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WW 948: Netflix Tears - Windows 11, version 25H2 heads to Release Preview!
Windows 11, version 25H2 heads to Release Preview!
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- [00:00]
A
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat is in Berlin for ife. We'll see if we can pry some IFA knowledge out of him. We've got Richard Campbell back in Canada after his trip down the river. We have lots to talk about. Four new builds in the insider program. We'll talk about earnings. They're up, up, up. And Paul is a little upset about the judge's decision in the Google antitrust case. We'll talk about that and a lot more coming up next on Window. Podcasts you love from people you trust.
- [00:37]
B
This is twit.
- [00:45]
A
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurad and Richard Campbell. Episode 948, recorded Wednesday, September 3, 2025. Netflix tears. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, everybody, especially you winners and dozers. This is the show where we cover the latest news from Microsoft. And our peripatetic pair of prognosticators are here. Mr. Richard Campbell's back from his trip. Did you catch some fish?
- [01:17]
C
Did, in fact, I had my Troutzilla moment. I've never happened to be before. Caught a few 14s and a few 16s and a 20. And then or shortly after that 20, I hit something so big, it just ripped the line off and took the fly and the leader and everything.
- [01:34]
A
Oh, my God.
- [01:35]
C
I'd heard the stories. That was the first time I ever had a Troutzilla on the line.
- [01:40]
A
Troutzilla.
- [01:41]
C
I don't know, man. That was a sturgeon. Like, I don't know, something big or.
- [01:45]
A
Weighed down with a bunch of other people's sinkers and bobbers and flies.
- [01:49]
B
Yeah.
- [01:50]
A
Well, congratulations. So you're rest, relaxed, you're tanned and you're well fed.
- [01:56]
C
Yeah. Managed not to get burned. Had a lightning show one day. You know, a little bit of rain here and there, which good for the.
- [02:01]
A
Fish, but that time of year.
- [02:02]
C
Yeah, it was fantastic.
- [02:04]
A
Nice. Well, welcome back. We missed you. Chris Hoffman did a great job filling in, but now we have to say hello to our favorite man about town, Paul Thurot. Looks like he's in a rathskeller in Berlin.
- [02:19]
B
I wish.
- [02:21]
A
In Berlin, huh? Well, that's it? That's all you're gonna say, huh?
- [02:28]
B
I'm a man of few words, Leo.
- [02:31]
A
Most of them.
- [02:32]
B
Most of them negative.
- [02:35]
A
Has the show started yet or.
- [02:36]
B
No? I mean, technically it doesn't start till Friday, but the press all arrives Monday or Tuesday because all of the hardware companies and other companies have, you know, press conferences and whatever. So I think as of now, as we record this, there hasn't been much that's occurred yet. I know Acer had some announcements, but they'll. There will be more.
- [02:57]
A
Did you see anything exciting yet?
- [03:01]
B
I haven't seen anything yet that I can discuss. Oh.
- [03:07]
A
Is that kind of thing?
- [03:09]
B
Eh, not yet.
- [03:10]
A
Good. Are you. Did you go to IFA last year?
- [03:14]
B
Mm.
- [03:15]
A
Okay. So this is a regular occurrence.
- [03:18]
B
Well, yeah, for two years it has been so before that I had not.
- [03:22]
C
Been the second annual.
- [03:25]
B
Yeah. Yeah, well, you get to go to Berlin. It's too easy to get to ces. So I said, you know, let's make it hard.
- [03:31]
A
Is this also more probably more to the point these days for PC makers?
- [03:37]
B
Yeah, it's one of the two big. Well, there's three really, but the two. To me, there are two big milestones in the year for chipsets that go into PCs, and PCs being announced, that is fairly universal. So CES and IFA are those two. And then obviously there's things like back to school season and so on. But as far as when stuff actually happens, those are the two. The two big ones. Nice.
- [04:01]
A
All right, well, I suppose we'll hear all about it in the weeks and months to come as Paul becomes free to speak. Meanwhile, I guess there's probably something to talk about in the news.
- [04:20]
B
Yes. I am so distracted. But, yes, actually, there's a number of big milestones this week. The first one is that unexpectedly, I think it was. I would remember this because it was such a big event, but I think it was Friday. Microsoft issued four builds to the Insider program, which is not technically the maximum they could do at one time, because there's also Windows 10 and 10. Technically, in the release preview, you could have Windows 10 and different versions of Windows 11. But across beta, Dev Canary, and Release Preview, new Windows 11 builds. And the Release Preview build we got was the first ever for Windows 11, version 25H2.
- [05:10]
C
Oh, okay. So they were not all the same.
- [05:13]
B
Right, Right.
- [05:14]
C
They weren't, but they did.
- [05:15]
B
Yeah. They were actually all. They were all, in fact, different builds. Although dev and Beta now line up.
- [05:21]
C
Because you would think they're different channels. They should be different things.
- [05:24]
B
Right.
- [05:24]
C
Okay.
- [05:25]
B
Right.
- [05:25]
C
I'm glad.
- [05:26]
B
Yeah. I mean, technically, you could have a Windows 11 computer in the Release Preview. Well, a computer in the Release Preview channel, and get one of. At this point, I would say three different builds. Right. Depending on what you were doing. Yeah. And as far as Windows 11 goes, now you have the possibility to get 25H2, but it's one of those. You actually have to go into optional updates, you know, to find it. It doesn't actually put it right out at the top, which is kind of unusual. 25H2 is going to be delivered as one of those enablement packages when they do ship it.
- [06:01]
C
So I know it's only one number different than 24h2. This is not a big deal. This is not a new OS like 24H2 was.
- [06:09]
B
That's right. That's right. Yeah. 24H2 was a big change, even though it didn't seem like it. Right. You know, and they mask that in some ways by releasing all the same features across the last couple of versions. So when you were on 23H2 and you went to 24H2, it didn't seem like that big of a deal, maybe. But actually the. It changed a lot under the covers. This time they're not changing anything under the covers. So this is a minor update. Of course, they're also bringing all the features of 25 to H2 to 25.
- [06:36]
C
So 25 H2 this time with no covers.
- [06:41]
B
Yeah, we've been on this kind of crazy train since this time. I GUESS it was two years ago when we were waiting on 23H2, which is going to include the first version of Copilot and whatever else, and they just threw it out in the world. Memory serves, I believe it was September that year. They just put it out as a 22H2 update as if it was nothing. And to force that down everyone's throats, because they knew the businesses would be able to skip that version otherwise. And so instead they put it in one of the last annual or monthly updates before the next version. Sorry, you're getting it. Which was kind of interesting. And then last year, like Leo, I think, mentioned or asked 24H2, or someone asked, sorry if it was you, Richard, but Somebody asked about 24H2 being a major update, which it was. And they really didn't talk about it that much. They didn't. They were like, let's go see if anyone notices. You know.
- [07:42]
C
I don't know why they're so shy about this stuff. Like, it's. It's weird.
- [07:47]
B
It's. Yeah. I don't know.
- [07:50]
C
I mean. And it's hard on it. You know, for an I, from an IT perspective, 24H2 is such a heavy lift. Like, you really need to test the snot out of this. But 25H2 should be trivial. Like, you shouldn't really worry about it at all. But you got to peel that onion to sort of figure that out. People got burned on 24H2 because it changed so much. It just lights up the ticket system. Like everybody's complaining.
- [08:11]
B
Yeah, I know plenty of orgs that.
- [08:13]
C
Are sticking on 23H2 and just looking, going, what do we got to do here?
- [08:17]
B
Yeah, well, it has had a year of testing. It's not like they've screwed up anything in the last year. So it's probably fine. I don't know. So. Yeah, that's kind of interesting. The weird thing to me is I've actually the. The two computers I brought here, I put onto the release preview channel. I hadn't been looking at that recently.
- [08:42]
C
Because you love flying close to the sun.
- [08:44]
B
Yeah, well, I fly closer to the sun than that. Usually I have, you know, like the dev channel is on at least three computers back home, but I haven't noticed any differences. And I think it might be tied to that enablement package thing. I think the, the thing that I got was the. I think it. If you think about how Microsoft deploys things now with Windows, you know, it's essentially malware, right? So they put this stuff on your computer. It doesn't do anything. It's just sitting there in the background waiting for the, you know, the payload to drop or whatever. And then in the case of Windows, you know, the patch Tuesday will show up and the thing you download is just a. It just flips a switch and it turns. Starts turning features on. So it's likely that what I just got was a. That thing that doesn't actually expose any new features quite yet or something. Or maybe it's on some timer or whatever it is. I mean, it's on random in many cases. Right? We know they do that. So yeah, these two, it's, you know, both of them, it's like it's okay. It doesn't have the new start menu. It doesn't have administrator protection. It doesn't, you know, you go down the whole list, it's like, where is this stuff? You know, I thought I was, thought I was getting on the train there, but I guess the train was going to reverse or something. I don't know what the metaphor is, but yeah, anyway. But this indicates that this thing is going to be on schedule, right? And so the normal, I would say September, October, release time frame where they'll probably have a preview update in September and then the public, everyone gets it version in October, which is typically how it goes. Not always, but typically. So, yeah, but so nothing to speak of. There, There is a. There are a Set of builds, that one that went out to dev and one that went out to beta. I noticed that the, the minor part of the build numbers were identical, which had never been the case or wasn't the case for much of the past year or two. And I went back to check because they must have change that at some point. Right. And so even though they're on different build streams or whatever you want to call that, where the dev channel is on the 26220 build stream, if you will, and 23H2 or the beta channel is on 26 120, the part that was after the, you know, the, the decimal point there was the number that was there. It was always different in the past, but now they're the same. So you know, to my like kind of ADHD brain, I was like oh nice, you know, but I was like when did they start this? And it was two or three builds ago. So I don't believe they even said anything. I think they just did it. Yeah, now they're lined up, you know. And I'm sure many someones, internal and external Microsoft were like, how come these can't be the same minor build number? Like they're the same features. Why don't you just make it, let's make it easy to figure out what's what, you know. So they finally did it. So that to me was semi notable. I don't know. But that's the type of thing I care about. So nothing major, but some interesting minor updates. In both of those Builds there are two new text actions, both semi related to Microsoft 365 are directly related. One is the ability to recognize something on screen that is a table and you'll be able to convert it into a table for Excel, which is kind of interesting. Right? So that could be a hand drawn thing, it could be whatever's on screen. If it looks like a table, you can hold down the Windows key, click screen, does the AI pink and purple thing and then convert that. That's kind of cool. And then there's this notion of a Persona card which is, I think, I believe it's from Microsoft 365. But the idea there is that you have contacts and there's a contact, I would call it a contact card, but this is a Persona card for some reason. But obviously it's a picture of the person, name, phone number, email address, whatever information you have associated with them. And so same thing when you're using click to do with the screen. And it recognizes things on the screen that tie into a contact you have through Microsoft 365. It will actually display what they're calling a Persona card as an option here. We have to go click it and go click through it. But that's kind of interesting, right? So I suppose we've all done this, right? So your phone rings. It's from some number you don't recognize these days. You don't even think about it. You don't even answer that thing.
- [13:16]
C
No, there's no phone calls in my life that I want that are on my schedule.
- [13:21]
B
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm kind of stretching this one a little bit because you can't really do this with your phone right now. But the idea here is that something on screen, it could be in an email, it could be somewhere. There's something will say an email address or a phone number or whatever it might be. And you're like, is this associated with somebody I actually know? And you can do that. Windows Key plus Click Click to do. And it will look and see if that has anything to do with anyone who's in your contacts list, which is actually pretty useful. Windows clicking Windows Key. Click. Yeah, or what's the other one? I think if you just. I think if. Is this a Copilot PC? Probably, yeah. Windows Key. Click. Is it? And then there's a way to just do it with the keyboard too. I think it's just double maybe click and hold. Something like that. The one that said there's a mouse action as well, but it does that little. You know, the whole screen goes A.I. it's like, oh, we're doing something fun. And then it tells you. It gives you. Yeah. It selects all the things you can do something with and then you can. This will be one of those things right. Now that second one I just mentioned is only if you are signed in with a work or school account for now and have a Microsoft 365 subscription. So enter ID, whatever. The first one is only on Snapdragon X, but it will be coming to AMD and Intel Copilot plus PC soon. Click to do is a Copilot plus PC feature, as we know. And then beyond that, there's two for every. For everybody, I guess. Or for all. All computers, regardless of whether they are Copilot plus PC or not. There's a new Braille viewer in Narrator. That's kind of an interesting feature. So obviously having an on screen Braille reader might seem pointless. Right? Braille is something that you feel with your fingers. Right. But this is not your screen.
- [15:08]
C
Your screen has problems.
- [15:10]
B
Yes. Right, right. We're going past multitouch now. We're going to multi bump. No, it's not that. So the way Microsoft describes it is if you are a sighted teacher, a trainer or developer tester who can't read Braille and you don't have any access or limited access to a Braille display, this is a way that you can display those characters on screen and then follow along in a classroom. Or maybe, you know, you're teaching people who are using a Braille reader or Brill interface of some kind. So it's kind of a limited use case obviously because it's an on screen thing, but feels like something teachers especially asked for. Hey, could we get this kind of a thing somewhere? So it's being built into the Narrator app. That's one of those big accessibility features in Windows 11. So that's cool. And then because it's been another week and it's the day that ends in Y, yet another change to Windows Share. So I don't know, it's the feature.
- [16:12]
C
That everybody should like, but nobody cares about.
- [16:14]
B
Yeah, nobody uses it. And it's like the, you know, one of those graphs where it's like one axis is number of people that use it, it's way down at the bottom and then the other one is like the number of times Microsoft is screwed with it and it's way up at the top, you know, so it's, it's kind of an interesting thing. But. So this is like a. It's hard to describe in part because I haven't seen it yet. But basically if you are familiar, like in fact, I will look here on this particular computer, I'll look at this one here. So if you know how Share works, they've kind of adapted it over time. So you right click on a file and it used to be just a share option and there still is that icon at the top. But now we have a Share with and it will list all the apps that are compatible with that thing you've right clicked to share. So on this particular thing it was an image and it has, you know, Paint and Outlook and teams, whatever else.
- [17:07]
C
Equivalent of Open with.
- [17:10]
B
Yes, that's right. That's exactly right. So now they're going to have a Find Apps option on the bottom and that will let you find compatible apps in the store. And that's. I have to be honest, that's a pretty good idea. Right. Because it's not always clear. You know, some things. If you want to send it via email, probably your email app is the choice. But I think in a lot of cases I don't think, A, I don't think anyone's using this feature to begin with, but B, even those that are, it's not always clear, you know, what you can use. And so I think that that's kind of, that's, that to me is actually a reasonable feature. It's just that no one's ever going to use it. So you heard it here first probably and also last because I don't think anyone's ever going to talk about it again, but there it is.
- [17:56]
C
It's different than Open with in the sense that you're not necessarily talking about opening something. Although I got to say, like I'm just looking at a picture on my machine and when I hover over share with and open with, it's basically the same list.
- [18:08]
B
It opens the app. Yeah. So the idea. So think about, you know, about this, I mean obviously, but if you think about contracts and how they were created for Windows 8 and the idea there was, you know, a public facing interface for what the app can do or things the app could do, in many cases what it could come up with is a more limited UI where it's just for that thing. So in this case, like obviously if you're going to share an image with Paint, you're just opening with. Right. But if you're going to share it with Outlook, you know, you might just have to bring up a new email message or something. It doesn't have to be the full app like you're going to, because you're going to send it, you know, it's. And so yeah, depending on what the item is and what the app you choose is, the interface could be exactly the same as Open With. But if these things are written to accommodate this feature, which again, most aren't, it could be more sophisticated. But yeah, I'm struggling to think of.
- [19:10]
A
A good reason this whole thing was solved in mobile years ago and I guess maybe because Microsoft isn't in mobile anymore.
- [19:16]
B
That's right.
- [19:17]
A
This is all new to them. But I mean every phone does this.
- [19:21]
B
Yes. So Leah, I won't remember when this was, but several years ago I sort of made this observation and I just don't understand why it was like this. Like if I, if I'm on mobile and they go to Instagram and I want. Because I want to post some photos, those photos at that time at least maybe and probably still today, I'm not even sure, but I think today had to be on the phone. Right, right. So If I have two phones and I took pictures with one phone, or actually maybe I took some with each, there's no one phone I could go to and say and just select all those photos. And if, if it had, you know, because it's, it's in an online service, it's in Google Photos. Like why can't I just do that? Right?
- [20:01]
A
Yeah, I mean on Apple it's in Apple Photos. And yeah, you know, the issue is if you have as you do a heterogeneous environment.
- [20:11]
B
Right.
- [20:12]
A
That you can't count on it be available on all the different devices. But if you're in the Apple ecosystem, for instance, no matter as long as you.
- [20:19]
C
It's nothing like a walled garden for compatibility.
- [20:21]
A
But if I take it with my Android phone, then I have to wait for it to get to Google Photos and then have to use Google Photos to share it.
- [20:28]
B
On iPhone and if you put your pictures on OneDrive, Google has tried to do things to make Android work the way Apple devices work. Right. You know, and they're kind of hacky in some cases because you can't rely on certain things. Right. If you get, once you get to something like Windows it's, you know, it's.
- [20:45]
A
Even worse because there's no mobile components so you have to work with all the.
- [20:49]
B
Yeah, but they all put right. So a lot of people, a lot of features rather in Windows today are inspired by the mobile stuff. And you know, I think it was last week there was a, there's a lot of that continue on type functionality. So they had built a feature in where if you were working in the OneDrive app on your phone and then you logged into your PC, it was like, hey, you were doing this in OneDrive, do you want to pick that up again? Is, you know, is useful and I think familiar to people who are familiar with mobile, but it's also kind of a one off. Right. And so last week they had announced we're going to do this for Spotify. And I'm sure there'll be. There already is a way for developers to write to these things but they're just trying to kind of jumpstart those kind of behaviors.
- [21:34]
A
Kevin Windows using it in WhatsApp. So I guess WhatsApp in that building.
- [21:37]
C
That seems to be the one company that is implemented Windows Share.
- [21:43]
B
Well, I hate to bubble on that. Microsoft implemented it for them because they wanted an example that people.
- [21:49]
C
It's very probable.
- [21:50]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yes. Anyway, so I, look, I, you know, I just did this. My wife and I were in the. Laying on the bed and I was doing something, I tried. I had to send her a file. And I'm like, I'll just use. Wait a minute. I use Share.
- [22:05]
A
Sitting next to each other on a bed.
- [22:07]
B
I know. Well, think about where I could be. This is. Right. How do you do it?
- [22:10]
A
How do you do it, gentlemen?
- [22:11]
B
Like in minorities in Minority Report, I would have switched it up and they would have flew over there. Right.
- [22:17]
A
You know what Lisa and I do? We touch phones?
- [22:21]
B
No, no, but I'm saying we're on computers, both of us, different laptops. And I have a file, and this is a file I download.
- [22:27]
A
Apple has Airdrop. Again, if you're in the app exclusively in the Apple ecosystem and Google's app.
- [22:33]
B
I checked, there's no Airdrop on Windows, so it's not a feature of the operating system. But they do have nearby Share, which is essentially similar, right? Yeah, yeah, similar.
- [22:43]
A
But, you know, that's what Android's doing, too.
- [22:44]
B
Not as seamless. Yeah, it's possibly still transferring right now. This was 35 minutes ago. Honestly, I use this for myself between my own computers a lot because I'll take screenshots of one, use them over here. That always works great. I don't know what this thing is. Not a particularly big file, but it's this thing. Yeah. 111 megabytes. I mean, they're, you know, so it's.
- [23:05]
A
Complicated because I think it uses Bluetooth initially to do the handshake, and then it switches over to WI fi for some.
