WW 946: Backing up the Intel Truck - Microsoft's gamescom 2025 reveals

Summary

Windows Weekly 946: Backing up the Intel Truck — Microsoft's gamescom 2025 Reveals

Date: August 20, 2025
Hosts: Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell, co-hosted by Micah Sargent
Podcast: Windows Weekly (Audio) – TWiT

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Overview

Episode 946 takes listeners on a deep dive into recent news and rumors across Microsoft, Windows, the PC industry, AI developments, and Xbox—with a healthy dose of banter, skepticism, and classic Windows Weekly conversational humor. Major topics include reactions to Google’s latest Pixel event, Windows 11’s evolving AI strategy, the rise of AI-driven file search and operating system design, Lenovo’s banner financials amid PC market turbulence, in-depth discussion on ARM vs. x86 CPUs, and Microsoft’s gamescom announcements, particularly around Xbox gaming on Windows ARM and cross-platform expansion. The episode closes with picks, listener tips, and a fascinating whiskey review.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Google Pixel 10 Event: Celebrity Over Substance? (00:27–08:52)

• Initial Banter: The hosts start by ribbing Google's Pixel 10 launch, hosted by Jimmy Fallon and star-studded with the Jonas Brothers, Steph Curry, and YouTube personalities. They all agree it felt overdone and distracted from the actual technology.
  • Paul Thurrott (01:37): “I confess a little nervous when I saw that Jimmy Fallon was going to host.”
  • Richard Campbell (04:38): “This is what the Amiga was back in the day. Everyone who knows anything is like, I have to have an Amiga. And then everyone else is like, yeah, whatever.”
  • The hosts judge Google’s attempts as an awkward effort to seem more “mainstream.” They compare Pixel’s reputation among enthusiasts to Windows Phone and the Amiga. Google is seen as a distant third to Apple and Samsung in smartphones.
• Device Details: Despite a global expansion, including the first Mexico launch, the Pixel remains a “geek’s phone.” New features like real-time voice translation (now reproducing your voice in translation) receive skepticism about real-world performance.
• Event Froth: Hosts note Google focused heavily on AI features but “there’s not a lot to say” about hardware anymore. The year-over-year upgrade cycle feels less compelling than ever.

2. Windows 11’s Future: AI Everywhere, Evolving UI (10:00–20:27)

• Vision Messaging: Microsoft’s recent “Vision” videos underscoring how AI will transform Windows are received with both anticipation and anxiety. Any “visionary” talk from Microsoft execs is met with the joke, “relax, don’t ruin it yet!”
  • Richard Campbell (11:22): “We have AI, right. It’s a Vision thing...they’re just playing with ideas.”
  • Windows is described as currently the most powerful “traditional” productivity OS because of its input plurality (keyboard, mouse, touch, pen)—but there’s a clear trend toward integrating more natural language and sensory AI.
• Natural Language Paradigm: The hosts discuss the rise of Copilot and AI-driven interfaces that will soon obviate old dialog boxes, menus, and settings panels—users will simply “say what you want.”
• Legacy Support: Despite surging AI, classic Windows features (MMC, old fonts dialog, VB runtimes) remain, and likely always will.
  • Richard Campbell (16:03): “If you want to add fonts to your system using that box from Windows 95, it's still there."
• Semantic File Search & Copilot Evolution (17:27–20:27):
  • Introduction of “Semantic File Search,” now available via Copilot for Insider users on Copilot+ PCs.
  • Discussion of Copilot’s ever-changing UI, which now resembles a cross between Trello, Microsoft 365 app, and a “Home Hub.” Indie that the Next Start Menu is “no Start menu at all”—maybe “this is the first step toward that.”

3. AI Commodification, Orchestration & Privacy (20:28–35:12)

• AI “Orchestration” Platforms: The hosts debate the real user value in the increasingly interchangeable AI offerings (Gemini Live, Copilot, DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Perplexity) and the trend toward “orchestrators” that combine models and sources.
  • Paul Thurrott (31:05): “If you can get orchestration and privacy, to me, that is a differentiator.”
• Privacy as Differentiator: Private AI (like DuckDuckGo, Kagi.com) becomes a rare selling point, but mass market doesn’t seem to care… yet.
  • Richard Campbell (31:54): “To me and you… we know the difference. Does my wife care? My mother? I can’t tell.”
  • The “Grok AI” incident is cited—where sharing a result link made it publicly searchable, even if the topic was confidential.
• Paying for Privacy: Feature-rich, privacy-centric AI tools are starting to cost real money (e.g., Kagi’s $150/year). The internet’s old “free” model erodes while user data becomes the new commodity.

4. PC Industry Shakeups: Lenovo’s Unexpected Banner Quarter & ARM Ascendance (46:38–63:21)

• Lenovo Smashes Expectations (46:38–51:55):
  • Despite a tepid global PC market, Lenovo posts record revenues and profits, pulling away as the largest global PC maker (over HP and Dell).
  • Deliberations on why commercial PC refresh cycles (hardware depreciation, OS support timelines like Windows 10 EOL) drive industry rhythms more than innovation does.
  • Lenovo’s AI PC shipments now account for 30% of units; AI is now a sales driver, especially for Copilot+ (ARM/MPU) systems.
• ARM vs. x86 in Microsoft’s World:
  • Personal purchasing anecdotes: Paul has bought three ARM-based laptops recently, raving about their daily usability and productivity—even as business (commercial) PC lines still mostly lack Copilot+ certification.
  • The end of Intel’s “co-marketing” financial clout results in more AMD and ARM options in premium devices—“backing up the Intel truck” of money for exclusivity is finally over.
  • Frank discussion of Linux preloads and support from Lenovo and Dell.
  • Paul Thurrott (59:13): [On why we don’t see AMD in high-end ThinkPad lines] “He’s like, ‘That’s the Intel truck dumping the pile of money on our front lawn.’”

5. Microsoft & Windows AI Browser Moves; AI Features Arms Race (65:36–75:51)

• Gemini in Chrome: Google’s integration of Gemini into Chrome is rolled out quietly and is only available to paid users—emphasizing how AI features are becoming paywalled.
• AI Browser Privacy and Security: Brave’s team uncovers a major privacy flaw in Perplexity’s browser, which exposed user data context across tabs—thanks to direct engineering comparison (“let’s see how they do it...Oh, they don’t!”).
• Memory as Table Stakes: AI “memory” (the ability to remember user context) now arrives in Gemini, following similar moves by Microsoft and others.
• Smart Editors (Grammarly, etc.): Grammarly responds to competition by evolving past grammar/spellcheck into a full-featured AI productivity suite, adding graders, citation finders, paraphrasers, and more to stave off existential threat from larger office suite competitors.

6. Windows 11 SSD Rumor: Security Update Woes? (77:10–78:36)

• Rumors circulate around a recent Windows 11 security update (KB506, 3878 and 2660) causing SSD failures during large file transfers.
  • So far, the incident appears limited and anecdotal, but the hosts urge continued caution and monitoring.

7. Xbox & Gaming: Microsoft’s Gamescom 2025 Announcements (79:01–92:38)

• Xbox App on ARM: Partial Revolution (79:20–83:42):
  • The Xbox app is being updated to support cross-store gaming libraries (Steam, Epic, GoG) and proper ARM/Windows on ARM compatibility—but not all games will run; there's no filter to hide incompatible games, leading to user frustration (huge downloads, instant crashes).
  • Richard Campbell (83:18): “The latest Doom... and Call of Duty because why not just go for the gold, right? Both... just crash immediately when you run.”
• Gamescom News:
  • Call of Duty Black Ops 7 continues a convoluted storyline; Microsoft’s Indiana Jones coming to Switch 2 as the only currently announced Xbox-published Switch title.
  • Hardware: ASUS ROG Ally Xbox handheld announced for Oct 16, expected price $600–$900.
  • Sony raises PS5 prices in response to tariffs.
  • Cloud gaming tech: Nvidia’s GeForce NOW now supports 5K60 streaming with RTX 5080 class GPUs (premium tier), but the hosts remain skeptical of practical “5K” streaming.
• Game Pass Additions: Main highlight is Gears of War Reloaded (remastered for a second time), along with Dragon Age: Veil God, Persona 4, and Goat Simulator Remastered making appearances.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“This is what the Amiga was back in the day. Everyone who knows anything is like, I have to have an Amiga. And then everyone else is like, yeah, whatever.”
—Richard Campbell on the Pixel’s niche appeal (04:38)

"The natural language AI bit that goes on the top I think is what will put this over the top... We weren't waiting for AI to solve the problem, but now it can."
—Richard Campbell on AI’s impact on Windows usability (14:50)

"If you want to add fonts to your system using that box that came inside Windows 95, it's still there. Everything's good."
—Richard Campbell on Windows’ legendary backward compatibility (16:03)

“Is that the Intel truck dumping the pile of money on our front lawn? That’s why.”
—Paul Thurrott quoting Lenovo’s reason for Intel exclusivity (59:13)

“If you can get orchestration and privacy, to me, that is a differentiator.”
—Paul Thurrott on where AI tool innovation could happen (31:05)

“I think you should invite Richard to Chiro [Chichibu]. I know he's a big fan of Windows Weekly, so…”
—Paul Thurrott, tying the whiskey pick into the show’s inside jokes (125:30)

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Timestamps by Topic

• Google Pixel 10 Event & industry positioning: 00:27–08:52
• Windows 11 Vision, AI & UI changes: 10:00–20:27
• Semantic search & Copilot UI changes: 17:27–20:27
• AI orchestration, privacy, convergence: 20:28–35:12
• Lenovo’s earnings, PC refresh cycles, ARM/AMD ascendancy: 46:38–63:21
• ARM/Intel discussion, “Intel truck” story: 59:13
• AI browsers & privacy issues: 65:36–75:51
• Windows 11 SSD update rumor: 77:10–78:36
• Xbox app updates & gaming on ARM: 79:01–83:42
• Gamescom software/hardware, Game Pass, GeForce NOW: 84:11–92:38
• Tip of the week, Notion offline support, Obsidian debate: 96:22–107:01
• Listener picks/whiskey of the week (Chichibu/Ichiro): 115:15–126:30

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Picks, Tips, and Whiskey

Paul Thurrott’s Tip

• Big site updates coming soon; Chris Hoffman’s new “Windows readme” Substack newsletter launching soon.
• Notion finally gets (limited) offline support, but with manual per-page enablement—Paul and Leo express wish for a more Obsidian-style, fully local, freely syncable approach.

Richard Campbell’s RunAs Radio

• Episode 998: Interview with Martina Grom on “securing your data estate” and using Microsoft Purview for data governance and M365 Copilot visibility.

Whiskey of the Week: Chichibu (Ichiro) — Chichibu Distillery (115:15–126:30)

• Story of Ichiro Akuto, his preservation of old Japanese whiskey traditions, and the legendary “playing card” series (one set of 54 sold for $1.5 million!).
• Chichibu’s “white label” malt & grain blend ($75–$100, if you can find it) is the main bottle most can actually buy; everything else is ultra-rare and expensive.
  • “Craft distillery, quiet, tiny, and considered the definitive craft distillery in Japan... They don't even have a website.”

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Conclusion

A wide-ranging session that’s both industry-insider and deeply accessible—balancing skepticism toward tech hype, appreciation of real innovation, and candid user-centric critiques. If you want perspective on where Windows, the PC industry, cloud AI, privacy, and gaming are headed—from those who have seen it all, with plenty of humor along the way—this is the episode for you.

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Transcript

[Paul Thurut]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul and Richard are here. There is lots to talk about. Windows 11, that rumor that SSDs are being borked by the Windows update last week. And yeah, the Xbox segment goes on and on. Plus a whiskey you really can't buy for love or money. But you might want to try all of that. Coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 946, recorded Wednesday, August 20, 2025. Backing up the intel truck. Hello to all our winners and dozers. Here we are once again. It's a Wednesday time for Windows Weekly. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you our man of the hour, Mr. Paul Thurat from thurat.com and our man of the hour, Mr. Richard Campbell. Net rocks. There's too many hours. Too many hours in the day.

[Richard Campbell]

Which hour did I get?

[Paul Thurut]

You got hour number one. We are starting a little late, which of course podcast listeners won't know because we always start exactly when you want us to start.

[Richard Campbell]

So you know what to do. Just pause and then wait like 20 minutes and then restart, just like the live experience.

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah, you'll feel like we do because we were watching a Google Pixel 10.

[Richard Campbell]

Announce, which by all accounts went off wonderfully. Is that not the case?

[Paul Thurut]

I confess a little nervous when I saw that Jimmy Fallon was going to host.

[Richard Campbell]

I know, me too.

[Paul Thurut]

That was kind of a statement. Like, you know, we know you don't really care about our Pixel phones, so we're going to bring in high powered celebrity talent.

[Micah Sargent]

Is that what that was?

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurut]

The Jonas Brothers, Steph Curry. He's now apparently Stephen Curry of the Golden State warriors basketball team. And then a number of celebrities from YouTube, including, call her Daddy's Alex Cooper, whose demo of the photo coach in Pixel went so poorly, they didn't even really show the final result. It was like, see.

[Richard Campbell]

It did not work.

[Paul Thurut]

It was terrible. Jimmy Kimmel was Jimmy Kimmel. I'm sorry, Jimmy Fallon. I know they are interchangeable, basically, but Jimmy Fallon was apparently exhausted from an overnight flight.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, geez. Didn't see this one coming, huh?

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah, it just, it. It was, I think, misguided on Google's part. Kind of their version of the Samsung Calamities of the last few years.

[Richard Campbell]

So is it still like Rick Osterloff or whatever is the guy.

[Paul Thurut]

Rick's great. Everybody loves Rick.

[Richard Campbell]

I think he's great. I don't write like, what's.

[Paul Thurut]

Let him do the thing.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. Why are you decorating this thing? Just talk about the phones.

[Paul Thurut]

Jimmy invited him over to the couch, they sat down, they did banter.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh boy.

[Paul Thurut]

The problem was there was so much banter, so many celebrities, so much back and forth movement that you really didn't hear a lot about the device itself.

[Richard Campbell]

And really a lot to say, right?

[Paul Thurut]

There's not a lot to say.

[Richard Campbell]

You nail it. So the problem is, this is the problem Microsoft had when they were doing with his phones. Like you get this celebrity you like, blah, blah, blah. And the question you really want to ask this guy is, so Jimmy, what model iPhone do you actually use?

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah, because you know, he uses not using a pixel.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, you know, he's not.

[Paul Thurut]

Like, you know he's not.

[Richard Campbell]

That's too bad.

[Micah Sargent]

No, if he really wanted to do this, you would have gotten him a pre release version of the phone he'd had for a couple of months and.

[Richard Campbell]

Then you would have seen, there would have been hints of it, you know, like people would have looked at the exit for something of his social media posts.

[Paul Thurut]

Excuse me, who cares what Jimmy Fallon uses?

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, yeah, but so why bring them at all, right?

[Paul Thurut]

Google's real problem is that they are a distant third in this. You know, it's really Apple and Samsung. Yeah. Oh yeah, it's Apple, Samsung. Worldwide, nobody buys pixels.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I was going to say worldwide, they're not even, they're not even eighth. I mean they're probably.

[Paul Thurut]

Well, we all have pixels, ironically. Yeah, no, geeks have pixels.

