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It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat's here. Richard Campbell's here. We'll talk about week D. It's here too. And actually, there's a lot of new stuff going in there. New Friday builds for the Windows Insider program. We'll talk about AI and Paul's love, his newfound love, for Linux. I kid you not, Windows Weekly is coming up next. You can yell at him later . Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Twitter . This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thorott and Richard Campbell, episode 985, recorded Wednesday, May 27th, 2026. Putting the metal in exper imental . It's time for Windows Weekly, the show we cover the latest news from Microsoft. And here they are, the dynamic duo of Microsoft journalism. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, winners and dozers, I give you Paul Thrott of Thor is that good? You like that? Hello, Leo. Yes. I always wanted to be a circus ringmaster of Thorat.com and his uh uh cohort crime . Mr. Richard Campbell from Run is Radio.com. Stretch to call me a journalist, goodness knows. Paul is in McCungey. Richard's in Mad Park. And uh all's right with the world . Yep. Except there's this thing called Microsoft. Yeah. They usually throw a wrench into everything. Week D. I love week D. I look forward to week D. I do too. And then I forget it happens and I wake up at you know, I don't wake up but at four thirty, five o'clock in the afternoon, it's like, Oh, right. This happens all the time. Why do I always forget this? So there are usually four weeks. Sometimes there's a fifth partial week in the month. Is there a week E? Yeah. Well, yeah, but there's no schedule, you know, regularly scheduledule thats' supposed to happen on week windows upon it. It's four times a year are we getting it a fifth week, right? Yeah. If we decided to do stupid months. And I uh uh maybe Richard might remember I don't remember the the point of you know Patch Tuesday is the second Tuesday of the month, and then the week D preview update now, which is a relatively recent construct, is typically but not always the fourth Tuesday. So it has nothing to do with the Chicago Bulls or anything like that. No. I no. No . I don't think so. That's a different kind of week. That's a different week D. Mm. Uh sorry, it took me a second there. Uh I know. I'm sorry. I thought a basketball reference would be right up your alley, so to speak. But maybe not. I'm sorry. I threw you the ball and you dropped it. I mean the whole league is weak D at this point. Uh we ek to non-existent. So uh week D, what does Microsoft do on week D? So week B so week B is patch Tuesday week. Yeah, that's right. We don't yeah, and oddly you never really heard the hear the term week B that much, do you? But yes, in Microsoft's kind of release cadence, whatever, that's what it is. Um you know I the this stuff has changed over the years, obviously the whole way that Microsoft develops software has changed. But with the changes we're seeing this year to Windows eleven and the improvements, the pain point addressing and so point and so on, um, we're seeing a return to what I think to be a more normal or logical common sense kind of a schedule , um, meaning that they won't always, but will often go, you know, through the insider program, you know, canary to experimental to beta to release preview, and then out to general or stable or whatever. Um, outside of the insider program, week D, the weekday Tuesday, it's not always Tuesday, but the weekday update is a chance to test what will be next month's patch Tuesday two weeks prior . So last week I think it was. If it wasn't it was the week before but probably last week we talked about a re a recent set of release preview builds that were a preview of this and this is a preview of patch Tuesday. So the same kind of set of updates, except not exactly interestingly. Um I know Richard will remember will remember this, but other others may not remember that Windows 11, 24, and 25 H2 are in the so same code base. So they get the same update, literally. They go to slightly different build numbers, right? So one is sixty-ighte or sorry, twenty-six thousand one hundred series builds, the other one is twenty-six thousand two hundred series builds, but the sub the sub uh the minor part of the build number, whatever I'd love to see the build pipeline on this that they literally are taking the same code and pushing it to multiple build numbers. So it's amazing you say that. I um I'm going to reference the past a lot today because I'm old and that's what I do now. But um back when Microsoft was working on what became Windows Server 2003, which was part of the wave of updates that also included the XP SP2 stuff with the security push, you know, trustworthy computing. This was going to be in the sir in the case well in both cases, but in the case of server, especially Windows.net server, remember the first release, right? And you know, the uh trustworthy computing and then uh common sense thing for branding kind of changed all that. But at that time, when Windows development was pretty simple, you know, compared to today, remember the guy whoever I was talking to at the time drew this thing on the whiteboard and he was talking about branches and for king and how, you know , i I can't remember the details of this exactly. I drew a picture of it that I put in some blog post at the time. This is twenty year twenty twenty plus years ago, almost twenty-five years ago. Um where there was a a main kind of a trunk for Windows client and then a separate one for server. And because of all the long horn silliness, this the client thing had gone off on its own, server had gone off on its own. And then to do what became Vista , and this was the case of server 2003 as well, it was based on the obviously the server code based, right? So anyway, he drew this, it was sideways, it wasn't like a tree going up like you would, you know, a normal tree, but it was a sideways tree and it had a, you know, just a couple branches. And I was like, yeah, I can't handle this. And the way it is today, you couldn't make an infographic that could fit all the branches of builds that we have today through all the versions of the inside . It's it's just yeah, it would look like a tentacled sea monster, like it's insanity. Um but just speaking just of the stable supported versions of Windows today. Windows 11 versions 24 and 25 H2 again, same code base, different version numbers, different names, but the exact same thing, right? The features are always going to be the same on both. Yeah, that's just the way it is, right? And that's good for a lot of reasons. In Microsoft's case, it's good because they can release a single KB, which is a cumulative update, um, which is a monthly patch Tuesday update usually, um, that services both and does the same thing to both, right? And so for week D, we're seeing that you get the it's the same KB, it's the same literal update, it's this, you know, the build numbers are very slightly different, but that's just because they have to be whatever. Um until this month, this year, 26H1, they've also been testing that and putting out monthly updates to that for some reason, even though for the first couple of months, especially no one had one of these computers. But it was always a month behind. And as recently as last week I commented on this, I I I think I said something to the tune of, you know, for sta ble, 26H1 is like the canary version in the insider program, meaning it's always a little bit behind. You would think it's the most advanced one, so to speak. It should be out there in the forefront. It it hasn't been. But this month I was surprised to say it caught up or Microsoft caught it up, meaning even though it's getting a different KB from 24 and 25 H2, because it is a different code base, the features it's getting, the changes, the updates, whatever, are, unless I missed something small, exactly the same with twenty-four and twenty five H two. That's a first. Now what about the arm line on this? Yeah, so that's what this is technically. So twenty six H one is only for X 2 based computers. Okay. Even though in the insider program, you could with an Intel or AMD or previous gen uh Snapdragon X computer enroll your PC in that and get the updates. They're never gonna ship publicly Right. Um the couple of weirdness, well, it's more than a couple, but one of the weird things is 24-25H2 will be upgradable to 26H2, which Microsoft is literally named, so the standard end of the year update typically around October. 26H1 will not. And they have not said when what you'll go to. So in some ways it doesn't matter because again, these things were going to be updated in lockstep going forward anyway, functionally, unless something changes and it could but I would have thought they'd bring it all together twenty six H two once the X twos are out in the world and they're cut a few You would think that right. But you think clearly and that's logical. Yeah. And that's just where you're failing. So I they have never said they've they basically they left it very vague. We will at some time in the future explain what the path forward is. And then at some point, of course, these things will all you know, get flushed down the same toilet or whatever. But um my theory, which by the way, um I haven't written about this because it's too vague to bother, but I guess I'll mention it here, is that this will become Windows 12, right? That 26H1 will become 12. Well 12. And then of course 26H2 will also, you know, get that upgrade path as well. Um the thing that has that thing I just heard is that we we know because uh Microsoft , I'm not sure they said this explicitly, but Microsoft is using AI to find bugs in Windows in the code base, like everyone is, right? And last month they were talking about this M-dash in-house frontier model. The creyated specific well, it's more of an orchestrator, but a frontier model essentially for finding bugs in the Azure Windows code bases, whatever. Um, they apparently have also been using Mythos like a lot of other people. They were one of the first companies to get access to that . They have found an astronomical number of bugs, right? Which is astronomical. And um and by all accounts, like own the keys to the castle type bugs. Like not, oh, this is a potential weakness, but it's like, oh, if they enact this, they have everything. Right. And this is over and over again. Right. This is both the concern, but also the promise of this stuff, right? That um it especially for a proprietary software company like Microsoft, this can be embarrassing and bad, and it sounds like bad PR. And but I, you know, we keep talking about this, like I feel very strongly that any company that creates software of any kind should use AI like that like Firefox is doing, like others are doing. Um by all accounts, it is an absolute arms race going on right now. Yeah. Most people don't want to talk about it all, but it's like we only have so many weeks before black hats have access to tools that can reveal these vulnerabilities as fast as we can. And we got to get them all fixed. They only have to display one of them. So a couple this might be a couple of years ago or at least a year ago, I was talking about Rust and uh Mark Rzinovich and Dave um Dave Weston . And well the the security guy from Mickson now. Sure. And how you know they're and they're talking about Rust and adopting Rust across the board. And and I purposely made this very generalized kind of prediction statement, whatever that um knowing that people would try to pick it apart. But that Microsoft should use AI to rewrite the Windows, whatever, Azure, whatever kernel in Rust, you know, which it is overly simplistic. And yet when you look at the way this stuff has evolved , maybe that's not so far-fetched, you know. Um I have not heard that they're doing that per se, right? I there there was that job listing where they were looking for people, more people with Rust expertise, et cetera, et cetera. There's definitely gonna be more Rust work at low levels in Windows and Azure and all that stuff, of course. Um, but this Windows 12 thing may it has been different things at different times. Like the AI stuff we see in Windows 11 at one point was going to be Windows 12, and then they kind of step back from that. And right now I the the vague thing that I'm hearing is that it's going to be this security refactoring from Mythos and M-dash that will form the foundation of what is Windows 12. And it will continue the message we're hearing this year about these pain point things that Microsoft address is addressing, right? But doing so in a far more architectural sense. Aaron Powell Well, I wonder if right now they're just patching what they can patch. And sooner or later they're going to set it run into a set of problems where it's like this requires a re think, aka a new version, right? You we're just talking about SP two, like that was the issue with SP two was we're really gonna have to change some things. Right. And deliver some pain to customers from a user experience standpoint to protect them and and just we're we're gonna have to collectively uh just kind of handle that um yeah i uh the the worry for microsoft here of course is that we already saw how poorly people responded, or customers, I should say, responded to the what at the time felt like very artificial hardware um requirements for Windows 11. Um this might instigate another escalation of that, which we should also put Copilot plus B C in the in the middle of the old way. The kind of personality that keeps a Gen Ten computer alive is also the kind of personality that will complain bitterly that because it doesn't have a T PM two chip in it. I have at least fifteen of those in my apartment right now. So uh yeah, I I understand that complaint, but yeah. I uh so we'll see what happens. I but if you uh you know copilot plus p PC is in kind of a weird area right now because you know sixteen gigs of RAM, two fifty six gigs of storage, the and the MPU are all expensive components now and yikes. So I you know we'll see how they 're not a good year to make hardware demands while the pipelines are as screwed up as they are. Yep. Oh yeah, you're not gonna hear a Windows eleven announcement. Well, at least certainly not a release this year, but if it you know but the best I've gotten out of any sysadbin owning a large computer purchase is uh why am I paying for an MPU? Like just no justification for whatsoever. And they aren't cheap. So they're still specifically going to the vendors and showing show me your non MPU systems on I have no need for that. It's not that they're not using AI, but they are within the cloud, right? It's almost like Intel correctly read the market somehow. That's not true. But um but they have a bunch of NPU uh MPU less or lower powered MPU based uh CPUs, of course, right? Like the non core ultra stuff. Yeah. Um But you know, the I remember this with GPUs too , you know, from again, very much from an enterprise perspective. Sure, home machines was all about the gaming and they were buying they would every new machine had a GPU in it. But when you were pricing hardware and they wanted a few hundred dollars for this GPU that Windows wouldn't utilize unless you're in direct X mode, which most companies would never be in. Like, why in the world would I pay for this? Yeah, I mean, if you accept and you should that consolid ation is just the natural market for us, you can see it on all kinds of different levels. One of them would be the on the component level where you have a motherboard with a dozen different chips or add-in cards, whatever they are, and you can consolidate that into an SOC. I mean Intel, I don't know if they were first, but Intel integrating graphics into their CPUs decades ago. Yeah. Well I think that reason was a look. GP to you guys somehow without charging you separately for it, so you can't take it out. Right. And yeah, and the first ones are terrible, right? Oh yeah. You know, b especially compared to dedicated graphics. They would be, but you know, twenty years later, those things are actually pretty freaking great. The new ones are certainly. Yeah, this is because the chips have got so good. But the joke the whole time with Iris and those early things was you weren't using 'em anyway. But at least there was a GPU on board. Yep . Yeah. And you know, we needed the GPU on board for things like the glass interface and Windows Vista, you know, that kind of uh took uh you know um took resource or took uh demand away from the CPU, freed it up for other things, which improves overall performance, you know, obviously uh dedicated. Right. Which at least they're not trying to update drivers now. Oh boy. I'm actually kind of surprised. We talked about WinHeck last week and uh this driver initiative they have and I just take over the drivers. Like just do it. Like just their own without a doubt. Yeah, just do it. Not that Microsoft is the be all end all of high quality software, but at least they have some incentive to do a better job. And then the trade here is you do have the NVIDIA's of the world that want to maximize utilization of the hardware and so they will jump through the hoops to make a decent set of drivers that rather than Microsoft. And then you have all the little like printer vendors and things like that who don't want to bother. They're always trying to go lower. Most of those are just someone slapping a brand on some ODM part, you know, that is it made in China and sold by eight different companies and yeah, and the quality will vary. Yeah. You don't want those guys making drivers. Anywho, um, with all that as backdrop, uh sorry for the history there, but um yeah, so week D, Tuesday, got the preview updates. This is a preview literally of what we're gonna see on Patch Tuesday in a couple of weeks in June. And last month you may recall that Patch Tuesday was the first major patch Tuesday, if you will, from a functional perspective, like new feature perspective. Um this one clearly will not be. So, you know, this is the we've talked about basically all of this, none of it is super important until we get to the end. But you know, shared audio support over a Bluetooth LE for supported devices, um, multi-camera, multi-app camera support, meaning you use one camera across multiple apps uh for camera hardware that supports that. This is where you can go and you know when you're setting up a computer for it the first time, there's a link in one of the screens where you can actually name your user account directory, which is one of those you could still you could kind of do this and if you were um automating this process obviously you could do it but um putting that back in