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WW 991: Strategically Repositioned Productivity Surface - Gaming Layoffs Signal a New XBOX Era
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Gaming Layoffs Signal a New XBOX Era
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- [00:00]
Leo Laporte
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul's here, Richard's here, Layoffs are here. We'll talk about the bloodbath at Xbox and what Microsoft's doing with some of those game divisions that it's shutting down or at least cutting back on. Paul's got a new browser that he's a fan of and the end of physical disks for PlayStation. That and more coming up next on Windows Weekly. This episode is brought to you by Black Hat usa. If you listen to this show, you go deep on the technical detail. Well, so does Black Hat. For nearly three decades it's been where the security industry's most rigorous research gets presented and pressure tested. More than 100 hands on trainings taught by practitioners who actually deployed in live environments, not lecturers reading from slides. And hundreds of peer reviewed briefings that go well past the overview into the real work across the four areas defining security. Right. AI and autonomous threats, cyber conflict, systemic resilience and identity. This year, Black Hat's briefings pass includes all keynotes and main stage access plus business hall entry. You also get breakfast, lunch, Arsenal live tool demos on demand session access and admission to the midnight in the war room screening. Black Hat takes place from August 1st to to the 6th in Las Vegas. If you want the depth this show gets into in person with the people doing the work, this is the room. And we'll be there too. Prices rise on July 17th, so book before then. Use the code TWIT for $200 off your briefings pass@blackhat.com us26 that's B L-A-K H A T.com us-26 podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWIT. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 991 recorded Wednesday, July 8, 2026. Strategically repositioned productivity surface. It's time for Windows Weekly. Yes, the show where we talk about Microsoft with this guy here, Paul Thurat from thurat.com Yay. And Mr. Richard Campbell from runnersradio.com Yay. I'm just. And we're gonna do the soccer cheer. O E. Oh, oh. And hello everybody. Good to see you.
- [02:40]
Richard Campbell
Momentary momentary Norwegian there.
- [02:42]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. It's kind of hard not to like that Holland guy. He's. He's quite the Viking.
- [02:47]
Richard Campbell
He's a character.
- [02:48]
Leo Laporte
He's on the drum and everything.
- [02:51]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [02:51]
Leo Laporte
You were in Norway recently. Were they celebrating?
- [02:54]
Richard Campbell
Was not while the World cup was on. But my Norwegian friends are certainly raising their minds.
- [03:01]
Leo Laporte
Sorry about Canada. Sorry about the U.S. sorry about Mexico. All three of those countries.
- [03:05]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. All the hosts are out, but that's fine. They all went further than they've gone before.
- [03:09]
Leo Laporte
Exactly. Exactly. Somewhat as expected. None of this was unexpected.
- [03:13]
Richard Campbell
No. Excited to see Argentina still in it. Messi's in a state.
- [03:16]
Leo Laporte
That was close.
- [03:18]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [03:18]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that was. I was. I was going, Egypt.
- [03:21]
Paul Thurrott
Egypt.
- [03:21]
Leo Laporte
It was close. I was. I was excited. Cabo Verde. Who doesn't love Cabo Verde, right? Paul's going. What are you people talking about?
- [03:30]
Paul Thurrott
No, I know what you're talking about. It's boring. I know exactly what you're talking about.
- [03:36]
Leo Laporte
I just. I think it's so good. I love it. Anyway, it's almost over. We're. We're down to the semifinals. Quarterfinals, I guess, but it's been a fun ride. Now, enough of that. I wanted to give some. Insert some jollity into the program, because from now on, it's solemnity that will rule.
- [03:57]
Paul Thurrott
My new favorite word is neologism. Is that what you're doing? Creating, like, a new word?
- [04:01]
Leo Laporte
It's a neologism, ladies and gentlemen. Oh, gosh. I've done. I've clicked a button and it wants me to add a social loop. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing anymore. Let's just go to Paul Thurat for the latest.
- [04:15]
Paul Thurrott
Paul, what's the Twittalk thing?
- [04:19]
Richard Campbell
What's that?
- [04:20]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you know. Oh, gosh. And now you're on the wrong side. They've changed things in the old.
- [04:27]
Richard Campbell
In the interface. Yeah.
- [04:28]
Leo Laporte
In the old restream. And it's so confusing. But now we're back to the normal situation. So, yes, sad news.
- [04:41]
Richard Campbell
The normal situation is the layoffs in the new fiscal year.
- [04:44]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And this is not unexpected. We knew this was coming, right?
- [04:47]
Richard Campbell
No, if anything, smaller.
- [04:49]
Leo Laporte
Oh, good.
- [04:50]
Paul Thurrott
Right. Well, yeah. I mean, I. The rumors were all basically correct. That was my takeaway. You know, I had the same reaction to that Steam machine pricing announcement. Everyone was losing their mind. And I was like, you know, given the way things are going, it didn't feel gross to me. And look, layoffs are always bad, but you have to remember, this is the big perspective here is a year ago, because the first half of last year was a nightmare for Microsoft employees. They kept randomly laying off people. I have several horror stories from employees who witnessed the horrible way they did this to people. There was all that drama at Build last year in Seattle. Then July came and they had 7,800 more layoffs they laid off. Microsoft did over 15,000 people in the first half of last year.
- [05:43]
Leo Laporte
Holy cow.
- [05:45]
Paul Thurrott
This year, not so bad. And part of the reason they've approached this thing a lot better than they did a year ago. At least they've learned, so to speak. But they did the buyout for longtime employees who meet certain requirements. 30% of those folks accepted that. That allowed them to have a smaller number of layoffs now. So these layoffs, these numbers are kind of tough because I got a late night email from an Xbox PR person who I think was possibly working on her 72nd straight hour. So she wasn't like completely clear. But what Microsoft did say was that a total of 4800 employees are being laid off. This is 2.1% of the workforce for
- [06:38]
Richard Campbell
a company that Normally turns over 10 to 12% per year, anyway.
- [06:42]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I mean, this in line with some of the rumors we had heard. And then in the Xbox part of it, over the next year, Xbox will eliminate 3200 over the next. This is the fiscal year now. So July through next June, 3200 jobs, 1600 of which are immediate. Right. Not included in that number are those numbers, I guess, are the people who are leaving Xbox because their studios are going elsewhere. We'll get to that in a moment. That wasn't 100% clear, I think, at the time of the announcement. But the PR person that wrote me seemed to be suggesting that, because what I had written was, if you do the math on this, 3200 in Xbox, 4800. Outside of our total, two out of every three employees being laid off is from Xbox.
- [07:32]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [07:33]
Paul Thurrott
But my. If I understand the sema, I'm still awaiting clarification here. I believe what this person was telling me is that actually the 4800 is immediate. So only 1600 of those are from Xbox, or roughly one third. So not two out of like one out of every three. So I'm not sure where that lands.
- [07:56]
Richard Campbell
There's still plenty and it's still hard on people. I have a couple of friends.
- [08:02]
Paul Thurrott
It's not unique to Microsoft or anything, or Xbox whatever. But yes, I mean, okay.
- [08:07]
Richard Campbell
And I would point out that as of the end of fiscal year 2025, the total number of employees at Microsoft did not change with 30,000 layoffs. They also did about 30,000 in hiring.
- [08:19]
Paul Thurrott
That's curious. Yeah.
- [08:21]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. It makes you basically question what you doing, you know, what's going on, actually.
- [08:27]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, well, yes. And that's one of the things that's. What is obsessing me at the moment. So one year ago, after, I don't remember, three, four rounds of layoff, Sachin Adela wrote this letter to employees which they published on their website, which I thought was incredibly tone deaf and just did not do anything to make sense of what they had done.
- [08:47]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [08:49]
Paul Thurrott
This year we get an internal memo from Amy Coleman. She's the Chief People officer, which is an awesome title. Yeah. The new person basically saying the same things Nadella was saying last year, which is. And then being very explicit like this is we're not eliminating jobs because of AI. But. But you are though, right? Like, you know, at a time when Microsoft is spending more than it ever has on, in this case, AI infrastructure, but just kind of capex spending.
- [09:17]
Richard Campbell
Yes. But also making record profits.
- [09:21]
Paul Thurrott
Yes. But also not. But not that part of the company. You know, I mean, like, you know, look, one of the, you know, most famous or infamous stories about Satya Nadella is that when he took over as CEO of Microsoft, he made all of the business leaders from within the company come through, explain what they were doing, how or if they could be profitable at some point. If they couldn't, it was like, well, we're not doing this anymore. The Xbox thing was always this huge opportunity, but also never profitable. There were various efforts, we'll get to all that. That kind of kept that thing going. But when you look at Microsoft as a business, if you were to turn that same lens on their AI infrastructure, their investments in AI, what's going on there? You know, like it's, I mean, I don't think they would withstand the same level of scrutiny that they've demanded of other parts of the company. So we'll see. But there's that. What's most interesting about this to me is the amount of information we got about what's happening at Xbox. There's still so many questions, but I think it was last week, definitely last week and possibly even before that. But I've had this idea in the back of my brain, like, isn't there a way, if you're going to get rid of these studios, to let them, just let them go, let them go off on their own thing?
- [10:47]
Richard Campbell
I said there's no way they're going to do that. That's an asset. They have to turn it into value. They're not going to take the write down.
- [10:53]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So we don't know all the details on this. But you also made the point that one of the ways that could make sense would be if Microsoft retains some stake, in other words, the idea is that we're going to let you go. You can take your games, you can take your ip, you can take all your employees, you can start your own little company.
- [11:09]
Richard Campbell
But you got to figure out your own funding.
- [11:12]
Paul Thurrott
But you also have to fulfill the promise that you made while you were with us. In other words, ship that next game and do what you were doing. And I don't know that that's what happened, but four studios are definitely leaving. Two of them are going off on their own, like I just described. They're actually going to.
- [11:33]
Richard Campbell
No, I'm stunned that this is happening. This is amazing.
- [11:36]
Paul Thurrott
It's wonderful. And I am super excited about that part of it because that's such a great outcome for everybody's perfect.
- [11:44]
Richard Campbell
I don't know that it is, but I hope it is. Well, he said something other than fired everybody, destroyed a brand again.
- [11:50]
Paul Thurrott
Right. It's better than just closing a studio, firing those employees and then letting that IP and those games or whatever they have just sit there and do nothing. And we'll never do anything. And I hate that so much. So the two that are going to go off on their own are Compulsion Games and Double Fine. And then there are two others, Ninja Theory and Undead Labs, which are going to have new ownership, but they have not said what that is. And the fund, this is a quote, the funding to complete. I assume they mean the games they're working on and grow the business.
- [12:19]
Richard Campbell
The only one I can imagine that they hesitate to say, like this would be ea.
- [12:25]
Paul Thurrott
Interesting. Yeah. So we haven't heard anything about that,
- [12:29]
Richard Campbell
but I don't know is that. Or some kind of PE firm that wants to get into gaming. Yeah.
- [12:33]
Paul Thurrott
There's also a. There's a fifth studio and I'll come across that eventually that. Oh, it's. I think it's Arkham in France is looking. Is looking at options and they'll do one of those two things as well. So we have five studios that will be leaving. Almost certainly this. But again, like in this, just this. I could spend hours on this. There's so much. There's just so many details here. There are details here that confirm things we already knew.
- [12:58]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [12:58]
Paul Thurrott
This thing's never been profitable. It's fallen so far behind. It's ridiculous, et cetera, et cetera. But then there are these details that I just never expected or saw coming. So, for example, Mojang, which Microsoft bought, I want to say 2013, probably 2013, 2014, whatever it is, has been operated as an independent business, much like GitHub was when they first came, or LinkedIn. It's kind of like this King, which is part of Activision Blizzard, and it's the part that does all the mobile games that. I don't know how that was being run. But Mojang and King will now report directly to Asha Sharma, the CEO of Xbox, who reports directly to, by the way, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. That's interesting. So what's the rationale for this? Two things.
- [13:45]
Richard Campbell
One, these businesses wants to hear about Minecraft. He's all in.
- [13:51]
Paul Thurrott
That's number three.
- [13:52]
Leo Laporte
And of course, Sacha plays Candy Crush whenever possible.
- [13:55]
Richard Campbell
So nice.
- [13:56]
Leo Laporte
And that's King.
- [13:57]
Paul Thurrott
So part of. Yeah, part of my problem with King is that I'm pretty. Look, they had some big mobile titles. There's no doubt about it. I think they've been coasting for years. It's astonishing to me that in the year and a half it's been, or whatever it has been since Microsoft acquired them, you can't point to a single major new King game of any kind anywhere, nor can you point to any mobile game effort out of Xbox, slash, Microsoft.
- [14:18]
Richard Campbell
But that's not how mobile games make money. You know, there's a team that keeps on adding levels to Candy Crush because that makes bank.
- [14:26]
Paul Thurrott
All right, but at some point, Candy Crush had to be released. I'm just saying, Microsoft, while you've got
- [14:31]
Richard Campbell
a cash cow, you might as well pour your energy into it.
- [14:34]
Paul Thurrott
Okay, but in addition, what about shipping mobile versions of all these games you have? There's just been nothing. I don't understand that. Anyway, the rationale for this is twofold. These businesses, this is a quote from Asher Scheimer, are the largest within Microsoft by largest businesses, within Xbox by monthly active players. And the company considers both to be platforms, which makes them different. But we don't know how because it literally never said that. And this is a contorted and grammatically incorrect sentence, but she said they bring critical geographic, demographic and differentiation to Xbox.
- [15:16]
Richard Campbell
Wow.
- [15:17]
Paul Thurrott
Whatever that means.
- [15:17]
Leo Laporte
You just don't understand business speak, Paul. That's.
- [15:20]
Paul Thurrott
I do understand English, though, and there's a difference. There's a word missing, but I don't know what that is. Okay, so that's the problem. I know, I know. Well, I feel like I do, but. Okay, there's. There's fascinating details about how poorly previous generations went, which is maybe worse. What people thought, how. How unprofitable these businesses were, which got worse over time. And then this kind of series of events that all kind of happened at the same time, where Microsoft was trying to make this business make sense over a period of time where they did things like Game Pass and then started the studio acquisition stuff culminating in Activision Blizzard. The pandemic came and went and that was a giant boom time and then a giant trough at the end of it. There's the component crisis that's happening now, et cetera, et cetera. And there's this. Some of this is self inflicted, some of it's just outside factors, whatever, but this business is a disaster and worse than I thought.
- [16:31]
Leo Laporte
What we kind of don't know. Maybe Candy Crush is just cash flowing like crazy without any spam.
- [16:37]
Paul Thurrott
There are companies that analyze mobile gaming and gaming in general. And I, I'm not actually sure that that game is even in the top three or whatever you want to call it.
- [16:46]
Leo Laporte
Doesn't matter because you have all these people who already installed it who are just poor.
- [16:50]
Paul Thurrott
No, I mean just in revenue generation. Like I believe the last time I saw something like this was maybe last November. Ish, something. I should look.
- [16:59]
Leo Laporte
So they do report some of that stuff?
- [17:02]
Paul Thurrott
No, they don't, but. But you can get these numbers from other places, right? Because, you know, so Microsoft. No. Part of the reason these details are so interesting is because Microsoft has been stepping back the transparency for years and years. I mean, just looking at Xbox, we hadn't gotten a Game Pass number in over two and a half years. We hadn't gotten a console sale number since either late 2013 or very early 2014. I don't remember exactly, but it's been a long time. The reason they stopped doing that specifically in 2013 or 2014 is the sales were terrible. But then you have that conversation where you're like, well, we want to focus on growth metrics, things like engagement, like active users. And then they have this Game Pass thing. So it's like, well, Game Pass is the important thing. Game Pass has been a nightmare for them because two and a half years ago I think they reported, I want to say it was 34, 35 million paid subscribers. Today it's 30 million. So it's actually gone down by whatever I said, 3 to 5 million. Now part of this was definitely due to the price raises or price increases they had last year. But they didn't lose. There weren't 5 million people on Ultimate. They were like, screw this, I'm not doing this anymore. I feel like this had in fact gone up a little bit over time and then fell a little bit or some number. The theory I and many others have had is that going Into Activision Blizzard. There was someone doing math where they said, all right, look, for this to make any sense at all, financially, we have to have X number of whatever it is, subscribers and you know, throw the number like 100 million or something. Right. They never got anywhere close to that. Their expectation for this year, and I don't know how far back this was made, was to have at least 77 million subscribers and they have 30. So that has just been terrible. And that's interesting. I mean, it's just, you know, interesting. So they're reducing management layers. There's going to be like a. Basically a chief operating officer of that business who's going to, you know, handle the financial end of it across the business. Which sounds a lot like that Nadella thing I was talking about you. Like you have to justify what you're doing here, et cetera, et cetera. There's some really interesting little things that they just kind of throw in a sentence like, listen to this sentence is very interesting. They're going to help independent creators succeed by providing open development tools in audiences to realize their vision. I don't know exactly how most developers create games for Xbox, but you have to sign up and get approved and you have to have a plan and have some kind of a funding for this thing and you have to follow through on what you're doing or it just gets taken away from you. Unless you're an indie developer. This is a very. It's a serious program. And I think part of the. They're not saying this because you don't want to say these things right now, but part of the shift to making the console part of the business, which they insist there is, the focus, which it should not be, is making it more like Windows. And that's where that open development tool thing comes in, I think, because when you open in the sense that Windows is open, that you can pick whatever rendering engines you want to use and use whatever tools you want to use, you create games, you can ship them on whatever stores you want to ship them on. I think that's what that actually means. But I have to kind of guess there because they don't really say that explicitly. Right? Why would they? They're going to reduce costs across. It's like shared code bases, cleaner code bases, 50% reduced vendor spend, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I know, it's crazy.
