Why AM radio and Ethernet still matter, and why Zelda keeps winning

Today on the flagship podcast of the Purah Pad: 02:19 - Senator Ed Markey chats with Nilay Patel about the importance of keeping AM radio in cars after many EV manufacturers have started to remove it from new models. Cars would be required to keep AM radio under new bipartisan bill The shift to EVs is slowly killing off AM radio — and that’s bad for emergency broadcasts 22:09 - Alex Cranz and Sean Hollister talk with SVP of networking at Nvidia Kevin Deierling live at the Computer History Museum for the 50th anniversary of ethernet about the future of connectivity. Wired: 50 years of ethernet CHM Live | Ethernet@50 52:51 - David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Ash Parrish discuss why The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom works so well and what the rest of the gaming world should do about it. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom review: new powers, new places, but less wonder A conversation with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s creative leads Tears of the Kingdom’s dungeons were designed with seamlessness in mind Tips and tricks to get you through Tears of the Kingdom Zelda players turned Tears of the Kingdom into a Korok torture chamber The wildest Tears of the Kingdom builds we’ve seen Tears of the Kingdom’s puzzle designers are fantastic trolls Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom walkthrough and guides - Polygon Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Purapad. I'm your friend David Pierce and I'm doing like the only thing any of us have been doing the last couple of weeks. I'm playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I'm still pretty early in the game and I only like just a minute ago discovered that I can stick a rock to a tree branch and suddenly I have the coolest bludgeoning weapon ever. So that's neat, big fan of that. Anyway, we have a great show for you today. We're going to talk about AM radio and why there's suddenly a big fight about whether your car should have it going forward. We're also going to talk about the 50th anniversary of Ethernet and the future of super fast-wired connections. I'm just realizing this as I say it, but we're kind of doing an old tech still matters thing this week and I dig that.

• 0:46David Pierce?

  And lastly, we're going to talk about Tears of the Kingdom. What makes this game special? Why we can't stop playing it? And what the rest of the gaming industry should do about it? All that's coming in just a second, but first I have to figure out how to get to the shrine over there without falling down the waterfall for like the 56th time. Here goes nothing. This is The Vergecast. We'll be right back.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  Company spending is complex. Managing it should be simple. This is AMEX Corporate, a single platform connecting cards, expenses, and payments to streamline the way you work. Flexible controls for when priorities shift, support around the clock, all backed by American Express, so you can stay focused on what matters most. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is AMEX Corporate. Get started at go.amex slash amexcorporate. Terms apply.

• 2:31David Pierce?

  Welcome back. You may not have even noticed this, or may not even care. But over the last few years, there's been a slow push to remove AM radio from cars. Tesla did it in 2018, and since then Ford, BMW, Volkswagen, and a bunch of other companies have said that especially as we move to electric vehicles, AM radio should leave cars. Basically, the carmakers argue that EVs can cause electric interference that shows up on AM radio, which seems simple enough, and it's certainly true that there are other ways to get radio-style content in your car. But some folks, including some lawmakers, argue that AM radio is important, and it's important for much more than just delivering

• 3:14David Pierce?

  radio stations. Ed Markey, a US senator from Massachusetts, has been leading the charge to keep AM radio around. Neelai recently jumped on the phone with Markey to talk about why he cares about AM radio, why he's introducing a bill that would keep it in cars for the future, why he thinks this isn't really about interference, and much more. Check it out.

• 3:35David Pierce?

  Senator Ed Markey, welcome to the Vergecast. How are you?

• 3:38Speaker 03

  Oh, great to be with you.

• 3:39David Pierce?

  I'm glad you're joining the show. We've got to talk about the most pressing issue of our time, which is the future of AM radio in cars. You introduced a bill today with Ted Cruz, which I want to talk about, called the AM for Every Vehicle Act. What is the AM for Every Vehicle Act?

• 3:54Speaker 03

  Well, AM EV. And the reason we made it every vehicle is the EV, which is the new vehicles which Tesla and Ford and other companies are saying is just too complicated to figure out how to put in new all-electric vehicles because of the electromagnetic interference. And at the same time, however, Kia, Hyundai, Honda, Toyota, Chrysler...

• 4:23Speaker 03

  They have all figured out how to put it in their new all electric vehicles. So it does get a little bit concerning, let's be honest. I mean, Tesla is partnered with SpaceX and SpaceX is trying to figure out how to put people on the moon. And then when you say, can you figure out how to put AM radio in cars? They go, oh, you have no idea how complicated that is. You don't know how complicated that electric vehicle technology is. We could never figure out how to get through that electromagnetic interference. So it's hard to believe, however, that Kia and Hyundai and Chrysler and Toyota and others are all figuring it out. And I guess what I suspect is they want to put all information behind a paywall. They want people have to pay for information in cars in the future.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  And as we know, beginning in 1920 with KDKA radio station in Pittsburgh, AM radio has been free. And I guess that just kind of runs contrary to the business plans of some of these auto manufacturers. They want it all behind a paywall. You have to pony up if you want to have access to information. And my feeling is AM radio has served as an incredible public safety protection in our country, especially in cars that people can use in order to navigate during times of trouble. And that it's absolutely unacceptable that they're going to remove that technology

• 5:50Speaker 03

  from electric vehicles using the flimsy case that they can't figure out how to make it work.

• 5:56Nilay Patel?

  All right, let me push you on this. One, they are keeping the FM radios in the car, right? They haven't said they're going to take those out yet. So maybe they're not pushing entirely towards a subscription future. I suspect they want to, I agree with you, but the FM radios are staying in the car. Two, all these cars are different, right? The Hyundai powertrain is different than the Tesla powertrain is different than the Ford powertrain. Have they provided any evidence that, hey, maybe it is difficult to you? Or are they just saying it to you?

• 6:21Speaker 03

  Well, I would say that I haven't seen the evidence. I'm not convinced. Again, we're talking about Tesla. We're talking about SpaceX, you know, why they can't figure out, you know, how to handle the interference issues. I just think they don't want to do it. Okay, they're moving on. Ford is calling AM an obsolete technology. So from my perspective, that's what we are disputing. It's not an obsolete technology. Tens of millions of people still use it every single week. And I know on my radio dial up in Boston, it's on 103, 1030 AM WBZ AM. And I've got it on and I've had it on my entire life.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  Yes, I have an FM channel as well, but I rely upon the all news WBZ AM 103, you know, to get immediate, up to the minute news information. And if I need it, safety information as well. So it's not an obsolete technology. Ford is wrong. Tesla with its crocodile tears is wrong that they can't figure it out technologically, while bragging that they're making the most technologically sophisticated vehicles known to mankind. It's just absolutely not believable.

• 7:34Nilay Patel?

  So when it comes to technology and obsolescence, yes, there's a lot of planned obsolescence in the technology industry. A lot of software support goes away, all those sorts of things. But this one is they can measure who's using what bands in the cars, especially with modern infotainment systems. If they're saying, look, a brand new Mustang customer is likely never to use the AM radio. Isn't that a market decision? And people like you who want to listen to your favorite AM radio station will just buy a Kia instead?

• 8:04Speaker 03

  Well, what about when the car is, becomes a used car? Is the person they sell it to also not an AM radio listener? They might be a little poorer than the original owner. They might not be able to pay for, or want to pay for some more sophisticated internet delivered information. I just think that the option should remain there. It's been in cars for 100 years and it doesn't make any sense to remove something that has been there and servicing our country for all of those years. So, no, I think that the choice should be there. And some of these cars are going to be around for 20 years. And we should ensure that that option remains technologically available.

• 8:50Nilay Patel?

  But don't you think that if enough people think AM is important, they'll all go by Kia's and Ford will have to figure out how to solve the interference problems they're claiming?

• 8:56Speaker 03

  From my perspective, I don't think that should be an option. I think we should look at it from a FEMA perspective. We should look at it from a public safety perspective. We should look at it from the perspective of needing to have that information be made available to consumers for when they need it. They might not be thinking as they're walking around a dealership, "Well, maybe there's going to be a tornado, you know, coming through my hometown due to climate change in eight more years, and I might want to have AM radio." So that's kind of from my perspective, how I view it. You know, for example, WBZ AM up in Boston, it's actually got a hardened facility down on the South

• 9:39Speaker 03

  Shore that can withstand almost any level of tornado or hurricane, meaning it will broadcast through any kind of an emergency. And I don't think it's reasonable to say that people should have to be stripped of the ability to have that technology available to them when they might need it at some indeterminate point in the future because they haven't been studying climate models as closely as they should. So, for example, in Greater Boston, Boston Harbor, the Gulf of Maine, is the second fastest warming body of water in the world, meaning we're heading for some real tough times in the years ahead, and

• 10:19Speaker 03

  we need to make sure that we're able to have the safety protections that remain in place in order to give them the warnings before something catastrophic happens to them or to their families.

• 10:31Nilay Patel?

