WW 964: Happy New Year! - Paul & Richard Get Toasty by the Fire

Summary

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Windows Weekly Ep. 964: Happy New Year! - Paul & Richard Get Toasty by the Fire

Date: December 28, 2025
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell

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Episode Overview

This special year-end edition of Windows Weekly departs from tech news and instead brings together Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell—literally, side-by-side—to swap stories, reminisce about their histories, talk about their families, and toast the holidays. Host Leo Laporte steers the conversation with warmth and humor, encouraging a relaxed, personal vibe. Largely skipping all current Microsoft drama, this episode is filled with tales of personal and professional journeys, favorite gadgets, and a playful look at the world of tech past and present.

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Festive Setup & Banter

00:00 – 06:50

• Paul and Richard join Leo from Pennsylvania, cozied up by the fire. They share the scene—Surface Studio, HP Omnibook, whiskey, gin, rum, and mutual ribbing about their holiday attire.
  • “It’s really, truly a Christmas miracle.” – Leo [01:16]
• Stories swap immediately: favorite drinks, a little lampooning of each other's gear (“This thing is hot.” – Paul [02:42]) and attire (“Paul’s wearing shorts... look like you could be a school crossing monitor at a Christmas school.” – Leo [02:59])

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Family Holidays & Childhood Memories

06:50 – 17:19

Paul’s Best Christmas Gift

• Leo asks: “What was your favorite Christmas memory, Paul?” [09:02]
• Paul: “Getting Barry Manilow’s greatest hits as a young man really was…” [09:09]
  • He genuinely appreciated it—and still saw Barry live just last year.

Richard’s Holiday Tech Origin Story

• Richard: “My father… an electrical engineer, got me my first soldering iron.” [11:57]
• Anecdotes about being forced to solder as practice, turning passions into life skills and jobs.
  • “Never forget your first [soldering iron], do you?” – Leo [12:08]

Fateful Blow-Up Stories

• Richard recounts blowing a capacitor in the service room as a youth, the mentor Tyler’s reaction (“So what have we learned?” [17:08]), and the long-term love for hands-on tech.

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Family Histories and Influence

17:20 – 41:13

• Both hosts describe how their parents’ careers and interests shaped them.
  • Paul: Dad was a Boston cop, then worked for Lutron (“the heart of Lutron country,” [18:49]); mom was a nurse.
  • Richard: Dad was an electrical engineer working on S100 bus cash registers (computers for POS systems), mother was office manager.
• Nostalgic for the heyday of Radio Shack and electronics stores where you could buy resistors from bins.
  • “One of the saddest things of the modern age is the stores where you… you can’t go buy those anymore” – Leo [14:06]

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World Travel, Family Backstories, and Migration

41:14 – 62:36

Paul’s Mexico City Adventure

• Paul shares how he and his wife ended up buying a home in Mexico City after decades of European travel plans were derailed by COVID.
  • “I have an idea. You’re going to want to interrupt me. Just let me get through this. I think we should go to Mexico.” – Paul [25:50]
  • Describes finding and buying an apartment on a whim, leading to “Eternal Spring”—a book, website, and YouTube channel chronicling their experience.

Richard’s Trans-World Family

• Scottish ancestors emigrated to Canada, with family moving to New Zealand; mother’s side has wild stories of rubber-smuggling ancestors and wartime intelligence.
  • “Move to a different hemisphere. So my grandmother, grandfather moved back to BC and my father married a Kiwi and had me.” – Richard [33:59]

Jokes About Nationalities and Shared Heritage

• Banter about being Canadian, New Zealander, relationships with the US and Australia; mutual ribbing about sheep and cows.
• “You both worship the same king.” – Leo [39:30] (re: King Charles for Canada/NZ)

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Tech Nostalgia — First Computers, Favorite Products, Early Days

62:37 – 88:13

Early Microsoft Experiences

• Paul’s first impressions were negative—back in the Amiga and Commodore days.
  • “My earliest understanding of Microsoft was really negative because I had Amiga, they did the basic, I hated it.” – Paul [43:45]
• Turning point with Office 6 and Windows 3.1/95 era (“I thought that was where they started to pick up a little bit of... good design.” [44:47])
• Group shares memories of early database programs, DBASE, buying kits, writing software, and hardware hacks.
  • “Kids today, you don’t remember, you don’t know… and we suffered.” – Leo [54:43]

Favorite Old Hardware and Gaming Memories

• The gang swaps stories of Intellivision, Amiga, Northstar Advantage computers, and the dawn of multitasking.
  • “We suffered....” [54:49]
  • “Sea Battle was amazing” – Paul [48:59]
  • “If a guy skated straight at you on the upper board, you hit him with your stick just right, he would flip over the board.” – Richard [49:39]

COMDEX/Trade Show Anecdotes

• Descriptions of staying in Vegas dump hotels, grabbing pounds of printed flyers, carrying out “free chlamydia” from Circus Circus [59:22], and the surreal nature of those early tech conventions.

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Inside Microsoft — Executives, Influence, Company Directions

88:14 – 89:01

Microsoft Execs, Past and Present

• Colorful stories: Ballmer’s pint-of-honey rituals, demanding style, and his “nice shirt” moment with Paul [66:54], Panos Panay drama (“He locked the door behind me… Like a mob meeting.” – Paul [64:16]), leaks, and hardware announcements.
• Satya Nadella — his tenure, transition to AI, and speculation about Microsoft’s next era.
  • “He was the Bing guy.” – Paul [73:59]
• Reflections on cloud, AI, AWS—what the world knows (and doesn’t know) about Microsoft and competitors.
  • “If I were to say it’s the cloud, that would be like, well, that’s electricity.” – Leo [75:33]

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Favorite Microsoft Products & Their Legacy

89:02 – 89:49

• Early items: Professional BASIC, Office, Visual Studio (“I like the realignment of the leadership and some of the new people are coming into play.” – Richard [88:13])
• Wistfulness for the time when Windows was the center of everything at Microsoft, and how the company is undergoing a new generational shift.
  • “It’s a new era.… Leadership is split up a little bit more between different people.” – Paul [88:49]

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Economic Outlook, AI Bubble, and the Future

89:50 – 90:27

• Discussion about AI, the tech market, and the potential for a bubble/crash reminiscent of 2000/2008; nervous gallows humor about investments and economic resilience.
  • “Look, the plane’s crashing. You’re just hoping for a water landing.” – Paul [84:53]

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Hopes for 2026 & Closing Toast

90:28 – end

• Paul hopes for clarity and opt-in AI approaches for Windows 12.
• Richard is excited by new company leadership and the opportunities for a new generation at Microsoft.
• Universal appreciation for the audience, Leo’s gentle digs about drinking, and the show’s unique holiday flavor.
  • “You’re all winners in my eyes, guys. Well, except for you, Kev Brewer. You’re kind of a…” – Paul [80:03]
  • “The clothes are only coming off at this point, Leo.” – Paul [90:43]
  • “Watching the world burn… No, there’s not going to—bring the marshmallows.” – Richard [90:19]

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Memorable Quotes

• “Better than like little bits of iron or something, you know… I mean.” – Paul, after Richard’s capacitor story [16:29]
• “My earliest understanding of Microsoft was really negative because I had Amiga, they did the basic, I hated it.” – Paul [43:45]
• “It’s a Pennsylvania old Fart. It’s nice. Local holiday tradition.” – Paul [07:45]
• “We know you’re in there. Come on… with our checks. Yeah, classic.” – Paul on Boston cops [19:48]
• “The unsung hero who is now… Hopefully a little bit all the drunk.” – Paul, about their producer [80:24]

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Highlight Timestamps

• 09:02 — Christmas memories and best gifts
• 15:25 — Spectrum analyzer explosion/early hardware hacking
• 25:50/27:03 — The decision to move to Mexico City
• 33:59 — Richard’s sprawling family migration story
• 43:45 — Paul’s earliest distaste for Microsoft basic
• 54:43 — “Kids today, you don’t remember, you don’t know... and we suffered.”
• 66:54 — Paul’s “Nice shirt” Ballmer encounter
• 84:53 — “Look, the plane’s crashing: you’re just hoping for a water landing.”
• 88:13 — New Microsoft leadership and Richard’s hopes for VS2026
• 90:43 — Paul jokes about “the clothes only coming off at this point”

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Tone & Atmosphere

• Laid-back, warm, and irreverent, with plenty of laughter, gentle teasing, and a genuine sense of friendship.
• Openness and nostalgia dominate—a break from the usual format, inviting listeners into the hosts’ personal worlds.
• A mixture of candid storytelling, tech reminiscence, and forecasts, providing both entertainment and insight for die-hard fans and casual listeners alike.

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Conclusion:
No Microsoft news or technical deep-dives this week. Instead, listeners get holiday cheer, life stories, real talk, and a sense that, even in the fast-changing world of tech, some traditions and friendships (and old hardware) never go out of style.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell are huddled around the fire in beautiful Macunjee, Pennsylvania, for a very special year end show. No Microsoft News, just stories, tales, and a little bit of heavy drinking. Coming up next on Windows Weekly, podcasts.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

You love from people you trust.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is twit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurod and Richard Campbell. Episode 964 for New Year's Eve 2025. Happy New Year. Well, happy holidays, everybody. It's actually, I guess we're airing this on the New Year's Eve. Is that right?

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

A special holiday recording of Windows Weekly. And lo and behold, the look who the reindeer dragged in. Richard and Paul are together in beautiful Makunji. Yeah, Paul's got some sort of odd.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's real. It's not.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at that. They're touching one another.

[Richard Campbell]

We could actually touch each other. There's no cup here.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. It's really, truly a Christmas miracle.

[Richard Campbell]

I flew back from Lithuania and stopped in Pence in. I landed in Philadelphia and took an U out to lower McCounjee. So here I am.

[Leo Laporte]

So just in case you're tuning in, expecting, like Microsoft News, forget about it. This is.

[Richard Campbell]

That's not what we're doing.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not what we're doing today. Today we're just going to celebrate the holidays with our.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, those people do like normal human being, adults, like normal.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know, traditionally on. On the network, we do best ofs, but I just thought, oh, heck, oh, heck. Why don't we do something different this time?

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Let the editors.

[Paul Thurrott]

It was like, you guys aren't working hard enough. Let's involve you this time.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. With headgear. Let's do all kinds of headgear.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's not do Windows news. Let's not do a best of. Let's get. And it turned out, because Richard was going to be in Rakanji, that you two could sit together. And now, Richard, you've got a Surface. Your look looks like there.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. This is a Surface Studio 2.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. That's a big one. And Paul's running.

[Richard Campbell]

It's got the. It's got the Nvidia 4060 in it, which means I can melt casings on phones with it. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't really need the fire, Is that what you're saying?

[Richard Campbell]

No, it's blasting out of the side of this thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hot.

[Leo Laporte]

You're on new log, and then Paul's using an HP laptop. Is that one of the elite books or.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it's an Omnibook 5 this is the Snapdragon based 16 inch nice so.

[Richard Campbell]

It'S not blasting heat out it's not.

[Paul Thurrott]

Blasting anything out except for oodles of.

[Leo Laporte]

Battery life Something's blasting heat up because Paul despite the fact that he's wearing a hat and a very odd vest looks like you could be a school crossing monitor at a Christmas school yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like a future guy in a post office wall warning poster.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah but he's also wearing shorts. Yeah Is it a hot day?

