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Chess, Fraud, Patreon and Baseball
66 Plays1 year ago
- https://twitter.com/JenShahade/status/1707039851642495423?s=20
- https://www.chess.com/news/view/st-louis-chess-club-issues-statement-on-alejandro-ramirez
- https://www.engadget.com/patreon-overhauls-its-platform-with-free-content-and-more-creator-control-202357279.html
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/04/15/school-chess-class-clubs/
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Transcript
Introduction to the hosts
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey there. Hey, how'd it worked? Yeah, it works. We're here. We're all together. It all looks okay. I think I'm going to not touch my microphone the whole time. Oh yeah. I don't know if it was your fault. I still don't think it was your fault, but no, I don't think so. Well, I'm, I'm always compelled to take the blame. So I'm going to absorb the blame and it's very gracious of you guys to not blame me. Yeah. Just sit completely still for the rest of the podcast. Yeah. It won't affect you at all. Nah.
00:00:28
Speaker
This podcast being Squaring Minds, episode 26 for October 5th, 2023. 10-5. Three lawyer friends goofing around for your own enjoyment. Nothing we say should be taken as legal advice. I'm one of those. I'm Andrew Leahy, tax and technology attorney from New Jersey. I'm joined, as always, by one of these two.
00:00:46
Speaker
Wow. Oh, generic. You're not going to give us guidance. He always, he always, no, no, no. He always puts you first. I'm going next. I'm Jason. I'm an employment, uh, litigator. I work mainly in Indiana, occasionally in Georgia, Florida, uh, but really only kind of tangentially.
Domain name collection and succession planning
00:01:03
Speaker
Uh, and, uh, you can find me at sue your bad boss.com sue my bad boss.com.
00:01:09
Speaker
Uh, and you know, anti-worklawyer.com. I still own that one. That's a good one. Yeah. Anti-work was having a moment, uh, two years ago, three years ago, something like that. And, uh, I thought, Oh, this would be pretty cool. And I don't think it's ever resulted in anything for me, but I said they were camping on it for 18 bucks a year. It's worth it.
00:01:30
Speaker
I was going to say, in order to have an employment discrimination case, you have to have a job first, but that's not true. You can have a job application case and never get the job. That's right. Yeah, still consistent. Do you have a succession plan? Hold on one second. I have a really important question for Jason. Do you have a succession plan for your domains? You're supposed to have that planned out for your clients and stuff. Do you have it for your domains so that Sue, my bad boss, will transition on to some much younger attorney?
Youthful optimism and fears in law
00:01:56
Speaker
Well, I have them all on auto-renew and my succession plan is my iCloud password management system has my hover login on there. When I kick the can, maybe Hannah will see a bill that has a bunch of, hey, you paid ICANN $18 for this thing or hover. The money doesn't go directly to ICANN, I don't think.
00:02:21
Speaker
Then she'll say, oh, how do I stop paying for this thing that I don't care about? Speaking of kids, much younger attorneys. Speaking of things I don't care about. No, I'm kidding. I care about kids. I'm Jacob Schumer, a Florida construction and land use attorney.
00:02:37
Speaker
Um, and I had the absolute, this is one of the most fun things. It's so basic, but, uh, it was such a blast this morning. I got to go to my old PD's office. I used to be a public defender and night circuit here, uh, and talk to the new crop of attorneys. Like every year they hired 25 or so new attorneys and put them through trial for a week. Um,
00:03:02
Speaker
And I mean, they've hired more than 25 a year, pretty regularly. And I got to just talk to them about the being a lawyer and being part of the Bar Association and also see my old friends who are still there, which is very few of the people that I started with 10, 9 years ago. But man, it's cool to see young
00:03:29
Speaker
Young lawyers at the very start of their career just having passed the bar and still full of hope and energy to go out and defeat the world and also fear. Love seeing the fear in their eyes that they don't know what they're doing. Little do they know, you can go 30 years not knowing what you're doing and still make money.
00:03:53
Speaker
Um, yeah, it was really, it was really fun. They're not yet cold and dead on the inside from years of soul sucking work. No, they're, if they're cold and dead, it's for other reasons.
Stress and teaching methods in law school
00:04:04
Speaker
Law school can make them cold and dead too. I see sort of a, a kind of a generalized, I've been on, uh, I'm teaching an undergraduate class right now. So I've been on campus of a law school while not in the law classes directly. I see sort of a frantic look. Like I almost feel like AI could pretty easily.
00:04:23
Speaker
Detect from just taking like an image of all the faces on the street outside the school the proximity to midterms and finals That this picture was taken like if they ever needed to like set you know when this picture was taken for purposes of like some sort of criminal defense Situation or something they'd be able to but look at the fear on this person's face. This is right in midterm season You can tell they're just they're stressed. They're sweating there There seems to be like a frantic energy that I'm sure I exhibited when I was in law school But I didn't I don't remember that I don't remember being that like
00:04:53
Speaker
wound up. Yeah, I I never I should have been. Yeah, I never took undergrad seriously, which was kind of my problem. So I didn't or I didn't take undergrad seriously until the last until January of my senior year. That's when I started taking undergrad seriously. So and then it wasn't really midterms that were stressing me out because like,
00:05:19
Speaker
undergrad, it was never that hard because I was a history major. No offense to history majors, but it's not like the people who were doing engineering and stuff. They were so stressed out. They got old fast. You see them now, they look like wizened. They're the same age as you, but they look 108.
00:05:44
Speaker
Yeah. My midterms were papers. That's the thing. Like they were papers that I was, I could write. I was good at writing. I liked it. And if you put effort and thought into stuff, you got nay. That's the thing. So, uh, in history, uh, I was a political science major, same experience. Like there was, there was no stress. We had the closest thing that I came to stress in undergrad was there were a few, we had like a pre-law track that was kind of a minor, kind of not. And like,
00:06:12
Speaker
One of the classes was a pretty bonafide con law class, and that would stress me out. They didn't put you on call the same way where it was, surprise, you're getting called on today. It was, you're going to be briefing this case, so come prepared to brief this case, which was much more merciful and probably necessary for undergrads. That and there was a legal writing class.
00:06:36
Speaker
That guy was really cool, really cool. There was some discourse on the Socratic method recently. The surprise, they're going to ask you about the reading that you were assigned.
00:06:47
Speaker
method and whether or not it's good or not. I liked it. I thought it was good because I actually read everything and I never read anything otherwise. Right. It was like an accountability heuristic or something for you. Like it kept you sort of on. I can see that. I mean, yeah, I always I wouldn't say I liked it. I don't think I liked it, but I always read because of it. And I guess I can't say for certain I would have read otherwise.
00:07:12
Speaker
The surprise aspect of the Socratic method is not part of the Socratic method, I don't think. It's just torture. But the Socratic method itself of
00:07:22
Speaker
exploring a topic by probing deeper and deeper into questions and basing those questions on the questions that came before. I think it is actually low key good training for taking depositions and eliciting testimony at a trial where depositions, especially when you're trying to discover stuff like that is low key good training for listen to the answer and then base your next question off of the answer that you just heard. So it's not entirely useless.
00:07:51
Speaker
And it teaches you how to probe and investigate something like that. Or you probably should know that by being a grownup, but it teaches you good investigation tactics in there. That helps you learn stuff. The surprise is terrible, it's torment. I don't remember Socrates. The surprise is the most important part though. I don't know that Socrates, I don't remember him surprising people. I don't think that was his whole deal, was he just hit under a bridge and popped out like a troll and asked questions.
