2025.11.20: The End Of The Start Of The Conclusion

Speaker 1 My name is Foxy.

Speaker 1 Hey! We're recording the podcast! Gut up!

Speaker 1 Good!

Speaker 1 Morning to you! Wherever you are, because it is WALLEX APLWAR! For November 20th, 2005.

Speaker 1 My name is Bernie Burns. Sitting right over there, she's less aggressive on average.

Speaker 2 Am I?

Speaker 1 Am I Bernie? You don't have your peaks and valleys. I was trying to smooth out today's intro with yesterday's very aggressive intro.
So it's a Thursday. Chill out.

Speaker 2 There's snow on the ground out there, Ashley. Buddy is there indeed.
We've got this like lovely snowstorm. I feel like winter does a really interesting thing where we are specifically.

Speaker 2 It shows up for, would you say, a week or two at a time?

Speaker 2 usually and uh it'll snow and the roads are terrible and everyone stays home and the schools are they're gonna close and no one can get through we're not getting mail nothing's happening uh and then after a week maybe two weeks for a long stretch, it'll go, oh, that was nice.

Speaker 2 And it will all melt away. And it will be gone until later and go, who wants a second winner?

Speaker 1 Or then it shows up in May. Or then it shows up in May.
You get your lambing snow in like April or May.

Speaker 1 I got to say, they've been here a long time, a very long time. But I can't help but notice that it seems like the people who settled in Scotland and just said, hey, let's put up a city here.

Speaker 1 I feel like they did it in the areas with the worst weather.

Speaker 1 Don't you? Like, if you go anywhere outside of like Aberdeen or Glasgow, you get great, I think, great weather.

Speaker 1 Like, not, it doesn't deserve the reputation it gets for Scottish weather or even British weather.

Speaker 2 It is true that I feel Aberdeen in particular, I have a lot of sympathy for. They call it, what is it, like a gray city or something because

Speaker 2 it's right there. It's on the coast of the North Sea.
You're looking basically like east to Norway.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so the sky is gray a lot. It's overcast or it's rainy a ton of the time.
The sea is gray. The city is built with a lot of granite stone.
So it's also gray.

Speaker 1 You know what I learned as a result of that? It's naturally radioactive as well.

Speaker 2 Pardon me?

Speaker 1 Yeah, just because, you know, when they get the stones out of the ground, there's a natural radiation that can occur. There's like a higher incidence of radiation in.

Speaker 2 Aberdeen. So what I'm hearing from you is there is a very real possibility that Spider-Man exists, exists, but he's in Aberdeen, not New York.

Speaker 1 I'm glad that I'm glad you picked up what I was hinting at. That was exactly where I was going with all that.

Speaker 2 And maybe his career just hasn't taken off because the buildings aren't tall enough to swing from.

Speaker 1 Well, it's a social safety net. He has no reason to

Speaker 1 extend himself, actually.

Speaker 1 We have big Scottish news.

Speaker 1 My group chat has been...

Speaker 1 Ashley, if I may use a word, a buzz. A buzz is a way to put it.

Speaker 2 I think that's an appropriate word.

Speaker 1 Waking up to like 95 messages unread in my group chat.

Speaker 2 So I know I can tell as well because I'll wake up and I'll hear buzz is it

Speaker 2 because you've got it on silent, right? But it still vibrates the bet. The big news is.

Speaker 1 Oh, they're full on muted now.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Is that Scotland is in the World Cup for the first time since like 1998. It's been a while.
So Scotland is very, very excited. And I haven't been following these World Cup qualifiers.

Speaker 2 And so I was talking to someone yesterday. They were talking, or I know, I know, big surprise.
I was talking to someone yesterday, and they were like, How amazing is this?

Speaker 2 And I was like, Yeah, the snow's great.

Speaker 2 And they were like, They were like, What do you want about? No, no, no. I mean, Scotland.
And I was like, Yes, it's snowing in Scotland. And she's, no, the World Cup.
And I went, What about?

Speaker 2 So she had to explain everything to me. So I am now appropriately excited, but mostly I'm excited for all the people around us who were excited.