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm sending a lot of mixed signals to my bodies about temperature right now because this thing is hot Richard's laptop is hot. Yeah this thing on my head is.

[Leo Laporte]

Hot Everything wear vests but it's all hot Are we in the thurat living room here? I like that you have the I like this over your fireplaces asl picture that's very cool that's nice I have purchased purchased no actually no I had it actually it's really the remnants of my collection here I have about a figment of angels envy I do have from the last time you were out Richard a little bit of the clana Kilty left oh wow, look at that.

[Richard Campbell]

Really good yeah it's very nice and.

[Leo Laporte]

Then I don't know why I have some Lagavulin 16 for some reason I.

[Richard Campbell]

Guess you needed if you've got a bottle of dirty ashtray I need a.

[Leo Laporte]

Little hit of Pete oh yeah that's.

[Richard Campbell]

Not a little hit of Pete that's a thorough thump oh good the cork.

[Leo Laporte]

Broke off so I'm good oh yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

That'S gonna be harder that's just more peep.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it would be appropriate to light the cork on fire and that would give it a really nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Peaty glow Burning cork is not a pleasant smell no, it doesn't smell too.

[Leo Laporte]

Well It's a little peaty yeah let's.

[Paul Thurrott]

Get a give it a second there's.

[Leo Laporte]

Action yeah okay and then just for for grins I brought because I'm more of a rum guy I brought some and gin I like I like gnts I brought some rusty blade gin Nice which is from the single barrel collection.

[Paul Thurrott]

Of witty what do you call these coasters it says let's let the evening be gin.

[Leo Laporte]

Let the evening be oh I get it like begin I get it well we can begin with a beguine this is a cask strength single barrel blade gin rusty blade well and.

[Richard Campbell]

It looks like it's got it's a little brown like it's actually that's why it's rusty.

[Leo Laporte]

So I wonder what the barrels are for. It slowly handcrafted on the shores of San Francisco Bay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh God.

[Leo Laporte]

They locally sourced the finest California from.

[Paul Thurrott]

The local Superfund site and spices.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it is. If it wasn't. It is now three stage distillation in a custom copper pot still designed by and manufactured exclusively for a master distiller. Evaporation of Angel Share finally reduces this precious spirit to 94 proof rusty blade gin. They don't say what it's aged in. It rivals fine single malt whiskeys, Exo cognacs or fine bourbons. We like it either neat or with an ice cube or in any brown spirit cocktail like the Rusty Nutcracker, which would be appropriate for this time of year.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

I wish it said what it was aged in something gave it all that color. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It'll be oak of some kind of. Yeah. Whether the most obvious candidate would be bourbon barrel. Just because they're so common. It can only be used once. Right. So, yeah, that's probably the safe bet.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think the Angel's Envy or the Clonak Hilti would be my choice.

[Richard Campbell]

They'll both go very well. This is actually the whiskey that's on the upcoming Windows Weekly which will already be out by the time this is out.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Richard Campbell]

We've already seen Pennsylvania Old Farm. You'll have already seen it and I've already told the story of it, which I only finished writing today.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's. Isn't that Paul's name? The Old Fart? I think that's. That's Paul's name. Old Farm.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, Old Farm.

[Richard Campbell]

Almost the same. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, man.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, so I hope you at home have something to imbibe while we engage in. We do friendly chatter. This show needn't be very long. If you decide you want to bail out, to tap out at any time, please be our guests. You know, Paul, you may. You may feel it at some point.

[Paul Thurrott]

I might cover your knees. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

You may pass out. What do you. So are you drinking that today? Tonight, whatever that was that you had?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Good.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a Pennsylvania old Fart. It's nice. Local holiday tradition.

[Leo Laporte]

If it weren't. So if. If it's a. It is New Year's Eve. So I mean, I figure it's okay. We can be a little. A little outrageous here.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Number of people are drinking coffee because it is. We are recording.

[Richard Campbell]

Sensible. Maybe you're at a work day, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Like that's only a Monday at Noon, my time. So it's a little. A little early, but the sun.

[Richard Campbell]

As my old grandfather Kelsey's probably a good call then, because the Irish don't mess around. Lunchtime is whiskey time.

[Leo Laporte]

As my. My grandpa used to say, the sun's gone over the yard. Ar.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nice. He had no idea what that meant.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's time to have a drink.

[Paul Thurrott]

It sounds manly.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I shouldn't drink it out of the bottle. Oh, but that clotted guilty is so good. It's a glass and there's not much. It's a glass bottle.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So I thought we'd just, I don't know, tell some. Some yarns.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Stories from our past.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's the only kind of story I have, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

I wanna. Yeah, there's no stories from your future yet.

[Richard Campbell]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

What was your favorite Christmas memory, Paul? Maybe your favorite gift or a favorite moment?

[Paul Thurrott]

Getting Barry Minnows greatest hits as a young man really was.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you actually get that as a gift?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I did. Those were more innocent times.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you. Were you excited about that or was that something?

[Paul Thurrott]

I was pretty happy about it. We just saw Barry live last year in Pennsylvania, actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Really?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. He writes the song 80 something years old. He's doing great.

[Leo Laporte]

Is he.

[Richard Campbell]

He's still doing his thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Is he. Is he energetic still and all that?

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, he doesn't move as much, but I wouldn't either. I mean, nobody's doing good.

[Leo Laporte]

We went to see Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road show, which was going. He said, you know, it was my last concert tour, but it went on for like four years. So it was his last. But I mean, it was literally his last. And he is not all that mobile. But they did something quite clever.

[Paul Thurrott]

He's a piano player. He can just sit in front of the piano, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. They put his piano on a conveyor belt and the piano would move around the stage. He would just sit there. The piano would move around with him.

[Richard Campbell]

And then it was efficient.

[Leo Laporte]

Every once I stand up and kind of bow and then sit back down and the piano would move around some more. Then, you know, because it's goodbye, everybody. My last concert, which, by the way, is obviously far from. But anyway, my last concert. And so they're playing. He's playing Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, appropriately, and there's a stairway leading to, like, out to a door.

[Paul Thurrott]

Did one of those, like, escalator, like.

[Leo Laporte]

It's an escalator. He doesn't have to climb it. He hits. But the escalator slowly moves him up and he waves and it's out the door and. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's amazing. I mean, not to walk to the van.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right. It probably goes straight to the car. Look, I mean, I'm lucky I can still move. I think that that's admirable that these guys are still out there performing.

[Richard Campbell]

That's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

At the age 82. That's incredible.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What was. Richard, do you have a font? I don't know. Do you celebrate Christmas in Canada?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, sort of. But we do it a couple weeks earlier. You know, it's like just like Thanksgiving.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. What's your mean?

[Paul Thurrott]

Nothing to you people.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Paul, you look like you're about ready to dance around the maypole. You know, you're really not. I don't know what's going on.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is really. It's just off that.

[Leo Laporte]

Is a beard attached to that that's now on your head?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I think you took it off. It's on the back.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sits around the back. It's where all the hair is. Anyway, it's on my back.

[Leo Laporte]

So, Richard, a fond holiday memory of yours.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, absolutely, yeah. My father, who's passed now lives electrical engineer, getting me my first soldering iron.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Because I'm that kind of geek, man. And he was.

[Leo Laporte]

You never forget your first, do you?

[Richard Campbell]

Never forget your fast. And he made me solder and desolder LED displays for cash registers over and over again until I get my hand right.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's important for parents to turn anything fun into like a job. Yeah. Work, you know, like my dad did this with me in basketball. Like I ran drills in the driveway. It's. Could we. Can we just have a good time or something or.

[Richard Campbell]

No, you gotta get a basketball. You're good at basketball.

[Leo Laporte]

Gotta plan for your future. There you go.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Did he think you were going to become a soldering fiend like in your future? That was what was ahead for you is assembling motherboards or something.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, well, I ended up doing a fair bit of that actually, and repairing PCs when they came along.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that how you got started? School job, after school.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow. Yeah, My after school job. Well, I bumped into Tierra Sadie in like 77, the model ones. And within a year I was working at a company called HS Microsystems Afterschool doing lower case kits for the Model 1 and RAM expansions. And then when the first floppy drives came along, they came as a kit and most people assembled it wrong. And the guy who was teaching me, a guy named Tyler, we'd make up these little bundles of the parts that People would usually screw up and so you could quickly repair them and get them on their way. So after school he'd literally have a line of like lowercase mods I had to do or repairs on drives and things. And I'd fix them up nice. Yeah, no, I'm really never done anything else.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I. I don't know if it would. It would burn you if you touched it. But could you fix this Mac? Because I think it's got a dead capacitor. It got that fishy burning smell, like burning fish smell.

[Richard Campbell]

You know those old spun capacitors, they just wear out, Right. You probably have to do them all.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. They'd have to be desoldered, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Desolder each one replace with comparable and sold them back up again.

[Leo Laporte]

Get buy capacitors that would be comparable.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, probably on Amazon somewhere. They'll come from China, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of one of the saddest things of the modern age is that the stores where you like Radio Shack.

[Richard Campbell]

Or others, discrete parts aren't a thing anymore. They're not worth stocking.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't go buy those anymore.

[Paul Thurrott]

Used to go buy. They used to literally have just aisles of bins.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, and you had to know the resistor codes, the colors and what they meant. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. I actually just bought, I had to buy some resistors for a thing I was assembling. And the only way I could buy them was as a huge kit of like a thousand pieces. But it was 10 bucks. Right. So for the two resistors I needed, I got a box like this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

I gotta move these resistors.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. If you need any resistors, I got.

[Paul Thurrott]

Salvage yard for electronic parts, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that you're dead, I guess kind of gave you your love for technology, you think?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, absolutely, without a doubt. One of the stories of working in H S is that the head of the service department loves salvaging gear. And one day he brings in a spectrum analyzer they got out of the university. It was worn out, but there was still a laser in it and a bunch of other parts. It's like, hey boy, take this apart, right. And pull all the parts out. So as I'm yanking parts out, I pull out these can capacitors, like one Farad capacitors. They probably weigh five, eight pounds each.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

So I'm like, you know what, I'm going to, I'm going to make myself a Jacob's ladder out of these things. So I, I wire them up, put them onto the power supply to get them charging. And I'm assembling the wire assembly to put the thing together while I'm still pulling apart. But, you know, I'm 12. I get distracted and I forget that I've left these things charging. And I hear this crackle. And I look up and the side of the capacitor is expanding outward. Oh, that's not good. And then there's this gigantic blue flash. And the whole building power goes up.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

So I'm in the. And we're in the service room. So we're in the back. There's no windows or anything. Right. It's completely dark. And I can feel something touching me. Like there's something flying around the room, but I don't know what it is. So there's much cursing and somebody finds.

[Paul Thurrott]

A main breaker, like a time. Like a time shift, you know, continuum.

[Richard Campbell]

Thing, until I'm blown into another dimension. They were paper packed capacitors, and I blew paper all over the room. Like absolutely everywhere.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, better than like little bits of iron or something, you know, I mean.

[Richard Campbell]

And the only thing left of the capacitor was the two bolts that I had hooked up to the. To the. To the power supply.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I'm like, pretty sure they had no. The arrival.

