Windows Weekly 1001 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell are here. Great show coming up. We're going to talk about patches for the Windows patches. Also, a big game segment coming up and a fever dream from Google that Paul just loves. Windows Weekly is next. Podcasts you love. From people you trust.

Leo Laporte [00:00:23]:
This is TWiT. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell, episode 1001, recorded Wednesday, September 16th, 2026. Corporate surveillance with watercolors. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, you winners, you and you dozers, you, you both belong here. This is the place where we talk about the latest news from Microsoft with the 2 of the best-looking commentators on the Microsoft scene. He's back from Berlin and he's got a beautiful East German haircut, Mr. Paul Theroux, theroux.com.

Leo Laporte [00:01:10]:
Uh, and to his left, my right, Mr. Richard Campbell from Run As Radio. Whoa, there is a— Richard, don't look now, but there's a sheep wearing pearls over your head.

Richard Campbell [00:01:25]:
Right over my head.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:26]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:01:28]:
The corner without the bed behind it.

Leo Laporte [00:01:30]:
Is that a Norwegian thing? Is that like—

Richard Campbell [00:01:32]:
I don't know. It's the Clarion Hub. It's an odd hotel. It's very big. It's right beside the convention center where we're doing the show. And, uh, yeah, I've been in here a number of times, and they have this thing, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:01:44]:
It's really cute.

Richard Campbell [00:01:46]:
It's something.

Leo Laporte [00:01:47]:
It's like—

Richard Campbell [00:01:47]:
I should have picked one of the— got one of the bear rooms, but there's a sheep and a dog and a cat and a bear.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:53]:
But you have to turn off the lights at some point, and you know it's still sitting there looking at you.

Leo Laporte [00:01:57]:
It's wearing little granny glasses.

Richard Campbell [00:01:58]:
It's like a little red suit. Lights on, have little glasses on, strand of pearls around his neck. I just put a towel over before I go to bed.

Leo Laporte [00:02:05]:
Yeah, that's a good idea, but then you'll think there's a ghost in the room. Uh, well, 2 weeks ago, Patch Tuesday, 1,000— nearly 1,000 patches. Twice as many patches in one Tuesday than they'd done the entire year before. This week they kind of regretted it.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:25]:
Yeah, actually it was last week. It was only 8 days ago.

Leo Laporte [00:02:29]:
They had to do an out-of-band fix.

Richard Campbell [00:02:32]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:02:33]:
What happened?

Paul Thurrott [00:02:33]:
These aren't all that uncommon.

Leo Laporte [00:02:36]:
They've happened before.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:37]:
Yeah. Yeah. But this is, yeah, they just caused a lot of problems with this. I mean, this is going to happen when you, yeah, you touch this much code. I guess these kinds of things could happen. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:02:49]:
Well, what it, to me, it demonstrates is that they get this, these, um, patches from AI in all likelihood, right?

Richard Campbell [00:02:56]:
Yeah, that's— I wonder.

Leo Laporte [00:02:58]:
And then they, they come in so fast and so furious that they can't test them thoroughly, but at the same time they know that they better fix it because if they've found it, others will, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:03:09]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:03:10]:
Am I right?

Paul Thurrott [00:03:11]:
I think so. I mean, I obviously— there's a process that they undergo. I'm sure they're looking at things. I don't know how code this complex, especially Windows, but Windows, Azure, Office, whatever, Um, there's gonna be a lot of dependencies and whatever in the code. I, I don't know. I mean, I honestly, let's just be surprised this doesn't happen more often.

Richard Campbell [00:03:31]:
So yeah. Uh, well, I mean, earlier in the year it did. We had a number of bad patches, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:03:36]:
Yes. Right. That's right.

Leo Laporte [00:03:38]:
And you know, how important is pasting and cutting in Excel anyway?

Paul Thurrott [00:03:45]:
I mean, for the next 15 minutes, it's kind of important. I mean, beyond that, I think AI is just going to do it for you. So who cares?

Richard Campbell [00:03:51]:
But yeah. Just ask coworker to change, to move that cell.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:54]:
You'll be fine. Yeah. Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:03:56]:
I can see. I mean, what are you going to do? You make a patch, you're not going to go around testing every possible—

Richard Campbell [00:04:01]:
well, they're supposed to. You're supposed to, but, um, and I, I honestly, normally I'm more annoyed by this, but it's like, yeah, 975 patches. I guess you might have a couple wrong. Like that was the craziest, craziest month ever. It's not—

Paul Thurrott [00:04:17]:
Hey, look, maybe this becomes the new normal issue of Patch Tuesday patch. Introduce an emergency fix the next week, and then repeat and mix, you know, mix, or what do you call it? Just repeat every month.

Leo Laporte [00:04:28]:
So, how many fixes did they have to put out?

Paul Thurrott [00:04:31]:
I mean, they had like almost 974. No, that was the number.

Leo Laporte [00:04:35]:
Yeah, how many of those did they have to fix?

Paul Thurrott [00:04:36]:
I think there were several, actually. But it's kind of hard to read because there's, well, several, I should, let's see, several problems that were related to features in whatever product not working the way it did before, like regression type bugs. But, but there are actually other fixes in here. I mean, if you go and look at this thing, um, there's actually, well, there's several, right? I mean, there's most of it's kind of, um, I'm just trying to see if there's anything that stands out. I mean, not really, right? I mean, who uses Hyper-V and remote desktop and who, I mean, security. I mean, come on guys, this couldn't have waited for October.

Richard Campbell [00:05:13]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:14]:
Um, so if I still have the question of what are they holding back?

Richard Campbell [00:05:19]:
What have they not been able to ship?

Leo Laporte [00:05:21]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:05:21]:
Just because you could detect the vulnerabilities and you know how to fix the vulnerability or the fix is so dramatic, they're afraid to do it. Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:29]:
Yep. Um, yeah. So if you installed the Patch Tuesday update last week, you'll get this new update. Um, if you didn't, you'll get this new update too, because it includes the Patch Tuesday patch. So they, they've updated that. So you'll just get it in one whack at this point, which Makes sense, right? So that's fine. Yeah, I'm looking at the year. I mean, I don't really see— I guess I don't see any other emergency, like out-of-band— not emergency.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:55]:
Well, it is an emergency, but out-of-band updates, right? I guess I don't see any from this year, so I'd have to go back to last year. Wait, am I looking at the wrong version? Oh, maybe that's because it's— sorry, that's 26H1. Of course I don't see any. Um, I feel like there must have been a couple. Yeah, I probably should have done this. Yeah, there's one. There was one in March.

Leo Laporte [00:06:15]:
Out-of-band patch.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:17]:
Out-of-band.

Richard Campbell [00:06:17]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:17]:
Meaning it's not Patch Tuesday, but yep. There was one in January. Yeah. And this is what Richard alluded to earlier. There were some problems in the beginning of the year and there were. Um, so yeah, so this is either the 3rd or 4th of these this year.

Leo Laporte [00:06:31]:
But this is how it used to be all the time, isn't it?

Paul Thurrott [00:06:33]:
Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, it is, but we also weren't dealing with as many problems. Right. And so I guess you could make the argument that Um, because they're, you know, working with this code a lot more than they used to. They're, you know, either by mistake or on purpose or uncovering things. So I don't know. I don't see this as a huge problem, but I'm glad they're fixing it.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:55]:
Whatever. They seem to have moved pretty quickly. Some of these were reasonably serious. If you think gaining system privilege is serious, I don't know. Um, but there's some stuff.

Richard Campbell [00:07:04]:
Weren't there 100 and something, like 120 crits? In that?

Paul Thurrott [00:07:09]:
Yeah, I wish I could—

Leo Laporte [00:07:09]:
120 what?

Paul Thurrott [00:07:11]:
Like critical, um, like, um, like critical.

Leo Laporte [00:07:13]:
Critical? Like they're, like they're happening right now? Like zero-day?

Richard Campbell [00:07:17]:
No, crits as in like, no, they're— if this, if this vulnerability was exploited, it would be bad, you know, keys to the castle kind of thing. To be clear, virtually none of these have been exploited. Yeah, the shows I'm doing on Run As where we talk about this whole problem, and I'm talking to the, the pen tester types and the security types, they're saying, you know, For the most part, the hackers are using AI to do the same old hacks they've always done, just faster.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:42]:
Right. And yeah, so the number, you were correct, is 114 were rated critical out of 997 total. Only one of them was being currently exploited by hackers. I mean, if you think about like a zero-day or any just out of band, I mean, typically the excuse for that is, look, this is actively being exploited. It needs to be deployed. The fix needs to be deployed right now. And, um, but that was the one that was being exploited was a fix that was in the Patch Tuesday update, right? Not something that's in this new, um, out-of-band update. So I don't, yeah, I'm not, we'll see.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:18]:
We'll talk about it.

Leo Laporte [00:08:19]:
This supports my thesis though, that it was, these are AI.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:22]:
Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:08:22]:
And, uh, and, and Microsoft's worried that if they could find it with AI, others could, although they're probably using Mythos with their own harness.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:30]:
And so they also have the source code, right? I mean, so I, yeah, that's a good point. That's one thing to probe.

Leo Laporte [00:08:36]:
Yeah, but less of a barrier than it used to be. You can reverse engineer stuff pretty well now.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:41]:
That's true. That is true.

Leo Laporte [00:08:42]:
Uh, anyway, I—

Richard Campbell [00:08:45]:
yeah, and I, I can't wait to have— for all of this to come out when it's over. Just how many people and how much work. Like, we all are implying what's going on.

Leo Laporte [00:08:55]:
Yeah, because we really don't know.

Richard Campbell [00:08:57]:
And believe me, I'm poking everybody I can find. You know, nobody wants to talk about this at all.

Leo Laporte [00:09:02]:
We talked yesterday on, on Security Now though. It was a very interesting, uh, story about Mythos, which is Project Glasswing, which is this thing that Anthropic created so that, you know, the companies like Microsoft, they were one of the members, would get this amazing AI that could find bugs first before the bad guys got something similar.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:23]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:09:24]:
But the number of vulnerabilities, according to this third-party research, that The last thing found was in the low hundreds, not 975. It was a very small number. But Steve pointed out that Microsoft is using a variety of models. Maybe some are Mythos, maybe some others. And maybe more importantly, we're really realizing this, their own harness designed for this. And it may be very effective.

Richard Campbell [00:09:55]:
Well, in the whole conversation of their internal product called MDASH, M-Dash, that's the one.

Leo Laporte [00:10:00]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:10:01]:
And so that is utilizing more models, but as Paul pointed out, and they have the source code, right? So I do think that makes a difference. Yeah. And I think what's happened is they've decomposed, they're breaking down modules or running them separately. Like they're really reaming through this.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:16]:
Well, that was the deal when Anthropic wanted to test, was it, I don't know if it was Mythos was the one or the one, was there something before Mythos? I don't remember anymore. I guess it was Mythos.

Leo Laporte [00:10:25]:
Fable. Fable was a public-facing Mythos.

Richard Campbell [00:10:28]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:29]:
So they were looking for a gigantic source code base that would make sense to test against. Of course. So now we're talking open source. What does that look like? And that's how they landed on Firefox. But, um, you know, in this case—

Richard Campbell [00:10:40]:
They found hundreds. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:42]:
And they keep, they keep finding them.

Richard Campbell [00:10:44]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:44]:
And so when you—

Leo Laporte [00:10:44]:
Thank goodness. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:46]:
Go to a platform maker, like a proprietary software platform maker like Microsoft, where they have this source code is even bigger, but it's Mostly been kept secret. I think obviously it's leaked a bunch of times too, but, um, yeah, they can— you can do a lot more damage there if you have the source code.

Richard Campbell [00:11:02]:
So, and, and old code, right? Yeah, like, you know, Firefox is old, but it ain't as old as Windows. Nothing is as old.

Leo Laporte [00:11:13]:
God, I know nothing's as old as Windows.

Richard Campbell [00:11:19]:
Yeah, they figured 100 million lines of code in Windows 11.

Leo Laporte [00:11:23]:
Yikes. Well, all right.

Richard Campbell [00:11:25]:
So, um, it's going to take a minute.

Leo Laporte [00:11:28]:
Pat, you know, uh, how do enterprises handle this? Do they delay on the patches and then they delay?

Richard Campbell [00:11:34]:
Yeah, in fact, that's this week's— the, the— this month's worth of shows. I've, uh, last week with Adam, uh, we were talking about WSUS, which is sort— which is patch management where you hold them and decide what you're going to deploy, which ones you want to deploy. So Right. You know, for a well-organized enterprise, they would've been able to pick out that crit that is a known exploit and say, okay, make sure that one goes out, hold these other ones back. But yeah, this week's show is with Susan Bradley. We had a great conversation about just the balancing act of patching between, hey, our primary risk now is unpatched machines versus, hey, I can't take my company down because Microsoft's racing these patches out at breakneck speed. And not just Microsoft, but often it's the hardware vendors too. are behind the ball.

Richard Campbell [00:12:17]:
So Microsoft may be fixing something, but if the hardware vendor hasn't updated their firmware for it, it creates a whole other set of problems.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:23]:
Yep. Yeah, that's, that's absolutely, that's true. I mean, it even impacts individuals. You see the same thing, but, uh, but we don't have that granular control over rolling out updates.

Richard Campbell [00:12:32]:
I know.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:33]:
And this is, this speaks to that.

Richard Campbell [00:12:35]:
And this is also a product, and again, I talked about this last week, like Microsoft's deprecating AWS SUSE. They want it to go away. They don't want to support it anymore, even though Config Man runs on it and so forth. They can't kill it. They're going to keep it in Windows for God knows how long. But without that granular support, you're basically forced down this path and you might have your whole company disrupted.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:56]:
So if they want to sell the enterprise on moving to Intune or whatever else to kind of handle— I'm going to call it a subset of the functionality that's in WSUS. I really feel like they need to start breaking up these security patches a little bit better, meaning Yeah, if there were 114 critical things, that should be a patch. And yeah, maybe that was the thing we could kind of agree as an industry, we're going to install that and then we're going to look at the other things, right?

Richard Campbell [00:13:23]:
That was also the promise back in the day too, is, hey, we're going to do security patches, we're going to do feature patches, and they're going to be separate, except for that part where they never did that.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:30]:
Right, right. Microsoft— everyone has heard of service packs. What few people in the Microsoft world have heard of is feature packs, which Yeah. You might be able to count the number of feature packs that were released across every Microsoft product on one hand, but, and I mean that literally, it didn't really go very far, but that was an early attempt before this kind of period of rapid updating that we have today to modularize that a little bit. But I think we're at the point now where there are the, you know, the active exploits, you know, critical level, whatever you want to call them, the really serious security patches, like these have to be installed, guys. Even if we completely screw it up and make you do it again next week, you got to do it. And then everything else falls below it at a kind of a different priority level. So I've never heard a hint of this happening, but it just seems like the type of thing that should happen.

Richard Campbell [00:14:20]:
And I think there's this sort of sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, like sooner or later there's going to be a massive exploit. Like, that's just this existential sense of dread. that we are in a race for some black hat's going to finally figure out one of these things that nobody's ready for?

Paul Thurrott [00:14:42]:
Well, I mean, look, I can't speak for the whole industry, but from what I can see from the outside, what Microsoft is doing, I mean, I, I feel like they're kind of doing what they can be doing. We might hear differently later when something goes wrong, but I mean, look, they're, they're tackling it. I mean, I, again, I don't know How well they're doing, but I mean, just based on the number of exploits they've fixed.

Richard Campbell [00:15:02]:
I have— I really do have faith, like, that these guys really want to fix this stuff and they're doing the best they can under the circumstances. And it does feel like an all-hands-on-deck kind of move by them. And again, they're being very stony black, you know, not talking about this.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:20]:
I think they're too busy. I don't think there's a lot to say.

Richard Campbell [00:15:22]:
I tend to agree. You know, a lot of unresponded emails.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:25]:
What's that guy that's, uh, security? David, um, uh, what's his name? Um, Weston. David Weston, I think.

Richard Campbell [00:15:31]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:32]:
I haven't heard from that guy in the last couple of weeks. I, I feel like he's busy, right? And yeah, like at some point there will be, I, I, there will be, uh, kind of a—

Richard Campbell [00:15:40]:
I've been struggling to find someone to talk about Windows Protected Mode and, and that, which, or Windows Print Protection Mode. That guy's disappeared. Like, and good guys, like folks I have a fine time with and done shows before, but right now, Nobody's talking.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:55]:
It's not the time. Yeah. Yep.

Richard Campbell [00:15:57]:
Yeah, it'll, it'll be a great story a year or two from now, maybe, unless it's an apocalypse.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:02]:
Like, that's exactly what I was gonna say, unless something goes really bad and then it's not gonna be such a good story.

Richard Campbell [00:16:07]:
Or it'll be a story around the campfire while we're cooking squirrels trying to stay alive. Like, I don't know which one.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:12]:
It's one of these. Yeah, geez, it does taste like chicken.

Richard Campbell [00:16:16]:
Remember when we had windows? That was great, wasn't it?

Paul Thurrott [00:16:20]:
Yeah, vaguely.

Richard Campbell [00:16:21]:
Right. Yeah, pass over the burnt squirrel.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:25]:
Oh boy. Well, yeah, all we can do is kind of sit here and witness it and see what happens. But I don't know, so far, so far so good.

Richard Campbell [00:16:35]:
Wishing you guys all the best. Yeah, go well.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:38]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, and then let's see, other than the stuff happening in Stable, which is mostly just fixes, um, Microsoft is moving Various new features through various parts of the Insider Program, which I will remind everyone is no less complex than it has ever been. It's really hard to keep this stuff straight, but I think it was late last week, probably Friday. They released 5 new builds again, as they do. Um, the way they announce it is like, oh yeah, we've got new builds for experimental and beta. It's like, right, but it's 5. It's like 5 channels, right? Because there's experimental 26H1, there's experimental future platforms. Yeti on and on we go.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:20]:
So, um, there's— I think these things are really hard to discuss because they're not all in the same thing. Like, I feel like they maybe kind of should be. This is getting a little weird, but, um, I, I, someone maybe could explain to me why this wasn't the case before. But if you go to File Explorer and you search using the little search box up at the corner, Sometimes it's index-based, indexer-based, like there's an indexer, right? You know, I think we all understand this. Sometimes it isn't. And obviously, I mean, maybe not obviously, but Windows by default is configured so that certain folders are in the index and some aren't. Apparently, I can't quite explain this, but the This PC view, which is the— well, it's not the default, but it could be the default if you want it to be— the thing that just shows the drives attached to your computer. is now indexer-based, uh, in— sorry, no, it's not now.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:13]:
In the experimental channel, it is indexer-based, um, meaning I think for a lot of power users would just change the default home view to This PC, but then when they search from that view, nothing happens, or it happens very slowly. In my case, nothing happens and also happens slowly, but, um, this should speed that up. It's kind of like a weird small thing, but, um, kind of a big deal. But this minor Updates across the board to different, different parts of the system. The, uh, I think it's like Snipping Tool has like a red outline instead of a yellow one when you're capturing, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Um, to me, the big one is I just, I love the convoluted way Microsoft addresses this problem of their own making, which is that about almost 2 years ago, they, uh, no, actually, I'm sorry. They did this with the, actually it was almost 3 years ago, right? Because they did this with the Copilot plus PC stuff. So.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:01]:
We have these Copilot keys that are basically on every keyboard ever made now. So every laptop, whatever, has this stupid key. Everyone hates it. We absolutely— I, you couldn't find a person on this earth that wants to launch Copilot with this thing. I have no idea what the point of it is, but, and they've gone through various permutations of things because people are like, hey, don't like it. I hit it by mistake. I don't want to launch Copilot. I uninstall Copilot and launches like a page in settings and This page in settings lets me make a couple of changes, but none of them are the, the do nothing thing I want or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:32]:
So I use like PowerToys has a, um, a key mapper or key keyboard manager, I think it's called, um, utility that lets you remap keyboard shortcuts, right? So I remap that key to just do whatever key is to its right on a laptop. That's usually the left arrow key. But in this new, this new build, in one of these 5 new builds, uh, which one is it? I can't, I'm not even sure which one it is. Um, It doesn't matter. In one of these builds, um, they have changed that UI so that you can remap it to the keys that used to be there, right? So if you're familiar with this, you might know that there used to be, back in the old days, would be like a right Control key. So that's one of the options now. And then more recently there was a little, it looked like a little context menu. And the idea was, it was, it's a stupid thing to have on a keyboard, but if you press this thing while you're with whatever is selected, the context menu for that thing will appear.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:27]:
So if you select an icon in File Explorer, you get the File Explorer context menu, right? Um, so they're adding that and that's fine, but for the love of God, Microsoft, just let us do anything with it. Like what, why do you keep, like, they keep supplying like a, a slightly longer list of limited options and it's like, just let us map it to anything. Like what, let us map it to nothing. There's no do nothing option on this thing. I don't understand that. So anyway, there's stuff happening, but I wouldn't describe any of this as particularly interesting or whatever.