- [23:11]
B
It uses WI fi. So we're both. We are on the same WI FI network, which is what makes that possible.
- [23:16]
A
Yeah.
- [23:17]
B
But yeah, for some reason, this is what this is. This is, unfortunately, the experience in Windows a lot of the times. You know, sometimes it works great. And in my case, I will say, you know, nearby Share for me actually does work pretty great usually. But, yeah, for whatever reason, I just need. I wanted to get this thing done and just get off this and move on. And I. Like I said, I'm not even sure it ever finished. I don't know. It's. It happens so slowly. Yeah, Yeah, I guess, but.
- [23:41]
A
111 occupants.
- [23:42]
B
Bigger. So I could have used a USB key. You know, I have that. There's one here somewhere. I could have emailed it. Like a jerk. I could have. You know, there's all kinds of things. But I tried to do it the, you know, the good way.
- [23:54]
A
I can't email a file that size. Gmail will reject it.
- [23:59]
B
Oh, yeah. Okay. I mean, you could put it, I could just copy it to.
- [24:02]
A
Yeah, put it on OneDrive.
- [24:03]
C
You throw it up to OneDrive and you send them a link.
- [24:05]
B
Yep.
- [24:06]
C
Because that's, we all have our little.
- [24:08]
B
Workarounds for these things. Right? Like it's, Yeah. I don't know. I tried. All I'm saying is I tried and I failed.
- [24:16]
C
Well, and somebody's fussing over this like they're trying to get better.
- [24:19]
A
It's a hard thing. And I'll be ecumenical. I don't think it's a Windows only difficulty. I think it's just a general computer difficulty.
- [24:25]
B
Yeah, no, that's why I kind of called out Google there because they're, you know, they're doing what they can do and, and you can see where it works and you can see where it doesn't. And, and that is the benefit of this walled garden thing. I mean, when you, if you don't mind being monoculture, you know, things can start working together in ways that would be very difficult otherwise. But Apple's a special company because not only do they do that stuff, but they also block others from using it. So it's fine. You know, they're, they're, they're the whole enchilada as recently.
- [24:58]
C
And because they own the back end and the front end, it's going to work no matter what. Where here you see Microsoft trying to do share and they're trying to get the front end people to play.
- [25:07]
A
It reminds me a lot of airplay on the Mac versus, what is it, DLNA on Windows. It's very much kind of that where, yeah, it's better to be in a locked in ecosystem. I enjoy warm Apple bags.
- [25:25]
B
There are pros and cons. I mean it might depend on what you're doing. I just, you know, I got like the, one of the new Pixel phones and yeah, look, I, I, I've used a Pixel within the past four to six months. Whatever. I, it, I should. But I been using an iPhone so you kind of get used to things. So like one of the first things I wanted to do is I was playing something on my phone. I was like, all right, cool, I'm going to put this up on the speaker. And then like two speakers come up and one of them is like a Google smart screen in my kitchen and the other one's like another Google screen is upstairs. And I'm like, what is this? I'm like, oh, right, I don't have airplane this thing. God damn it. Like, like, okay. So then it's, that becomes like a Game like, how do I do this? And I don't. I never did it again. To be fair.
- [26:09]
A
That happens to me on, on airplay just as often. I get all the things I don't want and I don't see the thing I want. But we have, we have, I don't know, 20 airplay devices in the house. I mean, I could play it.
- [26:20]
B
Oh yeah. No. The list that comes up on an Apple device in my house is amazing. It's, you know. Yeah. And you can also mix and match. You could, it could do. It's not just multi room audio. You could. Well, but I guess this is technically multi room audio. It's like two sets of speakers in the same room, you know, or whatever. It's like you can. It's nice.
- [26:36]
A
This is why home automation is struggling too, because it's just. There's no unified because nobody wants to say, okay, we're going to give into some standard and will all do the same thing. They want differentiation.
- [26:53]
C
Even though their customers want.
- [26:54]
A
We want standards. Yeah.
- [26:56]
B
We want things to work.
- [26:58]
A
Yeah. We just want it to work.
- [26:59]
B
Please.
- [26:59]
C
There's a great XKCD on this because, my goodness, there's 13 messaging standards. We should fix this now. There's 14. This. Exactly.
- [27:06]
B
Yeah. Yes, yes, yes. Which was. So I think I might talk about this later in the show, but like I went back and rewatched the first Google Pixel event, right. And this is notable for reasons I'll talk about later where they literally saw the future accurately and kind of nailed it in many cases. But one of the. I think he said there were four, like primary things we were shooting to do and the four, what the third or fourth was. It was. They didn't say it this way, but it was cross platform messaging compatibility. And I thought to myself, well, that's interesting because you know, we still, we've had this RCS thing in recent years, obviously the whole imessage blue and green bubble problem because my memory isn't great. I was like, okay. My guess is that what they did was they did something to interoperate with imessage, which Apple then shut off within three months or something. Right, right. But that isn't what they did. They released another messaging app. So the solution to cross platform messaging is use the app which we will make that you can put on both platforms. And it's like that does not solve the problem. And by the way, that app, which was the video app. Duo. Right. Remember there was like Alo and Duo briefly. I think it was in the market.
- [28:18]
A
Oh God, yeah.
- [28:19]
B
They had.
- [28:19]
A
At one point, Google had felt like half a dozen chat apps.
- [28:23]
B
Well. And honestly, people ripped into them and understandably and probably rightfully for that. But I actually think a lot of it was that thing I just said, which was like they were trying to figure out, like, what do you want interoperability with Apple. Right. And Apple does not want that. No. You know, and I think a lot of this was them trying to be like, all right, well, is there some way we can make this work?
- [28:45]
A
And I think the only person I ever used Aloe with was Jeff Jarvis. It was just me and Jeff. It was kind of sad.
- [28:52]
B
He's probably still using it.
- [28:54]
A
No, you can't. They took it away. They stole it away from us.
- [28:58]
B
I think they just. Where they roll it into meat, which is a great name for anything.
- [29:02]
A
Aloe became chat became meat.
- [29:05]
B
Yeah. It's too bad they tried. All I'm saying is they tried. All I'm also saying is you probably have 100 messaging apps between your phone and your computer, you know? Right.
- [29:15]
A
I mean, that's what they're talking about. Dustin says, my wife's family are all in Germany. They use Signal. They used to use threema.
- [29:23]
B
I don't even know what that is.
- [29:26]
C
Steve loves so many messaging apps he's just never had to deal with. And you're better off.
- [29:30]
A
Yeah, if we could just. Some global standard would be nice. I think Signal would be great. But I guess that's not going to happen.
- [29:36]
B
I don't know. So every time you run into this, you do what everyone does, is you kind of Google it. Right. So whether it's something like, for example, like, okay, so what's the one app that is third party app that does text messaging like mms, SMS and works everywhere. And the answer to that question is there is no such thing.
- [29:54]
A
No, there isn't.
- [29:55]
B
Or you do something like. That's not what it says. You have to go down the rabbit holes. Right. Or okay, I just want to press a button from any app on Android and have it display a menu of all of the AirPlay compatible speakers in my apartment or whatever. And I'm not saying there isn't a solution in this case, but there isn't. Right? I mean, there isn't and it stinks because I don't mind doing the extra work if I could just get it to work. But these things are orchestrated such that you. They're not. They're designed so you can't get it to work.
- [30:30]
A
In technology, any sentence that begins with I just wanna is doomed. To disappointment and sadness.
- [30:37]
B
Yep.
- [30:38]
A
I just wanna.
- [30:39]
B
You could just taste the salt of your tears. I hope that's what you want, because that's what's gonna happen.
- [30:46]
A
Hey, I wanna. You don't have to let me. But I would like to take a break right now. Would that be okay?
- [30:50]
B
Yeah, of course. I don't have to let you. I could. Could prevent this. You could.
- [30:55]
A
You could say. Well, but wait, first I want to talk about Canary.
- [30:58]
B
No, I'm not going to do that. Actually, I can't do it real quick because there's nothing to say. That one's just bug fixes. There's nothing going on there and I just.
- [31:08]
C
Bug fixes for the early, early release version.
- [31:11]
B
No one can ever explain what Canary is or why it exists. Nobody knows.
- [31:15]
A
So wait a minute. You said there were four new builds. There's dev, there's beta, there's Canary. What's the fourth one?
- [31:20]
B
Release Preview.
- [31:21]
A
Oh, she's Louise. All right, we're going to take a little break so you can wipe the sweat from your brow. I know we've been making you work on this.
- [31:32]
B
Stop trying.
- [31:34]
A
I just want to.
- [31:37]
B
You lost me right there.
- [31:41]
A
Paul Thurad is in Berlin for ifa. Richard Campbell's back home in Madeira park in beautiful British Columbia. And you are watching Windows Weekly, our show today, brought to you by US Cloud. Oh, the number one Microsoft Unified support replacement. You've heard us talking about US Cloud for a few months now. They are quite literally the global leader in third party Microsoft support for enterprises. They now support 50 of the Fortune 500. And there's a good reason. Switching to US Cloud could save your business 30 to 50% over Microsoft Unified or Premier support. It's also faster. Two times faster. Average time to resolution versus Microsoft. But now US Cloud is excited to tell you about a new offering their Azure cost optimization services. So be honest, when was the last time you evaluated your Azure usage? If it's been a while, you know you probably have some Azure sprawl, a little spend creep going on. Good news. Saving on Azure is easier than you think with US Cloud. US Cloud offers an eight week Azure Engagement powered by VBOX that identifies key opportunities to reduce costs across your entire Azure environment. With expert guidance, you're going to get access to US cloud senior engineers with an average of over 16 years with Microsoft products. And then at the end of those eight weeks, your interactive dashboard will identify, rebuild and downscale opportunities and unused resources, allowing you to reallocate those precious IT dollars towards needed resources or even Better invest your Azure savings into US Cloud's Microsoft support like a few of US Cloud's other customers, and completely eliminate your unified spend. The savings just keeps on going. Ask Sam, the technical operations manager at Bed Gaming B E D e. He gives us Cloud 5 stars, saying, quote, we found some things that have been running for three years which no one was checking. Those VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month. Not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend on Azure, but once you get to 40 or $50,000 a month, it really starts to add up. Yeah, end quote. It's simple. Stop overpaying for Azure, identify and eliminate Azure creep and and boost your performance all in eight weeks with US Cloud. Visit uscloud.com, book a call today to find out how much your team can save. That's uscloud.com to book a call today and get faster Microsoft Support for less. USCloud.com thank you USCloud, for supporting Windows Weekly. And now back to the gang of two. It's just two, but it's a powerful, powerful gang.
- [34:39]
C
It's a gang.
- [34:40]
A
It's a gang.
- [34:41]
B
It's a gang. You're a gang.
- [34:43]
A
More than one's a gang.
- [34:46]
B
So we just mentioned Windows Share, the app that nobody uses. And here's another app that nobody uses, although I have used this Windows 10 and now Windows 11 have something called the Mobile Plans app, which you will only see if you have a Nano SIM card or an ESIM capability inside.
- [35:04]
C
The computer in your laptop or tablet.
- [35:06]
B
Right.
- [35:07]
C
You can put it in that app appears.
- [35:10]
B
Yep. And the point of this, which I have to say even at the time sounded a little arcane, was that you could browse a list of mobile carriers that offered data sim, usually pay as you go plans, but I think you could also sign up for longer term things. And the idea was that for the next week or whatever it is, I'm going to buy whatever amount of gigabytes now of data and use it and that will be it. You know, like you, you can do pay as you go esims and things like that in your phone, etc.
- [35:40]
C
Yeah, just didn't. I don't know why they would bother with a physical SIM at all just to ESIM the whole thing.
- [35:45]
B
Well, it just, I mean, it started long ago enough that maybe we didn't. ESIMs were not that common or whatever, and I don't know. But yeah, I mean, and that was part of the problem because one of the nice things About ESIM today is that you can just, you know, I could have shown up in Germany and been like, oh, wow, my connection is terrible here. I need to do something. I could just download an esim, right? You know, buy one, get it, do it.
- [36:06]
C
You know, one of dozens of carriers that provide ESIMs in the air.
- [36:10]
B
You can shop for price. You don't have to like go to a store, you don't have to be.
- [36:13]
C
At the airport, you don't have to talk to anybody.
- [36:15]
B
Yeah, do it whenever you want. I do this all the time. But the interesting thing about that is that how do you do that in Windows? And so actually they have been almost contorting. They've been upgrading Windows so that it could do this. And they, Microsoft have been working with wireless carriers around the world so that they can. Will support that. So if you think about the Airlos or whatever it is, the Nomads, whatever the ESIM companies are, but also just the big carriers too, right? Like Verizon or whatever, here in the United States, they have all these different methods through which you can download and then configure an ESIM onto your. Usually it's a phone or maybe a tablet, but now also a computer and some, you know, it could be like a QR code. You scan it with a camera perhaps, or whatever. It's all different ways to do it. But this is happening. And so they're not, they're not killing it immediately, but sometime between now and the end of February of next year, they will turn this feature off, basically. And because you won't need it, you'll be able to do this right through settings.
- [37:16]
C
Yeah, it's not taking any functionality away, really. Just an icon that you never needed in the first place.
- [37:20]
B
Yeah. And actually so in some ways this is better because not because it puts the onus of finding it on you, but rather because that app was not the complete picture of what was available. It was just whatever companies had kind of partnered with Microsoft. Right. So now you can just do whatever you want. And so presumably I haven't tried this yet, but I'm not sure one of these has one. But I could put like a Google Fi data SIM in here. Esim, it should work fine, right? Because it works. It works with phones, works with tablets, whatever. So not a big deal, but I feel like a lot of people hearing this be like, what is this thing called? And they kind of, they'll start searching, like, I don't see this. You can find it in the store. So if you go, if you don't have a computer that has a SIM or an ESIM capability. If you just go to the Microsoft Store and search for mobile plans and.
- [38:10]
C
The main thing the computer has is a cellular radio, right? If you have a cellular radio and antenna, then you will have the ability to do this. If you don't have those things, you can't do this.
- [38:20]
B
I mean, you could download the app doesn't do anything. I try it won't work.
- [38:24]
C
It'll probably complain bitterly or crash.
- [38:28]
B
I want to get online. Help me. So there's that. Actually, I think I'm going to continue the trend and say, and speaking of apps nobody uses again, Microsoft started adding something called Windows Backup to Windows 11 a couple of years ago. I think they've since added it to Windows 10. It has since become a key part of the strategy for moving individuals from 10 to 11 as part of this big migration that's about to happen, apparently as Windows 10 sells off into end of life or end of support. And yeah, it's pretty terrible, frankly. It's a big part of what I would call the nagware experience in Windows today. So right now, I guarantee you, if I open this thing up, Give it a second. If you go into the Settings app, you'll probably see this is taking a really time to come up. Actually didn't do it. That's interesting. Usually when I bring up the Settings app, it. It gives me like this kind of yellow bar that's like, hey, you should back up. You're not backed up. You should back up, you know, and you don't have to click that. I don't understand what the point of it is. It automatically does this in the background. You know, you don't have to do it. So you can run the app. Now, this is one everyone will have. And if you do run Windows Backup, you'll kind of see what it does. And the UI has changed. So now they've had the transfer to new PC capability I was talking about, which is, for today, makes more sense or is more relevant for people on Windows 10 because they might be upgrading. But if you click on the backup this PC choice, you'll see the interface we've had now for a couple of years, which is not a lot of backing up here, frankly. But there is a. Well, you know, it's not even. Well, no, it is a front end. So there's a front end to the OneDrive folder backup capability. And on this particular. Again, this is one of those things that irritates me. The UI is a Little different depending on the computer. But on this particular computer, I actually have all 6, 5. Sorry. Of the folders that I could back up, I can actually do it here. On some computers I actually have to go into OneDrive to toggle this on or off, but whatever, let's not get into that little wormhole. But it will remember which apps and. Or which apps you've installed from the store and which of those apps you pinned to Start and. Or the taskbar. Now, it doesn't it back those up in the traditional sense, like there's not a copy of the app somewhere. But what will happen is if you do a. Not a migration, I guess you just. You restore from a backup as part of Windows setup. After you get to the desktop, Windows will over time start downloading those apps from the store. So you'll get them right after the fact, if that makes sense. And if you were pinning them in a certain way to your taskbar under Start menu, those will appear as well. So that's useful. It does some subset that no one will ever document of Windows settings and preferences. And then I don't know why they call this out separately, but there are credentials associated with your Microsoft account. So for example, WI fi, network passwords, accounts and passwords, and so forth. So if you sign in with a Microsoft account, which you'd have to do, by the way, to use this feature or a work or school account, like an Enter id, those things already happen. So, like this, this whole thing to me is a little weird. I think the only thing that's kind of unique to it in some, well, apps and settings, I guess, technically. But it's not all your apps and it's also not all your settings. So it's kind of a typical Microsoft experience, if you think about it. But some, yes, some. Which ones nobody knows. So, you know, we'll see, see what happens. Let's just restore it and see what happens. You know, you get some of them. But they're bringing this to businesses now, commercial entities.
- [42:12]
C
I assume it's a small business thing because by default, if you're set up in M365, your administrator controls all this anyway.
- [42:19]
B
Yep, yep. I don't, I don't understand this coming to. So there's a version that's called Windows Backer for organizations. Yeah, I mean, obviously if your organization does not want you to have this, you're not going to see it. That's fine, I suppose for, you know, for people in businesses who are getting a new PC. Obviously that thing's going to be. Well, typically that thing would be paved over by your it before you get it. Or maybe there's something that happens once you sign in, whatever. But I suppose mostly what this is for is, you know, maybe you had a cute background or you know, whatever color scheme or something you liked and it just makes it a little bit easier and that's one less support call that they're going to get. So, you know, because people will do that.
- [43:09]
C
They'll.
- [43:09]
B
It's like, all right, I did everything you told me to do, but my background's, you know, black. It's not the pretty flower I used to have or whatever, you know, and so they make the call or they send the email and it's. People spend time on it and it's like, well, just let them do it themselves. You know, it's like a self service thing. So it's okay. It's not great, but it's okay.
- [43:26]
C
Yeah, this definitely seems to fit in the middle ground because you know, traditionally you're using intune and autopilot and if you have to replace a machine or something catastrophic happens, you just like blast it and it rebuilds itself instantly. Like yeah, that's already done. So I don't know where this niche exactly fits, but it sounds like a run as I ought to do.
- [43:48]
B
I would be. Well, I was going to say I would be surprised if you ended up doing that. I suspect what's going to happen is you'll look into it and say, yeah, forget it, this is not worth it. But you know what? I could.
- [43:59]
C
This could be a lot like mobile plans.
- [44:03]
B
If you think about like the magnitude of moving from active directory to intune. Right. And how different.
- [44:10]
C
Which really means entra.
- [44:11]
B
And yes, they're very different. Right. And. But there's a, there is a simplification that occurs there that's kind of useful. I feel like this is the same sort of thing, but it's like a simplification to the point of like stupidity. It's like self service versus, you know, it's like, do I even have an organization? You know, it's like, what do you. What are you guys doing? Other than forcing me to do certain things? Like I don't. Maybe it's just like pumping gas yourself versus, you know, back in the day, used to have a guy come out he. They would come out and check your oil and, and re. And fill up your fluids and things. They would do other things and eventually that went away because it's expensive and then eventually that guy goes away because that's expensive too. Right. Now you do it. It's like you want me to handle the gas. Like really, you know.
- [44:58]
C
Well, in fol. Talk about the intune price all the time.
- [45:00]
B
I don't.
- [45:01]
C
Not sure entirely why, but they do.
- [45:04]
B
Yeah.
- [45:04]
C
You know, it does do quite a bit for them, right?