[Richard Campbell]

I had to vacuum up all the paper. Oh, but, yeah, but all the capacitor, all those big capacitors were. Were layers of copper and paper wrapped together in a plastic container. And the vaporized. The damn thing was. It was a good day. And Tyler comes in with the powers back on. He looks at me with a paper, goes, so what have we learned?

[Leo Laporte]

So your dad gave you a lasting love for technology, and Paul's dad gave him a lasting love for middle of the road music.

[Paul Thurrott]

That was not from my dad. But yeah, fair enough.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, who is it from, your mom?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. No, my dad actually had a really cool collection of, at the time, 60s and 70s music on albums. So I learned a lot about the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors, you know, Pink Floyd, etc. So I had that kind of thing. But he also. He was, you know, one of my best early gifts from him was a NSLR cam. Like a Motorola X570, I think it was. And I always laugh now, you know, when you look at like iPhones or any smartphone, and it's like, oh, this is a 200 millimeter equivalent. I'm like, yeah, because that 200 millimeter lens looks like this. I had one. I used to go to the Boston Garden, take pictures of the Celtics playing, and it was like, I Was sent, you know, center court. But that thing was.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you imagine you wanted to be a photographer when you grew up?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, but I was artistic and apparently autistic and I, you know, did become a graphic designer.

[Leo Laporte]

Didn't you?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So in a way, I've always liked photography.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And such a fine paying job.

[Leo Laporte]

What did your dad do, Paul?

[Paul Thurrott]

My. Well, the. My real father, so to speak. Not to complicate this story is he worked in. Well, he was a Boston police officer and then he worked in lighting and that's. They moved eventually here, which is why we're in Pennsylvania. This is where Lutron is based and that's. He was there.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, he worked for lutron.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, we're right there. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right by the heart of it. Heart of Lutron country.

[Richard Campbell]

Talking about Lutron tech this week.

[Leo Laporte]

So I have, I think Lutron switches throughout my house.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, yeah, exactly. I'm just looking at those.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Lutron Casita.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was. My brother in law no longer works there. When I was asking him about that and he was pointing me to a bunch of other stuff and I was like, you're not really recommending a lot of Lutron stuff. I see. You know, he's like, yeah, I don't want to talk about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you ever think about going into law enforcement?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I would have been an awesome state trooper. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So great. The chin strap up right under your.

[Richard Campbell]

Lower lip on a motorcycle.

[Paul Thurrott]

That would have been a great thing.

[Richard Campbell]

That's an aesthetic.

[Leo Laporte]

Black boots, jodhpur.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, I probably. I've known so many police officers over the years. Like, I have so many police stories, but like the. When I was in. A bank teller in Boston, they used to drive around the parking lot in the morning before we opened and they'd shine the spotlight in the door, you know, through the windows and stuff. They'd be like, Paul Thor art. We know you're in there. Come on. Come on. With our checks. Yeah, classic.

[Leo Laporte]

We know you're in there. If you're a mall copy, get your own segue. That's pretty nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, exactly. Well, this is well before Segways, but. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, you, you know, that would be something to aspire to later in life.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard, what did your. What did your dad do?

[Richard Campbell]

My dad was electrical engineer. He made S100 bus. Electronic cash.

[Paul Thurrott]

What are you, like data from Star Trek? What's going on? Yeah, yeah, 100 bus.

[Richard Campbell]

I really didn't have much of choice. You know, this is the path. I was.

[Paul Thurrott]

My dad was Jerry Purnell.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's what. But he did cash register. Point of sales systems. But they were computers.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they were effectively computers. Yeah, they ran on 80. 80.

[Leo Laporte]

You guys are so young. I would. I never thought I'd say that, but.

[Paul Thurrott]

I've owned TVs that had transisted to them. I don't know what you mean by young, but.

[Leo Laporte]

I just. I feel like I was an adult when. When S. 180 80s were.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All the rage.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I was a kiss. Yeah. I was just a kid.

[Leo Laporte]

But did your mom work or was she a homemaker?

[Richard Campbell]

She was always. She was always an office manager.

[Leo Laporte]

Office man, yeah. How about you, Paul? Did your mom work?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, she was a nurse and also a homemaker, obviously, because, you know, mothers do everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, that's right.

[Paul Thurrott]

That is working.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

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[Leo Laporte]

Hey, everybody. Leo Laporte here with a little bit of an ask. Every year at this time, we'd like to survey our audience to find a little bit more about you. As you may know, we respect your privacy. We don't do anything, in fact, we can't do anything to learn about who you are. And that's fine with me. I like that. But it helps us with advertising, it helps us with programming to know a little bit about those of you who are willing to tell us your privacy is absolutely respected. We do get your email address, but that's just in case there's an issue. We don't Share that with anybody. What we do share is the aggregate information that we get from these surveys. Things like 80% of our audience buy something they heard in an ad on our shows or 75% of our audience are it decision makers. Things like that are very helpful with us when we talk to advertisers. They're also very helpful to us to understand what operating systems you use, what content you're interested in. So, enough. Let me just ask you if you will go to TWiT TV Survey 26 and answer a few questions. It should only take you a few minutes of your time. We do this every year. It's very helpful to us. Your privacy is assured, I promise you. And of course, if you're uncomfortable with any question or you don't want to do it at all, that's fine, too. But if you. If you want to help us out a little bit. Twit TV survey 26, thank you so much. And now back to the show. Well, I've run out of questions. Thank you, guys. It's been great talking to you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I think this is an opportunity. I think this is an opportunity for us to get to know you guys a little bit better.

[Paul Thurrott]

So we're usually buttoned up during the.

[Leo Laporte]

Show, so I know you keep close to the vest, never express your true feelings, do you, Paul?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

We're a shy bunch.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm glad to finally have this forum, Leo. Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, what's irritating you this week?

[Paul Thurrott]

Religion, politics.

[Leo Laporte]

The works.

[Paul Thurrott]

I feel very strongly that women should not be allowed to vote. You know, things like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, God. He doesn't mean it, kids. He's joking.

[Paul Thurrott]

Come on.

[Leo Laporte]

How did. So Dustin's asking in our club Twit, how did you end up with a home in Mexico? What? How did that come about?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean, my wife and I have been going to Europe the whole time we were.

[Leo Laporte]

You used to do home exchange stuff, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, we took a break when we had the kids at first, and then we started going back and we. I think for about 20 years, we spent at least a month every year in Europe. And we always had this vague idea that we would try to split time between the United States and Europe at some point with no idea how that was ever going to work. And it would have been very complicated and expensive. But the year that pandemic happened, we didn't travel like most people. And then the next year the United States opened up, but we did not open to people from Europe, so we couldn't do a home swap in Europe. We have friends there. We have a bunch of friends there. The last family we had done swap with before the pandemic, Steve Bank. And we talked and he said, look, if we can't figure anything out, we should just do swap again. We're like, yeah, of course. Like outside of Amsterdam, but they couldn't come here. So I started researching things and, you know, like most Americans, I mean, Mexico was not on my radar. It was. It's a. It has a bad rep, you know, I don't know if you noticed in the news, it seems like it's a scary, bad place. I've seen like, you know, what's that? The Denzel Washington movie based on the book man on Fire. Like, this doesn't seem like a good place. Kidnappings, you know, whatever. But I. It came across my radar somehow. I started looking into it and I distinctly remember going to my wife and saying, listen, I have an idea. You're going to want to interrupt me. Just let me get through this. I said, I think we should go to Mexico. And she's like, I'm like, let me interrupt.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me stop you right there, Paul.

[Paul Thurrott]

But I showed her what I found and we looked into it and we. So we did just a week trip in June that year. And then we took the kids out later. We did a two or three week trip. I don't remember.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is instead of Europe, you thought? Yeah, because it's a lot less expensive, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Closer. It's a lot less expensive. Fewer time zones. It's easy, you know, getting older. It's like hard to travel overnight to Europe, etc. I don't know how Richard does it.

[Leo Laporte]

God, I don't know how Richard does it either.

[Paul Thurrott]

And we just.

[Richard Campbell]

I did, three days ago.

[Paul Thurrott]

The goal in 2022 is to spend years staying in different parts of Mexico City each trip and trying to think maybe there's a place here that we might want to be in. And the very first trip on the last day, we were walking down the street to go to a real estate agency just to ask about next steps. Like, how do we. What are the first things we should do? Whatever. Walked around the corner, there was an apartment for sale. We went and looked at it. My wife is the most pragmatic, dare I say cheap person on the planet. And I knew she was going to talk me out of this because I was like, man, I really want this place. And so I said, what do you think? And she says, I have to buy this place.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God, it was the weirdest.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's Just so against the way we have ever been, but it just kind of happened. And there we are.

[Leo Laporte]

You actually have created a website and a YouTube channel called Eternal Spring.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

About how you did all this. And it's going to be a book.

[Paul Thurrott]

It is a book.

[Leo Laporte]

It is a book. Oh, cool.

[Paul Thurrott]

This.

[Leo Laporte]

So is you think of this as a second career or is this just a side?

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not. It's not.

[Leo Laporte]

You're both writers.

[Paul Thurrott]

We're not going to make money doing this. It's. This is just sharing our love of this place and wanting people to get it right, because there's a lot you could mess up and get wrong. And, you know, we stumbled into this badly, but did well, and we just got lucky.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And so you did.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm very jealous, to be honest with you. I, I, I. Every time you, you call from Mexico City, I think, you know, you go out.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, we hit Thanksgiving Day. Incredible day. Well, no, sorry. A little bit after Thanksgiving, we were talking to a guy we know at a bartender near here, and he had moved to Maine, but he's back just for the holidays. And I said, I don't know, why you in Maine? He says, It's 7 degrees. I'm like, right, that would do it. I looked at it, I said, well, it's 71 degrees in Mexico City right now, so it's close. I said, seven's pretty good. If it's Celsius.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the biggest challenger difficulty you've faced.

[Paul Thurrott]

With this in Mexico?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, just in general with this. This whole. Because you live in two places now, although you no longer own a home in the United States.

[Paul Thurrott]

So actually, in September, we bought this place.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

We had been living here for almost two years.

[Richard Campbell]

He blames me, you know, because I. When we were. He was talking about being home, and I said, home?

[Paul Thurrott]

He said, what do you mean by home?

[Richard Campbell]

Where do you.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's the one. They're both home. Yeah. He said, well, where do you own real estate? I'm like, okay, I see what you're saying. That place, like. So you guys both know me well enough to know that the way we stepped into this was, I think, back in May or something. I said, I was looking at the calendar and I said, you know, I think we're going to spend more time in Mexico this year than we are in the United States, unless something goes south or whatever. And I said, obviously, we should buy a place here in Pennsylvania. And she says, it's funny you say that. I was actually thinking about that you.

[Leo Laporte]

Two are on a wavelength. Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that nice that you agree on all that.

[Paul Thurrott]

To know that we don't agree on everything.

[Leo Laporte]

What's an amazing face? I don't know how to interpret it.

[Paul Thurrott]

But I just had this. I was telling this morning, like, I'm in the bathroom this morning putting my contacts in, right. And my wife is next to me doing the same. Yeah. But she has a different bottle of saline. I said, what are you doing? She says, what do you mean? I said, you have your own saline. And she goes, yeah. And I said, why? She says, you never leave. You never close the bottle. Oh, we've never discussed this. Yeah. She goes, I also have my own toothpaste.

