Doom Scrolling and Digital Habits

It's time for Windows, weekly Paul Therat's here, Richard Campbell's here, a record seven builds to the Insider program. It's not simpler, it's not simpler. And is Xbox on the cutting block? Lots of interesting stories coming up next at Windows Weekly . Podcasts you love from people you trust . This is Twitter . This is Windows Weekly with Paul Therat and Richard Campbell. Episode nine hundred eighty eight recorded Wednesday june seventeenth, twenty twenty six. Bubble . It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, you winners and you dozers too. Wake up. Here comes Paul Thorat from thorat dot com and Richard Campbell from dot net rocks and runas radio dot com Hello guys, it looks like you're both at home . Well, I am I am actually not. Oh, where are you missed? Oh, you're that's right. You went to a gradu ations, didn't you? No, no, no, I did not. I'm in Nashville, Tennessee. I'm just here to visit . Wife and kids . Oh, you moved your wife to Nashville, hey? Nice. Close, but not too close. Yeah . One of the things I remember well, I really liked about Nashville is like every single restaurant has a band. Like there's just a thing. Oh yeah, music it's music. Yeah. I'm surprised they don't call it Music City or something. Weird Weird . A lot of music, a lot of good music . A lot of good food . Oh yeah, hot wings. I'd be careful with the Careful Chicken sandwiches, yeah. Yeah. Hot chicken. So we went to the place I think it was just literally called hot chicken. And I got the same little speech I often get in Mexico with the sauces or tomacos very hot. Which is like, this one is hot, this one is very hot. Yeah, you don't want to eat this one . And I did, I got it with no hot heat, whatever. And he brought out some just so I could try it. And I was like exactly the experience I had the first time I had Ab ,l whicho wasor like, I think you just shot me in the tongue. I don't know why shot. I don't even know why I tried that. Shot through the heart . Then you're to blame . You should have told me it was super hot. They do that to Lisa too, but she says, bring it on hotter, hotter, hotter. Let's go. Let's go. This will satisfy that need. Yes . Yes . So now I'm asking you, Mr. Thorat, and you, Mr. Richard Campbell. Yes, if there is anything happening in the world of Microsoft today . No not really. Slowly. Just tell the advertisers go home . Yeah. There's a lot to go directly to the whisky bit. I got the whisky right here. I got the whisky right here. There's a lot of Xbox stuff going on and a lot of it is not good and it's going to be a lot more of that in the coming couple of weeks . But I'm not I decided not I almost put it at the top because I was like we should skip this out of the way but no I did I don't know I like opening the windows weekly with window s stuff. That's kind of cool, you know? You're so weird like that. The name is wrong though. It really is Microsoft Weekly, but I just I didn't think I should use their name in vain. It's more alliterative. I use my name every day, Leo. Yeah . In vainly use your name in vain . Your name in vain. Well, let's see. What's going on in the Windows Windows Insider program? There's a tea . Yep . You really have hards, not you, Luo, I'm sorry. I mean one we all have one hard I don't mean like I don't know why you are no it's we're all having a really hard time under standing the insider program. I enjoy that they simplified it. I would have enjoyed it more if they had actually simplified it. They said they are going to simplify it. It doesn't mean it's true. Yeah. It's partially complicated by the fact that there are multiple supported versions of Windows, right? So this the arm problem. Yeah . Well, it's just the Windows problem. You know, it's actually I would call it the co pilot problem because when they introduced co pilot in late twenty twenty three , they jammed it down everyone's throats one month before the annual feature update went out because they wanted to make sure our businesses didn't skip it, which they all would have . And ever since then, they've pretty much, well, not pretty much. They've literally just gone to a system where if it's supported right now, you're going to get all the same features . So we have different , you know may,be foundational architectures in some ways, although no we do. I mean , twenty four, twenty five H two are the same basic core OS twenty six H one and we'll see with twenty six H two, but H one twenty six H one is, you know, different, right? There's some differences in there . But the features we get , no matter which version we're running are basically the same. I mean, sometimes they lag by a month on one or the other, but anyway, so we have God, it's such a mess I mean on I think it was Friday, but whatever day Microsoft released seven insider builds. It was the most ever ing well or against four ? Like three , support ed versions of Windows and then the experimental future platforms, which doesn't address any , right? And so yeah, right. So there's three experimental builds, one for future platforms, one for twenty six H one and one for twenty five H two , two beta builds, one for twenty six H one, one for twenty five H . And then two release preview builds, one for twenty six H one and one for both twenty four and twenty five H two . twenty four H two should be going away by now, but okay October yeah, it's going to be out of support in October soon. You know, we still mean they can't they simplified in the sense they got rid of the four different paths, went down to three paths , but then did two builds of each except for experimental where they did an extra , it's like a tree based flow chart where each step you take it then expands into more steps each way it's kind of tree based like except there's land mines. Yeah, there you go. Yes . You have been eaten by a groove . So I tried to break this down in a way that would make sense and there is no way to do that. So if you're in the experimental channel, which is, I believe, what Dev used to be essentially , regardless of its twenty six H one and twenty six H two, I think . I love speaking like this. Yes. experimental in the sense that some of these experiments will fail and not continue on. I think that's a possibility. It is a possibility, I should say, yeah, I'm sorry, yeah, you're correct. But that said, I feel like that doesn't happen very often, right? And I don't I don't know of any major examples of it. Nor should it, really. Like yeah, right. I mean, if you're going to push bills to the insiders, you care. Like it's important . I mean every once in a while you might want to do they used to do this with AB testing, but you might do an experiment literally where let's see what this looks like in this configuration and these guys over here will test in a slightly different configuration. Sure. But that means the feature is going to come. It's just a look and feel kind of thing. Yeah, but I am not aware of that yet in the new system, but no I don't know. Why would they make AB testing clear? And that 's Please remember this. This is this is Pavan's new windows. Like I'm optimistic in the sense that there's somebody there's leadership caring about how it's going on. It's not just , you know, three groups of bullies bat ting away at each other and deploying it to us . Look, for it's worth, I feel like not everyone, but you know, anyone we've heard of or they've spoken publicly or written publicly, whatever in positions of power, hopefully, but usually do care, right? The rank and file in many cases are helpless. They have to do whatever the company's doing. They can't, you know, they want everyone wants the product to be great. Yeah . But previvan, and we talked about this before, it felt like there's nobody supervising the insider program. There were a number of different teams that had access to different parts and they kind of did their own thing. And so it was kind of a mess . This was surprised I haven't written this yet, but this was very much like what happened with Longhornet when you think about it. It's just all these different teams doing their own thing. Yeah . And it will all come together someday somehow, we don't know, you know, because it always has. And at this moment, they're not even talking . So yeah. So it is, yeah, it is , I guess it's more organized in that sense. And also there is a leader who appears to be very hands on and is an engineer type and he's I like him. He's smart, well spoken. Yep. That's this is what has me excited, right? It's just leadership who seems to care . Yep. And of course this year, we're going to talk about this probably in depth, but this is also a good year for Microsoft and Apple, right? It's doing this infamous or famously, I guess . Kind of working on the fundamentals more and less on flashy features that maybe nobody wants, you know, yeah, fixing stuff that does annoying people for a long time. Yeah. So again, how that's interesting. An excellent mission, like a mission that is definitely feeding to the people rather than to leadership . Yeah , right. I mean, you want to you have to serve both masters to some degree, I guess, but sure . Anyway, so this year by and large, we've gotten a couple of big features, but just a couple and honestly , even the big ones, you know, the new start menu that actually , well, there's a new start menu that has rolled out. There's a newer start menu coming soon that has not rolled out generally, you know, to general public and the new task bar that has also not rolled out to everybody are big in a way, but they're also you know, they're familiar, right? I mean they're not actually major leaps or anything, but so whatever , there's a good range of things happening here . As far as this set of Windows insider builds goes , they're testing the less disruptive Windows Update experience, meaning they want to have one reboot a month for people . So we have typically gotten I don't like this term but they call it these days a security update. It's really what I would call a cumulative update that includes security fixes and other bug fixes, but also new features, right? I'd like to see those split up, but whatever . But there's also things like PC maker firmware updates and driver updates. And if you check that box in Windows Update, you can get some updates for other Microsoft apps. Like I think Visual Studio can go through Windows Update, for example, dot net updates, which are always time consuming for whatever reason, whatever they are , kind of roll, those all into one day, not one update, but rather, you know, because it's going to be different for everybody, but have them all occur at the same time, so that if you have to reboot and you will for most of those things , it will be one reboot, not we, you know, we rebooted on Tuesday for the feature update or for the cumulative update or whatever. Oh, and then Wednesday got a firmware update, reboot it again, Thursday , you know, they'll try to try to align those up, right? So that's good. Optimistic. Yeah . So window search improvements, which actually is something I have complained about, right? You can I'm not going to be able to do it on this computer, but if you this is probably not the case anymore, but if you open the windows, the start menu and start typing CA , depending on what you ran last, you're gonna see camera or calculator as a top choice Yeah, as a match , it makes sense . Some time ago, a year ago or less , if at least on my computer , when I did that, if I typed in CAM, it would actually bring up calculators the first choice. It's like what ? Or you could type something like AM ER for camera, right? You know, without the C and it wouldn't find it at all . It's now handling that kind of thing. So if you drop a letter, especially off the front, which was the biggest problem to me , if you have a typo, whatever it might be, type in some extra words, you know, et cetera. It's actually going to start finding that stuff, you know, like a real search . So weird it's actually so those are both good. I mean this those are solid. They're not flashy per se, but they're, you know, they're they're good . Yeah . And then we're getting beta stuff and it's like so twenty six one and twenty six H two are both getting that screen tint feature that we talked about previously from some earlier. It probably was an experimental. So it's moving down the chain, right? And this is an accessibility feature, but it adds a color tint to the entire screen . Right . I guess for eye strain, but I suppose depending on I don't think I would turn off, but you know eyes, different problems, right? Yep. It's funny because it's not funny. Well, it is funny . The example they use is a pink color in the screenshot and that's the color that my screen takes on almost on every computer basically when I turn on adaptive color , right which is, not available on all computers, depending on the capabilities of your screen. It doesn't seem to adapt. It just seems to change it pink and I hate it. So I try it and it goes pink and I turn it off. But depending on you may have some kind of an eye issue or whatever where this makes sense for you. So that's fine. It's not a it's not a big deal. I don't hate it or anything. It's just whatever it is. That's a cry and it's also actually it's a release preview. So we're going to see in twenty five H two pretty soon, I would imagine, probably in July, right? If it's there. So it's in beta across twenty six and twenty five H two, twenty six H one and twenty five H two , but also in release preview for twenty five H two suggesting , you know, it's going to be pretty quick. If you're in beta twenty five H two, you're also going to get the updated widget experience, which is this one I like personally because it is literally how I configure widgets. Like, you know, one of the first things I do is open the widgets , go to widget settings and I turn off that hover feature where the mouse cursor goes over the widget icon there. It launches . Why would any why would this one UI click me? Click me. No , you know, don't click me. Just come in my general direction, you know. Things will happen. And then I turn off the notifications, which are things where it will say something like some little newsfeed thing or like a stock tick or something, something. I like having the weather display down there and I don't want to open widgets unless I click on it and then I always click on it and then I hate myself because it's terrible, but whatever . So there's that. So that's nice . And I guess they're doing work on the backend to reduce the memory footprint, you know, in keeping with all that other efficiency type works. That's nice And oh yeah, the new zoom controls on Magnifier. So magnifier obviously lets you zoom in and out. They've done that's the primary feature of it, but now they have smaller step presets . So and you can actually set an exact percentage now that's cool. Seem to be a bunch of tools that are about dealing with vision impairments . Yeah , this was a good timing for me my eyes are terrible. So yeah, yeah, it's appreciated. Yeah, for sure . This is your world now pink and zoomed. Right . Every screen I look at looks like a postage stamp and I can't read it. You know , we went to like a print there's a famous print shop. Think about those classic like music posters, you know, but that they're stamped out they might have made sense . Yeah, letter press, exactly . There's a famous place in Nashville that does this. And we went there for a little we had a little hands on tour thing, whatever. And they were showing she had this, you know, it's like a metal plate and it's this is the normal typeface you said for a newspaper. So she's like, if you're reading on a phone or a computer, it's basically like twelve point times New Rome or whatever. And I was like, I could assure you, that's not what it is on my computer. It's like, I couldn't see that. I'm like, Is that one point type? But anyway, so there's that. And then so that's yeah, beta twenty six and twenty six H one, twenty five H two. And then as you get into release preview, you get this stuff I just talked about the screen tint thing, the widgets changes, the magnifier changes, and then some Bluetooth connectivity improvements , which are also going up to release preview twenty four H two, which is like okay . Yeah, okay . So a lot of stuff . And then there's there was no notation on these. So I assume these mean that they are working or being applied to any channel. So there are two features well, three,, really, but voice access and voice typing improvements , I believe are happening across the board . And then the new right click settings for touchpads, which I hope would solve my biggest accessibility problem, which is the thing I keep bringing up where I single click on a touchpad. These touchpads are the sides of Volkswagens now in many cases, but if I'm not in the left most one third of most of these touchpads , it doesn't register as a click . And I hate it so much . And they have these right click, you know, there's a right click in the corner or right click on the side, you can two finger right click which is what I prefer . I've talked about how you can open a menu anywhere in Windows and you can just click tap the touchpad to select the item . It closes the menu, which should mean it was selected, but it did not select it because I'm too far over on the touchpad, I guess . If I'm too far over, why did it do anything? You registered the click , but you didn't apply it to the UI . So anyway, it's not going to fix that. But it is a way to customize the size of the right click area. I would like that to be off, which you can do, by the way, you can turn that off . I would like the size of the left click zone to be the whole touchpad . You cannot do that. I don't know why. No . So I always want to get this surprise right click out of your touchpad . Yeah , I mean I like the definitive nature of like single click is click two fingers , right click, you know ? You very rarely want to right click something , you know , well certain user interfaces maybe is the way to say it. So making it like a deliberate , I guess I'll call it a gesture. I'm not really sure what else to call it like a two finger tap to me makes sense . You are very specifically trying to do that thing, you know, whereas every other time you should just be tapping it, you know, or clicking it or selecting it, or however you want to say that. But I don't know. Yeah. So there that's the mess that is the Windows Insider program. Everything's going very well . Well, I mean, to be fair to them, you know, and they're doing monthly updates now where they kind of recap what they've done. I mean, they're they're moving forward on the stuff. They send out this list. They're checking them off, they're getting them out there . The biggest ones have not come out to stable yet , but Windows update with that new calendar control and the ability to delay forever, the new start menu, the new task bar, this widgets thing I just talked about . I gotta believe there's an initiative somewhere to unify the versions, right? Why does the arm build to be separate from the X eighty six Bill? Yeah . So I had made the comment I don't know a couple of weeks ago probably it must have been a released preview one of the insider bills I was saying, you know, it looked like they kind of lined them up, but then patch Tuesday happened this month and twenty six H one is still a month behind, so it may be because twenty six H one is such a one off and they are at some point going to bring them back together in some way. But I don't know. Well, and maybe that's true. They want to unify the arm builds into that. And then it would just be four builds, this particular iteration instead of seven, which is, you know, something . What does experimental platforms actually mean if not ARM I think well, so you had made the point that experimentals should mean or maybe does mean the features that may or may not make it, right? Yeah, but there were three platforms experimental to place, right? Yeah. But then they well, so one of those experimental tied to each of the supported versions of Windows. And then there's a future platforms one. So future platforms to means even if they might not call it this, but the thing we sort of think of is Windows twelve or the next thing that you know, the twenty six H one, which is only on arm technically is not going to get twenty six H two . They haven't said what it's going to get or when and I think it's that if that makes sense. It's it's not raspberry pie or they're not yeah well that should work too like spark Yeah so So I don't want to get yeah I've got a thing coming up about some of the work Microsoft is doing to lower the system requirements and so forth in keeping with our little compon ent crisis that, you know, so we'll talk about that in a bit, but that's part of it . Do you want to take a break now? Should you like to? I'll do a little dog around the house. Keep Richard away from the whiskey while we pause and I have not opened this bottle yet. I'm gonna tell you a whole story before I open it. Oh it'll be a surprise for me. Actually exciting. Yeah, I like the tasting part of it. That's always fun and your tasting notes are very good. I don't you know, I'm trying to do this with coffee and it says well as you know, is it floral? Is it do you taste berries? Is it not just coffee? Tastes like coffee. It tastes like coffee For whiskey that say things like pencil shavings and old leather and I'm like, nah, now for that. I have had wine that tastes like old leather, but I don't know if that was intentional We're going to call that a feature. Why did you put that on the bottle? Could have been the boat bag it was in, I don't know. Let me talk about our sponsor for this segment of Windows Weekly Then we will continue on with the show were brought to you today by trusted tech and this is a very timely advert because in fourteen days everything changes . If you're managing Microsoft three hundred and sixty five for your company , you man respect, right? As the kids say, you're responsible for both the cost and whether it's set up correctly. And coming july first, so that's what, thirteen, fourteen days away, Microsoft is going to raise the prices . So any mistakes in your licensing are about to get more expensive one way or the other. Most companies are using that use Microsoft three hundred sixty five are either over licensed paying for unused seats and features. And sometimes you do that just because well, I don't want to be underlicent because underlic creates compliance and security risks. And you know, in some companies, you get it both ways. One department's over licensed, one is under licensed. The result is wasting thousands, sometimes tens of thousands per year on tools your team doesn't use or frankly worse, missing critical security features you thought you had . It's complicated. 