the UI I mean for the first time in 15 years I mean it's been a long time you haven't been able to do that in a while um and then improvements across the board, like you know, magnifier, uh the secure boot stuff that's in Windows Security, uh task manager, Windows Law, et cetera, et cetera. Um But how much of this is just to be pointing the AI at the backlog of complaints about reliability performance so we don't know um that's a good point so uh i think from a what what well just looking at the pain point thing when pavon d'aval ori talks about we want to uh um do things like improve the latency that occurs when you click something and something opens, like the start menu or a file explore, whatever. There's a it's not a one second delay, but it's something you perceive and it makes you feel slow. So we talked, I think last week about some of the things they're doing under the covers to improve like app and core system experience launches, right? Which is perfectly valid. Um you click something or ta hit a button, whatever it is, you expect that thing to occur. It will now occur faster. So there's actually a bunch of that in here. They didn't specify which bits, but performance improvements across those things, app and core system experience launches. And then uh reliability uh improvements across the board as well, but specifically for things like the sign and lock screens. And I hear this stuff, and look, I use Windows probably more than the average guy. Um I don't really, I don't perceive these things. And I think part of it might just be I'm used to it, right? And that sometimes you need to be jolted out of this, right? Well, I'll talk a little bit more about this in the context of Linux in a little while, but you know, going to like Snapdragon X-based Windows and ARM computers, you suddenly realize, oh , this can be better. You know? And I I feel like some of this will do that for everybody, where um you may not notice it but what you will notice is you're not yelling at the computer as much or you know however you deal with these things. I mean I do a lot of uh Tourette style yelling personally but um I think I look, it's it's valuable work. It's good to do. So nothing like from a like I said, from a feature perspective, nothing major, but that's always good. You know, I actually I prefer that . Okay Okay . Um well if we could just beat every topic to death like that, we'll go like four or five hours. So let's uh pause since you have reached a uh a An impasse. A Denou Mall. An impasse . I don't know. Something. Be good time to put in a uh a word for our fine sponsor, and then we'll get back to uh more of Windows Weekly. Is if that's okay with everybody here . Okay . I see you hovering your finger over the skip button. Do not skip this. You're not gonna want to miss this. Because this episode of Windows Weekly brought to you by Trusted Tech. Now you want to know about this, and I'll tell you why you want to know about this. If you're managing Microsoft 365 for your company and you're responsible for the cost, you're also responsible for whether it's set up correctly, you do know that things are going to change dramatically in a month. 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Onward and upward, Mr. T. So the party line is that Microsoft is simplifying the Windows insider program. And yeah, if you're doing a flyby, I guess it is simpler. But it's not really, right? Like there are, you know, these sub channels and other choices you can make inside of all the channels. If you've ever or if you've recently enrolled a PC in this and or have switched over to this new scheme, you'll discover that there are actually more permut ations now than there used to be. Um, in the good news department, um, there's a couple of things. You know, one of the things is that um you can easily move out of uh channel and into stable if you want, or another channel that's good. It's a little bit uh portable. Um uh you can enable feature flags to turn on all the features you're getting so you don't have to wait for them, like for a CFR. That's good, you know. But it's complicated. And they've changed the way that they announ ce builds. So this goes if you go to blogs.windows.com, there's a Windows insider program header and you can see just the articles that are from that part. And they just do like a single blog post for all the builds. And if I'm counting this correctly, and I'm not, um, there are at least four builds. And but the announcement makes it seem like we just, you know, made changes to beta and experiment al, which we put the mental and experimental because there are multiple sub channels, right? So there's at least four. I could be missing one. You have to go and look at the, I think they're on Microsoft Learn. Let me just make sure. Yeah. Microsoft Learn, which I thought was going away by the way, but um is has details about each of the the builds that they announced. This is from Friday. And oof, this is tough reading. So let's how do I say this? So the experimental channel, future platforms, right? That's the one of the sub channels. This is what used to be literally canary. What what canary was supposed to be but never was. No, it's what Canary was now, sadly. Um includes platform changes and is no features. And it's like, oh yeah, no, we've been here before. It's like the experiment is if you notice we change the name. Yep. And it's like the uh features and experiences might never get released. Uh this does not map to a specific very okay. Close the tab. Okay. And then there's experimental for twenty six H one. And it's like okay. And you know, reliability of Explorer EXE, nice. You know, okay. Switching between multiple desktops is gonna be a bit of great um this fixes across the board. Let's low-level stuff. I mean, not not literally there's a fix for the Times New Roman font family in here. I'd like yikes. Okay. If you care about diacritical marks and the like, you will enjoy that . Um and it's not till we get into experiment al just experimental. Oh no sorry that's not true. Experimental dev, what used to be dev . I guess it's experimental. So there's some narrators a bunch of accessibility stuff. I think this was tied to an accessibility um uh holiday or whatever or or mark day that we marked last week or whatever. But um there is there's a couple of things in here. I nothing major, although I will say let me see if this computer has it i bet it does if you go into the settings app and go to display and it's probably no it's right there in under brightness and color you may see an option called adaptive color um if If you're familiar with the way phones work and a lot of Apple devices, you know that the screen has sensors around it or in it that will detect the ambient lighting and adapt the color so that it looks true to the color to you no mat,ter what the lighting condition is. This sounds awesome. Um if you've ever used this in Windows, you know that what it does is it makes your screen pink. So um like I'll just put it on. Yeah, it's terrible. So um I always turn it off. I was no you see the pink and you're like, no, this is terrible. So they're adding um an accessibility feature called screen tint. And what this does is basically overlay a color over the entire screen that can do things like uh soften the intensity of the light, but you know, whatever. It's kind of it's an interesting idea. It's probably what adapt it's like not adaptive uh brightness or lighting, it's like manual lighting. Like you're it's something you have to do yourself but honestly is it for particular kind of a vision impairment that it goes pink so like a lot of accessibility features probably um it's not for like colorblind people or anything like that but that there probably are people with specific eye issues that may benefit from this. But I feel like a lot of people, you know, like if you've ever done like the orange light thing, like if you do night night light or whatever it's called a windows or on a phone or whatever, um, you know, a lot of the first reaction to that is like, oh, the screen's all orange, you know, and then after a while you're like, actually I kinda like this. It's nice. You know, and it I think it's that kind of a an update. Especially at night. Yeah. No, I've definitely one of the I think I feel like this is already there. Yeah, so night light warms your display to reduce blue light. Screen tint reduces overall screen intensity, which eases eye fatigue and light sensitivity even during the day. So yeah. I mean there I think there are going to be people who are like, yeah, no, I want it to be like this all the time. Right. Um, so there's that. Uh and there's also, you know, if you've ever used um voice access or um the uh what do you call it, the uh whatever the translation feature is called, where you you know you're having a meeting and there's a bar at the top of the screen and you can someone's talking in a different language and you can have it automatically translate in real time. Really cool. But also that thing is um uh from a UI perspective is predicated on the fact that the taskbar is at the bottom of the screen and now the taskbar can be moved to the top of the screen. So I'm kind of curious how it's going to impact those UIs. I'm sure they 're or to the left side as I'm Yeah or whatever. Yeah. I mean just like it's it's kind of interesting. We'll see we'll see how Microsoft handles that stuff. Definitely cities. Yeah. So beta and dev. I'm sorry. That's not true. Experimental, which used to be dev, and then beta both are getting the same accessibility features. So those are changes. It's not part of experiment. It's no part of experimental. It is, but it also experimental was dev and experimental wasn't canary . Right. Uh there is well there's an experimental future platforms that essentially is what Canary used to be. Okay. There's an experimental , which is kind of a new kind of canary that makes a little more sense than Canary ever did. There's experimental by itself, but then again, you you know, you have the three different Windows versions, it could be, um, which is basically what dev was. Are you up to three kinds of experimental this point? Are we having naming problems? I'm just saying I like I said, you know, creeping complexity. Just creep I don't know, complexity. I don't know it's not even creeping. It's just complexity. Um yeah, there's a lot of it. Just don't yeah, don't don't look at that too hard. Um so the more you look at it, the scary it gets. Um okay, so that's happening. Uh again, not nothing major, frankly, right? Um so there's no quite no no co-pilot buttons or anything. That's good. Um and then this isn't related to anything product or whatever, but Yusuf Medi, who's been at Microsoft for 35 years, announced this past week that he is going to retire later this year. Another long timer. One of the longest timers of all, really. I mean, um I you know, when he joined um Microsoft, he worked on Windows initially, but uh I remember him from all kinds of different things. And this is the thing, like he kept coming up for me. So when um this was not my first time going out to see Microsoft, but maybe my second or third time. I went out in 1998. I went to Seattle for what was the Windows NT 5.0 Beta 2 Reviewers Workshop. I met the people I would later work with at Windows NT Magazine, like Mike Ody and uh Mark Manassi and so forth. Um and Yusuf Medi was on the stage before the show start before the event started um setting up something. So I went up and I asked him, first of all, who are you? And secondly, um, is Dave Cutler going to be here? And he told me that no, Dave was off working on 64-bit stuff with deck processors , uh, which at the time I assume was like Alpha, you know. Yeah, whatever. Probably Alpha. Um and okay. So that was kinda cool. So it was the first time I ever interacted with him, but I kept bumping into him again and again. So he worked on Internet Explorer. So it was the big part of that . Um he worked he led, I think, Bing and MSN at a time when Bing and MSN were what later became things like um you know Windows Essentials and so forth. Like these were the things like MSN Messenger. And like uh they had like up the blog, uh whatever the blogging product they had was, like the blog editor and whatever it was. It was all these like kind of smaller apps, but they were like Windows utilities and they kind of um made Windows better. They weren't included in Windows so they could be updated more frequently. He was a big part of that. So I interviewed him at that time. Um he worked on they didn't call it Xbox briefly, but it was Interactive Entertainment, which when the Xbox One was coming out, the Xbox was going entertainment. You know, it was going to be music and videos and TV stuff and all that kind of stuff. Um, and then he returned to Windows Proper um and was part of Windows and Devices, and that's when, you know, with surface, right? Um, and then has been promoted up the chain and today he is the uh consumer chief Marketing Officer for Microsoft, which he's spent on the first time So the the through line here for me is yeah, I agree with you. Yep, 100%. Oh, and I should say the last thing for uh was he was the person on stage when they introduced what we now call co-pilot. So when that thing was updates to Bing Search and uh Microsoft Edge, he was the guy. And the thing that the thing that will always stick in the back of my cra is he was doing demos and he said, I am going to Mexico City in a few months for my sister's wedding, I think it was, and I and we can use AI to make an itinerary. And he had to make a five-day itinerary for Mexico City, a place I know really well, right? And so for two at least two years after that, that was the first thing I did in any AI chatbot was let's do a five-day itinerary for Mexico City because one of the things I saw immediately uh with what became Copilot when they first announced it was that this thing had no sense of how far things were from each other and it would recommend these days where first drive 90 minutes out into the desert and go to these pyramids. That's awesome. Now come back to the city, but go to the far end on the other side of the city and have dinner in Polanco and then go down to Centro, which is kind of in the middle of this. It's like, guys, this is not a day. This is a week. Like this is not gonna work. Um and AI, you know, has obviously gotten a lot better at that. Um not so good. Okay. Um he uh Yusuf is on the senior leadership team, which is kind of incredible. Um this is something like uh Panos Pine was not on the senior leadership team, but it's really a thing to to be on the SLT . So I yeah, I with like you, I I I think of him as specific kind of product things. But when I look at this now and I think about Microsoft and the way it has evolved literally in the thirty five years he's been there. He has gone against the grain. Uh uh almost everything he's done has essentially been consumer based. Uh, which is kind of crazy. Now back in the nineties, especially the early days when, you know, from uh whatever year that was, ninety two, ninety three through, you know, Windows 95 and the IE stuff. Uh there was no real division between consumer business, whatever. In fact, no, mostly it was just really consumer, if you think about it. But um but you know, at some point that, you know, especially as N T became a thing and then Windows 2000 and uh the enterprise stuff started, you know, eventually happened. I mean, there there was that real divide between consumer and um and business, and he's pretty much always been on the consumer side of this, which is incredible for anyone at Microsoft, but for someone who's been there for 35 years, he doesn't even have a one little dog leg into I worked on SQL Server for a little while or I worked on Exchange or or whatever. You know, like something purely enterprise based. Like, it speaks to him ending up owning the marketing problem for consumer. Yeah. I think it's interesting. It is interesting. It's unusual for sure. Especially in Microsoft. It's like that's not where the money was. Yeah. I don't know this guy like personally or anything like that. He seems like a good guy to me. He seems uh uh legitimately engaged with this part of the world, however, you want to say that. I mean he seems like a good person, but um yeah, it's just interesting. I I he's kind of dipped in and out of my professional life half a dozen times or more, I don't know, over the over many of those 35 years. Interesting. Okay Okay. Okay. What is it? Well, how long were you gonna get extended support for? They did extend it, right? For like a year. Well, for consumers it's for one year. And then for businesses it's three years, but you pay per year and the price doubles each year, right? So the yeah, so this uh starting in October like a Stacy was Higginbotham who was the one woman who uh of course our good friend who wrote that uh consumer reports letter to Microsoft was kind of ignored. But sh she's she says she thinks you're gonna extend it again. I betcha I will. It'll all depend on C count. You know, Microsoft's really good at leading the parade by figuring out which way it's going and running in front. So Yeah. Yeah, nobody yeah. I mean it's I understand why you want to deprecate a version. You don't want to support it anymore. I completely understand. Well, especially think about the wave of bug fixes for security they're going through right now. You really want to push this onto all the versions of Windows? That's not fun. So here's a fun. Well, maybe it's fun. I don't know. Um, bit of speculation um that just popped into my brain based on what you did uh the the thing you just asked about extended security updates. And also the earlier conversation about Windows twelve potentially happening down the pike. And this that side issue, which is not a side issue, is really the central issue of our industry right now, where we have this component crisis, right? Where um hardware components are extremely expensive, especially things like RAM and storage. And you know, the Windows 11, which by the way, you know is what, six years, almost six years old, right? I think 20 was it 2020 or 2021? It was 21. Could have been whatever year it was, we'll call it five years, um, you know, came under some criticism for having what felt like artificial hardware requirements, like I said, which felt like to many people a bid by Microsoft to get people to buy new computers. Right. Right. And look, this these criticisms write themselves. It's fine. You come up with Copilot plus PC where you specify even higher system uh requirements. And you know, for some like me, I think for people who watch the show, like regardless of what you think about AI or copilot or anything like