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Oakland A's, ChatGPT Lawyer Story Musings and Reddit Dumpster Fire
82 Plays1 year ago
- Oakland A’s fans stage reverse boycott | CNN
- ChatGPT Avianca - https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.575368/gov.uscourts.nysd.575368.54.0_3.pdf
- Elon/Zuck Cage Match - Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg agree to hold cage fight - BBC News
- Reddit ongoing dumpster fire - Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is fighting a losing battle against the site's moderators, Reddit Message Boards Stay Dark In Ongoing Protests – Except For Images Of John Oliver, The Talk Show ✪: Ep. 379, With Christian Selig
- Sigur Ros
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Catch-Up
00:00:00
Speaker
Oh, hey guys. Hi. How are you? It's so good to have you back. I forgot how to do this. It's been two weeks and I already forgot how to talk. How do I talk? I'm sorry. It's all my fault. So I'll explain to our listener, all one of them. I actually heard from listener
00:00:18
Speaker
Hi, Jacob. They missed us last week. We missed us last week because I had to run up in a hustle to take a look at our new house and go for the inspection because we bought a house that we had never actually set foot in before. Make sure everything was okay with that. It's my fault. Everybody blame me. You can hate me on Mastodon. It's at Jason at esq.social.
00:00:44
Speaker
I think we all had things going on, right? So it was just a race to who was going to cancel first, to be fair to Jason. I was the hardest to cancel. I was the most firm in canceling. So I'm happy to be the lightning rod for the cancellation. Sorry, listener. While we're doing, can I do my own apology now? Oh, boy. Yeah. I'd like to apologize to our listener who listened to last episode about all the background noise that was happening on the mic. Yeah.
00:01:14
Speaker
been using Zencaster as a crutch to eliminate our background noise, at least I have, I guess, and then it broke. And so Andrew had to put together our audio files himself. And unfortunately that meant all of my strong exhales out of my nose got caught in full view by my microphone.
00:01:38
Speaker
in a way that was very unpleasant. So apologies. I've rectified the situation. I've invested my good, hard cash and $25 worth into getting an actual microphone stand. That I see on the screen here that looks like it's like a red insect zapper on your screen. The red insect zapper is the microphone I've been using this whole time actually. But now you can see it because
00:02:07
Speaker
It's because it's a tall boy now. It's important for microphones to light up, I think. As I see yours lighting up, I now realize I feel the absence of lights on mine, and I feel sort of self-conscious about that. It's even cooler because I'm not going to do it now because they would hurt the episode. But if you touch the top of it, it mutes, and then the light turns off. OK. And then it's a cool effect. But does it make a big bang, bang, bang noise when you hit it to mute it? Oh, yeah.
00:02:36
Speaker
It's capacitive. I could do it. Don't make me do it. Don't make me mute myself. I'm going to mute. Well, that wasn't
Podcast Theme and Listener Engagement
00:02:44
Speaker
bad. It just happened. Okay. And now I'm back. No, that was good. I didn't hear a pop or anything. Okay. So you've got the microphone where you could be a bonafide Twitch streamer. Yeah. It is a gamer microphone. It is for gamers. It looks like a gamer microphone.
00:03:00
Speaker
Yes. Hey. And we both invested in Stan. So now we can type while we can quickly look things up to pretend we know what we're talking about. We don't know what we're talking about. I should get that out of the way really quickly. This is Esquiring Minds episode 20 for June 22nd, 2023. The show is just three lawyer friends goofing around for our own enjoyment. Nothing we say should be taken as legal advice.
00:03:17
Speaker
We're jettisoning the Supreme Court barbecue intro music, so we're still looking for some intrepid and talented listener that can perform some sort of musical feat of music for us. Or just hodgepodge something together that's better than Supreme Court barbecue with AI music generators. If you're a scat singer, I would love to hear what you've got going on.
00:03:42
Speaker
There it is. It's just the start of Frasier, basically, is what we're looking for. Something in scrambled eggs? What is it? Tossed salad and scrambled eggs. I wonder if they're calling again. Are we doing intros? We should do intros. Yeah, sorry. I'm one of those friends. I'm Andrew Leahy. I'm a tax and technology attorney from New Jersey. I'm joined, as always, by Jake.
Professional Insights and Humor
00:04:03
Speaker
Yes. I've already got my apology out of the way. Yay. I'm a construction of land use attorney. Um, yeah. Uh, and I just, as part of being a land use attorney, I was at a meeting last night until 10 PM and the meeting kept going on for a couple more hours. So those days, huh? You left while it was still going.
00:04:24
Speaker
Well, I had two things that I was doing and then those got taken care of. I wasn't going to make them pay for me to sit and watch them talk about other stuff. After. You do make them pay you to sit and wait for it to start. Yes. Sadly, they do have to pay that money.
00:04:48
Speaker
If only, if everything was done, no, it would still be the same. Yeah, it would. And then another voice we're hearing, that's Jason Ramesland. Hello, I'm Jason Ramesland. He's an employment attorney, extraordinary. He's an anti-work lawyer. We made it clear last time, you're not anti-woke, you're anti-work. You're against working.
00:05:07
Speaker
I mean, I like working. Even if I didn't have to work anymore, I'd probably still work because I find this work fulfilling and I like helping people. But I am anti-work in the sense of, you know what, the whole wage slave thing that the late stage capitalism has going on, just not great. And so I'm anti-work in that sense. Let's treat each other like Harry Styles says. Maybe we could find a way to, oh gosh, I'm gonna get it wrong.
00:05:35
Speaker
to treat each other with kindness, you know? Find a way to feel good. Is that what he says? Was he the first person to say that? No, no, but there's a Harry Styles song. I have a third grader. There's a Sesame Street song. You gotta help somebody you need, got a little kindness. It's like, who is it?
00:05:58
Speaker
No, it's not Josh Groban. I'm gonna think about it. Kindness is a muscle, work it out, gotta hustle. That was a PBS kids thing that will be one of the last thoughts that goes through my brain as it dies.
00:06:10
Speaker
It's seared in there from my daughter watching some little video over and over again. Well, two out of three of us have sung so far in the episode. So Andrew, you're going to complete the cycle here.
Oakland A's Baseball Saga
00:06:21
Speaker
At some point, you've got to sing it. Yeah, I'll come up with something. I'll sing the intro music. I'll do the Frasier scat. Toss salads and scrambled eggs. OK, so we have a lot of like, I think it's like a hodgepodge we're going to talk about today. But I think our mini topic. It's always a hodgepodge.
00:06:34
Speaker
because we all kind of have an interest in baseball and Jason and I can at least laugh at what's going on in Oakland and Las Vegas and Jason can cry about what's going on in Oakland and will soon be going on in Las Vegas it seems. So your A's, your precious A's, they're as good as gone now.
00:06:52
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, unless the owners pull a real surprise there, or Washington comes and saves us. Help me Marco Rubio, you're my only hope. Oh, true. Yeah, no public funds for stadiums. Yeah, he suddenly jumped on that out of nowhere.