  Talk me through the process here. Who came to you and said, "We need to introduce a bill to keep AM radios in cars"? Where did this idea come from?

• 10:38Speaker 03

  Well, AM, the AM radio, the National Association of Broadcasters, came to me. I've been on the telecommunications committee.

• 10:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you and I have talked several times because of your role on that committee.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've been on the telecommunications committee since the first day I joined the Congress decades ago. So they know of my interest in this issue in general, and they know that I believe that technologies have to be made in a way that serves the public interest, and they have to have a universal quality to them. So that's the constitution of the Telecommunications Act of 1934, universal access.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  And so AM radio played that role in the 20s and the 30s and the 40s and then we added in the 60s and 70s FM radio. But still at its core, it's a staple and the National Association of Broadcasters knew that I would want to keep that in place because it is affordable at the price of being free. But it also is an emergency warning system that will help people who otherwise might in fact fall victim to natural catastrophes that were otherwise capable of giving people the warning they would need in order to protect their families.

• 11:54Nilay Patel?

  And the NAB thinks they can't move that to the FM stations that they operate? Because again, the FM radios are staying in the cars.

• 12:00Speaker 03

  Well, AM radio is a very simple thing for them to continue to provide. You don't have to make a choice. This is a classic situation where FEMA built its emergency alert system around AM radio. So the auto manufacturers are saying to FEMA, saying to the federal government, hey, junk this whole plan that you've always had, you know, just move it, even though we already have a system that is an AM radio system, you know, that has worked and worked effectively for generations.

• 12:31Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I need to know the answer to this question. You are one of the co-sponsors. The other co-sponsor is Ted Cruz. It is not often that you and Ted Cruz are on the same side of an issue and it's certainly not often that a Republican like Ted Cruz is out here mandating what a very competitive, what players in a very competitive market like the auto industry should do. How did you end up on the same side of this issue as Ted Cruz? How did he end up co-sponsoring the bill?

• 12:54Speaker 03

  Well, we don't disagree on everything. There are many issues we do and you know, that's a long, long, long list. But when you're on the technology committee, and that's where we serve, we serve on the commerce committee, we serve on the committee with jurisdiction over telecommunications. Sometimes you have to work really hard to make that Democrat or Republican. It's technology. The only question is how do you want to animate that technology with the human values which we've had in all of the preceding, you know, technology debates? And so from my perspective, what I've seen over and over again is as the innovation occurs, that new innovation says, we don't need those old values. We don't need them to be brought along. It's an all-new era.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  It's almost like the internet. People say, we don't need a privacy bill of rights. We don't need to make sure it's accessible in schools for children. So I can't speak for Ted Cruz, but AM radio actually is something that I think we both believe supports the whole concept of media diversity, that there's a thousand flowers can bloom and you can smell whatever one you want on AM radio or FM or on the internet. But let's not subtract from this garden, which has been carefully constructed over a hundred years. We don't have to eliminate in order to allow for a proliferation of new sources and especially

• 14:19Speaker 03

  when, especially because of the emergency response capability of AM radio and the dependency which people have upon it that is central to what AM has always played as a role in American society.

• 14:34Nilay Patel?

  Is this a situation where the bill is out now, the automakers are going to read it, and you're hoping they soften their stance? Or do you think you have to push this through all the way and make it law in order for Tesla to figure out how to put an AM radio in the car?

• 14:48Speaker 03

  I think it's going to be hard to get them to fold. It's not their nature. I think we're actually going to have to pass this law. I wish that we could ensure that we would have universal response from the auto industry. I don't think that's going to be the case. So we're not seeing this as something meant to soften. I sent six months ago, letters to all of the auto manufacturers. None of them softened, you know, after I sent in the letters. The ones that said they're going to do it, they're going to continue to do it. The ones that said they're not going to do it, they're going to continue not to do it. So from my perspective, I think it's going to require a law and then the regulations promulgated by NHTSA, consistent with that law.

• 15:28Nilay Patel?

  How long do you think that process takes?

• 15:30Speaker 03

  Well, I think when Ted Cruz and Ed Markey support something, and we're both on as senior members of the Commerce Committee, I think we got a pretty good shot of moving this. I know who I can talk to, and you put it together with him, I think we've got the 60 votes in the Senate we're going to need in order to move it.

• 15:46Nilay Patel?

  Congress is pretty deadlocked. There's a lot of stuff going on right now. Do you think this is going to happen soon, or do you think this is when things calm down, you can move this one through?

• 15:54Speaker 03

  I don't think just because we're having a default crisis in the country, just because we have a Supreme Court in chaos, that we can't simultaneously work to protect AM radio. I think we can do all of those things simultaneously. And in fact, this might be kind of a relief valve, where Democrats and Republicans actually come together and stop fighting to do something which is good in finding common ground. And maybe we can use that as a building block for other issue areas.

• 16:23Nilay Patel?

  AM radio is going to bring us all back together. This is the thing you've been saying the whole time.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  AM radio just, to me, sings of our great American automotive history, especially and the role that it's played in the lives of just about every American family. And I do believe that it's not a nostalgia for a time gone by, but a recognition of its continued relevance that's going to have Ted Cruz, Ed Markey, and our left and right allies coming together and isolating Tesla and Ford and Polestar and the other companies who say that they can't figure it out. It's just too technologically complicated. We can get an FM station in there, we can't figure out AM. And so we're going to help them to focus

• 17:09Speaker 03

  on the problem better. And I'm highly confident that ultimately we will be successful.

• 17:14Nilay Patel?

  Very good. I can't let you go without asking you one question about net neutrality. You and I have talked about it so many times in the past. President Biden nominated Gigi Seun. It didn't go anywhere. She withdrew. What is happening with the FCC? What is happening with net neutrality right now?

• 17:27Speaker 03

  It's a tragedy what happened to Gigi Sun. Obviously, many, many industries out there hated her progressive past and projected it onto her being a progressive voice at the Federal Communications Commission. So my hope is that we can find a fifth commissioner for the FCC so that we can move forward on privacy, move forward on net neutrality, move forward on other important issues. But it was a historic loss, her inability to get the 51 votes that we would need. But I know one thing, we need a full Federal Communications Commission.

• 18:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  If we go all four years of the Biden administration without a full Federal Communications Commission, we have lost an incredible historic opportunity to put an imprint of inclusivity, of fanas, and Darwinian competition built into the marketplace, led by net neutrality and other principles that should be enshrined into American law.

• 18:27Nilay Patel?

  Is there anybody you have in mind for that fifth slot or waiting to see what happens?

• 18:32Speaker 03

  I know that they're vetting several people right now. I've seen some of the names. I'm not 100% confident who ultimately they're going to name, but all I'm asking is that they do believe in net neutrality. They do believe in protecting the children of our country. They do believe in Darwinian paranoia-inducing competition in industry. That's all I can hope from a Democratic nominee.

• 18:59Nilay Patel?

  And obviously you hope that they believe in AM radio.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  And above all, AM radio. You know, it's almost, it was the original internet in 1920 when KDKA went on the air in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and that was the first time that mass communication really began in our country. And then city after city after city deployed. And then actually at dark. On many frequencies across the country, by law, interfering stations had to go off the air. So even down here in the District of Columbia, when I'm driving home at night, I can listen to WBZ AM in Boston, 103, because all channels have to clear after dark. So it was the first time that we actually began to have national communication.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  That's really what AM radio instituted in our nation. And from my perspective, I'm not going to stand by silently while a new generation of tech geniuses decide they have to kill the old in order to begin the new. No, they can coexist. We have more than enough bandwidth to keep the old and the new coexisting in perpetuity so that everyone can have a choice as to which of those means of communication they want to take advantage of.

• 20:18David Pierce?

  Well, Senator, thank you so much for joining us and taking the time to talk today. I really appreciate it.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  No, great to be with you. Thank you.

• 20:25David Pierce?

  All right, we need to take a break. And then we're going to talk about another old technology that maybe still matters more than you think. Ethernet. We'll be right back.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  If you're looking to hire, you need Indeed. With Indeed Sponsored Jobs, you can spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 21:24Speaker 05

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.

• 21:57David Pierce?

  Welcome back. This year is the 50th anniversary of one of the most important technologies ever created, without which we wouldn't have most of the connected experiences we have: Ethernet. Good old fashioned wired internet. Those weird clicky plugs kind of make the world go around. You're probably listening to this, though, on a device connected either to Wi-Fi or a cellular network. So you might be like, "Okay, cool. Ethernet was great, but who has wired connections anymore?" Well, I'm glad you asked. We have a whole series of stories about why Ethernet still matters on theverge.com. I'll put that in the show notes. That question was also the subject of a Vergecast Live we did this week in partnership with the Computer History Museum. They hosted a big event for the anniversary.

• 22:41David Pierce?

