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121st Most Popular Technology Podcast in Australia on Apple Podcasts
95 Plays2 years ago
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- Attorney General James Sues Former CEO of Celsius Cryptocurrency Platform for Defrauding Investors
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Transcript
Introduction and Legal Disclaimer
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Esquiring Minds, episode two for January 5th, 2023. For the uninitiated, and that should be most of you, the show is just three lawyers goofing around for your enjoyment. And really nothing we say here should be taken as legal advice, but we are the 121st most popular technology podcast in Australia. So you can take all the tech advice that you want.
00:00:23
Speaker
Yeah. We've got that going for us, which is nice. None of us are Australian attorneys, but based on that, we're the number 127th.
Meet the Hosts
00:00:32
Speaker
Oh, no, that's right. It's not law, but you can accept us as technology advice. We are the 127th most reputable technology advisors.
00:00:55
Speaker
as long as none of
00:01:07
Speaker
All right. That was a flawless intro. Um, so now we just have to do names. I'm Andrew Leahy. I'm a, uh, tax and technology attorney from New Jersey. I had to say, I wasn't sure who I was. Um, I'm joined as always by Jake Schumer. He's a Florida local government land and use attorney. And, and I am very confused. I'm sorry. I was confused about the intro. This is only our second episode. Please be nice. No worries. This is all very casual. And, uh, the third voice you'll hear is a scourge of bad bosses everywhere.
00:01:36
Speaker
He's barred in Georgia and Indiana, I believe, but he'll find you wherever you are.
Political Comedy: House of Representatives
00:01:41
Speaker
Jason Ramesland. How are you guys doing tonight? Hello, I'm doing great. Pleased to be here. Pleased to see your sometimes smiling faces.
00:01:51
Speaker
I'm happy to be the 121st and rising most popular. I got it right. Most popular technology podcast in Australia. Apple. Yeah. Yeah. Parentheses Apple. Yeah. Yeah. We're in a, I don't know how we can move on to a hundred and 19th tonight, huh? Yeah. And set our sites on a hundred and 19th. Those Australians love us. I know it. So just about Australia, I love Australia too.
00:02:21
Speaker
Everything, of course. Just to sort of place us in time and space, are you guys following at all the drama going on in the house? We don't have to get into it. That's not really what this is about, but just are you enjoying the never ending votes?
00:02:34
Speaker
I'm watching politics through the holes in my hands as I cover my eyes, which is basically just looking at random mastodon toots and tweets, which is just like somebody mentioned some name like Bob Ross. I just see random senators' names or Bob Goode.
00:02:56
Speaker
Yeah, random house members names. Oh, this is the ninth time. I just I don't as far as I can tell nothing has changed in the last 10 votes. I don't think so. So yeah, I mean, now it's just like a
00:03:12
Speaker
the world's least productive filibuster, I guess. I don't know. I think this is a good insight into what it feels like to be British, having observed them in parliament trying to sort out arguments. And you guys ever watched the video of when they do questions with the prime minister time and how rowdy that stuff gets? That's what American Congress feels like right now to me. It's just this rowdy show. And like randomly,
Speaker of the House: Importance and Dynamics
00:03:38
Speaker
Matt Gaetz chimes in and votes for a guy who's not even in Congress to
00:03:42
Speaker
to be Speaker of the House. It's a special time. I've heard from many, many tweets, or many, many toots rather, that I keep seeing you don't have to be a member of Congress to be the Speaker of the House. I don't know if that's true. Is that true? I have taken that as red, but I have no reason to believe that that's true.
00:04:03
Speaker
I have no reason, I don't see why it couldn't be, but I accept, you know, I have no idea. It's hard for me to care at all.
00:04:13
Speaker
Because House Speaker of the House is like the face, right? But it's not that important. I think it seems like a terrible job. Basically, they're counting votes. They're they're they're they're swearing people in. It seems like a really bad job if you were to not actually have a majority. Like if something was to happen so that your party is not in majority, but you are the Speaker of the House, I think that is among the worst jobs in government. Yeah. John Boehner would be crazy. Paul Ryan saying a lot happier right now. Hmm.
00:04:44
Speaker
I may be crazy here, but I thought the Speaker of the House had at least some like agenda setting prerogative and maybe like committee assignment prerogatives. And so it doesn't matter zero, but that might be. Yeah. I mean, it matters. It certainly matters to the presidency.
00:05:03
Speaker
Like, but yeah, I guess it's more of a core question of like, why do you want why who wants this job? Who's like angling super hard for this job? Well, I feel similarly.
00:05:18
Speaker
Yeah. Do you need the name? Do you not know the name? You know, I've heard the name. But like, it reminds me of like, when I see somebody running for like bar president, I'm just like, I this seems like a lot of work, man. Like, what's what's gone? What is the benefit? This seems like a lot of work to take on a job. That's a lot of work.
00:05:38
Speaker
Apparently the party that controls the speaker controls the C-SPAN cameras. Have you heard about that? Like the reason why we're getting all these sort of interesting angles is because the camera people on C-SPAN have like kind of gone rogue. And so the majority party can kind of control like, look, we're going to aim it right at our people and that's it. We're not going to be sort of taking shots of people around sitting in different parts of the house. And since they don't have that, you're getting all these crazy little side conversations and stuff that they're picking up.
00:06:04
Speaker
So maybe that's why my favorite thing was my favorite thing to imagine right now is just the rogue C-SPAN camera operators like, Oh man, what kind of craziness can they get into? In like 10 years, there's going to be a jeopardy question about like for this in this year, we didn't have a sitting House of Representatives for 12 days. And this is the and this is the reason.
00:06:30
Speaker
And I'm going to know it and I'm going to be the old man and I'm going to talk, tell my kid who's going to be like, this is the stupid story, dad. Yelling and shaking your fist at the television. Yeah.
Celsius Network's Bankruptcy
00:06:42
Speaker
So in terms of topics we actually intended to cover, I think we were going to talk about the Celsius debacle. It's sort of become kind of our beat, sort of talking about crypto and technology. And we're talking a lot more about tech than law. But I think there's a little law. OK, so I think what we're going to talk about tonight was this Celsius network debacle. And for those who are unaware, Celsius was this ostensibly a cryptocurrency wallet company. But it was seemingly acting more like a lending
00:07:10
Speaker
Platform and it was headquartered here right here in Hoboken, New Jersey as all great Criminal enterprises begin in Hoboken. So to did this one and It is in bankruptcy and I think Jake you were gonna talk a little bit about sort of what what's going on here? What do you got? Yeah, and I do want to say that
00:07:33
Speaker
I am not a crypto expert. I am crypto adjacent. That is I own crypto. I listened to three whole Freakonomics podcasts about crypto and also a bunch of YouTube, watched a bunch of YouTube videos about crypto. So I would say I know more than 99.9% of the population, which still doesn't make me an expert because God, it is so complicated.
