Steam Controller and Hardware Pricing

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul and Richard are here. There's some big changes to Windows Update. Paul will have the details plus gaming on the new Snapdragon X2 and Earnings Learnings. Microsoft Earnings comes out at the end of the show, but we already learned how much money intel lost this quarter and we're trying to figure out why did the stock market go up insight coming up next on windows weekly podcasts you love from people you trust this is twit this is windows weekly with paul therat and richard campbell, episode 9 81, recorded Wednesday, April 29th, 2026, semi-sophisticated. It's time for Windows Weekly! Get ready, everybody. It's time to talk Microsoft with our dynamic duo of Microsoft Journalism, Mr. Paul Thorat from Thorat.com. Looking very dynamic today. Looking very dynamic. His range more like diuretic. Um hello, Leo. Hello, Paul . And Richard Campbell of Runaz Radio. Richard is back home in British Columbia. For the minute. Yeah. Yeah. For the minute. Beautiful. Beautiful sunny day out there. Yeah. Look at that. Tell us again, that is uh that is not a lake. That's that's the ocean, that's the Salish Sea. We call it like an inlet. Look at the sky go by in a speed. Island in the distance there. So what a view. And a perfect thing to wake up to, let me tell you. And perfect sunset. That is a postcard we're looking at. It is. Nice. We don't need to be better looking than us guys. We don't need to see us. Just the beautiful lake or lotion or whatever the hell. It's ocean. I don't meet anyone every once in a while you meet someone who like watches this podcast and I'm always I'm I always start off the same way. I'm like, I'm so sorry . I'm so sorry. Uh ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Surratt will commence today's sermon on windows. Yes. I'd like to begin with an apology. No. Um so you know, this has been a good year, honestly, and and there's a lot more to come, but you know, we all know that Microsoft is working on those pain points. Um we've been waiting for them to be implemented and now that has started through the insider program of course and so excuse me because I'm caught on a wire here. Um so there's two bits to what they've done. The first one is to roll out the changes to the insider program that they announced, right? Which is basically amounts to them replacing the dev channel with the experimental channel. The beta can channel, uh the beta can channel the beta channel continues forward uh as the beta channel, but the focus of eat of each changes a little bit, but uh experiment al is the channel where you'll get future features that you know some of which may not actually land. Right. And beta is features we're pretty sure those are going to be in Windows in the near future and then they'll move, you know, to release. Where canary goes . Nobody knows. Um Canary still has two different build streams. I don't like I don't know . Canary one and canary two. Can we have Canary One and Two? Listen, it's like so you know, like nobody knows more about Windows than we do. What's Canary for? I have no idea. It's not like anybody else knows best. No, I don't think I'm pretty sure Microsoft doesn't know. So that uh so that's in there. Um at some point that will be kind of enforced in the sense that you'll have to switch over it. But for right now you can just kind of opt into it. Eventually that's going to change. But um once you do that, what you'll see is a set of feature flags in the Windows Insider Program settings interface . And this is among other things, is where you can make sure that new features are actually there. You know? So the default setting. Well, no, you can specify them all or not. In other words, like in other words, you either get them or you don't, you know, which is better than nothing. I agree, kind of a well, I maybe I think that's you could you could select, hey, whenever there's an optional option or what you want to test , I want it. Exactly. I mean that's super important for you. I don't think it's important for anybody else in the world, but it's important for you. You have no idea how important we'll call it the thoracic . I am my uh living or dying on that hill. Um so I'm super excited about that. Uh hurt you. So that's cool. Um there's that. And then uh when you go into the experimental channel, and this is kind of an example of where it's simpler but uh it's not really that much simpler but you can uh at this time this will change over time too you can either test Windows 11 version 25h2 24 I'm sorry 26H1 right or future platforms. Um, and this is optional. I think by default it's probably on future platforms. So future platforms is those features that may or may not, you know, make make it all the way. Um, so that's great. And then they also implemented uh changes to the Windows update interface by which you would get to the Windows insider program interface actually in Seth. And this was Arya Hansen. Yes. Yes, right. So this is also this is this is this is rare. I don't get to say this a lot. Um this is better than expected. Um and what I mean by that is Microsoft has a long history of overpromising on del delivering. In this case, when they when Pavan Dav alori wrote that post where he talked about pain points, and he mentioned, you know, we're changing Windows Update. He was he was vague, you know. He said that they would allow users to customers to um extend the pause on new updates for longer than was the case currently. Currently you can do it for I think it's five weeks. Um but he didn't say how long. And I was like, what does that mean? Like six weeks? What are we talking about? You know, like seven weeks? What do you mean? And it's actually essentially indefinite or in infinite, I guess, or something, um, with two caveats. Um, you can extend it indefinitely in 35-day increments using a calendar control, which is, you know, super easy. There may come a time where there's some kind of a zero day something, something, and you actually have to get a, you know, a security update, right? There's there's probably nothing we can do about that. So that may happen, but you can essentially push this out indefinitely if you want. I don't know why anyone would want that exactly, but certainly you might be working on your computer, you're doing something like, look, I don't want this to happen right now. I'm in the middle of a project, whatever it might be. Um, I had seen this one before, but you can now shut down or restart the PC without installing updates. You have to do it through the start menu and then you get the additional option. So restart with installing updates if there are any pending or restart without doing that. That's nice. Um there's also that thing I had seen previously, which isn't technically Windows update, but update related, where you're installing Windows from scratch. So you got a new PC probably or you reset a PC and you get to that new uh new to 25 H2 screen where um you have to install a feature update and it takes twenty, thirty minutes, you know, it takes a long time. And now there's a little link on the bottom that says, yeah, we're not not g gonnaonna I'm do this right now. Skip this, you know, which is nice if that if you want to just get right in, right, and get going. Um and then back to Windows Update, sorry, uh fewer disruptions. And so they're they're coordinating um updates so that they will essentially ship or be implemented together. And I I kind of think about this in the sense that you know one of the things Apple does in their App Store is if you have all these little microtransactions, they won't put them through one at a time and have some credit card fee on each one of them. They'll bund they'll kind of bundle them together. And people who, if you're an Apple user, you might sometimes like get a little notification on your phone where it's like, oh, Apple charged you $35 or $14 , some random number. And you're like, what is this? You know, and it's because they're kind of bundling those payments together. And you know, it's not if you do a lot of purchasing, you may not, you're like, what like, what is this thing? Um, you can also as a seeker now, and I actually don't see this yet in the the build, but I'm sorry. Yeah. So updates have been piling up. There's going to be a new available updates. It's a expander is the name of the control, but you click on it and then it shows you whatever those things are. And then you can choose the ones you want to if you want to and or just wait again. You know, whatever. Um and so that's that's nice. And then they're building in uh a kind of functionality one would assume had been in Windows forever. It's the type of thing uh they first implemented and you're not gonna believe me when I say this, but Windows Millennium edition, when they had like an automatic driver rollback feature, which solved one of the biggest reliability problems of Windows nine X, which was that you installed a driver and then could not boot into Windows because something was wrong with it, right? That used to be a problem. Yep. So it Windows Me was the first system to uh uh actually just override that and go back they would save the previous driver every time you install the driver and then it would automatically roll back and then you'd be fine. You could you know do whatever you wanted to do. Um they're doing that with uh Windows updates now. So if there's something we I bet everyone listening this has probably experienced this at least once where you actually do try to install an update and then you and then you're working and you're doing whatever and you're like, oh let me go see other things doing. It's like update failed or whatever. And you're like, okay. And then you click retry and you work a little while and come back. It's like update failed. And you're like, okay. And you don't know why there's no obvious way to fix that. There are ways to fix it, but um it they're complicated and you have to look it up and um they're gonna do this automatically, like automatic recover of failed Windows updates, right? Nice. Yeah. So um obviously uh me being who I am and doing what I do, I went in and uh you know played around with this. And it it's great. Like I don't I don't know that I have a a complaint, which I have to say makes me feel I almost threw up on my mouth when I saw it. That's very distressing. Uh yeah, I know it's uh it's it's hard for me. Um but I this all looks great. Like I nice. I mean, and like I said, this is actually you know, when I when he announced this, I was like, Okay, I mean, let's see what they do before we get too excited here. Um and he was really vague on the time frame for pausing updates, but actually it's pretty good. uh she but yeah. I mean Pavan when Pavan talked about it. Sorry. Um when he became in his list of you know things we're gonna fix. Well I just you know we were both pleased when Pav I was we were both disturbed by the outcry against Pavon, although I don't think it was really against Pav It's the don't shoot the messenger thing. I mean. Although he also was a sort of thing. The thing is uh I didn't write this anywhere, but uh you know, as I was talking about this, you know, I I often do write and talk about like intent. Like what's the point of what Microsoft in this case might be doing or whatever. And when you think about some of the behaviors in Windows 11 that are bad or against what you want or maybe aren't opt-in and they just do it for you or they force you into like, you know, folder update that thing I complain about a lot. You know, you you complain and then you step back and like, well why you know wh why are they doing this ? And there are you know there are good reasons to semi force people to sign into Windows uh with a Microsoft account if you're a consumer. There are business case reasons too, right? I mean they're trying to push you in a certain direction, of course. There's the the there's both elements there. Um when you think about Windows Update and the system that they had in place, I mean there's no there's no business imperative like in certification type issue with Windows Update where you can say, well they're just making me install updates because dot dot dot. Other than I guess maybe there are new features every month and they want you to get the new features or something. But really to me this, goes back to the Terry Myerson thing about we want everyone to be on the same version, which is technically impossible. But by the way, they solved they actually solved that problem too, which is funny. But they keep the notion of keeping everyone up to date in this it especially when you talk about security updates is a good one like it's a good idea. Um it would be better if we didn't have to reboot so often you know there's that kind of a thing. And so I I'm curious here they they're being extremely liberal in allowing people to pause updates, which is like dramatically almost the opposite, but different than the previous policy. Yeah. Uh and I'm not talking businesses and their group policies and all that one. Which is a different thing entirely. We're talking about for consumers. Just like human beings, like just people. And I'm I'm fascinated by it because in some ways this is contrary to what is best for Microsoft as the maker of the platform, you know? But they're doing it. And that's fascinating. We also don't know what it'll actually manifest as to, right? Well it yeah, so uh time um in the same way that time can heal all wounds. Uh time also opens old wounds and it's gonna be time wounds all heals. So there's that. I well. You can get a cream for that though. Yeah. Sorry, I didn't mean that. Uh um that wasn't Kevin Kevin. Um is there a semicolon in there? Um I like completely lost my job. Like, what the um what I mean by this is uh when something is new and fresh , you don't you're not seeing the whole experience, right? And so um it goes against every grain of my being to allow Windows updates to accumulate somewhere. But I do use so many computers that this will eventually happen on some computers. So I'll be able to see what this is like. But I'm curious what the experience is like over time when you do in fact have maybe two months of security updates sitting in the queue and whatever those features are, whatever the other things are. Because you're gonna get uh dot net updates in here. If you have Visual Studio, you're gonna get those in there. It's gonna be other things too. So at what it there must be some point where they're like, we get it, you don't like updates, but seriously, you know , you need to reboot or something. So we're not seeing that today because there's there are no other things. See, that's the thing. I uh and you could pick any choice that uh especially enthusiasts do not or technical people don't like. The the forced Microsoft account sign-in thing, the um uh the Windows update pausing or whatever, you know, whatever it might be. The the even if you had to go seventeen l menus deep to turn off all telemetry, right? Yeah. The truth is most average people, which is most people using Windows, wouldn't even bother. They wouldn't even look. Never. So why not? Defaults matter a lot. Yeah, just give that to the the people if if if you're the exception smart slash dumb enough to want to turn that stuff off or whatever it is, let them let them hurt themselves. You don't need a bike, you know, it's not a motorcycle, they don't need a helmet, you You know know.? Some of them actually do know what they're doing. I mean, or there might be whatever reasons. Like, I mean, uh there are workarounds for everything, of course. Um, but yeah, it it does beg the question, why not just spell this into UI? Like, what's the why this is universal? I've I've argued for this for a long time. Android does it, iPhone does it, Apple does it. Uh just give us a switch. Hide it. I gotta tell you a secret. When my Pixel wants to update the OS, it just Android has one actually Android does it you have to tap to the word developer like eight times to get into the developer uh settings. That's fine because we don't care. We'll share this on Reddit and everywhere. The setting app added a similar thing. They there was always a developer mode switch, but there's uh in the it's like settings system advanced, I think. Uh they've lumped in all the advanced features, which includes the developer stuff. So things like um I want to right-click on the icon on uh an app that's running and choose and task from there. I don't want to have to go through multiple steps to get into Taskman or whatever. Um so that's to me is very much like Android, except that it, you know, you know, you know, at the top of the screen 10 times or whatever it is. Um you know, the pixel thing is interesting because I have I do have I have three pixels here and I'm I'm on the beta, so you d I see more updates than usual, I guess. Um it's it's pretty prickly when you don't install, you know. It wants it it really wants it. But that's right, because there's security patches. Yeah. I mean you need to do that stuff. Yeah. Normal people do. And that's always the problem here. Right. When that's the balance. That's the thing. And people it's hard enough to find anyone who wants to care enough to block any update but to find uh only block certain updates that you never find . Right, that's exactly the point. I always think my wife being a normal human being doesn't think about this at all, doesn't care. Sometimes she walks in, turns on her laptop, and it has rebooted. And you know, Windows is semi sophisticated in the sense that some you can this is click I think it's on by default now, but you can uh it will do what mobile platforms do and bring up apps that were running before if they're modern apps, right? I mean it's not perfect, but um sophisticated is what I'm always looking for in a I mean I'm just trying to be accurate here. I don't wanna, you know. Well, look, uh uh Windows is a legacy desktop platform, it has a modern app platform in there too, but a lot of people are going to be running some mix of these things. So modern apps such as they are uh have whatever deficiencies, but they are easier to resuscitate and do that kind of thing with. Whereas legacy apps, you know. Burke is saying that because he uses Windows Pro, he doesn't see as much nagging. And no, that's not true. I don't think that's true. I mean, is there I if you buy the LTSC version the and the enterprise editions are pretty stripped down. But yeah, but even even those I mean I've tried this too. Like is installing Enterprise Edition some solution? Um you know, honestly, if whatever the number of problems you might have with Windows, it only solves like two of the seven. It's not, you know, uh and it's because you're running it as a person. You know, um most people running enterprise are it's a managed environment and your it's your company who's kind of hand it that's handling that. And uh and they will determine your experience. Um Windows Pro though versus home, I mean , not really. I mean uh there were things along the way like when Microsoft started enforcing Microsoft account sign and they did it first with Home, right? So if you had Pro, you didn't see that at first, but then they added it to Pro. So slowly. It kind of depends. Yeah. I've always said Windows is best for uh somebody who has an IT department. Yeah. Or things like an IT department. Or your own IT. That's kind of what I used to say on the radio show. If you're using Windows, you're your own IT department. Yeah. Okay with that. I mean uh they're they're trying I don't know what else to say. I mean, yes. I look, I I just had this conversation with uh Laurent, uh my coworker this morning, but you know Apple uh well Steve Jobs are still around and macOS 10 was the primary concern there. He would make fun of Windows for having multiple product editions. They were like, we have one version of Mac OS 10, you know, at the time. Um we don't have like a enterprise, we don't have pro, we don't have home premium and ultimateate and and blah blah blah whver fair enough you know um Apple was able to move uh first to not charging for updates like for OS updates right um they did that before Microsoft like on the on the desktop and you know, it's a smaller platform, obviously. It's the the I don't know, vast majority of the case. Yeah, the majority of the customer base is enterprise. And and they They did have a server version, to be fair. Apple did. Yeah. Yeah. Yep, they did, yep. Desktop. Yeah, but they don't you know, there's this uh even today they don't uh they don't have the like cloud-based equivalent. They don't really do that. Like they're not I mean they have a an Apple business offering that that does it's basically MDM stuff up in the cloud, whatever. But they don't really do the Microsoft heavy infrastructure thing. Um but that's been the that's the shtick. I mean, you know, Microsoft's business is uh or the Windows business is for businesses largely. I mean, people use it, you know, for all the right reasons. I mean, you use Excel at work, you're like, I want to have this at home or whatever. I mean, I you know, it makes sense to some degree, I guess. I don't know, but um yeah, we're we're dealing with the um I guess the side effects of the uh different uh focus, I guess, of the two platforms. I don't know. Yeah, I think they're very different. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, you can move between them pretty easily. It's not like they're they're not that different. I mean But there does need to be I mean in in Microsoft's defense, there does need to be an enterprise enter operating system. Mm-hmm. Yeah, Apple's whole there's one version of Mac. It's like tell me you haven't broken into other markets without telling me you haven't broken it into other markets. Right. Right. Microsoft needs those different versions, I think. Customers are pretty clear about what they want. I I I Right. So I th I do I've felt this for twenty five years. There should be a business version and a home version. Yeah. They could have completely different UIs. I mean the only thing that really matters is that the basic interactions are the same and the apps all run everywhere, right? Like so uh there's no or maybe just the home version has fun themes or something and the business versions look like the home version should look like XP. The business version should look like two thousand. Yeah. Yeah, there you go. So they in a way they sort of did do that a little bit , but yeah, I don't know I don't know why they don't I don't know why they don't do that. I guess that's a support nightmare. I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, it's getting better. Mm-hmm. So that's good news. They're working on things that people are appreciate. Yes. I I got the sense from Arya's blog post that these were ideas she'd had for some time and just just got priority on. So she was kind of delighted. Like all the stuff I've always wanted to do for you, I'm now allowed to do. There is a um Windows and Xbox, there's these changes occurring right now where I think we're seeing people step in who were like, I've wanted to do this for so long. Yeah. And now I can't. Now I've been here. Yep. Yeah, a lot of people have uh left the company. You know, Rich and I both been around a long time, know a lot of people at the company. We both have seen this huge swath of people we're friends with. Generation of departure happening right now. It's insane. Right fooling. And it's accelerating right now because instead of the past two years-ish of like layoffs, you know, they've recently offered these people like a buyout essentially. First time ever. They've had a early retirement package. And I can tell you how many people have pinged me saying, Do you think I should take this? Yeah. Because like it's this or I get laid off. Like that seems to be the the sense. Yep. But it's also a reality. Like these are friends of mine from thirty years ago that are now, like me, in their fifties. People are always like, you know, Paul, you know, what does Microsoft think about all the stuff you complain about? I'm like, I don't think I know anybody anymore that matters. Like I used to know so many people there and it's very different. It's gonna get different even more different. I was gonna say worse, but just you know it's it's gonna get even more so. But the the one of the happy side effects is and it this won't always be the case, but we s like I said, Xbox and Windows, we're seeing people come in who are like, you know, I've been sitting on the sidelines for a while. I don't really like the way this is going. And now I have the opportunity to impact this in a way that's positive, and they are. And that's you know that,'s good because no matter how terrible any company is, if you know anyone who works there, you you you know these people, they're human beings, they want to make good products, they want everything to be great. And then you're like, Yeah, but your company's terrible. It's like I c you know, I don't I don't make the decisions, you know, whate ver. Um and now we're starting to see that. And and again, in both cases, so far at least, it's been mostly very positive. So um this is good. I feel like the uh you know the insider program has been tread not even treading water they've been circling the drain for years it's that's a huge problem and then you know I wrote a book about how terrible Windows 11 is I mean you know it's a it's a problem so it's nice to see that getting reversed . And it's mostly new people, you know, or yeah, maybe people in some cases, like guys like Marcus Ash and uh Rudy Hinner, whoever who I've known or sort of known for a long, long time. And mostly IC types, like not the managers. These are the architects and so forth who some ways kept their head down. Yep. Well they were just doing they were somewhere else. I mean they were doing whatever they were doing. I mean, but um you know Scott Hanselman is in this category now too, which is very interesting. He's a great guy. And uh And a big chunk of his time is focused on Windows now. It's really neat. I w I I want a big chunk of his time to be focused on Windows. It's good. So anyway, good good stuff is my point. So this is good . Um oh that's it. Um that's all she wrote. Thank you for joining us. No, no, we got lots more. Can't stop until there's whiskey. Lisa Lisa was talking, actually I should run this by you guys about maybe uh ending the show before whiskey, but not really. Uh oh. Like say, okay, that's it. Thank you for joining us. And then just doing the whiskey thing as a second. And then doing the whiskey thing and then offering it as a s a second item or something like that. That's I mean, to me that's almost semantic in nature. It is. Because I know there's some people , you know, we put it at the end. So it's at the end. You can just you don't care. So here's here's why she said that. She said, But people tell me they still listen to it in case Paul says something interesting at the end. Wow, that is uh that's bleak. In case. The chances of that are pretty slim. Um hope springs eternal . Okay. Well, I I th that's interesting. Um No, I don't think we're gonna do it, but I just No, I mean I I don't know what to say. I mean, like, you know, when Mary Jo was on, she did a bear segment or whatever, and I'm same c feedback. A lot of people loved it, and so a couple of people were like, I don't understand why you're talking about this. Here's the deal we're gonna make with you all. Paul will never say anything interesting after the whiskey segment . I can't guarantee I'm gonna say anything interesting before the whiskey segment. I don't know. So just in case you're sticking around, if you don't want to hear the whiskey segment, just you know, pause the tape. You know what? Actually when the whiskey segment's done, I'm gonna put uh put a band-aid on my mouth. I will never say anything extra after the whiskey segment. Uh let's pause. Uh more interesting things coming from Paul and Mr. Richard Campbell because Windows Weekly has just begun. But first, before we go any farther, we might want to mention our fine sponsor for this segment on Windows Weekly, Webroot. You know, uh, people are uh often ask me about uh which uh any virus I recommend. And uh I can tell you there is video of me somewhere on the internet some years a go, taking a box of uh, well, I won't say what brand, but it was a yellow box with a guy with a fat tie on it with his arms folded, and stomping on it, saying, I hate you so much. Uh if your computer is feeling a little sluggish, if it heats up when you open a few tabs, if it sounds like it's preparing for liftoff every time it runs, don't necessarily blame the computer . Bl ame the antivirus. Many big name brands, like the one with the guy with the fat tie and the arms folded, have become bulky, complicated, and full of pop-ups and upsells. And honestly, I blame uh uh us for this, the tech journalist industry, because we made those reviews, you know, you saw them in PC magazine with all the check boxes of all the features of each product, and they all the companies took that as a signal. Just keep adding features, you know, get more checkboxes, which meant you ended up getting a bloated program . 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We thank him so much for supporting uh Windows Weekly. And don't forget you support us when you use that address web root.com slash tw it . Uh Peter Norton is not dead. No. Somebody's looked it up. He's still alive. In fact, what he did is he took all the money he made when he sold to Symantec and he uh the he had the Norton Museum in uh LA is amazing. He got really into uh art collecting. He's got very good taste. Paul, you're muted, if you're saying something about Peter Norton. No one's hearing it. Sorry. Would you say that uh he and McAfee went in different directions? Let's not forget McAfee who has passed on. Uh yeah. to Due do uh maybe a little too many bath salts. Something were being kind of something. Yeah, what a story that is. You're right. They did they come they went completely different directions. Yeah. So I think Intel owns McAfee now. I it's very confusing. Is it Intel? I can't remember. They may have spun it off. Symantec's gone. Maybe they own . Symantec got Norton, right? Yeah. Yeah, but Norton . Hey Norton. I always think Norton there's a Norton web browser now. Um I mean like an AI, yeah. I think it's called Neo or something like that. I want to give credit to Peter Norton because he wrote really one of the best of programming windows. The assembly language uh for DOS thing was amazing. Classic s, DOS. That's right. It's it's the book. Yep. And uh he got in the whole thing because he wrote a simple uh uh I don't think it was a scanner, I think it was like a disc scanner. He's almost like the uh the st the Steve of assembly language, if you will. Yeah, yeah. Um you know but no disc to Peter Norton, but he sold it in the book. Yeah, you were talking about the yellow box with the guy with the arms grass and like who who was he referring to? Big just remember Fat Tie. That's the era. Yeah. Everybody remembers that box. He wasn't shopping at Chess King. Uh comes from a different era. Uh Norton is now owned by something called Gen Digital Incorporated. Intel bought him for seven point seven billion in twenty ten. So who owns McAfee? Then sold them in twenty seventeen. McAfee's owned by a an investment collector. Ah private equity. Yeah. Advent International Corporation. Okay. It's the business of the future. Yeah. Today. Yeah. Uh anyway. That's what Corell does, isn't it? Yeah. What are the software? And again, another great Canadian company. Corel was a great company. Yep. But that's what happens. Was Novell Canadian or were they American? No, they were from Utah. Ah yes. Right, right, right. So basically Canadian. They're the Canadians of America . Absolutely. Those are the Minnesotans, but okay. Well, Minnesotans too. Yeah, that whole area. Right. All right. Let's talk about uh Snapdragon. Yeah. D you still that that A Acer or is still it's the Still leaning on the door in middle. The ASUS is sitting at home waiting for me. That's the one with the awesome processor. So I can't wait to get it. But you got but it's good 'cause you have the first two levels on their uh Yeah, so I have a plus and an and an elite and uh you know they're both set up for disappointment, man. I think you're gonna get it and you're not be able to tell any difference at all. Well that would be sad. Yeah. I mean uh day to day that's probably gonna be true. So going between plus and elite , you know, just like uh is the case the first gen, you don't really day to day nor normal productivity stuff, no issues. Um one of the big things that's changed over the last year for Snapdragon is uh games are starting to be a better experience. And that's true in the first gen too. Even the the only one I had here previously was a first gen Snapdragon X, not even a plus, like the lowest end whatever. And depending on the game, you know, you could do something like Half Life to an older game. Like that stuff works fine. Like it's actually pretty good. Um, but for the X twos, I wanted to test a broader range of games because I had done this again toward the end of last year when they started improving the game stuff. You know, uh Fortnite, I played control, uh, the Callisto Protocol, which is actually a pretty heavy game, was pretty good, you know, not too bad. Um, so the first round I went through at you know, Half Life 2 again, which obviously works great. Um, the 2016 version of Doom and Doom Eternal, awesome. And by awesome, I mean actually Doom Eternal is even better for some reason than the first one. This thing runs it like on this computer. This is an X2 Elite. It's like 60 frames a second at sixteen hund byred nine hundred. Like I mean it's doing auto SR, so it's probably technically running at a lower res, but uh on a long life battery, nice thin laptop. No, it's it's good. It's monster, man. Yeah. Um, control is fantastic. 1920 by 1200, 60 to 70 frames a second, which is unbelievable. Yeah. Um, that's the one I had to install. I think I guess I mentioned this, the.NET framework 3.5. I was like, what? Um I played uh Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, fantastic. So this was good enough that I was like, I'm just gonna get stupid and see if anything triple A from two seconds ago actually works right or at all. And uh they do not. Um so Call of Duty, uh Black Ops 7, nothing, uh, which was the case before on previous gen. And then I tried Battlefield 6, same thing. Uh both these things like take half a day to install and then you get them installed and it crashes like immediately and you're like, oh I've wasted my life. But well you have to do this right. We'll see what it looks like when we get to the X2 Elite extreme base system, but I think I think this is more the games than the platform. I I actually do think these games could run fine. Um and that there's some work could be done. The fact that, you know, uh Activision's own by Microsoft now tells me maybe some work there will occur. You know, we'll see. I I I realize it's not probably not a huge priority, but um this is definitely um a step up in that capacity, I guess is the way to say it. So I think the next thing I w uh this is gonna be super hard to figure out, but I wanna see if there's anything that makes sense like from a local AI perspective with the MPUs, because it's uh depending on the system, the ones I have here are both AD tops MPUs. I I think the the lead extreme might be eighty-five or I I can't remember what the mix is, but uh roughly twice, not quite twice, but almost twice as good as before, or twice as fast, I guess. But what does that you know, like what does that look like? So I'm gonna try to figure that out. Um I I have been playing around with local AI I did an episode of Hands on Windows that will we're so far ahead now, it'll probably come out in September, but whenever it comes out, um on local AI, which has gotten dramatically better, right? I mean, so you know, we'll see. We'll see what that looks like. But I but so far I have to say um it's I guess it's not surprising, but it is definitely better. Like it's definitely a step up. If you care at all about games, I mean obviously if you care primarily about games, this is not the direction to go, but um if it's you're an occasional game player or whatever, or maybe just you know, want to play older games especially, no problem. Like that stuff actually works pretty good. So that's nice. Um we mentioned Scott Hanselman in passing earlier. Um he is uh one of uh among his many roles somehow. Um he's uh working with a part of the company that is doing what I would call uh technology preservation. And uh they have uh over time announced the op open sourcing, or I guess in one case the reopen sourcing of various versions of MS DOS, uh, you know, one point two five, I think, in version two , uh version four. Um and then today they announced, or it was last night, but sometime in the past twenty-four hours, um they released the source code for what might literally be the earliest version of uh MSDOS, which is C PM. I'm just kidding. Uh is 86 DOS, the uh, you know, the gem uh which is Tim Patterson, uh the guy who created the thing that became DOS, right? Um they announced or they released the source code for the kernel for 86 DOS 1.0, which is the thing he essentially showed Microsoft or and sold to Microsoft, right? Right. Um, that IBM called PC DOS, Microsoft called MS DOS. But it's not just the kernel, right? Um they have multiple snapshots of that kernel, which is cool. They have the source code for check disk and other early uh MSDOS utilities. And they have what uh Scott Hanselman kind of referred to as like the late 1970s version of like the GitHub um commits, where it's like his hand-written notes um and comments in the listings of the assembler talking about things that weren't working right and that they should be fixed and were in fact later fixed and things like that. So there's a whole like body of work that goes along with this that uh you know Tim Patterson has given Microsoft permission um to use and then to, you know, into open source and just make available to the world. So people this is like a insight into a uh obviously a milestone in personal computing history that's really important. And um it's amazing to me that anybody cares about this. Like it's so great that they're doing this. I think it's wonderful. So it's really cool. Yeah, I don't know that it matters, but it's doesn't well it doesn't hurt anything. Right. And that's right. Exactly. Yeah, it doesn't hurt anything. And I and I there's this a whole retro computing thing going on now, which is probably stronger than it's ever been. And I don't know that anyone's gonna I'm gonna make my own custom version of the MS DOS kernel from nineteen eighty or whatever. It's like, yeah, okay. But but pretty sure you're not. Yeah, probably not. Yeah, probably not. But but if you I think I think you could learn from this stuff. I think this anytime there's a source code open sourcing, whatever of something, especially if it's something you use, like the Zort games or um I think Word Word stars like this. It's amazing, right? Yeah, it's just amazing. I love this. So uh so this is the this is the original Seattle DOS, right? The Tim Patterson that Microsoft bought. Yep. It's it's not MS DOS, it's Seattle Dos. Well it becomes MS DOS, right? So it's at the time the his name for it was 86 DOS. Right. Oh I see. There's both 86 DOS, MS DOS, and PC DOS, which is the IBM , exactly. Oh, interesting. So you can really look at the whole Yeah. You can just look at the whole lineage. This is so cool. I know it's amazing. Oh my gosh. I wonder if Steve knows about this, because he could actually read this. Exactly. Like, oh, I see what they did right there. Look at that. What were they thinking there? Right. Uh wow, is this cool? This , you know, we talked about this some weeks ago, but like one of the things I think we've lost from a software development purpose, uh perspective is you know something that everyone really wanted, which was we have essentially infinite computing uh resources, even in with all the crises we have now, that we don't really, we're not forced to constrain in any way, right? I mean this, thing was had to run on a system. I'm I'm sure that the low end was probably 64, 128k. Um, you know, five and a quarter inch floppies, maybe even eight inch, I don't at the time. Um, you know, the the the fact that it did any You know, uh we had a guest on Wednesday on Intelligent Machines, uh, Ian uh Bogost , who is a um uh interesting fella. He's a philosopher, but he's also teaches uh game he has a game company. He teaches games. Yep. And uh he's at uh the Washington uh University at St. Louis University. And uh he had he just finished up a Atari twenty six hundred programming course. I got um so the and that's sixty five oh two program No I I sixty five oh two assembly language might like it's like if you want to learn assembly language. No, I'm it's pretty awful. Um but that's next indirect addressing work. This is why I would start with the six etyight. Two bytes for where I want you to write it. No, I want to use X8 but y there are you there are today more places you could write code that would run sixty five oh two. Well, that's true. Absolutely, absolutely true. Yep. So the other thing that I mean, that