[Leo Laporte]

Squeeze the toothpaste.

[Paul Thurrott]

Be a normal person and just talk to me about this stuff. I'm like, I would close the cap. You know, like, you just do. I go, what else do you have that I don't know about? Like, what is this? I don't know, But I guess the big things, right? I guess we're on the same pace.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think so. I mean, it's amazing that you didn't have to persuade her to move to Mexico, for instance.

[Paul Thurrott]

She was thinking she was gonna have to persuade me. I guess I. Same thing. Like, we were both, like, now. Yeah, I think I want to do this.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the residency rule? Do you have to spend a certain amount of time back home, back here in the States?

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, we have residency now, so. Oh, sorry. We have. Yeah, we do it. We have residency. We're not citizens, so we can be there as long as we want.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's no. There are no limits.

[Leo Laporte]

And how does the United States feel about that? Or do they care?

[Paul Thurrott]

They're ambivalent.

[Leo Laporte]

As long as you pay your tax, you know, so they don't care. Do you have taxes?

[Paul Thurrott]

No. I mean, legally, you have to have a home or to. And you have to pay. Well, you have to pay taxes. Right. So we.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

We pay taxes in this state and in, you know, the United States, obviously, that's not good. So that doesn't change.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

But I don't know what taxes.

[Paul Thurrott]

In Mexico, property taxes are going to be in this place, but in the house, they were like $8,000 a year, and in Mexico, they're $35 a year. So it's a. It's a slightly different scale. Yeah. It's bizarre.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard, have you always lived in B.C. or are you.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I was born in New Zealand.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's right. You're a New Zealander.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. I've had two passports. You know, I have the. I have the choice of countries. That's why I'm always down there. Right as I'm visiting family, family places.

[Leo Laporte]

You have a sheep farm down there?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Now wired for wi fi.

[Richard Campbell]

There's a, There's a cow.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm surprised you don't know the difference, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they're all the same to me.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

My family are part of the OH settlers group outside of Taronga. And I was born on Oiti Road, so I am literally part of that settlers group. So. But my, you know, it's crazy story of how we even got there. Like there's this sort of realization once you know, this story of my families, of why I travel so much. My father's family were Scottish Campbells that moved to Wales after the crisis with the Douglases and then immigrated to Saskatchewan. You know, where they were wheat farmers, as everybody is. My grandmother, my father's mother did not want to be a farmer's wife. So she did the only thing you could do in that era, which was she was a schoolteacher.

[Paul Thurrott]

I like you, I just don't like what you are.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go. And so she married a man who also didn't want to be a farmer. He was a jack of all trades. He was a carpenter and a mechanic and so forth. And she would get teaching jobs and then they'd pack up the family and go. So they made their way out of Saskatchewan, made it to British Columbia, and then she got an offer to run the English department for the Taronga Girls School in New Zealand. And so they took it, packed their four kids up, took a boat for six weeks and went down to New Zealand. I have the paid newspaper clipping of the New Zealand head of the English department arriving in Taronga in the 50s. And they stayed down there for more than 10 years. And then some point, you know, their kids grew up in New Zealand and at some point they decided, well, I'm not going to renew my contract, let's do something new. That they'd always done this to travel, right. And they decided they liked British Columbia best. So they decided they're going to go back to British Columbia, basically announce it to the kids. Well, the kids said, you know, my father had arrived there as an 11 year old, now he was 21. And he didn't want to leave. Neither did any of the others. His sisters all married off good Kiwis. And so that's one way to get all the kids out of the house all at once. Right. Move to A different hemisphere. So my grandmother, grandfather moved back to B.C. and my father married a Kiwi and had me. And then they came up when I was three to show me off as the first grandchild of the generation and they never left.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. That mother story is even weirder. Like that's the normal one. Like that's the normal one. That's the normal one. The weird one is my God. My maternal grandmother was the young eldest of six kids that grew up on a Malaysian rubber plantation. Her grandfather had stolen rubber plants from Brazil and escaped with them. There's a diary entry for Emile where he says left Brazil precipitously. And was it being used? Yes, because it was illegal to take latex plants out of Brazil. They knew that was their important product. This is what's going to be rubber. Rubber.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right. Was he going to grow in New Zealand?

[Richard Campbell]

He grew in Malaysia quite successfully. Was a wealthy plantation owner. So my grandmother grew up with servants, you know, her mother was a wealthy plantation owners daughter and had married this somewhat ne' er do. Well, he was a game warden. He shot elephants to keep him off the rubber plants. But then when World War II is starting and the Japanese are working their way on the Malay Peninsula, the father goes off to fight in the war and dies and the mother and the kids get packed off to England by ship. And they were of course being well to do, spoke multiple languages, well traveled, well educated. So they go, they, they get evacuated. Eagle. Just in time for the Battle of Britain. And so my grandmother, yeah, my grandmother's multilingual, so she goes to work for the BBC, arguably for intelligence, translating documents. And my Uncle Ray.

[Paul Thurrott]

Did you say arguably or allegedly?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, arguably, it's likely. But my grandmother was always cagey about it.

[Leo Laporte]

She didn't say what she did.

[Richard Campbell]

She never, she never really said. But if I tell you a story of life, she had access to a lot of information.

[Paul Thurrott]

She's like, I'm no Julia Childs or anything.

[Richard Campbell]

But anyway, the youngest uncle Theo, who I've met, who's six years old when they arrive in England and gets put into school, gets into a schoolyard fight, as you do as a new kid, chews out the kid in German.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh boy, that's not a good story.

[Richard Campbell]

All the little kids are rounded up out of the school. They grab the mother, they put them in an internment camp. And my Ray, who had been working in a factory, comes home. Ironic to find they're not there and ask. And he too gets picked up, put in a different internment camp. And my Grandmother Mona is smart enough to say, what happened to those people? Apparently they were German sympathizers. So she goes back to the BBC and says, hey, my home's been blown up and everybody's dead. Can I stay here? And so they put her up in the single women's dorm and she just kissed her mother goodbye to go to work. And now they're gone. Of course, the internment cans all get evacuated in 1940 and they disperse them out to the colonies, which is why they end up in New Zealand. My grandmother doesn't know this, but she somehow finds out. So again we talk about maybe she was involved in intelligence, that they've been evacuated to New Zealand and the only way she can get to New Zealand is to get deployed as a nurse. So she trained during the war, gets trained as a nurse and gets deployed on a hospital ship in 1945. And so by the time she gets to the Pacific, the war ends and the ship just is going to turn around, go back to, to England. But she, they make a stop in Australia. So she gets off in Australia, still hasn't made it back home. But now they're celebrating, meets a guy, things happen. And by the time she gets to Australia and says hello every time she gets to New Zealand to say hi to her mother, after six years, she's pregnant with my mother.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, this is a family story. Do they. They.

[Richard Campbell]

This is a family story.

[Leo Laporte]

Was it? It wasn't a family secret, it was a family story.

[Richard Campbell]

It was pretty secretive, but you know, as people get older, it becomes.

[Leo Laporte]

You'll learn the story.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. A little more casual. Anyway, you know, at the point where I realized the amount of travel my extended family, my, all of my family's done is like, well, gee, I no wonder. Like what the heck was I gonna do?

[Leo Laporte]

They're all. Yeah, we're all travelers, but it means.

[Richard Campbell]

That I'm only second generation Kiwi. My mother was born in New Zealand, but her mother wasn't. And, and I was. And now we're in B.C.

[Paul Thurrott]

So actually, I mean, my father lived in England for eight or nine years and then spent the rest of his career living in South Africa, Japan, Brazil, until there were kidnapping threats. You had to get out of there, but doing the lighting thing, but you know, outside. Usually outside of the country.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I look like a stay at home dad compared to both these guys.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, it's really interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

You both have still very well traveled.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but compared to most people, but not compared to you guys.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is when traveling was a little harder. I mean, today it's not such a big deal, but, I mean, that was. You had to take boats and stuff. I mean, it was a significant.

[Paul Thurrott]

I envy younger people today because it's so easy to do. Like, what we're doing now in our 50s was not possible in our 20s. Not really. And there are tons of people doing it now. I mean, it's really easy.

[Leo Laporte]

Are there a lot of Americans in your.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Too many.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You don't want that.

[Paul Thurrott]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

You didn't come here to hang out with America.

[Paul Thurrott]

I didn't come here to be with you people. But you're our people. Shut up.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They're asking about being Canadian and a Kiwi, but they're both. They're both Commonwealth countries, so you both worship the same king.

[Paul Thurrott]

Worship.

[Richard Campbell]

So we got to have something on the money. Goodness knows. We don't want it to be Alexander Hamilton.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good. You know, I was just looking.

[Paul Thurrott]

Too soon, man. Too soon.

[Leo Laporte]

I was looking at my 50s, and they have Andrew Jackson on them.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, Andrew Jackson. There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Not exactly a paragon of virtue, by any means.

[Richard Campbell]

Old Hickory.

[Leo Laporte]

Old Hickory. Oh, I'm sorry. That's the 20. The 50 is Ulysses S. Grant, who, granted, was a good general, who was a corrupt.

[Paul Thurrott]

When he wasn't drunk, when he was a president.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he was a terrible president.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So great, the Andrew Jackson and U.S. grant. Let's celebrate.

[Richard Campbell]

The other angle that's similar between Canadians and Kiwis is the Kiwis have a very close relationship with Australia to the point where there's work agreements between the two countries.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Canada has this relationship with the US Right. Except occasionally you all seem to go.

[Leo Laporte]

Not so much now.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It's a little difficult at the moment.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think The Katy Perry, Mr. Trudeau thing is gonna.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't think this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I think there'll be a marriage that will unite us. Is that what you're saying?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll be united in song anyway.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know the answer to that. But anyway, it's. It's all. It's all an interesting dynamic. And, you know, I just spent a month down there with the grandbaby.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. The familiarity is very clear, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

The same way if you're not sure if someone's a Canadian or American, it's best to just ask them they're Canadian because the Canadian will be pleased and the American will be amused. If you're not sure if someone's an Aussie or a Kiwi, just ask if they're a Kiwi, because if it's a Kiwi, they'll be a please, and if it's an Aussie, they'll be amused.

[Leo Laporte]

But don't ask a Kiwi if they're an Australian because that's.

[Richard Campbell]

They'll correct you quickly and vice versa.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, interesting. It's like France and Belgium.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That'S a pretty bitter.

[Richard Campbell]

Nobody picks their Belgians.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It was just with a bunch. There were several Belgians speaking in Lithuania as well. They're easy to tease. They're the country that went without a government for three years and barely anybody noticed.

[Leo Laporte]

Nobody noticed. You know what? That's an interesting thought. I wonder how that would be for us.

[Richard Campbell]

How strange. You know, really just let the system operate.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't really need that, do you? But people, I think, want to know more about, about you guys. By the way, somebody's saying, why, why aren't you wearing these brown Zune? Microsoft sweater.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I've been able to get one. I've been home.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was asking my wife about this. I have a Microsoft sweater somewhere. Couldn't, we couldn't find it. So this gave me this pile of Christmasy things I could try.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a forever. This is a forever sweater. It's called.

