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Space Karen and the Scummy Texas Two-Step
113 Plays2 years ago
- https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/01/twitter-to-end-free-access-to-its-api/
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-30/j-j-can-t-use-bankruptcy-to-end-cancer-suits-appeals-court-says
- https://www.wsj.com/articles/j-js-talc-bankruptcy-case-thrown-out-by-appeals-court-11675096308?mod=newsviewer_click
- https://www.techdirt.com/2023/01/27/ai-lawyer-has-a-sad-bans-people-from-testing-its-lawyering-after-being-mocked/
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Transcript
AI Sitcom Phenomenon
00:00:07
Speaker
Have you guys seen the AI sitcom stuff, the 24 seven Seinfeld? I watched How I Met Your Mother when it was on TV. That's basically an AI sitcom, right?
00:00:18
Speaker
No, it is so much more avant-garde than than you really haven't seen this yet, Jason. It's all I don't know what it is. I mean, it's cool, but it's a continually procedurally generated version of Seinfeld that is just on Twitch, right, Jake? And it's like pixelated garbage. And the plot lines are insane. I think it got frozen this morning, right? Everybody was stuck just at a mic in silence for like six hours. We do not know that wasn't part of the script.
00:00:48
Speaker
Maybe it was. It's by the way, it's not Seinfeld for trademark purposes. It is. It simply is for a female and female friend, male comedian, bald fat fat guy. You know, anyway, yeah, there were like 15000 people watching it this morning when I checked in. It's crazy. But yeah, none of it makes sense. There are no jokes.
00:01:16
Speaker
As far as I can tell, they're just talking, but there's laugh tracks. So I it's really something to behold. And they so I don't know if you guys know this, but they designed it before chat GPT came out. And I didn't know. Whoa. That like, why is that? Tell me, tell me why that's cool. Well, I mean, it's going to be so much better once they, you know, harness the power of chat GPT, which has actually makes Seinfeld like things.
00:01:46
Speaker
Yeah. It seems like a lot of projects were all sort of being worked on at the same time and they're all kind of coming to a head at once. Like everybody was working on a, I didn't get the memo that we were all supposed to be working on these AI models. Like a year ago we were supposed to get started. Yeah. You can have the real one, the chat GPT or the Seinfeld theme one, which is doesn't make any sense. Is this like the smart speaker that speaks to you in the voice of the guy from the Mandalorian? Gosh, what's his name?
00:02:14
Speaker
Pablo Pascal. Pedro Pascal. Pedro. Damn it. Oh my gosh, what is it? I like how we're just ignoring the music now. It's just like, yeah, there is no music. We don't need to introduce ourselves. Everybody knows who we are. No, nobody knows who we are. This is episode six of a super obscure podcast that like 12 people in the world have listened to.
Podcast Introduction
00:02:37
Speaker
Hi, everybody. I am not the host. Andrew's the host, but I'm Jason Ramsland. I'm taking over because Andrew thinks that everybody knows who we are.
00:02:45
Speaker
So I'm Jason Ramesland. Have I just totally screwed everything up now, Jake? Where's the rule of law? What is this? Oh, sorry. I'm making up the rules as we go. We're six episodes deep. We don't have to do anything too serious all the time. We need to be more casual now. There's a list. Be a little flexible. There's a list of things. Be a little... Okay. Oh, that's right. We got a document. I should open the document if we're going to talk about the document. You should check in, yeah. Okay, so hello and welcome. Just wire our minds.
00:03:12
Speaker
All right, all right, ready? All right, take two. Start. Clap. Hello and welcome to Esquiring Minds, episode six for February 2nd, 2023. This show is three lawyer friends goofing around for your enjoyment. Nothing we say should be taken as legal advice. I'm one of those friends. I'm Andrew Leahy. I'm a tax and technology attorney from New Jersey. You've already met Jason Ramesland. He's from somewhere. I don't know where he's from. I live in Georgia. He lives in Georgia at the moment.
00:03:40
Speaker
I practice law at adnm. suemybadboss.com. We are three friends screwing around, like Andrew said. Tonight there's going to be a lot of goofing around, it feels like. I'm in a mood, guys. I'm in a goofing around mood. We're going to have a good time. He's a wild card tonight.
00:03:56
Speaker
Yeah, I'm I'm Jake Schumer. I'm a local government land use attorney. I'm really going to take the no research rule very far this week because I've been busy. So, yeah, I got to substitute it with something. I if no research, then I'm just going to, you know, freewheel it. And well, you can't be the wild cards as possible. If Jason, we can't have two wild cards. That's not. No, that's that's totally fine. We can have two wild cards, one straight man. You're the straight man.
00:04:25
Speaker
Oh, I don't want to. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. You're, you're the straight man this week. Sorry. That's the straight man. Yeah. You're, you're the Jim Nance and we're two, two Tony Rome. I'll take that. Tony Rome was a great announcer. He was a great answer. He's gotten worse. He's fallen down the hill a little bit. He's not canceled. He's just bad. Oh, okay. He's gotten worse. He, he, he started liking talking too much and now he's much worse.
00:04:55
Speaker
He should start a podcast. So we are really, so Jake made mention of
Twitter API Controversy
00:05:01
Speaker
this. I don't know if it's been like thoroughly discussed as we've been on here before, but we have like a rule that's not a rule, a law that's not a law that we try not to do any research for this. So if you are looking for well-researched, well thought out scripted commentary that's like super insightful and precise, this is not the show for you.
00:05:22
Speaker
If you want three friends who are screwing around and like we say this every week, Andrew says it every week, we are here screwing around for our enjoyment and for yours. We touch on legal topics. We touch on technology topics. This is not advice. Even if it were advice, it would be bad advice that you should not take. If you want quality, go to The Daily. Take yourself to that feed. The Daily is a great podcast. I don't listen to it enough, but it's a good show.
00:05:49
Speaker
Yeah, I don't like quality podcasts. I like bad podcasts like ours. Shoot from the hip. Yeah, right. They don't know anything about the topics they're talking about. Those are the best ones. Yeah. I'm going to adopt the daily, the Michael Baubarro. Mm hmm. I'm going to do that as you guys talk. I'm just going to continually make those little noises. I mean, if we had every three words like and if you were to think about, you know, I don't even know if that's Baubarro. That's every like, you know, podcast voice. Yeah.
00:06:20
Speaker
If you had a name like Michael Barbaro, which is a great name, and if you could have a sign off line like, I'm Michael Barbaro, see you tomorrow. Like, Oh man, I got to work on that. I'm going to come up with that. Be my super fan. We got 40, we got 50, 60 minutes to think of one while other people are talking. So, you know, Oh, don't put that kind of pressure on it. There's no chance I'm coming up with anything in this time.
00:06:44
Speaker
Well, we've already frittered away seven of those 60 minutes, so maybe we ought to just go ahead and get started. Who's going to introduce us to our first little mini topic tonight? Well, me because I put it on there. Do you all care about Twitter getting rid of its free API as of today or in a week it's going to go away? Tell us more about what that free API was for or about.
00:07:09
Speaker
What did I just tell you, man? What I know is that you need access to it to make silly little bots and research. If you want to make a bot that automatically posts one picture of a possum per day, you need access to the API, and that's not worth paying for to post your possum picks.