00:07:57
Speaker
And so I guarantee you some part of what I'm about to say is wrong. But yeah, so they were, they kind of held themselves out to be an investment bank. The CEO, the founder, Alex Mashinsky, put a bunch of statements out there, was selling it as, you put your money in, it's still your money, you put your Bitcoin in, it's still your Bitcoin, we're gonna get you interest. And the whole idea was you get these
00:08:23
Speaker
extremely high interest earning accounts, like 12% interest. And people were making a lot of money, but they were all invested in so much of it was invested in crypto. The second crypto went down and turned out that they were way over leveraged and a bunch of people couldn't get their money out. They froze all their users accounts and then they declared bankruptcy because they didn't have enough money to pay everybody.
00:08:52
Speaker
Uh, and yeah, about June of last year, by the way. Yeah. It's been a while.
00:08:59
Speaker
And a lot of people lost a lot of money. And one thing that people were worried about even before then was the fact that was the idea of if you have your crypto in a hot wallet, that is a wallet that's associated with an exchange just like a wallet account, a like a Coinbase or a Celsius account is what happens when they declare bankruptcy?
00:09:24
Speaker
What happens when do you get your money back
Misleading Terms of Service and Asset Safety
00:09:29
Speaker
or can a bankruptcy court just take it away from you to pay somebody else that that company owes money to? And so Celsius, despite having told all these customers that
00:09:45
Speaker
that you'd still own your money. It turned out the terms of service said the exact opposite of that. It said Celsius owns everything you deposit. We absolutely own everything you put in because the bankruptcy court said, no, this is Celsius is therefore we can take it. We can sell it and pay the creditors. What are you gonna say, Andrew?
00:10:08
Speaker
Yeah, to your point, it's not only I initially thought it was they have like a an account that's called like an I think it was called an earn earning account or an earn service something where there was this high yield interest rate. During some periods, there was a high interest rate. But it's the terms of service say that anything you deposit into their wallet becomes their property. It wasn't just this like, okay, I'm holding this out is like, invest this for me. This was anything you had in there.
00:10:38
Speaker
It was explicitly the opposite of what he was claiming, which is, um, and that's, I mean, that's why he's now there's a lawsuit been filed against him personally for the statements he made with regards to, um, you know, this is as safe as, as a bank, uh, you should treat it just like a bank.
00:10:54
Speaker
Funnily, not about that. Funnily, it was not the customers, right? It was not the fact that he said you still own it, and then you didn't actually own it was not the basis of that, right? It was that he said that he was going to invest it in a safe, he's going to invest it in a safe location. But it was actually risky investments, which is like, it's kind of funny, because the thing that everybody's mad about is you said we would still own it, but
00:11:23
Speaker
But as so much happens in these investor in Wall Street corruption cases, what really gets you is screwing over the investor, not screwing over the customer.
00:11:35
Speaker
Um, so one of the like historical ideas here, so you made a mention of something called a hot wallet, which is, uh, kind of like, um, I guess it's maybe thinking of it in terms of like a brokerage account, uh, it would be a hot wallet where, uh, it's in the custody of some, somebody else.
Crypto Wallets: Hot vs Cold
00:11:55
Speaker
And then there's this kind of adage that's cropped up in some crypto circles where people say, not your keys, not your coins, right? So if you're not the one that's actually holding on to the keys or the kind of individual identifiers for those pieces of cryptocurrency, if you're not holding on to them, they don't actually belong to you. If they're not in your possession,
00:12:20
Speaker
then they're not actually yours. And so this whole idea of a hot wallet that a place like Celsius is kind of like that, a place like Coinbase is that way, is differentiated against a cold wallet, which is something like a USB thumb drive or something like that, that you actually plug into your computer and you safely and securely store all of your coin keys there. That's a cold wallet.
00:12:49
Speaker
And so folks for convenience, we're storing their assets for both convenience and also for this great return on investment. We're storing their coins in Celsius and other places, but Celsius is the problem child here. And these folks are discovering pretty quickly, not your keys, not your coins. You think about it in terms of, go ahead.
00:13:16
Speaker
No, it is so clearly connected to or easily analogous to like putting cash into your mattress or putting cash into a box and putting in, you know.
00:13:30
Speaker
And this is the reason why bank regulation was invented was because some banks can throw you in knots with terms and conditions. And there isn't necessarily anything nefarious about the terms and conditions, except some people will do something nefarious with terms and conditions.
00:13:50
Speaker
And if you keep screwing over people who don't want to have to read an encyclopedia to learn how to buy crypto or invest in or use crypto, then they're just going to throw their Ethereum into the mattress that is a USB stick.
00:14:11
Speaker
Right. I've been thinking about this a little bit. With a lot of these, there's the ripple case before this as to whether or not XRP is an investment or is basically tantamount to a stock or if it's a currency of some sort or if it's an asset of some other sort. It seems like the entire crypto
00:14:33
Speaker
market is sort of independently rediscovering all of the things that, as you said, why we have regulations for the traditional banking markets. We're just working through. Now we're in the 1930s, and we're discovering that without some sort of protection, banks can just basically do whatever they want with their money. And okay, well, we're going to have to regulate that. And I do wonder to what extent there is a sort of public policy interest
00:14:58
Speaker
to not particularly well police this because if you want to be outside, the customer want to be outside of the banking, the traditional banking system, this is a little bit of sort of like, well, there you go. Like it's the risk you've assumed now, right? You want to put your money in Celsius or on Coinbase or on any of these others, then there are protections you're not going to have. And we're not particularly interested in attempting to extend those protections.
00:15:26
Speaker
Yeah, you want to operate in the Wild West, then you're going to live by Wild West rules here. And that basically means that there are no rules. And
Crypto Regulations: Are They Necessary?
00:15:34
Speaker
basically, the rule boils down to possession. Turns out that these folks who thought that they were putting their assets into what the CEO was saying are, it's just like soaring in a bank. The coins still belong to you. Turns out not true at all. And so- It's a straight up line.
00:15:52
Speaker
Yeah. So here we are in this situation where now these folks who have stuck varying amounts of money into these Celsius accounts for these good returns, something like 12%, but not like out of this world, you've got to be crazy returns. And now these folks, because of the
00:16:12
Speaker
probably intentional misrepresentation of this CEO are now having what they thought were still their assets now being turned over to secured creditors in a bankruptcy. I guess we probably shouldn't assume that everybody who's listening to this is a lawyer, but in this scenario, in a bankruptcy, we've got
00:16:37
Speaker
more or less two different kinds of creditors. It's more complex than that. And I don't claim to know very much about bankruptcy at all, but there are essentially two different types of creditors. You have a secured creditor and an unsecured creditor. A secured creditor is somebody who has some asset pledged
00:16:56
Speaker
for security for the debt that the debtor owes to the creditor. So the most typical one that folks would probably have in a scenario like that would be most familiar to people, at least in the United States. I don't know how things are in Australia. Australians tell us if this works like this in Australia. I think it's going to be Australia-centric from here on. This is an Australia podcast now.