was talking about memory constraints. The cartridges, I can't remember if they were four K or eight K. Well, they could be the by way, they were probably originally they were two K. Probably two K, yeah. And then they you they wait one of the ways they expanded capabilities was by adding RAM to the cartridges, yeah. But they also built into ROM a bunch of routines like sprite routines that you could call. So you a lot of the code you'd was in the ROM. You didn't have to be a good thing. So look, uh there are uh newish Atari uh devices now that run that those cartridges. The Commodore is back, they're doing Well clearly these students took a class on eighty si on on twenty a programming Atari twenty six hundred. He said it was a great class, it was really enjoyable. That's the ultimate constraint environment, by the way. Like the Atari was I mean, even at the time was like crazy limited. It's amazing. Like how many things you could do between each scan line and all this. It was super, super constrained. But there's a s I'm so glad there's young people who want to learn this because there's this huge value to learning how to work within those constraints. By the way, this would be a good use of AI as well to have it teach you how to do this and kind of work along the I mean well that's why I'm glad these listings are in GitHub because you can absolutely say to Claude Code, get these listings, let's let's learn. Right. Uh and I think that's fantastic. Just incredible. No, I think this is incredible. I mean, again, you know, practical day to day for most people, nothing obviously. But I I appreciate any form of like technology preservation. You know, the good old game stuff where they're you know not just preserving old games but allowing you know uh changing them in some way so that we can run them to just on modern hardware right is awesome. It's I think that stuff's great. Add a sync is mentioning in our Discord ch at a very uh cool project that actually I found earlier, I think it was uh on Hacker News, where the guy created something called the visible Zorker. And when you play the game Zork, which is those great text adventures. What does it like show you the it shows you the code on the right as you're playing a lane ? So you can actually see. And of course, this is not assembly code. Yes uh this is their uh parser, yeah. Yeah, so it could run on multiple platforms. Yeah. Right. So but you're seeing the parser actually work. Yep. It's pretty amazing. You can see I mean this was their key intellectual property. Yeah. But they open source this again. This is why open source uh open sourcing this old stuff is fantastic. So when you you when you started talking about the guy who taught the uh Atari class, I I I I do have a vague goal this year to figure out game programming. And what what I mean by that is um a game like a Windows app, or like Windows really, is just a just sits there and it and then every time it comes in a circle, it does something and it looks and says It's an event. They call it an event loop. An event loop, exactly. And I I I I this is something I've just never fully understood my entire life. And I feel like between this Commodore stuff and the 6502, like I mentioned and whatever, like I I just I want to see examples of this, especially the simpler the better, right? Like stripped down. There are these incredible videos, by the way, on speaking of code and game preservation on YouTube where a guy analyzes the open sourcing of the code from Doom and then Quake and then whatever else. And and in each case this guy's like, this is a master class and how to write incredibly interesting code. The best code imaginable for that era. Because you know, John Carmack is basically an alien who came down from out of space and taught us all. Totally different body. It's just Jesus. Like amazing. And um and I'll never understand. Yes he did. Yes, he did. Um I wrote uh as part of a class, I took a class uh in uh programming from uh uh online from uh University of British Columbia, actually. Interesting. Really good class. And uh one of the final assignments was to write a um kind of uh battles not what uh what is it where you're shooting aliens. Alien uh space invasions, yep. Okay. And so uh and you write it in a scheme. It's called uh racket. So this is the code, and that's exact you nailed it. This is exactly what it is. It's an event loop that runs over and over again. Yeah, I mean uh and then you have to write all the things that happen in the event loop. Yeah. Which is really in a Windows app, you know, and then when I say Windows app, I mean dating back to like nineteen eighty-five. Literally, you kind of set up the app for your window for the app and then you set up that event loop. And it in the event loop is what events are we going to choose to respond to? Right. So when the mouse goes down, when the arrow when the arrow can just it it could do nothing and then your app won't respond to any mouse clicks or any but you you specify the things you want to reply to. And I feel like a game is basically the same thing. It's you know I but I say that . I think there's an event loop in Windows, you bet. Oh no, there definitely literally is, yeah. So that's the difference between a command line program and a graphical UI. Graphical UI has to have an event loop because you have to respond to all the different things that we've got the most must move. It's doing the equivalent of there's a phone and you pick it up, you're like, is anyone there? Is anybody there? Is anybody there? It's interesting. It's really um yeah. Actually that's the difference between polling and interrupt driven. Mm-hmm . Right. This is a good way. You know, kids should do this. I I know that's what I mean. I know, but you still I got you can't listen, you you the only the only way to be truly effective with AI and coding is to know coding. You need to you need to know what's going on. Maybe there's a Raspberry Pi s version of this or something. I mean I I feel like there's gotta be a semi-modern but also semi inexpensive and low end way to you know, learn this stuff or whatever. I'm I'm I'm gonna try to figure that out this year. Yeah, no, definitely look down the pie path. There's a lot of good stuff in there. Mm-hmm. That's interesting. Anyway, I like this stuff. I'm sorry. I love this stuff. I just uh and you know, in some ways I'm sad that I've gotten so much into AI coding because I missed it. Leo, let me on behalf of all Twit listeners, we're all sad a little sad. I know. I know. I'm sorry. I kinda lost my marble. No, honestly, no. I actually uh in some way not in some ways. You are literally inspirational in that way because of who you are and your level experience. No, no, but it's not just that. Your job is to know what's going on and blah blah. You do that stuff. But you the way you've uh dove , dived into this , I know what's the uh plural past tense ? Um doven I'll say dove bar into this is how one of the ways I know it's important because you could just know what's going on in the world and not have to not do anything with it and you'd still know what's going on. But like you the amount of attention you've given us is important because it shows that stuff is real dove into VR headsets. I did that's but that's what I'm saying. Right. I didn't dove into Bitcoin. Uh but when I saw this and started playing with it this is something. Well you just said is uh in many ways ex existential because every once in a while someone in the Discord and then you'll repeat it. You'll say, hey, they're asking, how come you do, you know, what's this topic that's going on with Windows? I'm like, oh, I didn't cover that because it's nothing. And important. And ignoring something, uh you kind of hope everyone's kept picking up on it, but what's going to happen is people are gonna be like, Hey, uh this thing happened, how come you didn't? Like, oh you didn't I thought we must not know about it. Let me tell you about it. And it's like no, I didn't that's called editorial judgment. It's kind of a hard it's a hard line. but But when you dive into something and it's like sorry, did you say censorship? So it's curation. Curation. Curation, not censorship. Well, you're self-censoring. Yeah, I guess. Bias. It's because we want to as humans we have limited attention. Right. We can't go do everything. but the amount of time and attention you are giving to this tells me, and sh I'm sure it tells millions of people, that this is important. No, I mean it. Like this is no I'm getting some pretty good stuff at it. Right. That's what I'm saying you can get some good stuff. I can even in the limited exposure I have to what you tell us about it during on this one show, I'm like, there's something going on here. Like this is I think this is important. You know, one of the things I've been preparing for is this trip to Hawaii. Mm-hmm. Because I wanted to it's all running on this local framework. By the way, coming up uh at two o'clock, we're going to interview the founder of Framework, uh Nirof Patel. Who is uh laptop company, who just made the awesome lap the back book for Linux or whatever. Yeah. And you know, his background's interesting. He started at Oculus back in the Kickstarter days. He did that he designed the Rift. Like before Meta but he went to Meta for six years. He was at Meta, did all the Oculus, the one and the two. Well, so did John Carmack, by the way. Yeah. And then he said, but he said, unlike John Carmack , you know what? This stuff's not repairable. It's gonna end up in the in the landfill. Yeah, yep. What if we made this stuff that you could repair and upgrade? Right. And that's how frameworks started. So he's very inspiring. But they have he made also this AI machine. And he's very worried. This is why we're going to interview him. He's very worried uh that AI is is going to be uh become the property of these big companies and you won't be able to run it like Oh I listen, I we talk about this a lot. Uh local AI has gotten so much better, it's not going away. If if if literally the world goes where most it won't, but even if it did, most proprietary AI is the big cloud stuff and most open source AI is the local SML, uh small language model, whatever. Um, it won't. But even if it did, that stuff's still gonna be awesome. Well, one of the things, so as I said, I'm going to Hawaii. The first thing I had to make sure is that I could access this framework, which is a local run circle and do you are you gonna bring that with you when you go to Hawaii? No, I have Tex Scale set up. So I and we had to I had to work with with Claude. We did I did a test where I just ripped the plug out of the machine. Are you gonna like call in from your phone and stuff? Is that what you're doing? Like from my w I could talk to it from my watch in Hawaii. Nice. Uh Hey Dick Tracy, we're waiting in the line for breakfast. Let's get moving. What you want you want to see ? Hey, uh say hi. Say hi to Paul and uh Richard. We're doing Windows Reekly right now, and they really don't believe it that I can talk to you from my watch, even in Hawaii . I want to see if it uh it should respond soon . Can't really hear it. I'm answering. Oh when I talk. Window. Yeah, you can't hear it 'cause it's uh I could hear a couple of things. Yeah, it's the other syllables or whatever. Yeah. I had it so now I can route through the Sono speakers 'cause I have Sono speakers in every room. See, and everyone thought that what the hell was that? But that's what that was. You were doing this. I said I'm never buying another Sonos device until I realized I can actually control it through HTTP posts. Now he has a fort made of Sonos speakers in his living room. I now have Sonos everywhere. And um and I told it follow me. So talk to me on whatever Sono speakers are nearest me. Which is awesome, by the way. I want I want the goal is to have the house. I can talk to the house and the house talks back to me. No one listened, even people that don't like this stuff at some point with Google or uh the Siri stuff or I get maybe back in the day, the Microsoft Cortana thing where at some point stood in some room in their house and said something to that agent or that uh assistant and then heard a speaker in some other room go, okay, Paul, the weather can be. Like seriously. Like and like, but right? I mean, we've all experienced this. It's using the Wi-Fi access point to locate me. So it can find that it can figure out But the difference is instead of talking to Google or uh Amazon or Apple, I'm talking to this little framework here. I'm talking to my local AI that knows me, has history, uh, has been, you know, carefully. What's the what's the model? Well, this right now is using Claude, but the next step, and this is something I'm gonna work on in Hawaii is to make it uh Quen, which is probably the best local version local version. Yeah, they have a well, this has 128K uh gigs rather. So it's it can run tw I think Quen what's the twenty-seven for sure and it might be able to run the one step bigger. But the thing is for an agentic thing where you're just saying, hey, make it a calendar appointment or can you find the email from Paul Thorat or whatever? You don't need Claude. I could just go as far as to say that could run on a sixty five oh two . Could probably run on well, yeah. That's a good question. You need a you need a lot of unified RAM. Uh anyway. Yes. This is the experiment, right? experimenting with uh Gemma, which you know the latest version came out in uh Gemma. It's yeah, it's really good. I have not looked it what's the Claude one again? I'm sorry, the uh the anthropic version? Clawed code. No, the Opus four seven? No, sorry, the the local one, the um the small language version. I don't think Anthropic has a small language. Oh they don't . Oh in fact mostly it's the Chinese ones. Deep Sea Four just came out this week and that's very good, supposedly. So but I'm not looking to code. I will code with Cloud Code. That's really or or codex maybe GPT FiFi. Those really are, those frontier models really are better coding. But there's a lot of stuff that does. By the way, they always will be, but right, exactly. But the small stuff's gonna get is just keeps getting better. It's crazy. Uh the only thing I've ever I think I said this because I I must have talked about this. Or maybe it's just I cause I did I did an episode of Hands on Windows about this, but I had to do like a thing about Tolkien uh writing and uh it just ran out of it runs out of context eventually. It it re it produced this like 18-page report essentially, but then it lost its memory of the case. Then it ran out of Tolkien. Because Tolkien, exactly. We did that pun a while ago. Yeah, last week, as a matter of fact. Right. That's the only thing. But but that's to ken management contacts man Right now. But that but again, it just keeps getting better. I mean It does because they're solving these problems for you more and more and more. Yep. So um I uh yet it's a really interesting time. Uh you think so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is. It really is. It really is. And what's, you know, what's a a challenge for Microsoft to bring it back to Windows is that these all these companies, certainly uh ChatGPT, wanna be platforms. Right. Chat GPT, we just got the story uh from Ming Chi Kuo this week that they're gonna do a phone and there won't be apps on Right. It will all it'll be the platform. Well, so I've joked about this when Apple integrated with ChatGPT and only ChatGPT origin, you know, originally still to this day, right? Um you know, from chat GPT's perspective, like you can you can have all these apps on your phone and we'll use those. That's great, but you'll never need to run those apps again. Like chat GPT, it's like is there a absorbs them? Yeah, like in the it's right. In the same way that like in Windows, you could like change the the shell to be any executable. You could have it in the old days boot into notepad if you wanted. It's like, I just want my iPhone to put in the chat GPT. You know? Yeah. Like the the Apple will not allow that. No, that'll never happen with Apple. In a main way that may be the right solution. Just like we were talking about earlier, where the sophisticated people will will have a path. So right now with the talk with the uh action button on the iPhone, when I press it, I'm talking right now to my AI. Just like Apple intended, Leo. It's so good probably so much. But I'm talking to my AI. Uh and when I stop, it will then send it to the framework . And then it will respond and it's going to talk through the speakers and it's going to say , what are you talking about? I don't know. Did you did you ask for something? But it appears that you're on a podcast. So I still have all the apps on here and all that stuff. And I s what I suspect is now you can hear it talking to me. What I suspect is that Apple will do this bifurcated thing where you'll have all the apps, but they'll like Bixby, remember the whole idea of Bixby where you talk to the this is the M C P slash semantics app thing where it will they'll expose their functionality. Exactly. So you can conversationally interact with those features or whatever. I also bought the Rabbit R1 little thing and talked to it through that too, which is a much more thing worked. No, you know what? The new version, uh, it talks to claw open claw. Oh okay. So I can talk d directly to it. And the only problem is it doesn't support tail scale, so I have to do a tail scale funnel which I haven't bothered setting up. So the watch goes to my phone which does support tail scale so I can get that back to the framework from anywhere in the world. I'm just trying to figure out the Windows app SDK and you're living in the future. I don't know. No, but that's the weird thing is I it's not you don't have to be that technical. You just have to know what questions are. Well, you have to have no questions to ask. That's right. Which by the way is uh the thing I would have said thirty years ago, like well you know also understand the answers you get back. Right. Okay, fair enough. Yeah. Some of this I don't like it. Knowing where to look for the answer is key. You c you're not gonna memorize everything, you know? No. It's a it's a good partner. And really I think the way to think of it is a kind of a dumb intern. Like it's really smart about some things, but it's also really stupid about some things. Yeah, it's like a random situation. Yeah, you gotta know where those boundaries are and where you can expect it to do the right thing and where you know it won't. Anyway, I'm sorry. No here I am interrupting. No, I'm I'm my head's I you you're sidetracking me easily because I'm just this is all uh t these days. Kenobi's response was ha. Apple's whole thing is to talk to Siri, not route around us entirely, but here we are . Obi-Wan on the wrist. It so it's it's got some personality, right ? Yeah. Uh bypassing the Empire, tell Paul and Richard the rebellion is going well. Oh boy. So how did it know all that, right? Well I have built in some memory, right? It doesn't really know that. Right. But it's full in me. I'm pretty sure Arthur Arthur Clark had a phrase about this. Certainly entertaining me. Well, entertaining is good, but being useful. There's some use because I one of the so for instance, I used to have a calorie logger, right? But such a pain you got to enter all that. So now I just tell it. Yeah, I had uh for lunch I had a tuna sandwich and a bag of chips. And it figures out what the calories are. Yep. It will then say, 'cause it knows I'm trying to cut carbs, Well, Leo, you're up to a hundred carbs today. You might want to try a salad tonight. I feel like useful already are kind of car or calorie carb, whatever counting apps that you take a photo of something and tries to there is rough you know there's one I actually tried it. It's kind of interesting. But but so that's their AI doing basically the same thing. But I don't even have to take a photo. I just tell it. It has a pretty good grasp of I can tell by the munching sound you're making that you're eating a vegetable. Uh so there are little use I slog my exercise that way and it knows where my goals are and what I'm doing. And so there's little useful stuff. Memory is helpful. Yeah. No, I I didn't mean to suggest it wasn't. I mean No, I'm suggesting it's not. It's enter it's Richard's right. It's entertainment. It is entertainment, but I feel like it's but it even says it on the license. But it is edging into useful , and that's the goal, right? It will be useful. It won't just be entertaining. Like it will be useful. And that's really my goal is to be prepared as we enter this world. It's not we're not quite there yet, but we're moving in that direction . But you are you're