00:07:10
Speaker
So last time we talked about this last time, I think about me being angry. I was already kind of resigned to the idea that the A's could not be captured, could not be brought back. And at the time there was talk and I didn't really get it. I didn't think it made a lot of sense of doing a reverse boycott game where, you know, the A's management has been saying, oh, we have to move because A's fans don't show up to games or average attendance is like a seven thousand, eight thousand.
00:07:40
Speaker
We have to move because they're not supporting the team. Our fans are so bad. And the idea was let's prove them wrong by by everybody showing up to this game and the.
00:07:55
Speaker
And I was like, okay, we're gonna protest by giving this dude money. Uh, it didn't make sense to me, but then the A's went on a six game winning streak as this planned boycott, reverse boycott game came up. And suddenly I was, I was all hype about it. And also ticket numbers started coming in and there was like, okay, we got 12,000 people coming. We got 18,000 people coming and it just kept going up and up and up. And, uh, and.
00:08:23
Speaker
A lot of you might have seen the news. There were 33,000 tickets sold. 28,500 showed up. It was a mess because they weren't prepared for 28,000 attendees for this. There was a K-pop concert going on across the street at the arena where the Warriors used to play.
00:08:44
Speaker
It was, the crowd was nuts. I was watching that game and the stadium is still half empty because the Oakland, one of the biggest problems of the Coliseum, this thing has been garbage for like over 20 years.
00:08:59
Speaker
One of the biggest problems of the Coliseum is that it has too many seats. It has like 90,000 seats because it's a mixed-use stadium with the Raiders who have left. It has that whole upper deck that is just never used, right? Yeah, that was used for Raiders games, but it hasn't been used for A's games ever. And the third deck, which was cut off from A's games in like the, I want to say 2008 or 2007.
00:09:28
Speaker
upper deck on that is never used was like a Al Davis special situation from the 90s to try to get the Raiders to come back. It was a whole
00:09:41
Speaker
A lot of this, this history goes back so long, and it has to do with both the A's, what they did to get, what Oakland did to get the Raiders back, the money they took out to get the Raiders back, the Giants who refused to let the A's leave Oakland as a city and go somewhere else in the Bay Area. But the crowd, even with a half full stadium, the crowd was crazy, electrifying. The imagery was kind of weird because, you know, you got this top, top
00:10:12
Speaker
uh his top rank that isn't full at all but man it was it was cool and everybody was coordinated they had thousands and thousands of shirts that just said sell on them they oh yeah the jerseys yeah yeah because just to be clear so they averaged like 7,900 uh attendees to it to again is what i saw right so this was like
00:10:31
Speaker
What four or five times that right so quite a turnout? Yeah, and like the best the best day it was a Tuesday It was specifically set for a Tuesday night against the Rays because the Rays might be good But they're not a draw nobody comes out to see the Rays when they're out of time, right? Right, and it's a Tuesday night on a night when nobody would it's not like a popular night So the point was this would have normally had like 4,000 people at it and
00:11:00
Speaker
this time they got like 30,000. And they were still, it's crazy. The stadium was more full in the ninth inning than it was in the fifth inning, because people just kept filtering in. Because the parking lots filled up by like the second inning. And they already had huge lives.
00:11:22
Speaker
So they had, it was like electrifying. There were these huge chance the exact same day. And they ended up beating the raise and the razor, they, maybe the best team in baseball right now, the best record. And it's not close either. They know they're like four or five games better than the Braves who are like just killing it on top of their division. So yeah, they're good.
00:11:41
Speaker
they had like a 20 game win streak earlier this season yeah they are there but to your point they don't draw because they're not particularly exciting they're like what the A's originally were the sort of saber metric team you know what i mean they yeah small hits small ball win the games not taking away from them but that doesn't really that isn't a big draw for for most people and they're they've betrayed
00:12:00
Speaker
They're from Tampa. They've betrayed their fans the same way that the Marlins did, where they had a great roster back in 2009, 10, 11, where they had a bunch of big hitters who became at that time big names. And they just sold them all off, like the Marlins do every time they get good. So not a draw. But that's great. I have a little bit of nausea at the sort of reverse boycott thing. Me too. If we're taking, let's say,
00:12:30
Speaker
Ordinarily, there would have been 4,000 fans at this game. Let's be generous, and let's say that there would have been 8,000 fans at the game, and there were 33,000. So we have 25,000 extra people. Let's say pretty cheaply that the average ticket price is $40. You just put $1 million into the coffer for this guy with your protest. That is not a good protest. No. Hey, so here's the thing. Yes, I gave them $1 million.
00:12:59
Speaker
like congrats you got your million bucks but the you know this is like a pride thing and also it was a party uh it was a million dollars to throw a tremendous party
00:13:09
Speaker
for like a going away party for the Oakland days. And also it kind of totally, it got this issue a lot of attention where before it was very, it was much more niche. It was like, you know, people just say, oh, sad, but too bad, they kind of had to. But this is like, I think it showed for a lot of people that the passion is there. And like, you'll never get that with the Las Vegas A's.
00:13:37
Speaker
The Las Vegas Raiders have complained about how they don't really have a home field advantage because they don't have a home crowd really that comes out. And they're turning these Las Vegas athletics. They're just Raiders just marauding in the desert in Nevada. No offense, Brandon. That's no home.
00:14:00
Speaker
They're turning these athletics into like a tourist attraction basically for out of town people to come see their team in Las Vegas. Let me ask you this. Have you ever gone on a trip?
00:14:15
Speaker
And we're going to eliminate the trips that are specifically for the purpose of going to see a baseball game in another city. Have you ever gone on a trip to another city and said, oh, fun activity. Let's go see a baseball game in this city that we don't live in. For me, the answer is no. You have. OK. I went to see the Redbird. OK, no, twice. I went to see the Cardinals when I went to St. Louis.
00:14:41
Speaker
And I had a good time. I also went to see the redbirds when I was in Memphis.
00:14:47
Speaker
And, but I'm, that's, you know, I would do, I would do that.
Economic Impact of Stadium Deals
00:14:51
Speaker
But would you do it? I don't fault you. No, no. Would you do it like on a trip to Las Vegas? Like, so do you want some sort of trip like that? Like go to Florida, go to Disneyland and then take a run over to see the race. Nobody's doing it. Right. Right. Nobody's got, nobody's coming to Orlando and then going to see, watch a Solar Bears game. That's, we're not, they're not doing that.
00:15:12
Speaker
Um, that's, uh, like that I did those things because that was like one of the big things to do. St. Louis loves the Cardinals and they have a lot of stuff geared towards Cardinals games. And the Las Vegas is not going to be that way. Exactly. Las Vegas is not going to reorient itself around the athletics, right? Are they even still the athletics? That's a stupid question. Are they great if they aren't?
00:15:37
Speaker
They haven't said, well, no, they are the athletics right now. They haven't said whether they're going to keep that name. Though, Rob Manfred, and I'll get to him later, has said that John Fisher, Rob Manfred, the commissioner of MLP, has said that John Fisher owns the athletics.
