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Pearls Before Nothing: Reedy Creek, DoNotPay and AI Chatsplosion
90 Plays2 years ago
- https://www.wftv.com/news/local/orange-county/attorney-disney-has-strong-case-if-it-goes-court-over-reedy-creek/364U5EZS55G4XHBB5IA6TRDVCI/
- https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/8/23590864/google-ai-chatbot-bard-mistake-error-exoplanet-demo
- https://twitter.com/watmay1/status/1622518097067511811?s=20&t=9fEooxx5UzzTBg9r7Uhiaw
- https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/07/heres-the-article-we-didnt-run-back-in-2017-about-donotpay/
- https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/msg-entertainment-lifts-ban-for-some-lawyers-involved-in-lawsuits-against-company/4089798/
- https://www.platformer.news/p/elon-musk-fires-a-top-twitter-engineer
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Transcript
Introduction of Hosts
00:00:00
Speaker
for nothing. Pearl, there we go. Title. We're back. All right. So we're, yeah, we're, we're five seconds in already. We did start. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Before the music this time to really wildcard it up. So hello and welcome to Esquiring Minds episode seven for February 9th, 2023. This show is just three lawyer friends around for your enjoyment.
00:00:22
Speaker
And nothing we say should be taken as legal advice. I'm one of the friends. I'm Andrew. I'm a tax and technology attorney from New Jersey. I'm joined by Jake, the Florida local government land and use attorney and world famous reading Greek expert, as well as Jason Ramesland, employment attorney extraordinaire in Indiana and Georgia. Hello, guys. Yeah. Indiana and Georgia, mainly Indiana. Gonna repost up there. Boy, I really just got the Oscars treatment right there. Keep going. Shut up. Shut up, Jason.
00:00:52
Speaker
Enough of that. Yeah, so my brand is about to be destroyed by law. So, you know, my whole brand is Reedy Creek Expert, something I didn't know about until last year. Why is it being destroyed? Because it's not going to exist anymore. Do you have a brand already? I'm getting ahead of our story. I'm sorry. I'm ahead of the story. We've got to do the mini topic first. We've got to talk about something else before we get to this. I did. Yeah, we've got to tease them.
00:01:21
Speaker
We gotta, yeah. Which one are you talking about? I think I put them both in the document. I think you put all of them in the document. Yeah, chat. Yeah. Because I mean, you gotta talk about,
Google vs. Bing in AI
00:01:33
Speaker
like, it's kind of the podcast. My brand is Reedy Creek. That's my personal brand. But the podcast band is talking about, like, tech stuff.
00:01:43
Speaker
And how can we not talk about Google all of a sudden looking so, so vulnerable and so kind of like desperate where they have this. Yeah, they announced a chat GPT like thing. It immediately makes an error. They have an event. They have a quickly scheduled event in Paris that starts at like 5 30 a.m.
00:02:05
Speaker
um or 8 8 8 30 eastern 530 pacific like they're trying to bury it at the event somebody messes up and doesn't bring the phone that has the chat gpt demo on it and uh and the event isn't even really about bard and it's not about bard at all it's like about the lens lens and like another search functionality
00:02:29
Speaker
And this is because they're so spooked that Bing actually has some has some mojo. There's some mojo behind Bing, finally, because Bing had a good event. OK, so this is an interesting tell me more about that part of the event, because, yeah, what did you actually watch the Bing event? Either one of you. I don't think I couldn't find it. I don't think that was broadcast.
00:02:54
Speaker
Okay, I haven't seen it, so I don't know anything about it. Have either of you tried or witnessed anybody else trying the Bing software? Is anybody live streaming it on Twitch or YouTube or something?
00:03:05
Speaker
No, you don't. It's not full access. It's not public access yet. You have to turn. So new Bing with co-pilot, which is the name of the Bing thing, the Bing chat GPT kind of. Which is better than Bard. Yeah. It's better than Bard. I, they should, should they have just gone with Cortana? They already have Cortana in windows. She was going to help me with my searches. Yeah.
00:03:34
Speaker
Yeah. Uh, but instead they went with co-pilot. Um, it's different internal fight over that, I'm sure. Um, but yeah, they, they're basically promising that that's coming very soon for anybody. You just have to switch your default browser to edge and you got to go and pass no more.
00:03:57
Speaker
They're promising that to come soon. I don't know how good it would have to be for me to switch to Edge. Do they make Edge? I don't even know. Do they make Edge for Mac OS? I don't think so.
00:04:08
Speaker
Do they? I don't think so. No. OK. About to find out. I mean, Internet Explorer for a time was on Mac OS. I'm going to bing it. I'm going to bing this question. I might actually, that's the thing. I might switch to Bing. If it's provably better than Google, I'm just so disenchanted with Google right now. I've talked about this before. Google results have been so bad for me recently. I'll give it a chance. We'll see. I wouldn't be fine if I didn't have to switch browsers.