[Micah Sargent]

Yes, right. But it's a geeky phone. I want a bare metal.

[Richard Campbell]

And this, right, this follows, this is like, this is what the Amiga was back in the day. Like everyone who knows anything about anything is like, I have to have an Amiga. And then everyone else is like, yeah, whatever. The world goes on and this is what always happens. It's like those in the know.

[Paul Thurut]

It's my sense that Google knows that for years their attempts at phones were seen as kind of reference versions, as developer devices. Maybe kind of like the Surfaces early.

[Richard Campbell]

On, I was going to say. The parallels here are rather.

[Paul Thurut]

This is, this is what we think a good Android phone should be. Nobody cares. Nobody followed their lead, Nobody bought the phone. So now it feels like Google said, oh God, we gotta get the consumers excited, let's bring in some celebrities.

[Richard Campbell]

This is like Apple giving away a U2 album that nobody wanted. You know, like, what do you, like you're not in touch with the kids.

[Paul Thurut]

You know, they kept saying kids words that I think now I had an actual Verifiable kid on with me, Micah Sargent. And I said, micah, you're going to.

[Richard Campbell]

Translate who's what, like pushing 40?

[Paul Thurut]

No, no. Mike is under 30, man.

[Richard Campbell]

Is he really?

[Paul Thurut]

He's in his 20s. Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

Wow.

[Paul Thurut]

So he's a young fella.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, good for him.

[Paul Thurut]

And so they were using words like cronk. And I said, people use cronk. He said, not in years.

[Richard Campbell]

So I pulled my kids.

[Paul Thurut]

That attempt fell flat.

[Richard Campbell]

I'd be like, guys, stay still. I'm making a Vine.

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah, exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

My kids are like, seriously, you have to stop this. And I'm like, no, I'm never going to stop. Hold on. I'm going to put this on MySpace.

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

Anyway, not that I'm gonna buy a 10. I think my nine is fine for another year.

[Paul Thurut]

Well, me too. I don't.

[Richard Campbell]

I.

[Paul Thurut]

There was nothing to push me to.

[Micah Sargent]

The 10 at all.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

If you had an urge, spend. To buy. Spend a lot of money on a fold with an awful lot of bumps on the back.

[Paul Thurut]

They got that nobody's buying. I'm especially given that the Samsung fold is so good.

[Micah Sargent]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So I wanted to see this to make that decision. But my problem's gonna be I'm gonna be away September, October into November, and I. So I can't like get it, you know, until, like, I can't get it right away.

[Paul Thurut]

So. Good news. They announced the Pixels will be available in Mexico for the first time ever.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. But bad news, electronics in Mexico are very expensive. So. Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

Whoops.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, that's good though. Okay, good. Maybe they'll open a Google store. I could hang out like a. Like a flunky.

[Paul Thurut]

They also showed, as they have many years in a row now, real time translation on the phone. You can make a phone call to somebody speaking Spanish. You speak English. And it was. The latency was low. And the one feature that they added, which I thought was great. It does it in your voice.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Nice.

[Paul Thurut]

So suddenly Paul Thurat would be fluently speaking Spanish, finally.

[Richard Campbell]

Because it's never going to happen in the real world, so.

[Paul Thurut]

But again, I'm, you know, Google showed this stuff for so long, I'm so skeptical. I just don't. I have to see it and use it? No, I don't.

[Richard Campbell]

I. It's. They're dramatically more expensive. They.

[Paul Thurut]

They're not this time. Not this time.

[Richard Campbell]

12. I think it's 1200 bucks for.

[Paul Thurut]

1200 bucks for the top of the line.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, that's the base model. Pro XL.

[Paul Thurut]

Pro XL. That's the base model. Is 799.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. I don't want a base model on me.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know. I don't know.

[Micah Sargent]

Fully loaded.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. But I. Yeah. We are obviously at the point where the, you know, the year over year upgrade is minuscule. Although pixels have a big problem with the tensor processors like processing power and battery life and heat, you know, and hopefully. I know it's gone down to what, like 3 nanometer with this version.

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah. They could have spent more time talking about how, hey, this is the best processor we've ever put in a phone. They didn't even really emphasize that the AI models they were using for some of this stuff, like the language translation were local. We know it's the Nano, so we know it's local, but I knew that, but they didn't say it. Yeah, I think there was.

[Richard Campbell]

I think, I think you kind of said this earlier. I think they're. I think they were trying to shoot for more of a mainstream.

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Audience.

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah. But did it work?

[Richard Campbell]

I don't think anyone's paying attention to this. No, I mean I am. I, I do care. I mean I'm being. It sounds cynical. I, I actually, I love Pixel, but I don't know. I have one of the latest Samsungs. It's fantastic. Obviously the iPhone's a thing. I don't know. I don't know. What are you gonna do?

[Paul Thurut]

Anyway, we're not here to talk about Google.

[Richard Campbell]

What are we not here to tear down Google, but we have a couple extra minutes, so. Yeah, that's fine.

[Paul Thurut]

Let's talk. I don't know. By the way, did you see that notion which we use for the show is now. It's a big announcement on the front. It's okay, we'll talk about it. New feature.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurut]

Long awaited feature.

[Richard Campbell]

But yeah, it's something Microsoft word had in 1983. But I. But you know what? Doesn't mean it's not useful.

[Paul Thurut]

Of course, Google spent. I was surprised. I thought maybe they'd downplay AI, but they, they started right off with AI and did nothing but show off AI features. Really?

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. You have to.

[Paul Thurut]

That's it. It's all about AI now.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. If you're gonna. If you're gonna play in the space.

[Richard Campbell]

Apparently. Just got a text message from the New York spca.

[Paul Thurut]

Oh, we have your dog.

[Richard Campbell]

And. Yep. If you don't subscribe, the dog gets it.

[Micah Sargent]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know what that's all about. Okay. Oh, okay. Let's talk about Windows. Sorry, Windows. Windows. Windows. What's happening with Windows. Oh, yes. So I think last week or the week before, we talked about the video that had kind of one of the Vision videos they're going to be doing for Windows, whatever, the next version of Windows, I guess. So they made another video, but it's not part of that Vision series. But this one has Pavan Davaluri, who is the guy that runs Windows and Surface, and he said exactly the same thing. It's exactly the same.

[Micah Sargent]

I mean, that's good, right? Like, at least the messaging is common, not arguing. Well, effectively.

[Richard Campbell]

So the problem is anytime anyone from Microsoft talks a about Vision, which is hilarious and an oxymoron in their case, or just about Windows and like, what we're going to do in the future, everyone kind of cringes up a little bit. It's like, oh, don't ruin it. Don't run it, don't screw it up. You know? And so when it was David Weston and he's the security guy and he was talking about AI and what, you know, how the Windows is going to change, I was like, guys, relax. This guy's not in charge of product strategy. He doesn't have anything to do with this. And then Pavan comes on, he's like, all right, now you can stop relaxing. He actually is in charge of this. But we talked about this a little bit before the show started. But the TDLR or whatever is. Yeah, of course it's going to change. We have AI, Right.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. It's a Vision thing. Right. Like, they're just trying to figure out. They're playing with ideas.

[Richard Campbell]

You can tell they're playing with ideas because they change the UI like, literally every month.

[Micah Sargent]

Sure. I saw this Charles LaManna video with. What's his name?

[Richard Campbell]

The.

[Micah Sargent]

The old head of Dev Div.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

And. And he was talking about ERP and. And all that software change as well. And I ultimately. Daryl Taft just published a piece on that video and quoted me and a bunch of other RDs because we're all thinking, like, listen, especially when it comes to information worker software, where you're just accessing data and looking in different ways, like, I don't know how much software you really need anymore, if the prompts can pull it accurately.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Also, if my experience with the Windows app SDK is any indication, maybe it's time to give up on native apps. Just a thought.

[Micah Sargent]

Well, you know. No, no. Accounts Receivable Manager job was to run an ERP thing. It was to get the money into the company. Yeah. Right. And so whatever tools, it's like, you Use the tools to get. They get you to your real goal, which was to actually make sure you get paid.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. So, look, I know a lot of you are freaking out, so I'll just say this. You should freak out. Your lives are over. Everything's ending. It's all going to be terrible. No, look, I can't speak to little details, but look, we have Windows. It works with keyboards, mice, touchpads, smart pens, Touch. Right. We do all this stuff. So natural language interactions. It's actually something we've been talking about forever, but now it's become a big thing, obviously. But also this kind of capability that we used to sort of associate with like Google or Microsoft Lens, which they're sort of calling Vision now, like Copilot Vision, which is the ability of the device, in this case the PC, to understand the things around you using sensors and cameras and whatever else. And also things on the screen. Right. That you're interacting with. So this is one of those areas where I think phones are going to be impacted a lot more because you're always with them and you're out in the world with them. And it's super useful to hold up a phone to a building and say, what is this thing? And it's like, it's a building, you idiot. No, I mean, we'll say whatever. The, you know, whatever. The business is very useful. But, you know, for the productivity scenarios or whatever, the things that we do do in Windows today, develop software development. Obviously there's use cases here. I mean, it's, it's fine, sure, that no one's taking your keyboard away that way. That'll be Windows 12.

[Micah Sargent]

And my goal using this machine was not to have the opportunity to click on with a mouse.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Micah Sargent]

Like, I, I have stuff to do.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, thanks to a mild case of Tourette's, I've been talking to my computer for years. I've been usually in defamatory ways, but that's not going to change.

[Micah Sargent]

You know, honestly, the lang, the language. I see a lot of developers speaking into their LLMs for programming is shocking too. It's. They're all one big moving HR violation. Good news is they're only talking to software.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Micah Sargent]

But, but listen, nobody actually wants a dialog box. Nobody wants options menus. Like, we don't want any of those things. In fact, you always say what your intent was while you go searching through all those menus. I just did it where we're setting up. It's like I got to check the volume levels on the microphone.

[Richard Campbell]

That was My goal, I always make this comparison. It's like the Infocom parser back in the day when we those text based adventure games or maybe the Sierra online version that they would do in their graphic like King's Quest, et cetera. And this was the 1970s and then the 80s and these things were not very sophisticated. So it was just a database or table of words and if you didn't get it exactly right, it wasn't going to do anything. And so you would get into the types of conversations that Siri users get in today where you're like, I'm sorry, I have no idea what you're talking about. But the natural language stuff, it's interesting because it doesn't really. Well, maybe it does. I was going to say I'm not sure it solves the problem, but it does. Right. So we've had a. Certainly in Windows but generally speaking with all the data we have now especially we have a search problem if you will. And we have indexing and metadata in ways that kind of help try to make that better. But the natural language AI bit that goes on the top I think is what we'll put this over the top, I guess, for lack of a better term. So yeah, we weren't waiting for AI to solve the problem, but no, and.

[Micah Sargent]

To be clear, they never taken anything out of Windows ever. So don't worry, you'll still have your mmc, you'll still have your Infinite Dialogues if those things make you happy.

[Richard Campbell]

If you want to add fonts to your system using that box that came inside Windows 95, it's still there, Everything's good.

[Micah Sargent]

The Visual Basic runtime still in the box.

[Richard Campbell]

Still there. Yep.

[Micah Sargent]

Net 4.3, that's what I got to do. Still in the box.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm going to go back to VB3, I'm going to just do everything I do will be 16 bit VB3 apps.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Because honestly, as far as like being native code at this point they're just as close, you know, what's the difference?

[Micah Sargent]

I mean, and to be sure they will make another variation on Windows X or any of those things to try and strip all of that way away, to sort of focus on. Fail mightily and it will fail again.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yep, exactly right. So yeah, look, Windows 11 is.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh no. And I blame you, man. I got a Windows 11 everywhere now that my Windows 10 machines are gone, they're off. These new machines are in play and they're 11.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm not sure how that's my fault, but I do prefer it to 10 at this point. I will say that that is true.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. It's funny you say that, because I had to hop back on the 10 machine. I was doing the last things like, ew.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, that's what. And that's a good test for an upgrade. You go back to the previous thing, and if you missed the new thing, it's probably a pretty good upgrade.

[Micah Sargent]

Great. Probably a hint. I mean, you should be annoyed with the new thing because that's just par for the course, but you're more annoyed with the old thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. Yep. So we've had an incredibly busy day today at my site for whatever reason, so we're kind of behind on things. But there's a couple of stories that I kept refreshing to see if Laurent has gotten to it yet. But he will soon, I promise. But there have been some announcements today in the Insider program that are kind of interesting, including that thing we were just talking about. So, Semantic File search, which, by the way, I think they might have just named it, or I should say renamed it, because that's what they were calling it originally. And then for a long time it was Improved File or Improved Search or Improved Windows search with semantic indexing or whatever that is. Apparently. I thought this was generally available, but anyway, it's available across any PC that's enrolled in the Windows Insider program, in whatever tier, channel, whatever we call these things. Assuming it's a Copilot plus PC. Right. Because this uses the on device AI stuff. And yes, I, like. This is the name I thought they should use when they worked. When they moved away from this, I was like, I don't understand the semantic search, even if it's kind of technically inaccurate, is, you know, it's concise at least. So maybe I'm trying to understand this. Oh, that's interesting. I'm sorry. It is available. So this is now available through the Copilot app in Windows. Right, Right. Okay. That's the distinction. I was like, I thought this was out. Okay, so there's that, and then they're screwing around with the Copilot App AI or App ui. Sorry. Yet again, it's starting to look a little like Trello, frankly. It started off as this really minimal experience. Of course, it started off as a kind of pane, and then it was sort of a resizable pane, then it was a floating window, then it was an app, and then it was sort of a web app, and now it's really an app again, whatever. But I kind of like the recent iterations of it. But now, of course, what it looks like a little bit is the Copilot or the Microsoft 365 copilot app, which used to be the Microsoft 365 app, which used to be the Office app, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Which is a way to go back to some of the things you were working on earlier. Right. So it lists the documents, maybe you grounded it with and has links like that. So honestly, that's fine. Also honestly, it looks a little bit like a Home Hub ui, like it's on top of Windows, but maybe it should just be its own thing. And maybe there's a hint there that as we talk about that future that nobody wants, where there's no Start button anymore again, which went over so well or whatever, I mean, maybe we're kind of looking at it, maybe this is the first step toward that. It's kind of hard to say, but. But anyway, if you are in the Insider program on a PC, you can actually, I guess you don't even update the os, you just go get the app. So upload, you know, you can check this stuff up today. So, you know, you still look forward to this.

[Micah Sargent]

You're starting to see the elements of the road ahead here, right? This idea of no applications, just click to do or say to do.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. If the software needs to be involved, the software gets involved.