Speaker 1 Well, I'm glad to hear you say that, Ashley, because my group of friends here

Speaker 1 in our group chat, it's about eight guys strong.

Speaker 1 Guess what we found out? I did some research, as you could imagine, I'm going to embarrass myself a lot here talking about the World Cup because I know nothing about it.

Speaker 1 What are two of the host cities? It's being hosted in the U.S. next year.
Actually, it's not the U.S. It's

Speaker 1 like a North American hosting.

Speaker 2 Yeah, which is something I just learned as a result of all this new buzz, that it's Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. So all of North America is hosting.

Speaker 2 So there is going to be some games in, I believe, Toronto and Vancouver. And then in Mexico, it's in Guadalajara, Mexico City, and Monterrey.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 You say that there's three different, by the way, a World Cup game in Mexico City would be amazing. Insanely.
Insane. It'd be amazing.

Speaker 1 Is it weird? Like, there's a whole continent that's only three countries.

Speaker 2 Is that a record? Like,

Speaker 2 does North America have the record for fewest countries in a continent?

Speaker 1 It probably depends on whether or not you're taught that Australia is a continent unto itself. Right.
There's a lot of places in the world that don't teach that. They call it Australasia.

Speaker 2 Right. And well, then it's like Australia, New Zealand, probably like, well, like Papua New Guinea, Samoa,

Speaker 2 you know, so they're, they're, yeah, depending on how you count it, I guess.

Speaker 1 I feel like when they say Papua New Guinea, I feel like there's another New Guinea and this is probably

Speaker 2 this is Mama New Guinea.

Speaker 1 I wasn't making that correlation.

Speaker 1 But yeah, but even if Australia itself is a continent, there are some island nations around it that probably are more than two other ones, right? you know so where's guam

Speaker 1 uh guam is in northern south america okay i don't think so i don't think so

Speaker 1 i don't think that's the right word all the americans we're talking americans talking about the world cup and geography guam is in the western north pacific ocean western north pacific it's in it's uh in the united states of micronesia we've got something on the north coast of south america down there we've got something over there i don't know what we've got it's one of these like kind of territories kind of military bases like Okinawa, something like that along those lines.

Speaker 1 Like Guam, basically. There's something in South America.
I don't know what it is off the top of my head. But also, while we're on the topic of geography, who gets Central America? Is that ours?

Speaker 1 Are we more than three countries?

Speaker 2 Right. Do we get to, are we taking it in the custody battle?

Speaker 1 Right. Or South America

Speaker 1 getting Central America. Like, we got Mexico in North America, I feel like.
But what about all the other ones, like the Nicaraguas and El Salvadors and stuff down there? Do we get the lives?

Speaker 2 I guess, I mean,

Speaker 2 do they get to choose who they get to go live with? I'm going to assume that they're going to then choose to live largely with South America.

Speaker 1 I think so too. I think probably because they also speak Spanish.
So when we ask the question, when we ask it, they're like, what'd they say? And then when South America asked, yeah,

Speaker 1 where were you guys? We understood that. Anyway, not that it matters.
Continents are a fabrication anyway. North and South America should be one continent.
There's no, what is it?

Speaker 1 We cut a channel across Panama.

Speaker 2 Was it one continent and we made it two continents through the power of the canal?

Speaker 1 With a river? No, that doesn't count at all.

Speaker 2 And they're disconnected.

Speaker 1 There are people who are experts in football and geography who are losing

Speaker 1 their minds right now.

Speaker 2 Speaking of which, back to the football.

Speaker 1 This is all for you. Yeah, let me explain football with great authority.
So one of the things I discovered, I mean, that I knew inherently about following football, is that the World Cup.

Speaker 1 What they do is they have a group play first where they have a bunch of groups. I I know how many groups there are.
I'm not going to tell you. You have to go look it up yourself.

Speaker 1 You have to learn something on your own. I definitely know how many groups there are.
And they do a draw.

Speaker 1 The draw is coming December 5th and that determines in what cities they're going to play in the group play. There's four teams per group.
They play, everybody plays each other.

Speaker 1 The best records go on to then seed them into the tournament, which is a single elimination bracket, which leads to the championship game in which they win the cup of the world.