  Bob Metcalfe, one of the co-creators of Ethernet, was there. He's a big celebrity, did a Q&A. It was pretty cool. And as part of the event, Alex, along with The Verge's Sean Hollister, sat down with Kevin Deierling, the SVP of Networking at Nvidia, to talk about not just the last 50 years of wires, but the present and future of super-fast cable internet. It was a great conversation. I learned a ton, so I figured we'd play you a chunk of the event. Here it is.

• 23:09Alex Cranz?

  Hello, welcome. Thank you for joining us. So last week, I moved. And the first thing I set up wasn't the toilet paper.

• 23:17Speaker 07

  Plex server.

• 23:18Alex Cranz?

  It wasn't the Plex server, actually, but I'm getting there. It wasn't the toilet paper, it wasn't all my clothes, it wasn't my kitchen, it was my network. And that's because networking is so, so important. That's why we're all here tonight, right? Like, we're celebrating networking. We're celebrating the history of it and what they did back in 1973. And I just really wanted to talk about that. And at The Verge, we like to talk about the future of this stuff, right?

• 23:42Speaker 08

  We do.

• 23:42Alex Cranz?

  We do. And so, we wanted to talk about the future of networking. And we thought, what better people to talk to than someone from Nvidia, who's always thinking about the future of networking and the future of computing? So we've got Kevin Deierling. He's the Senior Vice President of Networking at Nvidia. He's joining us here tonight, so please welcome Kevin.

• 24:05Speaker 09

  Thanks.

• 24:07Alex Cranz?

  All right, we're gonna go ahead and sit down. And Kevin, I'm just gonna start straight out of the gate. The folks asked Bob during the Q and A, is Ethernet gonna be involved in quantum computing? And he didn't know, but I think you probably do.

• 24:20Speaker 09

  Yeah, definitely. I think it's interesting. Quantum computing is using qubits. And the problem, they're scaling up the number of qubits.

• 24:29Alex Cranz?

  Uh huh.

• 24:29Speaker 09

  But qubits are in different states. They're not ones and zeros.

• 24:33Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 24:34Speaker 09

  Sometimes they're in the wrong state. There's errors in it. And so what's limiting it is actually how many qubits we can get. We have to do a lot of error correction. And it turns out that getting the data into a computer and correcting it is gonna use a ton of conventional networking and a ton of AI. So they're actually deeply connected. We're also using quantum computing for something called quantum entanglement, for doing encryption and secret keys. So they're intimately related. They really are.

• 25:04Alex Cranz?

  Is there a bandwidth limit? Is there like a bandwidth minimum, I would say?

• 25:09Speaker 09

  A minimum? That's a good question. I think that we have some fundamental laws of physics. You know, when you hear about what they were doing at 2.94 megabits per second and 340 nanoseconds, today we're broadcasting, you know, 100 gigabits, soon 200 gigabits per second. We're measuring this, the light pulses. If you could see them, they would be that long. They would be picoseconds. So there are some fundamental limits. We're actually fundamentally limited in terms of the distances we can travel. And the faster we go, the shorter distances we can travel on copper, for example.

• 25:44Alex Cranz?

  Right. Okay, another question that was asked was, how close are we to terabit Ethernet with just one lane?

• 25:53Speaker 09

  With just one lane? That's a tricky question. So we can do it today. But what Bob said on top of that is we have to do it with one lambda. So one of the ways that we can communicate more, we do something called amplitude. You send not just a one and a zero, we send two bits or four bits. So we have something called PAM4. But with light, we can do something really interesting. We can actually send different wavelengths down the same fiber. And when we do that, if you do CWDM, you have four. So if we could get to 250 gigabits, we're right on the edge of that. Four lambda, that's a terabit on one fiber.

• 26:33Alex Cranz?

  So that's pretty close.

• 26:33Speaker 09

  That's cool.

• 26:34Speaker 08

  It's easy to look ahead the next 50 years and say that speeds are going to get faster and faster because we're always improving speeds. Originally, Bob was saying that we went to 3 megabits was like 10,000 times faster than what you had before. If we're talking about eventually 1.2 terabit per second, then we've got 100 times thousand faster than we're getting, we're getting close to 100 times thousand faster than that. What happens when that network actually proliferates though? We see those speeds in very small lengths of cable. We see that in the data center. But I want you to paint a picture for us of what connectivity looks like across the country, across the world, as those speeds get that quick.

• 27:18Speaker 09

  Yeah, so I think, you know, what's interesting even today with before AI, before generative AI, you would do something into a data center through your network connection and that we call that north-south traffic that's going into the data center. And what that would then do is spawn 1,000 times more traffic because they're actually holding an auction to advertise to you. Yeah. To your eyeballs. They're figuring out everything that you've done. You know, I was looking at, I'm going fly fishing, so I was looking at a fly rod. They're going to show me a fly rod because I looked at it yesterday. And so there's 1,000 times more traffic going on, on that east-west traffic than there is on the north-south.

• 28:01Speaker 09

  That's going to explode another thousand fold with AI now. The amount of east-west traffic and on top of that generative AI is going to be generating really rich content coming back. It's going to be talking, it's going to be visual images, it's going to be generated on the fly. So we're going to need both. We're going to need the broadband connectivity and then massive amounts of east-west connection inside the data center.

• 28:24Speaker 08

  Are we getting close to the holodeck with all of that? All that connectivity and all that generative AI behind it?

• 28:31Speaker 09

  Absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, today, the digital twin is really part of what is AI. And people think they hear about the metaverse. We talk about the omniverse because we think it's more than just avatars and gaming. It is that, but we're actually going to build digital twins of everything, of human beings. They're using that for robotics and AI. When you're actually operating on somebody, you'll have a CT image that's going to be overlaid on top of somebody that's doing robotic surgery. We're building factories down to the light and all of the robots that are coming in, interacting with humans.

• 29:11Speaker 09

  You're going to fail in the virtual world quickly so that you can succeed in the real world very, very fast. So don't make your mistakes on a building, make it on a digital twin of the building.

• 29:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:24Speaker 09

  And then build the building right.

• 29:26Alex Cranz?

  So that's how we are going to avoid things like those death ray buildings, right?

• 29:30Speaker 09

  Exactly, exactly.

• 29:31Alex Cranz?

  Very excited to avoid those, melting all the cars.

• 29:34Speaker 08

  One of the things we heard a lot of the innovators talk about on stage is the importance of standards and the importance of being able to construct something that works across multiple companies. I don't know if I've heard of a particular standard yet for what the metaverse, what this digital world that Nvidia wants to make a clone of the real world, how that comes to pass in an open way. Do you know, is that a thing that you see on the horizon that all of these video game companies and technology companies band together around something? And what can you envision for us what that something might be?

• 30:11Speaker 09

  Yeah, so I think we're already embracing all kinds of open standards. So if you look at what we call the omniverse, these digital twins, it's actually based on something that came out of the graphics video world, okay? Which is a universal scene description. And so you can actually model physical light reflection of metal. You can look at sandpaper, you can look at the weight of things, the friction. of things as they're sliding, we model everything down to the real physics. So that it's completely accurate. And you have to do that for gaming. That's what it came out of. Turns out it's really useful for doing things like digital cars. Okay, if you're doing a self-driving car. Then there's a couple of ways you can get all that data.

• 30:54Speaker 09

  One way is you drive for millions of hours, collect all the data. The other way is you create a digital twin of the entire earth. And you train on that data. And you can do weird things that actually might happen once in a while. We had snow in the Bay Area this year. So you can put snow in the middle of the desert. We can create a digital world and train off of that synthetic data. So absolutely. You can do this, and I think we're seeing lots of standards being embraced because if you have an open standard that can people can develop on top of, more people will do it. It grows the ecosystem. We love doing that.

• 31:28Alex Cranz?

  Right. So I mean, Nvidia is very, very good at the GPU side of things, at the graphics. And what we quickly learned was that GPUs were really good for neural networks. And there's a, I think one of the things that Bob talked about was that one of the limitations of AI is these neural networks and what they can do. How do we expand the connectivity there?

• 31:47Speaker 09

  Yeah, so the the thing that's interesting about a neural network is he talked about the limitation being the data, the amount of data. And we had this strange thing happen over the last decade, which was the internet and the World Wide Web, and suddenly there's just this massive amount of data that you can actually access. Public domain, go out, scrape the entire data. Put it into a data center. It is a massive amount of information. So to train against that, there is no computer in the world that can hold all of the data. I heard when Google started, that was the request that Sergey had. He says, I want a computer that can hold the entire data of the internet. And back then, it was actually almost possible. Today, absolutely not.

• 32:30Speaker 09

  So if you think about it, we heard earlier, Andy was talking about that when Sun was founded, the network is the computer. That was the theme of Sun. But those were separate computers that could talk to each other individually. Today, it's not a computer with sheet metal around it. It's the data center is the computer. And the networking that's part of that is part of that computer. So networking is critical to be able to access all of that data that you need to be able to do to do the huge neural networks for large language models.

