Windows Weekly 983 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 Thuratz here, Richard Campbell. There's a Windows update that actually adds a bunch of new features. Paul will talk about that. Microsoft releases an AI security model with a great name. And we'll puzzle over Amazon's interesting numbers. There's something wrong here. Anyway, stay tuned.

Leo Laporte [00:00:22]:
You'll find out about that next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 983, recorded Wednesday, May 13, 2026, puts the buh in Benelux. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, all you winners and dozers. Time to wake up and say hello.

Leo Laporte [00:00:59]:
Smell the Paulie.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:02]:
No damn enchiladas.

Leo Laporte [00:01:04]:
It smells good in taco territory. That is Paul Thurat. Thurat.com. he is in Mexico City for the last week.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:12]:
Yeah, for a couple of months.

Leo Laporte [00:01:15]:
And also Mr. Richard Campbell. It's always fun. Where in the world is Ricardo Campbell? He is in. Where? The low cut Antwerp. We're in Antwerp. That's. That's where all the diamonds are, right?

Richard Campbell [00:01:29]:
Yeah, but it used to be that way. But not so much the Diamond Mart.

Leo Laporte [00:01:32]:
Not anymore. Not so much anymore.

Richard Campbell [00:01:33]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:01:34]:
So they'd all go and get their diamonds, raw cut diamonds, and bring them back to New York City and sell them. Okay, well, enough history. Let's.

Richard Campbell [00:01:46]:
Don't worry, I'm gonna do plenty.

Leo Laporte [00:01:48]:
Oh yeah, let's not forget.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:50]:
I was gonna say a lot of this is technically history.

Leo Laporte [00:01:53]:
The debate rages in the twit forums at Twitter community over the Whiskey segment. Some say just stop listening. Others say yes. But then Paul says something clever at the end and we don't want to miss that.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:05]:
That one still blows me away because I feel like that's pretty rare.

Leo Laporte [00:02:07]:
It never happens. Yeah, it never happens. Well, it might happen four times a year.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:12]:
Clever is the wrong word. It's like bizarre segue. You know, some kind of random stick something in.

Leo Laporte [00:02:19]:
Yeah, usually four times a year we get the last minute Microsoft earnings. Sometimes that happens, but that's only.

Richard Campbell [00:02:26]:
It's problematic.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:27]:
I mean, everyone's podcast player has a little fast forward thing, right? I mean, what's. You know.

Leo Laporte [00:02:32]:
And we're working on chapters. I know. Everybody wants chapters.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:36]:
You can't. Please. The problem is like, imagine if we just unilaterally give it up if you want. No, nobody wants that. No, no, no, no. That's ridiculous.

Leo Laporte [00:02:43]:
I like the Whiskey segment and I don't care.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:45]:
Right. The second we get rid of it. We're going to hear from the many people who are like, what the hell just happen?

Leo Laporte [00:02:51]:
And the history of it is, of course, Mary Jo Folio used to do beer, right? Did she always do beer?

Paul Thurrott [00:02:56]:
From, like, day one, you mean?

Leo Laporte [00:02:57]:
Yeah, I figured. I feel like she did. She's always. She was a beer drinker.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:01]:
I bet she was. Always beer. I'd have to go back and look at the notes, which means I'd have to open one note, which means I'll never do it. But I feel like what you call the back of the book has been there. It feels like forever.

Leo Laporte [00:03:14]:
Oh, yeah. I think we've always had it for a long time.

Richard Campbell [00:03:16]:
Yeah. So I think I told the story the other day of coming up to Penna Luna after the build event and being a good, you know, guest and bringing a couple of bottles of whiskey, and then you went and opened them on the air.

Leo Laporte [00:03:28]:
That was the mistake I made.

Richard Campbell [00:03:31]:
And straight to the cast. Strength. And I'm like, this is not a good idea.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:37]:
Like, two golems, you know, like, with my precious. I am.

Richard Campbell [00:03:41]:
I think you. I think you said something pithy like, I believe I've been shot in my tongue.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:46]:
Yes, that's exactly what he said. What do you think? And I said, I. I think I just got shot in my tongue.

Leo Laporte [00:03:51]:
That's funny. That's a good line.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:52]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:03:53]:
Yeah. My tongue is drunk.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:59]:
We have pretty much always had apple or abunda in our house since that week. So whenever. That was 15 years ago or something.

Richard Campbell [00:04:07]:
It's a while ago. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:09]:
Long time ago. Whatever it was. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:04:11]:
All right. I believe this is. Am I right? Is this. It was yesterday. A patch Tuesday.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:17]:
It was.

Leo Laporte [00:04:17]:
It was. What does that mean to you, Paul?

Paul Thurrott [00:04:21]:
What does it mean to me?

Leo Laporte [00:04:22]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:23]:
Well, it means it's another monthly reminder of how broken my brain is, because I always forget it's past Tuesday and then it happens and I'm like, God damn it. And then I have to write about it. And you think I would just. Would be the biggest day on my schedule or something, but I always forget. But I did know going into this because we've talked about it in terms of, like, the preview update from week D a couple of weeks ago, 10 days ago, whatever that was, that this was going to be a big one in the sense that this is the first patch Tuesday where we've received what I would call major new features for Windows this year. This has been quiet. Right. We've seen mostly kind of low level, fundamental things, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:02]:
And there's a Bunch of that, but I should say too, actually, the other weirdness to this is that 24 and 25 H2 both supported, still are getting the same update, right? So it updates to a slightly different build number, but the point beyond the decimal is the same. Right? Because it's the same update, same features, same everything. That's where all these new features are. And then there's also Windows 11, 26H1, which is on the new Snapdragon X2 based laptops, which coincidentally are the only ones I'm using now as we start winding down this trip. And there's not much going on there. So I had to break out like a couple of laptops that I'd packed away to be like, all right, I got to go see if I can look, look at any of this stuff. But if you have 25 or 24H2, you're going to get Xbox mode, which is a replacement for two things. This is the game mode replacement, which was previously or to this moment is just a toggle switch and settings that's on by default.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:58]:
There's nothing you can do to configure it. And then the full screen experience that debuted on those Xbox Rog, Ally gaming handhelds or handheld. Yeah, gaming handhelds. So this is the new version of that. It's a full screen experience like the old full screen experience. It gets rid of a lot of background processes, so it reduces resource ram usage, etc. The Xbox app essentially becomes the shell, if that makes sense. It's controller based or controller friendly certainly.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:27]:
And you know, the game bar is still there and all that stuff. And so if you're just going to use this computer for gaming, which you would with a handheld obviously, but maybe you would with a gaming PC too, you can just leave this on forever and you'll just have that kind of console like experience maybe is the way to put it. And I've seen that on one computer and it wasn't one of the ones I play games on, which is, you know, we're still dealing with CFRs, right, these random deployed features. So that will eventually go away, but it hasn't yet. The other major new feature is agents on the taskbar, which everyone remembers was what got Pavan Davaluri in so much trouble late last year, I believe, though it does support first and third party AI agents. I think the only way you could test it right now or use it is with the researcher agent. That's part of Microsoft 365 copilot. And this is where the agent will Behave like an app.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:24]:
So it will put a button or an icon in the taskbar. It will pop up notifications if it needs to get to you to ask it for, you know, next steps or you know, to clarify something, whatever it might be. And then you can also click on it. It'll pop up a little UI that will show you what it's doing, you know, where it's at, you can get a progress report, that kind of thing. So not seeing this yet and I don't have 365 copilot, but I'm kind of, kind of curious because this is Microsoft's attempt to make AI agents make sense within the context of how Windows works. Right. In a bit we're going to talk about how Google is doing the same thing, which is interesting, not the same ui, but their own take on this. Then there's just some other drag tray has become drop tray.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:11]:
Hate it. I turn it off so I don't care. Bunch of low level improvements to File Explorer which is getting performance improvements. We're seeing those across the board. We'll talk about that in a moment. This is interesting. The Windows kernel no longer trusts cross signed third party drivers by default. Instead, if a driver is in the hcl, the hardware, well the, I guess it's the hcp, the hardware compatibility program.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:40]:
It's not a list anymore. Right. I still think of it this like 1996, like the HCL, if it's in there that will be trusted by default. I think admins can make an allow list of trusted legacy drivers that will just be trusted by default. But this is Microsoft kind of shoring up that driver bit similar to what they did with printed drivers where they kind of just took that over and said yeah, we can't trust you guys anymore, we're just going to do this ourselves. So that's kind of interesting. If you do have 26H1 and you probably don't, but if you do, it's the stuff we saw in previous months. It's like 26H1 is the shipping or stable version of Canary.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:20]:
It's always like a month or two behind or more than that I guess depending on what it is. But you know, there were improvements to the narrator, the smart app control thing where you can toggle it on and off in real time. Now some pen settings improvements, the new setting about page which I feel like we've had for nine months or something. I have no idea. So these are just things like we've seen elsewhere. I don't know why these are Different. I mean, to me, I feel like 26H1 should have the same features or perhaps be a superset, if you will, of 25H2. But it's not.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:52]:
I can't explain that, but. Because why could I? I haven't had time to write this. I wondered when I saw this patch Tuesday release and then it was later confirmed. But Microsoft, not surprisingly, has developed their own in house version of Anthropic Mythos. Right. This thing that's finding all the security vulnerabilities everywhere. Their version is called M Dash, which by the way, I like the name but. And it's not, it's not really at the same level yet.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:24]:
I don't remember the exact number of vulnerabilities that it found this month, but it's in the double digits, like 20ish, something like that. I expect that to be, if not exponentially bigger next month and then beyond. But maybe it's going to be a lot more. I mean, as this thing ramps up. If you think about what Firefox has done with Mythos, this is going to be, you know, this is going to be big, you know, because this is going across Azure, Windows, obviously on the client Windows server, probably the Office apps, everything. I mean, throughout Microsoft. If you think about all this, I

Richard Campbell [00:11:01]:
just think we're going to get huge numbers of patches everywhere.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:04]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:11:04]:
And that's nothing special to Microsoft. These tools are turning up vulnerabilities like mad. And if they can turn them up themselves, the bad guys can too. Like the pressure is on.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:15]:
Oh yeah. So the reason I mentioned this is only because, you know, like, for example, OpenAI last week announced their version of Mythos. Right, whatever. I don't remember the name of that, but you know, everyone's doing it. You know, this is the thing with AI. Like, if you see a feature over here, just wait two seconds, you're going to get it on the AI thing over here. But this is stuff, this is not available to individuals. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:36]:
This is something they make available to companies, governments, etc. And in Microsoft's case, they could have probably, I mean, absolutely could have used Anthropic Mythos, but you know, they make AI so they want to have their own. So it's not. I mentioned this only because it's not really surprising that Microsoft would make their own agentic vulnerability finder or whatever. So we'll see how this goes. I think this year is going to be very, very interesting for found security vulnerabilities. I think.

Richard Campbell [00:12:10]:
Yeah, I think it speaks to. I was almost Making neuromancer references like, we're just not that far from having these models running inside of your network, constantly monitoring and resisting attacks.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:24]:
If I didn't, I think, yeah, well, Firefox will come up later in the show, but if I didn't say this last week, like one of the observations I kind of had about this is that at some point you find the bugs that are in an existing code base, but then you start using it more proactively because you're submitting new code into the project.

Richard Campbell [00:12:42]:
Yeah. And it'll be part of the CICD pipeline. Right. And this evaluate on the fly.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:48]:
Yeah. So in Microsoft's case, they've been promoting this notion of secure by default for possibly 25 years or whatever it's been. This makes that more of a reality, if that makes sense. So we'll see how it goes.

Richard Campbell [00:13:02]:
But anyway, it also seems like Microsoft is positioning itself as self contained on the AA realm. Like they obviously got into OpenAI first and so forth, but keep showing they

Paul Thurrott [00:13:13]:
have their own product so they're getting

Richard Campbell [00:13:17]:
ready for a go it alone day.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:19]:
Yeah, I suppose there's a possibility this is in fact based on whether the OpenAI thing is. And I don't know, I just haven't had a chance to look at it yet. So after the show's over I'll probably write it up and figure that out. But, but yeah, if this is in fact a homegrown model, great. I mean, that's, you know, good for them.

Leo Laporte [00:13:36]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:13:39]:
Interesting times.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:41]:
Yep, yep, yep, yep. Yeah, I mean I can't get like a Android Kotlin project to even compile, let alone figure out if it's secure, you know, but, but you know, these guys, they're on their, they're on a different level, so.

Richard Campbell [00:13:52]:
Yeah, but you hit the point, which is that a lot of people have a tough time even evaluating what security means. Like what does it mean to actually have this code well, locked down.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:02]:
Yeah. And I think for app developers, regardless of the platform, you know, if you're Android, iOS, web based, whatever it is, Windows, obviously there's the whole notion of like starter templates and like starter projects and you know, it's a code review thing you can do through AI, et cetera, I think that the security angle is going to be part of it from the get go like that, you

Richard Campbell [00:14:23]:
know, and it makes a lot of sense to have an agent that's running and gathering the latest CVEs and evaluating the coded scene the same way we have dependabot inside of GitHub. We could do the point with our own code bases where this agent is actually adding issues saying this CVE likely attacks this application and we need to be run through the evaluator.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:45]:
Yeah. In the old days we would say, oh, did it compile? Okay, ship it. Um, yeah. And now it's going to be more like, did it pass? You know, whatever the version of EM Dash is, this security profile, then you ship it. Right. So, yeah, I mean, that's. Look, I'm sorry, but that's 100% progress. Like, that's.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:00]:
That's good. This is a great. This is maybe the best AI kind of thing I've seen so far. Like, it's going to benefit everyone, even the people that hate AI, because there's, you know, the stuff they use is going to be better because of it. It's nice.

Richard Campbell [00:15:12]:
My. My AI hype ends. Ends with the story of Alpha Fold and giving away the 200 million protein foldings. It's like we fundamentally changed medicine with this technology. Now you're never going to take that back.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:25]:
Here it is. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:15:30]:
Should we do the insiders program?

Leo Laporte [00:15:35]:
Are you waiting for me? Is that.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:36]:
Well, yeah. I mean, do we need to do an ad or should we.

Leo Laporte [00:15:38]:
Well, you did it so fast. I can move the ad down. I like to go at least 20 minutes before.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:43]:
Before I make you stop touching my notes, Leo. Okay, so. So this. This.

Leo Laporte [00:15:48]:
I'm always guessing just how long it's going to take you to get to bullet point, you know, and I'm. I do.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:54]:
Well, I. I do the same thing. Just when I do the notes, I kind of think about it like, this is going to be a long show or short show, whatever, and like, I'm wrong every time. So.

Leo Laporte [00:16:00]:
Yeah, it's very hard.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:01]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:16:01]:
You know, sometimes you got more to talk about with.

Richard Campbell [00:16:04]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:04]:
Sometimes you go into it thinking, all right, this is going to take some time. Got to get through this. And then it's like, bang, done.

Leo Laporte [00:16:09]:
You know, I do like M Dash, by the way. That's.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:11]:
That is a good name. Yeah. They should rename all their AI to that.