00:07:34
Speaker
and kids doing research aren't gonna be able to pay whatever, I don't even know what it's gonna be. Well, they say there's gonna be a basic tier, which I think just makes it even more clearly a cash grab. Because if it was really about trying to sort of reinvent how Twitter is monetizing, then there would be no very cheap
00:07:54
Speaker
low-end tier, you would just have it be pretty expensive. Basically, you'd be looking to try to get some percentage of third-party apps that are developed. This is just a cash grab and to shut off these goofy little accounts, I think. And to your point, Jake, you need the API. Basically, if you don't want to be doing web scraping, literally just pulling the text down from a browser page,
00:08:16
Speaker
with some sort of application you're writing that would run on Twitter, you need API access. You need to purchase an API key. And every sort of interaction you make with the API is called an API call. It's like a command sent to the API, to the Twitter
00:08:30
Speaker
interface basically. And so what they're going to be doing now is charging for not quite per API call, but for a block of API. So you'll get maybe 500 for a certain, but they haven't announced the prices yet. They said there'll be a basic tier, but they haven't said what that means yet. And I imagine they're floating this to see how big of a backlash there is. Yeah. All the little possum bots are going to go away. A lot of academics are going to be sad. I wouldn't be surprised if they actually go back on this because of how, look,
00:08:59
Speaker
I think it's clear that Twitter's current ownership does not care about making its products attractive like other platforms have been doing. Elon's been treating Twitter like, of course, you have to be on there.
00:09:20
Speaker
Nobody's gonna go away. So people are gonna pay whatever wires. Yeah As opposed to you know, other platforms which are like we want these silly little bots We want celebrities because we want to draw people in So but I think this is so not gonna make enough money and annoy so many people that they might pull back like it does it's not that
00:09:46
Speaker
immediately obvious whether or not allowing somebody to pay $8 for a blue check is going to cause a bad effect, except for the impersonation. And then they pulled it back once the impersonation thing started happening. Though it's still possible to impersonate. The Washington Post has a bunch of
00:10:05
Speaker
had like an expose how they were able to create a Senator Twitter account. Even like a month after, even like a month after the initial blowback and pull back of Twitter blue. But yeah, like there's really no, like they're not gonna get a lot of cash out of this. And now I'm gonna have a lot of sweet bots on Mastodon to follow, hopefully. Hopefully they decide to port themselves over.
00:10:44
Speaker
you can log in to Twitter or you can credential yourself with your Twitter account. Is that what this API is? That's one of the things, I think. Yeah, I think what you're talking about is a little bit of the single sign-on type feature. Sometimes you go to a website to sign up for something. I think Open Table is one of these. You go to Open Table, you're going to try to make a restaurant reservation, and you can just log in with your Google credentials or log in with your Facebook credentials or something. That is one aspect of it.
00:10:55
Speaker
Because I'm going to miss my bots. I already miss my bots.
00:11:12
Speaker
But the other portion of this is just basically an access key that you can get access to the under the hood code of Twitter. You get access to the fire host, basically. So you can do things like pull down everything with a certain hashtag or something. There's a lot of little tools. A lot of podcasters use it for... You'll hear a podcast say, if you want to ask a question of the podcast, use hashtag.
00:11:38
Speaker
something or other, right? And that is almost certainly running through an API to be dumped into a Google spreadsheet of some sort that all those tweets show up because they're not manually searching for them. Yeah. Searching for it is really annoying. Like if you ever search for a hashtag, you're either doing latest, which is just like a lot of nonsense, or you're doing like top
00:12:00
Speaker
And that's top results. And then it's like you're going to keep getting the same stuff over and over. And it's like algorithmic and it's not that, you know, not useful if you want to see new stuff. I mean, I don't think
00:12:15
Speaker
the current management of Twitter realizes that I think they see this as sort of a nerd tool. And at worst, you're going to alienate the nerds. And they probably figure that if you're that much of a nerd, you're already out. You're off Twitter now. Or to what Jake said, where else are you going to go? You're locked in. But I don't think they realize how much traffic these sorts of little tools are driving, even if the people who enjoy the possum bots and stuff.
00:12:43
Speaker
That's just, you know, normies like following those sorts of accounts, right? You don't know how many like the ripple effects of something like this, I think is going are going to be larger than they expect.
00:12:52
Speaker
Yeah, normies follow the freaks, the freaks like the the one like what there's a study that like one percent of only one percent of Reddit signups actually ever post anything and like one percent of Twitter signups ever actually post anything. It's like there's a real there's like a core of people that post a poster class and poster class drives the value of the product.
00:13:21
Speaker
And they're, they're doing everything that annoys the poster class right now. Yeah. So is this, uh, is it possible that this is just space Karen overreacting to not reacting overreacting, but, um, it seems like everything's an overreaction.
00:13:38
Speaker
reacting to Fetty Finder and just like, Oh, too many people are leaving Twitter and going to Mastodon and Fetty Finder is this tool that's allowing, that's facilitating that Exodus. And so we're going to break the API that makes Fetty Finder work. Is that, I mean, is that a plausible explanation? Yeah, totally.
00:13:55
Speaker
I think it is. I mean, I think I also think that he sees everything as sort of take the third party app example. Those apps only exist on the strength of the API to him. So if TapBots, to take an example, has any profit at all in a year, that's just money out of Twitter's pockets. The aforementioned space, Karen.
00:14:17
Speaker
One, because they could be charging for the API calls. And two, because they're not seeing ads. And then, as you said, sort of FetaFinder, all these other kind of tools that are just meant to be like an exodus to get out of Twitter. Why do we want to be giving people free access to that? We'll charge for it. And I think he had a tweet today, I think, saying that insinuating that the basic tier would be like $100 a month, which is just not shutting down. There's no more possum bots or anything. Who's paying?
00:14:44
Speaker
Mm hmm. Yeah. So unless you have like, yeah. And what, what if also Fetty finder, uh, just because people may not be as online and as, as mastodon ish as we are. Uh, but Fetty finder is this sort of tool that allows you to log into your Twitter account with these AP credentials through the Twitter API that's getting shut down in seven days. And then basically not exactly scroll through, but look through your Twitter follows.
00:15:13
Speaker
and identify which of those people have said in their bios, this is where you can find me on Mastodon because I'm not here anymore. That's what Fettifinder is. And I think that's probably just ticked Elmo off and he wants to do something to stop it now.
00:15:29
Speaker
I'm sure something in the API TOS is gonna prohibit this, but could every stupid possum bot pool for an API account? I assume that's gonna be a Netflix account sharing situation where of course you can't.
00:15:46
Speaker
They probably could, but they'll be... I guess the calls will be the problems. But you still could do that, right? If it's something... I imagine that for, say, a possum bot, the calls are only to post because they're not pulling down any replies or anything. It's just to send one API call every hour or whatever. So depending on how they set those thresholds for that lowest tier, you probably could pull it together. But on the other hand, I do wonder if the API key would be tied to a single account.
00:16:14
Speaker
So, you could post dog photos on the possumbot, you know, at possumbot Twitter account, but you're not going to be able to tie the API key to some other account. I don't know. I don't think probably it'll be, you know, restricted where you can't do that in some way. I wonder if you could use like a Chrome extension to do like the simple stuff like post, like just like possum post and say, here's all the images that I want to post. Chrome extension says I will sit on Twitter.com
00:16:43
Speaker
and post this every 24 hours. I will post the next thing. I will click tweet. I will click attach image and then click tweet. It seems like something that should be positive. I mean, there are bots. They're shocking. There are bots on Twitter and those somehow exist despite not having API access.