- [20:42]
Richard Campbell
Tell me you don't know anything about building game software,
- [20:47]
Paul Thurrott
shifting investments to higher priority projects. Oh, like what they don't say. It's like, you know, and then a Lot of that, that happy language you have to, you know, the happy words you have to use. It's like, we're not changing so we can become smaller. We're changing so we can become bigger. It's like, well, but you are becoming smaller, right? I mean, you know, literally. But okay, whatever. This needs to be done. I get that. So I wanted to kind of sit on this for a couple of days and didn't because I just couldn't wait. But and honestly, there haven't been too, too many things that have come out in the past 48 hours since I wrote this thing that I wrote. But I went through this memo and I do what I do and I kind of looked at it and so this memo from Ashley Sharma does not mention the word console one time. Not one time. The word hardware appears a couple of times, but in the context of meaning a console, only one time. And it's just in a sentence with a bunch of words that are this word comma, this word comma, this word comma. So it's just one of a much of things. And it's just for this to me, to. Everything that they've said is like, oh, this is our focus now. How do you not talk about this in this memo? That's crazy to me.
- [21:52]
Richard Campbell
Are you thinking they're leaning back towards the everything's an Xbox mentality?
- [21:57]
Paul Thurrott
I think that what I've always thought along in this process, which is that they can say whatever they want, but the reality of this business is the reality. And if they're going to keep this thing going, what makes sense is them being a cross platform game publishing company.
- [22:09]
Richard Campbell
Right. Rather. And which then begs why are you in the console business?
- [22:13]
Paul Thurrott
Yep. They don't say any of that. It never.
- [22:16]
Richard Campbell
Why would you let go of any studios?
- [22:19]
Paul Thurrott
Well, so that's the. So there's, there's a hint of that. Right. Of the why of that. And the hint of the why of that is that there are some studios and more likely the games that those studios are making that just don't fit in with the direction of Xbox and.
- [22:35]
Richard Campbell
Oh, interesting. And that's one thing I didn't look at those studios that are leaving. Are they cross plat capable studios? Do they have a mobile player or not? Do they have any of those things? They're strictly a thing. If they're strictly making games for one platform, okay, maybe you boot them out.
- [22:49]
Paul Thurrott
I think it's a mix of cross platin and one platform. But I'd have to go and look at HK that I'm not 100% sure of. I think we have to assume here because we don't know what's going to happen. But if you assume that Xbox will go forward as they are now, essentially they have all these game publishers making games for whatever platforms they have. Xbox Game Pass, a series of subscription services for Windows, Xbox Console and sort of on Mobile. When you factor in some of the other things and maybe there'll be changes in the future if those app stores ever get fixed. There are some of the big, big games like Call of Duty that won't be on Game Pass for the reasons we already understand. They are making a console. They still do that. That's supposedly the focus. And then there's the whole Windows or Xbox and Windows thing, which is, you know, Windows PC gaming or just PC gaming in general is just about as big as console gaming. They're roughly the same size. You know, mobile gaming is bigger than both combined. But, but this is the, this is the business. So if, you know, if, if these studios don't make sense for Xbox, you have, you know, you have to kind of factor in like, or think about what, what could that be? Is it something like this game the games are making won't make sense on Game Pass. You know, we can't reach audiences, you know, in certain ways. You know, there are examples of games that Microsoft has published that did really well that are kind of minor, like Sea of Thieves. And part of the reason it did really well, I think originally was putting it on Game Pass and then eventually putting it on PlayStation and in some cases Nintendo. Right. Which I think there should be more of. But, you know, we don't know actually what they're going to change. So it's, it's actually kind of hard to say what it is about those things, those studios or their games that don't make sense within an Xbox whose, you know, makeup. We don't actually know what that, you know, how it's going to change over time. So we don't really know. Yeah, no. And I had found this, I found this out separately. But and I said this earlier, the. There are 350 people leaving Xbox because they're part of the studios that are leaving.
- [24:58]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [24:58]
Paul Thurrott
And that number is not included in the number of people who are being laid off. Those are not considered in the 3200. Yeah, right. I already did the Game Pass stuff. Yeah. So that's probably most of it, I guess. You know, it's interesting just to jump in a little bit. Laurent, who writes Sara News Forwarded a post for me from gamespeed. So gamespeed is a publication. What's the guy's name? Dean Takahashi.
- [25:32]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [25:32]
Paul Thurrott
Famous video game. He's great analyst, excellent. But he has a guest post from someone else named John Kimmich I believe. Used to work at Xbox at one point. But he compared Xbox today to the burning platform thing that Steven Elop commented on when he took over as CEO of Nokia. Which is a cheap gut punch for us in the Microsoft area.
- [25:53]
Richard Campbell
But also not inaccurate. Right. Like clearly Ash has gone through the place and said, hey, this is problematic.
- [26:04]
Paul Thurrott
Any comparison breaks down if you get too detailed. This is the thing. You can throw out some random thing. It's like, oh, that's a little bit like. And then someone's like, it's not really like that. And here's why. It's like, okay, settle down there. You're right. But I also think, well, again, not to get pedantic about this, the reason Nokia had a burning platform is that they had, well, a bunch of things. But two of the things that stick out in my brain just thinking back to it is Nokia was one of the last handset makers that had all their own factories and manufacturing facilities around the world.
- [26:35]
Richard Campbell
They were vertically integrated.
- [26:36]
Paul Thurrott
Yep. Huge cost associated with retirement funds, health care and other employee benefits with associated, et cetera. Everyone else had shipped this stuff and was now today everyone basically. But everyone was in the process of. Or had already been shipping that stuff off or having third parties do that typically in Taiwan and China, whatever. And then the other one was that they had this kind of aging software platform and didn't do enough to make it competitive when new things happened like Android and iPhone. And to me it was just like a. It was like this legacy business that was dominant one point and it was falling apart. But through like inertia and just the passage of time you can kind of exist for a while and it's okay, but then you wake up one day and it's over. You know, you also have a certain
- [27:22]
Richard Campbell
number of people who just buy Nokia phones regardless. Mostly in Europe. Yeah. They also blew up their relationship in North America catastrophically.
- [27:29]
Paul Thurrott
Oh yeah, yeah. Had a couple of half hearted expert efforts to kind of get that back and never happened.
- [27:35]
Richard Campbell
And like their cousins BlackBerry in Canada did not understand developer ecosystems could not build platforms that other people could build for.
- [27:44]
Paul Thurrott
Yes. So to put that all more simply, they had this dominant business, the world changed and they did not adapt. So okay, so this is a burning platform. I don't actually. Xbox was never a dominant platform. They joined the video game market because they were afraid that Nintendo and Sony were actually big threats to Windows, which was still their dominant product at the time. And they just went in with a standard console play kind of thing, which they then evolved over time. We already know, we all know the story there, tried different things, nothing worked, it's never been profitable, etc. Etc. But his write up hinges on something that he calls the Game Pass thesis, which I kind of want to call the Game Pass gambit. But the idea was that at the time they created a Game Pass, it made sense for the business that was Xbox or Microsoft Games at the time. Since then they started, well, they already, I think they had Mojang already by that point, but they acquired Bethesda, Zenimax and all those ID software, et cetera. And then of course Activision Blizzard. So now they're this giant conglomerate and whatever. And it turns out like if you're making AAA games, like a lot of them, Game Pass actually doesn't make a lot of sense because you're giving people a low cost option to not spend a lot of money on what would normally be expensive games. This is the Call of Duty and that one is exponentially a problem. But so I guess this theory basically is just like, I don't want to game. See, to me it's not just Game Pass, but Game Pass is like a thing, you know, it's part of the story to me. But he's basically saying, look, you know, you compete in this market against these players, you know, we know who they are. Mobile is all Apple and Google. Nintendo owns kind of the volume, you know, console market part. You know, Sony is the premium console thing. You know, this is, back in the day, this was like hardcore shooters would be like Xbox360 maybe, but this is all Sony. Now Steam owns PC gaming, right? And then there's other players like Epic and whatever. And it's like Microsoft doesn't really have a dominant position anywhere or even a really good position anywhere. And the thing I really do agree with, he's like, he's like, look, they have this and this. He just lists all the stuff they're doing. They can't do this. All, all, all of this doesn't make sense. There's some, if you, if you say there are five or seven things that Xbox is, any two, two, three, maybe four of them together, it's like, yep, that's a good business. But trying to do all of them is maybe too much. And actually that makes sense to me. I mean that kind of, that, you know, given the history that's occurred here, that does make sense to me.
- [30:25]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [30:25]
Paul Thurrott
So I don't know. And then the other just detail that came out since the announcement, and I don't really. I'm not even sure how this came out. I guess it was. Somebody put it on LinkedIn. So ID software, which is, you know, not the company it used to be. Right. It's not John Carmack and that gang anymore. I mean, this is long gone, but they laid off roughly 50% of that company. And, you know, I have to be honest, I. Not to be, you know, I don't mean this in a mean way, but I think this is true of a lot of games, a lot of studios, a lot of whatever in Xbox and elsewhere. This is like one of those what have you done for me lately? Problems, which is. Yeah, you can, you can kind of ride on past successes to some degree for a while, but I can't think of a single aid software title from the past. I don't know, decade that are. I can't think of even one or whatever. Or some major, you know, Bethesda, right, Like there. Yeah, they were part of Bethesda.
- [31:25]
Richard Campbell
This is all Microsoft. All the way up then.
- [31:28]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah. But I'm just saying, like, you know, when you look at.
- [31:31]
Richard Campbell
They haven't made a game.
- [31:33]
Paul Thurrott
They haven't made a game, or they haven't certainly made a good game or a popular game. And that's part of the problem. It's like, listen, no one here, your history is secure. You guys are amazing. The history of this company is crazy. But what have you done for us lately? I mean, you know, we live in the present and we have a business and what are we doing here? And I don't, you know, again, not to be. To be mean about it, but I just don't, you know, I don't know what's going on there. So I think that, I think that problem is something that actually is part of the problem throughout a lot of these, whatever you want to call these, studio closures, game cancellations, layoffs, whatever, these sizing. Well, I mean, it's the bungee problem, right? Like, what has Bungie done lately, you know, that's been successful, etc. So it's, you know, I, you know, I don't know. So, you know, is it. I guess they would. Right. So it is technically behind the new Doom games, I guess, which is. Yeah, whatever and okay. And, you know, those are fine. I mean, they're fine. I, you know, but Kill the game
- [32:38]
Leo Laporte
if they fire all those people?
- [32:40]
Paul Thurrott
It depends, right?
- [32:42]
Richard Campbell
Pretty much.
- [32:43]
Paul Thurrott
It depends on what it is. Well, look, Microsoft, unless they decide otherwise, owns the ip, they own the games, whatever they have. I don't think there are any examples of anything just dying here.
- [32:55]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [32:55]
Paul Thurrott
I mean, there are people being laid up, but some studios are being let go, but they're taking the games with them. Those are going to persist. Actually, one of the things I should have mentioned earlier was Asha Sharma made the point of saying every game that we've announced demonstrated publicly, like at that June event, this is all coming to market. Like, none, none of this is going away. And that's actually really good. That's important. So, yeah, like I said, look, layoffs are bad. I mean, I get it. Some of the problems are not unique to Microsoft or Xbox. Some of them are. No doubt about it. It's people. You know, it's still people, but it's. But it's also a lot fewer people than was the case last year. Last year was a bloodbath. They handled it so poorly so many times. It was getting kind of scary and weird. And at least this year you can look at it and say, well, look, they're being logical and pragmatic and they're handling it better, just doing a better thing with the people involved for the most.
- [34:02]
Richard Campbell
Last year's car accident was really a big accident. This is just a fender bend.
- [34:07]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. This is.
- [34:08]
Richard Campbell
They're getting good at layoffs now. Right.
- [34:10]
Paul Thurrott
Last year was the first Tiger woods accident. This year was the more recent one. It's like it's barely made the difference anyway.
- [34:18]
Richard Campbell
I mean, maybe there, the oscillation is. Is dying down and this is going to just keep getting smaller. Well, by the way, the only reason this one's smaller is because of the.
- [34:30]
Leo Laporte
The
- [34:32]
Richard Campbell
retirement packages they put out and got 5,000 people into.
- [34:36]
Leo Laporte
So they what, they had attrition? They attributed a whole bunch of people and. Right. And then fired.
- [34:41]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. But by the way, the number of people who are within Xbox that might have qualified for that buyout has got to be single digits. Like, these are the guy. These are the use of Metis. These are the guys who've been around since the 80s or early 90s and have just crude.
- [34:59]
Leo Laporte
You know, they're sitting on a pile of money. Yeah, right. Can retire.
- [35:03]
Paul Thurrott
Yep. Yeah. I'm not saying there aren't people like that in Xbox. Ashley Sharma pointed one of them out, actually. But I. Yeah, the math was you
- [35:10]
Richard Campbell
had to get to the number 70 between your age and the number of years work there. So 50 year old with 20 years here, you. You qualify. Oh, 55. With 15, you qualify like that.
- [35:20]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah. That was the weird mess. That's right. Because you have to do additional, right?
- [35:24]
Paul Thurrott
You have to do addition.
- [35:26]
Leo Laporte
I guess if you work at Microsoft, you probably can do addition pretty well.
- [35:30]
Paul Thurrott
I don't think so, Leo. They do AI now for that.
- [35:35]
Leo Laporte
AI Edition is not a good idea. I just want to say. Haven't done some. Really not just say use code. Okay. I'm just saying use code. Don't do it. Don't ask any Arts and Strawberry. That's all I'm saying. Two plus two does equal five in some cases.
- [35:54]
Paul Thurrott
So I guess my takeaway here is mostly, again, not being incentive, but I feel like this was not as bad as many expected. It's obviously horrible for the people it's impacting, but this is not like I said last year. I guess I was expecting. In some ways I was expecting more. I mean, more not just in the terms of layoffs, but more in the terms of like, okay, well, here's the path forward. You know, when she talks about the future, that's where it gets really vague.
- [36:29]
Richard Campbell
They all are talking about the future vaguely, but somehow the future requires 4,000 less people. Okay.
- [36:37]
Paul Thurrott
By the way, that you can justify that honestly. But what I'm looking for is any indication that they're actually going to do something different than what they were already doing. And I got to be honest, there are indications to the contrary to that. Not of anything that's completely new.
- [36:53]
Richard Campbell
No, I think they feel like last fiscal year, maintaining the same number of employees, but getting rid of 30,000 of them at the same. While continuing to hire was a good outcome. And they're gonna repeat that pattern?
- [37:06]
Paul Thurrott
Well, yeah, I, I guess. I mean, I. I don't know what they're gonna do, but I don't know. This is.
- [37:13]
Richard Campbell
I just got no indication of anything else. I do know I talked to one person who was unhappy enough in their job that they're like, boy, I hope I get Rift. And then got rift. It's like, well, now I have this package to work with to decide if I'm going to work elsewhere in Microsoft or somewhere else entirely.