Speaker 1 That's the way all of that works. Okay.
I've explained it perfectly and accurately.

Speaker 1 So the draw that takes place to determine the placements for the groups takes place on December 5th. That's a big day for us because guess what?

Speaker 1 Two of the host cities in the continent that we refer to as North America, guess what two of the host cities are?

Speaker 2 I mean, okay, if I had to guess, I'm going to say Seattle, I'm going to say New York, I'm going to say Los Angeles.

Speaker 1 Bring it closer to us, like relevant to our world.

Speaker 2 Dallas?

Speaker 1 Dallas and Houston are

Speaker 1 both hosting World Cup games. I guess Austin was left out because the Austin FC Stadium could get like 10,000 people or 25,000 people.

Speaker 2 Can you imagine the traffic at the domain having to host a World Cup game?

Speaker 1 I have no idea.

Speaker 1 You have two host cities in the one state that refuses to have any kind of public transportation. You know what the public transportation in Texas is? The tram at DFW airport.
That's it.

Speaker 2 That's all we have. That's the only one.

Speaker 1 All we have. But yeah, so the guys in the group chat are like, if Scotland ends up in one of the Texas cities,

Speaker 1 we're invading Austin. And boy, we had to book fast.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I bet. Can you imagine? I bet it's probably going to go well.
And I imagine there's going to be a lot of Scottish excitement leading into this thing. Probably a lot of people going to the games.

Speaker 2 It's going to be, you know, it's going to be fun.

Speaker 1 Long way to go for some four games of disappointment.

Speaker 1 We'll see.

Speaker 1 It'll be incredible. It's incredible that Scotland's there.
It's like, what an opportunity to get involved with the World Cup. I guess there was a World Cup previously while we were here.

Speaker 1 It would have been in 2022. I don't remember it.
It was like post-lockdown and everything else. So, yeah, don't even remember.
Didn't really follow it, but I'm going to be following this one.

Speaker 2 I feel like I have to. And also,

Speaker 2 whether I try or not, I will be getting informed of all the results.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so good luck to all you soccer fans out there. Hope your team gets a cup.

Speaker 2 But speaking of winners, Bernie, we actually, we do have a winner for the drop contest from yesterday, and that is a big congratulations to devilgin666 on roosterteeth.com uh who got the drop uh and also i guess congratulations on getting back the uh the account that you made in like sixth grade right i'm gonna assume i'm gonna assume that you made that account uh you know when you were in like junior high because that's the age at which we make accounts named um devil gin666.

Speaker 1 We should probably point out at some point we will have the ability to change your username

Speaker 1 away from what was cool in 2009 whenever you made that. So congratulations to you.
A lot of people answered this when they got it first. They were first in the comments on roosterteeth.com.

Speaker 1 Also, a lot of people knew the streamer and I went and looked him up. Do you have her name?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so that's it's Nega Oryx on YouTube at least. I don't know if it's if she's got the same name on other streaming clubs.

Speaker 1 This is from a clip when she was playing Last of Us, the video game, which is now a popular Mac series. HBO Mac? What are they name?

Speaker 1 Whatever their name is today.

Speaker 1 Yeah, she was watching a rabbit during winter cutscene, and the rabbit's very cute, and then it it gets shot by an arrow and that's her reaction they did not have to make that rabbit so cute all right uh we've seen what like wild hares and rabbits will look like they don't look like that they intentionally made that rabbit cute it's a full-on bunny here's the full clip of what it actually came from that's the cutest fucking thing i've ever seen in my entire life

Speaker 1 And we only played the reaction there. And somehow everybody was able to identify from just her reaction what exactly that came from.

Speaker 2 It is what you might call iconic.

Speaker 1 But I did, I didn't play the whole clip.

Speaker 1 I was going to play the whole clip and then cut it at the last minute because we have this kind of unwritten rule, kind of a guideline, more than a rule, that we don't put profanity in the opening drop.

Speaker 2 Well, if we're going to do profanity, it has to be really important to the moment, right?

Speaker 2 Otherwise, there's people who listen to this with the kids and there's a limit to how much we want to teach your kids.

Speaker 1 You're commuting and you could be on the, you know, who knows? You could be in an office like on the warehouse floor. Got kids in the back seat.

