Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
I'll Tell You What, Cardozo Was a Good Looking Man
81 Plays1 year ago
- Twitter Inc. has been merged with X Corp. and “no longer exists,” Elon Musk’s company says in a court filing. (slate.com)
- NPR Quits Twitter - https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1646140104640004098
- PBS left too - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-12/pbs-joins-npr-in-quitting-twitter-over-state-backed-designation
- Twitter partners with eToro to let users trade stocks, crypto as Musk pushes app into finance
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_N._Cardozo
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palsgraf_v._Long_Island_Railroad_Co.
Recommended
Transcript
Chicago Mix Popcorn: Origins and Humor
00:00:00
Speaker
All right. You know, my thing about Costco, I really like the, uh, they've got this Chicago mix popcorn. Do you get that at your, at your, uh, clubhouse, Jake? Well, maybe I would love to. Okay. So do yourself a favor and go to, in fact, you know what, I'm going to hold that off for my recommendations for tonight. That's going to go. No, no, no, no. You started it. You have to tell me what's in it at least because what's, what's the Chicago mix?
00:00:24
Speaker
I'm doing my recommendation at the top here. We're going to go all helter skelter tonight. Chicago mix is cheddar popcorn in the same bag and blended up with caramel popcorn. So you get like the salty savory and you get the sweet savory and it's delicious.
00:00:42
Speaker
Recommendation at the top from Jason, you're welcome. Everybody Chicago mix, try it out. Craters, C R E T O R apostrophe S at Costco. If your warehouse has it, it's fantastic. I'm going to have some tonight after we're done.
Podcast Introduction and Host Banter
00:00:55
Speaker
So it's basically like one of those popcorn tins, but it's not separated.
00:00:58
Speaker
That's what I was going to say. Yeah. If you were a kid and you got that for Christmas, you pulled out that little cardboard divider and it all just sort of merged together. That's what you're looking for. You're missing the butter. You're missing the butter. There's no butter popcorn in there because it was always the three segregated from each other. And what they did was Chicago is they bust the caramel popcorn over to the cheddar popcorn area and they integrated and they found out just like Dr. King predicted that they would find out that they learned that there was no good cause for the prejudices between cheddar popcorn and caramel popcorn.
00:01:35
Speaker
You can't even let Jake weigh in on that one. That's just, nope. It's too much of a song. I just want to make clear, I don't want anybody to read anything into the fact that I said that it was the caramel popcorn that got bust. That was not a suggestion about anything. That was just the order that events happened. Not a busing policy statement. Okay.
00:01:57
Speaker
All right. Well, hello and welcome. Good to know the squaring minds episode 15 for April 13th, 2023. Really weird start. You're welcome. Super, super weird start. Um, this is basically what the show is. So if you like this, then you like the show. If you don't like this, then maybe you want to go, go over to the daily and listen to that. Um, show is three lower, serious podcast.
00:02:16
Speaker
Yeah, just getting themselves into trouble with references to historical figures and bad policies, vis-a-vis popcorn. Three friends. I'm Andrew Leahy. I'm a tax and technology attorney from New Jersey. And I'm joined, as always, by Jason.
00:02:33
Speaker
Hello, everybody. I'm here. He's the popcorn guy. Yeah, I'm the popcorn guy. I'm the popcorn bus guy. Chicago mix, do yourself a favor. Why is it Chicago mix? Probably because that's the first place that they started removing those dividers. I don't know. Or it's one of those things that's like the Spanish flu. It actually had nothing to do with Chicago. Just like the Spanish flu, it doesn't
Nostalgia and Historical Trivia
00:02:53
Speaker
do with Spain. Just at some point, Chicago was either in vogue or on the outs, and they decided that they were going to call it that. It could be. There's a famous popcorn place.
00:03:03
Speaker
Hey, yeah, there you go. The band Chicago was like, you know, this is a nice melding of many different elements in one. Yeah. So we got to capture that in popcorn form. I felt like you were starting an accent when you started to speak as Chicago. And it sounded like you were maybe going to go. Is that an English band? I don't. I don't. I really don't know. I know their music. So are they not. I'm not going to lie. I don't know very much about Chicago, the band. No. I don't know very much about Boston, the band.
00:03:31
Speaker
Are they actually from Boston? In reference to the busing that we were talking about, don't know much about Boston the band. You'll be very surprised to learn, according to ChicagoTheBand.com, Chicago is an American rock band formed in Chicago. No. That's weird. That's nice. They're also known as the Big Thing from 1967 to 1968, and the Chicago Transit Authority from 1968 to 1969. That lasted for one year before they went, mm. Before they were like, our SEO is terrible.
00:04:00
Speaker
Yeah. I'll tell you what, switching away from the big thing, probably a good decision in the long term. Yeah. Yeah, that wouldn't have held up long. I don't know. Hashtag the big thing. I think I would prefer the big thing over Chicago. Did we do double entendres the same way in the 60s? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I think even more in the 60s and the 70s than it is now.
00:04:22
Speaker
Isn't that what the whole Austin Powers series set in the 60s is about? Right. I get most of my knowledge about the 70s and the 80s from, I love the 70s and I love the 80s, which I watched a lot of when I was in middle school and high school. Was that VH1? I think it was VH1. Yes, that was VH1.
00:04:43
Speaker
I also want to recant my statement about Austin Powers being set in the 60s. It's not. It's set in the 90s, I think. Not in the 60s. But also, he was from the 60s. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And and so he was brought over from the 60s and that's the. Yeah. Yeah. What is Mo Rocka doing if they're not still making I love the whatever? I feel like he was. Remember, he was always a guy would weigh in that comedian Mo Rocka. Right. I don't think Mo Rocka was one Michael Ian Black.
00:05:13
Speaker
Yeah. Paul Scheer. Yeah. Seven up, the seven up guy. Seven up guy. There's a lot in there. I know what Paul Scheer is doing. What's he doing? He does a podcast, I'm pretty sure, but also he was in the league.
00:05:33
Speaker
Oh, okay. Yeah, I don't know what Michael Lee and Black's doing these days. I love the 70s though, the commentators, I just looked it up. A veritable who's who. I mean, listen to some of these. You got John Amos, you got Lonnie Anderson, you got Alec Baldwin. Let's versionate my recognize finally.
00:05:49
Speaker
Yeah, these are just, I mean, really big time stars. Both are. They criminally charged Alec Baldwin. Alec Baldwin, yeah. I've been just drawing straight blanks here for like the last five minutes while you guys are making references to, I don't know what, but... Cheech Marin. Cheech Marin. I know that one. That's a guy I've heard of.
00:06:05
Speaker
Marilyn Manson, Sharon Osborn, Penn and Tell. This is Great Pod, right? I'm just naming out a cast of I Love the 70s from the 90s. OK, anyway, yeah. This is like how like how guys will get to there's a meme about how guys will get together and just name old ballplayers and be like, yeah, I mean, they'll be like, oh, yeah. Fred McGriff. Yeah. Who the
Technology Talk: Laptops and Platforms
00:06:27
Speaker
crime dog. Yeah. Yeah. Fred McGriff. Yeah. Fred McGriff. Moises Alou.