[Richard Campbell]

I think I talk about this every week now and I'm sure for the past at least two weeks I've threatened to actually write an article about this topic and I haven't yet or haven't finished it, but there is a very interesting thing to me and actually this might be just part of the developer background thing. So it's something Richard would really appreciate as well, I think, where you can draw parallels to what I'm going to call the kind of back end programmability, if you will, that AI will take advantage of either out in the Internet through online services and websites, but also locally on your device through apps, where these things are going to expose interfaces that the AI will work with. And you don't bring up the UI anymore, you don't bring up the website and it doesn't move the cursor for you and type things into a box and do it the way you do it, it just does it. Right. And you know, baby steps, obviously we got to get there. I mean, those things need to be updated to support that functionality. And I've used this specific example because it's simple and it's maybe the only good example so far. But Windows 11 has these app. I almost called them Intents. That's the Apple term app actions that work with click to do, et cetera, and eventually across whatever Copilot services. And the Settings app with the agent, which literally is a custom Microsoft MOO or MU local model that has been customized or grounded in all of what settings can do as an app, is that natural language interface. This is instead of today where you can type in a search and it's like Infocom or Sierra Online. You could just say, look, I just want to do this thing. And they're like, yep, here you go. And it just kind of does it. Right. And so that's the beginning, I think, of this capability in Windows. Google today announced, let's see if I can get this straight, that they were integrating Gemini Live, which is their version of Copilot Voice, essentially where you sit there and talk to it, you have a conversation. Right. And it will interact with apps. And so I think in the beginning it was, you know, tasks, calendar, maps, and one other thing I don't remember, but now they're adding more of those. And the idea here again is like, you know, it's not. The app's not going to come up. It's not going to. And then the other app, you know, it's. But as it gains these capabilities, integration capabilities, that thing becomes more powerful because you're expanding, you know, the range of things it could do pretty dramatically. And it's going to be available to third parties, of course, and pretty soon that's going to be it.

[Paul Thurut]

And so isn't it interesting that there's a. That they're all doing the same thing? They all have different names for it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, they're all doing.

[Paul Thurut]

It's. It feels like maybe that's they're copying each other, but that there's not a lot of innovation. Or maybe this is all we just. What we want.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So I think there's a combination of factors. It is fascinating to me that because of the kind of Lee, or regulatory governmental thing that's going on in the United States right now, they very much appear to be racing to get as much done while they can, where there's no oversight whatsoever and just get it done. And so these companies that would normally maybe compete and hold features for themselves are making everything open and everyone's doing everything and blah, blah, blah, whatever. But there's a minor story today that was later in the notes, I'll just mention it now because it kind of factors into this, which is duckduckgo which is privacy security focused as browser and whatever services, they have an AI or. Yeah, they have an AI chatbot called Duck AI. They don't make their own AI. Right. They let you connect it to other AIs and they put protections in place so it's anonymous and private and you know, you know, like Apple is trying to do as well. They added Support for a GPT5 mini, not full GPT5, but also web search results and. Okay, so this is a minor thing. There's not, not many people listening to this. Not many people out in the world are actually going to use what I just described. But it does speak to something here, which is that when these capabilities are just available everywhere and for free and with pretty good limits. Right. Like we've talked about how in GitHub Copilot, which I use not quite every day, but I'm going to say four to five days a week, easily, have never run into the limit on the free version. You know, people are going to bounce around a little bit. The stickiness of AI, I think it's commoditized. Yeah. It could happen in time. But the thing is, if you go to Gemini, let's just say, and you're like typing away and you're doing blah, blah, blah, and it's like, oh, hey, you reach your limit, sorry, see you tomorrow. And you're like, no, you won't. And you go, all right, chat GPT and you do it over there.

[Paul Thurut]

Exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

That's what people are going to do. Right. And so these things, because they're all kind of roughly the same or any given day sort of get into that.

[Micah Sargent]

Category, at least 80% is the same.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I mean, I think it makes, you know, you just move around. You know, it's like when you do it like a free YouTube TV offer and you get it for a month free and then you close it because you don't want to pay two bucks a month and you sign up with a different account and then you do it for another, you know, like people are going to do that or they're already doing it. Right?

[Micah Sargent]

They're doing it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they're right.

[Micah Sargent]

We have programmers with multiple instances of different LLMs doing different roles in their software development process and, and burning tokens at different rates and then.

[Paul Thurut]

Well, you know, you use up all your Claude tokens. You just go over and use ChatGPT5.

[Richard Campbell]

These companies are all working with each other. I mean, you can access GPT5 now, some version of it in probably a dozen different places. Right. Including Microsoft.

[Paul Thurut]

So my question is, is that because they're all filling the same need or they can't innovate and they're just copying one another. It feels like a company could step up and say, hey, we're going to do something no one else is doing.

[Richard Campbell]

Well. So to me, the big. Well, there's a bunch of issues, but one of the big things, well, we're going to do AI later. But brave comes into this.

[Paul Thurut]

We're always doing AI, aren't we?

[Richard Campbell]

It's actually small for this show. It's a little small. But it's really interesting to see companies approach it from a different angle. Like, privacy security is an obvious example because you're not getting that from Comet, you're not going to get it from Google. You get it to some degree, maybe with Microsoft, depending on the kind of account you have or whatever. But. But is that going to be a mainstream selling point? I don't know. But here's something you probably already know about and you could just wait for, which is Cory Doctorow, who I guess two years ago ish coined that term. Insuredification is actually coming out with a book called Insuredification in October, if I'm not mistaken, which I've already preordied, because.

[Micah Sargent]

Love is Go order now.

[Paul Thurut]

Make sure you use natural language search, though, because he is not. He's changing the word to be polite.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, funny. Okay.

[Paul Thurut]

If you search for insertification.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm sorry, I'm changing the word to people. Yes. I'm sorry, I'm trying to turn this into a PG thing, so.

[Paul Thurut]

No, it's fine and I appreciate that. I'm just saying your natural language search should be able to make the distinction.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a Boston accent. I just add an R. It's a. Yeah, you know, where there isn't one. Or don't use the R where there is one or whatever. Anyway, the point of his book is that it's not just describing it. We understand it. Right. We see it everywhere, but it's to get by it. Like, how do we solve it? And that's kind of interesting to me because it hits us at so many areas of our lives. But I think what's going to happen is once all this stuff is mature, everything's built out. We have all these AI services. They're all interconnecting and MCP ing and whatever the hell that is, they're going to start charging us for it. Right? And charging us more for it. I mean, they're going to charge more at some point.

[Micah Sargent]

They have to pay for what they've spent.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It doesn't get like free, it goes from free, you know. So you see that.

[Paul Thurut]

We're kind of already seeing that chat. GPT5 is somewhat rate limited because of their. Sam Almond said we've run out of GPUs.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. They're not rate limiting because of cost, they're rate limiting because of resources.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, right, right.

[Paul Thurut]

Costs be damned. They have plenty of money.

[Micah Sargent]

But I saw this great study about how on July 4, because all the Americans were partying, those who were using the AI models got massively faster and better results because the load was down.

[Richard Campbell]

In our defense, as Americans, we do have a lot to celebrate and. Or at least a need to drink a lot. I don't know.

[Micah Sargent]

Yes. And. Well, and continuous explosions. Let's not.

[Richard Campbell]

We do like explosions. I think that's one of those cross the aisle things that we can all agree on.

[Micah Sargent]

We can all agree on. On for one day a year. There's just a continuous stream of breath.

[Richard Campbell]

Just blow stuff up and enjoy. It's just. We'll just enjoy it.

[Paul Thurut]

The dogs aren't real happy about it, but everybody else is.

[Micah Sargent]

Sedate the dog and put the poor little bugger in the basement and.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

Poor, poor kitty.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Micah Sargent]

All right.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, that was one of 127 topics. Let's see.

[Paul Thurut]

Can I just say, by the way, I do think that private or.

[Richard Campbell]

There.

[Paul Thurut]

Will be a distinction. There will be a differentiator, which is private versus public. We just found out, by the way, I don't know if it's a mistake or an intention that if you share a link, a Grok AI result as a link with somebody else. Like I share it with you. It's now public. So. Hey, Paul, I have this condition, this disease. I asked Grok about it. What do you think? You share it with your doctor.

[Richard Campbell]

I'll tell you what.

[Paul Thurut]

Guess what?

[Richard Campbell]

I think your blood pressure is a little high, Leo, is what I think. I'm looking at your records. Yeah.

[Paul Thurut]

So I've been using. So that's one of the reasons I stopped using Perplexity. Because it's pretty clear Perplexity's goal is gobble, gobble, gobble mine every bit of information it can about you and then sell it on DuckDuckGo is a good choice. We had the founder of COGI, which is a public benefit corporation, trying to replace Google Search. But they have. And this. I don't think people talk about it that much. Cogi.com Assistant is a Assistant much like Perplexity. It's an orchestrator, as you. As you say, but has every model in it.

[Richard Campbell]

Now, the real question is, this is what's interesting to me.

[Paul Thurut]

This is the future.

[Richard Campbell]

Why would you use ChatGPT if you could use this?

[Paul Thurut]

And it's private. Now, here's the question. Because when you use ChatGPT here, it's probably using the API. Is the API going to give me the same results as if I use the ChatGPT app?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, boy.

[Paul Thurut]

We don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, this site was written for Internet Explorer, Leo, so no, you got to.

[Paul Thurut]

Use IE7 or nothing.

[Richard Campbell]

Exactly. Right.

[Paul Thurut]

So this has all the models. I mean, it's really kind of cool. And Kagi says we anonymize the data.

[Richard Campbell]

So that this is what we're looking for. So Brave's going to do this. DuckDuckDoog does do this.

[Paul Thurut]

I think it's great. So I stopped using Perplexity, and I find this is just as good. It's the orchestration. And you were the one who taught me this phrase.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I'm repeating it. I just.

[Paul Thurut]

I understand.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's a good word and it's accurate. Like it's. It's the right word.

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah, but that's what we're buying. And if you can get orchestration and privacy, to me, that is a differentiator.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know most people. So I. I was. I guess I was kind of heading there earlier.

[Paul Thurut]

I know. I was just.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, I. I mean, no, this is your. That's what I'm saying is, I don't know. To me and you and to people, here it is. We know the difference. Does my wife care? Does my mother care? I can't. I don't know.

[Paul Thurut]

I think if you get more stories like that Grok story where. Yeah, people.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, right.

[Paul Thurut]

They might start paying attention. They might go, what?

[Micah Sargent]

I don't know.

[Paul Thurut]

I shared that with my doctor, and now it's searchable on Google.

[Micah Sargent]

And yet the public seems to be remarkably uninterested in privacy.

[Richard Campbell]

I know, I know. I've always found this to be incredibly alarming. I've seen people, adults, like, this year in Mexico is a big thing. They pick up their phone and they just start using it. And it's like, you do you not. You don't have a code. You don't have a face thing. Like, they don't have anything. They're just, like, just using it.

[Micah Sargent]

Whatever, you lose it. I had a friend hand me his phone and say, look at my email outbox. There was a Spam mail coming out of it. It's like, dude, your email has been compromised. You need to change your password. Oh, no, I couldn't change the password.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh.

[Paul Thurut]

Oh, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

My mother. That's a really good mother, called me yesterday and she goes, I think I got a spam text that was supposedly from your son. Here's her grandson.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And I said, did it come from money? His. Was it his number? And she said, yep. And I said, what does it say? And it said. It said, hi, Graham, comma, whatever. And I said, well, that's what he calls you. It's kind of an unusual name for a grandmother. What makes you think this is spam? And she says, well, this kind of spam's going around all the time now. And I said, spam, where someone texts you and says, graham, I need something. So I said, if you want, I could call my son and. Or text him, see if, you know, be an orchestrator. So I did. And he's like, yeah, I'm going to Boston to see some friends. I'm going to go visit her if she's around. And I'm like, yep, she'll be delighted by that. So I called her back. I wasted a half a day.

[Paul Thurut]

Don't knock it, though, Paul. Thank goodness she's.

[Micah Sargent]

At least she's checking.

[Paul Thurut]

She's proactive.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurut]

I mean, it's better than the alternative. You know, there's somebody in the. In the chat room said, yeah, but.

[Richard Campbell]

Cocky's 150 Canadian dollars a year, right?

[Paul Thurut]

That's the point. You want privacy, you're going to pay for it.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, that's right.

[Richard Campbell]

And I think that's the sticking point for people. We've gotten very used to giving away the whole farm.

[Paul Thurut]

The Internet's free.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, Google Maps is free, but they have your whole. You know, we're at the point with Google Maps. This is a very specific example where if you're not paying attention, you'll look down and you'll see a little green leaf in the directions. And it means you're going the most efficient way, not the best, fastest way for you. And it will. It used to, like, you'd be driving on the highway and you say, listen, there's a thing coming up. What you want to do is get off the highway, driving this little back road, and get back on the highway. And you're like, okay. And every time you do this, you're like, yep, that saved me a lot of times. This is great. I'm pretty sure we're at the point now where it's like, nope, Google is just evening out the traffic. Some people it's going to be like, you go this way. Some people it's going to be like, you go this way. And I don't know that I trust it anymore. You know, we've gotten. So that's like an insertification thing right there. Like, who. Who's the master that is overseeing this thing? Like, what's the prime directive here? Because I don't pay it, you know, so is it doing the best job for me now, or am I doing the best job for it now? You know, and I assure it's the latter. Yeah, I don't really have a good answer to this. And this might just be a conspiracy theory idiocy thing on my part. I don't know. But I. I find myself wondering every time it's like, hey, we found a better route. And you're like, I'm gonna save 32 seconds. Do I do this? I don't know. I don't know. There's no way to know, right? You can't know.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, it's a great. It's a great assessment as to whether any of that's worthwhile.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know. All I know is I used to drive across the country with a AAA trip kit, which is like this paper thing on like a little folio that, you know.

[Paul Thurut]

Those are great.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, it was great back in the day, I loved it.

[Paul Thurut]

They put a little magic marker where your route was supposed to go.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that was wonderful. Yeah, it's really nice. It was like an assistant. An AI, if you will. That was. It was fine. Okay, let's see. Let me lightening around the rest of this Windows Insider stuff, because who cares? So we have had beta and dev and now two Canary builds since we last met. Beta and dev, as before, the same. The big thing that is there is just some selection. Models. Selection, models, mode. Sorry, I was like, that doesn't seem like the right word for click to do. And so this is much like snipping tool. So when you bring up snipping tool, it's like, oh, do you want to draw a circle? Do you want to. You know, whatever. It gives you these things. And I don't know why we need this many ways to do things, but whatever. And then the rest of it's got just minor improvements to taskbar, file explorer, et cetera. Nothing notable. You'll be delighted to know that if you're on the Canary channel, for some reason, you finally got all the copilot PC features that everyone else has had for a year and a half. So that's fun. And then today, there was another Canary build that just added some minor new features that have, you know, we've already talked about elsewhere. They're just things that are just around in other parts of the Insider program. So nothing major. But I'll tell you what is major. Another update to Notepad. And if you ever want to see Mary Jo Foley, just, just overreact, just mention anything coming to Notepadge. You just knee jerk cannot stand it. And I've tried. I wrote a. I wrote. I told you this. I think I wrote this article just a couple of months ago whenever they added, like, the markdown support to Notepad. And I wrote this because everyone lost their minds. Everyone was like, oh, you know, losing their minds. And I was like, I wrote an article called In Defense of Notepad. And then I was like, three, two. It was my phone. Mary Jo, she's like, you're an idiot. They're just screwing this thing up. It was like it hit Mary Jo before it hit the Internet. Like, I was like, somehow she had a direct channel. I knew I was going to hear from her. It happened in two seconds. And I made the case to her, like, I made in the article. Like, look, obviously you could add features to some things, some app or whatever, Windows, whatever, and screw it up, right? And there was a time when they were updating the Paint app early on in Windows 11, and they completely screwed it up. They got rid of all the keyboard shortcuts we all knew and used. They got rid of dark. Well, they added light mode that was like this bright, shining spotlight, but no dark mode. And it was terrible. And then it literally took them like 18 months or more. It might have been longer, but they finally got it right. And today Paint is, you know, well, it's actually better than it's ever been because there's all these additional new features. It's great. But Notepad, I just say they've never screwed it up. Like, they've added a bunch of stuff to it, but the stuff, if you don't like it, you can literally turn off all of it. You don't have to use any of. Just still works with plain text. It's great.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. Still normal text.