Leo Laporte [00:21:01]:
I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:02]:
I don't know what to call it. The other thing that's kind of weird here is that I just realized the thing I was talking about is actually in the release preview channel. So hilarious. I got that one completely wrong. But there's also 2 new release preview builds for 24 and 25H2. This is weird because the last Release Preview Channel builds were from mid-August, and that's when they got all the features that we've now just installed on Patch Tuesday, which we sort of associate with 26H2, even though all new features go to all supported versions of Windows, right? So at some point 26H2 comes out, whatever, and it's going to be those features. But now we have a new— or actually it's 2 new builds, but same features, right? So 24 and 25H2. 24H2 is about to go out of support.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:47]:
So one month from now, it's going to be out of support. But there will be a final October update for that with new features in it for some reason, one of which is that Copilot thing I just talked about, which is so stupid. But, and some other small things. But, you know, like, remember we talked about Wi-Fi support in the Windows Recovery Environment, and that's not broad Wi-Fi support. It's You've configured a Wi-Fi network in Windows on that PC, and it is— if your organization is managing your PC, they can actually prevent this from working. But for an individual, what that means is it will pop up and just work, which is kind of cool because there are many cases in the Windows recovery environment where you actually need to be online. Sometimes that means you might have to connect an Ethernet cable or whatever. So that's fine.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:31]:
But this is kind of strange because again, you know, 26H2 is sort of a thing and it's Probably going to come out sometime. And now we're already, you know, we're already kind of testing or doing final testing on some features that are kind of will come after 26H2, meaning that this thing will eventually, you know, probably starting in October, whatever release preview builds we get from there on out will have 25 and 26H2 versions, you know, because that's what will be current at that time. I confuse myself to talking about this stuff. Anyway, um, it's confusing, so we'll see. Okay, so anyway, I guess the point is, since we last talked, um, there have been 7 Windows Insider builds released, and, uh, I believe that's all the channels.

Richard Campbell [00:23:18]:
So it's all the channels, a couple of them twice. Uh, oh, it's also ARM, x86.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:25]:
Yeah, right, right, right. And, and then the different versions, right? 26H1, right? Whatever. Um, which, you know, still has not been resolved, but fun, whatever. Um, okay. And then I, I didn't, I sometimes just don't know where to put this stuff, but there were some software releases. Any one of these might have been like a, like an app pick of the week or whatever, but, um, I'll just throw them in here. So 5 months ago, uh, Google released a Gemini app on the Mac and now there is one on Windows 11. So if you're a Gemini user, you might want this.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:55]:
I, I, I, I, right now there's nothing in it that, um, differentiates it from the web version, but eventually what they're going to do is add native desktop capabilities. And that will certainly have to do with things like, um, you know, compute usage, like the way you can automate things on the computer, et cetera. So right now that's not there, but—

Richard Campbell [00:24:15]:
Give it privileges to the machine. That's interesting. The usual way I find most people get Gemini is they buy a Pixel phone.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:20]:
Right. Right. But I mean, you could, I mean, I, so for whatever, well, no, not for whatever reason, for that reason, right? Because with my last Pixel purchase, I got like a year of whatever that subscription is, Google AI Pro, right? And then on the new devices, you only get 6 months, but at least that's pushed it out another 6 months. So because I'm kind of getting this with the phone, like I do use Gemini probably more than the other, you know, big tech AI solutions or whatever. And yeah, it's on the phone for sure. But I mean, I actually sit on the web on Windows a lot. I did install this app to look at it. Right now I don't see a particular point to it, but—

Richard Campbell [00:24:58]:
You just got like a new Pro 11, right? So you really—

Paul Thurrott [00:25:01]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:25:02]:
It's in your phone.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:03]:
Yeah, it's in the phone, right? Yeah, we're gonna talk about some of this in the back of the book again, 'cause last week I talked about that Gemini Daily Brief, which I actually found useful. And Leo was talking about the Stream Beans.

Richard Campbell [00:25:14]:
As opposed to the M365 Copilot client in my Android phone, which can't open any of the previous conversations I've had with M365 Copilot on my PC because reasons.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:27]:
Because computer science is hard. I don't know. That's a good—

Richard Campbell [00:25:30]:
Listen, I didn't want to like M365 Copilot, but it can actually search Outlook mail in a useful way, and that's been impossible for decades. So like, this is the one miracle that will pay for anything.

Leo Laporte [00:25:42]:
That'll make search work.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:44]:
Does Outlook not know about indexers?

Richard Campbell [00:25:46]:
Um, it takes a frontier model to actually search Outlook email.

Leo Laporte [00:25:50]:
That's really—

Richard Campbell [00:25:50]:
but by golly, it does a good job. I mean, I really— I had to— I didn't do an expense report for a conference, and it was able to go through, pull several previous years of that conference, and compare the different ways I paid— it was paid each time. It said, you probably want to do this. And I'm like, that was a really good answer. Like, you—

Paul Thurrott [00:26:08]:
If there's anyone out there who, um, doesn't like me for whatever reason, which I completely understand, I'm terrible. What a thing to ask. Hold on. I'm going somewhere. I'm going somewhere.

Richard Campbell [00:26:19]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:20]:
You can take solace in the fact that my wife, who does not care about technology in the slightest, uses AI way more than I do. And she uses it—

Leo Laporte [00:26:28]:
Oh, that's interesting.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:29]:
Yeah, way more. And I mean, in almost every aspect of her life. And it's getting annoying.

Leo Laporte [00:26:35]:
And— She's got voices throughout the house.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:39]:
Yeah. No, she's not doing— no. And that's Just because she couldn't figure that out. Like, I could make that happen, and I'm not, but she— yeah, if she could, she would. She'd walk around talking. There's no doubt about it. But—

Leo Laporte [00:26:47]:
Oh yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:48]:
But the 2 things she just did this past weekend, which just annoyed the hell out of me, was we, you know, the bathroom— the toilet in the bathroom— at the toilet bathroom, right? The toilet in the main bathroom off of our bedroom. Um, you know, you got to flush it and then something disconnects. So you lift the thing, you look inside, just, you know, a little rattle. It's like this thing from a million years ago, right? Yeah, but the arm that goes from the handle to the chain in this toilet was plastic, so it snapped. Oh, so we actually had to replace it, right?

Richard Campbell [00:27:14]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:14]:
And so she pulled it out, put it on the table, left it there like taunting me, and then moved on to the next thing.

Richard Campbell [00:27:22]:
This is what you keep husbands around for.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:24]:
The other one was we have 2 of those electronic car keys for the BMW we have, and one of them, the battery died, and that was my key, and I hate it so much. Yeah, I have to go pull the little real key out of it, you know, open the door like a GM.

Leo Laporte [00:27:38]:
CR3220, 2330, 2437.

Richard Campbell [00:27:42]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:42]:
I did this for approximately a year and then she went away in June, so I took— we swapped keys. I've been using her keys ever since. And now she's like, Don, it's going to fix the battery. So she looked up this thing on AI. I assumed you had to go to the dealership. I would've paid them $250 for this. You just buy a battery and replace it. She figured it out.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:00]:
She didn't figure it out. AI figured it out. But then she, um, but the plastic arm thing, she found an arm that's metal. So she's like, this is never going to happen again. And then she couldn't get the exact right size to go through the little hole in the side of the porcelain toilet thing. So she shaved it down with a razor blade. And so she's in there like MacGyvering this thing. And I'm like, we need to, I, we need to have a discussion here.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:25]:
Cause I don't know if I, this is my job and also what the hell is happening. And, uh, yeah, she fixed both those things like instantaneously. spontaneously with AI, and it's really annoying.

Leo Laporte [00:28:35]:
Magical.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:36]:
Yeah, really annoying.

Leo Laporte [00:28:37]:
Well, speaking about Copilot, you know, the latest thing, I thought this would happen earlier, to be honest. I thought, in fact, I said at the beginning of the year when OpenCLAW came out, this was gonna be the year of agentic AI where people would have their own little agent that would be doing things for them. And it took a little while, but there's GrokBot, there's Claude Core. Yeah, there's Claude Core, the various agent bots. Meta Muse, which Lisa loves. I've been using it, I love it, uh, even though it's from Meta, which, uh, there's something called Instinct. And the rumor is that OpenAI is about to release their version of this. I mean, these are— yeah, everybody— and the whole thing about this is this, this is the next generation of chatbot.

Leo Laporte [00:29:18]:
It's not a chatbot as much as an actual agent where it knows you and it has access to your email and things like that.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:25]:
But we always talk about like job loss with AI, and, and this is more like, um, it's more like husband job loss. Now I've lost my point in the relationship. And, and like, and I gotta say, I mean, look, she did a great job, you know, but it's irritating.

Leo Laporte [00:29:42]:
I thought you were gonna say she got a 3D printer, she printed it out, she made one, she got the designs.

Richard Campbell [00:29:47]:
Nice.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:47]:
Oh, I talked to her about that. I was like, you're gonna 3D print this thing next, aren't you? And she's like, I looked into this, it's way too expensive. I'm like, you are mental. Literally, she's so—

Richard Campbell [00:29:58]:
she—

Paul Thurrott [00:29:58]:
that's literally what she said. Yeah, she's like, I'm just gonna make toilet parts.

Leo Laporte [00:30:01]:
I considered it.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:02]:
You know? Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:30:04]:
Honey, can we buy a 3D printer?

Paul Thurrott [00:30:07]:
That'd be the weirdest conversation of all time.

Leo Laporte [00:30:09]:
I need a toilet flushing arm.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:11]:
Like, who are you? Is there— is there an alien in your body? What is this? Anyway, I don't know. Um, I don't even know which one she— I wonder if she used— I think she uses Gemini. I can't tell. Yeah, she uses Copilot a lot.

Leo Laporte [00:30:22]:
That's the Entry drug, entryway drug, or the gateway drug is the chatbot. But pretty soon you get tired of cutting and pasting from a chatbot window. And so, you know, it gets, it evolves. I think Meta Muse is going to be the hot product for the Christmas season. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:38]:
What's the, so wait, what's the other one that's like that though? Because there's another, um, what you, I think you might've said it earlier. Um, the thing that's just like Muse, which is like a third-party AI.

Richard Campbell [00:30:47]:
Instinct.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:48]:
Instinct. Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:30:50]:
And there's others. There's one, I think there's Treehouse. But Instinct, I've been playing with. In fact, I have an invite if you want.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:57]:
Yeah, I mean, send it to Stephanie. But yeah, definitely. Um, and then by the way, have her on the next show too, because she can—

Leo Laporte [00:31:03]:
Well, I told—

Paul Thurrott [00:31:04]:
Talk to this way more than I could.

Leo Laporte [00:31:06]:
Because I know she uses Insta. Look, people think they hate Meta, right? Oh, they're destroying our children. But Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, between the 3 of them—

Richard Campbell [00:31:17]:
I know.

Leo Laporte [00:31:17]:
Everybody, especially WhatsApp, and when you go to Mexico, that's what everybody uses, right? That's how they communicate.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:22]:
No, it's incredible.

Leo Laporte [00:31:24]:
So, uh, I have a feeling— I told Lisa because she loves Instagram, I said you should look at Muse. She installed it. It's great. So Muse, I gave it my email.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:34]:
I think I gave it everything. So this— I am going to talk a little bit about this in the back of the book, but I think what you're— I think what you're sort of walking into or walking around a little bit is if you think about all these companies and like, what are their strengths? Like, what are the things they have? And like, what is the impact in your life? Like, you know, Microsoft, it's like productivity software. You're like, yep. That's where they could do all that stuff. Google is everywhere in our lives, so it's productivity and photos and maps and blah, and you're like, yep, now that makes total sense, email, whatever. And yeah, I guess I never considered what could Meta offer the world other than terribleness, but I suppose even though they don't seem to care about it too much, the interconnectivity we have with the people that matter to us most, whether it's through WhatsApp, Instagram, or Facebook, is real. I mean, it's the only reason I'm still on these platforms. Um, so yeah, I mean, good for them, I guess.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:21]:
I, it's, I don't know, it seems like the, the right approach, I guess. I'll ask my wife. She probably has more to say about this. Um, fucking irritating.

Richard Campbell [00:32:31]:
Anyway, Sue, uh, what's great about Steph is she doesn't worry about understanding all these things. She just uses what works for her.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:38]:
Yeah. I may write about this at some point, but many years ago, well, several years ago, we were in the house in Pennsylvania, the big house, and It was like Christmas Eve. Our sewer backed up into the basement. It was horrible.

Leo Laporte [00:32:51]:
This whole show is gonna be Paul's household woes.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:54]:
This is yet another— this is one of the early versions of me being like completely freaking useless. So we had to call a plumber and they kind of came in, they did, you know, whatever, they snaked and did things, whatever. But the guy pulls this thing out of the pipe and it's a reel of what to me looked like solder. And, uh, he's like, yeah, this thing's probably been sitting in here since the house was built, might have something to do with it. And, uh, kind of throw it on the floor. So my son picked it up, took a photo of it. This is what— this is probably 7, 8 years ago now, right? Maybe even almost 10 years ago, whatever. He takes a picture of it, he puts it on Reddit because that Reddit was to him is like how I would use Google.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:30]:
And he— I guess he— there was— it probably still is a place on Reddit where you can go and say, what is this thing? And within 5 minutes, someone answered and it was indeed something tight. It was a solder used for pipes, used to fuse pipes together. And the guy must've plopped it in there. I was like, oh well, not my problem, and left. And that was probably whenever they built the house, like 30, actually 40-something years ago. Right. And, um, that's kind of what my wife has been doing lately with things around the house. Like she's like, like I gave you 2 examples because they just happened back to back.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:00]:
And, um, you know, I was feeling pretty good about myself at the start of that day, but— But it's the same sort of thing, right? Like, like there was a while there where we'd go to YouTube and be like, how do I fix a toilet maybe, or whatever the question is? And you'd watch a video and it's like, okay. And now it's like, you're just going to do this with AI, obviously. I mean, or at least my wife is.

Richard Campbell [00:34:21]:
No, no, you take a picture of the thing you're working on and feed it to the tool and it gets right in there. It's pretty powerful.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:28]:
Yep. So I, I'm still wrapping my head around it. I'm too old for this. I don't know what's going on. I don't even, I just keep I can't wrap my brain around this.

Richard Campbell [00:34:37]:
I must have 4 or 5 of them depending on what— there's one for— I'm using for HA. It's got nothing to do with any of the others. The Copilot thing was because I had a problem with my, my accounts through the MVP program. This was a workaround. And then as soon as I found out it could handle Outlook, I'm like, well, you're staying. That's the end of that.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:52]:
Yeah, anyone, right? Anything that can make short work of Outlook is, is definitely—

Richard Campbell [00:34:56]:
Oh my God, like, I would have paid $50 a month 20 years ago for this. Like, it's It's just profound.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:04]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:35:04]:
I'm sure it does something else, but it does not matter.

Leo Laporte [00:35:12]:
All right. You might want to send Stephanie out here. I just got an alert from the Petaluma Police that they need water main replacement.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:19]:
Yeah, she could do it. She could whack that together.

Leo Laporte [00:35:23]:
Just come on over, bring her 3D printer and her ChatGPT.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:28]:
This guy's gonna— it's gonna like— her chatbot's gonna look like some muscular miner guy, you know? It's like, why does he— why is he never wearing a shirt? You know, like, what's going on here?

Leo Laporte [00:35:38]:
Actually, that's why I gave, uh, Grok the voice of Kronk. And I said, talk like caveman, because he's the coder. He's the strong— never mind.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:50]:
It's like a D&D class. You've made him like, uh, Yeah, like a fighter.

Leo Laporte [00:35:54]:
Yeah, it's a class. Each of the, uh, each of the bots has its own, um, you know, like there's the coder, the planner, the reviewer. But I should give them like— you're right, I should give them like D&D names, you know, Warrior, Armorer, and yeah, Hammer, you know, that kind of thing. That's good. What was the name that you used in the D&D game?

Paul Thurrott [00:36:14]:
Oh, it was something— it was probably Helm Hammer Bland, I think.

Leo Laporte [00:36:16]:
Helm Hammer Bland. Yeah. Okay. You got a new name.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:21]:
In my brain, that's what's funny. That's like one letter change.

Leo Laporte [00:36:25]:
It just, it's more fun to use AI if you give them funny names and voices. I'm just saying.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:30]:
Right. You want to have that tip for your wife. That moment, like when people are visiting and you have that some conversation with the wall and then they're like, what the hell was that? You're like, oh, you don't have this at your house? That's weird. Anywho. Uh, okay. I don't really have a story for the next one, but, um, so Adobe, Uh, just today released Photoshop and Premiere Elements 2027. Um, you can buy them.

Leo Laporte [00:36:54]:
There is some, uh, uh, upset about their license agreement on this.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:58]:
Yeah. So actually, so interesting you say that, 'cause I, I, I, I did, this has been in effect for, I wanna say 2 years. I didn't notice this till last year, but what you're alluding to is that when you buy these products, they're licensed for 3 years right now. I look from a business standpoint, I, I, I get it. You could, you could have bought Adobe Elements, whatever, you know, version 7 or something 10 years ago and still works, right? So other than this product, everything they sell is now just like a subscription service. Although you could argue with a 3-year license, it's sort of like a subscription service, right? Um, given how little these things cost and given how powerful they are, I mean, honestly, I'm not outraged by it. I, when I first discovered this, I was like, here we go, big tech, they're doing it again. You know, this is another, this is how they get you.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:48]:
And it's like, yeah, it is.

Richard Campbell [00:37:49]:
It is.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:50]:
I mean, it is, right? But I don't know, especially when you look at like what they've added over the past couple of years and this year. So there's a lot of generative AI stuff in here, you know, and if you follow Adobe, honestly, to be fair to them, they're probably one of the most successful companies when it comes to evolving for the AI era. If you think about like what Microsoft did with Microsoft 365 to bring that product into the cloud era, I think what Adobe's done to bring their products into the AI era is, if anything, even more impressive. I mean, there's a lot of—

Richard Campbell [00:38:22]:
Their podcast tools are astonishingly good.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:24]:
I mean, I, and right, it spans the whole, you know, it's not, I tend to think in terms of these types of products. So it's photo editing and video editing. Okay. But there's so much more than that. And it's audio and it's all this other stuff. And Honestly, and it's, they indemnify you, you know, they guarantee that the models they've trained, there's nothing in there that is dodgy and is ever going to get you in trouble. And, you know, you own everything you create with the tools, et cetera, et cetera.