00:08:18
Speaker
I thought it was that I thought the Socratic method was you teach by talking to the student and getting like interrogating the students, interrogating the student. I don't know about the surprise part, but you mean the surprise as in you don't know whether or not you're going to get asked anything in class. You don't know whether you're going to be the one on the hot seat.
00:08:36
Speaker
Yeah. Um, by the way, I was the first person that there was in my school. There's one teacher that's considered a hard, uh, hard-ass at Vandy. Uh, his name is Brian Fitzpatrick. He knows, he knows that's his reputation. He probably relishes it. Um, yeah, they usually do. Um, but he's honestly not, he's not that bad.
00:08:55
Speaker
Um, the, I got him my first semester in civil procedure, which is probably the, one of the strangest first semester courses to be sure a person with no legal background. It was the only person I was completely lost in the whole year. Sorry. The first person, first question, first person called and I gave a terrible answer, obviously, because I didn't know what the hell was going on or what the point of the case that they sent that
00:09:23
Speaker
what the first case was about notice pleading. It was Twombly Nickball. And I'm like, I don't know what any of these things are. Right. And so he asked the question. I was like, I don't know. I didn't say I don't know. I gave a bad answer. But that's what you do. And you say it authoritatively.
00:09:41
Speaker
I think, oh yeah, they weren't even teaching Iqbal and Twombly yet. Because first of all, Iqbal hadn't happened yet when I was, oh well. And did Twombly come after that? Which is like the other companion thing that always gets cited along with it.
Chess world controversies and cultural dynamics
00:09:59
Speaker
Was it Twombly versus?
00:10:00
Speaker
No, no, it was Ashcroft v. Iqbal and Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly asked me how those things come to mind so frequently. I may have been drafting briefs this week, but yet Twombly was 2007 and Iqbal was 2009. That was emerging jurisprudence, so there's no way I've been called on for that in 2007 in law school.
00:10:24
Speaker
Yeah, that's a hard place to start. Yeah. That's right. My worst experience in all of my, I had a weird school experience, like undergraduate career, because I did time. I did two years at a community college and then I did some time. And then I did some time at Drexel.
00:10:41
Speaker
And then I transferred to Penn. And what that meant was I couldn't transfer all the credits over. So I essentially did five years or maybe even six of undergraduate in order to ostensibly finish with a better degree. No game time for you. No. But my worst experience, not personally because you'll understand why in a second, but I had to witness it. I was in a class. It was a political science class, not at Penn. It was at one of those other schools.
00:11:08
Speaker
And it was for a midterm return of papers. The professor came in, came in late, had the paper, said, I'm going to give them back to you all. You know, did the whole like, I'm very disappointed in all of you type conversation with the class. And then he said he was going to hand them out in reverse grade order.
00:11:24
Speaker
Oh, that's so cruel. Yeah. And if you came in in the bottom half, not only should you consider the drop deadline is coming, you should consider dropping this class. You should reconsider if college is for you. There might not be some better career path.
00:11:40
Speaker
And I remember sitting there and having this feeling of like, you lose no matter what. You don't want to be named in the first half because then you're like sort of almost with him against the poor people who happen to have it come later. It was an awful experience. Far and away the worst thing I had, nothing came close to that in law school. Like there's a little bit of Socratic method stuff, but like nobody was actively trying to make you look foolish or belittle you or anything. All the things that I was like warned against. I didn't, I don't know if you guys had that experience. I really didn't.
00:12:09
Speaker
No, I did not have anything close to the horror experience that they talk about. People tell you, yeah. That story sounds terrible. Look to your right. Yeah. Yeah. By the end of the semester, one of you will be dead. Oh, good. By the other's hand. There you go. Your weapons are in your lockers in the basement. Check under your chair. If you have a weapon, you're a predator. If you have no weapon, you're prey. Everybody run. It's the Hunger Games. Yeah.
00:12:39
Speaker
Law schools know now we're plenty self destructive on our own. They don't need to push us anymore. Yeah. Millennials got in there and they knew like these people are, they're going to twist themselves into knots all by themselves. It's us. All right. So we have a lot of little topics to talk about and I don't know anything about most of them. Do we? I think we have a little, little topics, a little, little topics. If this, if this ends up being 30 minutes of me talking about cyberpunk, that's fine.
00:13:06
Speaker
Uh, but also I'm sorry to you guys. So, well, we're talking a lot because there's several topics here that I think it's mostly your view on it. I like the, the, the chess thing. I don't know anything about it. You got to tell me about the problem with chess. I, well, I knew that was going to be my thing. Cause normal, like video games are culture. Chess is still not culture, even though kids, I know it's like, you know, that like chess is like a problem in terms of how popular it is among some kids.
00:13:36
Speaker
that they like schools are having problems with kids playing chess matches during class and stuff like that. What schools have this problem? No, this is a real problem. You can like look it up anyway. This is not related to that problem. While you're describing this, I'm going to look this up because I think this is hogwash. I want to make some, hold on. Let's make some guesses first. Geographic locations for these problems. What are we talking about? Because like it is worldwide.
00:14:00
Speaker
So it's the United States for sure. We're going to find a story that is a state here. You will find at least one story in the Washington Post and there are others as well.
00:14:09
Speaker
But I'm guessing there's, it's not going to be like, um, I'm trying to think of, I don't know. Where would it, where would I expect it to be? Like what's a Chesi, what's a Chesi state? A Chesi state, New York. Okay. Uh, Connecticut, Connecticut, Connecticut, New York, California, maybe Washington, Oregon, that kind of Chicago, too much rain. The pieces get stuck to the board. Chicago. Wow. Okay. All right. Sorry. So tell us the story and we'll, we'll find out. This is not related to the chess craze.
00:14:39
Speaker
Uh, but, uh, you know, chess is dominated by men in a way that few weather sports are in terms of like culture. You shouldn't surprise you. I like, there's a chess creator. I follow, um, Gotham chess who was talking about like before the Queens gambit happened.
00:14:57
Speaker
His his viewers were 98 percent men and he's like he's the most popular YouTuber chess YouTuber by a lot. His viewers were like 98 percent men after the Queen's Gambit happened, which is a very popular Netflix show. Right. That with a woman chess chess master as a as a main character. It became 96 percent men. It kind of 96 percent. Yeah, that's the high watermark for
00:15:25
Speaker
double X chromosome participation in watching chess. And you know, there have been some historic, like, I can't remember her name, Yuda Polgar, like she's one of, she was a top 10 chess master at some point in the top 10. But like 99% of chess grandmasters are men. And
00:15:48
Speaker
So like there's a lot of sexism, like not just like normal, not just like, oh, women aren't good, but when they do participate in tournaments with men, there's like, you know, sexual harassment is like normal, like the norm. This used to be talked about a lot in like the engineering fields. I remember reading about like, it was like a soft barrier to women entering like engineering and undergraduates and stuff because like they just would be accosted. Yeah, you'd mean terrible.
00:16:18
Speaker
stairs at best. They've been working on it, like FIDE, which is the international, it's the FIFA of chess. FIDE had its first ever sponsor for women's chess and it was a breast implant company.
00:16:39
Speaker
So that was kind of what's going on with chess. But there are a lot of prominent female chess players and chess influencers and writers. One of them is Jen Shahadeh, whose brother is also chess master deep in the chess. And she came forward and this was, I believe it was about a year ago.
00:17:08
Speaker
and made some allegations regarding a chess grandmaster named Alejandro Ramirez that he had sexually assaulted or harassed many of his underage women students at the US Chess Club in St. Louis. That's not great. And so these are underage girls. There were like five or six people who said this happened. And this was reported to US Chess.