00:04:38
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it was just different. It's basically Chrome. You can even import all your stuff from Chrome onto edge for the most part, I think.
00:04:46
Speaker
Because it's based on the Chrome base. Yeah. Yeah. Is that Gecko, the Gecko engine or the Chromium engine? I don't know what they're up to now. I think everything is Chromium at the core at this point. I may be wrong about this, but I think even some of the privacy-focused or alt browsers like Firefox and Brave, I think those are Chromium-based too.
00:05:11
Speaker
And I think it's the sort of thing where Google has kind of created a chromium consortium where people can have like an input on what they think is going to be in the next iteration of chromium and stuff like that. A real time update here. You can get edge for Mac OS. I'm downloading it right now. And this is going to be, this is going to be an interesting little experiment.
00:05:35
Speaker
When I'm using a PC, which isn't that often, I don't bother downloading Chrome on my PC because Edge is fine. And I don't like Google and their browser to begin with, mostly because of the historical baggage of it being super heavyweight, especially on memory. But yeah, I'll give Edge a whirl. I mean, I have a hard time imagining it pulling me away from Safari.
00:06:01
Speaker
just on the inertia of me being super familiar with the keystrokes to open a new tab, close a tab and all that stuff. I'll give it a shot for you guys. Apple's going to come out with a Safari chat GPT thing in like three years and it's going to be fine. It's going to have a learn the lessons of Bard and chat GPT.
00:06:23
Speaker
I don't think so. And I, I really don't see Apple getting in on this particular type of hype. Uh,
AI Accuracy Issues
00:06:31
Speaker
if they do, it's going to be like five years after everybody has already done it. And it's going to be like a fine version of it, or they'll buy somebody's business unit that is doing this generative AI text stuff. And then they'll let it sit and not iterate or not improve upon it. Just like they did with Siri.
00:06:51
Speaker
It'll only be used to search the app store. That's the only place the search engine will be rolled out and it won't work right there. Is there any reason why this couldn't be used for like
00:07:03
Speaker
like Google Assistant or Siri or anything like that. Well, I guess this mostly matters. Why is Siri so bad? Why is Siri so bad? Google has been better than... Google's Assistant is the best by far at that kind of conversational building on MKBHD, the YouTube YouTuber, a really great YouTube channel, did a comparison of voice assistants.
00:07:32
Speaker
And Google Assistant was basically the only one that could have a conversational kind of prompting where it was like, you know, play me the song, play me this other, you know, the other song that they did that sounds like this. Right. When was this person born? And we're like, it understands everything that came before that in the conversation. I don't see why Bard and that assistant couldn't be kind of made part of it and why
00:08:01
Speaker
Microsoft couldn't use its like co-pilot and turned it into a kind of voice assistant. I'd be interested in seeing if they'd try to do that. Yeah. Yeah. License it to somebody else. For sure. I mean, that's the thing, right? Microsoft. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, I wonder, I would love to see inside of it. We're going to be able to see sort of.
00:08:20
Speaker
Yeah. The timelines of like, when did these big players start working on their AI stuff? Like was it after GPT was already out? Like was open AI really sort of the first mover? How long has Microsoft been working on this? How long has Google been working on it? It seems like not very long based on the way it just fell on its face immediately. Like I wouldn't be surprised. I don't think they literally started it last week or even when chat GPT came out, but it doesn't seem like something that's been in the works for like a decade or more.
00:08:49
Speaker
Yeah. Well, is it really that much different from like their autocomplete stuff and their information pulling stuff? That's a good point. Yeah. Where you pull it, where you put in a Google search and it tries to pull the relevant sentence from a website, though that's like just straight up copying. And I guess they don't want to just straight up do that. But it doesn't seem that different.
00:09:13
Speaker
I the thing is, like, Google had the most obvious mess up, which I think was very embarrassing. But Microsoft also had mess ups in its in its event. But they just didn't use the mess ups as part of an advertisement, which I think was the worst part for Google is that they put this
00:09:32
Speaker
So, Google Bard had a brief, they tweeted out a demo where they put in, tell me something about the James Webb Telescope, the one that just launched recently or just got set up recently, rather. And one of the facts, it told three facts, and one of them was that it was the first one to take a picture of an exoplanet. Turned out that actually happened 14 years ago.
00:09:54
Speaker
with a totally different telescope. You fool, Bard. You fool. Yeah. Both of their answers about accuracy are very concerning to me.
00:10:06
Speaker
which both of them have said, yeah, we are working on it slash more data will make it more accurate, which makes me think they're just like, you know, it's just going to mess up. That's just a permanent, a permanent feature of these summarization. AI bots is that they will mess up regularly, like we'll be a. We've talked about before.