Richard Campbell [00:38:48]:
So yeah, there are no Midjourney with Getty logos over all of this.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:53]:
No, that's exactly right.

Richard Campbell [00:38:54]:
Exactly. I don't know what you're talking about.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:57]:
So look, I mean, there are things, look, a lot of the stuff that's in here will be familiar if you know anything about AI, like image editing, like Generative expand, where you have an image, you'd want to make it wider or taller or whatever it is to, you know, fill, you know, make it fill a different space or generative upscaling. Like we have these things even in Windows has something version of this, right? But they're adding it to their, I'm going to call this like consumer level, prosumer maybe. I don't know. I would say given how quickly these capabilities are evolving, The 3-year license thing is sort of reasonable. I know that sounds terrible, but, um, I know, and I listen, I freaked out the first time I heard this, but yeah, it is 3 years. So, but you know, again, I, you typically these things are $99 apiece. You can get both for like $149, probably. They're always on sale.

Richard Campbell [00:39:50]:
Mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:50]:
You can always get both for $99 or at some point you would, you know, the next 2 seconds you'll be able to get it for, you know, both for $99. And for 3 years, honestly, given the capabilities, I, I'd like to be outraged, but I, I, I don't, I don't have a problem.

Richard Campbell [00:40:03]:
You'd like to be.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:05]:
Mm-hmm. My wife's probably using this already too. It's irritating. Um, this one's kind of semi-random, but, um, I, I talk a lot about Notion and I talk a lot about trying to replace Notion, right? And Notion works really, really well. So why would I try to replace it? But the primary 2 things are, I want to, I would prefer for this to be like file system-based Markdown files that I control, that I sync through whatever cloud service, not something that they control that has sort of partial offline capabilities. Right. And so I keep looking, you know, and there's 4 or 5 that are kind of in the top tier, you know, Joplin and like Obsidian is in there. And, um, I'll try to think.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:46]:
I think some of the others, I'm sorry, there's some other ones. I talked about something called Talaria recently. I looked at that again this week. It's really good. But, um, Anytype is one of those things and Anytype is very close. And, and a big part of the deal for me is the workflow bit where you're writing in it in Markdown syntax, but you want to take the stuff that you wrote and publish it somewhere. In my case, it's usually WordPress. And every time I paste anything into WordPress from anything except for Notion, well, Notion is a little bit of a problem, but Most things have some formatting stuff in there.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:16]:
There's, they've added extraneous HTML tags, et cetera, et cetera. So I kind of hate it. Um, but Anytype is moving to a new platform. They've completely rewritten this from the ground up. They have a new editor that's based on, um, an existing editor that I can't see the name of here for some reason, but it is a, um, like an open source, you know, really well, um, regarded, uh, kind of Markdown-based thing. It still will do the blocks. and all that stuff, you know, whatever. But this looks pretty awesome.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:43]:
So sometime either probably this week or next week, they're going to start— oh, it's called Lexical Editor. It's the one that's used by Instagram and WhatsApp, by the way, same editor they use. And it's actually going to be real Markdown, not just Markdown syntax, right? So like something like Notion is Markdown syntax. I mean, God knows what their format is, but it's local files, Markdown, et cetera. So it's So it's just something to look at. I, I, this was not a press thing. They actually just had like a, um, like a community town hall thing where they were just talking to people on video and I listened to it like a jerk and I, it was actually really interesting. So, um, anyway, there's something, something to keep an eye on.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:21]:
It's not, it's not there yet, or at least as I, last time I checked, uh, which was earlier today, it wasn't there, but it's gonna be there soon.

Richard Campbell [00:42:28]:
So.

Leo Laporte [00:42:28]:
They've been around a long time. I feel like they predate Yeah, right.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:33]:
And it's, you know, it's small team. It's not like a giant company or anything like that. Um, it's just guys, you know, there's, you know, typical, like, whatever developer guys. But, um, I've, I've come close. This is one I've come pretty close to with. And, um, I can't wait to try this new thing because I feel like this might actually put it over the top. We'll see.

Leo Laporte [00:42:52]:
We'll see.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:53]:
We'll see.

Leo Laporte [00:42:54]:
Yeah, we shall see, my friends. Romans, countrymen, countrymen, Norwegians. Oh, this is Windows Weekly. We are so glad you're here. Uh, we do this show every, uh, every Wednesday. We talk about Microsoft, uh, in great depth. And, uh, if you'd like to watch us do it live, 11 AM Pacific, 2 PM Eastern, 1800 UTC, we stream it in our club, of course, Club Discord, but also YouTube, Twitch, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. And we invite you to watch live.

Leo Laporte [00:43:26]:
Of course, you can always download it from our website, twit.tv/ww. Subscribe in your favorite podcast player. There's even a YouTube channel, believe it or not, dedicated to Winning at Twit.

Richard Campbell [00:43:38]:
And a Facebook channel. I just saw someone chat, commenting on the Facebook.

Leo Laporte [00:43:41]:
I believe that. And we just, we have now a Reddit channel for Twit. So I think, yeah, we're, we're trying to reach All the people where they live. Intelligent Machines is coming up at 2, and we're going to talk to Lon Seidman. I know a lot of you are fans of his YouTube channel. He's kind of a cool guy. Takes like old— his latest thing is finding old video cards from, you know, data centers and repurposing them for local AI machines. And it's really cool.

Leo Laporte [00:44:13]:
Yeah, it's really cool. It's a, it's, it's a cool channel.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:15]:
This was the— this is what Rey was doing in that Star Wars prequel.

Leo Laporte [00:44:19]:
Yeah, exactly.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:20]:
Except with Star Destroyers. Ching, ching, ching.

Leo Laporte [00:44:22]:
It'll fit. It's what Stephanie was doing. Let's face it. It'll fit. It just— hammer it, shave it. A little bit of this, a little bit of that.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:31]:
Yep. And eventually she's like, what's your role here again? I can't— Kelly didn't come up with anything.

Leo Laporte [00:44:35]:
So Microsoft announced a Surface event next month.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:40]:
Yeah, which is—

Leo Laporte [00:44:42]:
and Jensen's gonna be there, so that tells you something.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:45]:
Jensen Harris from Windows 8?

Leo Laporte [00:44:47]:
Oh, yes, exactly.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:48]:
Um, oh yeah, that guy. Uh, I guess he's famous too.

Leo Laporte [00:44:52]:
Yes.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:54]:
Uh, right, so this is interesting, obviously. Um, I— look, we already know they announced this, I think, at Build. They're coming out with a Surface Laptop Ultra that will run this new NVIDIA RTX Spark chipset. Uh, I, I've— IFA just came and went. There were a bunch of, uh, computers that were announced there. There were also— there's also this new, uh, high-end Ryzen chipset, which also uses unified memory and will serve a similar purpose in what I'll call like AI workstation class PCs. Um, which we'll talk about in a second actually. But, um, yeah, so, okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:30]:
I mean, obviously they're going to talk up the The Surface Laptop Ultra. They're gonna talk up NVIDIA RTX Spark. One of the missing pieces of this story, uh, if you look at any of the PC makers who have announced any of this stuff, is both the timing and the price, right? So, um, we knew, we have known, I guess since IFA, at least, uh, explicitly it would be before the end of the year. Um, I assume these things will come with 26H2 and that may be, well, this is what I wanna talk about in a second, but there, there, you know, what additional functionality could there be in Windows? that may be specific to these types of computers. Right. And we'll see, but I think that might be, there must be a mention of the Ultra in there. Yeah. I mean, it's, uh, well, I mean, right now it's vague, but I mean, obviously it's going to be the, obviously it's going to be the Ultra, right? So we'll see what that looks like.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:22]:
Um, so, okay. That's cool. Also, um, that is when, no, it is not. I'm sorry. Ignite. When is Ignite? Ignite is in November. November. This is in October.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:35]:
Um, I don't have this in the show notes, but the week after this, uh, the Microsoft event's on a Wednesday, by the way. It's a little annoying. Um, it's also the Tuesday— I'm sorry, the Wednesday after Patch Tuesday. Because I, I, at first I wondered, wait, are they going to tie this to 26H2 somehow? And I bet they might still, right? Because that seems like the logical time to kind of launch that. Not that it matters too, too much. Um, but also one week later, Google is having some kind of an event. Um, for the Google Books, which is these Android-based laptops. Um, so October is kind of turning into kind of a, like, a computer month, I guess.

Richard Campbell [00:47:12]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:12]:
Um, so we'll see what happens.

Richard Campbell [00:47:13]:
But I'm, I'm, I know I'm doing 5 conferences in October. And I mean, the good news about Ignite is it's not the same time as .NET Conf. It's the week after.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:23]:
Finally. Yeah, because sometimes it often is the same week, which is terrible.

Richard Campbell [00:47:27]:
Right on top of each each other, which is not good.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:29]:
Yeah. And where is Ignite? Is in San Francisco again this year, I assume?

Richard Campbell [00:47:33]:
Yeah, I don't know. I'm probably— I wasn't going.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:36]:
Yeah, I'm not going either, but I assume it's in San Francisco anyway. I'll close that tab. Who cares?

Leo Laporte [00:47:42]:
Um, so they don't want to have it in Seattle. We know that.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:46]:
Too many drugs, too many homeless people, and too many problems with homeless people.

Richard Campbell [00:47:50]:
So let's, let's go to San Francisco because the protesters are homeless there.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:55]:
Yeah. Yeah, that stuff.

Leo Laporte [00:47:57]:
But they did that last year, right? It was okay. Was it okay last year? Were they— they were able to pull it off without any—

Paul Thurrott [00:48:02]:
You mean in San Francisco?

Leo Laporte [00:48:04]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:05]:
Yeah, I think it went okay.

Leo Laporte [00:48:06]:
I wasn't there.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:06]:
It wasn't like Seattle. No, no. A lot of the problems they had in Seattle were actual Microsoft employees who were driving over to Seattle to raise a ruckus. And one of the theories is like, well, if we have it far enough away, they're not going to go to the time and expense to bother us.

Leo Laporte [00:48:21]:
The employees aren't going to be there.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:22]:
I mean, that could be it. I feel like that kind of protesting has completely calmed down, though, too. Maybe we have bigger problems today. It's kind of hard to say. But there's that. OK. So, I just alluded to this Ryzen thing, right? At IFA, HP, Lenovo, Acer, and probably others announced AMD Ryzen AI Max Pro, all caps, 400 and up. Um, and these are— it's, it's— they really should have come up with a different name because they're, they're actually quite different from the normal kind of, um, what's the Zen 5, you know, uh, other chips.

Leo Laporte [00:49:04]:
So I had the 395, AI 395 Plus.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:09]:
That's not a 400 though, is it, Leo? So that's awesome.

Leo Laporte [00:49:11]:
Well, I'm wondering now if I've—

Paul Thurrott [00:49:12]:
No, it's not even worth recycling. Just toss it in the trash. Uh, no, it's probably fantastic. I look, I, the modern, um, AMD stuff is awesome, right? And they, they don't call it this, but the integrated graphics they have, always excellent. The NPU stuff is excellent. Um, there's been this kind of, um, non-discussion around what this even means, right? Because we, uh, what meaning unified RAM, right? And so one of the features of the RTX Spark PCs is that they have unified RAM, which we equate to Apple, of course, which we should. And, uh, but how does unified RAM, like, how does this differ from, obviously you could have like whatever type of DIMM it is on the motherboard, which you don't see that much anymore. Or they integrate— everyone but Intel now will integrate RAM onto the SoC, which is a, a chip of sorts, but it's, you know, really a collection of chips on the same—

Richard Campbell [00:50:03]:
Yeah, yeah. The M series has a big wafer. Yeah, there's a lot integrated in the main chip, but the RAM is definitely in its own bank. But the shorter those wires are, man, that's right, faster things go.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:13]:
Yeah, it's, it's, it's a bizarre thing that like the physical distance, which we wouldn't measure in like single-digit millimeters, makes a huge difference in performance, but it does. Right. So, but I've been, this is something I've been sort of, I, I read everything that these companies put out about this. I, it's very clear that one of the advantages of Apple's integrated approach with this stuff on their chips, on Apple Silicon, is that. Um, you have this, it's unified RAM, but it's, it's also like shared RAM, meaning the RAM is shared between whatever it is that the set of processors needs. 'Cause there's a, they don't call it this, but there's an NPU on there. There's graphics on there. There's the general like microprocessor on there and they all use some amount of RAM.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:56]:
But my understanding is it's probably dynamic to some degree, et cetera, et cetera. So in the documentation for this new HP computer, which can come with up to the highest-end processors called a Raisin— a Ryzen AI Max Plus Pro, seriously, $495, right? It can have up to 192 gigabytes of unified RAM and up to 8 terabytes of, uh, storage, SSD storage. But they talk about how it's possible with this thing, there's going to be a UI in here for you, the developer, probably whoever you are, the, whatever kind of pro user you are, whether you're a creator, whatever you might be, whoever wants to, you know, spending thousands of dollars on this thing, you will be able to configure through some UI in the system how much RAM gets put aside for the GPU part of this chip that will be used for local AI. And the idea being that, you know, with, you have like a, on the RTX Spark, for example, the configurations we've seen are 64 and 128. You almost certainly want 128. There's something about 128 gigs of RAM where you have that much, you can put this stuff in, in memory essentially, and it obviously runs faster in memory. But with 192, you know, you could spread it out a little bit better, I guess. But I—

Leo Laporte [00:52:17]:
this—

Paul Thurrott [00:52:17]:
the only thing I could think of that was ever like this in my life was in the mid-1990s. I worked for this really small company and I was staying at the guy's house and I had to do something on his Mac, which at the time was, you know, a '90s, like a Mac OS 6 or 7 or whatever was new at the time. It was horrible, right? It was the most ridiculously antiquated thing in the world. And I couldn't get— I had to make something in Photoshop and it wasn't working. And I'm like, why does he— I'm like, this thing just crashes every time I load the image. And he goes, oh, I can fix it. And he went into— I think he went into the About box and you could change the amount of RAM that the app got. And I was like, why, why would a human being have to do this? Like, you know, a sophisticated operating system, or what we would call today an operating system, would just allocate RAM dynamically as needed and then take it back when it's done, right?

Richard Campbell [00:53:02]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:02]:
But back then you had to kind of do that. And that's going to be a feature of these systems. And I have to assume it's going to be in the Artech Spark machines as well. Like, you, you're going to be able to, like, maybe you're using it semi-exclusively for whatever local AI, you know, personal computer thing, whatever it's called. And, uh, you're like, yeah, no, I want that thing to have 120 gigs of RAM, GPU for that. And that's, that's all it's gonna do. The rest of it you can do however you want. And it's fascinating to me that that's a thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:30]:
And I wonder now if that isn't like a 26H2 thing. Is this something that, uh, I don't know, the chipmaker kind of does and gives to PC? I'm not really sure. Like, I, they don't really say that obviously, but. Um, anyway, it's something to look out for because I— that to me is brand new. I've never heard that before. And it just feels old-fashioned. It feels like, um, you know, like choosing the model in a chatbot. Like, you know, I have a question.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:54]:
Let me select the thing that might be best for answering the question. It's just so, so old-fashioned.

Leo Laporte [00:53:58]:
They're aiming this at local. Uh, I mean, I have, like I said, I have the framework with the 395 and it's designed to be a local AI machine. It's not a very good one.

Richard Campbell [00:54:07]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:54:07]:
It's AMD. But, um, They're designing—

Paul Thurrott [00:54:10]:
this is almost a year old. I mean, think about it.

Leo Laporte [00:54:12]:
Hey, I know. No, I'm just— I don't— I run a few local models on it, but it's— I mean, you really want— anyway, we won't go into that. But the idea is, I think you can allocate more memory to GPU. And so don't— you could say, no, don't— you don't let these apps use up too much memory. Don't let the— because the GPU needs it because it's all unified memory, right? So, right, I think that's—

Paul Thurrott [00:54:36]:
you can actually manually partition the memory. Yeah, that is bizarre to me.

Leo Laporte [00:54:41]:
Yeah, but I think that's why they want that, so you can specify, look, this model needs, you know, 160 gigs.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:46]:
Like, I mean, when you think about the Windows world and whatever that is, that set of chip makers and PC makers and component makers and, and Microsoft and whatever, and you're looking at, you know, local AI is really taking off on Macs for whatever reason, you have to look at that situation, be like, all right, well What is it they're doing that we're not doing, and how can we—

Leo Laporte [00:55:03]:
Unified memory.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:04]:
Windows, it's, it's not just— yeah, it's unified memory. But I think this is somehow— this is possible, or maybe it just works better with unified memory than it does with other types of memory. I don't quite understand.

Leo Laporte [00:55:16]:
Oh yeah, I mean, I don't see it as a Windows feature. I think it's a hardware feature that Windows surfaces more, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:55:22]:
Yeah, right. I'm not sure. Yeah, I don't know. Right. I'm just— yeah, I don't know where this is going to come from. But, um, it is—

Richard Campbell [00:55:28]:
and it sounds like AMD has responded with a revision to their motherboard design to be more effective at this.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:35]:
Yeah, yeah, they—

Leo Laporte [00:55:36]:
I mean, look, right now it's CUDA, you know, it's NVIDIA, or it's Apple with MLX. And, you know, those are both, you know, my Sparks have unified memory, my Mac Studio has unified memory, and I bought the Framework. It has unified memory, 128 gigs. But because it's Rockham and it's not— it's AMD, it doesn't— the models aren't very fast. And I think that this AMD is a little stung by that, and they would very much like to sell PCs as AI, local AI machines.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:06]:
Look, Nvidia is— it's weird because they're coming full circle in a way. And not that this will be their volume market of the future, but they started as GPU makers for computers, and then they went into the data center, huge success. But now they're kind of bringing that style of technology back to PCs. AMD is likewise also making a big data center push right now. I don't know that this is where that came from exactly. Maybe they just looked at Apple.

Leo Laporte [00:56:33]:
That's interesting.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:34]:
I don't really know. But it is interesting that both of these chipmakers— because we have not heard Intel talk about this ever.

Leo Laporte [00:56:39]:
Yeah, I know.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:40]:
You have to think they will. And also, by the way, Intel's making a big data center push, as well. Um, there will be some future Intel chip. I mean, you know, I've not heard anything about this, but usually at the end of the year they do something, there's CES, et cetera. So I can't imagine Intel's gonna let this go by without responding in some way.

Richard Campbell [00:56:58]:
Yeah, there should be. I presume they're designing a board.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:01]:
I think so. But I, I, I've not even heard a rumor.

Leo Laporte [00:57:03]:
Yeah. I don't know anything about data center PCs. You, I'm sure, Richard, you know more about that. Is it, you, or do they use unified memory? How do No, I don't think so.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:11]:
I feel like they can't. I mean, they must have—

Richard Campbell [00:57:13]:
No, it's not the design. Huh.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:16]:
Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it's interesting. I, I look, obviously when you compare local AI to cloud-based AI, there's a, there's a big gap that you have to make up. And one of the ways, like, one of the advantages, I suppose, of local AI just in general, all other things being equal, is, you know, the response is faster. I mean, it's running locally or whatever. Um, but that maybe for more complex things, this is what this— well, memory size and then, um, and then memory speed are what makes the, um, the complex queries kind of come back more quickly.

Richard Campbell [00:57:50]:
Yeah, eventually you just get yourself your own NVL72, right? Weighs a ton and a half, it's 8 feet tall, consumes 150 kilowatts of electricity, and is water-cooled.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:00]:
Yep, drive around in a truck.

Richard Campbell [00:58:02]:
Knock out that trillion-dollar model, no problem. No problem.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:06]:
Why is there a data center in your, uh, your parking lot or your driveway?