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Go to trusted tech. team slash windows weekly three six five and submit a form to get in contact with trusted tech Microsoft Licensing Engineers . You can thank me july second . Trusted dot team slash windows weekly three five. We thank them so much for supporting Windows Weekly and the good works of Mr. P. Thorot and Mr. R. Campbell as we can every time we say Kevin Turner's name, I'm like, I cannot believe we're talking about this guy He's been over a while, right? Like a long time. But I remember you talked about him a lot back in the day. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yes. No, he was a big time. Yeah. All right, moving on . Yes. Well , there were rumors earlier this year that Microsoft wasn't going to ship new Snapdragon X two based surface PCs until the second half of the year. They announced the Intel Coraltra series three models I think a couple of weeks ago, fairly recently . And that kind of, you know, that maybe cemented that theory, but then they just announced them this week . So well, that's the second half. No, I thought they would have announced them at build. I think but they only talked about the ultra at build, right? Right, which is the one that is not coming until that might explain the rumor there to be honest and maybe someone mis they heard arm or something and thought that's what it meant. But so in keeping with the lineup as it stood until fairly recently, there's a thirteen inch model model, a thirteen point eight inch model and a fifteen inch model or a series of models . When they went to the Arm chips two years ago with the first Napdragon X, there was just a thirteen point eight and a fifteen inch . And then sometime last year, I think it was they introduced the thirteen as a kind of a lower cost option. And then on the pro side , they have a new thirteen inch surface pro, which was the size, you know, has been the size for a couple of generations . And then a smaller twelve inch as well. So they have the, you know, the smaller surface Pro and the smaller surface laptop to kind of come in at a lower price, which these days is not a low price low prices. Not a one. No, but especially with Microsoft, right? And it's not their fault, but per se, but you know, you know a couple things going into any kind of surface launch. They're going to have fun new colors, which you can't get because they're only going to be on certain models and they're not going to be the one you want. Yeah. This year those colors are like a jade green, which can only get, I think, on the thirteen point inch eight inch surface laptop, and then there's kind of a, I think they call it dune, which is kind of a gold tan kind of bronze color , which I believe is only on the thirteen inch surface Pro, but but even less so than that, it's only on certain configurations. Like this is always the problem, you know , I and this is where I think they're missing out on an opportunity. Like the logical thing to do is make the highest end unit with the most memory and the most storage and the highest processor in hot pink. Yeah. So the so the geek who just has to own it has to own . You're right. And honestly, if someone who wanted the like two years ago, I would have gotten that light blue color they had. It was not available on the high end configuration I got . And yeah, I would have appreciated that honestly. Because I think the only picture of the ultra we got it's black. Of course it's black. Yeah. So the problem with the black laptop, any dark col ored laptop, assuming it's made of aluminum , is that it's anodized. That means you can scratch off the color and that means you're going to see the silver underneath. And I hate that so much, it makes me crazy. Yeah. So I had to get a when I bought my surface laptop seven two years ago , I had to get it in black. That was the only color that was available in the configuration I wanted . And sure enough, there's plenty of silver on the edges, you know, just from me rubbing my hands, you know, as I type or whatever, it just what happens, you know, it's the reality of it The vinyl wrap . Yeah, yeah, right. It's tough on the hard corners though, you know, this is just not, I don't know, it's nothing to do about that. The other thing you kind of go into this knowing is that Microsoft's prices are going to be a little higher because Microsoft in the PC space is sort of a boutique company, so to speak, and it does not have the volume discounts at like a Low Novo or Apple and never tried to be, right? It's like they were supposed to be reference machines and they're pricey . Yeah. So they've always that's always been true, you know, and the problem is with the component crisis, it gets exacerbated and exaggerated and sometimes to ludicrous degrees. So for example, with the laptop I bought two years ago, which was a thirty two gigabytes of RAM one terabyte storage fifteen inch configuration I believe, was two hundred dollars , which by the way , a lot of money for that kind of a laptop at that time. I mean, that's I would say from a well, and maybe this would no, it wouldn't be. This would be Intel, AMD, Snapdragon, whatever. That would have that's more like fifteen six hundred dollars. It was expensive. Yeah . That configuration today , I think nineteen hundred fifty dollars. It's significant ly more expensive. seven hundred and fifty dollars more . The price difference is going to vary by configuration. The biggest jump, the most terrible jumps are well, this two is when you go to thirty two gigs of ram or then sixty four, which is like off the charts, or when you go from five twelve to one terabyte or to two terabytes, both of which are off the charts . And this is this is the thing I was talking about earlier. You know, we know Apple's doing this on the on the Mac side and on iOS, et cetera, but Microsoft is doing it with Windows. This is the pain point . So they're addressing user concerns related to features they may be wanted like moving the taskbar around, okay, that's great . But they're also designing these things or designing all the system components so they take up less resources, they give up Rim or quickly . They'll do a little CPU boost for app launch speed, but then they'll go right back down . And this is going to help those who are staying with a computer they already own, which might only have, you know, hopefully not four, but they eight gigs or RAM or something . It will help PCMakers that now want to sell cheaper devices because the only way to do that is not to have all that RAM and storage in there . You know, all that add it later, right? These are all hardware . Yeah, so this is the right. This is the double ed swordged of these integrated SOCs is that's true with Apple Silicon. It's true of Snapdragon. It's true of the NVIDIA thing is coming. It's true of some like Lunar Lake, it was true, but it's not true of the Panthal Lake stuff for Intel . It is true with some of the AMD configurations as well. The RAM is integrated on the SOC, so you get what you get when you buy it and you cannot upgrade that . The rest of these computers are by and large much more upgradable than they've been in years. Meaning you can just take off the bike with normal tools , you can replace the SSD, the wireless module, the battery, you know, basically everything. I mean, but as an end user, you could actually upgrade certain components very easily . And I did that last year with a snapdragon laptop actually, right? When I did the SSD upgrade , but the RAM is integrated . So this is why this work is so crucial . And'll we get to that in a moment, but these things are tough because when I look at the prices of these computers , I would just never upgrade. There's no way . Plus, you know, two years is not a long, long time. One of the nice things about the Snapdragon stuff is that those laptops from two years ago are fantastic. They're still great. Day to day use, normal laptop productivity work. There's no difference x to x two. It doesn't matter. You can have the cheapest lowest end X one Gen plus whatever it's called. Actually it's called Snapdragon X . That thing's going to work great still. It's no problem there . But then the other little thing, you know, again, this is Microsoft because Microsoft, they're not Apple, you know, they're not Dell or Linova or HP. You know, they have trade in programs like everyone else. They do it through a third party . And one of the things I looked at was like, you know, if I got enough from my service laptop, I guess I would consider this upgrade . But the quote they're offering is like up to nine hundred dollars cash back with your trade in . And I have the second highest or what do you call it service laptop seven laptop you can get . So I'm thinking, okay, up to nine hundred, maybe I'll get seven hundred. No, three hundred eight andeen dollars and some is what I was gonna get. It's like yikes. Give it to a yep, yep. So we'll get to that in a bit. There's a little bit more I want to say about that. But Samsung could maybe coincidentally or not, also announced a new version of their really nice Windows laptop series. They have like Galaxy Book, whatever. So we're up to I think this one is Galaxy Book Edge , which is a this is crazy too. It's a sixteen gigabyte configuration, one terabyte of RAM, a storage sorry, for twenty one hundred dollars. Yeah , wow. Like I mean, yikes, it is a I think it's a fifty , fifteen point or no sixteen sorry, sixteen inch screen, but they're going to have a hard time selling these. Not because there's anything wrong with a laptop. This one, the surface stuff that they're all these are great computers, but these prices are too high for most people I think. And you know what? It just makes a lot of sense to wait a year . Yeah . It stinks that you can't upgrade more of it because you could make a case for low balling on if you could, you know, Ramon storage now just to get it and I can upgrade those one at a time, maybe over some period of time you can't. No, it used to be we'd just buy new SDDR for it and upgrade it, but that that time is passed. Will the year be enough, you think? I mean, will it will they ? Yeah, we don't know. So when this started going to be a long term problem. It's going to go through at least twenty twenty seven . The thing is every once in a while you'll see there are instances of sales and things, right? I've seen decent SSDs for good prices very briefly . So you could kind of time it for one of those types of situations . Look, I review over twenty laptops a year. I can only think of one laptop in the past, at least two years and possibly three where the RAM was upgrad . Even on systems where the RAM is not integrated into the SOC, it is almost always soldered onto the motherboard. And you just I don't understand this. I mean I do understand why they did it because that's technically that helps them create a thinner laptop . And RAM makers have come up with smaller like they're not called SO DIMS or whatever anymore. They're smaller modules that will help with that. They're probably similar to like a M two, whatever that is twenty two, forty, whatever those little cards, the little half sized cards . But they're not common. You don't see them a lot. I've only seen it on one laptop. So we're just not there. And I don't think we're ever going to get there on arm. I don't see that changing. I don't see it changing on the Apple side if it matters to anybody, but it's just, you know, where we're at. And it's too bad because I do think we could get a lot of us could get away with a slightly lower end configuration right now with the hope of upgrading later. It's kind of a nice thing that you can upgrade something and use it for longer and get, you know, and kind of keep that system going for longer periods of time. It's good for all kinds of reasons, right? But I don't know, this is I think it just's people going to look at that and go I'm going to wait and keep I can keep this machine you know I look at my studio too which is what two and a half years old and just pave it right he'll be happier with a pave . After two and a half years, all those software changes are like fatty food. That thing needs an angioplastic. It just needs to be blown out and it'll be good to go. Yeah , exactly. I feel very fortunate that I bought that framework desktop when I did with one hundred and twenty gigs of RAM because you could you would you'd be facing a car payment if you bought that thing today. But this is but the thing is the reason I mean you want RAM on the SOC because you want the bandwidth. You want to know I know that's what I mean. Like there are real benefits to it. There's no doubt about it. But the thing, you know, when Apple moved to the M series, Apple Silicon Chips , one of the question marks was, well, they do have these, you know, they have these big desktops at the time like the Power Mac . These are they can be configured in ways that are essentially like portable or not portable like workstation type computers. Will there be some version of them in the future where they offer dedicated graphics, you know ? And their answers is no. You don't leave in metal. Leave that. They're like, No, this is the way we're doing this. And so that was like a that was a minor thing. I mean, in some ways, you know, that but the RAM thing is a big one because that impacts everybody, right? And so when you have something like a MacBook Neo, which is inexpensive, but is only eight gigs RAM of, the fact that you can't even get a sixteen gig gig configuration is unfortunate to me. That was a showstopper for certain people. Well, it's interesting because the next gen iPhones are going to have to have twelve gigs of RAM so that they can run the Apple models. And yep, yeah. RAM is going to become suddenly a big deal. Yeah. Well, I'm the reason I feel good about the framework is because I had the thought a year ago maybe, I should have a central server and then I don't have to spend so much on the laptops. They can be thin clients connecting to something with more horsepower . And that's in fact what I'm doing. So I'm not so worried about RAM and the laptops anymore because all the work this is, you know, there are many ways where the big remain big and get bigger. And in the case of big tech, they maintain their market dominance or whatever. And that's one aspect of this, you know, where you have a bigger company like Apple or a bigger player like Lenova who are they buy it and they buy in volume. And so they get those discounts . But there's also we shouldn't discount the notion of like, well, run companies versus less well run companies. I mean, whatever anyone thinks of Apple, because Tim Cook with his little finger on the spreadsheet there knows exactly when memory prices change by a penny , probably bulk ordered RAM very early on, much order than a lot of company earlier than a lot of companies. And so they're benefiting from two things there, right, which is, you know, their size and the scope of how much they sell, but also just smart leadership. Like that really helps, you know ? And Microsoft is I don't know anything about who's running this and how smart they are about this stuff. It doesn't matter because they just don't sell enough. They can't. There's not much they can do to solve that for themselves. You know, this means we need memory futures market . I'm sure there is one . I'm pretty sure every gambling outfit that is what sports are today is also betting on the price of RAM, you know . Yeah Yeah , I yeah, sure . So look , all things end at some point. And I don't know that prices on RAM ever come down, but hopefully they likely will. I mean, the big issue here's the back orders, right? Like this is what Micron and all those guys were talking about is not that they're not going to jack up their production. They're going to raise it by twenty five percent or something because they've got a huge backlog that they don't think is ever going to get filled. The people that bought these orders are going to disappear . Yep , yep. And once that backlog starts to subside, you know, things will be different. Yeah. Well, I don't know. Yeah, I wish I would love some clarity here, but two years ago , Microsoft and Apple both did something that I thought was the greatest step forward and made so much sense and still does, but not when the prices are where they are, which was , you know, Microsoft has this minimum requirement in Windows eleven of four gigabytes of RAM, which is completely unrealistic and has been for years . And so when I write, you know, the Windows eleven field guide, whatever version, I mean, 'd have to figure it out. For several years , my recommendation has been like, you need sixteen gigs of Ramath at a minimum. That's the minimum. That's like a realistic minimum. Yeah . And then Apple, anyway, so CoPilot plus PC , that was the that's the minimum, right? So they have this spec ific it's a brand or whatever you want to call that I guess it's a brand, but it's also a specification. And one of the specifications you have to meet to get this is sixteen gigs of Ram. I was like, beautiful . Apple did the same thing when they moved to sixteen gigs of RAM as a minimum on Max at that time . Now they know they have an eight gig model again. But and I was like, okay, this is this is I like to see the minimum make sense. You know, it's common sense. Like it seemed like this was a good deal . Now two years later, we have a component crisis and we have computer makers selling or trying to sell computers with just eight gigs or REM that are brand new . Apple's doing it with like a phone chip. We have staff price point . Yep. Yeah, just you know, and okay, but both Apple and Microsoft and not for the first time in their histories are also looking at their platforms and going to release a major update to all of them that are basically just about making those things run better with fewer resources, right? It's the simplest way to say it. So when you think about the pain point stuff that Microsoft's doing, yeah, there are features like moving the task around. But really, the big stuff to me is all the we're actually going over the code with a fine tooth comb. We're going to like fix inefficiencies. We're going to let this thing work better with less RAM, less storage, less processor power, or whatever. You know, we have Snapdragon C chips coming on their arms side we have the wildlake is wild wild cat I guess or whatever the intel chip said is everyone's going to make these laptops and they're probably going to some of them on the window side will probably even come with four giga ram which makes me want to cry inside, but eight gigs around, whatever. What's going to happen with a four gig machine is it's gonna get returned? It's still expensive. You can't