that stuff. Like, you know, 16 gigs of RAM is a minimum nice modern, you know, fast SSD, um, MPU, whatever. That didn't amount to much. But I mean, the, you know, whatever. It is what it is. Those processes are great regardless of the MPU, but whatever. Um, especially when you go to ARM and you get the all the reliability, whatever benefits to that. But the c shaving off of the crufty bits of code because it just never got implemented for ARM. Right. Right. Which has its own benefit, right? I mean, um Mike this is not something Microsoft naturally does. So not being, you know, like looking at something like a new hardware architecture and having to make those decisions is actually very good for Microsoft and for its customers because it's maybe doing things it might not otherwise have even thought about. But what if there this is the speculation bit. So given everything I just said , what if um What if there is a Windows 11 upgrade coming for Windows 10 users that will be supported, that will have lower hardware requirements, because that's the reality of today? And that if you can build a like we know like Chewy is one of the um uh PC makers that's using, I think it's called um the Intel Wildcat processors. These are the new generation low-end things that are supposed to compete with like a MacBook Neo or whatever. So you've got Apple selling a MacBook Neo for 600 bucks to consumers running on an um a phone chip. You know, what if we could throw a bone to our user base in Windows, which is different from that on the Mac s sideide or Apple, whatever, and do two things. Like one, you know, better support lower end hardware, right? Whether it's Wildcat or whatever else . And that would include older processors that maybe don't make their way into the Windows 11 hardware requirements that the way forward it that might make sense for Microsoft from a support perspective is just have Windows 11 be the thing. Actually do get rid of Windows 10. I mean, there's still going to be putting those updates up for businesses, so maybe this makes no sense. But it'd be kind of interesting if there was a it would be Windows 11, like it would have the UI, it would you know, it wouldn't like it wouldn't require a T PM two point oh, let's say. It would maybe a one point two would be fine or something, or maybe even no uh TPM if that's what you're doing. Um But with all these concerns around security , like the they pick the TPM chip requirement for a reason. It really is the base level of deeding security going forward. Right. But it is. No, and and yeah, and I would say look, uh a lot of the security advances that have occurred over the past year, especially but year and a half, two years, whatever, do require TPM two point oh , you know, the the stuff we see in Copilot plus PC around virtualization uh virtualization based security and uh the Windows Low ESS stuff requires TPM two point oh. So yes. But not everyone has those things. Those things are expensive to make and sell now. Maybe there's some version of the future where But wait. Microsoft said you have to have TPM 2.0. Right. Microsoft says a lot of things, Leo. I find it's usually uh smart just to just to let it well it is so when they when Windows 11 was first announced, you didn't actually need any of that stuff, right? Windows eleven was Windows 10 with a new, you know, shell essentially or whatever. Um today, yes, there are especially Copilot plus BC, there are features that are integral to Windows that are important for security that rely on a TPM two point oh. Yeah, for for sure. And TPM two point oh has been out since twenty fourteen. It's been a while. It's it's reasonable to say by now. Yeah. So there's no way to really I mean I I maybe I should even that expensive I mean isn't it just on the system on a chip? Yeah no I this um what we're saying is y you have a laptop it's a tenth gen Intel something it's ten years old. Um it may I don't know what is it I don't actually know So let's pretend it's a TPM one point two in there. Oh, yeah. Right. So in other words . Let's let's acknowledge that there are millions and millions of computers out in the world . That just don't meet these specs. And they work perfectly well. And you don't want to put them on the landfill. And is there some version of this where it makes sense? So one the other version would be just let consumers do ESU for thro two more years or three, whatever the time frame is. Right. That's the clear explanation. There was a w there was a requirement for TPM two for Windows eleven and he complained if you didn't have it. Right. But it didn't stop you from installing. You can still yeah, you can work around it. You can use Rufus or whatever to work around it right now if you want to, right? Just like you can work around the local account sign and stuff or whatever. Um I'm just saying for like but for mainstream people who are never gonna don't care about this don',t think about it, like whatever. Would it make sense? I thought it did when they came out with Windows 11. I didn't understand this cutoff, but um look, you're already supporting two , you know You're saying this should be a real level version . Basically. Maybe. Yeah, I don't know what to call it. I'm not even sure if it may I just thought of this as we were talking. I I'm not sure. I this might not be fully full of the case. I agree with you. I think it's a good idea. I mean, that's how you compete against Chromebooks. That's how you compete against the Neo. That's what S was Windows S was supposed to be. Yeah, the the point of this is that it would work on new lower-end devices, which are coming to market. We know, like I said, ChewyBook is one of the companies that is making terrible name, but it's terrible. It's terrible. And there are others, obviously, but whatever. That's the one that's been they've been making kind of a splash. And then but you know what? But when you when you look at that level, like if we're gonna go back to eight gigs of RAM, you know, if we're gonna go have a lower end, you know, what we what I call the Celeron processor . Yeah, it's a different operating system. I mean, you know, whatever. Live with it. Right. Well, but is there a version of this well they're fixing Windows, right? I mean, that work that's occurring in Windows to let it run better on with fewer resources would benefit these older computers, right? That probably do have eight gigs of RAM and whatever generation Intel processor that somebody arbitrarily decided wasn't going to make it to Windows Eleven. Like maybe this is the time . Especially if you like Wookiees. Especially if you like Wookiee. Who doesn't like Wookiees? Completely parenthetically, I remember that whole kerfuffle about from Linux people about TPM and all this stuff. Right. Ironically, my uh framework desktop, which runs Windows or Linux, does have a TPM2 chip, and I was just investigating uh whether I could retroactively put Lux encryption on it. And then I realized, oh, but I don't want to have to enter a password, so I want to it come back up if the power goes out and I'm not here because it runs my AI, it's continuously running. So that's the problem with wind encryption. And my AI said, Well, here's good news: you got a TPM2 something chip, and it'll log in automatically from the TPM2 chip. It'll still check to make sure the machine hasn't been modified. And if somebody pulls the hard drive and tries to get into it, it won't work because it's not connected to the way the system's supposed to work. And it works in Linux. Right. I mean, Leo, that's the secret that no one told you for Microsoft. That's why they made it. So it would work in Linux. It's great. Good job, Microsoft. Well done. This was like everyone sort of uh remembers the history of like, you know, MS DOS or Windows or whatever isn't until Lotus doesn't run kind of thing. And like and of course Linux is a cancer, which is Linux is a cancer. But I mean I feel like by the time TPM like TPM uh harm ing the ability of a user to dual boot or switch to Linux was a a happy side effect, not the point of it. You know? Um it wasn't the strategy, but it's kind of an accident. Yeah., it was a happy Take it. Take it. Um, but yeah. No, I was really pleased. I thought, oh, that's fantastic. See, what Linux does, which is great, is they see where the hardware is and they go and meet it. You know, somebody writes it Yeah. And uh pretty much everybody runs Linux is running on a Windows machine. I mean you know of course that that's a PC. So right . Better at work. You know, anyway . I'll shut up now. I know I'm I'm introducing you. an I'm I'm the main thing I I think you're all about the security side of this right now and Oh man are we? Holy cow. Get ready. And so I don't know. Argument to this thing I just made up in my brain, which is we're doing this work to um uh harden Windows eleven and you know other platforms that are in active view like Azure, et cetera. Um maybe this is the line, like where it doesn't actually make sense to do that for Windows 10 as well. Right. But if we can harden Windows eleven version, eleven . That's the art. And then I and then you then you deliver good news to um look, nobody actually wants to upgrade. Uh you know, that's part of the problem too But sure. The reality is if you could do this for free and it actually worked great and worked better, I guess, and was secure, et cetera, et cetera, and was supported, um, I think a lot of people would be pretty happy with that. So it'. d be a good move And they and arguably the easier move is just fixed ten . One of the that's what I'm yeah, that's the question. One of the problems though is that few companies want to be in the low end market. More support. I think this is all for used older hardware. This is not for selling new machines. This is almost like uh like fan service, right? You have this user base that is feeling upset that you've arbitrarily to in their minds, whether it's fair or not. Kind of cut them off from the latest thing, which you don't want anyway, honestly. You know. But whatever, we have to have something to complain about. I mean uh this is it's an idea. I I again I'm not I'm not actually saying I don't literally mean like this thing I taught thought of ten seconds ago makes total sense. It's I I I don't think I've worked through it. But you're right. There's this line there's this intersection point of if we don't fix the win 10 machines that are still out there, they're going to be exploited and we're going to take heat for it. Like there's just no two ways about that. So do we fix Win 10 or do we make some other offering and a Win 11, I think somebody said S E for secure edition? Okay, or you know, simple editional. Nice. Right. Okay. Is the is the other way to tackle that. I think people would love it too, because they'd be like, look, this is the version of Windows 11 that doesn't have any of that cool pilot crap. You know, like um well and then people like with modern computers were like, I want to run SE too. You know. Um so we'll see we'll see. I look I just made this up. This is not happening. I I don't know, just think this stuff is going through my brain right now, but it's it's an idea. And I, you know, when you if you think about the Windows 10 support schedule as a a 10-year thing and sort of a 13-year thing, but you know, it's this whatever continuum of time. We're at like the 11th hour in this thing. Like this is not what Microsoft wants from a scheduled perspective, a major security initiative to harden a thing they're actively trying to get rid of right now. Yep. And to spend the time and the money and the effort and whatever. To do that too, I uh I you know, I'm not sure which is worse, right? Like doing that work or letting those guys go to some I guess new version of Windows eleven, which nobody wanted to make either. So I thought it's fun to do the math and go or ship them a NUC with the TPM performance. Right, right. Or just like a USB stick that has a like a T uh TPM armor or something. Being in a performance argument over a game where it's like this might might be cheaper to just ship everybody more RAM Ship ship RAM in the game with the game. Yeah, but comes with more RAM for your computer. Just put a RAM stick in every box. But that's you know, it was one of the ways we drew it on Well they sort of did this before, right? I mean, um in Windows Vista because you know it was kind of top heavy compared to its predecessors, they came up with something called Windows Ready Drive, which is a way you could stick in any USB key at the time and use it as sir basically cache. Like it was a way to kind of speed up the system, you know. Like I don't know, maybe there's a uh uh I don't know. Uh not they wouldn't be a USB. Well maybe it would be, I don't know. Maybe there's a way. Uh today for something similar. I don't know. I don't know. I just make stuff up. I don't know. I don't know. Um I've heard people say an idea word on the street. Word on the street. Um and then just a couple hardware your um uh earnings type things, uh Lenovo, which is the world's biggest maker of computers, uh had a blockbuster quarter actually. Uh a lot of records here. Uh net income is five hundred twenty one million, which is not a lot, but compared to the twenty one point six billion uh of revenues. But that speaks to a couple of things. One is, you know, the low margin H for PCs, but also the cost of building out its AI infrastructures, which is where a lot of the growth is coming from, right? That said, uh PC revenues, this is you gotta remember, this is the second calendar . No, it isn't. No, it's technically the first calendar quarter of 2026, right? Yeah. Um let me see, does it end March? I think they they kind of announced this a little late. Yeah, ending March 31. So the first calendar quarter. Um this is a time when the PC refresh cycle was over, essentially. Like people had been pre-buying PCs, et cetera, et cetera because of component price increases, et cetera. But that business grew 26% year over year, revenue-wise. Um, largest growth in five years. Um, it's the biggest PC business in the world, 24.4% market share. This is the largest gap between the first and second player in this market in over 15 years . Right? Now, I don't know off the top of my head what HP's market share is, but it's let's call it 20, or it could be as high as 21, 20, even 22. But the the gap between HP and Lenovo, which uh 15 years ago, I think HP would have been actually number one, but whatever. It the gap between number one and number two in this market is bigger right now than it's ever been. Over 50% of Lenovo's sales of PCs in a quarter were premium PCs, which of course have higher margins for the first time. Right. I mean, they you know, think they have ThinkPad. That's maybe not surprising, but they sell IdeaPad and Yoga and whatever they just have Lenovo uh branded PCs as well. Um that business was almost fifteen billion of the twenty almost twenty two billion the company made overall, but the vast majority of the rest of it was the infrastructure part of the company, which is the AI data center stuff. Yeah. That's and that's going great. Um they're also they're just doing the talking all the words, you know. They have a business an AI server business pipeline of blah, blah, blah, and more than what I mean. I guess that's the question is are these are I'm presuming they're still following gaps. So is this gear they shipped, not gear on order. So the revenue well, revenues are revenue. So it kind of doesn't as long as someone paid for it, I guess it doesn't matter. Um but what they're talking about. Well, what what are they talking about ? You know, they have over fifty eight hundred customers that are doing AI deployments in data centers. And okay. I don't think of Lenovo that way, but whatever. And then they have a services group that's another almost three billion bucks. They have been the best caretaker of this brand imaginable. They also let their their designers go nuts. Like they make orig ami computers. Like look, this one folds into a crane. Like it's it's crazy. It's crazy mostly because they are the biggest company in the space. And it doesn't make sense for them not to just be conservative. They're making rolling screen laptops that go in either direction. Yeah. I I love that they do this stuff. Yeah, it's it's it's awesome, actually. It's really cool. It is, yeah. And then there's NVIDIA, which um, you know, they're doing okay. I don't know how they keep doing this. Well, actually I do. In the gigantic industry circle jerk that is AI, there's only one company that's actually making money, like literally making money. Yeah. And I mean literally getting money from other companies and it's NVIDIA, right? 