00:06:33
Speaker
I'm a lawyer. This is Jason again. I'm a lawyer, just like Andrew, also a lawyer. You'll be surprised to find out. I'm going to give you a spoiler, but Jake is also a lawyer. We are the three lawyers screwing around not to give legal advice, not to really give technology advice, just because we are lawyers. We like technology. We like the law sometimes, and we like each other, and we get around, get together, and talk about this stuff weekly.
00:06:56
Speaker
have fun together and you guys can listen if you want but we do it because we have fun together and that's the real reason. Us loving technology is a great segue to Jake because he can introduce himself and tell us about his new bit of technology he has there. Yes, I'm Jake. I'm a local government-less use attorney. As we were talking, I am staring at my new laptop. By the way, if we're doing recommendations at the top, I'll do one little one here.
00:07:22
Speaker
Laptops, crazy discounted right now. Demand has seemingly cratered. So I just got this laptop that retails for like $1,700 for $800. It's a Lenovo X1 Nano. And it's got like 16 gigs of RAM and 500 gigs of solid state. And it is a 12th gen i7.
00:07:50
Speaker
It is for a tiny little thin and light laptop. It's been really good on Windows Update so far, which is the only thing I've done with it. So yeah, if you need a laptop to go through Windows Update with, I can't recommend this one enough.
00:08:09
Speaker
You got a $1,700 laptop for $800. I assume that means that you had to purchase it from Andrew's Homeland in New Jersey, where it fell off the back of a truck, right? Yeah. Some guy with a vowel. Directly from Lenovo on eBay. Electronic Bay. That doesn't sound direct. That doesn't sound direct. It was Lenovo. Did it have zeros for the O's in Lenovo? Because if that's the case, the username, that's not actually Lenovo. They had 25,000 reviews.
00:08:36
Speaker
So if they are if they are fake, then they are good, high quality fakes. What I've always liked about Windows laptops is they double for if you want to, you can turn them over and then they're a hot plate and you can sort of warm up like, you know, yeah, little little meals and stuff. It's a useful. It's a useful floor. Florida is about is notoriously cold. So, you know, I could use that heat.
00:08:59
Speaker
Yeah, that's true. Hand warmers. Hand warmers are good. You have to burn your wrists, where your wrists rest on the laptops. That's at least how it used to be. Seriously, that really was. I remember having an old Dell and it was in law school. And just using Microsoft Word and having your wrists get so hot, you start to get irritation on your whatever that bone is as I strike the microphone.
00:09:19
Speaker
And it weighs like nine pounds and gives you like back pain when you lug it around in your backpack for sure. Yep. It was great. The battle. And if you switch from just typing text to doing like a bulleted list, the fan spins up and you could feel the heat blast out that little side thing. Yeah.
00:09:34
Speaker
Yeah, those were good days. Back in those days, oh gosh, what was the stupid sports website that we all used to go to? Deadspin. Deadspin, that's the one. Stupid sports website, I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, for sure, for sure.
00:09:50
Speaker
So, hey guys, you want to talk about
Twitter Under Elon Musk: Changes and Future
00:09:52
Speaker
some technology stuff? Maybe some wall stuff? Sure. I'm here for that. Oh, you can hear it. It's the sound of Jake's laptop. It's on mute. It denied me. It's supposed to be on mute. Sorry. You know, you can see the windows updates done. A malfunctioning windows laptop. I can't imagine. I must have hit something.
00:10:12
Speaker
off of an old pair of headphones and plug just the jack into your, I mean, you really complete the look. That's what a lot of people had. Do you remember that? Did you ever see anybody do that? In order to like hardware mute your laptop, you would snip the connector off the end of an old pair of headphones and plug it into the speaker. Yeah. That was a great look. That's quite a, okay.
00:10:31
Speaker
That's quite a ways to go. That sucks. Yeah, it wasn't good. If you got to do what you got to do. Yeah. So speaking of sucky technology, Twitter doesn't exist anymore, right? Oh, yeah. Can they count as a technology?
00:10:46
Speaker
They are, you know, so it's merged with X Corp. And then today the other, I mean, merged is an interesting use of the term merged because X Corp seemingly doesn't really exist other than to hold Twitter. And maybe it'll hold the other junk that Musk owns.
00:11:03
Speaker
later. But for now, it's just that it's a Nevada corporation, he moved everything over to there. I read the article that I think you put in Jake into the into the document. It's it I thought it was going to get to some point that this was to dodge some sort of liability, which I was skeptical of, obviously, but it didn't. No, no. Well, there's yes, I think there is, which is it's not a specific liability they're trying to dodge.
00:11:29
Speaker
Uh, if you hear if you listen to and Lipton and other uh, s not social celebrities Uh chance chancery daily. I don't know if you follow her Uh, the corporate law people will tell you that when you incorporate in nevada, which is where they they've incorporated. Uh, you're probably trying to avoid uh, actual well-formulated corporate law and corporate scrutiny that delaware will give you
00:11:59
Speaker
And so they might be trying to avoid liabilities for misstating anything when it comes to the equity shares that they're giving away to their employees, because that's they're starting to get give equity as an incentive to their employees. And but he doesn't want to be held responsible for the things that he's tweeting. Gotcha. So there's a you know, and Lipton
00:12:28
Speaker
said something about how it's very difficult to determine whether or not you can actually sue for misstatements and that kind of thing when it comes to a private corporation. But putting it in Nevada just makes it more more unclear. But did that work retroactively or would that only be prospectively? I mean, I think it would only be prospectively. OK, right. I assume right. I'm not even sure if they've started granting the equity yet to the to the. Oh, OK.
00:12:58
Speaker
But you know about the X thing, right? Like why it's called X Corp? It's going to be the everything app. Exactly. He said it's going to be your bank, it's going to be Twitter, and it's going to be the best location for content creators.
00:13:16
Speaker
And I'm still trying to see the competence to run one of those. It is the best place to hold your doggy coin. I don't say dogecoin. I think that's dumb. Is it going to be a crypto wallet? Yeah, I'm sure it's going to be a crypto wallet, but only for doggy coin. And that's how you pay your XBlue subscription.
00:13:40
Speaker
and that's how you buy your Tesla. So I'm gonna have to sign up for this dumb thing and get my everything app from X. The idea that it's an everything app and it's based, at least as of now, around Twitter, the idea that this is going to do everything, it's your bank, it's all these other things. Twitter seems like a little micro blog, that seems like the smallest bit of what, of this project. You know what I mean? For this to be the thing that you build it on,
00:14:07
Speaker
It's such a minor aspect of that. So today also, the news was he partnered with eToro, or Twitter partnered with eToro, which is like a Robinhood trading of stock and crypto, what do you call it, platform. And you're going to be able to purchase things through Twitter. But it's just a partnership. It's not as though Twitter is selling the cryptocurrency yet or the stocks yet.
00:14:32
Speaker
Wait, so what are they doing? Are they going to let you... Is eToro functionality going to be merged into Twitter? So merged in the sense that eToro will continue to exist, but you will be able to use the facilities of purchasing cryptocurrencies and stock on Twitter. I'm sorry, on eToro through Twitter. It's like a partnership tie-in. eToro will continue to exist. From what I can tell so far.
00:14:59
Speaker
So is Twitter in this scenario the identity management system? Is that what Elon spent $54 million, $44 billion on? I think it's based basically on the idea of, if you remember, what was the big meme stock thing from last year? GameStop. GameStop? Yeah, that would be on. There you go.