- [45:08]
B
Oh yeah. No, yeah.
- [45:09]
C
And I gotta tell you, like Entra is not optional. Especially in this day and age. If you're on the Internet. I've got some great stories. I still unsure I'm gonna make the shows of phishing attacks that were successful and stole credentials. But then when the hacker attempted to use it conditional access said oh that's a teleport. You couldn't possibly have done this account locked.
- [45:29]
B
Right.
- [45:29]
C
Like just second order protections and things like.
- [45:32]
B
Yep.
- [45:33]
C
Boy oh boy. Like the arguments against Entra are kind of gone. Like it's.
- [45:37]
B
And look, I mean other than job security and just familiarity. I mean anyone who's used active directory or managed Active directory, when you look at how much you know, it's flatter simpler the level of oversight that you might want to have on a mobile device. And then I kind of applied that thinking to a computer. It's like, you know, this isn't. This isn't too bad. I mean it's. You know, it actually makes sense and.
- [46:03]
C
Active industry has its origin in the 90s are crying loud shipped out in the 2000s. Like we were thinking differently then. There's a lot.
- [46:11]
B
Oh yeah.
- [46:11]
C
I can't tell you how many big organizations I've run into that are still untangling choices they made in AD in 2006.
- [46:20]
B
I be the biggest. Well one of the big complaints against NT at the time was like it doesn't even have a real directory service. You know, it's like. And now it's like it better not have a directory service. What's going on there? Like that's a. That's some. That's some complexity, you know.
- [46:36]
C
Yeah. And yeah.
- [46:38]
B
Not.
- [46:38]
C
Not great complexity. So yeah.
- [46:40]
B
But the MDM stuff.
- [46:41]
C
Not that you can fully get rid of AD once you're moving into Entra. AD sort of lives with you and your organization anyway.
- [46:46]
B
But.
- [46:47]
C
But you're definitely trying to cut off Crofton more than anything. I think fine folks now that at least in the IT space they're just trying to get rid of group policies that they don't understand anymore.
- [46:57]
B
There's so many of course this and they all, you know, conflict with each other and nobody has any idea anymore. Yeah. And especially if it's been around For a long time. Which.
- [47:07]
C
Oh yeah, the person who created that and probably did it accidentally through a wizard. They don't work here anymore. And nobody.
- [47:13]
B
No, they're in a mental asylum somewhere.
- [47:15]
C
Because only if they ever realized what they did.
- [47:19]
B
Yeah. They just can't deal with it anymore.
- [47:21]
C
Yeah. But again, I'm back to like where does this tool live? What is this backup for organizations for?
- [47:28]
B
Right. So where it lives. Yeah, it's that look, the data is actually really minimal. Right. If you think about. It's basically just text, it's tiny. You know, other than the actual. If you turn on Folder Backup for OneDrive, obviously that's whatever the contents of that stuff is. So this is kind of goofy. It is in OneDrive technically. Right. For that user. But it's not. You can't tell them, well, here's how you go find it. You can't say, well, here's how you might. Maybe you want to delete it. That place does not exist, at least not publicly accessible. So probably a security thing, frankly. But yeah, technically it lives in OneDrive. And that's part of the, the rationale for the requirement both for consumers and businesses that you have to sign in with a managed account because that's part of what you get with that. That's where that stuff can go. So it's a small, small reason, but it's one of the. Okay, so now let's turn on to things that people do use potentially. Dolby announced today, I believe that Dolby Vision 2 is coming. So it's coming first to smart TVs. It will, but it will come to computers and devices. And this is basically kind of their custom. I'm going to call it HDR for lack of a better term.
- [48:47]
C
Is this necessary?
- [48:52]
B
Not in a day to day business sense. Right.
- [48:55]
C
I guess in that sense. But this is the same thing with Dolby Audio was hey, stereo is not good enough, we can do it better. And so that was like, hey, HDR is not good enough. We can do it better.
- [49:06]
B
Yeah, yeah. So the way that you do this better is you do things like enable HDR on content that is not hdr. You could do upscaling. So you could do per frame. Yes. And so a lot of it has to do with. Well, a is selling something to PC makers or device makers is something that they can put on there and throwing a bunch of a list of features or whatever. But yeah, it's just an advanced display technology that.
- [49:38]
C
But does it actually affect the hardware?
- [49:42]
B
In other words, do you need specific.
- [49:44]
C
Hardware for this does a vendor have to license Dolby Vision for them? Because you know, the argument has always been, well, the customer will prefer this device because it has Dolby in it versus the ones that don't.
- [49:54]
B
Yep. Right. I don't know if not only your still exists, what's DTS and why do I want that or you know, there's a lot of Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos content out there, which is kind of nice. Dolby Vision 2, I think the, or any of these specs really when you think about it, because Dolby vision is over 10 years old, it might even be close to 15 years old. But I don't think they, there's no, almost no need to have a like a set of hardware requirements per se, even though I'm sure that does exist because it's just going to be on new devices. Right. It's not going to be something like, you know, I have this old laptop and it's like, oh, you got your Dolby Vision 2 upgrade. You know, it's like, yeah, you're not getting that. Like you, you have to get a new computer because they will have whatever level of performance in the graphics chipset.
- [50:41]
C
That will handle well, there you lies a whole other game where you want why vendors want to play because as the new ones come out, you get to sell new hardware.
- [50:47]
B
Exactly. Yeah. No, this is a win, win for everybody except the consumer. Yeah, exactly. I will say like, well, not for whatever reason but obviously if this actually computer even has hdr, let alone Dolby Vision, it does. It has it for video streaming only. So you know, if you have the full HDR experience, none of it's enabled by default. Right. And the default setting if you do enable it is turn it off when you're on battery, you know, so even in the world where people might want this, it's semi niche in a way. Although I don't know, it does seem to make a difference in video games for that's worth if you play games. So for gaming, PCs may be a big deal. But yeah, I think this is something we've all done. You're like, well obviously I want to use this thing, I have this computer, I spent a lot of money on it. You turn it on, you're like, I don't want that on. You know, you don't really day to day, you really kind of don't want hdr, you know, personally.
- [51:49]
C
Well, not if it impacts performance or turns cranks up fans or you know, any of those things.
- [51:54]
B
Yep, yep. But in a game you know, plugged into the wall. You're like, yeah, actually, then maybe I do want it. Right.
- [52:00]
C
But I'm kind of at a point now where it's like, if the YouTube video fires up in 7:20, you notice right away.
- [52:06]
A
Right?
- [52:06]
C
And, oh, yeah, and 4K is noticeably better. Like, I don't know if our eyes are gotten better, if the screens have gotten better, but I'm starting to be more aware of the quality of the video.
- [52:18]
B
I think in Microsoft Edge, I believe Microsoft Edge does this. There's a setting where it will improve the video quality. It's probably in. But you have to be plugged in, if I'm not mistaken. And you know, for the same reasons. Right. So it's. Let me see if I can find it. I can't find it right now. But yeah, I'm pretty sure there's a feature in here where it's, you know, when you're connected to power, we can make videos that you stream online look better. Right. That's cool. So it's, you know, it's something you just kind of get. And then as things move forward, you'll probably be able to do that on power as chipsets improve, et cetera, et cetera. But yeah, not a huge deal. But they haven't. It's just been a long time since they've done anything with it, so it's kind of interesting. On that note, okay, so since we last spoke, two other PC makers have released their earnings. They're on kind of like what I would call off quarters. You know, they're not doing, you know, June through September. They're doing July through October for some reason, because months don't matter or something. I don't know. Whatever.
- [53:19]
C
Fiscal years are funny.
- [53:20]
B
Yeah. Well, sometimes you get ones like the quarter ending June 30, 2025, you're like, okay, good. And then you get one is like the quarter ending June 28. You're like, wait, what? Why? What are you doing? So there's that kind of stuff. But then you get these guys like HP and Dell. It's like the quarter ending July 31st or whatever. You're like, okay, I guess we're doing this today. So Lenovo had announced their earnings earlier. They had a record quarter. It was blockbuster. The PC business brought in a boat. Yeah, they're doing great in the cloud too. Right? And they're doing great with devices. They're kind of doing great across the board. But the PC business is doing great.
- [54:00]
C
Hey, crew. It did grow machines market share.
- [54:06]
B
They grow usage it's getting bigger then they're already the number one player, which is kind of interesting. So PC revenues for Lenovo were up 18% in the quarter. They don't line up exactly, obviously with HP and Dell, but Dell also a blockbuster quarter, almost 100% because of AI and servers, not because of PCs. Their PC business is almost flat. It only went up about 1%, but they still earned about $12.5 billion, which is pretty close to Lenovo. But I think it's because of the mix, almost. I don't know if it's 3/4, but if it isn't, it's close to 3/4 of their sales are to businesses, not consumers.
- [54:47]
C
Okay, yeah, no, and they're going to check big on the lease deals and things like that. Like they're doing their best to lock businesses in and replace machines.
- [54:55]
B
Yeah, there's not much been going on there from my perspective, but it's solid business. It's fine, you know, but HP, most of their earnings, they're basically PCs and printers. And printers aren't exactly going gangbusters these days. And they had a pretty good quarter too. Right. So 9.9 billion in their case. And a healthier mix, I would say, of consumer and business PCs. But the growth there was 6%, which is honestly for this kind of business is pretty solid. That's good. You know, none of them had like a down note, per se, about PCs. Right.
- [55:33]
C
A lot of interesting. I mean, clearly they're motivated to make sure the category is fine, but I don't know that it really is.
- [55:39]
B
Yeah, it's weird to me, you know, like HP split right. In half several years ago and there's an HPE out there. That is what HP would have been if, you know, it would have been combined Right. With the two of those businesses is probably bigger than Lenovo or Dell. But they did. They went into two separate directions. So. Good. Again.
- [56:01]
C
Yeah. I don't know that anybody understands the splits.
- [56:03]
B
Right.
- [56:04]
C
Like, it's just confused.
- [56:06]
B
I actually went back. I don't remember why I did this, but I. Within the last month I. Something caused me to go look that up. And having read the rationale for why they did at the time, I have no idea why they split up. Like, I don't actually. I actually just looked at it. I was like, okay, yeah.
- [56:25]
C
Honest to God, I think it's about concealing revenue while doing annual reports. You create business units that just make it confusing for folks so you can hide your weak groups and cover them with stronger groups.
- [56:40]
B
There was some Kind of a controversy that they had made an acquisition that had lied about their revenues and that once they brought them in house, they had to restate things and they got into kind of a problem. But it was on the enterprise side. And I don't know that that was why. But I feel like those things happen around the same time.
- [56:57]
A
The market makes them split, too. The market wants them to split, right? The market says, yeah, it might have been.
- [57:02]
B
Maybe it's just related stock price. So maybe just the company had been moving for some reason.
- [57:06]
A
If it's too high, I'm not sure I understand it either. But I feel like the market says.
- [57:12]
B
Oh, no, no, no.
- [57:13]
A
Your share value. Oh, I know what it is. You lose retail investors because they say, well, I'm not going to spend a thousand dollars for a share. So if you make it $500, split.
- [57:23]
C
The share to do that too.
- [57:24]
B
Yeah.
- [57:25]
A
Oh, this is not a stock split. What is this?
- [57:27]
C
No, they actually, they actually come.
- [57:29]
A
Oh, yeah, yeah, you're right. I forgot about that one.
- [57:31]
C
Yeah, yeah. And then the argument would be, this is a product line that's not going to grow rapidly. This is a product line that is growing rapidly. And I don't want to hold down the fast grow.
- [57:40]
A
I'll give you an example from ripped from today's headline. When you got a company making currywurst sauce and you have a company making ground up sawdust cheese, you don't want them to be. It's confused. I'm talking about Heinz, Kraft, which I think the equity investors made them pair up and now they're saying, yeah, this was a bad idea.
- [58:07]
C
They're splitting up KP Mac and Cheese forever.
- [58:10]
A
Man, HP split made a lot of sense. Actually, it was.
- [58:13]
B
Okay, I don't remember the name of the acquisition that caused them problems.
- [58:18]
A
Was it Overture? Was it the Microsoft one?
- [58:22]
B
Something like that, yeah.
- [58:23]
A
And then the guy, the guy died in a yacht fire. But a yacht sank.
- [58:29]
C
Suspicious.
- [58:31]
A
Well, it was weird because it was immediately after his trial.
- [58:36]
B
Right. Was he tied to a cinder block that had an HP logo on it or something?
- [58:41]
A
No, he won a trial, went out to celebrate in the yacht, and then Karma, baby. I shouldn't joke.
- [58:49]
B
That's crazy.
- [58:50]
A
I should not joke. Can I do. Yeah, it's one of those little things I like to do every once in a while we call an ad break. Paying the bill, paying the bills, paying the bills. Our show today, this wonderful, wonderful Windows Weekly show that you're enjoying so much. And by the way, I apologize, I missed a little bit of it. Because my 20amp circuit went.
- [59:13]
C
Oh, you popped a breaker.
- [59:15]
A
I've been sitting in the dark for the last half hour. So everything went down. That's why I disappeared. But I'm back. I had to go outside, turn the entire house off and on. Nice.
- [59:27]
C
Did you try rebooting it?
- [59:29]
A
Everything rebooted.
- [59:30]
B
That's amazing.
- [59:31]
A
Everything rebooted in the entire home.
- [59:33]
B
That's funny.
- [59:35]
A
But we're good now. I believe we're good now. Windows Weekly, brought to you this hour by Threat Locker. I don't have to tell you because you listen to our shows. You know ransomware is just killing businesses worldwide. And one of the chief ways people are getting infected phishing emails. But we've also been talking on security now about malvertizing infected downloads, malicious websites. There's always the good old RDP exploit. But look, the point is, you don't want to be the next victim. ThreatLocker Zero Trust Platform takes a proactive deny by default. That's the key deny by default approach. It blocks every unauthorized action, protecting you from both known and unknown threats. And it's trusted by some of the biggest global enterprises, companies like JetBlue, the Port of Vancouver, just down the road a piece from you, Richard uses Threat Locker. Threat Locker shields them and can shield you from everything. Zero Day exploits supply chain attacks and provides a complete audit trail for compliance. Threadlocker's innovative ring fencing technology isolates critical applications from weaponization, stopping ransomware and limiting lateral movement within your network. Threat Locker works across all industries. Of course, it supports Windows environments, but Mac environments too, and heterogeneous environments. It provides 24.7us based support and enables comprehensive visibility and control. And that's so important these days for compliance. Mark Tolson, IT director for another vulnerable entity, the city of Champaign, Illinois, says, quote, threat Locker provides that extra key to block anomalies that nothing else can do. If bad actors got in and tried to execute something, I take comfort in knowing Threat Locker will stop that. End quote. Stop worrying about cyber threats. Get unprecedented protection, quickly, easily and cost effectively with ThreatLocker. Visit threatlocker.com TWIT to get a free 30 day trial and learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's threatlocker.com TWIT. We thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly. We take you back now to the wrathskeller Rapal Thurat.
- [61:59]
B
I'm working on a pooch. Is that the word?
- [62:01]
A
No, a pooch. The beer hall pooch. Yes, the word.
- [62:08]
C
A really bad book.
- [62:10]
A
Yeah, go to jail for a few months.
- [62:12]
B
Kind of a manifesto adjacent kind of a thing.
- [62:15]
A
Oh boy, oh boy. Yeah, they don't like it when you bring that up. So let's just. Oh well, what's going on in the fabulous world of Microsoft?
- [62:30]
B
Well first I want to reference Microsoft's past by referencing what happened to Google.
- [62:36]
A
Today because oh yes, this is a huge story. It actually happened in the middle of security now and I had to break in because we've been waiting for Judge Mehta's decision.
- [62:45]
B
There's never good timing for this kind of thing but man, this is not the right thing.
- [62:50]
A
They ruled that Google was a monopoly almost a year ago. And he's been thinking all that time, what the hell do we do? And the Department of Justice proposed a huge draconian search. 20 ideas, selling Chrome, selling Android, giving the search index to third parties, taking away Apple's $20 billion in revenue, annual.
- [63:13]
B
Revenue, which by the way the court found to have been illegal. That was part of that ruling from last year. That's illegal. It's easy, you just take it away. What's your job as a federal. Remind me, are you upholding some kind of a constitution? He pointed out, well, the laws of the United States, I think this is interesting.
- [63:32]
A
These companies now are so big and so dominant that it's somewhat ties the court's hands. He pointed out, yeah, I could stop those payments to Apple and Mozilla and Samsung and others but that would harm those companies. I mean put Mozilla out of business. There'd be no Firefox without there. That's 85% of the rate.
- [63:49]
B
That's not what this case was about though. Who cares? What are you talking about?
- [63:52]
A
Well he was trying not. It was like the, you don't allow.
- [63:57]
B
The abuse to continue because it's gonna harm some. Like what are you talking about? It's like, yeah, my husband might be a murderer but don't send him to jail, he's got two kids over here.
- [64:05]
A
Well that's a good point. That's a good, when you put it.
- [64:08]
B
That way, that's crazy. One of the other crazy things he brought up was like, well you know, Google doesn't just do business in the United States. I mean if we took Crumb away, that would take Crumb away from people in other countries too. Uh huh. It's a U.S. company. You're just like, what are you talking about? That's crazy. So look, I wrote this thing up, just straightforward news story, but it's been Kind of simmering. And so today, when I had five seconds, I finally wrote something and all I could think about was this John F. Kennedy thing. Remember, they're going to go to the moon. And what did he say? He said, we don't do these things because they're easy. We do them because they are hard.
- [64:47]
A
So you're in the camp, and there is a big camp that says Judge Mehta gave him a slap on the wrist. Did not.
- [64:54]
B
Basically, it's not even a slap on the wrist. It was a power.
- [64:56]
A
The only thing he said is they can't do the exclusive deals that they do with other Android handset makers that say, well, right, but if you want the Google Play store, you have to.
- [65:06]
B
Look. I'm sorry, but the point. Look what they were found. They were found of having an illegal monopoly in search. Yep. And one of the ways you prevent that abuse from occurring is to look at the way that those things are distributed. Look, I'm literally not saying they should have taken Chrome away from Google. That's not my point at all. These specifics kind of don't matter. But I am literally saying you stop paying Apple, like, literally, because that behavior was literally found to be illegal by the same judge.
- [65:37]
A
But he said that would only strengthen Google's monopoly because then Mozilla's Firefox would go away. And that would.
- [65:44]
B
Mozilla's Firefox is not harming Google's monopoly or helping it.
- [65:49]
A
I'm sorry, I would be unhappy. That's what I use. Because I don't want to support Google.
- [65:53]
B
No, I don't want them going away. But that's not really my point. I'm just saying it's. All you've done is. What you've done is wasted years, found legally that this company is abusing a monopoly and is harming other companies. It's harming competition in general. It's harming consumers. You're like, all right, now what are we going to do about it? Nothing. Nothing. We do these things because they're easy. We do nothing. He said this was like, you know, the democracy is. What did. Was it Rumfeld said? He said, democracy is messy. Is that what he said? Yeah, something like that. That's exactly what Mehta said about. He said, yeah, this would be messy. It'd be messy. Taking Grum away, just messy. We don't want to deal with that mess. I got golf to play. I don't want to do this. I've never seen anything quite like this. You know, it is fair to say that every major antitrust case in the United States over the past, I don't know, since forever, since my lifetime, has ended with a complete whimper. But, man, this one is really notable because it was the same judge, right? The judge in the Microsoft case was going to break that company in half. And he was taken off the case. He didn't get a chance to do that. But that was happening in this case. Very clearly something bad was going to happen. This guy was so aggressively going against Google at every turn, you know, so it's like you're waiting a year. It's like, man, he's writing something great. This is going to be amazing. And what he wrote was gobbledygook, like it's insanity. It's so far off the mark, it makes me wonder what happened.