00:17:06
Speaker
That's true. It's a good point. They'll drive it underground. The possums will go underground as they love to. Yeah. I thought possums slept in trees. It's kind of strange. I guess they're not underground. You're right. Yeah. No, they're example. There are boreal marsupials.
00:17:22
Speaker
It's kind of strange. MKBHD pointed out that it's strange that Twitter had third party apps to begin with in the social media sphere. There's no third party Facebook or Instagram apps. Twitter was always kind of more dependent on third party stuff than any other
00:17:42
Speaker
social media company would have been comfortable with. I think it goes back to them not having a first party app initially. For a little while, if you wanted to access Twitter on your cell phone, you were doing it via the browser. I don't know if it was Tweetbot or Twitterific or that other one that I think has since shut down.
00:17:59
Speaker
But I think that's the genesis of that is they just didn't have an app. And sort of, I mean, Twitter was created by not only Twitter, but even like, you know, the iOS pull to refresh UI gesture. That's tweetbot or Twitterific or something. They were the first to do that. There was like a lot of innovation done with third party apps. And Twitter was certainly built by third party apps, not by first party stuff. There's been a lot of chatter about that in the last couple of weeks, too, as this is all going on.
00:18:27
Speaker
John Gruber, like a big time Apple journalist guy who does a great podcast, great website. He had Craig Hockenberry on his show, who was like the guy who invented the term tweet, who didn't work for Twitter, never worked for Twitter. He designed, I think he was Twitterific, was the Icon Factory's Twitter app.
00:18:48
Speaker
main thing, tweeting, was given its name by this guy who never worked for them just doing a third party app. It's so much more symbiotic than any other social network has been with any sort of external app.
00:19:01
Speaker
I was going to say that the reason why tweets were 140 characters for anybody they didn't know was because it fit into an SMS. It fit into an SMS. It used to be able to use Twitter with SMS, which had a limit of 160 characters, and they wanted space for the name. So it was the name and 140 characters for the tweet.
00:19:23
Speaker
And they held on to that for way too long. Do you guys remember the short code you had to text it to, to tweet? Do you guys remember the number? I'm sure you didn't. No, I never used that, no.
00:19:34
Speaker
I don't know if I used it, but it was always like all over the Twitter website. It was 40404 was the, the, the code you had to send it to. So it's a good one because it's memorable. It's memorable. Uh, also it represents the fail whale that constantly pulled up the, with a 404 being the error code. Exactly. Yeah. Anyway, we're ready to move on. You should not do this. It's going to be catastrophic for Twitter.
00:20:02
Speaker
But basically, the entirety of the last four months has been catastrophic for Twitter. Twitter, do this. Drive them to us. Drive them to ask that social. Ask all the lawyers and legally adjacent professionals.
00:20:17
Speaker
Yes. Speaking of lawyers and legally adjacent professionals, I think the sort of main topic we want to talk about tonight that wasn't Twitter is this Johnson & Johnson.
J&J's Divisive Merger Tactics
00:20:27
Speaker
And I assume what you're saying, Jake, you didn't do any research, you were very busy. So do you know anything about the Texas Two-Step beyond the dance that you know and love?
00:20:36
Speaker
So I did do enough, maybe. I don't know. So here's here's what I know. And you can tell me if I'm wrong. Okay. Johnson and Johnson. Everybody knows them. Everybody loves them. Okay, you're wrong. They made talcum powder.
00:20:53
Speaker
There's something up with talcum powder where it got infected with asbestos or something, or it has asbestos in it on purpose. This I looked into. There's apparently some controversy. The mineral frequently occurs in the presence of asbestos in nature. So when you mine it or whatever they do to get it out,
00:21:15
Speaker
it can get contaminated with asbestos. And so my understanding is that one contention is that this talcum powder had asbestos in it. And so that's not good. But another is just that like talc itself is carcinogenic. And so that's no good either, but sorry, go on.
00:21:32
Speaker
Okay, so that's the contention with all these lawsuits, class action, mass action torts against Johnson and Johnson for cancer caused by talcum powder. And there was one lawsuit where they were held liable for like $2 billion or something for like 20 people.
00:21:54
Speaker
And so that spooked them real hard. Uh, and because of that, they divided their company, Johnson and Johnson into two companies under a Texas procedure, which allows for a company to be divided into, and the old company is not liable for any of the new company debts. And one of the company got all the good stuff and one of them got all the tort liability for, uh, all these talcum powder lawsuits. And that company, I got all the tort liability filed for bankruptcy.
00:22:23
Speaker
And this was intentional to get rid of all that potential billions and billions of dollars of tort damages. And they wanted to get rid of that through bankruptcy. And the Third Circuit said no, I guess.
00:22:39
Speaker
More or less, yeah. So first of all, did you guys read about, did you see the term that came up as to what this is called? It's called a divisive merger, the spinning off, which I hate on its face as a term. Because it's the opposite. It's a contradiction.
00:22:59
Speaker
It's like a moist dryness. It doesn't make any sense. It is one or the other. It is not a divisive merger. It's either division or it's a division. Right. Yeah. It's a division is what it is. I don't know what merger has to do with it. Other than the only thing I was able to find was that the idea that both entities continue to exist is somehow important. And that makes it a merger. I have no idea why I don't know how that's emerged. I think it's, I think, and this is, I am not a mergers and acquisitions expert, nor am I a bankruptcy expert.
00:23:28
Speaker
Nor am I an expert, really, in law of any kind. But that's not true. Oh, no. Anyway. We can see your diplomacy. You went too far. Reel it back. Reel it back. You went too far. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We can fix that one on the editing room floor, right? Sure. We don't edit it. I'm so editing. Yeah. Yeah. So I think what happens is, and why you can still technically call it a merger is, I think they create
00:23:52
Speaker
a new entity in Texas or some other favorable jurisdiction that has favorable corporate governance provisions in the law.
00:24:02
Speaker
Uh, and then they merge only part of the company that splits off of the parent company. And so it still is a merger of, but it's a merger by like it. So it's not like strictly, what's the thing where cells divide? Is that mitosis? It's not mitosis. Exactly. It's more like we create another company and in the process of mitosis, the one that's leaving grafts onto this new company.
00:24:27
Speaker
I think is what's happening. And that company declares bankruptcy. Spudding? Yeah, sure. Spudding? Isn't that spudding? You got mitosis and then you have spudding where the other thing grows and then it just kind of snaps off? I don't know. Okay, but that company then declares bankruptcy after they... So is it important? I know there's no research, so I don't know if either of you can answer this, but is it important that they do
00:24:50
Speaker
fund the, uh, spun off company in some fashion. Like, so they threw, I don't know, $2 billion into that ATL thing. Is that relevant? Like, do they, do they need to do that? Because I don't know why they wouldn't just go all the way. Like if you're going to be evil, be evil. Just don't, don't give it any money. Throw the liabilities over there and yeah, don't fund it. I have to imagine that that is part of how you get a bankruptcy judge.