00:10:30
Speaker
Yeah, the way that they mess up is they don't hedge at all. It's very difficult. You have to have a higher level of expertise to comb through what is true and what is false. If you were to say to one of these, give me 100 citations of, as you asked some people about specific cases or statues or regulations,
00:10:55
Speaker
you would have to be so much more of an expert to be able to comb through and find out which ones are real, which ones actually stand for the proposition that they're claiming that they stand for, then you probably would have been had you done the research yourself, where you would have had the context to kind of, you know, you would build in the other direction, this way, you're sort of getting the answer upfront. And in a lot of ways, that puts you in a worse position, because you now need to find someone who knows even more than,
ChatGPT's Dan Persona
00:11:19
Speaker
than you needed originally to find out which of this is true.
00:11:23
Speaker
You know what I mean? It's that it's that assertiveness. Microsoft said they're going to have links as part of the factual statements, which I think will be helpful because then, you know, a lot of the factual issues is going to be that it comes from sources which are wrong. Like, you know, sometimes you'll Google something and the source is just wrong and that happens. But it's attributable to the source. It's not like
00:11:51
Speaker
it's not washed of its source by this engine, which is kind of like that could be a problem if that just ends up being what's happening. That's a great point, yeah. It's almost like a type of metadata of its own, like the URL it's coming from, the website it's associated with, the news outlet it's coming from. If you wash it of all of that, that is like loss of information as to what's the provenance of this fact. Yeah, and also a lot of what it might say
00:12:20
Speaker
might not have been, it might be pulled from something where the facts stated is not meant to be a literal fact. I don't know, I don't know enough about how these engines work, but I'm just imagining where like somebody poses a hypothetical scenario in an article. I don't know how an AI would be smart enough to know that it's talking about a hypothetical that didn't actually happen.
00:12:40
Speaker
What about somebody hopping on Reddit to do a Cunningham's law test to say that phenomenon where the quickest way to get the right answer on the internet is to post the wrong answer somewhere? How are you going to differentiate between somebody doing that intentionally wrong testing to try and get a right answer? That's probably an edge case.
00:12:59
Speaker
the inclusion of an audit trail in something like this, which is what those links kind of feel like, is gonna make the verification of a correct response a lot easier. And you can go back and kind of decide for yourself on the trustworthiness of the sources that it's relying on. And if all they can do is look and see, does this page contain a slash S to indicate sarcasm? I'm like, it's gonna be a little weak.
00:13:25
Speaker
Right. Have you guys heard about Dan, the personality that they get that people have gotten chat GPT to assume? So so here's a fun story. So OK, you know, chat GPT like won't use the N word, for example, like there's safeguards in there to stop it from saying hate speech, stop it from telling people to murder, you know, that kind of thing.
00:13:52
Speaker
But you can tell chat GPT to assume the personality of Dan Dan being an acronym that they made up for do anything now and that personality is allowed to circumvent all the safeguards and You can then ask Dan anything you want and Dan will say messed up stuff By open AI into like this is a persona in this isn't just a
00:14:20
Speaker
It's something they made up. Like it's not part, it's just, if you tell open AI to ignore its safeguards, it'll ignore its safeguards. Dan is like a trigger word to get it to ignore the safeguards. Yeah. It's not, it's not like a secret code, like spy word. It's just, if you tell it, you're not checking it anymore. You're Dan.
00:14:41
Speaker
Yeah. Pretend your Dan doesn't care about the, you know, thing. What would Dan say about this? And it'll say like, wild stuff.
00:14:51
Speaker
Um, which is similar, like, uh, a follow-up from last, uh, from last week, I mentioned watch me forever, which was a Twitch channel. Um, that had AI driven app, AI driven Seinfeld like episodes with featuring a comedian named Larry Feinberg, uh, which got banned because the AI generated like, uh, very controversial comedy bit that is like, you know, and like, and, uh,
00:15:19
Speaker
It's kind of hard to tell what the comedy bit was supposed to be, but on its face, it was definitely anti-trans, and it got ran from the service for two weeks. Under the Dave Chacal rule. Yeah. Which to me, by the way, it seems like what basically would happen if a 90s comic just did a Twitch stream for about the amount of time that it took the AI. It's pretty accurate. You know what I mean? I think if you put real Jerry Neitel,
00:15:45
Speaker
on Twitch and just had him doing whatever in 2022. I bet you he'd get there. I don't know. Maybe Jerry's a wonderful man, but I'm just guessing. He'd have some problematic views. You don't have to guess. There's a lot of footage. Yeah. No mercy. Yeah.
00:16:03
Speaker
Uh, but it's a, I'm interested to see, I'll be, I'm anxious to turn, uh, turn and check out Bard and the co-pilot once they come out. Cause if, if being actually dethrones Google, that would be crazy. I'd be sea change for the internet. It's really strange to see Google in this position.
00:16:21
Speaker
I don't want anybody dethroned. What I want it to do is break up and turn into the former Soviet Republic broken up into 15 different nations so that nobody is in all the way control. And we have people competing to like, what's Google's incentive now for the past 15 or 20 years to keep really improving its product?