uh kind of performing the same role or whatever as ever, which is to be on the leading edge of that, see where things are going and be able to get people ready for this. And I think that's important work. It's good. Thank you. You've always been it I'm fine to me. Thank you. No, it's um listen, if you were being an idiot, I would probably say nothing. Well you've sorted that sometimes too, yes. Paul Paul's being awfully quiet over there. Um that's what I love about you, Paul. You you you you will say what you think. And I appreciate that. That's what you want. I think it's I think it's great. Yeah. We've had our little dust ups. We don't agree about everything, but I feel like we agree on like ninety seven percent or something. I mean something Well this is what I love about the job that you and I and Richard have, which is we are not talking to the general populace. We're not trying to explain computers to people who don't care. We are talking to enthusiasts. And so we really are kind of my wife that because she'll be like, Really? Because let me tell you what my lunch was just like. Um but Richard, wasn't that the case at Zero Trust World where you're surrounded by people who are so much like you that you can immediately have a conversation. Yeah, no, very you're right about it. Yeah. It's great. It's like we have friends because we're in this niche in this subculture. Yeah. You get that that's the whole thing about conferences is once in a while you're not the only one in the room. Yes. I do have you know, I this would have come up when these things happen in real life, but you know, I uh I have a lot of friends like you guys do who are just like mainstream. They're not technical, they don't care about the stuff, whatever.' There confyused by my life. And um it was the same person, oddly in both cases I can think of, but I remember when uh my friend asked me about an iPod and like should I get an iPod? And this was like really early on and I was like, yep, this is I this is the way to go. And the other one was when he bought a new computer, and I guess Windows eight had just come out in last year, and he goes, So I can I can put this on Windows seven, right? Like I I there's there's something in here that makes it go back, and I'm like, oh, I get bad news , you know. Um, and they eventually fix that. But in both cases, like this is someone not not technical, a smart guy, but like not, you know, not in this world. And um, I think that's interesting too, because one of the things that's already interesting about AI, even now in this early day, is how many people, normal people, pay for like chat GPT or Cloud now or whatever. You know, like it's close to a billion people . Yeah. This has moved into the mainstream. Like they're um you know whether it's ready or not, that's a debate to be had, but um it's interesting. It's very we thank God, because I was getting so bored of these glass slab phones. I know. Yeah. In the Microsoft language we would s you know, we were uh stressing over what the next wave was and it was never anything interesting. And it was like oh God, come on, is that all it is? I remember some guy even like I was really into tablet PC stuff even though I can't handwrite to save my life. And I remember some guy in a in a this is that doesn't matter where it was. But we were it's like a whiteboard, someone had drawn this complex diagram using a like a dry erase, whatever. And uh this guy's like, that's why I have a tablet PC. I can draw that, blah, blah blah. And I was like, that's cute. And I took a picture of it. I'm like, you know, like I, yeah, whatever, whatever, Leonardo. You know, draw your picture. I like what you're like, geez, like whatever. Like, you know, just like I'm using the technology 'cause I have it, you know, not because that's what makes sense. I've been a sucker for that. I've bought a lot of note taking and then I've Yeah, we all have fun. I mean that's the thing. I don't actually I don't want to write .. No No. I have all the Apple pencils. I can't. My hand cramps up when I write a check. Why would I want to take notes? I cannot write a check. Stupid. All right. Where were we? Uh you know what? Let's do a Let's do a break. If you do the Intel news and then we'll news and your and your theory. I would like to hear your theory. So I look you guys know because every quarter we talk about Microsoft earnings. In fact, by the way, Microsoft will announce earnings, I think, today. So that's like a next week's show. I gotta keep an eye on that. Um I have uh over decades had this creeping sense of Microsoft not sense the creeping reality of Microsoft being less and less transparent about their earnings. They used to be really transparent about was how many iPods, iPhones, iPads, whatever they sold every quarter. They stopped doing that years ago. As soon as they're not the dominant number, they're never going to say it again. Well, or you do something like we have Azure or something, or Azure being Microsoft's iPhone or whatever, where the growth is phenomenal for like long, long time. And then eventually everyone on the planet has an iPhone, we're not upgrading as much. And it's not their fault. They're doing they're still doing great. This phone's great eventually you win. Right. And all of a sudden that story is not compelling to Wall Street. And the reason they change these things, the reason they stopped talking about these things, is so they they have a happy story they can sell Wall Street. The thing is, uh, in our case, because we live in the United States, like SEC regulations have not changed in this time period. Um they are actually their enforcement certainly has. Yes. They're legally required to provide uh information that will help investors know whether they should invest in this company and what the s pros and cons, strengths, and weaknesses, whatever are. They're not do ing that. And so I've you've heard me complain about that over many years. Um and then there are these other things that happen where um Spotify, for example, announced their earnings. Like I've I've held up Spotify as an interesting example of a transparent company because they have paid and non-paid uh users. The non-paid users for a long time vastly outnumbered the paid subscribers, although by the way, that's almost that's gotten closer. Um, but the revenues from paid subscribers, which is something , you know, we talk about with Club Twit versus, you know, ad supported people or on my site, you know, throw out premium versus ad supported people. Even though there's a lot fewer of them compared to the overall user base, they they contribute far more in revenues, right? And I always loved that because it was super transparent. But the th one thing I've seen with Spotify over the past couple of years is they've started lying everywhere. And by what what does lying mean in the context of reporting your earnings? Well, you say that you were profitable in a quarter in which you were not. Um, profitable meaning actual net income, which is profit or loss, after you add up all the money you took in and take out all the money you spent the at cost of doing business. But they were not doing that. They were ignoring that part of it. It's like saying, um, hey, listen, I'm gonna stop paying the rent. So all of a sudden we're net profitable. Um, you know, like all some extra money we have. Yeah. This uh past week they did their earnings. I I I almost had like a can like a brain aneurysm. Like they there's this notion of gap, which is generally accepted accounting principle. This is a yeah equivalent in Europe. Right. And there's non-gap. Legally, you are required to report gap earnings. You can talk non-gap if you want. Non-gap earnings don't take into uh account um currency uh exchange rate fluctuation, right? If you're a US company, you make dollars , the amount of money you earn is partially actually it's sometimes dramatically impacted by the the value of the US dollar, right? Uh uh versus other um currencies. Uh in Europe, Spotify's in Europe, uh they have a different it's the same rule basically, but uh different regulatory body, whatever, who cares? Um they said like I see these headlines. Spotify growth was I'm gonna make this up, I don't remember the number. Uh fourteen percent to whatever number, 4. 5 billion. I'm like, oh great. So I start writing the story. But I look at their balance sheet and their earnings or their revenues were up eight percent. I'm like, where did the fourteen percent come from? They used a non-gap growth figure with a gap actual hard number for revenue. I'm I'm sorry. That that's that's fraudulent. Like that's that's insane. And there's a lot more of that. I don't want to get go off on Spotify too much. Intel, though. I would like to go off on Intel for a moment. Um, Intel announced their quarterly earnings. Now, this company, as you know, it's been circling the drain for a long time. They were owed several billion dollars by the U.S. government, never got a cent of it. And then the US government announced an investment, in which case they would get this money finally, which they were owed legally. You should have sued the government, just gotten it, but whatever. And they they've not still not been doing great. They don't have any customers that are not named Intel for their foundry business, et cetera. You know, like they're still just not the kind of tread water, right? But I saw these headlines. Intel's back, baby. I literally saw an all caps headline. Intel is back. And I was like, oh , okay. It's only one quarter. I don't want to get too excited, but maybe they turn things around. So I'm like, oh, cool. I every headline was extrem not positive. I mean like overly positive, like crazy positive. I'm like, what's going on with this company? Intel lost $3.7 billion in the quarter on revenues of 13.6 billion. Revenues were up seven percent, so single digit, not great. Intel stock price jumped 20% because everyone was so excited by these results. What? What? Well now, come on, Paul. Like the 3.7 is mostly the mobile I write down. Like it's a paper. It's also money lost on payments associated with the U.S. government What the what? Okay. Here's the thing. That's like, you know, look, you're right, whatever. But here's uh I'll just say Intel's PC chip business, uh, the revenues in that were up one percent, negligible, nothing. Um what did go up 22% was uh their data center and AI business um unit. And that's the this is this is Wall Street ignoring the old school thing. No one wants to talk about this not doing great. But also ignoring the foundry, which they don't report as part of their running. I mean they do, but it's treated as a separate business. Um and they're like, oh, data center, great. Plus, Intel gave a um uh what do you call it, a uh an estimate of the current quarter for the revenues, and those were a little bit higher than the consensus from analysts. Somehow this triggered this euphoria uh from Wall Street stuff sent their stock through the roof. Insanity. I think turning around would have been fair. Back is a stretch. Turning around in one. I mean, I look, turnaround to me means a year of the blessing. Um, you know, whatever it might be. Um, their uh Intel foundry business, by the way, um five point four billion in revenues up sixteen percent. Um, this is almost insider trading, um, given that all that money comes from Intel. And uh to make Intel's own chips. And so Intel, if they wanted to goose this business, could be like, uh, let's pay a little bit more and make it look like the business business is doing great. Um it's this is weird to me. So I kind of put these things all together in my brain and I was like, what the hell? What you know, what's going on? Like, what is this? And I I look, this is insanity. I I wanna be super clear. I but I feel like this is a it's almost a conspiracy theory. The only ch ink in this argument being that these companies and entities, entities being governments, uh regulatory bodies, et cetera, are not in fact working together. They're just all doing the same thing. It's like it's all mutually beneficial. The circle jerk of money that does not exist that is our AI industry, that is hundreds of billions of dollars not exchanging hands between businesses, you know. Um we'll talk a little bit more about some of that in the AI segment. But like these things are all symptoms of the same problem, which is that in with the goal of making the economy seem as good as it can be, whether you're looking at it from a national level, like the United States or just globally, whatever, again, not like the the EU and US and whatever other countries are c olluding necessarily, but it's better for their countries, it's better for the market, it's better for the economy if this stuff just looks great. You know? And I just, I'm sorry. Spotify's lying. Intel's crap. They're not doing anything. AI spending is out of control and is incommensurate with the payoff. And I think a lot of these companies are just going to go out of business. Our uh you know retirement funds are all wrapped up in this if you live in the United States and have a 401k or whatever. And I just I'm like, what is this? Like what like what is this? So I don't know. I I I often no, I I I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like the Intel headlines where when I looked at it, I started to write the you know, the story that I was started to write was like Intel had a great quarter. Yeah. And then I read the quarter and I was like No they didn't. Like what is this? They had a better quarter with if you take the write down out, they had a better quarter than they've had recently. Yeah, but not by much. That's what I mean. Like but you can't take it out. It's part of the finance. That's like saying Well, it is an It is an admission of a mistake, right? It's like, hey, we made this investment, it has not worked out. We're admitting we've lost money on this the whole time and now we're finally doing the accounting of the mistake . You make that sound responsible. I I I I I feel like it is. It would be if there were no people that understood money working at Intel for the past five years. I mean, I you know th like they they knew what was going on. Like I I look these companies are all better. time. Okay. But I feel like the SEC in this case should step in and for all of these companies and whatever the EU regulatory body is in Europe, I don't know what it's called, should do the same and s and and be like, look, we have regulations for a reason. Yeah. Um I I get that you're trying to pr like it's uh earnings are not PR, except that they are, because good PR is what sends the stock price up, which is what sends their market cap up, is why is we're stuck with the three biggest companies in the world that haven't changed in twenty years. And the goal of these companies is to make sure we weather this AI storm and that we emerge on the other side with them in exactly the same place as they are today. And I know how like I said, I know this sounds vaguely insane. Like I get it. I'm anti conspiracy theory. And you could argue that the the shareholders should be up in arms about all of this. Except Your investment organizations are lying. Come on, but you but okay, but but your portfolio is bigger. So I do feel like we're coming into a moment like this so far this year with the with all the prices down, you're starting to see investors, you know, the investment guys looking around going, hey, we're not uh we're not actually making that much money anymore. Like, what's going on? Or just growth, the the gross byproduct of um uh consumerism and capitalism, I guess, where you have to grow and grow and grow. It's how you get something like we have a company that makes Oreo cookies and we've saturated that market literally with both fat and people eating cookies. And now we make uh Oreo cookie cereal. Yeah. Uh because we have to expand. And you're like, okay, well it's sort of food. It's I guess that's sort of similar. But we have like a sneaker company making AI. We have you know like everyone gets in everything. Spotify announced this past month paper books. What? What are you talking about? I know that is weird, isn't it? Like, what is this stuff? There there is a I I don't think this is in the story I read about Spotify, because again, I could have gone on and on and on about this, but Spotify has It's what all cool companies are doing. Just that you guy who started the company . Yeah, he's literally left, right? Wants to spend more time with his money. Since Janu ary , the CFO of this company, or the part of the company that is responsible for their earnings, has been providing the co-COs with what I would call fake numbers. So he can make policy for the company's strategy. And they're reporting those fake numbers in their earnings every quarter. So I guess it's consistent. But they it now again, they don't say fake and they don't you know that's you know, that's not a that's not a good word for them, but that's what it is. And they had they reported it. It's in the it's in the report. Like what ? But okay, whatever. I don't understand. I'm sorry. Like I I've said this a million times. I have a business that doesn't make sense. Why you're not a tech giant CEO. A hundred percent. Honestly. Yep. Part of it is just an inability to be successful. I don't know. Part of it is integrity. I don't know what you want to call it, but you're you you're limiting your ability to lie at scale. I get it. To lie at any scale. I it this stuff makes me sick. Let's not say lie. Let's say uh creatively Well, okay, but this sorry. I come from Boston. I'm a mass hole. I think this is an East Coast thing. We're not passive aggressive. We're just aggressive. We speak plainly. They're lying. They're lying. And I know, you know, like I have friends, you know, in Denver, Seattle, you know, they'd be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, settled down like that. That's a little hard. Tell us what you really think, Paul. Yeah. I I just did. They're lying. You know. And they have been for a while. Yep. I think in Microsoft's case, just because I follow this company much c more closely than any other company, I've seen it more clearly and I I really feel like every quarter is a little You know, there are weird exceptions. Uh a quarter or two ago they actually gave a hard number for Azure. Yeah, no, no. And we used to ripple across a whole bunch of numbers in the process. 