- [67:36]
C
Well, and the expectation was that he would do something draconian and then the negotiation would begin for a consent decree.
- [67:42]
B
Exactly as it happened before. Exactly. But now, you know, Google, you could hear them laughing from here. Right? And the thing is, but what they have to do is come out with some public statement with like, well, we strongly disagree with the court's determination. And they're like, I mean, I'm sorry, sorry, this is very serious. I mean, like, what, are you kidding me?
- [68:03]
A
Yeah, they won. I mean, it's a, it's a victory. There's no doubt about that.
- [68:06]
B
Now, this is. Gets into a weird area where trying to think if there's an example of this I can think of not really where I think the DOJ should appeal. Like this is to any other judge. Right. Looking at this objectively, looking at the thing he wrote last August and then looking at the thing he wrote today, whatever, it's like, are we talking about the same companies here? What is this? So, again, super clear, because I don't actually, I don't have answers. Like, I don't, you know, taking away Chrome, maybe taking away Android. Well, taking away, yeah, famously, Apple. Honestly, I could make a case of that one. But a lot of the stuff, it's not. The specifics aren't really what's important. It's just that you've literally identified illegal behavior, and your job is to find a remedy that prevents that illegal behavior from continuing. And you have done nothing to do that. And that is. That is a. You are not doing a job. I'm pretty sure he swore an oath. I'm pretty sure that's how you get the job. And he is not doing the job. That's crazy. It just doesn't make sense. He was so clear headed, when he rolled against the company a year ago, I was like, yep. I was like, this is going to get weird. And yeah, it did get weird, but not just not the way I thought it was very strange.
- [69:35]
A
Okay, we should get you on Twitter.
- [69:37]
C
Because.
- [69:39]
A
That'S an interesting point of view.
- [69:42]
B
Yeah, I mean look, whenever there's a ruling antitrust, you're going to find people and companies that will kind of support either side of the argument. Right. And I, whatever. I mean I, I feel very strongly about big tech and their abuses and whatever. And yeah, so I have opinions there. But like I, as far as like what this guy should have done, that's kind of beside the point. I never really even thought that path too much. It was more like, all right, well this is what he's talking about. And this is what the DOJ in the states recommended. This is Google had their own recommendations.
- [70:22]
A
Yeah, he actually slapped the DOJ around saying what they asked for was outrageous.
- [70:27]
B
Right.
- [70:27]
A
Chrome was outrageous.
- [70:30]
B
Yeah. Okay.
- [70:32]
C
I guess just because it's not a business. But the bottom line here is this was part of a negotiation to have Google agree to constraints on its behavior. That's monopolistic.
- [70:44]
B
And now 20% of Google's ad revenue, search revenues, if you will butcher ads can be. No, sorry, that's not true. 20% of Google's traffic through search is in Chrome. So there's the making of a number there where you could kind of just start doing math and whatever, you know, ads are occurring, et cetera, et cetera. So it's not the biggest piece of it. But the, I mean, but he literally said between all the agreements that Google has with Android makers, phone makers and Apple that they've nailed down the distribution channel for their search. Like they, they're dominant in search just for that reason. Not that it's not the best search. That's not what I mean. But I mean literally if you took away those agreements, yeah, there would be a fair marketplace for search. Now honestly I thought they should have.
- [71:43]
A
Split up the ad business because I think Google, because it both buys and sells is. There is definitely bad behavior there. That's a separate case though. So that may.
- [71:53]
B
Yeah, so there is a spread. There's a separate case. That one's just as serious and they're just as guilty and they are just as much a monopoly or whatever, but we'll see. And you know, there's the epic thing which they lost badly. There's other countries and obviously the EU and all this stuff and it's great. But I. This is not so much like, look, this is just an about face. That's the issue. It's like this guy, if you read. And I read it, I mean, I read this. Yeah. If you read what he wrote. He came down so hard in this company a year ago. And then you read this thing today and it's like, are we talking about the same judge? The same trial? What is this?
- [72:29]
C
We've also had the argument that they're coming at Google way too late because AI has disrupted the search market completely.
- [72:36]
B
Yeah. And I see this is. Unfortunately, that was part of his. That's part of what he wrote. And it's like, dude, you can't take a year to render a verdict and then say, see now, you should have waited two years. Maybe Google search would be gone. You know, it's like, what are you talking about? Come on, man.
- [72:51]
C
Well, and this was the argument with the. Windows has to spin off as a separate company within a few years. Windows was not relevant. You know, we got to it too late.
- [72:59]
B
Right. I would say the big difference between those two instances is that in the first case when. Because Microsoft made that argument. Technology moves fast. You know, things change. You don't know. Like we could disappear at any time. How are they doing today? Oh, they're the second biggest company. Yeah. So. Yes. But the thing that unseated them, which was actually a couple of things. No one saw it coming. No one saw it coming. The thing about AI is we do see it and there is that possibility. But the thing is, the problem is AI relies on data. And the best collector of data in the world is Google. Their best position to dominate this market. They haven't yet, but it's still happening. Right. And I just don't. You can't let someone. It's like, I'll just keep going back to the terrible example. I'm sorry to keep using this one, but it's like, okay, yeah, my husband killed this guy, but that guy might have turned out to be a really bad person. You don't know. And it's like, you're right. We don't know. And we can't rule based on that, you know, but he did. I. It's crazy. I. Google's most recent quarterly earnings, they made a point. There has been no impact at all on their revenues from AI going to taking away search from them. So. Right. It grew. Grew big time. It grew double digits. So. Okay. I guess it's a threat. You know, whatever. That was disappointing.
- [74:36]
A
Okay. Yeah. So I'm glad you actually brought this up because I, my initial reaction, I hadn't had a lot of time to think about it yesterday because it just broke.
- [74:44]
B
No, it happened late. And it was not.
- [74:46]
A
Was that. I mean, it was clear Google won. In fact, initially CNBC said Google will appeal. And I thought, really?
- [74:53]
B
Yeah. Well, they are going to. You have to do them. You go through the masquerade, right?
- [74:58]
A
Yeah. And there are some limitations on them, which they, you know, if they appeal, they can put off. They're apparently still thinking about it. But you're right. I think it's kind of. They're sitting around the boardroom giggling and going, oh my God, they definitely won.
- [75:11]
C
I mean, the stock market go the other way too.
- [75:12]
B
One guy's shooting coke out of his nose, the other guy's like, I just peed my pants. No one has any idea what's going.
- [75:16]
A
To go against them. That's a good point. And the stock market clearly said, oh, big victory for Google. And incidentally, Apple.
- [75:24]
B
Apple, exactly.
- [75:26]
A
But my reaction to it was that Judge Mehta, hands were tied because anything he would do would be so harmful. You know, he said Google did not use Chrome to build its monopoly. That was one of the things he said, we can't make him sell Chrome.
- [75:44]
B
But it is one of the elements it uses to maintain and potentially extend that monopoly. Which is meaning it's 20% of the. The distribution.
- [75:53]
A
Yeah, yeah. My initial reaction was anything that he did might be so harmful to other companies, these companies, that he felt like, you know, I can't do this. But you're right. I mean, one of the things is there is just like there was with Microsoft and their consent degree, a committee, an ombudsman, a board of six for six years.
- [76:13]
B
That will. But, yeah, they'll have that.
- [76:16]
A
Yeah, but what, but what are they going to do? Maybe that's, maybe that you didn't make.
- [76:20]
B
A, you guys didn't make a exclusive deal with like HTC or. They're not even around anymore, you know, like Motorola or something like. No, no, we have a deal with them and they, we give them a lot of money. But now there's no, it's not exclusive. It's like, okay, you're fine.
- [76:34]
A
Well, he did say what we're talking about. You can't tell people who use ASOP Android that they have and want the Play Store that they have to now make you the default search and the default browser and all that. They did take that, took that away, the buzz. Leave that as little as you could take away. Richard, what is your take on it.
- [76:52]
C
I think the part that John Schwimped, I think he probably got some pressure from outside forces and it's already difficult and he just.
- [77:01]
B
That's kind of what I was trying to imply. Like, I feel like someone kind of walked in the room and was like, this is going to go a different way.
- [77:07]
C
So just what's the difference between when he did his original ruling in a year from now? Well, there's been an administration change.
- [77:12]
B
Well, I don't know what is, what's the difference between black and white as a color? They're completely different. That's the difference, you know? Yeah, it was. It's a little off. Like, it's off. You know, look, if this guy had ruled differently and come down software and Google a year ago, you've been like, all right, we don't know what we're going to get here. This could be anything. But he was so strenuous against. It was such a contrast, so explicit. Yeah. It makes no sense. Hmm. Yeah. You look this up, you'll see Google is in the news today for another reason. And it has something to do with something. Something government wants them to not do something. And I think they're about to reach an agreement. I wonder if those things are probably not related. But it's kind of curious, that's all I'm saying. So I don't know. Also, this is kind of curious. I don't know if this is a rumor or just a fact, but Amazon, which has used AOSP to make their own kind of stupid Android type devices for a long time, at least a rumor that they're actually going to use a straight up Android. And why would they do that? Why would you even bother? And this, did they know this was coming? Is this like a. It's like, wait, it's like we can use Android now but not have to use like we could have the Play Store, which is what they really need. Right. But not use all those, like have Gmail on there. And they're like, oh, well, there you go. That sounds kind of interesting. Then maybe they could do that. Right. Because the big problem with those Android devices is you don't have the apps right now. They can solve that problem. So are those really. I mean, am I just seeing this is just conspiracy theory nonsense at this point? I don't actually have. I'm just talking, but I don't know. But I mean, it is kind of weird, you know, these things are all kind of happening together. I don't know. It's a little Weird. So I don't know. Look, the thing that happened to Microsoft 25, 30 years ago. 30, 30 years ago. 35 years ago. No, 25 years ago. 30 years. 25 years ago was amazing and dramatic and that judge got thrown off the case and then things changed. And then I think for Microsoft they had that near death moment and they realized like, okay, time to settle, let's talk, let's figure this out. And they did.
- [79:33]
C
But then that's Brad Smith and Bomber. But one would argue the company's never been the same. They don't have the latest set of moves with Satya trying to be number one in AI is the shaking off of the consent decree 24 years ago that. Because till now that's true. Microsoft comfortably was in second place on everything. Like that was the play.
- [79:58]
B
Yep. Yeah, that I can't explain. I mean Bill Gates has done this as kind of denied. Look, that never happened. You know, we didn't change. Yeah. There are these companies that kind of came up and did things that you would never have sat for a long time ago in the wake of this antitrust stuff. And in Europe too. Right. Which was also big. Yeah. Microsoft is definitely a different company. But I don't know. Anyway, Google has enough problems that this is not the end of anything per se. But this one felt like it was in the bag. Like I just don't quite understand how this went the other direction. That's so it.
- [80:37]
C
Well, it also speaks to you. If there has been manipulation, like this was stupid, you should have still come down on hard ruling and then made a deal and the deal's the deal. Like why make it so obvious?
- [80:51]
B
It just doesn't make sense. I did the DOJ overreach by suggesting that Google divest itself of Chrome. And then when that doesn't work, maybe we start looking at Android 2. I don't know. But you asked them, literally asked them to come back with things that would prevent the abuses I just outlined were illegal. And that would be one of the ways. I'm literally not saying it was the right thing to do or the thing to do or something. It certainly wasn't the only thing they suggested. But yeah, I mean this deal with Apple is the most painful one. This is one of the richest companies on earth. They don't, you know, Mozilla needs this money, but Apple doesn't.
- [81:35]
A
Yeah, neither Apple nor Samsung. I don't worry about them.
- [81:38]
B
Like that's crazy to keep that in place.
- [81:40]
A
He could have said that. He could have said, yeah, stop it to Apple. And Samsung.
- [81:45]
B
Yeah, I guess. Although, what's the legal basis for that? It's like, what's the legal basis for what he did? I really don't know. I think the real problem here is this. He literally has a legal requirement. It's to, you know, to uphold the law. And he ruled that this company had an illegal monopoly. He outlined how it was breaking the law. And if you look at the list of those things, he only addressed one of them and completely gave them a pass on the other six or whatever the number is, like, just walked away. It's bizarre. Again, you know, if it was a different judge, you'd be like, okay, you know, I guess we're seeing things a little differently, but same guy. Yeah, that's what doesn't make sense. So anyway, I don't really remember why this is here anymore. This will not become a regular feature of the show per se, but we do talk about insertification a lot. And it occurred to me, just maybe because I saw these things kind of back to back, like, I think we sometimes lose track of how this stuff mounts. Right. I think anyone listening or watching this will feel very strongly that online services prices seem to keep going up and up all the time now. They just seem to accelerate that. If you could make a graph, which you could, that would show the average price of whichever version of the Netflix subscription and what the price was over time, where it goes up, I think you would see it toward the end of the graph, toward today. There's more spikes, it's gone up more. That's what it feels like. And of course now we have so many of these things. It's like that death by a thousands cuts kind of thing. But there are different ways to kind of screw over customers, right? Like you don't just raise prices, like you just do things like, I don't really care about Prime Video per se, but I have been a Prime customer for ever since it was a thing. We use it all the time. And one of the unique things about that subscription is that you get this kind of combination of what I think of as like physical and digital perks or features or whatever. So Google ships you physical items, but then you get like Amazon Music for free or Amazon prime or whatever. Not for free. I mean, you're paying for the thing. But so when they came and added like ads to prime and then said, well, if you don't want ads, you can pay another five or six bucks a month and you could have the no ad version. It's like, but I did have the no ad version. That's what you had. And now you just changed. Kind of felt like they were changing the terms of the deal.
- [84:25]
C
This is shrinkflation. I think the price is same, but I take away some of the stuff.
- [84:30]
B
Yeah, right. In the physical world, you would see the bag of cookies got smaller instead of five. There were nothing small.
- [84:35]
C
The bag cooks exactly the same size, this cookie.
- [84:39]
B
There you go. Yeah. So YouTube is doing something like this now, too. And they just came out with this change where they said they're basically changing what it means to be in a family membership. So I don't do this, but I could, theoretically. I have a family. Right. I have a wife and kids. And so I could buy the YouTube Premium family thing and they could all be on it and we'd all get whatever the perks are, and I'm paying for it. Right. But now they're like, well, well, hold on a second. Are those people in your household, like, are they actually physically in the same place as you or is your kid in college maybe? Which they both were from it, you.
- [85:17]
C
Know, this is what Plex did.
- [85:18]
B
Yeah. And it's like, guys, what are you doing? What they're doing is turning the screws. Right. And so these things. Yeah. Oh, good. Please. I know. I. Yeah. If you didn't. That moment in time is the last time they ever sold a lifetime license to Plex to anybody. Because after everyone's like, no, screw you.
- [85:39]
C
Like, sorry, I'm meeting Netflix. This is what. Oh, Netflix.
- [85:42]
B
I'm sorry.
- [85:42]
C
Like, Netflix definitely did the enforcement.
- [85:44]
B
Oh, my God.
- [85:45]
C
And everybody said, we're all abandoning Netflix and they made more money.
- [85:50]
B
Everyone's doing it. And now what are you going to do? Yeah.
- [85:52]
C
Yeah. Although admittedly, Disney's talking about this big on the. Hey, I've watched everything on Netflix. Shut it off.
- [85:58]
B
I just.
- [85:58]
A
So I just signed potential risk of it.
- [86:01]
B
When I. When I review laptops, I always install Netflix and I find shows that are. And I pay for the highest tier to get this, because you need. You only get the stuff with the highest tier. 4K, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, whatever. I look for movies that have these things and look good, and I can kind of judge how good it sounds, how good it looks, whatever. Last time I signed in, this is like, a couple weeks ago, it said, hey, you're not in your household's location, you know, somewhere else. Like, you have to prove, like, well, we'll let you do this for a little while. And I'm like, I literally am the person that Pays this bill. What are you talking about? Like, so I had to go through a little authentication process where they emailed me, I entered a code, it came back. It's like, okay, you can use this for two weeks, but I'm home. I'm home. I use this almost every single day on the Apple TV that never comes up there. What's the problem? Like, what happened? And I can only imagine, like, one of my kids is watching my Netflix account and they have become the home location, you know, I guess they never told me. I don't know why that happened, but this has happened a few times recently. And I was like, this is. What is this? Like, they're just.
- [87:13]
A
The real risk though is people say, yeah, I don't really care. I don't need Netflix that much.
- [87:17]
B
Bye, bye. That is a risk because I got.
- [87:18]
C
We were headed there anyway.
- [87:20]
B
Yeah, right. I don't like it anyway. I'm just, I don't know that I'm gonna. I'm not gonna do this every week because I think honestly it would become painful. But. But I just saw this and there's some kind of semi related but stuff that involves Microsoft and Google that's not about insertification, but is like, we live in this world now where everything. It just feels like everything is so terrible. I think about these things in terms of relationships, right? A healthy relationship is one where you feel like you're getting something in return for what you're giving. And so when you buy a product or you are a customer of a company, you're paying them and they're giving you something and you see the value in it and that thing kind of works out. But I feel like a lot of our relationships with these online services or big tech companies or whatever are unhealthy. Like, they're abusive. They're one way I'm not getting. Like, I used to get the thing that I saw the value in and I still get a thing, but I don't see the value anymore because you've taken away so much. It's become like, what is this thing? Like, what do you. It's like, we're Netflix. Yeah, no, I get it, but I'm.
- [88:28]
C
No. And I think it has gotten people to look at their accounts more clearly and they're starting to turn them off. I get sad emails from Netflix every week about, I should be coming back.
- [88:39]
B
It's going to be a happy day for. I've always. I know people.
- [88:42]
C
It's the spam I look forward to. It's like they're Literally delivering tears to me each week.
- [88:47]
B
I love it. Miss you. I miss you so much. We just want to. We just want to get you on an autopay thing. I. We don't really care if you even watch the thing. I don't know. I just.
- [89:00]
C
No, let's face it, sooner or later, a series is going to come out that looks really cool. Turn that account on for a month.
- [89:07]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [89:07]
C
We're going to binge it and we shut it off again.
- [89:11]
B
Yep.
- [89:11]
A
Oh, that's their worst nightmare.
- [89:13]
B
Right? Which is. Yeah, they just. Now they. They'll split a show up, like the new season into two parts and to ensure that you at least have to be there for two months. Right. Which I guess I get on some level. But again, think about, like, the. Like, what's the. What's the point of this? The beauty to me of one of the strengths of Netflix or any of these services was I don't have to wait till next Thursday to watch the next episode. Like, I refuse to watch shows like that. Now. If there's a show that's on and they're putting it out, like, week by week, I'm trying to think, which one just started doing this. It doesn't matter. My wife asked about it, and I said, yeah, they just started. So it's 10 episodes. Ask me about it in mid October. That's when we'll think about watching it, because I am not going week to week on this stuff.
- [90:03]
C
We're still.
- [90:03]
B
So they stopped doing that. So the new season of Wednesday, I think, is one of the ones. And they've done this with various shows. Right. So they'll drop three or four shows and then do the other ones later. And, you know, as a customer, you're like, well, but I pay for this. Like, why are you doing this? Are they not ready? Is there a. Like. No, they're ready. They're all in the can. Okay. So, like, this is what you did. You always did this all at once. Like, why aren't you doing this? What if I wanted to stay up.
- [90:34]
C
All night trying to see if it's more profitable to do it this way?
- [90:37]
B
Yep. And then. I'm sorry, am I a rat in a maze now? I'm a part of an experiment. Like, what are we doing here? Well, I don't like that. And I think a lot of people don't like it anyway.