00:15:21
Speaker
That was on Reddit to some extent, but it was also on Twitter. Apparently, cash tags have been a thing on Twitter for some time. Fin Twitter is a thing. I think he sees some value there and he thinks, well, why are these people referencing purchasing a stock or purchasing cryptocurrency and then going off Twitter to actually do so? If we can do this through Twitter and obviously get something from Etoro for having
00:15:44
Speaker
referred these purchases, I assume. I think he sees that as a value add. But it is an interesting thing that he has stated he wants this platform to be a bank, right? But now he's just partnering with some other platform. That's not really what you're saying. Right. They aren't even the platform. They are bringing in a third party to
00:16:06
Speaker
not even like to just make that third party more valuable to add rationality for the third party. Right. And you have to question what do you say to Etoro? I mean, did they not ask any questions about like, well, Elon, you suggested that you kind of want to eat our lunch, right? So why would we want to partner with you and have you
00:16:26
Speaker
I mean, I see the short term value for them in having more, you know, traffic pushed to their website. I don't think they're a huge platform. They're relatively large, but they're not a Robin Hood in size. And so I see the value of having these cash tags be tied directly to Toro. You can just purchase something right there. Cash tag, by the way, is the dollar sign and then the stock, it's like a hashtag, but instead of the hash symbol, it's the dollar sign and then the stock ticker. And that functions in some way on Twitter. I'm not certain I have not used it.
00:16:55
Speaker
It'd be just like somebody who writes for Bloomberg to know something like that, wouldn't it? This whole thing reminds me of the, and this may be too deep a pull for most ordinary humans who have good hobbies, not dumb hobbies, but this reminds me of the time that in the video game World of Warcraft, they made it so that you could order a pizza.
00:17:16
Speaker
from in-game using our command. This is what that sounds like. This is like the slash pizza of Twitter where congratulations, we've linked two things that really have no business being together. We've linked them together for your enjoyment. Mazel tov.
00:17:32
Speaker
So you might have heard me typing because I wanted to look something up. But let's say you're Elon Musk and it's 2021 and you want to start a microblogging slash bank company.
00:17:51
Speaker
and you can't buy one that's both because that doesn't exist yet. Do you think it's better to buy the bank first and then start microblogging or buy the microblog and then start banking with the microblogging company? This is a real question. Which one do you guys think makes more sense?
00:18:12
Speaker
by the bank. I'm not sure about that because I don't know if, Andrew, you probably know as well as anybody because you pour over financial records, maybe not banking records, but point of sale records.
00:18:24
Speaker
As far as I understand it, banking software is grotesquely out of date and is still running on more or less Q-basic. If you are going to have a technologically advanced bank, you probably want to start that from scratch on the back of a technology company.
00:18:49
Speaker
rather than starting a technology company out of a bank that hasn't managed to pull itself out of running from a green screen DOS prompt. Well, so imagine you can buy a technical, let's say you could buy Robinhood and start, which is a much more technically advanced bank than typical, and start microbiology. Would you do that rather than buy Twitter and start banking?
00:19:17
Speaker
Yeah, probably. OK, because Robin Hood is it has a market cap of nine billion dollars. Oh, he could have done that. He could he could have literally waited six months on the Twitter thing for the price to crash and picked up a and picked up a free two or three free Robin Hoods instead of, you know, doing what he did and just the whole thing together.
00:19:45
Speaker
And he would have had a huge head start. Could he really have waited for six months for Twitter to crash or did Twitter crash because he didn't wait six months and it just got terrible because of him? It's Schrodinger's Elon. The market was not pricing in the value. Once he said that he wasn't going to go forward,
00:20:07
Speaker
it was trading, even though there was a binding contract saying he had to go forward at the price, it was trading like $20 lower than that binding contract amount. Like a total of like
00:20:23
Speaker
$30 billion or something like that. So much less than the difference between that and the between the total market cap of Robinhood. So the amount he offered to purchase it at a meme price anyway, so couldn't he probably have just sort of like actually given a real price that would have been $9 billion less or whatever you said for Robinhood and picked up the two of them?
00:20:45
Speaker
Well, it was like 420 a share or something like that. It was ridiculous. I mean, it's one of those things where it's like, how did you think this was going to go? I can't believe anyone thought this was going to work out. Yeah, I don't remember. I think the total ended up, oh, it was 5420 per share. Oh, yes, OK. For a total 43 billion. And then it was trading at 30 per share. So like half of what he paid for it.
00:21:12
Speaker
Uh, so yeah, 54 20 price. Yeah.
00:21:18
Speaker
Well, so this idea of this like super app thing isn't, and then the article I link to, it's a CNBC article I'll put in the show notes, they talk about it a little bit. It's not uncommon elsewhere. So in Asia, in East Asia specifically, there's a number of these. So in China, Tencent has payments through WeChat and WeChat has like, my understanding is it has like a marketplace and it is sort of, I mean, not to the extent what he's talking about, because I was trying to look and see what he has said over time X would include. And it's
Media and Journalism: NPR and PBS on Twitter
00:21:45
Speaker
been all over the place. It's been a bank, it's been,
00:21:48
Speaker
Something for... It did it again. Sorry. It was restarting. It's been something for Tesla. It's been... Basically, it's whatever he thinks at the time. As you said, for content creation, all journalists are gonna be on X, the everything app. And it's kind of funny because the other news... No journalists. Exactly. The other news, just to tie everything in with what's going on with Twitter this last week, is that NPR and then now PBS have both left
00:22:14
Speaker
Apparently, because there was some sort of flag put on their account that it would indicate that they were government-sponsored media. Well, they changed the flag a couple of times. At first, it was state-affiliated media. They tagged actual government propaganda outlets. And then it became government-funded, and then it became publicly funded. I believe that's how it went.
00:22:40
Speaker
Uh, but the second they were tagged was state affiliate. They were just like what they stopped tweeting. Um, and BBC was also tagged the state, uh, state sponsored media. And he immediately, uh, did you see that he gave a, a interview with them?
00:22:58
Speaker
Yeah. Uh, where he was like my, my bad, basically. I didn't understand the difference. Uh, probably because he's, uh, probably because he's got cat turd whispering in his ear about, you know, Russia. He doesn't need to understand that. I mean, do you not have, I mean, I guess not, he fired them all, but you don't have anyone who could pull you aside.
00:23:18
Speaker
It's last week's Hitler problem, right? There's no one, everybody's afraid of them. They don't want to get fired. So nobody's going to pull them aside and say, don't do it. This is a terrible idea. There's a difference between state funded, state sponsored and like, you know, propaganda outlet. And I mean, there are tiers of these things and you can't call PBS the PBS kids this and expect them to stay on.
00:23:35
Speaker
Well, uh, he's talked about how everybody has been telling him to not tweet. So he, people give him the good advice and he's just like, no, I'm doing it. I'm doing credit to the people who tell him like, uh, probably owe everything that they have. I don't mean that as, as a, you know, uh, an aggrandizing of him, but just like, he's probably surrounded only by people that he pays the salary of. And so it takes some guts to, or actually caring to say to him, like, you know, listen, you might want to pipe down a little bit.