• 33:03Speaker 08

  How important is the concept of Ethernet and the concept of the wired connectivity that underpins it going to be to all of us and all the, you know, the young children that are going to be born and living 50 years in the future? How much are they going to need to think about that living in a world where they have all the cellular connectivity? They have the 5G will turn into 6G and 7G. And how much of that is a thing that we explain to them is underpinning invisibly behind the scenes?

• 33:33Speaker 09

  Yeah, so I think there's, I'm old enough, I actually remember the coax cable with those little plugs that you had to put in. I was a freshman in college at Berkeley and I was connecting all of the professor's office with that Ethernet. Okay, so I lived this stuff. And I remember I was in Patterson's office, who was one of the pioneers of risk computing. Reduz and such had said, "Computing, David Patterson." And I asked him, I said, "What is risk?" And he looked at me and he said, "What is your major?" And I said, "Physics." And he said, "You don't need to know." So, so I connected that. I think over a period of time, people are, you know, you plugged in your network. I think that even with broadband connectivity through wireless, through 5G,

• 34:18Speaker 09

  I think that plug is going to exist. I think the Cat 5 cable, 25 years from now, somebody's still going to be running that Cat cable. I made a mistake when I built my house. I said, "You know what, wireless, we're almost there. It's almost good enough. I'm not going to wire my house with fiber and copper." I really wish I'd done that because now I've been up in the attic putting the copper back in.

• 34:39Alex Cranz?

  Anytime you're trying to download a game to your PS5, you're like, "Oh, I wish I'd use power lines or something there." Okay, I want to piggyback off this. How, you know, you asked about, are we going to have to teach our kids what Ethernet is? Are we still going to, how long are we going to still have to teach our kids the difference between an Ethernet cable and a phone cable?

• 35:00Speaker 09

  Well, I don't think people even know what phone cables are anymore. Ethernet has already outlived PSTN. I have a potsline at my house just because we have a really hard time to get broadband connectivity, but I don't think many people know what potslines are. I mean, really, I don't think people will be using those jacks anymore. I think that RJ45 for Cat 5 cables and Cat 10, etc., it's going to persist. The other thing that was interesting that Bob said tonight, which I thought was spot on, you know, he said before, "There's Ethernet and Ethernet not. Anything that's not Ethernet is Ethernet not." It turns out that even Ethernet is Ethernet not. Because he said today, he said that every time that, you know, we completely changed

• 35:44Speaker 09

  the standard, none of the things that are in the CSMACD that they were talking about, none of that exists anymore. Everything's point-to-point, there was no shared media, but they just keep calling it Ethernet. So while I'm saying that Ethernet will be around in 25 years, it's not going to be the same. We see convergences of technology all the time. We do other technologies for networking.

• 36:06Alex Cranz?

  What do you think it's going to be? What are those next ones we should be looking at?

• 36:10Speaker 09

  I think you're going to see a much more intelligent network. So when I talked about, you know, the network is the computer was Sun 1984. Today, the data center is the new unit of computing. When we accelerate things with a GPU, we're talking, you know, Moore's Law has slowed down. It used to double the performance of semiconductors every two years. It's not happening anymore. The speeds of CPUs plateaued a decade ago. But we're doing other things, architectural things, to accelerate AI. And as we do that, we've increased over the last decade a million-fold the performance of a GPU running AI. All kinds of innovations. Architecture matters again.

• 36:53Speaker 09

  We can't just rely on semiconductor processing to do that. What's happening when you speed something up a million-fold? It turns out that all that networking and communication becomes the bottleneck.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:06Speaker 09

  The network becomes the bottleneck. So what I think you'll see in the future is the network become really part of the computing. As all of these different boxes, they're part of the same computer. We are already seeing that you process the data as it's moving through the network. So somebody once said that, you know, how do you speed up a Domino's pizza delivery? Okay, it's easy to make more pizzas. You can buy more pizza ovens. But how do you get it faster than half an hour to the home? Because you take the order, you make the pizza, you put the cheese on it and put it in the oven, and then it bakes for 15 minutes. Well, one way you can make things faster is to put the ovens in the truck that's delivering the pizzas. That's what I think you'll see with Ethernet.

• 37:50Speaker 08

  Are you talking about from one node to the next node? So that within your server rack or within your GPU? Or are we talking about beyond that? We're talking about optical internet connects on the chips themselves and things like that?

• 38:02Speaker 09

  That's happening too. I'm actually talking about data being processed as it's moving through the network. So if your computer is now a bunch of different nodes, you should be able to process with AI networks and neural networks. They do a bunch of work. And then all of the GPUs need to share information to do the next round of work. And that sharing of information is becoming the bottleneck. So we have huge amounts of bandwidth, and the network's becoming really intelligent. The network is literally a computer. So instead of the network is a computer, it really is a computer.

• 38:38Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I'm about to say a dirty word, which is Wi-Fi. I feel like it's a dirty word tonight. Generally, Wi-Fi is great. But Wi-Fi does have a lot of limitations. Does that mean we're gonna see maybe less Wi-Fi with this like, the Internet is in all these nodes and doing the computation there? Can Wi-Fi keep up with that? Or is it gonna kind of be more reliant on?

• 39:00Speaker 09

  If Bob were here, I've heard him say it. He would say that Wi-Fi was originally called wireless Ethernet. So if we call it wireless Ethernet, it's fine.

• 39:07Alex Cranz?

  It's fine, it's fine, okay.

• 39:08Speaker 09

  It's fine. And, you know, different horses for different courses. In the home, you know, look, I'm connected all the time. I've got multiple devices. I've got Bluetooth connections. I've got Wi-Fi connections. And I have wired connections. If only I had a broadband connection, then I'd be really happy.

• 39:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, let's, let's talk about that. Because you live in the Bay Area.

• 39:30Speaker 09

  I do.

• 39:31Alex Cranz?

  And you don't have broadband.

• 39:33Speaker 09

  I have broadband. So, so, you know, when you look at that access of broadband communication, they talk about a couple of things. That's, it has to be accessible. It has to be affordable. And then it has to be usable. You have to know how to use it. And so I'm a technologist. I know how to use it. I'm fortunate in that I can afford to pay for things. But like my neighbor, for example, he pays for a T1 line. And that's 1.544 megabits per second. It's slower than the first generation of Ethernet from 1975.

• 40:07Speaker 08

  Hey, I was really jealous of neighbors with a T1 line back in 95.

• 40:11Speaker 09

  Back in 95, exactly. Well, he's got it for his weather station. He's paying $600 or $700 a month for 1.544 megabits. I happen to be the very last phone line from Half Moon Bay. It's 30 kilometers away. I can't do DSL. I can't do anything. So, so I pay for a satellite connection. And as long as it's not foggy, and as long as a lot of people aren't using it, it works great.

• 40:37Alex Cranz?

  As long as there are no tall trees.

• 40:39Speaker 09

  No tall trees, yeah.

• 40:40Speaker 08

  Yeah. I fought for two years to get AT&T to put fiber to my house because they buried the node two houses away.

• 40:48Speaker 09

  Yeah, but I think, I think actually, you know, one of the things we're doing with AI is we're working with a ton of the 5G companies. So I think 5G can start to address some of that broadband connectivity in rural areas, also in urban areas. It turns out that just the placement, because the cells are so much smaller now, and there's all kinds of reflections, and you know, they call it sort of an urban jungle, where instead of trees, it's giant skyscrapers in Manhattan or something. We're actually modeling with AI all of the reflections off of buildings and figuring out where the optimal placement to get the most reach and the best performance.

• 41:26Alex Cranz?

  Well, I kind of, I want to toss this one to Sean, because I hear that a lot, 5G is gonna, is gonna change things, it's gonna improve that connectivity, but 5G is still run by the big networks, and they have, they have demands like, you can't download too many things at a time, that sort of thing. Sean, do you think 5G is gonna?

• 41:45Speaker 08

  So many unlimited plans that are not unlimited. So much, so much, so many promises about being able to download your entire, your entire TV series before you get on the airplane.

• 41:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 41:56Speaker 08

  And then the airport has barely any 5G connectivity, and it's technically LTE, rebranded as 5G.

• 42:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:01Speaker 08

  It's, it's difficult right now, because we're in this intermediate period, but it does feel like every time they do have a leap, that the cellular does get faster and more desirable than it was the last time, and that you do get to a place where at some point you don't necessarily need the ethernet cable, or the fiber cable, you know, the coaxial cable, the coaxial or the fiber cable, running to your home. Do I, a technologist and Verge editor, want to have 5G instead of a physical line coming to my house? Absolutely not. But I can see people who are growing up with their phones as their only computers, I can see them not only liking that, but preferring that to all the complications

• 42:45Speaker 08

  that come with a wired house in the future.

• 42:48Alex Cranz?

  Do you think people are gonna be okay with? The trade offs there because the big telecom companies, they have a much stronger control of their networks in a way that the traditional ISVs don't.

• 42:59Speaker 08

  This is what I'm worried about and I know the analogy of, you know.