00:17:34
Speaker
in 2021, there's some organizational like complexity here. But the important thing to know is that the chess club in St. Louis is maybe is the most important chess club in the country. And one of the most important in the world, because of this guy, Max Seinfeld, I can't remember his how to pronounce his last name, who's like a hedge fund billionaire, who's put a lot of money into making it like a mecca of American chess.
00:17:59
Speaker
And so the St. Louis Chess Club is deeply together with the U.S. Chess Authority and all that. So like in 2021, these allegations are made privately to U.S. chess and kind of acknowledged as true.
00:18:17
Speaker
but they kept and they stopped personally involving Alejandro Ramirez with a like personally hiring him for tutoring, but kept allowing him to tutor like use their premises for underage to tutor underage women on the US chess and also allowed him to be a coach for the underage women's team.
00:18:39
Speaker
Oh, man. So that's that's the background. This this controversy kind of erupted in like March of this year because there was a Washington, not Washington, a Wall Street Journal article about it. It's like, oh, yeah, the US chess just kind of did nothing when they found out about this other than not actively help him find underage girls victims. Yeah. And so
00:19:09
Speaker
The way it's blown up now, again, is there's a, the president of U.S. Chess is a guy named Randy Bauer. And Jen Shahadi, one of the people who has been one of the most prominent about this, was basically talking about how they really haven't done anything. And Randy Bauer, the president, went on Facebook and started talking about how maybe I should make the name of these victims public if they really want to make such a big deal. Maybe threatening to out,
00:19:38
Speaker
Right. Basically saying, if you want to complain about me, he said, you've never done anything for US chess. What are you doing for US chess? Oh, man. If you want to complain, then why don't we make all this public? Nice. And as you might imagine, that was not taken well. Sorry, I'm. No. I'm always. That's good podcasting right there. It's good. Sorry, I was trying to turn away. Hopefully it was not that bad. A little dusting COVID for us all. Yeah.
00:20:10
Speaker
through the 5G airwaves, I'm sending COVID to you all. Yeah, we have those now. What's always surprising to me with these things is that the perpetrator, I certainly am not saying you understand, but I understand intellectually that there are perpetrators out there that do these things. What's always surprising to me is the enablers that seemingly are not really perpetrators themselves, but they do
00:20:33
Speaker
almost as bad stuff around like just enabling the perpetrator to continue on for reasons that never seem at all worth it even a little bit. Not that anything would be, but like even using their own sort of like, why do this? Why keep these guys around? You gotta imagine that their calculus of what's happening here is a little bit different because they care about chess way more than you do. And in a lot of these situations where you have this stuff happening,
00:21:00
Speaker
Uh, if you look at like Harvey Weinstein, you know what people who were complicit with Harvey Weinstein stuff did it because they care a lot about making a lot of money and they care a lot about getting movies made and they care about the prestige and accolades and whatever, but probably mainly the money. Like that's why you enable somebody like this. And that's why you see like, uh, jerks at big law firms continuing to thrive because they make rain.
00:21:25
Speaker
And so it's the same kind of thing, but on a chest prestige level. So this guy is a guy that they want to have around and doing stuff.
00:21:37
Speaker
The calculus is different for them than it is for you and me. Why are you keeping this guy around to tutor people in chess? It means a lot more to them. I did find, by the way, that there is a chess boom right now. I did not find a single reputable news article about this, Jacob, but I did.
00:21:58
Speaker
but i did find a in the teacher's subreddit they were talking about this your your clickety clacking an article up right now it's washington post i got you're trying to justify your existence here but apparently in the teacher's subreddit they were talking about it and apparently this traces back to
00:22:17
Speaker
at least in some part, Andrew Tate and like hyper toxic masculinity. And so I understand that it is predominantly, you know, men playing it or whatever. You just explained that. That's very funny. Right. And so, like, you know, the whole I am confident that
00:22:38
Speaker
the chess culture had more of an effect on Andrew Tate than Andrew Tate did on chess culture. But it kind of just all makes sense a little bit that, you know, I'm reading this thing on chess.com forums. God help me. But like, apparently he was a chess champion at age five.
00:22:59
Speaker
or something like that. That seems like nebulous terms. Like a junior under five champion kind of thing. I don't know. And not trivial in the scheme of the world of chess, I guess, but probably non-trivial to a five-year-old kid. And it kind of coalesces here. I get a picture. So now I'm imagining the chess community that is hyper-masculine, hyper-toxic masculinity.
00:23:27
Speaker
as like a bunch of Andrew Tates. And don't hear, what I don't want you to hear is that everybody who plays chess is Andrew Tate. But I can piece together the kind of culture you're painting of the chess culture here, Jacob, and kind of understand
00:23:44
Speaker
That gives some context to me. Sorry, is it weird that I'm calling you Jacob? I have the book title for them if they don't have it, Red-Pilling the Queen. That's free. That's for all you dirtbags out there. It's going to be a ghost written by Walter Isaacson. There you go, yeah. With a very thoughtful person in a turtleneck doing that deep stare on the cover that he seems to like so much.
00:24:08
Speaker
I found the article too, yeah, so they're having a big epidemic of kids playing chess in Illinois, is the one I saw, Washington Post. Jeffrey Otterby, a middle school teacher in Illinois, is facing an epidemic of student distraction. When his seventh graders are supposed to be learning social studies, they're glued to their school-issued Chromebooks. He is taking to standing in the back of the room to monitor their screens, where he can see the online game they're all playing, chess. That is the big, oh my goodness.
00:24:33
Speaker
Well, if I remember right, Illinois is the chess state, like there was a documentary called chess state, which was about the Illinois high school chess championships. And it included now celebrity, Eric Rosen, when he was a high schooler.
00:24:51
Speaker
And it was like, it had all these high school students talking about how cool chess was and stuff like that. So Illinois is definitely like a chess state. Um, but I remember that. So Andrew Tate, this is randomly, um, sometime I want to say like last year, he posted something about how, Oh man, I just lost at chess, but actually chess is for losers. It's not a real man's game.
00:25:14
Speaker
It's like, what, where did this come from, man? That's like you had a, you had a, you had an ego hit and this is like a reaction, an ego hit reaction in real time. Yeah. You're just like down. Oh, now actually this game sucks.
00:25:33
Speaker
Right. It's like Calvin. Yeah. Or, uh, Jim, have you ever heard the Jim Gaffigan's bit on bowling? Where if you bowl and you hit a strike or whatever, it's like, and that's how it's done. And then the next time when it's a gutter ball, it's like, this is a stupid sport. I'm going home. That, you know, plane crash of a downward trajectory, as soon as it doesn't go your way is same thing
Discipline and fairness in education
00:25:56
Speaker
here. Right. It's like, um, yeah, just,
00:25:59
Speaker
Andrew Tate, probably not a chess champion in anything more than some small little regional something. He was five or whatever. Sorry. If he was if he was a title, even if he was titled, it wouldn't be that surprising because like it's you know, that's kind of like a lot of chess culture is like that, like hyper masculine stuff. Oh, OK. Not like. Yeah. So it wouldn't be that surprising.
00:26:28
Speaker
But the about the controversy that just erupted that nothing is people called for the president of the US chess to step down after he did all this. That didn't happen. He hasn't. He's basically just hold up and isn't talking. But the chess club in St. Louis that had previously worked with Alejandro Ramirez did put out like a statement saying, you know,
00:26:50
Speaker
uh that they are going to have a bunch of like safety guidelines and working about working with kids uh people are going to have to go through training and then they're basically going to take steps to make sure that no coach is put in this position again uh which is at least they're doing something so yeah but it took them like four months to get there
00:27:10
Speaker
And it's always a little surprising with like, do we need training? The insinuation whenever there's some sort of like clear violation of norms and laws, right? When they announced that they're going to have more training and guidelines for people, it seems to be like, I don't think it was a lack of information that caused this. I don't think this guy was like George Costanza saying, was that wrong? Should I not have done that? No, he's a creep. You need to find a way to not have creeps in your organization. That's the key. It's an instinctual crime.
