like they lots of them around here. But the word loop actually refers to lower Loop culture around the Loop River. So this is just pre European. And there was a major drought in the 1300 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 identified 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, and, and storage vessels and things like that. And they had an agriculturally they did the three 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. All of this, of course, changes as the Europeans arrived 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 soldiers 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 now lands as part of the US you send through Lewis and Clark and eventually becomes the Missouri Compromise. And this becomes, 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. Not any. No slavery north of the 36th parallel. 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. And this leads to incredible conflicts, mostly in Kansas rather than 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. All but the conflict in Kansas, which they call the, the period of bleeding Kansas, is actually results in the collapse of the Whig Party and the formation of the Republican Party is the fallout from that over this conflict over slavery. And all of this is the decades leading into what results in, in the US Civil War. And this entire time, Nebraska is still just a territory. They won't become a State until 1867 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 one point the third largest distillery in all of the U.S. we have detailed records from 1880 where they were producing pure ryes, bourbons, sour mashes and sweet matches and malt whiskey to the scale of 1200 gallons a day. So, you know, 24, 25 barrels a day, massive operation for the 1880s is 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 the operation still exists today. Today it's called called Cornhusker Beverage and Bridal and they make local soft drinks, they make Nesbits and crystal and these days there's a popular drink here called Goody Pop and that's the legal company is still Willow Springs. Goes all the way back to pre statehood 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 seasoned, things like that. But we don't see commercial production of alcohol of any kind in Nebraska until the 18, 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 it 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. 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 up urban style. So corn, rye, barley. They haven't published any of their numbers. Their operation is small thousand liter stainless mash cookers roughly about the same size, maybe 1500 liters on the washbacks. And that's just from looking at pictures. They have no published investigations at all. 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. So it's tricky to. They're going to make old whiskey and their Nebraska straight bourbon is like three 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 be here to get it. But let me tell you, that's as good of any bourbon you've ever tasted.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Richard Campbell]

That Loop river, really just beautiful. Perfect, Perfect bourbon. Little caramel note, little, you know, a little bit of that vanilla note. It was lovely.

[Leo Laporte]

That's amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

And it was cheap. We got. We got three doubles for $25 at Jake's, and. And I'm like, what are we drinking? Like, what are you tasting here? And he goes, I don't know. It's gonna be any Kentucky whiskey I've ever had. Like, it's just. It's beautiful whiskey. I'm like, yep, they got the formula nailed. No big master distillers, none of that sort of thing. Small production, maybe a thousand 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. It's just crafty. But, yeah, local whiskey made by local guys for a local market. Kid, I'm there. It's beautiful. It was 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 angels 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.

[Leo Laporte]

How much left in the bottle?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, we'll take.

[Paul Thurrott]

You have a little a Nebraska in you?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, at the moment I do, yeah. But, you know, as soon as I finish recording here, it's probably going to land in the back.

[Leo Laporte]

They make gin and vodka too, but it's the whiskey you.

[Richard Campbell]

They do indeed want to try. I think 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. Is 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 with. 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 from the craft set. There's also sideshow. So they. They're all a. They've got it nailed. This good grain country.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like they know how to party. They're definitely having a good day.

[Richard Campbell]

Having a good. This, this place has a good time. It's really. It's been a year since I've been here. Yeah, we'll, we'll have a great time. The speaker's party is tonight so I've got my party shirt on. And then tomorrow keynote at 8:30.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. 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 on our whiskey playlist which you can find at Twitt TV Whiskey. More than a hundred of these segments beginning with how whiskey's made, the origins of whiskey and covering a whole bunch. Are you going to ever run out you think?

[Richard Campbell]

Richard? Dude, I've, I've got a list of just Scottish. That's 200 plus. And then everywhere I go because of the craft whiskey movement like you know the best thing about this job, Leo? I meet new whiskeys all the time. Like just that sanctuary I did a couple of weeks ago. Like I'm keeping a ball. That bottle's gone by the way like this clear it with. I take the, you know I do do the, the sample on, on the screen and so forth and maybe it stays on my desk during the day too. Then it goes upstairs in the cabinet and sometimes I come upstairs in that cabinet, you know, a week or two later and that bottle is nice. And I'm like okay, that is approved this every so often I, I find when it's Stacy's like yep, that's a good way.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, she shares them with you.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh yeah. She'll, she'll, she'll take them out for a spin if she likes them. You know they'll be. And they'll be in an old fashioned pretty fast.