00:17:21
Speaker
Most people when you buy a car and you have a loan on the car, the bank that loans you the money to buy that car is a secured creditor because their name goes on the title to the car.
00:17:34
Speaker
Similarly when these creditors were loaning money to celsius what celsius was doing was offering them some sort of pledge of collateral which would be like their accounts receivable their deposit accounts and stuff like that.
00:17:49
Speaker
And it turns out that when they made those pledges of collateral, the collateral that they were pledging was this money that they were telling the people who were storing their cryptocurrency in Celsius still belonged to them, but they were pledging other people's crypto. What they were saying was other people's crypto as collateral. And so that's kind of how you end up into the situation. Meanwhile, the people who are depositing their cryptocurrency in Celsius are creditors
00:18:18
Speaker
but they don't have their Celsius as sort of debt on the books back to them. They don't have that secured by an asset. And there are particular ways that generally you go about doing that. Uh, if you want to explore the depths of that, you can really get deep into the UCC in the United States. Uh, and, uh, I think we established that Andrew is our local expert on the UCC. I think he got an A minus in secured transactions. Hey, you just couldn't run over your grade.
00:18:48
Speaker
Yeah, it was too long ago. I'm sure you did better than that. I'm not confident. Perfecting a security interest in crypto apparently is also something that is not very well ironed out. So the idea of perfecting a security interest is like there's an element there that is kind of noticed to other potential debtors that these assets are pledged to some other debt, to some other creditor.
00:19:17
Speaker
And so perfecting a security interest is a state by state thing. And apparently, from what I've seen, it's by no means a, you know, there's a universal method for doing so. Some it's treated like a bank account, some it's treated like money and possession is perfecting a security interest. As you can imagine, it's difficult to sort of put other potential creditors on notice that a particular crypto is pledged to, you know, another creditor.
00:19:43
Speaker
And this is one of those things that often comes up in their context of dealing with law and technology and law regulating technology is
00:19:52
Speaker
crypto has been around more or less since 2009, I think is when Bitcoin really started churning.
Historical Regulation Lessons and Crypto
00:20:03
Speaker
The law is notoriously bad at figuring out how to regulate technology because technology moves so much faster.
00:20:13
Speaker
than legislators and regulators can. And you can take, for example, the regulations from, what, the 90s or early 2000s on spam and how basically ineffective that has been. And maybe more recently, the European Union's regulations that are going to require everybody to put all of their device charging on USBC
00:20:41
Speaker
And we haven't really seen how that one has played out in the long term. But the complaint about it is that, well, what about when we're ready for USB-D and we're ready to move to a newer, better thing? And you're artificially holding us back in this old connector that's slow and jankety and all that stuff.
00:21:01
Speaker
The law just hasn't kept up with regulating cryptocurrency. Meanwhile, cryptocurrency is, what, a couple trillion dollar market worldwide? And so we don't have any idea how to regulate this. Yeah, that's probably, I don't know, about 350.
00:21:19
Speaker
Right. They've probably had enough time. It's been 13 years since Bitcoin existed. It's definitely been a big part of finance for at least the last six or eight years. The law just hasn't regulated it the way that it probably should have in order to protect investors
00:21:43
Speaker
The same way that really became important after the Great Depression, the Wall Street Market crash. What was it? Black Monday in 1929. This is that lack of regulation chicken coming home to roost here is what we're seeing.
00:22:02
Speaker
Right. And even when there is ultimately regulation, oftentimes it's done through analogy to something else. And so even in this bankruptcy case, I think in the order I was reading, they analogized the stablecoins that have been deposited into Celsius and then transferred over through the terms of service to be owned by Celsius as unpledged inventory.
00:22:24
Speaker
And in bankruptcy, I think the quote is like, this is a novel case because stablecoins are a relatively new phenomenon, but they in this situation are indistinguishable from just unpledged inventory, like a warehouse full of stuff, basically.
00:22:42
Speaker
they're always trying to analogize to something analog, and so analogize to something analog. And so they sort of similarly hold themselves back by the constraints of what the physical world has sort of put in the law.
00:22:58
Speaker
And I think they're right to do that for, at least for bankruptcy, because that's kind of how crypto treats crypto, which is this is a coin. It just happens to exist. There's a lot of unique features to it, but it is a unit. It is a thing that you trade and it is a storage of value. And that is a thing that is
00:23:19
Speaker
something you can sell as from the perspective bankruptcy at least which is the whole point of bankruptcy is to pay off your debts basically to arrange how you pay off your debts and so that makes sense from that context but you guys were saying earlier that you know how you deal with is there some interest in it being a wild west and because you know you take the risk at your you take it at your own risk
00:23:48
Speaker
But they clearly are so concerned about money laundering, about the prospect of allowing this wild west to exist. I think that the government really considers crypto to be a threat
00:24:04
Speaker
Like they see the potential of digital currency. We have governments looking at digital. Many, many governments are looking at digital currency. Our own government is looking at digital currency because they see that digital currencies. Yeah. Yeah. Because they see that, you know, the writing is on the wall. There's no reason to have a piece of paper if you can have something that is good and as good and digital.
00:24:27
Speaker
man, there's a lot of like, there's so many implications to having digital traceable currency. I'm one of the few people that got into that invested in crypto after the crash. I bought, I bought like 20,000 dog coin in 2012. And I was like, Oh, this is funny. It's a dog. And then and it's somewhere in a landfill in Nashville. That's that money is gone. I don't know where it is.
00:24:55
Speaker
And the fact that we are to you listeners, if someone Nashville try to find a 2010 model MacBook Pro.
00:25:06
Speaker
And if you can get it running, which I couldn't, then maybe you'll get a windfall of a few thousand dollars and don't climb. But the fact that we've been talking about securing digital transactions to protect your place in line and bankruptcy, this shows how
00:25:29
Speaker
Yeah, crypto is not we don't even think about depositing money in a bank, because not only these banks stable, they even if they weren't, we got FDIC, they're all they all have to be insured for our deposits. There's no such protection. There is no protection. And I can see what you mean about the there being interest in the Wild West, because if there was not if there was a regulation, they would you would be able to put your money into this
00:25:57
Speaker
thing, which by its own nature, by its very nature, has a uncontrollable element to it.
Government's View on Crypto: Threat or Not?
00:26:04
Speaker
Right. So because it is a distributed, you know, a distributed system that, you know, isn't controllable by governments, at least for right now. I imagine they are spooked about it. Yeah, for both reasons and bad reasons.
00:26:24
Speaker
Yeah, it reminds me of weakening trade secret protection in order to push people towards the patent regime. There are these incentives to not give too much protection in one area to create the reason for the other area to exist. If crypto is suddenly put on the same level as the traditional banking in terms of FDIC and insurance and deposit insurance and all that sort of stuff,
00:26:48
Speaker
there's really no reason. They can't be on a level playing field because the traditional banking regime fails every time. It's worse in every conceivable way. Dealing with physical cash is much worse than dealing with digital cash if there's no risk in either. I've been thinking about Coinbase a little bit. Is Coinbase the only reputable crypto company left that is major?