[Richard Campbell]

So with that as a background, I'll just say they're adding another change. So if you're familiar with the context menus in Windows 11, right? So you right click the desktop or a File Explorer window or whatever, you get a context menu. It's new, it's modern, it's smaller, simple. And if you hold down the shift key, you can get like, the old Windows 10 version, which is ugly and terrible and complicated, but people seem to love it because it has these features maybe, that are missing from the default context menu. If you want to, you can edit the registry, bring back the old menu. So it just could be there all the time. Like, you just. That's what you get when you right click. Like, so a little bit for everybody there. But this is something they kind of screwed up as well. Instead of having this humongous menu with like, cut, copy, paste, you know, delete whatever the choices are, they put the common commands as icons at the top. Of course, no one knew what those commands were because the icons look like hieroglyphics. So now they have a little bit of a. Like a text caption or whatever under them so you can see what they are. It will say cut under the scissors or copy under whatever that's supposed to be, and so on, right? You're like, okay, there you go. You got it right and good. So now it's a lot. It's not tall anymore like it used to be. It has all the commands. No, not all the commands, but it has reasonable selection of commands. They are doing that to Notepad and with the same effect. So you're not losing any commands on right click. But the common ones, cut, copy, paste, and I guess delete, select all, and something else, whatever, are like they are in File Explorer or they will be soon. Like icons with little captions. Good. Let me tell you. You know who doesn't like it?

[Paul Thurut]

Mary Jo Foley.

[Richard Campbell]

She was on Twitter or whatever we call it now, just ranting about it, and I was like, mary, come. Come on. Come on, man.

[Micah Sargent]

Is this really the hill to die on? There are so many other choices.

[Richard Campbell]

This is. I get it. I mean, look, I use Notepad every day. I write a notepad clone every day.

[Paul Thurut]

We just should get her something that's just like she wants a typewriter. You understand? A computer typewriter. Can we get her something? Like, there must be something like that.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, sure.

[Paul Thurut]

Distraction free. There is. There are. There's things like IA Writer on Mac. I don't know if there's.

[Richard Campbell]

That's the thing. Like, I don't know. Yeah, I. A writer is on Windows. It's not quite as good as the Mac, but it's good.

[Paul Thurut]

Typewriter mode.

[Richard Campbell]

Typora is typewriter mode. Awesome. Yeah.

[Paul Thurut]

Why doesn't she use those?

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know. She has difficulty with change.

[Paul Thurut]

I think Windows comes with notepad and it should be simple.

[Richard Campbell]

I feel like this is an example of what you were just describing where Mary Jo's psychosis is out on the Internet. Now we're talking about it.

[Paul Thurut]

We love Mary. Mary Jo.

[Richard Campbell]

She gave it to AI or something. And now we're just.

[Paul Thurut]

Now we're all part of the. The insanity. Let's take a little pause. Pause. We got lots more to talk about. You're watching Windows Weekly with the immortal Paul Thurat.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I'm going to prove you wrong as soon as I can.

[Paul Thurut]

I'll never forget, I think it was the last time I did live with Kelly and Regis. And I'm sitting in the. In the makeup chair and Kelly comes in and she says, my immortal beloved. And I was looking. I like, who is she talking? And you were like, finally, finally the recognition I deserve.

[Richard Campbell]

I love it.

[Paul Thurut]

I don't. I think she was stoned.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know.

[Paul Thurut]

I don't know why she said that. I've been calling her ever since and she never picks up. So I. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

Regis Philbrand was a. What I would call a guilty pleasure because I hate those kinds of shows. And I just loved him there something about him.

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah, I love working with him.

[Richard Campbell]

I found him.

[Paul Thurut]

What's a gigabyte, Leo? Gigabyte.

[Richard Campbell]

You keep saying that.

[Paul Thurut]

What's that?

[Richard Campbell]

I know, it's so great. I. It was like if Jerry Pernell was friendly and funny. Yeah.

[Paul Thurut]

You know, that was. That was one of the highlights of my career.

[Micah Sargent]

Loved it.

[Paul Thurut]

I don't know, 20 or 30 of those early 2000s. And I really, really enjoyed doing that.

[Richard Campbell]

Was a lot of fun.

[Paul Thurut]

Anyway, let's take a break because we have a fine sponsor to talk about today. In fact, I think you know their name. I've been talking about them. US Cloud, the number one Microsoft Unified support replacement. I had never heard of them when I first they came to US and I had a nice conversation with them, really got to know them, and I said, I don't know. I don't know why I've never heard of you guys. I want to tell the world about this. They are the global leader in third party Microsoft support for enterprises. I think maybe some people have heard of them. They support 55. 0 of the Fortune 500. And there's a good reason for this, because switching to US cloud can save your business. Get ready for this. 30 to 50% over Microsoft unified and Premier support. Now, I know what you're saying. Well, fine, it saves me 50%, but is it better? Yes, it's half the price and twice as good, twice as fast. Average time to resolution versus Microsoft. That's a big number when you're talking about, you know, the network's down, your hair's on fire, you don't know what to have the pros from US Cloud available. That's the other thing. They are really good. With an average of 16 years experience with Microsoft and Breakfix, they know how to solve your problems. But now US Cloud is going to live up to their name. They're going to tell you about a new offering, something I don't think you'll ever see from Microsoft. They call it their Azure cost optimization service. I don't think Microsoft wants you to optimize your Azure costs. When was the last time you evaluated your Azure usage? If it's been a while, it's undoubtedly the case. You've got some Azure sprawl, a little spend creep going on, right? It's easy. The good news is you can save on Azure easier than you might ever imagine, thanks to US Cloud. They offer an eight week Azure engagement powered by VBox. It identifies key opportunities to reduce costs across your entire Azure environment. And you're going to, of course, get those expert guides. US cloud senior engineers with over 16 years with Microsoft products on average, these people know their stuff. And at the end of the eight week engagement, you're going to get an interactive dashboard that clearly identifies, rebuild and downscale opportunities, unused resources, giving you the chance to reallocate those precious IT dollars towards something you really need. For instance, keep the savings going. Invest your Azure savings. You don't have to, but you could in USCloud's Microsoft support. A few of US Cloud's other customers do that. And that's nice because the savings just keep on going, completely eliminate your unified spend. Ask Sam. He's the technical operations manager at Bede Gaming. B E D e. He gave us Cloud 5 out of 5 stars saying, quote, we found some things that had been running for three years which no one was checking. These VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month. Not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spent on Azure. But once you get to 40 or $50,000 a month, it really starts to add up. Yes, it's simple. Stop overpaying for Azure, identify and eliminate Azure creep and boost your performance all in eight weeks with US Cloud. Visit uscloud.com and book a call today to find out how much your team can save. That's uscloud.com to book a call today and get faster Microsoft Support for less. USCloud.com thank you so much for supporting Windows Weekly. They've got a bunch of people listening who could definitely use them. Back to Paul and Ricardo. More earnings. I thought we. Oh, actually this is a big story. The Lenovo earnings, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So Lenovo is the world's biggest PC maker.

[Paul Thurut]

Their number one. Dell used to be their number one.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, HP was for a while, then Lenovo several years.

[Paul Thurut]

That's still the top three though, right? Dell, HB and Lenovo, they kind of trade places.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean Dell's doing everything they can to get out of the top three, but yeah, but yeah, this has been kind of a weird year for the PC. I mean obviously there's a Windows 10 end of life thing happening, you know, this year and, and we're not in an age where we're going to get a lot of upgrades like we did in the past, but you know, whatever.

[Paul Thurut]

You don't think businesses are going to.

[Richard Campbell]

Say, okay, fine, we're just. They are, but they do, they do this on their own schedule, right?

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, they do. And you do it when your hardware is coming out of warranty, Right. Four year mark, five year mark.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

You know, we no longer turn to get the latest. We turn because we don't. Can't afford the maintenance sense.

[Paul Thurut]

I don't, I'm not a tax guy, but what are the rules about amortizing the cost across years? Like can you, can you write them off for five years?

[Richard Campbell]

They appreciate over five years? Pretty much, yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

They have no value at the end of five years. Like so that's.

[Paul Thurut]

But that's gonna be.

[Richard Campbell]

You can.

[Paul Thurut]

The time frame. How long can we, how long can we depreciate these?

[Richard Campbell]

I can afford it. I apologize.

[Paul Thurut]

The doorbell.

[Micah Sargent]

There you go.

[Paul Thurut]

He's getting a delivery. If it's Chipotle, I'm going to be disappointed. It better be a PC.

[Micah Sargent]

So what's tax.

[Paul Thurut]

What's the tax deal? You could. Lisa would know this. That did change though. I saw that.

[Micah Sargent]

That was maybe in the US I mean the deal's pretty much been all the same. Machines are essentially valueless once you buy them.

[Paul Thurut]

Three years, five years.

[Micah Sargent]

Well, we used to turn them every two because the upgrades were substantial. You could measure the productivity boost and you got new machines. But that stopped a decade plus ago. Yeah, you know, like it just.

[Paul Thurut]

Processors aren't vastly faster.

[Micah Sargent]

Doesn't mean. Yeah. And so really it was about, hey, these out of warranty. Machines aren't worth the maintenance cost. So you don't wait for them to fail and replace them. You just flop them at five years.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Micah Sargent]

And then most hardware leases are structured that way, too. That's the simplest way to go. They're all 60 monthly.

[Paul Thurut]

So there is a time frame roughly five years where at this point you've completely fully depreciated the product. It's worthless. And you would get some. After five years, you get a benefit from upgrading.

[Micah Sargent]

It would be a better incremental, depending on what kind of work you're doing. That's all questionable. The bigger thing is just support and reliability. And you get the Gladys os, which has been true for a couple of years now. Pretty much you're just buying machines with 11 on them already.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Micah Sargent]

But I don't see anybody rolling over early. They'll play the ESU game or whatever's necessary to turn over their hardware when the timer expires.

[Paul Thurut]

Would you get your Uber Eats, Paul? Was it. Is it.

[Richard Campbell]

So we have a UPS that has the delivery has to be signed for, so.

[Paul Thurut]

Oh, yeah, I know that feeling.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm like, I hate that. 1245-245. My wife's like, do I have to be here? I'm like, yeah, you have to be here. I'm on.

[Paul Thurut]

So they're right on time at 3:15. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

So anyway, I. I saw the truck out there while you do. I went and grabbed another drink and I could see the truck. I'm like. I was like, oh, maybe I'll luck out and he'll just come. And then he. Of course he came right after we started recording again.

[Paul Thurut]

That's fine. That's.

[Richard Campbell]

Sorry.

[Paul Thurut]

All right. So I was. That's okay. I was getting tax advice from Richard anyway.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's good.

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

And this is an IT perspective. Right. Like, that's what I want. Machines differently than consumers do. Exactly. Use your machine until it falls apart.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not coincidental that the top three PC makers are also major sellers of commercial PCs. Right? Only in the top five. Well, maybe that's not fair, but I would say in the top five only. Apple is kind of specifically focusing on consumers. I mean, obviously they sell a lot.

[Paul Thurut]

Of stuff, but they have a fraction of the market.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Well, they're not that. They're probably in fourth place. I mean, they're, you know, they're doing pretty good. It's like.

[Paul Thurut]

Because they're the only ones that make it.

[Richard Campbell]

That's the difference, you know, I guess I mean they make good computers. I'm not, I'm not dumping.

[Paul Thurut]

Oh, they're excellent. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

No, but, yeah but, but I, they don't have the presence in the commercial market like Lenovo, HP and Dell do, so obviously.

[Paul Thurut]

But Lenovo had a banner, banner car.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So this thing like it doesn't actually make any sense. Right. So we've had the tariff issues going on. We've got this end of life thing that isn't really going to trigger a huge boom.

[Paul Thurut]

How much of this maybe was to get ahead of the tariffs you say?

[Micah Sargent]

That's what I would do.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that could be some of it. But they set records. They set records on piece unit volumes, on revenues. Their market share is higher than it's ever been. It's like so this is, you know what, it's a low margin business. So 389 million on revenues of almost 18.9 billion in one quarter. But those are 108 and 22% gains year over year. Like those are, those are big numbers for a PC maker.

[Paul Thurut]

Their revenue doubled.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, like you could. Well their profit probably doubled. I don't think the revenue doubled, right?

[Paul Thurut]

No, the revenue doubled. The profit was 2%. Oh yeah. Vice versa. It's profit doubled.

[Richard Campbell]

You wouldn't see revenue double it. But the look, HPA to my knowledge has not yet done their earnings probably because they're not going to look anything like this. Dell did and their PC business is struggling frankly. They just rebranded everything. They're terrible. But that's what you would expect for these companies. I mean it's not a great market but. And by the way Lenovo does do other things. I mean they do have a group. Well they have phones as well but the Motorola phones aren't that great. And revenue wise they do have an infrastructure group that does server and AI stuff and whatever. But it was a 13, 13.5 of the 18.8 billion in revenues came right from computers.

[Micah Sargent]

W. It doesn't make any sense but it's really spectacular.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, good for them. So that's neat. Anyway, just thought that was kind of.

[Paul Thurut]

It isn't that they make massively better. I mean they make good hardware, they.

[Richard Campbell]

Make great computers and they are also doing a lot of experimentation. Right. Chris Hoffman, remember he showed us that kind of rolling screen device that was wild. Thinkbook like. But they're always doing stuff like this. Like they're always, you know I have a double screen laptop that's in right now that I find infuriating. But you know they're they're experimenting like they're like. And maybe this is tied a little bit to that conversation up top. It's like where things are changing. Like, what's this going to turn into? You know, we'll see. It's going to turn into a giant phone. That's.

[Paul Thurut]

What are they the. They're the number one PC maker now.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. By far. Yeah. They have 25% market share. That's unit sales this quarter. 30% of the computers they sold were AI PCs, which means they have an MPU. Right. So it's not Copilot plus PC, but also the intel chips that don't qualify for that would fall into that bucket.

[Paul Thurut]

It's also really good for Linux.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, right. Well, because they support. No, it is important. Well, because they explode. Dell does a pretty good job with this too, by the way. Yes. Dell actually sells like officially supporting the drivers and all that stuff and then. Yes. Selling the computers with Linux on there if you want. Right. No, that's important. I mean that's, that's good. But yeah, I, I don't, I don't know that that's important to their revenues or whatever, but I like that they do it. It's. It's good. No, it's just like the more.

[Paul Thurut]

Do you recommend. You think the Lenovo makes the best laptops or would you. Is that your favorite?

[Richard Campbell]

So. Oh boy.

[Micah Sargent]

These are real personal preference kinds of things.

[Paul Thurut]

It is. Because there's not that much real difference.

