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Strike While the Blood is Gushing and Romancing the Bear
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Transcript
Opening Jokes and Podcast Introduction
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello guys. We saved all the, uh, did we save enough pearls of wisdom and insight for the podcast or did we all just lose it all on the pre-show?
00:00:11
Speaker
I think we might have lost all the magic in the pre-show. I don't feel it anymore. I've been barely talking to you guys because I've been too busy. I've been too busy, you know, working very hard, not playing anything at all. So, you know, I think I've got plenty of pearls of wisdom for you guys.
Introducing Esquiring Minds and Hosts
00:00:32
Speaker
So we're just going to do recommendations this week and nothing else, right? And it's going to be just recommendations. Is this me? Yeah, that's it. Just one game. And he's going to give us a play by play of every scene and every moment and review it on a one to 10 scale. He's literally playing it right now in the background.
00:00:46
Speaker
Yeah. God, I wish. I wish. So in case people don't realize, this is episode 23 of Esquiring Minds. It's for August 17th, 2023. And the show is just three lawyer friends goofing around for our enjoyment, not for your enjoyment. That's going to be obvious soon. I'm Andrew Leahy. I'm a tax and technology attorney from New Jersey. I'm joined as always by Jake and Jason. Jake is the guy that plays a lot of video games.
00:01:12
Speaker
Hi. Well, not yes. Okay. Yeah. Everybody. Yeah. Uh, but yes, I, I'll accept that mantle. Uh, my, I am Jake, the Florida construction and land use attorney and youth consultant for the podcast and youth consultant.
Discussion on Youth and Family
00:01:30
Speaker
Yes. I, you know, I, I'm not really happy about that youth consultant designation because it feels unfair. You're not that much younger than I am, Jake. No, no. And I'm right in the middle baby. I'm just a little baby. It's Ernie. You're a, your son younger than me, I think. Okay. That's pretty weird metric. I'm not going to, I'm not going to go into, I don't want to upset anybody's operational security here. So, uh, you know, we won't go.
00:01:56
Speaker
Uh, too crazy here, but, uh, who was born on 2000. So we got, he's Jake's an attorney in Florida and he has a son of a certain age. So that's it. They've zeroed in. They got your house. They're looking at you right now. Yeah, that was a fake year, by the way. Locked in son was born. The son was born in 1992.
Jason's Federal Jury Trial Experience
00:02:17
Speaker
So, Jake plays Baldur's Gate, spoiler, and he's a lawyer. I'm not Jake. I'm Jason. No, that's Jason. He also plays Baldur's Gate. I am Jake's friend, and I'm also a lawyer. I see people's bad bosses. I'm getting ready to go to trial. My first federal jury trial, I've tried jury trials in state court, but this is my first one in federal court. Wow. Mainly because- Are you excited, nervous, or all the same?
00:02:42
Speaker
You know, if you're not nervous going into a trial, then probably something's weird. So I'm nervous in a sense, but I'm excited. This is a case that I've had with me since I started my own firm. It's like a four and a half year old case. And that's mainly due to the way federal courts are. And it's a little bit due to the way that COVID was, because we were scheduled to try this case almost exactly a year ago.
00:03:11
Speaker
uh, and it ended up getting continued because COVID messed up everybody's trial schedule and most particularly, uh, criminal defendants who are entitled to certain speedy trial guidelines. And so whenever a speedy trial, uh, guideposts had to be met, then they bumped the civil trial that was scheduled in order to
00:03:31
Speaker
you know, comply with federal law as it relates to making sure that criminal defendants aren't just hanging out there forever indicted, but not yet. So is this a employment case? Yeah. Yeah. It's a fair labor standards and family medical leave act case. It started out bigger than that. That's what made it through summary judgment. I'm excited. It's going to be fun.
00:03:54
Speaker
Cool. It's interesting seeing the difference between state and federal. I've never done a federal trial. I've done like a dozen or so state trials, but I've watched a few federal trials and from the perspective of a watcher, it's so much more organized.
00:04:13
Speaker
in a federal trial because the judge is handling a lot more. People seem more together with it. But from an attorney's standpoint, that's so much more stressful that you have to hit your spots a lot more often and you can't shoot from the hip as much. At least that was my experience here.
00:04:34
Speaker
Yeah, there's a degree of preparation that is expected from federal judges that is probably less frequently expected from state court judges. I imagine it's a product of there being, I think, many fewer federal trials and also the
00:04:56
Speaker
process for becoming a federal judge is insanely political and complex and heavy. Since they go through this crazy process of being nominated by the president, grilled by the Senate Judiciary Committee, then voted on by the Senate, you get some pretty serious jurists on district courts. They have high expectations because high expectations were had for them.
00:05:24
Speaker
Speaking of that, not to say that state court judges are bad. Don't hear that. Don't hear that. Yeah, it was a little alarm. We love state court judges. Love you. We might have some listeners that are state court judges. We gotta be careful. Yeah, that'd be cool. Yeah. If you're a state court judge and you, and you're listening, please. And you're offended. And you're offended. Email Jason. If you're not offended, email me.
00:05:46
Speaker
If you're offended, that was all Jake's voice that was just speaking. It's an AI thing. Jake is the problem. There I ruined it. He's got the AI thing. He's just ruining Jason's life. He's calling up people, and it's terrible. AI on this podcast? No, certainly not. I think we're going to talk about that. But speaking of federal
00:06:06
Speaker
court and state court, et cetera.
High-Profile Legal Indictments
00:06:08
Speaker
I think we have too many topics, one being Apple's going to buy Disney, but the other being, and I think we can cover this quickly, the hilariousness of Trump being indicted for a fourth time, and along with 19 other individuals.
00:06:21
Speaker
Yeah, that's the, that's the, you know, DeSantis being, or not DeSantis, Trump being indicted. That's old news, right? But having like a million other people being indicted with him. Who are these guys? Like Rudy Giuliani, obviously many people have heard of him. Um, and then like all these other lawyers, the, uh, with the federal society guy that, um, was getting disbarred in California.
00:06:45
Speaker
The name isn't coming to me. Do you know what I'm talking about? Is it Ray Smith the third? No. Is it Kathleen Latham? Is it Robert Chilley? No. Keep going. David Shaker? It's such a long list. We might be at this for a while. Is it Ken Cheesebrow? That's a great name. That's a fake name. You made that up. No. That's a real name. That's his name, yeah. Michael Roman, Sean Still, Sydney Powell, Scott Hall. That's a Georgia bail bondsman. Scott Hall has seven charges against him. He's just a bail bondsman.
00:07:15
Speaker
Yeah, fella. Man. Misty Hampton? No. Steven Lee? We're just reading off the end time. I'm waiting for him to get one. Harrison Floyd sounds like somebody's screwing up Harrison Ford, right? Oh, I love Harrison Floyd. He's a great actor. I loved Harrison Floyd when he was on the Colts. Right, exactly. Yeah, Trevian Cootie, Mark Meadows, Jeffrey Clark, and Jenna Ellis. So we named him. That's everybody. It's got to be one of those. I thought it was the... Jake's got nothing.
00:07:45
Speaker
I'm gonna have to Google this. Federalist society guy. I'm betting it's Ray Smith the third, because he's got 12. I don't know. John Eastman. Oh. Was he that excited? No, he's indicted. He's super. Nine charges. Yeah. He's the cowboy hat guy, right? Yeah. Oh, was he? I don't know. I don't know about that. Yeah, I think he wears a cowboy hat a lot.