00:15:52
Speaker
That one of the craziest confluences of events regarding this reverse boycott is that it was the same day that the Nevada legislature passed the incentive bill to basically give
00:16:07
Speaker
the athletics organization over $380 million and tax incentives to come to the state. And then the A's won. It was such a perfect confluence to get everybody talking about it.
00:16:27
Speaker
After that, a lot of people started talking about it that otherwise weren't. And they started asking Rob Manfred, the MLB commissioner, about it. And he has the absolute worst possible response, which is he basically makes fun of the fans and said, this is it.
00:16:44
Speaker
Oh, congrats to them on bringing out an average Major League Baseball crowd to this. Yeah. Which is funny because- He was a big log guy, right? Before? Isn't that he came from Gibson Dunn or something? Was he? Yeah, partner someplace. He has that sense wafting off of him. Yeah.
00:17:01
Speaker
But the maximum capacity of the proposed stadium in Vegas is 33,000 seats. That is the maximum. I want to talk about that. Quickly, the other thing about the reverse boycott, though, is what I thought is it does show there's value there if Fisher was interested in selling for potential buyers, too. I mean, yeah, that is an upside to the reverse boycott, right? Like, this is what you might see. This is the return on investment you might expect if you treated the team
00:17:27
Speaker
with some respect or whatever. But yeah, to your point, 30,000. Is it 33? I thought it was 30,000. And I think it's 30,000 seat stadium, $1.5 billion, which is on par with Yankee Stadium and Seafield and any of the larger stadiums. I think part of the cost is because it's going to be domed, which also I kind of thought we weren't really doing that anymore. I get you need to do that in Vegas because otherwise the players are going to cook.
00:17:53
Speaker
But that might also be a really good reason to not play baseball in the desert. Maybe that's just don't do it at all. If you don't mean wild idea. Yeah, maybe someplace else, anyplace else. I mean, what about the Bay Area where you absolutely know it's not going to rain between May and.
00:18:13
Speaker
September like it's just like I don't know about the Bay Area like Yeah, we know okay. This is once you hit like May There is zero percent chance of rain the rest of the rest of until fall That's probably true in Nevada, too 127 degrees and you'll let's boil in the outfield
00:18:36
Speaker
Let's tie this all back to Esquiring Minds topics that we could really nail on and put a little bow on this mini topic, which we, of course, have taken to 20 minutes. But first, Rob Manfred came from the firm Morgan Lewis, a big law firm, multinational law firm. So that ties back to the Esquiring Minds theme that big law sucks.
00:19:00
Speaker
And theme number two is a pet topic of Andrew's that you write about pretty frequently, I think, which is stop using public money to fund stadiums. It's dumb. It's a race to the bottom economically, and it doesn't actually make money back for the taxpayers. Stop doing it.
00:19:15
Speaker
Yes. I mean, that is pretty much the entire argument. It's a race to the bottom and the cities that lose out are the ones that can obviously at least afford to throw money at these billionaires to move the teams to. So in this particular one, it's $380 million of public financing, they've agreed to, for the $1.5 billion, 30,000 seat stadium. The funding is going to come from $120 million in bonds issued by Clark County combined with revenue from a special tax district.
00:19:39
Speaker
and no property tax for probably indefinitely. All of those are terrible plans. It's using public funds to basically line the pockets of the Gap family. And the property tax thing will be something, will be an albatross around Las Vegas' neck for 30 years. Oh, they have to stay, that is one thing. They have to stay in play for at least 30 years in order to not have to pay all those.
00:20:04
Speaker
Okay. But for 30 years, that's, you know, I guess, I mean, when you're advertising the, that $380 million worth of benefits, uh, over the course of 30 years, that feels a little bit better. Although I can pretty well promise you that in 12 years, they're going to come in and say, Hey, we need a whole bunch of public money to, uh, to renovate this stadium. That's now falling apart.
00:20:28
Speaker
All the bonds will get kicked further and further down the road. But also there has been pretty exhaustive economic studies into whether or not these sorts of stadiums and sports arenas do anything for the community around them. And they absolutely don't. And the best argument for it being a good idea is just that it does not harm the area immediately around the stadium.
00:20:51
Speaker
Most of the studies actually show the opposite. And anecdotes are not data, but just think about the area immediately around any sports stadium you can think of. Not the best part of the city, not the highest property values, not a lot of grocery stores or any of the sorts of things you would need to be able to live around there.
00:21:10
Speaker
and the people who work in the stadiums oftentimes can't afford to live around the stadiums and they're traveling from who knows where so it is not the thing this like this idea that it's a big job creator and it's you know such a big it's a central it's a tourist point for for you know everybody's going to be coming into the town and to both of your points
00:21:27
Speaker
just as you don't travel to, for the most part, other than Jake, you don't travel to some foreign city and then just go take in a baseball game. You don't go to a baseball game and then quickly go to a mall or go shopping afterwards. You just don't. You go in to do that one thing and that's it.
Baseball's Broader Implications
00:21:40
Speaker
And so, yeah, this is economically terrible for Nevada. I will say, the Las Vegas trip almost makes that make more sense because
00:21:51
Speaker
though i'm how even on the strip is it i i don't know how close it is to the strip it's the right isn't it yeah they're gonna knock down the truck yeah i think they're already knocking it down and it's like they're gonna knock it down no matter what um but the
00:22:07
Speaker
Uh, you know, that's already a place where they don't really have grocery stores and they don't have people living there really. So like in that way, it kind of, it kind of makes sense. You add it to the list of, of the list of things, activities that you can do alongside the shows. Oh, you didn't get, you didn't want to spend the money on the show. So instead you'll go see a baseball game, I guess. Uh, you know, and congratulations, MLB, you, you got added to the list of things to do on, on in Las Vegas.
00:22:37
Speaker
Uh, doesn't seem like a great, like a great landing spot. Maybe I'm sure they are also interested in gambling money. I don't know why, why they would, you know, they used to be, they were trying to keep that sort of separate. And now I think that's why Las Vegas is more in play because gambling is basically funding all of baseball. It seems. Yeah. All of professional sports, it seems like. Yeah. Um, so I,
00:23:05
Speaker
I don't know how being there actually helps them when it comes to that, but they seem to really want it because they're like waving. So next step is the owners. And I guess it's possible that because our favorite Senator Marco Rubio and a few others and also California, California legislators are like threatening MLB's antitrust exemption over
00:23:29
Speaker
this plus completely unrelated like culture war stuff. Yeah, that somebody actually spooks some MLB owners, but I doubt it. Like, hey, they don't seem to care very much.
00:23:41
Speaker
By all means, end the special treatment for baseball's labor union. Yes, great. Don't give them special treatment. That's special treatment for rich guys. You know what? While we're at it, let's take away more stuff from rich guys. Let's eliminate the stupid exemption over time in the FLSA for movie theater workers and the guys who sell your popcorn at the stadium. I don't know about that one, but I'm with you. You seem animated about it. Burn it all down. I'm with you.