'Cause you can backtrack it and say, like, oh, here's the point where they were just losing money on this thing. Yeah. Well, actually we can we can't really say if they're making money now because we don't have profits, but just revenues, whatever. Um but uh with that one major exception, they've gotten less and less transparent every quarter for possibly ten to twelve years. I don't rem I don't remember anymore. They used to say like, you know, like Apple would say we sold these many iPhones, Microsoft would say we sold these many Windows licenses. Mm-hmm. They don't do that. They have not done that for a long time. Yep. Well and and like I said it is a kind of collusion, collusion when everybody's doing it. Yep. Right. Right. And the collusion extends to again to Wall Street inve uh uh to the analysts, investors and very much regular collusion. Because those guys don't want to hear about windows. They want to hear about these high growth new markets. They don't hear about yeah, they don't want to hear about bad news of any kind. So no one's asking questions. It's like, well, you know, no one is like, hey, the uh great news, Azure, everything's going gangbusters. Hey, how what how's Windows doing? You know, can you give us a number there? I I no one's gonna ask that question. Who cares? Well, who cares? It's billions of dollars a quarter. It's several millions of dollars. We have figured out how to turn investment portfolios into a kind of financial junk food. Yeah. And just keep laying on the trans fats, baby, like I'm feeling good. It's sickening. And I'm look, I'm not an accountant. You know? It's got I I I liken this to antitrust, right? I'm not a I'm not a law expert. I'm not a you know whatever. I'm not into this, but Microsoft got in this trouble in the early 90s. They went to court in the late 90s, they went to court again in the EU. That thing dragged up for 10 years. I have to learn a lot about antitrust. And so now like in certification, you know when you see it. You know, it's I didn't mean to. I wasn't trying to become an expert in this. I but, now I'm like I'm really clear-eyed on this. And same thing with this financial stuff. I'm not good at math. I'm not good at numbers. My wife handles our finances. She should. I'm terrible. But I do write about earnings every quarter, every single quarter for several dozen more, whatever companies, Microsoft, I write really long articles about where the money's coming and going, where where it's possible to write about that. What you're really looking for is the Ozempic for financial reporting . Yes. What I'm really looking for is the truth. Now you're just talking crazy talk, Mr. Thunder . Honestly. Conspiracy theory. It's a picture of a UFO. It says the truth is out there. Yeah. I'm not going to try and get you to go back to where you was. I'm going to find a medicine I can sell you for an excess of them Aaron Powell Hey, we all look w whatever anyone's opinion about this, we all know how fascinating it is when some report comes out where we received internal documentation. Sometimes it comes from a court case. Those are those are good two where you're like holy crap like this thing this is what they were doing like in time like we'll find everybody knew it and we were all in on it and it wasn't and it was like if we don't do the our competitors doing it we have to do it too. Yep. I that's not a good way to live your life and it's not a good way to do well, actually it is a good way to do business, that's the problem. Yeah. Anyway. All right, I'm sorry. I'll back off from this. But I'm just tell us how you really feel. I don't I just don't want to get sued. That's all. So the guy I worked with. He goes, What if what if Spotify comes back and makes a statement about what you wrote? I'm like, what are they going to say? They're going to say what we do is legal . And if it wasn't, the regulators in the EU would come after us. And yep. Yep. Yep. So anyway . Let's uh talk about uh our sponsor and we will continue on with an AI segment. It's not a financial investment firm, is it? No. Okay., Okay okay. Something way better to us. Oh, sorry. Talking to talking to me. Gotta get him to shut up. Lisa, this m 3 a.m. Lisa nudges me. She says, There's somebody in the house. Yeah, you're like, Yeah. And I said, Does it have an English accent? She said, Yeah. Which would suggest to me that you knew who it was. I think I might know what's happening. I will take care of it. Maybe this whole idea of having it talked to me all over the house was a bad idea. Well, uh look, you may scale it back, but you have to get it to work first, right? So I still think it's important. That's what I told her. I have to get it to work first. Putting sleep time barriers on is a good idea. Yeah, I think I might say after midnight, please uh let's just wait till I you know the feature she really liked is all of the LEDs She does like that. She liked she noticed that right away. She does I definitely like that. My wife would like that too. And it took a minute. Early on in the whole smart home thing, my wife walked in and she turned the lamp I'm like, what are you doing? She's like, I'm turning on the light. I'm like, well, you don't touch that. She's like, you know what? I just want the light to work. Like it has to work the way I want to use it. I'm sorry. And I was like, that's a fair point. Yeah. Uh uh it's hard. It's hard living with us. I'm just saying. On the worst. Yeah. And I apologize to Lisa. Pretty much daily. I'm sorry. I really am. Uh you married a geek. Sorry about that. That's what you get. It's what you get. She you know, she knew . Doesn't make it any better, but she knew. Uh our show today brought to you by Zscaler. Oh, we love Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security plat form. So we talk about it all the time. The potential rewards of AI for your business, obviously too great to ignore, because your competitors are doing it. But let's not ignore the risks either. 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Find out more. zscaler.com slash security. zscaler.com slash security, we thank them so much for their support . So Microsoft and OpenAI changed the partnership for what seventeenth time now? I don't even I I've lost track of this, but obviously each time this happens, this is I think the third time in a row where um a lot of it is about Microsoft not wanting to pay for or provide the infrastructure that OpenAI is demanding so they can expand in their own way. And uh, you know this, is allowing open AI to go off and work with other cloud infrastructure, right? Um, you know, they have a great well, they have partnerships with every company you can think of, but um, you know, Oracle was one of the early beneficiaries of this. And um when they announced this, this would have been probably Monday, I was talking to Brad about this and I was like, Well, uh, you can queue up the uh AWS slash Amazon announcement, and su enreough, less than twenty four hours, um that happened. But one of the many things that's changed is that Microsoft or OpenAI rather has the right to uh deliver their frontier models, the b you know the the best uh GPT models they have um on other um cloud platforms, right? Um so the exclusivity thing is not as exclusive, I guess, as it used to be, maybe is the way to say it. Microsoft still has the right to use all of those models. There's still a time frame on it. The time frames have shifted a little bit. We're still talk talking up to the twenty thirties, I guess, twenty thirty-two, I think was uh or I think it was twenty thirty originally for everything, and now it's twenty thirty-two for some things. Um there's some been some changes around uh uh what happens if and when AGI happens, et cetera. Microsoft now has the right to pursue AGI themselves. Um you might know that Microsoft has actually been talking about doing that for a while, but they call it superintelligence. Um I suppose I don't know if they stop using that term now and just call it AGI, we'll see, but you know, whatever. Um, the revenue share thing continues. But the big thing to me was , you know, they're going right to Amazon. And sure enough, next day, uh, Amazon announced an open AI announced uh the expansion of their partnership and they're they're getting the whole mail deal, eh? So the open AI models are all gonna be available on Amazon Bedrock, which is this is through AWS. Um Amazon uh or sorry uh uh chat GPT codecs available through amazon uh bedrock um bedrock will use open ai to manage ai agents and of course now amazon's promoting this as this is where everyone always wanted this stuff to be. This is great for everybody. And you know, it's fair to say, like AWS has incredible um share, and I mean not just market share, but like mind share for developers that are producing whatever they're produ whether they're like mobile apps or cloud services, whatever. Um, and so Amazon is a you know the major, the major player, I would say, in cloud infrastructure. Um, this is huge for them. You know, it's and it's huge for OpenAI because the, you know, the funnel has opened up nicely for them. Um Amazon is one of two other companies, you know, essentially on Earth other than Microsoft who could provide infrastructure at this scale or better even, depending on how you want to look at that. So um not surprising but still it's honest that it took this long but also it's like just when openai seemed to have lost the lead to anthropic now you're over there. Likemaz Aon must be also annoyed. But yeah, you gotta add it to the offering. Yes. I mean Amazon has also a major investment in Anthropic and major partnership with Anthropic. And you know, they're they're they're doing what they should be doing as an infrastructure provider, which is we'll give you your choice of models and you as the developer can pick whatever you want and great. Yeah. Well uh the only so the one possible way is actually Amazon or uh AW geez, Azure, the other A word, uh Azure growth um in the future. So obviously Azure growth has uh you know slowed uh compared to the seventy percent you know year over year days, but is still high thirties, maybe up to near forty percent. I mean, it's it's possible that this will drive some not so much for j not because of AI in particular, but if you're gonna use a open AI on AWS , you might also be using AWS across the board for whatever other infrastructure. And I think some of those folks are that you would actually send people to Azure because they wanted to use OpenAI. People were using Azure to some degree, uh perhaps because they wanted to use the open AI models, you know, or Microsoft's versions of them, whatever it might be. So we'll see. I this is an interesting um Yeah, I don't think anybody I think everybody went to open AI, and so they were using Azure under the hood. Yeah. And it maybe they didn't account for that. Yeah, but that but that could show in Microsoft's earnings in the future. I guess we'll you know we'll see. We'll see. It's gonna be hard to know the truth of this, but um Well considering how they do financial reporting. Exactly. Don't get him started, Richard . Did I ever mention have you ever looked at it Have you ever looked at an Amazon financial report. If it was a hundred thousand words, ninety nine thousand of them are things we did this quarter that have nothing to do with anything. You have to really but they do provide hard numbers on uh AWS. Some on whatever number they're leading on, that's the hard number that appears that that corner. One of the things, and I'm sure we'll talk about this later on intelligent machines, but wasn't there uh language in the uh OpenAI Microsoft contract that said as soon as open AI hitted a hit AGI. Right. Everything changes. Yeah, that's changed. Um yeah. So does that mean they can now announce they have AGI within the G no. Uh so that announcement has to be verified by a third party both sides agree to. And even if they do it, Microsoft can I let's see, I'm doing this off the top of my head. I should probably just read this to be sure, but I believe I'm looking at the wrong announcement. I'm like, why don't I see anything about Microsoft in here? Oh, it's the Amazon announcement. Um I believe let me just make sure before I say this out loud because I want to make sure I get this right. I think by the way, for users, this is huge, because now with AWS you have access to some really good new models. Well AWS arguably is where a lot of developers wanted to be already, like the majority. And now they're there too. And it's like, well, this is that's what I mean. Like that's how maybe it could impact. Um let me just look for this right. I just want to this is also because open AI is about to IPO as is anthropic and open AI is starting to you start to see stories like in the Wall Street Journal saying open AI is struggling. They're not doing as well. They're not meeting Well there are these reports like that come out of internal documentation where it's like we're not even close to meeting our revenue expectations. We already are on the hook for close to a trillion dollars, by the way. Um we have there's no chance. By the way, there was never any chance they were gonna pay that. But this will maybe help a little bit. But also they they said I can't remember what they had a goal for the number of users that they didn't meet. And this was one way to improve that is by going on AWS. Yeah, it could be. Yeah. Could be I I think Microsoft was struggling to meet their infrastructure demand. Well, we know that. I mean that's a fact. Is that what was is that why because why would Microsoft give this up? Right. Well so actually that's a good way to look at that. Right. What like well what does Microsoft get? So Microsoft continues to get access to their models, which you know, depending on how you look at it are among the best in the world obviously that will continue past the point that AGI is declared now. I think that's different. I think it stopped at AGI before. Microsoft continues to get intellectual property rights to open AI research. Research meaning uh experimental models they've created that may or may not ever become public, but are testing things and we'll see where the things go. And so they get access to that. That's actually kind of important. Um, like I said, Microsoft can pursue AGI independ ently of them. Um the revenue share agreement they have right now, which I have to feel is somewhat lopsided, but whatever, uh remains in place until uh one of either company achieves AGI . That's interesting. But here's the here's the little financial bit. Both companies have agreed to spread out the payments for revenue share over a longer period of time, which they've not specified , um, which is the indication to me that neither company is even close to meeting their expectations on revenues from you know AI-based products, essentially. So in other words, open AI is not gonna have this money maybe ever, but not anytime soon. So this is an acknowledgement of that implicit. Um but and we've talked about Microsoft struggles with co pilot is at first party AI, whatever. Um I don't think either company is , you know, I mean they're spending so much on infrastructure. There's some little bit of money going back and forth, sort of on paper, but not really, right? I'm sure a lot of it's in the form of what I would call Azure Credits or something or whatever, ever you want to say it. Um it's not like they have two hundred and fifty billion to spend on Azure, which it was part of the requirements. Wow. Yeah. I mean Microsoft owns a smaller percentage of the public company. Of the public company than they did of the private company, if that makes sense. So twenty seven versus thirty two point five percent. But at their current value you can't sell versus twenty seven of something you can. And don't know why. Whatever I I feel like this company could create her, frankly. Absolutely Well Netscape had a real product. No, yeah, okay, fair enough. But Microsoft's um stake in open remember this company directly, I it's really hard to know how much they've spent on this company, but we know it's eleven or thirteen billion. It's what they directly invested is thirteen. Yeah. That's not what they spent. No, it it's a lot more. But their the value uh twenty seven percent of the value of open AI at the time of this announcement was a hundred and thirty five billion dollars. Um That was the valuation of the company at the time. I don't know who you sell that to. Uh you know, like I don't know I wonder he you know what's not in this agreement? What's the rules around the IPO? Could they unload their 27? I bet no. I bet because normally that's the rules anyway for uh is the the the precursor investors are locked out of the sale. Yeah, there was also that weird period where Microsoft and then Apple briefly were gonna have a person on the open AI board that did or did not have voting rights or whatever. It was an observer. And it's Apple wanted their observer too. They're like, uh, how about no observers? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean uh look, uh uh the the open AI Microsoft partnership deal, whatever you want to call it, was good until it wasn't, obviously. I at some point until they made demands that even Microsoft's going, we we can't do that and you don't need that. Yep. Right. You're asking us to validate your and your gro wth model by building infrastructure that you 're never gonna be able to pay for. You're never gonna be able to problem every time you have to go back for more money, you have to make bigger promises until you finally you're starting to promise more than the number of atoms in the universe. And you're like, I don't think you're gonna pull that off. I mentioned this a week or two ago, but there's an Amy Hood interview in Bloomberg everyone should look up if they care about the stuff where, you know, she talked about some of the um struggles or whatever with this kind of stuff because there's a I I think of it as a I think of it as I'm not sure what I think of it. Anyway, she framed the infrastructure problem a little differently than I would have, but probably knows a little bit more about it than I do. So um it's just there's a capacity constraint. And as big as these companies are, there's a capacity constraint everywhere, really. Um at some point Microsoft was out in the lead on a lot of this stuff and even let go of some property and power rights that the other companies grappled immediately and were criticized for. That's what's interesting. I mean, look, I at some point it's gonna be a what man would want them now situation with open ai but they'll bounce around they'll they'll go to the they've gone to Oracle they'll be at a W S Google will may jump in there too we'll see and every time there's a new announcement Google will be the best place their TPOs are the best. You know, we we''llll we'll have all that marketing stuff and we'll see um if they'll fake it till they make it or if they just fake it and then discredit it. Google's gonna have to focus on Gemini. They can't be interested in other people's models. Amazon's models just never amounted to anything. So unless it's just I mean a pure Google Cloud play where it's like look, we have infrastructure, we can host these. Uh you know, in other words, like all uh Amazon No, but I but they all uh uh sorry, I the you know Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and I guess Oracle, who cares about Oracle, but those three companies all have first and third third part first and third party services. And among the third party services are what I would call infrastructure. Google Cloud is that for Google. Um if Google or OpenAI models running on Google somehow made sense to either company well, it would of course it makes sense to Google. Who cares? They're a customer, but But it it it I mean I the Amazon model suggests to me that just being the electricity, so to speak, the infrastructure is a good business. Yes. And in the same sense that like serving ads is a good business and all those other companies want to be part of that too. Like I could picture Google being like, look, we Google Cloud is a distant third place in this market. It's always going to be. Yeah. Um, this might be a way to goose that a little bit. The same way that Bomber would attack anyone that would try and build something inside of Microsoft that wasn't directly beneficial to Windows. Yeah. You think there's still that that's where they are now with Gemini. Well I think when you think of Google and you think of Gemini, Gemini, well, you know, what is Google's primary product? It's telemetry. And Gemini is an excellent telemetry generator. So why would you ever impair that? So to use Microsoft's overly colorful language, this would be like Google knifing the baby, so to speak. Um and they're not willing to do that. But more importantly, the the senior VP in charge of Gemini has more clout than anybody at GCP. And if GCP makes any move that might jeopardize anything related to Gemini, they will be stabbed in the dark. But Richard, that would be like Google purposefully ruining search so that they could serve more ads because people had to click twice on links. Oh, they did do that. Uh okay. Fair enough. Yeah. No, you're right. You're right. You're absolutely right. The challenge is being cynical enough I thought I was cynical enough, but I guess I look we all have something to learn. It's okay. But you know, we've seen this political batt battles between these different elements within a company. And so, you know, my immediate response is nah, the guys running Gemini have lots of clout and anything that doesn't give Gemini love is not gonna have a chance. Yeah, I mean Go Google Cloud many ways to uh to Gemini is uh Intel Foundry to Intel's chip business. It's like, look, uh if if all you do is serve us, it's gonna be all good. Yeah. Like it's and if you do and if you do anything else, we will crush you like a bum. Well especially if it hurts us, yeah. Exactly. Well no doesn't benefit us. Or right, there you go. Okay. That could be. I don't, you know, I don't have that. This is not my part of the world, but I think you're I that makes sense to me. So yeah. Okay. Well that was uh that was depressing. Um so um uh if you are a Microsoft 365 co-pilot customer, I'm sorry, A, and B, uh you now have agentic features available to you through a Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. So this is similar to um I'm forgetting the term for this, but uh Anthropic has released these this time. This is co-work. Which is the this week's run as for that matter. The timing's impeccable. Yeah. And it was the M three sixty five conference last week. That's where all this stuff was announced. Yep. And we're still, you know, I I think w Microsoft here is kind of straddling a line. I brought up the Stevie Batish stuff last week, but you have the um AI on the outside, A on the inside. I think this is kind of a little mix of those. Copilot sense it's literally a sidebar, you know, we're kind of used to those in Microsoft