00:08:07
Speaker
I mean, you said the name Kenneth Cheesebrook and Federalist Society, and I just assumed that's who it was because that's a real Federalist Society sort of name, feels like. I mean, I'm sure many of the attorneys are members of the Federalist Society. The reason I singled out John Eastman was because he was on a leadership board of some kind that
00:08:28
Speaker
on the federal society and federal society basically didn't do anything when all this happened and they were criticized for their non-statements about John Eastman for not saying anything about him. Maybe this is just me not knowing anything about Republican politics or like conservative lawyers who kind of mill around in that field.
00:08:55
Speaker
John Eastman, I thought, was a fairly reputable guy who's had a pretty big fall from grace as a result of this akin to Dershowitz and his fall from grace where he just
00:09:09
Speaker
It rolled around in the slop with Trump and his gang, and now he's all covered in the things that pigs get covered up in. And Lin Wood as well. Has he always been a crackpot, or did he represent somebody kind of on the right side?
00:09:26
Speaker
I think I think I think Linwood was was always crazy, even if he represented somebody on like. Gotcha. Righteous endeavor. Right. That was my interpretation. Like, I am not a I'm not a Linwood scholar, but that was my. As you say, it's what your bumper sticker says. It's what your T-shirt says. You remind us every every episode. Yeah. What scholar? I'm not a Linwood scholar. No. Yeah. Rudolph Giuliani has 13 charges. That is one more than Donald Trump for in this indictment. That is rough. Yeah.
00:09:57
Speaker
I'm just like imagining the, are you, are you, can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you fine. Sorry. It's me. It's me like, uh, it's, it's, he's not outpaced Trump in total indictments because Trump has 90 something now, right? Yeah. Yeah. So you said he had at one point, I think it was before this, you tweeted right. That he had one for every year he's been alive.
00:10:18
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So what did he get 13 in the Georgia, uh, indictment? And so 12, sorry, 12. Okay. So that, what does that take him up to 90 something like that? Something like that. Yeah. It's, it's a high number. It's a lot of, uh, it's a lot to ask your political supporters to pay for. Yeah. I mean, my, the thing that I'm thinking about in this is like, how many court hearings and like,
00:10:42
Speaker
getting prosecuted once is a huge pain with how much stuff you have to deal with. He's getting prosecuted in four different jurisdictions. And man, that's this this political campaign season is going to be is going to set a real like hits historical record of how stupid it's going to be. Yes, absolutely. I agree. This is going to be very
00:11:08
Speaker
It's not going to be good for society. It might have some entertaining moments, but it's going to be the entertainment right before we're all screwed. I am more optimistic about it being good for society because I think that Trumpism and the whole
00:11:27
Speaker
I'm not going to use the F word for it. The whole uber conservative authoritarian streak could stand a good backside paddling. And I think that's what we're going to see. But I mean, do you think he doesn't get the nomination? I know this isn't really what the show is, but like it's hard for you to imagine he's trouncing DeSantis by
00:11:50
Speaker
Really, with every demographic other than lawyers, lawyers for some reason prefer DeSantis over Trump, I guess, because DeSantis is a lawyer. But I find it hard to believe he's not going to get the nomination. And like, I don't know, after 2016, I'm not so confident he won't win. I don't think he'll win. I mean, I feel more confident than ever he's probably going to get the nomination.
00:12:13
Speaker
If there's nothing that if there's no better mark for a Republican is having liberals hate you and they hate and liberals hate him to 90 to
Trump's Legal Challenges and Strategy
00:12:27
Speaker
90 indictment charges or whatever. Yeah. You know, obviously, that's not a description that people would agree with, but it's just like a way that some people will look at it. Right. And that's the paddling is like it's going to be a lot of
00:12:43
Speaker
Is it, is it a paddling if, uh, people still like you after you get indicted? Um, I wouldn't be surprised if he just dies. Uh, at some point I'm natural cause having nothing to do with not, not Jake related causes. No, like down the wrong pipe.
00:13:01
Speaker
I feel like the conclusion of this is because he can't lose. That's part of his personality. He can never really actually lose. He can't go to jail and the governor can't pardon him.
00:13:16
Speaker
The president can pardon him. He's going to have to go through the normal criminal procedure. Right. And that's going to be a stressor for that very old man. So anyway, will it be directly? I mean, does he have to how much does he have to kind of be checked? I guess he has to be present in court. Right. But that's a great question. I'm wondering when they're going to like, what are the pretrial release conditions that are going to be on this? Because
00:13:44
Speaker
You know, the D.C. case, they're already talking about speech restrictions, which are normal. Right. And we're going to talk about travel restrictions when it comes to campaigning. I'm not sure how much Donald Trump needs to actually go anywhere to campaign. Right. To fundraise maybe, but not secure votes. I mean, like he he has you get the fundraising to get the attention. He has the world's biggest mouthpiece. Right.
00:14:11
Speaker
Everything he says becomes news everywhere. That's a mighty big compliment to Truth Social there, Jake. He doesn't even care. This is the thing. This is how much he has the world's media wrapped his around his finger. He doesn't have to be on Twitter and he's not.
00:14:30
Speaker
He's like typing his insane stuff into notepad and taking a screenshot and it's still showing up on MSNBC on all the news shows. He could do iPhone notes and just text it to 10 reporters and it would be on front pages everywhere.
00:14:45
Speaker
So you made kind of passing mention of this, but the Georgia governor, so the newest charges on the indictment are in Fulton County, Georgia. It's the seat for Atlanta, one of the five or six counties that Atlanta sits in in Georgia. And apparently, because of Georgia's sordid history with the KKK,
00:15:10
Speaker
the governor of Georgia, to the extent that he might be inclined to pardon Trump for his crimes in the state of Georgia, which I don't know how Brian Kemp feels about that currently. But like, that's pretty interesting that he is unpardonable for these state crimes. That's pretty, you know, pretty spicy.
00:15:29
Speaker
And it's interesting that this happened specifically in Georgia because Georgia is one of those state administrations that actually was like, yeah, no, we are certifying this election. This election was legitimately done. And it seemed to have very good results electorally for Brian Kemp and Raffensperger, the secretary of state. You'd think they might've been punished, but actually they became very popular with the general population.
00:15:58
Speaker
And so he has less to they have less to to lose, maybe because they are already appear. They are already on their on Donald Trump's bad bad guy list, his rights of of of grievances. So we'll see. I'd be concerned with the amount that he has become the party. Kemp would.
00:16:21
Speaker
see fit to like, look, you know, Trump shouldn't be president again. I can like imagine the statement, right? Trump should not be president again. He has too much baggage. There's too many problems that come with him. You know, you should vote for me because I assume Kemp expects he's going to run for some higher office at some point. But like, you know, this was a political hit. This was I mean, why not? Like, why not toss some part if he could, if Kemp could do it, even though he sort of held the line and didn't fall in line for Trump before for something like this is really relatively little cost. What would like what would be the harm to him?