00:24:07
Speaker
Honestly, I was going to like go into a whole history of John Fisher being a bad A's owner.
Billionaire Cage Match Speculation
00:24:15
Speaker
But we've already talked about this for 24 minutes. So we'll move on. I will spare you guys. We'll move on to the next thing. We have our we have choices. So we're ready. We're beating up on billionaires. We want to further do it and quickly touch on Elon Musk and Zuckerberg going into a cage match. Let's move from beating up on billionaires to billionaires beating on each other.
00:24:35
Speaker
Yeah, I'm all for you. The Elon Zuck cage match. I think we're living in like a golden age of billionaires, like billionaire hubris. And if it could at least be entertaining for us right there, they're running for president. They're getting in old propane tanks and going down to the Titanic. And now two of them are going to two of them are going to be. That was that was Andrew who who made that comment. Just don't get angry at Jason or Jake.
00:25:00
Speaker
They do not. Anything I say is only my thoughts, not theirs. Anyway, so apparently, I don't know how this started. I just saw it before we started recording. Elon issued some sort of threat to Zuckerberg. Is that right? And Zuckerberg said, like, let's pick a place. Okay. So Musk put up on Twitter something to the effect that he was up for a cage fight with Zuck, like throwing down the gauntlet and apparently Zuck
00:25:25
Speaker
posted a screenshot of the tweet, I guess, I assume he did this on Instagram, posted a screenshot of the tweet with the caption, send me location. And so like- Perfectly human thing to say. This is the kind of stuff that starts, you know, you can see the Logan Paul esque brief beef like starting up here.
00:25:48
Speaker
and Musk apparently then replied to that, I don't know what venue this is on because surely
00:25:56
Speaker
Zuck's not doing this on Twitter and Musk's not doing this on Instagram or Facebook, whatever. But apparently Musk responds with saying just two words, Vegas Octagon, which is like the Octagon is the arena that Ultimate Fighting Championship, like MMA fighters fight each other in. Wait, Musk said that?
00:26:19
Speaker
Musk said, Musk replied to Zuck's response with Vegas octagon. Yeah. That, that seems okay. Uh, that seems like a stupid, by the way, are we in agreement that there was a 0% chance that Musk actually goes through with it?
00:26:36
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. What? No, no. It's 52 and he's a bit doughy. I don't I mean, I don't think I think he stands to look like an idiot. I think he goes. I think he does this. This is the Twitter purchase of fighting challenges where he's going to be like, yeah, I'm going to beat him up. I'm going to beat him up. I'm going to beat him up. And then he, you know, comes up with some excuse like, oh, no.
00:27:01
Speaker
or the Vegas regulators wouldn't let us and you know. They couldn't be sanctioned. Sorry, they got to go like rubble in the jungle. They got to go to Zaire to do this because no one stateside will let them do it. Only a moron would have thought I actually meant that. That was clearly a joke. I don't think that. Obviously what I meant was that we're going to have a lively debate inside of an octagon, an octagonal stage. Right.
00:27:26
Speaker
Well, so apparently he already started kind of walking it back a little bit because then he tweeted, uh, I have this great move that I call the wall. This is Musk. I have this great move that I call the walrus where I just lie on top of my opponent and I do nothing. And then he said he never works out except for picking up his kids and throwing them in the air. So that sounds to me like that has the feel of you've got your mouth off and now you're kind of like, ha ha ha, you know, I wouldn't, I'm not gonna, how can I get out of this?
00:27:51
Speaker
And then he found out that Zuckerberg's actually been doing MMA training because he's the other kind of billionaire. He's, uh, I'm a, I'm a fighter billing billionaire. The, uh, he's, he's the Kendall Roy, uh, of, uh, uh, he's got that going for him.
00:28:08
Speaker
So this trope goes all the way back to, uh, I'm sure it goes back before this, but, uh, there was like a series of episodes on friends. Yeah. Remember that John Favreau was like dating Monica Geller on friends and like his passion, like randomly one day he's, his true passion is, uh, is ultimate fighting. And he starts doing something like, yeah, rich guys like to bare knuckle punch each other or something. I guess, I don't know.
00:28:34
Speaker
Look, he grew up in the Fight Club era, you know? Yeah, that's true. As did I. Zuck, I mean, Zuck is our age. He's 39. And so and if he's 39 and he's been training and, you know, the perhaps less than ideally physically fit musk, just like, of course he's backing off. Of course he's backing off. It's too bad. I would love I would love for that to happen just because it would be terrible for both of them.
00:29:04
Speaker
I think, uh, there's no winners in that. I don't think, no, it's hard for me to hardly endorse schadenfreude like that of watching somebody get pummeled by somebody else that I also don't like. Uh, but you know, it's hard to resist that temptation too. I do think it would be great for Musk if he won, just because he's like, he is that level of maturity where that would be like the biggest thing in the world to him if he had won. But I also am just very confident he would lose. Yeah.
00:29:33
Speaker
Okay. I think we've beaten that, uh, that musk and or Zuckerberg into the, into the ground walrus that walrus. Yeah. The walrus. Um, so you guys want to talk a little bit about chat GPT. We have some updates on that, right? This was another sort of Jake, sorry, not on chat GPT on the chat GPT lawyer story. This was the story we talked about two weeks ago, I think, or maybe four weeks ago now where the attorney, yeah, it's like a hot developing topic. Like this is hot off the presses happened today, right?
00:29:58
Speaker
Yep. Yeah. So Jake, you did you read this whole I have thoughts generally, but go
AI and Legal Ethics Discussion
00:30:05
Speaker
on. Sorry. I didn't read the whole thing. There's like a 50. There was like a bunch of factual findings that I didn't like. Look, we all know what happened. So recap from last time, I think it was two weeks ago, a lawyer who was acting as a proxy for another lawyer, probably unlawfully,
00:30:27
Speaker
uh, cited a bunch of fake cases generated by chat GPT, uh, doubled down without realizing that chat GPT, um, makes up cases and submitted fake copies of cases when asked to provide copies and then got busted. Um,
00:30:44
Speaker
and went before the court and was basically pleading for mercy because they were like, man, we didn't know that chat GPT did this. We didn't know. I've never used it before. Yeah. Can we pause there for a second? Because this is where I had my realization. I scrolled through and I hadn't actually read the cases that he had provided. I read the brief or whatever, but I didn't read the supposed cases.
00:31:05
Speaker
There's more to this. They're scapegoating AI, because I have attempted to get chat GPT to write something like what they have presented as cases, and it just doesn't. Oh, really? I would love to hear what the prompt was that got chat GPT to just spit out an entirely fictional case. We talked about it two weeks ago. We said that we thought that this wasn't really an AI story as much as it was like a malpractice story. Or more to the point was that he was scapegoating, or I'm sorry, not scapegoating. He was
00:31:32
Speaker
uh this other attorney he was a front for this other attorney this other not barred attorney right or barred but not not admitted to practice in that state or whatever um i think that there was a lot more uh
00:31:46
Speaker
they knew what they were doing more than they're letting on. They tweaked the prompt. They edited what came out. They said, yeah, that, but it's talk a little bit more about the facts of the case that if you just play with chat GPT and ask it to even even explicitly ask it to make up a case where there's somebody who got injured and bankruptcy stayed the proceeding, stayed the statute of limitations or whatever they claim to said, it doesn't just spit out a case like that. Hmm.