- [90:46]
C
So you don't watch it until the whole thing comes out.
- [90:48]
A
Somebody move my cheese.
- [90:50]
C
Yeah.
- [90:51]
B
Which is what we do. Right. Actually.
- [90:53]
C
Well, and then, by the way, we.
- [90:54]
B
Pay for it, too.
- [90:54]
C
If the viewership's not high enough, they cancel the show.
- [90:57]
B
Yeah. Oh, yeah, right, right. I don't know. I don't get this stuff. Okay. I originally had these in the same section as that last bit, but I separated them because they're actually very different. And I can't remember what my justification now was for that. But. But whatever, they're separate. So these next two are kind of like misinformation, which is another example of, like, how we're all losing our minds collectively here, which is Leo, a couple weeks ago asked me. Hey. Someone in the chat was like, hey, how come you're not writing a story about this SSD thing? Right, Right. And I was like, okay. So at that time, I was like, I did hear of this. And I went and looked it up. I'm like, what's this based on? Right. And the story was that Microsoft had put out a Windows update that had corrupted SSDs. This sounds pretty serious. Like, data loss is serious. Right? And there were all these different versions of it. Some people obviously were no problem. Some people had, like, rebooted, it was fine. Some people, they rebooted and the SSD was gone. You couldn't even see it in the computer and all this stuff. And I was like, okay. So I had looked it up and this is. Again, this is right when it first happened. And from what I could tell, it was like one guy on Reddit, you know? And I was like, yeah, I don't. I'm not saying I'm not going to write about this, but I need more information. Like, I have to. There's not enough here for me to be like, this is what's happening. I can't trust that this is real. And so I didn't write about it. And then a week later, Microsoft finally came out and said, hey, we absolutely had nothing to do with this. But more to the point, having investigated this, we actually don't even think this is happening. Oh, we don't think there is a big instance of this happening out in the world. Right. So there's a company that makes the controller that is now in SSDs, but they make like hard drive and SSD controllers. And it's like Pfizer. What's the name of the company? Fison. Never heard of them. But they're in every single computer, like every SSD, every whatever ever made. And they spent 4,500 hours investigating this. And they said, we only have two facts we can relay. One is that this is not Microsoft they didn't put out a Windows update that did anything to anybody in this case. And we're not sure this is happening either. We have no evidence of this. We cannot reproduce this. And so that was interesting to me. And I. So that then I realized somebody trying.
- [93:24]
C
To move a stock price. Is this a, you know, I don't know, trader scam?
- [93:29]
B
So one of the ways that Mary Jo and I kind of linked up early on was she would contact me and say, hey, I have this story that I'm working on. And I heard something from somebody about something, and it was some source or whatever, and she'd say, what do you know? Do you know anything about whatever topic? She wouldn't tell me what the thing was, they said, but she was trying to get a second source to verify the information. And I, on many occasions could or would, you know, and she like, there it is. She's like, good. That's okay. And she could tell, okay, this is. This is how journalism used to work. You know, the way the. The dark side of anyone can publish anything at any time is that anybody does. And most people have crazy ideas in their heads. And there's a lot of. I deal with this a lot in my. On my site, where there's a lot of, like, anecdotal information out in the world, you know, where, you know, you feel like it's, like, it's believable, you know, you're like, yeah, it's Microsoft. Microsoft screws up Windows updates all the time. Like, I can see this, you know, just kind of believe it, you know?
- [94:30]
C
Yeah, there's some people didn't have problems construct. Except for that part where it didn't happen.
- [94:35]
B
Yeah, right. At least at scale, you know, so the other one that was. This happened back to back. This was crazy to me because I look at tech feeds every day, all day. And this story started appearing a couple of days ago. Google sends out warnings to then insert some number. 2.5 billion was one of them. Gmail users are at risk because there's been a huge security vulnerability exploit on Gmail. Your data is all out there. We're recommending that everyone change their passwords, whatever. And I was like, wow, that sounds pretty serious. I have like 6 Gmail accounts I have never gotten a message about. I think across all these things, I would have gotten something. So I just. One morning, every morning, it was. It was in the news every day. Everyone wrote stories, you know, and one morning I saw one of those stories and I asked Stephanie uses Gmail. I said, do you ever get a. You ever hear anything about a compromise, some kind blah, blah, really serious Gmail, something something? She's like, what are you talking about? I'm like, I know, I'm kidding. Really. I know it's not happening. But anyway, Google is forced to come out and say, no, this never happened. This is not happening.
- [95:47]
C
Listen, Troy Hunt, terrific security. It didn't happen.
- [95:51]
B
We're just doing. There are people maybe are phishing and whatever. So again, it's like, guys, I don't understand how you get from. I saw it online too. I published a story about it, but that's what happens. And then I got the beautiful moment of watching those exact sites write stories that had titles like, no, Gmail isn't being compromised. You said it was three days ago. Like you said it. Same thing with the Microsoft story. It's like, guys, is there some bar here? I don't know. Anyway, so there you go. I. This is not a holier than thou moment for me. I'm an idiot. I get it wrong all the time. But I mean, like this kind of thing, like I come on like, I, I don't know why we don't have to make stuff up.
- [96:42]
A
We'll be right back with more of Paul and Richard and their tales of fishing, both with an F and a ph. But first, a word from one. Get it? But first, a word from one password. Oh, you hear me talk about one password a lot. Over half. Half of IT pros say securing SaaS apps is their biggest challenge. I guess it makes sense with the growing problem of SaaS sprawl and really shadow it, it's not hard to see why. Thankfully, Trelica by1Password can discover and secure access to all your apps, managed or not. Trelica by 1Password inventories every app in use at your company, even the shadow IT apps. Then pre populated app profiles assess the SaaS risks letting you manage access, optimize, spend and enforce security best practices across every app, every app your employees use. It's a way you can manage shadow it. You can also use it to securely onboard and offboard employees and meet compliance goals. Trelica T R E L I C A But 1Password 1Password provides a complete solution for SaaS access governance. It's just one of the ways that extended access management helps teams strengthen compliance and security. 1Password's award winning password manager is trusted by millions of users in over 150,000 businesses from IBM to Slack. And now they're securing more than just passwords with 1Password Extended Access Management. 1Password is ISO 27001 certified with regular third party audits and the industry's largest bug bounty. 1Password exceeds the standards set by various authorities and is a leader in security. So take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application, even unmanaged shadow it. Learn more at 1Password.com WindowsWeekly that's 1Password.com WindowsWeekly all lowercase 1Password we thank him so much for the support of Paul and Richard in the Windows Weekly program. I shall now return to my nap and let you guys continue. AI. No, I've been, I've been struggling with equipment here.
- [99:11]
C
Just recovering from your power.
- [99:14]
A
Yeah. When the power goes out, everything's loses.
- [99:17]
C
Everything is grumpy.
- [99:19]
A
It's grumpy. But let's talk speaking of grumpy about AI.
- [99:25]
B
Yes. So actually something fairly monumental happened in the past week and this might, if it wasn't maybe for the Google thing. Arguably this is kind of the biggest news in a way, although it's incomplete as of today. So Microsoft AI, which is that organization created, I think it was March 2024 in the wake of the Sam Altman drama right. At OpenAI, was created by Satya Nadella using the former CEO and many of the executives and engineers from Inflection. Is that right? Yeah, Inflection. Mustafa Suleiman, right? Yep.
- [100:09]
C
He was supposed to be the consumer AI guy, but I don't know how well that went.
- [100:14]
B
Yeah. All right, so there was a kind of a copiloty kind of announcement at some point later in the year, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But it was just like, okay, whatever. They're working on Copilot stuff. We get it. But we knew all along part of the deal here was this is a Plan B of sorts. Right. For OpenAI, if this whole relationship goes south, we need to have these capabilities in house. And so they have been working on their own. I don't want to say Greenfield, but like their own in house. You know, Microsoft models, like AI models. Right. And they've now released at least one of them. There might be two, but they are, there's, there's one that's really straightforward where you're like, okay, no, this makes kind of sense. Like it's a, it's a natural speech generation model. It's available now in various places. It's coming to Copilot. So it will address certain use cases, et cetera. And as they released this, they had this big discussion on the blog announcement about it, which I kind of went back and looked because I was like, did I miss this? Have they been doing this all along? No, this is the first one. They are talking very much about how different use cases are going to require different models. And this is something we see all the time. If you paid attention to the recent Google announced with the new pixels, those devices ship with over 20 AI models. Like on the device Copilot Plus PC. When those first came out over a year ago, I believe the number was over 40. Right. And we talk about this sometimes. If you're familiar with Windows, you can go into Paint or I think Photos does this as well. And there'll be a little kind of icon up in the corner. It's like you got to download something and it's like, what is this? It's like you have to download a model because one of those little local AI features requires an AI model before it will work. So when you think like we tend to think about AI model. Well, at least I do anyway, like cloud models as kind of like these big things and they do everything and then they make versions obviously to do different things. But increasingly it seems like for local AI especially it's like we're going to have, there's going to be a lot of these things. They're going to be like DLLs, they're going to be like just, just all over your computer.
- [102:33]
C
We're also seeing a case too that generalized models don't work as well. Hallucinations come from this uncertainty in the probabilities of the different Markov chains. So just narrow the scope and there's not a lot of uncertainty.
- [102:48]
B
So this is in many ways a differentiator for Microsoft. OpenAI has several models, but Microsoft by now has dozens and dozens. There's, there's lots. And so one of the things that Microsoft AI is doing is making these highly customized models for very specific use cases. Right. And they started, the first one they released was for voice. And the explanation, this was not credited to a human being. But the blog post that Microsoft put out, Microsoft AI put out was that voice is the interface of the future for AI companions. Because it's Microsoft AI, these models are all going to have a name that starts with Mai. So it looks like missing an action a little bit. Which, you know, maybe I wouldn't have gone with that one personally.
- [103:34]
C
That would be mia. Yes.
- [103:36]
B
Yeah, but I'm you know, being vaguely dyslexic or whatever. So anyway, the first model is called Mai Voice 1. So this is high fidelity expressive audio, single multi voice speaker scenarios, meaning speaker, like people like speaking. Not speakers, you know, physical speakers, but, you know, whatever. But there's another one, and apparently this is available now on something called LM arena, which is a platform for evaluating models. And it's going to come soon to trusted testers via an API, which they've never explained. But the other one is called MAI One Preview. And this is their first foundation model, trained end to end, and it offers a glimpse of future offerings inside Copilot. And the quote here is, we are actively spinning this flywheel to deliver improved models and we'll have much more to share in the coming months. Coming months, like November. Right. When Ignite is happening. So we're probably going to learn more about this work.
- [104:43]
C
There does seem to be a lot piling on in the Ignite time frame.
- [104:47]
B
Yeah. So this is actually, this is very interesting because when you think about Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI and how kind of squirrely it is and how they very clearly do not trust or even like each other, and at some point there is going to be a break, it seems, you know, getting your own models up to speed is a big deal. Microsoft has other models, obviously. They do Phi and Mu and other things, but these are the first that came out of this organization that was specifically created in a way to kind of slot in maybe for OpenAI to.
- [105:19]
C
Be alternatives to OpenAI's models.
- [105:21]
B
Yeah. And it seems we'll learn more. Maybe I'm.
- [105:24]
C
We're going to see Mai GPT5. Like, let's go for it.
- [105:28]
B
Right? Well, that's the thing. Yeah. So I don't know. Well, but maybe not. Right. In other words, we spent a couple years there waiting for GPT5 to occur, and then it kind of landed with a bit of a thud. But. But it's this big thing and I know they then build off of that and whatever, but it's possible that instead of doing a big thing, that what Microsoft AI. And, you know, and maybe this is part of that consumer thing where a lot of it's going to happen on the device. Maybe, maybe what they release is 20 or 50 small models, very simple.
- [106:02]
C
And some kind of orchestrator that you can't see.
- [106:04]
B
Yeah, yeah, that's a good word.
- [106:06]
C
So you type in your request, the orchestrator now has conversations with each of these specialized LLMs and composes together an output.
- [106:19]
B
So that's.
- [106:20]
C
And then you can call it AGI. And it'd be hilarious if Satya beat, you know, Sam to the punch on using that.
- [106:26]
B
That would be funny, actually. Interestingly, this might have been the only AI conversation in recent memory where I wasn't thinking about saying the word orchestration. And then you said it. And actually, as you said that, I realized there's actually language in this post that kind of talks around that a little bit. The idea being that the voice model they have, the way they say it is. It's something. You'll see it in Copilot Daily, which is that kind of goofy interface. Or it's like, oh, here's what's going on, you know, like what's going on in the world today. And it tells you whatever Copilot podcast, which is like the. Like the Google Notebook lm, you know.
- [107:04]
C
Audio overview, you know, summarizing using a version of my voice. I get it.
- [107:09]
B
Yeah. And Copilot. Exactly. And. And Copilot Labs, and. But rolling out to Copilot, meaning broader code like Copilot, as we think of Copilot in the coming weeks to address certain text use cases. So actually they are going to orchestrate its use. Right. This first model. And that itself is almost like a test of the model when you think about it. Right. Because Copilot is, in this case, the orchestrator, working with multiple models. Right. And in some cases, it's going to say, all right, we're going off to Mai. I got to wrap my head around that. Mai voice 1. And for whatever scenario, because that particular model is very good at the thing that it needs to do either to output something to you or determine the answer to some question. Well, this one's not going to answer a question, but this one is probably just about output. But. But it's. Yeah, I mean, I. So, yeah, we can also thank. Thank Stevie Batish for putting that word into my brain. And now it's lodged there forever. And. But yeah, I see it. I kind of see it everywhere now. And I. Yeah, I think you're onto something. I think that's. That's where they're going.
- [108:19]
C
Yeah, no, and it. And obviously makes a lot of sense. It's. It addresses sort of the key issues is how you fight hallucinations. The coordination points part is going to be the hard part. But it also implies that Copilot's a bad name, because the problem with Copilot is the implication that there is one thing sitting to the right of you that helps you. And every really productive developer I see using these tools are running half a dozen or more different LLMs in different roles, simultaneously generating bits of code and testing it and. And working through integrations and so forth. Like, it's. As much as I love the copilot name, it just hit me recently, it's like, this is not what's happening. It's not this one thing.
- [109:05]
B
Yeah. So when, when this name first came up in the context of broader. Microsoft, not GitHub, Copilot, but when Microsoft kind of, they, they did their original Bang Edge announcement and I was like, you know, we're going to call this thing Copilot. We'll have a copilot for Microsoft 365. We're going to have one for Windows. We're going to. You know, as, as that sort of unfolded, it seemed like in that slice in time, this was a good name. Right. Because AI is this thing that kind of works with you. It's not taking your place. You will ask your questions. It helps you. You're the pilot, right?
- [109:35]
C
Yeah. That was the implication. It's still your fault. You're the pilot.
- [109:38]
B
Yeah. And you can still take credit too, if that's what it takes. Yes. But the thing is, AI moves so fast and so even back then, that first Stevie Batist talk when he was talking about the three app models, the, the final. Well, the. When you move past side by side, which is what Copilot is. Right. You get into where it's integrated into the app itself, but then you get into this thing where it's really just all these what we would now call agents kind of working on your behalf, you know, out in the world doing things. And it's like, out of the app, you know, it's not, it's not the app anymore. It's. It's like this has just become part of the fabric essentially, or whatever. And yeah, I guess in part because this world is advancing so rapidly, the notion that you would need a copilot is becoming almost obsolete. Right. It's sort of like when you ask Google to do something like I'll do on a photo frame, like, don't show me this picture again. It's like, okay, so it sounds like it's like, dude, just, just freaking do it. Yeah.
- [110:43]
C
You know, do not describe to me what you want to do. Just do it.
- [110:48]
B
That we'll look back on these kind of co pilot interactions and be like, man, that was a little tedious, you know, because eventually it will become so integrated and just part of everything. You know, you'll just, you'll just be talking to yourself and things will occur.
- [111:02]
C
Yeah. And you and your shorthand will work because bit by bit it's going to build a, a prefix, prompt that is your context.
- [111:14]
B
Yeah.
- [111:14]
C
So it knows what your tendencies are and it tends to include those things so you don't need to say them anymore. You know, eventually all LLMs will communicate with me in iambic pentameter because it makes me happy.
- [111:25]
B
Nice.
- [111:28]
C
If you're going to give me bad news, give it to me in rhyming couplets.
- [111:31]
B
Yeah.
- [111:31]
C
Way happy.
- [111:32]
B
I still think that's the greatest feature Microsoft ever added to a notepad. Turn this into a poem, you know, Completely useless, but it's beautiful. It's just like every time I do it, I'm like, oh, my God, that's good. You know, I couldn't use this for anything if my life depended on it. But it's really funny. And then just most of these just kind of random. But Copilot is now being added to smart TVs. I think Samsung, who signed had to be Samsung.
- [111:59]
C
Who else has got a relationship with sufficient. With Microsoft? They can do bad ideas.
- [112:03]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [112:04]
C
Is it going to be running. Is that Copilot on Tizen? Is that what that is?
- [112:08]
B
Yeah. It's only going to be a matter of time. We already run into this with assistance in some degree. If you have like multiple devices and there'll be some weird handoffs and we'll say like two devices will answer the question, or one will be like, do you want to use the speaker that answered or do you want it to be answered over here? And you're like, oh, God. It's like, I just want it to be answered wherever I am. Like, I just. Why? Why am I talking about this? You know? But so I guess smart, I don't know. It's fine. I get it. Like, I'm not against it, I guess, per se, other than I want a dumb screen, not a smart screen, but whatever. This could have gone in the insertification section in a way, but Anthropic is now going to force people to make a choice about whether or not their data is being used to train their models. Today they do not use your data for that. And to me, that was always one of their big selling points. But now they're going. And there will be people who will just opt in, I guess. So it's kind of a big change that kind of came out of nowhere, but whatever. I don't know. I don't know what to say about that one. It's kind of weird, but people have kind of bought into that ecosystem. I can imagine a lot of them were kind of. Other than accuracy and whatever, but performance. But were probably drawn a bit by the privacy part, so. So we'll see if that impacts them at all. Nvidia, another company that reported earnings. Not PC related in any way, but they're doing pretty good. I don't know if you guys follow Nvidia at all.
- [113:42]
C
Single largest company by market, cap on the S&P 500. Is that the company you're talking about?
- [113:46]
B
That one that, those guys? Yeah.
- [113:49]
C
Video game things.
- [113:52]
A
They did say that. What did they say? 29%, 39% of their business comes from two customers.
- [113:58]
C
Yeah, that's a little concerning. And by the way, Satya now talks to Jensen.
- [114:05]
B
Yeah, I was going to say they're.
- [114:06]
A
One and then Meta's got to be the other.
- [114:09]
B
The way the companies communicate information like that is interesting because this was probably like a 10Q filing of some kind. It was just like one of those. It was in their quarterly risks and. Yeah, no, but I mean, it wasn't like, hey, we just announced we have whatever earnings we did this, this business doing great. By the way, most of our money.
- [114:25]
A
Might have been in the analyst call.
- [114:27]
B
Yeah, it's in the, you know, it's in the, it's in there somewhere, people. Yeah. The big thing with Nvidia is we're looking for that massive year over year revenue jump to end, right? Yeah. And it's falling, but still we're talking. This is like what happened to Azure. Right. I mean, the revenue number was 56% jump year over year. If you look at the previous quarter, it's very small. Right. So it's ramping down. It has to. Right. I mean, at some point we kind of reach capacity here or whatever. But.
- [114:57]
C
Yeah, there's so many reasons why you can't buy more GPUs. You've run out of data centers, you've run out of money, they've run out of GPUs, you've run out of demand. Like pick your poison. There's a lot of things moving at once here.