00:25:13
Speaker
to approve this sort of situation so that you're not just basically defrauding, defrauding, excuse me, judgment creditors. You got defrauding and creditors smushed into one word. Defrauding, I like that. Defrauding, yeah. We're gonna make it happen. We're gonna make defrauding happen. Well, Johnson & Johnson is gonna make defrauding happen. Exactly. And so I think probably that's how you give
00:25:40
Speaker
a bankruptcy court judge the sort of cover that they might need in order to approve this sort of bankruptcy plan. Because otherwise, why would a bankruptcy court judge ever approve something like this if you are purely making sure that the creditors, the judgment creditors get absolutely nothing? As big a screw job as the Texas two-step merger is for judgment creditors and then perspective
00:26:08
Speaker
future judgment creditors who are plaintiffs in these cases, as big a problem as that is for them. If you put no money in there, the judge is going to say, no, pounce hand. No. In this case, judgment creditor means somebody who got cancer, theoretically. Anne Lipton asked how social celebrity seemed to think that the ... This was decided on bankruptcy law grounds regarding whether or not it was good faith bankruptcy.
00:26:38
Speaker
And, and Lipton seemed to think that it was more likely that the bankruptcy court would have allowed it if they didn't provide, like if they had been more brutal about it. Because you're not bankrupt. You have $2 billion. You've been funded by the parent company. So you're not in financial distress. Yeah. You're in prospective financial distress because you know you did a bad thing and the creditors are coming soon.
00:27:04
Speaker
I may have undersold the research because I did look this up when the first came out because I was interested. I was like, why is this not a fraudulent transfer? Because in normal litigation, if you're facing a lawsuit and that lawsuit might make you broke, if you transfer the money away, a court can invalidate that transfer through a fraudulent transfer.
00:27:28
Speaker
And I was like, why isn't this a fraudulent transfer? The divisional merger to put all your liabilities in one corporation. And the article I said, I saw said, actually, it is like there's nothing that stops this from being considered a fraudulent transfer. But the problem is that if you are
00:27:43
Speaker
if you are suing and you have a lawsuit which might cost millions of dollars just to litigate, you don't want to rely on the fraudulent transfer litigation years down the road after you've got your liability, after you've got your judgment, and try to claw that money back.
00:28:04
Speaker
Like, so really it's very likely that this merger, this divisional merger would be invalidated, but the lawyers would be facing a huge risk to do so. That's what a law firm website I saw seemed to say at least.
00:28:24
Speaker
Is there a legitimate reason? I mean, I was struggling to find how this is ever anything but trying to dodge these judgmental predators. Is there a legitimate reason to do this from trying to keep the parent company afloat perspective? And therefore, there's some argument to be made for, well, the only way we're gonna be able to ever pay these liabilities is if we can continue to keep the lights on. And if this thing takes us down as a company, you're not gonna get anything.
00:28:52
Speaker
I don't really see I guess I don't I don't see the other side of this other than I don't see how you defend this other than saying like well you know we want to pay as little as possible. I have a question like this is a philosophical question which either of you guys have to answer but like imagine somehow all of these all of these lawsuits are meritorious and they win and people suffered 75 billion dollars of damage over it.
00:29:18
Speaker
Is should our legal system be like okay Johnson and Johnson you're dead now like sell all your assets Shut down so that you can pay these people. That's like more of a like fundamental I That would be you know, that would be a legit bankruptcy That would be the whole point of having a bankruptcy in fact, so never mind my question is irrelevant because we have bankruptcy to Actually deal with that
00:29:45
Speaker
Yeah, this is part of the confusing thing to me here too, is that J&J, Johnson & Johnson, had pledged a funding backstop to make sure that this liability, I don't know, scapegoat company could actually meet the
00:30:03
Speaker
meet the financial burden of what it owes to these plaintiffs in these talc lawsuits and like, okay then, so what's the point if you're just going to pay it anyway? I wonder, I mean, some of it probably boils down to like Wall Street investors because J&J is a publicly traded company and some of that stuff matters. Some of it probably matters from the standpoint of insurance and re-insurance and all that stuff.
00:30:31
Speaker
When you step back from it and look at it, if they're pledging the funding backstop, then what are we even doing here? Why are we here? You didn't need the bankruptcy then, theoretically, at least not yet. Well, they get to set the cap on how much they would ever have to pay out based on whatever they pledged that backstop to be because it's not just whatever they owe. It's a set figure they pledged. That was what I read.
00:30:55
Speaker
Well, I think that's the plan in the initial funding creation kind of divisive merger term that you love is going to have that much funding in it. My read on this, and it's entirely possible that my read on this is wrong, is that J&J has pledged essentially some sort of like backup guarantee beyond the funding that initially ends up in this LTL company that's the sort of scapegoat company.
00:31:26
Speaker
And, uh, you know, if that's the case and they're pled, they're pledging to kind of be the backup, not exactly a guarantee, because that's got more entailed, but, uh, you know, we'll handle a deficiency. Like, okay. I'm not sure why we're doing this now. Yeah, I agree. Bank bankruptcies get crazy complex, especially when there are huge corporate entities involved. Uh, and I have every reason to believe that the filings on a bankruptcy like this would be
00:31:54
Speaker
in the many thousands of pages by the time that we get to the end of it. Uh, so it's far too goofy and complex to simplify and, uh, 60 ish minute podcast, but yeah. Did you see the, uh, that the attorney's fees for like one side in this case were over a million dollars on the appeal alone? It's nuts. Bankruptcy attorney fees are insane.
00:32:21
Speaker
That sort of raises a question to your philosophical question before, the idea that, well, should Johnson & Johnson have to pay all of the legitimate claims that come and have to go bankrupt if necessary? But my question, I don't know the answer. I don't know if you guys know the answer to this. Is there any reason to believe the claimants would be first in priority in front of whatever else Johnson & Johnson already owes, various mortgages and loans and whatever? So isn't it also possible that if that was to happen,
00:32:51
Speaker
the claimants would actually get less than if they, Johnson and Johnson did this move. Yeah, they would, right? Because bankrupt, they are the last, they are unsecured creditors. They're after all the secured creditors. And then I don't know what the, uh, what the prioritization is once you're past secured versus unsecured. So like unsecured creditors, I've, I've been an unsecured creditor in a bankruptcy or represented an unsecured creditor in bankruptcy. And it was just divided evenly.
00:33:19
Speaker
Among all the unsecured creditors, but we didn't really attempt to put ourselves above anybody else So without knowing what the secured creditors look like how many they know I mean I have to assume I really don't know anything about it But I would have to assume, you know a company of that size has a number of secured creditors Yeah, there might not be a ton of meat left on the bone for the talc victims. Yeah, and from what I understand there's like a there's a
00:33:45
Speaker
there's a lot of disagreement over whether or not the whole case of talc causing cancer at all is actually real or whether or not it's just like one expert or a handful of experts that actually think this is a real thing. So it's kind of reflective of the, if you're making medical products, if you're making like consumer products that are like powders or like
00:34:08
Speaker
something like that. Once there's like some evidence that it causes cancer, regardless of whether meritorious, you're facing a lot of risk that a juries is going to believe it. If an expert gets through, an expert has some legitimate case.
00:34:24
Speaker
The other company that is giving this a shot, I don't know if you guys saw this, is 3M, apparently, with earplugs. And I think the United States military is one of the main major claimants in that. Basically, the earplugs aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing.