• 43:03Alex Cranz?

  I'm just teeing him up for this rant, by the way.

• 43:05Speaker 08

  The idea that a frog jumping into a pot of boiling water, you know, you got the pot of water and you slowly bring it up to a boil. This isn't actually true that a frog doesn't feel pain as they're being boiled. They do, I'm very sorry froggies. But there's something to that analogy, it keeps coming up and I think that's, I worry that that's what's going to happen with some of this is that we're not going to realize all of the things that we are giving up until it's a little bit too late because the carriers do have so much control and because, like with MP3 audio, they say that younger people prefer the tininess of the compression in their MP3 music than the nice rich tones you used to get from vinyl and proper analog speakers.

• 43:47Speaker 08

  And certainly analog has come back in a nice way for enthusiasts, but there's this sense that we're going to lose something along the way and not realize that we've necessarily lost it.

• 43:57Speaker 09

  We can always go to lossless flak.

• 43:59Speaker 08

  I do like my flak.

• 44:01Alex Cranz?

  Flak is extremely, extremely good. Back to you Kevin, you talked briefly about 5G and how 5G AI is really working with 5G. Does AI help in other networking opportunities or is it just 5G?

• 44:14Speaker 09

  No, so I mean, we're, we're really analyzing all sorts of optical networks. We're using the AI to design chips. So this is a strange thing for me, I've been in chips my whole career and I always thought it was weird that we were designing chips back then so that we could stay on Moore's Law and just keep doubling the number of transistors. Today, we're so, it's amazing what we're doing, we're using light that was 190 nanometers to print features that are way smaller than that. And to do that, we have to calculate the reverse interference of the light. Today, we're printing things with 13 nanometer light that is going down to 3 nanometers. The amount. of optical proximity correction because photons are bouncing off of everything.

• 44:59Speaker 09

  We're doing all kinds of simulations in the real world of AI. These are reverse problems. It's actually easy to do the forward calculation. We need to do the reverse calculation. So, so we're doing all sorts of things. On 5G, I think it's really important. We've made great strides in the US. Things are getting better in rural areas. They just, I saw past another 60 billion dollars as part of the infrastructure that's going to go into that. So that's great. But ultimately, there's places in the world that are way behind. Some places like Europe ahead.

• 45:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:31Speaker 09

  But, but ultimately, we see all kinds of innovation of AI that need network connectivity. They need 5G. They also need super fast wired connections. These two things are going to live together. If you look at that example of medicine, you know, there's lots of places in the world where now everything has been digitalized. You're not taking a CT scan, an X-ray scan anymore with computational tomography and printing that on a, on a piece of, you know, silver nitride.

• 46:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 46:02Speaker 09

  It's, it's digitalized and then you need to send it to somebody and you need AI to look at it, to actually do the analysis and help out the doctors, say, hey, look at this one carefully. This looks super important. So I think the network, whether it's 5G, whether it's Wi-Fi and wired and optics, all of them are going to coexist at the same time. And they're all going to have their own innovation vectors.

• 46:24Alex Cranz?

  All right. I saw Sean shake your head very briefly when he was talking. It was around that rural broadband fund. And I'm looking at your face now and I'm seeing the feelings ready to come out.

• 46:36Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah. So I'm, I'm working on a story right now about that federal funding and it's very interesting. First off, originally it was going to be 100 billion dollars that Biden wanted to have come out and then turned down to 65 billion. And now it looks like it's going to be about 41 billion that's actually going to go out there. But the idea is maybe we can confinely connect everyone. We can close the digital divide if we roll out that 41 billion dollars appropriately. But You know, not having any real choice of broadband, and I know, not having any real choice of broadband for a long time, that it's going to be incredibly difficult to roll out that money appropriately. The allocations are based on faulty broadband maps,

• 47:19Speaker 08

  where the internet service providers were saying, "Here's where we are, believe us." And the FCC said, "Sounds good, we can't tell."

• 47:27Speaker 09

  You're right. If you have one person that has 5G connectivity, then the county has 5G connectivity.

• 47:32Speaker 08

  In your census block, anybody in your census block. They're finally fixing that. You could start to challenge these maps, but maybe not in time before the money comes out. 16 states in the United States have limitations on how that money can be spent in terms of you can't spend it on municipal broadband. So the public money gets used to erect toll bridges that the various carriers and providers own, instead of being used to create public roads that the cities own.

• 48:04Speaker 09

  Yes, so we definitely need it. So somewhere or another, because I think one of the things we've seen, the amount of interesting content from generative AI. I think, you know, somebody said, "What is the future?" They asked Bob Metcalfe. He's like, "I don't know." But I loved his line about COVID. Yeah. It was, what was it? It was COVIDia. Yeah. Collaborative video, thank you.

• 48:27Speaker 08

  Collaborative video.

• 48:28Speaker 09

  That was a great line. And we haven't anticipated that, and yet it was there. I actually worked on video conferencing back in the 90s. And we said it was going to be, I mean, the first call for AT&T was in 1964 at the World's Fair in Chicago. And they said it was the technology of the future. When I left that startup that I was at, I was still convinced it was the technology of the future. And suddenly COVID hit, and wow, everybody is doing video calls. So it's interesting how things, when you build that infrastructure, the geniuses in the world, and they're all over the world. We tend to be a little arrogant here in Silicon Valley, but I've worked all over the world. And, you know, trust me, there's innovative, brilliant people in Europe and in Texas and on the East Coast.

• 49:12Speaker 09

  They will figure out different ways to use these capabilities. So I think we've just got a tremendous excitement going on. I don't know what's going to come, but I know it's going to need a lot of bandwidth and a lot of GPUs and compute capacity, because that's just the way the world is going today. We have so much data, and we can generate so many cool things now, so.

• 49:32Alex Cranz?

  Well, I hope from your lips to all the ISP's ears, they start rolling this out. I want to thank you for joining us and I want to thank you guys for joining us. And I also want to, I'm going to do a plug because we've been working with the Computer History Museum on a really, really cool documentary. It's going to be premiering next week and it's called "The Final Act of the Lisa." If you know about the Lisa, there's that apocryphal story about a bunch of them being buried in a landfill. We got the true story. We got, we found the people who saw this thing happen. It's a super, super cool. The trailer dropped last week. I encourage you to go watch it. I encourage you to go watch the video next week. It's going to be super fun. And thank you so much for the Computer History Museum for working with us on this project. It's been awesome. Thank you guys so much for joining us today.

• 50:21David Pierce?

  All right. We've got to take one more break and then we're going to talk about Zelda. Because I need to talk about Zelda. We'll be right back.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Ask yourself, what are your best people spending their time on right now? Expense reports, receipt chasing, month-end close that takes weeks. You become what you spend on, and that's not what you're building toward. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that eliminates that work before it starts. AI agents that handle the manual stuff automatically so your team can spend their time on what actually compounds. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com/AF.

• 51:08Speaker 10

  As a pioneer in the organic and natural food industry, the Whole Foods Market philosophy is rooted in a shared connection to people and to the planet. From farmland to stores, its products have always been a symphony of colors, textures, and flavors. In addition to its national brands, Whole Foods Market's team of local foragers continually scours the country to bring over 60,000 emerging and local products to its shelves each year. And they work with credentialed experts and top-of-the-line makers to offer customers the best possible variety. Shop Whole Foods Market in-store or online.

• 51:50David Pierce?

  Welcome back. If you're listening to this podcast, there is a pretty good chance that you're already deep into the new Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom. It's a huge hit for Nintendo, selling 10 million copies on the Switch just in the first few days and presumably many more since then. It seems like half The Verge is playing it all day, every day. There were even a couple of people who took the day off, the day it came out, just to play it all day. They're finding new ways to explore Hyrule, new uses for Ultra Hand, and epic new weapons to take down all their enemies. I've been playing too, though not as much as I'd like. And I have lots of questions about why this game seems to work so well, about why there aren't more games like this, and about how in the world I'm supposed to get off this stupid island that I have been

• 52:32David Pierce?

  stuck on for like three hours. So I grabbed Alex and The Verge's Ash Parrish to talk about all of it. Alex, hello.

• 52:40Alex Cranz?

  Hello.

• 52:40David Pierce?

  Ash, hi, welcome back.

• 52:42Speaker 07

  Hello, thanks for having me.

• 52:44David Pierce?

  I have a million things I want to talk about, but I, the first thing we need to do is, we just need to like establish some baseline here. I was just looking and I've played like six hours and change of Tears of the Kingdom. I would like to have played more, but I have a small child who just hit the point where he understands when I'm not looking at him and grabs whatever I'm holding and tries to put it in his mouth. So it has been a challenge, but I will, I will get my numbers up. Alex, how much have you played? And then we're gonna get to Ash, who I suspect has just decimated here.

• 53:13Alex Cranz?

  I want to caveat that I had to move and go to a wedding. So I too have had struggles, but I've gotten at least five minutes into Zelda.