Richard Campbell [00:58:09]:
When you think Microsoft put 4,600 of those in one data center in Wisconsin, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:58:16]:
Wow.

Richard Campbell [00:58:17]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:18]:
Wow. I think I just figured out global warming. Um, yeah, geez. Oh well, anyway, okay, so there's that. And then I just— I don't want to talk about this at all, but I will just address the fact that Apple announced 117 different things in the past week, um, including, um—

Leo Laporte [00:58:36]:
You're an iPhone user, are you?

Paul Thurrott [00:58:38]:
Yeah, on and off. I go back and forth.

Leo Laporte [00:58:40]:
Um, will you get a new one?

Paul Thurrott [00:58:42]:
So that's one of the things I'm going to go back and forth on. So I, what I'm going to do, I'm using a Pixel right now. I'm actually going to trade.

Richard Campbell [00:58:50]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:50]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:58:51]:
Oh, that's right. I forgot you ordered the Pixel. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:53]:
Um, I am going to trade in the iPhone I have because the trade-in values are insane.

Leo Laporte [00:58:57]:
Yeah, Apple really needs you a lot.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:58]:
And Apple has, uh, kind of a unique thing among the— what I think of as the big 3 phone makers, even though Google's not that big— which is that you can trade in a Mac, a phone, a watch, um, what else? One more thing. I don't know, not speakers, but other thing, whatever. Oh, an iPad. And you could just get the trade-in value as an Apple gift card, which you can apply to any future purchase at any time. And you don't have to do it for a device. Like, if you trade in something to Google, you have to be buying not just a device, but that kind of device. You have to buy— if you're trading in a phone, you're getting a phone. You can't trade in a phone for a watch.

Richard Campbell [00:59:33]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:35]:
So that's actually very interesting because I don't know— I'm going to be away when the folding thing comes out, and I'm not sure if I want that or not. I might want the iPad Air 2 when it comes out in the spring. I don't know. Obviously, we don't know what's going to happen there. But I'm just going to trade it in and get the value, and then I'll decide when we get back from Mexico. You know, we'll see.

Leo Laporte [00:59:53]:
Oh, that's nice. So you don't have to think about it.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:55]:
Yeah, I'll read reviews and I'm not going to miss it. Like, I don't want to— I don't have to be on it the second it comes out. We're going to be away. I can't— there's nothing I can do about it.

Richard Campbell [01:00:01]:
So Duo is gorgeous. It's an impressive bit of kit.

Leo Laporte [01:00:04]:
So you remember, Paul, I bought the Microsoft Duo because I really liked that notion and I wanted more screen, but because it was a hinged dual-screen device, it just didn't— and the software didn't really sing.

Richard Campbell [01:00:18]:
And it was, you know, as we talked about, that's the thing you can count on with They're, they're not going to do that. Their software's not great.

Leo Laporte [01:00:24]:
No. And they've done it. They've done a— they've had to do a lot because there's no iPhone with that aspect ratio, anything close to it.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:31]:
That's right. Because no iPad either. You sort of see that and you think, well, this is an iPad Mini, so they already solved this problem. It's like, not exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:00:38]:
No.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:38]:
Um, you also—

Leo Laporte [01:00:39]:
The dock is on the right.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:40]:
It's weird. Well, yeah, they're accommodating this unique, um— And as a lefty, I'm pissed because you can't Apple has explained this, and what they've said is, we don't like left-handers, so screw those people.

Leo Laporte [01:00:54]:
Well, I think what they actually said is, isn't Leo Laporte a lefty?

Paul Thurrott [01:00:58]:
Yeah, yeah, okay, right, right. No, I think it's because of the book-like— right, they don't want it on the inside.

Leo Laporte [01:01:06]:
Yeah, I don't know about you, but I don't have any books with docks. But right, right, I'm not sure what they're talking about.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:14]:
I mean, when I was in school, if I read a book with my left hand, they would chop it off. So, you know, I'm just—

Leo Laporte [01:01:19]:
Yeah, no, I was lucky. The teacher didn't like it, but they let me use my left hand.

Richard Campbell [01:01:25]:
My whole house is left-handed. I think I might get one of these too.

Leo Laporte [01:01:29]:
I'm excited. I already decided. Lisa's getting the new—

Paul Thurrott [01:01:33]:
I'll read reviews and we'll see. Yeah, I thought I'm gonna get the purple one. Yeah, but I, I don't know. I don't feel like the Year over year, that's a big one. I mean, I've done it before, it's no big deal, but I will say my 9's starting to get a little bizarre.

Richard Campbell [01:01:46]:
It's been 2 years of flying, you know, 200,000+ miles a year, and you get a lot of memories in your phone, right?

Leo Laporte [01:01:52]:
That's why you want— see, I, to me, I don't use the— I hardly ever use the phone to call people, right? But I use it all the time to compute.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:01]:
Yeah, this is a— I'm sure many people have observed this, but the iPhone is not phone that takes pictures. It's a camera that also occasionally takes phone calls.

Leo Laporte [01:02:11]:
Well, and that's the sacrifice. The Duo's cameras are like the Air's camera, basically.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:16]:
To me, the bigger one is the, the Touch ID bit. Um, that's kind of a problem. Like, I—

Leo Laporte [01:02:21]:
Everybody says that. I love Touch ID. I hate Face ID.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:25]:
So I'll say I love Face ID. Um, in fact, I spent— I overspent on an iPad Pro, not solely to get Face ID, but because I just found the Maybe it's my face.

Leo Laporte [01:02:35]:
It doesn't recognize me. No, it's not.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:36]:
You know, part of it has to do with orientation. So I'm not— I am right-handed.

Leo Laporte [01:02:40]:
I'm not gay. I'm straight.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:41]:
No, I don't mean that.

Richard Campbell [01:02:43]:
I never use Face ID, but that's because of borders.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:47]:
It's just, it's just that as you rotate it, you have to get it right.

Leo Laporte [01:02:49]:
It's so natural just to put your finger on the thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:51]:
Yeah, if it's where it is, you know, I mean, if you're not rotating it, right?

Leo Laporte [01:02:56]:
Oh, I see. Yeah, but, you know— Well, that's a good question. Yeah, I guess if you—

Paul Thurrott [01:03:00]:
No, that's the thing. Yeah, so I think with the— I don't know where it is on the Duo, but whatever. I—

Leo Laporte [01:03:06]:
it—

Paul Thurrott [01:03:07]:
look, this is always—

Leo Laporte [01:03:07]:
it's on the right.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:08]:
Always— there's always stuff, right?

Leo Laporte [01:03:10]:
It's right here.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:12]:
So I guess it would always be on the right, right? Is that how that works?

Leo Laporte [01:03:15]:
Well, but you can use it in portrait mode, so it would then be on the top left or the bottom right. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:03:23]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:03:23]:
So that's— or no, I mean the bottom left.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:25]:
Right. But he would probably— most people would probably rotate it so that it was up at Yeah, I would essentially.

Leo Laporte [01:03:30]:
Well, and I do that with my iPad Mini, so yeah, I don't— I— well, you know what, that's why we have to, um, get one and see, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:03:40]:
So I'm gonna have time to see what people say about it. We'll see. I know the camera—

Richard Campbell [01:03:43]:
And see how it wears, right? Like, how fast does it take for that thing to get creased?

Leo Laporte [01:03:47]:
There are some things that are missing that I— of as affordances that I will miss. I use right now on the iPhone this Action Button to talk to my AI, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:03:59]:
But it doesn't have this.

Leo Laporte [01:04:00]:
It doesn't have an Action Button.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:01]:
Yeah, it has the— what is that— the camera control, which is— I hate. And the—

Leo Laporte [01:04:07]:
Does it still have— it still has the camera?

Paul Thurrott [01:04:08]:
I believe it has the camera one.

Leo Laporte [01:04:09]:
Because I do use that, but I'm not sure it should be a camera because it's— but if you have the watch, which of course I will, uh, it will unlock from the watch like your Mac does.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:19]:
So that's kind of like Face ID, which is not true of Touch ID-based iPads, interestingly, uh, right, which is a huge problem, right? Which is the other one, because I have— I, I actually, I'm trading in my Apple Watch too, but I had an Apple Watch for the past few years, and that thing not unlocking an iPad Air, which you spend like $1,000 on with the keyboard, it's like, are you serious? Like, that's an artificial limitation. Like, that's weird.

Richard Campbell [01:04:41]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:04:42]:
And the Action Button on the Ultra— the reason I'm getting an Ultra is purely because I want that Action Button so I can still talk to my AI through the watch.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:48]:
So I don't know, Is this an iPhone feature? I know it's a Pixel feature, but I think the iPhone has a feature where you can do like a back tap on the literal back of the device to trigger something.

Leo Laporte [01:04:56]:
Yeah, yeah, I think it does too, but I never—

Paul Thurrott [01:04:58]:
No, I never did either, but if you could, if that's on the Duo, you might be able to use it.

Leo Laporte [01:05:02]:
Oh, you could knock on the Duo.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:04]:
Maybe. If it supports that, I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:05:07]:
You know what, I'm gonna get it. I could take the arrows in the back and I'll be, I'll go over the hill first, and if it's too dangerous, you can hold back.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:14]:
I'm curious. I almost pulled the trigger on the iPod Air, iPhone Air last year, and it was just like one too many problems.

Leo Laporte [01:05:20]:
Yeah, the Air I don't think is—

Paul Thurrott [01:05:22]:
Mono speaker, one camera. I was like, I can't really do that.

Leo Laporte [01:05:25]:
This one has 4 speakers, so you can rotate it.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:27]:
Yeah, that's what you want. That's good. It's probably going to be good for that, for that kind of like media type stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:05:33]:
Anyway, I'm thinking of it as an AI, uh, tool, you know. Of course, everything to me now, right, right. When you're, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:42]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:05:43]:
And I am an AI hammer.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:44]:
When you're an AI, everything looks like a hallucination.

Leo Laporte [01:05:48]:
You know, there is a Windows angle on this, which is basically Apple has decided to throw itself on the recall blade. They are gonna do an always-on recording on the Apple Watch and then give you notes about your day. I think this is the greatest thing ever, and my suspicion is they're gonna get the same reaction that Microsoft got with Recall.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:14]:
Well, if they do, it's going to be because that audience is kind of sensitive to the privacy stuff. But I would just— I would also say, like, Apple, whatever pros and cons you think they have, they've—

Richard Campbell [01:06:25]:
they're pretty serious. LG be offering that service from all accounts.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:28]:
I don't trust LG at all, but like, no.

Leo Laporte [01:06:31]:
And they take great steps. They're— for instance, they only record 15 seconds at a time. It's a ring buffer, so you can only do— you can do a rewind By pressing this is honestly—

Paul Thurrott [01:06:40]:
this is the limitation. I mean, this is honestly more of a con than a pro. Like, Apple is so pro-privacy that they are going to kind of undermine this thing a little bit, just as Microsoft ended up doing with Recall, right? So, well, I, I don't know. I, it's, it's weird to me that Microsoft thought Recall was going to be the thing that sold those computers. Like, I, I don't— I never had the problem with it that all these privacy goons have. Like, I, I, most of that stuff was just made up and I don't understand it, but the— and I sort of agree that there are some people who maybe they think visually or something. And I was looking at a Green Jacket the other day, like they— that tool, that kind of thing could help them a lot. But I, having used it a bunch of times, I'm like, I have no use for this whatsoever.

Leo Laporte [01:07:22]:
My attitude was, if it's not on every single device I use, it's not as useful.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:25]:
And that was the very first thing I asked the guy who told me he invented this, which was, yeah, I'm like, I have some questions. He's He's like, here we go. I'm like, no, no, I'm not asking the thing you think I'm gonna ask. My question is, when can I get this on every device so that it syncs and blah? And he's like, yes, we are looking at that, obviously.

Leo Laporte [01:07:43]:
Yeah, which I think the privacy advocates killed that. So I am thrilled by the idea that, because remember I was wearing that Bee thing and I have all those bees. I love, and I think it's doing it in a sensible way. It's not recording it. There's no transcript. It's not identifying voices, it's just giving you notes. At the end of the day, you have this like notepad. So with little notes about things that happened today, I love that idea.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:09]:
This is the second week in a row you've completely preempted my back of the book thing with like the next step, which no, no, it's, it's actually kind of amazing. And it, and it shows how like you're literally kind of on the edge of this stuff. Like it's really interesting. Like there is a, um, uh, I'll, for Microsoft guys, I'll draw the comparison back to Outlook, right? Where you would open this thing up and it would have like My Day or whatever it was called. And literally, you know, this was not AI, but it was like, we have your email, we have your calendar, we have your to-dos.

Leo Laporte [01:08:36]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:36]:
So we have this, we can present you with this picture of your day. And this was like your dashboard for the day. And there is this, um, uh, it, I don't, I don't even think it's low-hanging fruit, by which I mean, I don't think that it's easy. I just think that it is such an obvious thing that many people would benefit from, which is like, look, We have access to whatever sources you have, email, calendar, whatever those things are, and we can present you with your day. Like, I, I, I— there, this is the modern version.

Leo Laporte [01:09:02]:
There's a difference because this is— that's what's coming up. This is what happened. This is the rearview mirror of that, which I think is very interesting.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:11]:
What I like about the Apple Watch approach, so to speak, is that the battery life will be like 15 minutes. But the other thing I like is that, um—

Leo Laporte [01:09:18]:
I am worried about that.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:19]:
Well, it's, it's Um, I don't know, holistic, is that the right term? Like it's not tied to, uh, you're using Apple's Memo app necessarily, or maybe it is.

Leo Laporte [01:09:28]:
I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:29]:
I hope it isn't. But like ideally if you're out in the world with it, whether it's a pin or whatever the thing is that's recording things so you can later be like, oh, here's that guy's name, or here, you know, or here's what you were talking about that meeting. You know, that should just work with everything. Like if you're wearing the thing, if it's on you, it should. You know, you should be able to just use that and it should work with anything.

Leo Laporte [01:09:49]:
Well, I wear my watch all the time, so it'll— right, it's going to get everything.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:53]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:09:54]:
Unless people say, and that's my concern, uh-oh, you're wearing a watch, take it off. You know, like every— everywhere I go is a SCIF now, right?

Richard Campbell [01:10:03]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:04]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:10:05]:
Hand it over.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:05]:
You gotta go into a room where like they block all the cell signals and, you know, it's going to be like a hyperbaric chamber, you know. Um, yeah, I mean, that's gonna— that will be a thing. And, you know, the glasses aren't gonna help. I mean, you know, people are gonna react this way. For people who like Apple Watch or want an Apple Watch or whatever, I mean, obviously you don't have to use this thing, so it's— you can leave it off, it's fine. It's like, um, but I think the people who want to use this are gonna—

Leo Laporte [01:10:30]:
I, I'm excited.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:32]:
To me, it sounds very useful.

Leo Laporte [01:10:33]:
Good. I hope for— I hope, I hope Apple doesn't, uh, I'm chicken out because I have a— because there are other issues like that where I'm in a two-party state where you're supposed to ask permission if you, uh, record somebody. Is this recording?

Paul Thurrott [01:10:48]:
I don't even know what to say to that. If you're out in the world and you take a photo on a street, on a city street, yeah, you're in the public.

Leo Laporte [01:10:55]:
I agree.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:55]:
And someone could walk up and say, excuse me, I don't want to be in your stupid photo, could you delete that? And you can respond accordingly. But the truth is they can't legally do anything about it.

Richard Campbell [01:11:04]:
They have no—

Paul Thurrott [01:11:05]:
they have no right. You're out in the public. If you don't want to be photographed, do not be outside. They can beat the crap out of Yep.

Richard Campbell [01:11:10]:
No, this, this whole list of repercussions. That's a crime.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:13]:
That's illegal. But I'm just saying from a pure legality standpoint, whatever, right? Like, when I, um, I, I don't do that.

Leo Laporte [01:11:19]:
Try arguing that, you know, I'm in the right here. I, you're, we're in public. I have the right to record you at all times.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:24]:
So I have, I've made this, I made this argument one time. We were in a, we were in a bar in, uh, Pittsburgh many years ago. My daughter was looking to go to college there and there was no one there. It was the middle of the day. So we sat at the bar and she, the guy came up and said, how old is she? And I said, you know, 19 or whatever age she was, you can't sit at the bar, you have to be 21. And I said, actually, that's not true. The Pennsylvania state law is you can sit at the bar with adults if you're— you just can't serve them alcohol. And he goes, I'm not saying you're right and I'm not saying you're wrong, but what I am saying is this is my business and if I get in trouble, I'm in trouble, not you.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:51]:
So you gotta sit at the table. I'm like, you know what?

Leo Laporte [01:11:53]:
There you go. That's fair.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:54]:
That was the right response.

Richard Campbell [01:11:56]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:56]:
And so maybe it's like that. And that's the problem. 'Cause if you're in a, like, look, we've all been in meetings where I just do this with OneNote, like 15 years ago, you could record a Microsoft press conference that you were at physically or something. No one really cared about that. You might have a phone call on Zoom or whatever these days where you say, hey, I want to record this, not because I'm going to publish it, but for my own— because I'm taking notes and I want it to be accurate. You know what you said? I'm going to let you look at it afterwards. And that's probably fine. But it's like anything else.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:27]:
Every once in a while you run into one person who says, actually, I don't want that. And then what are you going to do? You're like, okay, well, so, all right. But yeah, we're going to have to navigate this stuff. It's, it's, I feel like it's, there's like the, the legal aspect, which is going to have to catch up. But there's, I think there's just the societal, are we going to be good people to each other kind of aspect too, right?

Richard Campbell [01:12:49]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:12:49]:
I mean, it's not my intent to—

Paul Thurrott [01:12:51]:
Yeah. I'm not making a funny video of your voice, you know, like, or whatever.

Leo Laporte [01:12:55]:
Like I said, I haven't Right here on my watch.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:58]:
And then you like click, you click. No, you didn't. Here it is. And you're like, yeah, that's, that's the thing.

Leo Laporte [01:13:03]:
I'm not gonna do that.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:04]:
If you've ever seen the movie Amélie, they got one of the guys in the bar is recording the woman and he's like, oh, he's just like talking to his little recorder and everything. She says something stupid, he records it and then he plays it back at the inopportune moment. You know, like, um, I could, I could picture harassing people like that actually.

Leo Laporte [01:13:19]:
But, um, that's what this doesn't You can't play it back, but you, you'll have— I don't know what it's going to be like. It's going to be, uh, interesting. I think Apple's trying.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:28]:
I, I think they're going to try to get it right. And I feel like they will get it right. I don't mean 1.0, maybe we'll see, but I look, whether it's for professional purposes, like I've been saying, note-taking in a meeting, whatever, which is fairly obvious, or just the social situation. Like I am really bad at remembering names, right? Having a thing that remember that. And because I—

Leo Laporte [01:13:49]:
and I'll do this within them, I'll do it within a minute.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:52]:
Hey, I'm Bob. I'm Bill. I'm like, great. I've already forgotten all their names by the time it's over. And then I look at my wife and I'm like, what was that guy saying? And she's like, I didn't even hear him. And you're like, okay, great.

Leo Laporte [01:14:00]:
I'm wondering if you can like say, oh, hi Bob, dentist from Peoria wearing a brown corduroy suit. Uh, it's nice to meet you. Like, can you, can you add stuff into the, into the message.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:18]:
It's like those terrible, uh, messages you get where it's like the, that your name is a different voice.

Richard Campbell [01:14:22]:
Corporate surveillance.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:24]:
Yeah. Like you walk up and you're like, hi.

Leo Laporte [01:14:26]:
And it goes, Bob.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:27]:
And then you're like, it's nice to see you again since that last time last April where I saw you. And you're like, okay. Like, uh, sorry about that.