00:16:51
Speaker
Is he going to not get reelected as governor because he pardons Trump? I don't think so. Like not pardon the felony conviction, but commute the sentence or something like that. Yeah, he shouldn't. He's an old man. He's morbidly obese or whatever. He shouldn't be. Can he commute the sentence? I didn't even think about that. Well, he can't pardon him. So if he can't pardon him, I can't imagine that he can commute the sentence either. I think that's taken out of the sentence. Yeah, kind of. I mean, there's a meaningful difference in this situation because I don't
00:17:20
Speaker
I mean, I'm ashamed. We should probably edit this out of the podcast, but a felon can't become president, right? Isn't that a constitutional requirement? I think you can, and also you can become president while sitting in jail for a felony. Eugene Debs ran, right? He got like a million votes in the early 1900s. I think that the prevailing theory is that the only qualifications to run for president are in the Constitution, and the Constitution doesn't
00:17:49
Speaker
You're not allowed, if you're convicted of a seditious conspiracy, I think that might disqualify you under the 14th Amendment. Sure, doesn't this qualify as that? I get all that, but instead of thinking of it this way, let's play it out. Everyone tells him that clearly now. It doesn't matter if you win, there's no way you can be president. Everyone, meaning the media, people around him, his opponents, whatever. He says, I don't care, I'm running. He gets the nomination, and then let's say he wins in the general.
00:18:19
Speaker
Who is going to step in and say no you are not president the Supreme Court. I have questions as to whether that's the only one, right? The administration is just like yeah never know we don't consider this Then you're in like constitutional crisis territory, right? It's like the military is basically it. Yeah. Yeah, well then Supreme Court becomes like a
00:18:41
Speaker
says this is a political question or something like that. We have Kamala Harris showing up to the hearings to certify the election results. And she says, no, I'm not going to certify it. No. Right. And then we're back to where we were or what he wanted in 2020.
00:19:00
Speaker
Yeah. All right. Well, so we don't know what's going to happen. Awesome. Yeah, no, we love living in a world that we would consider purely theoretical, never going to happen like four years ago. Because quickly, I don't know if you guys still listen to The Daily, but the latest episode was on Hunter Biden's current like political position and the sort of motivations that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden are going to have to not have Trump be president again because he wants to like
00:19:28
Speaker
have him get the needle or something. I don't know exactly what he thinks. He thinks Hunter Biden is part of some vast seditious conspiracy against the country. It is an interesting, it is a very sort of, if you read this in a history book, it would certainly be about another country. This thing where like a major point for both parties was that, who am I going to jail if I get in? Which political opponent am I going to throw in prison?
00:19:51
Speaker
I think Trump sees his way out of this winning. Like I think he's very highly motivated to win. I know that, you know, in order to pardon himself, I know that it doesn't work in Georgia, but hey, get rid of the other two, two federal? Does he have two federal and two state now? Yeah. Right. Two federal, two state. Yeah. So get rid of the other two. Yeah.
00:20:10
Speaker
I will say we definitely have stuff in our history that's pretty dang wild in terms of you wouldn't know that we were so unstable.
Historical and Potential Mergers
00:20:27
Speaker
Obviously back in the 1700s, back in the very beginning, we weren't super stable and anything could have broken us at any time.
00:20:36
Speaker
And then in 1860, I don't know if you guys have ever sort of read about that period But the whole south half of the country just kind of kind of went nuts there. Well, there's the election was at 1876 where like, you know Was it like it was like the KKK or the proto KKK basically made it basically
00:21:00
Speaker
physically prevented black people from being able to vote, which won the presidential election for the Democrats. And so there was like a backroom deal over who became president. Really? No, it was a backroom deal so that like the Democrats won through this campaign of violence. And then the deal was reconstruction ended and Ulysses S. Grant stayed president or was president.
00:21:28
Speaker
1876, the election of 1876 was between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden. And Tilden got 4.2 million votes and Hayes got 4 million. This is not a name I've heard before of the whole losing the popular but winning the electoral. That's interesting.
00:21:48
Speaker
Anyway, this is not presidential history. I might be wrong about the year. My point stands. There's been some crazy stuff that has happened over the years, and so this isn't that crazy. Oh, it's crazy. It's crazy, but it's certainly crazy. It's mostly, I think, that no one alive has lived through a period quite this...
00:22:09
Speaker
disruptive. You guys remember Jake, you probably don't remember when the big scandal was Ross Perot is running as a third party candidate and he's going to siphon off votes from George Bush. Like that was the scandal. Is that a scandal? I didn't know it was a scandal. I just knew the thing. Please go back to those days.
00:22:26
Speaker
I would be delighted. Oh man, a video surfaced the other day of a, I think it was a Texas primary or some sort of Texas Republican thing where George Bush and Ronald Reagan and some other also ran, were on a stage together and they were talking about
00:22:48
Speaker
somebody posed a question to the panel of candidates and it was like, should immigrants who are in the country illegally be entitled? Should their children be entitled to go to public schools? H.W. said yes. Yeah, I'd have to say reluctantly that they'd have they'd have to be able to go. And it was, oh, man, this guy's not. Oh, it was like, why are we punishing these kids? Like, we want these kids to like be here and be a functioning part of society. Why do we want to create two classes of people, children in this country?
00:23:18
Speaker
uh where like oh no you're not going to get an education and so we're going to have this caste system that people are going to be separated into like can we let's I probably still wouldn't be a republican but could we go back to that republican party please like
00:23:33
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you start to get sort of a nostalgia for anything other than this. You can look at George W. Bush videos and go like, ah, funny little guy. Look at him. He says, we need to take the war to where the terrorists are. And then he says, now watch this drive. And then he hits the golf ball. That's funny. He choked on a pretzel. He wasn't sending. He would never send a mob of people dressed like Vikings to the capital. No, he sends him to Afghanistan and Iraq.
00:23:59
Speaker
Yeah, sure. But that's different. Hey, so do you guys think that Apple should buy Disney? I think so. Should they? Great question. I say yes. I vote yes. King of Segway is here. Yeah. So Apple buying Disney, does that even get through regulatory scrutiny? That's like a shot. I think it has a shot. Yeah. I think it has a shot. What gets stopped now?
00:24:24
Speaker
It's two huge companies, and that's where you first start off thinking, oh, this is going to require a lot of regulatory scrutiny. With some limited crossover, they're mostly in pretty different fields, because Disney does not make, they do make a lot of technology, but not in the same way. They don't make computers. They don't make cell phones. They don't make cell phones that you strap to your wrist. They don't make AirPods.
00:24:53
Speaker
They don't make laptops. What they do have in common is they both have among the top 10 most important streaming services. Each of them has a streaming service in the top 10 most important. I don't know what Apple's numbers are like, but they're not Netflix-level numbers. Is it top 10, though? Is it really that high, Apple TV plus? I think so. Oh, wow. I think so.
00:25:16
Speaker
There's some crossover there, but I think where you really start getting into more serious scrutiny for is this acquisition going to be allowed to pass through, is this merger going to be allowed to occur, is when you're locking up a horizontal combination of folks who are in the same business and you're locking that up. This really isn't that.
00:25:43
Speaker
Apple buying Dell would get more, does Dell even exist anymore? Like Lenovo or something. Yeah. Yeah. Dell's great. They're XPS. Yes. Yeah. They're still making those things. Oh yeah. Yeah. XPS 13 is a classic.
00:25:59
Speaker
Still. Apple buying Dell or Apple buying LG or something like that would be much more problematic from a regulatory standpoint, I think, than Apple buying a company like Disney whose businesses are making movies and owning theme parks and running cruise lines and stuff like that. I think it would get through.