00:27:11
Speaker
defined reputable. Like Coinbase is publicly traded. So they don't seem to be, if they perpetrate a fraud, that would be very, that would be monumental. I think the closest to being able to being sufficiently tied into the traditional, cause I mean, one thing to think about is this crypto crash, right? Had it had crypto been better tied into the banking industry, there's an open question there as to whether or not we would have seen, you know, something like an Oh eight level
00:27:38
Speaker
crash. I've heard, it seems most sort of economists that are thinking about this seem to think that that's not the case. It would not have ever risen to that level. But I have heard some that suggest it could be. And so yeah, to your point, I think Coinbase is large enough and sort of integrated enough that if they were to perpetrate something like this, this wouldn't be just a story being talked on, talked about on a podcast without, you know, this would be the story of the day. That might be the death of
00:28:03
Speaker
of crypto. If Coinbase dies, if Binance and Coinbase both died, or one of them had a major collapse scandal like that, that seems like, is Binance how you pronounce it? So like Coinbase and Binance, are those the two remaining biggest
00:28:23
Speaker
crypto firms. I believe the two biggest ones that I know of that are left. Yeah. Assuming FTX is dead for real, because I don't see it going back. I think that's a safe assumption. Yeah.
00:28:41
Speaker
Because if you have a solid, you can depend on them forever company out there, that's almost as good as regulation. That might be as good as regulation, especially if they get like, there's no reason FDIC has to be private insurance. It could be public insurance. They could get their own like, your account is backed by blank insurance. And that'd be enough for at least the consumers. And that might be enough.
00:29:11
Speaker
But having, but then you'd still have trust issues with the very fact that it, nothing is, all you can do, all you can get them back for is fraud. And that is such a difficult case to make fraud. It's the terms of service. Yeah.
00:29:28
Speaker
One of the really interesting things to me in this question is about the fungibility of cryptocurrencies. Fungibility is the notion that one dollar bill is essentially the same as another dollar bill. One ear of corn is essentially the same as another ear of corn. They're interchangeable. I don't know why we say fungible instead of interchangeable.
00:29:48
Speaker
I suppose. But the question of the fungibility of cryptocurrency, when we look at not dollar bills in terms of the actual piece of paper that you put in your wallet, that has a serial number on it. But when you're looking at
00:30:06
Speaker
you know, dollar bills and a bank account, a line item on a ledger. Those dollars are fungible. They're interchangeable. Cryptocurrency is kind of like that, but it is also not at all like that because each coin, each unit of cryptocurrency has its own like crazy high security
00:30:31
Speaker
unique identifier that is theoretically only available at any one time to one person or was only theoretically held by one person at a time. And so that whole question came up in this scenario of, you know,
00:30:49
Speaker
It's easier for a bankruptcy court, it seems to me, to say if we're treating cryptocurrency like fungible, we can take this cryptocurrency on this part of the ledger and transfer it to the secured creditors ahead of the folks in line who are just unsecured creditors like Jason and Jake and Andrew who had money in Celsius. I don't think any of us did.
00:31:12
Speaker
Uh, no, but the counter argument to that would be more like the legal concept of a bailment. Like I'm giving over this coin to you for, for you to hold it in custom custody for me. Like I give my car over as a bailment in the custody of like a valet at a hotel or a restaurant or something like that. And so it's interesting to me to think about this from the bailment.
00:31:39
Speaker
One thing is for sure, this whole cryptocurrency debacle and maybe this bankruptcy in particular is really going to make some potential, it has some potential for interesting bar exam questions for 15 years from now when the people who are writing the bar exams are actually interested in talking about something technology related.
00:32:01
Speaker
But it's got elements of bailments and agency and fraud and secured transactions. This has it all. All the stuff everybody hates. Yeah. Crime. Yeah.
00:32:20
Speaker
So unless we had any other sort of broad points on Celsius, I think both of our topics, it's great that we're ranking so highly down under with tech because both of our topics are pretty tech heavy. And the other one was a Jake topic as well, right? We were going to talk about Pacer and whether that's free or should it be free.
00:32:39
Speaker
So, man, Australians don't have our bankruptcy system or our PACER. And you should thank God it's Australia. Australia, think, or maybe not. I don't know what Australia has. PACER is our federal court system, public records system, our record system filing system.
00:33:02
Speaker
And it's got to be an acronym, right? Yeah. Yeah. Public access to electronic records. I'm going to guess. Oh wow. Oh, sorry. Oh, there's no F in there. Pay for that. Yeah.
00:33:18
Speaker
Uh, no, you get it right. The first time it was programmed an angel fire. Uh, it was actually originally a geo city site that was, uh, built on square slash I'm making that up by the way, Jason. Okay. I was like, it is believable. It is believable. Totally. Our federal courts.
00:33:40
Speaker
Our federal courts are run by a file system that was born of a GOC city site. If I remember correctly, before you go on, I believe, I think it was during COVID, there was an issue with Pacer and they were saying there were no cobalt programmers that could fix the issue that was going. Do you remember that? That was like, there was like a minor little moment there. I don't remember it, but I believe it. I'm almost certain. I could be wrong, but listeners write in if I'm wrong or if I'm right. Yeah. Or if you're listening, please.
00:34:08
Speaker
Um, but it is the world's it is
00:34:13
Speaker
old and crusty, and people have been talking about remaking it for like a decade or for over a decade. And one of the problems with it is that you have to pay like how many cents per page, Jason? Is it 10 cents per page? 10 cents per page. With a cap on, it's got a cap of if what you're downloading is 30 pages or more, it's got a cap of $3 per document.
00:34:42
Speaker
but not $3 per filing. So if you file a bunch of exhibits, you can have a ton.
00:34:48
Speaker
a $3 PDF for, so this is just to download PDFs. This is, that's all the, like, if I download PDF, it's 10 pages, it's three bucks. Yeah. No, it's, if you download a PDF that's 10 pages, it's a dollar. Oh, 30 cents. Yeah. Oh, it's still too much. Somebody attaches an affidavit to their summary judgment motion. If you're not, it like attaches an affidavit to their motion to continue. That's too many pages.
00:35:15
Speaker
Uh, it's, you know, uh, but they've been talking about remaking it for years. The, um, but the thing is these fees, obviously it doesn't cost $3 to let somebody download a PDF.
00:35:30
Speaker
And the court system has been using these fees for things that have nothing to do with the filing system, using it for courtroom maintenance and DVD players for judges, that kind of stuff. And they have basically taken a position which
00:35:51
Speaker
I would consider it to be professionally embarrassing to say out loud if I were working for the court administration, which is like, this is absolutely necessary. It is impossible to build a better system than PACER, even though I live in Florida, a state which has one-tenth the population of the government as a whole, as the country as a whole, which has a 10 times better public court system that is totally free.