Leo Laporte [01:14:35]:
Well, you know, I mean, honestly, Apple's thinking ahead to the next generation AirPods, which will have—

Paul Thurrott [01:14:40]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [01:14:41]:
Which will be this.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:41]:
Camera, not camera. Exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:14:42]:
It'll be like, it won't take pictures, but so it's very much the same idea. And I think you combine those 2 and now you have some sort of interesting privacy-forward recording of your day in a weird way.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:56]:
We're freaking out about this now because you can see these things, but eventually Apple and others, this will be an implant. You won't even know it's there.

Leo Laporte [01:15:02]:
Just get used to it.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:03]:
It's going to be happening. There's nothing you can do about it.

Richard Campbell [01:15:05]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:06]:
Or maybe there'll be a—

Leo Laporte [01:15:08]:
Everybody on MacBreak Weekly said, no, it's terrible. It's horrible.

Richard Campbell [01:15:13]:
See, I don't—

Leo Laporte [01:15:13]:
I thought it was great.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:14]:
If Google had announced it, I could see them saying that.

Leo Laporte [01:15:17]:
Or Meta, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:15:19]:
Or any of these terrible companies. Like, I just feel like if Apple has problems— I'm not— don't get me wrong, but I mean, I feel like this is the type of thing they actually do take seriously. So I don't know, I feel like they're going to get it there. We'll see.

Leo Laporte [01:15:31]:
We shall see. Uh, you're watching, uh, the fabulous Apple Talk Weekly.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:40]:
control what happened this week.

Leo Laporte [01:15:42]:
It's the news, man. It's just the news.

Richard Campbell [01:15:44]:
It's just the news.

Leo Laporte [01:15:46]:
As long— I mean, as long as we're talking AI, let's— have you been following what's been going on? I mean, Lisa said— she's texting me 2 days ago, she said, turn on CNN. And I thought, oh my God, World War III has broken out. And it was Dario Amodei being interviewed by Anderson Cooper. And then he followed up by this guy, Jackson Coxon or whatever his name is who quit Anthropic because I can't work because there's going to be 10% of the world's gonna die. And, uh, I, I couldn't watch it. My blood pressure was—

Paul Thurrott [01:16:23]:
We, we were— I think we were, we were at ThreatLocker in August and the Hugging Face thing had seemingly just happened a week ago.

Leo Laporte [01:16:33]:
Yeah, it did. Well, that was the big first presentation Yeah, and there was a presentation there.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:36]:
So after that show, I watched a couple of videos about this, and the conclusion was— I mean, I don't know how anyone could really know from outside the company, but the conclusion was pretty obviously that the AI was not acting autonomously or against anyone's wishes. It was following instructions.

Leo Laporte [01:16:58]:
In fact, the more we've learned, the more we know that OpenAI prodded it again and again, said they took down the walls. They had a Python loop that kept saying, now keep doing it, keep doing it, keep doing it, keep doing it. They pressed it into doing this.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:16]:
And then they're like, see? See what it did?

Leo Laporte [01:17:18]:
It's like anyone who's used AI for any length of time knows that the most common reaction from your AI is to stop.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:25]:
So I read the OpenAI report about this incident came out In the past week or two, I don't remember. And I read this.

Leo Laporte [01:17:34]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:34]:
And I gotta tell you, you don't have to get too far into it. Like 2 paragraphs in, you're like, no, you did this on purpose. You suck. And it literally says we lowered the safeguards. You're like, well, then we're not talking anymore because you're describing a thing that did not happen. You just admitted that you lowered the safeguards. So it didn't break out of the safeguards you already had in place. You lowered them.

Leo Laporte [01:17:55]:
I think frankly they're liable I did. They created— it's malware.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:59]:
Yes, I do too.

Richard Campbell [01:18:01]:
There's also this whole angle on the Artifactory evaluation harness having problems as well. And both the Hugging Face incident and there was another one that—

Leo Laporte [01:18:10]:
There were 2 zero days in Artifactory that it found.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:13]:
So my issue with this is at a technical level, I don't know enough about this technology, right? I don't know enough to speak definitively here. But I've been watching this stuff over the, you know, look, I, everyone knows I've been talking about overspending on AI for months and months and months, you know, years maybe. And then there's this, and I, and it's hard for me not to view these things in the same light, meaning that they're related, meaning that they're, they're selling their AI based on how dangerous it is because how dangerous it is, is how powerful it is. And I feel like as the, like that, like trillions of dollars of investment, uh, that has occurred in this industry over the past couple of years and will go into the next couple of years, I think is finally starting to dry up. And it's like, all right, we've milked big tech for all the many trillions they have. What else is left? And it's like governments and military, baby.

Richard Campbell [01:19:14]:
Sure. And, um, but also they're trying to make a profit now to try and stay in business. And as they raise the rates, people go to the open source and free products that are out there.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:25]:
Yep, you go to the good enough things.

Richard Campbell [01:19:27]:
So they want protection, and kicking up a fuss about, uh, danger to get the government involved is a great way to get the protectionism you're going to want.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:36]:
I have never— like, imagine Bill Gates coming out in the mid-1990s and saying, hey, listen, We were going to release NT. We were going to replace Windows 9x with it. But you know what? It's too powerful. It's too safe. We're not doing it. We're going to slow down. It's just not— it's, you know, it's, it's, it's insane. It's an insane approach to marketing, but these companies are insane.

Richard Campbell [01:19:58]:
When you're desperate.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:00]:
So I watched this guy on, uh, what's his name? Dario, um, um, yeah, okay, weirdo, but He was on like one of the—

Leo Laporte [01:20:08]:
He does kind of come across a little—

Paul Thurrott [01:20:09]:
Yeah, he's the guy I would have pantsed this guy in junior high constantly. And, but he, he was— I think the thing I watched was like CBS This Morning. And, um, he, he always said—

Leo Laporte [01:20:21]:
He's everywhere, man.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:22]:
Yeah, of course. And, and it's like, it's a, it's a big push. But he, but he finally said the thing that kind of set me off where I was like, I have to, I have to address this because this is the— this is how he started off. Um, I've always believed AI is powerful technology. Okay, so it comes with serious risks and serious benefits. I'm like, yep, just like NT did. Wait, what?

Leo Laporte [01:20:41]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:42]:
Um, I've always believed that the benefits outweigh the risk. Okay, fair enough. Um, then he says— this is the thing he said— this, this, this really pissed me off. He goes, looking at the— like, he's trying to look at the positive sides. I really believe that this technology could cure diseases that have plagued humanity. For millennia. I'm like, yeah, how come you haven't done that?

Leo Laporte [01:21:04]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:04]:
So you've been selling stuff that makes, uh, rabbit pictures of your neighbor or sound effects. And I can, uh, coding is very big. You, you've done that a million times. You, every one of, every model you ever put out is awesome for coding.

Leo Laporte [01:21:19]:
It really is actually.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:20]:
But if you, it is, no, but then that's fine. But I'm just saying, if you want to benefit humanity, broadly speaking, which by the way is in the charter of all these companies, right? Uh, here's an idea. Why don't you take steps to cure diseases? You know, fix cancer, maybe, um, you know, start small, go with one of the side cancers.

Leo Laporte [01:21:37]:
Because that's a hard thing to do.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:39]:
It is a hard thing to do.

Richard Campbell [01:21:40]:
Well, there is DeepMind AlphaFold, right? Like, there is.

Leo Laporte [01:21:43]:
That's right.

Richard Campbell [01:21:44]:
Demis Hassabis, what they've done with the Atlas now, where they basically published all of the protein folds, like, they are making new drugs. And, you know, like, right, but there's real credibility to this.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:54]:
So The Anthropic thing is literally the proteins. That thing was the only thing he could point to.

Richard Campbell [01:22:02]:
They published that. That's AlphaFold. That's DeepMind.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:04]:
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Anthropic has a first step toward this as well.

Leo Laporte [01:22:08]:
Yeah. They're all— all of them are doing it.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:10]:
They released it a week ago. Okay, great. So I'm trying, I'm like, I'm sorry. It's like, and I'm gonna paraphrase what I wrote cuz this was like a rant, but it was like, so you've released an uncountable number of updates to that Decoding, text, image generation, whatever else. You're a major contributor to the $1+ trillion circle jerk of monopoly money we're all spending back and forth on infrastructure nobody wants in their state, let alone their backyards. You've expended all the goodwill that mankind could possibly summon for these efforts. You fooled Wall Street into supporting the unsustainable. And only now, 3 years into this, are you taking the first step toward one AI model that has, has a basic understanding of protein binding.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:47]:
I'm like, excuse me. And, and it will be used to make a drug. Here's an idea. End cancer. Like, like, and by the way, I don't mean end it on Thursday. I mean, talk about it incessantly. Like you talk about image generation and code generation and AI agents and like, talk about it. At least pretend you're doing it.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:09]:
Like they have never really once broadcasted anything about this. They have nothing to show us. And it's like, could you solve— could you give us a miracle? Give us— everyone in the world hates AI data centers. AI negativity is at an all-time high. No one can stand these robotic-like idiots that run these companies. We're all tired of it. Give us a miracle. Give us something we can all be like, you know what? Okay, now I'm seeing the need for the data center thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:37]:
Because even the national security angle, where you're like, you know, if we don't do it, the Chinese are going to do it. I think most Americans would be like, let them do it. Let them destroy their environment to have these data centers everywhere. We'll still have access to it. Who cares? But solve the problems, you know, the real problems. And I'm just kind of confused by this. Like, to me, this is— this would be the PR campaign that would make sense for people, right? For the audience, for the— the citizens of the United States or whatever country we're talking about. I mean, you know, he talks about like détente or in the nuclear age, you know, the Soviet Union, the United States, like 10,000 missiles pointed at each other.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:19]:
I looked it up, by the way, we have fewer missiles, but they're way more powerful and they're still pointed at each other. So we didn't really solve that problem.

Richard Campbell [01:24:26]:
But— You stood down a bit.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:28]:
Yeah. I mean, it's like, okay, but—

Leo Laporte [01:24:31]:
Doesn't take that many. Let's be, let's be honest.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:33]:
No. No. And look, I do agree. Look, the national security angle is an awesome point, and it's going to help sell this stuff to the governments for sure. The United States government does not want to play second fiddle to China, and they certainly don't want China developing biologic weapons they could use against us. We're over here going, oh, we have safe AI, so we don't even know how to— look, I get it. This is the nuclear argument. You know, they have 10 missiles, we have to have 10 missiles.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:57]:
Like, this is—

Leo Laporte [01:24:58]:
That's what Trump said. You know, Trump said, we gotta be number one in AI, so we're not gonna slow down.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:03]:
You said that way more eloquently than he said it, but yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:25:06]:
Yeah, I think he threatened jail time, but okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:11]:
Whatever that idiot. But look, I just don't, you know, I don't understand this.

Leo Laporte [01:25:21]:
I feel like you do that the threat of ending humanity is overblown.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:29]:
It's not a— that's not— from a PR standpoint, that's not a winner.

Leo Laporte [01:25:32]:
Yeah. And I don't know why they keep saying it. I'm hearing a lot of theories. I don't know. And the other thing, and I don't think we know what's going on inside. I mean, they're presumably at all of these frontier companies looking at models that are far beyond what we're seeing.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:48]:
Sure. So maybe it is possible that inside Why don't you make us resistant to nuclear radiation? You know?

Leo Laporte [01:25:56]:
Well, that's a hard thing to do, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:25:58]:
It sure is, but start working on it.

Leo Laporte [01:25:59]:
It's a lot easier to turn your neighbors into rabbits.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:02]:
Local AI is not going to be able to solve this problem tomorrow. I get that.

Leo Laporte [01:26:05]:
No.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:06]:
But you guys, you know, you're looking at— you're getting all this money. I mean, use it for something that makes sense, not the rabbit neighbor thing I talked about. Like, like, you know, benefit mankind.

Leo Laporte [01:26:17]:
I'm sure they want to do that. But that's not an easy thing to do. I'm not really sure what you're asking. I'm not curing cancer.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:23]:
By the way, there— this is— we don't have time for this whole discussion, but there is a— there's a whole weird rationalism, semi-religious nature.

Leo Laporte [01:26:31]:
Oh, it's the effective altruism.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:33]:
Oh my God, the whole nonsense of we are the gods in the white lab coats bringing up this intelligence. Get over yourself. Yeah, this is like the guy who invented spell checking was like, I've done it. I will control mankind. You know, are you kidding me? Like, it's insanity.

Leo Laporte [01:26:50]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:26:51]:
Well, then you throw in that layer where they're confused that everybody's upset at them. Like, why? What would you be upset about? We're only talking about—

Leo Laporte [01:26:58]:
It's very confusing. They got an IPO on the one hand. They're telling investors we're worth trillions of dollars.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:05]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:27:07]:
And then like, some ways saying we have such great AI that they could kill us all is It's good marketing to some degree. It's not the best marketing. I saw one theory that they have to say that because that's what their top engineers are saying. They're saying, you've got to, we've got to do something about this. And so they have to respond, even though, I mean, it does, it's counterintuitive. It doesn't seem like the best way. I don't, I don't, it's kind of baffling.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:34]:
I love the whole, I love the notion that it's incredibly powerful technology. Hence, it is dangerous.

Leo Laporte [01:27:42]:
I mean, a computer is dangerous. Let's face it. I mean, what we have invented is dangerous in the wrong hands.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:48]:
Yeah, sometimes I lick my finger, stick it in the slot in the computer, electrocute myself. That thing could be dangerous. I get it.

Leo Laporte [01:27:54]:
Well, but Russians are using autonomous drones.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:57]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [01:27:57]:
Drones, you know, just, uh, I think this might be the first time, a couple of weeks ago, a Russian drone which was trained, it had an NVIDIA chip in it, That's right. It was trained with images of gas tanks, was flown autonomously to find and destroy gas tanks.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:14]:
And then they drew like a watercolor picture of the gas tank when it started and it was like, here you go.

Leo Laporte [01:28:17]:
By accident, it killed a few civilians.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:19]:
No, of course.

Leo Laporte [01:28:20]:
And I think this is the first example of an autonomous weapon killing civilians.

Richard Campbell [01:28:25]:
The UN had reports during the Libyan conflict of the Bayraktar autonomous drones. Like, it's enough that the UN has already legislated against it. Like 5 years ago. It's, it's clearly well before the LLMs. Yeah, the tech's been around for a while.

Leo Laporte [01:28:39]:
Yeah. Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:40]:
If you go back like 30 years, uh, the Iraq, uh, wars that we had, I guess the first one, um, they have these drones, right, that are blowing things up, but they're, they're flown by people. People who are in California.

Leo Laporte [01:28:54]:
Not autonomous UAVs.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:55]:
Those people all have mental problems now because of what they did, right? And so you can make this case, like, if we can get the science here where this could be autonomous, it does make sense. And then there's always that person in the car, well, we have to have the final sign-off be a human being. Like, yeah, yeah, no, we get that.

Richard Campbell [01:29:10]:
But—

Leo Laporte [01:29:10]:
I don't think the Russians care, though.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:12]:
No, I don't think the Russians care at all. And that's the argument.

Richard Campbell [01:29:16]:
That's the national— They're assholes.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:17]:
Yeah. That's the security, national security argument. Like, you know, we can be cute about this, but the Russians are going to do it. The Chinese are going to do it. we have to have some response. Like, we have to be there. And I, yes. And by the way, there's also a great case to be made that, um, you know, the US government or whatever government could be funding these AIs for those purposes, right? Like, we're going to develop these systems that are hopefully largely for defense purposes or whatever it is.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:41]:
But, um, but again, why hand them out to the public? Right. You're selling $20 a month subscriptions to idiots who are making rabbits out of their neighbors, right? I mean, like, like maybe, This is a good conversation.

Leo Laporte [01:29:54]:
This is the conversation we as a country and the world need to have.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:59]:
I don't know what the answer is. I know, and I don't either.

Leo Laporte [01:30:02]:
But I know the answer is not to just throw fear into the mix.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:06]:
Right. No, and we can't— we're not banning it. We can't slow it down. That doesn't actually make a lot of sense. Although, you know, again, we should have the discussion, whatever that means. I'm trying to Again, like, I'm just— you have to put it in the perspective of history. Just again, like Bill Gates, you know, went 1996 NT. They're like, listen, we could release NT 4 right now.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:26]:
It's awesome. We're not gonna do it. We're slowing down. Our shareholders are gonna love this. Um, you know, like you as an AI, uh, well, they, they don't have, I guess, shareholders. Well, I get they must have some semblance of shareholders.

Leo Laporte [01:30:39]:
They have investors. They sure as hell do.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:41]:
And I can assure you that these companies do not want to hear the these people, these organizations don't want to hear the term slowdown.

Leo Laporte [01:30:46]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:48]:
They want you to get the payoff. And I think the payoff for a while has come in the form of this big tech circle jerk thing. But I think they see the future of this. The only entities on our planet that have more money and more infinite money than big tech are governments. And you can make a really good case for national security. And that's great. But that's like, HoloLens made sense, I guess, for a little while for the Army, but it never made sense for people. There are use cases for AI for, you know, benefit everybody or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:19]:
But I think, you know, from the perspective of any country, yes, national defense, awesome. But also just the health stuff, right? Also awesome, right? I mean, like the central point of any government to protect the citizens, right? Has to include that aspect of it. He says, we live in a country with no healthcare.

Leo Laporte [01:31:38]:
There's nothing wrong with toilet float arms. And if you want to design those, God bless you.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:44]:
Too soon, Leo.

Richard Campbell [01:31:44]:
Too soon.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:45]:
Still a raw wound. It's okay. I'm used to being belittled by my wife.

Leo Laporte [01:31:53]:
Honey, I left it on the dining room table for 6 months. I finally had to do something about it.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:00]:
I told her that My central strategy is procrastination.

Leo Laporte [01:32:04]:
Yes, me too.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:05]:
It never doesn't work.

Leo Laporte [01:32:07]:
Lisa and I have different time clocks. And so she'll say, take out the trash and I will do it eventually.

Richard Campbell [01:32:14]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:32:16]:
But she wants me to do it right away. You see, we have a little conflict there.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:22]:
You know, it's— and this is the same—

Richard Campbell [01:32:23]:
Timing is everything.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:24]:
Our wives have the same PR problem as AI when you think about it. Which is not going to destroy the world.

Leo Laporte [01:32:31]:
P-doom in this case is Paul's doom. That's what you're saying.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:34]:
We flew to Berlin on a Monday. On Sunday, my wife announces to the family, meaning me, that we're going to clean this place. And I'm like, yeah, that's not how I'm spending my day. And she's like, well, the bathroom's disgusting. The kitchen's gross. We got this over here and blah, blah. I'm like, fantastic. Thank you for telling me 12 seconds before we left.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:51]:
This is not an emergency. This can wait till we get back. It can happen over time. I feel like you should have told me this a couple of days ago. It's astonishing we're still married. And so it did not go— this conversation did not go well.

Leo Laporte [01:33:04]:
As any husband who's been around knows, the best answer to that is, yes, dear.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:08]:
And then I was cleaning the toilet. Exactly. And then—

Richard Campbell [01:33:11]:
I know how this is going to go. There's only one way. Just say yes, dear.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:15]:
And then, yeah, in the movie version it says 2 minutes later, and I'm like scrubbing the toilet bowl.

Leo Laporte [01:33:19]:
No, here's your toothbrush. Get to work.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:23]:
Here's your hands, bitch. Um, yep.