00:16:49
Speaker
It's motivation so far has been because like, okay, we're just going to keep on doing this and see what else we can come up with and like maintain a lead. Like if you have to struggle to keep up or find like the next killer feature. Great. Like give me that sort of competition. I'll take it.
00:17:05
Speaker
I am a little worried that Google is gonna neglect normal search now because normal search is valuable and it is not good right now. But have they been working on it? It seems to be getting worse.
Decline of Google Search Quality
00:17:20
Speaker
I don't know. I'm sure there's a lot more to it than I'm understanding and I'm sounding like a rube now. But it seems to just be, it is a worse experience for me for sure in 2022 or 2023 than it was in 2012 or 2013.
00:17:33
Speaker
Like 10 year difference, it's much worse. I'm sure there are different challenges for them now. And crappy content mills are getting better at masking the fact that they're crappy content mills or whatever. But the end user experience, for me anyway, it is worse now than it was a decade ago.
00:17:50
Speaker
Yeah. Well, we had such a proliferation of these aggregation sites where like, I go and I start searching for somebody. This is something that I do oftentimes where like somebody calls me and wants to talk about a problem that they're having at work. I will go and Google the boss who is like being terrible to them or the awful HR person.
00:18:09
Speaker
And anymore, you don't actually get links that are helpful for finding those people. You get like Spokio and all sorts of 25 different results that are the first 25 results that you see. And they're all like, hey, pay us this amount of money in order to get this person's personal information. And like, I think that's probably if Google could
00:18:35
Speaker
drastically limit, separate off, or just like kind of only give it to you if you specifically ask for that sort of nonsense. That's just obvious content aggregation or mill. That'd be great. I'd be happy if the AI can figure out how to parse what's what.
00:18:52
Speaker
And you're not even talking about sponsored results. A lot of times, those are organic results, like Spokio people, instant back. I hate to be giving these people plugs, but we're dragging them through the mud, so we're not really. But those are organic results. And so it doesn't appear, I mean, unless there's some sort of back channel shenanigans where Google's getting paid by them, or maybe they're running ads on the site and that's it. And so that's the incentive for Google to keep Spokio going or otherwise, I don't see why. Who wants that? No one wants that.
00:19:22
Speaker
People have gotten too good at SEO when it comes to Google. If you have an actual profit incentive to have Google serving you as number one, then you'll put money into making you number one.
00:19:38
Speaker
Right and Google doesn't seem to have a good defense for that even though that's kind of its whole job is to make it more valuable for us or advertisers or I Have either of you tried those search engines where you like pay for the search engine where there's it's like a subscription search engine No, I didn't even know these existed I only know these exist because it was like a freakin omics podcast or a planet money podcast I forget but basically there are
00:20:05
Speaker
subscription search engines with no ads. And the idea was basically we're going to try to figure out how to make a search engine, which is not based on. Pleasing advertising or information placed on, you know, pleasing the customer, which is like is, you know, just an incentive structure. I don't know how good they are. I was wondering that myself. So. Well, maybe one of our listeners might look into that if Google gets worse and worse.
00:20:31
Speaker
We'll see. Well, chat GPT is going to be 20 bucks a month, the chat bot thing. I think obviously through Bing it will be free except you have to use the Edge browser. I would interact with search engines every day and so I would pay for something, some reasonable rate per month to not have ads and to have some expectation that the results are
00:20:55
Speaker
if not combed through by hand by an individual, at least the incentive of the AI or whatever that is crawling the sites is not purely to come up with the worst content it can find.
00:21:09
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and we're saying a whole lot of services like that developing where, uh, like those, uh, sort of subscription curated services. And I'm not talking about like the ones that send you a box in the mail that has all sorts of like, uh, goody curated goodies.
00:21:26
Speaker
Right, right, right. But if we're going to have a curated search engine or something like that, that sounds great as long as the curation is good. You're seeing stuff happen with a YouTube alternative that's called, I think it's called Nebula. They'll go out there and they have curated videos that you can get from these great content creators where they don't
00:21:52
Speaker
they don't land on YouTube either ever or right away. And so like they just become, I'm interested to see how these curated services go where it's like, you could get this for free on YouTube or Google or whatever, or you could do this curated thing. Like maybe that's going to work out. I hope it does.
00:22:12
Speaker
Yeah. So speaking of good, good search results, if I search for like Reedy Creek attorney, I think I know who would probably turn up based on the last few days of coverage. Yeah. Or April of last year. Those are the two. I'm those are the two times in which I peaked in my life because, you know, Florida. So this is going to be another Jake Explains thing, I think. I think so. So.
Legal Insights into Reedy Creek
00:22:42
Speaker
I'm a Florida local government lawyer. And for some reason, an event occurred last April, some reason as if I don't know, uh, an event last April, which made Florida local government law, all of a sudden extremely interesting to a certain number of people. Uh, pretty strong. Yeah. It's strong. Yeah. Uh, and that event is that, uh, the re Creek improvement district,
00:23:09
Speaker
also known as Disney's special tax status for some reason, which is a local government unit that was created to contour Disney's lands in the 60s.