00:24:06
Speaker
The interesting thing about this, well, there are a lot of interesting things about it, but one that stuck out to me as I was looking into this a little bit today, not as research for the podcast, just as research for being a human being in this day and age,
Law School Memories and Legal Education
00:24:19
Speaker
was NPR's funding is something like 1% government grants. And so it is not as though we are talking about, you know, the North Korean organized state media, which is the only media outlet
00:24:35
Speaker
or Russian government TV, which I'm sure there are others there, but that's like the main one I would imagine. This was someplace that gets 1% of their total revenue and overall operating revenue from the government, which I don't know exactly. I mean, the NFL makes a ton of money. So they may be a bad example because I'm sure it's less than 1%.
00:25:03
Speaker
How much money does the NFL get from the government? It's not a small amount of money. In fact- You mean like for stadiums and stuff? Yeah. For stadiums, sure, fine, whatever. But I'm thinking of how many branches of the armed services advertise in the NFL programming. They are getting tons of money. Do you think that they're trotting out the National Guard there just for goodwill? Or is it recruiting and expenses are borne by somebody? I don't know the answer to that question. It'd be interesting to find out.
00:25:31
Speaker
These companies, these branches of the US armed services are advertising with the NFL. How much of the NFL is state funded? Are we going to make them a state funded organization on Twitter now too?
00:25:46
Speaker
How about Tesla itself? Yeah, Tesla. How about Twitter itself? Elon Musk and Tesla and SpaceX and all of the, every dime he has, not every dime he has, but a decent proportion of the money he has is bet you, you can trace those funds pretty, not in like a, a, a Paul's graph, like ridiculous level of tracing, you know, the proximate cause type trace. You know what I mean? Like he's like one or two hops away from a tax break or literally being just cut, you know, a huge grant by the government to build a rocket or,
00:26:15
Speaker
whatever else. I love using Paul's graph as the as just like you can just say Paul's graph and it's like, Oh, you mean a an incredibly distant event that yeah wings of the butterfly caused it down the road. Yeah, I love using that as shorthand for I'm sure we don't we don't have a lot of non lawyers, but that's what that means.
00:26:38
Speaker
I think the case was a kid was trying to get on a train and he fell out and fireworks went off and there's a woman trying to get on a train, a train conductor as the train was moving, train conductor tried to help her accidentally kicked over another man's bag.
00:26:57
Speaker
That man's bag falls out of the train. It turned out that bag included fireworks, fireworks go off. Down the track like 100 yards, a pole falls over and injures a person.
00:27:09
Speaker
But the little bit that our, what is that, torts, I guess? Our torts professor weighed in. The value add he had was he brought in a picture of what that pole actually was. What it is, is it some sort of scale mechanism? It's an enormous thing. It's like one of those big old brass clocks that you see in a downtown area.
00:27:29
Speaker
And so it coming down really would be quite a lot. I can imagine being hurt really bad by a pole. And in the case, the question was whether the person trying to help the lady get onto the train should be liable for that pole injuries when it's such an insane series of events.
00:27:47
Speaker
Torts, one of the most fun classes, if you're a fan of Final Destination, the movie series, it's an awesome class. There's bags of corn falling out of second floor windows and crushing people and stuff. It's great. Did you guys, in your Torts classes in law school, did you read the case about the flopper carnival ride?
00:28:10
Speaker
No. No? Okay. While you talk about what you were going to talk about, Jake, I'm going to look up a brief for the flumber. I'm going to talk about a different case, which I've been trying to find because the events are so crazy. I'm like, it had to make news, which is somebody had a dock on a river for their property. They hooked up their boat to their dock, but not tight enough.
00:28:37
Speaker
And somebody else's boat gets unmoored upstream. That boat comes down and hits this guy's boat and knocks it loose. Now, there are two boats floating down the river together. And they both go down and hit a huge boat. That gets undocked. And all three boats then come down to a
00:29:03
Speaker
a canal and block the canal and flood a city by blocking the canal. And the question was whether or not that second boats person tying, tying inadequately to a post. And you're sure that's a real case and not like a hypo for a test or something? Yes, that was a real case.
00:29:23
Speaker
I don't remember the name of the case though. I mean, when you started talking about it, it does sound vaguely familiar. It's in that period early on in torts where like I didn't really know, I don't know if you guys experienced this. Like I didn't really know why we were reading, what we were reading cases for. I had the same feeling in Civ Pro. You know what I mean? Like I didn't realize it was building on each other. I was trying to pull out like what's going on here. But that fact pattern does sound kind of familiar.
00:29:46
Speaker
Yeah, so Siv Pro was my first class and it was the meanest professor in the school who was not very mean. And looking back on it, he's not that mean. But I and I was called the first person called on by the meanest professor in the school in the first class. And it was about notice pleading. And I didn't know what the hell a pleading was.
Supreme Court Justices: History and Personal Stories
00:30:10
Speaker
uh i don't know i was so confused right i gave a terrible terrible answer as any one first day one l no legal experience person shit uh but yeah that was a welcome to law school have you found your case jason
00:30:27
Speaker
I found it. I totally found it. I'm not going to go through it because it'll just be, I'm just going to toss it out there. It is a real case. It's from 1929. It was written by Justice Cardozo of the New York, what most people would refer to as the Supreme Court, but it is actually the New York court of appeals, which is totally backwards. And I think they're changing that in other news. Yeah, they're changing it. Yeah, they're changing it. Yeah.
00:30:50
Speaker
So, for non-lawyers or people who aren't following the news, forever and ever, New York's judicial system has been really confusing because the trial court, the basic entry-level court in New York has been called the New York Supreme Court, which feels totally backwards because for literally every other state, territory, and imagination, the Supreme Court is the highest court of the state.
00:31:14
Speaker
And now they're making it so that the Supreme Court of New York is actually the highest court in the state. Go figure. Good job, guys. Yeah, good job. Right on time, Nick. This is Justice Cardozo opinion from 1929. The case is Murphy versus Steeplechase Amusement Company. And it's an interesting little read, or you can just read the brief because it talks about, you know,
00:31:42
Speaker
what happens when you step on a dangerous carnival ride and to what extent do you assume the risk when you get on something called the flopper, which is going to flop you around along with the other people who are going to be flopping in there with you. The dude broke his kneecap. It was not great. Yeah. I mean, that's like up and now that's, that's the, you can break a lot of bones that are less consequential than that. But that one, I think I understand to be very, very intense pain. So,
00:32:08
Speaker
Murphy versus Steeplechase Amusement Company, 1929, Justice Cardozo, good opinion. But Cardozo, I don't know if this is true, but this is the way it's portrayed and towards class, basically invented our system of negligence in this country. I think that's about right. I didn't know that. Thanks, buddy. I think he's probably regarded as the best judge to ever not make it to the United States Supreme Court.
00:32:37
Speaker
No, he did. He made it. Yeah. Oh, he got voted in like unit. So I had some Wikipedia time on this, I believe. I believe he made it. He was the first and his appointment was considered. I think it might have been like a heart. You're totally right. He absolutely did. No. And it was considered the only good thing that president ever did.
00:33:01
Speaker
Did you say Hoover, Jason? Oh, Hoover? Oh, OK. He had the Vills. He had Hoover Vills. Yeah, everybody loves Hoover. Yeah, they love that accomplishment. Everybody loves camping. Yeah, but he got on the court and basically didn't have much time to do very much. Yeah, he was there for six years. So that's probably why I overlooked it, because we basically have just people on there for decades and decades decomposing most of the time.