[Richard Campbell]

That's the greatest sweater.

[Leo Laporte]

Holidays. I'm so glad I got this one. I remember Chris Capicella used to join us by the time he was on. But he always had it. But it was always sold out by the time he came on.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Apparently they're consistently a hit.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, These sweaters?

[Paul Thurrott]

According to Kevin King, people say Microsoft's not popular with consumers. You know, I don't know. They could go to clothing. They'd be fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe they should just. Maybe they should just do swag. Forget the hardware and software. Remember all the different ones they have?

[Paul Thurrott]

But now you think it's funny. Yeah. Now it's on sweaters.

[Leo Laporte]

Now it's sweaters. It'll be available through the Microsoft Company Store, the Redmond Company Store in Seattle, and the Microsoft Experience center in New York City. So you could run over to the Microsoft Experience center and experience a sweater.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

We used to do live shows from there. That's the, the former Microsoft store there.

[Leo Laporte]

Remember? I remembered we did a live show there. Yeah. When they had hollow ones, they had the Hololens demos there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You and Mary Jo went in the back.

[Richard Campbell]

I, I, I know where my Hololens is. I'm gonna put it on the shelf behind me in my office when I get back there.

[Leo Laporte]

You should.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. This is Display. Yeah, I don't charge anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

It's an old device.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess I should ask you like, your favorite Microsoft products.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, boy.

[Richard Campbell]

Do you have a favorite?

[Paul Thurrott]

Those are hard.

[Richard Campbell]

Tell me. It's Loop.

[Paul Thurrott]

So, I mean, my earliest understanding of Microsoft was really negative because I had Amiga, they did the basic, I hated it. On the Commodore 64, there was like a super expanded cartridge that like turned BASIC into something pretty good. The Amiga, you know, garbage basic. It was terrible. So I really didn't respect Microsoft a lot. But it was. I think it was. Well, it was Office Whatever. I think it's Office 6, essentially. Whatever. Right before Windows 95, my wife was at a company that had like early access to this thing, and I was really impressed by that. And then they got into the writing and stuff and I was on a lot of the betas for things like Windows 95 and Office 95 and MSN and whatever was happening at that. Plus 95, whatever. And I thought that was where they started to pick up a little bit of. I don't know what you call it. Good design or good software. It seemed like it was good software. NT4 especially was a big leap for me.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember the first time I saw 31 1. I was a Mac guy from 84. I used DOS and PCs before that and didn't. Not really think much of Windows 1 or Windows 2 or even Windows 3. But when I saw 31 1, I remember vividly. We have a show with Paul John Cedar.

[Paul Thurrott]

Windows for Work Groups and then whatever. The second. Windows for Work Groups.

[Leo Laporte]

Windows for Work Groups.

[Paul Thurrott]

They had the 32 bit file access. 32 bit. I think it was 32 bit memory access as well. You had to turn these things on. But it had the guts of what was going to be Windows 95 without that new UI. And that seemed like they were on a good path.

[Leo Laporte]

I had an epiphany, I thought. I remember looking at it and saying, this is actually good. This is like Apple's in trouble.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's what I mean. So you like me? I think before that didn't disrespected what everything they did was not impressed. And then you have that moment where you're like, oh, they're starting to grow up a little bit here.

[Leo Laporte]

To the point where I prefer Dr. Dos to Ms. Dos. That guy's thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I think the first Microsoft product that made me money was their Professional BASIC before Visual Basic came out. So in the 1980s, in between cubicle.

[Paul Thurrott]

Basic and visual basic, GW basic, GW basic?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, in that window. But I remember the box was like.

[Paul Thurrott]

Their professional BASIC because they had one you. There was one that was built into DOS but then you could buy one where you could actually compile the programs. Right. And turn them into exe so it's.

[Leo Laporte]

A real programming language.

[Paul Thurrott]

But back then though. But Turbo Pascal was amazing. Turbo Pascal was awesome. That was mind boggling mind just way better than we had in the Mac.

[Richard Campbell]

I was working in Dbase but these guys had an IBM PC and they wanted. They didn't want Dbase.

[Leo Laporte]

I wrote a giant Dbase 2 program. Dbase was terrible on CPM on a North Star Advantage computer.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

This must have been 90. No 83 or something.

[Richard Campbell]

4 I had Northstar Advantage. Those are great machines man.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. It was Vector Bus. I convinced. I convinced you Northstar was famous for their S1 hundreds. I convinced. I was working at a radio station in San Jose klok. I couldn't afford anything like that. But I convinced the boss, you know, we need a computer.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

And for a while we looked at a thing from a company called Fortune that was an 8088 or probably 8086 or maybe even. No, actually would have been a Z80 based multi user system. One Z80 multiple users. Because I thought for, you know, for the business that'd be good. But I managed for some reason somehow I got him to get a Northstar Advantage. And then I wrote a large program in DBASE 2 for keeping track of music playlists. And it did graphs on the screen.

[Paul Thurrott]

Because the North Star did you call it Napster? And that was the real story.

[Leo Laporte]

And then I got sued by ours Ulrich and everything changed.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Able to draw graphs on the screen because North Star Advantage had vector graphics.

[Paul Thurrott]

And.

[Leo Laporte]

And I made him this beautiful thing where because he would. Every week he would look at the. Look at all the charts. You know they opened the Billboard and all the charts and all the. And he actually had the 45s and they put them on and he'd listen to him and decide what the playlist is going to be. This is weird because he wasn't the. He was the owner, he was the general manager. But he loved doing that. And I thought well I'm gonna make this really easy for him. His name was Bill Weaver. He was kind of a legend at the time in the radio business. And I made this beautiful thing. So you don't have to look Bill, you don't have to look at the magazines or anything. I'm gonna show you the charts. How the record's going on, the graph where its position is all this stuff. And he never used it, but it was beautiful. I was very proud of that.

[Paul Thurrott]

A lot of people are just born on the edge of different eras and they can't make that transition.

[Leo Laporte]

No, he liked the way he did it.

[Paul Thurrott]

He didn't need it. We got like an Intellivision whenever that came out. And my dad really wanted to play this thing, but he was just never going to be able to do it. Like, he just couldn't get there. Yeah. Wrong generation.

[Leo Laporte]

You did?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, a little bit, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you did a little bit, yeah. Are you downplaying what was your favorite game on intelligent television?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it depends, right? Like, so we. Dude, Sea Battle was amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

It's gotta be hockey.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it's definitely the hockey on the television. Football. NFL football was amazing. My brother had this trick play where he would throw the pass on the upper sideline. So the ball was white, the line was white. The ball would be. And you couldn't see it. So his. Like there's a receiver would run over to the far end of the field, catch it, it would go. Because it had that white noise fan thing and they'd run it.

[Leo Laporte]

That was all the noise it could do. It wasn't. Yeah, it was very limited. This was, believe it or not, Mattel. This is when toy companies made video systems.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

If a guy skated straight at you on the upper board, you hit him with your stick just right. He would flip over the board.

[Paul Thurrott]

My grandmother was over one time, sitting in the den, my brother and I were playing Utopia Sea Battle, one of those cartridges. And after a while she says, I don't like this show. Could you change the channel? So we just put a different cartridge in. This is so abusive, grandma. She had no idea what she was looking at. You know, look at this.

[Leo Laporte]

They had a voice synthesis module. Did you have one?

[Paul Thurrott]

Intellivoice 17 bomber.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God. And that. And the joystick was attached by the same kind of cable. You have a phone in your kitchen.

[Paul Thurrott]

It was hardwired too, in the first one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You can't. Yeah. Ridiculous. Well, I guess they didn't have wireless. Yeah, well, they didn't.

[Paul Thurrott]

It wasn't detachable. I mean, you couldn't replace it, you know, easily.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? It's hardwired.

[Paul Thurrott]

Fix that eventually.

[Leo Laporte]

But unless you were, you know, like.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, like. Like Richard Champion. Richard would have rewired it, but.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but if you had those pop pads, once they wore out, they were wore.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they were Terrible.

[Paul Thurrott]

Which is why you would have to replace them then.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, they wore. Well, you know, speaking of the North Stars, after the Advantage, there was a machine called the Dimension. And I became a reseller of that.

[Leo Laporte]

Really?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. When it was, you know, just out of high school because it ran Netware and Ms. DOS and it had an 8186 as the central processor. So it's a multi workstation, you know, machine. So you could have, I think it was up to five or six consoles attached to this one machine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, like the one 186.

[Richard Campbell]

The 186 was the. Was the server processor. And then you could have 8086 boards for each of the workstations, all inside of the one chassis. That was a hell of a machine. I made a lot of money.

[Leo Laporte]

You know their original name before Northstar? Yeah. Kentucky Fried Computer.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was gonna say. Yeah, I can imagine that one didn't last.

[Leo Laporte]

They had to change the name.

[Paul Thurrott]

So they changed. The next name was Alabama. And they were like, yeah, you're not doing that one either. Not gonna work.

[Leo Laporte]

Kentucky Fried Computer, I actually remember that. That name. But they made a nice system. But all those companies are gone, aren't they?

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, they're all gone.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, even Dex, even Digital is gone.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is the inevitable consolidation that happens in any industry. Right. And this is what we're going to see with all the AI nonsense that is happening now. We have 3,000 companies doing AI things and eventually it's just going to be three again. It's going to be the same three we're all really happy with. So don't worry about that.

[Leo Laporte]

But Advantage came out in 82 and the dimension in 84. So I guess that was 82 when I did that. This was actually a pretty impressive computer. 4 MHz z 80, 64 kilobytes of RAM, which is a lot in those days. 20 KB of graphics RAM.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Dedicated.

[Richard Campbell]

You got an expansion board for it so you could run a PC DOS on it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it had 88.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You have a good memory.

[Paul Thurrott]

8888.

[Leo Laporte]

A CO process that ran Ms. DOS one.

[Paul Thurrott]

I didn't have a PC until when.

[Richard Campbell]

You had to boot off the A drive. So I was configuring those.

[Paul Thurrott]

You remember they had.

[Richard Campbell]

They had the two five and a quarter bays in them.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So I take one of the five and a quarters out and put a shoe art five megabyte drive in it. And then I. You had to boot off the A drive. So I boot off the floppy to Configure the hard drive and then rewire it to make the hard drive the A drive so you could boot off the hard drive.

[Leo Laporte]

You could boot.

[Richard Campbell]

I made some, that made me a bucket of money. That was a good time.

[Paul Thurrott]

I had like a Commodore Amiga 500. They had like PC MCIA drives that were, you know, credit card size roughly. And they. I had a 20 megabyte drive. I think it was my first hard drive. And today you couldn't download an MP3 that was smaller than that. Like, you know, like they're like in the MP3 file, they're all bigger than that.

[Leo Laporte]

Like the double sided, double density floppies on the north star advantage were 360 kilobytes.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you were a God with that.

[Leo Laporte]

I wanted a C compiler for it. There was no way you could run it. I got White, bought White Star C. And you had to. I had to bootstrap it up. So it gave you the kernel and you had to build all the libraries and everything. And there was no way you could run it on floppies. So I must have had some sort of persuasive powers. I got Bill to buy me a. That five megabyte Winchester drive.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, the shoe.