- [115:10]
B
Yeah. I mean this company has been a rocket sled. I, I don't think I've ever put.
- [115:14]
C
A rocket slide on one trick pony. And it's. Admittedly, it's an important pony and everybody likes the delusion, but the fact that seven companies out of the 500 are 55% of the value, that's not good. And it's all for the same reason. So when any of them go down, all of them are going to go down.
- [115:35]
B
Well, it's, it's not like this is a bubble. I mean, it's no, come on.
- [115:39]
C
It wouldn't be. That wouldn't be a thing at all.
- [115:41]
B
Talked about my dream of post apocalyptic movies of the future all taking place at the site of a former data center out in the middle of Ohio or Pennsylvania or somewhere.
- [115:51]
C
Well, I now see the fund guys setting UP S&P 500 indexes with the seven out. So you can offset the disproportion.
- [116:02]
B
Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. It turns out in that scenario the United States has the economic gross impact or whatever it is of like Madagascar companies out. Slightly smaller number.
- [116:15]
C
Those 70 companies spent more money last year than all of the consumers in the United States. Like it's. These are crazy, crazy, crazy numbers. But the other side of it, and I think it's a real relevant one, is that they didn't borrow that money. They had that money.
- [116:32]
B
Yeah, right, right. That's true.
- [116:33]
C
So when the stock price goes down, it's not like they're over leveraged, but everybody around them is.
- [116:41]
B
But if we've learned anything from intel, and I like to think we have, and Nokia before it, part of the problem with having all these physical facilities in place is if they're not being utilized, that starts to hurt real quick. So we'll see. You know, we'll see.
- [116:59]
C
But I. Yeah, well, and already the average municipality doesn't love a data center. They don't employ very many people. They don't pay much in the way of taxes. They consume a lot of power and a lot of water.
- [117:10]
B
Yep, yep. I mean there are no trucks on the road, so you get that.
- [117:14]
C
But it's.
- [117:15]
B
Yeah, yeah. My whole, the part of the country I live in, Pennsylvania, is all. It used to be all shipping. And back in the day we had shipping on canals and eventually on trains and roads and, and our roads are full of Amazon trucks because our whole area is full of Amazon warehouses. That's all. This area used to be farms. And when you're a township in Pennsylvania that doesn't really have any meaningful income anymore because that stuff's all gone. Someone comes and says, hey, what do you think? Pay some taxes, whatever, blah, we'll employ some people, whatever.
- [117:50]
C
We'll employ some people while we build this thing.
- [117:52]
B
But then the people that live there can't get home or to work because the trucks are all full in the streets and they're ruining the roads and no one's paying for it and it's a disaster. So I don't have any answers. I just have complaints. I just saying there's a lot of trucks And I'm tired of it. I don't know, do I want a data center? Is that better or worse? It's probably just as bad. I don't know. I'm sure the water will be fine.
- [118:14]
C
I'm sure the destabilization of grid is fine.
- [118:19]
B
Yeah, I kind of mentioned this up top. I guess I won't beat this to death now because we're going to run out of time. But I am looking at those new pixel. I have to say Google called this like 10 years ago. It was nine years ago, really. But if you go back and watch that first event, they did a clip in the very beginning of this year's show where they went back and Rick Ursula was talking about the intersection of hardware, software and AI, which obviously was a riff on the Apple thing, but it is really what they've done. I think about all the computational photography stuff all time. The. The million pixel features on these phones that answer calls for you or stay on hold or figure out if something is spam or what corrects a mistake. And whatever it is, like, it's. This stuff is like all over these phones. It's a very different approach to what Apple has done so far anyway. And I have to say, like, some of the new stuff is actually pretty cool. So I'm going to be looking at this over time. There'll be more about this later, but. But I'm just mostly fascinated by. To me, it seems like they floundered a little bit in phones, but when I go back and watch the first one, I'm like, oh, there was a real vision here and it has not changed other than that daydream VR thing, which, by the way, did not go great.
- [119:39]
C
But other than that, what VR thing did go great? Paul?
- [119:43]
B
Right. But they did do it. There's a demo in this, this is nine years ago, where at the time Android navigation was on screen button. So they went from physical buttons to on screen buttons. And now we have gestures, but there was a round button in the middle for home. And you would press and hold on it and that would bring up the assistant. You're like, okay, but the guy did a text message thing with his wife. Where do you want to go to this concert? Yes, we should have dinner. All right, what about. What do we think about a place in the area? They used AI to find the place and then you could press and hold in that round thing and drag it up onto the screen and it would use the context of what was on the screen to inform the answers. It would give you to your questions. And so it would say something like, oh, so it sounds like you want to get a reservation at whatever the name of a restaurant is. I know you're going to the concert, so it's going to be on this day. They have these times available. Do you want one of the. Yes. Two people? It's like, all right, you'll get a confirmation via open table and email. And the place just exploded. It was like seeing the future. And there's still. I don't mean they Google. I mean literally the whole industry really is still actually working on that feature. But this is that thing. This is what Copilot vision is. Right. Like, it's what click to do is in some ways, or whatever. Like, it's. We're still like, yeah, like this thing is going to see the world. Yeah. It's fascinating. Like, I. It's. It's really interesting that they tried to do this right away, like a long time ago.
- [121:14]
C
Yeah. I'm wondering. The computational photography is interesting because you're already getting tools now. It's like, take six photos and we'll composite them to get in the best one. I suspect we're not that far away from. Just hold the camera up. Okay, I'm good. And it produces a photo that is actually a composite. But it didn't involve you in it.
- [121:29]
B
I just made this comment. It might have been today. If it wasn't today, it was yesterday. But I was. You know, you're out in the world, you do the thing. Depending on your phone, you'll have different. Different thing on this screen. But basically you're holding the phone and it. And it'll be like a line. It's like a level. And it's like. It's like 1, 2, 3. Like, no, I want it on zero. Like, and I'm ADD enough. I'm like, I want this to be, you know, it's gotta be straight. How is it possible that we don't have phones that have cameras that just do that? Like, just make it straight. Just make it straight. Like have a little gyroscope there or whatever. It's kind of weird to me. Like, that's not a thing. Like, it has guidance for you. You can make. It knows you weren't even.
- [122:04]
C
But there's no reason it couldn't just correct the photo.
- [122:06]
B
Yeah, just make it straight, you know, but AI, it will never make it hilarious.
- [122:14]
C
Not a thing.
- [122:16]
B
It's just all fake. It's all fake.
- [122:18]
A
We actually. Coming up on intelligent machines have a. A couple of professors who Have a course called BS Machines, I guess they call it.
- [122:31]
B
I love it.
- [122:31]
A
They use the full term and I'm reluctant to do that, but we're actually debating how do we talk about this.
- [122:37]
B
Without saying yeah about a lot.
- [122:41]
A
Yeah, I don't want to do beep, beep, beep. That's kind of insulting.
- [122:44]
C
Everybody knows what you're saying. Just like insertification works. Like just use what you can use.
- [122:49]
B
Yeah. Like honestly, that comes very naturally. Like I almost use it it exclusively instead of the real world in some ways. Right. I mean.
- [122:57]
A
Yeah. No, I like the word. So their website, which is kind of. I think is as good. This is kind of an introduction to AI, its pros and cons and stuff. It's called Modern Day Oracles or BS Machines. So Carl Bergstrom and Jevin west will be our guests.
- [123:12]
B
Great line.
- [123:13]
A
Just about 45 minutes on intelligent machines.
- [123:15]
B
I like it.
- [123:16]
A
Yeah, it should be good. Should be interesting. They did a nice. This website is. It's really pretty too.
- [123:22]
C
This is Barry Squarespace.
- [123:24]
B
Did they buy.
- [123:25]
A
Yeah. They're using something called shorthand. Are you familiar? I've never heard of this.
- [123:28]
B
No, I've never seen that one.
- [123:29]
A
But standout visual comms and content.
- [123:34]
B
Yeah.
- [123:34]
A
Let's do Prezi. Did you guys ever use Prezi?
- [123:37]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [123:38]
C
It's an Apple thing. But I had a few friends who use it, I think.
- [123:42]
A
You can't use it on Windows, I thought.
- [123:44]
B
I'm pretty sure the New York Times uses this but like randomly. So if you read a thousand articles in a year, you'll every so often you get one of these. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's bizarre. I have no idea.
- [123:53]
A
I'm sure they have an entire in house css.
- [123:56]
B
No, I'm positive. Yeah.
- [123:58]
A
Yeah. Prezi was a little weird because it would zoom and swoop and all that stuff.
- [124:03]
B
Yeah. And anyway, remember when Blink was annoying? Well, yeah. Well, we have advanced way beyond.
- [124:11]
A
Part of this is I. I just am always interested in something other than PowerPoint to do my presentation.
- [124:15]
B
Right.
- [124:16]
A
Because it's just they look. They all look kind of the same and. But this actually makes people nauseated.
- [124:22]
B
So I write too much. It's like I just want to read.
- [124:26]
A
Yeah.
- [124:26]
B
What are you doing?
- [124:27]
A
What are you zooming in on this stuff for?
- [124:29]
B
Yeah. Now with a guy, Kawasaki. Right. The original Macintosh Evangelist.
- [124:35]
A
Evangelist, yeah.
- [124:36]
B
Do you follow him at all? Yeah. So he just today on Substack published about death by PowerPoint. Kind of a classic thing. But he had some solid advice for making good presentations and he has a 30, 20, 10 rule and all this. You should look this up. It's really.
- [124:53]
A
He's very good. He knows how to the 10.
- [124:57]
B
But it's good. I read this and I'm like, yes. The next time I do a presentation, I'm definitely going to refer to this. It's really smart.
- [125:04]
A
He's a very smart guy.
- [125:08]
B
Because we all look, we've all sat in a room where some guy literally read the slides to us. Right. What are you doing?
- [125:15]
A
Why did you do the slides?
- [125:17]
B
You know, what are you crazy? What are you doing? Like, it's. It's. Yeah. So he has really good advice about that and how to handle that kind of thing. This is on his substack. Sorry.
- [125:27]
A
Yeah, no, this is it. He says 10 slides, no more. That's all you need.
- [125:34]
B
Yep, yep. But it's also like there should be something memorable and that you can scan and understand immediately.
- [125:42]
A
Yes.
- [125:42]
B
And isn't like a thousand words where you're like, you know, you have to try to read it and no one remembers that.
- [125:48]
A
10 slides, 20 minutes in 30 point font. That's the 10, 20, 30.
- [125:52]
B
Yeah, no, it's. Honestly, it's really good. Really interesting.
- [125:57]
A
Yeah, he's right. He knows actually this is from 2005. So he said.
- [126:02]
B
Yeah, if you look to whatever his latest thing, the thing that went out today. Because I get it. I get it in email. But it's. He references this.
- [126:10]
A
But speeches. Maybe this is a really old website I found of his.
- [126:14]
B
Yeah. Just look him up on like sub. Like, see if. Like.
- [126:16]
A
I did. My mistake. I did a Google.
- [126:18]
B
No, no, it's okay. But. But that's. No, that's a big part of it. But he, but he, he expands past that. Like there's more stuff. Yeah, just good, good advice for anyone.
- [126:26]
A
Is that a master. His substack is called Remarkable people. Our mission is to make you remarkable so it's not others, it's. You make it remarkable.
- [126:38]
B
Well, I was made a slightly more remarkable today because I did read it.
- [126:43]
A
The only pitch guide you will ever need. Oh, his new book. It's for a new book. Think Remarkable.
- [126:49]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [126:50]
A
Good for you, guy. We should get him on actually.
- [126:53]
B
Yeah, we.
- [126:55]
A
He says post AI. Let's go post AI.
- [127:02]
B
If you want to see what that looks like, you should watch that HBO show, the Last of Us. That's pretty much. Oh, God.
- [127:10]
A
That's post fungi, not post AI. You want to do an Xbox thing? I mean, you don't has to.
- [127:21]
C
You can.
- [127:22]
B
We like it sometimes I referenced this earlier in the show. Sometimes I don't have something in the notes and you're like, how come you didn't mention this? So I just wanted, for the record.
- [127:31]
A
I ask you all the time and I apologize.
- [127:33]
B
No, no, no. Actually, I think it's one of the best things you do, to be honest. I like it.
- [127:38]
A
Okay.
- [127:39]
B
But just for full disclosure, Microsoft or Xbox and Five Hour Energy did announce a partnership today where they're going to have the little Xbox branded Five Hour Energy. I don't know if it's a drink. Is that what it is? It's probably a drink, I guess, for the outer worlds too. So I did not put that in the notes. I'm not going to write about it, but I just don't want anyone to be like, oh, papal, you missed the biggest story of the week, the Five Hour Energy partnership.
- [128:07]
A
No, that's not the biggest story of the week.
- [128:09]
B
No, it is not the biggest story of the week. Okay. There are a couple of big stories though. Microsoft has, well, Microsoft has announced they've only released part of it, but there is an August update for Xbox that went out on the last day of the month. Classic that has four new features, only three of which are actually available. Two of which. Sorry, that are available now. So one is the one that we've been testing in the Insider program, which is the cross device cloud, playable play histories. That makes sense. And the idea there is that as Xbox becomes available in more and more places, you can play more of your games in more places. And so we have play anywhere and all those kind of features. And the idea is that maybe you play started on a PC, you continue it here. So this stuff will just appear in your most recent list if you're on an Xbox app on Windows or the play history on a console, whatever. But the idea is I really think they're working. They're obviously, I mean they haven't really set it out right, but they're clearly working to making this be like one platform, Windows based where possible, streaming where not mobile, obviously, but it's kind of interesting. And they've also started rolling out this, they're calling it my apps, but this is where you can access the stores for other companies that make PC game stores like Steam Epic Games and so forth. But also those games will start just appearing in your library. So if the Steam app is on your computer, maybe you've downloaded whatever game from that, that game will appear in the Xbox app. And the reason that's important is because that app is the UI for those handheld gaming PCs that we're going to get soon, like the Xbox Rog Alley. And that's the interface, it's literally the shell, right? And so you want to be able to see everything that's on there. Now there's a way on those devices to get out. So obviously you're going to want to go to the desktop, you install Steam, maybe get the game, whatever. But for the most part you're sitting there using it like a controller. And so that's kind of just available to you, you know, wherever you got the game. Like it'll just be available to you from that Xbox app or what is the shell? Essentially this one I have seen myself and I have to say the first time this came up I was like. But we jokingly talked about this when they announced it. The gaming copilot, which is in beta, is part of the game bar, which used to be the Xbox game bar. So if you are in the Insider program, have a PC enrollment or sorry, you have enrolled in the PC Gaming Preview as part of the Xbox Insider program, you download the app, update the Xbox app, you'll start getting these new features. And so this is one of them. So the little windows that appear in the game bar are called widgets and to date they've all been pretty small.
- [130:52]
C
But the interruptions you mean.
- [130:55]
B
No, I mean the size, size of the windows, like the amount of space that takes place, takes place, takes up on screen. And the two latest ones are actually quite big. Right. So there's that game, the Edge based Gaming Assistant, which is like a browser where you can, if it recognizes the game, it will kind of come up and say you're playing Call of Duty. You know, it looks like you're stuck. You know, we'll kind of give you advice, but you can also Google or Bing or whatever and find answers to problems while you're in the game without leaving the game. Right. It comes up over the game. But now they have this game in Copilot and I haven't seen it do anything per se, but it's just as big, it's like a big window and it's like a. You can chat with it. Right. And so the idea here is that the way you're probably going to interact with it isn't so much by bringing something up and typing, but you could just say, hey, say the keyword, the thing will come up. With a little interface, you keep still playing the game and eventually it's going to say things like, all right, it looks like you're stuck. At this point in the game, here's how you get around it. Or you should go to the left to do whatever. It's going to be like that kind of thing. So they're actually starting to roll this up. Like I said, I so far haven't seen anything, but it's starting to happen. And the other update is also related to those Xbox Handheld Gaming PCs where you'll get improved controller navigation in the Xbox app. So the Xbox app, the Game bar, both have controller navigation through like a compact mode. And in the case of Game Bar, that's like a one widget mode, if that makes sense. So you kind of go from widget to widget using the ui. But because this is going to be the ui, I mean, or the interface, I should say, I guess UI and interface on these devices, they want to make sure that it works as well as possible. So I don't have one, but I have used this interface with a controller. It works fine. So I think it's going to work pretty well. And then just a couple of random stats as part of this announcement. They said Xbox Play anywhere now has well over a thousand games. They added 20 in August or July. Sorry. Over 450 games are in the stream. Your own game collection, which is part of Xbox Cloud Gaming, which will now be available to more and more people. Because it's not just Game Pass ultimate or will soon not be, I guess. They added six more titles to that Retro Classics collection, which is another Game Pass perk, in case you were worried they weren't pushing Game Pass hard enough. And then he added mouse and keyboard controls to 12 more games, including Grounded 2, which just came out, and Heretic and Hexen, which just came out. Right. And the point of that is you're streaming the game, which was made for a PC, possibly to a computer, possibly to an iPad or something. Typically on a mobile device you would play on screen, but when you add keyboard and mouse controls, that means you can play it the way you would, the way God intended. Especially in the case of Heretic and Hexen, because that's, you know, that was what we had back then. You can use those controls even on like a mobile device or whatever. It doesn't matter what device. So that's pretty cool. A lot of stuff going on there. Okay.
- [134:01]
C
In the end, everybody will be part of the PC master race. It's inevitable.
- [134:05]
B
It is weird to me that I made that switch myself. Yeah. And they've improved.
- [134:10]
C
It starts with just putting that Xbox down for a little while. Just put it down.
- [134:14]
B
Yeah, putting it. Putting it down is the phrase I would use. But yeah, I see what you're saying. It's. I haven't. I, I. Well, I've turned it on, I think. I don't leave it plugged in because it will just sit there updating the whole time. But I did turn it on since we've been home. I got it up to date, whatever. But I haven't actually played a game on it.
- [134:33]
C
I mean, they tried really hard to make updates, not annoy you. When you leave it off. That means every time you turn it on, you lose it for a couple hours.
- [134:39]
B
Oh, yeah. Do not ever think you're going to just turn it on and play a game. If that's the way you do things, you got to be prepared.
- [134:46]
A
No.
- [134:46]
C
And I at one point had one Xbox because Microsoft gave me a number of them that was plugged into a TV that whenever the Xbox did anything, the TV would automatically activate and chime and quickly found out at around 3 in the morning, ding.
- [135:00]
B
It was doing itself. Well, that's a. Okay. That was on the part of Microsoft. That was a thoughtful time.
- [135:05]
C
At least they were trying. Yeah. It's just, it was, you know, a bad HDMI is all. It's not its fault.
- [135:11]
B
So. So this one, to me, came out of nowhere. I'm not sure what I think about this, but Activision has signed a deal with Paramount to turn Call of Duty into a movie.
- [135:24]
A
You should be so excited about this, Paul.
- [135:27]
B
I don't know what to think about this. So I think the first game was already made that was called. What was it called? Saving Private Ryan. But that's the thing. So Call of Duty is not the same thing all the time. I mean, it is really. But obviously the initial World War II games, the first three, and then a few others later on, there was the Modern Warfare series, which there are now two. Right. Black Ops, which were on six, about to have seven. But there was the initial trilogy and then with the newer ones. And I guess thinking about this, I think the Modern Warfare storyline might be good for a movie or even a series of movies, as would maybe Black Ops. And actually, I think if you're going to make, if this turns into something, you could kind of mix and match those two. I don't, I don't see going back to.
- [136:18]
C
There seems to be an illness that folks who write the storylines for video games think they're as good as movie scripts.
- [136:25]
B
Yeah, well, yeah, right.