00:27:40
Speaker
that you like you can't really train it out of somebody no there's nobody like taking your furious notes at the like don't molest the kids training session that is going like i was gonna but now that you explain to me that you shouldn't do that i like my job i certainly won't. We should i hope there's background checks or something.
00:27:58
Speaker
Yeah, I hope there's data that shows that it's actually useful because it's, it reminds me of like sexual harassment training and stuff like that. Um, which I don't know how useful that is. Well, the most galling thing about that is that a lot of times when they make you undergo like, uh, sexual harassment training or which sounds bad because it sounds like you're training somebody to actually do sexual harassment.
00:28:19
Speaker
But when you're talking about diversity training or sensitivity training or stuff like that, the most galling thing about it is it's actually exhibited in the office when they come in and have to do that thing with Michael Scott because of Michael Scott that they make everybody do it so that the person who was the problem doesn't feel called out as the problem. No, no, that person's the problem. You should be calling them out as a problem.
00:28:45
Speaker
Oh, that's an enraging to me when they make my clients who are the victims of those things participate in those trainings. Like you understand that this is the person that who was harassed and discriminated against, but you're making do this now. Like, yeah.
00:29:00
Speaker
It's the adult equivalent to like in high school, the idea that the person who started the fight and the person who just, you know, got their butt handed to them both get suspended. Right. Right. Where it's like, well, hold on. I don't understand what they're supposed to do. Yeah. You struck his fist repeatedly with your face. Yeah. You're just as guilty. So anyway, you were that coming from a place of hurt for you, Andrew? No, I was not. It's not a no personal experience. I was homeschooled for high school, so my parents would have had to beat me for that. Hi, Mrs. Schumer.
00:29:31
Speaker
Bye, Mrs. Schumer. She couldn't hear you because of my headphones. It's probably better that way. She'll hear it tomorrow. She says hi. Hi. OK. We were talking about chess. That's all I have to say about that. That's all you got? All right. We've moved on from chess controversy. So what's up next? We have a million mini topics. Want to talk about fraud?
Patreon's platform evolution
00:29:49
Speaker
My takeaway from that, by the way, is don't let my children play in chess club. Yeah, no. I should keep them interested in yo-yo. My nine-year-old's super into yo-yo right now. I think he's going to do the yo-yo club.
00:30:00
Speaker
That feels a lot more wholesome. Maybe an adult, there's nothing wrong with chess. No, get your kids into chess so that they can be like, you know, the positive influence. Yeah, I guess. So they get propelled by entertain. Yeah. If there's some sort of adult man teaching children how to yo-yo, I would keep your kids away from that guy too. There's certain things where it's just, you know what I mean? I don't know. I don't want to meet an adult who's like super into yo-yoing. That's a problem. I don't know.
00:30:27
Speaker
Well, I mean, I'm sure he seems like he'd be super into yo-yoing. I don't know. Hmm. That's true. I don't know how much you all know about Blippi, but I'm just trying to pass off as though I know what you're talking about. Do not do not take this as an invitation to tell me all about it. Oh, my gosh. No. That's his brother. Let me know. No. Oh, mercy. But every every parent with a kid, my kid's age knows Blippi.
00:30:55
Speaker
on YouTube. Okay. I looked it up. Yeah. There's a guy he's wearing crazy. Oh yeah. You, I mean in real life you would absolutely keep your kids away from a guy who looked like this. If he was at the park, just like hanging out on a bench and your kid went to near that kid, that guy, you'd get him away from him immediately. You know, you're at least watching closely. Yeah. Very closely.
00:31:13
Speaker
All right, speaking of people that are totally safe around children, Trump, he's in big trouble, seemingly constantly. So his latest thing is, yeah, he overvalued his property in order to get tax breaks and leverage the property. Yeah. And insurance purposes, right, to improve his insurance premiums because he, you know, had more value than, yeah.
00:31:37
Speaker
Anybody shocked by this? My insurance companies. Yeah, talk about an unsympathetic fraud victim.
00:31:46
Speaker
Yeah, so that's true. Yeah, actually, I don't know who I want to win in that case. Trump versus insurance companies. I'm not sure who I'm rooting for. I'm rooting for a gigantic sinkhole to open up below the courtroom right at the parties tables and where the lawyers and the parties are sitting. Like, I want the judge to be fine. I want the jury to be fine. Bailiff, spectators, like, I want everybody to be fine.
00:32:07
Speaker
But the parties and their lawyers sinkhole. I'm team sinkhole. I'm team sinkhole. That's how I feel.
Trump's legal battles and strategies
00:32:13
Speaker
That's the same solution you had for the Musk and Zuckerberg fight. You wanted that to get considered for that fight. Whenever the Phillies play against the Mets, I cheer for the sinkhole then.
00:32:24
Speaker
Oh, teensicle. That's not fair. I like the Mets. OK. Well, anyway, so in this case, the latest thing that I heard that was great, the New York judge is Arthur and Goran. Did you read the article today that was reporting on the the trial yesterday? He like put his face in his hands and banged his fist on the on the bench and said like something or other. He was like just so disgusted by whatever the latest nonsense Trump's lawyers spat out.
00:32:51
Speaker
Well, is it is the nonsense that we're talking about here? The fact that there was a gag order placed on Donald Trump because Donald Trump was doxing the Instagram account of the of the judge's law clerk. Yeah, basically directing. You know, he was doing that. Stand back and stand by. Stand back and stand by to all his three percenters who were out there just waiting to find out this this insidious law clerk who's making Donald Trump's life bad.
00:33:22
Speaker
Is that the nonsense? Was that yesterday that that happened? I think that might have been like two days ago. I think it was two days ago. I don't know what the latest thing was. In that situation, if the judge was putting his hands in his head and banging on his desk, that is the gentlest reaction that I can imagine from a judge who's
00:33:42
Speaker
who's dealing with her, whose law clerk was being threatened that way. Oh, I don't mess with a judge's staff. I'm surprised a literal gavel was not thrown at somebody in that situation. Like I would have been team gavel in that situation. Yeah. Oh yeah. It's, it's, it's bad stuff. So you, I don't want to put you two on the spot. You know this better than me. Did you hear the story that apparently the reason why he's not having a jury trial for this is because his attorney failed to check a box on a form.
00:34:10
Speaker
Well, they, I thought it was that the attorney didn't file any form at all. And the attorney general, like it's not the insurance companies that are bringing the action, but the attorney general said non jury. Um, and so that's why that's my understanding. Yeah. So the jury would necessarily be better for Donald Trump, but so I don't know, I don't know exactly how this works in New York, but in every civil case that I've ever been involved in and Jake, you probably would have some context for criminal.
00:34:36
Speaker
I think criminal you probably defaulting to a jury trial but in a civil case the person who files the case the plaintiff gets to decide. In their pleading whether they wanna elect to have a jury trial or not obviously a jury trials not available for every kind of thing.
00:34:52
Speaker
Most particularly, if you're bringing a suit in equity, asking for an injunction, for example, like a specific, go do this thing or don't do this thing, you can't get a jury to try that. But you make a decision when you file your lawsuit about whether you want to ask for a jury trial versus a bench trial.