even imagine to be furious. I don't like four gigs or M and a VM , you know , but I mean whatever. But okay, I mean look different people have different needs. There is the one thing the qualifier I will add to this is that when I talk about computers, I'm talking about computers a human being will actually use every day. It's a primary device, right ? For some people, a computer like this is like the Chromebook use case in some ways, or at least it was in the beginning, other than like education or whatever is like a secondary device. You're doing spending most of your time on a phone probably . But every once in a while you need that big screen and your full size keyboard, get a type out something, whatever. If you're just using it occasionally , like for that kind of thing, a chromebook, a MacBook Neo, a eight, four, eight, but eight gigabyte Windows laptop. Yes. You spend three thousand dollars for something you used occasionally? I know yeah, that's the problem. So with the price, I know the prices are crazy. Buy another phone . But here's the thing the silver lining to this, the little flower going out of the shit storm, that is everything that's happening in our lives right now , is that this is the this type of situation is what drives innovation in a way. You know, when you are forced to make do with less , life finds a way. You know, the Jurassic Park thing, like we was just rereading, I'm gonna I'm working on this series of articles about whatever it's kind of tech hist ory thing, but I was reading about , you know, when the Vic twenty the Commodore Vic twenty came out in nineteen eighty or eighty one, whatever you that was , the norm at the time for things like the Commodore Pet or the Apple two TRS eighty or whatever it's like sixteen kilobytes or RAM . The IBNPC came up with a minimum of sixteen, but it was really, you know, more than that depending on where we were at. And they're like, yeah, we have this cute little computer. It's five K a RAM, and it's actually not even five K, it's really like three point five K RAM. And it can't even do a forty column text display. It's twenty two columns at best . It doesn't even have sprites, you know , but we can sell it for three hundred dollars, which was the price of an Atari twenty six hundred . And developers worked with what they had and made incredible arcade quality games on this thing . And that's what you do when you have to. And I have lived in a world where we essentially have infinite resources and certainly for the developers at Microsoft and maybe elsewhere act as if they do . And you write to this world where everyone has gigabytes of memory and gigabytes of storage and amazing processors and you don't really write tight efficient code anymore because you don't have to. No, no, and that's been true for a long time. Yep, because we're so this exacerbates it, right? I mean, the component crisis really drives this home. Like and then and then you throw in the LLMs where you can tell the tool, go find me resource savings . Yes, yes, definitely. Yes. And so it doesn't , you know, I'm not going to thank AI for ruining the world . But but there is, you know, there's always that other side of the coin, however you want to say that where yes, there's bad , you know, to this. But they also say that Vick twenty became the gateway drug to the sixty four. Oh yeah, I know almost nobody who loved their Vic twenty didn't immediately get a sixty four. There were a lot of them in closets . Yeah. Yeah, and actually the interesting thing about that history is that the Victor twenty three hundred bucks was in the market for maybe two years before the Competent sixty four came out. So the expectation from a lot of people was that well, , they'll replace the Commodore sixty four in two or three years and they didn't. You know? Yes, it was a one hundred twenty eight event. one hundred twenty eight, but it was a commodore sixty four with other stuff. And then that came and went and the Commodore sixty four kept going and that was thing in the market until their mid or at least early nineties. Well, it was the it was the happy size, right? Yeah, worked it was a nice yeah, it was a good combination of capabilities. And I so the stuff that's happening now will benefit everybody, right? So if you have to buy a computer and you're not going to get the thing you wanted maybe because the prices are so high , Apple, if you're on that side of the fence or Microsoft on this side, will are doing the work to make that make more sense, right in the sense that the OS will run better, et cetera . But if you already have a computer, that also means you can keep that thing running for longer, right? We're going to benefit that way. And if you do buy or have a computer with lots of RAM and lots of storage, you're still going to benefit from this stuff. I mean, it's all good. Like there's no downside to this . No , I've never met anybody with one hundred twenty eight gigs of RAM going, damn it, too much memory. I wish I had more RAM . Yeah . I can only run one hundred and seventeen VMs. I don't know what's going on here. Yeah, but God, the prices really, they just blow my mind. You could spend three thousand seven hundred dollars a on surface laptop . Yep . There was no planet on which that makes any sense. None. Like that is, that's insane. And the other thing Ultra's gonna be more, right? Yeah, fine. It's gonna be yeah. That's gonna be the next step up for sure. One thing I found, actually I'd say two things . Big fan of the Snapdragon stuff. I think I made that very obvious. Yeah. I still laugh out loud a little bit every time I open the lid just comes on. Love it. Efficiency, reliability, performance, the whole thing. It's great. It is astonishing to me and this happened a year ago when I bought that at the time, six hundred dollars Omnibook five with a base level Snapdragon X processor . This year, the version of that is an idea pad slim fifteen inch X two based, you know, X two plus based laptop, right? Where these are the these have the lowest end chip you can get in this processing family and they are wonderful, like they're wonderful . And here's a little kick you in the gut thing if you're a big fan of Microsoft Sur face , that fifteen inch idea pad, which is a Snapdragon X two plus, sixteen gigabytes of RIM, five hundred and twelve gigabytes of storage , which the surface will cost you seventeen hundred dollars . You can buy right now for eight hundred and fifty dollars , which is one half of the price of the service. One half . And it is the exact same internals. Yeah, that's what you're going to do if you want that thing. And the nice thing is a way to and by the way eight hundred and fifty dollars is an excellent price to pay for a laptop . Yes, it is the lowest in Snapdragon. But there's something magical about these chips where low end things work great. It is one of my well the year old X one nonplus version, the new X two plus idea pad are still among my favorite computers. Excellent seven years old, but yeah . Well , the laptop I bought was from a year ago, but yes, right. But it's they're like so these things have legs, they work great . You can save money by going down our market . You can't do that with surface. Like one of the problems with surface laptop is that you can choose between an X two plus and an X two elite . So you're like, well, let's save some money that way. If you go down to plus, you only get that one config, it's the sixteen gigabram five hundred twelve , but like I said, it's one seventeen hundred dollars . It's if you go to the X two elite, you only add one hundred dollars to the cost . So like saving one hundred bucks is like maybe you know I guess I would do it. But how about saving one hundred and fifty dollars? You know, get the you would get the Lenovo instead . Yeah. And I guess at least it's an option, you know, at least it's an option . You know, a year ago, the equivalent, like I said, was selling for six hundred dollars . Yeah . So even that's more expensive, but at least it's under a thousand dollars. At least . It's hard . And I noticed it seems like the default rate for these surfaces the X two s are sixteen gigs. And then you get it in Jade . In Jade, yes. Well, one of the many open questions here and they'll be answered in time as things happen because as we've been talking about , I feel like they're either going to have to change the CoPilot plus PC brand or make those features available elsewhere, which you know we talk about this and not just up the chain for people with high end GPUs, et cetera, but because PC makers are going to have to sell eight gig configurations that. Do meanes we're going to get a surface l aptop slash pro with AGRAM, which they've not announced yet , but probably will ? And if so, is that thing now not a co pilot plus PC because it doesn't officially need that . Or do you seize the specup, you know, we don't know. I don't know what I don't know what if that stuff actually works, right? Like that 's you don't just make an eight gig machine, you have to go through the full set of testing . Yeah, but if you think about like I don't actually know what the interaction is here. So if you think about a sixteen gig co pellet Plus PC, it has this forty tops or eighty tops MPU depending on the gen e. And you're running whatever local AI models to do things like super rez or so what do you call it like a super resolution upscaling or image creation in one of those photos or pain apps or background removal of whatever it is . If you have an eight gig machine and now you've updated the API so that those things can actually run against a CPU, a GPU, if you have an integrated GPU, an MPU, if you have that, whatever , how does that impact things? Like would it still just would it just work? Would it run a little more slowly ? Would it not work at all? You know, is the RAM that important? You know, Leo mentioned the phone thing like we've seen this with all phones, but Apple's, you know, every year now is raising the RAM and the phones because you need that, you know, it's this is always explicitly stated, you do need it for these AI operations, at least for them to run well, you know, it was remember when the Google had come up with the first Gemini Nano on device model and I think I guess it would have been the Pixel nine series of phones. It was on all of them, I think, yes. And then when the nine A came out, they were like, yeah, it only has eight zero ram. We can't put it on there . And everyone freaked out and complained. And they found a way. You know, life finds a way, I guess maybe it's not as capable , maybe it runs more slowly. I don't know, but they did kind of figure it out. Like I feel like that has to be part of what's happening Windows N aple, like all the Apple platforms. It's it's an interesting problem . Yeah . It's a fun and it definitely has messed with my need to replace this machine, this studio two because it's, you know, like I said, I think if I think I'll pave it if it really annoys me. It's getting a little weird now. So it's been two and a half years. So I think you expect it to get weird after a while. Yep . Look, I , you know, until two seconds ago, if you had an older computer, if you had I mean if you well, I was just going to say so you know, Windows eleven and just rough roughing it a little bit here. If you have an eighth gen Intel or equivalent processor new or you can upgrade to Windows Lot pretty much, right? There's exceptions in both directions. But let's make it simple. But if you have an older computer, six, seventh gen, whatever it is , the answer to date has been, you know, put Linux on there, you know ? You could work around that, right? I document ways to do that all over the place . I think someone who's technical enough to run Linux could handle that that . But then again , if you just made Windows more efficient , you know , I don't see them lowering the requirements or anything. We're not going to come wake up tomorrow and Microsoft. Yep. We're doing seven gen and six channel, know, you that's not gonna happen. But no anything that could kind of keep these things going longer is good. It's good for everybody. You know, like I said, I mean and spending a little time on efficiency is not a bad thing either. Right. There's almost no downside to that . Yep. Yeah, I mean, yeah, everyone , you know, Apple is Apple does this, you know, they did WW DC last week . If you were looking for splashy excitement, whatever, it might have been a little boring, you know , but in the sense that Apple fans can rationalize anything , the general consensus here is, oh, this is like what they did with Snow Liprid. They had this, you know, remember zero new features? They were celebrated for this, you know ? They took a year off from adding new features and just to fix all the problems they created . And then we celebrated them for that, you know ? Microsoft does the same thing guys. That's what Windows seven was just, I mean , we've done this multiple times. We've all done it. Very popular version of Windows. Yep, it was inarguably the most popular version of Windows ever . And all it was was Windows Vista with service packed permits sufficiencies. Yes, it was a service pack. I mean , and the people who made Windows seven hate hearing that, they don't want to hear that. They would argue it. But they just were wrong, but that's all it is. Yeah, they're just that's their position. I get it . So yeah, we'll see . I don't know. I'm really I'm curious this whole year is going to be fascinating. I'm just curious to see what happens next. I feel like any given day I could we could wake up and there will be news along these lines. There'll be some clarity someday on the you know, whatever the twenty six H one upgrade is, whatever the future of CoPilot plus PC is, whatever that NVIDIA thing is, and there will be lower end versions, et cetera, what the prices are, you know, we're going to learn all this stuff eventually . But I think I said this last week. I mean, you try to understand like why is Microsoft finally listening to feedback when they've been ignoring us for so long? And one of those things is, you know, well, you know, corporate customers obviously is a pretty obvious place where to go , but they could see this component crisis unfolding too. And they have this big bloated thing that's not very efficient. And God we could take a few months and actually fix this, like we should fix this . No, that would be the positive thing. But the other side of this is, like you said, all these producers are back ordered for data centers that may or may not be built. And if the bubble burst heavily and a whole lot of those data centers went away and the back and it' justs evaporated. These producers still be left holding bags on a whole bunch of very high end chips, the only things that are being ordered. Like we could easily see pricing tank . Yep, right. Like that. There'll be a mem ory glut that will be the exact same GPU glut. And all of a sudden you're going to be sitting there with your five thousand dollars laptop saying you bought that for what? Right. Well, or you'll be sitting there with your one thousand dollars laptop wondering why you can't upgrade the RIM. Yeah, which is a shame, I guess. But look, I wish the Wit Microsoft or maybe the PC world could market things like Apple does. But like one thing I think would be a good message that could come out of Microsoft, which is something Apple would have said at any given time with any update of anything, which is like , you know, Windows eleven, you know, whatever it is, twenty six H two because this is the one with all the efficiency stuff, built into it is like getting a new windows in your PC, you know, like is the way Apple would say it or whatever. You don't have to buy a new computer. You're gonna feel like you have a new computer because it's going to run so much faster . And the base configuration is going to be thirty two or sixty four gigs 'cause RAM is so cheap. Well, that would be the next one. Then you'll be that will be why you would upgrade, I guess, but you didn't get two hundred fifty six gig RAM in your laptop, what's wrong with you Boy, we can only dream . Yeah . One more ? So I just want to just real quick because at some point this year we're finally going to get these Google Book things. I think I mentioned this a week or two ago. Google , when they announced Google Book and then at IO, at least in the keynote , never said the thing I was looking for, which was what is this thing really? But then if you watch some of the sessions, like I did it for IO and Build then a week later , they actually just say this out right there like this is the next rendition. It's Chrome OS. It's just like we're changing the underlying platform. It's going to be Android based completely not. But it is literally going to replace Chrome OS. And we're calling them Google Books, whatever , but this is a replacement, right? And okay, and we're going to get these Android based laptops is how I would describe that, I guess. And this is similar in a way to what Apple did with iPad OS last year , but it's more than that, right? Because Google has had Chromebooks for many years and they've been successful for certain audiences. It's done well in certain places . But of course they also sell billions of Android devices every year. So this is bringing Android into a new place. This is bringing Android into my place, you know, meaning like where Windows is. And where Apple has a Mac, you know? And so it becomes a little more important. So yesterday they released Android seventeen and it's going out first on supported pixels . There's one feature in here that I think is kind of interesting . One of the worst things I ever enabled on my Android phones this would have been on a pixel. And actually I just saw this this past month or two . It's called bubbles. And the way bubbles have worked in Android or at least on Pixel to date has been you could use it in the messaging app . So what this means is say my daughter because this is what how it happened for me, my daughter texts me and you get a notification that comes down you get like a little badge, I guess, on the icon, right on the home screen. But you also get a little bubble. It's a circle on the screen. It's over everything that's with my daughter's face on it because she texted me . And I think I enabled it to see what it was like. You can turn on chaps bubbles. You don't have to have that. I hate so much . Yeah . And you can hear myself. We kind of get rid of it. So what would happen is my daughter's face would pop up. You think this would give me great joy. I didn't. It annoyed the hell out of me. And I would swipe her away and swipe her away and swipe her away until I finally figured out how to go and turn it off. And so in Android seventeen, they're adding this capability for all apps. And so you can turn any app into a bubble, which is not which is actually a way to mobile paranoid a small screen. It's called Ferrari. Yeah, it's both ferry. Free the bubbles. Free the bubbles. Yeah. So it's not a little circle, it's a little floating window. I mean I think it minimizes down to a circle or something, but it's like you can have a little floating window above whatever you're doing. So it's kind of like a way to do two things at once or wh atever . But if you have a bigger screen device, which today is basically just like a folding device , there's actually a bubble like toolbar or floating little toolbar thing where all the apps that are bubbl can appear in this little thing on screen. And I wonder if this isn't going to be a , you know, tablet slash Google Book, you know, laptop, whatever UI of sorts where it's just like a it's kind of like a new way to I don't know how new it is, but a different way to multitask which I think it' interestsing. I'm kind of curious now to see this, but it's nice to see people trying stuff, right? You always turn it off. Yeah, I guess it's sort of like the stage manager thing that Apple did, you know, where are like, oh, this is exactly what I want. And most people like, oh, what is this thing? No, stop . Like, you know , so some people just latch right onto it. And then some people are like, oh, like, you know, so we'll see. I don't know how successful this will be, but interesting . It's the kind of thing that users would not approve of. It's kind of the one thing you don't really want in your operating system is interesting . Yeah , I've spent a lifetime removing notifications and other annoyances and you have found another way to float something above what I'm doing. Like this is not what I want you doing. Yeah, that's for me. There's always another pop up. But some people are like, nice . Well, that's the thing. I mean, you don't know until you put it out there whether or UI improvements. The problem is always going to be someone who likes these things, right? The question is, is it going to be a mask part ? The person who made it maybe their mother, but that's exactly . I'm so proud of you. Oh, do you use them? No, no, it's terrible. I didn't know. My boy invented liquid glass. I'm so proud of him . I hung it on the refrigerator. I sent him a message about it every day from my blackberry. I just must Allen Di is such a good boy Ladies and gentlemen, you have tuned in to the fabulous Windows Weekly program with Mr. Paul Thrott , mister Richard Campbell. I just say that in case people stumble upon us and don't know . Sure. What's going on? Well, if you like me, you suffer from short term memory loss, so you have no idea who I am. Who am I? What am I doing here? He's just bad on the screen. Why is he in a bubble? I feel it coming, you know? It's like Game of Thrones, Witter is coming. Yes. I just feel it coming. The other day, Lisa and I were sitting there and I'm going, you know, that thing I take every day, I put it in my water. What is it? It's called, what is it? It's for the muscles. It helps your memory . The thing that helps my memory? I can't remember it. That's amazing . And then you know, and then five minutes later, we're in the middle of a meeting like go creatine . she's like, I've been asleep for two hours. What are you doing? It's sad . just I find me a lmoryoss of Turtles. It's set of a split creatine. It's a good combination. It helps your memory . I heard myself getting out of bed. I heard my ankle going down the stairs here. Like I banged, not the normal way, like twisting it. I just banged it on like a stair and now it's cute . It hurts right now. Yeah. If I think too hard about a part of my body, it will start hurting . Not to mock him, but Jeff Jarvis injured himself seriously making the bed. No , I know . So I saw him by the way ten years ago, I would have made fun of that. When I saw him , I saw him post about that. I was like, I get it. I was like, I'm like, I'm not serious . Yeah, I'm not gonna make fun of this. I'm like, this is I could pitch you doing this . Well, it's why I don't make the bet anymore. That's right. Yes, that's it. That's an excuse. That's right. That's right. Many household accidents begin with bed liking. Why do you ever make the bed you like Jeff Jarvis Huddington? Minder, it's dangerous . So Topia two has come home to Disney plus. Let's go. Get ready for a new case. We're gonna crack this case and prove we're victorious partners of all time. New friends. You are Gary Desnake. And your last name, Desnake. Dream Team , the new habitats. Utopia has a secret reptile population. You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home. You're clearly we're gonna at Zutopia too. Now available on Disney plus rated PG . Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha rappuccino drink? Or a sweet vanilla? Smooth caramel maybe? Or a white chocolate mocha? Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks rappucino drinks buy fore gverroc youer your . Rayman Meta lets you explore the world without a screen getting in the way, so you can stay present in the moment. Hey Meta, tell me what kind of dessert this is. That's a stroop waffle, a Dutch waffle with spiced syrup in the middle. Is it sweet? Yes, perfect for a snack or dessert. Mm , delicious. Get answers on the go without interrupting your flow. Ray Ban Meta, iconic style meets Meta AI, available at Walmart and other authorized retailers. All right, let's talk about software that's next on the agenda. Mr T . Yeah, so just a couple things . App release, I don't really normally don't have a place in the notes for this per se. Sometimes there'll be like there's always an app pick, but sometimes there's like two or three things that happen. So it's like, I don't know how to handle this exactly. But sometime, a couple of months ago, Google announced that they were moving to a two week lease cycle for Chrome , because everyone loves installing browser updates . And then the most part you don't notice them, they just happen, right? Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, sometimes you get the little prompt thing where it's like, Hey, you should reboot and get the latest version. I guess if you just reboot it, it will leave it too long. That dot goes from green to yellow to red to exactly . Yeah. But when they did that, I speculate like Microsoft's going to have to do this for each. It's based on Chromium. You know, it makes sense that it would follow the same release schedule and it will. So they said starting in late August with version one hundred fifty two, they're going to move to a two week schedule for Edge as well. So okay, that's fine. Did you build a chromium? Depply new version of Edge. Yeah, I mean, it's just the way to do it, right? So nothing. I mean, it makes sense. Mozilla, which is on their own schedule, I think I think they might be sold on a six week schedule somehow, but if not, it's four weeks, but I bet it's six. They're obviously like it's more often than that, even Yeah, that's why I said that I feel like it might expect maybe there was four now, but some of this might be because of mythos like they're they keep finding bugs . Yeah, I mean this isn't why you do it like every two weeks, but if you think about it, if you want to spread out those bug fixes, you know , rather than dump like one hundred and twenty seven fixes in a single . The more you do it, the better. I think nowadays you want to do it as quickly as possible. Some of these men . Yeah, no, one hundred percent. And this is why when I was talking about Windows upfront, it's like really I feel very strongly security updates should be separate from future updates every month in that yes . You can make a compelling case for why someone would have to install a security update right away . The feature one is like I don't know feature it's just a feature like this could wait, you know . So maybe features a browser, honestly . But yeah, so browsers have been, you know, browsers are all, you know, what do they say edges like version one hundred and fifty two? And actually coincidentally, Firefox just released or Mozilla just released Firefox one hundred and fifty two. So weird . Yeah . And look, it's new settings interface, which looks great, by the way , you can get on a waitlist now for that smart window feature, which I just got into, by the way, it's pretty cool . But they've been talking about a lot of the work they're doing. They're doing the pain points thing in a way. I mean I think a lot of Firefox users either left because they couldn't take it anymore or have just been frustrated with Mozilla not doing what it is they want in this thing. And so they they've been working very hard on this stuff. And I really do like the way they're doing things. They're very transparent, etc , et cetera . So Firefox one hundred and fifty two is the latest in a string of releases where it's adding these things they've been talking about, but now they also have a public roadmap you can go look at to look at what they're planning for the rest of the year and beyond, right? And there's some major things like that Nova user interface refresh, the smart window thing I mentioned . And then some other stuff that they haven't really talked about per se. So they have like a free VPN that's on the desktop version that's coming to mobile. There's containers for multiple accounts. There's a power saving mode , you know, for reducing their resource uses in tabs, which other browsers do obviously . Lots of stuff. So if you care about Firefox , there is this new release and they do have a roadmap so you can see but not to see but also provide feedback on what it is they're planning for future releases as well. So I think this is in keeping with the whole open source we care about the community thing. So that seems good to me. Yeah, I use Zen so I'm at one hundred and fifty one but behind by one, but I guess I'll get into it. So Zen wait, Zen That's a Firefox spin. This is the arc like Firefox, right? Yeah, it's basically Arc, right ? Yeah. I really the more I use it, the more I like it. Yeah . So I've been using I talked about this last year. Tell me about another brand. No, well, it's the one I told you about last week. So brave the one I ignored. Yeah. Brave origins Origin , which I always want to call brave origins for some reason. Like it's a new Spider Man movie or something. Starring Melt Gibson. Yeah . It 's brave with all the brave stuff in it. You know, the brave UI stuff , which I like . I still haven't got is I don't think it's happened on iOS yet. I'm kind of curious about it on mobile . The one thing I do , I've talked about this helium browser, which I love, but the only thing that helium, well, two things that helium doesn't have is any form of sink. And I mean, there's not even a way to export settings and import them. There's nothing. And that has to happen eventually , but there's also no mobile client . And mobile clients are tough because Apple, especially with Google two, restrict what you can do there . And I'm kind of hoping that changes, but brave , excuse me, has both . And so it I don't know, I kind of go back and forth, but I'd be the Brave Origins thing has been good, I would I would say . So I'm a fan because I likedc. A Ir'm a fan of the Yeah. You like the tab thing on the side ? The vertical tabs. And then they also have these groupings that are so they have essentials, which is this what is this called? It's like a sidebar, like yeah, sidebar. The essentials are, I think you get sixteen or three by five . So twelve that never go away. Right. These are like pinneds basically. Yeah, they're well, but then these are pinned. So you even have more right. I mean, you but can organize those in some order. Right. I have coding news, social shopping, AI. So I think you have a different sidebar for each thing. If you want to project new sidebars, et cetera. Yeah. When I'm doing my news gathering, I can go right there . And then yeah, I mean, I just and it has the icons down here, but I never remember what anything is. So I just I really like that organization and then it slides out of the way when I'm on a page. That's the thing the thing I really like about the most honestly is when it's not there, you know, which is a goofy thing to say. Like it's there when you need it, but when it's, you know, most the typical browser UI takes up some space at the top, you get tabs, the dress bar, et cetera, or on the side, whoever you do it. But I like yeah, I like it not being there. Like I like having the whole screen for the looking at it. Well, in fact, for the shows, I need a browser that has the least amount of chrome . Yeah, you almost you want to run it full string basically. Yeah. I don't I don't want any additional stuff , you know, taking up space. So of course Zen does that as well. So that's why I like So this I just want to be clear. You see this is the like the essentially arc for firefox. This is the firefox it's a firefox spin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's very fire foxy. In fact, like I said, it's it's a firefox . So it does benefit from what Mizule ton . Yeah essentially Yeah, you got the it's really I think just a UI on top of Firefox. Yeah . Okay that's and you know it's a little you know the nice thing about Chromium browsers they seem like they're much faster fr,ankly. I If said to you that like, imagine you wake up tomorrow and Mozilla has purchased or acquired or whatever people, and this is gonna become fire . Very hot or was that okay? No, I'd be very happy. Yeah. Yeah. I like Mozilla. I would use Firefox Plane, but I want these additional UI features. Yeah, that's why. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I think that would be good. I think they should, yeah, this is the thing. It's an open source project so people can take it. I mean, so is Chromium, but the problem is it's sort of quasi open source because of Google's involvement . So when Google says no more manifest V two and you buy chromium like chromium, everybody has to do it. I feel like one hundred percent of the companies or organizations that use Chromium, the first thing on their bullet point is get rid of all the Google stuff . You know, even though it I mean, it's stripped down yeah, you know, but you can I mean, you can I think they kind of try to hide it or there's an ungoogled chromium, but that's very different than chromium. Chromium doesn't make any sense. It should be completely degled fide. No, but it's not because guess who runs the chromium team? Guess who the engineers are they all work for . com email addresses. I know that you know. Yeah, they all work for Google. So yeah, there's an ungoogled Chromium . But again, I want the sync. I want and this has sync it uses firef ox Sync. So that's right. So Firefox has zero syncing. That's great. The one thing I like about Brave, one of the things I really like about Brave, which is a little off putting at first for people who just don't understand it is that they have sync, but it's not acc ount based. Rave does not have your account information. You're doing peer to peer sync. So yeah, it has one long string of things. I know it's crazy. It's a twenty five word thing. I email it to myself all the time. Right. It's like when I have a new browser, but it's not controlled by any works well . It's not it's never going to be attacked. You know, no one can get it. I really like it. Yeah. I like that. Yeah, no, I think that they've got that down. I think that's quite good. There's a lot of things to like about Brave. And but you know, I like to not like too. I mean , I just basically want to support something besides Chromium . Right. You know, Brave's based on Chromium. I want to, I think there should be other browsers stand ards . So let's talk about the big AI segment on today's show . I am delighted to announce . I mean , I mean it, like delighted. I went over the note, I went over the last weeks of news twice because I was like, this can't be right. There is no major AI news that impacts our audience anyway. Paul, my biggest AI story is maybe the biggest tech story of all time. Right, which does not impact Windows doesn't impact Windows users at all, which tells you something . And that plus I hate line, so I don't I just don't care. No, that's not the cursor story. I'm talking about Fable. I'm talking about the White House. Mythos shut up. I thought you were actually talking about the SpaceX IPO? Okay. Oh, SpaceX . Yeah, last week was a crazy week. But there's so acquisition of I mean, the blocking of fable by the White House is a huge, in my opinion, if you think AI is important and the most powerful AI model out there and there's no mind question being like Mythos a mythos scary. I think Mythos is a bigger deal than Fable. Fables public facing mythos was fixing software but let's be clear. It's the same model The only difference is Fable has more blocks, more safety . That's classifiers . There is more guards. But if the inside model is shutting down Mythos when all of these companies are trying to fix their software . Right. It's a huge that's right. So that's a that to me that okay, that's fair. All right, but don't worry because we're going to be covering it in just a little bit on intelligent machines effect , there is a website called freefable . org makes a very strong case for why it is wrong for a government to block it . And the guy who wrote it is Alex Stamos, who we know very well. Alex is a very well known security guy. He'll be our guest at two PM to explain interesting why this is is ansue. Mike Maznick on TechTir today I think gave us a smoking gun that it's actually political . And it's , you know, by the way, this I mean, what a shock. This is why I didn't write about it. It's actually more simply. It's peak on the part of the president based on it's a long story. We'll tell it at two PM. So , if you're looking for like a shining star of light in the darkness that is our world right now, the thing to remember when it comes to politics is that everything terrible this guy has done has been reversed by some cord or some , you know, whatever. Pretty much like it's ninety something percent, ninety seven percent, it's a high number. And you know, the terribleness is always going to be temporary. I don't think this is illegal. I think the Commerce Department does have the right to say foreign outside of evidence. I figured on Monday Manthropic would have filed a case if they were going to do anything about and they did it. They have. They're trying to negotiate out of it. You know, anthropic might consider moving to the EU to throw it out there. Well, this is what's going to happen is that this is now a clarion call to China, the EU, and everybody else . You better come up with some AI models that the U. S. cannot shut down because you're always going to be at risk of that. There was news that China probably did gain access to mythos at some point . Almost if briefly, I don't know, but access to using it. I don't think access to stealing it. Sure yeah having used Fable for two days , it was clearly shoulders anything out there. This was personally big news for you. That's true. You were rewriting our Twitter sales system out in the middle of it and it said, this model no longer available. What? Did I not pay my bill ? Look, the feel good AI story of this year, well, I guess there are a couple, but the big one to me was just starting with Firefox using this to fix problems at a time when hackers are increasingly going to use AI to cause problems . Yep, is so smart and so necessary and so great, you know ? Well and I don't think it's a coincidence that Microsoft had its largest patch Tuesday in history last week. It's not coincidence. It's not at all coincidence . So these are all very, very good things . And now they've impaired it that have been completely shut down. That's weird because I can defend almost anything else our government does. Well, that's why it's lost. You don't see any news coverage of it. It's too technical and it's completely lost. We've been beaten over the head . Well people are like more worried about the color of the reflecting pond than they are about what I think is hugely consequential from a techn ology point of view. Yeah. But it's a technology story, and I don't think they really most people don't know. So what? I still got chat GBT. What's the big deal? So anyway, I don't want to ruin your perfect record . There will be no AI talk on a show . No, it's fine. Yeah, I just didn't see an angle from there is an angle. And we're going to come right. You're right. You have an eye shut. You are correct. This is Windows Weekly ladies and gentlemen. Do not mistake it, mister Paul Thorat, mister Richard Campbell, and now the thing really you care the most about. Oh, would you jump with a whiskey ? No . Oaksbox, dude, Xbox. Yes, yes. The other drug. There's no there's no theme song for whiskey. There's theme song for Xbox though. Play the Xbox theme. Okay, but you have a standalone thing now. I mean, I don't know. If we're competing, I feel like you're in a pretty good position, Paul . Lady Sub boys and girls . Master chief, it's time for the Xbox segment. Yeah, there's a lot of Xbox news , a lot of Xbox news. A lot of it boy. Most of the yeah . Get business done with the new American Express Graphite Business Cash Unlimited card with unlimited two percent cash back on all eligible purchases, unlimited five percent cashback on flights and prepaid hotels booked through American Express Travel Online, and a flexible spending capacity that can grow with your business, you'll have the confidence to keep building. Apply today and earn a welcome offer of one thousand five hundred dollars cash back after you spend fifty thousand dollars in qualifying purchases on your new card within the first six months of card membership. Terms apply, learn more at go. Mx slash graphite . These days , you've got two choices buying a new car or making the one you've got run like new. We know which one we'd choose. That's why at Firestone Complete AutoCare. We have thousands of ASE certified technicians nationwide trained to spot an issue with your car before it becomes a problem, no matter the make or model. Get more out of your car. Firestone complete auto care . Call or go online at Firestone Auto. com to book today Do you hear that? Sounds like breakfast is ready. Because Quakers coming in hot with morning nutrition one hundred percent whole grain oats and a good source of fiber to fuel the rhythm of your morning and kick start your day . And that sounds absolutely delicious . Fuel to start whatever's next . Quaker, official sponsor of FIFA World Cup twenty six. Let's go . So look , we've been talking about this to some degree, but But I feel like it's gonna get worse. I don't know. The last I'm going to say let's say, I would say ever since the