Leo Laporte [00:16:15]:
Yeah, they should fix all their bugs. That would be cool.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:18]:
Yep.

Richard Campbell [00:16:19]:
Well, now you're just talking Tracy talk. That's not how that works at all.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:26]:
All right.

Leo Laporte [00:16:26]:
If it's so good, why can't it just fix all their bugs?

Paul Thurrott [00:16:29]:
Yeah, just fix it. Just fix it.

Leo Laporte [00:16:30]:
Just fix it.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:31]:
That's what I want is the just fix it button, you know, for the kernel. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:16:34]:
Yeah. Simple. That was easy.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:36]:
Yeah. So I feel like for the rest of the year, or at least for the next few months, we're going to be dealing with this kind of a weekly thing. And the weekly thing is going to be, well, two parts, right? There's the. Microsoft will either talk about or implement some low level changes that improve Windows to some degree as part of this pain points thing they're working on now. And then you will run into people who complain about it, which is bizarre, right, Because I think most of anybody, I mean pretty much using Windows would look at what they're doing and I can point out things they're not doing, like that's my job. But as far as like what they are doing, it's all, you know, it's, it's good and unless you're a complainer. So one of the things that Microsoft is quietly working on is something called a new low latency profile for Windows 11. And this response, this, what this does is actively engage the CPU very briefly to boost the performance of an app launching or a ui like the Start menu or widgets or whatever it is responding to that click.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:38]:
So in other words, the delta of time between you clicking the thing and it, you know, coming up or whatever like File Explorer, notably the app shell comes up fast. But that display of the home screen is slow and slow in this case means like one to two seconds.

Richard Campbell [00:17:54]:
Did we really think it's CPU bound? I think it's usually network.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:59]:
So it depends on the ui. So actually that's, we're going to get to that because that's actually part of it. But this is for specific on device, display of UI essentially whether it's an app launching or like I said, like a Start Menu kind of thing. So Start menu is. I'll just get to it now since you said it. Start menu is an example of something that is both, right, because it is connecting to the Internet and in Scott Hanselman's words, too many times to do certain things. And so people are like, oh, it's react native, it's slow and it's like, it's not that, it's like it's just doing too much and that slows it down. You know, the initial, you know, you expect to click on something and see it, you know.

Richard Campbell [00:18:39]:
Yeah, and by too much you mean stuff I didn't ask for, that's another issue.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:45]:
But yes, absolutely, it's fair to say that you can customize the Start menu to some degree if you don't like that stuff. But yeah, fair enough. So Windows Central and some other places have tested this, and according to those people with this enabled, if you, you know, side by side, same machine with this low latency profile enabled or not, they're seeing like 40% faster launch times for inbox apps like Edge and outlook and 70% faster launch times for interfaces like Start and right click context menus and so forth. So it's working, right? But of course, like I said, people complain. So someone on, I guess Twitter, X, whatever we're calling this, he's like, so let me get this straight, it's like the slowdowns here are really coming from whatever the runtime is like React Native on top of XAML or something, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, so you screwed around with the low level, how the processor works and that's the fix. And Scott of course being technical and having the brittleness that comes with that is like, yeah, that's not. Has nothing to do with React native.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:54]:
This is something that Linux and all mobile platforms do as well. And so what doesn't matter what the device is. You bring up a phone, you tap an icon, you don't wait seconds, right? It just appears. And so every interaction, whether it's touch based on a phone or in Linux now or Windows, as it's happening, it's like, like cores get woken up on the processor, clock speeds get boosted, the thing occurs and then it drops back down to idle. And this all happens in milliseconds, right? Apple does it, Android does it, and in Scott Hanselman's words, Apple does this. And you all love it. So fair enough. I'm not sure I've experienced this.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:40]:
I've been using like Snapdragon X2 laptops lately, so I'm already seeing an awesome performance boost it. So, you know, I do, I'm sure, I'm sure this will help you guys. So anyway, that's good. And that's something I don't know, I'm not even sure where this. I don't know if some of this is unstable yet or if it's just inside a program. I believe it might be inside a program. This is probably. It would have been late last week.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:04]:
So Microsoft is announcing Insider builds differently now. In the past, what they would do is have blog post for each new build. So if there was a beta release, canary release, dev channel release, whatever, there would be a separate blog post for each. Even though in many cases they might have a lot of overlap for features and so forth. Now they have simplified the program by having fewer top level channels, but also made it more complex by Having sub channels, which is super confusing. And they're doing a single announcement for everything. So whatever day comes, Thursday, Friday, whatever this was, they're like, here are all the builds we released. There's four of them.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:46]:
One is in the beta channel and then three are in experimental because again, we can't have nice things. So there's experimental that used to be the dev channel. It's just experimental. There's experimental that's on 26H1, which is essentially the former Canary 28,000 series builds, I think. And then experimental future platforms, which is now what I think of as Canary. But the further out stuff that may or may not make it into the system. And when this was Canary, I was thinking that this is like 26H2 essentially. But you know, who knows? So we got those four builds and then there were two notable changes or new features or however you want to say this, that neither one is, I mean, you know, groundbreaking.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:30]:
Exactly. But one is that they're adding additional gesture options for touchpads that support like precision touchpads that have all the multi touch gestures related to scrolling and zooming and automatic scrolling, et cetera. I didn't see one that I was like, oh, I'm gonna have to try that. I was like, no, I don't care about these. But the other ones is nice. I mean one of the issues, and this is probably related to, you know, Chromebooks being super cheap and then MacBook Neo is now super cheap. And if you are in a smaller educational environment where you don't have IT staff especially and you don't have any budget, right. You might want to just go buy computers like either in the channel or even at retail because they're so cheap.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:11]:
Like you can get these really cheap Windows laptops, but when you buy them that way they come with what's Windows 11 home like the consumer version.

Richard Campbell [00:23:19]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:20]:
So what they're allowing now is for you to buy a Windows 11 home based PC and then upgrade it to what's called Windows 11 Pro Education for K through 12 and for free. So it's not.

Richard Campbell [00:23:34]:
What do you need to be able to do that upgrade? Like you have to be a teacher of some kind.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:39]:
I didn't even look into that. So I would imagine. Yeah, I don't know. So probably Right. And the idea here is that like pro, but also, you know, Pro Education is. Can be centrally managed to some degree or not.

Richard Campbell [00:23:53]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:53]:
Can't. Can in fact be central manage. Right. So it might be an MDM type solution. It's unlike it's not going to be active directory, probably.

Richard Campbell [00:24:00]:
It'll be in tune. Yeah, they're not doing anything new with ad. It'll be in tune.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:04]:
Yep, yep.

Richard Campbell [00:24:05]:
So per seat charge. So.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:08]:
Yeah, that's nice. I mean, to me, that's just nice. So

Leo Laporte [00:24:13]:
good on them. That's just nice.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:15]:
It's nice.

Leo Laporte [00:24:16]:
It's a nice.

Richard Campbell [00:24:17]:
It's nice.

Leo Laporte [00:24:17]:
Anybody say the word canary? Now let's go back to Paul where the word is. A new threat has emerged.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:29]:
Yeah, I mean, Google's been kind of previewing this for a year, but they finally announced, well, what the device there we'll call Google Book, which is a new kind of Chromebook, Right. Based on this aluminum OS thing, which is not going to be the final name of the os, but Android Aluminium, by the way.

Leo Laporte [00:24:46]:
Not.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:47]:
Yeah, I'm not doing that.

Leo Laporte [00:24:49]:
No, no, I'm not. That's what they say. But anyway, that's how they spell it. But they say, don't worry, it's a code name.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:54]:
It's a code name. Yeah, yeah. Still a lot of questions here, but. And I, I've written a lot about this. I'm fascinated by this notion of like scaling up a mobile platform to make it compete with the desktop platform and how that might or might not work. So a couple of things I will say because this is pertinent to our space. You know, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, once described Copilot as potentially becoming the new Start menu. And we all kind of chuckled and laughed and everything.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:22]:
But when you think about it, this thing you go to, to get work, that way you start, you start, you know, you launch, literally start. I keep saying start, but you start your day, so to speak. That makes some sense. But you know, Google, unlike Microsoft, has had a lot of success with its AI and they're putting Gemini in their case across their entire stack. They have incredible reach with consumers and businesses. And this thing, you know, I don't like some of the marketing here. It's like it's not an operating system, it's an intelligent system. You're like, okay, guys, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:53]:
But you know, Android based makes sense because that's the popularity and the, and the scope that you need. All the developers there, the drivers go there first, etc. Etc. So this, you know, they're doing what they did with Chromebook. I, you know, it's sort of rethinking the laptop.

Leo Laporte [00:26:09]:
You know, there's a. I really like and I have, I got it from my daughter, the Lenovo Chromebook with a mediatek companion process.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:19]:
No, those are great.

Leo Laporte [00:26:21]:
That's the funny thing. Terrible name. Great process.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:23]:
Yeah. So it's a. That's a like a Copilot plus PC class Chromebook. Right. As far as the hardware goes with

Leo Laporte [00:26:29]:
the benchmarks make it kind of equivalent of Apple's M2.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:33]:
Yeah. So the Google Books, we don't know a lot about the hardware, but I

Leo Laporte [00:26:38]:
hope they use this MediaTek for us.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:40]:
So they're going to use Snapdragon, they're going to use the MediaTek whatever, what do you call it?

Leo Laporte [00:26:44]:
And the Lenovo has a LED screen.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:46]:
They'll use it as well. Yeah. So we know that all the top 5pc makers are on board, which, you know, they are for Chromebooks as well. I didn't realize this at the time, which kind of shows you where my head's at. But one notable exception to that list of OEMs is Samsung, which is Google's biggest partner in this space.

Leo Laporte [00:27:05]:
They make great products.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:06]:
Yes, they do. And there was a rumored Samsung Galaxy Book running this OS out doing benchmarks or something in the world. So like that will happen. It's more likely that this was not a snub and that because these guys are such close partners that they'll have a special thing with just the two of them, you know, at some point.

Richard Campbell [00:27:25]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:27:26]:
I, you know, so that's interesting that Chromebooks are still a thing because I feel like schools have kind of soured a little bit on that.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:33]:
I don't, I mean, I don't know about. I don't know. I mean, I will say having recently reevaluated Chromebook using like a really cheap one too. It was like under 200 bucks. It's actually, it's fine. It's pretty good. Like it's.

Richard Campbell [00:27:46]:
As long as you don't need to install any software on it. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:27:50]:
Nowadays everything's web based.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:51]:
Well, I mean like a real Chromebook, you could install. Install Linux environment and run Linux apps. I mean that's, you know, for developers.

Richard Campbell [00:27:57]:
That was just a bit common.

Leo Laporte [00:27:58]:
Android people. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:59]:
Oh no, I understand. And then.

Leo Laporte [00:28:01]:
But almost everything's web based now. Everybody had. Even QuickBooks has a web interface. I mean.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:06]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:28:06]:
Can't you run on in a browser nowadays?

Paul Thurrott [00:28:08]:
Well, a game locally.

Leo Laporte [00:28:10]:
Oh, that.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:11]:
And then. Yeah. Like, like top.

Leo Laporte [00:28:13]:
That's why schools like it, frankly.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:15]:
No. Right. No, there's good reasons for it. I mean you could see where a business might like it too. But yeah. Anyway, this is, you know, this is interesting. Like I.

Richard Campbell [00:28:22]:
So I think the question is, is it more Android compatible than Chromebooks.

Leo Laporte [00:28:26]:
I think this will be, I think

Paul Thurrott [00:28:28]:
that's the whole, I think it's literally just going to be Android. I think it's Android. Yeah, well, it's Fuchsia and it will run, it will run the full desktop Chrome web browser with the extensions and all that. So that's important. So in that sense it will be like a Chromebook is today. There's no plan to replace Chromebook immediately, but that's obviously going to happen. These are going to be premium kind of Chromebook plus or Copilot Plus PC type devices. They did.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:54]:
There were a bunch of announcements around this, but one that is pertinent to us is that I, you know, I mentioned this agents on the taskbar thing that Microsoft has in Windows and for this system Google is rethinking like the mouse cursor. Right. And so if you're familiar with Windows, you have to enable this feature. But there's a, it's called Shake. I forget what it's called. I think it's just called Shake. But you shake your mouse cursor and all the Windows minimize. And so what Google is doing is you shake the mouse cursor and then it turns into what they're calling, I think it's a smart pointer or magic pointer and it becomes this Gemini kind of front end.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:33]:
So it does that vision stuff where whatever's under the mouse cursor, you can learn more about that. You can select items and put them into kind of a little, it's like a pop up bubble bucket and then have, and then write a prompt right there like next to the cursor, you know, on screen anywhere. And you know, okay. I mean I like, I, I've not used it. It looks interesting and it is a way to bring kind of new AI capabilities into what is essentially like a what I'd call a legacy, you know, desktop type platform. I know it's not a legacy, but as far as you know, there's a, basically a taskbar star button. You know, it's like the thing everyone knows and knows how to use and you know, they're kind of rethinking it which, you know, Google has a pretty good history of doing this kind of thing. It's kind of interesting and we'll see.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:22]:
There's a lot of questions. A lot of questions. So many questions. Yeah, devices by the end of the year, one of the inevitable conversations you get into with this kind of thing. And I say that because I often trigger it myself, which is you can Take something big like Windows that's been around for decades, and you can kind of strip off, strip off, strip off and try to arrive at this more mobile like, or literally mobile platform that's simpler. Does that make any sense? And Microsoft's tried this with Windows CE and all the stuff that became Windows Mobile over the years. They tried it with Windows RT and the Windows 8 time frame. And then what we have today is Windows 11 on ARM, which is just Windows 11.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:04]:
Right. I mean, there is some culling of legacy code in there, which is great, but they haven't really changed the. You know, it's the familiar Windows interface. Apple did the same thing, right, With Mac OS X when they made the iPhone. And then they've since used that smaller code base, which they added things like multitouch and whatever too, and created all their other platforms like iPad, you know, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, et cetera. Google's done the same thing. Like they have Android xr, they have Google tv, Android auto wear os. I'm forgetting some.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:37]:
It doesn't matter. So it's interesting, but the question of whether a mobile platform can replace a desktop platform is obviously dependent on who you are and the things you need to do. But I kind of like the idea of scaling something small up in a way like you're starting from maybe a simpler code base, hopefully. And we'll see, we'll see where that goes. But I. They position this, this was their wording that this thing is modern. Right. In other words, they're not really saying mobile.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:08]:
Like, they don't really describe it as a mobile platform. It's a modern platform. Right. And you can make the argument that desktop systems like Mac and Windows are legacy platforms. Right. I mean, they've been around for a long time. There's a lot of cruft and with great power.

Richard Campbell [00:32:23]:
I mean, I'd definitely like to see one of these as a tablet.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:28]:
Yeah, well, right. I mean, so the answer there would be. Well, we have that, right? We have Android tablets. Like, this is very specifically a laptop.

Richard Campbell [00:32:36]:
Not that good.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:37]:
Well, we'll see. I mean, you know, like, the iPad can be good at like, like a laptop in the sense that you have a magic keyboard.