00:34:41
Speaker
A lot of soldiers suffered hearing loss or something. This has implications for it. I think there was a third company, too, that was leaning on this Texas two-step thing. This was the first I had heard of it. I hadn't heard of this before, before the Johnson & Johnson thing. Everybody started talking about it as though we've all been talking about it for months or whatever. Johnson & Johnson seemed to be the progenitor of this.
00:35:05
Speaker
Yeah. It seems relatively new. Like they started doing it in like 2017 or something. Like that was the first Texas two step was like within the last few years, I think. And that's kind of crazy. It feels like kind of an obvious thing to do. Yeah. Is Texas the, did Texas, is Texas the only place where this happens? Is that, or is this, is it possible for this to happen from other places?
00:35:34
Speaker
Is Delaware about to be supplanted by Texas? Because you can Texas two-step your way out of all these liabilities, at least for products. I thought I read that there was another. It was like Texas and I thought it was Delaware. It's basically places that have these demerger laws that are conducive to it.
00:35:52
Speaker
Divisional merger, you mean? Divisional merger, yeah. Yeah, sometimes it's called reverse mergers. Reverse mergers, there we go. Sorry, yes. But I think demerger too is one of the terms. It's a merger. That's too close to demerrer, which itself is an annoying word. Shouldn't exist, yeah. The reason that they call it a Texas two-step doesn't, it has to do with the fact that Texas is a forum in which you can do this, but it's also because it's a clever sounding thing that sounds like the dance from Texas. So that's why it's called the Texas two-step.
00:36:22
Speaker
I imagine that there are other states that it can happen in. I haven't seen specific references to other states that this can happen in, but I don't think it's unique to Texas. Just unique that Texas has a dance that goes nicely with the name that they want to give to this thing, because that sounds a lot more fun than a reverse merger. Makes everybody think of reverse mortgages and infomercials that play during Jeopardy and stuff like that.
00:36:51
Speaker
That is a cool, it is a cool name for a very boring liability, uh, limitation vehicle, boring and scummy. Yeah. It's a good word. Yeah. Yeah. She called it. Yeah. It is rage inducing thinking about like, Oh yeah. You're about to face a bunch of liability. You're going to, I'm just going to make a new company and it's going to be valueless. And yeah, sorry.
00:37:16
Speaker
uh seems extremely like a huge issue if it if it was like unlimited if it's truly as unlimited as as it sounds where any texas corporation can just be like yeah yeah oh okay i have liabilities okay bye bye um yeah okay new new company and just becomes a normal thing like it's hard for me to like that's a
00:37:42
Speaker
Because Texas corporations are doing, you can be a Texas corporation and operate anywhere. What are you gonna do about that? If you're a California, if you're a Colorado, if you're any state that isn't Texas, and you have Texas corporations doing business in your state, you can't legally say, Texas corporations can't do business in my state. That's unconstitutional. So what do you do? You have to let them register.
00:38:11
Speaker
And then they do business in your state. They harm your residents and you're powerless to collect against them. I guess you collect at a certain point. Yeah.
00:38:23
Speaker
While we've been talking about this, I pulled up, why would you pursue a reverse merger? What are some of the bona fide reasons that you might do something like this? It turns out the SEC has put out a paper on this saying that, and I'm quoting from this, I'll send the link so that we can put it in the show notes, a private operating company may pursue a reverse merger in order to facilitate access to capital markets.
00:38:47
Speaker
including liquidity from having it stock quoted on a stock market or listed on a private exchange, being able to get funding from a broader pool of public investors, cheaper method of going public as it were. And so perhaps there are some ways that this could be used in like a good faith scenario. This doesn't feel like that to me.
00:39:11
Speaker
Isn't that about SPACs? Is that what they're talking about? So SPACs, meaning the special purpose corporations where it's like you go public as a kind of meaningless business. And then another company goes public by being subsumed by this tiny business through an insane merger. Do you know what I'm talking about?
00:39:34
Speaker
Yeah, that may be kind of related, but there's no specific reference to that in this paper. I mean, I think it comes down to basically spinning off parts of your business that are more profitable or more
00:39:49
Speaker
Able to raise capital like it's basically just spinning off divisions or sub products like if you own if you're like Hasbro and you've just come up with like Lawn darts or something. I don't know. I should pick something that didn't kill a bunch of people in the 80s, but You're gonna want to like spin that off of your nice family friendly game Market to try to keep your you know Keep one entity sort of chugging along while the other one can be a little more risky like I mean
00:40:16
Speaker
I guess I understand it, but it's all the same variation of the same game. And with this, it's like the profits didn't flow only to this little subsidiary. I mean, I think that's the part that I get hung up on, right? The business operated as a whole and profits flowed between different divisions of Johnson & Johnson freely and marketing was spent freely. And now you're only cabining it off when there's liabilities.
00:40:43
Speaker
And I don't know, it just seems to me to be sort of transparently, as Jason said, scummy.
00:40:51
Speaker
The other, as we were, as we were talking here, I also found that apparently in 2021, taking a different part of this, the NRA attempted to do just the bankruptcy part, the part where, you know what I mean? Like this, it sounds like there's a whole lot of angry villagers coming to the castle. We're going to declare bankruptcy now, because if they all file claims, we're in big trouble. And similarly to here, they weren't able to do it because they weren't in financial distress at that point. You can't be like prospectively in financial distress.
00:41:21
Speaker
Which to me seems like an obvious public policy necessity, right? It's not be able to just sort of like, well, we sold these products. We know we put poison in the ice cream. We're going to declare bankruptcy now. Oh man, when those kids start eating it and drop dead, we're going to have a lot of lawsuits on our hand.
00:41:38
Speaker
And like, it's, you want companies to be able to have the flexibility to spin off entities and here's it here's an example that I could think of is like, Google bought nest forever ago, and right.
Corporate Restructuring Examples
00:41:53
Speaker
I had a Nest thermostat before they were bought by Google, and Google acquiring Nest was not a great thing that happened for people who had Nest thermostats. And Nest probably does a lot better when it's out from Google's control, out from under the thumb of Google. And so if Google wanted to turn this into a thriving company again,
00:42:15
Speaker
spinning back out and have the flexibility to do something like that. I'm in favor of that because that's spinning out a going concern, not spinning out something that, hey, we're going to set this boat a sail in the ocean and then we're going to shoot flaming arrows at it so that it burns up to incinerate the dead corpse of the king. No, that's no good. We don't want that. Do you not like having the Nest thermostat in your Google Home app?
00:42:45
Speaker
It's so convenient. Google is a good example. We talked about it last week with the advertising stuff, right? If they're forced to spin off double-click or spin off the sell side from the buy side of the advertising, I assume functionally what they would do is something equivalent to a demerger, right? Or whatever, this is a divisive merger.
00:43:05
Speaker
Yeah. So I relate to this like I do with all things, which is through gaming. Microsoft purchased Bungie, the makers of Halo, before Halo came out. And then they spun it back out and let Bungie go independent and now Bungie is on by Sony.
00:43:25
Speaker
So I don't know how, why? I don't know why, but Microsoft was like, be free, go, like Harry and the Hendersons. I don't know what the financial
00:43:41
Speaker
Incentive there was, I guess they were like, look, we don't think you're that good of a business. We think that you're more, you're more than, you're more like, I guess, I don't know. I don't know because Benji is so successful.