00:35:10
Speaker
You can make that decision based off of a number of different factors. Is this the sort of issue that a complex understanding of legal issues is going to benefit my client? In that case, maybe you elect for a bench trial. If I've got a really sympathetic client in a sympathetic situation and the defendant is a real big jerk and a jury of my peers is going to work favorably for me, you pick a jury trial.
00:35:34
Speaker
The other side of that is once you've been sued, which this is a civil suit brought by the state attorney in New York. Let's use your James, yeah. Yeah. And so it's a civil suit. The defendant then has an opportunity once they're served with the lawsuit, and it varies when you have to do this. I've had a circumstance where it's been as soon as 10 days after you're served. I think most of the time you have to do it with your answer, which usually comes
00:36:01
Speaker
20 or 30 or 28 days after you're served, you indicate in that responsive pleading whether you want to demand a jury trial. One person asking for a jury trial is the Trump card. If one person asks for it, they get it as long as they comply with the rules. Sounds like what happened here is Letitia James just didn't specify that she wanted a jury trial.
00:36:27
Speaker
probably a good choice in this situation, I should think, because we're dealing with complex legal issues and a jury is much more susceptible to ruling for a defendant just because they like them. And you're not going to find that as much with the judge. And so I think it's probably the right choice here to pick a bench trial
00:36:49
Speaker
And it sounds like Jake, you, you maybe have some more specific knowledge about this. Like did they just not ask for it? I thought they had. So the attorney general specifically said non jury. Right. And then I've seen that one. Uh, and then I think Donald Trump just didn't file an opposing form and it's like,
00:37:08
Speaker
It's like a special statute that the attorney general is filing under. So I wouldn't be surprised if it's the kind of specialized law where if you don't know what you're doing, you can just mess up all the time because it has specialized procedures and that kind of thing. Like Medicaid. Yeah.
00:37:25
Speaker
Trump's lawyer, yeah, David Schoen is one of his lawyers apparently said that there was like a 2011 case apparently that said there was no right to a jury trial under this New York executive law. It's like, I have a note, section 6312. So I think it's what Jake is saying. Basically,
00:37:40
Speaker
They just assumed there was no right and now it's like some commentators have sort of weighed in and said that generally speaking apparently in New York is what they're saying. I'm not saying this. People make the attempt anyway. And so it's not entirely plausible that they're failing to even ask for one.
00:37:56
Speaker
was like a conscious, considered decision. And so it was like a post hoc rationalization that they didn't ask for it. And then they said, well, they're seeking equitable remedies. So that's why we didn't ask because we just assumed we wouldn't have it. The counter to that seems to be, most people ask anyway, I guess. I don't know if that's, I don't know. I don't even know if it would help them, honestly, is the thing like in New York. Is this in New York City that this is happening?
00:38:22
Speaker
I don't know if it's helping him. You got enough of a MAGA presence that maybe you can hang a jury metaphorically. In New York? I don't know. It's not unanimous, right? On a civil case like this? I'm betting it's majority.
00:38:42
Speaker
So I don't know. New York's rough. I mean, I've seen little clips of him coming and going from Trump Tower in New York and like there's a decent contingent of people there shouting some stuff at him. Like, I don't think he's particularly I mean, New York, New Yorkers hate no one as much as their own. Is it on Staten Island? I don't that's.
00:39:01
Speaker
Oh, is it? I don't know. I don't know. I'm just saying that's like the only situation where I can imagine a jury helping him much. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. For sure. Yes. That was probably the only borough where you're going to get a couple of that Long Island. You get some stuff out of Long Island. That's not. But that's not New York City, right?
00:39:18
Speaker
Well, yeah, I mean, you're going to start a whole thing if you say I don't disagree. But I mean, people from Long Island will not. I'm married to somebody who would who would argue with you that that is, you know, every bit New York City. OK. Yeah, my I have family that's in it's in Rochester County.
00:39:38
Speaker
And I used to call that upstate New York. If it's North or West of New York City, as far as I'm concerned, it's upstate New York.
00:39:51
Speaker
Even though it's literally like 30 minutes, 20 minutes away from Manhattan. Listen to the California boy weighing in on what counts as New York City. Give me a break. There's nobody I love annoying more than New Yorkers, honestly. That's fair. They love annoying you too. Sorry, Andrew, the Yankees deserve it. It's all because of the Yankees.
00:40:15
Speaker
I'm pretty sure. What is that's why New Yorkers deserve all the ill that yes. At least your motives are pure. Yeah. They had an abysmal season. I mean, yes, they had really bad. Your abysmal season is a winning season. That's your abysmal season. Yeah. If you're the new Yankees for sure. But you're a fan of the Oakland A's. So how many, how many losses did the Oakland A's have? Did they finish fourth in the division? Yankees? Yeah. Uh, I think so. Uh, maybe they,
00:40:46
Speaker
Could they overtake the Red Sox? They might have overtaken the Red Sox. Well, here's the thing. Here's the thing. The Rays and the Orioles and Toronto are all in the playoffs. So they had to have been at least fourth. They might have been fifth. They might have been fifth. Yeah. Yeah. That's a pretty bad season, Jake.
00:41:03
Speaker
It's bad, but the AL East, there was a time there where the one through five, if you combine the AL East, and I want to say the AL West or the AL Central, if you sort of listed them out, the order one through five of AL East, and then one through five of AL West or Central, whatever this is, would be the same order. So in other words, the first place team in the West would be the sixth place team if they were brought over to the East in terms of their record.
00:41:32
Speaker
Like that's how off the whole thing was. But anyway, I'm rationalizing a horrible season. Dear listener, hang in there because two episodes from now baseball season will probably be over and you can stop listening to us talk about baseball. The Braves are about to take on the Phillies, right? Yeah. Starting on Saturday. I'm rooting for the Braves all the way. Thank you. Good man. Good man.
00:41:54
Speaker
That's a dangerous on your home turf there, but, uh, yeah, you're a good man. You're a good man. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, Donald Trump is, uh, on trial for fraud. That's, uh, he's inflating all sorts of stuff. He doesn't have a jury trial. Um, I'm actually really pleased to see that the gag order seems to be having some effect. And I think it's probably because a grownup got a hold of his truth, social credentials and deleted the stuff. But like,
00:42:17
Speaker
I hope that he actually abides by it because I'm not super into the whole schadenfreude of watch how bad this gets for him. I would rather the law clerk be protected.
00:42:31
Speaker
because that's probably better. I think he understands he went over a line by attacking the locker. I think he knows that's not an okay target. She's not a player in the game. I don't agree with that. I don't think that he understands that. I think that he just had the right people drop the hammer on or around him that said, you do this or I'm out of here.
00:42:55
Speaker
Uh, I don't think that he has that sort of conscience, but no, I don't think I don't think he would ever think she's like, she's not a player in the game. At most he would ever realize is, Oh, I messed up in terms of like the ramifications for this or not worth, um, you know, whatever I'm going to gain from it. I don't think he ever thinks in terms of from outside appearances. I don't think he ever thinks in terms of like, whether or not this was fair for the other person.
00:43:19
Speaker
I just don't think that's like in his makeup. But yeah, anyway, this case seems he seems done. He overvalued his properties. It's exactly what everybody always said he did. No one's shocked. He's not worth nine billion dollars. He's worth significantly less. His companies or his properties are all worth significantly less.
00:43:36
Speaker
Sort of to your point, Jacob, you're saying like the schadenfreude, you don't really want to see it get worse. My concern is that I feel like a lot of these things are exactly his wheelhouse of breaking, which are like mores and like soft norms and rules and things. I don't like to see him keep sort of testing the fences because I'm not entirely confident that the ramifications for him are real in the way that they would be for you or me.