Leo Laporte [01:33:26]:
Anyway, so Bill Gates is going to donate a billion dollars. Thank you, Bill.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:30]:
Yeah, so Bill Gates comes out a week ago freaking out about AI, and now he's like, you know what, I have an idea. A little follow-up to that last thought. I think, how about if we pay for it? It's like, wait, what? But look, it's the Gates Foundation. They're going to spend at least a billion dollars trying to ease the very obvious economic imbalance here, which is—

Leo Laporte [01:33:50]:
So where's the money going?

Paul Thurrott [01:33:52]:
Poor people, basically, right? Or to poor countries. I mean, seriously, like, I mean, you know, the idea here is that rich countries are going to have, you know, access to AI. But if you live in Africa or whatever third world country, you know, Mexico even, I suppose, or a lot of Latin America, Southeast Asia, wherever it is. Um, you know, this is— it's the same.

Leo Laporte [01:34:15]:
By the way, this is hysterical. So what do I see? I go to tharot.com for this story, right? And it says toilet scrubbing is over.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:24]:
Okay, that's bizarre.

Leo Laporte [01:34:26]:
Are they listening? They're listening to us.

Richard Campbell [01:34:29]:
They'd be listening.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:30]:
That's incredible.

Leo Laporte [01:34:31]:
They're listening. Your own NAMM website, Paul.

Richard Campbell [01:34:35]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:36]:
I'm glad someone's listening, you know?

Leo Laporte [01:34:38]:
Yes, it's good somebody's listening.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:41]:
I mean, it's too bad it's AI, but whatever, it's okay.

Leo Laporte [01:34:44]:
So I think this is good for Bill because this is something that is not, I think, widely considered. We say, oh yeah, $200 a month for your, you know, your Claude Max subscription, great deal. That's a monthly income for people in many countries.

Richard Campbell [01:35:01]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:02]:
Listen, the right way to do this is say, look, we're gonna fund this, we're gonna make sure that the poorest nations in the world come along with the rest of us, because if we don't, I swear to God, I'm gonna make a Sarah McLachlan ad with the stupid little dogs or whatever, and you will be suffering.

Richard Campbell [01:35:15]:
In the arms of the angel.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:16]:
Make it happen. Make it happen. As I'm like scrubbing on my arm with like a non-sharp object because it's all I have.

Leo Laporte [01:35:26]:
No, I mean, if you think, if it is I think one thing we can all agree, AI is a force multiplier. It lets somebody— it's a lever like the computer is. And the people who have access to this have an advantage. The people who don't are disadvantaged. And I think that that's—

Paul Thurrott [01:35:44]:
Yeah. And I think AI is hard. This is a simplistic example, but that's my brain. Like when the iPad came out, I remember being very critical of it because I had had by that point, several years of experience with tablet PCs and how those things had progressed over time and they had gotten better or whatever. But, uh, and then, yeah. And then this thing comes out, it looks like a kid's toy and, uh, it's basically an iPod Touch, but bigger. And I, you know, so you're critical of it. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:12]:
And then of course it does, it does pretty well. I don't know if you noticed it's still around, but, um, and tablet PCs really kind of aren't, although all PCs, I guess, have these capabilities if you want them to have that, whatever.

Leo Laporte [01:36:21]:
But.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:22]:
But sometimes your experience colors— well, your experience should always feed your view. It does. It feeds your view of the world. Your experience is kind of what one of the things that makes you who you are. But I guess in that one case, and I don't mean to say it's the only case, but in that case, certainly it was maybe, um, not beneficial for me to have had that experience. Right. Um, and AI is like that, but for everyone, because we've all used computers, we've all used phones, we all have tablets, we have all these devices, everything in our home is Electronic to some degree, digital, whatever. And you would think, well, this is, this, it's technology.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:57]:
I get it. It's just software. I understand it. And it's like, yeah, you kind of don't, you know, there, I, even though at some level you could make all these comparisons to other software things or other technology products, whatever it is, there isn't, comparing it is hard because it's, it's more Star Trek than it is, you know. Zoom or whatever.

Richard Campbell [01:37:20]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:20]:
Um, if that makes sense. I don't know. It's a hard one. It's a, this is a complex topic. I, and I hope I, if whatever I said, whatever I've read, if I rubbed anyone the wrong way or if you agree with me entirely, um, I don't have the answers. I, uh, this is, I'm, I'm asking questions.

Leo Laporte [01:37:37]:
I don't either. And I'm a big AI fan and it's still a puzzle.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:42]:
Yeah. I, I just don't know what the right answer is. Right. I, look, I, uh, I'm going to talk about one positive aspect to this AI stuff in the back of the book. I, I mentioned some months ago this notion of when I grew up, there were the first computers were coming out. It was very exciting. Like things move very quickly, kind of like now. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:00]:
And it was always getting better, better, better. And all I could think, like the notion that I could, as a person, own a computer and have this in my bedroom and as a kid, it was super exciting. And I—

Leo Laporte [01:38:10]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:10]:
Yeah, I think about it all the time. In fact, I think about it too much. But the, but it was a period of time I was young, but also I was like, what can I make with this? What can I make with this? Right. And I think there is some aspect, um, uh, to, uh, of this to AI, which I think is, is one of the exciting things. It's, it's, it's too bad because it gets lost in all the bad news, right? Because there is bad news too. Um, But, um, I, I think it's important to try to have that perspective that there's good and bad and it's not all bad. Uh, and some of the good stuff is kind of fun, like the turning your neighbors into rabbits. Um, you know, I don't like neighbors.

Leo Laporte [01:38:53]:
Well, yeah. And actually kind of like the computer when I first got one, it was like, well, what do I do with it? Right. I'll balance my checkbook, write a BASIC program.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:02]:
The first computer I had, Well, real computer was like a Commodore 64. And I did it for some months. I didn't have a way to save anything, right?

Leo Laporte [01:39:10]:
I didn't have cassette tape to type stuff in.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:12]:
So I used to read— I, I, what I got was, it was like a fire sale at Toys R Us, like a $29 plotter printer thing. And I, I would print out the programs I wrote on this little, like a register tape essentially, and then type them back in the next day.

Richard Campbell [01:39:28]:
You know, that's one form of storage.

Leo Laporte [01:39:31]:
Kids, you don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:32]:
Yeah, it's not super efficient. And then I walked a mile through the snow, you know, you know the deal.

Richard Campbell [01:39:36]:
Both ways, uphill both ways. Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:39:38]:
You don't know. We had it hard back in the day.

Richard Campbell [01:39:41]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:39:42]:
You and your—

Richard Campbell [01:39:42]:
And then your father slashed you in 2 with a butter knife.

Leo Laporte [01:39:48]:
Is that the Canadian version of that anecdote?

Paul Thurrott [01:39:50]:
I've never heard that.

Richard Campbell [01:39:51]:
It's all the Monty Pythons.

Leo Laporte [01:39:53]:
Oh, okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:54]:
I never heard that one.

Leo Laporte [01:39:59]:
Uh, what else is going on in the world?

Paul Thurrott [01:40:01]:
What else is going on? All right, so a couple of actually more specific things. So this just happened before the show started, but Microsoft has a product called Copilot Studio, which as of— this was one of the things, this would have been back, I guess, right after Build this year was a little bit later than usual, like it was in June, I think. And then they had announced a bunch of things around, um, like AI agents and creating apps and all this. And I believe at that time, I think it was, maybe I'm mixing things up, I could be wrong, but Copilot Studio is a way to make things with Copilot. One of those things is like apps, but now they've expanded it to actual apps you can roll out into a, like a managed environment, which is kind of interesting. And Copilot Work, which is the Microsoft 365 service, I guess we'll call it, also has this same thing. So there's a new app skill that applies to, it's a Copilot skill, so it works in both places. and they're going to let people build apps and then put them into a company-wide registry, which IT can manage and control the access and accessibility of or so forth.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:05]:
I guess those are the same word. Or just manage them in general and make sure that they work correctly and they can let other people in their environments use them perhaps. And so, I mean, that's kind of interesting. Okay. Yeah, I think I was mixing this up with the Google tool because Google has a Google, I think it's Google App Studio or—

Leo Laporte [01:41:23]:
Uh, Anti-Gravity, are you thinking of?

Paul Thurrott [01:41:25]:
Yeah, maybe. It originally was for web apps, but then you could make Android apps.

Leo Laporte [01:41:29]:
Oh no, they have a studio. Yeah, Google Design Studio or something like that.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:33]:
Yeah, whatever that is. There's a lot of these things.

Leo Laporte [01:41:35]:
Anyway, they have way too many names.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:37]:
Yeah, way too many.

Leo Laporte [01:41:38]:
Microsoft names everything the same. Google has a different name for everything.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:42]:
I know, I know. I— and that actually, that's sort of—

Richard Campbell [01:41:44]:
And then they abandon them as fast as they make them.

Leo Laporte [01:41:46]:
So you never know which is which.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:47]:
Now that my wife is an AI expert, that's what— that was one of the conversations I had with her, which is like, they need to get rid of all these brands. They have too many different names for things. Like, just—

Leo Laporte [01:41:56]:
They renamed NotebookLM, which I think is a great tool, to Gem— what is it? Gemini? I don't even know.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:01]:
Gemini Notebook.

Leo Laporte [01:42:02]:
Gemini Notebook.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:03]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:42:04]:
Like, why?

Paul Thurrott [01:42:04]:
What?

Richard Campbell [01:42:05]:
Well, that one actually makes sense. Could have been Copilot.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:07]:
Yeah, right. I mean, to me, they're using the right brand there at least. But I mean, they have like Nano Banana or Dream Beans or like, they have all these names.

Leo Laporte [01:42:15]:
Guys, They really are kind of goofy.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:18]:
Just for the love of God, like, just like, stop. Um, but anyway, okay, Google's a little weird. Um, this actually happened during, uh, the recording of the show, but, um, Google announced that they're going to bring, uh, an MCP server to Google Home. Oh, it's available.

Richard Campbell [01:42:35]:
It's time for nobody to care.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:36]:
Yeah, right.

Leo Laporte [01:42:38]:
Is Google Home over?

Paul Thurrott [01:42:40]:
No, Google Home is terrible.

Richard Campbell [01:42:41]:
Pretty much.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:41]:
It's amazing how bad it is.

Richard Campbell [01:42:43]:
They neglected it for so long. It's just brutal.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:46]:
I mean, this year they've been updating it like weekly. Um, and so if you—

Leo Laporte [01:42:50]:
because Apple's about to jump in with—

Paul Thurrott [01:42:52]:
all right, so Apple, honestly, look, neither one of these are great, but the Apple Home stuff is actually way better than Google Home right now. I mean, we'll see how that changes.

Richard Campbell [01:43:00]:
It's a smaller ecosystem, but it's well executed.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:03]:
It just works better.

Richard Campbell [01:43:04]:
I don't know, Google's a pile of neglect.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:06]:
Yep. Like, I, I have, I have, uh, both of these environments here and in Mexico, and in both cases, the Google version is a subset of what I can do on the Apple I think it's just, it's kind of bizarre, but, um, but this makes sense to me. And, um, unfortunately, one of the things that doesn't make sense is they have 2 tiers of Google Home subscriptions. And if you have a Google AI subscription, you get the lower end of those 2. And it's, you know, it's all this stuff. Like if you want to have recordings or whatever to save for some amount of time, you have to have the re— you know, you have to have one of these subscription services. So I believe The Google Home MCP server is limited to the premium version of those 2 Google Home subscriptions right now, but it's a pre— it's an early access preview. It's not like generally—

Leo Laporte [01:43:52]:
They do that. They often do that. Yep.

Richard Campbell [01:43:54]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:54]:
It might be something that opens. I think I'm sure it will, like it will, it will come out to more people. But anyway, I look, this is a positive development, so I need to look at this more, but, um, This, this to me reads as smart. So we'll see how that goes.

Leo Laporte [01:44:08]:
But everything needs an interface. That's all I'm saying. Totally. It could be API, could be MCP, could be something else.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:14]:
I feel like MCP is the API of the 20th century, 21st century in a way, right?

Leo Laporte [01:44:18]:
Essentially the same thing.

Richard Campbell [01:44:19]:
And one would argue it's all but obsolete too, because these tools now are super good at analyzing APIs directly.

Leo Laporte [01:44:25]:
That's true.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:26]:
That's a good point.

Leo Laporte [01:44:26]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:27]:
Yeah. Right. And then this also just happened today, but You know, we've known since late last year that Microsoft, or I'm sorry, Mozilla has been working on something originally called AI Window, which is now called Smart Window, which is going to be their incognito type window, but for AI tasks in Firefox, right? Which is a unique and interesting way to handle AI, right? Obviously a big segment of their population does not want AI. And so it's off by default. They have the AI kill switch, which they don't call it that, but they have it. And, but if you want to do AI tasks and be sure that it's, you know, your data is safe, you can open this smart window, or you soon will be able to open a smart window and, um, and do this thing. And of course, you know, part of the key to making this work is you have to have, you know, AI that can work. So they've talked about, uh, having a lot of small language models on the machine.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:18]:
And if you go into Firefox settings and you enable certain AI features, you're actually downloading a small model. that will serve that thing, right? And, um, they just announced a partnership with, um, Mistral from France. And, um, this is a cloud-based AI, but it's going to be, you know, it's going through Firefox and SmartWindows. It's private. Um, and it is, of course, they're from France. So it's rolling out across, um, different countries, not just, uh, US and Canada, including France, where this thing is in French, right? Like fully in French. And that's part of their point. They're like, we need this to work in every country, in every language, and it has to work the same way, you know.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:02]:
And so then after this, they're going to go to the United Kingdom, which I think we can all agree has a different language as well, and Germany. And in fact, I would argue those 2 languages are very similar to each other. Meaning, as an English speaker, I recognize them sort of, but not really. Anyway, I, this seems, they, this continues to be interesting to me. Um, the way that Firefox/Mozilla is handling AI, it's interesting. So anyway, that's what I'm looking at.

Leo Laporte [01:46:30]:
Yeah. Well, well, well, that was, uh, that was great. Now Xbox is coming up.

Richard Campbell [01:46:39]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:40]:
In case you thought I had a shred of dignity left and wanted To just scratch away at the remainders.

Leo Laporte [01:46:47]:
Oh, that's special.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:48]:
You're like, anyway.

Richard Campbell [01:46:50]:
Anyway.

Leo Laporte [01:46:52]:
Anywho, you're listening to Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell, and we have many, many more goodies to come, but really, this is the moment you've all been waiting for. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, it is the Xbox segment.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:18]:
I think it's important— oh, we still going?

Leo Laporte [01:47:20]:
Yeah, don't interrupt the chorus.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:23]:
Sorry about that.

Leo Laporte [01:47:24]:
Okay, now you can talk.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:25]:
I was gonna say, I think it's important when you're a bully that your comeuppance be like what you do to other people, which is what that felt like earlier. So that was good.

Leo Laporte [01:47:34]:
It's called karma, buddy. Karma.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:36]:
I like it. It's, it's, it's the appropriate comeback. Um, okay, so Xbox, um, Uh, we're in the second half of September, not quite, but almost. No, we are.

Leo Laporte [01:47:46]:
Almost.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:46]:
And yep. So they announced a bunch of new games coming to, uh, Xbox Game Pass across platforms. Um, Black Ops 6, interestingly, um, which I have to say is technologically, uh, just as good as the current game, not the one coming out soon, but, um, same, you know, and honestly, in many ways, if you play multiplayer, it's almost better in some ways too. Um, really good. But the big one to me is going to be Gears of War: E-Day. So this is the prequel to the original Gears of War. Um, that's coming out. Let me see, what's the date on that one? Where's the date? Gears of War: E-Day is October 6th.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:24]:
So that's actually not even the second, so early next month. But Minecraft Dungeons 2 is in here. That's the end of the month. Uh, Dune Awakening is in here. Ninja Gaiden 4. It's a bunch of stuff in here actually. This looks, This is a nice, um, it's a nice, uh, lineup. Also, I, um, for whatever it's worth, I don't know if it must've been 2 weeks ago, uh, for the first round of games for September, one of them was, uh, Black Ops.

Leo Laporte [01:48:47]:
Sorry.

Richard Campbell [01:48:47]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:48]:
It was Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War. And up until about 2 days, 3 days ago, whatever it was, if you would ask me, did you even play this game? I would've said—

Leo Laporte [01:48:59]:
I don't.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:00]:
I don't remember that at all. I'm not sure I did. And I have not looked, and someone could tell me if this is right or wrong, but I have a feeling that Black Ops Cold War, which was Black Ops 5, came out right after Modern Warfare 1 or 2. I bet it did, because it looks like Modern Warfare 1 to me, like the graphics. So they're not as good as what we have in the more recent games.

Richard Campbell [01:49:22]:
It's beautiful.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:22]:
But it does have that— yeah, but it has that gritty kind of feel to it, which I love. I mentioned this a few weeks ago, like if you go back and play the original Modern Well, the original Modern Warfare remake, the one, you know, not the original original, but the, the, you know, when they redid the series. Um, it, it clear it has that same kind of gritty vibe to it. And then I started playing, I just tried, I, you know, installed, it's like 200 gigabytes, I swear to God. But I, um, I played, you know, multiplayer and first couple of levels I was like, yeah, no, I've never seen this. I've, I've definitely never seen it. But then I kept going and I'm like, Oh no, I know this. Oh no, I know.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:56]:
I, I, this, I must've played this game for an entire year actually. I just don't remember it. And now that I'm seeing it again, I'm like, oh my God, these, some of these levels are awesome. And there are some that are in the very latest game. So if you play Black Ops 7, um, a couple of my favorite levels have been remade many times. And, uh, well, 3 of them are in Cold War. Um, one of which is Nuketown, obviously. That that one's been remade the most, but there's some, there's just like, it's surprisingly good.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:26]:
So anyway, Black Ops Cold War, which is essentially Black Ops 5, and now soon Black Ops 6 are available as part of Game Pass. So, um, cool. A lot of people playing it too. It's good. It's good stuff. Um, uh, Xbox, uh, announced that they would be going to the Tokyo Game Store, uh, game store.

Richard Campbell [01:50:44]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:44]:
Game show later this month. Um, Um, by later this month, I mean tomorrow. So I guess it's tomorrow. Um, but, uh, the big thing that came out of this was that announcement. I think, Leo, I don't know if it was on the show or before the show, mentioned that, um, the new Kojima game that was going to be coming out on PlayStation but was canceled by them is now going to be published by Xbox Game Studios, uh, Fission. And that's interesting.

Richard Campbell [01:51:11]:
It's a game that's a couple of years behind.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:13]:
Like, yeah, well, so is Xbox.

Richard Campbell [01:51:16]:
There you go.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:17]:
Sorry, too soon. Um, yeah, I don't know, actually know much about it, but I know the name of this guy is Hideo. Um, Hideo, Hideo, I don't know how you say it.

Richard Campbell [01:51:27]:
Hideo.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:28]:
Uh, awesome. Like, that's—

Richard Campbell [01:51:30]:
and you know, God, this is the Metal Gear Solid guy, the Death Stranding guy.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:34]:
Yep.

Richard Campbell [01:51:34]:
I, I know he was behind, but come on. And then the kicker, of course, is that somebody didn't read the contract properly because he keeps all the assets if you leave, right? If you could come out. So he's got his game and, you know, thanks for paying for half of it anyway.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:50]:
I mean, uh, PlayStation is trying to be as diplomatic as they can be. Uh, they basically said, fuck you, we hope we never— no. Um, I mean, what do you know? What are you gonna do? But I— yeah, whatever. I— the fact that this is continuing at all— Xbox picked up, awesome. I, in some ways, I don't really care who picks it up, but Um, the fact that it was Xbox is of course delicious in some way, but whatever. So that's fine. Um, and then, you know, we've had late last year the announcements of the Steam Machine, which is the, you know, the cube computer.