• 53:22David Pierce?

  So you've like said the word Zelda out loud at one point in your life, is basically what you're coming to this one?

• 53:26Alex Cranz?

  Look, he got a new arm. Is that a spoiler? Am I allowed to spoil that?

• 53:30David Pierce?

  No, I think we're good on that one. Also, one of the things we're gonna talk about is that there is nothing about this game that has not been spoiled. Ash, hit us with it. How much this game?

• 53:38Speaker 07

  So I want to caveat this with nothing. I cannot explain or defend my actions, but I looked today and I have over 175 hours in this game.

• 53:50David Pierce?

  Hell, yeah.

• 53:51Alex Cranz?

  Yes!

• 53:52Speaker 07

  I haven't no life to game this hard since ever.

• 53:57David Pierce?

  As you think about it, does that feel like less than you would have thought, more than you would have thought, or like about the right amount?

• 54:03Speaker 07

  Oh, more than I would have thought. Like, I don't do the kinds of things that I'm doing in Zelda. I don't do that for any game. I just don't do it. The only thing that even comes close is maybe like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV. And those are games that are designed to have you play it as long as possible because the content doesn't end. It's ongoing, right? This game has a discreet ending that's somewhere. I just, I ignore it. I refuse to engage with it. I have spent all of my time. I have unlocked every shrine in the underworld. I am working my way back to unlock every shrine in the overworld. And along the way, I get pulled into these neat little side adventures that have just, I keep racking up the hours. I, I can't explain it.

• 54:47David Pierce?

  Okay, well, the rest of this segment is just gonna be Alex and I are gonna leave. And you can just talk about kind of whatever you want for a while because we are not qualified to be here with you. But actually, where I want to start is I want to go back a little bit because obviously this is the, the sequel to Breath of the Wild, which was this like earth-shatteringly great game in 2017. And like, kind of not came out of nowhere, but was like an even bigger surprise in how great it was than I think Tears of the Kingdom has been. And I'm curious, like, looking back, you know, six years ago, did Breath of the Wild sort of change video games forever? There were all these hot takes back then about like, this is a new paradigm for how we're gonna experience video game. And this is just a whole different universe and things will never be the same. Did that happen, Ash? What do you think?

• 55:31Speaker 07

  No.

• 55:32David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 55:32Speaker 07

  I think that everybody would like to think that Breath of the Wild changed the world. I think Breath of the Wild changed how we think about games. And I definitely think Breath of the Wild changed, like, set a bar. Like, it set a, a very new, very high bar about how video games are talked about, like, and critiqued by papers of record or whatever. Like, i- it has definitely set that bar high. But as, in terms of like changing, like, the video game landscape, not really, no. I mean, Nintendo is a very unique company. The things that they do, the games that they make. People try, but they just cannot replicate them. It just stands alone as this like extremely high bar that people aim for.

• 56:17Speaker 07

  And sometimes they get close and we get great games out of that. And sometimes they just completely miss the mark. But at the same time, because Nintendo is so unique, other game developers are like, we can't even do that. We can't touch that. So we're not, we're gonna do our own thing. And I don't really honestly think that game development or the kinds of games that we've seen since Breath of the Wild have been too terribly influenced by it. I mean, because Breath of the Wild didn't really do anything too different or crazy. It just presented all of these different elements together in this really unique pack- package. But things that have existed before, crafting existed before, open world exploration existed before. We've seen all of these things done before. It's just Nintendo was able to do it in this extremely unique, extremely polished,

• 57:02Speaker 07

  extremely approachable way that has not existed anywhere else.

• 57:07Alex Cranz?

  See, I kind of disagree.

• 57:10Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 57:11Alex Cranz?

  So I don't play games as often as you do, obviously. I think just where I'm sitting, it feels like a lot of the games I've seen, especially the AAA games, those games that people really get hyped on, those games for people like me who don't play a lot of games and we only kind of hop into this space on periodic basis. A lot of those games feel really strongly influenced by Zelda, particularly the, the ability to kind of go everywhere and do kind of anything. And then like, this could be because before Zelda came out, I was just playing Horizon Forbidden West forever. And that game is like, just a direct line from Zelda. Like, just virtually identical in a lot of ways.

• 57:50Speaker 07

  Are you sure it's a direct line from Zelda? Because Horizon Zero Dawn was pretty much the same thing.

• 57:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but you couldn't float around on a little parachute.

• 57:58Speaker 07

  Okay, okay, okay, you're right. That, that is a big, I, I can caveat my previous answer in that the real, the big thing that we've seen from Zelda that everybody else is doing now is paragliding. That is the thing.

• 58:12David Pierce?

  Which is the greatest game mechanic in video games. So like, in that sense, good job to Zelda.

• 58:18Alex Cranz?

  It never stops being fun. And I found myself just like playing Horizon for the best being like, "Oh, it's just, I can't wait for Zelda. I love doing little floaties and stuff like that." But yeah, I think, and I feel like we saw a lot of clones or attempts to clone Zelda after the first one came out in 2017. And most of them weren't successful, obviously. But I think it has kind of opened up people's brains. And what I really hope comes from this game is this game is built on the same engine as the last one. And I actually really like that. And I wish more, more video game makers would not need to reinvent the wheel every time they do a sequel. And sometimes just be like, actually, we just want to like tweak a few mechanics and tell a really cool story and put you back in these spaces.

• 59:02Alex Cranz?

  And like, it seems like Zelda is doing that. And everybody should, should take note because it works. It's fun. For the five minutes I've played so far.

• 59:10Speaker 07

  I think it would be a really worthwhile experience to talk to other game developers at like these AAA studios. Because one of the things that we're starting to see now are game developers getting their hands on Zeldas and freaking out about how the physics engine works. And remind, and mind you, this is still running on the Switch, which is extremely underpowered hardware, right? It doesn't hold a candle to your Xboxes and your PS5s. But you can take, you know, the, the clip that's going around right now is that you have this like, you know, metal rope bridge that you attach to some wheels and you send it across some lava. And the physics is just like completely like accurately represented in this astounding way. And I would love to hear game developers talk about why this works so well.

• 59:54Speaker 07

  And how like almost magic it is that Nintendo was able to get this work on such underpowered quote unquote hardware.

• 1:00:00David Pierce?

  Yeah, our colleague Charles Pulliamore talked to the, the creative leads. And one of the things they said to him about that was they like, I think they called it like fake physics. Where it's this idea of like, even when it doesn't follow actual physics, it follows how physics sort of should be intuitively. Like if you hold a big thing and throw something, it's going to do more damage. And it's like intuitively it tracks and there's so much of. That in this game like even if the thing that you do wouldn't actually happen in the real world. It feels like it should happen and it does and it's it's I can't explain how that feels, but it's so cool and so unusual in a game like this. But I want to talk about the switch thing because this is the thing that has stuck out to me the most. One of the things that has occurred to me is that there's a lot of like Roblox and Minecraft in a game like this.

• 1:00:45David Pierce?

  It's so big, it's so open, it's so about like creation and tinkering and playing and like, at least in my experience so far, the the actual sort of plot of the thing is kind of ancillary to just like figuring out what this world is and what you can do and how it can work. But it works offline and I can do it in a thing that I hold in my hand. Like I played it, I played three hours on an Amtrak the other day. Like I can't play any other games on Amtrak because they all have to be connected. They all require really great low latency interconnect connections. But this I can like pick it up, I hit A three times, I hit A one more time and I'm back in Zelda. And there's just like something about this hardware, it's less powerful. The screen frankly kind of sucks. I still have the original switch. But there's something about it that was like more enticing than my typical process of like

• 1:01:29David Pierce?

  booting up my PlayStation and waiting an hour for it to load and the internet connection being screwy. And it's like, I it just felt better to me. I don't know if that's been y'all's experience, but the switch actually feels like perfect for this game to me.

• 1:01:41Speaker 07

  Absolutely. I think that's another thing that speaks to Nintendo's uniqueness is that they say that they want to be not accessible in terms of like accessibility, but accessible as in wide ranging. And because, you know, people are grown and they have grown jobs and they have kids and other people are, you know, they're kids, they're they're like, you know, 10, 11 and 12 years old and they don't have the capability or the interest in doing like, you know, the 4K ray traced crisis, whatever. And that's what makes the switch and by example, this game so accessible because it is, you know, on this cheaper hardware that everybody has and everybody can play. And there is a very relatively low barrier of entry.

• 1:02:23Speaker 07

  Like they do that stuff intentionally because they want to appeal to as many people as possible and it works and it works really well. They know who their audience is. They're not going after, you know, our Tom Warrens who wants everything to be ray traced or whatever. They're not going for the people. Who need to see like every single pore on Kratos's face. That's not, that's never been their bag. That'll never be their bag. And they know that they have the people that will spend hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours on this game alone for the rest of the year. They've got their audience locked in. They're very good at that. And that's why the Switch does what it does and this game does what it does. And you don't need an internet connection to play it.