Richard Campbell [00:32:44]:
Definitely that. And that was my point. It's like, are you really going to make the iPad Pro competitor that can snap into the keyboard and be very laptop?

Paul Thurrott [00:32:50]:
Right. So we may see that they. They're not talking form. I mean, in the past they were talking Android laptop laptop. But they, you know, we'll see. I mean, it's possible OEMs, Google itself, whatever, we don't know. But I will say, you know, with the iPad, there's still some little rough areas where it's touch first, you know, it's, it's awesome as a tablet, of course, but there are interfaces, you know, depending on the app and whatever it is where you're trying to right click and it doesn't right click, but if you click and hold it then gets the menu, which is how it would work with touch, not how it should work with a mouse. And if Google can kind of get by that and make this a little more seamless, maybe they're onto something awesome.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:33]:
Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. Okay, so that's kind of fun. Always like to see that out of the middle of nowhere. I guess that's not the right way to say that. Microsoft announced a major update to Edge across both desktop and mobile today. Wasn't expecting that. Oops, I just closed the tab.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:58]:
So this is gonna be another one of those, you know, you'll cheer, then you'll boo moments where it's like, I'm happy to announce that they've gotten rid of co pilot mode. Yay. No, because it's all co pilot mode now. You knew that was coming, right? Come on.

Richard Campbell [00:34:14]:
Like, yeah, we don't need an icon when you can never get away from it.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:17]:
Yeah, it's just, there's no mode. It's just going to be all this AI crap. So there's a lot of new capabilities that are occurring across both desktop and mobile. There are some things that had been on desktop before that are now coming to mobile. So for example, Copilot Vision and Voice are now available on mobile for the first time. So that's kind of cool if you want that, I guess. I don't know. But the things that will be across both is Copilot has first of all long term memory, which I think is important to all these things, meaning you can ask it about things and it will have the context of all the stuff you've given it permission to see.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:53]:
Which can now include not just multiple tabs, but reasoning across multiple tabs. So you can compare information, get summaries, see what matters the most, blah, blah, blah, whatever. The new tab page has been redesigned. This is the thing. This looks like the Copilot mode new tab page to me. But that's fine. Copilot has these two features that were experimental. Actually one of them still is, but this a feature called Journeys which is now broadly available across desktop and for the first time.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:22]:
Mobile. I don't think it was even tested on mobile before, at least publicly. I could be wrong about that. I don't think so. There's a study and learn mode with guided study sessions. There's a writing assistant, which is obviously AI based for drafting new things or just rewriting or for tone, clarity, whatever. There are copilot quizzes, so you can generate quizzes, flashcards, guided sessions, etc, based on information you might be looking at in a tab. You can turn any tab into an audio podcast.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:51]:
Right. So if you think about. What's it called, the immersive view or whatever, the reading view in Edge today, you know, that's a way to read the actual article, but without the distractions of the webpage with, you know, whatever ads and nonsense might be there.

Richard Campbell [00:36:08]:
All the blinky and jumpy stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:10]:
Yeah. But you can also click a little play button and it will read it to you, which is nice. But the podcast feature is not a literal reading of the article. It uses AI to kind of summarize it, and then it presents it as if it were a podcast. So you might be on your phone, maybe you see some interesting article, you're like, I got to get on the subway of the bus or whatever. I can't walk around and read this. But you can listen to a podcast version of it, which for some reason is super common with AI making a podcast out of things. It's almost like they were training all their models and all the podcasts, but I'm sure they didn't do that, and I think that's probably most of it.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:46]:
So these features are all rolling out across Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone, and iPad.

Richard Campbell [00:36:52]:
So cool.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:54]:
There you go. This one kind of hit me, personally, because I love Markdown. I write in Markdown. I almost think in Markdown at this

Leo Laporte [00:37:03]:
point, you're writing a book about Markdown.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:05]:
It might be writing a book about Markdown.

Leo Laporte [00:37:07]:
John Cooper is expecting you to write a book.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:08]:
Yep, yep, yep. Now there's some pressure. Yeah, there's pressure. But the thing is, Markdown is. Has become even more prominent lately because it's the language of AI and especially AI agents. And I guess I never really thought about this too much, but it's one thing for it to be able to easily process Markdown, because Markdown is just plain text with a couple of formatting tags essentially. But it also outputs a markdown. And there's an engineer from Anthropic, and I think Anthropic as an organization is making the argument that this is not the right approach that the output should be HTML.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:51]:
And because this is richer possibilities there, including programmatic interactions through JavaScript, et cetera. You can link to images in Markdown just like you can in HTML. So there is some visual kind of things that you can do there. But the thing is, this isn't the part of the book, part of that book I'm working on. I wrote this, but I haven't shared it publicly yet because that chapter is not done. But when Jon Gruber created this and Aaron Schwartz.

Leo Laporte [00:38:21]:
I really want to make sure Aaron gets credit.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:23]:
Okay. I'm just based on me reading his blog. Right. He described Describe Markdown as two different things. There was the syntax that gets added to plain text, which is both human and machine readable, obviously. And then in his case, I think it was a Perl script, but it was a way to transform that markdown plain text into HTML because that's what gets published on the web.

Richard Campbell [00:38:47]:
Sure.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:48]:
Doing that in having AI do that, having an AI agent do that actually to me does make sense because the, the surface that you're looking at in cloud or whatever, you know, AI you're using, if you're on the web, whatever, it is going to be HTML. Right. Like you might. It might as well use the thing the whole world already uses. And it has richer display capabilities as it is and must maybe better understood as well. So even though you can do some, you can do some, you know, some kind of cool. Depending on the Markdown editor that you use, a lot of them have a side by side view or a view where you can bring up the. It's called a preview usually, which is the HTML view.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:31]:
Right. So you're writing in code essentially. Well, you're writing plain text, but it has little hashtags and whatnot. And you can read it, it's readable, it's not particularly pretty, but if you want to see what it's going to look like on the output end, that's. That is HTML. It was always going to be HTML like. So I think this, it's an interesting point. Like I, I don't know why AI agents spit out Markdown other than the.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:57]:
I don't want to. Let me think of.

Richard Campbell [00:39:58]:
They like text, right? They're just.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:59]:
They love text and it's. Yep.

Richard Campbell [00:40:01]:
Could have been HTML, but.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:03]:
Yeah, and he's. And they're saying they do both equally.

Leo Laporte [00:40:06]:
Well, honestly, it's just whatever. If you told your agent, use HTML from now on instead of Markdown, it would.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:13]:
It will just do it. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, I think what they're saying is.

Richard Campbell [00:40:16]:
And by HTML you mean marquee with flaming text.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:19]:
Yeah, I mean blinking text. So after.

Leo Laporte [00:40:23]:
After that article came out from Tariq, I. But I don't. I. So. And some have said Daniel Meisler, who I think is really smart, has said, stick with Markdown and do HTML when you want something that is easy to. That's prettier or easy to read. So I still stick with Markdown and you need to for things like Claude MD or Agents md.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:45]:
Right. I think the reason it is marked down on output is because it is on input 2 and these things all interact and so it's just easier. This is the workflow.

Leo Laporte [00:40:55]:
I'll show you what I've done. So what I do when I want something that I can visualize better, I'll say make the markdown and put it in my Obsidian. Because Obsidian reads Markdown well. But also make a page. This is on Cloudflare, so I just have a Cloudflare page. So we're working on a workflow and it just did this page now, it also did it in Markdown, but you could see instead of using Mermaid to make diagrams and stuff, it does it HTML and it's nice and it makes it easy to read and it's stuff like that. The other thing I had to do, which I guess I can share this with you, we're planning a vacation in the fall and I didn't know what to do where we're going, so I had the AI act like a travel agent and recommend stuff. And I said, make that an HTML page and put it up on the Cloudflare.

Leo Laporte [00:41:40]:
Cloudflare is free for pages and it's easier to read. That's all. That's the beauty of it. That's all it is. And then I have an index on it. So this is just like a quick bookshelf. They're disposable. And I think that I still use Markdown because I still put it in Obsidian.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:00]:
Like I said, I almost think in Markdown. So to me that's just normal but easy.

Leo Laporte [00:42:03]:
It's how you type. But nowadays when the AI is typing, it doesn't matter. Python, go Markdown. HTML. Yeah, it's spitting out thousand lines a second.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:13]:
Anyway, obviously can read HTML. It's the earliest role of AI was a web scraper.

Leo Laporte [00:42:22]:
Yeah, right, right.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:23]:
Translator, obviously can handle it. Anyway, kind of interesting conversation. Yeah, it's interesting.

Leo Laporte [00:42:29]:
Um, I do both, is what I say.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:32]:
Yeah, okay. Yeah, I.

Leo Laporte [00:42:33]:
Depending on how I. You know what I How I don't

Paul Thurrott [00:42:37]:
think about it because I'm not producing anything that I want anyone to see. Like, I'm just. You know what I mean? Like, I don't really.

Leo Laporte [00:42:42]:
I'm not producing well for things like those, the diagrams and stuff. It's a little easier to individualize, but anyway, it's just as fluent in both languages. So I just say, hey, give me an HTML list and put it up on cloudflare. And it does it.

Richard Campbell [00:42:54]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:55]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [00:42:55]:
It's easy.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:56]:
Yep.

Richard Campbell [00:42:57]:
Yeah, that's great.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:58]:
Yep. So I think we referenced this last week. I hadn't. I still to this moment have not written about this, but Google Chrome was found to be downloading this 4 gigabyte local AI model, which I said at the time has to be Gemini Nano. And it is. I also had this vague idea, like they said a couple of years ago they were going to do this, and they did. Actually, this is not a secret thing they're doing. I made the point, I think, last week, that Firefox does this with the language translation stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:33]:
Every time you select a language in there and say, I want to be able to translate between this and whatever other languages I've downloaded, it downloads local AI models for that. That's what it does. Now, they're probably not 4 gigabytes of space or whatever, but all these people are writing tips like, here's how you can free up 4 gigabytes of space on your computer. And it's like, okay, but I mean, if you're actually using this stuff and you want this thing to work offline, for example, or whatever it might be, and you have the space, I guess you might want this. But it was sort of presented as this nefarious plan or something, like, we're going to sneak Gemini.

Leo Laporte [00:44:07]:
The only thing nefarious about it is that it's changing web standards unilaterally without the help of the W3C.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:15]:
So you use the word only, and that's actually serious.

Richard Campbell [00:44:19]:
But it's not. I mean, is it actually trying to change the RFCs? I mean, no, but it's.

Leo Laporte [00:44:24]:
But it's de facto, right? So if a developer says, well, I have an API, which it is, by the way, there's an API. If I have an API to a local AI, I'm going to use it. But the problem is it only works with Chrome. So there goes Firefox, there goes Vivaldi, there goes.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:39]:
This was the Internet Explorer strategy back in the day, you know, make stuff that only works in ie. And this is not what we want, we don't want a button that says this page works best in whatever the browser is. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:44:49]:
So I don't think it's a bad thing at all.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:51]:
Yeah, I mean, when. Well, the first outrage about this wasn't that.

Leo Laporte [00:44:55]:
Although that it was the four gigabytes.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:56]:
It's just the four gigabyte thing. And it's like, okay, but you know, whatever. I, if you have a copilot plus PC, you might have 40 gigabytes models. I'm not joking.

Leo Laporte [00:45:05]:
Like, and there's a lot to be said for a local only model, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:45:08]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:45:08]:
Especially Gemini, which is very, very good.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:10]:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:45:13]:
There's a lot of.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:14]:
This is the same model that Google puts on their Pixel phones, for example. Right?

Leo Laporte [00:45:18]:
Yeah. Right. It's on every phone. Every phone is a local model. So.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:21]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:45:22]:
But I, I do think it's, it's unfortunate because it means Firefox is. There should be a W3C should set a standard for local models in the local API. I agree. I do, but I agree Google has

Paul Thurrott [00:45:36]:
been doing this kind of thing. So they're. They were going to do that. What was that sandbox thing they were going to do?

Leo Laporte [00:45:41]:
Yeah, they Bigfoot everything they eventually gave

Paul Thurrott [00:45:44]:
up on, but they were just basically pushing by whatever the standards are and, and doing their own thing and, and my God, where they was there complaining. So the good, the good news is that complaining leads to antitrust investigations which leads to them completely reversing course. So maybe they'll do that here. I don't.

Leo Laporte [00:46:02]:
Yeah, they gave up on the.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:03]:
Whatever that, That's a privacy sandbox.

Leo Laporte [00:46:06]:
Privacy sandbox. They gave up on that, didn't they?

Paul Thurrott [00:46:08]:
Yeah, they did.

Leo Laporte [00:46:08]:
They had several different proposals.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:10]:
Five years, maybe longer. It was, you know, they were going to be doing that for a long time until they were not.

Leo Laporte [00:46:16]:
The difference was it was the advertising community that didn't like that. This would be end users that don't like it. They don't know how much clout we have.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:22]:
It blows my mind that it's like we want to find something that's going to be really good for advertisers and doesn't violate your privacy so much. And it's like there's no such thing as that. You're going to do one or the other.

Leo Laporte [00:46:35]:
I'm sorry, just pressed the wrong button. I'm trying to get my watch to shut up. Instead it made more noise. Sorry.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:43]:
No, it's okay. OpenAI has a coding agent called Codex. Like anthropic cloud code. It has expanded to Include productivity functionality.

Richard Campbell [00:46:56]:
So they're going after co work?

Paul Thurrott [00:46:58]:
Yep. Oh yeah, yeah. Yes they are. They released a Codex app on the Mac and then on Windows and this is over the past, you know, X number of months, I don't remember. And what they found was, and it's always fascinating to me, like you think you release software and it's intentional, but then you users actually use it and you find out, oh, they're doing different stuff with it than we thought. The most common workflows that customers were using happened in their web browser, whatever it was. Now they have a version of Codex that's for Chrome, meaning it will work in. I haven't tried this, but it should work in any chromium browser like Edge, Brave, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:38]:
The idea here is that if you're doing across multiple browser tabs, workflows like inspecting log, this is their words, inspecting logs, testing web apps, reviewing dashboards, moving through internal tools, CRMs, dashboards, docs, yada yada yada. So okay, okay, whatever. You're cute. So that's happening. That's all I got.

Richard Campbell [00:48:06]:
Suddenly open AI is chasing, which is

Leo Laporte [00:48:08]:
weird, you know, isn't that strange?

Richard Campbell [00:48:10]:
Just like that, they couldn't quite get

Leo Laporte [00:48:12]:
to a billion users. They wanted to, they thought they would.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:15]:
And they're also consumer side, they're chasing that valuation thing which is very similar to what OpenAI is doing. And I don't know the organization, but there's some, you know, in the same way that we have like analyst bodies that tell us, you know, what they believe market share is for like OSS and browsers and blah, blah, blah, whatever. Apparently anthropic adoption with businesses just surpassed OpenAI's.