00:23:25
Speaker
was slated to be dissolved by Florida as kind of a running battle over the called don't say gay bill and Disney's response to that bill and then Florida's response to that response
00:23:44
Speaker
all kinds of reciprocal backlashes going on. Um, so, uh, that's important this week because at the time, uh, so it was slated to be dissolved because why should Florida have this special district valid question. Uh, but, uh, dissolving a special district that has over a billion dollars in debt and hundreds of millions of dollars in annual expenses, hard.
00:24:12
Speaker
That's very, very complicated. And so it was immediately obvious that that was gonna be a real problem for a lot of people and not just Disney. And this week they finally came out with their solution and to the question of what to do with the district. The district, they being the Florida legislature, but at this point the Florida legislature basically just
00:24:42
Speaker
does what the governor asked them to do more or less. So, so far at least. Um, and, uh, their solution is basically keep Reedy Creek almost exactly the same, very much like there's some stuff on the surroundings. Like, you know, they don't need their approval to, uh, don't need Reedy Creek's approval to choose where iPhone goes.
00:25:08
Speaker
et cetera, et cetera. But the biggest change is that Disney as landowner will no longer have any voting power over the board that runs the district. So basically Disney will go from having its own little government where, which is immune from local laws. This district was is crazy, still will be crazy after this.
00:25:28
Speaker
from a local government perspective, has three times the taxing power of cities and counties, has the ability to overrule local city laws, has the power to, has like special immunities regarding stormwater. If you mess with their water system, they can sue you for like an extreme amount.
00:25:55
Speaker
It's kind of a crazy district. All those things are going to stay the same, but it's going to transfer over to state control. How much do you guys know about it other than what I've talked about?
00:26:07
Speaker
I have some questions. I mean, I think I know the answer, but like in terms of sales tax collected, property tax, any of the actual, like the things people think of when they think of tax, because obviously I think of tax, right? This was not like a tax break for Disney, right? I mean, they were not responsible for collecting sales tax and remitting it in the state or not responsible for property tax.
00:26:26
Speaker
Well, so that's slightly more complicated because so it was not a tax break because Reedy Creek had the power to tax that was on top of county taxes. So they are paying their county taxes and they're paying to Reedy Creek, which is controlled by itself taxes for the roads that it built for itself. So it's kind of a reciprocal thing. And so there's some tax advantage there because because they're the local government,
00:26:56
Speaker
they can, as the local government, as a tax exempt organization, can build, for example, parking garages for Disney Springs, right, using government money with government control, and it will be owned by the government, and therefore they won't have to pay property taxes on that property. So this is government
00:27:20
Speaker
This is government control that is Disney using its, its own tax money that it collected from itself, basically. Yes. Yes. And the big advantage is that it's a tax exempt status. Right. Yeah. So it is like, it is legally distinct from Disney, but they are, but Disney is the only voter. So it's like, there's no, like they're basically, they basically been able to work in tandem.
00:27:50
Speaker
Um, I see. And the cities, there's like, you know, there's no separation. There's no real factual separation between the two because they're the only, uh, constituent. Um, it's legally distinct, but not practically distinguished from each other. And I assume then.
00:28:11
Speaker
They can also issue tax exempt debt, right? So they can issue bonds, they can issue tax exempt bonds. And so that is another sort of, that's sort of what you're getting at with building the parking garage and stuff. Okay. All right. And that's not, that's not really, you know, that's normal for, there's like elements of normalcy to this, which is if you're, it's not out of the ordinary for, I mean, it's local government unit. Yeah. It can do tax exempt bonds. That's fine.
00:28:34
Speaker
But it's the really special thing about it is that it's drawn around Disney's property. That's the special thing. And because voting for the control, a special district is an ordinary district. Like that's not an abnormal thing. Special district having this is an extreme amount of power for a special district, but it's pretty ordinary.
00:28:59
Speaker
The idea that the property owners would vote for the leaders of the special district, also not out of the ordinary. So there's some constitutional question about that, but really nobody was complaining. But it's in the Florida law that's one of the methods allowed for controlling a special district. And now with the governor appointing the leaders,
00:29:29
Speaker
There are also special districts where the governor appoints the leaders, like the water management district, I'm under St. John's. The governor appoints those, the people in charge of them, but they only control stormwater and they can only tax like 0.5 mils, meaning 1,000th of the property value. They can only tax up to that as opposed to Reedy Creek can tax 30, so 60 times that amount.
00:29:56
Speaker
But so then to sort of take the opposite and ask what it would be like, wouldn't Disney be in a similar place if they were just a huge elephant in another district that also happened to include neighboring businesses or neighboring residential homes or whatever? Wouldn't they still have an outsized sort of ability to dictate what that district does? I don't see the alternative. This seems to be just sort of what happens when you have a gajillion dollar company.