Speaker 1 You know, we try not to play profanity in the drop if we can avoid it. Watch out, profanity.

Speaker 1 So actually, what else is going on in the world? Can we cover big news? Can we cover like, get it out of the way, like the big thing?

Speaker 2 Okay, let's talk the big thing.

Speaker 1 We checked this box and we talked about it.

Speaker 1 Okay, so the Epstein vote has gone through. in both the House and the Senate, and now it's been signed by the President of the United States.
Let me check my reference here.

Speaker 1 Donald Trump has signed it.

Speaker 2 That means that it's good to go. The files are going to be released.

Speaker 1 But then i've also heard that people have been reading into it more and there are some exemptions that might be concerning like very vague exemptions okay let me read you this is from ap news it talks about how the uh epstein files are now being released and what comes next this is by stephen groves reporting for ap news the bill compels attorney general pambondi to release essentially everything the justice department has collected over multiple federal investigations into epstein as well as his longtime confidant and girlfriend Ghelane Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for luring teenage girls for the disgraced financier.

Speaker 1 Those records total around 100,000 pages, according to a federal judge who has reviewed the case. It also compels the Justice Department to produce all its internal communications on Epstein.

Speaker 1 That's interesting. And his associates and his 2019 death in a Manhattan jail cell as he was awaiting charges for sexually abusing and trafficking dozens of teenage girls.

Speaker 1 There's the potential that they could actually be a murderer if they find that out. That's like a whole different wrinkle to this entire thing.

Speaker 1 The legislation, however, exempts some parts of the case files. The bill's authors made sure to include that the Justice Department could withhold personally identifiable information of the victims.

Speaker 1 Makes sense. That totally makes sense.
Child sexual abuse materials and information deemed by the administration to be classified for national defense or foreign policy.

Speaker 2 Okay, so that last one sounds vague enough. that they can maybe come up with a wiggle room where they choose to.

Speaker 1 There's actually another exemption that gets called out that people are more worried about.

Speaker 1 It says the bill also allows the Justice Department to withhold information that could jeopardize active investigations or prosecutions.

Speaker 1 That's created some worry among the bill's proponents that the department would open active investigations into people named in the Epstein files in order to shield that material from public view.

Speaker 1 So they could start an investigation on somebody. Yeah.
You know what that sounds like to me? That sounds like yet another opportunity for graft and corruption. Like, can you imagine like,

Speaker 1 I'll make a huge donation if you open an investigation into me.

Speaker 2 How backwards does that sound?

Speaker 1 I know, right? It sounds so backwards, you know? It's just shielding it and then they'll, you know, redact it from all the files.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so, you know, we'll, we'll see what happens. I think it's a good thing that it's, well, I think it's a good thing that it's gone through.

Speaker 2 If we can get, you know, if there can be some closure on it, if there can be, you know, some accountability, I've seen some resignations already as a result of,

Speaker 2 you know, of some people knowing that they're in those files. So we could see some change.
I don't know. Something would be nice.

Speaker 1 Well, I think people have been really focusing on the political aspects of this too, but there could be now economic impacts of this being out there because, like you said, there's already been resignations, but this could be people who are in the elite in America, but not necessarily the political elite.

Speaker 1 Larry Summers was announced that he's taking leave from teaching at Harvard after release of Epstein Mails. He's also associated with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

Speaker 1 So this could start to have impacts in lots of different ways. Lots of different ways.
But we'll, like, as always, we'll see. We'll see.

Speaker 1 Is this the end or is this the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?

Speaker 2 Who knows? Or the end to another beginning.

Speaker 1 Right. Sequel part two.
It goes on forever and ever and ever. One thing I read, though,

Speaker 1 where they were showing data models of this is that there's something like 4,500 emails in the archive of Epstein emails.

Speaker 1 At least that seems like something that somebody could go through in about three or four days.

Speaker 2 Oh, man. I don't know.
That's a long and very like stressful and draining three or four days.

Speaker 1 I would imagine, yeah, but they have people that can help them do it.

Speaker 1 May I recommend OpenAI's product chat GPT? I don't know.