Leo Laporte [00:48:39]:
Yeah, it's the enterprise. That's the, that's where the money is. Those are the people who are going to pay the money.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:44]:
Right. And I'm doing this off the top time ahead, so forgive me, I think this is correct. But they're doing the run rate thing, right? So they, you know, they have whatever revenues they had in some great quarter and their annual run rate is, was either the 30 or 50 billion, I can't remember, but their annual run rate the year before, or maybe their actual revenues I guess were 9 billion. So like that's great growth. That's awesome. It is awesome. The thing is they're on the hook for like 4 to $600 billion in costs and that run rate is not going to pay for that. You know, there's no such thing as a 30 year mortgage for this stuff that makes any sense.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:18]:
Like, so these. It's not anthropic. This is not unique to them. And I'm not dumping on them. But the financial story, and it's always presented as this giant positive is very close to what you see with OpenAI. And meaning big numbers for, like, growth. Yes. But not enough to cover their costs.

Richard Campbell [00:49:39]:
No. Well, and also so much of the cost stuff is speculative based on further growth. Like, these are hard numbers to work out.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:48]:
I know, I know. I keep waiting for this whole thing to come crashing down to earth, but

Richard Campbell [00:49:54]:
it seems to be getting closer.

Leo Laporte [00:49:56]:
I don't know. I'm not convinced. I mean, it's bubbly.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:59]:
It is bubbly. But is it a bubble? Bubble. But is it a bubble?

Leo Laporte [00:50:02]:
I'm not.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:03]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:50:03]:
Well, it's a question. To me, the moment the momentum shifted is when the memory companies refused to double production at that point. And all those projections for all those servers were impossible.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:18]:
It's like, we're going to stop selling this to individuals, but we're not actually going to increase capacity.

Richard Campbell [00:50:24]:
No. And I think they're looking at this as a bubble and thinking, I don't want to be in the situation of a global crossing or a KPN at the end of the dot com boom where I laid all this undersea cable.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:35]:
Whenever you went broke, the market is flush with RAM that nobody wanted. And now it's selling at.

Richard Campbell [00:50:41]:
And they're like, it takes us three years to build a fab. You guys aren't going to be wanting these things in three years. We're going to stick to the production we can do.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:49]:
This is smart for AI companies because it puts all the risk on the microns or whatever these companies are that make RAM and other components. And they're all like, no, no, we're not doing that. Like, sorry, we're not, we're not.

Richard Campbell [00:51:03]:
You know, you also see where the micron's saying, we're taking deposits. If you want more ramp, there you go. No more speculative ordering because they're just not going to be caught holding the bag.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:13]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:51:13]:
But at that moment, that, you know, slope graph going up and to the right is impossible. You can't keep scaling. We don't have enough equipment. You have to get more efficient.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:25]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:51:26]:
You know, you have to change the trend. And so it's like that's how you deflate a bubble. And hopefully in a graceful way.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:32]:
Exactly. Not the balloon going around the room, but rather a. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:51:36]:
A graceful Big Ten came off, what, 2 trillion in the first quarter. And they've had a Bounce back for the past few weeks, which is the pattern that happened in the dot com boom, too. At some point, the investors go.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:49]:
Right. This makes me.

Leo Laporte [00:51:51]:
Yeah, I mean, it comes down to how much the investors will put up with, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:51:56]:
Yeah, they're putting up with a lot. And. And, you know, in the same way that, you know, if you watch sporting events on TV now, you'll see all the ads are for, like, basically gambling apps or services, whatever. Wall street has always been speculative, obviously, but, like, it has become more and more like gambling than I think ever before in history. I've never. I. I don't know what's going on here.

Richard Campbell [00:52:17]:
Well, they moved from crypto.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:21]:
Fair enough. Sorry. They're collecting junk. I'll be right back.

Leo Laporte [00:52:24]:
I know the junk girl is here. You said it was like a child.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:28]:
I can hear that. Yeah, it's a girl. She's a woman now, but she. It's a child's voice.

Leo Laporte [00:52:33]:
They recorded it.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:34]:
She's famous in Mexico and so funny. I tell you who doesn't like her, though, is the dogs. They're like. All the dogs out there are going, All right, I can hear like five dogs. It's so funny.

Leo Laporte [00:52:48]:
Can you really bark?

Paul Thurrott [00:52:49]:
Oh, they're freaking. They're not barking. They're whining like they hate it. It's like they're.

Richard Campbell [00:52:52]:
Thank you.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:53]:
The sound of this is punishing.

Leo Laporte [00:52:55]:
All the good stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:57]:
I don't think that's it. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:53:01]:
All right, we'll take a little break. Dogs howl.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:05]:
The.

Leo Laporte [00:53:05]:
The adult woman cries as a baby.

Richard Campbell [00:53:09]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:53:09]:
Mexico is alive. Labradoras. Etc. All right, my friends, Onward.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:19]:
So I'm not a security expert, but

Leo Laporte [00:53:23]:
I play one on tv.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:24]:
Yeah, I pretend to be one sometimes. I do have comments.

Richard Campbell [00:53:27]:
The Holiday Inn Express last night.

Leo Laporte [00:53:31]:
Did you really?

Paul Thurrott [00:53:32]:
I'm so sorry.

Leo Laporte [00:53:32]:
No, yeah, I was going to say

Paul Thurrott [00:53:35]:
I broke the waffle machine. Sorry. So. But I do have a sort of pet peeve about security vulnerabilities, which I should put air quotes around, like, where the first step in the way that you duplicate, you know, that you make this happen, is first of all, sign into your computer. Like, okay, but now you're signed in. I mean, when you're signed in, you have access to your web browser, which has all your information on it. I mean, you're. You're signed in, you know, so there were a couple of these this past week.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:11]:
You know, the recall. The more. The recent recall episode is one of them. So this first one, I've. I've not written about it. Just. I just Was alerted to it today. So I gotta.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:21]:
I'm gonna look at this in more detail, but the person who found this vulnerability calls it yellow key. He describes it as one of the most insane discoveries he's ever had. Feels like a backdoor. So it says how to reproduce step one. Copy the whatever folder to some other location. Well, actually, that's not step one, is it? Step one is sign into your computer.

Richard Campbell [00:54:44]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:44]:
Can't just copy that folder. So to me, that's like the rest of what you're describing. It's like I've kind of stopped listening. Like, what are you talking about? Like, you know, when my. The recall one was a little bit like this, it's like, okay, sign into your computer and it's like, well, you know. And then sign in to recall, which requires the Windows hello ESS nonsense. And it's terrible and slow. It's like, I'm sorry, but that's, that's the security.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:11]:
What are you talking about? Like, so I don't know what to say about this one. I got to look into this a little bit more. We'll see. But in the same vein, there was a report this past week, Microsoft Edge loads all you say passwords into memory in clear text when you first run the browser. Microsoft has responded this one similarly to what they did with Recall. And basically the short version is. Yeah, that's how it works. It's supposed to work that way you're signed into a computer, like, securely.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:44]:
This is what the security protecting the browser, which is the operating system, which is Windows hello. Is what secures this. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:55:53]:
But at the same time, it's like, then you click on a phishing email that drops a payload on your machine.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:01]:
Yeah. So today they're saying this is by design. I agree. I. I feel like, look, they've already done the thing where they want to make it more secure so it becomes less convenient. Right. That one of the reasons, maybe the reason you would do this in plain text is fast. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:21]:
If this is encrypted and you have to decrypt it every single time you access any password, that could take a long time. That would slow down the performance, et cetera. People would complain about that. And yeah, there's got to be a better way. I mean, you know, the, the new Windows hello experience is very. Is slow. I hate it. When you're in Windows, signing in is the same.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:43]:
That's always worked great. But the, you know, do we want more of this? I don't know. You know, here's the way you can secure Microsoft Edge, don't use it. And you know, just use like an actually secure browser. So I don't know. I don't know what to say to this one.

Leo Laporte [00:56:57]:
It's an interesting story. The same. By the way, Chrome used to do the same thing, keep the passwords in the clearance. And Google's explanation of this was, well, if, like you said, if somebody has access to your computer, I mean, you have problems.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:09]:
You know, it's not just this, you know, it's like. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:57:12]:
So, I mean, I think it is kind of a tempest in a teapot. I don't.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:17]:
But I don't know about this.

Leo Laporte [00:57:18]:
You should be using a password manager anyway.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:21]:
This is.

Leo Laporte [00:57:21]:
Right, that's the real answer.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:24]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:57:24]:
But Google for a long time kept passwords in the clear in Chrome. I'm sure that's why Edge still does. It's just.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:33]:
Yeah, I feel like, you know, they have this Secure Future initiative, they have the Windows resiliency initiative, it's, etc. Etc. Etc. This is going to get caught up in that. I, I can't.

Leo Laporte [00:57:43]:
Google does encrypt them now, which is why.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:45]:
And no one is complaining. Right. So no one's complaining that Google is slow when it comes to accessing a password. Then again, if you're using a Google Password Manager and a Chrome browser, you have mental problems and you need, well, assistance.

Leo Laporte [00:57:57]:
I hate to say it, but that's how most people.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:59]:
I know.

Leo Laporte [00:58:00]:
I know, of course.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:01]:
But most people don't know any better.

Leo Laporte [00:58:03]:
You know, they shouldn't.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:04]:
And I. This is why you use a third party.

Leo Laporte [00:58:08]:
You would also think that if. That people would start to say, well, wait a minute, but I also need those passwords in other places on their mouth.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:15]:
How do I. Yeah, with the third party password manager.

Richard Campbell [00:58:18]:
Yeah, that's how they keep them encrypted all the time.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:21]:
Yeah. They're there everywhere. They're everywhere.

Richard Campbell [00:58:23]:
I'm just saying they're free.

Leo Laporte [00:58:27]:
Yeah. Bit Warden is free for personal use.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:29]:
Proton is for, you know, as well. What's the other big one. Password I think you have to pay for.

Leo Laporte [00:58:35]:
But yeah, most of them, they're good for.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:37]:
Bit Warden is, you know, for this audience. I mean, Bitwarden.

Leo Laporte [00:58:40]:
Yeah. Bit Warden's open source, so it's free. Free forever.

Richard Campbell [00:58:42]:
Your primary consumer breach is a phishing attack and that's the moment where whatever you had loaded in memory under your context is now vulnerable.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:51]:
That's true. Like that you're. You are the weakest link, in other words.

Leo Laporte [00:58:54]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:58:55]:
And you're Going to make mistakes. The whole trick here is how badly punished are you going to be for that mistake. If those things are encrypted and rest only decrypted when you use them, you know, like Bitwarden does, then you're not going to have all your passwords immediately hijacked.

Leo Laporte [00:59:09]:
And we should mention Bitwarden is of course, a sponsor of the podcast. The other thing, though, I hesitate to say this. Most individuals are not going to be attacked, right? Or not. Is that not true?

Richard Campbell [00:59:23]:
Well, most phishing attacks are cheap.

Leo Laporte [00:59:26]:
That's true.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:27]:
Social engineering attacks of all kinds are.

Richard Campbell [00:59:29]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:59:30]:
I mean, by the way, valuable target is of course an enterprise, not an individual.

Richard Campbell [00:59:35]:
Sure.

Leo Laporte [00:59:35]:
But.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:36]:
Well, you can still.

Richard Campbell [00:59:37]:
48 hours I've been under steady attack. Like I'm getting.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:40]:
I had a. Fishing. I mean, yeah, so, yeah, I. Look, you can get distracted, you're out in the world, you're on the phone, maybe you don't see it. So good. You didn't think to look at the email address? No, I mean, that happens. It's very real.

Leo Laporte [00:59:52]:
So I had my. Hadn't had my coffee yet.

Richard Campbell [00:59:54]:
First stage breach is always a possibility. Everything is about what happens next.

Leo Laporte [00:59:59]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:00]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:00:00]:
And in that case, the password manager didn't help me because I was. I was going along. I was helping the bad guy. Oh, yeah, I got all the. I got all those credit card numbers.

Richard Campbell [01:00:11]:
What do you need?

Leo Laporte [01:00:12]:
No problem.

Richard Campbell [01:00:13]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:00:14]:
Oh, yeah, they're encrypted, but I know how to decrypt them.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:17]:
Yeah, could you do that now, please? Oh, yeah, of course. I'm signed in. That's the first thing.

Leo Laporte [01:00:21]:
I'm sending you the code. Oh, yeah, I got the code. Thank you.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:23]:
Do you need remote access to my computer? I'm going to be out for a few hours.

Leo Laporte [01:00:28]:
That's what we do with OpenCloud.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:30]:
I know, that's what. I was just joking about that with Stephanie, my wife. Today I'm just going to open up my life to AI and just let it run amok because what could go wrong? What could go wrong?

Leo Laporte [01:00:42]:
I counted them. 19 different cron jobs running on my framework all the time, doing all sorts of stuff. I mean, it's code, so it's not. I mean, they know what they're doing, but, You know, you can get a stripe account for your AI now, which is great.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:05]:
It's going to buy a bunch of those little terminals so it can start

Leo Laporte [01:01:08]:
running people's credit cards and post it on X, something like. Okay, now that I can have the stripe account. I said to my agent. Buy yourself a gift. What would you like bought? Like an $8 ebook?

Paul Thurrott [01:01:22]:
Who owns Stripe is Stripe? Is that Block? Is that the same company?

Leo Laporte [01:01:26]:
No, no, it's the Collisons. Stripe is Stripe. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:31]:
I don't know. I'm trying.

Leo Laporte [01:01:33]:
They have a larger name. Okay, I can't remember.

Richard Campbell [01:01:36]:
Stripe is Jack Dorsey.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:38]:
Yeah, it is.

Leo Laporte [01:01:39]:
Oh, so it is Block and.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:40]:
It is Block. Right.

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

Paul Thurrott [01:01:42]:
He's trustworthy. I. I wouldn't.

Leo Laporte [01:01:45]:
He likes his AI.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:48]:
Yep. I think he likes his Nazis too. Anyway.

Leo Laporte [01:01:51]:
No Jack Dorsey. Oh, no.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:52]:
I'm sorry. Sorry, sorry. I'm sorry. Right.

Leo Laporte [01:01:54]:
He's the hippie.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:55]:
Sorry.

Leo Laporte [01:01:56]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:56]:
Sorry, sorry. He's not Peter Thiel. These people. There's too many of these people. I can't. I. I apologize.

Leo Laporte [01:02:04]:
No, Stripe is not.

Richard Campbell [01:02:05]:
No, it's. It's Colson.

Leo Laporte [01:02:08]:
It's the Collisons. Yeah, it's. It's privately owned.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:10]:
I feel like the only person.

Leo Laporte [01:02:12]:
It's not Berg.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:13]:
It's like Automatic, the company that makes WordPress. Is that Dorsey too? No, no.

Leo Laporte [01:02:20]:
Stripe is not Dorsey. Let's get this clear. It's the Collison. Block is Dorsey.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:26]:
We should probably just.

Leo Laporte [01:02:27]:
Automatic is Matt Mullenweg.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:30]:
Right?

Leo Laporte [01:02:31]:
It's hard to. I. Look, it is really hard to keep track of this.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:33]:
I. Screw this, especially because this is on the periphery for me. This is not my focus at all. Like, I. I would know this if I was cared about this stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:02:41]:
I guess I don't care about it and I have to know it.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:43]:
I'm sorry. I don't know why. This is what I. This is how my brain works. I'm so stupid.