00:44:03
Speaker
Like if this was you or me and we just like kept ignoring the gag order and we attack the clerk. Oh, yeah. We would just get locked up. It would be over. Right. Yeah. I don't know that he didn't do that. Right. Yeah. He didn't ignore the gag order. Not yet. Yeah. No. But like that's my point is like, I don't want him to test it further because I'm afraid he's going to find out and we're all going to find out that like he really can just do whatever he wants. They're just not going to have the ramifications that we would have. And it's never going to happen.
00:44:30
Speaker
I think if he attacks the clerk again, I think he will actually get arrested and put in jail. I think that'll actually happen. Yeah. But what does jail look like when you have a secret service? What does that even look like? What are we doing? He's going to find out and I don't think he's going to like it. That's a whole other thing. And like, I have no idea what that even looks like.
00:44:52
Speaker
probably looks like house arrest as in don't you leave Mar-a-Lago and don't... Oh, I think they're gonna put him in a unit. I think they're gonna put him in custody. In like the Manhattan Place where Epstein did or did not kill himself? That was federal, right? No, it wouldn't be that place. Was it federal? I thought it was state. Okay. All right. Well, but in some equivalent that probably has all the infestation issues that that place had. Yeah.
00:45:18
Speaker
I think he ends up going to a bad place and I think that's why he never breaks the gag order. Yeah, that is a separate question of like, is he confident that he would never go to jail? I don't know. That is a big risk to take. I think he has a lot of confidence.
00:45:37
Speaker
awareness of his own ability to wiggle out of trouble. But I think it's often been monetary trouble or reputational trouble or electoral trouble. This something where there's like real physical, I mean, there's that clip of him from when he was president where somebody said there was a threat to him or something and he like bolts off the stage.
00:45:56
Speaker
When there's real threat to his personal safety, he moves pretty quickly. So I can imagine that if he thinks even a little bit, there's a one percent chance he could wind up in jail. Yeah, he will abide by the gag order and he will just.
00:46:09
Speaker
attack the many other people that he is completely free to attack. Like there's plenty. Yeah. Yeah. He's got plenty of people to yell at. Exactly. Uh, the other fraud trial that we thought we might touch on quickly. I don't have anything to say other than ha ha is the SPF trial, just the ongoing disaster. He's really like, he's playing, he's basically using the Trump playbook. The reason why he's currently
00:46:28
Speaker
having difficulty apparently preparing for trial from a prison cell is because he was out on bail and he just tried to intimidate a witness and got himself thrown into jail where he is now. To some extent, that is actually a good example. I feel like that is what Trump would be going through if he had never been president.
Sam Bankman-Fried's trial difficulties
00:46:48
Speaker
He wouldn't be getting away with all of this and just being continually warned and gag order and all this sort of stuff and having no real ramifications if he hadn't been president. If he's just a billionaire, he's in jail. He's awaiting trial in a cell somewhere. But because of all the logistical and political issues, he's not.
00:47:05
Speaker
He might be the first person with four separate criminal charges that is spending all of them on on pretrial release, like spending them out of custody. Right. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. Which, you know, kind of kind of speaks to the fact that unique fact that all four of the crimes were committed. They let the allegations were committed before any of the other prosecutions took place. And also they're all like white collar ish, you know, like, yeah.
00:47:35
Speaker
I guess technically first offense is every one of them is a first offense. Oh, that's true. It's a race to the first offense. I mean, you can say the first time offender for all of that could be the defense for each one of them. Can you, uh, can you get a habitual offender if they all happen in like a six weeks, the same day, right? All, all, all the convictions come down in six weeks. Yeah. That's what a mess.
00:47:58
Speaker
Yeah. On SPF, there was this one document that came out that was interesting, which is that the Stanford professor, who was his sponsor or whatever and gave him bail money, was fired as a consultant and initially was paid $200,000 for nothing, and then asked
00:48:19
Speaker
Like, why am I only getting $200,000? And SPF was like, Oh, don't worry. I'll take care of it. And he emailed like the ZFO, let's give him more money. Um, and he got like a million dollars a year. That's awesome. Um, it's just like, it's just crazy. It's like, uh, Senator Menendez from New Jersey. He, uh, struck a deal to push some thing that would be beneficial to, I think the Erdogan regime in Turkey. And then, uh,
00:48:45
Speaker
Was it Egypt? I thought it was super pro Egypt. You're right. I'm sorry. But the funny part I will get right. Apparently ran home and Googled how much gold bars worth, which is just terrific. That's awesome. Just be like, just blanket, like just bumbling. Mr. Magoo, you know, goes to the fraud house or something, right? Or Mr. Bean commits fraud. Yeah. But I cleared my browser history.
00:49:10
Speaker
Right. Oh, man, I thought I did that in an incognito tab. Did I not? Oh, sweet mercy. It's the Borgian and criminal defense. It's I guess these are just people that get caught. But the number of like, there's just people like who can leave evidence of the crimes that they're committing everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. Because they just like assume they're not going to get caught until they, you know, they feel heat. And it's like, oh, my God, there's a million pieces of evidence showing. How am I going to clean this up? I told.
00:49:40
Speaker
I told all these people about how I'm committing a crime, oh no. The story I always tell for that, that was a great, I don't remember the documentary, but it was a fantastic, they didn't highlight this part, but I thought it was great, other than the murder that I'm about to explain. This guy killed his wife, and he was leading the search for the body or whatever, doing the thing they always do where they inject themselves into the situation, and it's pretty clear that there's something going on. He kind of got word that the police might be sort of looking at the apartment,
00:50:07
Speaker
And he decided he was going to need a new mattress for reasons of the crime being committed on the bed. So he took the mattress out and he dragged it downstairs and he's going to throw it out in the dumpster for his apartment complex. But like six feet to the left of it was the dumpster for the neighboring apartment complex. So he threw it in there because the idea was like, that way, hey, has nothing to do with me. Nobody's going to. And he like told people that later when he finally confessed, like, yeah, I thought, you know, if you put it over there, it wouldn't be connected back to me. And that's just the story.
00:50:37
Speaker
That was a fantastic call. I'm so sorry. Was that a bad sound? That was the closest we're ever going to get to a spit take on this podcast, I think. That just sounded like you getting taken out by a sniper. Oh my god, sorry. I'm coming off a cold. I'm just coughing up the storm here. That was worth it. Even if we could edit coughs out, I would not edit that one out. That was great. Sorry for anybody whose speakers got blown by that.
00:51:06
Speaker
Okay, so SPF is an idiot too. I feel bad because this other one was mostly a Jake thing and I don't want to make him talk too much, but apparently Patreon is overhauling its whole platform and trying to make it a whole platform, right? I watched that video, Jake, and you talked about it being Big Business Brain, the title of our last episode. He was very excited about something that doesn't really sound like that radical a departure from what Patreon is already doing.
00:51:35
Speaker
And so it just sounded like a CEO getting hyped about basically a non-event. And chats and a timeline. That's all I heard. Chats, a timeline, and also creators. Creators are under attack. The internet is making it so that creators can't interact with their audience anymore.
00:51:59
Speaker
And, you know, there's no good way to put your creativity out there. We say as you know, we have Patreon and we have memberful and we have podcasts where literally anybody see also this podcast can get out there and publish something.