Office, but um, you know, but more deeply integrated into these products uh maybe than would be possible otherwise, I suppose. So um I I this is this well, other than the fact that you actually do have to pay for a sub separate subscription to get this, right? Which is the kind of squishy thing here. Um this is uh a somewhat well, it isn't though. I was gonna say a captive audience because they're already paying for Microsoft three hundred sixty five. I suppose there are and Richard brings this point up sometimes, you know, that writing the one check is more beneficial, you know, in some ways to as long as the functionality is, you know, close enough comparable uh rather than writing a second check to well that's what this week's run adds is about is like it was not comparable and no it wasn't but I mean maybe you know a assuming that it is at some point uh or is today maybe um then it be then maybe that becomes a good business for Microsoft. Um if I live long enough, I'd like to see Outlook eradicated from the planet Earth. Um Good luck with that one. I know. It's uh it is the um we used to call these what PIMS, right? Personal information managers. It's like the the PIM version of cancer or uh I I don't know what to call it. It's like at the cockroach, I guess, of of productivity. Um uh they're doing this to outlook too. So obviously there's gonna be copilot integration, Microsoft three sixty five copilot integration, or just copilot whatever you want to call it, um, that will allow you to manage your your email, calendars, your contacts, et cetera. And I mean, pretty much the only thing anybody ever wanted from LLFs is like, can you help me tame my mail? Right. Right. Listen, um, if we could all spend less time in email and less time in Teams meetings, our lives would all be less stressful and healthier. And and who knows, maybe uh is co pilot the cure? It's or just a symptom of the pro I don't know. If copilot can actually search my email and in my outlook me email in a meaningful way, that would be awesome. But you I don't imagine it can't. I was gonna say, what are you talking about? That's um yeah. Uh search is still that thing that should have been the low hanging fruit and the the big win for customers with AI, and it is somewhere, but uh to my knowledge, not so far with Copilot. But we'll get there . I think. I don't know. Um speaking of Outwick and how much I hate it, um it was down uh for quite a a bit of time uh this past week. And specifically Outlook.com, not Exchange Online Services. Yeah, right. Um I'd like to see it just go down and not come back, but I guess you know like I said, I don't think that's gonna happen. I don't know. But Hotma il Hotmail used to be um a uh free ESD-based uh HTML email system, which you know in the day was probably pretty good . And now it's something out of hell's seventh circle. I don't know. Anyway, uh I'll just move on from this because I hate it so much. Um week ago, two weeks ago, maybe we talked about uh GitHub copilot was rumored and then Microsoft confirmed would be moving to what they're now calling I called it a token-based usage, uh token-based billing model. They're calling it a usage-based billing model. Same thing. It's the same thing. Um rect. Like it is absolutely a token-based model. Yeah, and uh tokens are fun because they you get to be charged in both directions. Um so but this is an interesting sorry the request based model had problems. Oh yeah I knew folks who wrote the most extraordinary requests through those tools. Yeah. So you could make the argument that um a single prompt, I guess we'll call it, is a request. It's one unit of billing, if you will. Yeah. Uh it could generate uh multiple instances of things running on the server and then multiple instances of it coming back to you either to give you some bit of data or some uh request on its part because it needs more information, whatever it is. And those things all cost money. And um and I'm over singing. I have a channel in Sl Signal where a group of us were trying to figure out what was the prompt that would take the longest to run. It still counted a single request. We got over three hours. This is like that's every year there's a C language obfuscation thing where you can write like a single line of code that does the most or whatever. Does the most but nobody can read it. Yeah, yeah. And all the Lisp guys are like, ha ha, yeah, that. I love it. I got this. We were running the pro prompts from Doom. So this is like anything else. Like, you know, uh uh telecoms announced like uh all you can eat internet access and then there's like the three people that abuse the hell out of it and they're like, All right, we're not doing this anymore. Yeah. Um now we got a terabyte cap or a hundred. Yeah, it's it's possible for some big percentage of the user base this won't change things. And then it's possible for those who used it the most, this will change things pretty dramatically. And I think that's the point. They're they're trying to kind of right price it, if that makes sense. You know, let's actually charge what this thing costs for, you know, but an idea. But you're seeing this movement across everything to do with these tools is: hey, we're gonna have to actually start getting costs right now. Like the this is how the bubble ends when you start caring about efficiency. The problem is from the perspective of a user, this isn't certification, right? You were you gave me this thing. I got used to it. Yep. I be the fact that I was it was costing you money feels like it's your problem. I don't understand how you didn't solve that, but okay, but now you give me the cost and I don't like it. Yeah. And so we'll see. We'll see what this looks like. But it's their problem and they've passed it back to you. That's right. We're passing the problem on to the consumer. Wait, that's not the phrase. Um They're doing s I I think I just referenced this a week or two ago too. This is kind of funny. And but people have been around in the Microsoft space for a long, long time. We'll know that back in 2008 they launched something called Windows Azure. And at the time it was only this is one where I'll need Richard's help. At the time it was was it only infrastructure as a service or no that softw servers. Yeah, we saw only platform with servers. Right. Okay, right. Well, you know, baby stuff. But the joke is they were describing serverless compute five years before anybody wanted it. Yes. And we can thank Ray Ozzy for this, uh, because he had already created products that had this kind of back-end infrastructure where this was a thing and it was like this is it was his architect Abitab, who was one of those also one of those guys who would say, if you don't understand this, it's cause you're stupid. Yep. Well, compared to him, everyone is. But uh no, he he had as is typical of smart people, he had gotten all the way to the end game. Right. Right. And you know don't show your work like people wanted VMs. I bought VMs from from Amazon. Sell me a VM. No. you If don't want a VM, you're stupid. Yeah. You want this. Okay. And the first thing Guthrie did when he took it over in 2011? He made VMs. Yeah, right. Right. Made what people wanted. Yeah. Um it gave them something I would say uh maybe that's the wrong term. Gave people something they understood. Understood. And then you build them a path to to tell it's something like we should have serverless. Yeah, that's a great idea. I've I've had two instances in my life professionally where I went into some Microsoft event and meeting and then I didn't understand anything they said. And one of them was um uh uh what do you call it uh um quantum quantum computing which I I couldn't explain it right now if my life depended on it. If you understand quantum computing is because you don't understand it. Right. You're wrong. Right, right. But the other one was uh Windows Azure. And and the day they announced it, I sat in the audience at probably uh not ignite uh what do you call it? Microsoft tech tech oh PDC. Okay, not tech . Okay, PDC, fair enough. And I was like, wow, it was a white man. And I walked out of the room and they had some PR people there and they were like, Hey, we're gonna have like a press only thing, you know, twenty, fifty people, an hour more. You could if you have any questions, I'm like, I have nothing but questions. And I sat through that thing and I came out and saw the same woman. She said, uh, how'd it go? I'm like yeah I have no idea what you're talking about. I I so you were still nice enough now to say and I'm pretty sure you don't either I don't think anyone here knows. But the one thing they said uh this wasn't at the announcement but but as it but is Windows Azure went uh wound its way through development, they got to the point where they were gonna release it, but they didn't know what to charge for it. So what they said w they were they basically were going to the same model they're doing here with GitHub Copilot, which was we're gonna go to a usage-based billing model. We don't actually know if this is fair, if anyone will even like it. So what we're gonna do is for I think it was for three months or some number of months, we're gonna send you a pretend bill. So you use it, well it's free, it's still in pre-production, whatever. And we're gonna send you a bill as if you were paying for it and then you can see what that bill is and you can tell us if it's you know if it's okay. And uh they're literally gonna do this for GitHub Copilot. So in uh I think it's in May, uh customers on you know and the these are paid plans obviously will get a pretend bill, which they can go look at, and then they can understand based on their usage that, you know, maybe they were paying uh what is it, 20 bucks a month probably for the pro version as an individual. You can look at that bill and look, if you don't use it a lot, maybe it'll be less. I think for a lot of people it's gonna be a little bit more, but you know, this is we're gonna find out. So then you start assessing value, right? Right. That's right. I've I've got friends with multiple c uh anthropic two hundred dollar max I was just gonna reference this exactly. Yeah. So when as a pr as a person, not as a professional developer or an infrastructure guy, when I hear about a two hundred dollar anything, whether it's Jet GPT, Anthropic Cloud, GitHub Copilot, I think has something like this, probably. Um, whatever it is. I'm like 200 bucks a month, are you kidding me? That's a car payment. That's crazy. But you know what? If you're a professional developer or whatever it is, this is like, come on, this is the cost of doing business. This is no problem. Well, and it's you've now had enough time that this is your no your workflow and you're wildly productive. And you've seen it work and you're like, no, 200 bucks a month is no problem. So you know, we'll see. I mean, again, for me as an individual it's a problem. But I but I get it. Like I I you know, I think this is a uh we'll see. I'm I'm really curious to see where this with where this goes and what bills look like. I you know well I don't know how transparent Microsoft will be, but you'll hear from customers and things and we'll and we'll find out. Yeah, it's going to be kind of interesting. So that starts June 1, but then you'll in May you'll get a pretend bill and you can see you know, see what it looks like. We'll see. Yeah . Um I'm just mentioning this for the humor factor, but OpenAI is apparently working on a phone. So the two hourlier conversation. Uh great. I'm pretty sure, you know, they they bought uh uh Johnny Ive and his company, whatever it's gonna be called, because they can't keep the name, I guess. But whatever it is. And uh and I believe there's some period of time where they can't, in fact, release a product, but that's okay because this isn't gonna enter mass production until two or at least two years from now. Um it's not, you know, instead of apps, it's gonna be AI agents. It's the whole nightmare that everyone who hates AI uh feared this happening. Yep. Uh it's happening, it's obviously happening. And um okay. I mean, whatever. I have fun with that. Um obviously it's gonna be it's gonna have to be Android-based, right? I mean, like I like. Yeah, but but with no app store, because why would you need an app store when you have agents? Let's ask A Amazmazonon. , why would you need oh that's why? Um that's why yeah. I mean we'll see. I there I I think the big bet here is that we see this product, see the light of day. I know. I uh well so we we talked about this a little bit earlier for whatever reason, but the the notion of you have AI, it could be running in the cloud, it could be running locally, it doesn't matter. It's on a computer, it's on a phone, it doesn't matter. You have apps and you have online services and they're connectors of whatever types and, we have these kind of what I would call a modern version of screen scraping for those apps that are not uh compliant with whatever standards we have now. I mean, there's ways to get data in and out of apps, et cetera. Yeah. Um the bet here is that this will be a lot more seamless and cloud-based than it is today, and that 's going to require a mindset change on the part of users. And this is something again, this is oddly something Microsoft was has been trying to do for at least three decades , which is get people to stop thinking about apps and thinking about what it is they're trying to accomplish, right? This was the document-based UI in Windows ninety five. It was the people centric UI in Windows Phone. It the uh and you know the They want you know in other words, you're not editing a photo, you're running Photoshop. You know, they want you to think app first. Yeah. But open AI is b and I think other a companies too are are kind of counting on a mind shift change, which by the way speaks to the natural language thing, and we'll talk about how this works in the creative market in a second. But this notion of of some these tools are complex. I may not want to learn them. I may not be able to learn them. I may not be paying for them. Whatever it might be, whatever it is. But I know what I want to do. I want to remove the red eye from a photo. I want to take that person out of the corner of the photo if we're talking about photos. Or I want to, you know edit a document or whatever it is and I want it to be whatever font I want it to match our brand our branding and our whatever style guide we have et cetera et cetera um you know today those things all require someone to know the tool and where the options are and how to use them and all that kind of stuff. And the idea here is actually very appealing, even though it's very different, which is just tell it what you want. It just does it. And you don't care what it uses on the back end. If it's using Adobe Photoshop, fantastic. If it's not, fantastic. Who cares? As long as it does the thing you're asking for. So um I'm not saying this isn't gonna work. I'm just saying this mind shift change has never worked, you know, in the real world yet. Um it doesn't mean it can't. And I and maybe AI is the thing that does put that over the top. Maybe. You gotta make the product first. And and let's face it, if that product was going to work , wouldn't it already? Because I've got chat GPT, I can put perplexity, I can put any of these tools on my phone. And then when that notice I'm not using any apps. So um I mentioned this. I want to this year I'd like to figure out the video game thing. One of the other things I want to figure out, what I I could think of this is like a focus month. Like sometime this year, it won't be May, but sometime this year I do wanna kind of figure out some set of tasks where I can automate something and reduce the time and the drudgery and the whatever. Um, you know, is there like right now I use whatever apps I use to uh I I have a photo or an image, whatever it is, I crop it, resize it, post it onto my site. Is there some AI workflow that does exactly that and works as good or better than the manual process I'm doing now. The answer is almost certainly yes, by the way. Um and that's what you know that's what they're betting on, right? That this will be true across the board. This is Star Trek. It's what Leo's doing, actually. It's you're you're talking to the AI and it's doing the thing you ask it to do. Um we need those I've got the holodeck working downstairs. I just yeah you know what you are is you're like the guy you're in it you're in a c uh uh a wagon going across the country. You have no idea what's out there, but you have a dream and eventually we're gonna have California. And you know, like right now, you maybe you're the Donna party. People are gonna die of display. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. But you know we'll be feasting on leg of uh leg of Paul . Basically No, but I mean we need the pioneers, right? So um Yeah, you can't have a revolution without a donner party. That's how scenarios in the back. Yes. Blood will be spilled. Um So we'll see. And that's anyway, that's the vision. And without even knowing the pri who cares, and as it's at least two years away. But um I I think there's something to it. I have to say, I uh the the notion that um people today and Leo does and some others do and and it will get better that can just talk and it does the thing and it works and you know you have to have enough experience with it where you stop thinking about it. It just does it and you're like, my God, this just works. Um, and then we're gonna look back at what we're doing right now or 10 years ago or fifty years ago, whatever it is, and be like, wow, I it's gonna be like I cannot believe we used to dot dot dot. And and right now we're saying I can't believe in the future we're going to dot dot dot. But you know that's that's how life works. Some of this is my own uh timing as I age. I want to kind of have this in place when my memory starts to fail so I can have uh a little help. Right now. Right. We I think I made this comparison uh on a previous show, but it's like the in the show Veeep, the guy whispering into her ear. Yes, that's the guy. I want my bag man. You want yes, you that's one of the roles AI will provide because we go out in the world here, we meet we know people, we don't remember people's names. I have to remember dogs' names. There's like I I don't I you know I'm mad at this. I have a notion note for all this I don't remember things like that. Is it a crazy idea though to think that I think it's just a s it's an augmenter of some kind. Of course it is. In other words, like when I see a person I recognize and I know them and I and I immediately have like warm feelings for them because I know them and we exch you know, exchange whatever pleasantries. And this thing can be like, by the way, his birthday is tomorrow. Exactly. You know, that's I I'm sorry, but that's undeniably useful. Now, yeah uh in the beginning it's gonna require stupid glasses, eventually it'll be some kind of an implant. It will you know, whatever. But or maybe ready though when you're like the flower that skirts water out of it, but also is recording everything. Like whatever it is, you know, whatever the form is, right? It's gonna evolve. Yeah. Um undeniably useful.. Ye Yeah.ah Right . That's all. I think glasses are a good form actually. But they're also an interim form, right? I mean, I don't know what it'll finally be. Maybe I say that the having spent like you put a contact in, it's backwards, take it out, reverse, put it in its backwards, reverse, put it back like what's happening? You know, like so maybe glasses are actually the best form, I don't know. But yeah, uh but although you're right. Uh smart contact lenses might be right. That will be a step, there's no doubt about it. You know, it'll be hearing a type thing. Yes, he sure is. I've been talking about AirPods. AirPods will do this, right? Yeah. Now that we've made it acceptable to wear air buds in public, and actually, by the way, not only acceptable, but preferable to idiot on his phone, watching a video or having a call where the everyone in the restaurant gets to enjoy this, right? It's actually better that you wear earbuds. Um we've made it socially acceptable. So that will be part of it too, right? It's no doubt Apple will come up with something whenever if they ever figure out AI . Um anyway. Well they're certainly going to announce something at the WWE C in about a month. So we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. I mean they're the they're the most likely , I think, company to try something like this. Of course. Oh my god. In the home and then just generally for consumers or out in the world, right? Um But we don't know if they'll do what we need. We just know that they'll