[Micah Sargent]

No.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, yeah, I, I mean I have a person like, I really like the, the Microsoft stuff, which is stupid. Right. I would never recommend this to most people, but I really do like laptop, for example. But HP or Lenovo, I would say those are both. Right. Kind of Neck and neck and it depends. Yeah, I would go ThinkPad X1. You know, I wish there was a Think1 X1 carbon 16 inch without a numeric keypad. Like that would be close to being perfect because it's so light. But there are HP laptops like that. I just bought a 16 inch HP base level Snapdragon X laptop for like 600 bucks. It's unbelievable. Wow. Unbelievable.

[Paul Thurut]

But that you bought a laptop.

[Richard Campbell]

I bought it. Yeah. Well, it is. I, I bought. So by the way, why would you.

[Paul Thurut]

Buy a laptop, Paul?

[Richard Campbell]

Because they won't send me the cheap ones. I wanted to see what it was like and it's. I can't stop using it. It's so good. I don't even know what to do. Like, it's, it's a problem.

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But I have bought three computers now since the beginning of last year and I had before that not bought a. Well, I buy used computers actually. But as far as like buying a brand new computer, I couldn't even tell you when the last one I bought was a long time ago. And this is not coincidental. All three of them are arm.

[Paul Thurut]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

Actually four if you count the one I bought for my daughter. So yeah, I mean that's where my head's at. So I would say Lenovo or hp. Yeah. And go for the premium segment devices, not the consumer Y ones.

[Paul Thurut]

Yes. You don't want consumer pieces.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, unless you like crapware and terrible. You know, nobody likes. Maybe you do, I don't know.

[Micah Sargent]

But clear. There is no Copilot plus PC that's specifically aimed at the business market. Yet this is still a consumer product line.

[Richard Campbell]

There technically are in the sense that the Snapdragon ThinkPad T whatever is.

[Micah Sargent]

That's it.

[Richard Campbell]

There's an Elitebook, I think it's called Ultra X or whatever which is just a laptop but technically is a business laptop. But I think the thing that's interesting about Copilot PC if you look at the few models that are in that part of the market market they're really selling to individuals and there's always an intel or AMD equivalent. Whereas on the consumer side you will see unique devices, you know, here and there because there's no, you know, they don't have to worry about, you know, upsetting anyone. You know, they're not going to Suddenly just drop x86 or whatever for like ThinkPad x1 carbon, you know, but they'll do like one T version, you know, that's okay. And then they'll do an AMD and an Intel. Right. And that's an interesting example of a laptop where you can actually get all three and then you can kind of compare them like had apples to apples or whatever. Okay.

[Micah Sargent]

For all the options that it's. Yeah. Just looking at the list and they're, you know, they lead with the AMD machines. Like clearly they have a bias for what they want you to buy or.

[Paul Thurut]

AMD gives them co marketing dollars or.

[Richard Campbell]

Actually the real story there is intel can't anymore, they can't afford it. And so AMD this year has their best ever market share and they're mostly selling AMD and it's because PC makers can now offer it as an option.

[Paul Thurut]

Is that going to change now that the US government owns Intel?

[Richard Campbell]

I. I'm just kidding. No, I don't think that changes that. So I.

[Paul Thurut]

Apparently they. Apparently the federal government is taking a stake in intel for reasons I don't.

[Richard Campbell]

I know. I literally just like, rebooted when you said that so.

[Paul Thurut]

Well. Hey, it works so well for the Chinese. I think we should do it too. Yeah, we want our golden shares.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't want to talk about this. All right. So I just. It makes me crazy. All right, so, yes, intel has had their thumb on the scale for the past 20 years. Right. Right. I told you the story. I ran into a guy at. It was IFA last year in Berlin. And this. Actually, it was the slap. We were talking about this laptop and I said, so you have like the T. Whatever number amd, intel and Snapdragon. I said, how come you can't. Why can't. Why don't I see an X1 carbon with an AMD chip? And he goes, beep, beep, beep, beep. I'm like, what's that? I'm like. He's like, that's the intel truck dumping the pile of money on our front line. He goes, that's why.

[Paul Thurut]

That's a very funny answer.

[Richard Campbell]

And I was like, okay, I see. So that was kind of interesting, you know, like. But I. That's coming to an end or has ended. Like, they don't. They can't afford this anymore. And you're actually seeing it like. You're seeing it like there's way more AMD availability now.

[Paul Thurut]

That was the intel inside sticker that you had to peel off your keyboard. And you know, the ads where you'd see and, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurut]

And all of that. And that.

[Richard Campbell]

They call it co marketing dollars tinnitus, by the way. It's.

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah. Do you hear it? I think so. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

All the time.

[Paul Thurut]

Not anymore. Not.

[Micah Sargent]

Well, this is interesting. I'm. I'm looking around on the Lenovo site and it's all intel and amd.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

And there are two ARM machines. That laptop.

[Richard Campbell]

And this is in the business space.

[Micah Sargent]

This is because they make more than that.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, they. But, okay, so they're saying they're out of them.

[Micah Sargent]

Right. They're all in limited stock.

[Paul Thurut]

They're sold out.

[Richard Campbell]

Out. Well, we're. We're a month away from a big Snapdragon event, by the way, so you would hope. Well, I mean, we'll see what happens.

[Paul Thurut]

Well, that's interesting. We should talk about that at some point.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, we will.

[Micah Sargent]

We will. Yeah. So they clearly are clearing out the old Snapdragons to get ready for the new one.

[Paul Thurut]

Would you at this point prefer an ARM based.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, well, that's all he's. By buying.

[Richard Campbell]

That's all I buy. I just bought a 600. So you know Snapdragon, when they announced it, it was Snapdragon X Elite. And then as they got closer to launch, they said we're going to have A plus as well and each of these will be arranged. There's some number of cores and this.

[Micah Sargent]

Was the Bin dual core boost. And yeah, as our yields continue to decline, we're going to offer new variations.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. And then there was, I think maybe it was IFA last year there was like an eight core plus. You know, they added, that was the thing they added, added. So you flash forward to January this past year at ces, they announced Snapdragon X. So it's not X plus or X Elite and it's basically the base level, X plus. It's slightly less clock speed, but I think other than that they're roughly identical. That's what's in this little hunk of junk I buy, which is, by the way, it's one of the best computers I've ever used. It's awesome.

[Paul Thurut]

Really?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I love it.

[Paul Thurut]

In fact, I wish I like everything now. Windows Unarm is compelling.

[Richard Campbell]

I literally have three instances of Visual Studio going on this thing on the same time, which is, is. It's. I can't. I love it. I just love it so much. It's like, it's awesome. So anyway, but yes, to us, to people in the industry, it's like, what are they doing? They're moving kind of slow. Like they're moving down market, they're binning, they're, you know, they're, they're putting these chips into cheaper computers. But you got to remember, you know, not quite a year, little 15 months ago, whatever that was when they launched it, you know, Snapdragon X at the time, X Elite, I guess pretty much in the early plus versions too. You know, this is a very specific part of the market they're going after that kind of premium thin and light, you know, what we used to call Ultrabrook part of the market. And we still to this day, even though one was announced to see us, do not have any desktop form factor ARM devices, obviously there's no dedicated GPUs. We don't have like gaming class devices. So for that generation of chips, like where they could go and where PC makers asked them to go, by the way, was lower price points. And so that's what they've done. And so hp, the thing I bought hp, announced it, I think in May, released it in early July. And I bought it, I think as soon as I got home from Mexico. I was waiting to buy it and I was like, and it's way better than I thought it was going to be. It's kind of freaking me out a little bit. Bit. It's really good. It's a really good laptop. I wish I could have gotten it with like a beefier, you know, like more RAM or, you know, something just to be, you know. But it's. I don't know, it's surprisingly good. So we'll see. Graphics are on the card or on the table, whatever it is for the next gen. And that's the rumor at least. So we'll see. We'll see where it goes. All right. We got a rifle through some of the stuff. We're kind of losing track here. Do you want to. Do we need. Yeah.

[Paul Thurut]

Let me just say, so that everybody knows, so that there's no confusion. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. We're really glad you're here. Special thanks to our Club Twit members who make this show possible.

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[Richard Campbell]

Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.

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[Paul Thurut]

That's not the itinerary we're following.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

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[Richard Campbell]

Bon voyage.

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[Paul Thurut]

All right, let's move on. What's next?

[Richard Campbell]

Okay, so a couple of AI things. Nothing too major. I've been kind of evaluating the AI browsers, such as they are. This is slice and time stuff. I got the Gemini button in Google Chrome and I was like, that's kind of interesting. Where did this come from? And I looked this up and if you go back to Google I O and watch the video, it let's say it's 90 minutes long. There's a 25 minute segment somewhere in there where they say, and we're bringing Gemini to Chrome.

[Paul Thurut]

Hey.

[Richard Campbell]

And then they moved on. That was all they said about it, right?

[Micah Sargent]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

And I was like, okay. And I believe it is limited to people who are on a paid Google AI plan, like Google AI Pro, the 20 buck a month thing, which used to have a different name, but I only have because I bought a Pixel last year. So I got it for free for the year or whatever. And that might be why I got it. I think it's us only. I think it's only if you're paying. I don't think it's. But this is where it's going, right? So you're like, okay, this is the world's most popular browser. This is what browsers are. What does this look like? It doesn't look like that much. It is just a button. If you are familiar with Copilot mode in Microsoft Edge, where they move the Copilot button over to the address bar and you click that and it comes up with like kind of a minimal little window. It looks like that, but it's up in the other space. You can move it around so it's not covering the screen and it will remember where it was. And the little fun thing they did was it's a tray icon for it. So if Google Chrome is not physically there, you know, visibly, you can still bring it up and there's a keyboard shortcut for it, just like there's for Copilot. Right. So if you wanted to just interact with Copilot, you could just do it from anywhere. It doesn't have any of the vision, whatever they call it, stuff for you, your computer, it does for the browser. So I asked, like, I was looking at the desktop and I asked it a question. It says, well, based on the new tab window you're looking at, it seems what you're asking, it's like, no, that's not what I'm asking you. So it has to do that kind of thing. So there are basically four what I would call big bucket AI features in Chrome right now, and only two of them are actually big bucket. And one of them, the thing we're talking about right now, is not available to everybody. So there's not a lot going on here. But. But this kind of makes sense because they own the market. Like, they're going to move slowly, they're going to move. They're not going to go radical on the ui. They've kind of learned that lesson, right? They're just going to keep it. You know, it looks like a browser. You don't open it, you're like, oh, my God, everything's different. Why did they move things around? It's like, nope, it looks exactly the same. It's fine. The other thing they added was this was earlier they added Google Lens to Chrome, which on, you know, desktop doesn't seem that useful. But I actually use this to. When we were in D.C. sitting at a bar, it was this fun little lamp with a little. And you plug it in with usb, it was brass. And I was like, that is really cool. And we actually really need that in Mexico. And we usually need like three of them. And I'm like, I bet I could use AI to find this thing. And I did not use AI, could not find it with AI. It was freaking me out. So when I was writing about Google Chrome and what they have, I'm like, I took a picture of it, I'll pull the picture in and see. And it found it immediately. I bought three of them on Amazon like two seconds later, like, it found it really, really well. So that worked okay, but not a big deal. Oh, yeah. So Brave today disclosed a security vulnerability in Comet, the Perplexity browser. Which, you know, you might.

[Micah Sargent]

That's their job. That's not their job.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, but here's the thing. So they made an interesting disclosure in this discussion where they said, we're working on adding these agencic features to our browser. We're going to do it in a way that protects your privacy. This is sort of what the duck AI thing I was talking about does for the search chat or Whatever. And so they're like, well, obviously we're going to go look at what's out there, you know. And it turns out, yeah, these no name companies no one's ever heard of, they don't really care about this stuff too much.

[Micah Sargent]

So hey, you're just trying to get a product out in the market for anybody to care about, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Like, that's right. And I, but they, but Brave and Perplexity did the right thing in this case, which I think is interesting and important, which is they disclosed it to Perplexity privately. They Perplexity fixed it two days later. And then Brave came back and said, it's mostly fixed, but there's still one problem, whatever. And then they made another fix and that fixed it and they sat on it for two to four weeks, whatever the timeframe was, and it did fix it. There were no known exploits or whatever. And so Brave came back and said, all right, we're going to disclose this publicly, but we're going to give you a two week warning. So, you know, we're doing it and when we're doing it and we'll let you know when it's happening. And it just kind of all went as the way, this is the way it should go. Like it was the right thing to.

[Micah Sargent]

Found it, we fixed it, we've explained it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurut]

Why did Brave find it? Which is. That's kind of odd.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, because they have engineers that are looking at agenic capabilities and what they're trying to do is anonymize and privatize the interactions between the AI and the person. And they're probably having trouble doing it. And they're like, well, how does this company do it? And they're like, oh, they don't. That's hilarious. And it was just like the thing you said with the Grok thing.

[Paul Thurut]

So I don't trust Perplexity anymore. I really.

[Richard Campbell]

They put the thing that they were able to get into was the authentication tokens for the user to get into. Perplexity, like they, they publish. They have a email address, right. That's your account and then there's like a one time passcode that you get through email, I guess. And they actually were able to get both of those things every time. And they were like, okay, so the problem is you're asking it questions about this, but your browser is this and it has all these other tabs open. And I guess at that point maybe they fix it. Comet used to just use the context of everything you were doing. So one of them could have been like your medical page at the doctor. One of them could have been the fight you're having with your wife or whatever. One of them. One of them could be anything, whatever. And that's what they found was like. Yeah, actually everything's. Everything was like wide open. Anyway, they fixed it. So Perplexity is totally safe now. I wouldn't worry about it. Whatever. Gemini added a memory feature because, you know, everyone has to have that, so obviously you don't have to.

[Paul Thurut]

I like that though.

[Richard Campbell]

You have to have it. It's. This is the assistant.

[Paul Thurut]

I don't want to start over every time.

[Richard Campbell]

Right, right. Yeah. It's like typing in the source code to a program every time you want to run it. You know, it's like I just. To want one could just get there, please.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, let's just go.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And then I mentioned this earlier, but just a quick refresh on this duck AI, they've added GPT5 mini, which is I guess the default, although it wasn't when I looked, but it will be. And then they're integrating web search results. So if you need up to date, you know, results, they'll do it. And they do it automatically. You can force the issue. You can actually go say, I want this to be a search, but this is. Is a minor form of orchestration, but that's what you want. Like they still have a model picker, but for some reason when you ask a question, we'll say, all right, is this a question that would benefit from a web search because there's more recent information. If yes, then we will do it and if not, we won't. Right. So okay, that's good. And then Grammarly in December bought either the company was called Coda or that was the.

[Paul Thurut]

No, it was the company named the.

[Richard Campbell]

Product or I remember but. And then in May they bought a second company, AI startup.

[Paul Thurut]

Superhuman.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, Superhuman. And they're. And they're the announcement. And they also secured a billion dollars in financing, by the way. And the idea was we're going to move past what we have now, which is this kind of spelling and grammar writing help service, AI based and just be like an AI productivity suite. And so the Coda editor is the basis for. They're describing it as a new editor, but they've had an editor for forever. But Grammarly has this editor and whether you use it there, meaning it's AI in their editor or in Word or whatever app you're using, Google Docs, they also have several AI agents, all of which are based. Are tied to writing in some way there's an AI grader that will evaluate what you've written and say you're likely to get this score from your teacher. Like grade based on because it knows what the grade level is, et cetera, citation finder, reader reactions, humanizers, proofreader, paraphraser, AI detector, plagiarism checker. It's like these are all like super legit, productivity focused. Like you know this. Good ideas, they're good ideas. Whether it's good or not, I can't tell you. I have started using Grammarly again against my better, better judgment because I am kind of curious about this. These things do all work if you don't pay for Grammarly by the way, you get more of it if you will, more usage or probably whatever. I'm sure it's limited in whatever way if you don't pay. But they actually all are making all of this available to everybody. So that's good for them I guess.