[Leo Laporte]

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 fly fishing expedition, which means you'll be gone next week. I'm telling you something you don't know. And Paul has an assignment. He has an assignment to find.

[Paul Thurrott]

I fulfilled the assignment.

[Leo Laporte]

You have fulfilled the assignment.

[Richard Campbell]

Are you going to give away the name or. It's going to be a surprise.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I. So it's going to be Chris Hoffman.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh good. I did ask Larry Joe window.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. I did ask Mary Jo. She just.

[Leo Laporte]

What did she say? She says never Go near that Leo again. So handsy. What did she say?

[Paul Thurrott]

She said, no, but

[Leo Laporte]

you, by the way, you've stayed in touch with her. You're good friends.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Done with podcast.

[Paul Thurrott]

She's actually so she. What she told me honestly was she feels out of the loop when it comes to windows right now.

[Richard Campbell]

Ah.

[Leo Laporte]

She doesn't understand that we don't care what she, we, what we care about

[Paul Thurrott]

is what she literally said. She said, please tell them. I'm. I, 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 a in the loop is the way she said it. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

People do tell me that all the time. I'm like, I don't, I can't be on Twitter. I don't know anything about what's going. And I say, we don't want you.

[Paul Thurrott]

I've been doing it for almost 20 years. Anyone could do this. What's going on?

[Leo Laporte]

Like, you know, you're here to have fun.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, we tried. Chris is great too.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nothing to.

[Leo Laporte]

Not Chris.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, no, of course. I mean, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

And you know what's great about Mr. Richard Campbell? He misses very few shows. He does his.

[Richard Campbell]

That was the original plan. Right. It's like, look, I travel a lot, know. Well, this portable rig started working really well and the listeners seem to like this whole where's our giveaway thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, I noticed you're wearing a mic on your lapel mic today.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's new.

[Richard Campbell]

This is the road. The new road. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I think this sounds fantastic.

[Paul Thurrott]

Thank you.

[Richard Campbell]

Does this sound great?

[Paul Thurrott]

So by the way, I've told. This is my, possibly my favorite Leo story, but two summers ago, I think it was, we were here in Mexico and I was like, like, I, I have the older road and I desperately wanted to use this instead of all this stupid equipment, you know? So I put this thing on. I, I, I left the real microphone in front of me just to see if anyone would notice.

[Leo Laporte]

You fooled me.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I did not fool you. That's why the story is so awesome. I, you, you signed in and you were like, you said something like, I said, hey, how you, how you doing? And I, you said, I'm doing great, but you sound like. And he was like, right away. And I was like, all right, so much for that experience. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. I got these road this road 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 and listened to them like, holy man, this sounds.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this what you used when we were at the Houston or the Cape Canaveral?

[Richard Campbell]

No, that was your.

[Leo Laporte]

That was our gear.

[Paul Thurrott]

You just, you got this.

[Leo Laporte]

Should we just take. Get rid of all these. These big gold, big ass microphones.

[Paul Thurrott]

Did you have this in January? I feel like you might. Because I feel like I. I got to experience this.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, we.

[Leo Laporte]

We use.

[Richard Campbell]

We use these in Mexico. You're right. Yeah, we did use the Mexico. There's two of them and they come on separate channels and I can configure them as mixes. Single channel ourselves.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's so great. They're so small and.

[Richard Campbell]

And they're so small and they last like six hours.

[Leo Laporte]

So it sounds better than the countrymen

[Richard Campbell]

you used to use.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean this really, really is great.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it says something too.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's.

[Richard Campbell]

I think the Heil's still. The Heil's better.