• 1:03:01David Pierce?

  First of all, shots fired to Tom Warren. Tom, come on this podcast and yell about ray tracing anytime you want. We're ready for you. But no, I think one of the funniest things to me was reading the comments on your review, Ash, and a bunch of people were like, oh, why didn't you talk about performance? It only runs at 30 frames per second. And in almost every single case, there was a reply to those comments saying, yeah, it doesn't matter.

• 1:03:23Speaker 07

  No.

• 1:03:24David Pierce?

  Like, running Zelda at 60 frames per second is not the reason that Zelda would be great. Like, that's not how that works.

• 1:03:29Speaker 07

  Exactly. And that's another thing about, you know, this particular game and Nintendo's business ethos overall is that this game sold 10 million copies in like its first three days, right? And it is completely offline. It is, you know, runs, has these terrible, you know, 720p graphics and, you know, 30 FPS. And people bought it en masse because it doesn't matter. There are no multiplayer options. As far as we know right now, there is no like microtransactions, no, you know, there'll probably be a story DLC later and stuff you can buy to, you know, add to it or whatever. But, you know, it doesn't have a battle pass or anything like that. It's just the single player experience that demands people's attention.

• 1:04:13Speaker 07

  And that's kind of refreshing when you have games like Diablo Immortal and when you have games like, I don't know, Call of Duty and, you know, Overwatch, where every AAA studio seems like it has to pump out these looter shooters that keep you on a hamster wheel for as long as possible while, you know, they're, you know, taking money out of your wallet. And that's just not what this is. And people respond to that. And I hope more people see that from Breath of the Wild and now Tears of the Kingdom and want to emulate that. Like, there was a while ago where people, the discourse was, you know, single player games are dead because, you know, the landscape is dominated by your Fortnites and your Call of Duties. And it took a game, I hope it takes a game like Zelda to, for people to realize like, that's not the case anymore.

• 1:04:54David Pierce?

  One of the things you said in a couple of your stories, Ash, is that A, you've never really fallen for Zelda games before, which is also true of me, including Breath of the Wild. I played it a little. I was like, oh, this is neat. And then I never really had the sort of compunction to keep going. And then you said in another story that you were surprised at how much you liked this game because you tend to need structure and sort of rails to play on, which also resonated with me as somebody who loves like the Arkham Knight games are some of my favorite games ever because they're just like, go there, do that thing, go there, do that thing, go there, do that thing, run around for a minute if you want, go over there, do that thing, congrats, you win. This is the opposite of that in a way that at various times has been very exciting and absolutely infuriating to me. I spent like two and a half full hours walking around on that first island that they drop you on after the training stuff, trying to figure out what the hell to do.

• 1:05:39David Pierce?

  And some people are like, that's fun. You get to explore. I think it just sucks. It drives me insane. But I'm curious for you, what it was that tipped it kind of the other way where like this game resonated despite being a person like me who needs a game to kind of tell you what to do all the time.

• 1:05:53Speaker 07

  You have to make your own rails and put yourself on them. And I think Tears of the Kingdom, more than Breath of the Wild, has a good way of making you make your own rails. And then while you're on the path that you've set for yourself, you can see things like on the periphery that you can go then and explore. So the way that I crafted my own rails is that I wanted to uncover all of the map. So when I first got off the tutorial island down to, you know, Hyrule proper, I'm like, okay, well, I'm gonna investigate all of the sky towers so I can unlock all of the map. And then when you're traveling from place to place to place, you like, you know, see somebody with a little quest thing up and you're like, oh, okay, this is a low lift thing that I can do while I'm on my

• 1:06:38Speaker 07

  main quest, which is not to save Zelda, but you know, cartographer's experience. And while you're on that, like that main quest, you, you kind of find these little side quests that you can do on the periphery that kind of like expand from there. And so from after I discovered all of the towers, I next wanted to do the shrines because I like those puzzles. Those puzzles give me good brain feeling, good brain scratch. So, you know, from, from the, the towers, I go to the shrines. And then from the shrines, you know, you go to the underworld, which Kudos to Nintendo for like completely obscuring that from all of the promotional materials. It was a real treat to explore the depths and go down into the depths for the first time. That was, that was great. And then from there, you know, I want to explore

• 1:07:21Speaker 07

  the, explore the depths. The depths is this dark place where you can't see like five feet in front of your face for the most part, but they have these like little light roots that will light up the area so you can see what you're doing and where you're going. So I went completely sick of mode and found every light root in the depths and then from that, you know, while I'm doing all of these different side quests on the way, I learned that there is a one for one, that the, the light roots in the depths have a corresponding shrine on the overworld. So by, you know, the transitive property, if I can unlock everything on the depths, I can find their corresponding shrines in the overworld and through that I can unlock the shrines on, in Hyrule. And it's completely absorbed my life.

• 1:08:04Alex Cranz?

  What kind of inspired you to create those rails? Cause I think a lot of games do that. Like Skyrim was one where you, you could create your own rails, but also the first time I played Skyrim, I was so overwhelmed by the, the breadth of things I could do that I turned the game off. Like it was too much. And then I had to come back and, and then like, okay, I'm going to get into the plot. I'm going to let the plot kind of like get me into the game and then I'm going to go. And then this game, that's not necessarily the case. Like you, you get kind of opened up pretty quickly and then you guys both sounds like are saying, okay, yeah, I'm actually okay with creating my own rails and figuring myself out in this game. What, what was the little twist of this game that kind of like said, okay, I know how to create my rails here in a way I don't typically?

• 1:08:45Speaker 07

  I think for me is I don't like exploring without, you know, a direction to go. And I think one thing that was really great and really well done about Tears of the Kingdom is specifically that first part where you have to unlock all the sky towers. And the sky towers, they illuminate the map, but how they do it is that they shoot Link up in the air, like they're firing him out of a cannon and you have to, and you go up and then there's this like breath and pause, like you're on top of a roller coaster before he starts plummeting to the, to the ground. And the thing that, you know, makes Tears of the Kingdom such a triumph, technically speaking, is that you can see everything. And when the closer you get to the ground, you can start to see little visual points of interest. Like, oh, that looks cool. I want to go over there. Or, oh, I can see the shrine from up here, so I'm gonna go over there.

• 1:09:30Speaker 07

  So that's how I was inspired to like, create this own, you know, system for me to follow because I know that when I'm doing this, I will find other things that are also interesting on the way and I could just build my entire experience just from that. Just from that, like, little thrill of discovery.

• 1:09:47David Pierce?

  That is cool. What's your strategy as a explorer like that? Are you like a read a thousand guides on the internet and go for it? Are you like a die a million times, see what happens? Like, what's your, you like, land on Hyrule, where do you go? What's your plan?

• 1:10:01Speaker 07

  It's like a bit of a happy medium between the two. So I got on to the ground and I'm like, oh crap. What next? I don't know what to do. This is too big. I don't want to do this. I guess I'm just gonna mainline this main story quest and see what happens.

• 1:10:14David Pierce?

  You just described the part of the game I am at precisely right now. That feeling is exactly where I'm living right now and I need to get out of it.

• 1:10:20Speaker 07

  Exactly. And then I'm like, okay, well, Pura told me that if I unlock this sky tower, I can see more of the area and it'll help them with their thing. And then I got up and then I looked down and I'm like, okay, I can do this. That looks interesting. That's a shrine. What's that over there? What are these cool little, I don't know, drawings on the earth? What, what is that? I want to see what that is. And through that, like, initial experience, I was able to create this, like, branching web that set me on this path to have like 175 hours in this game. It was completely not by design at all. All like totally emergent gameplay. And I think now that the game is out, like, you know, before a game is out, like, you're kind of on your own. You have to figure it out because you have no help.

• 1:11:04Speaker 07

  But now that the game is out and the guides writers are doing the Lord's work by putting up all these, like, you know, guides and walkthroughs and whatever. Whenever there's a time when I get stuck or my patience wear is a little thin, I can now like, look up something and it can. Help me. Like, I don't need a step-by-step now because I've had so much time in the game. I don't need a step-by-step, like, walkthrough of what to do. I just need a hint for where to go and I can figure it out myself. And I like doing that. Like, I tend to, I get that little, that feeling of, I didn't need any help and I did this all by myself, because I'm a big girl. So I have, I get too much of a good feeling out of that to want to look up guides too much, but there are some parts where I get like, okay, this is too much. I need a little help. Tell me where to go. So it's a little bit of A and B.

• 1:11:48David Pierce?

  Yeah. Quick plug both for the stuff that you and Charles and Andrew have done on our site and also our friends at Polygon who put together, like, the most detailed guide I've ever seen.

• 1:11:58Speaker 07

  That interactive map is ridiculous. It's incredible.

• 1:12:02David Pierce?