pandemic ended, the pandemic never really ended. It kind of just drifted off there. At least our attention spended, but the video game market has been tanking , right? We all know this. There's been studio closures, layoffs , all kinds of stuff. Big problem all around. I mean , Xbox as the I don't know, I hate to say it this way, but in some ways the smallest player in the smallest part of the video game market has suffered incommensurately to some degree. I mean, this is the way it is . You know, they had a Phil Spencer and that Sarah Bond and that leadership group that were doing what they could do within the confines of the company that owns this business and try to make sense of it, et cetera . I don't want to discount the good that Phil Spencer did because he made Xbox make sense to Microsoft during the cloud era , convincing Satch and Nedella that this could this would work, you know , and this is game pass, right? We've had the studio acquisitions turning Xbox from kind of a console first business into more of a game studio published business where Mojang first is small minecraft, but influential. And then Bethesda with all that stuff, you know, they own ID and whatever else they own everything. There's a bunch of stuff in there . And then of course activision, blizzard. And today, and I think it was Ashle Sychumer who said this Xbox as we now call it, all capital letters is the second biggest game publisher on Earth, right ? By nature, to be that thing, you have to be cross platform . It's just the way it is. But we also know that we're having a flurry of Richard Campbell promo images through the industry just gone incredibly distracting because they are spectacular . These guys are insane. District destructive distracted these are fantastic. Sorry I'm derailing myself. So that's what I do. Well, you have a themed song. He's got billboards. That's fair. So by the way, I love the one. He's got Clippy on his t shirt sitting down here in the loch . I feel like we need to get him that t shirt . So anyway , look, the comparison I've made at some point, I don't remember where I made this now, but because it was like two days ago and I can't remember the fireback. But you know, we talk we have talked about how when Sacha Nedela came in and became the CEO of Microsoft . Kind of sort of the dynamic there was and Steve Balmer has talked about this more recently is that he basically continued what Microsoft was already doing under Steve Balmer. The whole cloud first thing started with Balmer . But because Balmer a known quantity, had been down on certain things for so long or promoted certain things for so long. The message was never going to fly from if it came from him, you know? Yeah. No, there was just an acknowledgement of that was the reality, right? Yeah, he was going to be an impediment to a lot of microphone becoming cloud centric. Right. And many, many leaders of companies would have had too big of an ego to have done what he did, you know, and to step down and let it happen. You know, and so Microsoft's market cap for you guys, I guess , you know, market cap and net worth essenti ally has skyrocketed in the Snatch Nadella by doing what Steve Ballmer was doing, right? It's kind of an interesting thing. I feel like there's something to this with this leadership change in Xbox, right ? That logically speaking , you could say, look, this is the world the way it is. This is what we have, this is how it's going. This is what we were going to do. What would you change? And the answer is nothing. You're doing what you can do. And I've said this many times. I feel like these guys , this new team, there's not much you can do big, you know, big changes. You're not going to do some major left turn thing and save the business , you're going to continue down the same path . And the problem is that may not work . There may be no saving this for all kinds of reasons. Microsoft is a big company for this to make sense, you know, there are parts of Xbox or all of Xbox that might make sense as a stand alone entity or as smaller companies where a game doesn't sell particularly well, but that's fine for a smaller company. It might not be fine over here at Microsoft or, however you want to phrase this, you know ? And I feel like what we've seen is a very public rationalization on her partner, her leadership team's part Asher ma, that is of them trying to understand this process, right? I like how public they've been about what they're doing and what they're thinking even, right? Phil Spencer was good at this too, but like just kind of , you know, and they've made a couple of I don't know Xbox fan centric decisions, you know, to cheer people like we're, you know, we're going to be we're going to do another console, which they're already doing or, you know, making people happy with that kind of stuff. But the reality is this business is still what it is and it's going to, it has the same fundamental problems like a woman in this case or a new person running the show doesn't change anything. Like she still has to, you know, it's still what it is. And so Microsoft's fiscal year ends on june thirtieth, so it's less than two weeks away or about two weeks away . Microsoft's next fiscal year starts on july first . And this is the time when we historically make big changes, including things like layoffs and so forth. So it's hard to know like separate the kind of fact from rumor at this point . A lot of stuff is going on, but she's talked about things like having a big reset over the next , you know, whatever it is . She had the first hundred days and I think that was her evaluating the business, the next hundred days are going to be about this reset. Was she brought in to be the hatchet person? See, this is this, it's interesting you say that because within the past twenty four hours, I read something about her that thought went through my brain finally like, wait a minute . What if this is why she was brought in? She's the Nick Bilton of Nick Spokes. She got to hope that. That's a that's a very insight accurate Nick Bill, he's running sixty minutes and a former Twitch panelist, which cracks over . Was he like was the New York Times? Yeah, and when he was at the tech guy at New York Times, we had him on Twitter all the time . Yeah, not as beloved on that side. Well, we'll see what happens. But look, I've made the point that if you think about Xbox as a game publisher, it is what I would simply you could say is stack division, you know, I mean, Activision plus Bethesda plus Mojang, I guess or whatever, right? Plus Xbox whatever the studio games you already had, but Activision essentially is a profitable business, right? They sell for all the platforms, they do whatever they do. It's good, you know? Oneiv actision never did any kind of game passive thing. They were never going to do that. They just came up with big games and sold them. That's that was their business. It worked great . They they had no interest in the stuff that and some of the stuff that Xbox has done with them and now it's starting to back away from with call of duty. But you know, the whole blizzard line, which was where the war craft is recurring revenue model, like they had both businesses . Yeah, but they didn't have like an all in all up, probably want to say it's subscription service. They didn't have activision online where it was everything. You know, like they would do it for individual franchises where it made sense. I never got the sense that they unified those entities together at all, like that was never a thing. Blizzard was Blizzard, Activation was activation . Yeah, that could be. Look, I'm speaking from just looking at call of duty, I guess, like it's been different over years and the strategy has changed a little bit. But for quite a while, they moved to this model where you know there'd be a new college to game every year. To make that happen, they had three different studios working on these games. They got so big and they're expensive to make and they're hard to make, you know , but they would sell you a game. And for a long time, that game was fifty and then sixty dollars ninety cents, and you played it for a year , but they would also have these downloadable content drops, right? These map packs and all these things, DLCs, right? So for several years, they had a, I think they call it like a season pass at one point or whatever where you could spend sixty bucks on the game, but then you could spend another sixty bucks on that season pass and you would just get those things as they came out . Plus Manny Baster is that kind of thing. So that's not a subscription service, but it is a way to make money from dollars for product . Yeah.. So yeah So you go from sixty dollars a year for a big part of the fanbase because there are hundreds of millions of people that buy this game . And then you double it by having the season pass. And then you get it to Microsoft and it's like we just start in the game pass and we'll make it up in the volume or something. I don't know what the theory was, but it didn't it just didn't work out obviously. So look there look, there are going to be layoffs. There's no doubt about it. There are going to be studio closures . There are going to be games that are cancelled . Have they if they do go forward with this next console, which they say they are, it's going to be expensive. We just talked about all this Cabota crisis stuff. I mean, it's going to be this is all a problem, right? So I do feel like over the past two weeks or so they've been kind of setting the stage for what's to come. So we haven't had the ball drop, so to speak yet. We don't have all the details . But there's some weird stuff going on. So I don't know if it was two weekends it's not last weekend but the weekend before was the game showcase they did which was, great . At least one of the games they announced is probably not happening now . They literally showed it off like this month and that would have that's the third hellblade game, the Shinua title that is from the speaks to a lack of a plan then for some reason . I do feel like a lot of this is a lack of a plan. You always think like the people who are in charge of whatever it is businesses or countries or whatever, you know, know what they're doing and you know there's smarter than me in some way or something. Like I struggled to understand how call of duty, especially but activision blizzard whatever would make sense financially within Microsoft and within Xbox and within the game pass system . And it's hard to really come up with this is how many they have to solve for that to make sense because you don't really have all the numbers to do that math. But I never saw it making sense . I don't mean to say it's gratifying to be proven right. I actually wanted to be proved wrong on that one, but what eventually happened was what I thought was should have happened from the beginning was like this will never make sense. We have to pull call of Duty out of the system. It just doesn't make sense . Maybe game pass can make sense without Call of Duty, maybe Call of Duty makes more sense without game passing . Whatever. So this is a bunch just a bunch of just the bad bad news. And we're we're also coming back to this kind of thought that maybe this thing should be spun off or maybe part of always comes around every so often. Yep . And this is something I've debated myself over possibly twenty years, you know, that would Xbox be better or worse without Microsoft, you know, as a from a kind of branding perspective, it doesn't make a lot of sense within Microsoft. They've talked about , you know, the phone experience, the PC experience, the living room experience, right? And that and by the way, I think those are all attempts that happen over a period of time to make that thing make sense within the Microsoft of that day, right? Yeah . You know, look, we 're so critical of this stuff, but you have to understand there are people who mean well and hopefully are smart, but they're trying to make sense of it within the context of what they have to work with. And so like we go back to like the Xbox one and this was when they said, you know, it's like, oh, it's an entertainment machine. It's not just games. It's gonna be video and music and blah blah blah whatever. I mean, that's not because they hated video games. They were trying to make it, you know, trying to make it work, you know? Yeah. Instead, but I feel like but if they'd stay doing what they're doing, that was going to fail too. It's also punted on the dev side of gaming too. You know, they for a while they had was it XDR where they had a stack you could work through studio to deploy to the Xbox. Yes. At one point, they probably could have bought unity, but never did. And God knows he couldn't now. And again, that would be another angle of rationalization of, hey, we are about developers and developers make games like make that part of it as well . But I mean the argument looks down and I think in the sense of Xbox has never been weaker as a connection to Microsoft as it is right now There's even calling her a CEO for crying out loud. I know. Well , interesting . Yeah, so we often talk about how tough it was for Windows when Microsoft was right cloud centr ic, it didn't really fit into that world, you know ? And you see these sort of I would call them semi tenuous connections, right? Like Windows three hundred and sixty five. Yes, there is a business use case for this just as has always been for things like terminal server or whatever. Yeah, of course. But this was not going to be the future Windows, you know , not anytime soon . And it's just, I feel like it's something that happened because it had to happen because we're cloud now and that's what we do. It has to be on Azure and you know that kind of stuff. Game pass , but in a way because subscription service, but I would say game streaming, especially is failed but trying to make sense of it being a cloud thing and it's like it's kind of tenuous. So is Xbox real sin that it doesn't have a good AI story now? Is that what it's? Yes, it is actually. That's my point. Like the interesting thing about the AI era now at Microsoft is that Windows becomes important again. And that's kind of neat for me personally because that's what I care about. So great. Okay, yeah. I don't like most of what they've done with AI and Windows for sure, but that's not really the point. The point is Windows is getting attention. And we also know it's getting some good attention, right with the pain point stuff. So this has been a good year for Windows What are you doing? I mean, other than using AI to make games, which by the way, no one wants to know you're doing or hear that you're doing that. They hate it so much. Yeah. And I don't understand . If you don't do it, you don't stay in business . Exactly. It blows my mind how the one thing , not the one thing, but one of the things that would benefit the most from AI , the creation of games, right? For all the reasons we've already discussed the multiplayer maps that are like the best maps that it ever made or the open world games where it's like infinite number of side quests and new towns and people and scenarios and whatever it is , AI would make this so much better . And my God, this audience is like, don't you dare mention AI when you dare do this. For better or worse, the way those tools were presented has made it very easy for everyone to hate it. Yes. Yeah, the marketing augmentation to talented people to try to make great things. It's been replacing everybody. You have I feel like there are people this is like it's like the Red Scare in the nineteen fifties, right ? In Hollywood where they blacklist actors because of whatever for made up things mostly , where there are people, I feel like people are booting up games to be like, oh, I think that might be AI generated . Let's complain about it. And then there are multiple examples of game studios admitting to this, apologizing , and then pulling it out so they can have human beings recreate the artwork or whatever it is, the assets to please these people . And I'm sorry, you just made this business unprofitable. It is and I've seen camp, you know, whole game ass studios are like everything and done, everything human done. Like that's the thing . Look , there will always be that we'll call it artisanal. I don't know maybe there's not a good word for this, but there'll always be that thing. There are very fun games that look like they were drawn by hand or something. They have a cute, you know, a nice kind of visual style that is feels handmade or maybe not old. I don't mean to say old fashioned but kind of classic look to them, whatever it might be you know, yeah, made by made by hand. You're really serious about making games. You'd be picking up the electrons one at the time with chromium tweezers and sticking them in the USB key. This using keyboards and computers, it's all cheating. It's not real. Wait, I'm sorry, you're not programming in zero ones. Why don't you care about the hardware? Yeah, I don't get this. I have a big problem with this, but anyway, this is the world Microsoft's trying to navigate or in this case . It could have led in, and it doesn't seem to be what's happening. No, so we're having these conversations again, you know , ahead of what will no doubt be massive layoffs The CEO and chief of staff of Xbox Games Studios, which is their game publishing arm, which is , I think most of the business just resigned . They were probably out of the book. Did he get an offer to resign rather than be fired or did he choose not to be a part of the layoffs? Yeah, probably both, right? Or one of the one or both, right? Okay, and these are people who both of them came from Rare at the game studio. They've been at the job for less than a year and a half . Okay , so there's that? Great There was a report in the Verge, I think yesterday and it only cited a single source, which I hate, but I feel like anyone could forward an email, okay, fair enough, whatever. But supposedly, they have closed ninja theory which is the game studio games that makes hell blade, right? They're one of three that have been recently rumored to be closing But it's not clear if it's actually happening because since then I've seen other stories that had said that these studios are now negotiating with Xbox slash Microsoft to either become independent , you know, buy the company out and just go with their own thing, become a smaller thing. The other two by the way I'm sorry, double fine and compulsion . Double fine made psychoonuts, right? That 's a series of games. I don't believe I've ever played them. And then We Happy Few, which is kind of one of those fun cartoony looking games with Scompulsion Games none of this is official, no this has been announced, but the Ninja Theri one, like I said, is kind of weird because they just showed up to the hellblade game. Yeah There is this Phil Spencer used to speak about this . If you look up this company, I'm not going to remember the years. They don't remember numbers like this, but those the first two games came out over a period of many years. You know, the first one might have been two thousand four or something, the second one was like twenty seventeen . I'm getting that wrong maybe it's twenty seventeen, whatever the numbers are, but they're they're not like every year or two or three. They're like they're kind of spread out and that might be part of the problem too, right? You want to one of the things with Xbox is they've gone through entire holiday seasons. They've gone through con sole launches where they didn't have any Marquis titles to mark, you know, to bring out for the thing, you know, for their latest console. This is kind of a big problem. Like you want all these studios like what are they doing? Like you got to get games out too, you know? Yeah I presume there was a plan to pull all these entities together. Yeah, I think it was to rationalize game pass right I mean this whole push was to get recur ring revenue into Xbox . Yes, right . Yeah , I mean , fundamentally a major component of any subscription service is that some percentage of that population is paying you every month or every year or whatever it is for something they do not use ever , right? Yes. A lot of people will pay for these things because they think they're going to use it and don't, or they think they might need it, but then they never do. Or in the case of Xbox Game Pass when it originally was announced, it was people forget what this was like, but if you think back to the beginning of Netflix as an online service, this was a thing that used to mail red envelopes to your house with a disc in it and you'd play a DVD and you ship it back. And you could get like two at a time or something and you know, whatever the deal is, who cares? But then they added this subscription service kind of like an add on thing