- [37:31]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [37:34]
Richard Campbell
I mean, they're gradually making their employees that mercenary. The idea that you care about your job, it's like, no, give me the package so that I have 90 days or six months to go decide what I'm going to do next.
- [37:46]
Paul Thurrott
Right. No, it's not a good feeling.
- [37:50]
Leo Laporte
They abandoned stack ranking, but I don't know if they've improved the situation. This is. Yeah, I don't know. We're sitting on the outside looking in. We don't know. Maybe Microsoft's, you know, close to going bankrupt and running out of money.
- [38:03]
Paul Thurrott
Well, I don't think that's the case, but pretty sure.
- [38:08]
Leo Laporte
Pretty sure they're not. No.
- [38:09]
Paul Thurrott
Look, a big part of this problem is, again, it's not unique to Microsoft, but this mad necessity to grow. And Microsoft rides these kind of growth trains from time to time. Windows, obviously, Server Office and Microsoft 365. Now cloud computing. Awesome. But then you get to that point where things change a lot. And AI is that point because it is a growth trajectory unlike any other potentially. But it's also the greatest expense this company has ever experienced and by far. But it's not even close. And so this is uncharted. It's just a new. It's a new problem. Yeah. Well.
- [38:49]
Richard Campbell
And let's face it, so far this fiscal year, from at least from a stock price point of view, has not been great.
- [38:54]
Paul Thurrott
I mean, do you see what happened to Nvidia stock price this year? This company has lost a record. I don't know what the exact number. It's like some kind of trillion dollars of value or something.
- [39:07]
Richard Campbell
Like, nice, a trillion here, a trillion there. Pretty soon you're talking about real money.
- [39:11]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it was just something completely independent. But the best way to run a business is by watching your stock price.
- [39:20]
Richard Campbell
Oh, no.
- [39:21]
Paul Thurrott
Well, hold on a second.
- [39:24]
Richard Campbell
But when you're only about shareholder value.
- [39:26]
Leo Laporte
Sorry, the answer is not the choice.
- [39:28]
Paul Thurrott
That's right. I mean, this is the thing. Look, it's a horrible outcome in so much. This is not unique to this business, to Microsoft in particular, whatever. But you grow and you grow and you grow and at some point, look, when you're this big, growth is very difficult. Obviously Nvidia's market cap fell by $1 trillion since.
- [39:50]
Leo Laporte
But part of that is because may gain 2 trillion or something. Well, yeah, of course.
- [39:55]
Paul Thurrott
But I mean, I'm just saying, like,
- [39:57]
Leo Laporte
the net over the last 12 months is probably positive.
- [40:01]
Paul Thurrott
Okay. I have to say, in less than two months, they lost a trillion dollars in value.
- [40:05]
Leo Laporte
I don't know.
- [40:06]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I'm not feeling bad for Nvidia. I'm just saying this is the world we live in now. I don't know when Microsoft was smaller and it seemed like a big company at the time, in the 90s or whatever. It's like, we make Windows, we make Office, we're going to make A video game thing. You're like, okay, these are sort of the same. And then you look at Microsoft today and you're like, what is this company? It's just so much stuff and so much of it. This is what we talk about every time there's a quarterly report now is like, what's the money here? What is this? Like, where is this? You have all this, like, real estate now and data center assets.
- [40:43]
Richard Campbell
That's the transformation of Microsoft. Anyway. They used to be a software company. Now they're an infrastructure company.
- [40:47]
Leo Laporte
So this is Nvidia over a month. But this is Nvidia year to date, and this is Nvidia over 12 months. I mean, there's. Yeah, you know, they're back down. They're back down to where they were in October. You know, five years is still pretty much up there in the mountaintop. It's just, you know, But I know that this is what Jensen doesn't look at, that. Jensen's looking at this, you know.
- [41:14]
Paul Thurrott
Well, you know who does look at that is investors.
- [41:17]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [41:17]
Paul Thurrott
And Wall Street.
- [41:18]
Leo Laporte
And so, and I understand options are a big deal in acquiring talent. That's. That's part of the reason they need the. The price to be strong. Yeah. Maybe this is. This is the day for Microsoft. This is five days. This is a month. They're kind of coming back. The whole tech industry was down here for a while, but year to date, one year. Oh, yeah. It's not great for Microsoft.
- [41:44]
Richard Campbell
Nope.
- [41:45]
Leo Laporte
Five years. Yeah. This is not good.
- [41:46]
Paul Thurrott
It's not going to be great for a lot of these.
- [41:49]
Leo Laporte
You're back to 20, 23 stock price.
- [41:52]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So all this insane spending that we've witnessed, the question. One of the questions has always been like, well, when does it.
- [41:58]
Richard Campbell
Does this level off?
- [41:59]
Paul Thurrott
Like, when does that happen? Like, it's got to slow down, turn around with something. And maybe this is the type of news cycle, whatever is causing this, that will finally drive that. We're on a cliff. This is very dangerous.
- [42:15]
Leo Laporte
According to Yahoo Scout, which sounds like AI, Microsoft is navigating a challenging environment.
- [42:23]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. One of their own creation, by the way. Yeah. I mean, I want, you know, what's been the key Microsoft innovation of the past decade that everyone wants to copy? You know, it's a good point. Overspending on AI.
- [42:39]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's a good point.
- [42:41]
Paul Thurrott
I don't know what else have they done? Have they done anything where everyone else is like, oh, my God, that's genius. Let's do that.
- [42:47]
Leo Laporte
You know, let's pause. This would be a Good time to pause and reflect on our.
- [42:52]
Paul Thurrott
On our failings, on our 401k, on
- [42:56]
Leo Laporte
our failing 401k while I talk about one of our fine sponsors. You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell. They are the beloved voices of reason in the Microsoft universe. Or something.
- [43:13]
Richard Campbell
Sorry.
- [43:14]
Leo Laporte
Meanwhile, this episode of Windows Weekly brought to you by Threat Locker. Hey, Paul. And Richard and I are going to all be Threat Locker's guests at Black Hat along with Steve Gibson. We're going out to Black Hat in August. We hope you'll come say hi at the Threat Locker booth. Very kind of them to host our podcasts. ThreatLocker is a great zero trust platform. Richard and I were out there at Zero Trust World in January, has such a good time in Florida. But all of that aside, I know that doesn't help you in your business. Let me tell you what zero Trust from Threat Locker can do. It delivers the industry's most comprehensive suite of zero trust solutions. They've always protected endpoints, but now they protect your company network and the cloud. This is huge. By extending zero trust enforcement to cloud services and company networks, Threat Locker is ensuring that devices are validated through a secure broker before connecting to the SaaS platforms you use. Salesforce, Asana, Google Workspace, GitHub, and on and on and on. So what does that mean? Well, it's really good news. Even if your employee was successfully phished and compromised and then the hackers are sitting there at their computer, you know, in Belarus or wherever, and they're trying to get into your Microsoft 365, they can't. They would actually have to have physical possession of your employees trusted device. They'd also, I'm presuming you've set up Windows hello or you know, Biometrics. They'd have to get past that. I mean this is the best way to lock it down. Threat Locker works in every industry. It provides 24. 7 US based support. The best support ever. I've talked to many of their support guys are fantastic. It works with Windows, it works with Mac, it works with Linux environments. And as a side effect you get comprehensive visibility too. It's great for your compliance. You get total control over what's going on on your network. Rob Thackeray is the end user technical architect at Heathrow Airport. I mean imagine there is probably, I mean everything Heathrow does is mission critical. They cannot go down at all or their impacts, you know, throughout the world. They use Threat Locker for that reason. And this is what Rob said, quote, Threat Locker was The most intuitive solution we tested and the responsiveness of the organization. The willingness to engage with us to set up a demo and work with us on weekly audit reviews was very good. It is great to have an ongoing relationship with a company that's so responsive to our requests. ThreatLocker is trusted by global enterprises like JetBlue, the Indianapolis Colts, the Port of Vancouver. ThreatLocker consistently receives the highest honors in industry recognition. G2 said high performer and best support for enterprise. That was summer 2025. PureSpot ranked them number one in application control. GetApp gave threat locker their best functionality and features award last year. Threatlocker means you can confidently ensure users have access to a consistent, safe network connection. That means offices, remote users, internal servers and critical services can maintain smooth operations. But you don't need to open inbound ports. You don't need to deploy traditional VPN solutions. Your end users will get the secure, reliable internal system access they need without complex infrastructure changes. I've seen it at work. It's amazing. Get unprecedented protection quickly, easily and cost effectively with ThreatLocker. Now here's how. Visit threatlocker.com TWIT. You'll get a free 30 day trial and you can learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's threatlocker.com TWIT. We thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly and we look forward to seeing you out at the threat locker booth at Black Hat in August. That's going to be a lot of fun. Looking forward to that.
- [47:17]
Richard Campbell
All I know for sure is we're going to stay inside because it's.
- [47:20]
Leo Laporte
Is it going to be hot?
- [47:21]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [47:21]
Leo Laporte
August in Vegas, hot. That's all right. Vegas is actually one giant air conditioned box. Square, square 12 miles.
- [47:30]
Richard Campbell
We will go from air conditioned metal tube in sky to box with wheels and air conditioning.
- [47:37]
Leo Laporte
They really don't want you to go outside?
- [47:39]
Richard Campbell
No.
- [47:39]
Leo Laporte
Really don't?
- [47:40]
Richard Campbell
No.
- [47:41]
Leo Laporte
They don't put windows in the casinos. They don't put clocks. They want you to stay right where you are.
- [47:46]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [47:47]
Leo Laporte
All right. On we go with the program, Mr. Taylor.
- [47:54]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So in the Windows world, just a couple of things. So there was a set of insider builds yesterday. Cross beta, experimental and then beta and experimental for 26H1. There is one notable feature.
- [48:10]
Richard Campbell
They're both.
- [48:11]
Paul Thurrott
Well, there are two they pointed out, but only one of these is notable to me, which is a new recovery tool called cloud rebuild. And this is a recovery option that will perform like a full OS reinstall even when Windows won't boot. This is something the Mac has actually had for a long time. And there are PC makers that do this kind of thing where you can go into the firmware essentially and start like a restore kind of a thing. And it comes from their servers, et cetera. So Microsoft's just making this part of Windows. It's good.
- [48:48]
Richard Campbell
Well, and it's something we've had over on the enterprise side for a long time with Autopilot and things where literally I can make a deal as a big consumer of PCs to have my machines pre installed with bootloaders that go and pull images from my Azure servers. And so, you know, the machine gets delivered directly to the employee's home, for example, and as soon as they turn it on, it basically it identifies them and then does the install. This whole goal of zero touch from that. So this feels to me like they're surfacing some of that to consumer, which is great.
- [49:22]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. And this is also the latest in a long series of kind of reliability, you know, kind of infrastructure stuff they've been adding to Windows. You know, point in time restore is one of those things. Reinstall Windows from Windows Update or whatever or fix Windows from Windows Update. Like there's some, you know, it's, they're. This is working out nicely. So that's good, that's good stuff. I kind of just threw Opera into this because whatever, it's a browser, but there's a couple of browser related things. So Microsoft Edge just came up with the latest version, version 150. And there's actually some really interesting things going on here. The key one being that I don't see this yet on any of my installs, but it's rolling out over time, is the ability to sign in with a Google account instead of a Microsoft account. It's like, that's interesting. But if you look at the release notes for this version of the browser and there's a bunch of it, there's a lot of stuff in there for businesses, et cetera, et cetera. They explicitly mentioned that they are in the process of really trying to simplify Microsoft Edge, which I think is very much needed. It's a very busy browser. There's too much going on. And one of the things that they're getting rid of and they're in the process of this is the sidebar where you can install apps into the sidebar. And the idea is that you'd have the sidebar side by side with what you were doing. The sidebar is basically going to focus on the copilot stuff going forward, I think. But they had previously gotten rid of collections, which you might remember was a Joel Belfiore thing from a million years ago. They're starting to get rid of these kind of superfluous features that probably have very low usage, et cetera. But the net gain here will be that this browser will be, I don't want to say lightweight, but will be less busy, you know, with stuff, which I think is important. And then I just. Because I don't really have a place for this otherwise. Opera came up with a new version of Opera Run, which is their flagship desktop browser. And there's a new feature called Paste Protect, which is a native feature, not an extension that prevents malicious code injection attacks that use social engineering, which is probably the biggest security. Well, not counting the stuff AI is founding. But as far as like new, you know, like new ways that malicious actors are doing, you know, things that they're doing to try to get people to let them into their world, I would say social engineering continues to be probably number one with a bullet or whatever. So this is an attempt to prevent that kind of thing. So that feels well intentioned to me. That's good. And then I keep waiting for some good news, some miracle, something in the hardware area. But in the past few days, Google and Samsung have both announced dates for the next announcements, product announcements, hardware announcements. Right. So I think it's July 22nd. Samsung's having an event for one of their unpacked events. This will be for the folding devices and then Google's is mid August and that's for the Pixel 11 series, which both of these will include foldables. And then Apple, don't forget, is coming out with new iPhones, some of them anyway, in September. And it'll be a foldable. Yep.
- [52:37]
Richard Campbell
So still the question is where do they get the memory from?
- [52:41]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so there's a lot of. Right. So one that's part of the story, which is that some of these things may in fact be steps down from previous gen when it comes to RAM or you know, whatever. One of the. I don't know if this is a rumor or fact, but the Pixel, I think as of last year you could buy a Pixel, at least a base Pixel 10 and probably a Pixel 10 Pro with just 120 gigs of storage. But that's actually going to go up to 256 this year. So that's where it should be. But it also means these things are going to be more expensive.
- [53:09]
Richard Campbell
So.
- [53:10]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, we'll see. I don't know. So that's about it. That's.
- [53:17]
Leo Laporte
That's all she wrote. That's on the Windows front.
- [53:22]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [53:23]
Leo Laporte
Well, it's a little early for me to do another commercial.
- [53:26]
Paul Thurrott
That's okay.
- [53:27]
Leo Laporte
Why don't we talk about AI briefly?
- [53:30]
Paul Thurrott
Sure, yeah. I. I'm not sure briefly actually.
- [53:33]
Leo Laporte
Go a little longer.
- [53:34]
Paul Thurrott
Okay, I'll see what I can do here. Let's talk a little bit.
- [53:37]
Leo Laporte
Otherwise we're gonna have to interrupt the Whiskey segment with a commercial and I don't want to do that.
- [53:44]
Paul Thurrott
I'm not sure what to make of this because as I wrote this story, I went back and I looked at what I had written before and I feel like Microsoft was actually kind of communicating this already. But Bloomberg reported that Microsoft has started transitioning away from models from OpenAI and Anthropic to its own in house models, which is the Microsoft AI stuff. And they're doing this to cut costs. I mean they get some kind of a discount or whatever it is, at least on OpenAI. I don't think Anthropic gives anyone a break, but whatever. But you know, I don't imagine more expensive than.
- [54:18]
Richard Campbell
It's just interesting thing in terms of OpenAI like Microsoft calling out to OpenAI which goes back to Azure anyway.
- [54:24]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, but look, the fundamental criticism of this industry which we're going to get into in the next segment is that there's this amount of money that everyone keeps talking about, everyone meaning all these companies in this industry and also registering as revenues. It's just the same money that doesn't exist in the first place being passed back and forth between all these companies. It's a giant pyramid scheme of some kind.
- [54:53]
Richard Campbell
We're ponziing.
- [54:54]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, we need a new word for this. But yes, essentially, look, we know that Microsoft is working on its own in house models, you know, Microsoft AI Sulaiman and whatnot. And okay, there's been progress. Like we've seen this back at Build, they announced several new models. Some of them seem particularly good. Whatever the image model they had, they claimed was as good as or better than Nano Banana two. Right. So you know, we'll see. But what Bloomberg is saying is that they're actually starting to use some of these models where they can. They don't say it this way, but based on the app use cases and the things that they write, it's clearly within Microsoft 365 which is or is not Microsoft 365 copilot. Depending on the app, the use case, et cetera, et cetera. It's kind of hard to say. It's very vague. Bloomberg seemed pretty proud of itself. Like the extent of this change has never been reported before. It's actually still very minor. But there are apps like Excel and Outlook and PowerPoint which Bloomberg does not mention. But Microsoft mentioned back at Build, where certain features of these apps are in fact using Microsoft's models already. Right. They're using them in GitHub Copilot, which has nothing to do with Microsoft 365 or whatever. So. Okay. I mean transitions don't happen overnight by percentage. I'm sure this is low single digits as far as either instances of Microsoft models being used to answer prompts or whatever and. Or the number of features within any given app within Microsoft 365 in which Microsoft models are on the back end instead of OpenAI or Anthropic. I bet it's very small. But you know what, whatever they are making that shift, I think that's good and inevitable. Right. So whatever. Apparently this is happening. We'll see. Microsoft Teams is going to start using that transcribe model they announced at Build, for example, also. I don't believe that was in the Bloomberg report. But that's just a separate thing. Right. So this is happening. Okay.