Richard Campbell [01:52:21]:
The Gabe Cube.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:22]:
Um, yes, the Gabe Cube. Thank you. Uh, the Steam Frame, which is like the VR, AR, whatever, MR headset, the controller, blah, blah, blah. And everything except for this, uh, Steam Frame thing has pretty much been Released asterisks, you know, like you can kind of get it, you have to get on a waitlist and blah, blah, blah. But they did announce, uh, that this thing is coming soon. It's gonna be powered by Qualcomm chips. So Qualcomm has, you know, in addition to— well, I'm sure they're Snapdragon branded, but they're, uh—

Richard Campbell [01:52:49]:
They're gonna be ARM chips.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:50]:
ARM chips, right?

Leo Laporte [01:52:51]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:52]:
And I think I, I could be wrong because— but Snapdragon or Qualcomm has chips for IoT and for different, you know, wearables and whatever. And I think this is actually a phone chip that's in it. I don't think it's a like a wearable chip. I think it's a full, like, phone chip or whatever. But okay, um, it's gonna be expensive, uh, like everything else these days. So $1,059 to start, USD, uh, base model. And if you want it, um, and God help you, I don't know why you would, but if you do want it, um, you have to get on a waitlist. And that's how that's, you know, that's how this stuff's been going.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:28]:
So there you go. So that's happening. And then someone maybe someday could explain this to me, but Amazon from a gaming perspective is interesting. Obviously, they have a Luna game service. Originally, it was like a straight-up game streaming thing, competed with Google Stadia at the time, also gone now, or is gone now. We have Nvidia GeForce Now. Microsoft has cloud gaming through Xbox. Um, and the one thing they got right with this is they do that thing where the controller is directly connected to the internet, not to whatever device you're playing on, right? Smart.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:04]:
And that's worked out pretty well. Um, I don't think it's done well, but it is Amazon. And so, you know, they, the one thing they've done that's kind of nice if you're a Prime person, like if you have a Prime subscription, is you get, uh, Luna as part of that subscription. So it's not like an extra thing. You could subscribe to it separately if you wanted to still. Um, but they also have something called Amazon Game, uh, Amazon Prime Gaming, which I've I've certainly used as a tip in the past, um, because every month they offer at least several PC games that you can just get for free. So if you're a, if you're part of Prime, you can go to this site, um, this site being, uh, I think you just go to luna.amazon.com, but I think you could also just go to, I think it's just look up Prime Gaming, you'll find it. But, um, usually every month it's like at least 2, 3 games.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:47]:
You're like, oh, nice. Like these are good. And you own these things forever. So if you quit Prime, you're like, you still own them. And the reason you still own them is they're almost never directly through Amazon, although sometimes they are. Um, they're usually through like, uh, GOG or even Xbox/Microsoft or, uh, Steam or Epic Games, right? And so when you click on one, it gives you a code. You have to go to the other site and get it and whatever. And it's usually a pretty good deal.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:11]:
So this is something, you know, if you're a PC gamer, it's something to look at, like pay attention to. But, um, Doom and Doom 2, which are a package, are available now for free if you don't already own those games somehow. And Doom Eternal, which is the first of the modern Doom games, right? Doom 2016. No, that's not true. Doom Eternal is the second one, isn't it? I think 2016 was just called Doom. So it's probably the sequel, the second one.

Richard Campbell [01:55:33]:
Mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:34]:
So anyway, those are good. And they're bringing games like Star Wars Outlaws, which I actually played a big chunk of this past year, and Avatar Frontiers of Pandora to the standard tier of Luna, which is the one you get for free with Prime and some other stuff going on there.

Richard Campbell [01:55:48]:
So Star Wars Outlaws is getting lots of acclaim. People like it.

Leo Laporte [01:55:51]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:52]:
And I think so that this is part of what will be a trilogy. And I think the third game is actually fairly imminent and it's, yeah, I think, no, in fact, I'm positive. Like I think it might even be out before the end of the year. It's supposed to be very interesting. So I will say, uh, I don't remember the name of the other one, but, uh, those two games are Um, very good. Sorry, uh, Burke's like, no need to explain that Amazon brings a butter knife to a gunfight when it comes to gaming anything. That's fair enough. Uh, but, but there's something to pay attention to because, you know, again, I think a lot of people— Maybe something good will happen.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:28]:
Yeah, you never know, but just get the free games, like whatever. Um, and then I don't know why on earth they would do this, but Amazon, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who Let's face it, is probably the best source of information about any— anything inside of Apple. Um, Apple is reportedly working on their own game controllers for iPhones that will report, uh, will compete with things like the Backbone controls, you know, the—

Leo Laporte [01:56:51]:
I think it's particularly— don't you think that's the—

Paul Thurrott [01:56:54]:
Yeah, right. And I think there's a, there's probably a fun controller for that where it's not out on the sides, but maybe it's, you know, the thing sits on the top like a screen.

Leo Laporte [01:57:03]:
Yeah, the picture he had was Exactly.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:05]:
It's like a backbone. Yeah, that's a backbone, I'm sure. But, um, yeah, I mean, these controllers work well. I'm too old to see a screen that small, frankly, but I mean, you know, everyone else on Earth is probably fine. Um, so whatever. I don't know why they would bother, but that's fine. I'm sure they'll have a much better updating scheme than they use for AirPods.

Leo Laporte [01:57:26]:
Sorry, ladies and gentlemen. You've just seen a perfect demonstration of why this is the premier Xbox show in the world.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:38]:
The premier Xbox show?

Leo Laporte [01:57:39]:
The number one. There's no better.

Richard Campbell [01:57:42]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [01:57:43]:
I mean, we even have a jingle, ladies and gentlemen.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:46]:
That's true.

Richard Campbell [01:57:46]:
That's true. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:57:48]:
Unique.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:48]:
Which has passed every copyright claim that's been foisted upon us.

Leo Laporte [01:57:53]:
It's fine.

Richard Campbell [01:57:54]:
We're fine.

Leo Laporte [01:57:54]:
If you play it forwards, it says, Paul is dead.

Richard Campbell [01:57:56]:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:57:57]:
Yeah, exactly. I don't know what it is. Now it is time for Paul Thurrott. We go to the back of the book and Paul's tip of the week.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:07]:
So I can't imagine this is going to make for a compelling episode of Hands-On Windows, but maybe I can work it in somewhere. Um, someone has discovered a new workaround for signing into Windows 11 with a local account instead of a Microsoft account during setup.

Leo Laporte [01:58:23]:
I think there's a lot of interest in that.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:25]:
Yeah. But the, so the problem with it, and I think the reason this won't have a lot of legs for me in particular, is that it only works in Windows 11 Home, which is kind of funny, odd. Um, I, there, the, well, let me tell you what it is first. So as you go through each of the steps of, um, Windows setup, you get to the point where it says, let's add your Microsoft account. There's a little bit of text at the bottom. There's a A Learn More link. You click that, you'd think it would like open a webpage. I think it kind of does.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:54]:
But once you do that, then you can actually just bypass the Microsoft account sign-in, which doesn't feel purposeful, but I don't know. And maybe they'll get rid of it. I'm not really sure, but I can tell you, and this is something I keep looking at, I have read multiple times that the classic workaround for this, which I misspelled in the notes, is bringing up that command line window. when you have to sign into the network and typing ubi/bypassnro, and then it will reboot when you hit enter. And then you could just sign in as a local account. But that, that works all the time. Like, I, I just tried this on a clean install of 26H2. It was Professional, but I don't— it doesn't matter because it works on Home and Pro and it still works.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:34]:
So I, I mean, to me, like, that's just the easiest way to do it. But I guess the nice thing about this version is you don't have to reboot. You just, you're in the process, you click it, just goes through. So if you are installing Home for some reason, um, until and unless Microsoft gets rid of it, I guess it's a, it's one way to bypass it. It's one of a few ways, but you know, okay, that's fine. All right, so last week I mentioned the Gemini Daily Brief, um, and Leo of course, um, talked about Dream Beans, which is this, uh, surreal I don't know, the way I described it was a fun and vaguely creepy fever dream.

Leo Laporte [02:00:13]:
It is very surreal.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:15]:
I signed up for it, like, I think it was the next day that Google announced that this thing was just generally available to everybody.

Leo Laporte [02:00:20]:
Yeah, I've been paying for it. I like it so good.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:23]:
So I signed up and yeah, it took like a day. Actually, when I went to sign up, I signed up with my personal Gmail account. And it told me it was not available in my country. I was like, what? And then I clicked, I clicked on the link and it, they're like, oh no, you're from Mexico. I'm like, no, I am not. I've had this account for like 15 years. What are you talking about? So I had to petition them hat in hand to please change. I couldn't change it myself.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:51]:
And I'm thinking, oh, they're never— yeah. I'm like, they're never going to come back to me. But they got back to me like an hour later. Like, yeah, sorry about that. And they fixed it. So, okay.

Leo Laporte [02:00:58]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:58]:
Anyway, so I got it and I got to tell you, I love this thing. I love this thing.

Richard Campbell [02:01:03]:
Oh, it's so cute.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:04]:
No, I love it. And it is, it's insane. And I want to be, I want to be clear, like what this is because, um, Google has another, uh, Google Labs product called CC and it's, it's kind of superfluous now with these other things, but it's, it's a, it's a, uh, like an extension for Gmail that you could, you, it signs into, I think it's like your Gmail, your calendar. And maybe, I don't know, drive or something.

Richard Campbell [02:01:30]:
What are we looking at here?

Paul Thurrott [02:01:31]:
It looks at your data.

Leo Laporte [02:01:32]:
This is my dream beams.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:34]:
No, I mean, they're, they're insane.

Leo Laporte [02:01:36]:
I don't know how it knows that I want to do Turkish get-ups with my kettlebells, but it does.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:41]:
I'm obsessed by— every morning I cannot wait to see what it comes up with.

Leo Laporte [02:01:44]:
I don't even know how it knows I have one of these rebounder things.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:47]:
No, I have an example of that, of like, how did they know? Like, it doesn't actually make sense. But anyway, sorry. But Google, uh, uh, Gemini Daily Brief is very similar, except that in this case you get the notification from Gemini. So it's typically on your phone, although you can get it on the web as well. And it's, you know, it's based on what's going on in your life, like based on your calendar and all that stuff, right? Um, Dream Beans is not that at all. You, you do connect it to all your Google stuff.

Leo Laporte [02:02:12]:
It's evil Dream Beans is what it is.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:13]:
Well, it's not, so it's not like, here's what's coming up, you might wanna look at this. It's like, it basically examines your life, which is scary. It does that, that Google creepy thing. Where you're like, oh, come on, what the hell is this?

Leo Laporte [02:02:24]:
How does it know I do flexible cold fermentation? How does it know that?

Paul Thurrott [02:02:29]:
But what it does is it suggests things you might want to do in the real world or online based on the things you've done in the past. And the pictures, like, in the article, the phone is attached to the camera. I can't really do anything about it, but—

Leo Laporte [02:02:42]:
I'm showing mine, so people can see mine.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:44]:
No, I know, but like my article is like—

Leo Laporte [02:02:46]:
I'm sure Stephanie's in yours, right?

Paul Thurrott [02:02:49]:
Well, that's what's weird about it. So first of all, uh, Stephanie and I— I'm often in it, Stephanie is often in it, Stephanie and I are often in it. We're often but not always wearing clothes we actually own, which is freaking weird. Isn't that weird? Way, way older than we do in real life, which makes me crazy. And but then it's— it then it brings in like other people because you're out in the world doing stuff with other people, right? So my sister and her husband are in it a couple times. Sometimes It's just him. There's one where it was like my brother-in-law, my sister-in-law, and Stephanie were out enjoying Greek pastries and shaved gyros at St. Nicholas Festival.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:23]:
Like, what is happening? There are many of these things where we're cooking together or making cocktails together and looking lovingly into each other's eyes, our old, old eyes. And then, but then there's stuff where you're like, what? So, uh, 2 in a row where like, like, I'll just read this 'cause, you know, it's right there, but it says, walk Daisy along the shaded trails of Little Lehigh Parkway. Yeah, Daisy's been dead for 4 years. So, you know, thanks for opening that door.

Leo Laporte [02:03:52]:
Do you think they're getting this from your email? Where do they get this?

Paul Thurrott [02:03:55]:
So a lot of it's from photos. Oh, of course it is. In other words, it looks at, like, if you look at my Google Photos, or you could just look at my Instagram, you'd be like, okay, so Paul went— Paul goes up to this like wine country area in upstate New York. He might want to go to a Greek pastry festival that's in eastern Pennsylvania or an apple orchard that's in whatever part of Pennsylvania. Right.

Richard Campbell [02:04:15]:
They know where you are.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:16]:
You can sort of see where it's going. But here's the— not— I'm not— well, I was gonna say the weirdest one. This is not the weirdest one, but this is not— this is a recommendation. Watch Slow Horses season 6 on Apple TV.

Leo Laporte [02:04:27]:
It knows.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:29]:
Gary Oldman returns tomorrow as Jackson Lamb in the quick-witted MI5 spy series for an evening straight series.

Leo Laporte [02:04:34]:
Great series, by the way.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:35]:
Yeah, yeah. Okay, I've never seen it. I, I just mentioned—

Leo Laporte [02:04:38]:
You should. You would love it.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:39]:
I'm going to now because it told me to.

Richard Campbell [02:04:42]:
But it—

Leo Laporte [02:04:42]:
the thing is You do look old in this, I have to say.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:46]:
I know, I know, I'm so decrepit. I watched this show with Stephanie over the past 2 weeks called Sugar, right? Which— yeah, so it was on Apple TV. It's an Apple device. I'm not sure how Google got its tendrils in there. I don't even know how it knows that I did this. But the thing that freaks me out about this recommendation, because it's, it's a solid recommendation, in the image it provides— and by the way, these images are pen and ink and watercolor, I guess.

Leo Laporte [02:05:12]:
They're beautiful.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:14]:
I am wearing— I am walking through the streets of London wearing a trench coat.

Leo Laporte [02:05:16]:
Oh, you're in Slow Horses.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:18]:
Why am I in London? I'm watching it on TV.

Leo Laporte [02:05:21]:
No, no, you're there.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:22]:
I'm not gonna wear a trench coat. I'm not cosplaying. Like, I'm like, what? Like, that's crazy.

Leo Laporte [02:05:27]:
That's hysterical.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:29]:
It doesn't make any sense.

Richard Campbell [02:05:29]:
There's a real Total Recall vibe to this, you know?

Paul Thurrott [02:05:33]:
Yeah. It's like, it's like a glitch in the Matrix. It's like Paul went to Weinkart.

Leo Laporte [02:05:38]:
They are making you look awfully old.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:41]:
I know, I don't like it. Richard's in a bunch of these things. Um, Richard's sometimes in it by himself. I don't know, like he's just a fat—

Leo Laporte [02:05:48]:
There you are, Richard's exploring the iPhone Duo.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:51]:
There's a lot of, a lot of the ones with Richard is me and Richard looking at something on a table and it's like a, like a deconstructed computer.

Leo Laporte [02:05:58]:
There's that with me and Steve Gibson.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:59]:
Yeah, I don't know why. At least it's really interesting. It's very weird. So, I have not yet done anything that's recommended. I have, by the way. No, I don't mean— I mean, but—

Richard Campbell [02:06:10]:
You gotta read me some of these pictures.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:12]:
Some of these recommendations are pretty good.

Leo Laporte [02:06:16]:
I got one that said, you and Lisa enjoy a full moon kayak tour of the Petaluma River. And I said, hey, that's a great idea. We did it.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:28]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:06:28]:
So, that's the one thing we've done. Although a lot of the things it shows are things Like me and Steve Gibson going to the Computer History Museum together. So kind of fun. The one thing I— surreal and weird.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:41]:
Exactly. I, I have to say, I appreciate it's, first of all, it's recommending activities, right? The thing I didn't show, I got a lot of stuff like learn 6502 assembly language programming. Um, look at like the, the, the camera specifications for different, um, here I am with Anthony Nielsen enjoying sourdough and ribeye at Cattlemen's. And man, is he looking at you a little too intensely.

Leo Laporte [02:07:05]:
It's like a romantic dinner!

Paul Thurrott [02:07:07]:
A little too intensely.

Leo Laporte [02:07:10]:
Isn't that hysterical?

Paul Thurrott [02:07:11]:
No, it's bizarre. At some point, I'm going to show this to my brother-in-law, who's— privacy freak is a strong term, but he's not going to like this. I want to be super clear about this. He's going to be very unhappy. that he factors into this at all. But it's just like, I can't—

Leo Laporte [02:07:30]:
It's another weird kind of bizarro world too. I mean, like, the pictures of Petaluma are kind of accurate. Like, that kind of looks like the theater.

Richard Campbell [02:07:40]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [02:07:42]:
But they're not quite it.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:45]:
Oh, what was the one? I'm— oh boy.

Leo Laporte [02:07:47]:
Oh, here I am doing something I'm never gonna do, building hardbound notebooks.

Richard Campbell [02:07:52]:
There you go.

Leo Laporte [02:07:53]:
Learning traditional paper binding in Petaluma. This weekend.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:56]:
Look, this thing has told me about events in my area I did not know existed.

Leo Laporte [02:08:00]:
That's what it's good for.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:01]:
And I have to say, that's good for inspiration. That's pretty cool. And the suggestions are split between like out in the world doing stuff like traditional events or whatever, and things you want— like, it looks like you were researching this topic. Do you want to— and then you can kind of dive into it. And I'm like, okay, like, that's like—

Leo Laporte [02:08:17]:
It knows kind of for some reason that I'm going on a cruise in a month And I'm going to be on that particular ship that has that particular Italian restaurant.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:27]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [02:08:29]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:29]:
I, I, yeah, I can't explain some of that. Some of this is, is—

Leo Laporte [02:08:34]:
I love it though. I mean, you too. I know why, because it's about us.

Richard Campbell [02:08:38]:
Yeah, it's corporate surveillance with watercolors. It's great.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:41]:
Well, it's like, look, there's always been that creepy thing with Google, like, how do they know this? They're listening. And this is 100% that. You have to be comfortable with it. Yeah. You have to just accept that that's what it is. But then you look at some of the stuff, you're like, oh my God, like what the hell is happening? Like, it's crazy. Like it's, it's very interesting. It's fun crazy.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:59]:
Like I—

Leo Laporte [02:09:01]:
It's a fever dream and that's why it's named Dream Beans.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:04]:
I am fascinated. And so Stephanie has of course done this now. She's got this thing every morning. We're like reading off like what our recommendations are. It's, it's amazing.

Richard Campbell [02:09:13]:
For living a better life.

Leo Laporte [02:09:15]:
Yeah, I don't—

Paul Thurrott [02:09:16]:
I will leave it. It's a more entertaining life. I don't know, like, it's, uh, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:09:20]:
Well, if I did everything in Dream Beans, it would be a better life.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:24]:
Oh, I would be so busy. I'd have to retire.

Leo Laporte [02:09:26]:
I'd be so happy.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:27]:
Yeah, it's not a horrible living.

Leo Laporte [02:09:29]:
I—

Paul Thurrott [02:09:29]:
a lot of apple orchards in my future, apparently.

Leo Laporte [02:09:31]:
But, um, it's got to work with whatever it's— whatever it's got, it's got to work. Although I think, uh, we've got— we've got something here, but it could be a new show, right? You and, uh, this is like a Holmes and Watson thing almost.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:47]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:09:47]:
What are— do you— are you carrying bells? What are you carrying?

Richard Campbell [02:09:50]:
Well, I, I mentioned that that picture looked more like Christopher Walken than Paul.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:54]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:09:55]:
So, of course, directly to more cowbell.