and it was a monthly cost. It was cheap. The content they had in the beginning was terrible . And it was not even B level. It was like C level content, right? It was like filler mostly. Over time, they developed it and turned into something pretty special, honestly, and now they're screwing it up with price likes and whatever else. But the deal for Xbox was a little bit better because there were still lots of really good games out there that just weren't making money now because we've moved on. It's been two, three, five, whatever number years. Those studios have made later games, newer games, whatever, and those are selling. But they have this IP or these games that are sitting there not making money. And so Microsoft could go to these companies and say, look , just throw this thing in Xbox game pass and we'll give you some percentage. Look, it might be low , but it's more than zero. You know, it doesn't cost anything. It doesn't hurt you to do that anything now. Yeah. And I always kind of appreci ated that because I feel like gaming is gaming I don't know if this's totally unique, but semi unique in that there is this body of content out there that most people have never seen and might be delighted by in many cases and maybe that's how strong nostalgic pull like yeah, but I think Steam owns that space so much more deeply than Microsoft does. But this you know, people compare it game to past like the like a Netflix of gaming, which is slightly inaccurate if you want to be pedantic, which is the best way of being right, which means meaning you weren't streaming those games, right? I mean, you can stream as some of them now, but you actually one of the weird problems with game pass was that you had to download these games, some of which are humongous , and then you would try them and maybe you didn't like it. And they were like, great, I spent a half a day on this I.' Nowm not, going to play it. They just delete it, move on to the next one. Whatever it's going to be better. It's not and then find out you're not going to play it. one hundred percent. Yeah, yes. So and either way, you never own the game . Right. But , I'm an outlier with this, but I feel like for a lot of people , you play a game once and you're done and you move out of the next thing anyway. So if you can get that thing as part of a subscription and the cost of that subscription over the period of time you would have played the game, which is often going to be less than a month anyway is only at the time, we'll call it seven ninety nine dollars ninety nine cents whatever the cost was in the beginning less than the cost of the game. So why not? Plus you have that plus you have you've got that, you know, rainy day thing going on in the background. They also have this catalogue of Honduras and eventually maybe more games where you're like, well, you never know, you know, and I want to play these other games too. So it starts to make sense. And then they make it better and better over time . We were going to get all of the Xbox or Microsoft at the time, Microsoft Game Studio games day and date, right with their release . So they would sell it at retail if you wanted to buy it. But you could also, if you had the Skin Pass subscription , get it as part of your subscription. You know, which was an awesome perk. You know, it was nice. So like a new gears war game or whatever would come out. You know, halo infinite it wasn't awesome, but when that came , you just got it. Like you just got a subscription. I think a lot of people would have bought that thing, found it, they hated it and would have been like, why did I spend six ty bucks on it? But if it's part of that nine ninety nine dollars a month then who cares? Like you just like, okay, I downloaded it. I hated it. Good, now I know. If you did want to buy a game later, because games sometimes would go off game pass, you could get a discount when you bought it despite being a game passer There was a lot of goodness there is my point. And then the justification for buying studios and adding to the catalog and until you spent too much on one studio with one blockbuster game that never made years worth of yep and just yikes . So I remember Blizzard Activision acquisition that's breaking the back of Spencer's plan. Is that what this is? Yes . Well, I mean, look, he made a big bet and Microsoft, I mean, ultimately such an all Microsoft made a sign the check in the end. Yeah, that this would make in other words, but someone had to present them with some chart or some receipt of something that said, look, here's how it's going to work. And I feel like part of that was this thing breaks even and then becomes profitable at X number of subscribers . And they never hit those numbers . And then you raise price. And then you lose members subscribers. And it becomes a big problem, right? . And this all came down middle of last year. And that's, you know, somewhere in October, Spencer started making noises about retiring and then went offline for months . Right, which I you may recall, I made it. I noticed it. That was weird . This is a guy who has spent his entire time running Xbox in the public eye. Never stopped talking about it. And I'm like, I don't think I've heard from this guy in months . And then I looked it up and I hadn't. He hadn't said anything . That was suspicious to me. It was right at the time when he started making noises about retirement. Right . So look, it's in our industry in probably any in just history in general, but in our industry, especially the world of Microsoft, however you want to hone it down , there is a never ending series of what ifs that are fascinating to some degree. Yeah, we can debate they should have, they should have, they should have, whatever. all very we're suspicious of Asha Sharma's situation here. There's a hell of a chain of promotions for her . She's she's a young executive. No two ways about it, right? She's not even forty . And she's sitting as CEO of if she's got the nerve to actually spin this thing off or to actually turn it into anything . Right. Only for her, like, holy cow, man, that's a big deal . To just punk along . Well, I met I made this point upfront in some ways if she is the Sachinedella to Steve Balmer in this scenario, you know , she's the new face who can push something through that maybe we all saw happening, but no one no one there could actually got the nerve to say this isn't working. Let's fix it. Look, she's she's one of two things . She either literally is a patsy put in place to be the public face of this downfall because who cares about her anyway ? Or there was a good faith. We 're going to you freshize, evaluate. You want the brass ring? Here's the brass ring . Take the hundred days . Come back with what you think needs to happen. Just did the math. It said one hundred and fourteen as of today . Okay, so my guess, my prediction, my however you want to say, my bet is on the is what I said upfront, sort of, which is I don't think she's there's no secret that she's going to uncover that makes this make sense. It faces the same problems it always has. Was true the whole time? I don't have an answer answer, you know, of any kind that I can give that this is what they should do. I think everyone has these opinions, but I don't none of us know enough about the logistics of this gigantic business. Why pick ninj a, right? It's their sin. I don't know, I don't know. I mentioned the Phil Spencer thing , the quote he had he was talking about when they were doing he said this in the context of layoffs's like., He you know , we at we at the time, him at the time, his company, his business or his leadership team evaluated these studios . And they were like, guys, you've been sitting there for three, you know, we've been throwing resources at you for two years haven' yout produced a game. What are you doing? And I maybe it's some of that, you know, maybe it's a little bit slow. I don't know. But in general, with these bigger titles, two to three years is the norm, which is, again, terrible for revenues when you're supposed to be posting income every year . But you know, this is the dynamic of studios . Somebody, you know , Sony has a massive write down for related to Bungie, right? So Bungie is a company that started in the nineteen nineties. I think their first game, but if it wasn't their first game, certainly their first big game was a Marathon, which came two years after Doom was very Doom like, but for the Mac, only at the time . And then they were going to release this halo game on Windows and Mac. And Steve Jobs introduced them and showed them off at a Mac roll, I think two thousand two thousand one, whatever year that was . And it was a big deal because the Mac was not and it's still not a big game platform . Microsoft snapped them up, turned a halo into a launch title for the X for the first Xbox, which was awesome. They did release it eventually on Mac and on Windows two actually, the first one . But it became, you know, the kind of franchise, the big franchise for Xbox . The first three halo games were fantastic. I would also throw in ODST and Halo Reach probably I didn't play that one too much, but those are all the Bungie games who were great . And then they split off. Remember they did the wrong thing. So Microsoft kicked Halo and Bungie went and did what's the thing called ? What's the big bungee game ? Whatever it is, they made two of them. Whatever the game is. It 's Marathon. No, the previous two. Why can't I think of this ? So bad with this bungee totally there was a technology that could answer this question. Yeah, only destiny sort of destiny thing. Oh Destiny . Destiny and Destiny two to me were so halo like I was like really bothered by how Halo like they were . Bungie has had a lot of legal issues by the way. They were sued for stealing the story , you know , the story of destiny, the original one was very much like two Twilight Zone episodes as well, apparently or something like that . But anyway , they went off on their own. I think they linked up productivision blizzard, by the way for a little while as a publisher. They bought themselves out of that , they got sold to Sony . But another example of a studio that kind of sat there and didn't do much at all over a long period of time didn't certainly didn't recoup Sony's investment and had legal issues where they had to settle in one major case because they stole the ideas for one of the games . And someone says to me why would Microsoft let Sony buy this company? They should have bought them back . And it's like several years after they broke up with this company, they have a at the time, three hundred and forty three industries now Halo Studios making these games. Hundreds of people working on this stuff. They're driving this shift to a standard game rendering engine instead of this proprietary one that Bungie admitted no one knows how to use. I don't think that would have worked. I don't think that would have that's not the silver moment back. I think by letting letting is a strong word, but not worrying about that and Sony buys them, they just cost one of their biggest competitors a lot of money. That actually worked out great for Microsoft . I think Bungie coming back to Microsoft would have been a huge mistake . But that's like one of a million little what ifs like what if they only just kept Bungie and it's like Bungie did not want to be there no, you know, they were done with Microsoft to the tune of we gave up the biggest thing we ever did to walk away from this , you know ? I don't have an answers as my point. Most game makers I know want to make new games, right? Like they don't even want to make sequels. They corporation wants them to make sequels. Developers don't. They want to make new things . Yeah , right . Yeah, unfortunately, Bungie just kept making the same thing over and over again. And then, you know, Marathon , Marathon looks interesting. I mean, I was excited to see it was coming back . It's not sold well, I guess and I've never tried it. Maybe I'm part of the problem. I don't know, but you know, we'll see what happens there. I don't know. So look, we like I said, we've got less than two weeks or two weeks this to the end of the fiscal year . I think the next four weeks are going to be they're going to be bad, you know, and we're still suffering that post pandemic hangover thing where Xbox, the whole video game industry, the whole technology industry like kind of over hired, overspent because everyone was staying home and spending money on the stuff and then they weren't. And they just had to overcret to fix it. We thought we were done, but we're not done. And you can see it in Nintendo and Sony , both of which are underperforming now . And Microsoft Or Xbox, I should say, is the smallest part of that part of the business is experiencing it too. You know, it's going to be bad . And we'll see what happens . Yeah, I'm going to spin it off, split it up, sell off pieces. You know, there's a bunch of things you can do. Or the other aspect of this is often the best way to get new funding in a new mission is to threaten to end it all . Yeah , right . Right. How you negotiate with leadership actually is to construct a plan that ends it and then say double dog daria and see if you don't get another round of funding and a new mission . When is this when are they going to reveal all of this? How do you reveal the fiscal? Really? Yeah , I would say sometime between now and the end of the fiscal year and then you could a lot of that would be a whole thirteen days, friends , thirteen days. So yeah, it's going to it's probably going to be a blood bath, I think is the point it's gonna be yeah yeah. The other problem is, you know, even for the people that want that next console, the ones that are excited about this for whatever reason , you know, it's not happening this year, right? Like when they when they're talking about like by the end of twenty twenty seven, they don't mean releasing it. They mean releasing the first developer dev kits . forget two years to make a game. This is so far out. I don't know how you tread water for this long, but it's going to be it's a problem. speaking realistically here, it's like you aren't going to see the launch of that till Christmas of twenty nine with a couple of titles. Yeah. So which is why, you know, when the they did the game showcase about ten days ago, whatever that was , you know, you see what they've got coming up mostly this year then into early next year and it's like okay, this is a strong lineup. This looks great. Games look good. There's a lot of personality and stuff. It's nice, you know , but that's the that's that software. That's games, you know , that's the thing that this business should be good at, right? They have so much IP , so many good franchises, right? Yeah . The hardware has always been the I keep saying, I don't mean to just keep repeating myself, but I can't stress this enough. If they just didn't make hardware, this thing would be hugely successful . You know, maybe this thing gets, you know, you spin this thing off as Xbox, okay, but how do you like how do you sell hardware and then compete with your partners ? Yeah, you know, you're going to sell hardware but also make games for PlayStation and Nintendo, right? What you have to do as a game publisher to make sense. Nope. What do you do? It created an irreconcilable conflict to yourself. Yeah. You're either in an ineffective . This is why I'm saying you couldn't rectify it, you know? Well, and this is why Phil played the game of Everything's an Xbox. Stop worrying about the hardware. Right, right, which by the way, as much as people hated that was the right answer for the business, I mean, but it was an answer. It was a way to rationalize the problem. Yes, I mean, right. In other words, I was going to say given the cards that you would dealt, but it's more like given the cards you dealt yourself , you know, how does this make sense? That's how it makes sense . I don't know. It's I don't know. Any as, much as we're poking at Microsoft for the situation they're in, the whole games industry is struggling too. Yes, I think it's right. That's an important point. And the, you know, the problem I just mentioned with Bungie and Sony, right? This is very two very high profile successful companies struggling badly. Nintendo, not going to sell as many switch to's or cartridges. But have also kept, it's almost they've anticipated the shrinkage a bit better . They play a tighter ship. They can tolerate fluctuations better. The folks that are thriving , the indie gamers, right? The best titles you're seeing, stuff that people love to play right now coming through steam , three or four people. So two things. Work in unity. Yep . This parallels the conversation I had earlier about where all the industry together is suffering, but good leadership matters too, right ? And market dominance, right? And so when you have companies like Sony and Nintendo that have done a better job than Xbox historically , they're going to be better positioned to weather this storm. Okay. So that's part of it. Um , but I don't know, I just it's just it's like you get everything you want and it's terrible , you know, like I don't know how to, you know, you would think icrosoft acquires Activision Blizzard and it's like happy days of here again. And the next year was the worst year ever . You know , and it's probably going to get worse right now . Yeah, it's bizarre. Like I can't explain these things . I can't explain anything. That's my problem these days. I love being able to explain things and I hate when I can't, and I can't. I try and I just don't understand I don't know. I don't see an answer here. No. Well, let's see if we can get past the bad news. No , no. So beyond that, should we rename this to the PlayStation five segment, maybe? I'm thinking . No. Could it have yes five . It's like the death Xbox Death Watch No, no, no So I mean, there's like there's like things are still happening, you know, we Xbox is going to be a game scomp this year. This is the annual show they have at Clone, Germany, I believe. They're going I guess. I mean it's like question knows who's going airline tickets and hotel reservations just gone . Lauren told me this morning that this was happening and I was like, as a reminder, Commodore went to CES in nineteen ninety three the year they declared bankruptcy. So I don't know , or ninety four, whatever the other was . So we'll see what happens there . Maybe who knows, but by that point, they might have more to show off . We have gain we have Xbox console updates occurring both generally in the form of the June Xbox update and then through the Insider program. I talked about a minor one last week. There was another minor one this past week . I don't think any of that's super important important, but whatever . And we do have a new set of titles coming to Game Pass across platforms for the second half of June. The biggest probably being college Dee Vanguard, which is one of the World War II games, if I remember correctly , EA Sports FC, which is the playing the soccer game as we would say in the United States, twenty sixty , I think it stands for football club, right? You know, as they would say in Europe . And then a bunch of Tony Hawk, Pro Skater three and four. I have to say, I don't know what this game is, but I like the name RV there yet. It's pretty good. That's a pretty good . It's good. Nice little player wins . I don't know so that's cool. You know, whatever. What's the seventeenth yes, you can get Vanguard today is actually today . Jungster, a couple of others. So that's happening. And then I think I didn't I didn't put this I don't know we were waiting for in with bated breath for blizzard games to start appearing in the in the game pass . So you really cared about that for like a year ? I think everyone's just given up on it, you know? At this point, I don't think you know, like , if there's a giant franchise and activation has at least a few of those, like World War Craft , and related titles they have . Those would be the ideal ones never to show up , you know, like on game pass, right? I mean, like why would you see ? So we know that GTA six is finally going to come out this year. I think it's November December . And so I had a double take on this. I had to try to understand what this meant. Rockstar Games is offering free upgrades to current gen versions of GTA five. This is the current game. And by current, I mean it came out in ten years ago. This can't be true. twenty thirteen. Are you frequent serious? That's awesome. Windows eight was still new when this game came out. Think about that for a second . Yep. So if you have an Xbox one or a PlayStation four, these are the previous ten consoles, right ? They have done a bunch of graphical performance improvements, et cetera, which they provided already to people on current gen , and I think on PC as well if I'm not mistaken , that stuff is going to the previous gen consoles. GTA five originally launched on the Xbox three hundred and sixty by the way. And the PS three. That's how long ago this was. two hundred million copies of that game. Something that's incredible. I believe this is the best selling selling game . I think it is. Yeah . It helps to have a thirteen year ramp . I know. We should all have that level of success. I know I'll increase the sales of my old game. Don't ship the new game. Yeah, you guys have been coasting for a while. It's like, yeah, it's nice, isn't it? You know, like it's going great . I got a so what was man, I just saw something about Rockstar. Does anyone remember what the original Rockstar game was like so before they did GTA , let me see if I can find this. There was some class they did some classic side scroller, wasn't it? Something oh really old . I don't see it here. I just read something. Let me ask my Chinese model Quinn and see if she can come up with. So they did read thatd de redemption with pain. Max Payne, those games. Max Pain, that predated GTA didn't. Oh by that was in the nineties by the way. Max Payne. That's not what I'm that's not what I'm thinking of though. Why don't I see allowst . I felt like they just came up with something. It was like a book I was reading I think where it was like what ? Like I'm responsible for what? I don't see it. Book Star does what? I forget more than I remember . That's for sure. Createine . Why is this why is this there ? Quinn is really thinking . It's three minutes . I don't think it's that simple. Here we go. Because there's all these different entities that were Rockstar that made different products. The original Rockstar Games is Grand Theft Audio nineteen ninety seven top down view by the twins. Dan and Sam Hauser launched in the UK in nineteen ninety seven. So they used to do a lot of port that's what it was. I think this is they used to do ports of games. So they ported monster truck madness to the Nintendo sixty four. They ported earthworm gym three D to the Nintendo. Earthworm Gym Evil and Evil Yeah, Austin Powers games. Jeez. Bully Noir, Red Dead, Max Payne and Midnight Club . The Italian job, that great PlayStation game . But I think if they did GTA top down in nineteen ninety seven, maybe you know what? That's got to be the first. But it's pre rocket. The weird thing is I thought that was based on that it was in the context of the top down GTA where obviously on the games are isometric . That was well before well, ninety seven . No, doom had been had come out before that. Yeah, doom was ninety three . Manhunt? No, no, that's two thousand four. Yeah, I don't remember . Maybe it was just the maybe it was just the top like maybe the maybe I'm just misremembering this like the first grand theft autos were top down games like the first Duke Nukem were sided . Yeah, right. And then they went three D, right for the third one . Maybe that's what it is . It was just something it was so archaic. It was like what how is this how this thing started? And now they do these crazy open world games , which is super popular, obviously . Oh, it'll only every once in a while because there we go. Dan Houser graduated from Oxford in nineteen ninety one and started at BMG Interactive, the Entertainment Division of BMG Music in nineteen ninety two as a game designer. There he worked on the Z series Z, Steel Soldiers and Z Moto Cross Mania and contributed to the first true crime game in nineteen ninety three . Sam, his brother, later joined BMGactive and In,ter they left in ninety seven to form Rockstar games under parent company Take two Interactive. GTA was their first flagship title, but no, I think the isometric , that might be . Yeah . Okay . You call that third person? No, you call it top down. Just top down. I think top down . Yeah . Or isometric? No. Anyway, everybody gets GTA five and that's good news . Yeah, I thought it'd ended on a high note , but I just really think this game is going to be all that or is it going to be such a of times now? Yeah, you anticipate it for so long it was going to come out and then they're in the duke contract now too long. Yeah , they can't make it good enough to live up . Yep You never know. We'll see what ? Okay, isometric is a little from the side . Oh, like a ton like a one. Yeah, three quarter . What do you call it? Three quarters three quarters whatever the reason I ask that is there's a guy who's with AI created a isometric map of New York City that is just wild. It's greatly different. There are people just using AI to do those kinds of things all over the place like recreate maps of whatever, you know, whether it's a real place or something from a video game and redoing it in some other way in some other platform, some other whatever it is. And I'd say, I mean, overall, you know, without accepting IP infringement, et cetera, awesome, right? I mean looks like Sim City. Isn't this ? Yeah, it looks just like Sim City. Yeah . But people I zoomed in and that's my apartment building. And it looks like that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's expected to see like Homer Simpson driving around a convertible or something. Yeah , you know, this is so cool. Salt Hanks . What am I? I saw reference to Salt Hank on another YouTube video. You said Joshua Weisman , Joshuismann. He said, I sent it to Hank, by the way. Thank you for that. And he said, yeah, Weissman was in two months ago. Yeah , you know, production lines. But that is good recognition, although I wonder because he's teaching people how to make salt and French dip at home. Yeah. Well, the more reason just go buy it. The best thing about lifting the tide is people forget it's a lot of water. Yeah , good point. Thank you. . I still haven't had a salt hank. You can't go all the way to New York, man. I have to go to New York. I really do. Hello now we've got Josh's recipe, maybe we'll just make it at home . Oh yeah . Sepank has suppliers man. I mean, he's got the best beef product. He's got the best baguette in New York City. He's got the best salt. That's why the column is salt, salt . Steve Gibson is so funny. He really liked original Salt Hanks truffle garlic salt guy still have some of that left and like a we sent it to the Yeah . still have like the smallest like half inch of it or something. Not made anymore because he that was the first round and he made it with these two ladies in Petaluma and they couldn't possibly make enough for the demand. The one that's like white and black dots and it looks Yeah, it's really good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think so I think that's the one we should still have a little bit of Steve's wife figured out who made it, called them . Wow. And said, I need more, and they said, Well, we really can't make it without Salt Hank's approval You say the Gibson family would pay for a quarter inch of galaxy. It's gold. Steve two days ago sent me a picture of the last few grains. And I said, good news, it's arriving tomorrow 'cause I texted salt Hank , my son and said, would you make would you tell the ladies to make some for Steve? And they said, got it. So we made I think we made twenty jars for Steve . Wow . But yeah, one year we sent that out to you. My investment, Leo. So thanks for that. Well, I told Steve, you better cherish this because there ain't going to be no more. The ladies are not making it again. So I mean, how much salt could this guy need shoulds you, have eaten salt of your age? What are you doing? The garlic counteracts the salt, my friend. I say okay. That was a digression . No, it's altogether salt in Canada, but only if I pay thirty six dollars for shipping. I'll bring you some. I'll be down your way before you're up my way. Okay. Well, that's a fair trade because you gave me the best amoretto I've ever had. Oh, that God, that stuff was so good. My god . You know, we might be going to Florida soon , so maybe we could have an exchange of salt. Where do you go? Over the border? Yeah . Okay, a salt exchange from Mexico . Actually, I'm gonna see both of you . Can I tell them this, Lisa? No, it's Florida. I'm sorry, Dallas Las Vegas, dude. You both went right? Some places . He says, Paul says, Yeah, we're going to Florida. I said he's like, no, no, Dallas. I said, No, it's Las Vegas. Sorry, you went to Florida last time sorry. We're doing Windows Weekly at Black Hat in Las Vegas We're going to be in the thread locker booth on August fifth, right? Is that right ? Sorry The blog is up so it's okay. It's public knowledge. It's officially and we're also going to do a Steve's coming too. So we're going to do maybe that's what we should do. We should harass Steve to bring his . He's going to be sitting in a car like pinch and salt in there with a mouthpoint Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this. It's going to be a lot of fun. If you're going to Black Hat , we will be there live at Black Hat, august fifth , Windows Weekly at ten AM and security now at two PM and you can watch us do it. But it's a tiny poof, so yeah , you're gonna have to all jam in We like each other. We're your deodorant that day. I'm excited. Lisa, you're on camera. You're on microphone now. Be there. No bad name words Your wife has literally just emailed me about flights by the way. Oh, good. Yeah, I'm excited. This is We're gonna have a we'll have a we'll get together and trade salt . Are we are we done with the Xbox segment I've lost track? Yeah, let me just add one thing 'cause I just came in an email too. Microsoft emailed , I think it's Microsoft. Yeah. Yeah, to say that ten of the security and vulnerabilities they patched in June came from MDS . Ten Paiser, honestly. So I guess the rest came from or MDS . I think there were some Steve was thinking that Microsoft's own model M Dash Man. That's the one that did the test. Well, oh Mash. The best thing about MDash is you can still use it. So that's a heck of a feature. The others came from Fable, you think, or from Mythos? or mythos Yeah, 'cause they have mythos. Yep. Interesting. I don't know. Yeah . Well, anyway , that's the point, I guess, is that you're kind of hobbling the good guys a little bit . Although Erich Schneider makes this point in the Guardian today if it's every model can do this eventually. In fact, every model can do it now, every all the high end models can do it now. So yeah, this is not the time to take a pause on that to take a pause. Yeah, my it's the interruption of workflow it's a big brum. Yeah . All right, we got the back of the book coming up in just a little bit before, we do that, I do want to give you a personal invitation to join the club , Club Twit . This is a club . What was it ? WC Fields said or no , I think it was Casey Stinkle. I'd never join a club that would have me as a member. No, it was Groucho Marks who said that . Well, we will have you as a member and you must join. We want you to join. We really do. The club is a great place to hang out with smart people in the Club Twit Discord doing fun things like all of those whisky segment images that Joe Espisito does. He does those with Photoshop, by the way, not AI somebody saying they want to picture me with a black hat or the promo Okay Okay , here I am. You could do this for the promo black hat . Say the club gets to demand things of me and I do it. I leap into action because the club members are what makes it possible for us to bring you shows like . thirty percent of our operating cost is somebody scanned the QR code. Thank you . I didn't know I would get a notification . Wow Wow, hey, everybody scan that QR code up here and apparently I get a notification when you do. So I will mention it . So don't all do it at once . If you scan the QR code or you simply type in twitter slash club twit, you'll find out what all the benefits are. I guess I mean the chief benefit is ad free versions of all the show. You wouldn't even hear this plug . Somebody just scanned the QR code again. Look at that . You also special programming. We don't do anywhere else like coming up the photo segment on Friday with Chris Markart. He's back. Got Micah's crafting corner, his media club. We also have Stacy's book club, lots of great stuff, the AI user group . But really the biggest reason to do it is to support the content that you see here . It is hard these days to be an independent podcast network . Everybody, you know , is moving to Spotify or Amazon and they're spying on you. They get more information about you than we ever could. Four more viewers scan the QR code. Keep it coming. This is great. Thank you . It really I think is important to have journalism that's supported by its audience , that it owes no favors to any big tech company that tells the truth as they see it. If you value that too , the best way you can do it is supporting whatever outlets you listen to , whatever outlets you read, and I hope that we are earning your trust. And I hope you will support us twit tv slash club twit. Three more viewers just scan the QR code. Everybody scan the QR code. I'm tempted just to leave it up. That's amazing. I didn't know I'd get a notification. Is that the best black hat or would this black hat be better? I have many black hats. That's a good hat. This is maybe you went from Clint Black to the guy from Guns and Roses when you slash slash . I give you slash or Clint Black. I don't know . I'll wear one of these. I'll tell you what, I will wear one of these to the party and you know, to our Windows Weekly Black Hat. And I will let the club members tell me which one . Okay and they can they can specify other black hats if they want. There is the prohibition bar in the Mandalay, you know . We are staying in the Mandalay. We are staying in the Mandalay, so tell me about the pro hibition bar. Well, because it is August, so going outside in Vegas is a good way to be set fire to . And so the fact that there's actually, you know, maybe we should do a little meet up there. Yeah, maybe something I'm up for that. Yeah. Richard could give us a little personal lesson in a couple of interesting bottles, you know? I like that idea. Let's work on that. Take y'all a little drink. We'll be there Tuesday night to set up and then Wednesday to do the thing. I think we're doing dinner Wednesday night , but we could we could work on a meet up. That would be fine. Do you have to do have to know password to get into the prohibition? I hope so because that's the swordfish. I feel like that's kind of a minimum at that kind of place . All right , that's enough of me flogging the club . Let's flog Molly. No, let's flog the tips and picks. It's the back of the book with mister Baldur at. Ryan Reynolds here from Midmobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for fifteen dollars a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities, so do like I did and have one of your assistants assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mint mobile dot com slash switch up front payment of forty five dollars for three month plan equivalent to fifteen dollars per month required , intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra feeful terms at mint mobile. com I didn't think the pain from the shingless rash would affect simple everyday tasks like bathing, getting dressed or even, walking . I was wrong. Though not everyone at risk will develop it, ninety nine percent of people over the age of fifty already have the virus that causes shingles, and it could reactivate it anyt.ime I developed it and the blistering rash lasted for weeks. Don't learn the hard way, like I did. Talk to your doctor or pharmacist today . Sponsored by GSK. Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets? Yes, good. This is for you. Because on Spotify, there's an audience that's different, locked in, loyal, invested. They're called fans. Fans don't just listen to music, they feel seen by it, like it belongs to them. So when your brand shows up on Spotify, that's who you're talking to. And you're right next to artists like me, Lizo. So, are you ready to talk to fans? Spotify advertising . You're among fans . I was I saw this story about like doom scrolling and it's one of those terms, you know, I've heard it a hundred times and I sort of have this vague idea of what I think it is . And so I like that I think it is what you do every day . Well, so as it turns out, it's actually not what I do every day. So I guess technically or literally the best kind of being right is when you doom scrolling is when the news is always bad but you can't stop looking at it. So you just sit there and then it's three o'clock in the morning . I think it's kind of evolved like a lot of words do in this case to mean someone who's like on social media probably just scroll ing Ducelling really speaks to the whole video short algorithm where because you're no longer selecting your content, it's just how long you linger over it. The longer you linger over something , the more you get of it, and that's what turns it into doom. , okay. I mean, okay, then I've been doomed living for a while, but nice. Yeah., yeah Linger overweight. I just get obsessed, you know, like a by the way I bug eyed some high school students where I said, pick a category you linger over all the time in TikTok or whatever it is. And for an hour, every time you see that category, just flip away immediately and see what happens after an hour. Wow. And now I was at that school all day, those kids came back at me at lunchtime, like, oh my god, it's like, welcome to the algorithm. Like, you have control here if you use a little executive function to manipulate your algorithm. Yeah. So by the way, this is a big part of this for me because I'm sort of a big back or I support the notion of like personal responsibility or control or whatever you want to call it, but there is an addictive nature to this kind of thing where you kind of can't blame the victim, so to speak because, you know, the world is allied against you. I mean, it's this is designed. The reason we call this an algorithm is A because it is, but also B because you know, it's designed to keep you locked in. I mean, that's right. It's working well what you spent the most time on. . But I but that's it, I don't really I mean every once in a while and I mean a great once in a while, there are things I do I do this purposefully like there are there are things on social media that I think are interesting that are like fall into that kind of stupidity of SaaSquatch, UFOs, you know , ghosts, you know, whatever that is where it's like you look at like a video. It's like, Oh, what's that thing in the woods? You like, it's nothing. And then you see twenty of them and then it's three o'clock in the morning, right? And that I don't mind because I don't do it like I don't I don't do this all the time, right? But I can see the addictive nature of this stuff. You can see it in things like Call of Duty or in like dualing, like this language learning thing that I do, which is gamified and it's, you know , when we were in Mexico, I made a point of kind of trying to break out of that cycle and finally did where you know, it's like I was really trying to win this thing every week. You know, you're in a group of people or whatever it is and everyone has a score. And you know, my goal is not to spend ninety minutes a day , not learning Spanish. It's, you know, whatever . So I kind of tried to break through that. But I do I sort of appreciate the problem and I do I certainly get fixated on things like I get it . I came across this is not I am not recommending this. This is one of what is probably thousands of such things . But there are suddenly a lot of things that are alternatives to DOOM scrolling that I think are kind of cool , meaning they're like healthier things to spend a little bit of time on every day. Like you could learn something, you know? And one of the things I came across is it's a certain you pay for this. It's like sixty dollars a year. Again, I'm not saying you should do this thing, but the one that I have been doing is something called Nibble . And it has all these a lot of stem related kind of topics . And then some fun ones like crime solving type things or whatever, logic puzzles and stuff. And it's kind of , I guess if you do find yourself kind of addicted to this doom scrolling scenario, however you do it , this thing that you could do, whether maybe you're laying in bed or it's the morning or you're standing alone in a grocery store checkout line or whatever and you just have a couple minutes to kill. There's all kinds of ways you can spend the time . But one of those ways I think spend do little micro learning things, you know ? There are ones for developers, you know, they're a little language learning, not language like language like Duolingo like human language like computer programming language type things. There's probably a