[Leo Laporte]

Thousands of dollars.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you remember how much it was?

[Paul Thurrott]

RAM drive?

[Richard Campbell]

I think it was a thousand bucks.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, sorry for the Apple Iigs. It had to have been this size. Like I was just 4K RAM drive. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll never forget going into a computer store listening to somebody saying, well, what you really want is eight megabytes of ram, because then you can have a two megabyte ram.

[Paul Thurrott]

Two megabytes was out. I was in the Amiga store and I heard the guy saying, you need all the Megs. Like at the time, the May, all the megs was five parts.

[Richard Campbell]

That's what you got so many megs.

[Paul Thurrott]

Five megs. You know, that was all the Megs.

[Leo Laporte]

Kids today, you don't remember, you don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, all the Megs.

[Leo Laporte]

And we suffered. We suffered.

[Paul Thurrott]

I had the talking about making money off of a PC. My wife got an IBM PC PS1, right. For the Sears.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

She couldn't figure out how to launch WordPerfect. So I went to, sat down at the computer, I typed WP didn't launch. I'm like, I don't understand your problem. And she's like, well, at work we have this menu. We had to choose. She didn't know how to use it. So I bought a book on Ms. DOS batch programming. You know, programming. It's not Programming. And I was like, this is so quaint, you know, because I had, like, Amigas at the time. I was like, this is a joke. But I wrote this front end thing so she could launch whatever apps and she could modify it so, like, she could change what the programs were and how to launch whatever. So a friend of ours worked at this. No, I'm sorry. A friend of ours moved to Phoenix at the same time we did, and he had bought a computer from another friend of ours who had his own company, and he had a 486. I was super impressed by this computer. I only had like a 386SX. Whatever. So I'm over his house one day and I booted up, and it booted up to my program. Like, what's. I'm like. I'm like, lou, where did you get this? And like, my. A friend had stolen this from me and he sold it on his computers. And I'm like, dude, what the. What is this? Never told me.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the. This was the thing that everybody looked at.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I remember well, because you would.

[Richard Campbell]

Post standing up and cheering for this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Multitasking because it had.

[Richard Campbell]

But it had sound, too.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like it made the boinging sound. But the point was, the OS is you could bring up the window and have. There were other things running at the same time. Yeah, this is in miracle in 1985.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Inconceivable.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's from the Amiga history channel on YouTube.

[Paul Thurrott]

Clearly made with Movie Maker in 2003 or something. That terrible video. But.

[Richard Campbell]

This is the greatest thing we'd ever seen.

[Paul Thurrott]

Standing ovation, this Genlock thing. It was a camera mounted vertically on a stand and you put a photo on it. And it had three. The color wheel with the three colors. You would scan it each time and then it would turn it into a single image that would be color. And this process took about 40 minutes, you know, to scan, like, one photo. And I'm sure it was like 320 by 240 at the end of the day, whatever it was. But it was. It was amazing at the time, you know, couldn't do that stuff on a Mac or a PC at a time.

[Richard Campbell]

When the IBM PC was CGA with all 16 colors.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So. So that demo that everybody saw and gave a standing ode to was at CES in Las Vegas, and I'm not sure what year that would have been. What do you. What do you. 80s, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, the Amiga 1000 came out in 1985.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, 85.

[Richard Campbell]

So I'm sure I Saw it in Vancouver. I wasn't going to CES but you know, they were touring it around.

[Leo Laporte]

What was your first?

[Paul Thurrott]

Launched it in New York at some big gala event with, you know, Blondie and what's that guy's name? The artist. Everyone's famous for 15 minutes. That guy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that guy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Whatever he is.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember him anyway. Blinded me with science. Thomas Dolby.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh yeah. He was probably really into this stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you remember your first computer trade show?

[Richard Campbell]

I think I went to a database conference in Seattle in 85.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's early. I went to a world of Amiga.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember the Windows 95 not for work.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean just like as a person.

[Leo Laporte]

That was pretty good in 1995.

[Richard Campbell]

Start me up, right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I think maybe it was probably. Or a PC.

[Leo Laporte]

My first. My first Comdex was a. Was around 91 or 92 in Vegas and Gina Smith brought me. We were both working for Zif Davis at the time and I was very excited. I'd never been to a. I mean maybe it had been to a cigarette.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, no. I carted around 10 pounds of paper. Everyone was giving up.

[Leo Laporte]

They give you bags and they just load you up with material.

[Richard Campbell]

Flyers, flyers.

[Paul Thurrott]

The plane couldn't leave because everyone had 20 pounds of paper with them.

[Leo Laporte]

Eventually they had a FedEx in the lobby there and you would just bring your box of paper. Same ship that back home. So I can throw it out in.

[Paul Thurrott]

The first time I checked into the hotel, this crappy hotel that we. The only thing we could afford in Vegas for the first Comdex Circus Circus. No, it was.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, 30 bucks.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, this was.

[Richard Campbell]

Comes with free chlamydia.

[Paul Thurrott]

I've stayed. I've stayed at Circus Circus. This was actually worse. It was the New Orleans theme one. Whatever it was.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, yeah, that riverboat.

[Paul Thurrott]

And they. They handed me the key card for the room and it was like it had OS2 logos on it. And I handed it back. I said do you have a Windows version of this?

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Was that. It was Debbie Reynolds. Was like n. Then it become Debbie. It was the Orleans and then it became the Debbie Reynolds.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think it was the Orleans. Yeah, it was terrible.

[Richard Campbell]

We.

[Leo Laporte]

Just opened and Ziff Davis had a long term deal with MGM to house its, you know, many hundreds of people that they would send us Comdex every year at there and was pretty cool. It was when it was a Wizard of Oz hotel and Frank L. Frank Baum's grandson would sit in the lobby all day every day signing wizard of Oz books. It was stunning.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's crazy. I'm vaguely related to the guy that wrote these stories.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it was his. But it was not him. It was his.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, no, that's what I mean. Like, I'm not even the guy.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not even the guy. But I'm going to sign.

[Paul Thurrott]

I have the same last name exactly. It was like, I do that for Henley Henry David Throw. I show up in like, sure, whatever that is.

[Richard Campbell]

Clothes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, sign. Yeah, sign some books. Make some hickory furniture. Anyway, we stayed there for several years. Then it could tell as if Davis was starting to, you know, kind of tighten the belt. We'd stayed at the Luxor, and that's the hotel. That's the pyramid.

[Paul Thurrott]

Stayed there too. Same. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And there's rooms in the sides of.

[Paul Thurrott]

It where the wall really triangular at the top. Well, most of the room, like most of the room is unusable because it's a triangle of space. It's horrible. It's the stupidest design.

[Leo Laporte]

It's horrible. And then finally at the end, when I think it was probably ZDTV and they were trying to sell it, we stayed at Circus Circus. And I knew we'd really come to the end of the line because I.

[Paul Thurrott]

Was in line at Circus Circus and see breakfast at the buffet thing. And there's a TV every 10ft that it's like, this clown comes and he's like, if you guys come back, play some keto. I'm like, what fresh hell. I'm like, I have to get out of here. And I started moving forward in the line of Swim. Dudes, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm sorry. I'm really hungry. I gotta get out of here. I'm like, this is. Get out of here.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't take clown.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm like, you gotta be kidding me.

[Leo Laporte]

I knew we were in a dump when I. I noticed that not only was the lamp bolted to the bedside table so you wouldn't take it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

So was the remote control for the TV nice? It was in a little metal.

[Paul Thurrott]

You bring a black metal thing. It would have looked like a crime scene.

[Leo Laporte]

Bolted. It was like crime scene. And it swiveled. So at least it was a little more convenient. You could swivel. It's like, what a dump.

[Paul Thurrott]

What's the Excalibur? Where it's like wallpaper that looks like the wall of a dungeon, but it's just flat and terrible looking, you know? Like, that was a long time. Like, almost everything in Vegas was terrible.

[Leo Laporte]

Cheesy as hell. It was. That was the King Arthur play across the Excalibur.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, ridiculous.

[Leo Laporte]

All of those places, I think are mostly gone, right? I mean, yeah, I think it's kind of more upscale now. It was. Vegas was a kind of dumpy place, kitschy and terrible.

[Richard Campbell]

It was inexpensive and now it's not. Well, that was.

[Leo Laporte]

The funny thing is because they were gambling was what supported them. You know, the drinks are free, the, you know, all you can eat for a buck fifty, you know, I mean.

[Richard Campbell]

It'S really not the way anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

The way anymore. They realize we can make money on gambling and everything else, including parking.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think, I think I stayed at Excalibur. It was the show. I arrived really late. It was like one o' clock in the morning. It would have been CS by this point. And I had to wait in line for like 45 minutes just to get into the room. It was all these people checking at the same time.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So when I finally got up to the desk, I at that time booked it through like Expedia or some stupid third party service. And the bill was basically double what I had been quoted like, what is this? And they went through the list. It was all these additional fees, like room fee, Vegas fee, whatever, not paying attention fee, Thursday fee, like whatever it was. And so the next day I met with Terry Morrison and he was telling me about, at the time it was called Windows 10 Cloud, but it was what became Windows 10 S. And they were going to charge for it if you wanted to get out of it to get back to normal windows. And I was like, Terry, this is exactly what just happened to me, this hotel last night. You can't do this to people. I'm like, this is what happened. You find out about it after the fact. This is the worst possible user experience. And he literally laid back in his chair. It was one of those chairs that goes back and he's looking up at the ceiling and he was like. It went on for 12 seconds and he's like, we're not doing that. I'm like, thank you. Because I was like, that is a huge pro. That's going to be bad because people don't want. You don't want to screw them after the fact. You know what I mean? Like, you don't make them buy the computer and then be like, oh, surprise, there's another 50 charge upcharge.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, good. So you had some influence on them. Is that the last time they weren't.

[Richard Campbell]

Already angry enough with you?

[Leo Laporte]

Is that the last time they listened to you, Paul?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, probably actually. Because I Haven't really downhill for anyone since then. I met. The first time I met with Pano Spinae, he locked the door behind me, and he's like, I need to tell. I need you to tell me exactly who leaked you the information about whatever the Surface 2 stuff. And I'm like, I'm not doing that. It was like a mob meeting. I'm like, what are you talking about?

[Richard Campbell]

Are you gonna beat me up?

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think you understand how the press works. Not telling you what my source is. Like, what, you crazy?

[Leo Laporte]

Was the implication. I'm not letting you out until you tell me.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it was like this back room, I got a call. He's like, panos is going to be in Boston. At the time they had the Microsoft store. Can you meet him at the store? And I'm like, sure. So I went into town. The guy ushered me into a back room. And then he closed the door behind. Closed the other guy out. It was just me and him in the dark. And I'm like, what is going on here? And it was like. He's like, you're going to tell me who did this. I'm like, no, I'm not. And he's like, no, you need to tell me. And I'm like, no, I don't. I'm like, what do you mean? I'm not. That's crazy.

[Richard Campbell]

And what are you doing? Like, are you nuts?

[Paul Thurrott]

He was really upset about it.

[Leo Laporte]

How did that resolve itself? Did you say, okay, fine, unlock the door?

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, I. I think he eventually understood somehow, through all his gold change, that. I wasn't going to say it. I don't know. I was just. It was a very strange guy.