00:33:27
Speaker
He was on from 32 to 38, nominated by Hoover. Also, if you look him up on Wikipedia or any other image search thing, just a startlingly handsome dude, like an OG silver fox. Good looking fella.
00:33:41
Speaker
I think he never got married. I know too much about him. I think he was like selling it his whole life or something. Well, that's what he says, but nobody's believing that. He does look like Conan O'Brien in a lot of these photos. Benjamin Cardo's out. Good, very prominent eyebrows. Yeah. One of the most important people, most people I've never heard of for sure.
00:34:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think most people, I think even most lawyers now would probably know him mostly from the school, right? Cardozo law. Cardozo law school in New York. Third tier law school in New York. I thought you were saying from torts class, everybody has to take, every lawyer has to take torts class and everybody. I feel like if you can find me a torts professor who doesn't fawn over Cardozo, like I'll be shocked. Yeah.
00:34:29
Speaker
You got your learned hand, which is the top 10 name of a judge at least. Yeah, I can't solve it. Yeah. Benjamin Cardozo. I'm trying to think of others that, you know. Was Learned Hand a Supreme Court Justice? No, right? I don't know. That might be the most. He's just a second rate Cardozo, you know? Yeah. I'm over one on that tonight. So I'm not, I'm not guessing on. Did they, did they make it to the, to the nine? It might not have been nine at this point. I don't know.
00:34:59
Speaker
Learned Hand was the guy that had the judicial decision that said, actually, a tomato is a vegetable, you stupid idiots. Stop calling it a fruit. We know that it's technically a fruit, but everybody knows it's a vegetable. So we're going to use what people think it is, even though it has some technical other, you know, there's some technical other definition that puts it in the fruit category.
00:35:22
Speaker
So as long as we're talking about appearances, you got to look up Learned Hand. He has a face like an owl. He looks, he's a spooky looking man. And an interesting fact, if you thought Learned Hand was a weird name, his first name is actually Billings. And he was never a Supreme Court justice. He was a judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
00:35:44
Speaker
but he does look like he has a very owl-like face in his later years. He's got kind of vaguely a, who's the bad guy from the first Captain America movie, the like little German guy, not the guy who was also in The Matrix. Not Red Skull. Yeah, not Red Skull, but the other guy who did all the science experiments and stuff. Yeah. That bad guy. He looks a little like him. The guy who turns on his master for a steak.
00:36:14
Speaker
I want to point out while I'm on Benjamin Cardozo's Wikipedia page, we were talking about how awesome he is. We've got a streak of great Supreme Court justice names coming from his heritage. He was preceded by Oliver Wendell Holmes. That is like an old money Supreme Court justice name. Then you've got Benjamin Cardozo.
00:36:38
Speaker
solid name, followed by Felix Frankfurter. In addition to having a great name like Felix, it's alliterative. And who doesn't love an iterative judge? Felix Frankfurter sounds like a name that a Japanese game company would give to a baseball player because they don't. Yeah. Because they're trying to invent a American name. Or it'd be like the mascot for like Oscar Meyer. Yeah. Yeah. Here he comes. He's coming to hey kids, it's Felix Frankfurter.
00:37:06
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Oliver Wendell Holmes is one of those stories that is always told. I don't know if it's actually true. My understanding is he shook hands with both Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. And the way it worked was it was, you know, he was a kid when Lincoln, when he shook hands with Lincoln and Kennedy, you forget that Kennedy was, you know, a Nepo baby and he had a lot of connections in that family. So he shook hands with Oliver Wendell Holmes when Oliver Wendell Holmes was a Supreme Court justice and Kennedy was, you know, a child.
00:37:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny how like history if it's like 60 years ago, it feels like forever ago if you are like 20 years old or something like that. Yeah, I'm just thinking like when when I'm like 80, I'm gonna be telling kids, you know, I was alive. I was alive for a long time before there was a black president.
00:37:53
Speaker
Um, and kids constantly, we know, we know, we heard it and you're going to tell them again. Yeah. And it's like, yeah, like I was like, I'm still, you know, I'm still around and kicking. And anyway, uh, times that history is not that recent or not that, uh, not that far away.
00:38:15
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Do you guys ever do that? We're really off a topic, but, um, do you guys ever do the math of like, you think of a time, like a year in the 2000s that you don't feel like was that long ago, like say 2002, 2003, and that's 20 years ago.
The Future of Journalism: Platforms and Alternatives
00:38:28
Speaker
Then you think back to some other time in the nineties where you remember like being in, in fifth grade or something and you think back to
00:38:34
Speaker
how like take that 20 years and go back like how long ago that was then and that seems like a much longer stretch of time 1968 to 1998 seems like a lot more than 30 years whereas 1993 to 2023 seems like a lot less
00:38:49
Speaker
Yeah, it does. I'm thinking that's mostly like just, you know, a product of perception. But I also wonder how much of that is because of how much of the change in the way that we deal with things has been software-based and we're still looking at the same like
00:39:11
Speaker
smartphones came. We already had cell phones, but smartphones came. And now we've been looking at the same more or less smartphone screen for 15 years. And the software has changed. The way that we arrange meetings, that kind of stuff has changed. So it's less tactile
00:39:32
Speaker
But that said, the styles are definitely very different. No more frosted tips. Now the frosted tips are like, it's retro. If you're doing a frosted trip. That's a question though, but are they as different 2003 to 2023 as they were, say, 2003 to 1983?
00:39:53
Speaker
Yeah, I'm saying like just 20 years do as much because I've definitely lost Decades having their own feel like I don't I don't have that anymore I feel like the 90s were a thing Maybe the LOs were a thing but the teens were not and the 20s are not the 20s are are they? Oh, yeah to me that I mean 20s were the emo years, you know Okay 20s were emo 10s were like
00:40:19
Speaker
Like midnight like indie 10 10s were the heyday of Of indie like never mind Like M83 you guys know M83. Yeah. No, yeah Foster the people
00:40:40
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. But isn't that OOs? Isn't that like 2000 to 2010? I think, uh, I think Foster the People got big in like 2010, 2011. Huh.
00:40:52
Speaker
Well, anyway, the 20s are the decade where all the wheels are coming off of everything. So we'll get back to Twitter. Twitter's bad. My question for you guys is, so PBS has left, NPR has left. I don't see that as that means that it's the end of Twitter. What do you guys think will be the
00:41:12
Speaker
I mean, not us three, but I talked a little bit on esq.social with some people who were talking about, I think it was Grant Gullifson and somebody else, were talking about what will be the group that leaves Twitter that will cause everyone else to leave as well.
00:41:30
Speaker
And the thought is that journalists are what is keeping people there now. And I think I kind of more or less buy that. But I don't think it's NPR and PBS that's going to pull everyone away. But then when I ask myself what will, you know what I mean? What is the bellwether? Like what what will be the group that leaves in that man? Like ship sailed. It's done. I don't know. Do you guys have any ideas?
00:41:51
Speaker
So I think my perspective on this is what would kill it is if there is a trifecta departure from Twitter of New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.
00:42:07
Speaker
I mean, maybe I'll give a shout out to your benefactor here and say Bloomberg too, right? Thanks, Michael. We love you, Michael. Yeah. So I think about the journalists that I follow on there. And aside from like weird niche interests, writers that I follow on there, the actual like when I was using Twitter as a news source, which turns out that was never a great idea. But when I was using Twitter as a news source, it was primarily
00:42:36
Speaker
NYT, WAPO, and Wall Street Journal journalists who are coming through, not necessarily the publications themselves, but the journalists who are writing for the publications. I was following some of them. And if we see a mass exodus from those three major publications, I think that's the sign that the journalism part of Twitter is defunct.