Leo Laporte [02:09:57]:
Oh, it's like— oh, it's what it is. It's more cowbell.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:00]:
Oh, is it a cowbell? It almost looks like a megaphone.

Leo Laporte [02:10:05]:
You know, it's a cowbell and you're Christopher Walken.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:08]:
I just walked in the room.

Leo Laporte [02:10:09]:
I'm walking through the streets of London.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:11]:
I'm searching Java developers. You are all wasting your lives. You're welcome.

Leo Laporte [02:10:17]:
Jess, sometimes this is what the funny thing about AI, it kind of tickles me. I don't want to like it.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:25]:
Right. This is—

Richard Campbell [02:10:26]:
they found a way to make corporate surveillance amusing.

Leo Laporte [02:10:29]:
I love it. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:10:30]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:30]:
No, I have to give them that.

Leo Laporte [02:10:31]:
Well, we know they know it. So might as well just like flaunt it.

Richard Campbell [02:10:34]:
Do something fun with it.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:35]:
Embrace it. And yeah. I can't explain. I, I think Leo understands. If you've used it, I think, I think you understand. Like, there's something super compelling about it, even though it's like, what the frick is happening?

Leo Laporte [02:10:48]:
When I got a bill for $99 a month, I, I immediately said, oh, I'm not paying for this. You must, must misunderstand.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:55]:
I think you can just get it. I don't think you even have to pay for it anymore.

Leo Laporte [02:10:57]:
It's free. It's free now.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:58]:
Well, you have to be in the US so far, but—

Leo Laporte [02:11:00]:
I think it was Google Plus, some kind of Google Plus account that I, you know.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:05]:
Yeah, it was definitely a, um, you had to have a Google AI or something.

Leo Laporte [02:11:09]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:11:09]:
So why is it US only? Do you think it's just a straight surveillance element of it and every other country actually has laws on this stuff?

Paul Thurrott [02:11:15]:
Yeah, it could be that. It could be just language. I mean, it seems like this is true of technology in general, biggest companies in the world, whatever, but it— English, US and English first is usually the path. And then, you know, we expand out from there.

Leo Laporte [02:11:27]:
I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:28]:
Or don't.

Richard Campbell [02:11:29]:
Not even making it available to Canadians that it really does.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:32]:
Yeah, but I mean, I feel like it will get there. It will get there. Well, there'll be a lot of curling in yours. It'll be the same thing. There's a curling festival. You're like, there's always a curling festival. What are you telling me?

Leo Laporte [02:11:43]:
Why does Richard show up? And why does Anthony Nielsen show up in mine?

Paul Thurrott [02:11:47]:
Right. And why are you— so there's been no Leo so far that I can tell in mine, but Richard has been in it several times.

Leo Laporte [02:11:53]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:54]:
And we're always together too.

Richard Campbell [02:11:55]:
You see a lot of photos of us together.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:56]:
Yeah. We're not together in person a lot. I mean, not often, a couple times a year maybe. But man, in this thing, you are pictures. You are a central part of my life. Like, it is, uh, and we're together doing stuff.

Richard Campbell [02:12:09]:
Like, we do talk every week.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:11]:
Yeah, no, I know, I know. But we're just solving problems, man. Like, I don't know, we're just doing stuff.

Richard Campbell [02:12:16]:
It's really fun. Change the world.

Leo Laporte [02:12:17]:
I think you're right though, it's from Google Photos. I think you're right.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:20]:
Oh, it's definitely, definitely Photos because you can tell from like the shirt, like some of the shirts are the top that my wife or I wear pretty frequently, you know, and there are photos like, or whatever. But then every once in a while they'll be like, I don't have that. Like, what is this shirt? Like, sometimes it'll be just made up. I don't know. Like, it's trying to be diverse or something.

Leo Laporte [02:12:37]:
I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:38]:
I find it to be incredibly entertaining.

Leo Laporte [02:12:40]:
But you know why? I mean, it's because it's about you. Well, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:46]:
I mean, it's about me.

Leo Laporte [02:12:48]:
I mean, it's You love stuff about us.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:50]:
I guess so. I mean, you know, it's like, I kind of— part of it is the recommendations are just so amazing.

Leo Laporte [02:12:55]:
But they're good. I mean, like, I would like to go, uh, spot— spotting Oaxacan spirit sculptures in Glen Ellyn.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:01]:
I'm kind of surprised there aren't more styles for the artwork, you know, because after a while, like, when I look at your pictures, I'm like, yeah, no, those are exactly the same. Like—

Leo Laporte [02:13:08]:
Oh yeah, they're the same.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:09]:
They're just—

Leo Laporte [02:13:10]:
except I'm not as old as you for some reason.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:12]:
I know, what the hell's happening?

Leo Laporte [02:13:14]:
I look pretty ripped in this This one, I'm practicing my rotational control with a Turkish getup.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:18]:
I do that. I've tried that. I would throw out my back apparently. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [02:13:21]:
I've actually done these. I don't— and I know there's no pictures of me doing this. I don't know how it knows.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:27]:
Well, look, all I can say is you look great.

Leo Laporte [02:13:29]:
I know. Isn't that great?

Richard Campbell [02:13:31]:
Keep it up.

Leo Laporte [02:13:33]:
You know, when you get old, getting up gets harder.

Richard Campbell [02:13:36]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:37]:
So I make mistakes getting up all the time.

Leo Laporte [02:13:41]:
All right, that brings us, uh, to the Richard Campbell portion of the program and Run As Radio.

Richard Campbell [02:13:50]:
Uh, had, uh, Sue— we already talked about this to some degree. I thought Susan Bradley back on the show, her handle on Twitter is SBS Diva. When we first started talking literally like 15 years ago, she was all about Small Business Server, but things have evolved. Small Business Server doesn't even exist anymore. And she's become one of the patch goddesses. Like she's, if you're in the business, like if you're an sysadmin, you read her posts about problems with patches and things like that. And so I thought I'd do a recap with her because she's obviously concerned about the rate of patches that are coming in, the quality of them, the issues that Microsoft's having, and very much so the third party, the hardware owners and they're behind and not incented to keep their firmware up to date.

Paul Thurrott [02:14:35]:
So.

Richard Campbell [02:14:36]:
makes it really challenging to get everything working together. So we talked through some of the problems that are, that are happening, the issues around Secure Boot, uh, the challenges with BitLocker with some of these rapid updates have locked people out of their machines mostly because of firmware being out of date. Um, good conversation. And I think I got someone mention in the, in the chat stream actually that they're listening to the show and really appreciated it, which is— that's great to hear.

Leo Laporte [02:15:01]:
Episode 1054. Patching in 2026 with Susan Bradman.

Paul Thurrott [02:15:08]:
Love it.

Richard Campbell [02:15:08]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:15:08]:
Runnersradio.com. Uh, now we have the moment you've all been waiting for. Richard's something from— oh, I gotta play the song. Yeah, do you want me to play the song?

Richard Campbell [02:15:21]:
You gotta play something.

Leo Laporte [02:15:21]:
I like your theme song.

Richard Campbell [02:15:23]:
Yeah, it's quite a song.

Leo Laporte [02:15:24]:
Kevin, you should actually put it on the, um, TriCaster so that we can play it automatically. It should be—

Richard Campbell [02:15:30]:
somebody was asking for a download of it. You could stick it on the—

Leo Laporte [02:15:35]:
I think I put it in the club the last time.

Richard Campbell [02:15:37]:
Yeah. Okay.

Leo Laporte [02:15:39]:
Um, because yeah, it's pretty— it's, uh, I'm gonna pull it up at suno.com. Suno does an amazing job with this stuff. Let me go to my library of fun tunes. And ladies and gentlemen, the Irish Whiskey Rope Everybody dance!

Paul Thurrott [02:16:04]:
It's vaguely irritating how good this song is.

Leo Laporte [02:16:07]:
Do the Highland fling!

Paul Thurrott [02:16:08]:
He's serving.

Leo Laporte [02:16:25]:
Ladies and gentlemen.

Paul Thurrott [02:16:26]:
From a farm where the scarecrow knows my name, a malt that spent its winter in a barrel marked Bicycle Flame.

Richard Campbell [02:16:33]:
What?

Paul Thurrott [02:16:34]:
A corn whiskey golden as a plumber's shiny shoe, and a tiny little dram that says I might remember you.

Leo Laporte [02:16:41]:
This is better than, uh, Dream Beans. Ladies and gentlemen, it's whiskey time with Mr. Richard Campbell.

Paul Thurrott [02:16:48]:
Spectacular.

Richard Campbell [02:16:49]:
It's crazy. And I didn't go looking for Norwegian whiskey. I haven't had time really. Last week I was in Kansas City, and you remember during that week I actually talked about a Tasmanian whiskey that I'd had at a party.

Paul Thurrott [02:17:00]:
Yes.

Richard Campbell [02:17:00]:
And I thought was amazing.

Leo Laporte [02:17:01]:
That no one can get. Yes.

Richard Campbell [02:17:03]:
After, yes, after the event was over, I had a day to do a whiskey tour. Actually went to the Holladay Distillery, had a great time. Although we've already talked about Holladay about a year ago, the last time I was there and And got a bottle of it. So I didn't want to talk about Holiday either, but I did end up— we went to Weston. And you only remember when we talked about Holiday Distillery and Ben Holiday and went back in those— in that era in the 1850s. Weston was this huge paddlewheeler station on the Missouri River, right? They— big stopping point, lots of trade and so forth. And then there's a number of distilleries there, Holiday being one of them. They've also got a— they've really done up the place sort of the, that 19th century style.

Richard Campbell [02:17:47]:
It's, you know, it's the middle of nowhere, really, western Missouri. Not a big, not a big place at all, but fun. And Heather, my friend, that's local to the area, takes us down this little alleyway and I'm like, oh boy, I haven't been shanked in Missouri before. This is awesome. And we go through this back door and it's a speakeasy. It's a little whiskey. It's called the Whiskey Den. Takes me upstairs.

Richard Campbell [02:18:09]:
And Tyler is this incredibly knowledgeable whiskey guy. And we went around in circles trying lots of different things, and one of them grabbed me, uh, well, several of them did, but I really wanted to talk about this one, The Art of the Spirits, uh, and specifically their 9/11 edition, which is rather timely. It was only last week, 25 years. Uh, you know, we talk about lots of different ways to make whiskey, right? I mean, of course we love the, the craftsmen that have been in it for years, you know, 150 years of heritage, that kind of thing. Uh, we've talked about the marketing groups, the, you know, the guys who don't really make their whiskey get it done elsewhere and so forth. And this falls a little more into that category. This is a guy named Richard Paul. He's out of Denver, Colorado, very much an artistic type.

Richard Campbell [02:18:55]:
He worked with some fairly famous artists related to Harley-Davidsons, guys like David Uley and Daniel James. And he got this idea to do limited edition artwork from these guys with limited edition whiskey releases.

Leo Laporte [02:19:08]:
This is very manly whiskey, this whiskey.

Richard Campbell [02:19:11]:
Oh, it's very manly. A lot of '30s speakeasy vibes, like that whole thing. And every so often you'll see it called the Art of the Spirits Distillery, but believe me, there's no distillery. That is not what's happening here.

Leo Laporte [02:19:23]:
It's about the label. It's not about what's in the bottle.

Richard Campbell [02:19:25]:
It's 100% about the label. In fact, one of the quotes, uh, from one of the interviews I read— I, I watched with Richard Pauls called it a whiskey brand doubled as an art gallery.

Leo Laporte [02:19:36]:
Oh, interesting.

Richard Campbell [02:19:36]:
Right? So it's very— it is very much art. And again, they occasionally think it's Colorado whiskey because he's from Colorado, but I don't think any of it's from Colorado. He's buying barrels from different distilleries and doing custom bottlings. Um, one of the videos I saw a picture of a Buffalo Trace barrel. So, ah, although many of the bottles, including the one I'm going to talk about, uh, say right on it distilled in Missouri. So I think very wisely, being a Midwesterner himself from the Denver, Colorado area. He's going to places like Nebraska and Indiana and Missouri and getting good deals on barrels. Now, he mostly makes what are called commissioned editions of whiskey.

Richard Campbell [02:20:20]:
So very artistic labels, but related to both military and first responders. So I think many of his original products are military related. So he's had that team come in to commission an edition. He'll get various barrels and get them to blind sample from them, pick one they really like, and then he'll bottle that for them. So you figure a single barrel like that's going to be 200, maybe 250 bottles total. One of his most famous editions is one called Swim with the Mission, which was done for the Navy SEALs at $1,000 a bottle. And apparently they sold 80 in the first minute of sales.

Leo Laporte [02:20:59]:
So it feels like you don't want to drink this. You want to leave it in the bottle. I don't know.

Richard Campbell [02:21:04]:
Yeah, and I think that might be what you might do, which should also be a mistake. Like, the whiskey— I tried a couple of different, uh, Art of the Spirits editions. They were very good. Like, in the end, more than anything, as much as I love the craftsmanship, if the whiskey's bad, the whiskey's bad, and that's not a good thing. And I'm not, you know, an idealist about every whiskey has to be good or a particular style. I drink lots of different styles. Hell, I even have respect for Jack Daniel's, the most popular whiskey in the world. for no other reason than it's made in exactly one place by exactly one team of people on exactly 2 stills that are the largest in the world.

Richard Campbell [02:21:36]:
Uh, he also operates a charity called Whiskey for Vets, which is specifically about supporting the families of veterans, where a portion of the revenue from selling these commissioned bottles goes to support a veteran family. It's often just financial support, getting them groceries or gas, that kind of thing. It's $72. I've read further into this. It was $72 a case. So case being, um, 12 bottles. So if you're thinking an edition of 200-something bottles, so it's gonna be a couple of thousand bucks for people who could really use the help. Uh, there have been many 9/11 editions, uh, from Art of the Spirits, I've come to find.

Richard Campbell [02:22:17]:
Uh, there's 2 general categories. There's one they call Forged in Flames, which is really focused on the firefighters from that day, and then the Honored to Serve, which is the police. a focused version, and they've got particular art on it. The, the Honor to Serve bottle is the one I had a taste of, which has got a, a painting of a police officer hand over heart with angel's wings.

Paul Thurrott [02:22:37]:
Oh.

Richard Campbell [02:22:37]:
And I found at least 3 editions of it. This particular one that I tried was made in conjunction with the El Paso County Sheriff's Office Foundation. Don't know how much El Paso has to do with 9/11 per se, but it is their 501 reporting fallen officers and the like. Uh, it quotes Matthew 5:9 on the back, which, if you're not that intimate with the Bible, is the blessed are the peacemakers portion of, uh, Matthew's Gospels. There's a debate as to which mash bill actually with this. At least one of them was 65% corn, 17.5% rye, 17.5% wheat, which is weird. No barley. Like, that would be odd.

Richard Campbell [02:23:20]:
Often when we see both rye and wheat in mash bill. There'd also be barley to be a 4-grain bourbon. In this particular case, for this particular edition, which again, it doesn't seem to be available anywhere anymore, it was aged for 9 years and 11 months.

Leo Laporte [02:23:36]:
That's right.

Paul Thurrott [02:23:37]:
A little, a little longer.

Leo Laporte [02:23:38]:
9/11. I get it now.

Richard Campbell [02:23:39]:
Yeah. Which, and also it had been finished in Tokaj wine casks. Tokaj is a region in northeastern Hungary and also a bit of Slovakia where they make quite sweet wines that have been affected by, uh, Botrytis cinerea, also known as the noble rot fungus.

Leo Laporte [02:23:58]:
Lisa's favorite dessert wine.

Richard Campbell [02:24:01]:
Yes, Sauternes is made in this same technique. So there is a Hungarian equivalent called Tokaji. And so I suspect that Richard Paul bought 9-year-old bourbon from an unnamed distillery— they all typically sign— and then stuck it in a Tokaji barrel for 11 months. Interesting. To do a little finishing on that. This was released in 2024, and so very timely here in 2026 for the anniversary.

Leo Laporte [02:24:24]:
Was it really sweet?

Richard Campbell [02:24:25]:
And— Oh, you didn't taste it?

Paul Thurrott [02:24:27]:
It was not.

Leo Laporte [02:24:27]:
No, it was not.

Richard Campbell [02:24:27]:
I did taste it. No, I absolutely had a— I had a good shot of it. And, uh, it is a bourbon, so it's got a lot of corn in it anyway. It's fairly sweet in the first place. Um, I don't know that you could tell the Tokai was there or not. It was an interesting, uh, whiskey, but— and a very interesting bottle, and, and a fascinating story. I don't think this guy was ever in the military. I think he's clearly fascinated by them, and he's built a lot of relationships.

Richard Campbell [02:24:52]:
Pictures of his speakeasy are covered in the badges and patches of many different parts of the military, and there's been many editions made. So obviously it's working. The Frogman set, which is the origin story of the SEALs, is, you know, 3 different editions alone. And again, they, they Some of them make a lot of money. So this particular 911 series is gone. They've sold them all, which is fine. And when it was last sold, I think it was about $85 a bottle, which is a reasonable price for a bottle of bourbon, although admittedly, 500ml bottle, not a 750ml.

Leo Laporte [02:25:26]:
Yeah, they look like smaller bottles, so they might—

Richard Campbell [02:25:30]:
Yeah, they're the 500s.

Leo Laporte [02:25:31]:
They're the fifths.

Richard Campbell [02:25:32]:
So they're getting more bottles per barrel that way. And again, I'm trying to decide how feel about this. So this is very much a marketing branding exercise. Uh, the artwork is interesting. It's clearly supported by military and first responders. He does run a charitable operation on the side of it. Uh, I have a tough time being terribly angry with this. He's not hiding from what he's doing, right? It's very clear.

Richard Campbell [02:25:55]:
He's done—

Leo Laporte [02:25:56]:
It sounds like he has good taste in whiskey. He's picking good whiskey.

Richard Campbell [02:25:59]:
Seems, seems to. And if he's smart enough, as I've only just learned in the past couple of years, Midwestern whiskey is very good. You know, they, they do an excellent job. And, uh, and you don't have to go to Kentucky to get good bourbon. Like, that's just the truth. Now, there's excellent bourbon in Kentucky, uh, but there's excellent bourbon elsewhere in America too.

Leo Laporte [02:26:19]:
Art of the Spirit—

Richard Campbell [02:26:21]:
Spirits. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:26:22]:
Uh, Colorado. Artofthespirits, plural, .com.

Richard Campbell [02:26:27]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:26:27]:
And that, my friends, is our whiskey pick For the week, Mr. Richard Kerr.

Paul Thurrott [02:26:35]:
I heard you correctly earlier. You said you've never been shanked in Missouri. Was that the quote? We were—

Richard Campbell [02:26:41]:
you know that moment when your friend suddenly leads you down an alley and it's like, what turn is this gonna take?

Paul Thurrott [02:26:46]:
I do.

Richard Campbell [02:26:47]:
And then, of course, it was a speakeasy door between 2 garbage— big, you know, big garbage smithereens. So it's like, oh, okay, fine, I get it.

Leo Laporte [02:26:54]:
I've never been shanked in Missouri. I think you're angling for the show title for this week.

Paul Thurrott [02:27:03]:
See you again next year.

Leo Laporte [02:27:05]:
Thank you, Richard Campbell. You'll find Richard at runnersradio.com. And Paul Theroux, you will find at theroux.com. His books are at leanpub.com. And you will find the both of them here for Windows Weekly every Wednesday at 11 AM Pacific, 2 PM Eastern, 1800 UTC, or download it From our website, twit.tv/ww, or of course subscribe. That's the best thing to do in your favorite podcast app. So you get it automatically. Thank you, Mr.

Leo Laporte [02:27:33]:
T. Thank you, Mr. C. Thanks to all our winners and dozers. We'll see you next week on Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.