[Paul Thurut]

I feel like this is going to be a hot category as these smart editors.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

So this is emotional and it's also an existential threat to Grammarly. Like if they don't do something, something somebody else is going to be in the space and there'll be nothing.

[Richard Campbell]

The necessity for Grammarly never made sense to me because Word has existed for 35 years by now should have the best grammar and spell checking in the world. You would think it doesn't but Google does what they do. They have AI in search and whatever. They should be pretty good at this stuff. It's like why does anyone need this? Well, as soon as you start using something like this and look, I mean I write for a living. I'm not saying I'm good at it, but I do write a lot. And you turn this thing on and it's like it's all these yellow and red lines and you're like oh my God, what have I done? But it finds things. I don't always agree with it. You write.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, but you know grade 10 grammar teachers now standing over your shoulder underlining.

[Richard Campbell]

As you type the, the, you know, whatever.

[Micah Sargent]

Hunting your commas.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

Wondering why you use the ellipsis.

[Richard Campbell]

It's useful. It's useful in the same way like you know, you're out at night or whatever, you get a text message and you get the AI help there with whether it's literally writing or just the way you word something or just spell checking. Right. If you're maybe it's your boss or your mother in law or someone, someone you don't want them to be like idiot. You know like, like that's really helpful. So I Grammarly. Yeah I Grammarly is doing what a lot of other companies are doing and you see this a lot with what I call little tech companies now especially where they're doing or trying to do to Google Microsoft what Google did to Microsoft which was come in underneath no cost basically basics, not as full featured but they're kind of web based approach to what a word processor or spreadsheet might look like at the time when Microsoft was and still is absolutely dominant. Dominant. And so now you get these other companies and now it's just like a bunch of mix and match. It's like start at the board. What are you using? I'm using Trello Notion substack, like whatever. There's all kinds of this stuff. It's crazy.

[Paul Thurut]

It's like it used to be where you have instead of one app that does it all, you have a bunch of apps stitched together. Hey, before we get to the Xbox segment, I wanted to ask you if you had any thoughts on this story that There's a Windows 11 security update that came out last week that is causing some SSDs to die.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurut]

Have you seen this?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. What's the problem?

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah, this is. What's the problem? I don't know. No problem with me.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's like a fix for a fix for a fix. Wasn't this.

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah, so it was. It was too two releases, KB506, 3878 and 2660 that sped up a slow startup because of certain installed stuff. But apparently something in it caused large file transfers to cause the drives to disappear and sometimes not come back. Which is a big.

[Richard Campbell]

That's why I based my new NAS all on SSD storage. I just want to someday it's just going to disappear.

[Paul Thurut]

A couple of people posting on X discovered this.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurut]

12 of the 21 drives they tested became inaccessible. Only one though Western Digital Drive could not be recovered even after reboot. So it's Fison's been kind of new.

[Richard Campbell]

There's not a lot of information out there about this system. No, I haven't read about it because it feels a little anecdotal, you know. Yeah.

[Paul Thurut]

And it's not a huge number of.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurut]

Machines. So yeah. Maybe it's just anecdotal.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm not saying it's not real. I just don't. I don't know. I just don't know anybody. Yes. And I was like yeah, I don't know.

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah, it's too, too soon.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurut]

All right, well, I'm sure we'll keep an eye on that and have more to say about it if it turns out to be more than just a few scattered incidents. You are watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thoraic, Richard Campbell. The thing people like on this show, besides Whiskey, which is coming up, is the world famous, the one, the only. We are the number one Xbox podcast.

[Micah Sargent]

In the world, thanks to you.

[Richard Campbell]

We're not.

[Paul Thurut]

Hey, we live in a land of hype and opportunity and I'm going to take advantage of that.

[Micah Sargent]

Okay?

[Paul Thurut]

It is the best darn Xbox series.

[Richard Campbell]

I like how positive minded you are.

[Micah Sargent]

Yes.

[Paul Thurut]

Hit it, Paul.

[Richard Campbell]

It will be the best Xbox segment you hear during this episode of this podcast.

[Paul Thurut]

I agree.

[Richard Campbell]

It's pretty obviously so there's actually a lot going on. Believe it or not, I feel like last week was a little on the late side, but I think it was last week. I'm losing track of time here, but the two big Windows and Arms stories, remember, related to gaming last week, week, and now we have another one. And I really do think this is not coincidental timing. It's very curious to me that this is happening now. So if you play games on Windows, you may know, or even if you don't, you may have seen there's an Xbox app, right? And what is this thing? And it depends, right? So if you play PC games and you buy games through Microsoft, they'll appear there. The big draw though is for people who are or have Xbox Game Pass because that will list all the games you can download and install and play as part of your subscription. And if you have Xbox Game Pass ultimate, you also get game streaming. So whatever the selection of Xbox series X games that you can stream to your PC or whatever device will appear there as well. And they are in fact, this is actually in insider builds right now, but they're adding support for third party stores as well. So if you have Epic games installed, Steam, a couple of Gog, and then one other, I don't remember the other one, it will actually collect those games into your library view in the Xbox app. And when you go to, if you have to download them, you'll obviously get them through the other store over the other app, but they'll appear there as games and you can, you know, as you play games. It's kind of a hub, right? It's a dashboard, if you will, because it looks a lot like the Xbox dashboard on the console console. So last year we just talked about this in June Microsoft's partners hardware partnership the first Copilot Plus PCs, they're all based on Snapdragon X which is Windows 11 on ARM. And this thing includes the Xbox app. But if you run this app on an ARM machine, it doesn't do anything. You can't download any of those games from the app or you couldn't. I said this is changing. Finally the only thing you could do was stream games, right? So if you had a game pass ultimate subscription, you could go to the, I think it's cloud gaming thing on the side rail there and it would show those games. You could stream them, right? Because you can stream to anything. You can stream to an Echo device or a probably any Iot device these days, whatever. And I always thought that was kind of weird because as it turns out some games, not most games, but some games do play fine. I've there I. It seemed to me like Microsoft would have the facility to. Because we're not talking about millions of games. It's hundreds of games maybe. And you could rate them. How well do they run on arm and just show you the ones that will actually work. Like why not just do that? And now they are finally. Well, they're not even doing that actually. So now if you have a Windows 11 on ARM Snapdragon X based PC, you have to be in the insider program for Xbox, which, which it's not a big deal, anyone can sign up and then you check for updates, you get a new version of the app, you get that multi store thing I was talking about, which is not a big deal yet. And you get all your games like you do on a normal computer. Fun. So the first thing, this is what.

[Micah Sargent]

They were holding out for. They don't want to say this run. This doesn't. It's just like everything runs.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, Richard. I love how you're running an emulation.

[Paul Thurut]

Richard.

[Richard Campbell]

Hold on, hold on. He was normally so, so cynical and now so naive.

[Micah Sargent]

It was the anti cheat problem, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Okay. Yeah, that was one of the stories from last week. So what they haven't done is the thing you think they have done and what they should do, which is only show you the games that will work. They just show you every game.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, no, I think that's what they were holding out for is they wanted excuse to say everything runs, but everything doesn't run.

[Richard Campbell]

So the first thing I did was install.

[Micah Sargent]

You want truth? Let's not get crazy.

[Richard Campbell]

I can't do this for every game because these games are humongous. But I've done a Few. The latest Doom game, Doom, Dark Horizon or Shadow, whatever that called the latest Doom game. And then Call of Duty because why not just go for the gold, right? Call of Duty, Black Ops 6, full install, took half the day to get there and both of them just crash immediately when you run.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, nice. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

They do not work.

[Micah Sargent]

They don't get errors or anything. They just fail.

[Richard Campbell]

It starts up and it crashes hard with the same error message. Right, right.

[Paul Thurut]

Because you've downloaded gigabytes of data.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh yeah. Many, many gigabytes. I think it was last week, probably last week. Yeah, last week we talked about whatever the parent company is now, Bethesda, Raven, whatever, released remastered versions of Heretic and Hexen, which are those original DOS era Doom engine games. Right?

[Micah Sargent]

Yes, the first game, Doom Engine games.

[Richard Campbell]

Back in the day that. Yes, that game installs wonderfully and runs great on arm. So even on the little X, you know the, the, the low end one, it works great.

[Micah Sargent]

30 year old games work perfect, works great.

[Richard Campbell]

Native res, 60 frames a second. Awesome.

[Micah Sargent]

They did upscale it and stuff, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh yeah, they're doing stuff to it. It looks good, runs good, no problems. But yeah, Doom and Call of Duty not so much. So I've been meaning to push more games through this and see how it goes and I haven't had a chance yet. I'm sorry. But I'll look at this. I originally thought, I think as Richard did, I think that they were showing you a subset and then when I saw it was every game, I said, well, I know that's not going to work, so I'll just try it. We'll see what happens. And what happens is it crashes. Yeah, what happens is you waste lots of your bandwidth and time and then nothing works. So if that's your, you know. Well, you are a Microsoft user, maybe we're used to this, I don't know. So that's that. And then Gamescom is this week, it's in Germany, I think it's in. Where is it in Germany? Maybe somebody knows, Hamburg or somewhere, I don't know. It's not in Berlin though, I can tell you that. So Microsoft promised they would have some big announcements and they have. And on the software side, Call of Duty 7 or Call of Duty, Black Ops 7, which I have to say lost me a little bit there. When you read the description and it, well, it says following up on the storyline from Black Ops 2 and Black Ops 6 and I'm like, oh, okay. No, it's like when you're watching Lost and you have no idea what they're referring to. And they, you know, it's like, what are you talking about? Okay, I'm sure it's fine, whatever. It's just more Call of Duty. It's going to be interesting to see if battle. I almost said battleship. If Battlefield 6 maybe puts a dent in Call of Duty, I think there are a lot of people are ready to move on to something and I do like the kind of Modern Warfare look and feel of it. But whatever. Indiana Jones is the first Microsoft game coming to the Switch two. Right. And that was the only game they said, let's go to Switch.

[Micah Sargent]

So they specifically said, I wonder what Nintendo's requirements are. Like, that's. They're not easy hoops to jump through, those guys.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. I mean based on the fact that you can play like. Like I do play Call of Duty. The latest version on any piece. Yeah, Laptop modded laptop like in the past year, year and a half. I mean there's no doubt that the Switch could handle this game really well. Like, I mean, welcome to the fold guys. But I. We haven't heard that. Although remember before they did get Activision Blizzard, they were talking very specifically like we want to be bring Call of Duty back to the Switch, back to the Nintendo. The last Nintendo game I believe, or the one I played was Call of Duty 3 where you could use the numchucks to throw grenades, which would course cause you to. Which is why that wrist strap was so important because you really want to go for the distance. You don't want to throw that thing. And then on the hardware front, they announced the timing, not the pricing for the Asus rug. Xbox. Ally. Ally. Sorry Handhelds. Which is October 16th based on the rumors.

[Micah Sargent]

Trying to make Christmas here.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's probably going to be 6 to 700 bucks and then 8 to 900 bucks depending, you know, for the two models. It's going to be in there somewhere, I would think, which, you know, it's less than a Pixel 10 Pro XL or whatever that's called. I didn't link to this for some reason, but Sony has finally succumbed to the madness of tariffs and they're raising the price on each PS5 model in the US by $50 because they're not passing the savings along to us, I think is what they're trying to say. They're tired of paying that.

[Micah Sargent]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And then. Oh, I skipped one. Sorry. So this is actually a little late, right? Yeah, it's like the 20th, but usually we get two of these a month. These are the announcements about the game pass games that are coming across the different platforms, but we just got. It was yesterday. But for the remainder of the month, several new games coming. But the big one, well, Dragon Age, the Veil God is probably pretty big depending on where you're at. But the big one to me is Gears of War Reloaded. Right. This is the remastered version. So this is the second time to my knowledge or to my memory that they remastered the game. The first one was when this is a million years ago. Seriously. It was like 2006 when they were doing games for Windows Vista or games for Windows Live or whatever. It was the Xbox thing that we weren't calling Xbox. Halo 2 was one of the games they brought to Vista and then the original Gears of War. And because it could play on a PC, they added back the level with that Tyrannosaurus Rex looking thing which is now on the console. It was kind of like an end boss thing which was awesome. And some additional other things and I'm sure they up resin whatever. So yeah, you can, you can expect this thing to this gna be 5 years redo this game, you know.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. Because it gets trash. Looking at the rest of the list, by the way. Goat Simulator. Hilarious. Like just so dumb. So funny.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurut]

So old.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, it's the Remastered edition. And for the anime fans, like Persona is a very important game line. Like Persona 4 is a pop.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's like Hurdling.

[Micah Sargent]

I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know. But Gears of War Reloaded, man.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh yeah, yeah. This big game.

[Richard Campbell]

I played this game through to completion at least two dozen times. Like I played it so much, I'm not sure I have the capacity to play it again.

[Micah Sargent]

But more importantly, the fact that you now know you have finished it now when you struggle to pick back up again, it will make you angry.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, right, right, right. That's true. You know me very well. And then. So GeForce now is a cloud streaming game service. Obviously they have been using whatever class of GPUs Nvidia GPUs. Obviously it's an Nvidia company. And now I guess if you pay for their most expensive subscription, you'll actually get updated quality like up to 5k which I'm sorry, I don't care what kind of connection, that's never happening. But 5k and 120 frames per second using RTX 5080 GPUs.

[Micah Sargent]

You know what this really means? They finally get the black belt production squared away and they have enough, they.

[Richard Campbell]

Can actually kick the 50 minutes down.

[Micah Sargent]

To the less expensive products.

[Richard Campbell]

Apparently it will Support up to 360 frames per second at 1080p.

[Micah Sargent]

You don't have a screen that'll do that either. No, I've been stressing my 5080 and it's a lot of torque, man. Like, that's a lot of radio card.

[Richard Campbell]

The.

[Paul Thurut]

What's your 0 to 61 of the.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm sorry. I have a laptop that has a RTX 5050. I think it's 5080, but laptop GPU. Right, right. And it's. It is like when you went to HD back in the day or to 4K where you feel like, oh my God, my eyes are brand new. Like I see things in the game I never saw before. Little wispy smoke effects.

[Paul Thurut]

Nice leaves. Maybe that's HDR as much as anything else.

[Richard Campbell]

HDR is part of it, but it's HDR that actually. But it's also like real HDR.

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

2.8 case display, OLED, HDR. And then these graphics. So it's cranked up. It's like all the effects are on ultra. The thing runs at like 140, 150 frames a second. Second. And it sounds literally like a jet engine. If you were hanging onto the wing like you were that creature in that Twilight Zone episode. Like it's. And it doesn't stop. It's like it is the. I've had to turn the.

[Micah Sargent]

Building some space animations with frame pack.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

At. At 16 gigs fully loading the card. And I could cook food on that machine.

[Richard Campbell]

It's like the. It's like the Ford Mustang approach to performance. It's not like efficient and. And battery powered brutes. It's just like a.