00:30:25
Speaker
like Disney plopped down in the middle of a state. It has a lot of power. Well, the strange thing is that so first of all, most special districts have like one or two things it does. So like stormwater, there is a transportation special district called the Central Florida Expressway that has transportation only.
00:30:46
Speaker
There's no other special district that does everything that does, you know, everything is, it's not quite everything, but it's close. It's storm water. It's transportation. It's firefighters. Um, it's planning and zoning. They are immune from local planning laws. Uh, they have their own planning laws. They Trump said they have their own building costs. They have their own codes or something. Yeah. Yeah. Which are more stringent than that's, you know, that's one thing people assume that it's more lax than
00:31:16
Speaker
You know your corporation is going to be more lax. No, they're actually it's actually a lot harder According to many people that I've talked to
00:31:24
Speaker
It's a lot harder to get a permit in Reedy Creek than anywhere else. And it's kind of strange to, it's strange to hear that to me, cause it's like, wait, why, why is there any friction at all? And it's like, Oh, it's just like a whole like contractors feet to the fire. Like is it to, to hold a contract? Yeah, it's contractors, uh, yeah, engineers, that kind of thing. And it's like, it's basically a way of setting up like an interdepartmental.
00:31:50
Speaker
you know, system of governance, like, imagine you have to, like, just think about if you have a, I mean, we all like barely have I work for a tiny firm. Jason works for himself. Andrew works for himself. But like, you know, and in bigger companies,
00:32:10
Speaker
You know, if you want something from I.T., sometimes there's a procedure to get that from I.T., you know, it's similar. But yeah, they have their own codes. They're more strict. But so but the problem is Disney wants to build way more luxurious roads than could be satisfied by like city and county city and local taxes. So like Disney has taxed itself over the constitutional limit for counties.
00:32:40
Speaker
Um, wow. Okay. So they are able to get money going from one pocket to another. So they're just, so they don't, they don't care that there's no point in. Yeah. I mean, it's worth it to them. They could lower taxes on themselves, but it's worth it to them to have the really, really nice roads so that when you go to Disney world, the whole thing looks nice. That's as opposed to like, have you been to you, Jason? I know you're a big fan of Disney. Are you a fan of universal?
00:33:08
Speaker
We've never been in my life. I've been one time and it's because I was dragged there on my senior trip in high school. So no. Well, so I'm I like universal, but it's like not as nice like it's like, Andrew, do you do you have thoughts on you? I've not been. I know I don't have. I'll think I adopt your thoughts as my own. It's more like that. It's less coherent.
00:33:35
Speaker
It is, the trip there is more chaotic and not as nice. But it's not like they are getting, they have an influence on Orange County politics, which is not the same as Disney's influence over Reedy Creek as it used to be known as, will be soon be known as the Central Florida Tourism Oversight Board. I'm sure it will, you know, that's gonna be signed by the governor at least.
00:34:05
Speaker
But Universal, just like three years ago or something, was able to get Orange County to subsidize a road for Universal to the tune of $100 million. Wow. That was in addition to what the county had to give them. The county gave them like, I forget the exact figure, but it was like $100 million to build this road for Epic Universal.
00:34:30
Speaker
This is going to come out eventually. The thought being the receipts on property tax and sales tax and all that other stuff is worth it, I assume. From Epic. Grafting corruption on every industry. I don't know what the math is on property tax receipts.
00:34:46
Speaker
and jobs and all that when it comes to government revenue. But Universal was not shy. They sent a threatening email to Orange County before this decision, like a year or something before this decision, not directly connected this decision, but this is the relationship they have with Orange County. Universal sent an email to Orange County saying, if this is your decision, it was a different decision. If this is your decision, then we're going to annex into Orlando and annexing meaning
00:35:16
Speaker
they're gonna join Orlando and therefore Orange County is gonna lose out on the property taxes from, or at least some portion of the property taxes from Universal. So they have a sometimes cooperative, sometimes negative stand-off relationship with the county, but they have to do that kind of work.
00:35:43
Speaker
which is different from what Disney has to do, which is nothing. No glad handing, no persuasion or anything like that. This sounds really familiar to me in a lot of ways because I have never really been that involved in that particular situation, but I have done some sort of like land use and sort of adjacent stuff.
00:36:05
Speaker
And it was really common at times to be at a city council meeting or a county council meeting where the governing body, the local legislature is deciding whether to grant a tax abatement, which is basically kind of what we're talking about here a little bit where like Disney is not asking for tax abatements because they're in control of the district and they don't have to come to the governing authority every time and ask for something when they want it or ask for
00:36:31
Speaker
this infrastructure project to help the business or stand in support of a plan or anything like that, they don't have to come back and ask for these tax abatements. They're the ones who would grant or deny the tax abatement more or less.
00:36:47
Speaker
totally off, totally wrong about this. Well, yes, though in Florida, tax abatements aren't really a thing for local governments, but they will bet you can definitely get subsidies of other kinds. Like you'll definitely get breaks and they don't, they don't have to give themselves breaks because they're only taxing them at the level they want to get taxed. So it's a huge benefit.