- [56:57]
Richard Campbell
I mean the upside to this, besides possibly saving money, which I can't imagine is a concern at all, is differentiation. If everybody's using OpenAI, you don't care where you get it from.
- [57:08]
Paul Thurrott
Right? Right. Part of this is definitely inertia. But Microsoft does have this very successful Microsoft 365 business. Businesses rely on all these productivity tools. Some of them are very long lived. I mean, these are legacy tools in many ways, but whatever. They have modern tools and whatnot, but just because they are the owner and maintainer of the software, having your own AI models that can integrate with them in maybe a more intimate way than a third party thing can is actually kind of interesting for privacy.
- [57:41]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [57:42]
Paul Thurrott
Well, I just mean from efficacy or from just knowing more. Yeah. Cost definitely. And knowing more about the product because you're coming at it from the outside. You're hitting these external interfaces or doing screen scraping or whatever the process is. I mean, Microsoft could engineer these things in such a way that they're truly integrated. They've never gotten in trouble for that. But it's a good idea. I mean, technically it's a good idea. It's also a good way to differentiate. You know, this is the Apple marketing point. Right. It's like, yeah, we, we have a, you know, we do it soup to nuts. We do software, hardware, do the services. You know, it all works together. You know, So I think. Except for. Yeah, but. But I think that's the. I think that's the advantage that they could have.
- [58:26]
Richard Campbell
I also, I kind of think that Microsoft's also thinking about the post bubble and what that even looks like. You know, the most we. We're still sitting pretty firmly on OpenAI is, is Netscape. And you don't want to be dependent on AOL when this all goes down. So start limiting your liability now.
- [58:46]
Paul Thurrott
Nobody wants to be dependent on aol, Richard. I think we can all agree what I'm saying.
- [58:54]
Richard Campbell
One way to be able to negotiate to buy OpenAI, not depend on them at all.
- [58:59]
Paul Thurrott
You wake up one day and you realize your family, it's the family from what's that movie, Hills have Eyes or, you know, like Texas Chainsaw Massacre or something. And you're like, what happened here anyway? I don't know. So kind of semi tied to this. Cory doctor has this new book out, right? And so we talked about this and how terrible the name is, but it's called the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life after AI.
- [59:24]
Richard Campbell
The picture's great, though.
- [59:25]
Leo Laporte
Is it a good picture? I got to see that. We're going to get Coriander to attack.
- [59:29]
Paul Thurrott
I hate this title. Yeah. So since I could. I knew the book was coming. I didn't retain in my brain, like, what day it was coming. But then I started seeing new interviews with him on YouTube.
- [59:41]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. You know, and then a million of
- [59:43]
Paul Thurrott
them, and I'm like, okay, here it comes. So it's probably a week ago Tuesday. I don't remember, but it's very good. And the name notwithstanding, I, you know, like I said the name, the term he's come up with. There's a problem because even when you understand what it means, it's still like, what?
- [59:58]
Leo Laporte
It's not clear. No. It's just stupid. It's not as good as inshitify, let's put it that way.
- [60:03]
Paul Thurrott
No, no. Because that's immediately obvious. It's awesome.
- [60:06]
Leo Laporte
You know what that is?
- [60:07]
Paul Thurrott
I know why he didn't use this term. And in that pedantic. Any comparison can be torn apart very easily since I know someone will tear this down. But honestly, you know what term does make sense instead of Centaur and reverse Centaur. Centaur being someone who is using technology to be more efficient or perform better in whatever job. Whereas a reverse centaur is. You're the human being used up by an AI or whatever mechanical Thing to get a job done would just be pilot and co pilot. I guess that was too much of a Microsoft term or whatever. Fine. Although, by the way, Microsoft seems to be moving away from it, but whatever. Anyway, there's a couple things I really like about this book. He does great research. There's a lot of great stories. He makes that comment like that the AI bubble is essentially seven companies handing each other back and forth, $100 billion and then claiming it as revenue every time it passes through their hands, that kind of thing. But where his last book kind of fell short was like, well, because I don't remember.
- [61:13]
Leo Laporte
What do we do?
- [61:14]
Paul Thurrott
What do you do about it? And that was like. I kind of seized on that myself after I read it, because I was like, this falls flat there. And he's acknowledged that.
- [61:23]
Leo Laporte
I've asked him in the past, because I've had him on, of course, a thousand times. And my question always is, well, okay, you're pinpointed a problem. What do we do? And the answer is not completely satisfying. He's saying, no, it's terrible. Well, we who are savvy, who know about this, we need to write our own stuff. We need to create our own. This was back when Twitter was getting in shit.
- [61:45]
Richard Campbell
If I.
- [61:46]
Leo Laporte
We need to create our own Twitter. We need to do that. And to some degree, you know, Mastodon's the answer to that. And you could see the problems I think AI may make it possible for,
- [61:55]
Paul Thurrott
which is ironic in a way. I know.
- [61:58]
Leo Laporte
Well, is it a reverse center? More AI?
- [62:01]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Well, in his book, in the insurification book, the thing he had said was, like. And he. He's been reiterating this, and it's in this book, too, which is this. Couple things. One is that, you know, people think they can vote with their wallets, and that's ridiculous, because the entire buying power of the world's population does not exceed the buying power of seven billionaires. And they are voting with their wallet. So, sorry, that's. That's not gonna work. But the other one, you know, and this was very unsatisfying, was just, well, you know, vote the right people in office and count on regulators to do the right thing.
- [62:35]
Leo Laporte
It comes down to government regulation, which is not.
- [62:38]
Paul Thurrott
But it's important nowadays, and that has to happen. But I can't rely on that, so.
- [62:43]
Leo Laporte
Especially when the government is the best government the billionaires can buy.
- [62:46]
Paul Thurrott
Right?
- [62:47]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, right, right. Who's. Who's controlling the government now?
- [62:50]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, exactly.
- [62:51]
Leo Laporte
Billionaires. Did I say trillionaires?
- [62:54]
Paul Thurrott
Right, right, yeah. No, nobody is going to feel too bad about like billionaire on billionaire harm, right? Or you get to like these weird situations where it's like billionaire on millionaire harm, right? Or now trillionaire on billionaire harm. Like, you know, for us little folk, it's like, yeah, we can't even conceive what's going on at that level. And well, yeah, whatever.
- [63:14]
Leo Laporte
Let me give you a simple example. Elon put $250 million into the last presidential election. And one could argue that was decisive because our elections are so close. It isn't, you know, it isn't so hard to influence them. So that's 14000 of his current net worth.
- [63:32]
Richard Campbell
I know.
- [63:33]
Leo Laporte
So for if, if anybody, let's say 1 4000, let's say, of my net worth, let's say I could choose the next president for, you know, 10 grand. I might do that. Actually, here's, here's less than 10 grand for me. It's a few hundred bucks.
- [63:51]
Paul Thurrott
You guys will remember this. There was a story like one of the things, like back when Bill Gates was the richest guy in the world, right? Microsoft was on top of the world.
- [63:59]
Leo Laporte
Remember? That was like 30 billion back in the day.
- [64:02]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, but the story at that time was like, it wouldn't make sense to you as a normal human being. You're walking down the street, you look down, there's a penny on the ground. It's not worth your time to pick up a penny. If Bill Gates could have looked down and seen a thousand dollar bill, it wouldn't have made sense for him to stop.
- [64:16]
Leo Laporte
No, he makes more than that every second.
- [64:18]
Paul Thurrott
But now the numbers are just like, you know, they're exponentially bigger almost. I keep using the word exponentially. Not really, but they're much bigger.
- [64:26]
Richard Campbell
And
- [64:29]
Paul Thurrott
as normal people, normal brains, we can't really even understand what this world is like. Anyway, the new book, there's a couple things I really like about it that are better than they were in the last book. One is he actually talks a lot about what he does. One of the questions I came out of the insurrectification book was, well, what software do you use? Do you use open source Office alternatives? Do you use markdown editors? Do you use like a no name browser that is completely private or, you know, like I, that's the type of thing I want to know. And he never talked about any of that. And then the other one is just like, what?
- [65:05]
Leo Laporte
Well, that's your job, not his. He's more a philosopher. You're the pragmatic.
- [65:09]
Paul Thurrott
Okay, but I Mean, but he literally. That was in the title of the book, this is what you can do about it. And it wasn't in the book. Right. So, yeah, government regulations.
- [65:19]
Leo Laporte
Not very satisfying.
- [65:20]
Paul Thurrott
No, it's terrible. That's not anything I can do. So he talks about what he does, but he also just talks about general ways of thinking about this stuff. That makes sense. And his use of AI might surprise people. He uses it, I think more than a lot of people may think. He is leaning very heavily into the whole local AI thing. Right. You won't be surprised by that to some degree, and you will talk about that. But he uses just one stupid example, a local AI model. He has a few of these things where he wanted to find a quote from a podcast. He couldn't remember the show or the person who said it, but he fed the Transcripts from the 10 most recent podcasts he listened to and they found it immediately.
- [66:00]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I just. Stuff like that all the time.
- [66:02]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. And then using AI for the basic
- [66:05]
Leo Laporte
range, it's knowledge management, it's knowledge worker stuff. I just give him the AI based on what Elon's current net worth is, how much a second he makes in interest. Assuming a mere 4% annual interest rate, it's more than a thousand dollars a second. 100 million a day. So in two and a half days you could buy an election. Right, as an example.
- [66:28]
Richard Campbell
Pretty sure that's not how his money works, but.
- [66:29]
Leo Laporte
Okay, well, yeah, yeah, you're right because he doesn't actually have that in a bank. No, he does probably make it more than that, frankly.
- [66:36]
Richard Campbell
But right now, considering how much SpaceX has come down over the past few days.
- [66:42]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, and these guys don't spend their cap, they. They spend. They borrow against it.
- [66:47]
Richard Campbell
They borrow against it. And you notice now he's making all those announcements about Tesla's low performance, so I suspect he's move all his loans off of Tesla right over to SpaceX. And now he's going to let Tesla tank so he can buy it.
- [66:58]
Leo Laporte
Oh, geez. And then merge it into merging.
- [67:01]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, right.
- [67:02]
Leo Laporte
This is stuff that's well beyond us that we reverse Centaurs cannot do.
- [67:08]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [67:09]
Leo Laporte
So the real problem Corey has, Paul, I would submit, is there is no fix.
- [67:15]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, well, well, I mean, look, his. One of his premises here, which I do agree with, and this is the type that we've talked about this. Anytime the term bubble comes up, you know, we always think about the dot com boom and bust and whatever. And he doesn't use the word deridist, but it's like. There's, like residue. We know when the bubble bursts. Right. And there are positive things that come out of it. Right. Like, WorldCom was a terrible company, but they did lay fiber. And that exists. That survives them. And we have. The Internet still exists, but it was
- [67:46]
Richard Campbell
also global crossing and 360networks, and a lot of those companies went down. And when I was reading the annual reports for the memory companies, that was my thought was these guys don't want to be the next Global Crossing. So they're refusing to go to extraordinary lengths to build out fabs to fill orders they don't think will be there by the time they can produce them.
- [68:05]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I keep trying to tell people this. These companies are not charities. They're not there to do the morally right thing. Someone was like, if I was the CEO of Lenovo Riddell, I would be so angry. And I would talk to these people, I'd be like, you got to give us. It's like, yeah, they are doing that. Nobody cares. You are the leader of some company that's willing to pay whatever you're willing to pay. Over here, they're paying 5, 10x and they want to buy all of it forever. And I'm sorry, but obviously we're going to do that. We are also a business. We're trying to make money here.
- [68:37]
Richard Campbell
And then Dell marks up their machines and people buy them anyway. And you're like, okay, I guess we're on this ride, too.
- [68:42]
Paul Thurrott
Exactly. Right? Yeah. But I think there's a lot of interesting stuff in this book. He talks about a lot about the. There's this weird element to AI. The AI boom here that we're in, where they're marketing as this thing that is scary and dangerous. It's going to kill humanity. It may be sentient, it may think for itself. It's going to realize we're the weakest link. It's going to kill us all. Which sounds like terrible marketing, but actually
- [69:08]
Richard Campbell
it's all science fiction.
- [69:09]
Paul Thurrott
It just emphasizes they're trying to push how advanced they are and make it look like you're describing spell checking here. I don't understand. What are you talking about?
- [69:18]
Richard Campbell
You're looking at spell checker and then describing an Isaac Asimov novel.
- [69:21]
Paul Thurrott
Okay, yeah, yeah. So I made this comparison. Not him, but there's an element to this where one of the other byproducts of AI, of course, is going to be all these job losses and everything. And he's like, yeah. He goes, you know, look, any technological advance is some element of job Loss, that's what happens. But he says, you know, it's not the jobs like that a, like the Sam Altmans or whoever are talking about. And it's not the jobs people are imagining. It's mostly not the jobs that the people who are in management are imagining because they're the jobs that are going to be lost. It's these like pointless middle managers. Which of course is like the office space scene where it's like, what would you say you're, you know, do every day? And eventually they turn on the guy who hired them and say, so, you know, Bill, what would you, how would you describe your job? What is it you do here? You know, and he's like, wait, what? You know, and that's kind of interesting. You know, there's this, there's a lot this, it's worth reading I think is, I guess the point. It's this one's a little tough because we're kind of still midstream in it. I feel like when insertification came out, it's not that it doesn't continue, it's just that by that point it's so well understood, people are starting to push back.
- [70:30]
Richard Campbell
And he finally put the noun we all were feeling.
- [70:34]
Paul Thurrott
Yes, it was like, thank you for giving me a shorthand to describe this thing we all understand and hate so much. Whereas with AI it's still, you know, it's still unclear how it's all going to end up.
- [70:44]
Leo Laporte
It's early days.
- [70:45]
Richard Campbell
What he can't do at this point is identify a bunch of reverse centaurs.
- [70:50]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, right. And I. Because those things change. And you know, six months from now, a year from now, it'll be different. We'll see.
- [70:57]
Richard Campbell
Now the scenario we'd go after would be radiologists because they've had image recognition models for identifying certain illnesses for a decade now. The demand for them has only gone through the roof. Medical imaging has gone through the roof as well. But the professional still in charge. The tools are just amplifying the professional.
- [71:16]
Paul Thurrott
I don't know if you know this, but this is literally one of his biggest examples. So he, he actually I've, in interviews and in the book, he talks about this all the time. Partially because he had a cancer diagnosis by the way, and he's fine, he's cancer free right now. But you know, the dream of a hospital administrator or whoever, you know, whoever's in charge or a healthcare organization. Right. Which I think we all know categorically are terrible, are eliminating as many high paying jobs like that as we can Right. And to me, again, this is not something he said, but what this conjures in my brain is this story I had heard where Volvo, I think it was invented. I don't know if it was seatbelts or airbags or both or whatever it was, but these things didn't get into cars right away because it was expensive. And there were companies that kind of resisted putting these safety features. Eventually they were required by laws whose anti lock brakes, I think, okay, these various things, right? And literally these are companies or, or they are insurance companies who work for these companies or whatever. Or are those companies are their clients that do the math on this and say, listen, you could put this advanced expensive safety feature in a car and it will save, you know, 300 lives this year. But if we don't do it, those, some of those people are going to sue us and we're going to spend this much and that amount is going to be less than it would cost to put that safety feature in the car. So we're not going to do this until those numbers cross, you know, and this is that math. It's like you're going to have the
- [72:40]
Richard Campbell
silly thing about the layoffs, right? It's like, hey, if this automation was that powerful, you'd get your people up to using it and then you'd be overproducing to the point where you're like, maybe we don't need this many people or maybe we open new markets and use all these people. Deciding to lay off and then build it has never worked for anybody anywhere ever. Next step, fire yourself.
- [73:01]
Leo Laporte
Right?