00:36:20
Speaker
And they say it's like, oh, it would take two billion dollars to build a system that is free and good. And it's just so ridiculous that I can't believe they're saying it out loud. But help was coming. Help was on the way in the omnibus bill that just passed the Congress like a week and a week ago or so. There was going to be a bill to make pace for free.
00:36:48
Speaker
and the and the the budget office could get the amendment passed. Yeah, they couldn't get it passed, even though the budget office had said actually it's budget neutral to do this because you're not actually getting any money from these ordinary joes trying to download their $3 PDFs.
PACER System Critique
00:37:08
Speaker
That's not worth it to you.
00:37:12
Speaker
The money was going to come from the federal agencies that do like tons and tons of filings. But they didn't get it through this time. So Pacer is going to remain bad for the foreseeable future. And that is I hate to be a tragic podcast, but man, that is a tragedy. Though apparently there's some hope that there's there's some hope on the horizon. Jason, you deal with this a lot more than I do. So you go. Yeah.
00:37:40
Speaker
Let me give a little bit of perspective to this. First of all, Pacer is an old system. I think, Jake, the Pacer system itself might be as old as you are. It started in the late 80s and became accessible across the internet basically right after the turn of the century.
00:38:01
Speaker
And it really hasn't meaningfully improved since then. I wasn't using it back then. I've been using it for what years? It's 2023. I've been using it for 13 years. And it hasn't really changed. It is a filing system where you enter your password, your username and your password to get logged in. And after that, it actually varies like an astonishing amount from one district court to another district court where
00:38:31
Speaker
It is difficult to tell what heading or a category or subheading you're supposed to file anything under. And you can get frequently, usually gently scolded by court clerks for filing it under this when you should have filed it under that. This should have been an appendix, not an exhibit. And in the future, we need you to do this, not that.
00:39:00
Speaker
It is a wonderful thing that since 2001 in the federal court system, we have been able to electronically file documents into cases. What is tragic about it is that it has not changed or improved even slightly in that time period. I might have been nice by saying it was a Geocities site. I might have been too generous.
00:39:25
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it's a really, really old system. Yeah. So the clerks are stuck being the mods on this website from Hells. The clerks are who are policing whether or not you're sort of using it properly. I've never used this, so I'm not feigning that I don't know. I really don't know.
00:39:43
Speaker
Yeah, so ordinarily it's someone from the judge's office, usually a clerk or something like someone from the courthouse who is emailing or calling to say, hey, you filed it as this when you should have filed it as this. Now, like I said, and especially in the districts where I practice,
00:40:05
Speaker
universally very kind and very gentle about it as long as you don't keep obnoxiously making the same mistake over and over and just kind of, you know, not being courteous to them when they call you to correct you. So they're making the best of a bad situation and there's so much arcane stuff to remember in here.
00:40:26
Speaker
Uh, but like the geo cities or angel fire thing, like it's, it's a little off, but it's not that far off. Uh, and, uh, so when somebody files something into a quick, into a case that you have appeared on when, uh, whether it's something that you're filing or something that somebody else filed, there is a window of time.
00:40:47
Speaker
during which you can click into the link in that email that indicates that a filing was made on that case. And you can get that document for free. I don't know what that window is. It's not all that long. So you get one free shot at it. And if, for example, you were to have something happen, like
00:41:10
Speaker
you know, this is not totally outside the realm of possibility, but you click on the link and your internet access is slow or Pacer has some sort of error and it just the PDF doesn't load. Congratulations. You're now paying 250 for that 25 page filing.
00:41:25
Speaker
And you're not actually because there's a little grace period where in 13 years of federal practice, I don't think I've ever paid Pacer anything because I always on my own individually stay below what is, it used to be a $15 threshold for the quarter. I think now it's like 30 or $50. So as long as your bill stays below that amount, they just forgive the whole thing. For folks that big firms, it's worse.
00:41:55
Speaker
Is that window where it's free? Is that intentional or is that like an exploit? Is that like a speed running kind of exploit? No, it's intentional. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I thought it would be really cool if there was this bug that's just been sitting in Pacer for like years and it's just like, oh yeah, we're never going to fix this. Okay, you can just keep going. Just keep going. It's eventually, yeah.
00:42:15
Speaker
You've got a clerk in the office whose sole job is to just click on the Pacer links the moment that they come through and save that $2.50. Actually, if you use Adblock, you don't have to pay Pacer at all. Just use Adblock. That'd be great.
00:42:33
Speaker
Wait, seriously? So there's a number of projects. No, I think he's joking. There are a number of projects to be clear. I'm joking. I don't even use ad block for real. I pay for YouTube. That's what, that's what my life's about. I respect copyright pro. Do you all not respect copyrights? I, you wouldn't, I wouldn't download a car. I hope y'all wouldn't download a car. You're being real spicy tonight, Jake. Yeah. Yeah.
00:43:01
Speaker
So there's a couple of projects attempting to sort of open source this, right? So one of the things we're looking at was free.law. And my understanding is noted internet activist Aaron Schwartz sort of got into some trouble for that. He's most famous for
00:43:17
Speaker
downloading, yeah, hundreds of thousands of documents from JSTOR, the academic paper database. But he also was working with, I think it was called, it was like, Relaw or Reeve, something or other, that eventually became the Free Law Project. And he sort of seeded the initial database of downloaded, you know, dockets or whatever's on these things. Again, I don't know.
00:43:42
Speaker
Is that is that project at all related to the the frit at all related to the group in Georgia that got the Georgia annotated code put into the public domain? Do you know that was? Yeah, right. I vaguely seem to remember. I think it was more than last year. I think that was a a
00:44:05
Speaker
a time distortion from the pandemic. Because my friend worked on that case in the 11th Circuit. But it looks like it was 2020. Yeah. But yeah, that was a case where the Georgia legislature puts out an annotated code, but it used to do so by licensing it to Lexus or something. And even though it was approved by the legislature and considered borderline compelling,
00:44:32
Speaker
uh they were you know trying to sell it as copyrighted and the Supreme Court was like no that's a government edict so it can't it's not copyrightable uh which i think is probably you know great for the people of Georgia that they don't have to pay for this basically binding law set out by the legislature
00:44:49
Speaker
Definitely. It was Lexus Nexus and apparently it was section 105 of the Copyright Act that says that works created by the federal government can't be subject to copyright. And so the annotations are created by the government and thus, yeah.
00:45:04
Speaker
But yeah, that's Pacer. Yeah, I mean, it's a Chrome extension.
Open Source Court Records
00:45:08
Speaker
The stuff that applies to Pacer from free laws, like there's like a Chrome extension, right? That allows you if you download a Pacer article, this kind of shows how the court administration's claims about how much it's going to cost are kind of ridiculous. There's a Chrome extension that allows you to download it and then give it to other people. And that is free.