00:26:22
Speaker
It is funny to think about Apple owning my area. Owning Disney and all these theme parks and stuff. You hear about all these corporate deals. By the way, we're talking about this because there are rumors about Apple buying Disney because Disney
00:26:45
Speaker
looking very strong in, I wanna say 2021, all of a sudden looks very weak, just like two years later. It was a contract that expired with some sort of, didn't they lose most of their numbers in India? I think we talked about this at some point.
00:27:03
Speaker
Uh, they're hot. You mean streaming? Yeah. That was relatively new. If I, in India, but they definitely lost, they lost a lot of numbers. I don't know why. I don't know why it was it a contract. I thought it was a contract thing. Yeah. They had something with like the big telecom and I thought it was India. It was like a package deal kind of thing, which obviously they were paying for.
00:27:25
Speaker
They bundled in Disney Plus or whatever the analog to Disney Plus in India is. They bundled it into like we do with Verizon or something like that where it gets bundled into your cell phone service and I think their subscriber numbers pretty radically dropped when that free period ended for most new customers.
00:27:47
Speaker
And it highlighted Disney's relatively poor performance in the streaming field, which they leaned into and bet on pretty hard, I think. And so I think that's why they're floundering. And then you have Iger coming out. I think this is what's really reignited the talk. Iger came out and said that basically,
00:28:11
Speaker
TV doesn't feel necessarily like it's core to Disney's business and so they're looking at maybe spinning out ABC, spinning out ESPN possibly. I think that's what's got people really interested and that coincides in time with Word coming out that Apple was making pretty serious offers to get that Pac-12 TV package.
00:28:33
Speaker
And so like, Hey, Apple, you can own the whole cow. Yeah. Well, right. And like, uh, and this was like part of the whole story of the pack 12 basically ceasing to exist. Uh, and not literally ceasing to exist, but basically it's almost there. It's on its way. And so like, if Apple is making plays,
00:28:55
Speaker
They just made a big play to get into MLS and really give MLS a boost, and that seems to be going pretty well. And now Bob Iger is out there saying, hey, maybe we need a partner or need to offload our TV business. ESPN becomes available, and that's an easy play for Apple to make to Apple, who's sitting on 60 some billion dollars in cash right now with a 2.8 trillion dollar market cap.
00:29:20
Speaker
They could pay cash to buy ESPN and suddenly you have sports.
00:29:26
Speaker
Yeah. The idea that you need live TV for sports is not true if you have an Apple or you're hooked into the Apple ecosystem somehow overnight, basically. So the question I would have is the test is if it would harm consumers and reduce competition. And I don't... It's hard for me to envision how it particularly would. I don't think there's a lot of people that are fleeing from one to the other between Apple TV Plus and Disney streaming service, unless I'm missing something. No.
00:29:55
Speaker
Those products are so different. Apple TV plus. Yeah. Yes. And Disney, Disney plus is is like very good in terms of numbers. It has like 150 million subscribers, which is right. I think way, way more than Apple TV plus does.
00:30:12
Speaker
Probably. Well, so the TV plus thing might have the same thing because you get it free with almost everything. So they may also always be sitting on a base of numbers that is inflated by people who have not paid for their year. But also they barely make anything for Apple TV plus. Yeah. But what they make is super good. That's right. Like Disney's quality has been not great in right across the board for like, I guess, a year and a half now. Oh, disagree.
00:30:38
Speaker
Well, I'm not counting Andor. Yeah, hold on. I'm not counting Andor. Andor, obviously, is one of the best shows of all time. But what else? What do they mean? That's good. Parts of The Mandalorian was interesting. Parts. I don't know about the last year. I'd have to look and see what's going on. I was going to say, well, you're talking about season three. There are parts of season three. We're OK. Yeah, we're OK. That's all I'll give it.
00:31:02
Speaker
Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was pretty good. Yeah. Wakanda Forever was pretty all right. I liked Black Panther better, but is that a year, though? That feels longer than a year ago. That was, I think, this year. It was last year. I saw it in a theater in November of 22. Are we talking about Disney writ large or Disney streaming stuff? Disney writ large. Oh, OK.
00:31:30
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's not a lot. I think I'm wrong. Apple is not in the top 10 streaming services. So like basically they're just buying their way into a better streaming service. But I think the Disney's problem isn't that they have low subscriber numbers. It's that they're hemorrhaging cash that they're losing money. They're spending $200 million on secret invasion, which was terrible and also not good, not
00:31:53
Speaker
Like, why are you doing that? And they're not charging enough. They weren't charging enough, at least. They were charging like, they were growth, growth, growth, growth, growth. They're going to, you know, sell this for $7 a month while spending $200 million per season of a show and get like,
00:32:17
Speaker
a ton of different shows get, you know, just tons of quantity of shows. Um, and then the movies aren't doing well either. Uh, at least compared to what they need, like the Indiana Jones movie, I guess the thing is people are have liked some of these movies. I've heard the Indiana Jones movie is pretty good. I didn't see it, but I heard that too. Yeah. But also I just have no, I was like, I don't care enough about this to go. I would, I would rather go see Barbie. Um, the, uh,
00:32:47
Speaker
Like they're relying on remakes and old properties so much that it's hard to, that I just don't care about. Like I, um, though I, this is my complaint. We've drifted into my complaints about what Disney's been doing, which is like,
00:33:06
Speaker
They are doing, they've been talking about having been trying new things with a lot of these like Marvel shows, but everything still falls to the same formula and the quality hasn't been there. And then they do these cookie cutter remakes. The remakes just make money. That's all they do. I don't, and yeah, but it's been trickling down to like a bad, a bad feeling about Disney.
00:33:32
Speaker
for across the market, seemingly. It seems to me that if you pull, I'm surprised to hear a company like Disney saying that TV is not where they want to be because it seems like movies are like in the toilet, like COVID all but killed theaters. And so are you just going to have, is that all you're going to be is just movies? You're still going to have a streaming service, but it would be
00:33:56
Speaker
just for movies? And then how does it work with like, what are the licensing agreements? How is Apple, you know, doing the next season of The Mandalorian, which is a Disney, you know, now an Apple, you know, in this fantasy land of a future where Apple has purchased TV from Disney. There now it's like an Apple TV plus property, but
00:34:15
Speaker
It's not because I assume Star Wars would be retained and look at all the Lucas films would be retained by Disney proper, right? So what is this without a full like spinning it off? I don't know how you disentangle all these little bits.
00:34:27
Speaker
Really? Like, I guess they probably keep Disney's name forever, right? They just leave it named Disney. It's not going to be a, you know, made already presented by Apple. The magic kingdom, the Tim Apple cut, you know, they replace all the Walt Disney stuff with Tim apples. He walks out and he takes a bite out of the apple and that's the, that's the little logo. Yeah.
00:34:49
Speaker
I mean, the way it makes sense is you have two really, really recognizable brands that are aligned with each other in as much as they don't do the same thing. They don't even really do that much that's similar, but they do it in similar ways where they have kind of a premium experience that is very, very good at extracting money from you at a premium price.
00:35:12
Speaker
and like okay they're kindred in that way and also the products that they deliver are by and large pretty good costly pretty good and there's like the did y'all watch the imagineers series on disney plus.
00:35:29
Speaker
I think so, yeah. Over COVID, maybe. When Disney Plus first came, that was like the first thing they had, right? Yeah, yeah. It was one of the first things that was on there, where it was like a six-episode thing on the Imagineers, who built Disneyland and Disney World. And I see a lot of kinship between the Imagineers and kind of the Apple ethos of engineering and over-deliver and stuff like that.