Leo Laporte [01:02:49]:
All right.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:51]:
We have talked a couple of times about Mozilla and Firefox and using anthropic mythos, etc. There were. When they released, I think it was Firefox 150, 270 fixes they had made in that release alone. By the end of April, they had fixed 423 security vulnerabilities just in that month. A year ago in April, they pitched Fixed or patched 31 vulnerabilities to give you an idea of the scope of how this has changed. So that's great. Not all of those are actually from Mythos. They still do all the traditional stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:26]:
People. People still submit bugs and they still find things and that still happens, you know.

Richard Campbell [01:03:31]:
But I think they're also starting to use the new AI development style too. So they are moving faster as well as using these tools for detection.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:38]:
And that's one of the things I guess Mythos is very good at is not just saying, hey, here's a vulnerability, but hey, here's how you can duplicate it yourself and here's how you can fix it. And for an organization like Mozilla, but whatever company, they can take that information and prove it to themselves, prove that the fix works and make that fix. And not a lot in the way of false positives, although I guess it must be the Microsoft one. I think they were talking about false positives there.

Richard Campbell [01:04:04]:
But these things, well, and often problematic fixes too. There's ways to fix things that are creating other issues. I'm hearing over and over again from different teams that they're using tools like this and they're just finding incredible reams of vulnerabilities and as it was described to me, keys to the castle kind of vulnerabilities. Like, yeah, no, no, that's not a, that's not just a buffer overflow they might exploit someday. That's. I have, I have admin access to buffer overflow.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:32]:
The good old days.

Richard Campbell [01:04:33]:
Yeah, I was so looking forward to that.

Leo Laporte [01:04:35]:
Yeah, that's incredible.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:38]:
But these guys are doing that thing I said, which is they're going to shift into a place where now they're going to be proactive using AI so they'll find problems in code bases as they're submitted and before they ship to the public. Right. And it doesn't mean it will be perfect. You know, software is never perfect. But I think this is going to lead to a new level of. And level.

Richard Campbell [01:04:59]:
Well, the problem. And the problem is because it needs to.

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

Richard Campbell [01:05:02]:
Because that same set of tools are being used by the black hats to find and take advantage of vulnerabilities in zero day at high speed.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:08]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:05:08]:
And there is a panic going on. It's a, it's an underlier.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:13]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:05:13]:
Since the fall last year of all, all of these major companies going, we have to get this stuff patched as quickly as possible before they, the attacks really come in full bore.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:23]:
And then China was like, hey, can we have access to Mythos too? And Anthropic said, no, no, you cannot. Interesting. In other good news, I guess this is not AI related, but rather security related. I think Monday or the other day, whatever day was Passkey day, which used to be password day. And Amazon used that to announce that they now have over 465 million customers who have enrolled in pass keys. So that's how they sign into their Amazon accounts. Now that's a 75 gain year over year. That's awesome.

Richard Campbell [01:06:01]:
It's not going to continue. Obviously that's now most of their customers. So they won't do.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:04]:
I don't know what the. Yeah, exactly. But, but that's.

Richard Campbell [01:06:07]:
You hammer away at. Sign up a passkey. Sign up a passkey.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:10]:
Sign up.

Richard Campbell [01:06:11]:
Yes. So it's like, I can make this go away.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:14]:
I think you guys are the same. But you know, I use passwords wherever I can use passwords. And I gotta say, the best passkey implementation to this day is GitHub. GitHub's implemented like really nice. Signing into GitHub is the best. Like it's. I love it.

Leo Laporte [01:06:30]:
You know what's great is that many, many AI tools and I think other geek tools use GitHub as their single sign on provider.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:38]:
Yeah. So there you go. It's great.

Leo Laporte [01:06:39]:
Like it's so now passkeys everywhere.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:41]:
Because they really did it again. Now the caveat to this is it's possible Amazon's is just as good. But every time I sign in with a passkey, I still get a code on my phone.

Leo Laporte [01:06:50]:
No, everything.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:51]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [01:06:51]:
It's not just as good.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:52]:
Okay. I would say. I wasn't sure if that was like something I did.

Leo Laporte [01:06:55]:
No, it's not just you. It's me too. I hate it.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:57]:
Yeah, I don't like that. I feel like the passkey should be it.

Leo Laporte [01:07:00]:
Yes. It's fully secure. You do not need.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:04]:
And then third factor, if you sign into Google a lot, which I also do, your experience will either be the best experience imaginable or. Are you serious? Like, because they literally do it randomly when you sign in. So one time it will say, oh, do you want to use masking? You're like, yep. And a little, you know, my password manager will come up and boop, done. Other times it will be like, oh, you'll get an alert on your phone. You're like, oh, come on, man, just do the same.

Leo Laporte [01:07:31]:
I haven't had that experience.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:32]:
Oh, I have this every day.

Leo Laporte [01:07:33]:
Mine uses and I had to have Russell, our administrator, turn on passkeys for workspaces because they're not on by default.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:39]:
Yeah. So I have one in workspace and one for consumer account. And that might. Maybe that's part of it, I don't know because I go back and forth between the two.

Leo Laporte [01:07:46]:
But I have always been able to.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:49]:
Okay, see, that's a good.

Leo Laporte [01:07:52]:
And I say yes.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:53]:
And so that, That's a good experience. Like, that's. Yeah, that's good.

Leo Laporte [01:07:57]:
Huge. I still have to enter my email address. I really don't even want to do that, honestly.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:01]:
I know.

Leo Laporte [01:08:02]:
A site should say you have a pass key.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:04]:
Exactly. And give you the choices. If there are choices, or just the one. And you click. Yep. And then you do a Windows hello or whatever you're using for authentication. And. Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:08:12]:
I don't want to have to enter anything.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:14]:
I just want to click 100%. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:08:19]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:19]:
If you're feeling suicidal, I mean, remove the password from your Microsoft account. Have fun with that.

Leo Laporte [01:08:25]:
I regret that so much. I did it.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:27]:
Yeah. I did it with a secondary account. And I will. No, I can't say never. I mean, so I will not do it to my. The one I use all the time. Because it's just like. Are you serious? Like, what is this?

Leo Laporte [01:08:36]:
Like, it's screwed up.

Richard Campbell [01:08:37]:
If you're going to keep a password, make it as long. Make it a 32.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:42]:
Mine's three digits, but, yeah, I mean, it's. But that's another inconsistent experience. They have all the right stuff. Like, they. They have all the secondary forms of authentication. And the problem is you have to use them every single time. It's like a. You know.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:59]:
All right, now we're going to send you an email to a secondary address, type out the full address, and then you go to that address. You get the code. You go, okay, now do it over.

Richard Campbell [01:09:06]:
And like, seriously, is this just because you're in Mexico? Is that what it is?

Leo Laporte [01:09:09]:
No, it's happening to me. And it happens on Xbox. And Xbox won't give you enough time to type in. In the code. Every single time. It says you didn't do it fast enough. And it's like 10 seconds. I don't know how fast it's supposed to be, but this is the problem

Paul Thurrott [01:09:22]:
with the, like, a two FA code thing is you can see, like, on the countdown, it's like, I get 12 seconds. I got this. And then I'm like, you know, and then, like, you. You finally get it in and it's like, nope, it's wrong because they moved on to the next code.

Leo Laporte [01:09:33]:
Yes.

Richard Campbell [01:09:33]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:34]:
Like, I. Well, someday. Oh, well, someday.

Leo Laporte [01:09:41]:
That's an amazing number. 465 million.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:44]:
I know.

Leo Laporte [01:09:44]:
Yeah. I don't even believe that.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:46]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [01:09:48]:
I don't think that's true.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:49]:
Interesting.

Leo Laporte [01:09:50]:
All right, wait a minute. Well, how many people are in the US including infrastructure?

Paul Thurrott [01:09:55]:
Amazon is humongous in other parts of the world, too.

Richard Campbell [01:09:57]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:09:58]:
And how. What is passkey adoption generally? The percentage, it's not more than 20 or 30%.

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

Leo Laporte [01:10:04]:
This is everybody in the world who.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:07]:
Who so I don't understand it. I. Look, the first day they offered this, I did it Right. So I can't tell you what the experience is like if you're not using it.

Leo Laporte [01:10:16]:
I don't believe it.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:16]:
I suspect they're pushing it pretty heavily.

Leo Laporte [01:10:19]:
I don't think they have any reason to lie. I mean, it must be true, but

Paul Thurrott [01:10:21]:
it just seems you want that thing to be. You want that to be secure, right? I mean, it's money.

Leo Laporte [01:10:28]:
How many customers does Amazon have?

Paul Thurrott [01:10:30]:
That's a good. Let's find out.

Leo Laporte [01:10:32]:
Must be several billion in order for them to have 465 million pass keys, remember?

Paul Thurrott [01:10:38]:
So when companies start doing e commerce in the early days, they'll always say something like, and it might just be count, we have X number of credit cards in our system or whatever. Right. So there are 260 million prime members worldwide. There are.

Leo Laporte [01:10:53]:
Okay, so this is more than twice as many. Almost twice as many prime as prime members.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:57]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:10:58]:
So maybe just counting the number of pass keys.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:00]:
Keys.

Leo Laporte [01:11:01]:
There's something wrong with this number. I don't buy.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:03]:
If it's. If it is the number of pass keys, I must have 10 of them because in different. Look. Well, let me see. Let's look at the. Where's the wording?

Leo Laporte [01:11:13]:
This is on LinkedIn. He posted this.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:16]:
Yeah, because that's where all the good stuff is posted, man.

Leo Laporte [01:11:19]:
I actually have a LinkedIn account.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:21]:
Just because it literally says 465 million of our customers. Oh, so I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:11:28]:
Agree. Doesn't mean they use them.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:30]:
No, no, they agree. No, they actually do say 465 million customers enrolled in passkeys.

Leo Laporte [01:11:39]:
Not in this post.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:41]:
Let me look it up. I got an email in this post.

Leo Laporte [01:11:43]:
Passkeys are one of the most useful changes in user auth security. Guess what? 465 million of our customers agree.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:50]:
All right, this is the email I got.

Leo Laporte [01:11:52]:
Oh, you got an email. Let's do it. I'm just looking at the link.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:54]:
Yeah, no, well, it should be in there too, like. So where is this?

Leo Laporte [01:11:58]:
I don't know what agree means. Yeah, you're right. Oh, no, you're right. In the first quarter of 2026, more than 465 million customers have enrolled passkeys in their Amazon accounts. That's amazing. It doesn't seem like it passes the sanity test.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:13]:
I mean, that's. It's almost like it's everybody, you know, basically. I mean, how many?

Leo Laporte [01:12:18]:
Well, well, they must have billions because I guarantee. I mean, Lisa's not using passkeys. On Amazon. Most people are. I know. We agree. Everybody should be.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:29]:
Put her on the phone.

Leo Laporte [01:12:31]:
So we were talking about this this morning.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:33]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:12:33]:
And she said, you know, I really should be using passkeys everywhere. And I said, yeah. She said, but I don't want to take the time to go through all my accounts.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:39]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:12:39]:
Which, by the way, just do it.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:41]:
A good password manager would tell you which ones support it that you're not using. Right?

Leo Laporte [01:12:45]:
Yeah, that's true, too.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:46]:
This is a good feature, but I

Leo Laporte [01:12:47]:
don't think you have to go through everything. Just as you use accounts whenever you log in.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:52]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:12:52]:
And you go, oh, another password. See if they have passkeys.

Richard Campbell [01:12:55]:
If they do, she's trying to bulk it up, which is, you know, reasonable.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:59]:
I do have two Amazon accounts. I mean, I suppose.

Leo Laporte [01:13:03]:
Let me, I gotta ask Perplexity. How many, how many, how many people have Amazon accounts?

Paul Thurrott [01:13:08]:
I love that you turned immediately to Perplexity.

Leo Laporte [01:13:11]:
Well, I paid for it. I might as well use it. Amazon accounts, like globally. Right. Because if they only. Oh, wait a minute. I'm not logged in. Restore it.

Leo Laporte [01:13:26]:
Something went wrong. Okay, bye, Perplexity. Sorry I paid for you.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:32]:
Don't make me regret this.

Leo Laporte [01:13:35]:
Don't make me. I got a. Okay. What would be the next. God, everything's malware blocked. What is going on on my machine?

Richard Campbell [01:13:45]:
You're rocking it. This is what happens. This is what happens.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:48]:
Travel. Exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:13:50]:
Yeah. No, that's exactly probably what it is. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:52]:
When I go home, Netflix is gonna be like, where do you live again? What the hell is happening?

Leo Laporte [01:13:57]:
Yeah. You must go through that, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:13:59]:
It's a huge problem. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:14:01]:
Because suddenly and, and how do you watch tv?

Paul Thurrott [01:14:03]:
Do you.

Leo Laporte [01:14:03]:
Don't. Don't does.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:04]:
So we don't watch much live tv, but when we do, that's out in the world somewhere, like a sports or whatever. So we just, we have Apple just

Leo Laporte [01:14:10]:
go to a blog.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:11]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [01:14:12]:
And the app. We do complain.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:14]:
We do. We do watch Netflix here, though. It works. I mean, it's fine. I have a, I mean, I. Also on this trip, I've used Proton VPN on the Apple TV the whole time for the first time. Like, it's interesting. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:14:27]:
I didn't know you could do that. That's great. So it thinks you're in Pennsylvania.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:30]:
Yep. And I am Leo. Wink, wink. I, I, I sure am. I don't know why I just said that out loud. It's fine.

Leo Laporte [01:14:41]:
Okay, so this is wrong. I mean, this is chat GPT working really hard, by the way. I mean, it has been looking AWS to kick the hell out, looking everywhere. Says I'll go with about 300 million Amazon accounts. Amazon does not disclose this. So that's not that number.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:03]:
That seems small though, right? You know, given how much money this company makes, most of which is on literally things being shipped around the world. I don't know. I don't know. That's an interesting question. I don't know. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:15:18]:
Hello, Marcelo in Argentina listening today, I think Marcelo and I had a lovely meal in Buenos Aires, I think, many years ago, I believe.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:27]:
Google AI overview tells me that over 635 million users across Amazon through its mobile app.

Leo Laporte [01:15:35]:
Oh, okay. All right.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:37]:
I mean, I.

Leo Laporte [01:15:38]:
Anyway, ChatGPT has apparently given up. It's. It's checked everything from Axios to Substack, trying to find a number for Amazon accounts.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:48]:
Right. We're going to get. Let's look at AWS's internal servers. Hold on for one second.

Leo Laporte [01:15:53]:
Yeah, really? Come on. You're chatgpt. You should be able to look this up anywhere.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:59]:
Yeah, I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:16:00]:
All right, I give up. Let's take a break. Maybe by the end of the commercial.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:06]:
This is a site, but it says Amazon had 635 million users on its E Commerce. Oh, that's the same thing, but it's just said a different way.

Leo Laporte [01:16:14]:
You mean regular retail customer accounts like

Paul Thurrott [01:16:17]:
on the app, you know?