  If you need to know anything about Tears of the Kingdom, it's in Polygon's guide somewhere. It's very good. We'll put it in the show notes. The thing about all of this, though, is I think there's, like, something amazing that this game has done with kind of the way it thinks about puzzles, right? And you can put things together and you can use Ultra Hand to move things around, infuse things. And I sensed in your review, Ash, that you were struggling with the tension between like, okay, this dynamic is very cool. I can do so much stuff. This world is big and cool and exciting and open. And is that all coming at the expense of, like, making me care about the characters and story and sort of world that I'm in? Do you still feel that, having, you know, 178 hours in? Do you, do you find yourself sort of more attached to the people, places and stories than you did?

• 1:12:47David Pierce?

  Or do you still kind of feel that tension?

• 1:12:48Speaker 07

  I wish I could care more about these people and I don't. And they try to make you care. And it just doesn't work. It's just, you bounce right off of them, I think, more so than what I did in Breath of the Wild. So it's much different in Breath of the Wild, the way the story is told, because it made you care about the characters that you were, the champions, right? And they, and they were already dead. So you go through the game and Link doesn't have his memories and you go find the memories and you relive these memories of these people. And like, oh, I have a soft spot for you, like, because, you know, you, we were friends. I don't remember you anymore and I, you know, and, but I can't have that friendship now because you're gone.

• 1:13:29Speaker 07

  And I think that created a sweeter, better narrative moment than anything Tears of the Kingdom has done. Because Tears of the Kingdom story, it might as well not even be mentioned. You have to save Zelda. And there's a really hot goat dude, and there's a really hot archaeologist dude. And there's, you know, a really hot city full of women. And there's a really hot fish guy, and that's it.

• 1:13:52David Pierce?

  It is like an unusually sexy Nintendo video game, I will say.

• 1:13:56Speaker 07

  Nintendo is funny because they totally realized that everybody was like, were super horny for the fish prince. And they were like, okay, calm down. We're gonna marry this guy off in hopes that you guys will like chill out. And, you know, it's not gonna work, but I could totally clock that they did. They're like, you know what? Y'all are too much. Let's, let's get our boy married up and away from you sickos, so.

• 1:14:18David Pierce?

  I mean, there's nothing better than a sexy bad guy. That's just true.

• 1:14:20Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I.

• 1:14:21David Pierce?

  So one of the things I think is so interesting about Breath of the Wild and seems to have really influenced Tears of the Kingdom. And Ash, this is a question for you, and I'm curious if you're gonna get to like, from 178 to like 500 hours. Because the magic of Breath of the Wild was that like still now, people are playing it and discovering new things they can do and new ways to beat the game. And it's an increasingly weird vibe over in Breath of the Wild, I think. People are just like getting real weird with it, how to do everything. Is Tears of the Kingdom gonna have that same thing where like you're gonna be able to sort of play the game 100 different ways, 100 times? And six years from now, you're still gonna be finding new things about it?

• 1:14:54Speaker 07

  Oh, absolutely. What I'm starting to see are people like recreating the tricks and the trick shots from Breath of the Wild into Tears of the Kingdom. But like the thing that has like dominated the discourse for the weird things that you can do is Korok torture, which makes me very sad because they're just baby.

• 1:15:11David Pierce?

  It's so weird.

• 1:15:12Speaker 07

  I don't, I don't understand, like you people need therapy.

• 1:15:15Alex Cranz?

  Those are the little guys with the leaf faces, right?

• 1:15:17Speaker 07

  Yes. And then in Breath of the Wild, like you found them in these like weird places and they gave you a little seed. And then you collected all like 900. Yeah, like, yeah, ha ha, you found me. And then you get like 900 of them and then the payoff for doing that is like really lackluster. So I guess people are taking their frustrations out on them in this new game.

• 1:15:35Alex Cranz?

  I definitely was gonna do it, and I didn't on the first one.

• 1:15:39Speaker 07

  No, I can't bring myself to do it, but there are so many different varying ways that you can violate Geneva Conventions in this game that is gonna give this game just as long a tail as Breath of the Wild had, because your creativity is limitless. The number of, with the number of different devices that you have and the ways that you can deploy them, we're gonna be seeing crazy stuff in perpetuity. Like, and that's the most exciting thing about Tears of the Kingdom for me is because I'm not that creative, I'm not really a good builder, like, I don't, I don't get joy from that at all. Like, I just wanna make the thing that is the most functional, that will do its purpose. I don't need any kind of flash or panache or anything like that. I don't have the patience for it. But watching

• 1:16:20Speaker 07

  other people do that stuff is like, I have a good time. I could watch hours of it. And just the fails too, in addition to like, all of the successes. Like, you know, you, you jump up and then, you know, Link accidentally gets hit in the head with his own creation because it fell out of the sky or something like that. I love that stuff, and I can't wait to see that stuff. I can't wait to see speedrunners break this game. They have already. They're gonna break it more, and I can't wait to see that and just see all like, oh, that's brilliant. Like, just today, like, the, the things that I'm learning from people is just so fulfilling to me. Like, there's in the depths, you know, it's dark, and they have like, a little zonai device that is like a flashlight, right? That you can use, it consumes energy, but you can use it to light it up. But I saw someone today, like, they made like, a little cart to drive around in the depths, and instead of sticking a

• 1:17:05Speaker 07

  light, a lamp on it that consumes energy, they stuck one of those little bright bloom seeds that you have that, you know, that you can throw that will light up an area like a static flashlight. I'm like, I never thought of that. It's so brilliant. It doesn't consume any energy. That's cool. Yeah. Just the things that I'm learning from people, like, that is far more exciting to me and pays off so much more to me than just like, my own experience, that even in itself has been extremely rewarding.

• 1:17:31David Pierce?

  And Nintendo always says that they don't intend for people to do the weird stuff, but it's like Nintendo, come on, like we know.

• 1:17:37Speaker 07

  Come on.

• 1:17:38David Pierce?

  You want people to do the weird stuff.

• 1:17:39Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:17:40David Pierce?

  If you're gonna give people, what's the line in Mythic Quest, the like, time to penis? And it's like Nintendo knows, right? Like, this is a thing. It's gonna happen. It's great content. Everybody wins.

• 1:17:50Speaker 07

  I mean, if they didn't want us to do it, like, they would not have given us all of the different weird things that they gave us. Like, there's one Zona device that's called a stabilizer. And I've only used it like, maybe twice. It's a thing that where you hit it, it will orient everything attached to it like, straight up at like, a 90-degree angle, right? It seems like the most useless thing, like, throughout the course of the game that I've played, because like I said, I've only used it like, once. And that's because they give it to you in a shrine. But seeing people, like, out in the wild, like, make use of it, I'm like, oh, okay, yeah, that wasn't for any kind of thing that they thought, oh, this is cool. This is specifically a sicko-enabling device. This is for people, because they want people to do crazy stuff, and they know it will

• 1:18:35Speaker 07

  make it easier if they had something that will make sure that whatever you make will stand the way that you want it to make, and that's why that was made. You can see it.

• 1:18:43David Pierce?

  Ash, your job is to turn sicko-enabling device into an official video game term. We're gonna make this happen. This is, this is it. That is the official term. SEDs. This is, this is everything. All right. We all have more hours to play. Alex, we're gonna check in on Friday, and every Friday from now on, to see who, which of us has played more. It's gonna be great. Ash, Alex, thank you both.

• 1:19:03Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 1:19:04David Pierce?

  Thank you.

• 1:19:06David Pierce?

  All right, that's it for The Vergecast today. Thanks to everyone who came on the show, and thank you so much for listening. I have a lot of Tears of the Kingdom to play, and I appreciate you listening to this podcast instead of playing Tears of the Kingdom. That is a great honor. There's a whole lot more from this conversation at theverge.com. As always, we'll put some links in the show notes, but read the website. It's a good website. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or ultra-hand tips you want to tell me about, you can always email us at [email protected], or call the hotline, 866-VERGE11. We love hearing from you. Send all your thoughts and questions. And, starting next week, we're gonna do a hotline question every single episode. So, keep them coming, and we're gonna get through as many as we can. This show is produced by Andrew Moreno and Liam James. Brooke Minter is our editorial director of audio.

• 1:19:50David Pierce?

  The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai, Alex and I will be back on Friday to talk about Microsoft Build, Instagram's new text-based social network and all the other news of the week. See you then. Rock and roll.

• 1:20:13Speaker 11

  Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in. An all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at Odoo.com/vox. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash vox.

• 1:20:49Speaker 12

  Support for this show comes from Harvey AI. The future of law is agentic. Not just tools that assist, but AI agents that navigate complex matters. That's why Harvey created agents that can do the work from end to end. They build a plan, pull from secure data sources, run subagents in parallel, and draft the work product ready for your review. So you delegate the work and own the judgment. Trusted by more than 60% of the Am Law 100 and leading Fortune 500 legal teams, Harvey is the AI operating system designed specifically for legal work. Harvey, AI tailored for law. Learn more at harvey.ai.