00:42:59
Speaker
I think that's an important distinction, too. It's the journalists going, right? It's not the institutions. And I think that is a much harder lift than the institutions, because New York Times could just make the decision to pull their accounts no big deal. But the journalists are thinking, well, I'm not necessarily always going to be with the New York Times. So I think I will keep my account on Twitter, my personal account, and I'll push out my stories as long as people are clicking them.
00:43:21
Speaker
Right. And I think that's kind of I don't think there's any one group or I think if every journalist and every every journalist with New York Times with Washington Post with local news suddenly only started posting on Mastodon
00:43:37
Speaker
Twitter would still be alive to some extent for years. I think it is going to be a slow drain from the balloon of Twitter. I think it's already started. I think the medium step first is those Twitter accounts, those journalism Twitter accounts.
00:43:58
Speaker
And if the institutions themselves start backing Mastodon for real, I would love to see that. Just as a user of Mastodon that really likes Mastodon and would have more fun with more engagement from these kind of people, I would love to see that.
00:44:17
Speaker
And they don't have to abandon Twitter to do it. But the second they don't need Twitter, I have no reason to believe that Twitter is suddenly going to start making good decisions. And there will be plenty of excuses along the way to be like, actually, I don't need it anymore. I got plenty of audience over on Macedon. And I know that I personally get more
00:44:40
Speaker
engagement and fun out of Mastodon already. I'm on Twitter. If you know who's my person, if they leave, I'm out. He's a lawyer that I am friends with locally. And he just tweets about UCF and politics constantly in a very funny way.
00:45:01
Speaker
And he's like a tiny niche, not celebrity, but he's like a power user in the UCF athletics game. And, but he's so fun to interact with. It's like, that's, that's UCF, that's UCF, that's Twitter at its best. And also I follow gaming journalists and that I would come back to like, not journalists, but like,
00:45:27
Speaker
like commentators and stuff like that. Influencers. Influencers. Can we pressure your local friend to join esq.so or whatever? I'm not really trying to. Yeah, you know, I'm probably I've actually I think I've tried that at some point. But he likes using gifts and replies a lot and videos.
00:45:48
Speaker
And it's a lot easier in Twitter still Yeah, and probably forever just because of the cost of do it. That's you paying for that Andrew Yeah, I mean that is a limitation and but but I mean I think one way those sorts of limitations are ameliorated is I don't think like You know, but Bloomberg was to say jump from Twitter to Macedon. I don't think they should join an instance They should start their own right and there should be a Bloomberg server. Yeah, absolutely. That's
00:46:17
Speaker
immediate verification for all your journalists and you don't have to worry about your about it's probably less than the I mean I know it's less than the cost to get an organizational verification from Twitter because they're charging like like a thousand dollars a month for organizational verification
00:46:35
Speaker
on Twitter, which is Bloomberg or any of these other big institutions have the scale capacity for the server, you know, the deals they have for the servers they have, wherever they have it. Probably Amazon, probably Akamai, all these other. It would be a drop in the bucket to just throw on. And they could hire the staff to operate it. They could hire the staff to moderate it. And yeah, you're right. It'd be instant verification. If you have an at Bloomberg dot com or an at New York Times dot com. Yeah. Mastodon address. You are from there. That's it. Yeah.
00:47:05
Speaker
And you don't even need to moderate it, right? Because it's like, literally, it's only your journalists on this. Right. We'll just fire you. This thing. That's the moderate. HR is the moderation. Yeah, we'll come down. Why are you posting crazy things on me? Do you have the ability to kick people off S. Social? Yeah, of course. You can? OK. Yeah, I did. There was one guy I kicked. He had swastika as his avatar. Oh, mercy. Really early on.
00:47:30
Speaker
I guess I was wondering whether or not like they are allowed to export their stuff when you ban them. It's one of those things where on esq.social you definitely can. You can still export all, you could transfer all your stuff over because the idea is... It's a soft ban. Yeah, and the idea is sort of like that's not like mine and air quotes. That's not the servers to take from that person. I don't want you here saying the things you're saying.
00:47:55
Speaker
but your friends list, I, you know, that has nothing to do with me. You want to go someplace else, go someplace else. Um, but you certainly could make it, you know, they could delete all their followers and do whatever else. Cause they could say like, you built this brand up, this name up under our, sir. You know what I mean? There's some connection there. Yeah. It solves the problem of, you know, uh, that newspapers and journalists have all the time where the journalist is building up a personal brand and the pre the outfit doesn't like it because it means they can move.
00:48:25
Speaker
Um, but the journalist obviously doesn't want to be contained. So, you know, they'll have their official Twitter and then their personal Twitter. Uh, and, uh, this, this way you could have a professional mastodon, which is also your personal mastodon, because once you leave, you port it somewhere else and they port it somewhere. Anyway, same way you would do with email or something, right? I mean, the, everything after the app lets you know where the person is. And that, I mean, it makes perfect sense.
00:48:55
Speaker
It's such a good idea. Newsberg, NPR, hit us up. Yeah, at npr.org. Yeah, I agree with what you guys, that's basically my thought on Twitter as well. I think the thought that has occurred to me is I remember long after I was off of MySpace, I for some reason like went back to, I think I got an email saying like, you haven't logged in in two years or something. And so I went into like formally delete my account and it was still,
00:49:21
Speaker
marginally active. It was still probably on the level of the amount of activity you see on Mastodon now. Pretty active. Not Twitter levels, not Facebook levels, but there's a lot of people on there. Twitter had a lot more people because there's a lot more people online. Twitter had a lot more accounts to start with, and so that slow bleed will take a long time.
00:49:40
Speaker
Yeah, but and the other thing is sort of like how do you measure because like I still have a Twitter account I still occasionally check it. I don't I'm not active on there and Jake I know you occasionally check yours. So what would like what is the measure of I don't see a lot of people I guess what I'm saying is I don't see a lot of people deleting their accounts right now So even if you're saying the slow bleed is happening now, it's mostly with like attention not with Formal account losing done and I think that's gonna be it is it's just gonna be you know, you have
00:50:09
Speaker
entire news, you constantly have news stories that are just like, Oh, this thing happened on Twitter. That's a news story. I think we're gonna see that less and less as people care less about
00:50:20
Speaker
as things happen less or the things that happen are just so openly non-newsworthy and just pure toxicity. I mean, a good example to segue into what you put in the document is the substack thing, right? That was a thing. I mean, like we heard about it, but it wasn't as big as it would have been at the height of Twitter being like the homepage of the internet. You know what I mean? This being the main thing, they just completely blocked the abilities. So what was the deal with this? The story was,
00:50:47
Speaker
Yeah, so Sebstack is a newsletter app company where you can start a newsletter and the idea is they provide the newsletter software and you can basically form a little small business and charge people for your newsletter like a Patreon.