'Cause GPUs that power all these data centers. Yeah. But the growth numbers, you keep thinking it's gotta slow down. Well just from a manufacturing perspective, right? That's why I keep pushing on this. They don't even sell in China. You know, they can't. They've given up on China. Yeah. Um, you know, they're just a question of how are they accounting for this? Like uh when when does the manufacturing pipeline just not keep up? They could put this money in a passbook savings account and would never go out of business. Like it is astonishing. It's like it's just it's just a mountains. It's tons of money it's stup id. So, you know, eighty eighty one point six billion in revenues, uh corporate record for that quarter, by the way, um, is a gain of eighty-five percent year over year. I didn't look at this, but you know it was 70 something percent this quarter last year, and you know it was seventy something percent the like how but and valued at five trillion like it's a five trillion, oh probably. Yeah . Um this business is so big, they're actually gonna split what is this I think they just call it data center two words um into uh different groups because they they're gonna try to explain like where money's coming from now. So they're gonna have like a hyperscale business and a AI cloud industrial and enterprise business. So that will be fun. I don't know. It doesn't matter. You can spread this the spread this money out however you want. It's you're never gonna run out of it. It's just astonishing. I've never seen anything like this company. Well , five trillion valuations. No, not to this level. I just crazy . Okay. Did Laurent ever write the open ? No, he didn't. Okay. Um moving into um AI and and dev a little bit. Um uh we didn't write this up yet, but Google announced sometime in the past twenty four hours that they're adding Google Drive synced to notebook LM, which is like, yeah, duh . Um, and I feel like this might be workspace specific. I don't know if this is how it works for consumers. I I should look into this, but this makes sense. You in other words, you can bring your note like notebook LM is a lot of things, but one of the things that is is like a notebook, right? And and it's really for research, you pull in things into a project like documents or whatever it is, or links to websites and stuff, and it uses that as the context and it can ignore the rest of the world and do a great job with that. And then it creates, you know, like infographics and whatever you want to do with this stuff. But you could also just use it as kind of a general purpose um kind of note-taking app. It's part of the complexity of this Google today because they have so much stuff, but having that single Microsoft every day. Yeah. Uh to me makes a lot of sense. Um one thing I've never done, but as uh Laurat was talking to me about today, it's like we might want to look into this, is uh Google has this uh preferred sources feature in Google search where you can go in and configure like the sites you trust and have those maybe uh um coloring the results a bit, you know, by coming out near the top or whatever. And I don't I've never even looked at this. So I'm gonna ask our Robit or a web guy about this. But interesting. Yeah. And I I and I I don't know that I would have I mean I've seen it and I don't think too much of it, but now they're adding that to AI mode and AI overview, which are two Google search features, which arguably are the future or even the present of Google search. So, you know, having um um you know having a formal thing like we need to have a button you know like on the page or something like we don't have that so there's a way you can just go you can add any site you want you can just go into preferences and Google search to do that but um yeah we I it's possible this is something. Yeah, right. Like trusted test yeah tech sour yeah, tech sources maybe or whatever. Yeah. That's right, like playlists almost. Um yeah, but it's also uh this is the bubble I want to live in. Is there a list Yeah. Probably actually, right? But that's a good idea. I want the I want the all conspiracy theory list. How about that? Can you have a list? Every response refers to the conspiracy theory. What if my only trusted source is the onion ? Nice. I want a whimsical view of the world. Like the world I wish it was, not the world that is. Which I guess you kind of do, by the way. Um this one came out of the blue, and I don't know that they have a formal announcement about this anywhere, but they contacted me and a bunch of others. But um DuckDuckGo says that their usage across uh their search service, Doc AI, um their mobile apps, et cetera, has gone up dramatically in the wake of Google I.O., which of course was this AI announcement tsunami last week that I'm still trying to recover from. Yeah. And um this is like basically people who are like who's you because you know, this is the reaction, right? You you either look at this as the greatest thing that ever happened, or you're like, Oh god, this is the end of the world. I need to find something else. And so people are starting to look around, right? Yeah. Um and you know in the US, I uh average growth of their DuckDuckDucco mobile app, you know, up eight over eighteen percent . Um peak growth during the holiday weekend, long weekend, 30 %. Wow. Um usage and I've had was average growth of 33% and peak growth of 69.9% on May 25, which I think was Sunday. Um crazy. There's they have a version of Google. I wonder if it's a number large enough . Yeah. I was just wonder if Google notices. Like are you Yeah so Google IO is your traffic actually down in a meaningful way, or is just DuckDuckGo small enough that those increases don't measure meaningfully to go? Yeah. So these are meaningful for DuckDuckGo. What you're asking is is the loss meaningful to Google? I I would guess and say probably not. But then again , you also have to be paying attention to this, right? I mean, sure. DuckDeko literally quotes the federal judge in USV Google, who says Google is a monopolist. It has acted to maintain its monopoly , and monopolies do not worry about users leaving. You know? So there you go. I mean, I it's interesting. So I mean good for them. I uh duck that goes great Yeah, no, and and again, it's like it's interesting to see where people are at. Yeah, I don't I don't have that kind of non-AI position but, I will say in I know in Helium and somewhere else I've been I've been using DuckDucko a lot lately, not by any design, it's just that it must be in Helium. But if you use Google Search, like one of the things you'll see at the top of search results is this kind of AI or it it spits out whatever it spits out. It's like a little summary of whatever. And it has links and whatever, but it's it's you're you're meant to just get the answer right there. And the way that Duck DuckGo does this is kind of interesting. I actually I didn't realize it wasn't at first, right? So I thought I'm like, oh, they they scaled this back a little bit. And what they there's like an AI overview section at the top unless you specify no AI. And um you have to expand it to see that stuff. So it doesn't actually spew out all the AI by default. It only does it when you ask for it. Um Um, you know, which honestly is not a horrible approach. Um and then just generally speaking, when it comes to switching from anything to anything, um the big blocker uh generally speaking is you when you notice things are bad or different in a way you don't like, you always notice that and then you just kind of go back because you're like, I can't deal with it. Like, and that would be the experience with like Brave Search or DuckDuckGo search or whatever at any time where uh in the past especially I should say, where you you're like, well I want to use this thing. I'm gonna try it. And then or bing was like this. Like you you search for things and you're like, no. That's right. No. And I still sometimes I've done this at least twice in the past, you know, five days ish, like where you some search result comes up and you're like, No. And then you go Google.com and you type it in again, you paste it in and it's like, yeah, there it is. And and you know, that's that's the that's the trick. Certainly had that experience with Khaggy where I'm like, no. Yeah. So I mean, but if you're the average mortal consum er who ended up with the default of Google in the first place, right. Are they going to then now sees the AI blurb and goes, This offends me? Are they gonna switch off the AI blurb? Like they didn't change any settings anyway. What's easier? Switching off the AI blurb or switching to DuckDuckGo. So if you want to do it in Google, if I'm not mistaken, I think you have DuckDuckGo is like we literally have a page that is no never any AI, you know, like you can do it that way. Yeah. Um I but I would say to your point though, like if you're you pay for Khaggy, you have the situation where, you know, whatever I don't know how whatever percent, 10%, 5%, whatever it is. Where you're like, no, and you actually have to go to Google. Yeah. If that's not fifty percent, if it's like a tiny one, you know, single digit, that's okay, right? I mean you're still has happened, but not much more than that. That's what I mean. Like not enough to make you go, no, I'm not doing this anymore. So no. Like you're the goal, look, you you have to be realistic. Like you're not going to completely remove Google from your life if that's your goal. Yeah. But you can minimize your exposure to it. And that's one way to do it. So it's well and that was the whole thing is m let's make Kaggy the default and spent the Yeah and then right hour going from machine to ma set up the account, pay for it, then go to the phone and to the PC and and yeah. And yes, okay, this is now my default. When I type into the search bar, go to keggy first. Well and a lot of browsers don't even have khaggy as an option, so it's kind of it's more of a pain than it really seems like. So I did it I 'cause I care. battled through it. Yeah. I just wanted the experience. Most people won't. Most people won't. You know, no we know that. And I I committed to a year, right? Just buy for the year when the renewal comes up, we'll see. Yeah. And I I look, uh in my case, I I it must be it's gotta be helium because I've been installing uh different computers. Helium doesn't have any kind of like a settings thinking. Yeah, that's yeah. So you have to kinda you do it from scratch every time. Which in my case is a little painful because you know lots of computers for most people, who cares? Um but I have to say, you know, I have noticed it. I've noticed like DuckDuckO is the the fault, I guess. And and that's fine. And I think the first time I ever used the browser, I probably did switch to Google at the time , but I just I haven't since then. It's fine. You know, and and yes, sometimes all right, Google.com, whatever, whatever the thing is. I care I wish I could remember an exact thing because it was I there was some search I just did. It might have been this morning where I knew what I was looking for. I just didn't know where to go to find the thing. And it wasn't coming up in the first, you know, five or eight, whatever. And I was like, come on, I know this is going to be right at the top of Google. And it was, you know. But but that's, you know. Here's w the kind of s underlying issue though is that both Kagi and DuckDuckGo rely heavily on Google's index. They license Google's index. Sure. Right. Google could at any point just say, Yeah guys, we're not going to be Right. So I I mean uh the one the one well a couple of things to that. I mean first Nobody's doing their own sp spidering. No, of course not. I mean uh but anything that take like um Apple's approach to AI so far on the iPhone has been like you can you can use chat GPT, it will be anonymous. You can sign in if you want, you don't have to. And I think and and we you see that with private well not private, you see that with like smaller AI um chatbots where it may be going off to chat GPT or whatever it is and but you don't have to sign into it. You could be anonymous like uh you know Proton I think does this kind of thing with uh Lumo or you know whatever it might be. So if if smaller search engines are using the Google stuff, but you're not getting all the Google whatever it is, AIO reviews and stuff you don't want, I mean that's okay, right? I mean it's um because you can't just you no one's got you can't spin up a new Google tomorrow. You know, like this is like they 're I mean everybody's trying to. I I think both Kagi and Big DGO are trying to, but yeah. That's it. Just use D Pr. They stole it all. It's all fine. Um, you know, you're fine. Let's just do that. Um, yeah, this all it's all gonna change. But but as of today, it's like look, the the goal is to minimize it for a lot of people. I mean, and trying to be realistic about it. It's like, look, okay, maybe they're using us on the back end or whatever. I don't care. I'm not signing into my Google account. They're not, you know, they don't know who I am. There's no AI. I think it's a good thing. There's no AI is a big yeah. That's gonna be a draw for people. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. That's fine. That''ss it not not per perfect. I mean,hing'sfect. What's perfect? You know. No, it doesn't have any AI. This show doesn't have any AI. Oh, not that you know, but I've actually been an AI construct for seven months. I'm actually asleep in a bed right now. I figure the day will come when uh I won't show up for work. Right. But you won't know. It will just happen. And you'll yeah, I think that day is not far off. There' is a a horrible show . Yeah, I watched it. I actually I liked it. See it's another Nicole Kidman. Yeah, who doesn't look like anything like Nicole Kinman anymore, which I find bizarre. But I Yeah. Actually the woman who plays her young self on Scarletta looks more like Nicole Kidman. I kinda wish it was just about her, frankly. But she was great. I loved her. Yeah, I thought she was very good. Actually a lot of the actors are great. It's not that the first two episodes, uh which is all I've seen, is you just don't like a bad Boston accent. I know what I actually that guy's really from Boston. Although the guy who plays the younger version of him is not. But Lenny Clark is a famous Boston stand-up comedian. Oh good. Oh nice. But the no I the two the two things that stand out to me are it's it's just people yelling at each other all the time. And the after the first episode I, I was like, don't know if I can take this. Like I I yeah, we get it. Everyone's family's terrible. Like let's move on. Like I, you know, they argue about everything all the time. But the other one is there's a character who who uh has a wife who died and she's AI now and she talks to her all the time. Isn't that wild? And uh oh, you know this is gonna happen. It's probably alright. It's not like it is in the show yet, but it will be it's too in the show, it's way much better than it could ever be now. Yeah, it's bizarre. This is people will absolute people are falling in love or developing deep relationships with AH Pots who are nobody. If you can make that thing like someone , especially someone who's past. Can I tell you something? I'm working on it right now because Lisa's mom passed a few months ago. Her dad is in is really grieving. And Lisa said, What if we made like a little Amazon echo that was her voice? So think about the baby steps to this, right? The the the photos from the past that turn them into little videos where you're like, oh my God. Or the people, how many people? Seriously, just listening to this podcast worth hundreds of thousands of them who have some voicemail recording on their iPhone or whatever that they will never get rid of because it's the last time they could hear that person . I have twenty of my mom's voicemails 'cause I know that it won't be long and I want to cry I know. And someday you're it's someday you're gonna have to it's not gonna be there anymore. Yeah. Record your loved ones now with high quality recording equipment. Yeah. Because the problem I have making Lisa's mom's AI is we just don't have any good recordings of her voice. I did a two day sit-down with my grandmother. Perfect. Talking about that life. And do what you're doing. So you're explaining all the photos. A personal right. I wanna so I uh the time unfortunately has passed to do this with um Sharon is not my mother in law or my m stepmom, but the woman that we who was married to my father who we bought this place and our previous house from has this treasure trove of photos that I've digitized for the family but no one knows what any half of them are and unfortunately she has dementia and probably I feel like I keep saying to my sisters like she's gonna have one of those clarity days. You gotta break out the photos right then because she has these super clear moments where she can she's like oh that's Bob from Caribbean Maine. I did that with my mom too. Yeah. Oh my God. It's credible. Tell me those stories. Get I mean, first of all, it's great to have those recordings, regardless. Yep. Um but if you ever thought you wanted to make an AI simulcrum So I'm by the way, you you're you're your stepmom Sharon,, no but you know who will? I I don't Sharon Osborne. Right. I don't I don't know that I want that, and I don't know that that's healthy, but there is a AI Ozzy coming. Boy. Oh, for goodness sake. Walks in the door and he just belts out the beginning crash. That's how he walks in the door . Bum bum. Sharon says they're gonna take it around the world. Yeah, of course, yeah. Yeah. AI Ozzy. He kind of looked like an AI anyway. Yeah. They did it with ABBA, with the whatever that was. Oh yeah, that was weird. That 3D. And they're not even dead. They're a bands touring right now that don't have a single original member. You know? Well, that happens because I go to the cabinet. I know, but that's I mean that's like a I see that all the time. It's the Drifters with George Burns. Yeah, exactly. Bob Smith from Alabama. And uh well, I'm sorry. Who is this guy? What ? Yeah. He played guitar on one tour and now he's Alabama. He saw them in one tour. That's the only qualification. You don't even have to have ever been in the band. You're just doing it now. It's very strange. May I uh may I introduce you may I interest you in a commercial break of course about that time. We will continue on. You're watching Windows Weekly, Paul Thorat, Richard Campbell, and the AI Ozzy. Oi, oi, oi . Our show today brought to you by Webro ot. I wish we'd been running Webroot in the January because we got uh a little we got a message from Google a couple of days ago saying, you know, your workspace has been comprom ised . And the bad guys have been in there 1 21 days because one of our employees clicked a link in a Gmail that brought them to a fake Google sign-in page and they signed in . And we didn't have because they were on a Mac, we thought, oh, they don't need any protection. They have it now. The problem is which protection you use, and I gotta tell you, there are bad antiviruses out there. You know their names. 