00:43:56
Speaker
You're, you're, this is more than you're worth. So we're going to spin you out. Maybe we, they saddled them with debt or something on the way out or something like that. I don't know. It also happened to the makers of Hitman. Hitman spun off from 505. Anyway.
00:44:13
Speaker
I told gaming. It's also apparently pretty common in the power utility industry for the supply side versus the other delivery side. Right. They they start as one entity and then they they get spun off into separate entities. And the other thing I was thinking about is in with mortgages, a lot of times you'll find that the note holder is not the mortgage servicer. And I imagine that is something similar to that. Like you might have Wells Fargo as
00:44:38
Speaker
sort of a portfolio loan holding entity and then they'll separately be a loan servicer sometimes for their loans, but oftentimes for other loans. And so I can understand how it might be, you know, it might have some utility and some like legitimate use at certain points, but obviously here the timing just seems like it is clearly Jason's metaphor of them both with the flaming arrows. Yeah. They are not being, you know, they're not being sly about this. They're just like, yeah, no, you take, you take this poison and you run with it.
00:45:08
Speaker
Yeah. We should get Chancery Daily and Lipton on the podcast to explain what's going on, or why things get spun off for legit reasons. Yeah. I have to believe there are legitimate reasons.
00:45:24
Speaker
In a scenario where you imagine like, okay, let's take the bungee spin off or something like that. What happens when you spin bungee out into a new company? Who's the shareholder that owns all of it? Well, it's Microsoft at first until they sell it. They're probably recovering some cash by selling it to either privately or publicly to somebody else.
00:45:45
Speaker
Maybe they just wanted the cash more than they, or the absence of debt more than they wanted the functioning video game studio that turned out to make some pretty great products. Yeah. Who knows.
00:45:57
Speaker
What's the actual difference between a wholly owned subsidiary and a company where a company just happens to own 100% of the stock of that company? Is it just purely governance? You're under our health insurance, you are- In a functioning- On our books?
00:46:22
Speaker
policy regime wouldn't sort of, again, to bring back the Google ads thing, wouldn't antitrust law be at play between the two entities? Or no, I don't know. Again, I'm not an antitrust expert. But I mean, that was my assumption is that when you split them up, there is some like bargaining requirements, there is some I don't know, I just assumed there was some use for doing this. I don't see
00:46:42
Speaker
They seem to go to a lot of trouble to split up companies frequently and I just have to assume there's a reason for it other than just, no, no, you need to rent different office space and go work out of that now. I bet you, I have no actual factual basis for saying this, but I bet you like probably nine times out of 10 it has to do with tax advantages.
00:47:07
Speaker
If any listeners have any corporations to give away so that we can learn how this works, I'd be happy to take a couple, especially nested corporations. That'd be super cool. Just like hit me up on Mastodon and I'll take them off your hands.
00:47:26
Speaker
Speaking of companies that should be broken up or shouldn't exist, have you guys been paying attention at all to this do not pay, this ongoing do not pay?
DoNotPay's Misleading Practices
00:47:35
Speaker
The metaphor I use, which I hope resonates with you guys. You guys have seen Eddie Murphy's delirious standup special, I hope.
00:47:42
Speaker
Oh, it's been years. It's been so long. He has this bit where he says that when his aunt Bunny falls down the stairs, she tries to stop herself. And so it takes like a half an hour. It takes a lot longer than if a kid falls down the stairs. And so then he makes this sound, this long thing of her slowly falling down the stairs. And I feel like, do not pay. And Josh Browder is that aunt, just like falling down the stairs and trying to stop herself and trying to come to a halt.
00:48:08
Speaker
This is like a slow motion train derailment of just every aspect of what this guy has been saying over the last month is slowly being unveiled as just utter nonsense or lies or both.
00:48:22
Speaker
I feel like it's more like a Wile E. Coyote situation where he's been standing on open air for like a long time and hasn't looked down. He's still not looking down, but Catherine Tucson, or is that her name? The paralegal that's destroying him is like pointing out to everybody how there's no land beneath him.
00:48:45
Speaker
That's a better one, yeah. Yeah, that's the situation. It's so funny. Did you say what happened? No. Okay. He promised that he was an AI. This company, which has existed for six years, seven years, we mentioned this last week, but they were like, we're going to put an AI lawyer in the courtroom
00:49:08
Speaker
And we're going to get people to walk into a courtroom and get instructions from the AI lawyer through AirPods. And then he canceled it because everybody was like, that's unlicensed practical law. That's literally a crime. And he's like, the government's trying to take me down. So we're going to stop.
00:49:31
Speaker
And Ms. Tucson, Catherine, Ms. Tucson. After that happened, so she's been pointing out problems with it this whole time. Maybe her initial big splash thing was she was like, I'm gonna sign up for Do Not Pay, I'm gonna ask for these four documents that they promised that they can do.
00:49:55
Speaker
And she signed up for them. She put her information in the AI generator, and the AI generator was like, this is going to take eight hours. Come back in eight hours. And this guy, Browder, blocked her at first, and then eventually said, OK, sorry, we're canceling all those services. Those services no longer exist. And here's your money back.
00:50:24
Speaker
And the latest is he's updated the terms of service. Yes to say that you can't test it Basically, you can't discover my fraud. Yeah is in the terms of service now. That's against the terms. You can't yes He added that after talking to her without saying that it was added But also he said that the reason why it didn't work for her was because they have AI to detect when it's being tested This is a real proceeding this is fake so we know yeah
00:50:50
Speaker
Yeah, we knew. Wait, he asks, so was your use legitimate? What is that? What does that mean? What does that mean? Oh, you have the most you actually have secretly have the most advanced bot detecting AI where it detects humans that are not being true to themselves. Humans who aren't being true and real. That's incredible. You should sell that.
00:51:14
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good product. Yeah, that's an incredible product. A marketable product. Yeah.
00:51:21
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. This is a follow up. So yes, this is a follow up from the previous week. So then the most like just cringe inducing agreed. So the aforementioned Ms. Tucson then dives into his tweets and finds that he had promised to, because of the wonderful way that our medical debt system works, there's ways that you can basically make donations to charitable organizations to purchase other people's medical debt for like pennies on the dollar.
00:51:49
Speaker
And so he said at some point, if every like retweet, some stupid tweet of his was get God or whatever, he was going to give, you know, $50 to purchase the medical debt of, you know, people who are saddled with that. And so I don't know when this was. It was at some point. I think about it in twenty seventeen. It was quite a while ago that he had made this. He had made this declaration. I thought it was last December. Or was it just last December? OK, it was last December is when he said he made the the donation.
00:52:17
Speaker
Right. But the point being then when he tries to prove that he made this donation, it takes him about 20 minutes. Similarly, I think to how long it takes him to generate these documents. He then comes up with a receipt that looks like Mad Libs. The date is like kind of higher on the, it's not in line with where it should be. And so Ms. Tucson makes a donation of her own and gets a receipt and compares the receipt to see like, well, you know,
00:52:42
Speaker
Good faith, maybe that's just how these donation receipts are generated. They're a little askew or whatever. Super not askew. The date line was perfectly lined up with the word date as it should be. Hers looked quite a bit different from his receipt. So I think she then presented it to him and I think he didn't answer or whatever. But she then reached out to the, it was like ripmedicaldebt.com or something, reached out to them and said, hey, could you just let me know when this person made this donation? And it was like,
00:53:11
Speaker
four minutes after she had pointed out to him on Twitter that he had never made that donation, or I guess she asked. I guess the initial thing was an ask of, did you make this donation, right? And so four minutes later, he makes the donation and then quickly replies in 15 more minutes. I presume the amount of time it takes him to open Photoshop or something and then quickly lock it up to look like it had been made back when he made the tweet.