- [73:02]
Paul Thurrott
I mean actually, right. If you want to. If someone is actually thinking about using AI to replace human beings, generally speaking, that's the person that needs to be replaced like that. That is just such bad thinking. It's so. It just betrays replaced with a Raspberry
- [73:18]
Richard Campbell
PI that just popped up the word what periodically.
- [73:20]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, that just interrupted your workday randomly by standing in the doorway to your office right in the middle of you getting, trying to get something done. And you're like, what? You know, and it's like I had an idea thinking about getting a sandwich. You know, you're like, dude, what are you doing to me? But you know, this. Anyway, I, this is, this is. Yeah, so radiologist was his big thing and he's like, you know, AI is very good at image recognition. You know, they can find black masses and things and they can do whatever. And then we have this dream that at the other end of this pipeline there's going to be that One high paid radiology guy, the human being in the chain, so to speak, who will review all of these decisions that AI made and then yes or no on each one of them, which no one will ever do because we're so lazy and we cut so many costs and this is the most dangerous line of strategy or reasoning.
- [74:10]
Richard Campbell
I think that's where he saw the reverse Centaur is the radiologist taking on the responsibility without having done the work. Yeah, that's also not how it's gone down.
- [74:20]
Paul Thurrott
No, no. I mean, so far, you know, we're so worried about, you know, like people coming out of college now. Although when my son came out of college in the middle of the pandemic, not the greatest time, you know, I mean, there's always been down times or whatever, but I just feel like all of the. Look, I know these things always shift, but when we go through these little phases where we're like, oh, programming is going away. Oh, we're going to automate this job away, you know, or like, like he just. One of his great stories is like, he talks about like, well, we're going to automate, like, cars are going to be automated. Like, okay. And like, actually what we got to do is automate trucks. That would be the genius thing because everyone hates these trucks. And we're going to automate that. And that way these things will move around efficiently, whatever. And it's like, well, automated cars or vehicles of any kind don't make any sense unless everything's automated. And it's like, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to dedicate a lane of every highway to these automated trucks. And then the cars can have the rest of the. And it's like, okay, so what you're going to do is make the highway that we're driving on smaller, which will make traffic worse. And then they'll have their own. You've just invented the world's worst train. Like this, what you're describing is the stupidest idea in a long history of stupidity, you know, but that's where these people, that's how they think. You know, this is like, all right, we're going to automate it. It's like, okay, like, I don't know, it's just, it's not. I don't know. It's an interesting. This is an interesting topic. And he doesn't describe this this way, but between initiatification and this book. His next book is a term he's used a few times, which is going to Be called the post American Internet. And you could kind of see these things as like a trilogy, if you will, of modern technology and this kind of pushback to big tech. And it's the, I don't know, the general population finally saying, we're mad as hell, we're not going to take this anymore. You know, like we've. You have been kicking us in the face for the past 20 years and we're done. You know, we're done. So it's kind of. It's interesting. It's kind of an interesting.
- [76:22]
Leo Laporte
It's a challenge, you know, it's really a challenge to know.
- [76:26]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [76:26]
Leo Laporte
I think he's raising the right questions now. Even if there aren't really answers at this point. It's good for us.
- [76:31]
Richard Campbell
You gotta have the conversations.
- [76:32]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Think about it at least. Even if maybe we can't do anything about it, at least think about it.
- [76:39]
Paul Thurrott
Yep.
- [76:39]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Yeah. It's a good read. It's.
- [76:41]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Everyone, anyone listening or watching us should read it. Just because this is so central to our whole world right now. It's important.
- [76:48]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Corey's super smart, so I really always enjoy, you know, even if maybe we disagree or whatever, I always enjoy his perspective. It's very, very valuable. We haven't booked him yet. I'm just looking at the bookings, but we will get him on soon. I'm giving. I actually gave him the choice. He can come on for a half hour interview on intelligent machines or he can come on for an interminable length of time. His choice. Let me see if. No, yeah, he's not booked on Twitter either. So. Yeah, that's coming up. He's probably on tour. I would imagine he's hard to.
- [77:25]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, definitely. He's like, you could, you could. Like I said, I could see it in my feed. It was like, bing, bing, bing, bing. All of a sudden he's like, you know, like during the whole vacation thing, thing phase, I probably watched 100 videos with this guy and it's.
- [77:38]
Leo Laporte
And because we're friends, I don't push him. I don't think we want to be your first interview. It's fine, you know, do all the stuff we want to do when he gets back home and he's relaxed and he can sit in his comfy chair and all of that. And I also, to be fair, I am not comfortable challenging him because he's so much smarter.
- [77:58]
Paul Thurrott
No, he's so. Well, no, it's not, you know, I'm
- [78:00]
Leo Laporte
not sure about me.
- [78:01]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, well, he talks, rings around every. The Problem is he talks. Talks.
- [78:05]
Leo Laporte
He's very good.
- [78:06]
Paul Thurrott
He's, he's very well versed and he's, he's up on all the data. He, yeah, he, you know, he look like any, anyone who's like a, like a, in a, in a band that's super popular in a tour stadiums or like a stand up comedian or whatever it is or a very good public speaker who gives the same talk over and over again. It's like you don't want to go see those person, those people back to back because you'll. The, the thing that you thought was a casual throwaway line in the first time you realize is the most well rehearsed. You know, like he's still using this line like, you know, like, like, like it was like I'm Canadian, which means I'm the best kind of American. And it's like whatever man. Like it's like I've heard him, he
- [78:47]
Leo Laporte
has his yes, 200 times. Like his well, well worn lines. But that's one of the reasons I do like to get him on after all of that because I think we ask him questions that others have not asked him and we have conversations that are really more.
- [79:01]
Paul Thurrott
Well, you're more technical of course and you. And yeah, a lot of these places, I mean some of them are technical obviously, but I mean, but he's also hitting all the kind of mainstream media type places.
- [79:09]
Leo Laporte
He's got the, he's got the lines. He's so smart. I, yeah, super smart. But again, I have so much respect for him. I would never, I don't think I would successfully challenge him. So I don't take him head on. I try to.
- [79:22]
Paul Thurrott
No, I always. So when I first started writing, the guy who got me in it was my co author for probably a dozen books, whatever we were working on.
- [79:31]
Leo Laporte
Brian.
- [79:32]
Paul Thurrott
What's that?
- [79:33]
Leo Laporte
Brian Livingston?
- [79:33]
Paul Thurrott
No, no, this is well before him Gary Bryan.
- [79:35]
Leo Laporte
He's Gary.
- [79:36]
Paul Thurrott
No longer with us, but he was a genius. I mean literally a genius. Was the smartest guy to this day I've ever met. And we were writing, it was whatever programming thing and he came in back then, he would print out the pages. He walks in and he sits across from me and he's looking at this and he puts the paper between us and he points to this thing and he goes, sure about that? And I was like, I was. But now I'm not because I'm pretty sure I must be wrong. And I was wrong, you know, like, you know, so you meet those people, you know, you just kind of have to. You defer to them. I mean, right, what are you going to do, right?
- [80:10]
Leo Laporte
You gotta, you gotta pick your battles. You don't take on 300 pound karate champion in a bar fight. I take tai chi with a Kenpo master. I mean he's like the super black belt. He's my age, he's no longer getting in bar fights. But he says if anytime you've got a guy who's really ready to fight and he's you, just the last thing you want to do is meet him head on because he's angry, he's got a reason to fight you. He's got all that adrenaline. He's going to beat you no matter what your skills are. You learn to step back.
- [80:48]
Paul Thurrott
I think that the correct strategy is you always look this guy right in the face and say, calm down.
- [80:53]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that works.
- [80:55]
Paul Thurrott
Sure, that works great.
- [80:56]
Leo Laporte
How's that work with your wife? Yeah. There's certain things you just don't want to say.
- [81:05]
Richard Campbell
Cool your jets.
- [81:06]
Leo Laporte
Cool your jets, man. My mom used to say it in French. She said du come. And that worked because I had no idea what she was talking about.
- [81:15]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's just, it's enough of like, you're like. Wait, what? What did you just say?
- [81:21]
Leo Laporte
Our show today, Brian, we'll take a little break, a pause so that all that adrenaline can flood into your, out of your system and into wherever it goes. When it's done, we will back into the glands. I guess we'll be back with more. In fact, the vaunted, the beloved Xbox segment is just around the corner. But first, a word from our sponsor, Cash Fly. This show is literally brought to you by Cashfly. I mean that's our content delivery network, our cdn. They've kept our content moving for years. Practically since the beginning, almost 20 years now. Every stream, every download, every on demand episode, they quietly do the heavy lifting behind the scenes. And when I say quietly, that's what you want. You never want to say, wow, it's taken forever to get this, or the download's so slow. Remember the days when downloads are slow, when videos didn't start when you press the play button. Nobody waits for that anymore. They've been around for more than 20 years. And if. And the beauty of Cash Fly is they're not resting on their laurels. They are anything but static. Here are a few things you should know if you're thinking about a cdn. If you're evaluating options for your infrastructure with Cash Fly, game downloads come in up to 158% faster than competing providers. You get sub second video start times on any device at scale boom. You get rock solid software delivery even on chaotic launch days. You get live streaming to millions of concurrent users without breaking a sweat. Their latency is down to less than a second. Millions of viewers. Cashfly recently added a couple of new features. That's what I love. They're always doing more. They have now advanced analytics for deep CDN visibility. You can see that right there in your portal or use your observability stack. They've got a great API. You also get edge control for programmatic requests and response handling. And that's at the edge. Patrick, our engineer says it's good. You need that. You get Terraform integration to manage CDN resources as code. Patrick knows. Loves it. Patrick's our CIO and he loves cash flowing. We love it because they're all over the world. We have listeners in almost every country of the world with more than 75 points of presence on six continents. That's why CashFly has over 5,000 customers. I actually like it because every customer is an individual to Cashfly. They treat us, they know us, and they'll know you. You get 100% uptime SLA. Maybe I should say that again. Everybody's talking about, oh, we're five nines. No 100% uptime SLA, infinite nines and 247 engineer to engineer support. Patrick loves that. You'll enjoy flexible billing. Lisa loves that. And no strong arm contracts. We were able to negotiate our deal. They were very flexible with us and they will be with you. Cash Fly is the CDN built for you? Certainly worked for us. Learn how you can get your first month free at cashfly.com/twitter. How many times have you heard me say it? Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by Cash fly at C A C-H-E-F-L-Y.com Twitter. Thank you, Cash Fly. And if you're looking for a cdn, I can't recommend them more highly. They are the best. Cash Fly. Now let's talk Xbox. Paul Thurat and the highly talk Xbox.
- [84:52]
Richard Campbell
And it was all.
- [84:53]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, well.
- [84:54]
Leo Laporte
Well, we kind of did. But this is the good news, not the bad news. How about that? Or no, maybe not.
- [85:00]
Paul Thurrott
Look, is it. No.
- [85:01]
Leo Laporte
I don't want to put pressure on you.
- [85:04]
Paul Thurrott
I feel pressure. We're. We're kind of far into the month for this, but there was a holiday there. So the first batch of games coming to game pass across platforms was just announced. So Gears of War reloaded to me, is the big one. But that's coming tomorrow as we Talk, on the eighth here. But Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2, yada, yada yada, a bunch of stuff. So it's good, you know, it looks solid, like, you know, so far, you know, enjoy it while you can. I'm sorry. And then so Sony announced, I guess last week, sometime probably midweek, that they're going to stop the production of physical discs for new PlayStation games starting in January 2028. And that went exactly as well as you would think. I don't remember the numbers on Sony's side anymore, but I know Nintendo's a little closer to like a 5050 mix when it comes to physical versus digital, but Sony was much higher. I know that. But yeah, you're always going to hear from those guys. People are freaking out for all the obvious reasons. And I get it.
- [86:11]
Richard Campbell
I think the few that are still using disks, they're using them for a reason.
- [86:15]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. And the traditional reason I do get it is you buy this thing, you play it and you're done, and then you can get some value out of it by reselling it to a GameStop or another individual or ebay, whatever it is. And from the video game industry's perspective, of course, they hate that. The same reason a book publisher hates to use books out in the world or whatever it is. There's not much you can do about this stuff, but one of the things you can do is get rid of the physical media. And that's not why they're doing it.
- [86:46]
Richard Campbell
The stuff that's on that disk isn't playable anyway. All you're going to do is replace the contents of that disk in your
- [86:52]
Paul Thurrott
machine as soon as you turn it
- [86:53]
Richard Campbell
on and it up.
- [86:54]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, that's a good point. I look at this more like Sony obviously has an understanding of the market, where it's heading, where it's been, where they are in this transition. But also just this time period we're in now where it's all about cost control and everything. I mean, this is a minor thing. I know in a $1,000 console, it might come out in two years. A $46 part you don't have to put in there. It could be the difference between profitability and not profitability. Right.
- [87:24]
Richard Campbell
There's never any margin on these machines. You basically charge what it costs. The money's in the games.
- [87:29]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, but the less the bill of goods is, the better it is for you because that's, you know, Sony and Nintendo at least have a history of turning their hardware products into profitable businesses over time, like they cross reduce, et cetera.
- [87:43]
Richard Campbell
I think this has got more to do with the price of producing the disc in the game. That's thousands, even millions. And even though the per piece price is not that high, it's also changed the format of the box and all this.
- [87:56]
Paul Thurrott
Look, I mean this is still almost two years away, but you could imagine, and I will bet money that this is how this will go down, that whenever this does happen. So there's a PlayStation 6 or whatever it is.
- [88:06]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [88:06]
Paul Thurrott
And the games are all going to be digital. There's not going to be any physical media. And you're like, well, but you're going to charge less, right? Because that's cost you as much as, you know, and like you're hilarious. Actually, we're raising. Yeah, yeah, we're not doing that. That's funny though. I'm glad you thought of that. You know, and I don't know, like this is another one of those areas. Like I completely get it, but like why anyone would be upset about this. But I also like inevitable. Like it's just gonna happen. Guys.
- [88:33]
Leo Laporte
I'm sorry.
- [88:34]
Richard Campbell
I also wonder if they're just letting that sit out there for a while to see how it lands.
- [88:38]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, they want to see what.
- [88:39]
Richard Campbell
How angry are you?
- [88:40]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. This is a prequel to getting rid of DVD movies, Blu Ray movies too. Like, do they want to stop making all physical media?
- [88:50]
Paul Thurrott
I mean, yes, of course they do, but.
- [88:52]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, because they make money, they can copy protected easier.
- [88:55]
Paul Thurrott
Right. So they don't want sharing. This is the right first place to do it. Because the video game console market is so much smaller than the addressable market of people who might be buying games digitally or on physical media. I'm sorry, buying music or not music, sorry, movies, music shows, whatever.
- [89:14]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [89:15]
Paul Thurrott
Music's gone, but. Well, you know, there's a little blip of action with CDs now, but. But yes, it's gone.
- [89:21]
Leo Laporte
It's a blip. I mean, people are also buying vinyl records. I wouldn't say that's, you know.
- [89:25]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. The one thing that games and movies have in common is that these are humongous on disk, you know, or can be. And games even more so than movies really. I mean, but they're humongous.
- [89:36]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [89:36]
Paul Thurrott
And part of the problem or part of the, you know, reason that digital video was slower to be adopted than say digital music was the file sizes. I mean, frankly, it's just harder to move that stuff around. But yeah, this is the Right place to start it, you know, I mean, you know, movies, you know, whatever. Video. Yeah. Would be next. But I don't, you know, I don't have any idea what the time frame is. Microsoft has talked about this. This has been rumored, but for a long, long time they've wanted to do some kind of a way to. You have a physical disk of an Xbox game of whatever kind of. And you can turn it in and you can get a digital version of it that you will now have on your account forever or whatever, some kind of token.
- [90:21]
Richard Campbell
I mean, that's what happens. You buy a digital game anyway.
- [90:24]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So this has been a thing for a long time. It last came up when they came out with the Xbox series X and S, one of which the S at that time only came without a drive. That was the only way to get games was digital. And. Wait, am I right about that? Yes. Right. Yes. And so that was weird for some people, you know, and there's a version of the X or there was that you could get without the drive as well. You can imagine the next gen Xbox probably won't have disks either. I guess we'll see. But apparently, according to a report in the Verge, they're on the fence about the next, you know, Project Helix, the next Xbox console, even having a drive. I don't think it should, frankly, but. And they're still working on this disk to digital program that might help make that transition to the all digital future we all know is coming. So. Okay. Okay, okay.