00:52:15
Speaker
You have all sorts of other more PG-13 and R-rated and NC-17 rated for creators. So there doesn't really seem to be an assault on creators. We're doing all right, but apparently he's really hyped about this. Tell me, Jake, what's the problem? Why is this guy freaking out? That's the thing. I'm not sure it's a problem yet, but it's a bad sign that this guy is like,
00:52:43
Speaker
the announcement is patreon is so much more than than memberships and you know that if you're not familiar with patreon it's you it's membership which is you pay five dollars you get me you know maybe exclusive podcast feed exclusive videos access to
00:53:01
Speaker
a Discord or something else like that. They streamline all of that too. If they give you access to a podcast, they allow the podcast creator to upload the mp3s directly there and that then generates the RSS feed, which goes into iTunes listing and everything. That's why often you'll see there's a regular feed for a podcast and then the Patreon feed, which is separate and might have extra features or whatever.
00:53:27
Speaker
They make that very easy to do. Yeah. But other than that, I mean, I do. I agree with Jason. They're they're memberships. I don't know what exactly they're really like to seem this. I understand your comment is big business brain or business brain, whatever we said. I don't really understand what he's saying is going to be revamped. Really is part of the problem is like I don't get it. So the redesign of the app is a little weird because now it's no longer there's no longer the option for a chronological timeline. OK.
00:53:57
Speaker
So but it's not algorithmic, algorithmic either. It's instead grouped by creator and.
00:54:03
Speaker
So you have to scroll through your creators to get to more recent stuff from other creators. Some people hate that. Yeah, that seems worse in every possible way. It's like it's going to foster a whole bunch of people titling their things. AAA podcast. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be the yellow pages problem all over again. Yeah. The car membership company AAA will have the most popular podcast on Patreon for the next long time. It'll be AA Alcoholics Anonymous and then the automotive group.
00:54:34
Speaker
That's just like an annoyance though. But what he's saying, it sounds like what he's saying is
00:54:41
Speaker
He wants Patreon to be everything for these communities. It's gonna be X. It's gonna be Substack. It's gonna be Slack. It's gonna be Reddit. It's gonna be everything. But isn't it Substack already? Don't you already put posts on there that are like that, like long form? Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah. I get the Discord thing is different though. The Slack and Discord. If he's looking to move chat to there, I think that is a good point, right? Yeah. Right now, the way- And I think they might have merchandise stores, maybe.
00:55:09
Speaker
Which I think the thing is, I think that that would maybe would be good if they do it well. Yeah. But I'm also thinking, does this mean? Here's the question. I'm not saying that this announcement was bad at all. I'm saying that it's a signifier that he might be like growth brained, which is gotcha. We've got a good business here. Why don't we have more of it? Why don't we grab more of the mind share? Why don't we get more people spending more time on our app? Right. And then.
00:55:39
Speaker
It's going to end, by the way, behind the scenes, something y'all might not know is that Patreon creators have been getting less access to information as time to have gone has gone on. So it's getting worse for creators already in terms of what Patreon gives them. Right. And so are they going to start in shitifying after once they've got everybody in and they already are at that point, like,
00:56:06
Speaker
They are now, it seems like they're going growth mode. This is like the embryo of growth mode that is eventually going to be like, they're going to hit us with higher and higher fees and for stuff that nobody asked for because they want to be everything to everyone.
00:56:23
Speaker
And that's, that's where the big business brain where I'm like, I'm worried about the direction that this app is going. Cause it's, cause it was perfectly good as it was soon. He's going to be posting videos on YouTube shorts or wherever this was hosted. Uh, that's going to be like announcing all of his super sweet venture capital investments and like, look, we had this great round of fundraising and, uh, uh, look, we're going out and acquiring Etsy.
00:56:49
Speaker
I have no idea the relative sizes of these companies, but whatever. I bet they would go after Discord. That's the one that's interesting to me. Because to Jake's point about they're looking to grow, I bet they have data on how many Discord users they're redirecting or whatever you want to say. I mean, how many new Discord users they're creating through their memberships. And then somebody looked at that and said, so wait a minute. If we were just running that, we would have all of that. And we could serve them ads, or we could
00:57:18
Speaker
make them buy whatever discord by boosts. Boost. There you go. Yeah. Things I don't understand. I don't know what that's for. Patreon Nitro mercy. I'm sure he has data on all of that. Every, every other service that things are being pushed to through Patreon. I'm sure they have that information and they're thinking that's the next step. I don't think you make this announcement unless you're like trying to raise money and trying to raise money is concerning.
Unity's policy reversal and community response
00:57:41
Speaker
Yeah. And with the way that the tech field has been going,
00:57:45
Speaker
uh, outside investment has translated to bad service. So the, uh, the biggest problem I had with this video, and maybe we can put the video in the show notes, or maybe you can just find it cause it's not hard to find. Uh, but the biggest problem I had with the video is it gave off a really weird, like
00:58:03
Speaker
January 2004 Howard Dean vibe where it was like, we're going to go to South Carolina. We're going to go to Iowa. We're going to go to New Hampshire and yeah. That's all. That's kind of that's attacking Howard. Howard Dean had like genuine energy, like weirdly over the top energy. Yeah. But genuinely, genuine energy. This felt more forced energy. Oh, OK. You know, that was my feeling about the video.
00:58:33
Speaker
Fair enough. If you ever want to watch a video that's all that energy, just watch any any Marvel snap video with Ben Brode, their game director. This is very specific, but he is this whole brand. And when I put on a he used to be the director of Hearthstone. And and when I would put on like one of his update videos, my wife would be like, turn that off immediately. That is, I cannot handle this guy's energy.
00:59:02
Speaker
That's good. Anyway. I also have an update on Unity since that's before moving on. Let's move along. Unity backtracked on all the stuff we talked about last time, kind of. Coward. Cowards. The biggest backtrack being that it's not going to be retroactive. You can avoid all the changes by not updating.
00:59:27
Speaker
which is kind of the whole thing that made everybody so mad, which was saying you couldn't get out of it, and we are pulling the rug from under you. By not updating to a new license agreement, right? Right. Not updating to a new version of the agreement, or a new version of the software. So you can't update to a new version of the software, but they keep supporting old versions of the software. OK, gotcha. So they can still update the game, but whatever game is made with that engine, you can update, but you can't update. Yeah, you can't update the engine itself. Gotcha.
00:59:57
Speaker
And the amount that would be charged for this, they're really wedded to this install fee. It doesn't make any sense. It's capped at 2.5% of the game's revenue. So that's less than what Unreal charges as a maximum. Have they managed to successfully shift the Overton window on this whole thing?
01:00:21
Speaker
We're gonna reach as far and be as terrible as we can be so that it seems totally reasonable when we come back and say, well, we're not gonna do these two super horrible things. We're just gonna do the rest of the things. And look how magnanimous we've decided to be after we were decided to be terrible. You've spoken and we've heard you.
01:00:39
Speaker
I feel very strongly that this was just a peer screw up because they you talked to like people in the indie dev scene. They're still like next time we can't trust them because they have said they're you know, they made it clear they feel like they can pull the rug out from under us. Yeah, if they want to get to the point of why is there now it's 2.5 out out the window. I don't think that would have caused nearly the same backlash, right?
01:01:03
Speaker
So to the point of why they're doing this, I just found an article, Unity booked apparently a net loss of 193 million on $533 million of revenue in the second quarter of 2023. So they are like bleeding money. So I mean, that's what it is, right? It was desperation. It was like, give me chat GPT, give me a plan of what I need to charge all the people that are using our engine that will get us profitable before we run out of money.