00:51:09
Speaker
Um, and, uh, they added a feature called sub stack notes, which I think is actually open to everybody and is free. Uh, but is, you know, obviously mostly for the sub stack creators, which looks a lot like Twitter. It lets you start, write a little thing and start a conversation and have conversation with your readers. Uh, and it was enough of a competitor looking thing to Twitter that Twitter not only
00:51:36
Speaker
So well, any link, any tweet that links to sub stack could not be, uh, could not be favorited, uh, could not be, and could not be replied to, I believe. I think it could still be retweeted. Um, sub stack, the sub stocks account itself was, uh,
00:51:58
Speaker
Well, nobody could reply to it, I believe. I think that's right. So then people were retweeting their saying this was going on and then replying to that to sort of try to have the conversation still. And then if you tried to search Substack, it brought up the word newsletter as well. So it just seems like a total, like, total bush league move to stop people from looking up Substack stuff.
00:52:26
Speaker
He sort of formally, like this was an actual rule, I'm not defending it, I'm just saying. This was like an actual rule change sort of early on in his tenure, right? We're like, we're not, I remember there's something about like with the Mastodon stuff, we're not gonna be getting like free advertisement to Mastodon. I've had my Mastodon handle in my name since the day he said that and I don't think I've had any. Well, he backed off that. He said it was a mistake. Like months ago, he said it was a mistake to try to stop that. He was like, Mastodon's not a real competitor.
00:52:55
Speaker
His explanation for the Substack thing was that they were trying to download the whole database, which doesn't make it. I have no idea what he's even saying. He said Substack was trying to download their whole database.
00:53:08
Speaker
What whole day? What? Like what? What does that mean? It sounds like a it sounds like a like boom or like an NBC. It's you know, it's like, oh, I got their back trees in me or something like that. It's like an NBC level. Yeah, exactly. Crime show right now. He's trying to download the database. He's behind 10 firewalls. So apparently this has been rolled back or at least partially rolled back because I am scrolling through sub stacks.
00:53:41
Speaker
replies on it, even the note, the pinned tweet at the very top that introduces notes. That's got some responses, some comments, some retweets, some likes, and for some reason I can see their number of views. I don't know if I've hacked into some super sweet panel. You downloaded the entire database. Yes, I downloaded the database. I'm in your base killing all your mans. Maybe they rolled it back.
00:54:02
Speaker
Twitter page right now and it's got
00:54:09
Speaker
It's probably too little too late. And like, why bother rolling it back once you've already gotten this bad publicity? Maybe it's to kill the story so that it dies off in a couple of days. I don't know. Just another in a long series of terrible judgment moves. I don't follow any sub stacks or subscribe to any, do either of you? Yeah. Yeah, I do. Yeah. I follow. I don't pay for any. I'm a big freeloader. I follow platformer.
00:54:37
Speaker
which is Casey Newton and Zoe Shiffer's newsletter about social media companies. I'm going to subscribe to that right now. They have a lot of great reporting. Chancery Daily, who does stuff about corporate
00:54:55
Speaker
Delaware Court of Chancery, but got very famous off of her live blogging of the Elon Musk trial with expertise and actually explaining what was going on. I like Substack. I don't see it. I'm a little bit surprised that Musk sees it as a direct notes, as a direct competitor. Yeah, it's not. It's more like Tumblr.
00:55:20
Speaker
And also, it's just not of the side. Like, I really think Mastodon, I'm biased, I guess, because I run an instance. But I think it's much to the extent anything is a threat. It's more of a threat than Substack is. I also don't really think it's a threat right now. But I would understand more of that than than Substack notes. Why that? Why not Tumblr? It's a huge cell phone because all of a sudden everybody cares. I wouldn't have cared at all about Substack notes or probably even known about it. Sorry. All of a sudden, everybody's talking about it.
00:55:49
Speaker
I thought you said it's a huge cell phone and I thought we were talking about like saved by the bell Zach Morris, but no, it's a huge self own. Yeah. Uh, I think sub stack is like the sub stack newsletters are going to be great for a decentralized journalism.
00:56:04
Speaker
And so there is a journalist from Lafayette, Indiana who used to be with the big Gannett publication. It wasn't originally a Gannett publication, but got scooped up by Gannett and thus stopped reporting any meaningful local news and only basically was a reprints of USA Today. And so this guy quit, got laid off, whatever.
00:56:29
Speaker
But he was like the guy for good local news. So I get his newsletter. I get the free version of it because I don't know. It's good. It's not enough that I want to pay for it yet. But I think that's a good solution for journalists who are exiting Twitter, who already have followings built up. And I think the hardship is going to be for people who are cracking into journalism.
00:56:54
Speaker
And so this is going to probably disproportionately affect younger or newer journalists because they can't pop on there, get retweeted a couple of times by, you know, the Washington post and suddenly, you know, be flooded with followers that they can then port over to mastodon or sub stack or something else. So that's kind of regrettable that the folks who are trying to break into a field that had gotten more permeable
00:57:21
Speaker
probably between 2009 and 2020 maybe, maybe 2021 that had gotten more permeable where you saw a lot more grassroots journalism. It feels to me like you saw a lot more grassroots journalism during that period attributable to Twitter, Facebook and stuff like that. And that is at risk now.
00:57:47
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there really haven't been like, I'm thinking about you're talking about local journalists, there haven't been meaningful competitors for all that long. I mean, I use Twitter, you're right, I have a list for local for like some Philly reporters and some like hyper local like this, you know, area in New Jersey.
00:58:04
Speaker
Patch, patch.com was supposed to be that sort of thing, right? Like local news journalists can write things directly for individualized hyper local sort of like quasi newspapers. All those things, I think they're now probably a Gannett company or something by now they've been bought by someone.
00:58:20
Speaker
That seems to be how all these things go. And Substack is interesting because the other sort of value add they have is that you retain your list of subscribers. So platformer, right, they have a like basically a dot CSV file of all the people's email addresses that have signed up for it. So if Substack starts getting a little hairy, they can just pull the plug and go someplace else. Yeah, and port over the memberful or something like that.
00:58:44
Speaker
Exactly. I mean, it's not to the mastodon level of where you actually run the platform, but I don't know that everybody has to. I don't think good enough or perfect has to be the enemy of good here. Because there's been a lot of people talking about, why would you get behind Substack Notes when you're just throwing your hand in behind another company that could screw you basically.
Big Law Culture and Legal Authority
00:59:04
Speaker
But I don't see that it
00:59:06
Speaker
is to the same degree where where Twitter was where the there is no nothing to export. There is no list to like all you can do is what we did with Macedon, which is try to use different tools to see if someone has affirmatively said they have a Macedon handle that you follow. Right. Yeah.
00:59:23
Speaker
It's quite different to me. Yeah, that is a very different thing from, like you're automating the process of just searching Twitter for people you used to know on MySpace or Friendster. That's quite different from exporting a list of email addresses that you could just import someplace else. And so, you know, I think Substack is a great alternative to Twitter. And if people like that better than Macedon, then I'm all for it.
00:59:43
Speaker
Yeah, there's nothing that says we need an exact Twitter in the world. That's just the way that we've gotten used to it. We can get the short form, quick react to content in other ways, and we don't necessarily need to enter the cesspool of literally everyone in the world when you're looking at that content. Yeah, I think maybe the discoverability of local journalism or other local featured stuff
01:00:08
Speaker
is probably being fed out to TikTok and Instagram reels and YouTube shorts based on their geo linking. I'm getting fed because I started following a bunch of Indianapolis accounts. Here's the guy that does the good restaurants in Indianapolis or the new restaurants in Indianapolis.