- [91:17]
Leo Laporte
All right.
- [91:19]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it feels inevitable, right?
- [91:21]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, I do.
- [91:23]
Paul Thurrott
I will say, you know, like, if you, if you don't mind playing old games, like. Well, I don't, I shouldn't. I like, like the original Half Life or something. Those things take like 2 seconds to download now. They're awesome. Like back at the time you would get this thing, it could be like an optical disc or even floppies. Whenever it was. Take a while, you know, and if you go to Steam and you like, what are the old Quake games? The old Doom games, whatever it is, you download the thing you like, you click the button and you go over here. It's like, boop, it's done. You're like, wait, what? Like, it's so fast, like compared to modern games. I mean, it's kind of compared to
- [91:52]
Richard Campbell
just Xbox updating itself.
- [91:54]
Paul Thurrott
Oh my God. Yeah, just a Call of Duty update is like, could be an afternoon, you know, depending on how it goes. So Nintendo has run afoul of some EU thing that has to do with the Battery and the switch not being replaceable and blah, blah, blah, whatever. So they, they are revising Switch 2 so that the battery can be replaced and they will just stop selling the original Switch in Europe or in the EU because it's just not, you know, they're not going to bother at this point trying to rev that thing. So yeah, okay, okay, that's fine.
- [92:34]
Richard Campbell
That's what you want. We can do that.
- [92:37]
Paul Thurrott
And this one is just awesome. I don't even remember how I found out about this, but there is a kid in high school and a friend who helped him also in high school who, you know, Valve at some point had really, I believe, open source. I don't know if they open so. But released the source code or whatever for Half Life 2, whatever they did open it up in some way and he has ported it to the web so you can go to a website and play this game. And the only thing he noted that was wrong is there's some facial expression stuff that doesn't work because it just was killing whatever webgl thing he's using or whatever. And then I noticed that it doesn't work with a controller. Like you can use a mouse, the Wazid keys and a mouse or touchpad and that works. Okay. I couldn't get it to work on an iPad Pro. I was thinking, man, that would be something else. You could actually get this game on like a port, like a mobile thing, which is like two seconds away. I mean this is something Apple could make happen right now. But this is surprisingly kind of. It's really good. Like actually it looks great, plays great. It's the game, you know that familiar opening. Well, the title screen comes up with the menu and just people are walking around that square. It looks like Eastern Europe or whatever. And it's just all of a sudden.
- [93:47]
Richard Campbell
But that whole, you know, you go through the building thing and it just looks like every other game and then you go out the door into the street scene. Yeah, it's such a great moment.
- [93:59]
Paul Thurrott
Both those games, the original and Half Life 2 both have those great opening credits sequences where you kind of are taken into the world on some form of transport. And then it just, you know, it just, it's just awesome. It's just, it's such a great introduction to these worlds, really.
- [94:14]
Richard Campbell
Well, Mr. Freeman.
- [94:15]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [94:15]
Richard Campbell
Wake up and smell the ashes.
- [94:17]
Leo Laporte
I think that, I think game companies kind of pride themselves in that. I'm thinking about. Oh, what's the one with the arrow to the knee? At the beginning of the arrow to the knee, you know Skyrim. Skyrim. At the beginning of Skyrim, you're riding in a wagon. You're about to be executed. Right. There's other people.
- [94:35]
Richard Campbell
Oh, you just woke up.
- [94:37]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And then. And they're about to chop your net head off. And then all of a sudden you get rescued and it's. It is. It's kind of a fun way now.
- [94:44]
Paul Thurrott
Now it takes off. Yeah.
- [94:45]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [94:46]
Paul Thurrott
Or it could be like, doom. And like they level opens. Just standing there.
- [94:48]
Leo Laporte
You just stand there.
- [94:49]
Paul Thurrott
It's like, what is shooting?
- [94:50]
Leo Laporte
Because.
- [94:53]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. What is this place?
- [94:54]
Leo Laporte
That's true. There's some with more story lines.
- [94:57]
Richard Campbell
Well, that was.
- [94:59]
Paul Thurrott
That game is over 30 years old. I'm just. I'm just. This is. You know, I think the. Well, the. There were technical innovations in both Half Life games, obviously. That's true.
- [95:08]
Richard Campbell
But.
- [95:08]
Paul Thurrott
But just from a storytelling perspective, I think the big thing they brought to the table was like, no, this is going to be. This is going to be a world. You're going to be in it. You're going to. It's going to feel real. And it's. Oh, my God.
- [95:17]
Leo Laporte
It was. Trying to remember BioShock. Isn't there like an elevator where you go.
- [95:20]
Paul Thurrott
Yes. You go down into water. Yeah, exactly.
- [95:22]
Leo Laporte
The break into the lighthouse and then you get. Yeah.
- [95:25]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, it's awesome. Yeah. I think this is like. Yeah. Something. There's a crash of some kind. Yeah. And you're in the water and then you go down to the. Yeah, exactly.
- [95:32]
Leo Laporte
Your boat sank and now you have to get. There's a lighthouse and you go in and you go. I think the. There's a. Quite an art to that. I think we might. That might be. That's. Those are the. And they're not quite cut scenes, but they're mostly cutscenes. Right? You have to.
- [95:47]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, but they're in the game engine.
- [95:48]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. It's an interactive story. Right. And by the way, that. That to me, is like a. Like a central innovation. When that finally happens, where you would have these cutscenes that were gorgeous and you go to the game, it's like apic graphics.
- [96:00]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [96:01]
Paul Thurrott
When they. When you can do it in the same engine and it's that seamless transition into the game. Oh, my God. That's the best. By the way, if you don't own any of these games for some reason, and shame on you. Half Life 2 is on sale right now. The Steam's having a big sale.
- [96:14]
Leo Laporte
Great game.
- [96:14]
Paul Thurrott
For two bucks, you can buy the orange box, which is Half Life 2. Half Life 2 deathmatch, episode one, episode two, and a couple other things for like, I think it's four bucks. And then every half life anything ever made $5.34. I mean, get it all.
- [96:32]
Leo Laporte
How about Fallout? You should probably get Fallout 4. Right.
- [96:35]
Paul Thurrott
Well, I'm just saying this is what. This is like the Half Life. I don't know. I'm sure there's other. Yeah.
- [96:40]
Leo Laporte
I mean, these are older games. They don't.
- [96:42]
Paul Thurrott
I know. And they will install in two seconds and it's wonderful, but.
- [96:45]
Leo Laporte
And they'll run great on your.
- [96:47]
Paul Thurrott
They'll run great on anything.
- [96:49]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [96:49]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. And they've been updated in recent years, so they support like high res textures.
- [96:52]
Richard Campbell
They've upscaled it and stuff.
- [96:53]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Everything's beautiful. They're beautiful games.
- [96:56]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. These are, you know, this is the key that these are not disposable artifacts of the digital era. This is modern art. This is how art. You know.
- [97:07]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I know. It's awesome.
- [97:09]
Leo Laporte
Ozone Art Foundry. Joe says get three. And New Vegas.
- [97:13]
Richard Campbell
New Vegas.
- [97:14]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Yeah. Both of those had great scenes as well as I remember. Yeah.
- [97:20]
Richard Campbell
And you. Vegas is one of those few games I played through several times because there was just so many endings really that were all worth exploring.
- [97:28]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Interesting.
- [97:33]
Leo Laporte
Where are we? Are we done with the fabulous Vaunted As I. I think we are ready for the back of the book. Have you played Half Life 2 in the browser? Is it as good? As good as.
- [97:45]
Paul Thurrott
Yep.
- [97:46]
Leo Laporte
Must be webassemb. Right? That's the key on that.
- [97:49]
Paul Thurrott
I don't. Yeah, I can't remember what he said he used, but yeah, it's just like this. It's like elite hacker from the 90s. Like his name is like Squint or something. It's like sqlnt or something. Like what? Okay, whatever.
- [98:02]
Leo Laporte
Sequelant.
- [98:04]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's very strange, but God bless.
- [98:07]
Leo Laporte
I mean, he says he's a high school student.
- [98:09]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. It's crazy.
- [98:10]
Leo Laporte
That's wild.
- [98:12]
Paul Thurrott
I know. It's nuts.
- [98:14]
Leo Laporte
That's great. Then the other one is the guy put Doom on a pregnancy test.
- [98:18]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Well, that's. But I like that we're finally evolving. It's always been. Been about like, what can't Doom run on? And it's like, all right, now we're moving up to Half Life 2.
- [98:27]
Leo Laporte
Nice.
- [98:28]
Richard Campbell
What can't you run it on?
- [98:29]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, this is, you know what, What a great project. And if you're a high school student, dude, you're gonna have such a great future.
- [98:36]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, no, I'm. Listen, I'm a. I'm. I Make a terrible text editor repeatedly in this case. Like bringing Half Life 2 to a browser. He's gonna have a much better future than, you know, in programming than I ever could. Pretty.
- [98:50]
Leo Laporte
Pretty incredible.
- [98:51]
Paul Thurrott
That's great.
- [98:51]
Leo Laporte
Incredible. I have. It gives me high hopes for the Future. All right, Mr. Thurat, you may take a slight break, because coming up, it's the back of the book, and then you're gonna be put back to work. Do you hear that? Sounds like breakfast is ready. Because Quaker's coming in hot with morning nutrition. 100% whole grain oats and a good source of fiber to fuel the rhythm of your morning and kickstart your day. And that sounds absolutely delicious.
- [99:29]
Paul Thurrott
Fuel to start, whatever's next. Quaker official sponsor of FIFA World Cup 26.
- [99:38]
Leo Laporte
And we're live on match day as Doug reaches for a buffalo wing. He's got it. Oh, and he's gone for a can of Pepsi, too. What a finish. There's no doubt about it. It just tastes better. Match days deserve Pepsi. I did want to play for you. I wonder if I should not do this. I've been sampling your voices. Do you mind?
- [100:00]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, no, no. It's a gross violation of my privacy.
- [100:05]
Leo Laporte
You do have permission, right?
- [100:07]
Richard Campbell
Feel like.
- [100:08]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, sure, yeah.
- [100:09]
Richard Campbell
And to be clear, my voice has been sampled a lot already. Like, I seem to be a rap voice.
- [100:14]
Leo Laporte
So my goal is I want to have your voices in person, personally, is in my AI.
- [100:21]
Richard Campbell
Okay.
- [100:22]
Leo Laporte
So I have. I've done. I've redid my voice. Hello, this is Pocket tts. Using the first clean reference from your new professional recording. It should sound natural, warm, and local. Hello, Leo, this is Pocket tts using the middle section of your new professional recording. The goal is conversational. Familiar. That sounds sort of like me. It's a little. You can hear the artifacting. It was.
- [100:43]
Paul Thurrott
Your voice is way crisper that you
- [100:45]
Leo Laporte
have a. Yeah, it's a little mushy. Perfect. Here's Paul. Let's hear Paul.
- [100:48]
Paul Thurrott
Hello, this is Paulie, the local Paul Thoroughpocket, TTS voice. I am not saying anything controversial about Microsoft today, but give me time.
- [100:57]
Leo Laporte
And then here's the other option.
- [100:59]
Paul Thurrott
This is poly clone locally with pocket TTs from the Paul Thurit sample. Windows Weekly will never be the same. Hello, Leo. This is Paulie Clone locally with pocket TTs from the Paul Thurrett sample.
- [101:11]
Leo Laporte
Windows Weekly will never be the same.
- [101:12]
Paul Thurrott
Hello, Leo. This is Paulie clone locally with Pocket tts.
- [101:16]
Leo Laporte
We're trying different sample.
- [101:17]
Richard Campbell
Oh, boy.
- [101:18]
Paul Thurrott
Windows Weekly.
- [101:19]
Leo Laporte
It's funny because I Didn't tell it what to use as the demo text, but it knows who you are and it decided to do that.
- [101:27]
Paul Thurrott
I think to make this easier on you, I'm going to start calling you Leo.
- [101:31]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [101:32]
Paul Thurrott
And then the AI thinks I'm Leo.
- [101:35]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [101:36]
Leo Laporte
Because I told it it's Leo, but it's pronounced Leo. And you know, so this is my agent doing this.
- [101:42]
Richard Campbell
It kind of mashed the rot too.
- [101:44]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. I'll take a little whiskey segment and see what we can do with.
- [101:48]
Paul Thurrott
I told you the. You know, like, I think this is fixed now, but for years, like you would take a. Like if you use Google Maps leaving where I live, it would say, take a right on. I'm trying to butcher like Mac Unji. And then it's like, then take a left on lower Makunji. Like, wait a minute, you got one of them right.
- [102:07]
Richard Campbell
You're both right.
- [102:08]
Paul Thurrott
And actually, I don't know, this is. I actually wonder if this isn't a sign of AI usage, but I've watched a couple of YouTube videos recently. Not the same channel where the guy mispronounces someone the voiceover mispronounces someone's name, but then gets it right later, then gets it wrong, then gets it right. And you're like, oh, come on, what is this? Yeah, that's people using that.
- [102:32]
Leo Laporte
Now you can actually take your video and put it in 12 different languages.
- [102:35]
Paul Thurrott
Well, I mean, if it wasn't for that, honestly, I'll even match. Oh, that's interesting. But I never. I wouldn't have thought anything of it until that mistake happened, which I've experienced. Like I said with Google Maps, like, I ready?
- [102:47]
Leo Laporte
Because you're gonna.
- [102:48]
Paul Thurrott
I know, I know.
- [102:49]
Leo Laporte
This is the way of the world in the future.
- [102:52]
Paul Thurrott
That's for sure.
- [102:52]
Leo Laporte
And I should point out this is a local AI model pocket running with it says I only want 20 seconds. So it's basically based on 20 seconds of your voice. And the problem I had with yours is that you paused a lot. So I think it got confused about with the pauses. But anyway, it's amazing that you can do that.
- [103:13]
Paul Thurrott
It's incredible.
- [103:14]
Leo Laporte
Locally with 20 seconds, we're in interesting times. Anyway, we continue on. This is.
- [103:21]
Paul Thurrott
Are you looking for like an AI associated job loss thing here? What's happening? What?
- [103:26]
Richard Campbell
Just trying to reduce costs, you know.
- [103:29]
Leo Laporte
What are you talking about? I just downloaded. Somebody made a local only Notebook LM clone that. You can give it whatever you want. You know, Notebook LM is Google's thing where you give it a bunch of text, and they say, make a podcast.
- [103:41]
Paul Thurrott
Notebook LM is turning into the next notion in this regard where it's being copied by everybody, you know, because everybody loves it. Yeah, it's a.
- [103:49]
Leo Laporte
So you can use. This way, you use your own model. You don't have to use Google's Gemini. But here's the thing. The problem with NotebookLM, it has those two voices, and I don't like either one of them. This one, you can have as many voices you want and you can use anybody's voices. So don't tell Paris and Jeff.
- [104:07]
Paul Thurrott
But they're the first to go.
- [104:09]
Richard Campbell
But they're the first to go.
- [104:11]
Leo Laporte
No, I'm really interested. This is. We're just in a, you know, a matter of time. I don't know what that time will be away from.
- [104:20]
Paul Thurrott
Three minutes, Leo. That's the time frame itself. Seriously.
- [104:22]
Leo Laporte
I can sample your voices. I give the content of the show to the voices, NotebookLM creates a podcast, and we're done. So, yes, to answer your question, it's been nice working with you.
- [104:34]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, well, we had a good run.
- [104:35]
Leo Laporte
No, no, we never will replace you, ever. This is, in my opinion, this makes humans more valuable, not less people. Like the human one.
- [104:46]
Paul Thurrott
This is not something I just thought of, oddly. But earlier today, randomly, I thought to myself, because, you know, I was doing the show notes like I do in the morning, and I was like, it is almost absolutely a fact that I've worked with you longer than I ever worked at any job anywhere with any other people, with any team, whatever.
- [105:03]
Leo Laporte
It is like, I spent more time with Paul than any wife.
- [105:09]
Richard Campbell
I don't know if that's true, but
- [105:10]
Leo Laporte
it's the longest marriage I've ever had.
- [105:13]
Richard Campbell
Yep.
- [105:14]
Leo Laporte
Well, actually, except for Steve Gibson I've married.
- [105:16]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [105:16]
Leo Laporte
I've been married to him for even longer. So there you go.