00:32:12
Speaker
That's interesting because, you know, he had different, they had different fonts within those cases. And that was something the judge noticed. And so why would it do that?
00:32:22
Speaker
It didn't. He wrote a decent portion of that and chat GPT filled in the gaps or something, but they were more actively fiddling around. They knew what they were doing more than they're letting on, I think. And now they're caught and they're going to... But I mean, what that tells you is, or the question it raises is what did they think was going to happen?
00:32:43
Speaker
Like what, best case scenario, what happens, right? So let's just assume for the sake of argument, they knew what they were doing and they were using chat GPT to generate fake cases that made the argument they wanted, but they definitely knew they were fake, right? Best case scenario for them. Do they expect opposing counsel to just read them and go, Oh, Oh, okay. Well, yeah, nevermind. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Is that even remotely? You guys know better than me. Is that even remotely plausible?
00:33:10
Speaker
No, I don't think so. In this instance, where it's not like some like discovery motion, it is a motion to dismiss for statute of limitations based on law that this firm practices all the time.
00:33:23
Speaker
Right. No, that would because it would totally change like things that they've been doing forever, or like thoughts that they've had on their law that they practice forever. If there was case law saying the exact opposite of what they knew to be true, right, it would look at it very hard.
00:33:43
Speaker
That's the sort of thing that would be immediately whatever list serves that you're on for the Bar Association, whatever practice groups that you're a part of, this is something where they would immediately be shooting off rockets. Hey, bulletin, you need to know about this thing right now. And it would have been taught at every single topical CLE that year. They would have known these things. And I didn't look at when these things are dated from.
00:34:09
Speaker
Uh, there was something like 1992 and like, you know, there was like old, old law supposedly.
00:34:16
Speaker
Like 2,000. I don't know what Margie's was, but yeah, I don't see a date on it. I can't look into their minds and like imagine what they thought the consequence was gonna be. But I can say that anytime that you receive an order that says opinion and order on sanctions, and the order is 34 pages long before you get to the appendices and exhibits, like that's big trouble for you. And God help him.
00:34:45
Speaker
I don't know how they got off with a penalty of just $5,000. I think that there's probably more coming down the pike later. But perhaps the worst part of this whole thing is on page 34 in conclusion paragraph B that says, within 14 days of this order, respondents shall send via first-class mail a letter individually addressed to each judge, falsely identified as the author of the fake
00:35:09
Speaker
One, two, three, four, five, six opinions. The letter shall identify and attach to this opinion in order or transcript of the hearing, a copy of the April 25 affirmation, including the fake opinion attributed to the recipient judge. That is the most embarrassing thing that I could possibly imagine happening is having to write that letter, send that letter, and you now have to eat your hat with all of those judges too, like mortifying.
00:35:37
Speaker
Uh, we didn't get, we didn't actually get to the result yet, but yeah, $5,000, $5,000 fine for them. They have to write this embarrassing letter, but like, yeah, the, the, that's it. Like that was it. And I think a lot of people thought they got off light. I was surprised that the judge didn't refer to them, refer them to for discipline. And the judge barely commented on the fact that it like a lawyer was basically
00:36:04
Speaker
just acting as an intermediary for a lawyer that wasn't admitted in that federal district. That was the situation was he wasn't admitted to in the, in the federal district of New York, but was admitted in the state, easy peasy admission. Uh, but yeah, that's crazy to me. I, my hunch about this, this is judge Castel, uh, Castel, I don't know where the emphasis goes. Uh,
00:36:29
Speaker
My hunch is that judge already knows, has already been contacted by the bar disciplinary commission or somebody who is responsible for prosecuting this sort of thing and knows that there's something else coming and doesn't really want to step into that because district court judges in federal courts aren't the ones who are going to make the decision about somebody's bar status in the state bar. I am surprised and maybe there's a separate mechanism in the district courts for this and thank God, I just don't know about it.
00:36:56
Speaker
I am surprised that there was no comment about revoking their admission to practice in the district court. Yeah, for La Duca, at least, because Schwartz was never admitted. Right, right, right. I'm a little bit surprised by that, but maybe there's a mechanism for ejecting somebody. Not ejecting.
00:37:17
Speaker
rescinding somebody's admission to practice before that particular court. Maybe it doesn't happen in an order like this. Maybe you got to put up a panel of district court judges or something. Yeah. I think in my district, there's a panel that handles admission and admission issues and discipline issues. The thing about bar discipline is once one bar has kicked you out,
00:37:45
Speaker
It's the other bars are all going to, I think in some cases it's like actually the law, which is if you're like disbarred or disciplined in one state, you're automatically disciplined in the other one. It's called a reciprocal
00:38:02
Speaker
reciprocal suspension or something like that here. That would make sense. Yeah. Especially something like this where it's not like, well, it's not simply you did something that is not permitted in this state or in this district, but in many other districts, it would be permitted. This is crossing the line anywhere around the world across languages. Yeah. You don't really got to think too hard to know whether or not submitting a false, a fake case of the court is
00:38:30
Speaker
considered out loud. I'm too lazy to do this, but maybe a listener will do it. Our one listener will test them with doing this. I'm looking at the cases that were supposedly written by chat GPT. I think that the character count is too high for what chat GPT will give you in one go.
00:38:52
Speaker
So I don't think you could, even if you did somehow craft a prompt that would say, write me a case that says that China airlines, you know, whatever the whole thing, Vargas. Um, I don't think you could get this in one go. So you would still have to go back and say, uh, finish it or, or give me some more paragraph. Right? Yeah.
00:39:10
Speaker
maybe that i would like to see that those questions be asked because i bet they don't have answers to those questions like walk me through this year you just keep saying i use chat gpt i thought it was a database that i could search and i didn't know that it could make something about a whole cloth okay fine in order for that to be even remotely plausible explain to me how you use chat gpt because that's gonna tell tale right if you're saying,
00:39:31
Speaker
Are you responding with a secondary prompt saying, right, but make it stronger? Make it better for me. Yeah. Yeah. Make the argument stronger for me, right? That would be a tell that you kind of knew that this was not a database. This was the equivalent of asking somebody to forge something for you or to make something up. Yeah. I mean, if they did that, then they would be completely... I think there's no way... If the judge thought that they did that, then they're gone.
00:40:02
Speaker
I think he's not holding back at all. I could definitely tell that the judge was kind of holding back because because of the attention that they got, the public embarrassment they got. He explicitly said that he considered that as part of the as part of his calculation of deterrence, that they already got a huge amount of negative attention that is horrifying, which is definitely the stuff of my nightmares, even though I would never do it, never do the thing that got them that attention.