00:53:36
Speaker
Yeah, so he's just wholesale. Sad. Yeah, sad. Very sad. Unbelievably sad. And so you discovered something. I saw you had posted Jake on Macedon, the initial, is this the new golden boy of Silicon Valley story? Yeah. Well, I just name searched him on Twitter because I was like, this guy, who is this guy? Because we know he's the son of a big... Bill Browder.
00:54:01
Speaker
Bill Browder, who's a Russian capital guy, specifically in Russia. But I was like, so what's this guy's deal? But yeah, I found when he was 19, it got a lot sadder to me. When he was 19, he was getting glowing write-ups from Wired about how this 19-year-old has taken on. He's only 19 and he's got a business to
00:54:29
Speaker
to take on, you know, people's the injustice to take on the gap, the justice gap. And it's like, oh, this guy, how do I wonder how he got that business at 19? I wonder how he got in wired with this with this business that hadn't actually done anything. It's like, oh, I see what happened here. This kid
00:54:53
Speaker
You know, he's being, I don't know what, who was driving the bus there. Uh, but it's like, you know, he's gone off the cliff. Yeah. It's, it's always, he's always had the biggest birthday party I'm betting. He's always had the, he always had the spotlight. I want to leave, I want to leave a lot of opportunity open because this is,
00:55:14
Speaker
basically an exact parallel to how Tony Stark's story began before he became Iron Man.
Medical Debt Solutions
00:55:19
Speaker
So I'm leaving open the possibility that he could get captured by the Taliban and build this awesome robot exoskeleton and become a superhero.
00:55:32
Speaker
Good on you, Joshua Browder, if that's what happens here. I do want to take a second here and call out RIP medical debt. This may not be a thing that a lot of people understand, but in the United States, at least in most states, every state that I've ever practiced law in, you can buy and sell debt pretty easily. It's called buying the paper or buying the debt or something like that.
00:55:55
Speaker
You can exchange debts. And this leads to one super scummy business of people discharging bad debts, banks, credit cards, selling them off to debt collectors who then have scummy practices. And that's why we have the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.
00:56:11
Speaker
RIP medical debt, on the other hand, is an organization that is dedicated to buying that debt, not to collect it, but to discharge it, because these medical providers, and in particular, probably hospital corporations, grossly overcharge for a lot of their services. And it turns out, when you grossly overcharge for something, you'll accept pennies on the dollar. And that's why a $500 donation to RIP medical debt
00:56:38
Speaker
could plausibly be extended to discharge $50,000 worth of medical debt. And so great on that organization and let's amp them up and let as many people hear about that as possible. There was an awesome episode this week. Gosh, what's the name of that show with John Oliver on HBO? Last Week Tonight. Yeah, Last Week Tonight. I think they did an episode. We know something was on there. Do we? Me. I just talked to them. What? Anyway, never mind.
00:57:06
Speaker
Well, never mind. We're circling back to that. That's our concluding thoughts here. We'll circle back to that plenty next week when Florida brings in its special session to resolve the Disney's Reedy Creek thing. Anyway, you'll see. So anyway, there's probably a what, three or four year old episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver where they did this very thing and he like hammed it up real funny. But this is a good organization that does good work.
00:57:37
Speaker
in the kerfuffle here between Joshua Browder and Catherine Tucson and the three of us, you know, kind of, what are we doing here? Ganging up on him, dog piling on him. Let's not lose sight of R.I.P. Medical Debt is an organization that's doing a really cool thing that is relieving people from crushing medical debt and is absolutely worth time and dollars to give to.
00:58:04
Speaker
There's a really good four-part podcast or four-part arc of This American Life called Somebody Else's Money, which is about the medical insurance and medical services economy.
00:58:20
Speaker
That was really good. Like it kind of explains both why hospitals super overcharge and why this, you know, the debt will, you know, get settled for for pennies on the dollar. It really just is a shame because like hospitals don't expect to collect it for the most part, but people have a sense of honor and also want to protect their credit score. They don't want to leave debts on unpaid. And so it's like it really sets it up where the like the
00:58:48
Speaker
the more you fail to pay that debt, which is artificially inflated, the better you are. They expect you to not pay your debts, which sucks. It's not a good system to have.
00:59:06
Speaker
Yeah, that cool on grip medical debt. Definitely, definitely. All right. Um, if you guys have anything else to say about, uh, do not pay or, uh, uh, Joshua Browder or, um, anything there, do you guys want to move on just to what's going on and you know, recommendations and such we're coming up on an hour.
Entertainment Recommendations
00:59:23
Speaker
Yeah. We made it all the way. We did. We made it. Is there ever any doubt, was there ever any doubt that we could sit here and just blow smoke for an hour?
00:59:33
Speaker
Did you guys watch episode three of The Last of Us? Are you okay? Did you watch it? I haven't watched any of them, man. I haven't watched any of them either. I'm not turning them on until I finished both episode one and episode two on the PlayStation. Of the games. Yeah. And I know I'm probably okay to watch season one of The Last of Us if I finished episode one, which I have.
00:59:55
Speaker
But I just, you know, I want to get it all into my belt before I make my foray into that. But are you OK, Jake? Yeah, I'm after seeing it. I was great. Episode three is so like, have you seen the San Junipero episode of Black Mirror?
01:00:12
Speaker
Or have you seen Black Mirror? These are both all timers that people are gonna be talking about for a long time. But yeah, that's gonna be my recommendation. I'm taking over. My recommendation is The Last of Us, episode three. It's like, even if you're not a fan of the game, even if you're not a fan of the show, even if you don't like zombie shows,
01:00:37
Speaker
You don't even don't watch episode one or two. It doesn't know that there's zombies in this world. Keep watching for the first 15 minutes or something, and then it'll get to the the good stuff. Yeah, it's it has Nick Offerman. It has. Who doesn't love Nick Offerman? Murray Bartlett, Nick Offerman playing a prepper.
01:01:01
Speaker
Um, or a survivalist as he, as he likes to call himself, uh, very on brand for the guy who played, uh, Ron Swanson, Ron Swanson. Exactly. Yeah. Hmm. If one wanted to play the game, uh, the last of us, what is that on PlayStation? Yeah. PlayStation four and PlayStation five. Not actually. Okay. Uh, there, I don't think it's on, it might be on PC now. Um, the last of us one, not two, but one, I think might be on PC. Okay. Thank you.