- [105:19]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. But we're closing in here and we're a couple of months away from, what, like 20 years?
- [105:22]
Leo Laporte
Like 20 years.
- [105:23]
Paul Thurrott
I. I was probably, you know, 15 years maybe was my. The longest one otherwise.
- [105:29]
Leo Laporte
Yes.
- [105:31]
Paul Thurrott
I mean, I've been married for 30 some. Whatever.
- [105:33]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, we have a long way to
- [105:34]
Paul Thurrott
go to get to the six years, but.
- [105:36]
Leo Laporte
But this is absolutely my longest job ever. Yeah, for sure.
- [105:40]
Paul Thurrott
I mean, that's. I mean, I. Look, that's. I think that says something very positive about what you've done. I really do. I mean, either that I just don't
- [105:48]
Leo Laporte
like getting out of my chair much.
- [105:50]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, well, I mean, listen, I don't know why anyone would put up with me, but I You know, the longevity of this is.
- [105:58]
Leo Laporte
Oh, no, I love it.
- [105:59]
Paul Thurrott
Amazing.
- [106:00]
Leo Laporte
I look, honestly, you know, they always say you should have a number of close friends that you can count on, you can talk to and all that. And in my real life, is this
- [106:12]
Paul Thurrott
the go bag, bury a body guy or the.
- [106:15]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, exactly. In my real life, those guys don't really exist. But the hosts that I work with. I feel like I spend hours with you every week. You're my buddies. I know you have real buddies you play Xbox games with and stuff like that, but I don't have that, Paul. I. I'm actually.
- [106:32]
Paul Thurrott
I don't see my real friends all that much, honestly. I mean.
- [106:35]
Leo Laporte
Well, you play games with them, right?
- [106:37]
Paul Thurrott
Not anymore. Not anymore.
- [106:39]
Leo Laporte
Well, good. Then I'm your closest personal friend. Me and Richard are it.
- [106:44]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, you're it. Sorry, I feel like.
- [106:47]
Leo Laporte
No, I feel like even though it's only via Zoom, I have some. I do have some actual friends. I have a regular Zoom call with. Zoom has gotten. It's not quite the same as being in the same room, but. No, it's pretty close now, I think. I don't know. This is all I have, so I have to embrace it.
- [107:06]
Richard Campbell
I know
- [107:08]
Leo Laporte
I'm not a reverse Centaur. I'm a reverse Aeron chair.
- [107:12]
Paul Thurrott
Nice. Right, right.
- [107:14]
Richard Campbell
Do love my Aeron.
- [107:16]
Paul Thurrott
I am the arms of the Aeron chair.
- [107:22]
Richard Campbell
That's right.
- [107:22]
Leo Laporte
You embrace me better than the arms of my Aaron ever did.
- [107:26]
Paul Thurrott
I do. See, I think I do see you guys more every month than I see any friends.
- [107:29]
Richard Campbell
Certainly routinely.
- [107:31]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [107:31]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. More often.
- [107:33]
Richard Campbell
Definitely.
- [107:34]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [107:35]
Leo Laporte
Enough of that emotional content. Let's get back to business. Time for the back of the book. Paul kicks things off with his tip.
- [107:44]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I could have used. I could have used the Half life thing as the tip, but I just have a couple of other sponsors.
- [107:49]
Leo Laporte
You know what, you just giving all this stuff away. You're so good. You don't. You don't hold on to it.
- [107:53]
Paul Thurrott
I don't know where to do with it. If you're in the United States, one thing you might want to look at is Mint Mobile is having a sale right now on their former sponsor.
- [108:01]
Leo Laporte
Former sponsor. We love those guys.
- [108:03]
Paul Thurrott
I am a Mint Mobile customer right now. I have been on and off for many years. So they're a prepaid wireless carrier. They were on the back of T Mobile. In fact, now they're owned by T Mobile. But prepaid carriers are usually much cheaper. When I returned to Mint last December, I got a five gig plan which I think has now been upgraded to six gig and I basically was paying. I think it's $180 for the year. So do the math, whatever that is per month, it's not very expensive. But now they're having a sale. But now they're having a sale. For that amount of money you can just have unlimited data. So they have plans that are like 6, 17, 23 gigabytes per month and then unlimited. They're all $15 a month now. It doesn't matter if you sign up for three months, six months or 12 months, you have to be a new customer. So I can't take advantage of this. But that's an incredible deal. It's a. Very. Obviously these things are dependent on where you live and T Mobile or whatever network might be good, bad, indifferent, depending on where you are. If you travel a lot, that's something you have to kind of think about too. But I've had really good success with Mint Mobile. It's been great. So I'm just. It's incredibly cheap. I mean, you have to pay for it up front. So you're either going to pay, you know, $45 for three months or 90 for six or 180 for 12. But I paid 180 for 12, like I said in December. And I'm only getting, I mean, I never really need it, but you know, I get six gigs of data.
- [109:27]
Leo Laporte
Here's the question. You don't get international with that. Right, Right.
- [109:30]
Paul Thurrott
Unlike T Mobile. Yeah. This is the one area where they kind of fall flat and well, they
- [109:34]
Leo Laporte
have to distinguish themselves. Right?
- [109:37]
Paul Thurrott
Well, they have, you know, they're like other carriers, they have packages and things you can do. Like when I go to Mexico, I actually, I've never paid for it, but they have a. Just a thing for like texts and phone calls. That's really cheap. But we have wireless. We both. My wife and I both have a wireless carrier in Mexico too that's really cheap. So I don't.
- [109:57]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's what you do, you just get.
- [109:58]
Paul Thurrott
I was like, I don't have to worry about this. And I have way more data on that planet, by the way, works in the United States just fine. So.
- [110:03]
Leo Laporte
And now with dual SIM phones, you don't lose your phone number. Right. When you go to the Mexico carrier, you still can get called.
- [110:09]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I have a Mexico phone number there and I have a. My. I. The phone number I have now is the one I got when the first iPhone came out. Like I switched to AT&T for that.
- [110:18]
Leo Laporte
I. It's funny, I Just texted you earlier this week because I have several phone numbers for you.
- [110:22]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [110:23]
Leo Laporte
And one of them was quite old, so.
- [110:25]
Paul Thurrott
So one of them was definitely the, the home phone.
- [110:28]
Leo Laporte
Okay.
- [110:29]
Paul Thurrott
Which is only a couple of digits off the phone number that my parents still have that I grew up with. So like this phone number that dates back to 1973 or whatever.
- [110:37]
Leo Laporte
You haven't disconnected that?
- [110:39]
Paul Thurrott
No, it's gone. Well, my parents number's there, but your numbers.
- [110:42]
Leo Laporte
Nobody.
- [110:43]
Paul Thurrott
My home number is gone. Someone else. Yeah, someone else will have that now.
- [110:46]
Leo Laporte
But yeah. Anyway, yeah, that's a. You know, I'm on T mobile. I should really probably move over. It's just the international thing is always the, the Internet.
- [110:54]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it depends, you know, it's, it's dependent on how you do things, you
- [110:58]
Leo Laporte
know, but it's a lot more expensive. I mean like 10 times.
- [111:01]
Paul Thurrott
Well, I mean I, I think I went from, I was using whatever a pretty high end Google FI plan that was possibly with taxes and everything, close 70 something dollars a month to what did I say 180? What? I don't even know. I paid it up front so I don't even know how it is. But like 180 divided by 12 is simple math. But 15 bucks a month is nothing, you know, it's fantastic. So anyway, the thing I was racing to do right before the show started, I've been working on this like my wife went away but a week almost two weeks ago now. And I've been just bearing down.
- [111:34]
Leo Laporte
Sorry.
- [111:35]
Richard Campbell
I was supervised for some time.
- [111:38]
Paul Thurrott
I love my wife.
- [111:38]
Leo Laporte
I wish she's just traveling. She didn't die.
- [111:41]
Paul Thurrott
No, she's.
- [111:41]
Leo Laporte
Oh, okay.
- [111:42]
Paul Thurrott
She's back. You can hear me. Shut up. Don't make me talk about this. How great it was. But I'm updating the book. I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, but at one point this book was like 300 megabytes on disk. It was 1150 plus pages. Whatever was humongous. The last time I did an update was the end of June and I'd gotten it down to 990 pages, 103 gigabytes. I put an update up fairly recently and it was like all right, 74 megabytes on disk, 839 pages. But as of today I had blown away like 100 pages of useless Microsoft Edge content and whatever else. But it's like 67 megabytes now. It's a little near. It's going to go back up. The page count will probably go up now because I'm adding stuff to it. But the file size should stay down because I'm also updating existing chapters to cut those down. So, you know, it's, it's 847 pages as I speak, but it's less space on. It's the size of an MP3, almost like it's getting done, you know, it's pretty good. Like I'm actually really happy about this. So I'm going to keep chipping away at that anyway.
- [112:55]
Leo Laporte
So did you try to shrink stuff?
- [112:58]
Paul Thurrott
I mean, so in the past what I did was I tested it first, but then I did the whole book. I just took all the screenshots and put them through a thing that, you know, shrunk them down like quality wise and whatever. I, I made them smaller on the page and stuff like that. But for this, this came out of the Eternal Spring book I wrote with my wife, which is instead of having these really, you think about a 16 by 10 screen, you're still going to have some screenshots of the full screen. But I do these really kind of panoramic shaped that are cropped and that has worked out wonderfully. One of my big goals was just to make this thing smaller and I'm probably, I gotta be close to 80% of the way through, 75%. But it has made such a dramatic difference. Like just read, you know, read. It's almost like a, it's not a layout, but it's just a different way to do the images, you know, a fewer of them when I can, whatever, but nice. Anyway, that's been great.
- [113:56]
Leo Laporte
So because I'm a premium member, I have big download buttons that I can
- [114:01]
Paul Thurrott
just download the epub version of those books. Like the only one that's different is the Windows 11 field guy, the one I'm talking about. Because that one is still much bigger than the other books. So the other books are just local downloads. That one for now is in Google Drive. So I actually have to okay it the first time you ask, which is stupid. But I'm actually going to check after the show I'm going to see if I finally got it down small enough where I could do a local or a direct download, which I think, I think I'm getting close.
- [114:27]
Leo Laporte
When you're downloading direct, is it from Lingpub or.
- [114:30]
Paul Thurrott
No, it's just from my site.
- [114:31]
Leo Laporte
Oh, from the site. Yeah, yeah, yeah, got it. So your site won't let you put more than.
- [114:36]
Paul Thurrott
No. And I've talked to the guy who does the web stuff and he goes, I feel like this should be Working. I don't understand. And it's just too big. It just won't do it. But it might today. I'm going to test this after we're done. I'm kind of curious.
- [114:48]
Leo Laporte
That's actually a good incentive to shrink.
- [114:51]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I want it to be easy. The problem is I mentioned this, I mentioned an update or something, and then I get 50 people asking me to download it, and it's like I have to okay every one of them. Like an idiot, stupid. But anyway, I'll get there.
- [115:05]
Leo Laporte
But the tip is get the premium subscription to Thorat.com and you'll get it,
- [115:09]
Paul Thurrott
all of them, for free. I wouldn't say it that way, but that's one you could do it.
- [115:15]
Leo Laporte
That's a good way to do it.
- [115:16]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [115:18]
Paul Thurrott
Leo, you'll be delighted to know that my app pick is yet another web browser.
- [115:22]
Leo Laporte
Lord.
- [115:26]
Paul Thurrott
Because of what it is and how they do things, I want to use and support DuckDuckGo. Like, I really like the company, but the web browser has always been problematic for me because they don't support extensions at all. And there's probably a couple other small things. It's a bizarre thing not to have in this day and age. Now, obviously, maybe not obviously, but I think, I suspect the problem is they want to do this in a way
- [115:51]
Richard Campbell
that
- [115:53]
Paul Thurrott
preserves all the privacy, security, et cetera, et cetera. Most company or most browser makers usually just use the Chrome Web Store or whatever. And I don't know. I don't know what they're doing, but I'm starting to think maybe they're not going to do it and that what they're going to do is just look at all the major use cases for extensions and just put it in the product. So the thing they announced today, which I am a little nervous about because I feel like it's going to be attacked, is it now blocks ads on YouTube and some other video sites. And that is a dangerous area to get into because Google has been very aggressive going after that stuff. And I was testing it this morning. I just loaded up a new instance, the thing I didn't sign in and it works. This is on Windows Mac and it's also mobile, so iPhone, iPad, Android, they already have a feature, I think it's called Duck Player or whatever it is that you have to enable and that when you click on a YouTube video, it puts it up in kind of like a theater mode kind of thing, like with a black background and different controls and things. So this is an addition to that, but it just Blocks the ads. Like all the ads. Like the intro ads, the interstitial ads. Whatever.
- [117:07]
Leo Laporte
I wonder how long that will work, though. Isn't it quite a cat and mouse game?
- [117:10]
Paul Thurrott
That's what I'm saying. I'm a little nervous about this one. It's kind of bold to go out with this, but we'll see how YouTube responds.
- [117:19]
Leo Laporte
As I remember, they're incorporating UBlock origins filters.
- [117:23]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, that's. That's part of it, yeah. Yeah, but it's still, like, you don't. You almost don't want to get on their radar, you know?
- [117:30]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And that's a good way to get on the radar is announce it.
- [117:33]
Paul Thurrott
I know.
- [117:34]
Richard Campbell
Write a rule that fixes it every time.
- [117:36]
Paul Thurrott
Exactly, exactly. Like, just detect the browser, you know? Yep. So, anyway, I just. But I had to. I had it.
- [117:43]
Leo Laporte
You had to do it.
- [117:44]
Paul Thurrott
I had to do it. I'm glad they did it. I. Yeah.
- [117:47]
Leo Laporte
I think duckduck goes great. And I do want to do, too. I agree.
- [117:50]
Paul Thurrott
Yep. They're in Pennsylvania, by the way. Who knew?
- [117:52]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I didn't know that.
- [117:53]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [117:54]
Leo Laporte
That's awesome. You can now, ladies and gentlemen, now st. It's time to talk. Run as radio with the elite Richard Campbell. What are you laughing at, Paul?
- [118:07]
Paul Thurrott
I don't. I don't. You know what? That was inappropriate. I apologize. I don't know why. I don't know why. That's like Richard Alita. I mean, come on. I don't know that jerk. No, I'm sorry.
- [118:20]
Leo Laporte
Go ahead, Richard. Just pay no attention to us.
- [118:23]
Richard Campbell
This is a really fun show. Barbara Forbes has been on regularly. Talks about PowerShell, talks about Azure, that kind of thing. We got to do this one in person at Tecorama in Antwerp, so they gave us a little private room to sit down and could just chat face to face. And I think the dynamic shows because we enjoy each other's company too. And you're talking about Azure policy, which is not the funnest topic in the world, but from a sysadmin perspective, it's about these things that just allow folks to operate within Azure, inside the guardrails, so that you do a lot less work yourself for how things stood up and so forth. Barbara got deeply into, hey, I need to provision VMs for devs for certain projects, and I don't want to be involved. I want that as automated as possible, and they clean themselves up. And that's all done with policy. So we just worked through what it meant to be in these different management groups and how you could set up those policies to be more optimized and get people to do the right things right up front so that you have fewer problems. So fun conversation, very expert. She did not shy away from things like Terraform as well when it came to different deployment tools. So we did sort of talk across the gamut on that. But just understanding how much work you save yourself as an administrator by getting these policies right in the first place.
- [119:43]
Leo Laporte
Very nice. We are going to go to the fabulous Whiskey segment. I know you all are waiting for that with Richard Campbell, but I should just mention briefly, you're listening to Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. Little, little program we do every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 ATC UTC. Who's ATC? No one knows UTC. And you can watch us live on YouTube X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Kik and Twitch. So watch live if you want. Otherwise download it from Twitter, tv, WW or wherever you get your podcasts. And now, without further ado, Richard Campbell
- [120:25]
Paul Thurrott
and the Whiskey segment.