[Micah Sargent]

You know, you got 11,000 pipelines to fill them. Boy, you're gonna fill them.

[Richard Campbell]

See, if I was making ads for this thing, I'd be like, is it a Hemi?

[Micah Sargent]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

It sounds like it sounds like one, that's for sure.

[Micah Sargent]

It's going.

[Richard Campbell]

All right.

[Micah Sargent]

That's good.

[Paul Thurut]

Well, now you know why that's the number one Xbox segment in the whole wide world. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Paul Thurat. The king. King of Xbox.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm not even the king of Call of Duty. I'm. I am a serf in my own kingdom.

[Paul Thurut]

You're prestigious 11, are you not?

[Richard Campbell]

I am prestiged up nicely. But I. That's just. That's just stupidity time. It's not like skill. It's just, you know, I could run around and get shot in the head all day and I'd still be like, you know, I'd still be up there somewhere. But let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new Family Free Freedom offer.

[Paul Thurut]

That's not the itinerary we're following.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house.

[Richard Campbell]

Bon voyage.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

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[Paul Thurut]

It's the back of the book, just around the corner on Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. We do this show every Wednesday, 11am Pacific unless Google decides to go a little long with their silly announcements. 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. We stream it live on eight different platforms. Club Twit members get behind the velvet Rope access in the club. Twit, Discord. Discord. But the unwashed masses can also watch us. You know, and you know who you are on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. How about that? How about that? Of course, you don't have to watch us. Live on demand versions of the show made available of all of our shows on the website, Twitter, tv, WW for this one, that's audio or video. There's also a link to the YouTube channel so you can send clips to your friends and pester them with little tidbits from Paul and Richard. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast client and get it auto magically as soon as Kevin King is finished taking out all the swear words. All right, on we go. The back of the book. Kicking things off with Paul Thorat's tip of the week.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, this one's a little on the light side, but this is a weird, busy week for stuff at the site. We're doing a big change behind the scenes to the way our memberships work, like on the back end, which is a nightmare. Chris Hoffman, who was on a few weeks back, is starting his new newsletter, which I can now tell you is called the Windows readme, which I think is really cool.

[Paul Thurut]

The Windows readme. Love it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurut]

One word. R E A D M E. That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. That's a good name. And he's got some cool like kind of of branding stuff. So if you're already on Windows Intelligence, you'll just get it. If not, we're going to probably this weekend we'll switch links in the.

[Paul Thurut]

Not the best search SEO I just for Windows readme and I found.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, well, it's. I think it's still like. I don't think it's public yet. Like, you know what I mean?

[Paul Thurut]

I don't think it's.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's.

[Paul Thurut]

You might have to say something like newsletter at the end of it just to make distinguish it from all the other Windows Readme.

[Richard Campbell]

It's probably windows readme.subsack.com or something. Something.

[Micah Sargent]

Okay.

[Paul Thurut]

Oh, I found it. I under. Re letter. Yes. Is that right?

[Richard Campbell]

Re letter. No, I don't. I don't know.

[Paul Thurut]

I think. Well, I don't have a lid. I think. Right. Let me see the Windows readme.

[Richard Campbell]

That's it. Yeah, yeah, it's. It's not live yet. Like it's it. But that's the name of it. It's not.

[Paul Thurut]

That's the place.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. That's where it will be.

[Paul Thurut]

And Re Letter will be the host.

[Richard Campbell]

The Read letter.

[Paul Thurut]

What's Re Letter? That's what it says here.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know what that is. Oh, that's. No, that's. No, no, it's on substack.

[Paul Thurut]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

This is just a site pointing to it. I don't know what that is.

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah, maybe they were stealing your thunder.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not mine, it's his, but whatever.

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah, but you're in it, aren't you?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, we're partnering. I mean, he's, you know, we're.

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah, it's you too.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes. I mean, it's his thing. It's fine. Whatever. So I have a premium newsletter that I have been very lax on, but I'm going to kick that going. But one of the other things that's tied to all this is the book. So I haven't really started on the 20. Well, now I have, but the new version of Windows 11 Field Guide because one of the problems is it's published to LeanPub, but they don't have this sense of like you bought the previous edition, you get 50% off or whatever the deal. They don't do that. Right. So I had to figure out a way around that, that, you know, like. Anyway, what I figured out was I'm going to. I'm going to do what I for this book, what I did with the last book. So I'm going to give away the. The existing Windows 11 field guide with the new version and then move to an annual thing and until it's up to speed. But it's a new format, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Anyway, I have a post about it in my set, if you care about this stuff. So if you just buy the new book, it's going to be super cheap. It's going to be like five bucks or something. So, okay, the biggest story of this week. And then what is the phrase? Richard Trough of disillusionment. I think I went from the highest highs to the trough in about three seconds flat was I woke up this morning and I saw in my feed notion ads, offline support. And literally the hallelujahs rang out, the music was playing, the doves were led into the sky and destroyed by the hawks we have here. But the. But then you look at it and you're like, oh, notion, how do I turn it on? I was worried that it was going to be a paid only feature, which would make sense. I keep waiting for that moment. But no, anyone can do it. You have to manually enable it note by note or page by page. There's no sense of. Could I just have. This whole notion's a little strange if you haven't used it or if you're not familiar with it, that if you get this kind of sidebar with all your pages, I think of them as notes, but whatever. But a page and, or a note, whatever it's called, can also serve as a container essentially. Right. It can have other notes within it and if you look at that page directly, they'll appear as links. But if you look in the sidebar, they're like that tree view you would get in File Explorer if you turn that on that we used to use in Windows 95 and you can't go to the top of a part of the tree. Like I have a Windows Weekly section or whatever.

[Paul Thurut]

Get that whole folder.

[Richard Campbell]

I just want the whole thing off, offline. No, yeah, well, I can, but I.

[Paul Thurut]

Click, click, click one by one.

[Richard Campbell]

So in that sidebar there's a dot, dot, dot menu. Click one of the items, it's a little toggle switch offline and then you can see the sync and you can see it happening.

[Paul Thurut]

Well, that's, you know, that kind of fits the way it has been in the past because that's how you would lock a page or make it bigger or stuff like that.

[Richard Campbell]

But if it's the top of the tree, so to speak, if it's like Windows Weekly in this case, it should say, oh, do you want to do all of them or do you want to do more of them? Or it just. But no. So baby steps. They're going to make it better if you do pay them. If you have favorited any pages, those will automatically be made available offline unless.

[Paul Thurut]

You tell them to.

[Richard Campbell]

And it will also, I think it takes some. I don't know if it's 20 or whatever number of the most recent nosif access will always be available offline as well as well, it's not good enough, frankly. But this for me has been a minor issue because the way, for whatever reason as I use notion, I often have connectivity on planes. So like planes would be the offline time for me. Right, Right. And it's worked fine. Like I don't really need it that much when I'm on a plane and when I do use it, it's fine. But I guess maybe this will solve that.

[Paul Thurut]

You really want us for our entire notion to be right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yes. So the other issues with the notion that I think have historically been a little more serious are that notion is a cloud service, so all your stuff is there and not here. There's no version of it where you're like, well, move it to my thing or move it to OneDrive or whatever. You can't take control of it. And I don't kind of like that and just. Well, I guess these are the same thing, actually, but it's just, just. There's no local. You can't just save it. So if you use Obsidian, I think anytype might work this way as well. They're just, in that case, Markdown files.

[Paul Thurut]

It's all local. Markdown. That's why I switched from Notion to Obsidian. I moved over.

[Richard Campbell]

If you're an Apple guy, you can save it to icloud. If you're a Microsoft guy, you could save it inside OneDrive. It will just sync everywhere and it works everywhere. Right? And I do wish Notion was like that because I have to say, other than that, it's. I mean, perfect is a strong word, but it is. It is the stickiest app I've used.

[Paul Thurut]

Functionality is great.

[Richard Campbell]

It's unbelievable. You get really sucked into it. I get really used to it. I love it.

[Paul Thurut]

I love Obsidian. I picked the point, I made the change.

[Richard Campbell]

I think about you all the time when it comes to this kind of thing, because I just did this, literally. I think it was yesterday. I installed it again, I googled it. I think I asked AI this sort of. So I have this, like, I need to output plain, like literally plain, no extraterraneous tags, anything HTML. And it still doesn't exist. I mean, there might be a version where I could write something that would make it do this.

[Paul Thurut]

But even in the community plugins. You've looked in the plugins.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, yeah, there are some famous ones. Yeah, there are. But if you look at the code, there are little span tags and little descriptors on the H that describe the style or whatever. And no, I want literally like the cleanest. If you pure HTML, if you copied and pasted from Notion into, in my case, the WordPress editor and then looked at the code, it is the cleanest code. It could be. It couldn't be cleaner. Right. And when I do it from Obsidian, it's gross. But then with the plugins, I could try different things. I can get it better, but you can't get it fully. Just perfect.

[Paul Thurut]

That's a showstopper. If that's something you.

[Richard Campbell]

It is for me, but I keep trying to all of them. I guess I could do this. Like, I. I'm like, Obsidian is so there. Yeah, there's a great interview with the CEO of Obsidian by the way, I think in the Verge cast, maybe if you haven't seen or heard it, whatever. Yeah, yeah, I would look at that. It's. He's.

[Paul Thurut]

Obsidian, to me, has replaced Notion because I've got many of the features that I loved with Notion. The. The graphical headers and the.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I'm going to make you love it more later. I'm just gonna. What I'm about to say, I think is gonna really resonate with you.

[Paul Thurut]

Okay. By the way, I used GPT5 to vibe code.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Paul Thurut]

A weather doohickey.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. No, it's awesome.

[Paul Thurut]

So watch. So I can actually say Lisa's in Dallas. I wonder what the weather in Dallas is. And it goes out and looks it up. Not only does it look it up. Oh, it's cooled off quite a bit. But it gives me the check and all that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yikes.

[Paul Thurut]

Well, it was 103 yesterday, so it's actually warmer in Petaluma today than it is in Dallas. So anyway, I think that there's a nice. This is. Go ahead, give me other reasons to love it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, if you use Notion and you want to use AI, you could probably use. I'm sure Grammarly. Probably works at Notion. I'm not even sure of that, but whatever. Probably does. But Notion is trying to sell you AI, right? Like Notion has AI. It's in the product. They're trying to sell it to you. Whatever. Whatever. Obsidian is doing nothing like duck AI or Brave with Leo or whatever is doing where it's like you can just plug in whatever AI you want to.

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah, I have several. Or not. Which a lot of people say, oh good, I don't have to use AI. But there's an Obsidian plugin called Harper that's an open source grammar checker that I use.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, nice.

[Paul Thurut]

There's one called Copilot. No relation.

[Micah Sargent]

There's.

[Paul Thurut]

That will go through your notes and make connections and stuff. There's a lot of choices. So. Yeah, yeah, I've looked at any type too. If you. If you end up playing with any type, let me know because I'm.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, I've played with it.

[Paul Thurut]

Tempted.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. No, that's one I also look at. Yeah, that one's interesting. It's. Yeah, they're both.

[Paul Thurut]

I am just such an Obsidian fan now and because it's all local and I do pay for Obsidian Sync so that I have. And they just added a feature which gives it real parody with Notion, which is a database feature, which was the original Notion feature.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Yeah.

[Paul Thurut]

It pulls from property based on properties so you can have all of your movie reviews in a database with images from the pictures on the COVID and so forth. So I mean, I just. I feel like this is for me if you actually. This is it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. These are the big ones. I mean, obviously notion is kind of the king of the hill in this area. And then. Then yeah, obsidian, any type. Those are the ones I keep going back to personally, but there's like Joplin and then 1100 others. Like there's so many.

[Paul Thurut]

I've used almost all of them.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, same. I've tried each one at least once. You know, emacs.

[Paul Thurut]

Org mode.

[Richard Campbell]

That one. I've.

[Paul Thurut]

I've used them all, but yeah, I just use it for a daily journal but because I can interlink to other pages.

[Richard Campbell]

You just want everything to work wherever you want far, you know, and I.

[Micah Sargent]

That's just crazy talk. But okay.

[Richard Campbell]

I know I'm a dreamer, man.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurut]

Imagine all the people just wor. Synchronized notes.

[Richard Campbell]

Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new family freedom offer Offer.

[Paul Thurut]

That's not the itinerary we're following.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house.

[Richard Campbell]

Bon voyage.

[T-Mobile Advertiser]

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[Paul Thurut]

All right, that was your tip. We're going to pause briefly for a little club Twit plug and then see I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm doing a bad thing. I'm doing a mean thing to you. I'm making you stay tuned nice. For the, for the Richard Campbell whiskey pick of the week.

[Micah Sargent]

And just an odd one.

[Paul Thurut]

Just a little bit. And we got it. We got a good one for you. But first I want to do, I really do want to thank you. We did this morning we did the coverage of the Google event which we could not have done without support from our club members because a we don't sell advertising. We used to sell advertising for it. We don't sell advertising for it because we can't stream it publicly anymore because of Apple. They kept giving us Strikes on YouTube and stuff. So we now can do it in the club with support from the club members and I really appreciate it. 25% of our operating revenue now comes from your support. So club members, thank you. If you're not a club member and you want to keep Windows weekly and security now and this week in tech and intelligent machines and all the special stuff we do in the club like the Untitled Linux show and Hands on Windows with Paul Thurot and Micah's Hands on Apple and Scott Wilkinson's home theater geeks and on and on and on. All of that happens because of our club members. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the club Twit Discord, which is really a lot of fun. It's become kind of my favorite place just to hang out. Even when there aren't shows on the club Twit Discord is the place to be to just talk with other smart people sharing important information. We also do a lot of events in there now that are for club members only. Micah's crafting corners coming up tonight. He's going to be making some Legos. I might do some sewing. I got to sew buttons on my shirts. September 5th, our photo time with Chris Marquardt we got our AI user group on the 5th as well. We do so many things in the club and I, I really would love to have you in it if you're not a member. See that? See that QR code in the upper left or that URL in the bottom of the screen? Please go to Twit TV Club Twit and join the best darn club in all the Land Club Club Twit. Thank you in advance. And another thing Club put it makes possible Richard Campbell's fabulous back of the book. Well, let's start with a plug for runners radio your. Yeah, your own. Your very own podcast.

[Micah Sargent]

Thanks. Yeah, I've been going on coming staring 1000 in the face. Right. It's gonna be any day that is episode congratulations 998 yeah, thanks. Paul and I are gonna have some fun with it. We got some great questions.