00:40:31
Speaker
But yeah, if the judge thought that they had cooked the chat GPT responses or that they wrote extra stuff in that chat GPT didn't write in, I think they would have been totally dead. So maybe they got away with a little bit. Yeah, some other fun bits here.
00:40:51
Speaker
In this sort of situation, I absolutely would have expected that the defendant, Evianca, would have asked for attorney's fees as part of the sanctions sought. And paragraph 21 of the opinion here just says they didn't ask for it. And so we're not going to give them like, I'm a little bit disappointed that the judge just kind of didn't do that suesponsy. It's hard because you got to verify the actual amount expended on attorney's fees, like
00:41:18
Speaker
figure out hourly rate, how many hours were worked, et cetera, et cetera. So that's a little bit surprising. I feel like they probably could have figured that out because I mean, from the second they filed their motion to dismiss, every second they spent on that motion to dismiss from the response, which was full of the fake cases and based on the fake cases.
00:41:39
Speaker
Uh, I think that could have been arguably part of the sanctions. And so, um, and then of course, like the reply to, or whatever it was, they, uh, um, when they actually did, um, so preparing that reply, which said, we can't find those cases. And then looking at the cases they did that they attached and been like, no, these seem like fake copies, your honor. And writing that letter, uh,
00:42:06
Speaker
That would probably be traceable, though. Maybe they were just happy. I mean, so another thing about this is the plaintiff lost that motion to dismiss today also. So the case is gone. So congratulations. You got sanctioned and also your case is over.
00:42:21
Speaker
Um, maybe they're just happy to take that and, and run. But yeah, I think that might've just been an oversight that they were trying to duck. They were trying to duck and cover from a, from a judge that was completely on their side and also extremely angry at the other side. And it's one of those skills as a lawyer is to know when to stop making the argument because you've won.
00:42:45
Speaker
even though you're totally prepared to make the argument. And so maybe we're like, look, we want to stay away from this because we have one already and we don't want to mess with that.
00:42:56
Speaker
I also had the thought, I would think that Avianca Airlines mustn't be super excited about this whole... I mean, great, they won, but how many airlines do you know a specific detail about somebody getting injured other than this one? And why do you know it, right? Like, if you're Avianca Airlines, a lot of people know one thing about your airline now, your drink carts injure people's needs. That's the only thing they know.
00:43:19
Speaker
Hey, they know it exists. So that's a step up for 90% of the people that read about this case. I don't think I've ever heard of it. If I ever go to Columbia, I probably won't use them because I think they're bankrupt, right? Or did they come out of bankruptcy? I don't know. Yeah, I think it was a Colombian airline. But yeah, it's very interesting. Another embarrassing bit about this going back to the conclusion where the court is actually handing down orders.
00:43:48
Speaker
The court, in 13 years, I've never seen a court do this, which admittedly is not forever practicing, but also I've never seen it done to anybody else yet. The court ordered the plaintiff's lawyers to, within 14 days of the order, send a letter
00:44:09
Speaker
individually addressed to the plaintiff, their client that identifies and attaches this opinion in order. They had to order these lawyers to send a copy of this order to the plaintiff, their client, because they have no confidence that they're actually telling this client the truth or what's going on in the case.
00:44:27
Speaker
That's pretty embarrassing, too. I can guarantee you that anybody in the entire world who knows Roberto Mata and follows the news even remotely, this guy's gotten plenty of calls unsolicited from reporters asking for comments about what his lawyers are doing screwing around. Yeah. I haven't seen that from a court, though I imagine I've had similar
00:44:55
Speaker
Like when you file a motion for fees or for sanctions in Florida based on, you know, it being frivolous or not supported by the facts, a lot of the time it ends up being a client versus attorney situation where, you know, if the attorney is totally at fault, then maybe, you know, you have to talk to your client because, you know, there's an issue of paying the fees that were part of the sanctions.
00:45:23
Speaker
But that's definitely I know that's common in like disciplinary cases in Florida and Every time somebody gets disciplined in Florida the Supreme Court attaches the condition that you need to send this this You need to send this disciplinary order to all of your clients like that's one of the conditions so yeah, I didn't realize that wasn't common in other places, but that's I
00:45:49
Speaker
You know, that's some of the fun stuff that comes out in Florida bar news, but it seems I can see it. I could see it happening in disciplinary cases, but this is not, this is a order in a regular case, not a question of attorney discipline and admission. So right. It's attorney discipline by another means and not normally the people to do that thing.
00:46:08
Speaker
not normally the venue where you'd have that kind of- And I expect there's more coming. There just has to be. I think you should use chat GPT to draft the letter that he sends. I think that would be the final- Well, it's something it's actually good at. Yeah. Yeah, why not? Go ahead. Why not? Nothing unethical about that.
Reddit's API Controversy
00:46:28
Speaker
No. Okay. So you guys want to quickly talk about the ongoing Reddit dumpster fire before we then get to the recommendations and stuff. Yeah. We started with Reddit a couple of weeks ago, right? We were talking about it when it was in its infancy. And apparently things have just gotten worse and worse and Steve Huffman has just really decided to spaz as he goes by on Reddit, has just really decided to dig in his heels and go full Elon on this whole thing.
00:46:54
Speaker
Yeah, and he explicitly said they're not going full Elon, which is funny. It's one of those things where it's like yelling at someone, I'm not robbing you. Yeah. And it's like, I've never been more certain that you are robbing me. Yeah. He said this is not we're not going the Twitter route. That's not what this is. OK, but he said that he took inspiration from Twitter earlier and from Elon specifically, I'm guessing because like Elon, Elon laying off like
00:47:22
Speaker
to like three quarters or five, six of his workforce, whatever it was. I'm not gonna deny that a lot of these tech firms have too many employees and have people that doing stuff that isn't really that necessary. But that was a totally different situation.
00:47:40
Speaker
But the thing to me when it comes to this guy that has really made it go really bad, and I'm not saying that, I'm not even sure any of this has a real effect on Reddit's profitability or whatever, but it just keeps making him look bad. He keeps lying constantly.
00:47:58
Speaker
He keeps lying about the third party developers and things that he said to third party developers over. And by the way, this is all about Reddit deciding to, it started because Reddit decided to charge an exorbitant amount to use their API.
00:48:14
Speaker
because they said they wanted to keep it from being used to train language, uh, yeah, uh, large language models, sort of ais, right? That sort of stuff. That was ostensibly the original reason for charging for the API. And that's sort of his first, to your point, lie is his first argument. And now he seems to have completely abandoned that. And he's just talking about how, Hey man, you gotta, you know, you gotta pay for things you use. All these people need to grow up. They, that's just how the world is. And sorry, go on.
00:48:42
Speaker
Yeah, no, yeah, that's, I forgot about all that. Like, of course, yeah, there's like a million ways he put his foot in his mouth. Like, for example, saying, we got this really valuable information, Renata's going to give it away for free. And of course, the whole reason he has it is because the users gave it to him for free.
00:49:02
Speaker
He called mods landed gentry or something before throwing up their protest blackouts. And then you lied about the third party app developers, which for years and years, Reddit didn't have its own app. You had to use a third party app.