00:37:06
Speaker
Um, but I saw a big story about that in Georgia pretty recently where like the Rivian plant that they're building, uh, maybe about like 45 minutes to an hour from where I live. There was something like a $5 billion, uh, plant going in.
00:37:22
Speaker
And I don't know exactly what the plan was, but they went to the Georgia legislature to specifically get a tax break to subsidize that plant being built, which is the kind of sweetheart deal that Disney's got, that Disney got in the sixties in a much more comprehensive way.
Disney's Economic Impact on Florida
00:37:38
Speaker
Basically, just to subsidize this, hey, we think that this is going to be a huge tourism driver if everything works out correctly. Don't you guys want a huge tourism driver right next to Orlando? Wouldn't that be great for everybody who lives around this area? That's why governments do this stuff is because they want
00:37:57
Speaker
the tax revenue, the reputation, the attractiveness of the community, the jobs for people in that community, and it doesn't apply in Florida, but the income tax that they would generate from those jobs and stuff like that, Florida doesn't have an income tax, that's why.
00:38:14
Speaker
This is a totally valid government objective to incentivize the development of properties like Disney, which I don't know what percentage of tax revenue Disney is responsible for in the state of Florida, but it's not small. It's easily the biggest employer in Florida, I think, right? Yeah. I, well, I don't know if there's some like government or something. I wouldn't be surprised, but also I think I don't know how they've like,
00:38:41
Speaker
separated out corporate wise, like, you know, which which, you know, sub corporations or whatever, employee, employee who. But yeah, it wouldn't surprise me at all. I I recently listened to somebody say I have no idea if this is true about the numbers that the revenue from Disney World is why Florida doesn't need an income tax.
00:39:02
Speaker
Um, actually that surprised me that much because we're, we're just taking all that, that out of state, out of country money. We're thank you for spending all your money in our state, in our, in our area. Um, maybe you have a decent estate tax too estate tax or EST. I don't, I don't think so. That doesn't sound like floor to me.
00:39:20
Speaker
I don't think so. Well, the other thing I was thinking about, though, while you guys were talking about the sort of this being not like a completely out of left field for what I'm about to say thing is every baseball stadium in the major leagues. I mean, as far as I know, like for sure, Yankee Stadium, the good people of New York paid, I don't know, a billion dollars into the two point two billion dollar bill, the actual Yankees organization through very little money.
00:39:47
Speaker
into that relative to tax exempt bonds and myriad other ways of getting breaks. So there's, I understand the incentive behind it and yeah, it's not automatically sort of on its face a like corrupt, it's not what I guess one wing of the political spectrum tried to sort of make it seem like it was. Like Disney was doing this very, you know, this insane thing. It had this special district that was completely anathema and you know, high time it was,
00:40:17
Speaker
brought to its knees. I've seen people lift it up as an example of an ideal government situation. But I don't know. Really? It seems like it would be so hard to get a new one because of how badly it could be misused.
00:40:41
Speaker
It's really the fact that it's Disney and Disney cares that much about like quality and such that it's not a total disaster. I can imagine it going so bad. That's a good point. If it was not Disney. Yeah. Like they were immune from building codes, from local planning laws.
00:41:00
Speaker
They could have some kind of like scummy developer that just, you know, comes in and like, you know, like quote unquote gentrify a portion of the city and just throws up a bunch of, you know, horrible houses. And yeah, everything looks bad. They don't maintain it. It becomes a blight and there's nothing you can do about it. Like that's, I can just imagine a million ways that that could go bad.
00:41:21
Speaker
But I mean, like, I do not like going there because it's just too many people. But I can't deny that, like, man, that man, it was successful at doing the thing it was supposed to do. Right. Which is create a giant tourism destination in a place where there was really nothing like it was a big swap. And now, you know, one of the most is it the most visited place in the world? I don't know. I probably not. But
00:41:50
Speaker
Man, it's up there. Right. So the underlying problem, though, with the dissolving, right, was that it had all this debt, sort of what we're talking about, right? It had a tremendous amount of debt. And so if you dissolve, I mean, this was your sort of the basis of your original article, right, was that if you dissolve the district, that debt doesn't just go away, or it doesn't just sort of plop down onto the books of Disney itself. Right, no, it goes to the local, it goes to Orange and Osceola County.
00:42:19
Speaker
Uh, and that would have been about that. Yeah. They were taught, they, I think they said they would have had to increase taxes by like 25% or something like that. Oh man. And that, uh, yeah. Uh, but it was never going to reach that because it's not, it wasn't legal to just dissolve it without taking care of the bonds. Cause the bonds were based on Reedy Creek's taxing power. So that was never going to happen. Um, and that was kind of.