[Paul Thurut]

Or you can do the thousandth together. That's nice. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

It's fun to hang out with someone and just make fun of the whole thing. But Martina Grom is my guest this week. She's been on regularly and in the past we've talked about securing your data estate. This whole issue around how do we get our data in sufficient order that we can let loose the M365 copilots and really understand that. And of course a lot of this has been speculative. Folks are doing it, they're not doing it so forth. But Regina came back to me with a okay, I've now done this for six different companies. Let me tell you what I've learned. So we were real brass tacks. Like these are the things you need. There is a governance toolkit that exists and you can start with subsets of data. But you know, one of the angles you really pushed on was with Microsoft Purview. And Purview is one of those, it said, you know, this is your data loss prevention data markup sort of toolkit that you probably already own whether you're using it or not. If you've got E5, you know, you get all of these features, you don't really have to buy it separately. It's only if you're real stripped down in the M365 size. You might have to pay something for Purview. So it's one of those things you just have to configure and get to work on the piece. Now I we've talked about this before, that this is about marking up data and making sure that copilot knows what to use, dealing with archives properly but she really drilled into you can also monitor what data the co pilots are utilizing through Purview. So it's not just, you know, tagging the data in the first place and monitoring people's usage for dlp, but the copilots themselves. And so it's a way to gauge are we getting usage, what are the copilots being pushed on, are they looking in the right places? Like have we done the correct thing? So really walked us through the process of being successful with these tools over time. It's not a one shot and you're done. It's you can regularly observe, you can set, set up monitors and so forth. You can see if data gets misused and you can track down where those things happen. So it's a lot less of a black box. And I really appreciated all those insights that really helped us understand this is how you manage it well. And she pointed to a number of papers including the Data Security Posture Management for AI as there's great documentation now the stuff's mature. If you scroll down a bit, you'll see the in the show links we've referenced all of the products and the documents to help you have more success with M365 as an administrator.

[Paul Thurut]

Oh, look at that. Yeah, GRC. I love it.

[Micah Sargent]

Just trying to put it all in place.

[Paul Thurut]

Well, thank you.

[Micah Sargent]

Martina's based in Austria so of course she's concerned about the EU rule set. So we certainly talked about that part as well.

[Paul Thurut]

Nice. Yeah. Well, now that we've gotten that out.

[Micah Sargent]

Of the way, a little bit of work. Ready for some play?

[Paul Thurut]

Let's play.

[Micah Sargent]

Anybody?

[Richard Campbell]

Clear.

[Micah Sargent]

I'm on a dry week right now. Last week I was in Kansas City with a bunch of my friends that involved an awful lot of whiskey, including that lovely rivalist that I got a chance to tour the Union Horse distillery. And next week I'm going to be fishing in Montana. Oh, it's not something I do very soon. It's not so at all. So this is the week where I'm like I'm taking it easy, deliver a break. Yeah, a little cruise. But I wanted to talk about a whiskey that I've been pursuing, doing for some time. A we hadn't talked about Japanese in a while and with a name like Jichibu, it's probably Japanese and Jitibu is outside of Saitama, Japan, which is about 100 km northwest of Tokyo in the sort of rolling hills, plains areas in the interior of of Japan. This is central Japan where you have below freezing winters and very warm summer. So Large temperature room. It can be very humid there, there. If you've ever spent a summer in Tokyo, you've been very sticky. That's the sort of the reality of it. And we are talking specifically about a fellow by the name of Ichiro Akuto, whose family has been in distilling and brewing for over 300 years. Direct family lineage over multiple generations since 1625, obviously mostly Saki. But in 1945, at the end of the war, his father established a whiskey distillery called Henryu. So this is not as old as your famous Japanese distilleries that you know well, like Nikkei and Yamazaki, but it's still an older distillery, unfortunately. While they had the great boom in the 80s, that was followed by the Japanese economic crisis in the early 90s. And it did take out his grandfather. The Hanyu Distillery shut down in 2000 during because of that financial crisis and who knows what else. But his grandson Ichiro did take control of about 400 casks of whiskey from his grandfather's distillery. And a few years later, starting in 2005, he started putting together editions of some of these very old whiskies they called the playing card series. These are considered unicorns. I've been looking to just try a couple of them. They're very hard to come by. There's not very many of them.

[Richard Campbell]

Them.

[Micah Sargent]

And they did make 54 different bottlings, aka a deck of cards, 52 cards plus the two jokers, makes this whole thing in 2020, a full card series. All 54 bottles was sold at auction for $1.5 million. What? Yeah, it's a little nuts.

[Paul Thurut]

54 bottles, not barrels.

[Micah Sargent]

Bottles. Yeah, bottles. So this had been. Collector had been rounding up one of each of the, of the card series and he had, when he had the complete set, he put it there for auction very, very well. So, yeah, like I said, I've always been looking for these. But in the meantime, while Ichiro had been establishing relationships and doing work with his grandfather's barrels, he started up his own distillery, called the company Venture Whiskey. And he did, and he called it the Chichibu Distillery because it's in Chichibo. So starting construct, the company was set up in 2004 when he started selling his grandfather's whiskey. In 2007, he completed the distillery, was operational in 2008. So it's young, you know, they still only, you know, 15, 16 years running and he's trying to make purely Japanese whiskey, but he at least initially, using a fair bit of Scottish malt, he Certainly uses Scottish stills. But in his angle of being more Japanese, he.

[Richard Campbell]

The.

[Micah Sargent]

The production lots are very small, so he uses a stainless wash tub. Only 2400 liters. They stir by hand, so as much hands on as possible possible.

[Paul Thurut]

That was this here.

[Micah Sargent]

Those are still.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

The Washington will be stainless steel. It might be in the pictures of somewhere. By the way, they have no website, so I just gave you links to the.

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah, I like it.

[Micah Sargent]

And the Instagram because they literally have no website. They just don't. They have an up.

[Paul Thurut]

They don't need one, my friend.

[Micah Sargent]

But they've got eight washbacks that they've made out of miniserna oak, which is unusual because it's a very difficult wood. We've talked about this before. The Japanese oak, oak, typically they're not big enough until the trees are over 100 years old to even try and make staves or wood from. And it's also not a real straight growing oak. So it takes. It's a challenge to assemble these things. And the wood grows mostly in the far north, but he's managed to round up enough of it to make his washbacks from it. So this is where fermentation takes place, unusually in wooden washbacks, specifically for using this oak, which introduces its own flavor. Most folks when you're using mizunara for aging whiskey find it's not that good in short term use. But if you age for long periods of time, it brings up really nice flavors. So the fact they use it in washbacks is unusual. But traditional washbacks are often cedar or Oregon pine. They're often wood because it does hold on to the lactobacillus in a particular way that does introduce a character to the fermentation.

[Paul Thurut]

Are these. Are these the washbacks you're talking about?

[Micah Sargent]

That's the washbacks we're talking about. Exactly.

[Paul Thurut]

It's very typ. Japanese style.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. The strap. The strap model. Yeah. And so these are. I mean, then those are 3,000 liters each. So they're fairly big. There's. There's eight of them. But again, it's. Nobody else does this. There's other wooden. It's the only one with a Japanese oak. They do have Scottish stills. Four Thighs of Scotland stills, a pair of 3,000 liter ones that wash and a spirit still. So that's pretty traditional. They decide on the head, heart, tail, cut by taste. So they're not necessarily timing things. They literally look to the character of the whiskey. Because their runs are small, they don't make a huge amount of whiskey. About maybe only 90,000 liters a year. So this is very craft distillery and it's, you know, kind of secret. They don't have a big public presence and they only make small batches and they often win awards. But they're not well seen and not in, not in many markets when they, when a production lot goes up for sale, they're sold out in hours. Is it typically a run of three to five thousand bottles in a given lot?

[Paul Thurut]

Is it that good?

[Micah Sargent]

I still don't know. It's like.

[Paul Thurut]

We don't know.

[Micah Sargent]

It's very mythological. Right. But he's mostly been aging in bourbon casks, but now starting to use the, the Mizunara wood as well. And his warehouses are old school Scottish, so dirt floor, wooden racks, three to four hogs. Try to keep it as cool as possible in that hot environment. He is starting to use some Japanese barley, which is fairly hard to come by. He's even started using Japanese peat. Doubly difficult. And he's been doing his own floor maltings again, only in very small lots. And most of his whiskeys had no age statements because he's just not been around that long. So they're pretty rare to assemble. The one of the fury few I've run across that actually had an age statement on it. He has his first two 10. So the first 10 years old. And they're incredibly rare. I found one for sale for 1600 US which I'm not prepared to buy, so. But they're famously his most award winning. He won a lot of awards. When he first went in production 2007-2013, he won best Japanese whiskey every year at the World Whiskey competition.

[Paul Thurut]

Wow.

[Micah Sargent]

But he's now moved into doing a lot of blending work both with his grandfather's collection and with other distillers. Not that he reveals who it is, but he's now four years running winning. It's one thing to win the best Japanese whiskey, you know, when your Japanese whiskey, that's one thing. But he's winning best blend in the world now four years from 2017 to 2020. And that is combining between five and 20 year old whiskeys from four to six countries, including his own and then again small production lots. But Andy, that whole facility there, they have no visitor center. Center. They don't. It's not open to the public. But once a year, typically in February around a celebration time in that part of Japan for industry experts only. He will do six tours of 20 people. So. And Ichiro is part of that tour. Like it's a big deal to be with them. Now, that being said, there is one whiskey you can typically lay your hands on of Ichiro. And I couldn't. I could have gotten one if I'd been planning more, but I thought I'd bring this one up and I'll probably go pick one up. And it is the Ichiro malt and grain white, what they call the white label blend. So that's the combined whiskey. It's typically about $75 US. Can go up to as much of 100 depending on where you can find it. And it is an exotic blend and it's unique in the. In the species. The industry thinks it's. It's the bee's knees for. It's by far his least expensive whiskey, the white.

[Paul Thurut]

Is it this 111 proof one?

[Richard Campbell]

Nope.

[Micah Sargent]

That would be probably $1,000. That one, though. They call it the white label for release. It is white. And yeah, that one's in the local liquor stores here in B.C. and it is available in some. The sometimes in Total Wine, sometimes Abevmo. Certainly in some specialty shops. You'll find that one.

[Paul Thurut]

They say they want to look for.

[Micah Sargent]

Any of the others. Prepare to start at $500 for any of his special editions.

[Paul Thurut]

It must be good.

[Micah Sargent]

Anything like that.

[Paul Thurut]

Well, now we know what to give Richard for a gift.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, you know, it's not. There's not a lot of unicorns that I chase around anymore, but this is an odd little distillery. It's been around for a long time. It very rarely publicly markets itself in any way because they're selling everything they make.

[Paul Thurut]

Doesn't need to.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, yeah. They're as busy as they can be. He's sort of considered the definitive craft distillery in Japan.

[Paul Thurut]

Nice.

[Micah Sargent]

So it's just an odd duck. And I'm just trying to figure out if me making YouTube videos about whiskey makes me an F professional. To get in on that February tour is. I'd like to walk through this place by far, but probably pretty tricky to get a spot.

[Paul Thurut]

Yeah, I think you should invite Richard to Chiro. I know he's a big fan of Windows Weekly, so.

[Micah Sargent]

So obviously, yeah, he's listening right now.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm sure.

[Paul Thurut]

Who wouldn't be? Wow.

[Micah Sargent]

Anyway, you know, you know why folks talk about me getting into the weeds. So I thought here, you want to see where weeds go?

[Paul Thurut]

This is. This is weeds, baby. We're talking weeds now.

[Micah Sargent]

Way in the weeds.

[Paul Thurut]

Way in the weeds. Very cool.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, he does the weed or just the weeds.

[Paul Thurut]

He only has 9,000 followers on Instagram. Which tells me. Tells you that he isn't. That isn't that well known, right?

[Micah Sargent]

No, no. And I think that's almost intentional. Right? Like you have to know enough to know. They apparently are working on another distillery, a larger one. So the production may increase sometime in the future, but for now we have this little, you know, quiet little distillery and kind of in the middle of nowhere that's making very unique product and trading on what his grandfather made, made decades before.

[Paul Thurut]

Chichi Boo. C H I C H I bu Distillery. Now we really got to get a bottle for Richard so that we can all enjoy it together. Richard Campbell is in Madeira Park, California. Okay, let me start over. Richard Campbell is in Canadia. He's in Madeira Park, British Columbia for one more week. Next week.

[Micah Sargent]

Right.

[Paul Thurut]

Oh, look at the sunflower. Where'd that come from?

[Micah Sargent]

It's growing out of the garden there. Yeah, look at that.

[Paul Thurut]

It wasn't in the shot last time.

[Micah Sargent]

No, it popped up while I was away. Wow. There you go. Yeah, it's a beautiful day.

[Paul Thurut]

That is a picture perfect day. Puffy clouds, Madeira Park. You're leaving town though. Tomorrow I am and I won't.

[Micah Sargent]

And next Wednesday I will be on a drift boat, fly fishing. So no bandwidth there. Sorry.

[Paul Thurut]

A river may flow through it, but no bandwidth.

[Micah Sargent]

So no bandwidth. No.

[Paul Thurut]

I'm going to be on the Montana bound.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurut]

Have a wonderful trip. Ready to do this year?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Paul Thurut]

Paul Thorat will be back next week. He is of course at. Well, Richard'[e-mail] that's where you can get all 998 of his run, his radio episodes and dotnet rocks, of course, to show you as with Carl Franklin, Paul [e-mail] which is behind the scenes being fresh paint.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, we're painting the underbelly. No, wait.

[Paul Thurut]

Yes. And his books [e-mail] now there isn't yet a way to subscribe to the new Windows readme, but there will be soon. We'll have a link when that is the case. Although you subscribe to Windows Intelligence. Right. Subscribe there in the subscription.

[Richard Campbell]

It'll just be pushed over on macro.

[Paul Thurut]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurut]

Very nice. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Richard. Thank you to our club members and thanks to all of you for joining us. We will see you right here next Wednesday. And we'll have to get a fill in for Richard. Unless you want to do it alone, Paul, it's up to you.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. I could. Could ask Chris again. Probably. Probably.

[Paul Thurut]

Chris was great.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurut]

It'd be a chance to promote the new thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, right. That's be a good timing for that update, actually.

[Micah Sargent]

Okay.

[Paul Thurut]

And then we'll see you back in two weeks.

[Richard Campbell]

Richard, say hi to Tim Huckabee for me, please.

[Paul Thurut]

I will.

[Richard Campbell]

Huck's gonna be the little evildoer.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, he's in Wyoming right now. I just got a message from him off of Starlink or something.

[Paul Thurut]

What does he walk to? Montana?

[Micah Sargent]

He just skips from fishing location to fishing location, pursued by bears.

[Paul Thurut]

What a life.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, now he's got something going on, but yes, Scott Stanfield's joining us too.

[Richard Campbell]

I told this story about Tim Huckabee, but he was appearing in the Windows Vista launch in New York. And I saw him on the sheet when I sat down. So I got up and I walked out back. No one questioned me because I look like I'm from Microsoft. And he was in a dress. He was in a chair with a thing on him, a tarp. And the woman's doing his hair or whatever. So I was like, shh. And I was like, get out of here. And then I got up on the chair, literally with my feet on either arm of the chair. Chair. They had a little brush. Beautiful. And his eyes were like. And I was like. I was like literally standing over him in a chair. It was awesome. It was awesome.

[Paul Thurut]

Hysterical.

[Richard Campbell]

He was like half asleep. He had no idea. Just getting his hair done right up on him. That was beautiful.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurut]

That is a nightmare to wake up to that.

[Richard Campbell]

You don't want to see me next to you when you wake up. I can tell it's worse than a horse's head.

[Micah Sargent]

And Tim and I have bunked together a bunch of times. Mutual society.

[Richard Campbell]

I love Tim. Not going to be.

[Micah Sargent]

I'm. That's great.

[Richard Campbell]

Please do say. I said I will.

[Paul Thurut]

Well, thank you, gentlemen. Thank you all, everybody watching. Thank you all you winners and your dozers. We'll see you next time on Windows Weekly. Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ad Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one. Across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsynads, go to libsynads. Com. That's L, I B S Y N Ads. Com. Today.