00:49:24
Speaker
And then basically forcing the mods to reopen by saying, we're just gonna replace you.
00:49:32
Speaker
Like we're, oh, okay, nice little subreddit you got there. If you don't open up, we'll replace you. Yeah. Okay. And so yeah, that's the, that's so not only is it entirely user generated content, the moderation and most of the running of the site, most of the like day-to-day work of the site that isn't backend engineering was kicked down to volunteers, right? It was these people who were running these subreddits. Oftentimes some of the subreddits like AskReddit, some of them that are among the largest,
00:50:00
Speaker
were run by just people doing it after work or whatever. And so this idea that now you're kind of spitting in their face and not allowing them to... Framing it in such a way that they should be glad that they have this opportunity to do all this free work is just sort of...
00:50:20
Speaker
he just clearly doesn't understand the Reddit community or like nerds. Uh, this is all just waving a red flag in front of a bull. Like you're just asking for increasingly, uh, insane responses. And I don't understand how he's not figuring that out yet. And so, yeah, so it started with the API thing with the, they're going to charge the API so that language models can't be used to train on the data. And that had me a point I wanted to make that I meant to talk about that, uh, two weeks ago when we talked about it is
00:50:48
Speaker
That in and of itself is kind of a spurious argument, because GPT and these other language models were never using APIs to train the models. They were scraping the web. And you can still do that. Unless he intends to put Reddit behind some sort of walled garden type situation, like if you think about how threads are in Discord, where there is no website that you can go to read a thread in Discord. You need to go through the app.
00:51:13
Speaker
It's a little bit more difficult for like a web scraper, which is so quickly an API.
00:51:20
Speaker
program would use things that are purpose-built hooks in the website to pull the data down, pull post down, pull information down from Reddit. A scraper just basically pretends to be a browser window and just pulls all the text off the screen. The same way you or I could read the text on the screen in a browser, a scraper works that way. So unless he intends to do something to put all of Reddit behind a walled garden,
00:51:45
Speaker
That's already either already has happened or it is certainly going to happen. And so already I'm skeptical. I'm sure he has people around him that have told him that that is true. And so this is just a cash grab, I think, and a series of attempts to make arguments for why it's not. And it's just getting increasingly or getting less plausible as he goes.
00:52:07
Speaker
Yeah. So if you want to experience a really, really good deep dive into this topic, John Gruber's really good podcast, The Talk Show, had Christian Selig on there, who's the Canadian developer of the Apollo app for Reddit.
00:52:25
Speaker
which is on iOS. And I'll tell you, listening to this podcast and listening to, in particular, Christian Selig, get on there and talk about his livelihood that was just taken away, he's so very Canadian about the whole thing. He's just very
00:52:42
Speaker
polite and kind and patient and put together and calm about the whole thing. But a lot of the points that he made about this were they were talking about not wanting to have their asset. What Reddit feels like is their asset, which is all this community contributed stuff that's on Reddit now. They didn't want to have their asset used for companies like OpenAI, who Reddit feels like probably truthfully, a lot of their content
00:53:10
Speaker
their content, I'm putting up air quotes, was used to train these models. And now these companies have valuations in the hundreds of billions. Meanwhile, Reddit is trying to IPO and is looking at like a 10 to 20 billion valuation, maybe.
00:53:30
Speaker
when they have what they feel like are the goods that enabled that hundreds of billions of dollars valuation. And so that's kind of where Reddit may be coming from a little bit, but the way that they're putting it with developers and API access just kind of doesn't make a lot of sense because right now, Reddit had a policy where they allowed something on the order of like 86,000 API calls a day
00:54:00
Speaker
And to hear these app developers who are making app readers for Reddit, they were making like
00:54:07
Speaker
three to 500 calls a day per user or something like that. Just an insignificant amount in the face of what they were permitted. And then if you take the time to kind of drill down and figure out what the value is of a single API call, we're talking about fractions of a penny for server costs, infrastructure costs. Fractions of fractions, like insanely small.
00:54:32
Speaker
infinitesimally small. And it turns out what it's actually about is, well, Reddit loses money because they don't get eyeballs on their ads because these API dependent apps are not pulling ads in with the rest of the API, which is like kind of one of the big points about using these apps. Also, Reddit's own app sucks, and that's another point. But
00:54:56
Speaker
And so they're missing the 12 cents per ad view or something that they might get for Gardasil or whatever's being advertised on Reddit. And like, okay, fine, then there's a way to fix this. You either charge them a reasonable amount for that API call, or you just make it so that they have to accept ads in their API calls or something like that. You can specify the terms and conditions on which they can use the API.
00:55:25
Speaker
But they're just not doing it. And number one makes them look scummy and dishonest. And number two is basically pulling the rug out from these guys who built these things on the hope and even the reassurance from Reddit like months ago that they're not going to do what Twitter did and make the pricing exorbitant. But it's basically
00:55:55
Speaker
They're charging them something like 10 or some order of magnitude higher than what their actual cost is and what the opportunity cost of missed ad serves is. It's just incredibly scummy, incredibly dishonest. I love Reddit. I enjoy Reddit, but it makes me want to not use it anymore.
00:56:19
Speaker
Yeah, me too. Well, you'll really not want to use it when you have to look at Pete Davidson eating a Crunchwrap in order to use it. Because I had to go through that. As an official Reddit app user, there was a week of terror where every time you open the Reddit app and look at the feed, 75% of the screen was Pete Davidson eating a breakfast Crunchwrap.
00:56:43
Speaker
Oh, and that was the worst. But going back, going way back to the fully one thing, I just thought about how similar Spez's comment, Mr. Huffman, his comment about the nods being landed gentry is is to Elon's thoughts on blue checks and verified users from the old times.
00:57:13
Speaker
And how completely backwards it is that these mods are the ones. Imagine you get people to give you tens of hours of labor for free. And you start basically say, Oh, these mods have too much power. We got to get rid of them. And just like with Twitter and blue checks, imagine you got LeBron James to write for your site for free. And he's like, Oh, I want to, I want to make this miserable for them.
00:57:38
Speaker
because I don't like how they have this cultural cache. And so what Huffman learned was that you don't charge $8. You charge $20 million a year, whatever. That's the only thing he learned from Musk, really, was, oh, I see. You should charge even more. You go after the wrong people.
00:57:55
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. You target another group of people that are giving their free labor to this thing. Talking about Pete Davidson eating a Crunchwrap Supreme, did you see a lot of the subreddits turned over to every post had to have something to do with John Oliver? What's the latest thing? This is what I'm talking about with the waving the red flag in front of a bull.