be trying for sure. You know. Yep. Yeah. I think I think you're right. Yeah. All right. Little little quickly. Sorry. This is two more. They're related. Um Adobe released uh their Firefly AI assistant in some kind of a public beta. So if you were waiting on that, that's there. And this is that describe what you want and it works across the apps in Creative Suite. So you know if you're a uh creator type, you use these apps, you pay for this thing. There it is. Um and we'll see. And uh you know, I think a lot of that workflow is gonna be heavy app based in the beginning, but will become more and more of the conversational thing. We'll see, you know, we'll see where that goes. And then Anthropic about 10 days ago announced um I don't think they call it cloud creator design. Yeah. Which is a capability for cloud where it can uh create design assets for creators, right? Which is really cool. Today they have a shot. Yes. Right. So today announced uh uh just a long list of partners. It's like Affinity, Adobe, Autodesk, Blender, like across the board connectors, so that those things can work with cloud, right? So you can go in either direction. some In cases, like in Blender, there's going to be a cloud plugin in the app where it it's there. You're going to be able to do it. Claude, right? Claude. I'm sorry I'm not I don't have to pronounce these stuff. Cloud. Look, I I still say P interest, dude. You got to understand I'm never gonna be able to get this name right. But Claude Claude. Is it Cloud or Claude? It's Claude. Claude. C L O D Claude. That's a terrible word for an AI. Anyway. Um well you know the new model from open uh AI is called SPUD. So there's that we're gonna use it to grow plants on Mars. Okay, Spud. Exactly. Whatever, Spud. Like Spud Webb, the little guy that played basketball that could dunk. Right. Spud the uh the the dog. Yeah. Oh Spud right. Wasn't it the Budweiser mascot Spud? What was that dog's name? Um Spuds McKenzie. Spuds McKenzie. There you go. Spuds because hilarious. Yeah, eventually we'll have a Budweiser AI and there'll probably be Spuds. Um it will be a frontier model, uh and uh god knows. It will hallucinate a lot 'cause it's drunk all the time. Actually I did get an email from somebody who said, could you tell Paul not to call it cloud? This is like um I like this is like calling someone's parent. You know, I get the emails. You know, you really ought to tell Steve to knock out the It's like you know he's available on the internet too. You can just well, interestingly and the my one of my my tip today is based on an email just like that. So we'll uh Okay. We'll go in the opposite directions. Okay . Um anyway, so uh fifty plus tools across all these major uh apps. Um so look, this is the thinging we were just talk about. This is it happening in the creator space creative space. So it's exciting. Yep. And we're back in the miller's yard. Despite the heat, their True Green lawn is thriving. They tapped True Green's local South Carolina pros to get a lawn like a golf course. And PJ to a golfer started showing up. Like this pro, amazed this grass looks this good and this heat. Has to clear the trampoline and the kiddie pool. Oh, perfectly struck. True Green, the easiest way to get a golf course quality lawn. Tap the screen now and get started today at TrueGreen.com. Exclusion supply. See TrueGreen.com for details . Experience a membership that backs what you're building with American Express Business Platinum. Get two times membership rewards points per dollar on eligible purchases and key business categories, as well as on each eligible purchase of $5,000 or more on up to $2 million in eligible purchases per calendar year. American Express Business Platinum. There's nothing like it. Terms apply. Learn more at American Express.com/slash business dash platin Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink? Or a sweet vanilla? Smooth caramel maybe. Or a white chocolate mocha. Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks rappercino drinks wherever you buy your groceries. Now, yes, it's time to prepare yourself because the back of the book is coming up. But before we do that, ladies and gentlemen, Paul Thorat, Richard Campbell, you're listening to Windows Weekly, and it's time for the Xbox segment. Paul. Yeah, how are we doing on time? Oof. I'm gonna try to ramp. I'll rant this one. Well, I'm gonna do a long one. I always film like I'm short sticky minutes. No pressure. I'm gonna spend six of it doing this. You should never do radio, man. Exactly. It was man that network clock. Look well you we've all done the thing where you're saying on stage and there's a little timer down there and you're like uh it's hard. You know, this stuff's hard. Uh by the way, Alphabet and Amazon just announced earnings. Uh fantastic. Oh, yes. Today, Microsoft Meta. Yep. The rest of my day is screened, is what I just saw. Okay, fantastic. Um, so big news out of Microsoft last week or out of Xbox, I guess Microsoft gaming. Um, part of the return of Xbox uh was not just a phrase. Ash Ashama announced that uh the Xbox as Xbox as a business or sorry, Microsoft gaming, which is the overreaching business for all this stuff, will be renamed, rebranded to Xbox, which I think a lot of us like, yeah, nice. Um, that's what it should be, right? And um, you know, they're saying all the right happy words are on Xbox. The one thing um I really like is how vocal they're being and how public they are the um Asha Sharma and then Matt Booty, who I think is like the chief content officer of Xbox, right? He's the guy who's been around for a long time. He's been around almost 20 years, I think. Um, are just talking to everybody and just saying all the right things. I mean, obviously there's certain things they can't say. A lot of people are asking about exclusives. Are you gonna and it's like, well, we're talking about it. I d I don't think the end game is that too much changes, but they're doing what Windows is doing with this pain point thing in Windows 11, which is like, look, we we hear you, we're gonna address this stuff, you know, they lowered the price of game pass, et cetera. Um, they're making a lot of good noises. I like I'd like how vocal these guys are being and how positive the news is. It's been nice. Like this, you know, we've had a couple of really rough years with Xbox. And I'm not blaming uh Phil Spencer or anybody who ran that part of the business at the time, but it's it's really neat uh that the like, you know, Asha Sharma's kind of an unknown. She came in every was like, what's going on? Are they winding it down? Is that what this is? Like they want her to fail? No, it's very clear. Um they want this is a big thing for Microsoft. They want this to succeed. It's awesome what,'s happening. So I'll just leave it at that for now. Um, among the things that people have asked her about is Microsoft two years ago, I think, uh, back when the antitrust stuff with the App Store started happening with Apple and of course Google as well. Um, Microsoft started saying, yeah, we're gonna put an Xbox mobile game store on iOS and Android. And then they never did. So um the deal there is like she's like, look, I just walked into the job two minutes ago. Give me a second, but this is still on the table. We still want to do this. A lot of it's gonna be based on whether enough uh regulators around the world reign in these app stores, and I think they will. So um they the plan still is to have some form of um Xbox mobile game store on mobile. So there 's that. Um I think it was November, but maybe December, whenever it was, Valve announced this new uh Steam computer. What's the name it's a Steam not Steam Deck, but the computer like the Steam Machine. Yeah. Um alled c it the Gabe Cube. Yeah. The first thing I thought, you know, because this was I noticed I'm like, you guys never mentioned how much this is gonna cost or when it's coming out, and then they never released it. Um, but they just announced the big uh peripheral for this thing, which will still work with other things as well. It's a kind of a first pl uh class peripheral for any platform really, is the steam control ler. And if you were worried that these things were going to be expensive, you were right, because this thing's gonna be 99 bucks. Wow. Oh. Yep. So a list price on a standard Xbox wireless control these days is probably $69.99. You can often get them for $59.99 or less, you know, depending on sales and stuff. Um so yeah, that's expensive. Um it has the the the two sticks and all the buttons and all the you know the D pad blah blah blah. But it also has Looks like an Xbox controller. Yeah, but it but below those sticks are two track pads, there's one on each side, right? Yeah, touch pads. And that's interesting. So very well placed to be bumped accidentally by your thumbs while you're on the sticks. Yeah. I mean based on my inherent clumsiness and my problems typing. You know, um, this would probably be me shooting myself on the head in Call of Duty a lot or whatever the equivalent is, but um it's interesting. So 99 bucks. I mean, uh I would be shocked if the steam machine came in at anything under a thousand, frankly. But a thousand dollars. But honestly , I was thinking you know, the next Xbox is gonna be in that price range too. Like, now they're making happy noises that it won't be because one of the core tenants of this new Xbox, so to speak, is that things will be affordable. Now I uh this is a razor razor blade kind of. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure it's gonna be uh yeah. Uh we'll see. So we'll see. Yeah. All right. See, you got you got it done in uh five minutes. You mowed that down, Frank. You mowed it down. I had incentive. I had incentive. You just you just want to hear about prohibition. That's what is around the corner. Yeah. Well, Microsoft earnings just around the corner. Probably right about now, right? I know that's what I'm marking. Is it out? Oh, geez. All right. You look at that while I tell everybody why it's so important to support this kind of independent content, right? Podcast ing is really a miracle. It's RSS, so we can't spy on you. Can't say that about uh, you know, Spotify or Audible or Amazon or anybody else would that requires you to use a special app, we don't have that information. We don't want that information. It's also independent because we're not owned by a big company, which means we can tell the truth. We can we're not beholden to anybody and everybody who works at TWIT uh is very careful to protect their independence because we know that's important to you. Our integrity is important to you. We'd like your support. Now yes, we have ads. Um, you know I, mean , just between you and me, if we didn't have to, I wouldn't I'd be glad to get rid of the ads. But to do that, we need your support. Uh to actually keep doing what we're doing, we need your support. Ads only cover about 70% of our operating costs. So help us out a little bit. Twit.tv slash club twit, show your support for independent high integrity tech journalism. That's what we do. We're very proud of it. We want to keep doing it. Ten bucks a month gets you ad-free versions of everything we do. No ads for you. You also get access to the club twit discord. Smart people hanging out, talking about everything we care about. It's the place where the geeks go. Uh, we also have special programming. We don't do anywhere else. Micah's crafting corner, our AI user group. I'm actually really thinking about making that every other week at this point because there's so much going on in AI. We've got Stacy's book club scheduled uh for next month, a couple of weeks from now. Great book. That should be fun. The photo corner also coming up next month with Chris Markwart. There's a whole lot of stuff that goes on in the club and we'd love to have you there for it. Twit.tv slash club twit. If you're not a member, join. Join. It helps us a lot and it supports the kind of programming we do. And if you care about that, then join the club. That's all I'll say. Now it's time for the back of the book. Paul Thorat's gonna kick us off with his tip of the week, Mr. T . Where is Daredevil . Alright . Don't miss the return of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again. So what's next? I've been liber ated . We're gonna take this city back over Medicaid in an all-new season now, stream ing, only on Disney Plus. They're hunting us. It's time we started hunting them. I can work with them. No one . This should be tons of fun. Marvel Television's Daredevil, born again. Now streaming only on Disney Plus. Now at McDonald's, a McDoubble is $2.50. So you can get your gym gains on. Or just get lunch. For only $2.50. Get more value on the under $3 menu. Limit time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher for delivery. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom line. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion-dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story . Subscribe now at bloomberg.com . Uh yeah, so I hit a twit listener. He was listening I think it was Mac Break Mac Break Weekly. He was talking, he described it as a Mac OS feature, but there's a there's a Mac app or solution called UTM, which is one of several ways to uh run virtualized machine or virtual machines on a Mac . This is a little problematic under Apple Silicon for whatever reasons, but um most people have heard probably of Parallels uh desktop, which is the big way, but it's paid and it's you pay every year, so that's kind of a a a problem . Um and then I think uh VMware still makes fusion on the Mac, but I haven't looked at that in a while. Um, but the question had come up, like the one of the problems is you can't like buy like Windows 10 on ARM, you know, like uh Windows 11 on Arm, sorry. And you know, in in parallels, they offer like a push-through thing where it it goes to whatever online store and but the the thing is um the the two things you need to know are um if you buy this officially what you're buying is a windows product key and and a windows 11 product key works on x6c4 or ARM. So you could just buy it. You could buy it from Microsoft directly. You could find a store that sells it. You could buy it there. It doesn't matter how you get it. But what you're getting is a product key and you can enter that in Windows running virtually on a Mac or wherever and it will work. It will activate and you'll be fine. So you can do that. That's one thing. The other one is um, yeah, don't do that. Um I so um I I have my MacBook Air here. I don't remember if I did this right after I got here or right before I came here, but I did reinstall everything. I was trying to just use the Mac by itself without parallels. There's a couple of Windows things I really need. So I did eventually reinstall parallels. And the one thing I've been doing on this trip was I just didn't pay for it. I mean, I I actually have product keys I could use. I I have paid for Windows, like if I I if I wanted to. I kind of wanted to see how long it would go. And uh every once in a while it's like, hey, you should activate this. I'm like, all right, close, and I don't do it and it works fine. It's fine. Now, if you're running apps full screen or if you're running in a virtual environment, you will actually have a not activated watermark, which is not great. Um, I just run the apps in uh whatever it's called, coherence, and so I don' I don't see this. t really care. Um do not buy this thing from Microsoft and pay 200 bucks or whatever the price is. Um there are product keys everywhere. And uh this is like the argument I made about Spotify. If it was illegal, Paul , the EU would step in and prevent it. But you can go. I have bought product keys myself from product keys.com, game card shop, show when in office is one. You can get these uh a valid Windows 11 Pro license key for as little as nine ninety nine, do that. Because by the way, let's say it does let's say a year from now it falls apart somehow it stops working. You only pay ten bucks. You know, don't worry about who cares. L ike that's all. You're gonna be fine. You're gonna be fine. You can tell them Paul sent you. No, don't do that. Um the other thing, uh well, so that was a that was a a listener, I guess, is uh wrote in. But um just yesterday, Microsoft released Power Toys 0.99. So someday 1.0, baby. Um, it actually has two new utilities, and both of these are awesome. Um, one is called power display. If you enable it, it puts a little, you know, monitor looking icon down in the tray and it allows you to control the features of multiple displays without having to go into the settings app, which is actually kind of a pain in the butt, by the way. So this is especially this is useful for anybody, but if you have multiple monitors, like on this SMI with the three, um, you can adjust the volume, the brightness, contrast, color profile, and other features just from a little fly out. You select the monitor and it has the features right there. Awesome. So that's cool. The other one, this is interesting how people have described this. The other one is called grab and move. And what you basically do is a keyboard shortcut and then you can uh grab the any window running in Windows, like an app or a whatever window, and you can move it around. And so people see this like, oh Linux has had that for 20 years or whatever. And it's like, yeah, but that's not actually I why this thing exists. Um if you are familiar with Windows, you can do this yourself right now, um unless you have installed something that overrides this for literally dating back, I think 30 years, there's a keyboard shortcut called Alt Space that brings down the window menu of any application, including modern applications . And there's some options in there. You can close it, minimize it, whatever. But one of the options is move. And if you select move, there's a submenu. Or no, I'm sorry. No, it just puts it in move mode. And then you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move that window around the screen. That's nice. Because dragging is so well, the pro the reason this is good to know is because you can have an app window that's slightly off-screen, especially in a multi-screen environment, by the way, where you're like, I can't grab the thing and move it. It's off screen, like the title bars off screen. So I can't even access that thing. So if you know this keyboard shortcut, you just do alt space and then move, you know, the arrow keys and then you can move it around. Except in modern da ys, there are multiple apps, including some built into Windows, that actually override this by default. So one example is Copilot. Copilot seizes the AltSpace keyboard shortcut. If you install PowerToys, ironically, um there is a uh utility that is sort of a um uh start menu replacement that I've just zoned on the name of it, doesn't matter. But anyway, it by default um overrides that keyboard shortcut as well. So for people that are using something that overrides this, this is another way to do it, right? So it's the same thing. It's a way to grab the menu and then move it around by holding down a key. Um it's I think it's like alt plus right-click by default or whatever but you can map it to something else which is good and uh this is kind of a way for these things to work in harmony so the uh the point of this is you always have a way to move a window even if you can't select the title bar or the window control up in the corner. So super good. And then a bunch of improvements across several of the utility. Oh, Windows Command Palette is the name of the thing I couldn't think of. That thing picked up a clock and a desk calculator history and a lot of other features, keyboard manager, which is awesome, especially if you want to kill the co-pilot uh key, which I always do. Zoom it, which is the Mark Rzinovich utility, imagery size, et cetera. This is a like a giant release, um, strongly str,ong ly recommend anyone using Windows um uses Power Toys and it just got better. Nice. Love Power Toys. Awesome. Good stuff. Now it's time for Mr. Richard Campbell and our run as a radio picture. I'm gonna mute myself. I apologize. I gotta I'm gonna try to work. Yeah, yeah. You know what? Before we do whiskey, because I already promised at the beginning of the show that Paul would not say anything of importance at all. Oh, I'm gonna mute myself right now and I won't say anything important until Friday. So no, no, no. We have earnings Palooza. Paul will give us just a little summary. Oh, okay. Okay. Uh after the f after the run is radio before we go into whiskey. So that if you can't I know this Microsoft stock is going down. I thought seven minutes was a problem. You're talking like two minutes now. You're gonna have two minutes after