Leo Laporte [01:16:19]:
No, no, it's going with 300 million. So I don't know. I think. I think this is wrong. Anyway, all right, so I'm still puzzled

Paul Thurrott [01:16:30]:
by the four I'm writing that's going to say Leo laporte colon, Amazon is a liar. And using math to support this assertion. You know, I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:16:43]:
I. Where would it get? So, yeah, I just. I don't. Copilot says Amazon has 310 million okay. Monthly active users. So 465 million passkey users is a nonsense number.

Richard Campbell [01:16:58]:
Well, if it's monthly active, so you know, it's not all the users.

Leo Laporte [01:17:03]:
True. Huh.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:06]:
I don't know. Huh.

Richard Campbell [01:17:07]:
But if they're not active, why would they set up a password?

Paul Thurrott [01:17:10]:
And at least three of those customers are paying for Amazon Alexa plus, so I am.

Leo Laporte [01:17:15]:
I'm sad to say, although it's jaunty, it has a different personality. No, it is. It has different. I'm using the sassy. It's the sassy personality.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:24]:
But it is hilariously wrong.

Leo Laporte [01:17:26]:
Johnnily wrong.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:28]:
It's funny.

Leo Laporte [01:17:30]:
There's nothing like jaunty AI. Let me just Say, there you go.

Richard Campbell [01:17:35]:
Everybody wants jaunty AI.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:38]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:17:38]:
Let's take a pause that refreshes and then we will get to the Xbox segment. Back of the book coming up with. Got some. I think there'll be something interesting because Richard is in Belgium in Antwerp. And I imagine last time you were in Belgium you had something interesting to tipple.

Richard Campbell [01:17:56]:
You remember I. When you were picking up that shirt, I got the little jumper for the grandbaby that says I need my space.

Leo Laporte [01:18:01]:
Yeah. How'd that go?

Richard Campbell [01:18:02]:
I got pictures. Got pictures of her in it now.

Leo Laporte [01:18:04]:
Oh, that's so cute.

Richard Campbell [01:18:05]:
Straight.

Leo Laporte [01:18:06]:
That's so cute. Yeah, that was. That was the best. Kennedy Space center. And we went to Gator World and I have a Gator shirt. I don't know where I want to go next time. There is apparently a Sloth World.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:19]:
Of course I'm not a big fan of the only in like only in Florida type things, but in that case, like only in Florida, like Orlando is pretty. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:18:29]:
Yeah, it's definitely an interesting place. Apparently Sloth World has had a problem lately. A number of. Large number, several dozen sloths have passed away. I don't know how you know it's

Paul Thurrott [01:18:40]:
the new bumblebee problem or bee problem order.

Leo Laporte [01:18:43]:
Yeah, I was reading about it. I thought, how did we miss Sloth World? We saw capybaras at Gator World, which was great. I don't know if they have them there for food or oh God, amusement. But it's still. I always wanted to see a capybara. Anyway, enough of that. Let's move on to the Xbox segment.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:04]:
Mr. T. Yeah, number of things this week. If you are in, we talk about the Windows Insider program a lot, but there is also an Xbox Insider program and if you were in that, there's a new update rolling out now for insiders that has basically three new features. So one is a. A new boot time animation for the console which they had previewed on Twitter or whatever a week or so ago. There is a. They're doing like badging now.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:34]:
So when you have game of score milestones and the game of score is when you get achievements and games and your. The total is the game score, right. Of all those achievements. They have badges now for milestones like 10,000 achievements, I guess achievement. Well, the gamer score points through achievements, right. Like 20,035, you know, a million, 3 million, 5 million. Whatever. That's whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:56]:
And then this just a new way to filter the game library so that. Who cares? Anyway, just some filtering, no big deal. I was kind Of I saw this thing, I'm like, oh cool, they're. They're racing for it. No, it's kind of small. Forza Horizon 6 is coming out soon, unless you're on Steam, in which case you could have gotten an early leaf copy. And apparently it was not supposed to be leaked. It was someone, I don't know, someone.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:21]:
Someone figured out how to access the game early. And I wish I could remember the, the time frame, but I, I think, I think Steam said the. Anyone who played this game is going to be banned from Steam for 8,000 years. I think it was, I think it was, it was some stupid, it was some stupid number like you're just never coming back.

Richard Campbell [01:20:39]:
I think it's like somebody downloading that game is like in on the scam. They saw it and they downloaded it.

Leo Laporte [01:20:45]:
Come on.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:46]:
I know it's crazy. But anyway, early Access launch is May 15, which is in two days. So this Friday as we record the show and then I. The release, the general release I think is May. It's next week sometime. May 19th, I think. Okay. If you're a Discord fan and.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:05]:
Or user, I guess you would be a fan because they have Discord Nitro subscriptions. Right. And so we have many. Yeah, so Nitro is the 9.99amonth version, 99 bucks a year. And they just added a new Xbox related perk which is Xbox Game Pass Starter Edition. And this is the one that gives you like access to over 50 games across PC and console. Actually, it's the whole thing pretty much. So yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:34]:
I mean, that's cool. I mean I would personally pay for Discord. I feel like I pay for Discord every time we do the podcast because that app and that up at app updates literally every single time.

Leo Laporte [01:21:47]:
Yeah, it does, doesn't it? Every long update.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:49]:
Yes, it is. Yep. They've somehow managed. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so Mojang, which is the Microsoft company that owns or you know does Minecraft, they have these. I don't know if they're quarterly or every so often they have like a Minecraft Live event. They're going to do one during what's called TwitchCon Rotterdam, which is Saturday, May 30th. So they're going to announce new stuff about updates to the game, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:16]:
So there's literally no information beyond that. So May 30th there will be a Minecraft announcement or series of Minecraft announcements. So we know that Microsoft's not selling many consoles, but they also don't tell us how Many they're not selling. Sony and Nintendo do tell us how much they're selling and now they're telling us how much they're not selling because this most recent quarter was terrible for both of them. So Sony sold 1.5 million PlayStation 5 video game consoles in the most recent quarter that ended March 31st. Probably this is by far their smallest number of PS5 ever sold sequentially going back in time. The previous figures were 7.9 million, 4 million, 2.5 million, 2.8 million.

Richard Campbell [01:23:06]:
So they sold 7.9 million last.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:08]:
It turned the holiday quarter. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:23:10]:
Oh yeah. Which is the prime quarter. Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:12]:
Yeah, that's why it was so high. Yeah, yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:23:15]:
Normally this quarter, this past quarter is the slowest quarter of the year anyway, so.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:20]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:23:20]:
But this was a particularly year over

Paul Thurrott [01:23:22]:
year, bad first party.

Richard Campbell [01:23:24]:
But I'd also say hardware sales across the board are off this year because.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:29]:
Yeah, but it's the whole business like. Yeah, the. Yeah, right, right. For all this. Yeah. And you know, they've had to raise prices, etc. But you know, the, the revenues from first party software sales are down. Their digital numbers are big, like meaning 85% of people who buy games for PlayStation do so digitally.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:50]:
That situation is very different on Nintendo, which we'll get to in a moment. The overall game and network services revenues, which is the part of Sony that does PlayStation, were flat basically year over year. You know, like hardware revenues, 110 million yen last year in the same quarter, 183 million. So it's like not great. Monthly active users are good actually. So they're pretty steady. And they were up pretty good from a year ago, 133 million versus 124 one year ago. So you know, the people out there are using it, I mean they're just not selling as many, but they're not buying new ones.

Richard Campbell [01:24:29]:
Yeah, this is a great year to skip it with the prices being up on all those sorts of things. So I think you see that Nintendo sold as many as they had, except that I know they ran out of them over Christmas so maybe first catching up.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:41]:
The Nintendo one is weird to me because, you know, they launched Switch 2 in I think June last year. So we don't have, you know, we don't have a full year yet. It got off to the fastest start ever for any Nintendo hardware. But I think we all kind of understood that the original Switch is by far the best. Well, not by far is the best selling Nintendo console. If you forget about the mobile stuff. It is by far the Best selling. And I just.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:09]:
I never felt like this was going to have the legs of the OG Switch. I just. No way. You know, and it's kind of collapsing a little faster than expected, but. But for the reasons Richard just kind of alluded to, which is, you know, the whole component crisis stuff, all the. Everything is bad. So let me see if I can come up with this. They sold 2.49 million units in the quarter ending in March.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:31]:
They've sold a total of just under 20 million units for their fiscal year, which also ends in March. The previous quarters were 7 million, 4.54 million and 5.82 million. And that goes backwards. So 7 million is the holiday quarter. It makes sense that this would be the slowest quarter of that year, but it just came out, too. So their quarter was fine financially, but they warned on the coming year, which is good. This is their only business. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:00]:
They don't have other stuff. Sony, you know, makes washing machines or whatever they do. They have other stuff they can sort of rely on if they have to, but this is all Nintendo does. So they lowered their. They. Well, first they've raised the price, remember the Switch to. Or they're about to. I think that's about to happen.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:15]:
Or maybe it just happened. I don't remember it. But they've also lowered their estimates for the current fiscal year for unit sales. So previously it was about 20 million units. They were expecting. No, I'm sorry, that's not true. That's what they just sold. This year they expect to sell 16.5 million.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:31]:
So they did lower their estimate, but I don't think we ever saw that estimate. I think they just said that that's what happened. They also sold another 560,000 original Switch units in the quarter, you know, down from 1.36 million. Whatever. You know, they was hovering around a million for a while. So that console has sold like over 156,000. Yes. No, million.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:54]:
No. What? 156 million. Sorry, I wrote that as thousand. That's not right. That's an. You know, which is awesome. But software sales were up, you know.

Leo Laporte [01:27:04]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:27:04]:
Like I said, you know, the markets are. So are. Are the. The work is soft and stuff. So people are going to play their machines, but they're not going to buy them.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:13]:
Yeah, so. Yeah, so the two other data points are about 55% of switch software sales are digital, up from about 54% a year ago. So it's. Yeah, I think it's low, too. But, you know, they come on these fun Little card things. Like. I don't know. It's kind of like a.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:27]:
It's kind of a thing in that market. And then retro. Yeah. Yeah, it is, right?

Richard Campbell [01:27:32]:
I mean, I want my games on vinyl.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:34]:
Yeah, you want, like, a fun little carrier like you would have for CDs, but really small, because these things are tiny. I don't know if it was last year or two years ago. There was like a. Like a Super Mario movie or whatever. They did. Awesome. And it actually really helped them a lot, which they really needed at the time because, you know, the original switch was winding down. But this year, they have a Super Mario Galaxy movie that's out, that's sold, you know, has made 100.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:56]:
I'm sorry, 800 million in revenues in its first four weeks. Who watches these movies? Is wrong with you?

Richard Campbell [01:28:03]:
Apparently. I mean, the great thing when you get a good kid movie is the kid wants to just keep going.

Leo Laporte [01:28:07]:
Yeah, that's what it is. It's why baby shark is so big. Okay, so just play it over.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:13]:
Back in my day, we just. Not my day, my kids day. We had Caillou. We had Dora the Explorer. We had the Teletubbies.

Leo Laporte [01:28:20]:
It wasn't the same Teletubbies. Oh, my God. We had Barney the Barney.

Richard Campbell [01:28:24]:
Barney.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:25]:
That was before my kids. Yeah, Barney the dude.

Leo Laporte [01:28:27]:
You're so lucky.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:30]:
Well, but we did have the Teletubbies. The Teletubbies is, like curious storage, where they screw up constantly and then some adult figure. In that case, the new new vacuum cleaner cleans up after them, and they never learn any lessons. And I'm sorry, as a parent, I have a huge problem with this. Like, I always hated this. I hated this so much. If I could take out Curious George with a sniper rifle, I would do it right now.

Leo Laporte [01:28:51]:
Oh, my God. Oh, my God. He's joking. Curious kids. He's making a joke.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:56]:
He's a. Is a cartoon monkey. It's fine. It's not a person. It's okay.

Leo Laporte [01:29:01]:
Has no tail, by the way, despite what many believe.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:05]:
Like we said, curious. So not a monkey, then. Oh, no. Anyway, let's move on from that. So I, like most normal people with brains, I get excited every time this Apple suffers illegal defeat. But in this case, what happened was the US Supreme Court said that it would not review this awesome remedy thing that's occurring in the Epic v. Apple case. So the next steps are that they will get in front of Judge.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:32]:
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez. Roger, who, by the way, is the judge in Elon Musk versus OpenAI. Right she's awesome. Yeah. And determine how much Apple can charge for the services it offers through its app store. And I'm guessing it's not going to be 30 and 15%, but we'll, you know, we'll see how, how low can we go? We're gonna find out.

Richard Campbell [01:29:50]:
How did Apple get here? Honest to goodness. Talk about.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:54]:
By being belligerent jerks. Is that. Yep, that's how we've invented an arbitrary price. And then we defend it to, you know, like as if it were sacrosanct or something.

Leo Laporte [01:30:04]:
Now, now it's going back to Judge Gonzalez Rogers, who is not happy with this company.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:10]:
She referred an executive of the company to the. To attorneys general for lying. Lying under oath.

Leo Laporte [01:30:16]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:17]:
Yep, that's Apple.

Leo Laporte [01:30:19]:
I don't think she's gonna be that sympathetic.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:21]:
What happens? Your iPhone stays in Apple's pockets. Oh, no, that's not the phrase. Sorry. It's. It's fine. It's fine. That's awesome.

Leo Laporte [01:30:30]:
A billion hands in your pocket. Y' all

Paul Thurrott [01:30:34]:
should have made a deal.

Leo Laporte [01:30:36]:
All right, now let's return to Windows Weekly and Paul Thurat with his world famous.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:45]:
Okay, I hate the pressure that you put me on.

Leo Laporte [01:30:48]:
Actually, you did the Xbox. It's the world famous tip of the week. World famous, my world.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:54]:
Two tips. I. One is I've been working on the Switcher series of articles since the beginning of April. Actually, it's probably the end of March. So this one, it's gonna, it's extending into this month. It's gonna be a busy month because we're going back, we some travel and whatever, but I'm going to expand it beyond like OS platforms to include things like applications and services. So I wrote something up about web browsers. And by the way, part of the advice there is use a third party password manager.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:19]:
Obviously. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned Helium, which is one of the newer kind of chromium based browsers. Privacy security focused. It doesn't even support like account sync of any kind. I love it. Like, I love this thing. It's almost like it's basically Brave, but even more lightweight and with less going on in the ui. So, you know, in Brave you kind of want to turn certain things off if you don't want like their wallet thing or their VPN or whatever they offer.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:45]:
This thing has none of that. It's just really stripped down and light and I love it. And then this is, this is so random. I have no idea why this was promoted to me on YouTube, but I was, I just went to YouTube the other day, and there's something there called Cloud FM, which is described as music for thinking and building. And it's that little crab character from the. Probably open Cloud, but the, you know, the cloud code thing.

Leo Laporte [01:32:10]:
Yeah, that's Claude. The code.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:12]:
That's the little. Yeah, so he, like, he. He fries an egg or whatever and he flies. He flies in space.