- [136:29]
C
I mean, they make the same kind of money, but that doesn't mean it's the same thing. The game that you want to play is not necessarily the game you want to watch.
- [136:35]
A
Watch.
- [136:36]
B
Right. Because. Right. Obviously the game is interactive and you're doing the thing.
- [136:40]
C
Yeah. And it's calibrating to your capability.
- [136:43]
B
Yep. There was this. I. I enjoyed this. This was lambasted by most people. But they made a version, a liveaction version of the. The game Doom with the Rock. Right.
- [136:53]
C
Yeah.
- [136:54]
B
As the main character. Or actually he was the bad guy. It was Carl Urban or whatever his name was. A Carl was the man. It doesn't matter. But actually the Rock was the bad guy. But. But there's a scene in the movie where they actually do this like with the game where the gun comes up and it's the first person view. So he's walking down the hall and things are happening and you get that little kind of. This is what it's like to play the game. And it was like, okay. I thought that was pretty cool. I think most people thought.
- [137:19]
C
Yeah. I mean, this is. How do you make a video game movie work? A, nostalgia and B, self referential humor. Make fun of what you're doing. I mean, that's why Fallout works.
- [137:30]
B
Yeah. And. Right. New season of Fallouts coming soon, by the way. Yeah.
- [137:34]
C
Because it was that good. They're actually gonna make more.
- [137:36]
B
Yeah. I look at things like. But. But I don't know. Like I love Call of Duty and also hate it. But. But it. It's the game I play the most. But I think about things like. Like Halo, which I know has been a TV series for over two seasons. And Gears of War, which to me like these lend themselves to movies or whatever. Netflix type shows, whatever you want to call that Call of Duty, though. I'm like, I don't know.
- [138:01]
C
Maybe the only way that movie succeeds is if there's a tea bagging somewhere. Some. At some point the whole room will blow up. If that happens and if it doesn't, forget it. You haven't got a chance.
- [138:13]
A
But will it be the Rock? That's the question.
- [138:15]
C
No, It'll be a 14 year old kid. Because that's the rule.
- [138:19]
B
That's funny.
- [138:20]
A
Doing it to the Rock.
- [138:22]
B
I don't know what the. Yeah, well, I don't know what to say about this. I will see. We'll see. We'll see what it looks like. Like. And then we have. Because it's a new. It's September. Right. Already, somehow. So we have the first several games coming to Game Pass this month, including Hollow Knight. Silksong, which will be day and date. If you have a Game Pass subscription, at least. Or at least the ultimate one. I don't know when the other ultimate. Or maybe I can't remember anymore. What do they do? The song again? I think it's ultimate and PC. Game Pass. And then Game Pass.
- [138:55]
C
So this is a new title. This is not. They're just rolling out old titles.
- [138:59]
B
That's right.
- [139:00]
C
But that was always the point title, by the way. Wildly overdue, right?
- [139:04]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [139:05]
C
It's like eight years they've been working on this thing. Like most games die if you've gone longer than three.
- [139:10]
B
Yep, yep. I don't have this in the notes, but actually, I think I saw the headline today. Yeah. Perfect Dark was supposed to have a new sequel. That studio was either closed or hollowed out pretty dramatically. The game was put on pause or stopped. And then I guess they tried to sell it around and weren't able to. So now it's apparently actually dead. Not happening. So, yeah, sometimes things just disappear. But that's the big one in here. Unless you think Paw Control or Paw Patrol World is a big deal. Oh, man. I don't know. Maybe.
- [139:48]
A
Paul, I'm shocked you didn't mention the Five Hour Energy drink based on the Outer Worlds.
- [139:53]
B
Thank you, Leo. Exactly.
- [139:57]
A
You were right. We did have to get it in. And by the way, at the bottom it says copyright 2005 by 25 by Microsoft.
- [140:04]
C
Yeah.
- [140:04]
B
Crazy.
- [140:05]
A
Is this a good game? Actually, I'm not going to drink this stuff, but the game looks kind of cool.
- [140:09]
B
Yeah, it does, actually.
- [140:11]
A
That looks like a heart attack in a bottle.
- [140:13]
B
That is. Yep. Well, you'll have. You'll have. What's that movie with the. Oh, God. Jason Thrace, where he's. His heart.
- [140:21]
A
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He has to hit adrenaline or whatever.
- [140:24]
B
Yeah, yeah. It's like that. If you. If you want that effect, it'll make.
- [140:28]
A
Your head look like the guy. The moon in outer world.
- [140:31]
B
Exactly. And if it doesn't look that way, it will definitely feel that way. It's kind of. What is this? It's like caffeine juice. What am I. What's.
- [140:39]
C
Mostly caffeine? Yeah, yeah.
- [140:41]
A
And niacin. They give you a big niacin flush.
- [140:44]
B
And do they give you like a.
- [140:45]
C
Bunch of other stuff that'll eventually make energy blend?
- [140:48]
B
Like a thing you can jam into your leg if you're going into the shock or something, just in case.
- [140:52]
A
It's actually only 230 milligrams of caffeine, which is about a cup of coffee, but maybe the taurine. I think the niacin is what makes you feel like, wow. I don't know what I just took, but turning bright red.
- [141:03]
B
Okay, man. Are you feeling it?
- [141:05]
A
I'm feeling it, man. Oh, I'm really feeling it.
- [141:09]
C
The B12 shot is what they were sticking into the arm. You know, in Comfortably numb. Yeah, you'll feel a little prick.
- [141:17]
B
Yep, yep.
- [141:18]
A
Or in Brave New World, Soma. We're all on Soma now. We brought in the interstellar sweetness of purple berry punch. Your absolute favorite. Outer worlds consumable to our world.
- [141:30]
B
Love, love, love the marketing.
- [141:32]
C
Now with more defibrillation.
- [141:35]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [141:35]
A
Life's too short for boring flavors.
- [141:38]
B
Bow Zoom with that scene in Pulp Fiction where you jam the needle into that chick's heart. Well, you're gonna need that.
- [141:45]
A
This should be. They should say just. It's five and a half hour energy drink. It's just.
- [141:50]
B
Yes.
- [141:51]
A
Half an hour more.
- [141:52]
C
The half hour is waiting for the.
- [141:53]
B
Ambulance, but mine goes to five and a half.
- [141:55]
A
Five and a half. Spinal Tap's back, baby. And I'm glad to hear it. I'm glad to hear it. All right, let's pause. This is the pause, the refreshes, and then the back of the book. And as you know, we missed Richard's whiskey pick last week, so he's got one for us. Did you see the premiere of Ontario pouring out the bottle of Crown Rob Ford? Yeah, Rob Ford's pouring out the Crown.
- [142:24]
C
Royal because they're shutting down their. The Crown operations in Canada. Oh, Rob.
- [142:32]
A
Poor Rob.
- [142:33]
C
Oh, well, it hasn't been. It hasn't been a Canadian company in a long time.
- [142:36]
B
Right.
- [142:36]
C
Like Diageo is a mult. Is a proper multinational.
- [142:39]
A
I guess that's fair. Yeah, but it's good. It should let people know just because it says, you know, Canadian on it.
- [142:46]
C
Rob is very performative in these sorts of things. Not surprising. He's quite smashed. Smash the bottle and then start stabbing people with the glass.
- [142:58]
B
I'm no tech genius, but I knew if I wanted my business to crush it, I needed a website.
- [143:03]
C
Now, thankfully, Bluehost made it easy.
- [143:06]
A
I customized, optimized and monetized everything exactly.
- [143:09]
B
How I wanted with AI.
- [143:11]
A
In minutes, my site was up.
- [143:12]
C
I couldn't believe it.
- [143:13]
B
The search engine tools even helped me.
- [143:15]
A
Get more site visitors. Whatever your passion project is, you can set it up with Bluehost with their.
- [143:20]
B
30 day money back guarantee.
- [143:22]
C
What do you got to lose?
- [143:23]
A
Head to Bluehost.com. that's B L U E H O.
- [143:27]
B
S T.com to start now.
- [143:29]
A
From unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena. From comedy goal to relationship fails. Amazon Music's got the most ad free top podcasts included with Prime. Because the only thing that should interrupt.
- [143:42]
C
Your listening is, well, nothing down download.
- [143:45]
B
The Amazon music app today.
- [143:53]
A
Our show today, my friends, brought to you not only by our fine sponsors, but even more importantly by our fine club members. We love Club Twit and we are so glad that you are a member. And if you're not a member, why not? We'd love to have you in the club. Yes. Okay, I admit it. We have an ulterior motive. Club Twit makes now up 25% of our operating costs. It's really vital to our operation as far as I'm concerned. Let's make it 100% right. All it would take really is right now. It's sad to say about 1 in 50 people who listen to our shows are members of the club. If we could get it to 1 in 20, 1 in 20, we wouldn't have. We'd be golden. And we could have more shows. We could do more stuff in the club. Let me tell you why you want to join the club. Besides the fact that if you join the club, you get such great things as ad free versions of all the shows. The good feeling. By the way, you got to update the price, Joe. It's now $10 a month. A good feeling.
- [145:05]
B
You look like a concert pianist.
- [145:06]
A
I look like Liberace playing a Commodore Community in a single subscription. That's a Joe. Joe is one of the fun people in our club. This is the Club Twit Discord, or as I like to call it, the Club Twit Disco, where the party goes on 247 even when there's not a show. Wonderful club members hanging out in here. About half the people join the club go to the Discord. The Discord is where we have our events. For instance, Friday we're going to do our photo time, our monthly visit with Chris Marquardt. Our assignment this month. It's not too late. Delightful. Take a delightful picture. Maybe you'll be one of the picks of the month. That's at 1pm Pacific this Friday, right after the AI user group. And we're going to talk about Nadin, which is a very interesting local server solution for AI and other stuff. Coming up, we do hands on tech. We do home theater geeks do live shows in the club. Of course, the Apple event is Tuesday because Apple takes us down when we stream our coverage of the events on such public places as YouTube and Twitch. We do it now only in the Club Twit Disco. So join us, Micah Sargent and I. 10am on Tuesday, 10am Pacific for apples. Awesome dropping event. Our coverage of the new iPhone announcement and whatever else Apple announces. We'll go right from that into Mac break weekly. There's iOS today. We're going to do Meta Connect right after Intelligent machines in two weeks. See what Mark Zuckerberg has in the way of glasses that weigh your head down. So we do a lot of this stuff in the club because the club supports it. There is dancing in the club to a disco ad, free versions of all the shows, access to the Discord, those special programs we don't do anywhere else, and the good, happy, warm feeling knowing that you are supporting the efforts we're making here. If you find our shows useful, please join the club. There's a two week free trial. There are individual memberships, family memberships and corporate memberships as well. Plus a yearly plan. Join the Club Twit tv Club Twit. To learn more, thank you in advance. Now we go to Berlin to visit with Paul Thurot and his tip of the week.
- [147:37]
B
Yeah, I almost blurted this out during the insurtification segment there, but I have now two pairs of friends who are doing this thing I've been kind of talking about for a long time, but I've never actually done myself, which is just sparing themselves the heartache of all this baloney with all these different online services. Like just change the subscription every month. So like this month we're going to do Netflix. Catch up. Next month, go to Hulu.
- [148:02]
A
Oh, that's a good idea.
- [148:03]
B
Yeah. And I've always thought it was kind of a good idea and I just have never done it. And after the second one mentioned this to me, I was like, ah, man, I got to get this.
- [148:13]
A
You should AI Vibe code a Windows app to do this.
- [148:19]
B
Yep. Yeah, just auto switch. You auto rotate.
- [148:22]
A
Yeah, yeah, you could call it sit on this.
- [148:28]
B
Yes.
- [148:29]
A
Just a thought.
- [148:30]
B
I'm just saying I will workshop it. But yeah, no, maybe. Anyway, it's always seemed like a good idea to me and yeah, I don't know, maybe this would be like a New Year's resolution thing for me or something. I don't know. So I'd like to get there.
- [148:47]
A
Okay. Your online services. I. Yeah, I like this idea. It does seem like a lot of work.
- [148:53]
B
It. It's work. Yeah, but it's not. I mean, I Don't know, it's. If you're paying for four or five services, you could save 100 bucks a month. I mean, you know, depending on what you're doing. I. Seems like it's worth it anyway.
- [149:08]
C
Just paying attention to what you're spending monthly money on.
- [149:11]
B
Yeah. Just as.
- [149:13]
A
Just that. Yeah.
- [149:14]
B
Yep, yep.
- [149:15]
A
It's sensible.
- [149:15]
B
Yeah. I mean, I, I review this from time to time.
- [149:18]
C
Yeah, we, like I said, we just suspended. We just let Netflix go because she'd seen everything she wanted to see. And Netflix sends me sad emails every month and I feast on their tears. I'm delighted. And, you know, maybe we'll turn it on when they make something we want to watch.
- [149:31]
B
Right, Right. Yeah, yeah.
- [149:37]
C
There's not a lot of spam that makes me happy, but. But Netflix's pleading makes me happy. Like, that's very enjoyable.
- [149:43]
A
Please, please come back.
- [149:46]
B
We miss you.
- [149:48]
C
I will send you an envelope of tears for you to try.
- [149:54]
A
App pick of the Week. We just got the browser stats. I just say this parenthetically, chrome is like 80% now, the monster. It's totally the monster. Edge is like 15% number two. Yeah, it is amazing. It's the tyranny of the default, to paraphrase Steve Gibson. Then Firefox, then Opera and the rest, it's just belong to it.
- [150:20]
B
Yeah. Nobody knows. Yeah. So the 2% of whatever is the rest is probably 5 or even 10 that maybe people have heard of. And this is one of them. But the reason I mention it this week is because there's a lot of these things, right? Obviously most of them chromium based. There's a couple that are Firefox based as well, obviously, but most of them are chromium based. And the thing is, it used to be I want Chrome, but without the Google stuff. And then that's what Edge is. But then Edge has its own form of tracking and whatever. And it's like, all right, so what I really want here is I do want Chrome, but I want it without any of the tracking stuff. And then you have Brave and whatever. So Vivaldi does all that. But the thing that's been happening more recently is this AI browser kind of phenomenon, for lack of a better term. So there are the established browser makers like Google and Microsoft that are kind of going about it in a very slow moving, kind of general way. And then there are the small companies no one's ever heard of, like the browser company or Perplexity, which is making Comet, where it's a little more radical. And if you look at like DuckDuckGo, Brave Opera, any of these other browsers. Like, well, what are they going to do? Like what's their plan? Like what are they doing? And they have ideas and they talk about doing different things. Like maybe we'll have a thing where you could pick your models and you could, you know, maybe you pay and get better models at some point or whatever it is. And it's like, yeah, so it's like, what's Vivaldi doing? Like we're not doing anything thing. That's what we're doing.
- [151:59]
A
Intentionally.
- [152:00]
B
Yeah. And I actually have to say I think there's going to be some attraction to this idea.
- [152:05]
A
It makes me want to try it, I'll be honest.
- [152:07]
B
And it's a good browser. It's a really good browser. But the thing I like about this is, look, they're not denying AI, AI is happening. What they're saying is it doesn't have to be part of the browser. You can get extensions, you could go to the page. Why does it have to be what are we bloating this thing up for? And I guess you could be cynical and be like, oh, they couldn't figure it out. That must be what's happening here. But it's like, no, you know, like this company was started to make this thing and they, their big deal is to me seems like it's customization, personalization. Like it's a little off the charts. Like it's, it's dense with options.
- [152:42]
A
That's the thing that stops me is that learning curve.
- [152:45]
B
But then yeah, and they, and they just, yeah, they, they pile it on. Like they have a built in email app and you know, all this stuff, it's like there's all. If you want it, you know, you don't have to use any of it if you don't want it. But it, But I have to say, like I think they're going to find an audience with this one. Like the, it's like, we heard you like a lot of people. Like enough, like keep your AI out of my damn browser, you know, that kind of thing.
- [153:05]
A
So it's Chrome based, right?
- [153:07]
B
Yeah, it's Chromium. Yep, yep. But it does all the right stuff. Like if you write out of the box, if you go to, it does all the tracker and ad blocking and all that stuff.
- [153:16]
A
Okay. So you don't have to worry about Ublock origin because that's the problem.
- [153:19]
B
It just does it. And it's effective. It does it right. It's good.
- [153:25]
A
All right, I'm Going to install it. You do this to me every freaking time.
- [153:29]
C
Another browser. Another browser.
- [153:32]
A
Every time, Paul.
- [153:34]
C
All a browser.
- [153:36]
A
I got to thank you, though, because you've introduced me to some fun stuff like arc.
- [153:41]
B
Yeah. Glad that one worked for the 15.
- [153:44]
C
Minutes that it was around.
- [153:45]
B
Yeah.
- [153:45]
A
Right.
- [153:46]
B
Well, it's one of those things. It's 1 out of 10 people. They're like, oh, my God, I can't live without this. Now the other nine are like, what? Let's see if he's looking at.
- [153:58]
A
So Vivaldi has ProtonVPN. It syncs. I'm just looking at it right now. I have an account from ages ago.
- [154:08]
B
Yep. It will take that if you have it. Like, you could sign in. Yeah. And you get additional things. Obviously, you get whatever you get with Proton. But I mean, like, I think the version that's built in, I don't think you. Maybe you can't choose, like, where it's coming from or something like that. It's some, you know, it's a simple.
- [154:22]
A
Version, but bring your favorites. Okay, do that. Import selected. Okay, continue. So now I have all my. We care about your privacy. Do it. Lock it. Lock it all. And now make it yours.
- [154:39]
C
Dark look.
- [154:40]
A
My soul. I like my tabs on left. You know the one thing for this machine that I look for a browser that has this little.
- [154:53]
B
Right. So it's a little busy by default.
- [154:55]
A
Can I get it full?
- [154:56]
B
Yes, you can really minimize it that way.
- [155:00]
A
Let me see. Let me turn on full screen. Okay. Well, I'll have to, I guess, turn off some toolbars and things. Oh, that's nice, though. It has the categories. I like that.
- [155:08]
B
That. But I do. Yeah. Like the little. The sidebar stuff they have. Like, I hide that by default and.
- [155:13]
A
Yeah, I'm sure I can just. Yeah, hide that. Yeah. Yeah. Look at all this. There's a lot of stuff going on. And there's the V. Yeah, it's.
- [155:22]
B
You know, but this is. You can 100 customize every picture I'm.
- [155:27]
A
Gonna show because you're my. You're my guy.
- [155:30]
B
I'm just. I'm just as. You know, as an AI, if you don't want AI in the browser.
- [155:36]
A
Well, but that's the beauty of it. You don't have to have AI in the browser. What I really hate is Google now. Like, I go into Google Drive and it says, hey, you want to summarize all those documents?
- [155:46]
B
No, I know. I got stuck.
- [155:48]
A
Hey, hey, you want to do something with AI? It's like Clippy.
- [155:50]
B
It's Worse. Yeah.
- [155:51]
C
Clippy's everywhere. Clippy's everywhere.
- [155:53]
A
And the problem is it's usually going to junk it up. It's not going to enhance it. It's going to junk it up with stuff. And then I have to undo all the crap that the AI did. I love AI. I use it, but I don't.
- [156:05]
B
Yeah, but you want to be purposeful, like, I, like I'll go. I'll go to you when I need you. How does that sound? You know, that kind of thing. Yep.
- [156:11]
A
And it certainly can do that in.
- [156:14]
B
All right.
- [156:14]
A
And I noticed by the way, they have weasel words in the press release, like, until it's useful, until it's good, and then we'll, you know, all. But they don't. They're not gonna. They don't want it where you say, hey, you told us you were never going to do this. This.
- [156:27]
B
It's like, hey, you should do your taxes with this. Also, AI makes mistakes. Be careful, be careful, be careful. What?