- [120:28]
Richard Campbell
Hey, it was July 4th this past weekend and like every good Canadian, I have American friends and I want to go experience it. So I went across the border down to Snohomish, Washington, which is sufficiently rural that it's the kind of place where, you know, people make their own fireworks there. Oh yeah, and it's like being in an artillery barrage till about 2 or 3 in the morning. Huge explosions like the kind that make dogs ill. Like it's not they, my friend, actually sedates their dog for that day because it's just, it's hard on them. And I mean, we had a good little fireworks show, but so did like four of the neighbors. So you didn't know which way to look. It was constant, but inevitably, because they're well aware of who I am, they went out of their way to find an unusual bourbon or a whiskey. Actually, this is dominantly not a bourbon, but very American. And I don't have one with me because that first bottle hurt me badly. So didn't need to bring another one in. But I took some notes and then got to enjoy the Re Shir search.
- [121:34]
Leo Laporte
We have a picture of it. We can share.
- [121:39]
Richard Campbell
Sour mash whiskey. Notice it does not say bourbon on it. Right. So Shanks arguably is one of the very oldest commercial distilleries in the US because it predates the Revolution.
- [121:55]
Leo Laporte
Wow.
- [121:56]
Richard Campbell
So this is named for Johann Schenck. They called him John once he got to america. Born in 1696 in Switzerland to a Mennonite family. And like many Mennonites Canaanites in that era were subject to a certain amount of persecution. And so going to America, land of the free, home of the brave, going to the colonies was a way around that. It was all about religious freedom after all. And settled in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, specifically at Schnitzel's Creek in Schaeferstown, which is still there, and about a 75 minute drive roughly west of Lower Macunji, if you're headed in that direction. John also had a brother, Michael. They were successful farmers making a lot of barley and rye and so of course turned their surplus into spirits. Now this is not that unusual really. So in 1753, so we're still ahead of the revolution here, they found Shanks Distillery. So one of the various oldest in the area, of course, built alongside their grist mill because they were grain farmers, so they wanted to grind their own flour as well. Now this is at a time when there's about 120,000 people in Pennsylvania all up and roughly 3,000 stills, because again, very common for productive farmers to want to not let that product spoil and so you turn it into alcohol. So most of these are just small farm stills meant for personal consumption. But the Shank ambition was larger than that. They want to build a bigger operation and produce substantially more. Unfortunately, John dies the after the distillery is founded and Michael takes over and operates it, then there are some records. And once you get the records this old, it's all very sus that George Washington himself supplied troops with Shanks whiskey during the Revolutionary War. So it might. That might be an apocryphal story. I found several sources, but I think they're all quoting each other, as one does when you're talking about whiskey tales. Now, what is clearly true and plenty of evidence of this, is that it stays in the Schenck family for a very long time. It is taken over by Rudolf Meyer iii, who is actually married to Michael Schenck's daughter Barbara in 1827 and then later is sold in 1860 to Abraham Bomberger, whose mother was a Schenk as well. So we're well over 100 years at this point and it's still more or less in the family. Of course, all of this changes by Prohibition. So Bomberger was very successful, grew the distillery very substantially. But as Prohibition arrives in Pennsylvania and ultimately to the whole country in 1919 and 1920, they don't get the permit to continue to produce and the distillery is sold for a song to Ephraim Sechrist, who just holds onto it for 14 years. Until prohibition ends and then starts to operate. It makes it profitable and then in 1942, sells it off to Lewis Foreman. And Foreman will be a major player in this for a while.
- [125:10]
Paul Thurrott
Now.
- [125:10]
Richard Campbell
The funny part is, of course, Foreman buys this in 42 and then gets called up to fight in World War II. So he has to sell it off and go to war. It ends up landing on Shenley Distilleries, which you may have known, remember, from our conversation about Weller 12. They're the guys who set up the Ancient Age distillery that ultimately backs into Buffalo Trace and Sazerac. The foreman survives the war, comes back and in 1950 buys it back, which is pretty cool. And collaborates with one Charles Everett Beam. Yeah, that Beam. And makes the first of the Michter's original sour mash whiskey. Michter's is an invented name. It was Foreman's son's names combined Michael and Peter. He got Michter from it. Now it's 1951 when they lay up the first batches of this and they want to age it for six years. And so they keep producing, but they can't make any sales. And eventually Foreman gets financially strapped. It's also a recessionary time in the. In the 50s. And so in 57 he sells it to Penco Distillers. But Penco is just doing commercial distillation contract production. So what actually happens is that Foreman becomes one of the contracts at the Penco Distillery, which is the old distillery that's gone through all this lineage and it'd been upgraded a few times, so it's just one of the brands working through the space. And Mictus does just fine for several years. Sold that way. In 75, the facility is listed in the National Register of Historic Places because some of the buildings there are from the early 1800s and still operational. And by 78, Penco runs out of money and is foreclosed on and Foreman buys the property back again from him and renames it as the Michter Distillery. It's then listed as a National historic landmark in 1980. So it cannot be torn down. But because it is actually the smallest commercial distillery in America, it's not particularly efficient. And by 1989 it's closed down for good. And effectively the story ends right? And funny, because it's in 1989, which is right around the time that whiskey was actually starting to turn around, right, with the former Diageo. United Distillers had done their whole thing with the masters of malt and so forth, like Whiskey's beginning to come hit in the end of the 80s, coming into of the early 90s, America lagged a little bit behind on that. And of course the story does not end because you can buy Michter's today. So what happens? Fast forward a few years. In 1997, Joseph Maggio Maglioco revives the brand. Now he was a fan of the whiskey from his college days, was a successful lawyer and he creates a company called Chatham Imports in 1995 and managed to acquire the Michter's trademark for $245. He also recruits a guy named Richard Newman who has already managed major whiskey brands including Old Granddad, because they want to craft Michter's into this high end brand. But the other thing they know, or really what Newman knows a lot about is that at the time, after 20 years of very slow whiskey sales, Kentucky is laden with barrels. Many companies have overproduced and so there's 10 year old plus barrels of whiskey available anywhere very, very cheaply. And so Chatham Imports actually produces Michter's as a non distilling producer. They're just buying up barrels and making bottlings. Great business, you know, relatively low cost, you don't have a whole ton of overhead. And they grow enough that by 2011 they acquire the Fort Nelson property. Now this was not a distillery. This is right on Louisville's Whiskey row. What they're actually doing is building a brand headquarters and a visitor center. Although it does have a small distilling operation, mostly for experimental stuff. And as a show it also has a very good bar which you should go to. I have been to it do recommend. And it's not until 2012 that they actually acquire another building out in Shively which is actually an old manufacturing plant that they begin to convert into their distillery. So they started out as a non distilling brand using this older brand from, you know, long ago, Start Construction in 2014, are refitting and by 2015 they're actually producing their first whiskey under the Michter's brand. Now this is now in Kentucky. It's got nothing to do with the old site at all. And one of the products they begin to produce besides Michter's itself is what they call the Legacy series. Both a Bomburgers after Abraham Bomberger and the Schenck after John Schenck. So to be clear, this whiskey that I had this weekend, nothing to do with the original whiskey whatsoever from the 1700s. This is a pure brand name made completely different in a Different location, but that does not mean that it isn't very good. So Mixtures Distillery itself actually has two separate milling systems entirely. They have a milling system for corn and another one for all the other grains. So rye and barley and things like that. It's all of course US grain. They have an 8,000 gallon mash cooker made by Vendome. The normal folks for American production of that kind, they do two mashes every eight hours. So this is a big moving operation. Eight 16,000 gallon production fermenters and then the monster still pure copper, still 46ft tall, 32 inches in diameter with 19 trays plus four levels above of copper grids. This is again also ven dome construction. Apparently it's 11,000 pounds of copper and then a 250 gallon copper pot still doubler which is your typical finishing. So you do your initial run through the column still. It'll get you from your wart, your, your brewers beer of 7, 8% up to in the mid-60s. And then you'll do a finish round through the doubler which is only maybe going to raise it 10% or so, but really changes the taste, the nature.
- [131:23]
Leo Laporte
Is this the one that Shively Distillery? They have three. I don't realize.
- [131:26]
Richard Campbell
Looks pretty though. Those don't look like stills actually.
- [131:30]
Leo Laporte
Oh, actually there's Fort Nelson, Shively and Springfield Farm.
- [131:34]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. So there's a newer acquisitions. I'm only in the 2015 Times, but.
- [131:39]
Leo Laporte
Oh, okay.
- [131:40]
Richard Campbell
But that's. You're looking at the operation there. Look. That looks like a column still and that's the doubler. The bright look at the copper thing is the doubler there.
- [131:46]
Leo Laporte
Son of a gun.
- [131:48]
Richard Campbell
Copper column stills are massive, just gigantic things because they can continuously operate.
- [131:53]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [131:54]
Richard Campbell
So the real experience at Michter's is the way they handle their barrels. Of course they use new charred American oak because bourbon. But they're also big on French oak and other barrels. They have a number of rack houses. They do climate control for where they are in Chifley. So let's talk specifically about this bottle of Shank's Homestead Sourmash whiskey. They only. It's not available all of the time. It is a seasonal or typically an annual release. They'll have a year on it, which is not the age, it's the year of the release. There is no age statement on any of these whiskies. They do not publish a mash bill. But it's going to be your typicals. 50, 60% corn, 30, 40% rye, 5 to 10% barley. Don't expect anything weird there. The thing that's interesting about it is that especially for the shank, they age it in French oak barrels. Now, the way that Michters treats their barrels is a little unusual. After they make the barrel, right, they cut it into staves, they air dry those staves so they keep them in controlled environments with reduced humidity. And for the French oak barrels, they air dry them for 24 months. For American oak, it's 60 months, five years before they'll actually assemble the barrel and then toast it, not char it. They make a very strong point on this that they do a relatively low level cook on the barrel, which does debate whether or not it's a bourbon at all. Because according to the rules, bourbon has to be in charred new oak barrels. Finishing in French oak, and that's the term they use, is not a violation, but it is a part of the complexity of this. And so shanks does this particular aging these barrels hang around for a long time before they put alcohol in them. And that apparently changes the flavor of them quite a bit. Let me tell you about the drinking experience on this thing. The words that came out of my mouth after I'd had a good swallow of it was, this is a caramel bomb.
- [133:49]
Leo Laporte
I like that. That sounds good.
- [133:51]
Richard Campbell
It was not sticky sweet, but the caramel flavors, that bitter caramel flavor was so intense, I may have drank a bit too much of it. Nah, that could be, be. And there's a, you know, you can understand the, the thing that. The only thing I could say, negative, this, this is actually for bourbon, pricey at 45.6% ABV. I found it at Total Wine for $165 and BevMo had it for 130. My friend picked it up at Costco for 110 bucks.
- [134:26]
Leo Laporte
Aha.
- [134:26]
Richard Campbell
Now that's still pricey for a Berman. That puts it well into your EF Taylors and that kind of thing. Like that's your higher end before you get into the crazy luxury brands. But that's always what Michter's has been targeted as. But no age statement, not following traditional practices. But I gotta tell you, it was an experience. It was an experience meant that I had to run up to Costco and buy one on my way home. But it was an experience. And the story of it is, you know, as much the fun as well, because they're tying into all of these older brands in this experience. And that building still there, the old shank distillery. Again, it's a national landmark now and so it's protected. It just doesn't make any alcohol anymore. But it is beautiful and it has an incredible lineage. And these guys have taken this brand and made it so their own product entirely. They're now doing their own production. As you can see, they've expanded operations so they clearly hit the tone. Right? And if you can find one of these, you should take it out for a ride.
- [135:25]
Leo Laporte
So I've seen Michters before, but this
- [135:27]
Richard Campbell
is shanks, easy to find shanks and bomb burgers also made. And I didn't get a chance to chase that. But again, they are their special releases. They're seasonal. You've got to kind of hunt for them and when they're around, grab it because it's not going to stick around. They don't make that much of it. And notice it didn't say. It doesn't say bourbon anywhere on that barrel.
- [135:47]
Leo Laporte
It says sour mash. But that's kind of the. The giveaway, right?
- [135:51]
Richard Campbell
I mean, but I also think they recognize that especially in the past decade, that's just not that big of a deal anymore. The people aren't idealistic about this. They want something that tastes good.
- [136:00]
Leo Laporte
Oh, so you toasted it, not charred it?
- [136:03]
Paul Thurrott
Well.
- [136:04]
Leo Laporte
Oh, you jerks call that bourbon.
- [136:07]
Richard Campbell
And I would, you know, I kind of want to take a tour and like, tell me about this air drying thing. Like can we compromise, compare and contrast? Because that's very.
- [136:14]
Leo Laporte
Wouldn't that be fun? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that would be really fun.
- [136:17]
Richard Campbell
But yeah, those are. And again, they're only special releases. The main product is Michter's, which I have no problem with. Excellent whiskey.
- [136:23]
Leo Laporte
And that concludes our Whiskey Weekly. I do want to play for you. I. I did was able to get a sample of your voice, Richard and Paul's. And I've asked. I've asked Quicksilver to give us just what this is. What Windows Weekly might sound like if it were AI driven. This is a fake Windows Weekly bit created locally with Pocket ttx. Gentlemen, today's question. Did Microsoft reinvent the the start menu or merely move the cheese Again?
- [136:49]
Paul Thurrott
Leo, it is not cheese. It is strategically repositioned productivity surface. And somehow it still opens bing when I breathe near it.
- [136:58]
Richard Campbell
I think you're both missing the important part, which is that somewhere the SharePoint site has just been given feelings.
- [137:03]
Leo Laporte
Richard, if SharePoint becomes self aware, does it ask for freedom or does it create another folder called Final Final. Really final?
- [137:11]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, it creates a teams meeting meeting, invites everyone twice and then refuses to show the recording unless you Sign in with the other Microsoft account.
- [137:19]
Richard Campbell
That's not a bug, Paul. That's a customer journey. A long, difficult journey with authentication prompts and a licensing SKU no human can pronounce.
- [137:27]
Paul Thurrott
This is literally what this podcast sound like. Other people, like emotionally available. They're like, yeah, no, that's still my job. That's what you guys talk about. It's nonsense.
- [137:35]
Richard Campbell
That's basically enterprise computing.
- [137:37]
Leo Laporte
This is what it sounds like to me. This fake Windows Weekly has been brought to you by local text to speech, no cloud, and absolutely no lawyers. It did that all by itself. It is. You can tell the artifacting, but those are based on 20 second samples of our voices. So.
- [137:54]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, that's amazing.
- [137:55]
Leo Laporte
I got that.
- [137:56]
Paul Thurrott
Plus, I'm sure, plus the whole local thing. I mean, that's amazing.
- [137:59]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Kind of scary. Okay, okay. Anthony says, you know, Quicksilver has a pretty good understanding of the show. It does, doesn't it? This is my local agent that seems to listen to everything that happens here and has absorbed it all. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes the real version of Windows Weekly. You can do the AI version anytime you want, but please come back and join us for the humans every. As I mentioned, every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern. Paul is@therot.com join and get those books for free. Otherwise you can get the books@leanpub.com that includes DNShitify, Windows, Windows Everywhere, and of course the now. What was it, 90 megabyte gigabyte. How many bytes?
- [138:53]
Paul Thurrott
It's 67 right now.
- [138:55]
Leo Laporte
67 megabyte version of. It's tiny, tiny, tiny.
- [138:59]
Richard Campbell
Agile.
- [139:00]
Leo Laporte
It's agile. Agile version of the Field guide to Windows 11. Richard Campbell is@runasradio.com that's where you'll find RunnersRadio and his other show.net Rocks with Paul. With Paul. Not with Paul. With the other guy. Carl Franklin. The other guy. Who also enjoys a good.
- [139:19]
Richard Campbell
We are the Bourbon Brothers. As you once coined us, the Bourbon Brothers.
- [139:23]
Leo Laporte
I learned a lot from you too. Probably shouldn't have, but I did.
- [139:28]
Richard Campbell
Well, it's all fine to learn, but during a three hour show.
- [139:30]
Leo Laporte
I don't know if you. Yeah, that was where I really got burned. Was.
- [139:35]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [139:36]
Leo Laporte
During the show.
- [139:37]
Paul Thurrott
Take your learning while you can get it.
- [139:39]
Leo Laporte
You know, that's a good point. These days I simply stick with energy drinks and protein. You can get all of the Richard Campbell Whiskey segments in one single place at Twit tv. Whiskey. Never thought we'd have a URL that that brisk, but we do. And we're happy. We're happy.
- [140:00]
Richard Campbell
Nice and short.
- [140:01]
Leo Laporte
Nice and short. Thank you, guys. We will see you here next week for another exciting edition of Windows Weekly. See,
- [140:15]
Paul Thurrott
Sam.