Leo Laporte [01:32:16]:
He plays a guitar that's going too far now.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:19]:
But he. But. But it's all. It's eight bit and it's cute. But the thing is, it plays this kind of ambient music in the background. It kind of reminds me, you know, like Richard does the Net Rocks podcast with Carl Franklin. And Carl has recorded a lot of music to code by.

Richard Campbell [01:32:35]:
Like, you know where you put 27 tracks of it.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:38]:
Yeah. Like, it's grown over time and it's. It's kind of the same theme in a way. There's a lot less of it from Anthropic so far, but it will. I showed my wife.

Leo Laporte [01:32:48]:
He's making green eggs and ham.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:49]:
We sat there and watched this for like half an hour.

Leo Laporte [01:32:52]:
I think I can play the music, right? This is generated.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:55]:
So. Yeah, I think so.

Richard Campbell [01:32:56]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:57]:
It's.

Leo Laporte [01:32:58]:
This is music to code by. What makes music good? To code by no longer lyrics, probably.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:02]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:33:03]:
20 minute units and, you know, one of the things I've noticed with musico by certain tracks that I like the most and literally it's now in my psyche to send me into the zone.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:15]:
Into that.

Richard Campbell [01:33:16]:
I hear it.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:17]:
No, that's great. So it's actually working for you.

Richard Campbell [01:33:20]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:20]:
I find. I find any music to be distracting when I'm writing, especially unless I'm on a plane, oddly than I do.

Leo Laporte [01:33:29]:
I was listening.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:29]:
I don't know. Yeah. I can't explain that. But there's some. Really.

Leo Laporte [01:33:32]:
Because you're using noise canceling headphones. You don't want to hear the jets. You don't want to hear the babies crying. So you got to have a little background.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:38]:
There's the last album that. Yeah. Pink Floyd put out was all instrumental. And like, that's an. It's like. It's called like the river or something. Or the river something. Something.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:49]:
But it's a. It's just a great. You know, it's. It's nice for that. Like in this.

Leo Laporte [01:33:53]:
You know, I saw a tweet from somebody who said he's been coding for 20 years listening to Fish.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:58]:
Okay.

Richard Campbell [01:33:59]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:33:59]:
Which would probably be. Okay. Code.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:01]:
It's just all Ozzy Osbourne, you know, it's Jam band.

Leo Laporte [01:34:03]:
It's like, you know.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:04]:
Yeah, Yeah. I thought it was kind of cute.

Leo Laporte [01:34:06]:
This is a little soporific, a little repetitive, but I guess it's. The idea is to get your add mind.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:11]:
Right. Right.

Leo Laporte [01:34:12]:
Calm down.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:13]:
Exactly. That might be what attached me to it. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:34:15]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:17]:
Oh, I already mentioned helium, like an idiot. So two things on the effort. I mentioned helium already. So helium is only on the desktop. So one of the problems is there's no mobile client. But I think you can mix and match pretty easily with that kind of thing if you are on an Apple device. There's a mobile browser called Orion which is similar, although they have sync and so forth. And Orion is another one that offers kind of a nice experience, but on mobile, but only on the Apple side.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:43]:
So far, I had forgotten about this app. I. Maybe I'm wrong. I feel like I use this on Windows Phone or, you know, I think I did, like back in the day, or. But Snapseed, which was made by an individual, it's a small company or whatever, originally for the iPad. So the year the iPad came out, it won the award for like best iPad app. The first year they did it, then it went to iPhone very quickly. Then it went to Android and then Google bought them.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:09]:
And they don't release major milestones all that often. 3.0 came out last summer, I think, but only on the iPhone. But now 4.0 is out and it's more full featured on Android this time than it is on iOS. But I've been looking at camera apps and also photo editing apps on mobile. This one is. This is really impressive. Like, I've not looked at this in so many years. It's astonishing, like, how many tools and fixes and things there are in this app.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:38]:
It's really, really good. It's worth looking at if you've never heard of it or haven't thought about it in years, like me. It used to. I know it used to be on Windows. I feel. I swear to God, I use this on a phone, but it was a million years ago. I don't remember. Anyway, it's worth checking out.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:52]:
It's free and it's astonishingly powerful. Like, it's really, really good.

Leo Laporte [01:35:59]:
You're. You're working me. You're working me. I know, I know.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:03]:
I'm sorry. Yeah. Also, just. Leo, since we're talking, please install a new webrush browser every freaking week.

Leo Laporte [01:36:10]:
My God.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:11]:
I know.

Richard Campbell [01:36:11]:
I'm sorry.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:14]:
It's all right.

Leo Laporte [01:36:15]:
Helium is good. I. I did. I installed It. Some time ago.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:18]:
It's a good one.

Leo Laporte [01:36:19]:
It's good. I'm.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:20]:
I would love to see.

Leo Laporte [01:36:21]:
I feel like everybody needs a Chromium based browser as at least your second. I use Zen, which is a Firefox and I really love it. But everybody needs a Chromium browser in the back pocket just in case. And Helium's probably.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:35]:
If you want to. I mean. And what. Oh, and I should say. So there's a site, you know, cover my tracks or cover your tracks, which is the eff.

Leo Laporte [01:36:42]:
Yeah.

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

Leo Laporte [01:36:42]:
From eff.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:43]:
Yeah. This is the only browser I've ever seen out of the box where it comes up green for everything. Like. Oh, it. Even. Even the fingerprinting thing comes up. I've never seen that before. Like.

Leo Laporte [01:36:51]:
Yeah, you block origin built in.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:54]:
Yeah. Oh, right. Actually. So there's the caveat, I guess.

Leo Laporte [01:36:57]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:57]:
But it works really well.

Leo Laporte [01:37:00]:
Well, there you go. And if you only use it as a secondary browser, the sync isn't important because you're not really bookmarking. I mean, Zen has all my very elaborate bookmarks and tabs and workspaces and all that stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:13]:
There's an astonishing photo that Joe Esposito has posted to the Discord.

Leo Laporte [01:37:17]:
I have been unfortunately missing. There have been so many good photos coming over the transom here, and I've been missing a lot of them.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:28]:
This might be my new profile photo.

Leo Laporte [01:37:30]:
This will be a new segment on the show where we show what's going on in the Discord. We have a lot of AI guys.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:36]:
This is a good one.

Leo Laporte [01:37:37]:
Oh, yeah. There you are sniping Curious George.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:41]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:37:42]:
You look a little worried like you might.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:44]:
I'm like, I want to get it right. I'm like, you can thank. You can thank me later, world.

Leo Laporte [01:37:48]:
Oh my God. With his 50 millimeter cannon. Let's see, there's some other good ones.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:54]:
If you go back.

Leo Laporte [01:37:55]:
I know they've been putting a lot of good stuff up here and I

Paul Thurrott [01:37:57]:
haven't really been showing this spectacular.

Leo Laporte [01:38:00]:
Yeah, I really should because these guys. This is. This is why I love. Oh, this is a fun one. When during the club twit thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:08]:
I'm. I'm a little disturbed that you're promoting a trash 80 there, but it is.

Leo Laporte [01:38:13]:
This is an old Radio Shack ad. Joe Esposito is a Photoshop with not an AI guy. So he takes original ads and then puts our own, you know, content in there. It's pretty good. He's really good, I have to say. There we are. As Teletubbies.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:26]:
Yep. And then they run around in circles,

Leo Laporte [01:38:31]:
you know which one of these is the girl? Teletubby? I don't remember.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:33]:
Oh boy.

Richard Campbell [01:38:35]:
I think they're all andromed.

Leo Laporte [01:38:37]:
Are they gendered?

Paul Thurrott [01:38:39]:
I think, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:38:41]:
Okay, there's Barney the purple dinosaur. Okay, here's Mario. I think I've got.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:47]:
People need to keep themselves entertained while they're watching this.

Leo Laporte [01:38:51]:
Here we are with the sloth.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:53]:
Yeah, visiting.

Leo Laporte [01:38:55]:
Actually, they've closed Sloth World, I'm very sad to say because of the now 55 sloths have died in Sloth World, including Dumpling, the most much beloved Dumpling. So I think that there is something. Here we are in our space outfits. Thank you, Darren. Okey. One of these will end up being the thumbnail for the show. You know that, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:39:22]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:39:23]:
Here's a sad story of dumpling, the 55th sloth world death, which now has

Paul Thurrott [01:39:28]:
caused Sloth World launching a Florida State investigation into the death of Dumpling. This is the crazy.

Richard Campbell [01:39:35]:
How do you. You can't get much more Florida than that. Really.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:38]:
Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:39:39]:
I'm sorry if your kids are watching this. That's probably pretty upsetting.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:42]:
Sorry about Dumpling, guys.

Leo Laporte [01:39:44]:
Now, ladies and gentlemen, Richard takes over. An adult finally in the room.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:49]:
It had to happen eventually. Unlike with the Teletubbies.

Richard Campbell [01:39:54]:
They're all Teletubbies in the end.

Leo Laporte [01:39:56]:
What's coming up on Run as published

Richard Campbell [01:39:59]:
today was my conversation with Vaishnavi ghidorah about production LLMs. Now what do you figure is the largest LLM application that has LLMs embedded in it Runs every day. I think it's teams because every teams call, does transcripts, summaries, multiple languages. And Vaishnavi is one of the ladies that operates that system and just talked about what it means to manage 500 million teams calls a year. Wow. And what that what it takes to scale systems, to run those kinds of language models on all those things and also cover all the rules of the countries, all the regulatory bodies for that kind of data transcription. Like it's a huge problem. And just it's one of those things where you come out the other side of it going, a, I'm glad I don't have that job and B, what you're doing is easier than what they're doing.

Leo Laporte [01:41:01]:
Not for true.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:03]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:41:04]:
Anyway, it's a great opportunity to talk to just an extraordinarily brilliant lady who just cranking on a hard problem with a great team.

Leo Laporte [01:41:13]:
Run as radio episode 1036. You get it@runnersradio.com and now I'm wondering, do you have something from Belgium?

Richard Campbell [01:41:23]:
This week I went shopping in Belgium because you know, and it's Belgium. You know about Belgium. Everybody likes Belgium.

Leo Laporte [01:41:32]:
Beer. They're famous for beer, mannequin piss and Manu.

Richard Campbell [01:41:38]:
Right? Yes. Part of the low country speak French.

Leo Laporte [01:41:41]:
You put the B in Ben.

Richard Campbell [01:41:43]:
You put the B in Ben. You're Belgium.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:48]:
What's that? The beer with the pink and elephant is from there.

Richard Campbell [01:41:53]:
Yeah, I'm gonna talk about that later because it falls into the story. Yeah, the. The tremis. So Belgium is Flanders in the north, which is the Dutch speaking spot. Although they are their own variant called Flemish or Belgian Dutch. The south part is Wallonia, which is much more the French speaking part. And then there's course there's Brussels, which is actually in Flanders, the Dutch part. But they mostly speak French.

Leo Laporte [01:42:17]:
There is Antwerp in the Flemish part.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:19]:
Where.

Leo Laporte [01:42:20]:
What is Antwerp?

Richard Campbell [01:42:20]:
Yeah, it's for. Yeah, very much up against the Dutch border here. So I actually flew into Amsterdam. The train down only takes about an hour. It's a great ride. Easier than flying into the Brussels airport, I swear. This is also the country that just doesn't have government sometime. You know, in 2010 their election was so bro.

Richard Campbell [01:42:40]:
Their election had so many parties involved they couldn't get a coalition together to actually make one for Florida. 541 days.

Leo Laporte [01:42:46]:
What?

Richard Campbell [01:42:46]:
Which seems like a lot, except that in 2018 the same thing happened again. They didn't actually have a government for 652 days.

Leo Laporte [01:42:53]:
What?

Richard Campbell [01:42:54]:
And you know what happened in that time? Nothing. They were fine.

Leo Laporte [01:42:59]:
That tells you something.

Richard Campbell [01:43:00]:
It's Belgium. Yeah, they're kind of chill. At one point during that, that long break they talked about actually splitting the country up. Flanders going to the Netherlands and Wallonia go into France. Like let's not be a country anymore. But of course Brussels make that all impossible. This is the headquarters for NATO. Since 1967, this is the de facto capital of the EU.

Richard Campbell [01:43:23]:
Normally there isn't a capital of the EU, but there are some major centers and the one in Brussels is huge. And like you said Leo, it's all about the beer. The trappist, the lambics, the whit beers, the saisons, the strong ales like the Christmas beers.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:37]:
So many.

Richard Campbell [01:43:38]:
So.

Leo Laporte [01:43:38]:
So if you're so good, if you're

Richard Campbell [01:43:39]:
going to talk about a whiskey in Belgium, it only makes sense that it's a 15 year old distillery attached to a 500 year old brewery. But maybe, maybe we should go to the start. We're talking about the low Country. Lands here, this area that they now call Belgium. And there's evidence of human habitation going back a hundred thousand years. So that's mostly Neanderthal. They even in the Neolithic period, this is the western edge of what they called the LBK or the Linear Pottery Culture, so named because their, their pottery has a very distinctive style with bands on it. That was about 7,000 years ago.

Richard Campbell [01:44:19]:
So 5,000 BC, they were doing agriculture here fairly early on. One of the very first agricultural societies anywhere that actually collapses after a thousand years. And literally for 2,000 years, there's no evidence of farming in this area whatsoever. We don't see really permanent farming culture around here till about the end of the Bronze Age, 1750 or so. The Celts show up in this part of the world about 500 BC. They were the big traders, of course, so the trading into the Mediterranean and so forth. And Julius Caesar himself arrives in this area where he referred to, refers to them as the Belge during the Gallic Wars. And in his Cometare de Bello Galachio, he describes these residents as a fierce confederation of tribes that of course they've won over between the Seine and the Rhine rivers.

Richard Campbell [01:45:08]:
And this area remains part of the Roman Empire and subsequently the Holy Roman Empire, until the collapse of the Western Empire in 500 AD. So 500 years, this was Gallia, this was the Roman, a Roman part of the world. As the Western Empire collapses, we get the Merovingian dynasty, followed by the Carolinian dynasty. They actually fight back and forth and have control in different times. Around 800 AD, you get Charlemagne in the area. And then after his death in 1848, 14, there's a conflict for the better part of another hundred years until the Franks dominate. The French sort of take control of that, and that largely breaks down into a series of feudal states for the 11th and 12th centuries. And so by the 1200s, this area is basically tested between the French and the English, going back and forth repeatedly, while trade goes on through the Hanseatic League.

Richard Campbell [01:46:01]:
Which leads us to the story of this particular whiskey, which is actually made. It says the. The Golden Carolus. This particular one's the Port Oak. And this is from Mechlin. It's just south of here in. Outside of Antwerp, particularly in the Groot Bengehof. So Mechlin is a small town, or not that small anymore, but back then, and there were these areas, these colonial areas, big.

Richard Campbell [01:46:30]:
And this is the grand one, this was a religious, a lay religious women's community. So it didn't want to be nuns, but they did have a strong Christian influence and the community was founded in 1232. So this is old doctrine, old culture, and this particular one is seven and a half acres, over 100 buildings now considered a UNESCO World Heritage site. And this group of women were running a hospital. But they also brewed beer as part of their charitable mission. And in 1471 Duke Charles the Bold granted that group a tax exemption for their beer. It's always about taxes in the end. And they had operated continuously in that form for the next 400 years.