00:35:58
Speaker
they've been kind of dancing with each other for a long time because Steve Jobs owned I think 12% of Disney through his next investment in Pixar and then Disney's acquisition of Pixar. When he leaves Apple and he starts next, great book is Walter Isaacson's book on Steve Jobs. It's interesting from a history of Apple type perspective. So he leaves
00:36:18
Speaker
Apple, he's fired from Apple, and he goes to, and the Pepsi guy takes over Apple, he goes to found next, which is like an alternative computing system, which runs on BSD and is the proto operating system to Mac OS 10. Because when he then comes back to Apple, he brings what he did with next over to Apple. And that's where you get Mac OS 10. And Apple starts to take off as an actual competitor again. But anyway, point being,
00:36:44
Speaker
Next, I think Pixar used Next Computers to render their early movies and stuff. So they couldn't pay for them. And he got ownership stake in Pixar. And then when Disney acquired Pixar, around the time of his death, I'll say maybe in the year or two prior to his death, he owned 12% of Disney. And that at the time they talked about. Yeah. Yeah. He was at one point the single largest shareholder in Disney, I think. I think so. Yeah. And so they're related in a lot of those ways.
00:37:14
Speaker
I think it could happen if you listen to the podcast Scuttlebutt, you hear very, very informed Apple folks. I don't have any Disney podcasts in my playlist, but if you listen to like John Gruber, he doesn't think it's ever going to happen. If you listen to Jason Snell, like he thinks that there's a, like in the next five years, there's a pretty decent shot that Disney gets bought out by somebody and not really anybody. Right. Nobody makes more sense than Apple.
00:37:40
Speaker
Nobody could, who else could do it? Well, Google could do it. Netflix could probably pull it off. Meta could probably do it. Microsoft could probably do it. None of them make as much sense as Apple doing it because of the kind of similar ethos that both companies seem to have though.
00:38:01
Speaker
Yeah, the family friendly kind of general sense as well. I know it's not strictly true, but that is the image they kind of give off. You know why Microsoft makes sense is Disney has always been trying to get into video games with mixed success and Microsoft has Xbox.
00:38:19
Speaker
Yeah. Sony could scoop up Disney then. But you want to see, you want to see two companies that are match made for each other. Disney has tried to get into video games for years and sucks and so has Apple and they suck too. Oh, that's true. Yeah. It's like two people can't swim saving each other. They'll get together and make terrible video games. Yeah. They'll get together and they're going to make Mac exclusive video games.
00:38:40
Speaker
Right, but don't work. Yeah. Promise things they can't have it. But anyway, so watch this segue.
Social Media Dynamics
00:38:46
Speaker
I believe that Apple could certainly purchase Disney if Elon Musk could purchase Twitter. And speaking of Twitter, look at that, right? That was smooth. Wow. I announced it and you guys still didn't see it coming. It was so smooth.
00:39:01
Speaker
Apparently, Elon Musk has been throttling links to places he doesn't like on Twitter. I'm shocked. It seems that it is true that it was throttling, but my initial reaction was I thought it was pretty likely that this is just bad infrastructure. They're not paying their bills for something, and that's it.
00:39:21
Speaker
Well, the thing was that it was only to, it wasn't to every site, right? It was to only certain sites, which is why people were like, Oh, this is, this is an intentional annoyance, which is funny because it's only annoys people who are on Twitter. Like if they are using your service service, you have them, they're getting annoyed. Yeah. So congratulations. I have people in the store looking to purchase things and you're spitting on them. And it's why, why them? Why don't you go out on the sidewalk and do it?
00:39:49
Speaker
It doesn't mean like it makes it a better not being on Twitter as a better experience. So right It doesn't it it is spiteful and nonsensical and therefore very consistent with what we expect which makes me think it's happening and
00:40:04
Speaker
It's a funny thing too because this is something that when Twitter first was only 144 characters. So the way that they were doing this was there are things called URL shorteners and everybody has seen them. It's like t.co slash and then some random little hash of characters. And what that's intended for is if you share a link on Twitter and there's a character limit obviously on Twitter, the link would eat up a lot of your characters.
00:40:27
Speaker
URL shortener just takes some long, you know, newyorktimes.com slash politics slash whatever, whatever.html and shortens it all down to a more compact, you know, fewer character using URL. And early on in Twitter, there were lots of third party. Bitly was one tiny URL was another. There were all these like third party companies that still exist for the most part but are not really used on Twitter that much because if you share a link on Twitter, it automatically generates that now and you don't have to do something to shorten your URL.
00:40:53
Speaker
And when that first happened in like whatever, oh, nine or 10 or something, when Twitter started defaulting to shortening with the T.co URL shortener, the sort of tinfoil hat people were saying, and now, as it turns out, they're not tinfoil hat people, they were right. It was sort of a problem because that becomes like the canonical link. If Twitter gets too big, which was ridiculous to talk about back then, because if more than like 100 people were on it at one time, you got the fail well, right?
00:41:21
Speaker
But if it ever got too big, these would be like the canonical web links to these articles. And now it's not in the hands of the content creator or the publisher or whatever. It's now in the hands of this third party social media company. And that could be a problem. And for the most part, obviously, that argument didn't win out and T.co became the default and you'd have to go to great lanes. In fact, if you were to put an already shortened URL of some other company in a tweet from Twitter, it would still get shortened to T.co.
00:41:49
Speaker
So you weren't even able to really truly share a link on Twitter since like, I want to say 2012 or 2013. You can submit your link to be shortened by Twitter and then that can be shared. So they're always injecting themselves in as a middleman. And weirdly now, it actually came true, like that someone is actually meddling with it.
00:42:08
Speaker
but now everybody's doing that right like facebook doesn't facebook do that now too and instagram does that too so like it just became a thing that everybody did right uh and i'm sure there's some there's certainly some like there's like ad insertion and there's your data is being used for all sorts of stuff in that regard
00:42:26
Speaker
Yeah, that's the other, that's like the dirty part about all these like redirect links is like every time I copy a link and I see like a long string of characters after a question mark, I'm like, Oh, you're tracking me. I know what you're doing. Right. I am deleting this. Hopefully it still works. And yeah, it's
00:42:48
Speaker
It's one of those ways where we I become uncomfortable realizing exactly like how how I'm viewed by the internet community Do the thread and needle thing on a board and follow you through the internet across a day? Yeah, like and then he went to Twitter and he clicked in your yeah So apparently what he was doing Yeah was the sites he didn't like Washington Post New York Times Certainly threads which is another follow-up thing because I want to know if you guys are using threads. I'm not and
00:43:16
Speaker
Blue Sky, I think, was another one. Basically, like any liberal media outlets and then any alternative social media platforms that are viewed as in competition with Twitter, which I assume is all of them. But I mean, I don't know. I don't think like they didn't get so granular that like our Mastodon instance, esq.social, from what I can tell, that wasn't throttled because like they don't even know about that. Right. But I would bet, you know, Mastodon.social may very well have been that's that's one of the main instances and it has like two hundred thousand users.
00:43:43
Speaker
So you can kind of see where his paranoia clicks in and where he's not so concerned. Yeah. I'm just a jump ahead. I'm still using threads. I'll say I haven't been using social media as much the last few weeks. Why not Jake? Because he's working hard. I'm working hard.