lot of this stuff. And I 've only just started kind of looking into this. So this is the one I found, but it's kind of an interesting idea. Like I think it's a nibble. I have to try this. Yeah, it's worth looking at anyway. And then looking at things like that, because like I said, I think there were actually very many of them . It's kind of kind of break out of the cycle a little bit . And then on the app pick, I had this up in that software section ahead of top with the Mozilla and Edge, but I decided to make this my pick this week because this is so important. I talk about this one a lot, but Power Toys is like one of the greatest things in the world. It's for everything that's wrong with Microsoft, this is like the part that's really, really right. Like this, they just do a really great job at this . Their versioning is horrible. I hate this so much, but the latest version is zero point one zero zero , which I have argued is the same as zero point one , but actually the next one will be one zero eight, one zero two. Like, I don't know what they do. It's released one point zero for frick sake, but whatever, they're on stupidity version. How many years has this been out? This is well in its current form, the st ates back to Windows ten. I mean, there was noise for Windows ninety five. There was one for ninety eight. I think this was one for XP if I remember correctly, then this is a new effort, but this is a collection of utilities and many, many utilities , some of which over time have made their way into Windows, right? And there are certain ones that are in there today that should be in Windows. So for example, Windows supports light and dark mode, but not a way to automatically set that on a schedule like every other platform on Earth. So there is a, I think it's called Light, what's it called? What is it called Light Something that does that? It's a power of Tory utility. There's all kinds of different ways to do it. You can have offsets and so forth, but a lot of people just do , you know, sunset to sunrise, right? Have a go have it be dark mode, right? Smart, right? Stuff like that. Command palette is a lot like spotlight on the Mac. It's kind of a start replacement, which I actually prefer this kind of interface . But this version zero point one zero zero is a bunch of stuff. The biggest updates are probably to the shortcut guide, which used to be this horrible full screen experience, but now is a context , a context aware pane that appears on the side , a bunch of new stuff with command palette, power and display . Zoomit, which is the Mark Rosenovich utility now supports the ability to record your webcam in an overlay over the screen recording, which you 'd want to do if you don't screen recordings, right in some cases, right? That really cool . They updated it to net ten, right? Which dramatically improves the performance and makes it smaller as well in the disc, et cetera. There's a ton of improvements in this release . This is like an endless series of fodder for hands on Windows, right? Because it's a lot of, you know, it's good to demonstrate and it's good for people to know about it. It's just it's free. You can get it from a story you, can you get can get from Win Get, it wherever you can just download it from GitHub, I think. But I can't imagine anyone watching or listening to this doesn't know about this or maybe probably most of you haven't. But if you don't, or look, you have to please, dear God, this is like this kind, of completes the picture to me for Windows. Like this is stuff. A lot of this should just be in Windows . Definitely good to know about. Awesome . I'm sorry, I'm Learn scrolling. I learned scrolling for you now. Good term but learn scrolling. I love it. Yeah. The problem is, I'm setting up Nibble. By the way, this is my new black hat, what do you think? Nice. Black press. They'll call Black Frasest Con confference Cello. It's a Blackfest conference. I'm going to Blackfest . You like where's it? You're like, I'm at the wrong show. Oh, I need a brim Yeah, that's a hat. You call that a hat? I'm setting up Nibble. The only thing I don't like about it is you're asking me a lot of questions. Like, can't it just get rid of? The onboarding is really long. And but you know what? It's worth it. And I I don't can't say I've done it every single day, but I do it most days and ten minutes away. It's testing me now. Do you know when the Berlin Wall fell? Right. I don't know. ninety nine ninety nine . Was John F. Kennedy the youngest elected president ? That's true. Who led the free French forces during World War two ? Charles de Gaulle? Yeah, from London . Here's something your peers may not know. Medieval maps often put Jerusalem at the center. If they were it easy for you to find time to learn? Cry minutely. Would you just give me some nibbles? This is why my Instagram wins if you drive me . I just want some nibbles It's time now to continue the back of the book with Run as Radio Mr Richard Campbell . Well, one of the biggest problems we've got in security at the moment is the crisis around certificates . The real issue here is when a certificate authority gets breached or private keys are lost in some way . The revocation mechanism doesn't work full stop. It just plain does not work. You can revoke a certificate, but unless the browsers go and check all the different revocation sites, you're not going to actually get it revoked. And so the industry has made a move and that move is to shorten the lifespan of assault certificates. So today right now and this is what we talked about on show ten forty one with Todd Gardner, you can no longer buy a two year certificate. The longest certificate you can buy from a uthorities two hundred days. And that number's going to keep going down year over year until it reaches forty seven days , which is thirty days plus some slack essentially, so that you would be basically replacing your SSL certs every month . This is just a way to fix the revocation problem. Steve has been driving this has been driving Steve Gibson crazy. Oh yeah . And so I'd had Todd on the show maybe five, six months before talk about the early stages of this because he was building tools called Sir Kit. And he' whats come to appreciate as he started getting into the marketplace is the issue is not browsers and web servers. That's not the issue. The issue is like IOT appliances and firewalls and stuff where change in cert s is just hard . And so there's been a big push to build out automated tools so that you can get those certs and replace them routinely as this pressure comes on. You know, we've had tools like AC andM thingsE like that. They're work for certain things, but just getting deeper into it . Just so many places that search need to live. So huge talking point and just a crisis that's coming on to address the real issue, which is if revocation worked this would,n't be necessary . But that's where we are. Streal life, man. It's a complicated story, but it is, and at least they're addressing it, not just ignoring it. Yeah. The answers are not simple. Well, I feel like I need a drink after this. You ready for a drink? I can hook you up. This was a gift for my visit and my visit to Copenhanger I ended up doing four different shows in two weeks . And this is the Thorness Danish Single Malt. So we're back to doing the sort of farm to bottle thing in Denmark again. We had Tui just last week and Tuy is in the far northwestern corner of Denmark, but this time we're going to go to Kagarup. And Kagerap is in the far eastern part of Denmark, nice and close to Sweden , about fifty kilometers north of Copenhagen. There's an area, the overall area in that part of the country called North Zealand, no not New Zealand, North Zealand as in Sealand, they're surrounded by the Baltic right there. And there have been humans there literally since the end of the Ice Age. The Maggamosians, the Kongamus , the Ertabal cultures like four thousand seven thousand BC, like right from the very beginning. And then just like we talked about with the Tui, you get to the funnel beacle people who come into the area in the neolithic times some around four thousand BC with Emmer wheat and barley . Interesting about the New Zealand zone, specifically, their archaeology read this great paper on this was there's this period between three thousand five hundred and twenty three hundred BC where a new group of folks move in and they don't push out Fnunel beaker people per se, this was the pitted wear people, it's all descriptions of their pottery, right? And they were actually hunter gatherers, but there were marine hunter gatherers. So it was fishing, sealing, shellfish and they just sort of moved around where the funnel beaker people who were farming were a little more in land. So the two groups live side by side just in different ecosystems. The coastal lands aren't particularly good for growing wheat and barley and the hunter gatherers just keep moving around . So things are pretty stable like that for hundreds of years until you get to the beginning of the copper and brown jags of chaleolithics because that explodes trade . All right. The tin was so rare. The copper is pretty plentiful. You can find it wherever, but tin is hard to come by. And one of the big sources of tins is Southwest Britain . And so there's tin being brought from Southwest Britain in through what is now France and onto the river system , and that starts to construct trade routes all the way to the eastern Mediterranean where the Bronze Age is really going to go big. And as those trade routes, all river based driven, explode , everything that's tradable becomes important . And Denmark has amber . Now the amber comes from the seafloor of the Baltic Sea, an ancient huge forest that was submerged when the Baltic Sea appeared as the end of the Ice Age came along, buried all of this wood for so long that it became fossilized and this amber literally pops off the seafloor and floats ashore routine. This still happens today. I've been in places all on the coast of Lithuan ia where they've routinely find chunks of amber . And amber was hugely prized by the Mediterranean folks. And so Denmark becomes a key part of a trade route so they get the bronze. They're training down the amber, this Nordic gold as it's referred to. But the Bronze Age ends in the Bronze Age collapse around twelve hundred BC or so . But that in the Eastern Mediterranean was kind of catastrophic. The Egyptians, the Mycenaean Greeks, the Hittites and so forth became a famine. There were the sea people raids, like it's a massive collapse. And that's not what happened in Denmark. In Denmark, the trade just faded away . And so the sort of wealthy culture that emerged that built large mounds for their rich people, that kind of thing stops for a few hundred years. It just becomes kind of quiet until you get to around the first Iron Age cultures, the Halfstad cultures that make their way up to the Nordics . Now why the Iron Age comes after the Bron ze Age? Well, it's mostly metallurgy . You know, bronze is just an alloy of tin and copper. Tin melts at like two hundred fifty degrees C, no big deal. But copper you got to get up to over a thousand degrees to actually melt it, which is tough. You've got to use charcoal, you've got to use bellows to get that kind of heat, and once you alloy them together make bronze, it actually has a lower melting point than copper has on nine fif hundredty, and you can once you get it molten you can cast you can cast tools from this. Typically axe heads are the most common thing, but also sickles because you're cutting wheat, right and cutting iron. Iron's melting point is fifteen hundred degrees Celsius, and that is really, really hot. It's very hard to get that high temperature. You need to get that high to get the impurities out. Most iron ore's are heavily contaminated. You need to remove the slag. But there was a discovery made that around eleven hundred twelve hundred degrees or so the iron ore has become malleable enough that you can start to hammer them and make what's called bloomery iron. Ando Bomlery iron is not got all the slag out of it, but if you keep folding and pounding it, you can get some usable metal from it. It's not real hard. It won't hold edges particularly well, but for simple tools , it's workable . Andiron is far more common than copper and tin . So you get this early iron age with these softer tools. You're probably still going to use bronze for your finer edges, for your sickles and swords and things like that, but light dirt tools start to emerge in iron. It's not going to be until about five hundred BC that bronze really gets replaced once and for all as we learn to make higher temperature kilns and start to actually melt things , which also very much changes that part of the world because as you get more iron tools, you get far more agriculture. You can produce a lot more food. And so there's a series of iron ages that happen in this world. There is a period we call the Roman Iron Age and that's from the beginning of AD up to about four hundred. Although the Romans never made it that far, but their goods did . And then as the Romans collapse, you have what they know called the Germanic Iron Age from about four hundred to eight hundred AD until you reach ultimately the age of the Vikings . And iron was a huge part of the Viking Age because as iron tools proliferated and their ability to make them became so common, agriculture grew to the point where you had overpopulation problems. And when you have too many people, you put them on boats and get them to go visit other people and kill them . Winding down the iron, out of the Viking Age in the medieval age, we now start to talk about this land where Kagaru is located, specifically Gridskuff, which is in the northwest corner of North Zealand . And even in the Viking Age , so you know, you're talking over a thousand years ago, it was a managed forest. It was routinely harvesting timber from it, but in a manageable way, and it was a hunting preserve, and also areas for grazing pigs and things like that. And by the medieval period it becomes a royal hunting forest, so as the kings emerge and wealth emerges again they were protecting this forest the whole time and today even today it's still an important forested area in the northwest of North Zealand . So as you come into the modern age where we start to talk about this particular distillery , there is the Falcondell farm, Falcondell, meaning the Falcon Valley and raptors are common in this part of the world and the Falcondale farm has been in operation since the late eighteen hundreds, this all phenomenal barley growing country, cool marine climate, mild seasons. Winters aren't too cold, summers aren't too hot . And we bring us to our story of actually making a distillery and this is a guy named Tarbin Thornis Anderson and the distillery is called the Thornes Distillery. This guy's not a whisky guy per se, he's just a fan. He was educated as a copywriter and an author and a journalist, and he loved his whisky and toured around Scotland a fair bit. And then he got this idea, as he admits himself, that he wanted to be make his own twelve year old whiskey before he turned sixty . And with all of the relationships he'd made in the spine in the Scottish Highlands and spaceide. He sort of got going on that. Now, while he was from Copenhagen, he chose North Zealand as an ideal place to make whiskey because of the farms, the availability of the barley and excellent water . So he rented an old horse stable that was on the Falkandale farm. It was a bit of a derelict. It actually had a fire twenty years earlier, and the farmer didn't have the means to restore it and wasn't really keeping horses anyway, so the building had just been left as it was. And so he raised enough funds to actually repair the building and assemble the first distillery in North Zealand producing a single bolt, an organic single bolt. First production is in twenty nineteen. So this is all very recent . And Thomas's focus was on totally manual operations, no automation , running a team for many, for quite some time just three people. They have a few more now. And while they always bought Barley from Denmark, it's only just recently that they're producing enough barley on the Falcondale farm itself to be part of the process. They don't own the farm. They're just renting the space on it. The farm is still in operations . First casket laid up in twenty twenty, of course they want to wait at least three years and even at three years old, you know it's not going to be that good. So they go for very small cast as little as fifty liters, tiny little barrels, which means quick maturation because lots of contact with the wood, but also a lot of angel share loss. So it's kind of a expensive way to go . It's a small operation, sixteen hundred liter mash done, that's tiny. They do very long fermentations. You know, generally speaking , your yeast has done its thing in forty eight hours, but if you leave it in and this is what these guys do , one hundred and forty hour ferments to let the trailing edge of the least and some of the lactose to actually kick off to richen up the flavor as well. They do use traditional distiller's yeast. This is not Belgium , this is Denmark . And the leftover mash after they've done the extractions from it, they actually spread along the forest edges to feed the local wildlife. There's not a lot of farmland . That's nice . Yeah, it's good. Three small stills, two wash stills and two and one spirit still all about a thousand liters a piece. These are round bulbous squat necks and short short lie arms. They do very slow distillation runs ten plus hours per run. And when I was talking about Tui just last week, that was for six hour runs. So you can get the idea. They're going after real oily textures and lots of grain notes, that kind of fl avor profile. In general, they do barreling in ex bourbon and reconditioned barrels as well as sherry casks and they have local storage for hundreds of casks. That's largely open air so they get the temperate climate into there. But we're talking specifically about this edition called the Kegarup edition. It's on the side and it says very specifically Sherri Lorosso. This was distilled in twenty twenty one and bottled in twenty four. So it's only three years old and it was aged in a single Oloroso Sherry cask, the cask called MW zero zero nine . And there's eight hundred seventy two bottles of this, of which I have bottle number three oh two, which caused me pause because generally when we do a single casking it's about two hundred bottles. How the heck do you get eight hundred seventy two bottles out of this? So let's do the math. This is a seven hundred milliliter bottle. We got eight hundred and seventy two bottles. That would be six hundred and ten point four liters . So add in the angel share, racking launches, wood soak and all that. We need a barrel at least seven hundred liters big . Are there sh erry casts that big? Now our normal sherry casts are bigger than bourbon casts. Bourbon casts are typically two hundred liters when they're originally made. They're remade into two hundred fifties , but sherry casts typically come in five hundreds , right? Those are the butts and those are generally what we call sherry season casts. You can buy these from the sherry distillers. They put sherry in it for as long as you want them to and then sell you the barrel for about a thousand euros. It comes from the old transport cask concept, but they don't do transport casks anymore. But there are bigger barrels. So the Punchones, those are about six hundred liter barrels. Now those are real barrels used in Bodega typ isically for aging, secondary aging after you finish the Bodega method, and they're much more expensive. two thousand euros plus, but that's not big enough for making eight hundred seventy two bottles. No, if you're really gonna do this, if this is what this is , it's actually got to be a tonal, a bodega tonal barrel, which is a seven hundred liter barrel. I don't know how the heck you would have got one of these. These barrels are very thick, made of European oak. They're typically used for decades in the Bodega process, that three tier process where they're moving from barrel to barrel . And look at the color on this whisky . For three years in the bottle with no color treatment Like that must have been a brand new barrel, which I went and priced one. If you can find one and you probably can, five thousand euros easy for a little distillery. This seems insane , right? And it's only going to be like this for this bash. And I would point out this edition did win bronze the World Whiskey Awards in twenty twenty six . So here I go. I've sold it up. Have strong overtones of sherry, you think ? Well, you would think with this much color. Yeah. This young yeah, no, that smells like sherry, holy man