00:45:29
Speaker
And that doesn't cost that much money to help distribute stuff to other people so that they can, if it was that expensive, that wouldn't be possible to just do that kind of basic functions. So the nature of the project here is
00:45:46
Speaker
But what they're trying to do is basically democratize all of these orders that are being issued by primarily district courts because you can find with some degree of ease basically every federal appellate court opinion. I'm probably overstating the ease because lawyers have tools to do that.
00:46:10
Speaker
LexisNexis or Westlaw or CaseText or what's it, Findlaw or? Findlaw, Justia, right? Yeah. And so there are some resources, most paid, some free, that allow you to get access to court filings. But this is, they've got this recap project, which is basically trying to democratize access to, public access to
00:46:34
Speaker
court filings, especially court orders by inviting people to install for free extensions into Chrome or to Firefox or Safari. It looks like are the three browsers that are supported right now. Sorry to y'all who are using Edge, all five of you.
00:46:53
Speaker
They're basically trying to democratize these and it will scrape whenever you access with that plugin running will scrape the PDF and turn it into this free law project to make it accessible at either no cost or low cost.
00:47:12
Speaker
It's basically peer to peer for this, right? I mean, it's hard for me to distinguish this against, I understand what the argument is. The argument is that these things shouldn't be copy written. They shouldn't be behind a paywall. They should be free. But taken as read, it's hard for me to distinguish this from like a Napster or any other peer to peer file sharing. I literally do not know this. Do we own the copyright of the like motions that we file? Because they seem like legally
00:47:43
Speaker
And even if even if we did own the copyright, I guess we probably do. But it seems like free use to download it and, you know, read it for public interest consumption. Because otherwise, you're kind of ridiculous that you can't.
00:48:00
Speaker
Can't read motions in major cases even though it's, you know. There are motions in any case where you have like an interest that has nothing to do with what the actual, you know, the poet, as much as I think my writing is, you know, poetry and, you know, worthy of publication in the Atlantic Monthly or whatever. I don't know where that kind of stuff would be published.
00:48:26
Speaker
These third-party projects are really cool and they're interesting but I mean in terms of Downsides to this what I see is that I don't know that I want to have to rely on private
00:48:39
Speaker
open source projects to have access to those things. That seems a little alarming to have these competing state by state projects or competing projects across the country that are relying on what Patreon pages to be. If this is important, then it should be handled by the government. It shouldn't be something that is foisted off onto these nonprofits that are operating just under the law. You know what I mean?
00:49:05
Speaker
No, and if I were federal court administration, I'd be embarrassed by the existence of recap. That's basically the idea. There's a notion that in a free society that's governed by the rule of law that we shouldn't have to experience
00:49:27
Speaker
costs like this to get open access to the court system. Now, if you're asking a court staff to photocopy or burn to a CD or gosh, burn to a CD, it's been so long since I've considered that prospect. But if you're asking them to do work or print paper for you, like I totally get it. Like there's a cost attendant to that in the staffing hours that are necessary to do it in the actual cost of the paper and the toner and whatever.
00:49:57
Speaker
But for something like this, where it is a digital transfer of something that is generally measured in megabytes, if not kilobytes, there's no reason why something like this needs to have a cost associated with it in a society where we value open documents, open government, open courts,
00:50:18
Speaker
Uh, you know, this is just kind of an, an easy win to say, Hey, this thing that used to cost money to get access to, to see what was happening in the people's courts, like in the courts that, uh, belong to the article three branch of government, the people's government, like.
00:50:36
Speaker
Here, have access to it. That seems like just an easy win. And now it's being gate kept by, you know, this 10 cents a page nonsense. I say that I go on a diatribe about it, having literally never paid for anything in Pacer ever. You're pounding the table. You're, you're, you're, you're shaking your fist. It's you're very, that's right.
00:51:01
Speaker
Have you guys seen the New York Times video about that case in Ohio about public records, where they tried to charge a guy like $100,000 or something, or maybe it was less than that for public records of a PDF, based on the idea that they could charge 10 cents per page?
00:51:24
Speaker
There is a court case about it. And there was a deposition where the city clerk or something simply would not testify whether or not they had any copiers in the office because they were their lawyer had coached them so hard about don't admit what a copier is. Don't admit what a copier is because they wanted to claim that a PDF was a copy that they could charge 10 cents per page for.
00:51:50
Speaker
So it was like it was embarrassing. I'll put it in the show notes. But it was a very funny video about this kind of like how silly it is to try to apply these 10 cents per page rules to PDFs, which I send now 20 times a day without thinking about it. So I guess maybe the best way to think about this is
00:52:17
Speaker
Historically, when Abraham Lincoln walked into courthouses in the 1840s in Illinois, he got to walk in and look at and view the files for cases that he was working. I don't know if he was a lawyer in 1840. He probably was. He was, yeah.
00:52:36
Speaker
So he would walk into the courthouse and could open up the folders and actually see what was happening in a case. And we don't really, we still could technically do that, but that's not how we do it anymore. We do it by electronic files now. And Abraham Lincoln didn't get charged. He's a bad example. William Jennings, Brian, when he walked into a courthouse and wanted to look at a file, they didn't charge him 10 cents a page to look at the file.
00:53:03
Speaker
And you should be able to get access to this stuff. Access to case files and court files in an open society should not be a profit center.
00:53:18
Speaker
Right. Can you go into the courthouse? I was gonna ask the same question. How would you do that? In Florida, one of the things that as a local government attorney, one of the things I deal with the most is public records. There is always the option to go in and inspect records and nobody ever does it. You have two options. You can ask for copies or you can ask to inspect.
00:53:44
Speaker
I cannot, I've never dealt with a case where somebody was like, let me inspect them. I don't want copies. I want you. I wouldn't expect that they always want to see him. I want to see him. Email them to show them to me. Yeah. I want to hold them in my hands. Yeah. Like it's always been an option and it's not, and it's free. Uh, but, uh, yeah, nobody ever seems to take it.
00:54:08
Speaker
Yeah, I have no idea where one would even go. Yeah. This is how this is why all those hypotheticals about time travel are like, oh, I would be I would be dead within a day. I'd be like, how do I order lunch? Right. What am I doing?
00:54:27
Speaker
Okay, so I mean, I think that we touched on the two main topics we had.
GitHub Copilot Lawsuit Update
00:54:32
Speaker
So all we really wanted to, we had a little bit of follow up, which I think was mostly me. I just wanted to quickly circle back in episode one, I talked a little bit about GitHub co-pilot and what was going on with that and the lawsuit being filed against them. And that's actually being filed by Matthew Butterick of typography for lawyers fame, the book and the website and all that. And so it was more or less
00:54:57
Speaker
There you go. It was more or less as we speculated that the licenses were just ignored for any sort of open source licenses that restricted commercial use. Those seem to be just ignored and this AI just sort of churned through all the GitHub repositories to learn how to code basically.