[Leo Laporte]

It's better on the lower if you want to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but this doesn't travel well.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You know, you just travel at all. It's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Burke, should we just send everybody the roads I've been using. I have the.

[Paul Thurrott]

You just.

[Richard Campbell]

These new road micros are stunning.

[Leo Laporte]

The new. Is it the Insta or the dji? I think it's the new dji. Lapel mics. I should try that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that come. The pair of them and that one comes with the. The camera. Right. The portable camera has a. Has a mic.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I got the Insta. Okay. Thank you, Anthony.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Kevin, our producer says the Heil's still best to my ears.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. No, true.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I agree.

[Paul Thurrott]

You can't, you know, you can't carry this thing around like if you travel travels all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

But I am putting together. I think that's.

[Richard Campbell]

That's.

[Leo Laporte]

Remember how I struggled with the high in Hawaii? It was like couldn't. I didn't have anything.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah. It's terrible. Right? You just. It's too much gear. Right. And it's really hard,

[Paul Thurrott]

you know, want to carry this stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

But I, I always. I'm always afraid of traveling 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]

Then they sound like they get buzzy. They don't.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. There's no fix to that. Right. Like they're. They're not quite a few.

[Leo Laporte]

Few dead hiles actually broken Hiles.

[Richard Campbell]

And that's. I mean the reality is they wear out, right? Like eventually the diaphragm collapses.

[Leo Laporte]

My friends, you have been listening to a fabulous show called Windows Weekly. We do this every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern. That's 1800 UTC. If you want to calibrate your global clock. And the reason I tell you that is because you can't actually watch this live. If you want the fresh version, we stream it live to to six, seven different places. One is the club to a 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, but there's Twitch, there's X.com, there's Facebook, there's LinkedIn and there's Kik. So total of seven different ways you can watch. You pick the one you like the best. If you're chatting in any of the those I do see the chat. We have a combined chat that I can watch. Let's see what else you don't have to watch live. I guess that's the other point. You can always download a copy of the show. 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 and 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 members have their own personal link which allows them to have the ad free version with chapter markers. If you We've updated our newsletter. I think it looks really great. Ty McLarty did a great job. He's our marketing guy. 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 Twitter TV newsletter. It's free and it gives you an update on things that are coming up.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a good way to keep up

[Leo Laporte]

on shows that are coming because we do have some unusual things coming up. For instance, we're going to be doing doing Windows Weekly from Black Hat in a couple of weeks in August.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is that. That's in two weeks, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's right after fishing.

[Leo Laporte]

Right after fishing. We will be live in Las Vegas at the Threat Locker booth and you can come visit us. Of course the newsletter would have told you that you'd already know it. And let's see, I guess that's, that's really all of the paperwork. We have stamped your visas and you may now exit Windows Weekly country but do come back next week. Okay? Thanks to Paul thurat. He's at therot.com his books are at leanpub.com but here's the cool thing. If you subscribe as a premium member to Thorat.com, you get the books for free of a thousand dollar value. You can say any amount you want, $45 value.

[Paul Thurrott]

But yeah, it's whatever it is, it's

[Leo Laporte]

whatever you said it. If you set it for a thousand, it's a thousand. You get Windows everywhere. You get the field guide to Windows 11. You get the windows and all of that. That th.com as a premium member. Richard Campbell is at run as radio.com that's where you find the latest, well all the episodes. All 1000 some episodes of Run as you'll also find net rocks the show he does with Carl Franklin. And in there in the dot net rocks feed there are a lot of geek outs. Some really interesting stuff. You know Richard likes to dive deep into this and and you should look at. Is there any way to just kind of find the geek outs? Are they named geek out? Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Search on geek. You'll get just those. The latest one is data centers in space.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Elon says next year. Elon says a lot of things.

[Richard Campbell]

He says a lot of things and you know putting one of them up is one thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, maybe you know what, maybe the first one will go up next year. That's credible. Yeah, that, that maybe is credible. Thank you Richard. Thank you Paul. Thank you all you winners and don't dozers. We will see you next week on Windows Weekly. Bye bye.

[Paul Thurrott]

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[Richard Campbell]

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