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That's if you get the full package. Oh, and I should mention AI has obviously changed the cybersecurity game. Scams are smarter, malware is faster. Phishing emails look shockingly real . Tell that to our team. But the good news is you don't need to be a tech expert to stay ahead of it when you use security that can keep up with the AI threats. Unlike a lot of those free antivirus tools or older security programs. Webroot is built to counter the modern AI-driven attacks. It's fast, it's lightweight, it's designed to spot threats before they ever reach you. Live a better digital life with WebRoot. Webroot is offering our listeners an exclusive 60% off offer. Visit Webroot.com slash twit to learn more. That's Webroot.com slash twit.ch W e br om slash T W I T. Thank you, Webroot, for your support. By the way, did you notice, Paul? I realized when I got that book off my bookshelf that I have the Thirat teacup. And I have the Rennes Radio Coffee Cup. That's nice. And I thought, well, they belong on the set. Oh, that's fun. Yes. I don't know if Desk had them sitting there as I recall. That's a that was a limited run too . Oh, well I won't break it then . That's gonna break on its own, Leo. It's cheap. But it is on a kind of a sliding uh sliding off the edge of it. It's a little slippery. I ship out a run as mug once or twice a week, so I have a ZD TV mug that nobody's making anymore twenty six years later. And I really don't want to break that one. So I'm very careful when I wash that one. Anyway, let's go on with the show. Sorry to interrupt. No, no problem. OpenAI, I guess sensing all of the uh wonderfulness that Anthropo is doing with uh Office has released a chat GPT plugin for PowerPoint. Um without getting into the I know the specifics, uh like how specific that is, I will say, um, you know, this is one of my earliest examples with AI when when you think about you know and trying to grasp what's happening and understand it all and you know what could AI be good for. The two things I always come back to are my story about how every January I have to make a new like re-fix a chart and excel. I don't know how to use this stupid thing. Or um every once in a while I have to make a PowerPoint presentation. Like I don't speak regularly anymore. I'm not traveling a lot for this. I've never I've never been and never will be a PowerPoint expert. But um you know being able to go in it literally says like would you like to make a you know like a new presentation like yeah yeah I'd like you to do that for me like you know that's just this is a good use of AI I think um so okay whatever I'm not saying this is a particularly good one or whatever, but like of course they're doing this. So you're gonna see this everywhere. I got a new deck to make, you know . And it's the data centers in space deck, too. Thank you. I'm I'm only okay with this if if every time you begin the presentation you say it as Dena Data Centers in Space Space Space I think the talk title is actually Above the Cloud. Nice. This is heaven, really, right? Yeah. Is that what you say ? Um, and then uh yeah, I you know, I I've been complaining about.NET 10 just because I don't quite understand what the point of it is. But last week I talked about I'm pretty sure you're complaining about dot net eleven, but okay. Oh.net eleven, sorry, sorry. Um complain about it if you want. Okay. It's fast. It's fast. But you're complaining about eleven because then you're not seeing anything in 11 that you care about. Okay . Well, um .NET Maui, uh, which is Microsoft's, you know, uh C based uh what do you call it? Xamarin Forms uh follow-up for mobile app But also trying to include everything else. It's trying to be the unified UX solution. But yeah. It's not going to work. So uh it's not going to be good for that. But if you like mobile apps, um so they're they're supporting uh material you or as they're calling it for some reason material three uh which is the most recent modern version of the uh google slash android design language uh and it's just a this is just a property flag in your project properties much like when you add support for like dot net nine I guess it was to uh or I should say WinUI3 to um WPF projects so same the same thing. It's just like a single line and they're going to improve it over time, et cetera, et cetera. But um yeah, so that's cool. I mean that's okay good for them. And then uh last week I talked about, I think this was my tip or something, this notion that, you know, we're getting to the point where normal people are going to be able to build apps, you know, or and this notion of like just making things with AI. And when I was watching, I knew this was coming, but in watching the Google AI keynote, when they got to the Google A I Studio bit and they were talking about making native Android apps. I was like, I gotta try this. And I didn't see a way to do that at the time, but I ended up making a what is a really a web app version of like a markdown editor similar to typora, which is the app I use. And it was actually pretty great. And then the next day I got up and I was like, I'm going to try this again. And Android app support was there. And I was doing this on a Windows on ARM device. This is kind of weird because Android Studio on the Mac, which is ARM based, runs the ver their emul emulators, like their virtual machines for the devices. No problem. But on the Windows side, you actually have to have an X64 device to do that. So I was running this against physical devices, first the phone and then the um the fold because it has the bigger screen, which is more like a like a desktop sort of and holy crap that was really good. So and I was like, okay, that's interesting. Um the only issue I had like I I kept refining the prompt and then what I got to was like the the app came up on the fold in this case it was just an all-white screen with nothing in it. So I'm writing the thing back and I'm like, yeah, this is not working. It's just a blank screen. And so it's like, okay, testing. And it went through this whole process. And at the end it was like, no, this is working exactly right. Just type into it. And yeah, if you have to save it, just type, you know, control S. And I was like, oh my God, seriously. And it just made this total um like minimalist, you know, version of the app. And I was like, okay, that's fine. I don't want that, but that's fine. But then I spent a lot of the weekend doing this stuff in various ways. Like I did it directly in Android Studio, which I'd say not as successful a good as maybe the GitHub Copile experience in Visual Studio, but you know, I'm sure it's gonna get there. Um I went back to cloud code, which is something I'd used before I was able to finish my WinUI pad or.NET Pad project, but um uh mixed results and that was still kind of mixed results, but um but i was really i i and then i the last thing i did uh before the end of the weekend was i i went back and did another version of the markdown editor but this time i was like all right listen i want this thing to be installable as a web app, like a PWA. Like I what I want to be able to do is go to this URL and there'll be the thing in the browser address bar and I can install it. It was like, okay. That's like 22 seconds. And um yeah, it works great. And it had like this superfluous little UI bits like in the corner of the app there were like these three circles that I guess were supposed to look like Mac buttons for windows or something. Didn't do anything. So I was like, get rid of that. And then there was also a superfluous kind of install app button near the top that I said, get rid of that. That's part of the browser UI. And it did, no problem. And uh yeah, this thing it's pretty much as good as the app I use every day. Like it just works everywhere. Works on mobile, it works on my computers. Like it's it's insane. And um, and I think this is that Leo's just Leo's been doing this for months, so he's that's not impressed by any of this, but the and this notion that you can have a conversation about the thing. In this case, I do not understand the code base like at all. I'm not uh whether it's web apps with JavaScript at React or whatever it might be or uh native Android apps, which is Kotlin and uh Jetpack Compose. I don't understand these languages. I don't understand these frameworks. I don't I mean I'm I have basic like developer experience in other languages and uh frameworks, I guess, but I just I I I just don't I'm not gonna be able to edit this code, you know? And I yeah, there's a point where in the future maybe get the yeah, I can't it's not gonna, you know, it's gonna work. I'm not gonna be able to figure it out maybe I don't but I haven't hit that point and I also you know when if you look at the description especially for Google AI Studio they're like look you should use this for specific apps like simple apps like you know the a list of whatever type of apps I'm like yeah that and the thing I'm making is not on that list and it's pretty complex and but it's working it's incredible like it works great like it's really good so I just just quick update on that. I just think user acceptance testing is the most important testing, one way or the other. There are overarching elements like is it secure? Well yes. I mean in this case, it's just a uh my I'm creating a it's a text editor essentially, but it displays in kind of our it's HTML, but it's a rich text look like it has styles and blah blah blah, whatever. I'm I can open files in the local file system, I can save them back.' Therey f like they open them elsewhere. They look perfect. Like everything's fine. Like um I think the I think this is like a gateway drug. I think um, you know, when Google adds like uh what do they call it? Widget editing, like or widget creation, like uh kind of conversational vibe coded widgets that if you if you're familiar with widgets on Android, but really widgets on any platform like iOS or whatever, it's really just another surface for an underlying app. Like you have a weather widget that's it's pretty, but it's using the weather app on the on the phone, right? Like the widgets you're gonna create in a couple of months on Android could draw from multiple sources, right? It's they're like super widgets in a way. And in many ways, they're more powerful than the widgets that are built into your phone because you can say, you know, I've like the it this is based on the demo they did, but it's like I'm having I have a trip coming up, like so I want some kind of a calendar thing, and I want something where I can see my itinerary, and I want something where I can see my plane tickets. And you want all this stuff in one place, it's like a screen on your phone or something. Um, that's actually very powerful, you know? And um I know I just I don't know. I'm this this is super impressed. Uh impressive to me. Yeah. So and this idea of wrapping yourself in personal software seems very reasonable. You know, given there's sufficient guidelines around it to don't put it in a place where it's going to be risky for you. But if it helped uh it's automations that help you, why wouldn't you? Yeah. And this is where the historical strengths or weaknesses of like Apple and Google in particular are going to come to the forefront because Apple will be slower, but what they do will eventually be great. You know, Google will be faster and they will make mistakes, you know.? Yeah But it will be nuts. And um so I in that sense there's gonna be something for everyone. And I'm just talking mobile here 'cause I think that where that's where most of this is gonna happen. But um it's I don't know. It's just a different world. Like it's crazy. It's an interesting time that we're in. Yep. For sure. Yep. Yeah . Um okay. And then I only have a couple of Xbox gaming type things. We talked about the uh Before you say that. Do you mind if I just tell everybody they're listening to Windows Weekly, a fine program on the Twitter Podcast Network, starring Paul Thorott and Richard Campbell? And now the Xbox segment. They never put a commercial in there, but if they wanted to, they could. Now continue, please. Benito will probably never complain about this because he's such a good guy, but when I record hands on windows, on average I would say I'm supposed to p h have a break in the middle so there can be an ad. Yeah, and that usually that ad's me, by the way. Okay. But I I don't I forget three out of four times. Yeah. And I make a point of remembering. Like I I try to put it in the notes and and you know, but uh even in the same recording, I'll do it one time and then miss the next three. Like I'm really bad at that . Sorry, everybody. Sorry. Okay. They hate me. It's okay, Paul. Don't worry about it. We all have our strengths. I just have fewer than most people. Um so last week we talked about more leadership changes in Xbox briefly. There's not too much to say there, other than the weird AI core thing that's occurring in Xbox right now, which I don't understand. Um she's also run off and grabbed a bunch of senior gaming folks now, too, from outside of Microsoft while forcing out the inside of Microsoft gaming senior folks. Yeah. I mean if you look if if the argument is like what we've been doing isn't working and we need to make changes, it's like okay. I mean it's kind of hard to argue with that. No matter what anyone thinks about people or whatever. But in the initial grab, and I think I said this on the show when she grabbed a bunch of core AI folks was well, don't surround yourself with people who don't know anything about gaming. Right. But then the next thing she did was bring in new people focused on gaming. So yeah, so you're right. So the most recent. She's definitely up to stuff. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Like that like the guy from YouTube that bought Commodore, like one of the things he did that I think is so cool is he just brought in a bunch of former Commodore Luminaries to advise or help, you know, like Sam Tremell uh Tremell and uh, you know, Dave Heine, like guys who were so or uh David Pleasants, you know, guy guys who were part of Commodore andor Amiga for many, many years, but like thirty years ago are back, you know, helping with this company. Now it's credit for the self awareness, you know. I am an enthusiast, not an expert. Right. Go get some experts. Yeah, I think it's neat. Um smart. I don't quite understand this one , but this happens like late. It was like super late in the day. I ri I think I was done for the day and I this came across my feed. I'm like, okay, I guess I gotta write about this. But first of all, um Xbox has is now all capital letters, so it's Xbox. I'm not sure I like that. Um, I don't know why. It vaguely remembers or reminds me of the original Xbox. There was a kind of like a kind of a brute force kind of nature to that device. You know, it was a big brick of a thing, a monolithic, whatever looking. I it maybe I don't know if that's from that. Maybe maybe it said that on the controller and the button in the middle, which I don't think back then lit up or did anything, but I can't remember. Um but I saw that and I was like the old logos were all one typeface. Like they weren't there was no upper lowercase. Okay . Yeah, maybe that's what it is then. But anyway, they're using it, so whatever. Um Microsoft or sorry. I mean it definitely speaks to if you're going back to the old culture of Xbox, right? That we're gonna focus on the console and that kind of thing, making a reference like once upon a time there was no upper and lowercase when it came to it came to Xbox. Right. There was no upper and lowercase on an Apple IIe either, but uh you know, I guess this is what you know. Yeah. Um yeah. I look at some point we just go full blown nostalgia, you know. Like uh I I've made the argument like McDonald's new restaurants should look like they looked in the sixties, you know. Yeah. When I worked there, they had arches. Yeah. Right. Right. I think people would actually meet the tile and yeah, it was cool. Yep. Um anyway, they're not doing that, but at least not yet. Um but they announced something called the Xbox Game Studio Shop, which is an online merch store. So you can buy things that are like uh, you know, hats, uh, t shirts, drink wear, whatever, um, obviously with logos or designs related to Xbox Studio games like Halo and Forza Gears Award, et cetera . Kind of a limited collection as of yet. They're it's going to expand dramatically. I guess they're going to have big launches alongside games where some new Call of Duty or not Call of Duty actually, but some whatever Xbox Studio game will come out and then they'll have a bunch of new merchandise as well if you want to do that. Um I didn't know this, but apparently they already have stores for Blizzard, Call of Duty, Bethesda, and Minecraft, like gear stores, like like physical item stores. So this will be another one of those. Uh but for Microsoft's I guess I mean they're all first party, but first party. Oh, they got a bunch of Halo ge ar, that's for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's the only way that thing's gonna make any money these days. So that's good. I don't know what they're doing, but it's kind of weird. Um and then this happened just I think since we started the show, but the um the Valve has brought back or is now again selling the Steam Deck OLED, which at one point was the most expensive, you know, the better version with the better screen, right? Of uh their their portable gaming device. But this thing now costs like forty to forty six percent more depending on which one you're getting. So like wow the five hundred and twelve gigabyte version um now starts at seven hundred and eighty nine dollars. And the one terabyte version is $949, which is $300 more than it was before. Um, but they're back in stock. So I think the yeah, five twelve version was five forty-nine and now it's seven eighty nine. So if you're holding out for that steam machine whatever. The gate cube . It's probably gonna be expensive. Yeah. Sure. Or they wait till the the things even out, right? I'm surprised they didn't update the components in this thing. I think this is just the same thing as before, just with higher prices. Yeah, and the free little question is how many have they made? Because eventually those prices will come down. But then they can sell, but we sold every one we made. There you go. Selling like hot cakes, which I think we should all wonder if that is good. How expensive are your pancakes? How many hotcakes could you sell? Do you think that the main reason people are booing speakers at commencement when they say the word AI is it's just a bunch of gamers who can't afford to get uh gaming . No, I think it's you know what I I honestly I think it's people f facing one of the bleakest job prospects in history. You know, frankly. Yeah. I mean I understand. College has never been more expensive. No, no, I I don't either. It it it actually the the reason or rationale of it doesn't matter, right? It's you just spent four or more years hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yeah. Yeah. And you're gonna be working at Pizza hut, you know. Like it's it's kinda tough. Yeah, I completely understand. I mean, my son graduated during the um the COVID thing and that was terrible. He had a heart he could not get a job in his field, right? Well, it's the same it's the same people who graduated from high school during COVID who are now graduating from college to that's my daughter. Yes, exactly. She's like the uh she's the luckiest kid on earth, you know. Oh god. Um you know what? I completely understand why they're pissed. I be So AI may be a straw man or whatever you want to call that, but it's it's emblematic of the problem they see out in the world, you know, because it's the root cause of the company . The only thing I would say to them is I understand you're upset, but you should really figure out ways to use AI to help you get a job. Because people who do who are affected, I just had a friend who was interviewing an Apple. Yeah. And the f one of the first things they said is, What's show us an AI project you've worked on. Right. And fortunately he had a really good one and was able to show them and they were very impressed. Do that. Yeah. You know, um b because there will be jobs that just changing the same way that, you