00:55:15
Speaker
And the way that was... I can't believe it. They just ignored it. Can you imagine? For what? For money, for a profit. They just, they shirked all those licenses and just read the code that they had access to, but there was a little license file that said, please don't. But anyway, it was kind of interesting. The way that it was outed was that apparently there is a JavaScript, a line of JavaScript code that can be tied to a
00:55:41
Speaker
an individual project that is not allowed to be used for commercial use, and that JavaScript code has a typo in it that renders that code not usable. And so if you go into GitHub Copilot, or if you did at some point and you tried to create a function and use this Copilot to create this function, it would use that code.
00:56:04
Speaker
And they were able to sort of show or they are attempting to show that there's no way that that would just sort of independently reinvent this error because it doesn't work. And so it reminded me a little bit of, I don't know if you guys have ever read about the way dictionaries, dictionary companies used to seed their dictionaries with fake words and fake definitions to try to catch other companies. I think it was Funk and Wagnalls that did this to try to catch other companies copying their definitions because the word would show up, basically.
00:56:32
Speaker
And then sort of follow up to the follow up there, just talking about AI and stuff. The latest of this similar sort of problem, it just came out today, so I don't really have too many details, is Adobe apparently is feeding, they have a software program called Lightroom, which is sort of like,
00:56:50
Speaker
a light version of photoshop where you can tweak photos and do some more basic things before importing them into apple photos or google photos or whatever you may use they've been working on a beta for a while of an ai that allows for retouching and manipulation removing people from photos that kind of stuff
00:57:09
Speaker
And apparently they are feeding any images imported in through Lightroom into this AI to improve the AI. And again, ignoring ownership of the photos or copyright protections or anything like that.
00:57:26
Speaker
AI is seemingly going to be around for quite a while. Even if it was, that's the thing. AI could be stealing anything we put into the public at any time and we will never know. Stealing is maybe a strong word, but it's using that information. Permanently borrowing. Permanently borrowing. In the same way, I permanently borrow
00:57:51
Speaker
ideas from, you know, glass onion, if I ever wanted to tell a story, just by having it in my brain. At least that's one way to think about it.
00:58:02
Speaker
But yeah, if we put something out there, somebody could use concepts from it for anything they want. Or apparently, just take it virtually wholesale, right? An example of the GitHub component JavaScript code. Yeah, it's just, I mean, somebody wrote it wrong. So it's not exactly a work of art. It has a problem, right? But it's, yeah, just lifted wholesale. It's funny that you mentioned the typo thing. Did either of you hear about reception gate that happened over the holiday?
00:58:31
Speaker
I heard about it, but are you prepared to tell us about it? Yeah, I want to know prepared. But this is a man I love niche, niche drama, niche, niche field drama. But this is about historical manuscript study. And
00:58:49
Speaker
basically, what happened is that there's some there's some historical manuscript organization called reception. That where they publish something, you know, they published some historical manuscript analysis. And then another historical manuscript blogger was like, actually, you just ripped that entire thing off from my blog. And part of the proof was a shared
00:59:17
Speaker
was a shared typo. I might be getting this all wrong. But there was a typo in there, which is, of course, a common way of determining, like, authenticity of manuscripts from history is like, if there's a typo that, you know, that's kind of whether or not something is legitimate, because typos are not repeated, are not repeated unless you are copying, basically.
00:59:44
Speaker
Right. And so when that, that person, the blogger put out the blog saying you're stealing, you're stealing from me, it people started looking more into this organization. And it turned out they had a bunch of fake employees, their address was fake, it was like a PO box, it wasn't a real building, all their pictures were, were taken from the internet from other people. And
01:00:09
Speaker
The people involved are actually all related and they've been getting government funding for studies that never occurred. It was really like to set off a whole chain of events. I guess at some point when you're sort of pulling off that grift for that long and that completely, you start to go like, yeah, what the heck, pull off a blog and say it's a
01:00:34
Speaker
our own work. What's the difference? You know what I mean? Like we don't exist. We don't have a real entity. None of this is real. You start getting sloppy. Yeah. It's like check that on. It's historical manuscripts. They know how to catch you. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead, Jason. It sounds like those folks are ready to run for Congress in Long Island. Yeah. Yeah.
01:00:59
Speaker
Carla Rossi, if you ever hear that name in American politics, I think she's from Switzerland, but she can make it work. Carla Rossi. Fellas. Fellas. Yeah. Aside from getting together on Thursdays and talking to each other, what's going on in your life? Jake, what's going on in your life right now? Okay.
01:01:20
Speaker
For people who don't know, I am I am famous. And I'm famous because like in May, I wrote an article about Reedy Creek, which is a local government unit that is not very important except for the fact that Disney
01:01:37
Speaker
happens to own every piece of property in that government unit. And it is also the home of Disney World. And that article is called titled the contractual impossibility of unwinding Disney's Reedy Creek. I like that. I've always enjoyed that title. Contractual impossibility. It is. And who wrote that article?
01:01:54
Speaker
I wrote that. What genius wrote that article? And it's basically say, and that was after the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, everybody loves him. Does pass basically, the legislature passed a law saying that this this district was going to be dissolved.
Dissolving Disney's Reedy Creek: Legal Issues
01:02:14
Speaker
basically as like a basically to get back to Disney for like some public statements they were making about laws that they were passing.
01:02:26
Speaker
And basically there's been some, dissolving the government would have been a complete and total disaster. Dissolving the Greek would have been a complete and total disaster. So they've been kind of jostling over what's gonna happen. Cause they don't wanna put it totally back in place. Cause then why would you do it at all? But they can't do too much because then they're gonna lose a lawsuit. And so basically I've written a followup article
01:02:54
Speaker
on Bloomberg Tax, and it will be in the show notes, talking about how basically they are kind of confined to the status quo. There's not a lot they can do. They have to go back. Disney is inevitable. They get to keep their special little government.
01:03:13
Speaker
because they figured it out in the 60s. They figured out exactly what they needed to. That should be what it says right after that star goes across, what is it, Cinderella's Castle? It should say across the bottom, Disney is inevitable. I should have suggested that as the headline for this story, as Disney is inevitable, Reedy Creek is going nowhere. That's good.
01:03:38
Speaker
But yeah, I've written that. That is available online on Bloomberg Tax. Yeah, that's what's been going on in my life. Andrew? How about you, Andrew? Yeah, my goings on is more of a question than a goings on. So I've been trying to get more into gaming, playing games. I haven't in a long time. I used to enjoy playing games a lot. You guys have been talking about games. You're always talking about games in the shared Slack we're on.
01:04:05
Speaker
And so I've been kind of dipping my toe in a couple of different games. And I'm looking for recommendations from you guys, looking for recommendations from anybody that listens, that would want to give a recommendation. The two games I've been playing with, toying with a little bit, I sort of have the same problem with in both. I'll get it right out of the way. It's Elden Ring and it's Destiny 2. And in both cases, I have no idea what I'm doing. And I can't figure out what I'm supposed to do. How much is the game?