[Leo Laporte]

But he did. He had a thing for you, didn't he? He took your laptop at one point.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. We had an up and down is the way I would say it. Mostly down.

[Leo Laporte]

You. You were at a announcement event that he was.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I was typing on a laptop, and he picked it up out of my hand and held it up. I don't remember what the point of it was. Held it hostage or something.

[Leo Laporte]

It wasn't a Mac. It was a Windows laptop.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it was a Surface laptop too, is what it was.

[Leo Laporte]

It was one of theirs.

[Richard Campbell]

His machines.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's like the one I leaked ironically. No, actually, no, that's not true. It was one of the originals, the Surface 2. Literally Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2. So it was later picked it up.

[Leo Laporte]

To make a point of some kind, but it didn't. It felt a little hard.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm a good person to make an example of. I screw up a lot. It's fine. It's like, I get it.

[Leo Laporte]

Didn't Steve Ballmer at one point stomp on an iPhone at a. Yeah, he.

[Paul Thurrott]

Threw someone employees iPhone on the ground. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And stopped like a salesman.

[Richard Campbell]

He was the drama guy, you know, he was through the chair, through the glass wall when the first time Gotra left went to Google.

[Paul Thurrott]

First time I met Ballmer, I was walking around. It was right. COMDEX at that time. But I was like sort of my day off. I was just walking around as a person. I didn't have any, you know, I wasn't there like dressed up or anything, but I had. I was literally wearing a. You killed. Oh my God, you killed Kenny. South park shirt.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

And he look, he's standing next to me. He looks down at my shirt, he goes, nice shirt. Nice to meet you too. Oh, well.

[Leo Laporte]

So this was at Safeco Field. A Microsoft.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it was one of those all hands meetings or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Steve comes. You know how he does this, running around, slapping his hands and he sees.

[Richard Campbell]

He would down a pint of honey before he'd go on stage.

[Leo Laporte]

No. You're kidding.

[Paul Thurrott]

For his throat.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Richard Campbell]

That's the thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, it's throat.

[Richard Campbell]

They coat his throat and a jack him up. And he wanted everybody else to do it too. Like it was a thing, not a good thing. They always have this stack of honey.

[Leo Laporte]

It gives you the shakes about five minutes later.

[Richard Campbell]

Anyway, did you see him on stage? Yeah. Now that you know, it's like.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know what though?

[Leo Laporte]

He's hyped up on honey.

[Paul Thurrott]

I still miss the guy. He was. He was a good cheerleader for Microsoft.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh yeah. He was enthusiastic. I played mini golf with him.

[Leo Laporte]

Mini golf with Ballmer?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. He was going to win at all costs.

[Richard Campbell]

And every and every business unit we talked about, he knew every. All the leadership, all the business. Like he needed the entire company backwards and forwards.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

He was detail oriented. Yeah, still is. He does like his. He runs the Clippers now into the ground this season, but whatever. And, but he's a big Excel spreadsheet guy. Like everything.

[Richard Campbell]

He likes his stats.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Did he know everybody's shoe? Model, make and model shoe? Remember Mary Jo said that Steve Ballmer remembered people's shoes. That was a salesman's old salesman's trick for remembering people. That.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

He would memorize the shoes that they were wearing. I don't know how that would help you. I think it'd Be better to memorize their name, but.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, hey, Manoa Oblonix, am I right?

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't seem like that would be useful. No. I remember Mary Jo telling us that he knew. She knew every shoe that every everybody was wearing. What kind? Who was your. Okay, so is Panos your least favorite Microsoft executive of all time? I don't want to get you in trouble here, but why not?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, no, no.

[Richard Campbell]

There's so many worse people than that.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, that's a hard.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a hard.

[Paul Thurrott]

There were just people like. People like Julie, Les and Green who were just unqualified to be where they were and had no right being there and were awful.

[Leo Laporte]

They may be.

[Paul Thurrott]

He was awful, but he was blowing there. He was just like a marketing guy. He didn't know. I don't know that he knew anything about technology. Like, he wasn't a technologist.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Was Bomber a technologist? He knew technology.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, but, but, but he's a sales guy by being there for so long and you know, he, he'd absorb. He understood it like, yeah, hey, look, he set him down this path that they're on right now. They did. He. He was the guy. It was like we got to do Cloud, you know?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah. Did. He had to go against everything he was arguing for with a Windows centric company. He knew that. And it's one of the reasons he had to move aside was he was an obstacle to the next.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, just like Kevin Turner's who were like that. God shouldn't have been there. This, you know, whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

We.

[Paul Thurrott]

We Johnson that guy.

[Richard Campbell]

We did a.net rocks tour and they asked us to do a show in Bentonville, which is the craziest damn thing. And several of them came up to me. Headquarters of Walmart.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And several of the guys came up and said, hey, when you see those Microsoft guys, thank him for taking Kevin Turner off our hands.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

He was a former Walmart guy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh boy.

[Leo Laporte]

That's qualification enough. I'm satisfied.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is a hard thing because I care about technology, obviously. And there are guys who are just kind of engineers or technologists who I would just sort of knee jerk like because of what they were, but maybe they weren't the greatest leaders too, you know. And then there were promoted, right? Yeah. And then there are people who maybe like Ballmer, who wasn't. Didn't go into technology, but ended up being great at leading that company. And so it's. You can't really. I don't know. You never know. Like, you never know what you're gonna get. That's why, like, the jury's still out right now on Pavan Davalari. But I see. I like what I see so far a lot, you know, but we'll see.

[Richard Campbell]

I like that he exists. I like that there's a new unification to Windows. There looks to be a future, because for a long time there, it's just like Windows was in stasis.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, my God. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And I think that was partly intentional because it takes a long time to convince a company of 200,000 people, hey, we're not a Windows central company.

[Paul Thurrott]

Remember, the thing we only cared about, now we don't care about that at all. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And the only way we can convince you of that is to utterly paralyze that group while not actually destroying the product and still collecting several billion a year from it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, that's a tough balance. Right. That's the old joke. Unless they have eight wives and a cocaine habit, they don't need the money.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, in the modern era, there's no version of this for Apple because the iPhone hasn't hit that stage. But it would be like. It's like, I still care about the Apple Iie. Like, it's a tough place to be in today.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of people leaving Apple, though, the last few weeks. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

There's something going on internally that's got people upset.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I. I would just. I think they've done so well for so long. There's not a lot of up, you know, what do you call, like a. Like up?

[Leo Laporte]

What am I trying to say?

[Paul Thurrott]

There's not a lot of headroom for success. Like. Yeah, all you can do is be compared against these huge successes they've had. I mean, who's going to succeed?

[Richard Campbell]

You really going to make another iPhone?

[Paul Thurrott]

Is that going to break through? No one's been able to do that. So, yeah, it's hard. It must be hard there to get ahead and you'll make a meaningful difference.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of them are in their 60s, so a lot of them are retir.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And they've all made plenty of money. Right. They're not. They don't need the money anymore.

[Richard Campbell]

That's sort of the truth of all the leadership on all of these companies. Like, none of them need them.

[Paul Thurrott]

Which always makes me wonder, because what are you doing with your life? I mean, why bother? You're not gonna make. You're not gonna do it again. You're not gonna. It's hard to know, you know, but.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S hard to acknowledge that you know.

[Richard Campbell]

See, Satya jumping so hard on the AI thing like this is the first thing he gets to hang his name on.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

That's happened to Microsoft. And so he's going for it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. That's. That's.

[Paul Thurrott]

I guess every CEO's folly or Sacha will be beloved for the rest of history. We'll see.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Well, you know, he's number three, so he has a choice. He's either the next Gates or the next Bomber. Which one does he want to be? That's his choice.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You'd rather be Bomber.

[Paul Thurrott]

He's already.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

He's presided over an incredibly successful run.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. The stock price is through the roof.

[Leo Laporte]

Ironically, Ballmer was the idea who had the cloud guy. Who had the cloud idea. And. But Satya came from the cloud.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He was the Azure guy.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So he. Let's not forget what he really was.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, he was the Bing guy.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, okay, all right, all right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

And he only became the Azure guy because Bob Moo. Left.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

He was the Bing guy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, he was the Bing guy.

[Paul Thurrott]

We never forget is all I'm saying. You know, hashtag neverforget.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And it was him and Guthrie that righted the Azure ship because, you know, Azure was struggling those first few years.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. It's just that, you know, when you. For being a CEO, Steve, or Bill Gates is Bill Gates. I mean, unassailable in a sense from what he did at that time. Right. For a business, you know. C. Ballmer, unfortunately will be known for flatlining the stock price for 10 years plus. But they did great, obviously, under Steve Ballmer as well.

[Richard Campbell]

And he kept the company together. He got the consent decree.

[Paul Thurrott]

He got through that stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. That was his job. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

So Satya has led the company during this incredible expansion of financial power. But if you asked any normal person, what do you know Microsoft are. They would all point to stuff from the past. They have no idea what any of this stuff is. And it's a curious. We don't know what that legacy is yet. We'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's normal. We're watching the football game the other day and Lisa's ex husband comes over to watch the games with us, which.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is, you know, we're not awkward. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Not awkward.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Got it.

[Leo Laporte]

And. And he says, what's this? Aws. I keep seeing ads for aws and I have to think that's gotta be what most people are going. Yeah, well, I keep seeing that it's for aws.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's the most profitable business that Amazon has by far.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, right. But nobody. But. And so Lisa says it's, I don't know, some networking thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, there you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Nobody knows.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's plumbing. It's. It's a synthesis.

[Leo Laporte]

If I were to say it's the cloud, that would be like, well, that's electricity.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's air developers.

[Paul Thurrott]

Basically.

[Richard Campbell]

It's the next utility, you know, that's compute on demand.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. Well, that's what the whole Internet is.

[Richard Campbell]

It's the Internet.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Really, you ask people to know, like, remember the names of executives at electrical companies and because their companies did great for 10 years and you're like, I don't even know what you're talking about. And unfortunately for Satya Nadella, it's kind of what Microsoft is.

[Leo Laporte]

We remember Jack Welch's name. We don't forget his name.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Have you read his book? Because Satya Nadella's book is terrible by comparison.

[Leo Laporte]

No, you know, I haven't read Jack Welch's book. I'm reading a great book about ge, the history of GE and mostly about Jack Welch. And it's really.

[Richard Campbell]

But all of that is at the end of his career. Right. Nadella's book is the one he put out first to sort of position himself as the, the yoga CEO.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

The warm cuff, cuddly. We're all going to get along CEO.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Which that, you know, then Dark Sacha showed up and everything's different now.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there any CEO book that's really any good? Any.

[Richard Campbell]

Only at the end of their career. Right. Like why.

[Leo Laporte]

They can't tell. They can't say.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well.

[Richard Campbell]

Like they have to have pulled something off. Right. Like Welsh did the turnaround of GE and that's book that everybody.

[Paul Thurrott]

The problem is when you're successful, you, you might, you write a book. You don't. Or someone writes a book about you and. But you, you've done this thing and it's great, but you're never repeating it like. So I'm not sure what the lesson to learn here is exactly. No one followed these people and did their own amazing things like you're. And they never did anything else either. So I don't know. Like I, we all, we're all looking for that magic formula or whatever, but whatever happens to Microsoft or any of these other companies, if they're successful or not, it's going to be something we don't even know about right now. So, you know, I'm not sure what lesson we can learn from them other than they got really lucky. Right place, right time.