00:44:08
Speaker
Yeah, but uh, what of why i'm still using threads like it's interesting because Uh, you know some people get on threads and it's like no nobody's nobody's on here at all And then some people are like huge on threads that were never huge on twitter or mastodon. Yeah I've seen that it's like Some people just like hit the threads algorithm just right and now they're big on threads and that's you know sustaining threads and then twitter like
00:44:35
Speaker
Twitter is just like a place I hop in and hop out really quick. I'm never scrolling through Twitter a lot like I am through Mastodon and threads. The problem is that with Mastodon it being a
00:44:52
Speaker
you know, only, only, uh, linear feed, what's the only chronological, chronological. Yeah. And following a ton of people, um, I just miss so much constantly. Oh yeah. And the second I open, I talked to, I mentioned this, uh, Andrew in the context of you, uh, hearing about rate limiting, I opened my mastodon feed and I'm like,
00:45:18
Speaker
waiting for it to load like thousands of of toots right when I miss it for a day or two and I'm just like okay there's got to be a moment to deal with this algorithm is what we need something surfaces things for you you know
00:45:34
Speaker
Yeah, for me. Yeah, just for you. Yeah, I don't want to think about what I'm consuming. I just want I just want to inject it into my veins. So in this case, it would be me at the helm of that just sort of meddling with your day and turning certain things up. Let's see if we can get them to go to talk about this other movie. Makes me happy.
00:45:52
Speaker
Yeah, Blue Beetle, I'm going to turn that knob up and see if you get all
Local Reactions and Skepticism
00:45:55
Speaker
into that. You know, honestly, Blue Beetle looks better than most Marvel movies coming out these days. So I might even watch a DC movie. There's your hot take right there. Blue Beetle looks better than Marvel movies. People in Philly are very upset because they've plastered, they put a big projection, I think, on the art museum steps of Blue Beetle, like a big ad. And oh, this is a landmark. How could you do this? Whatever. By the way, this is the place that at the base has the Rocky statue from
00:46:20
Speaker
No. Rocky 2. How dare they mess with Sly like that? Right. How dare they hewn the good name of Sly with a bad movie. Blue Beetle. Geez. Good though. I think it's probably good. It's not Rocky, I'm sure. Every time I go to turn on threads or like, oh, hey, I've got some free time here. I would love to use threads. I think I don't want to do this on my phone. I'm sitting at my computer. I want to do this in a web browser.
00:46:48
Speaker
And it's just not there. And I can't even use. Yeah. And like it's, it is insufferable for me to, uh, to sit at my phone and like reading with my thumbs. Fine. But I spend enough time texting my family and texting my friends with my thumbs on this tiny little screen that, you know what, what I am engaging with the internet. I want to engage with them sitting at my computer.
00:47:17
Speaker
probably because I'm an old, but whatever. Get a web client and then I will use it a lot more. As it stands right now, threads is probably my most used social media, but that's not saying a lot. Well, unless you count Reddit, I'll scroll through Reddit a lot more than I do threads.
00:47:37
Speaker
I, I really, I agree. They really need a web client. Like I like having at work, like when I'm working, including at home, um, having like a 15 second brain break where I just click to another tab and I take that 15 second break.
00:47:54
Speaker
And I don't open my phone or anything. I don't open anything. I just have a tab ready to take that 15 second break. And not having that for threads is definitely a downside. Yep. And see, yes, quickly. I mean, I personally use it to quickly see, like, is there some major news story I'm missing? Like, is there anything going on? I mean, I think it's what a lot of people that are even older than us might do is where they would have 24 hour news on all day. And it's not they're not really paying attention to it. But like, you know, if
00:48:20
Speaker
Carter dies, they'll, you could, so there you go. You know, we're seeing a retrospective and there he is in black and white. And now I know what's going on today. I feel clued in. But yeah, the web thing, I mean, when it first came out, they're not being a website or client or, you know, any client for, you know, obviously any Apple stuff. They're more of, I think, a Windows company, which is a little slight on Windows and Facebook. Initially, they're not being that, gotcha. They kind of rushed it. They were trying to get out ahead of whatever Musk was doing at that time. They were trying to strike while the blood was,
00:48:50
Speaker
gushing. But now it's been like, blood was gushing. I'm combining strike while the iron was hot and smelling blood in the water. While the blood is gushing. Okay. Sure. I guess that's good advice for some situations.
00:49:12
Speaker
Um, but speaking of that, what do you guys, do you think this cage match is ever going to happen between, uh, Elon? Absolutely not. I don't care. I don't care. It's becoming less fun as it becomes as Zuck is leaning more into this guy isn't, isn't serious. And then Elon becoming more desperate in terms of appearing like he wants to fight. Elon's never going to fight.
00:49:37
Speaker
Um, and they should just stop talking about it because Dan's never going to fight because I'm rooting for a real fighter. I'm rooting for the fight to occur and then a sinkhole to open up in the earth and swallow them both. Yeah.
00:49:55
Speaker
Okay. That's sort of your, your contribution. We had strike while the blood is gushing. You're hoping for the apocalypse. This is sort of like an uplifting episode. It's not an apocalypse. It's a, it's just a sinkhole. Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, like just like a water main issue, just like infrastructure problem that they built on a swamp that they shouldn't have built on. And then they opened up below them. You know, I just want these two particular guys in the octagon smited. I want them smited. Okay.
00:50:22
Speaker
That's not too much to ask, I don't think. A sinkhole, a little like, I don't know, what do you call those little isolated, like super local, hyper-local tornadoes or something like that? Like just drop one of those little storm cells on only that octagon. Right. And everybody just sees that show. The observers are unharmed. They just see these two getting like kind of cheese grated around inside that cell, right? Just sort of banged against the thing and turned to mush. I like it. Yeah. Yeah.
00:50:52
Speaker
All right, I think we have time for one more thing before we do recommendations because you guys are gonna talk forever about this game that I don't know anything about But I found that I mean, it's not obviously the story is not funny, but the ongoing Louis Briswa debacle is Somewhat amusing if you can sort of set aside that it seems like the two people at the head of this for terrible people I mean,
Legal Profession Scandals and Alternatives
00:51:11
Speaker
it's a shit. It's a schadenfreude situation kind of except a bunch of poor people Yeah
00:51:17
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's the problem is like, there's the people who are actually being spoken of, which I feel bad for, obviously, and then what was 100 attorneys that left, you know, there's a decent number of those people that had no idea, right, that these were, you know, despicable human beings or whatever, because you just you're, you're this poor associate attorney, these are partners, these are named partners, right? That wasn't one of them actually, but no, I guess not. They weren't named at Louis Brisbane, but they were named at the new place.
00:51:39
Speaker
So, so this was the story we talked about, like, whatever, a month ago, where Louis Briswa had 100 attorneys leave to go form a new firm. That was what, Ronin and something or other. Right. And Barbara and Barbara and Rainan, Barbara and Rainan. Oh, good grief.
00:51:59
Speaker
And then Baba Anne, yeah, didn't didn't do so well, because Louis Briswa released some emails from the two partners, Barbara and Rainan, that they were terrible, anti-Semitic, racist, all sorts of horrible stuff. Right. So then they stepped down and but the firm wasn't initially the name wasn't initially changed. Then it was changed. And it became I don't even remember now. But at any rate, that firm is now shut down. It's over.