01:04:36
Speaker
How much time do you want to put into learning how to do a thing? How much time do you have in your life? Because Elden Ring is a lifestyle. That's the thing. And so is Destiny. In totally different ways. Elden Ring is like you need to become
01:04:57
Speaker
one with being punished. You need to love getting your butt handed to you. That's helpful. That's helpful information because that is the experience that I've had so far. I run around, I find some terrible looking little critter, I attempt to attack and it kills me and I'm summarily sent back to where I started and then I turn off the Xbox and I go to the room.
01:05:18
Speaker
Yeah, if not all, not all people can get into that. That's the thing. That's, that's kind of what schools games are about. And then destiny two is you need to be in tune with the grind. And that is, you just keep shooting, you just keep shooting, right? You the numbers go up, you get better, your light level goes up, you kill the queen, it doesn't matter what she says.
01:05:40
Speaker
Uh, and yeah, that's, that's, but your numbers go up, your light level goes up, you get the cooler gun and it's all good. And the shooting just feels good. You need to be in tune with the grind. Uh, doesn't sound like something I really want to do. Sorry, Jason. Yeah.
01:05:56
Speaker
have played Elden Ring. I played a little bit of Destiny 2. Don't play Elden Ring if you don't like to live a life that is characterized by persistent rage because it is enraging to just sit there and bang your head against something that just over and over and over. It's a beautiful game. I had fun with it. I also
01:06:24
Speaker
My whole body clenches up when I think about replaying it, and it clenches up with preemptive rage. Have you tried it? It seems like it's beautiful for the wild. Have I tried keeping it? Yes, Elden Ring is a game for masochists. The whole Souls series is a game for masochists, a gaming series for masochists. Hey, that's me.
01:06:47
Speaker
Okay, so do you guys have a recommendation? Okay, so I I do well I I can give you the exact opposite of Elgin ring So I'm in there. There are some handy crash It's kind of like what do you want to do you want to just tune out or do you want to engage? if there's I just finished the game called a Disco Elysium
01:07:11
Speaker
which is there's no combat in it at all. It's a dice roll. It is a role playing game dice rolls. You are a detective solving a murder mystery and a kind of fake France that has a lot of
01:07:29
Speaker
It is one of the funniest games I've ever played, but it's not like it's not exactly a comedy, but you have like 30 aspects of your personality like logic, you have your electrochemistry, you have your reason, you have your rhetoric, you have your encyclopedia, and they all talk to you and they chime in at different points.
01:07:54
Speaker
So like, you know, like electrochemistry. Yeah, it is like electrochemistry wants you to do drugs, because they feel good. And logic is like, don't listen to him. Volition or volition is like, don't listen to him.
01:08:12
Speaker
And it's very funny, it is very political in a unique perspective of everybody. It is very directly, you can become a racist if you want to. It's like you can adopt the skill of becoming a racist.
01:08:31
Speaker
You can adopt the skill of becoming a communist. I didn't either. You can become a communist. You can become a fascist. You can become a centrist. And every time you do that, the game makes fun of you. It's like, oh, you're going to become a communist. Where that where a thousand people fail or where a thousand civilizations fail, you will succeed. Right. And it's like that that's just kind of the tone of the game.
01:08:54
Speaker
uh but then there's like that's the tune out game right and so what's it what's the like more engaged no that's the one that is the engaged okay so what's the tune out then there's like a tune out like uh star new valley do you know that game that's uh it's sort of like
01:09:10
Speaker
Animal crossing for NES looking type thing, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's the style. OK. Yeah. And I can do that. Yeah. That's like you. You are. That's the opposite. You're your your grandfather. Your grandfather died and left you a farm. You go and start your farm and you make your farm and you plant your crops. And it's very nice. And there's some people around and you can marry them if you want. And it's very nice. And there's like a mine where you can go. Yeah.
01:09:45
Speaker
That's a call back to the never to be heard probably ever episode zero.
01:09:54
Speaker
Yeah. Patreon supporters. You can do that. We don't have a Patreon, but it is $1,500 a month. And if you, you subscribe for that, you'll get that episode.
01:10:10
Speaker
Do I remember right, Andrew? You all got a Quest 2 for Christmas. Is that right? We did. Yes, that is correct. Okay. With your Quest 2, I strongly recommend the absolute best VR experience that I've ever had in like an immersive plot driven game is Half-Life Alyx.
Gaming and Legal Work: The Last of Us
01:10:28
Speaker
It is absolutely completely worth the play through. If you have a PC set up that you can that can actually like power a VR game. And so anything like I know from knowing you that you have a PC that's VR ready, but anything with like maybe like a 970, a GeForce 970 or better, you can play this game.
01:10:54
Speaker
It is just really, really cool. It doesn't lean too much into the horror, but like it is just well done plot, well done storytelling, well done combat, well done exploration, just all together really, really good. I'm about six or seven hours into replaying that right now. So strong recommend. Wow. Awesome. Okay.
01:11:17
Speaker
Awesome. I think I have a good little selection here. But I'll turn it back on you, Jason. What's going on in your life? What's happening with you, other than playing Half-Life, Alex? Yeah. So I just started playing for the first time ever, so don't spoil anything for me. The Last of Us. I have The Last of Us. Oh.
01:11:36
Speaker
volume one and volume two. I don't know, maybe two or three hours into it and already my heart has been broken and I'm devastated and I'm very upset about everything. But I've been playing that in the mornings before my kids wake up when I inevitably wake up before them because I'm an old man and I wake up early now.
01:12:00
Speaker
Uh, and so I've been doing that and I'm getting ready to, uh, uh, drop some bombs on employers who think that they don't have to pay their employees overtime because they work for it because they're a staffing agency and their customer doesn't pay them for overtime. So we surely don't over over time ourselves, right? He's coming for you. That's, that's what's going on with me, busting up staffing agencies and playing the last of us.
01:12:28
Speaker
You know the HBO, HBO is coming out with the last of us TV show.
01:12:33
Speaker
I saw that and I'm excited about it. And now I have to rush and play the video game all the way through at least the first installment before I get to watch Pedro Pascal dazzle the screen as Joel before he gets spoiled. Yeah. And for people who don't know, The Last of Us is like a zombie kind of story game, very good, well-written spoilers. Yeah.
01:13:03
Speaker
Well, there are, yeah, some people, yeah, it's basically zombies, you know what I mean? But yeah, those games hit different when you have a kid. The game is like, all about like a, you know, father relationship. And yeah, it's a, it hits different. Yeah, after having first played it when I was in like law school or whatever, and
01:13:30
Speaker
Not an unmarried single guy. Yeah, it's different. I'm excited for the TV show. All right. Well, I will let you guys get back to your leisure activities and suing bad bosses, et cetera. And I think we're all wrapped up, right? Yeah. Yep. That's it for this week. Thank you for tuning in to episode two. Good night, Australia. We love you. Thank you, Australia. Good morning, Australia. Oh, good morning. That's true. Good morning, Australia.
01:13:59
Speaker
I bet-