know Right. Yeah, but that's not what the tech bros are saying. No, I know. They're saying there's no more work. Yeah. You know, so first of all, every one of these idiots f dropped out of college. So what are we listening to them for? Yeah. So Peter Teal's paying people not to go to college. Right. Well, I wish he'd pay me not to go to college. I can do that pretty easily. Um Yeah, I don't know. I you know, li y Leo's right. First of all, job jobs are training. Like I was t my sister, the teacher, we were with her over the weekend and I was asking her about AI in school and kids and all that stuff. And I was you know, and she was saying, you know, her belief is like, you know, software development is just gonna go away. And I'm like, yeah, it's not that's not exactly right, but I I know why you say that. It's changing. Like and it's the thing we've talked about. You're almost more of a project manager, a program manager. It's the thing I just did. I just did a bunch of I made stuff with the code. Except I didn't do any of it, you know. I just directed it. You know, I told it what to do. You described what to make. It's not hard, by the way. I have to say it's a lot easier than actually coding. That much I can tell you is true. Um so yeah, it's it everything's changing for sure . Um you know it's uh not changing the fabulous back of the book. It is an eternal truth that will be with us as long as there is windows. It is an eternity if you're waiting for it to end. Back of the book is next. Uh just a quick plug for our fabulous club and a thank you to our fabulous club members because without them there would be no Windows Weekly, there would be no Mac Break Weekly, there would be no This Week in Tech, there would be no Intelligent Machines, there would be no hands-on windows, all of the shows we do. You may say, Well, you have ads. We do, thank you to our advertisers, but ads only cover that's a it's a dwind a small and dwindling amount of our overall expenses. About sixty percent. I think it's down to fifty percent now. I'm not sure I.' havent checked lately. Um and the and the and we knew this was coming. That's why Lisa uh said, we better start a club. And we did actually in during uh COVID. And it's been great. And we are so grateful to all our members. And I just want to let you know it's still there. If you're a member, you get ad-free versions of all the shows. Uh you get special programming. We don't do anywhere else. And thanks to club members, we're able to add new co programming. We're we're now doing a show with Johnny Jets coming up uh this Friday. Actually Thursday, I guess. Yeah, Thursday at one. Johnny Jett, uh our travel guru . It's called Jet said with Johnny Jett. We've just added a new show with uh coding horror blogger, the guy who created Stack Overflow and Discourse, our forum software, Jeff Atwood. It's called Off by One with Jeff Atwood. And if you've ever seen Jeff on our shows, you know he is off by one . Uh it's a really good name actually for a show about coding AI and everything in between. Uh we do that because the club members support us. So if you like the programming, you want to see more of it, you want to support independent podcasting not owned by a big company. Twit.tv slash club twit. You'll be a member of our Discord. You'll be able to chat with us. There's lots of benefits, uh, but mostly the warm and fuzzy feeling knowing you're supporting independent podcasting like this. Now, let's get to the back of the book. Mr. Paul Thorat is waiting with his I have so much I want to unpack from what you just said. Johnny Jett, is that his real name? No. No. His real name is Johnny Jet Ski. Jeff . No. That's not his real name either. He when he was a younger man, he was a jet ski racer and he was and he called himself Johnny Jetski and then he focused on travel, so he changed it to Johnny Jet. I I I used to know his neat real name, I can't remember. He doesn't hide it. But it is not good a idea. Sometimes people are just lucky. When I went to b back to college and the internet was happening, you know, the web, this guy I went to school with who helped run the lab I was at, his name was D ennis Webb and we used to call him Dennis Worldwide Webb. You know, it's good it was just good timing. It just it just lucks out. Oh, and I forgot to mention a very nice new feature that uh thank you, Patrick Delahantey has added club members get chapters in their podcast apps. Chapters that means you can skip ahead and backwards or go to a subject you want. We've been people have been asking us for chapterss. It' very difficult to do on shows like ours where ads are added to fact. An endless series of segues um that make it impossible. Well that's another thing structure . I don't I some poor editor's gotta go, I is that a new subject? I don't let press the buttons . What is he talking about ? But there are chapter markers now and you can jump around. And the reason we don't do that for everybody is because of direct ad insertion, those ad lengths are variable. We don't know how long they're going to be. So there's no way to kind of same thing on YouTube. It makes it hard to do it on YouTube because it's moving around. It's a moving target. So uh if you but if you're in a club member you don't have ads in your uh in in your your feet shows, so we can easily markers work? Yeah, they do work. But only for club members. Yeah. And actually you could help us out because it doesn't work not all podcast players respect the markers. Right. We have a list on the website uh and we're trying to add to that list, especially if you're an Android. Um if you use an Android Podcatcher that does or does not support our chapter markers. I youf're in the club, just put it in the Discord and uh we will add that to our list of ones that do and don't because you have to it's uh twit.tv slash club twit slash chapters. I mean I rely on this now on YouTube for sure for videos. Yeah. And that's a that's a useful feature. Does it w how does it work when they put ads in? I don't know . Maybe YouTube's got a magic. They I bet see they're putting in the ads so they know. I think it's uh I don't know how they do it, but I mean it's a I actually don't know how they do it, but I bet it can't be, right? Because they insert ads you know, depending on who you are, like all over the place, right? Yeah, you know what? That's it. They know how long those ads are, so they can do the math . Maybe we don't know because the ads are inserted after the fact by a third party. So we can't do the math. Gotta hit your marks. Gotta get the exact amount of time. 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Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com . We're gonna restart it. The back of the book. Paul Thorat is tip of the wing. Tip of the week. Yeah, so a couple weeks ago we were getting ready to come home from Mexico. I I think I mentioned the day we had that big electrical problem. And one of the things I did that day before everything went south was, you know, I'm getting ready to fly home. I have all these laptops and electronics and whatever there. And I was I was like, I'm gonna be ready for this trip ahead of time. So one of the things I did as part of that was I kind of decommissioned or like even reset or whatever laptops that I wasn't going to need or bring home with me, et cetera. So a lot of those things were like laptops I had been testing Linux on. So I've been writing this long kind of switcher series over the past couple of months, looking at various Linux distributions and apps and whatever else and and other alternatives to Windows, etc. And something interesting happened, which is I, you know, within a day or two, I find myself like kind of missing Linux. And I was trying to figure out like why, like what was it about Linux? Wait, wait a minute. Did you just say missing Linux? Don't pay attention to this. Um What ? This is not for Leo. So I did a couple of a couple things came out of this. Um, I installed uh WSL, the Windows subsystem for Linux on the laptop I use most of the time. And yeah, whatever. But I was trying to figure out like what it is, what is it about Linux? Like what are the things about Linux that are appealing to me? Um, and a couple of things came out of this. So one was uh the thing I talked about last week, which is the like you're gonna set up Windows 11 as a Linux user with Linux, right? In other words, you're using an a uh local account, you're not going to connect ever to a Microsoft account or to any Microsoft services. You're going to install things from a command line, et cetera, whatever it might be. So I we talked about that last week. And then I had, but I I wrote down a list of the things that were about Linux, which you know, factored into that article. And then I I think it was yesterday, wrote finally wrote the article, which is like which I call the Zen of Linux for no good reason. But like what are the things like like the the conceptual differen ces you have to get over? And two of them are actually coming from Windows, I I guess, or maybe the Mac, but definitely from Windows, right? Um but but two are applicable to Windows, like and and speak to that article I talked about before. The first one is this notion of like Windows users uh just knee jerk, go to the web, download ex all them, and that's how you install apps. You find them on the web, you install them from the download you got from the web. But we have this thing Linux has had forever, which is a package manager. There are third-party package managers, but Microsoft has one built into Windows, Winget or the Windows Pack age Manager. We obviously have the store, which is its own thing. We have new CLIs all over the place, like the store CLI is the relevant examples here. But you can in the context of Windows, do things much like you do on Linux, except that w one of the big uh Achilles heels for Winget is it's great for finding and installing apps. It's great for bulk installing apps through a script. It's no good at managing apps, meaning keeping them up to date automatically. Because you can go to the command line at any time and you know wing gate upgrade and dash dash all whatever, and it will update everything, but you have to do it yourself. Like on Linux, like this stuff just kind of happens. And like that's kind of the that's kind of a neat thing. Like it's a different it's a different mindset. You know, it's a different way to think of it. The other one that applies is the command line, which is like, you know, we've spent the past , I guess, 50 years now getting away from command lines, right? You know, the world of MS DOS and whatever preceded at CPM, et cetera. But um, you know, I gotta say, as I'm getting, I was talking to Rich, I mentioned this, I think to Rich before the show started. Like more and more, it's like if I could boot into a command line and just use that most of the time, I think I would, you know. Like I I love that Microsoft edit, you know, command line editor. I mean, I love it. Um I like you are really falling deep into this. I know I'm a it's it's not good. Um it's gonna be a just a matter of time before you're using Emacs . Uh doing good that far. Max is n't much. Um but but the command line is is not just something you have to deal with. Like when people are like, well, Linux will make it when you don't have to go it's like yeah, you're not thinking about this correctly. There are there are things that are faster and better and more efficient or whatever from the command line. It's just are like the app updating thing, even on Windows where you have to do it manually, it's still more efficient just to do this , like then, you know, I guess you could just leave it alone, not worry about it. But I mean, the thing that's nice about WingGet or any package manager is that it's everything. So no matter how you install an app, like this will unless the thing is literally just not uh like outside of the system and doing its own thing like this will update all your store apps it will update web based apps whatever like it's it's really nice and um and I just think you know like it it's not like a it's not something you have to deal with. It's something you should just embrace. Like this is it's just better for certain things, you know. Um, there are other things on Linux that are just different. Like the file system obviously comes out of Unix and whatever. Our file system came out of something stupid, like CPM, which was inspired by some IBM stupidity from the late s or early seventies that whatever and we have drive letters and we still have 'em and I you know whatever it it's normal to us, but it's just not whatever. And then the one thing that Microsoft's trying to get to, which I'm not 100% sure is actually a huge Linux advantage, is um the chaos of updating and recording reboots, right? So Microsoft wants to get Windows down to like one boot a month. Neat. Um if you bring up a new Linux PC or new Linux install, whatever, you're gonna be rebooting that thing. I mean there's no doubt about it. But I I guess the goal here is that Linux is architected in such a way that you c updates will uh don't pr ha stop you from running the underlying app or service and they can just update in place and that works and usually you don't have to reboot and that's kind of cool I guess but we're trying to get there. But um I guess the uh the notion isn't so much like you should just like switch to Linux, um, although that will be an option for some people, but more like kind of incorporate some of the thinking of Linux into the way that you approach Windows, you know, which is what that thing last week was about. So Yeah.. I agree Kind of interesting. You know, people act as if Linux is all different than Windows. It it's just another one. Well, it can't so the problem is Linux is different from Linux, right? Like you know, you run something like Debian and there's nothing you can customize at all. Like it is things missing. It's bizarre. You don't even get like a like your account, you have to figure out how to make your account able to even do pseudo. You know? It's insanity. It's not built in in Debian . Some of them are in they're just crazy uh customizable, never ending. You could just spend your whole life playing around with the UI if you wanted to. Yeah, there really is. In the world of Linux. Yep. I'm a very happy user. And I'm glad to see that you have finally joined The Dark Side. Or whatever we're calling it. So okay. Um and then I don't have an app pick, but some of this is tied to the Switcher stuff, some of it is just timely. So Vilvaldi released the 8.0 version of the browser last week with what they're called. I think they just call it a unified Yeah, unified design. It's a new design. It's just like the the what they call the Chrome, the outside of the browser. It's actually really nice. Like it's um it's beautiful. Like this is this is where this is good enough, it's worth looking at. You know, it's a Chromium browser, whatever, but um their whole thing has always been customization. Their thing lately has been no AI. You know, that's part of their little story. But um this UI is fascinating because this is what Mozilla has been talking about to do for Firefox. And now they're publicly testing it. If you want to, you can go get the nightly builds of Firefox. You can see this thing. But I think literally Vivaldi just shipped it. Like it's basically the same thing. Um, it's only on desktop today, but you know, I'm sure they will come to uh mobile as well. But um but you can also if you want to, you can look at uh the Mozilla uh version of this if you will. Um and I know Kev Brewer had posted this in my forums and I think it was before we wrote about it, but Discord now has a native Windows 11 app. Windows 11 on ARM app, sorry. Um so you can if you have uh Snapdragon X or whatever PC, you can get a native app version, which I guess is uh snappier. Um sorry. And one thing I this is kind of bizarre, like I I've spent a lot of time lately, like we talked about like with uh markdown editors and making them with AI and everything. And I'm I'm I'm a little nervous about turning my attention to like a notion type app because this can be complex. But I have been looking for a notion replacement, right? And it it's weird because when I think about it off the top of my head, the things that I think I need are things like it's not a black box, meaning it's up in someone's cloud and I have to sync into it to go get it. I can I don't have a local version of anything. I can't sync it to myself. There's no real offline mode. I mean there's offline support, but I can't arbitrarily easily mark things for being offline like you can with like uh like most uh many apps, right? Um and that stuff's true. And there are things like Obsidian and Joplin and whatever there's a million of these things that are uh the individual notes are are are markdown files. You know, they use some YAML or something else to uh create the the structure in the app itself. You can sync it to your own thing if you want to put it in OneDrive, Google Drive, Synology Drive, whatever you want. Um, you can do that. And that's good. But then I realized in testing these things, there's actually a couple of other things that I need. Um, one of them is like sharing, right? So I we do the Windows Weekly notes in No tion and I share it with Richard and Leo and people from Twit and it works great and it's easy. And I sharing is kind of a problem when it's like markdown based files. It could be anywhere in a file system. It's a little , it requires a little bit of infrastructure, basically. Um and then the other one is like a mobile client, right? Um some of the apps I just mentioned, I think Obsidian and Joplin probably, App Flowey probably , a couple of others, any type, I think is one. Do have mobile clients, you know. Um, but I just came across this thing I think people really need to look at. I I love this app. It was written first for the Mac. It it would would, it only shipped about a month ago and now it's on Windows as well. And there's some things in it, like you right click on something and it says show and finder instead of show and file expair you're like eh you know, but it's beautiful, it's clean, it looks just like um Notion , it is local save markdown files, right, that you control . And it is called, what is it called, Paul? It's called Tolaria , T-O-L-A-R-I-A. This is is this worth looking at. It is it's beautiful. It's pure markdown, excellent. It's a great markdown editor, by the way, which is really interesting. Like one app that can do the two things. So you can use markdown syntax like a Notion, right? You can use markdown syntax in other apps, but this thing has like a kind of a traditional for this kind of