[Richard Campbell]

You know which is the most likely.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Which is how I feel about you guys.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

People do.

[Richard Campbell]

Right time.

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[Leo Laporte]

Shopping is hard, right? But I found a better way. Stitch Fix Online Personal styling makes it easy. I just give my stylist my size, style and budget preferences. I order boxes when I want and how I want. No subscription required. And he sends just for me pieces plus outfit recommendations and styling tips. I keep what works and send back the rest. It's so easy. Make style easy. Get started [e-mail] Spotify that's stitchfix.com Spotify. Well, gentlemen, I don't think we need to belabor the point. It is New Year's Eve. Everybody who's watching is wondering what the hell happened here? This is not your usual Windows Weekly. Because first of all, A, we don't want to make anybody work on New Year's Eve.

[Richard Campbell]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

And B there isn't going to be a whole lot of news on the day before a new year begins.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I mean enjoy the two week break between Windows updates. Always happening. We'll have that little bit of time off that will be fun in like Pretend Cold. Are we in week D? It's the longest week D in the calendar. Just enjoy that.

[Leo Laporte]

Just live it up. I'm just really glad to spend some time with you guys. Just talking about stuff. So many great stories. Any final wishes you wish to send along to all our winners and dozers and Twitter broadcast?

[Paul Thurrott]

You're all winners in my eyes, guys. Well, except for you, Kev Brewer. You're kind of a. No kidding. No, I love Kevin. Thank you, Kevin.

[Leo Laporte]

Really. We should thank Kevin King who is the producer of this show and most.

[Richard Campbell]

Of the time keeps his stuff together.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he's gonna have a fun time editing this, taking out all of the stories we don't want anybody to know.

[Paul Thurrott]

About the unsung hero who is now.

[Leo Laporte]

Hopefully a little bit all the drunk. I was really hoping you guys would get just sloshed and we could.

[Richard Campbell]

It takes a little longer than that.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm doing my best.

[Leo Laporte]

Best. You're way too disciplined.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Speaking of which, hook me up over here. What are you doing?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Way too pickled, slacker. Yeah, you haven't been. So this is. This was from last week's Windows Weekly, your Pennsylvania whiskey pick.

[Richard Campbell]

The Pennsylvania Wixie pick. Because I was in Pennsylvania, so I needed.

[Leo Laporte]

I actually was trying to find. And I. I couldn't. In the liquor club closet. We must have drunk it all up our local Petaluma whiskey.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's actually pretty good. Griffo. I'll find a bottle and then you can come up to the attic.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I will. That sounds fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard Campbell. Are you doing a run? His radio end of the year thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, yeah. Well, I think the last show of the year is going to be Paul and I, a little drunk, doing a happy Christmas thing. And then I always lead off the year with the sort of. Okay, what's it like going to be a system in a 2027?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Which I've been taking a lot of notes on.

[Paul Thurrott]

What will be the saying no to AI?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I think the bubble bursts next year. And so just how do you position yourself to deal with that?

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, Gartner just came up with this report and said, do not install any AI browsers.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like any.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's true, but I think you would if you were a business and you aren't using AI. You're missing the bet.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is a hard thread to. Or needle to thread, I guess, is you want to give up all your data.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you have to do it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Your employees are smart, your controls are good.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to do it intelligently.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is a. This is a tough one where. This is early days.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I do feel like AI is an advantage for business intelligence, if nothing else. Right. Or am I wrong? I'm not a business.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I don't know, because generative AI was useful for business intelligence long before we labeled it with the LLMs. Right. So they know that part still there.

[Paul Thurrott]

It makes good infographics. It's good at summarizing things. And if you can do that graphically, it's fantastic.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, the bigger issue here is how big is the. How hard is the S&P 500 being corrected by 30% going to be on Everybody, right, we're back to a sort of hunker down moment.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. 2008, 2029. What are we talking about here?

[Leo Laporte]

There's a real consensus about that but I, I'm not convinced only because I feel like, like there's genuine value being created.

[Richard Campbell]

This stuff without a doubt. Imagine there was genuine value being created in the web.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is dot com bubble stuff. Like we, everything that occurred there is. We're still using it, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

But there it.

[Paul Thurrott]

There was an inevitable, well, I don't.

[Richard Campbell]

Know change in economics.

[Paul Thurrott]

There was a, a bit of a correction.

[Leo Laporte]

What caused the dot com collapse, the 2008 collapse. AOL.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. But also you now had investors that had gotten in in 95, 96 and it had been five years and they weren't seeing the returns. And at some point if you've been taking money from other people to invest in these companies, you're expected to show a return. And so you hit this threshold where you have to tell folks that you're not seeing this and that starts to cascade out.

[Paul Thurrott]

The only company in history that has had the same sort of impossible kind of possible profit to debt ratio as OpenAI is was a. All Time Warner.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know and if you look at like companies like Amazon that ran for whatever 12 years or 10 years without a profit or Spotify or Tesla or Uber. Little, little amounts of money and then you get to OpenAI and it's this giant massive. It's 20 to 30 times as big.

[Richard Campbell]

But all of those companies were making bringing in significant income and investing it it and choosing not to show.

[Paul Thurrott]

Amazon was always going to be profitable.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It's just, they were just grabbing. It's like that's open a so enormous and the only thing you can see is only a bigger gap. Like they're saying things that are crazy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

So they're. I expect them to be acquired by somebody.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's that. Yeah. It's going to be a question of fire sale time or when it happens. I don't know. We'll see.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Anyway, you were hoping for a soft decline. It doesn't seriously damage the market and if it's not that way then we hunker down and focus on our fundamentals.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And we know what more advice can I give.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love the economic outlook is look, the plane's crashing. You're just hoping for a water landing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know like we're hoping you skip.

[Richard Campbell]

Along the ground a bit.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, exactly. Just don't go like nose dive. Like hopefully you just like a stone across the top.

[Richard Campbell]

Get a couple of good bounces in there.

[Paul Thurrott]

So that's fun. Yeah. I hope you guys don't intend to retire anytime soon. You know, you'll be fine.

[Richard Campbell]

A little five year gap.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm living on my portfolio. I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

How big's your mattress, Leo? Are you gonna get that going?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know, it's too late to buy gold.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

If you bought bitcoin to hedge your bet, you're not.

[Richard Campbell]

How's that going for you?

[Leo Laporte]

That's not been a good thing. I'm gonna ride it out.

[Paul Thurrott]

I figure I can't wait till the US Economy's on the bitcoin standard. You know, that's gonna be the next one. Oh, boy.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to ride it out. I'm staying in. I think. I think it's all going to work out.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm just glad I built new machines before Ram went out into the Strat. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that a crazy. And then Micron's announced that they're not.

[Richard Campbell]

Going to sell the consumers at all.

[Leo Laporte]

Why bother? We make so much money selling to.

[Richard Campbell]

AI companies and they don't complain about the prices and they buy all the.

[Leo Laporte]

Chips we can make. So. See, a consumer, see.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I. I'm a little nervous because I've been.

[Richard Campbell]

These all seem like harbingers, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe. Maybe. I don't know. I'm gonna. I'm gonna hope for a Christmas miracle.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I think your Christmas miracle might come in August, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. As long as it comes before I'm 80, I think we'll be all right. I'm gonna. I could. I can live 10 more years on.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, my experience, we recover pretty quickly. We're pretty quickly from 2008. We recovered from 2001. It always seems to be faster.

[Leo Laporte]

Every time I think, oh, I'm gonna cash out. Then the market doesn't make sense anymore.

[Richard Campbell]

All of a sudden, probably is a good time to cash out.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know what, though? You could live to be 100, and that will always be the buffet thing. That's the problem is when you're. When you seriously think I'm gonna cash out, but it will never be right. Right. You can't plan that.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't believe in market timing. I'm. I'm.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, you can't. It's impossible.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm a. I am betting on the long term success of the country in our economy. Maybe that's foolish, but. But honestly, if it is, it's all we got.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that was a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

That was a uplifting way to end this fine program. Your hopes for 2026, which starts tomorrow. Paul Thurat, what are you looking forward.

[Richard Campbell]

To in the new a gentle plane crash?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I mean to keep it to the sort of Microsoft Windows space. I'm hoping we learn something about Windows 12. You know, we've been talking about this one for two years now, I feel.

[Richard Campbell]

And now we see the pieces in place finally. It's exciting.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I look at how.

[Leo Laporte]

It'Ll be all AI. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I hope the lesson learned here in Microsoft's part was opt in is important and always give people an escape hatch for those that don't want it. And they do seem to be trending in that direction. So hopefully that continues.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard, what do you think for 2026? What are your hopes?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, I'm in the same boat here that I looked at what Visual Studio 2026's roadmap looks like and how they've gone all AI for software development. I think it's a good roadmap for what? Windows. I like the realignment of the leadership and some of the new people are coming into play. That speaks well to a younger generation wanting to take the company places it hasn't been before. I think the situation between Judson and Satch is a little weird, but we'll see how that pans out.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, It's a new era. Maybe that's the. You know, we just talked about this. The sense of like first, second, third, CEO.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And maybe the future is a little different. It's. Well, leadership is split up a little bit more between different people.

[Richard Campbell]

Satch has been in 10, 11 years. Right. Like, he has run his course in that respect. That's as long as Ballmer was in.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know.

[Richard Campbell]

So, you know, it's not out of realms. We might see a leadership change in the next year or two.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think that's what you're seeing at Apple, too. Not that we care that much about that. But the. But in general, newer generation coming in.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, there's a new generation coming in. You know what? They're smart, they're hungry, they want to change things.

[Leo Laporte]

Things.

[Richard Campbell]

And I. I'd like to be on that ride. That's exciting.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we're going to be in some very interesting times.

[Richard Campbell]

We're in time without a doubt.

[Leo Laporte]

No doubt about that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Doesn't seem that complimentary, but yeah, you're probably right.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. My friends, it's wonderful to be able to spend the year with you. I look forward to a great 2026 worth of Windows Weekly episodes every Wednesday, 11am to 2pm Pacific, 2pm to 5pm Eastern, 1900 UTC. We'll be back here next Wednesday, January 6th, for the next Windows Weekly. Happy New Year, guys. I hope you had a wonderful holidays. We thank especially the members of the club who've been our great support all this year. We look forward to A nice next Wednesday's January 7th. Thank you, Kevin. He's paying attention. Thank you for your support through the year. And I promise you 2027, it's going to be very exciting for all of us on Twitter, especially if there's a crash. We'll have lots of fun watching us.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh boy.

[Leo Laporte]

Burn. Watching the world burn.

[Richard Campbell]

No, there's not going to be the marshmallows.

[Leo Laporte]

I am contrarian on this one. Paul Thurat thurat.com leanpub.com for his books. Have a wonderful New Year, New Year's Eve, enjoy your fire. Put some pants on and we will see you next week.

[Paul Thurrott]

The clothes are only coming off at this point, Leo.

[Richard Campbell]

It's sitting by this fire. Things are getting toasty around.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is as much as it's ever going to be today.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you guys. We'll see you next time.

[Richard Campbell]

Bye bye.