01:01:31
Speaker
And then that's what this was, right? It's just desperate. It's what we talked about, I think. I think it's all these companies. It's the VCs, VC chickens coming home to roost. I think Jason said it last week or two weeks ago. I think it's what it is. They're just all these companies are have been we're running when money was cheap. Money's not that cheap anymore. And now they are cutting bleeding through their their venture capital funds and running at an operating loss every year and are just desperate. And that's why Reddit is doing what it's doing. That's why Twitter did. But it's you know, is doing what it's doing now.
01:02:01
Speaker
Um, in addition to Elon Musk and unity, I think we're going to see, this is going to be like an ongoing thing where it stays with the Patreon, right? I'm sure Patreon is losing money somehow, somehow, despite being like basically a website that just has memberships and takes a cut off the top. They are somehow losing money and going, Oh, it's kind of baffling how some of these like places are losing so much money. It's like, what are you doing with all the money that you're spending? Cause it's kind of, it's all going to AWS.
01:02:27
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, true. That's not, that doesn't explain like the hundreds of employees that some of these companies have. And then you'll have like a social media company that has like, like 12 employees that is running a perfectly good software. Like their software is perfectly good. Right. Is it all like, it's not all modern moderation, clearly. It's not all like trust and safety and server costs don't cost that much. So, I mean, it's certainly costs a lot, but it's not that much. So like,
01:02:57
Speaker
Man, where's all this going? And in the case of Unity, they acquired a ton of companies. And they have a bunch of business dev people who are like, how are we packaging all this and all that?
01:03:13
Speaker
But I bet they acquired those companies the same way Elon Musk acquired Twitter by leveraging shares of the company to purchase it. And now they got to pay the debt and all that. Yeah, they got to pay debt. And I'm sure there's acceleration agreements when certain stocks' prices go down. A lot of times, you got to basically renegotiate your deal when the underlying collateral of the stock price goes down or whatever. I'm sure they've hit that with the stock market taking a dip and tech stocks taking a dip over the last couple of years.
01:03:42
Speaker
I just found a thing, I did not see this beforehand, but as of 2019, the Patreon CEO was saying, the company's generous business model is not sustainable unless it sees rapid growth. They need to build new businesses and new services and new revenue lines in order to even have a sustainable business, said Patreon CEO Jack Conte. That was in 2019? 2019, yeah. Okay, they've increased prices significantly since then. Yeah, I'm sure somehow still,
01:04:10
Speaker
Not profitable, losing money, needs to do all these things. Turn it to 11. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All right, so we did our follow
Listener recommendations
01:04:18
Speaker
-up. I don't have any recommendations other than watch baseball while you can. I think you should watch Jason's Atlanta Braves, and I think they're going to go all the way. Let me tell you, there are some special things about these Atlanta Braves this year. They have had pitching injury troubles this year. And for them to have turned around, and I think they won 103 games this year,
01:04:37
Speaker
pretty solid, not setting any records there. They tied Major League Baseball's all-time record for team home runs in a season by hitting 307 home runs in a season. They had, I think, five different players with at least 30 home runs. And I think they had three players with 40 home runs. And Austin Riley was only just barely short of being the fourth player with 40 home runs.
01:05:02
Speaker
They had Ronald Acuna Jr. who had the fifth ever 40-40 season in the existence of baseball where he had 40 home runs and had 40 stolen bases, but he actually had slightly more than 40 home runs and 70-something stolen bases. I think it was 73 by the end of the season.
01:05:20
Speaker
Uh, and a hundred RBI is like, nobody has ever had a season like Ronald deCunha Jr. Spencer Strider set the season single season strikeout record for the Atlanta Braves. Uh, Matt Olson would certainly have been the MVP of the league in any other year, except for Ronald deCunha Jr. And Mookie Betts for the Dodgers. Got to help him.
01:05:44
Speaker
going off this year and just being both incredible. And so like you have three guys who in any other year would have been like head and shoulders above everybody else. Matt Olson led the league in home runs and RBIs and RBIs was not close. He had like 30 more RBIs than the next guy. So yeah, watch the Braves. Great recommendation. That's my recommendation too. And Ronald Acuna, what you said he did, was it 40-40 season, right? Only five times it's been done?
01:06:12
Speaker
Yeah, it was Jose Conseco, Barry Bonds, Alfonso Soriano, and A-Rod. We're the only other people... Cheater. Cheater. Cheater. And not a cheater, right? Soriano, not a cheater, right? No, Soriano. P-E-D's. Sorry, I'm counting. Only Acuna is not a cheater in that list. Okay, I thought you were...
01:06:31
Speaker
It sounded like you were saying A-Rod wasn't a cheater, and I was like, what? No, no. He was a good man. No, he was a cheater. So only five have done, like, let's put that in context really quickly. So there's been way more perfect games. There's been way more, I don't know about way more, there's been more 60 home run plus seasons, for sure. Because if you just got Ruth, you got Maris, then you have Sosa, Maguire, and Bob. So there's been more than five seasons, absolutely.
01:07:00
Speaker
What we choose to put emphasis on is strange, because that is more of a rare achievement than many of the other things that would be much more celebrated. And I don't hear about Ronald O'Kenya Jr. I hear about him a lot, but not nearly as much as I think he should be highlighted. Coming back, by the way, from breaking femur. Was that last year? No, he was back last year. He was out most of the year before, because that was the year the Braves won the World Series, and he didn't get to play in it.
01:07:28
Speaker
Yes. And so this is like coming back around. No, no, no, no. He was he was passed. I think he was a rookie in twenty eighteen. Oh, was he really? OK. Yeah. Yeah. One of the other really interesting things nerding out about baseball. Relax, guys. Only one more month to hear it until next year. But Ronald also was the lead off hitter for the Braves. And it's unheard of for your lead off hitter to hit 40 home runs. But he also led. I'm pretty sure about this. I think he led the league in runs scored.
01:07:58
Speaker
Uh, it led the league in hits. And so like just an incredible season all around, like there's, I, it, it ranks as in my opinion, one of the best single seasons for any baseball player ever.
01:08:13
Speaker
Totally amazing. Fun to watch. Watch it in the playoffs. Especially, yeah, he has speed, he has power, he has, he's hit for a decent average. I mean, what was he, not decent, high, 337. Over 300. Amazing average. Yeah. Yeah. Very impressive. And also the Braves are, this year's Braves are the first team to ever have a slugging percentage over 500, which means that
01:08:35
Speaker
And in an at bat, they average getting half of one base per at bat. Like holy crap. That's crazy. It's it's something else. Watch him. Great team. Yep. How's Oakland doing? Did they, uh, they didn't, I don't think they broke the record for losses. So that's going to be shot. Jake, tell us about, uh, tell us about Phantom Liberty. Yeah. Well, yeah, I was good. Uh, cyberpunk has a new expansion, also a 2.0 update, which,
01:09:03
Speaker
revamped everything. This is a video game again. It's a video game corner. But their new expansion, Phantom Liberty, is so good. The game is just so good now. The story is awesome. It's like a, you know, the trailer will tell you, you rescue the president to like start it. But it's like a spy thriller. And man, it hits hard. Like the ending of it is so like,
01:09:32
Speaker
It is thrilling and emotionally devastating in a good way. It's really good. There's never been a better time to be a gamer. There are so many games out and I'm taking a break because I'm like, man, I need to take a break.
01:09:53
Speaker
a break because I'm just jumping from X in game to X in game. You should go for a walk. Yeah. Get into knitting or something. I don't know. Um, and preparation for Alan wake to start knitting out later this month, start knitting while you watch playoff baseball. Yeah. Oh, nice music. I forget we have music and it's like, Oh yeah. Only for the outro.
01:10:20
Speaker
Alright, watch baseball and play Cyberpunk 2077, Phantom Liberty.