00:52:27
Speaker
Rest in peace. Yeah. No, there is no more. Yeah. Rest in torments. And everybody moved to other places and all was settled, I guess. Yeah. I assume that everybody's just going to end up at Ogletree or something like that and just be
00:52:48
Speaker
you know, the people who were doing their jobs quietly with their heads down, like doing good work to the extent that employment defense can be considered good work, like great, like you'll find a place to land. I think that these terrible guys will find, will do just fine for the rest of their lives, but gosh, they really shouldn't.
00:53:14
Speaker
Absolutely. If I could make a prediction, I would say that they'll have a contrite apology, and I've learned a lot, and then they'll just do speaking engagements from this forever, and they'll be absolutely fine. The same way politicians, they just leave, and then they just charge $50,000 to go talk to some college students somewhere, and they're fine. They never have any real money. Come and hear my redemption story.
00:53:36
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And like tell people because I remember going to like in law school, we had these things where like people came and like talked in the pro rep class and would tell these stories that were meant to be these like, oh, you know, and I just needed to borrow a little bit of money from my Ulta account. So I used it to pay my own mortgage or whatever. They would tell these stories that were supposed to be these like, so, you know, make sure you never do that as though these were like little slip ups or something like this kind of thing. Right. Where no, we all nobody's going to do that. We all get that. We read the book. We got
00:54:05
Speaker
People are not making your, I mean, I'm sure they are, but like, I don't think they're going to be convinced. Nobody's going to like furiously write down notes when one of these idiots goes and speaks to the school saying like, oh, don't, you know, don't be a racist, a horrible human being, or at least don't send emails if you are.
00:54:19
Speaker
They could do that if they're a good enough speaker. I'm learning about this speaker circuit, speaker fee situation, now doing bar event stuff. And it's like, man, it's so hard to get a good speaker, like somebody who's really good at captivating a crowd. Honestly, you get basically any topic where somebody is a good speaker that can captivate a crowd, they'll find a way to make money.
00:54:49
Speaker
And if they're willing to do that for a living, for money, that's the normal thing. They'll probably get paid more than they ever did as partners at the Louis Prismon. I don't know about that. I bet Louis Prismon makes pretty good money. Yeah, that's true. They probably minted money by bilking clients while they were screwing poor abused employees. But why now? Oh, okay.
00:55:16
Speaker
Probably. If you're Lewis Briswa, let us know what you think. Email us at Jason at Rams.land. Apologies to Mr. Lewis and Mr. Briswa. SueMyBadBoss.com. Both of my uncles. What? I didn't tell you guys. This has been very uncomfortable. My uncle is Lewis Briswa. Oh, my son.
00:55:42
Speaker
So do you want to move on to recommendations for almost an hour? Sure. You probably need to go first, Andy. Two screens. I have to go first. I don't know if I have anything that interesting. Oh, because you guys are going to talk about Baldur's Gate forever.
00:55:55
Speaker
We I yeah, I'll talk about ball just gate the should I well we're waiting for you go go Oh, my only right. It's not a recommendation. I'll just say I cuz I've never talked about it We've talked about I have we Jake is also a moderator on esq.social It's a mastodon instance. We also have a lostodon.org, which is like a kind of
00:56:17
Speaker
like a look up like a yellow pages for P for attorneys and legal professionals on the fetaverse. And so most people are listed in there that were already members of the law fatty list. But if you're interested in looking to see like, well, who else is on the fetaverse who else is in ozone mastodon. It's a one of many useful sites and
00:56:36
Speaker
Yes. Now, Baldur's Gate. Also, well, hold on. Matrix, have we talked about Matrix yet? Oh, we have not talked about Matrix. Yeah. Matrixslat.esque.social. Chat.matrix.ask.social. Yes, I'll put the link in the show notes. Great URL. It's awful. I'll set up a redirect, too. I'll get like ESQ chat or something. But anyway, I'll put the link in the show notes. Matrix, for people who don't know, is like open source Slack.
00:57:04
Speaker
Yeah. And it's not, it's 98% of what you want from, from Slack, frankly. Um, so like, I think, I think it's great. Yeah. I like it. I did it mostly as a hedge. You kind of guessed it. I think Jake, you said it. I did it mostly as a hedge against the eventual terms of service coming out from Slack. I'm just speculating. I don't know anything, but where they say they can take all of everything you talk about and use it to inform their AI, their Slack GPT that's coming out. So I just did this basically as like it, it,
00:57:31
Speaker
trying to learn a lesson from Twitter and Reddit and everything else that it's, you know, good to have another option. And so, yes, it would be great to eventually just go all Fediverse and have that be my, you know, the my pretentious thing is like, oh, I'm only on a federal, you know.
00:57:47
Speaker
I'll I'll make it my identity like, oh, I'm not on any of those, you know, centralized, very only for me. Yeah. But is it federated? Hmm. Yeah. Yes. Does it really? Yeah. Is it activity threads? Oh, that threads. That will be acceptable maybe later. But anyway.
00:58:07
Speaker
You'll be a huge hit at bar events, but that's that whole tone and what you're talking about. Yeah. Just saying, are you fatty? Also that I don't, if I, if I didn't know what that meant, like the things I would guess, I would just sort of say no and try to avoid the rest of the night. Yeah.
00:58:23
Speaker
All right, Baldur's
Baldur's Gate 3 Game Insights
00:58:24
Speaker
Gate, hit us. Baldur's Gate 3, the third one. This is the good one. This is the one that worked. Yeah. This is a very good, humongous game that came out like a... Well, it's been in early access for like two years, but it came out two weeks ago, I want to say. It's been in early access for two years?
00:58:44
Speaker
Yes, only the first act of the three acts. Oh, OK. So and it's like it's it's from the same studio that made Divinity Original Sin, which you might not have heard of, but it was very, very popular. It is it's connected to our podcast
00:59:05
Speaker
in a different way is that remember one of the third episode or something we did, we talked about Wizards of the Coast and Dungeons and Dragons and the open source rule set. This is a game that's based on Dungeons and Dragons rule set. And even their universe is a Dungeons and Dragons universe that they built on top of.
00:59:27
Speaker
It's a tactics kind of role playing game where you play a character and you interact with these other characters. It's all fully voice acted, mo-capped. The conversations are mo-capped. What is mo-capped? Motion captured as in like it has physical acting as opposed to just like characters standing there and talking.
00:59:51
Speaker
It is like an incredible achievement, I want to say. I thought that Zelda was like going to walk away with the most like memorable game of this year, but I I've Baldur's Gate surpassed it for me. No, it's all just Zelda still going to win it. Zelda has more much more mass mass market appeal.
01:00:11
Speaker
This has hyper nerd appeal. This is a nerd dream. I don't mean computer nerd. I mean Dungeons and Dragons. I grew up playing Magic the Gathering kind of nerd.