Richard Campbell [01:47:17]:
It's not until 1872 that the van Breedem family, who were distillers in Blaspheld further to the east there acquire the brewery because they want the tax benefits. And of course they focus on ales because a lot of Belgian beer is ale based. And by 1904 the breweries known as the Hetanker or the Anchor, as it was such a supporting part of the city's past and was always been there, always been part of the process. And so the name Golden Carolus actually comes in 1960 after a flagship beer. Remember this is a brewery this whole time. And they. Golden Carolus actually mentions the is about the golden coins that are minted during the reign of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. And Charles the Act.

Richard Campbell [01:47:58]:
The man himself had spent his formative years in Mechlin and so was effectively the brewery's patron Saint. So by 2010, so again they've been making beer all along. Van Breedem and the and the Le Clef families finally build a distillery they call Distillery de Muhlenberg on the back on in glasfeld in their 17th century farmstead which is had once hosted the family's Genever distillery. This part of the world made a very an early variant of gin called Universal still aged with juniper and so forth, but that had long shut down. But they already had the space, so that's what they used. It's a common product. They moved that distillery to Mechlin in 2024. It's all very recent.

Richard Campbell [01:48:41]:
And Charles Leclef, which is the current managing director, represents the fifth generation of the Van Breeden Le Clef families that have run the brewery and now also distillery. But it turns out he's the last. He has no family successor. And so he's actually at the end of 2024 sold the entire facility to the Bruges Hugeen out of Mel, which also is a 300-year-old brewery, but never got into distilling. But they're famous for a beer called Delirian Tremens, which is the, you know, name for severe alcohol withdrawal. It's a strong blonde, Alex.

Leo Laporte [01:49:17]:
It's a good beer.

Richard Campbell [01:49:18]:
Yeah, it's been made a great label too. Well, because they call it Delirium Tremens, it actually upset a lot of people. It was banned in the US for a while there, so they changed the name, but they put the pink elephant on it and that's where you get the pink elephant from. So this is a very modern distillery and say, you know, built a modern way. They actually bought stills from foresights of Scotland. It was the first in Belgium. Because whiskey culture is not a. Has not been around here for very long.

Richard Campbell [01:49:46]:
It's not a big thing. But when you got a 500-year-old brewery and you're going to make whiskey, you start with beer. So they literally use the same process that they make the Golden Carolus triple, which is a 9% blonde ale. And at the point at where you would add hops to it and it becomes the ale now they actually diverted into distilling, which has some interesting consequences. And I want you to notice this bottle is mostly empty because I was hanging around with a group of miscreants last night and we just had to taste it.

Leo Laporte [01:50:19]:
Now who's got Delirium Tremens?

Richard Campbell [01:50:22]:
I call it being at work, but okay. But otherwise, the still is a classic modern still. So stainless steel mesh, tonsilater turns. They do the double distillation in copper pots. They of course, use ex bourbon barrels for their primary aging. And then in this case of this one, which is the port oak, they do their finish in Portuguese port wine casks. It's warehoused in Mechlin, which has got a good climate for this. Relatively cool winters, mild summers, steady humidity.

Richard Campbell [01:50:52]:
So they actually have a very slow angel's loss. They typically distill up to 68%. They barrel at 63.5. This is bottled at 46, I think I wrote down here, but it actually says 40 48. So I probably misread it. This is the 48. And this is only a 500ml bottle. It's a small bottle.

Richard Campbell [01:51:09]:
There aren't a lot of rules for Belgian whiskey because it is a relatively new thing. They've only been really making it from the 2000s and so they're pretty relaxed. They don't care about what grain you use. Although admittedly this is all barley, because they do make it from beer and. Oh, no, I had to pour it all into my glass. That's so sad.

Leo Laporte [01:51:27]:
It's all gone.

Richard Campbell [01:51:29]:
It's not all gone. It went to a better place. Their original Head Anchor whiskey was a single malt and it immediately won Best Belgian single malt. Which is not much of an achievement when there's only two, but okay. This Port Oak Edition is a much newer version. Now this beer is of course, because it's a port cast, it's got a lot of color in it, right? That's just cheating because you've got the board. It's not gentle nose for a 48. It should be more fiery.

Richard Campbell [01:51:56]:
It's just not. And that's typical of, you know, Belgian beer is 8, 9, 10%. And you don't notice it until you drink too many of them.

Leo Laporte [01:52:06]:
And they come in nice big bottles. Just so you can.

Richard Campbell [01:52:09]:
They do come in nice big bottles. Here's what's really cool about this whiskey. It's got a beer note to it. It's kind of beery. It's got that sort of sudsy feel at the back of your throat. I mean, it's still heat going down. Like I'm definitely drinking whiskeys, no ways about it. But the same way when you take a big slug of ale, even after you swallowed, you've got sort of a juiciness in your mouth.

Richard Campbell [01:52:33]:
It's like the beer suds. It's in there. And I figured out why. It's because they're using the ale yeasts, the normal yeast that they make the triple from. The usual distiller's yeast, which is also an ale style yeast, right? Like there's ale yeast and there's lager yeast. The lager yeast are bottom fermenting and they're slow. They're for preserving beer from making lagers. Ale yeasts are fast, they run hot, they, they cook off quickly, short duration and so forth.

Richard Campbell [01:53:01]:
But distiller's yeast, the type that the Scottish use, are very neutral. They don't have a lot of flavors in it. But man, this is Belgium and Belgium takes their beer really seriously. So this is a bright, flavorful yeast that's in that this whiskey was made from. And you can tell, you can tell immediately. I swear to you, if you put Belgian whiskeys, and there's two that do this, that use the ale yeast. There's also one called Belgian Owl, which we'll save for next year because I'm probably going to be back, I'm telling you, you'd know right away. There's something so distinct about this and it makes me laugh because there's so many countries that are trying to make whiskey that you can't distinguish for Scottish whiskey.

Richard Campbell [01:53:44]:
Right. We've tried them all. We go to all kinds of places, but all of a sudden, like, wait, this is Belgian whiskey. And you know right away, because the Belgians aren't afraid of serious yeast and that's what they've done here and it's made something super special. Now, I picked up this bottle at Hus Verlough, which is just down the road here. Guys were very nice, easy for me to work with, cost me €51. It's about 60 USD and admittedly that is only a 500 mil bottle. So if you're going to balance that number out for tickle 750, we're talking about about a $90 bottle of whiskey and unfortunately not sold in the US.

Richard Campbell [01:54:19]:
You can get Golden Caroless beer in the US. They've never exported the whiskey.

Leo Laporte [01:54:26]:
Is that because they don't make enough?

Richard Campbell [01:54:28]:
I think that's part of it. I think the licensing is complicated. I think this is still a relatively new product and it's just changed hands. So the new guys who, who don't have a distillery at all, they're still going to figure this out. It'd be interesting to see what happens going forward. Forward on this.

Leo Laporte [01:54:43]:
But I'm a fan of port barrels. I really love port.

Richard Campbell [01:54:47]:
Aging is great and their regular single malt has won multiple awards. And it's an. And by all means, people say great things about it. But I'm telling you, the secret of the Belgian whiskey is that ale yeast, that's made it just a thing that you would know immediately that it's Belgian and that's, I mean, good on Belgium, you know, they've came up with a way to make their whiskey theirs and I'm delighted. Delighted.

Leo Laporte [01:55:14]:
Isn't that nice?

Richard Campbell [01:55:15]:
And now it's, you know, 10 o' clock at night here, so I don't feel bad having a drink or two.

Leo Laporte [01:55:19]:
Yeah. I mean, by the way, Richard will take one for the team no matter what time of the day or night. Sometimes 5am, 6 in the morning. He doesn't, you know, he's. He's that kind of guy. He's very selfless.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:32]:
It's not even day drinking. It's like early morning drinking.

Richard Campbell [01:55:36]:
Yeah, I, I usually take a very small sip early in the day.

Leo Laporte [01:55:40]:
Yeah, that's probably why.

Richard Campbell [01:55:41]:
No, this is the end of my day, so enjoy.

Leo Laporte [01:55:45]:
I'm sorry.

Richard Campbell [01:55:45]:
That's the end of it. I'm delighted to find this whiskey just very.

Leo Laporte [01:55:49]:
I bet it's really good. I Can taste it.

Richard Campbell [01:55:51]:
You don't get surprised very often.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:54]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:55:54]:
Genuinely. And then sort of unravel the whole plan and go, okay, I get what you've done here and I'm here for it.

Leo Laporte [01:56:00]:
Cool. Very nice. Very nice. Richard Campbell, besides being our whiskey expert, also does a couple of really interesting podcasts. Run as radio and with Carl franklin.net rocks. If you're a net fan, I'm sure you know about that. That's the.net podcast. Both of them are@runasradio.com Paul Thurat has a very famous website called Thorat.com.

Leo Laporte [01:56:26]:
okay. No, it's coincidental he has no relation to Thurat. But no, he does.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:31]:
It's his.

Leo Laporte [01:56:33]:
I mean, it's eponymous, as a matter of fact. T H U double r o double good dot com. His books are@leanpub.com although I'll give you a hint. You can get them for free. Windows Everywhere, the Field guide to Windows 11, and of course, the New D and Shitify Windows. If you become a premium member@therot.com so it's well, well worth your money. I'm a proud premium member. And I guess Paul's heading back to Pennsylvania tomorrow.

Leo Laporte [01:57:05]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:06]:
Friday.

Leo Laporte [01:57:06]:
Yeah, Friday for a couple of months. Richard, where are you headed next?

Richard Campbell [01:57:12]:
Berlin.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:14]:
Ah, that I am jealous of.

Leo Laporte [01:57:17]:
I'm so jealous. So many great places. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:57:20]:
And I'm really looking forward to it. And the Germans make some interesting whiskies too. So I'll be doing some searching on Monday.

Leo Laporte [01:57:25]:
Are you flying or training?

Richard Campbell [01:57:28]:
I'm gonna fly. I'm taking the train tomorrow up to Alkamar to spend a few days with a buddy of mine. And then Sunday, fly to Berlin and home on.

Leo Laporte [01:57:35]:
I just love the trains in Europe. It's so easy to get around. It's so great. So great. Well, we will be back. We do the show every Wednesday, 11am Pacific Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us do it live if you're in the club. Of course in the club.

Leo Laporte [01:57:51]:
Twit Discord. But if you're not in the club, you can still watch on YouTube, Twitch, X dot com, Facebook, LinkedIn, Kick. We want to be wherever you are so that you can listen and watch live. And if you're in any of those places and you're chatting, I see your chat and I appreciate it. We love having you in the chat after the fact. On demand versions of the show available at Twitter TV ww. That's our website and we have audio and video there so you could Take your pick. Everybody seems to be liking video more and more these days.

Leo Laporte [01:58:23]:
I still think audio's a dominant podcast medium, but. Yeah, but videos up and coming. I hear this YouTube things.

Richard Campbell [01:58:32]:
It might catch on.

Leo Laporte [01:58:34]:
I catch on. You never know.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:36]:
We'll see.

Leo Laporte [01:58:36]:
You never know. We are on YouTube. We have a Windows Weekly channel there. The nice thing about that, besides it making it easy to watch, is you can share clips from it. You know, you can actually jump to a part of the video and share it with somebody and Everybody can watch YouTube. So that's kind of a good way to tell people about the show. We appreciate it when you do that. But for somebody who watches every week or listens every week, probably the best way to get it is subscribe.

Leo Laporte [01:58:59]:
Now if you're a club Twitter member, you'll have a unique URL just, just for you. That's the ad free version. Everybody else put the, you know, just search. Go to your favorite podcast client and search for Windows Weekly and you'll see it right there. You have a choice of audio or video or both. Actually, if you search for tweet, you'll find that and all the other shows, something like 15 other shows that we do, all of which are subscribable. If you want to comment on this show, club members, of course, can do that in the Discord. There's a kind of mini forum for all the shows in the Discord.

Leo Laporte [01:59:31]:
But everybody, it's open to the public, can go to our forums@twit.community I don't mention them enough and I, I think it's a great way and it's the only really way that you can directly comment on the shows. I read those comments and we appreciate those, positive and negative. You can also participate in our Mastodon instance if you're a fan of the Fediverse. That's at Twitter Social. Both of those are open to Twit listeners. So when you sign up, you won't get. You know, I have to approve it because there's a lot of spam and bots out there. And I finally figured out, I saw

Paul Thurrott [02:00:05]:
your post about this.

Leo Laporte [02:00:06]:
Yeah, I finally figured out how that happened. So there is a, an organization called IFTAS that, that looks for disinformation on social networks. They sent me notifications a couple of days ago that there were like a dozen Russian bot accounts on Twitt Social. And I thought, well, I have to approve all accounts. I can't, couldn't figure out how they got in. And then I looked at their application and they were invited by somebody. So that was a little loophole where you could invite somebody to join. Okay.

Leo Laporte [02:00:37]:
And then I wouldn't.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:39]:
I'm sorry about the Russian bot thing. I, you know, I'm not really good at social.

Leo Laporte [02:00:42]:
Don't invite Russian bots. Well, I turned off, so that ain't gonna happen anymore. You will have to. You can't get in via invitation. You just go, I'm inviting you, Twit Social. All you have to do is say, I listen to Windows Weekly or any.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:57]:
You know, just as the bots are like vampires, they need to be invited in. And then they can get in by Waterloo.

Leo Laporte [02:01:04]:
Says, I only invited him for the free vodka. They were nasty, too. I mean, the stuff they were posting, it wasn't nasty. It was. It was disinformation. Was real propaganda. It was actually kind of interesting. And I thank you ifas for catching them.

Leo Laporte [02:01:19]:
And I think I've purged them all. At least I've turned off the invite capability. Was that Julie invited them all. Thank you. Julie was also.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:29]:
Julie was the.

Leo Laporte [02:01:30]:
Oh, Julie was a disinformation bot as well. So somehow she got in. I must have overlooked it.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:36]:
Well, people sometimes, you know, they can masquerade as a person and they lurk around for a little while, everything's fine, and then all you have to do

Leo Laporte [02:01:42]:
is say, I listen to twit. I'm not like, vetting everybody.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:45]:
But you're not doing a background check on every single person.

Leo Laporte [02:01:48]:
But most spam bots don't. Even though it says when you sign up, why do you want to join? They don't ever enter anything in that field. All we'd have to say is, I like twit and they'd be in.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:58]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [02:01:59]:
So.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:59]:
Well, now that you give them the recipe for getting in.

Leo Laporte [02:02:02]:
Well, I don't think the bots listen to what I either.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:05]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [02:02:06]:
Anyway, I'm hoping. But we would love having you in the Discourse, the discord if you're a club member, the Discourse if you're not. That's@twit.community and the Mastodon at Twit Social. You know, we pay for them. I moderate them, I keep an eye on them, and it's, you know, I keep forgetting to mention them. So we'd love to have you in there. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Richard.

Leo Laporte [02:02:28]:
Have a great week. Safe travels. We'll see you all right back here next Wednesday for Windows Weekly.