Speaker 2 Are you sure you want to train chat GPT on all that?

Speaker 1 Oh, God, can you imagine? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I heard, too, that, you know, one of the problems that we're running into with training these large language models is that they're running out of data to train them on. And we talked about this.

Speaker 2 How? How is that possible?

Speaker 1 Everything that's out there, right? There was an article that was on Reddit just yesterday, which is something like 99%

Speaker 1 of the overall human experience happened during the prehistoric period, meaning before we recorded anything whatsoever.

Speaker 1 You know, it's like there's only so much stuff that we've recorded and written down or put in a digital format that an AI training algorithm could even access it.

Speaker 1 One of the things that it wouldn't have access to is court documents and things that have been locked away.

Speaker 1 So there's going to be this weird distillation of like information that's really negative and really like horrible to train an AI on. And that's all that's left at that point.

Speaker 2 Well, actually, okay, new conspiracy theory dropping. Are you ready for this?

Speaker 2 Okay, so what the like the tech billionaires, what they actually want is they're on the hunt for the lost library of Alexandria, right?

Speaker 2 Like the sum of all human knowledge, right? Like this is the big one. This is like all recorded human knowledge, you know, before the internet, whatever.

Speaker 2 And in order to finance that, they need to get like the entire industry on board. So like, oh, in order to train our AIs, we need more information.
We need more like records. Okay.

Speaker 2 And so now, what are they going to do? Not pay billions to train their AI? So no, whatever you need, let's go. Let's find the library.
We're going to do it.

Speaker 2 That's what this whole thing has been about this whole time.

Speaker 1 You called that a new theory.

Speaker 1 You came really close there to pitching the digital series devs with Nick Offerman. You almost exactly changed the premise of that show.

Speaker 2 You loved that show.

Speaker 2 My experience of that show is knowing that Nick Offerman is in it and walking through the room a bunch of times that you were watching it going, what is this show even?

Speaker 1 It was really, it was great performance by Offerman. He does a lot of really cool stuff.
I almost feel like it was overshadowed by his appearance, guest appearance, in Last of Us in the first season.

Speaker 1 For good reason. It was an amazing part, right? And he did an amazing job with it.
But his part in devs is equally is like, it's really, it shows a lot of depth and range.

Speaker 2 It's a weird series. Who is that series?

Speaker 2 Is that Alex Garland? What we saw of it seems to have that really kind of like weird, surreal, sci-fi twist to it that Alex Garland is known for.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and it falls in that category of things that I liked, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend.

Speaker 1 It was a pandemic era one. I think it was 2020 when it came out.
It was one season, eight episodes.

Speaker 1 I put it in the exact same category as like Station 11, which is another one I really liked, but I wouldn't, it's so weird and odd.

Speaker 1 And it has a weird, a thing that I like in it, which is like people who go through trauma and specifically they use the word damage a lot in that show.

Speaker 1 And then they go through and they heal with people that were directly responsible with their trauma and damage.

Speaker 1 I don't think there's a big appetite for the latter part of that conversation for modern audiences. The trauma and the damage they like, but the healing, the hard healing part of it,

Speaker 1 I think there'd be a high rejection level for a lot of people watching that.

Speaker 2 Well, I feel like that's a weird show because I don't know how they pitched it, right? It's a dystopian show in it's like post this pandemic that kills what, like 99% of people. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And then, so it's telling this story largely in the aftermath of that, like, you know,

Speaker 2 years later.

Speaker 2 And people are living in it, but it's not about

Speaker 2 that. It's about a theater troop.
Yeah, but they, they go around and they do, you know, performances in theater and like Shakespeare and all this stuff. So it's, it's weird to me.

Speaker 2 I don't know how they pitched that show to HBO and got Greenlit, but it's a great show.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and it's it's interesting because I just think also COVID absolutely destroyed our appetite for those things.

Speaker 1 It did.

Speaker 2 All of a sudden, all the sort of like things where

Speaker 2 a disease kills a bunch of people are like, yeah, I'm too close to home right now.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they're not making contagion with Matt Damon and Gwyneth Palchow today.

Speaker 1 Everyone's going to be like, nope, nope, nope. Or they walk out and have arguments and protests in the parking lot or something like that.
Nobody wants to deal with that stuff.