01:00:25
Speaker
Okay. Now, all of a sudden, I'm getting fed. Here are the good playgrounds there, and here are the good theaters to go to, and don't go to these bad theaters, stuff like that. Maybe that's the new discoverability venue, and journalists, you need to get yourselves over to TikTok. No, not TikTok. Choose Instagram. Do them both. Why not?
01:00:49
Speaker
OK, so I mean, I think we could hit follow up and then we can call it a night fellas. The only follow up I had that I added was I don't know if you guys saw this partner from Hogan levels. You kind of knew when we had that Paul Hastings PowerPoint thing that it was going to be a foot race for some big law partner to write, like, here's what our version would be. You know, I mean, this is this is how we see it. And we treat our our chattel with respect here. Did you guys get to look at that at all?
01:01:19
Speaker
That's what they say. I don't even know. It's not great. It's more or less what we were talking about, and they tried to clean it up a little bit. I'm not going to go through the whole thing, but I'll give you a quick one. Number one, big law firms tackle some of the most challenging projects for some of the most sophisticated clients. We act like it's a privilege to be trusted with our clients' matters because it is.
01:01:47
Speaker
and you can kind of get the tone from that. Number five, clients pay a lot for your time. They wouldn't, if what you're doing didn't have value, every assignment you do matters. It's basically taking the other version and trying to like clean it up a little bit. They're still saying, you know, we're dragging the beds into the offices, but you know, we're going to put some nice fitted sheets on them. We've got a nice quilt for you. It's going to be delightful. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't, I was thinking this was a different op-ed that we had talked about.
01:02:12
Speaker
But yeah, this is Sean Marotta, who's very active on law Twitter. And I think this kind of gets at the fact that the problem with the Paul Hastings slide was the kind of attitude that was the main problem with it. There's certain things that were wrong, but mostly it was like,
01:02:32
Speaker
The perspective of this, the tone of it is so wrong. That was the main problem. So changing the tone is one thing, but there's some actual content there that needed to change as well.
01:02:48
Speaker
Yeah. And in my skimming of it, I didn't feel like it necessarily was addressed that well. But I think the other op-ed you were referring to, which I didn't put in the show notes because I don't really need to give it more attention. But there was another op-ed on Bloomberg that just basically said the presentation wasn't that offensive and then went on to say that that's just how big law is.
01:03:09
Speaker
and kind of said nothing. I mean, I heard a lot of this. It wasn't that offensive. And also, yeah, yeah, nobody agrees with this with this thing. So it wasn't so you actually think it was bad. Right. Do you think it was bad or do you not think it was bad?
01:03:25
Speaker
Right. So it's hard to tell with that. This reminds me of a conversation that I had today where it was, yeah, of course these customers are racist. You just got to suck it up and deal with it. Like, no, that's not how this works. Oh, wow. No. I do have a follow up on the Reedy Creek thing. It's more of a tamp down on a follow up.
01:03:51
Speaker
which is Reedy Creek is considering a resolution to basically place its laws and superiority to the two cities that exist within Reedy Creek which are Lake Buena Vista and Bay Lake and people I got asked for comment on it and whether it was an additional power grab
01:04:09
Speaker
And certainly, it could be viewed that way. But the truth is that that was already possible under the old law. The old law already said that Reedy Creek's now Southern Florida Tourism Oversight District, it already said that Reedy Creek had the ability to usurp the laws of these cities, which there's some question about why these cities exist in the first place.
01:04:33
Speaker
But the point of that resolution is that the cities are controlled by popular vote. Disney is all the voters like a normal city. So so, yeah, it's a it's a power grab, but it's one that was not unexpected. And in fact, was kind of part of the design of the district. Is that worth a column or an article or anything? Or no. And if it was,
Personal Recommendations and Gaming Culture
01:04:55
Speaker
I wouldn't write it. I'm so I'm exhausted. Yeah.
01:05:00
Speaker
Okay. I'm starting to think, uh, maybe there's a good analogy to be made here. Maybe there's not, but it's like Disney, the sovereign citizen of corporations. Uh, I don't know. It's actually right. It's actually sovereign. Yeah. I'm going to tease this out of my mind over the next, uh, I don't know. Yeah. You're going to workshop it. You're going to workshop this joke. You'll come in with, we're going to get there. That's right.
01:05:23
Speaker
All right, so if we're all good with follow-up, I think all we have is what's going on with us. I think we know. Well, so Jason already gave his suggestion. It was Chicago makes popcorn, baby. I'm going to go upstairs right after this and get a bowl. Problematic popcorn. OK. I can't call my think pad a recommendation yet because I have barely used it. I went on a mini vacation, as you might remember from last episode. I did work during that vacation, shamefully.
01:05:51
Speaker
But I did play video games. I played a video game called Dredge. It is a fishing game where you sail around the little group of islands and fish and upgrade your boat as you sell your fish. And it's got a nice little gameplay loop, but the twist is that this little group of islands that you landed in are cursed by Cthulhu.
01:06:20
Speaker
uh and so there are some uh because of course why would they not be so there are some uh like so for example so when you're out in the day it's fine but at night you start increasing a panic meter and you're you can and as your panic increases more and more horrifying things come out of the ocean to fight you you will see a boat and it turns out that boat is like a demonic angler fish so if you try to go talk to it it's actually an anger fish that hunts people
01:06:49
Speaker
And it will chase you. And if you if your panic gets high enough, a big old Leviathan will come out of the ocean to grab you. So that sounds a very interesting game. It's not like an indie game. It's an indie game. I would call it an indie game. It sounds like some sort of like twenty five bucks, I think.
01:07:09
Speaker
Yeah. I want cursed by Cthulhu Island fishing games to become so popular that it becomes like like Metroidvania style games. You know how they just refer to it as style? Like I want that to become so common that that should. Oh, another one of those Cthulhu fishing games. Okay. I was going to call it Cthulhu Vania, but that's no.
01:07:30
Speaker
Cause you got something to workshop this week too. Yeah. It's like when people refer to the selves as being rageaholics. What's the a hall, right? You're not, you're not addicted to rage at all. Just can't live without rage at all. Yeah. Classic, classic Homer Simpson line.
01:07:46
Speaker
Oh, is it? I probably probably got in my head somewhere from that way. So I've been playing some games, too. I've been playing MLB The Show 23. I play most of the baseball games when they come out. I play them for a little while. I never get that into it. It's cool. It has an old historic version where you could play as Negro League players and Negro League teams. Never had an opportunity to play a game like that before. And
01:08:07
Speaker
It's free for Game Pass users. It's free on Game Pass, rather. I recommend it. Good game. Not on PC, Game Pass, sadly. Is it not? Oh, I'm sorry. Life is hard. Yeah. All right. Well, we know Jason's recommendation, so I think it is time to say good night so he can go have his popcorn. Good night, buddy. I would give you some popcorn. Jake, have you ever considered getting that little handheld game station the play date?
01:08:34
Speaker
Oh, the little, the one that you can wind up? Yeah, it's got a little crank on it. No. It's got a bunch of really little indie games that might just be right up your alley. No, I don't think so. If we got people to send in money to buy you one. Yeah, buy it for me, audience. Okay. Please. There's the call. He'll review it. We'll do one whole show where he just plays it while we talk about old Supreme Court justices. The song ran out of time. Good night. Sorry. Bye.