01:00:27
Speaker
Yeah, no, it is. It is very much. That's the funny thing is like I'm not. I don't like the Dungeons and Dragons like lore stuff at all. Like I'm not really into dragons and goblins and stuff. Me either. Me either. Man, they made it work for this and it's successful in a way that I don't think anybody was expecting. Like they peaked at like eight hundred thousand concurrent users, which is
01:00:54
Speaker
insane for a game that costs $60. And that is only on PC and has very strict hardware requirements. It is a hard game to run. It takes a pretty beefy PC to run it. And just compare it like
01:01:16
Speaker
That is not quite like levels of cyberpunk when cyberpunk being like one of the most hyped games of all time. When that came out, it isn't at that level, but it's like it's in the top 10 most high highest concurrent users on Steam when it came out of all time. So like
01:01:39
Speaker
Which is most of those top 10 are free games that are we have a ton of people playing where most people are not paying any money And so it's been successful in a way that I think is really shocked people and it's like so I if you liked Mass Effect
01:01:55
Speaker
Or Dragon Age, those games, this is like the just the right analogy. Yeah, Dragon Age, definitely more because it's, you know, Mass Effect was more streamlined. Dragon Age origins, especially. Yeah. It was streamlined sci-fi. Dragon Age origins was like a tactical, also more fantasy setting. It is like that game times a thousand, like in terms of depth and in terms of the
01:02:26
Speaker
quality of the production. It's just absolutely insane. The interesting thing to me, it is it is fun. It's engaging. It's fun. It's good storytelling. The gameplay is a little clunky, but the story is engaging in a way where like you can do a lot of different things. And if you want to be great, you can be like a
01:02:54
Speaker
very virtuous character. You can be a very evil character. You can be kind of middle of the road. You can be just purely self-serving. And you can make a huge range of decisions. And that huge range of decisions can have ripple effects throughout things that you would just kind of not expect. And there are just
01:03:20
Speaker
a very large number of potential outcomes from decisions and from luck occurrences or literally roll of the dice occurrences. You're constantly rolling a 20-sided die in this game to figure out, do you try this thing? Does it work? Does it not? This is a core Dungeons and Dragons thing, I think.
01:03:43
Speaker
It's fun. It's interesting. It's engaging. Having never played Dungeons and Dragons in my life other than as a video game, as Baldur's Gate, more or less. It's really fun. It is sprawling in a way that feels adventurous.
01:04:00
Speaker
and not like daunting. It is daunting a little bit, but it's sprawling. It is definitely daunting, I would say. Just looking at what's going on in terms of the combat, especially seeing like tons of buttons.
01:04:17
Speaker
and the freedom that it gives you. The freedom it gives you, it's not just about outcomes, it's also approaches. I've watched some people play it and do stuff where I was like, I didn't even think about doing that. I had no idea this could happen. Just as an example, there's a person who is standing next to an explosive and threatening to blow it up. And I talk them out of it or something.
01:04:44
Speaker
Sure. But that's what you do. Right. The other there was another option, which is you can turn invisible and steal the thing that they're going to blow up because you're invisible. And then they just look down and they're just like, what the hell?
01:05:01
Speaker
And they and they accounted for that. They accounted for you being able to turn invisible and steal the thing that they were about to blow up. Yes. And in terms of like an impressive achievement of like, yeah, that kind of scale and scope of depth. Right. Yeah. Like breath and depth. Yeah. Yeah. You know that you can do the approaches and they'll think they've thought about the approaches that you can do. They put they gathered. I'm this is my head cannon. This is my imagination. I think they gathered like
01:05:32
Speaker
20 different groups of the most creative, nerdiest dungeon masters and gamers, like Dungeons and Dragons gamers that they could, and just said, hey guys, go wild and just watch them. And maybe they fed it all into a chat GPT-4 or something like that, let them ingest that, and then said, hey,
01:05:51
Speaker
Uh, chat GPT, write a story, play out a million different possible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like write out the craziest scenarios here. And like, what would happen if there was a bear character in your party and you decided to romance the bear, uh, like, okay, are we going to have that scene acted out and ready to go? Like,
01:06:16
Speaker
Strangely specific example out there. This is how I was introduced to the game's existence by Mr. Schumer.
01:06:25
Speaker
Yeah. So that generated the fact that there is a bear romance scene. And by the way, bear is a human shifted into a bear anyway. Try to explain it. That makes it better. It gets way less weird. As long as it's a human soul, then it's fine. So that generated a ton of headlines of people being like, what the heck?
01:06:49
Speaker
It gets more depraved from there. It's definitely not for kids. It is rated M to be clear. They really go to depths that most games don't go to.
01:07:12
Speaker
The depravity is not forced upon you. You can play and be virtuous. I am playing a virtuous playthrough. No depravity here. Because people often like to, when you have all that freedom, you like to do something you're not doing in your regular life. So you are, you know, whatever you do, whatever you do in your regular life, that's that. But then you're going to be really nice in the game. And then Jake, you sort of see the opposite because he's a nice guy. But then in the game, he's got the bear.
01:07:39
Speaker
And, you know, I wasn't talking about evil, but yes, you can also be like super. In fact, you can be like a like there's an option when you're creating your character that like there's one character called the dark urge where you are a serial killer and you can't you play the whole game can like trying to resist or not your urge to kill people.
01:08:02
Speaker
Anyway, that's a great way to kind of do you remember when? The US Army put out the game America's Army the first person shooter and it was like an oddly good game It was a recruiting tool. It's the first person shooter There's basically set in you know, modern modern weapons and everything and it was built on like unreal tournament or something But anyway point being that would be a great tool there to just you know Go ahead and knock on the doors of the people that choose to do that and poke around a little bit and see what's going on You know what I mean? Check the check the crawl space for anything that shouldn't be there and that's it
01:08:33
Speaker
Sounds good to me. Yeah, so I've been asked the stupid question I always ask. Do you need to have played Baldur's Gate 1 through 2? No, I have not. I have no idea if there are any... There are some characters that I've met where I'm like, they're talking about them like they might have been in Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, but I have no idea. They might not be.
01:08:51
Speaker
Because it's a really old franchise, right? I feel like I've heard this name for 15 years, right? It must have been around for quite a while. So one is obviously not something you'd be playing on modern systems necessarily. It would be like PlayStation 2 or something. And this studio didn't make the first two. So it's like totally different. From what I've heard, it's like barely any connection at all. Except it's the same world. There is a city called Baldur's Gate.
01:09:22
Speaker
But that world itself is already D&D world. Right. It's all sort of similar to this. If you've played those sorts of games, there will be a lot of components that will be recognizable and like, oh, right, this is. Yeah. And I've looked up like some items from the game and it's like, oh, yeah, this is a D&D item. And I'm just like, OK, it's literally like, you know, it's the same stuff. I don't know. There's a thing. I'm going to look this up right now. There's a race called Get Yankee.
01:09:50
Speaker
And it looks like, yeah, they are. Yes, they're in D&D. So. Yes, and they they have more or less the same role as in D&D, I guess. So this is all. Gotcha. You can jump in now. So it's a story within that universe. And there aren't like I guess they aren't characters in the universe, but there are races. I don't know. I don't know. So I'm enjoying it not having no knowing any of this.
01:10:17
Speaker
Baldur's Gate 1 came out in 1998, 2 came out in 2000. And so it was like right in late high school and early college for me. And so like I was around people who played it. I think you can play Baldur's Gate 2 on an iPad now.
01:10:33
Speaker
Really? Yeah. And it does not meet the sensibilities of the modern gamer in terms of how it looks or how it plays, unless you're into things looking like Minecraft. Right. But, you know, it's fun if you want the story exploration options.
01:10:57
Speaker
Uh, but I don't think that you need to have played either one. I haven't played either of the ones, at least not in depth. I might have dabbled in college, but that was probably just primarily rebellion against, uh, having been sheltered against Dungeons and Dragons for my childhood growing up, fearing the satanic panic and Dungeons and Dragons. So. All right. Well, I think we will. Yes. All right. Thanks y'all. Play ball to skate.
01:11:27
Speaker
Play or don't have a bear in your party or you know, don't let people steal your data.