01:01:32
Speaker
Yeah. All right. I'll go next. I, my wife and I, we watched this Friday. Last Friday we watched the first two episodes that got published of this new show on Apple TV Plus called Shrinking. I am a, I will confess to being a Jason Siegel fan. I will confess to being a Harrison Ford fan. Who's not? This is a surprisingly heartwarming show that is kind of in
01:02:01
Speaker
In some ways, it struck me as being in the same spirit as Ted Lasso. And that's not that surprising because it's made by the same creator, Bill Lawrence, who created Ted Lasso and also created Scrubs, like two all-time shows that are among my favorites. But the heart that's in this and like the quirky humor, and I just like literally burst out laughing at Harrison Ford just sitting there deadpan delivering his lines. It's got so much heart, it's got like
01:02:30
Speaker
a touch of sadness and overcoming emotional adversity and dealing with hard stuff in your life. And so it's got that Ted Lasso feel and just strong recommend. It is not extremely light. And so you're not going to necessarily walk away from it feeling like you just watched some super joyful procedural comedy or something like that.
01:02:59
Speaker
that 70s show, we're now that 90s show, where you're gonna walk away with it from a, oh, that was a fun 25 minutes of laughs, but really, really good, strong recommend.
01:03:09
Speaker
Is it a limited series, or is it going to be an ongoing thing? I think it's ongoing. I think I might be confusing it. No, I'm confusing it with the last of us. I thought for a second there that it already got picked up for season two. I have a hard time imagining how it wouldn't, because already in the first two episodes, that's really good. But I mean, it's not just one season. Gotcha. OK. No, there wasn't. Plus is really working out. They're doing well. Yeah. You know, I've heard them analogize to the old HBO, where it was,
01:03:39
Speaker
not a ton of content all the time. Uh, but the content that was on there was like the must watch content. And the awards are bearing that out. Like they're, they're cleaning up at the awards shows. It's the opposite of the Netflix model of turnout, a bunch of trash. And eventually you'll get lucky. Uh-huh. The volume in a way about a Frogger game. Yeah. Um,
01:04:04
Speaker
OK, so I think, Jake, you made your recommendation, right? Or did you want to talk about that? You had another high-fi rush. Good game. Good game. If you have Xbox Game Pass, buy that. Or if you don't, buy that $30. Very good game. Rhythm Combat.
01:04:18
Speaker
As in music, like rhythm as in, okay. Lonely Boy, Nine Inch Nails on the soundtrack. It's all good. Okay. Lonely Boy, Nine Inch Nails. Lonely Boy, The Black Keys. Oh, okay. I understand. Got you. Okay. Okay. So my recommendation is not a recommendation. It's just I've had a chance now to play with the Oculus Quest 2, I think is what it's called, right? I can never remember. The Quest 2, yeah.
01:04:42
Speaker
Yeah, it's very cool. I'm enjoying it a lot. So I was more, as I often do, looking for recommendations from you guys. So far, what I've been playing is there's a game like Contractors, which kind of reminds me of like an old like Counter Strike kind of game. I'm just playing. I'm not playing a multiplayer because I'll kill myself or, you know, break something in the house or whatever. So I'm just playing with bots and stuff.
01:05:02
Speaker
Obviously, Beat Saber, very cool. I'm having some difficulty with like after about an hour or so, pretty, I won't say nauseous, but there's some vertigo going on. And that lasts for quite, I know you guys aren't doctors, but like that lasts.
01:05:21
Speaker
that last for quite a while afterwards that does not immediately go away and then interacting with any other screen afterwards is very strange like I was I played a game before and then I sat down in front of the iMac I was looking at it and the screen was kind of doing some like weird you know coming at me
01:05:38
Speaker
um but yeah looking for recommendations what you guys i know i asked a little bit on slack and you guys gave me some answers but uh do you have a quest uh jake yeah i'm sorry innocuous yeah i have a quest um innocuous i wish it was an oculus but no it's a meta quest now
01:05:53
Speaker
Oh, is it not an Oculus at all? I go to a place.com to buy games. It's meta now. It's meta now. I'm sorry. Every game that I played on there, I was like, after an hour, I'm like, okay, I want to get out. This is cool, but I want my head to breathe. But Beat Saber, I could play for like three hours.
01:06:14
Speaker
And it was like good exercise. It was, it was really good. I will say there's a, um, if you feel nauseous in there, you should immediately get out. Uh, because I know somebody who played a game called bone works, which is a VR game. And it's just like, it's similar to contractors. Those are the two that people recommend for like first person shooters. Sorry, go ahead.
01:06:35
Speaker
Yeah, no, so bone works is supposedly good, but it's very taxing vertigo wise if you're sensitive to that. And apparently what happens is if you have vertigo, or if you have like motion sickness problems, if you keep going, it'll ruin VR for the rest, like, entirely, like you won't be able to put it on at all, you'll just have an immediate like motion sickness reaction. Like,
01:06:59
Speaker
If you are okay and then not okay, you'll lose the part where you're okay. You're just going to have emotions like this immediately. And then when that's the only reality there is, I won't be able to exist anymore. I'll cease to be. This is like the time when I was 12 that I threw up watermelon and now I hate watermelon.
01:07:18
Speaker
Exactly. That's what I totally thought you were going to say. Like if you press through, you'll vomit, but then you'll rally. Yeah, then you'll be okay. Just have a bucket with you, you know, push through, you'll be okay. It's not the puke and rally situation. It's the puke and hate it forever situation. You can keep puking and puke forever.
01:07:35
Speaker
I can see why. I do have a beat saber related recommendation. They have add on music packs that you get it and that you can get in there. And there's, I don't know the exact name of it, but there's one that's like, I don't know, just like the rock and roll or like the classic rock music pack. And it feels really bad to guys my age to call Nirvana classic rock, like smells like teen spirit. Doesn't feel like classic rock to me, but it totally is. But that is an awesome pack. Sweet child of mine is in there and that's a fun play.
01:08:05
Speaker
Okay. Cool. Yeah. I haven't done any of the expansions yet. So that's a good, that's a good recommendation. I saw them in there and I just didn't know, like, you never know what's actually a, you know, a kind of translate. Well, that's great. No, you're still living on a hundred dollar bills, uh, bills. Yeah. And things that actually referenced the game itself. I think one of them is called beat saber. Yeah. And it just keeps telling me that I'm in beat saber and this is beat saber. Yeah.
01:08:28
Speaker
You're playing Beat Saber. Yeah. There you go. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Just reminding you, you're playing Beat Saber. Do yourself a favor and try. There's one in there called Fit Beat. Try that on 360 mode. It's awesome. Fit Beat 360 mode. OK. Yeah. I forgot about 360 mode. Yeah. I don't even know what 360 mode is. I haven't done that yet. Oh, they come from all directions, basically, obviously, I guess. Yeah. You have to turn around at points. It tells you where it's coming from.
01:08:57
Speaker
Um, okay. But yeah, my, my kid really likes a hundred dollar bills or he did back when I was, uh, it's such a, like the song for people who are listening. I haven't heard this. It's like got the dumbest lyrics. This is like a hundred dollar bills, a hundred dollar bills, a hundred dollar, a hundred dollar bills. And it's just like that over and over. Uh, yeah, great song. Love it.
01:09:23
Speaker
I think that rendition is a great thing to go out on. And if we ever make a trailer, that little bit there is going to be in it, I think. Your version of $100 bills. That's going on the soundboard. The Esquiring Minds soundboard. Exactly. That's our episode, Kim Asabi. That's my attempt at a catchphrase. We were talking about that earlier. Sweet sign off line. Save it. That's going on the soundboard too. Yep.