Speaker 1 I just saw, I just, one of the things I was encoding,

Speaker 1 classic horror film, Dawn of the Dead by George Romero. Okay.
1978. One of your favorites.

Speaker 1 Over time, being a kid, I just like the gore and the violence and the horror sticks in my head, but just the structure of the world that he built and watching everyone pile in and build careers off of doing that basic story again and again and again.

Speaker 1 It's really incredible if you go back and watch it. The effects definitely don't hold up.
But man, what just it's such a cool story.

Speaker 1 You think, and when you watch it, you think this guy was just like creating all of this stuff on the fly.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it would be one of those things that's hard to go back and watch now with the proper appreciation because if you've seen anything about zombies in your life, then it won't seem as new to you.

Speaker 1 It looks like a shitty version of their thing.

Speaker 2 Right. But like at the time, it was.

Speaker 2 It was the first. There was nothing like it.
It would have hit you like a freight train.

Speaker 1 Even though like the first, you watch the first 10 minutes or just when they're in the news station and they're like, you know, trying to pull down the help centers and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 Like all of that stuff seems so advanced for someone who is inventing the first iteration of that thing. It's really incredible.
It's really incredible.

Speaker 1 Can I just say, too, while we're covering stuff from previously in the week,

Speaker 1 another thing that I tried and wouldn't recommend, I said, hey, I wanted to play Kingdom Come because it was on Game of the Year list. Okay.

Speaker 1 So I sat down, downloaded Kingdom Come, 120 gigs, by the way, to download.

Speaker 2 Big download. Big download.

Speaker 1 And I played it, got it on console. Maybe I should have gotten it on PC if it exists.

Speaker 1 And then I went to play it. And

Speaker 1 I got to say,

Speaker 1 I got through the first part. It's like a full open world, like RPG game.

Speaker 1 I got to the character screen and I saw all the different tabs of all the different attributes and all the different skills and then all the different inventory slots and everything like that.

Speaker 1 And, you know, and everything that I can level up. And I just immediately went, I can't do it.
I literally said, I can't do this.

Speaker 2 And what you just closed it out?

Speaker 1 The character, the character interface was like four pages of like charts and stats. And I was like, I can't do it.

Speaker 2 No, here's what we do. Here's what we do.
All right. This is, this is where it becomes a team effort.
Okay. Because if you get to that character creation screen, you hand it over to me.
All right.

Speaker 2 I will spend the next eight hours or whatever making you the most precise character in the world.

Speaker 2 And then you can pick it up from there and you can go and, you know, you can become king or whatever you want to do. But I'll make that character for you.
I will take on the character screen.

Speaker 2 That's what I play.

Speaker 1 I just want to be clear. This wasn't character creation.
They give you a character that you play as, right? You don't even even make what they look like.

Speaker 1 I think his name is Henry, and you're playing as this person. It's just all the different attributes that you're going to have to manage for the entire time you're playing the game.

Speaker 1 The whole thing, Ashley, it's insane. It's like,

Speaker 1 it's like a city management game, but for a person, you know? And I'm just like, I can't do it. I can't do it.
I immediately knew I couldn't do it.

Speaker 2 Well, speaking of

Speaker 2 these games that we were talking about playing, I'm starting to get my plans in place for playing Donkey Kong Bonanza with the kids this weekend. But now I have a dilemma.

Speaker 2 I thought I'm going to get this ready and I went to download it and I paused because I now have a philosophical,

Speaker 2 like a, how do we handle this as a family dilemma? And that is with all our other media projects, do I download this game or do I buy a cartridge?

Speaker 1 Oh, I see. Physical media or digital.
Yeah, because we're in our physical era.

Speaker 2 We are in our physical era. And there's the thing is that like where I'm getting stuck is there's a lot of like ups and downs to both sides.

Speaker 2 Upside to getting a physical on a cartridge.

Speaker 2 You know, this is a game that can have a very long shelf life. It could be a nostalgia play for the kids when they're older, right?

Speaker 2 And there's a non-zero chance that at some point in the future, Finn might have a Switch too, right? Like, I don't, it could be, it could be like eight years in the future, but he might still have it.