00:58:18
Speaker
he just seems to not understand the crowd and doesn't understand that these sort of heavy-handed tactics are 100% not going to work out. You may have a site when you're done, but it's not going to be the site you started with. And it's not going to be with the users you started with, and you're going to lose a lot. And so there is the hacker group that has said they're going to release, I mean, they're going to release it anyway, but they've said they'll release
00:58:39
Speaker
a trove of Reddit data. My understanding of it is the initial thing was it's a ransom demand. There are no heroes here. These are not great people. They demanded like $20 million and then later added in and listen and roll back the API stuff. Let Apollo have their app. Thanks guys. But $20 million first. We know which part you care about. Yeah, but then roll it back. Yeah. The ones that are doing John Oliver are just the ones that aren't so straight up poor now because a bunch of
00:59:09
Speaker
safe, a bunch of normal subreddits became not safe for work subreddits because they can't sell ads on those. Um, as so that was a super, that's super clever. I love that protest because now I can, I can tell you have a rough idea of if the terms, if certain terms are in the name of the subreddit, you know, that that's a place that, uh, is going to be serving adult content and you can make your decisions from there. But if you see like our funny,
00:59:39
Speaker
or are wildly interesting. And it's got an NSFW, not safe for work, warning on it. You know that what's happening here is not actual not safe for work stuff. You know that they're just participating to demonetize this because they won't serve ads in it. I'm here for that. That's a clever way of using Reddit's own systems against it. And so I'm proud of those guys who came up with that not safe for work marking.
01:00:05
Speaker
There's a John Oliver meme that I saw like a couple hours ago of John Oliver. It's this John Oliver, a fake John Oliver quote where John Oliver is telling people how to make like a what's the what's that your EU information right to destroy your information.
01:00:26
Speaker
G.D.P.R. how to make a G.D.P.R. request for Reddit to take down all your information. And so and then it had like a like in the comments. So like people are you know, the the protest continues in like various ways as mod as mods have been threatened for their individual for their John Oliver protests for the not safe for work protests, basically saying if you keep protesting, we're going to remove you.
01:00:53
Speaker
Uh, that's the implied thread at least. Right. And install who though, that's the next question. And then what, you're going to hold votes or you're going to, you're going to hold an election for new mods. What are you going to put in? These people have been running this this whole time. And do you have the employees too? You've laid off 50% of your workforce already. Who, who's going to moderate these now? It doesn't make any sense. Oh, one of my favorite, cause one of my favorite, uh, protests was after the landed gente con comment.
01:01:19
Speaker
uh, like five subreddits, I think decided to make every single user a mod moderator. And so there was no more blended gentry. I imagine those, those subreddits immediately went, went terrible, but, uh, that's a clever one. All right, fellas, I think we could probably wrap up with our sort of what's going on or, or recommendations or whatever. We're going a little long here. What do you think?
01:01:45
Speaker
Yeah, that's good. Yeah, let's make some recommendations. Okay, I can make a really quick recommendation. I don't know. I don't think I've ever recommended this before. I've gotten back into playing wingspan. I think I've talked about it with you guys a little bit. It's a tabletop card game, but the game I play is on iOS and Mac OS. It's like an engine building game.
01:02:02
Speaker
And it's really well done. The apps are really well done. The conversion, the port, whatever you want to call it, is really well done. If you have any interest in birding at all, it's really cool. Each card has the call of the bird that you're playing. You learn a little bit. You play with your family. It's great.
Recommendations and Personal Anecdotes
01:02:20
Speaker
Wait, what? Wait, where's the engine building part of this come from? So the card game is engine building. Basically, you're not necessarily playing against the other people you're playing with. You're sort of building your own little ecosystem. Yes, engine building. OK, I was like, is this a game about... I thought we were talking about a bird game.
01:02:41
Speaker
And then we were building an engine for a car. No, no. Yeah, you're building an engine in in cards, but super interesting. Great to play with. You could I'd say kids over the age of maybe eight or nine can certainly play good for adults. You can play on iOS and Mac OS and it plays out. You can play over the Internet. It's great. I think it's on Steam to play wingspan wingspan. I wish I well.
01:03:05
Speaker
I'm still playing Diablo 2. I haven't done anything recently. I've been working. Diablo 2? Diablo 4, sorry. There you go. There you go. You're still playing Diablo 2. Wow. Still playing. I could. But yeah, Diablo 4 is still good. I think I was playing it last time. I mean, it's going to take me forever to play it at my current rate. What do I recommend? Oh, I recommend. I don't know if this... I recommend if your wife
01:03:34
Speaker
Texts you randomly. Hey, I got Taylor Swift tickets in another state. Can I go there? I recommend saying yes. So that's what I've got going on in my life, which is this weekend I'm going to be taking care of the kid while my wife joins the second class, the upper class of America, which is, as you know, divided into Taylor Swift concert attendees and those who have not attended Taylor Swift concerts.
01:04:03
Speaker
Uh, so at least for millennials. Yeah, I have not attended. So I will be, I'll be the, a remainder when, when the, uh, when the, when the Taylor Swift, I always knew that about you. Yeah. I'm a remainder.
01:04:18
Speaker
I'm going to make a non-video game-related recommendation this week because I feel like we make a lot of video game recommendations. Segar Rose is an Icelandic band that became popular maybe a little bit in like the early to mid aughts. And then they did some of the music for like the movie. One of the guys from the band did some of the music from the movie We Bought a Zoo.
01:04:42
Speaker
Put out a new album maybe six days ago a week ago something like that and if you are looking for really like ethereal Music that you can put on in the background. That's just really satisfying very pleasant and you
01:04:59
Speaker
There's words and vocalization to it but it's not going to distract you with the lyrical content of it because I think most of it is nonsense in any language. It's just really soothing. I had it on while I was working this afternoon hacking away at some documents for a case and it's great. It brings me back to sitting in bars drinking beer in the
01:05:26
Speaker
mid 2000s and just like listening to this on the way home and uh, just a satisfying sound. I really like it. I remember them. I always like, I never knew them more than as a name that would show up on my playlist.
01:05:43
Speaker
And so I thought that was a person I thought sugar. I thought it was sugar Ross and I thought it was a single individual person's name. Uh, so it shows how, you know, fake fan, um, you might've caught them. Uh, I think they did some music on the soundtrack for the, uh, Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz mega hit vanilla sky.
01:06:04
Speaker
Well, I do actually really like that movie. I really like that movie too. We should have a watch party sometime, Jake. Or that movie or Abre Los Ojos. Is that the name of the Spanish version that it's based on? I do believe it is, yeah. Wow.
01:06:21
Speaker
Yeah, I need to rewatch that movie. That was a good movie. Now this is turning into a vanilla sky recommendation. Yeah, look, vanilla sky, I recommend it. It's an underrated movie. I've never seen it, but I recommend it too, based on your recommendations. Don't look it up. Just watch it. It's a conceptual, interesting movie. Going to hold, it's like the fifth element. You got to watch it going in cold and not know anything about it.
01:06:51
Speaker
Yeah, the fifth element. No, not fifth element, sixth sense. Okay, I was gonna say the fifth element. I haven't heard that about the fifth element. No, the sixth sense. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, okay. Oh yeah, we have music. Yeah, we have music. We still have the actual music. We'll have it this time as long as everything uploads properly. Yeah. Please, Zencaster. Please, Zencaster Gods. Please.