app three-pane view where it's like the uh the side pane with like navigation essentially, and then uh a middle pane, which is a list of notes that are in that folder you're looking at, and then a main pane with the editor itself. So if you do like control three is the primary view, if you do control two, it turns off the side pane. If you do, I might be doing this backwards. Yeah, no. And if you do control one, it's just a markdown editor by itself. Like it's really clean. And I'm like, you know, this thing is pretty damn close to being something I would just use. It's just that it does not support. Yeah, it looks awesome. And I've been using it like it is awesome. But I I don't believe there's a way to share anything in here, which I is uh kind of crazy. Oh, so you couldn't do the share phone. No, can I and that's so that makes it an on-starter for right now. But I feel but it's being it's so it's being so quickly updated and well, 'cause it's on Git. Yeah, so you we could be sharing with fetching, but that's yeah tricky. Right. So it actually right. So I I have connected it to Git, so it's you know , there's that. It that's a form of sync, right? If you think and obviously also version control . And um what's the other thing? Uh oh it it also integrates with AI, right? So this guy is actually vibe coding this thing, by the way. Well, what a surprise. You're gonna see a lot of these. But look at how yeah, but look at the quality of the UI. It's good. It's astonishing. Yeah. So you can connect it to AI. So when I install it, like on the first PC I installed it on, I had cloud and cloud code installed, uh, which is like the CLI part of it or whatever. And it picked it up immediately. It was like, do you just want to use this? I'm like, yep. And I never use the AI cyber. You don't have to, but it does have that AI sidebar thing, and you can bring your own AI. Um it's pretty it's impressive. This is um it's kind of a stripped down obsidian, is what it really is. Yeah, yeah. It's really neat. Like I this is interesting to me. So the sharing thing is actually the but I think you could easily add a piece with your AI um to sh to to share it. It's not just that though. Like I don't I don't want to have two things that do the same thing, right? So I use Notion for everything. So there's you guys see the show notes, but I use it for my business. I use it for the eternal spring thing I do it with my wife. I use it for my meeting notes that are just whatever. I use it for personal things like, you know, weights at the gym or um the the names of people and dogs of Mexico City in different places or whatever it is. Like I use it for personal things. And that means I need to be able to access it on my phone. And, you know, individual markdown files sitting in a directory that yes, I can access on my phone and I can see it's fine. But I, you know, ideally there would be like an app that is this thing that is connected to the same back end that I'm using for sync, which in you know could be one dr, like I said, anything I want it to be, would be better, but it that also makes it difficult because of the nature of the thing. So anyway, look, I just want people to this is I think most when you when you say or Google Notion alternative, you'll get the same five to ten choices every time. Everyone's heard of them all, obsidian, any type, especially Joplin, whatever. But this is one I don't think I this will start coming up. It isn't yet, but um it's brand new. I literally I think the initial release was a like a month ago. And it is super impressive. Like it's really nice . Really nice. So it's worth it's still worth looking at. And it may meet your needs. I'm really and now you got me thinking. I know. Is the the source code's probably on GitHub, I presume. Yeah, it is. So it would be easy enough to say, okay, take tel aria and I want to add your own component to it. Right. Yep. I mean, this is why Notion is in the cloud, because that makes it easy to share. Notion probably has a formal uh I'm sure they have to the a system for third parties to make extensions or whatever whatever they call them, right? Like Obsidian has this or what you know the form the the products that do this have that. So I don't know that this has it. I don't know that it is part of the plan. I think it would have to be. It's a bit young right now. Yeah. I don't believe it's there yet. But but I I just look at the quality of what it is today. If you just think of this as a well I guess I guess a note like a you know like a standalone notion, whatever. It's it's like what's there is so good . I'm just kind of I'm curious, you know, to see where this goes. And I feel like this guy, um his blog is interesting. He's an interesting guy. Like he is actively developing this. And you can s you can tell, you can see the how how often you know new releases go. It's pretty incredible. Nice. So yeah. Kind of incredible. I don't even know how I found it. So under the radar, but it's um well 11,000 stars on GitHub is one way. That will do that. It's a very popular radar. It's a very popular GitHub. It looks like you're making a lot of markdown editors. Do you want to look at this thing? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and that's the other thing. There are a lot of things like this, but this looks really nice. No, there are a lot of things like this. Right. That's the right. And and look, we all have our own little set of criteria. If you're trying to do this kind of thing, you could be like, all right, what meets my need, whatever. Go to alternative to dot com or whatever it is and look at look up Notion Alternative. There's a bunch of them, right? But yeah. Um this one this one's really good. Really good. Very nice. Very, very, very nice. This means because you have come to the end of your chapter in the back of the book that it's time for Richard Campbell and his chapter, beginning with Run Az Radio . Uh brought my friend Karin Bissette back on the show. She's done a few now. She still works for Veeam, uh, but very much in a communicator type and digging into different texts. Of course, Veeam means means a lot of backup and stuff like that, but that was not the conversation we had this time around. This time we were talking about Loop and its role in Finally productivity. I'm looking for a loop show. Is Loop still around? So before you go on, I just let me just ask you one quick question. Does uh co-pilot notebooks ever come up in this conversation? No. No, I'm serious. Because I feel like that is what Loop becomes. I wonder. Yeah, co-pilot notebooks. But really we were the we the play we she was talking about loop components primarily, which by the way, you have to be in the M three C C five telem et for any of this to work. No outsiders. Like they've not attended the same way, like in Teams, they you can have an external now. You can't do this with loop at all. But it was really uh her focus with the component piece was about making living documents where you're always have the current data . So even as far as in a teams meeting, the agenda can be dynamically edited by anyone and everyone has the synced version of it. But uh and also went into while in the te ams meeting as we were talking through tasks, those became work items that appeared in people's planners, uh, that any data set that you were counting on as part of that conversation was synchronized with everyone and real-time updated when you come back uh to review it as well. Like it it just was a very much the 'cause loop is too many things. Like we talk about loop as the notion competitor, which it's a mediocre at that. You know, the number of times in a given week, like you know what I can't do with my loop phone client? Figure out what whiskeys I previously previously talked about because the search is worthless. Right? So I'm you know, go into a liquor store, pull out the Windows week whiskey list, and yeah, no, I can't find anything. It says work works fine on the PC. Doesn't work on the phone. But uh when it comes to this integrating M365 doc uments and tying them together with component feed. It's really quite powerful, but very much you need if it's a collaboration tool for a group of people inside an M365 tenant to deal with not hand ing files around, not uh working on on a date uh references, that kind of thing, that's really where uh Corinne dug in and said like look this will save you a ton of pain and really pulls together the role of Teams and Planner Loop, even autom ate, you know, or even putting components directly into OneNote if you prefer OneNote. It could do all of them. So it it was was a a great conversation. It talked about an aspect of loop I just did not know that much about. And it speaks to why some folks have such a great experience with loop and don't know what you're con about, but it's like cause you're not losing using loop like it's notion . Which I'm still doing for some reason. And then maybe I have to stop it. Do the last one. Yeah. Yeah, I'm using one note most of the time. I just tried a few things in loop and I'm a big Obsidian fan and Obsidian works really well with AI, so I'm you know, I'm happy with that. But it is more it's a little more heavyweight. For sure. And P and I suppose loop is too. But I got my loop open right now for my whiskey pick. So that's where I put those notes. So uh we're back in Canada. I decided to pick Canadian whiskey. And uh the particular one I grabbed this time around is from John Sleeman and Sons. And you will notice this is an un opened bottle because I'm going to tell the whole story and predict what this is going to taste like. And then I'm going to unwrap it and taste it and figure out how bad how badly wrong I went. Live on the air. Living on the edge, man. This is better than Al Capone's Vault, ladies and gentlemen. There you go. Funny you make the Al Capone reference because we're going to get there. Uh-oh. So we're back in Ontario. We're in Gelf, uh, which is a university town. This is uh near Waterloo and Kitchener, which are all university towns. It's like a cluster of universities. This is about uh ninety kilometers west of Toronto, fifty five miles. Although if you're from Ontario, you would never say that you'd say it's 75 minutes away because for one reason the Ontario folks always talk uh distances as time-driven . Uh, this is a part of the world that has always grown corn, the original corn was there. There's evidence of the Mississauga peoples, which is what this region is known 10,000 years ago, growing corn in this location. Although corn was very different uh at the yeah Tina State, which is the sort of precursor corn, was a very different plant that long ago. Uh what makes the location important? It's a river intersection, of course. The Speed River and the Aram osa River. Can't find a reason why they called it Speed, but because it's not a fast river in any way. Those two rivers ultimately feed into the Grand River, which dumps into Lake Erie, not Lake Ontario. You know, Toronto's on Lake Ontario, but then you got to go to the next great lake down, that's where the Grand Liver drains into, but that'll become relevant later. Uh this is a climate zone we call humid continental, so quite cold winters, very snowy, and warm humid summers. Now the European influences uh started becoming relevant in this equation around 1827 when a Scottish entrepreneur named John Galt, quite famous in this area for building out towns and so forth, and this was a very planned town. And he ceremoniously felled a tree at the intersection of those two rivers, the Speed and the Aramaris , and uh named it uh Guelf uh Guelph after the House of Guelph, which was the ancestral line of King George IV, who was the reigning monarch at the time. Remember, we are talking about Upper Canada in the Dominion of Canada, which was a British colony . So the if you look at the map of Guelph, if you ever get a chance to go there, you will see that the river intersect ne the speed river is sort of the starting point of the and it does a radius uh a radial road set, very much like a commons model into a grid. So very European with large boulevards, lots of room. It was supposed to be a stylish and important location, and it became one . Player here, John Sleeman, is shows up around that time, originally from Cornwall, England. He immigrates to Upper Canada in eighteen thirty-four and he gets brings the family business with him, which is breweries. So it's all about the beer. And he arrives in Guelph as the operator for a brewery owned by John Hodgert, uh, which he'll be successful enough with over just a few years that it'll get sold and he'll lose his job in eighteen fifty and so then has enough money to open his own brewery called the Silver Creek Brewery, taking water from the Speed River. It's also where the Grand Railway line runs directly to the US as well. And so he starts cranking out beer there, famous for small batching his beers in a hundred barrel lots, more or less. Again, this is very much before bottling. By 1859, he hands the reins over to his son George, who within a year or two renamed when his son George Jr. gets involved, rename the company George Schleeman and Sons . John Sleeman, the original, actually retires back to England in 1867, which is the year of Confederation for Canada. That's when Canada becomes Canada and leaving George Sr. as the sole owner and he lives out his last days in England. By uh 1870, and we have the letters between George and his father to sort of all the stories. there George Lehman gets heavily involved in Guelph from a public service point of view, becomes a city counselor, sponsors the local baseball team, who even wins a championship in 74, 18, 74, that is, and by 1880, George Flem an is actually the mayor of Guelph. And wisely, and there's a great paper story about him becoming mayor, one of the very first things he did was he declared July 1st, which we then knew as Dominion Day, as a official day off for the whole city of Guelph. Now, today it is a holiday and everybody's in theory supposed to have that day off, right? But back then it was not as an obvious thing. Some folks took it off, some folks didn't. But it was also in the eighteen seventies, eighteen eighties, a ton of serious labor strife. We're just coming into what will eventually become the union movements and things like this. And so making that play to get a day off was a very popular move for the working man. It was also mentioned in the article I read that he was also in the business of selling beer and having a day off is a good chance to sell more beer. And so by the late 1800s, Sleeman is looked on at the same level as the biggest beer makers in all of Canada. So folks like Molson and LaBlatte, uh Sleeman was said lame literally the same voice, although not as well known uh for a while there, which will be explained later. Nineteen hundred, the G George Jr. incorporates the company of Sleeman Brewing and Malting, and that name will persist. Now, his father has invested heavily in railways and tram systems in Gulf, and to the point where he actually loses the brewery to the banks when the finances get a little tight. They've also opened up a secondary brewery they call Spring Bank and he gets and makes enough money to actually buy it back from the bank within a year or so. Uh things get crazy by World War I when there's uh shortages of everything, and then in 1916, uh, the temperance movement, prohibition arrives in Ontario before U.S. prohibition. Now, that was fine for Sleemans because they were already on the rail line and were exporting lots of product to the U.S. anyway, so they just focused on that. Although they did start making a medicinal beer, which was only 2.5%, which fell under the thresholds for prohibition. So they were able to continue selling that. Although later they'll get into trouble with making overproof beer being over 2.5% and selling it in Ontario. Things get really grim by 1920 when the US pro U.S. prohibition begins. And that's when the smuggling really takes off. Now remember, I mentioned the river system in Guelph goes through to Lake Erie, which means if you can get to Lake Erie, you have access to New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. And so beer selling by all accounts continues apace . Uh, and it's not until nineteen twenty-six that we there starts to be major investigations into the corruption of customs and excise uh around uh products traveling into the US and the brewery shuts down. Actually George Jr. uh George Jr. passes away and his son Henry is now running the business . And prohibition comes to the end in Ontario in 192 7 . And at that point, even though the brewery shut down, the commission that had been doing the investigations of corruption and so forth starts dem anding to review the books of different breweries in the area. There were a number, and one of them was Sleemans. And we have the court records where Henry is talking about the fact that they've lost their books . That you know, they hadn't been able to sell, uh they weren't selling beer back then, they were selling other products, uh, but they had already shut down and uh they had no records at all. And of course what, the commission was really up about was not paying taxes on the exports. And so ultimately they find the brewery guilty, although immediately after Henry 's trial, he sells his brewery to the competitor a holiday brewing. But even that uh doesn't hold him completely several. So the trials go on for some time. And by the time 1933 rolls around, AK when prohibition ends in the US, the Canadian government has shut down the holiday brewing operation, which also includes the semen operation, for tax evasion and seizes assets of the owner the, new owners , and the old owners for back taxes and fines, essentially bankrupting the Sleeman family as a whole, and they exit the business. Now, if you read these stories today in the marketing that the new Sleemans is doing, they talk about a 50-year ban for brewing, which we have no real evidence of, but it makes for a good story because in 199 8 4, John W. Sleeman, which would be the great-great-grandson of the original John H. Sleeman from the 1830s, and again the story goes this way. I don't know if it's true. Acquires the recipes of his great-great-grandfather from his aunt Florian, who tells the tales of the brewing business of the past and how the Sleman name was so big, and with all the things that happened in prohibition, also the fact that they kept no records because that might incriminate them, and that they'd had a 50 year ban, and now that 50 years had gone by, the Ant is passing on this information to John W. Sleeman, including the story that they had apparently during prohibition been selling beer to Al Capone . There