Speaker 2 The Switch was a really long console life cycle. Brittany, with your hand up, please.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I just want to point out that you can't rip the game, so you can't convert it to like a universal indefinite format or evergreen format no you have to keep the cartridge switch three comes out you're not going to be able to play this digital theoretically you'd be able to play theoretically it depends on if they keep the backwards compatibility going so right now with my switch 2 i'm able to play all my old switch games right and i was able to just download them and it's it's good to go so in that regard digital is an easier solution.

Speaker 2 At the moment, it might be that Switch 2 cartridges will fit in the Switch 3, but we don't know that. So we don't know what the future-proofing is going to look like in that regard.

Speaker 2 I believe that Switch cartridges do fit in the Switch 2, so you can do that, right?

Speaker 2 But there's no guarantee that the next iteration of the console will be able to play them. Bernie, you have another question.

Speaker 1 Yes, thank you for calling me. Bernie Burns, the Herald Sun Times.

Speaker 1 Do you trust Nintendo to even extend you that backwards compatibility via digital? Because haven't they monetized like their classic games like pretty heavily? Yes.

Speaker 1 Like we gotta rebuy them, you gotta rebuy them on a new platform?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean they have they absolutely have. The way that the industry is trending, probably,

Speaker 2 right? They have done backwards compatibility from Switch to Switch 2.

Speaker 2 I think you can pay like $5 or something to upgrade from Switch to Switch 2 versions for some games where they're like, we'll make it more powerful or we'll like, you know, add another graphic to it or something.

Speaker 2 And so they're, you know, the trend is towards backwards compatibility. Everyone is moving in that direction, but there's no guarantee they will continue to do so.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 Okay. Right.
So I don't know. I've got this dilemma.
Digital, easy. Also tied to my account.
Right.

Speaker 2 So I couldn't necessarily like download it on another Switch for Finn later for him to play under his profile.

Speaker 1 There's a whole other aspect to physical media, which is a physical aspect too.

Speaker 1 And I feel like having a cartridge on the Switch 2 is a benefit because it is the type of console where you dedicate yourself to playing one game. At least you do, and I do too.

Speaker 1 Whereas in the Xbox, I might play one of like three or four titles over the course of the same month or two, depending on like if my friends are online or if I'm playing by myself or if I have five minutes or if I have an hour or that kind of thing.

Speaker 1 So it's like swapping out discs to play different games all the time would be a pain in the ass. It would.
Whereas I I don't feel like you're doing that on the Switch.

Speaker 1 I feel like you play it through to the end, you move on to another game, and you just don't play this one again.

Speaker 2 That is how I tend to play them. So it would make sense.
And I did also confirm that the cartridge is a cartridge.

Speaker 2 Nintendo is doing this new thing with some games, and I think it's mostly third-party games, but you can have a key cartridge, like a key cart, where it's a cartridge, but you still have to download the game.

Speaker 2 What? I know. And I know, I don't understand.
It doesn't make any sense to me. It sounds like the worst of both worlds, right?

Speaker 1 Because you have this physical thing but it doesn't have the physical thing on it which is complete the point of the physical thing well this reminds me of when game stop was selling boxes that had download codes in them right

Speaker 1 you just would take the code go punch it in and download it it's like why did i come to your store to do this and buy a box with a code in it it seems like all of the pitfalls of having digital quote-unquote ownership of a game combined with all of the environmental impact of manufacturing, right?

Speaker 2 Yes, yes. So I don't know.

Speaker 2 At least this one I confirmed, the game is on the cartridge. It's there.
So that is not a concern for this particular game.

Speaker 1 Ain't nobody got time for that.

Speaker 1 All right, Ashley, I need to go shovel some snow. So maybe we should say thank you.
Who wants to come and help me shovel snow?

Speaker 2 All right. Big thanks to Joshua Lane and Mark Jesperson for volunteering to shovel snow.
And thanks for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com slash morningselmore and roostyourteeth.com.

Speaker 1 Well, all right, well, that does it for us today, November 20th, 2025. We're going to be back to talk to you tomorrow.
We hope you will be here as well. Bye, everybody.