- [156:33]
A
Watch out. Run as radio Episode 1000 yeah, here we go. Exciting.
- [156:45]
C
Got to 1000 somehow. Just persistence, I guess. So little bit of an indulgence episode. I put out the word a few weeks ago saying, hey, if you got any questions about the show or things you care about, let us know. Got a few audio clips for some folks as well as lots of email questions. Invited my friend Paul to help me triage through all of this and where do we go? 75 minutes. So, yeah, a little indulgent.
- [157:11]
B
Yep.
- [157:12]
C
But, you know, tried to answer them all and sort of fell into certain categories or certainly the windows is irrelevant conversation. There was the AI taking over all the things conversation and I don't know here and there, some, you know, digging into some system and problems and stuff. And we had a good time. It was. It was really fun and I'm grateful folks care enough to listen.
- [157:34]
A
Absolutely.
- [157:36]
C
A special.
- [157:36]
A
A very special episode.
- [157:38]
C
Yeah, it's a while. It's only been, what, 18 years? So.
- [157:43]
B
Okay.
- [157:43]
C
Thousand episodes you've been doing as long as we have.
- [157:46]
A
That's pretty impressive.
- [157:47]
C
That's amazing. For better or worse.
- [157:49]
B
Wow.
- [157:50]
A
Runasradio.com Episode 1000 and now let's get Canadian.
- [158:00]
C
Well, first, let me, you know, before the club break, we said some things about Crown Royal and I should. Lots of folks had come at me with a. You did that wrong. Let me correct some stuff A. There are two Fords that were premier of Ontario. There was Rob Ford who. Who is dead.
- [158:16]
A
Oh yes.
- [158:16]
C
His brother Doug Ford is the current.
- [158:19]
A
This, by the way, confused me as a non.
- [158:20]
B
The dead one is the one who has the Netflix special. Is that right?
- [158:24]
A
Ford was a little.
- [158:25]
C
Oh, no, I don't think his brother's all that much better. He's just still alive, right? Which is a feature. And he's still premiere, hasn't overdosed anything. He keeps getting elected and very. They're famous for doing stuff like, here's my cell number. You got a problem, call me, right? To a province of. Of 15 million people. Crown Royal is made in Gimli, Manitoba.
- [158:46]
A
So it is made in Canada.
- [158:47]
C
Made in Gimli, Manitoba. What Diageo is shutting down in Amherstburg, Ontario, is a bottling plant, right? That bottling plant has been under producing for a long time. The sales of whiskeys are off across the board. They're just not selling as much. They didn't need that bottling plant. So that's all that's being closed.
- [159:05]
A
Okay.
- [159:06]
C
And Doug Ford is making a big show of it because it's good for, you know, pull up politics. All the whiskey make the noise.
- [159:13]
A
So still Canadian, though. That's the thing. It's still Canadian whiskey, but owned by.
- [159:17]
C
Owned by a massive UK conglomerate, as all whiskey is as many now. There's a half a dozen big ones. There's a, you know, a French one and a Japanese one and an English one and. And then a few odd ducks and there's an Argentinian one, right? Or Filipino one. But the way we are talking Canadian today, because I felt like it, it. And the particular whiskey we're talking about is a classic, one would argue. This is the Jack Daniels of Canada. This is Canadian Club.
- [159:46]
A
God bless.
- [159:47]
C
The 1858 original. There's a bunch of other editions. And the hilarious part is, as much as it says Canada on it, it was made by a guy named Hiram Walker who was from Massachusetts. Yeah, Massachusetts. In his early 20s, he moved, moves to Detroit and he's trying to work the grocery business, works for a few different companies. Finally tries to set up his own store. He fails a couple of times by 1850. So now he's, you know, 35 or so. He's got a grocery store that's working and he's starting to make good vinegar, which is a distillation process. So he starts to experiment with whiskey and he can't get a license by 1855.
- [160:28]
B
The.
- [160:29]
C
The initial stages of temperance are going on and the state of Michigan has restricted alcohol sales to druggists, AKA pharmacies, and so can't get a license. But hey, he's in Detroit, you know, what's right across the Detroit river.
- [160:45]
A
Oh, Canada.
- [160:48]
C
And so in 1856 he buys 500 or so acres land just east of the little village, at that point a few thousand people of Windsor, Ontario. And he builds a company town, brings in water, builds a bunch of townhouses, a bank, a church, along with a distillery and a flour mill because he also had a side flour business and animal farms, both pigs and cattle because the byproduct of whiskey that spent mash is good cattle food. So he's doing vertical integration in the 1850s. Now the product when initially released, and again they had the name, the year right on the bottle, 1858 is called Heroic Walker's Club Whiskey because the first big customers were gentlemen's clubs.
- [161:35]
B
Oh.
- [161:36]
C
And so he's selling his barrels in a gentleman's club, so it's called a club whiskey. And of course he's built, built out this place around his distillery where his folks work. I would point out that within a couple of years of operation, he's just sort of lucky. The American Civil War begins. Lucky for Hiram Walker because the military stops buying beer because it goes bad. They buy whiskey for part of the production. So he gets huge contracts to supply whiskey into the military during the Civil War. Within a couple of years, he leaves his own little town, it's now called Walkerville, moves back to Detroit. He has a house built there. So he's living comfortably with his family in Walkerville. And his big innovation in 1865, he starts selling his whiskey in bottles, not in barrels. At that time, most whiskey was you would go to your pharmacist or the, to your retailer with a bottle and have it filled for the barrel. But always the question was what was really in the barrel? Right, sure, it says, you know, club on the, on the barrel, but how do you really know? So his big push was, here's a bottle, it's got a tamper proof seal on it. You know, we make a reliable product. And I think it's important to remember that this is the 1860s. There is no FDA. The FDA won't be formed until the 1930s. In fact, the precursor to the FDA, the purity laws won't come in until 1906. So there's really a problem with quality of products. There's no controls. And so this push in 1865, you know, makes is big. It sells a lot of whiskey. People really like that, that. Now the hilarious part about this is at this point, Canada is in Canada, yet Canada doesn't actually Confederate until 1867 and it won't be until 1875. And we talked about this back in the Crown Royal episode about the Canadian Food and Drug Act. The first rules come down in 1875 defining the concept of Canadian whiskey, Canadian rye whiskey and rye whiskey and about mashing, distilling and so forth. The alcohol level, size of barrels, what you could do with the wood and bash bill was pretty much wide open, although there was a lot of rye grown in the area. So they often talk about rye whiskey. It's also very common to use bourbon barrels and so does Canadian club. Also the Canadian practices and Hiram Walker was one of these. They do what they call multi stream barreling, so or multi stream production where they don't mix the grains, they don't make a mash bill, they do distillation, separate and then combine them after the fact fact. So by 1870 Walkerville's a village, several hundred people living in it and whiskey is selling extremely well. And coming out of the Civil War, the US distillers are complaining about the how well this whiskey is doing. And so they convinced the Congress to pass a law requiring foreign whiskies to have a declaration that they are foreign. And so Walker puts Canadian on the label and his popularity actually goes up. Now it's an exotic import whiskey that's hysterical. He also puts in a ferry called the Essex running between Detroit and Walkerville because he didn't like taking the train all the way around. But that ferry will get really useful sometime in the 1920s and there's a great, I saw a great ad that said less delay the Walkerville way. So by the 1880s there's about 700 people living in Walkerville. The production at this point, his warehousing is over 5 million gallons. He actually incorporates in a city as a City by 1890 and is one of the largest whiskies in the world. They were literally the Jack Daniels of Canada. Heron walker dies in 1899. His sons take it over, becomes Heron Walker and Sons and they operate it for another 20 years or so until prohibition comes in. That starts in 1920. And after a few years sales are down enough that the Suns are over leveraged and they sell to a guy named Harry Hatch. And Harry Hatch is an interesting character too. This guy had been a top salesman out of a competitive distillery called the Corby Distillery. And during Prohibition this is further east up the Detroit river into Little Lake, Ontario area. Hatch had been the guy who had recruited a bunch of fishermen to run barrels across the lake to supply during Prohibition. Apparently at one point they called it Hatch's Navy. It was like 450 different boats running back and forth across. And Corby had amassed quite a bit of. Or Hatchet amassed quite a bit of money. And so he went to the Corby Distillery and tried to buy it, and they said no. So he went to the Walkers and bought that distillery instead. But don't worry, he's not done. He has enough money that he knows Prohibition is going to end sometime soon, and he starts building a huge distillery in Peoria, Illinois, and basically timed its opening to the end of prohibition. 1934, it opens up, making 100,000 gallons a day. By the way, that distillery still exists today, but it just makes industrial ethanol as of 1970. The next year, he turns around and buys Corby and. And a bunch of other distilleries in the process. So Hatch was the big mover and shaker in this space. And so by the beginning of World War II, Canadian Club is sold in over 90 countries. And because it continues to be one of the largest whiskies in the world, Allied Dominic acquired them in 1890, in 1989, which is the beginning of the consolidation of the whiskey industry. That was then bought by Pernod Ricard in 2005, and that's where they remain today as part of Pernod Ricardo Card. Canadian Club had a huge bump in sales in 2010 with Mad Men because Don Draper drank Canadian Club.
- [167:29]
A
Oh, that's right. I remember that.
- [167:32]
C
Yeah. I'm laughing about the whole story about. This is the pure bottle because they have the seal tamper, food seals and so forth. I bought this bottle yesterday just so that I'd have one in hand. And it has no seal on it. It's just a screw top. Oh, not like the expensive whiskeys that have the foil wrap and the little. And a cork and stuff like that. That. Nope, just a screw top. Because this is inexpensive Whiskey. It was 25 Canadian dollars. The distillery itself, the. The operation in Walkerville, which is still running Walkerville, has actually been incorporated into Windsor, largely against the will of the people that live there. But that's how it went down. They use combination of pot and column and rectification stills. Most of the grains are bought in and around Ontario. They have storage facilities all over Ontario, but the bottling is right at that same plant as well. The actual way that Canadian. The traditional Canadian Club is made is primarily corn, which again, is malted. It's not malted, but it's Dried, ground, mashed and fermented on its own. They also use rye, malted rye and malted barley. And each of those has a separate stream where they're malted, dried, ground, mashed, fermented. And only at the point of casking do they combine them into the production product. They do use American bourbon barrels because they're plentiful and inexpensive. And it's aged minimum of three years because that's the law. Some say it's up to six. Depends on what it is. All right. This smells like inexpensive whiskey. It's got that strong corn, you know, grain.
- [169:03]
A
Harsh. Is it? Maybe a little.
- [169:05]
C
No, it's not. Got a burning nose. That drinks are super nice. Ice. This needs an ice cube and some soda water and it would be brilliant.
- [169:14]
B
Yeah.
- [169:15]
C
By the way. So I was trying to find, can you buy this in America, right? It's Canadian club and of course you can. It's like they sell far more in America than they do in Canada. But actually finding the sort of so called 26 ounce or 750 mil bottle is hard.
- [169:29]
A
Really. A total wine all with a handle.
- [169:32]
C
19 is a handle.
- [169:34]
B
Wow.
- [169:35]
C
Which is a great term.
- [169:36]
B
Right?
- [169:36]
C
It's a handle. What's a handle? Well, it's a bottle so big it has a handle in it. That' why it's called handle. It's 1.75 liters as opposed to the 750 mil. And by the way, it is actually 1.75 liters. Not roughly. It's 59.15 ounces. There's a secret here which is that back in the 70s, the ATF and the distilled Spirits Council actually switched over American alcohol to metric measurements. And they've never actually gone back back. So what you know of as the, the, the, the, the original 26 ounce bottle, which was never a 26 ounce bottle, it was a 25 1/3 ounce bottle, was actually 757 milliliters. Is now a 750 milliliter bottle. Also known as a metric fifth because it used to be a fifth of a gallon when it was 25.35 ounce. A handle is actually 1.75 liters. But you know, only the fractional amount of that.
- [170:38]
B
That.
- [170:39]
C
But it's also known as a metric half gallon. So in the system, in America you use the metric system. You even refer to it as the metric system just for your bottles.
- [170:51]
A
What? I didn't know that. That's hysterical.
- [170:54]
C
Yeah. And they're all fractionally different from each other.
- [170:56]
A
Right.
- [170:57]
C
But in the end. The production is simply that. But yeah, 19 bucks for a handle of Canadian Club. Get a big bottle of soda. You will be happy there. You know, I could be snobby about whiskey. Goodness knows I've dropped. Drank all kinds of expensive whiskeys over the years and I have enjoyed them. They are delightful. But you know, the last fishing trip last year where we had the whole thing about Jack Daniels and it made me research Jack Daniels. It's like, listen, drop the pretense. Whatever you like, whatever you want to drink.
- [171:30]
A
Something with a handle.
- [171:31]
C
It's good and you know, the handle's hilarious. And it says something about you. It says, not only did I come to party, I came to party hard.
- [171:37]
A
My mom, when we put it home.
- [171:39]
C
In the original book of Dr. No, James Bond. I know it's all about the martinis in the movie, but in the original book, such a good book, James drinks CC and soda before a mission. And not only that, but a lot of it. Because, you know, Fleming was big on the fact that Jane. That Bond was highly stressed. Like this was very dangerous stuff. And he was an alcoholic. And yeah, he drank Drac and soda before the. That's before the trip.
- [172:07]
B
Mission.
- [172:07]
A
So he managed to keep his head clear.
- [172:09]
C
However, I don't. He's a fictional character. So of course.
- [172:15]
A
True, true.
- [172:16]
C
But of course, when they make the movie and. And it's Sean Connery, then it's all about the whiskeys and it's all about, yeah, the martinis, the Vespa.
- [172:27]
A
Very nice. I'm glad we did a little tribute to the Ford brothers and Canadian whiskey.
- [172:36]
C
There's a whole other piece here I could have gone into about the relationship between Detroit and Windsor and the automobile industry which grows up around Walkerville like that. Walkerville was already there and how always those industries were deeply integrated and right now they're completely crippled by some foolishness. Yeah, but I'm not going to do that. I'm going to have a drink instead.
- [172:55]
A
Yeah, that's probably the only. Only reasonable response at this point.
- [173:00]
C
Fair enough. And I would point out that my soda has been silent for two plus hours. And the moment I started doing this bit, she lost her mind.
- [173:08]
A
I want some. Johnny. I want some. I want some something.
- [173:10]
C
He's talking about alcohol again. He's talking about alcohol again.
- [173:12]
B
No, it's just like you must be talking to me.
- [173:15]
A
We will add this along with all the others to something weird from my closet dot com. The compilation of fabulous whiskey segments from our great whiskey lover himself, Richard Campbell. He's Got a Scottish name, but he's all Canadian. Actually, I think there are quite a few Campbells in.
- [173:37]
C
I am that Scottish Campbell. The ones that betrayed the Douglases and later found out. I was told as a kid we are Welsh Campbells. Which apparently. What you said.
- [173:46]
A
Yeah, we're the other Campbells.
- [173:48]
C
We're the Welsh Campbells.
- [173:52]
A
Only after you ran.
- [173:55]
C
My grandmother was born in Wales but grew up in Scotland.
- [173:58]
A
So there you go. There you go. Richard is@runasradio.com that's where you'll find the 1000th episode of Net Rocks, which already a number of people said is great. Well worth listening to.
- [174:09]
C
Thank you.
- [174:10]
A
And of course with Karl Franklin. He does the Net Rocks Rock's show as well. Paul Thurot is in Berlin. His coverage of the IFA conference, which technically gets underway in a couple of days, has already started to appear at thurrot.com t h u r r r o doublegood.com Become a premium member. Don't rotate that subscription. Become a premium member.
- [174:32]
B
Yeah, not that one.
- [174:33]
A
Not that one. No, stick with that.
- [174:36]
B
Don't mean me.
- [174:39]
A
And you can also find his books, including the Field guide to Windows 11, featuring Windows 10 built right in and windows everywhere@leanpub.com Paul, are you going to. I think you're going to Mexico next week.
- [174:56]
B
When am I going? It's going to be a few weeks. Okay.
- [174:59]
A
Back home to Makunji and then on to Mexico. The jet setting Peripatetic. Paul Thurant. Richard, you're going to stay home for a little while?
- [175:08]
C
Nope. Leaving on Sunday for Copenhagen.
- [175:11]
A
Oh, good.
- [175:12]
C
Gonna tour a thorium nuclear reactor because that's a thing I do.
- [175:16]
A
That's great.
- [175:17]
C
That'll be interesting. Yeah. We got the. The Copenhagen Dev fest.
- [175:22]
A
Okay.
- [175:22]
B
Bring home each other in the air. So I will wave to you.
- [175:26]
C
Yeah, we'll go on by. And then the following week I think I'll be in Valencia.
- [175:32]
A
Very nice.
- [175:33]
B
When we do the show. Show.
- [175:34]
C
Oh, no, I'll be back. I'll be back in Amsterdam for the show. I'll be in Valencia earlier in the.
- [175:38]
B
Week, but very nice.
- [175:39]
C
I'm going to a friend's son's wedding in Amsterdam, outside of Amsterdam. Known him his whole life.
- [175:45]
A
So I miss Amsterdam. I miss.
- [175:47]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [175:48]
A
I really enjoyed Amsterdam. I will be back next week and the week after. But then I'm going on a trip for a couple of weeks.
- [175:56]
C
Michael, I'm so excited for you, brother. I'm glad you're doing this trip. It sounds absolutely amazing going down the.
- [176:02]
A
Big, up the Big Muddy, starting in New Orleans and going all the way to St. Paul. That'll be interesting.
- [176:07]
B
Yeah.
- [176:09]
A
Lots of tales to tell when I return. Thank you gentlemen. Thank you all you club members for making this show possible. Don't forget Twitter, TV Club Twit. If you're not a member, we'd love to have you. And of course we'll be back next Wednesday. We do the show every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern. Eastern. That will be 1800 UTC. And you can find us in the club in the disco. We're behind the velvet rope there. But you can also watch in the YouTube, on the TikTok, on the Twitch, on the X dot com, on the Facebook, on the LinkedIn and something else that I can say.
- [176:46]
B
Kick. Because Kick's my favorite one.
- [176:48]
A
Kick's the one in Australia.
- [176:49]
B
Yeah. Kick.
- [176:52]
A
Yeah. I can't. Anyway, they're all great. They're all great. And get in there, chat with us. I see the combined chat. So I see all your comments and thank you for participating. We appreciate that after the fact, on demand versions of the show available as soon as the show is done@TWIT TV WW. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to the video. We have audio and video. The YouTube channel is a great tool for clipping little bits and sending them to friends and family. Great way to share what you have learned on Windows Weekly or about Whiskey for that matter. And there's of course the best way to get it, any podcast really. So subscribe in your favorite podcast player. Use the RSS man. Use the RSS Luke and you can pull it in just without even any effort on your part. And listen on on Wednesday evening after the show is done. Leave us a five star review if you would. We'd appreciate that. Also, if you're a club member and you don't want to hang out in the Discord, but Discord. But you want to know what's going on. You know the Discord has an events button that you can click to see what's going on. But if you aren't, Lisa reminds me, we have a free newsletter that talks about all the events of the week to come. Easy to subscribe TWiT TV newsletter. There's no cost. You're all welcome to subscribe to that. It's a great way to keep up on the goings on around here. Thank you everybody. Thank you all you winners and you dozers. We'll see you next time on Windows Weekly.
- [178:20]
B
Buh. Bye. High interest debt is one of the toughest opponents you'll face unless you power.
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C
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A
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B
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A
Could get the funds as soon as the same day you sign. Visit sofi.compower to learn more. That's s o-fi.com P-O-W-E-R loans originated by.
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C
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