Richard. And then uh and then we he will hold his peace until next Wednesday. Okay? Fair enough. Don't hold it too tight. All right. Now, Richard. I may have made a mistake with this show. Because I actually recorded this show at the end of February. This is my friend Sharon Weaver who has been in the consulting business for a ye ars and years, SharePoint and M365 and so forth. And was a big has always been an advocate of M365 co-pilot, but then she took Claude Co-Work out for a spin back in January and just said like this is what you were wanting from M365 co-pilot when it came to stuff like Excel and PowerPoint. And so it's like, well, let's talk about it. And you know, we and we actually got dug into this idea of I think Microsoft's trying to do too much. You have all these different groups inside of the Excel team all trying to make their contribution. And so in some ways, doing everything meant nothing worked. Where with COD Copilot, their approach to their Excel co-work tool was, you know, what here's the six things lots of people need to do, and it does those things really well. Like just the layout uh ability to tweak your the look of your sheet and they, you know, move things around and so forth. Incredibly impressive. So we were very wowed. And and I probably should have put this out a few weeks ago because of course Microsoft has had the response of working with Anthropic immediately. And we just had last week the announcement about A gen take AI for Excel and PowerPoint. Things move so fast in AI, you know. Well and they do. And it and I I remember debating at the time, it's like I don't know how quick to drop this show. You know, I had a certain number of things already ready. I clearly held onto it longer than I needed to. But it's a great conversation with someone who's very knowledgeable. Yeah, there's good information in here. Yeah. Yeah. And and just you know, if you haven't taken cowork out for a spin, you probably should. It's impressive. And it also speaks to the advantage of being arm's length from a product. Like they didn't have the ability to talk to the product team about how to do stuff. What they did was talk to the users, talk to people who use Excel and say, you know, what do I what can I do that'll make the most difference for you? And that's clearly the direction they went in. And I understand , you know, the success of cowork hit the Microsoft people very hard and they are very much taking the same view point now of we just got to focus on the brass tags, the things that matter the most. So in one sense I'm really excited there's competition in this space uh because it'll definitely make better products all around. But yeah, on the other point, we've been talking about this for a while. Anthropic seems to be running away with this. Like they're clearly using their tools to build more software and more tooling that is beneficial than just about anybody else. Cool. Impressive. All right. We have whiskey. We are going to do whiskey, but before we and it's a fun one. Yeah. Before we do that, Paul's typing furiously. What do you think, Paul? Before we do that, we're gonna just get a quick top line because this is uh earnings Palooza. Yeah. Today, Microsoft, Meta, and Google all announced earnings today. Tomorrow, Apple. So it's crazy. And we will talk about this in more detail next week once the earnings learnings become apparent, but just top line. Top line, uh thirty-one point eight billion in uh uh net income on eighty-three billion, I'll call it in revenue. Those are both double digits of gains, twenty three and eighteen percent respectively. You know, then they get the fake you know, like our AI business surpassed in the annual revenue run rate. Ugh, who cares? That's it doesn't mean anything. As soon as you hear annual revenue you run run it, you know. Fake, fake lie. Yep. Ly lie lie. Anyway, um cap ac spending did go down sequentially quarter over quarter. Uh that was thirty-one billion, it was thirty-seven point five billion in the previous quarter. They did indicate that that was going to be the case. The thing you actually compare that to is a year ago, and it's double the number a year ago. So it's still up. Um I I I haven't had time to look at the individual businesses, but since we're this is Windows Weekly, I just look at more personal computing real quick. Um Windows OEM revenue declined two percent. Uh yeah, let's not look at that. Um so they made a lot of money. Um and I need more time. Yeah, yeah. Take take your time. We don't want to rush you. There's lots to know. Yeah. There's lots to know. And and and again, and these are obfuscating documents. Truly. It's it's a hype that good. Yeah, it's a wild appeal the young IT. Do you ever feed this to an AI just to say uh hey, analyze this? Well, I'm gonna ask you the question I ask everyone who asked me a question like that, uh which is why would I wanna save time and money? That's I mean I'm not saying it's stupid, but like you serious? Uh I don't know. It's probably pretty good at analyzing corporate. No, you're of course. Um yeah, right. Because corporate speak very well. Especially when you want to do comparisons over a long period of time and you can look up that data. Yeah. That would And in about 18 minutes, we are going to have uh the founder of Framework, Nerf Patel, on the Intelligent Machines. But that gives us 18 minutes to talk about brown liquor. Yeah. Time for whiskey pick. Well, and I'm back in Canada, so of course I pick a Canadian whiskey. And I'd been meaning to talk about this one particular one for a while. This is the Rifle Rye. Great name. And they've got their own webpage, rifle rye.com, which is sweet, because it's actually Alberta Distillers. And we've talked about Alberta distillers before. So I'm kind of cheating here in the sense that, you know, there's so many other distilleries talking about why would I go back to this one? Uh it was 939, so about a year ago that we talked about rare batch, rare old batch number one from Alberta distillers. Although Alberta Distillers makes all kinds of things, including a bunch of American stuff. They're obviously based in Alberta. They're just outside of Calgary. Uh currently they went they started in 1946, went through a bunch of different acquisitions. Today they're part of the Suntory Global Spirits brand. Um, and they and they they this is a large scale bespoke operation. If you want to make booze, you can call these guys. They have a bunch of their own brands. They make a bunch of different vodkas, they make a ton of different whiskeys, which rifle is one of them. Uh, and also manufacture for other brands, including guys like Whistlepake. Uh, what they're famous for is making a hundred percent ryes. And we've talked about this before: that mak ing straight ryes are very, very difficult. It's a difficult grain to work with. It's expensive. It's sticky. Uh it has a lot more call polysaccharides in it. And so uh the way you solve this problem is what what Alberta Distillars has done is you employ some uh microbiologists who re literally optimize uh a a kind of now uh kind of enzyme they call it a purified enzyme, this is Shannon Thomas, so that they can properly digest the rye to be able to process it better. And uh that's their business all around. Now, I want to talk specifically about the rifle rye because George R if le was one of the founders of uh Alberta distillers back in 46. And that's where the name obviously comes from. Although he had nothing to do with it because this he he passed away uh before this actually happened. But the story of the rifle family is kind of epic. So we got to go back to George's grandfather Henry Rifle, who arrives in Vancouver in 1888 at the age of 19 with his brothers Jack and Conrad. They're German immigrants from the area around Bavaria, beer-making families. And they had been, they actually landed in San Francisco first, missing the end of the gold rush, and they worked in breweries there and then moved up to Portland and were working breweries there. By the time they get to Vancouver, they think they can open their own brewery. So they open a brewery at 11th and Maine, and this is in the late 1800s. They call the San Francisco Brewer y. Clever. It doesn't go well for them. They I mean they they were in the right location. There used to be a creek running uh down 11th um that's all been covered over now. The city is has grown a lot since then, but that was was there a bunch of there was brewery row then. And so they they go broke. The other brothers got out of the business tirely. But Henry goes, he thinks he knows what he's doing. He gets back into it again. He creates a company called the Canadian Brewing and Malting Company. And does very well for him self. Until World War One. For two, there's a couple of problems with World War One. The first was he was clear a German immigrant, and uh World War One was he was on the wrong side at that point, so he had problems there. But also, in 1917, British Columbia brought in alcohol prohibition. And so being a beer maker was a problem. And Henry, recognizing he was struggling to be in Canada anyway as an immigrant, and his business was jeopardized, grabbed his son, George, not this George. This would be the the uh the father of the George we're talking about. We'll call this one George C , because it's middle name started with C. And they went to Japan and founded a company called the Anglo-Japanese Brewering Company and started making beer in Japan. In fact, they even learned how to malt against rice, they'd learned a bunch of other things. But in 1921 , prohibit is repealed in BC and he still has a bunch of family there. So he sells off that business and comes back to Vancouver . And prohibition is still in full swing in the U.S. So, you know, loaded with cash and experience, they set up a new set of breweries, but they also buy a distillery in New Westminster. And their operations are in an area called Delta . This is along the Fraser River, and it's called Delta because it's literally the Delta of uh the Fraser, which breaks into a number of arms. And so they have this big piece of land along Waltham Island that's all marshlands, which is ideally set up for rum running . Now, today that area is known as the George C. Rifle Migratory Berg Sanctuary. When they got out of the biz , they then donated the land to the government to protect birds, but it's a good bird sanctuary because it was full of plants and things and good at hiding the illegal shipping that they were doing. So they've got this big distillery. They're producing a lot of whiskey. Their largest ship was called the Malahat and it could carry a hundred thousand cases of liquor. And so they'd go out of this big ship down to near the near California, Mexico area, about 12 miles offshore. So they're outside of the legal limits, and then smaller boats would come out, load up with them, and then smuggle in . They made a huge fortune, just a pile of money running in this until of course 1933, when prohibition is ended. And then wisely they get out of the business. They were being investigated by all sorts of governments. And so the moment the business model didn't make sense, they got rid of everything and just settled down. Now in the meantime , they'd made so much money, they'd built this phenomenal mansion in the wealthy area of town. There's the for folks who are from Vancouver, the Rifle family built the Commodore Ballroom and the Vogue Theater along Granville Street, which are two like landmarks in the city . And it sounds, it seems like from the research I was able to do that the Canadian government largely backed away when it's like, we're not in this business anymore. Like it's not us at all. But in nineteen thirty-four, when the uh the rifles were in the U.S. for a visit, they were arrested by the government and charged with smuggling. They and the indictment included a charge for 17 .25 million dollars in 193 4 . Uh they were required uh it was offered a bond at 250,000 negotiated that down to 100,000 each and then immediately went back to Canada with no intent to go back to the US at all, but then negotiated a deal with the US government to settle, giving up their two hundred thousand dollars worth of bond, plus an additional half a million dollars to settle out of court. So pretty good deal for them all around. And George C then has he had his son back in 1922, which is George H, and that's the George of Rifle Rye. And he's also the guy who founded Alberta Distillers in nineteen forty-six and passed away in nineteen ninety-two? So, you know, live to the ripe old age of 70. This was launched in 19 in 2022, so 30 years after George passed away. And let's talk about how this works . Uh, if you look at the website, you will notice that they talk about a classic cocktail with rifle rye known as Ri Rifle on the Rockies, which is to say on ice. Very clever. So I got a big ice cube here and a big glass and I poured a little rifle into it. It is not a mixed drink. It's just rye whiskey on ice. It's rye on ice. It's properly made. Hmm . So , no mash bill, right? That's an American thing. Uh the the way they make this is they make pure 100% rye distilled. That's what Alberta distills is known for. They age it in new Ike oat and X bourbon casks, but then they blend it. So what's actually in the bottle is 91% of that rye distillate, but also 6% old granddad bourbon and three percent olor rosso sherry . Not aged in those barrels, actually the liquids. That's a weird mix. Well, remember when we did the Canadian whiskey story back in the day. And I talked about the 111th rule. Yeah. Well, the one-eleventh rule means that up to nine point oh nine percent of a Canadian whiskey can be anything else. And so if you do the math, six percent old granddad, three percent sherry, it's still under 9.09. So this is a Canadian whiskey by the rules. Now, this is not the first time that a bird is the stolis has done this. They have uh back in 2015, they released something called Alberta Rye Dark Batch, which is exactly that same ratio with six percent old granddad, three percent all of Russell Sherry. And interestingly enough, old grand dad bourbon owned by Sentauri . Now and they don't know and now Sentauri doesn't own any Sherry Bodegas, but they do have operations in Spain for wine and distribution, so they have a good deal to be able to put this all together. And uh yeah, so it's you can only make this in Canada. Nobody else would do this, right? It's only because of that rule that you have this option to just simply add things to it. And I tell you, you can taste it there's definitely like a sense of the sweetness of bourbon. It's not that spicy. Like normal, we the relationship that most people have with rye is in bourbon, which is mostly corn, a little bit of barley for the amylase, and then in between will be a flavor grain, and that flavor grain most of the time is rye. And we talk about the rye bringing the spiciness. Well, that doesn't happen here. This is a very light drinking, easy, uh Canadian whiskey to drink. Right? And by the way, it is a Canadian rye whiskey. But according to the rules of Canada, there doesn't have to be any rye in a rye whiskey. There happens to be rye in this one, but it's not a requirement. And it begs the question: like, how did we get to this situation? And the reality is that during the US prohibition destroyed their rye market entirely, and the Canadians continued to produce rye the whole time because the different provinces went on had prohibition at different times. And so by the time prohibition ends in the US, there's nobody left that makes rye down there. It's made a comeback now. We've talked about that. And so generally speaking, people were associated rye with Canada anyway. So Canada just started putting rye on everything and never made a requirement. There actually has to be rye in it. The idea of 100% rye is very weird. Again, we've talked about this a number of times, and they do have that problem solved. It's not a requirement, nor is it a requirement to only have Canadian whiskey in your whiskey, up to 9.09%. This is $50 Canadian. That's about 35 US. And yes, it is a vailable in the US, but only spotty. The big dealers don't handle this. You'll have to look around for it. But at that price, you can and can't go wrong. It's 40%, 2% ABV. It's eminently drinkable. And do you taste the sherry? I mean, is it it's weird to have No three percent it's barely there, right? It's probably the same kind of roughly that you'd get from a sherry barrel, you think? Yeah, and it and that's was the original excuse for the one eleven throw was that the Canadian distillers were having a tough time buying the sherry barrels because they were largely locked up. Okay. Uh you know, the Scots kinda had that tied up. So it was like, hey, can we just add a little sherry? Because in the end, isn't that what you're doing when you put it in the sherry barrel anyway? Right. Yeah, okay. But only up to one eleventh. How about that? Okay. And what does the old granddad bring to it? Smoothness? Yeah, and a little more sweetness too. Sweetness. Yeah. You know, that's got corn in it. Yeah, and it's a bit more mature. Like this is probably only the rye's probably three years old, like oh with the exception of that one that I talked about a 939, which was a 20-year-old rye, which is very weird, right? Like most of the time these things would be no more than five years old. They're only required to be three. The fact that there's no age declaration on it lets you know there's no way it's much more than three. Well, so they're they're winning enough awards that they're doing something right. I mean that's a good thing. It's a cool drink, no two ways about it. But I understand if you've spent time in awards ceremonies and so forth , it's more about how much you spend on the awards programs than necessarily how much your drink is per se. So you can you know, there's some I respect more here than others. Like that international spirits awards are pretty good. I mean, most of the other ones is like listen, I've done this in some of my startups too, where it's like we need to win some awards. That's too hard to pull off. Like you can figure that out. So you know, maybe that's where I've gone wrong. I need some awards. You could just go, you know what? If you went and played ball with some of those podcast conferences and stuff where they run those awards, we won't awards actually. Paul and I spent some time back in the day doing conferences where they had, you know, best of so forth those are and it it cost a lot of money to be in those things. A shelf of awards. Yeah. And I threw them all out. And then unfortunately, the only award I really cared about , my Emmy Award fell off the shelf in the windy day and it broke. And so I've I've trapped it inside my Webby Award. Oh nice. You protect your Emmy and your Webby. I love that. It's kind of it's a s it's a s it's a it's kind of a metaphor about the future of of media. Just cram them all together. An Emmy trapped in a webby. Yeah. Richard, excellent job. Paul. Yeah. Don't say a word, because we've promised. I got one thing to say. Okay. I won a writing award. Uh some big plaque, you know. So 15 years later, my wife won a writing award. And my daughter was like, that's impressive, right? I'm like, yeah, I mean, I won one fifteen years ago and and mine's bigger . But but I mean but you know but good for her . And to be clear, when you win an award like that, especially like an Emmy and stuff, you have to buy the award, right? It's not free. They don't I had an employer at the time. I you know, I don't know how it happened, but you have to buy to enter those. Yeah. You have to buy to enter them. The awards themselves they're also pricey. Somebody entered it, I guess, but you know. I think the MAI won fair and square. Yeah. Without doubt. I don't know about the Webby. Just saying mine's bigger. That's saying . Mine's dustier. I'll say that. I bet you you could contact the Emmy organization to have that thing remade for it. You can and you pay for it, just as you said. It's very expensive. Yeah. They're happy. It's very profitable. But I kind of I think this is kind of cool. I love everything. She's trapped in a uh in a prison of her own making. This is like the beginning of uh Superman where they're the Phantom Zone or whatever. Yeah. Absolutely a metaphor for the whole thing. It's carbonite. New Media Carbonite. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes this thrilling and gripping edition of uh Windows Weekly. You will find Richard Campbell at his uh website, run as radio.com. There's also another great podcast there that he does with Carl Franklin called.net Rocks. By the way, episode 2000 publishes tomorrow. Wow. That's impressive.