is no evidence that any of this is true, but it makes an excellent story. Somebody had to. Yeah. John W. Sleeman does go to the effort at this point. And by the way, the the recipe book, there are pictures of it. So apparently that's real. But he does manage to get the Sleeman Brewing and Multi Company back. He gets it for a dollar, buys it back from Nabisco, who got it through a series of acquisitions after it was shut down in the 1930s, and goes to work making beer in a serious way. And Sleeman's uh beer is very popular uh over the next 20 years becomes a well-known beer name in Canada once again. And I say 20 years because in 2006, John W. sells the kitten caboodle to Sapporo for $400 million . Now, Sapporo is a big Japanese brewer. They're not a supergiant like Centauri, but they are big. They and they also own anchor brewing in the US as well. So Sleemans and a subsidiary in Quebec are their uh their Canadian production side of things. Uh John Sleemans stays on as CEO for a couple of years, but he will step down in twenty ten and uh just becomes a figurehead for Sleemans. Uh, but he also starts inquiring about distilling . He has two sons, Cooper and Quinn. And so by 2015, they're getting serious about building a distillery. And there's a bunch of versions of the story, but I find gets really fun that they go to this ruin of a site, the former Allen's Mill. So Allen's Mill was built in 1830 as a woollen mill, and various things happen along the way. It gets rebuilt as a stone, as a limestone mill in the 1850s, but by then it's operated as a flour mill. At some point, it's also a brewery and a distillery. Some of that structure on the other side of the river. Um, a lot of that got ruined in the 1870s in another big fire. It's rebuilt and repurposed again through the nineteen sixties when another fire shuts it down. But at that point it's kind of a heritage site, so they clear the whole area a park with just the ruins of the big limestone building. And then again, there's several versions of the story. In 2015 , they're looking for sites for the distillery. There's an argument that this was originally a sleeman's building anyway , and somebody shows them that under a hidden space in the floor, in a hidden basement, there is the remains of a distillery that was run during prohibition. Now again , there was no evidence that the Sleemans ever sold whiskey or distilled products in prohibition. They were beer sellers. But they take this story and run with it and decide to restore the building , rather than build a new distillery, take the old Allen's Mill limestone structure that was largely a ruin, and restore it into the Spring Mill distillery. The restoration. There was. Uh and it was different provinces had prohibition at different time. In the case of Ontario, it was from nineteen sixteen to nineteen twenty seven. Oh, same roughly the same time frame as well. Yeah, the US was nineteen twenty to nineteen thirty three. It went substantially longer there. And so all of that story, you know, that m Canadians got into rum running into America because they weren't able to sell at home. Prohibition started in Ontario before US prohibition. And so Sleeman focused on selling only in the US. And then when that went away, it was not that hard to switch to just continue to ship it. But in the dark. And then they had the river system leading right to Lake Erie just made it easy. So until in the end the government comes for the back taxes and that uh it shuts all of this down. So this this distillery, the spring mill distillery, uh is in operation in 2019. So we're not going to get any age statement, whiskey here. It's went much, much too young. Their first uh barrelings go in 2022 and they make a rye in 2023. By all accounts, is a even though it's in an old restored building, it's a fairly technologically advanced distillery, lots of electronic controllers and things like that. They're acting like it's a craft distillery. Their language is certainly that, but they seem a bit big , even though most of the detailed information of the distillery is not published in any way. They talk about being all Canadian grains, uh mentioning both corn, rye, and barley, which do grow in the area. They do make a single malt, which would be straight uh barley. But in this case, we're going to taste the rye whiskey. We know that they use wooden washbacks from Scotland, but made from Canadian Doug fur, which is what the Sc ottish use, actually. It's a sort of a famous thing there. Uh, we don't know exactly the size, probably between eight and eight thousand and twelve thousand liters, which should be on the big side for a craft, but a or a small commercial operation. Stainless steel fermenters in the 20,000 liter si ze, and a pair of four-sythe pot stills. So these are the Scottish style pot stills. Unusual for North America, because typically we, you know, most Canadian distillers as well as American distillers use column stills with maybe a rectifier or a single finishing pot still. But this is all pot stills. They say that the largest in North America without any published stats. The guess is somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 liters. They also have their own cooperage. This is very unusual, but one of the sons, Quinn, studied in Scotland to be a cooper, to be a barrel maker, and so one of their claims to fame is that they have actual Canadian oak barrels. Now, this is the same species of oak that grows in the U.S. and Missouri, but uh is on the other side of the border. So it's still Quarle uh Quarelus Alba, the white oak, but just on the other side of the border, and those trees do grow in southern Ontario uh Ontario just fine. Their storage system is the rack house style. It's in the stone mill. The stone mill obviously is much bigger than the distilling operation we really need, and that limestone really lends to managing the temperature variation a bit more. So winters are awfully cold in that part of the world, but this limestone will leave that off and same with too much heat. So everything that's being distilled is put into barrels in the same building. And remember, this is still Canada, so we tend to not do mash bills the way the Americans do. We distill each grain separately because they need separate treatments and then barrel them separately and only marry the different alcohols or distillates together when you're going to bottle them. In some ways, the woo from the all the information I've gathered on this distillery, they're really straddling the line between Scottish and American techniques. I mean, going all pot still is very Scottish and rather than a column still should be more American. Uh in the case of this particular whiskey, their rye whiskey, this is just corn and rye, no barley, which is different from anything. All the others. If you're going to use the mash bill, you need the barley for the amylase. But if they're just doing corn and rind, they're doing them separately. They will use other enzymes to do the sugaring, the breakdowns. And by using the structures the way they're doing, they're they're aging faster than Scotland would, which is much cooler and slower, but slower than Kentucky, which tends to be much hotter than that. Now, granted, it's still early days, so they don't have any age statement whiskeys of any kind. They do make a r they do make a single malt and they do make this rye whiskey, although um we'll talk about how much rye is actually in this thing. The only numbers I've seen for production levels so far is that they're making about 150,000 bottles a year , which is small. That would be barely over a hundred thousand liters. And we talked when we when I did the stock and barrel conversation, we talked about how little benefit Ontario gives to small produc ers. So it's uh they're kind of small, but they seem to be set up for a larger operation of this. So reading the bottle here, they talk about rye whiskey and Canadian white groak, white whiskey, and American white oat and corn whiskey in American white oak. So what is this most likely? The best numbers I've found of one of at least one of the websites that's selling this whiskey said it's 75% corn, 25% rye. That's fine. There's no rules for it to have to be all rye. There is this idea of a high rye, which would be more than 50% rye. It does not say high rye anywhere on this. Anyway, that's not a requirement in regardless. Anywhere they mention American oak, which would be both the rye and the corn , it's almost certainly ex-bourbon cast. You would not use uh virgin cast for that. But the Canadian oak is probably virgin cast, which is means nothing else has been in there. Uh not that they're gonna have very much of it. It's relatively hard to come by. We don't know if they fired it or not, which is normal with American oak, right? That they actually toast the inside to a certain level. So that's an unusual quirk. And we know because we've had other alcohols that have been put in virgin oak, that gives much stronger, woodier flavors, right? That typically you go into ex bourbon barrels because certain of those strong flavors are already gone. You might come in at a slightly higher alcohol level, like 63.5. And I have none of those numbers for this distillery. They've been very secretive. But I am going to open this now and uh we're going to go on the ride together, so to speak. Classic bottom That's okay, you know. The cork trees of Spain are dying out. It's Portugal, but yes. Portugal, wherever they are. All right . Give ourselves a healthy pour because it is the afternoon and I don't have to be that well behaved. Okay, uh, it's only 40, but it's quite alcohol-y, right? They get that sort of strong alcohol shot. It doesn't smell super sweet. I'd think at 75% corn, it would be sweeter than that. And normally when we talk about rice, we're talking about in the context of bourbon, where 25% rye would be a lot for any bourbon. It's normally like 10 or 15%. And it's considered the spicy grain. So am I going to get a big spicy hit with that much rye in here ? The answer is no. Um, this is very mild. It's not coming across very sweet. It's got a little bit of heat in it, which is fine. It didn't burn the mouth in any way. The noise nose was a little more interesting than the mouthfeel. It went down really well . Yeah, there's nothing wrong with this. It's it's not spectacular . You know, I'm not big caramel rich notes. This is kind of a gentler , it's very Canadian since it's very mild. It's got a little more floral and flavor to it, which is interesting. It did you know what? If you put this in a lineup, you wouldn't pick this out as a Canadian. That's what interesting about it. Yeah. It's like a it it's it seems more Scottish than anything else, but a scot would be confused because this it seems it's not sweet like corn, but it's lighter than straight barley would normally be. Yeah, I'm really , this is a surprise. I'm not gonna hunt this down. It's also $45 Canadian, so it's bargain. That would be 30 bucks American, and I don't think they're selling in the US yet, so I haven't seen anywhere. I think I picked it up for $50 . Um so this is not these are guys are in relatively new production. No age statement on this. Obviously corn it's they say it's all Canadian grains. Uh it is called a whiskey, so it's got to be at least three years old. They're not calling it a blend, just a rye whiskey, but you know, again, those are not restrictive in Canada. So they've certainly spent at least you'd call it a whiskey, everything had to have been in the barrel for three years. They did the barreling separately. They were only laying up barrels in 2019, so the longest anything could be was seven years. I don't think it's that old. And for that price, certainly not. They do make a single malt that's 75$. Which that's barley and it's harder to make and probably needed to age a little long longer as well. Although there's no age statements on their singles either, or on their single malt. This is nice. Uh for this difficult as was it to find because I'm on the West Coast, because it's really in Ontario, uh, and people have a good feeling about the Sleeman's name, just being their new beer, their honey honey brown and so forth are good beers and things. You'd probably want to grab one of these. And of course, this is more to do the Sleeman family than the Sleeman beer does anymore, which actually is from Saparo now. So, you know, if you like the con the the the folks, and again they're hyping up their prohibition angle now these days. They're trying to be the bad boys and that's why they're in whiskey now. But I think it's mostly just stories. I don't know how I've heard that stuff is. But yeah, they've made something as distinctive here and I'm good on them. You know, they're playing off the eight the night it says on the label here 1836 and i hope by the story i've just told you this has nothing to do with 1836 they got that distillery built in that in 2018 so bit of a stretch, but okay. But you know, if you were gonna get into the whiskey , you think about you think about uh John W. Sleeman, who put twenty something years into bringing back the Sleeman name in beer and then sold it off for a huge pile of money and now dec ided to do whiskey with his sons, which is really what we're talking about. Yeah. You need a story. Don't you need a story? So you play on the old name, you play on the prohibition story, you play on the 50-year ban, which again , I could not have found an ounce of evidence that there was actually a legal mandate for the 50-year ban. Not a bit, but lots of people talk about it, but I think it's just part of the story. They've done something fun here, and they made a decent whiskey from it. So I got nothing bad to say about John Sleeman. Well done. Cool product. Bad website, by the way. Uh you actually when you finally dig your way, if you if you go to the shop online and the whiskey section. Yeah. You'll see the whiskeys and there's an option discover. And when you click on discover, you will have a very slow loading Squarespace page. Oh, that's funny. That is just the brochure where of that wiki. It's literally the page they would put in a store. It's not even there's nothing. It's not clickable, it's not linkable. It's like it might as well be a PDF. Which one do you which one are you rec I can't even get back to the Yeah, no, you'll have to uh the one I just tasted with the rye whiskey, which was the forty five dollar Canadian uh bottle. I can't. The high you're on the high rye, which is sixty five dollars, so that presumably is more than fifty percent rye. If I was gonna go get another one, I'd go get their single bottle. Okay. Because I want to taste the barley. And it's the most expensive at 75 . All right. Uh yeah. So very interesting. Berg's talking about who doesn't love a bootlegger? Exactly. They're playing off the bootlegger and they're playing off finding that little space underneath the old mill that clearly had a bootlegger's distillery in it. That was from 1836. That's the part that was from that's well that would that was probably not that was probably from nineteen twenty five. Right. It was while they were b making stuff for the Americans. Somebody built it almost certainly wasn't the Sleeman family. One of the things they noted when they dug all that stuff out was it had dump pipes into the river. So I think they were prepared for if the police tried to raid them that they could drop load in into the river. Yeah. Um which makes it much more of a of a bad guy's, you know, distillery that you have these systems for avoiding uh law enforcement and it was hidden in a floor and all that sort of thing. One of the quotes on this is it literally they lifted up an old carpet and there was a brass ring set in the floor that popped open a hatch to a ladder down to this hidden basement. Again, all need an escape room or whatever. Yeah. I don't know much of that stuff is true. They've definitely restored the old building. Apparently John W. had been planning to build a new building from scratch and after f inding this switched, but again, I found no evidence that that was true either. You know, uh who wants to hamper a good story and it makes for a display of whiskey. So well, you know what I'm most interested in? Five years from now. See if they make a ten . Like what did they lay up originally? When we start getting some real age statement versions of their whiskey. How many barrels did they put put down? Yeah. How many did they put down? That building, because it's an old mill, is massive, much bigger. So the they have several floors of rack house above the distillery. So they have the ability to lay up a lot, but you know, limits of wood and money. You gotta you spend a lot of time. They do make a gin in a vodka, so clearly they've been trying to fill the pipeline to make a little revenue as well while they've been waiting for the whiskey to get ready. Nice. Yeah. Maybe a good Canadiana story. Mr. Richard Campbell is a Canadian all the way down to his New Zealand boots. Then he becomes a New Zealander. Nobody's perfect, Rio . No one's perfect. He uh is from RunasRadio.com. That's where you'll find Run as Radio and dot networks, his podcasts, and of course you'll find him here every Wednesday with Paul Thrott from Thrott.com and his books at leanpub dot com. Although if you subscribe to uh Thorat.com you get all those books as part of the package. So that's a good way to get Windows Everywhere, D and Shittify Windows, and the field guide to Windows 11 as part of your membership at the Rot.com. Every Wednesday, eleven AM Pacific, two PM Eastern, eighteen hundred UTC, we sit down, we we turn on the microphones, we turn on the lights, we turn on the cameras, we turn on the whiskey, and we talk about Windows, uh, and Microsoft and all of that jazz, and you're invited to join us. If you want to do it live, you can. Now club members of course get behind the velvet rope access at the club twit discord . You know, that's that's neither here nor there. The rest of us unwashed masses can watch on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. How about that? After the fact, on-demand versions of the show at twit.tv slash dubdub . There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly, a great way to share clips. And the easiest way to make sure you get every episode is subscribe and your favorite podcast client. Of course if you're a member, you can get the chapter markers and skip around if you wish. Many of you, I know, you just want to go straight to the whiskey. And if that's what you wish to do, join the club and you can. Also say counseling because you might have a drinking problem. Please drink responsibly. I suppose we should say that at the end of every show. Uh AI responsibly. Also drink.