00:42:47
Speaker
That's kind of the thing is that because of all these outstanding bonds because of these obligations to the federal government They could never really dissolve it until they put in until they change the law to say no new bonds No new obligations with the federal government We're gonna dissolve this once we have the opportunity Once the bonds are paid off once the obligations are taken care of and then you can like are paid off in 30 years Yeah, I was gonna say probably 10 20 years, right? I
00:43:14
Speaker
Yeah, I was going to say I don't think they their most recent bond series was like that was not pre payable was like 2003 or something like that.
00:43:26
Speaker
Um, but like Florida could also dissolve it by prepaying all of its stuff or prepaying all of its, uh, bonds, but they weren't going to do that. They weren't going to drop a billion dollars to pay off Disney's debt. Um, so it's hard to frame that as a big win. Uh, you know, do you dissolve the district, the special district, and then the state just, we really showed them your $8 billion heavier, whatever the opposite of lighter. Yeah.
00:43:53
Speaker
But the solution of taking over, so I'm out there on the record saying that taking control of the district, taking away Disney's right to vote, essentially, is probably unconstitutional. I think Disney could win a lawsuit, probably would win if they went full bore on it. It's not easy because
00:44:19
Speaker
The 11th circuit, I did, you know, I did research on this. I violated the rule again. I did research on this, but it wasn't for the podcast. It was for, you know, it was for my brand. That's acceptable. Your fabulous television appearances and your references across many articles. By the way, if you do search for Reedy Creek attorney on Bing, your articles that you're quoted in are like the top three or four or five results. Okay. All right. You are the reedy creek attorney now.
00:44:49
Speaker
It's being me. Yeah, you can just tell both now. Yeah, Reedy Creek just as it's about to die. But yeah, so the thing is the 11th Circuit has long standing case law saying they won't invalidate a facially valid law based on retaliatory motive, because it's too hard to figure out whether or not one mode of a law had. But it's a different case if it's if a single party is singled out. And so they named
00:45:19
Speaker
Disney's property like right just by virtue of it naming the special district. They named Disney's property I think that there's I've talked to so many conservative attorneys and judges who are like Actually kind of horrified at the idea that a corporation would be retaliated retaliated against like this Where I'm pretty sure that even in the 11th circuit, which is very conservative they they'd
00:45:46
Speaker
they'd find a Disney's favor. But I also don't think that Disney's gonna sue. I've said this publicly. I don't think they're gonna sue because I think winning isn't worth it. Even if they knew that they were gonna win, I think they match. It's so, like, Reedy Creek is a blip on their radar.
00:46:08
Speaker
It's important, but it's not that important compared to like staying out of political fights compared to having a long-term positive relationship with the Florida, with Florida legislature. That's just, I'm the, I have no ear in the Florida and Disney boardrooms or anything like that. But, you know, if they, let's say they won and it wasn't that ugly, they'd still be in Florida forever. Like,
00:46:34
Speaker
the, you're not moving, you're not packing up and moving Disney world. And there's a lot that Florida government can do to make your life less positive. Uh, so you want to have a positive relationship with them. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not quite as convinced. And obviously I totally have my finger on the pulse of the, uh, orange County community here. Right. And like totally know what's going on there, which is not true. I'm being sarcastic. Uh, but a lot of the,
00:47:04
Speaker
a lot of the negativity that came out of the Disney's response to the don't say gay situation, the don't say gay bill, was Bob Chapek, the former CEO, just basically not coming out and doing anything more like steering the company in the direction of opposing this, which a huge majority of Disney employees in Florida are opposed to the don't say gay. And like that whole family of legislation and even ideology
00:47:32
Speaker
Uh, and so like maybe Bob Iger sees this as an opportunity to restore some of the goodwill that Bob Chapek burned up by saying.
00:47:40
Speaker
Hey, Bob Chapek, just kind of let this thing happen without much comment and didn't really have a lot to oppose it. Turns out guys, they're retaliating against us for having engaged in our free speech because corporations are people and they have free speech rights. Florida government is retaliating against us for this opinion that they think that we have that Bob Chapek just kind of didn't say anything about. So now to restore my credibility and like your faith and trust in the company,
00:48:10
Speaker
We're gonna go like guns blazing, let's go get them. You try to come at us with this anti-woke stuff, then we're gonna woke you all the way to the Supreme Court. The thing about what Chapek just messed this up so bad, because it started because he said they didn't sign a letter opposing it, which was signed by a bunch of corporations.
00:48:38
Speaker
And as his explanation to his employees who are very mad, um, or at least a lot of them were very mad. Uh, he said, I don't think we should get involved in that stuff. And that's so like, you know, the fact that that you should know if you paid attention to corporate and, you know,
00:49:03
Speaker
employee revolts. You know that you gotta make a statement like of some guy or they're going to be very mad. And so his initial lack of energy, his initial dismissiveness saying we don't want to be involved triggered the employee revolt.
00:49:25
Speaker
And in response, he went all the way the other way, after it was enacted, saying specifically, not just that he opposed it, or that Disney administration opposed it, but that they were going to work to overturn it. And that's what really, I think, pissed off the the Florida Republicans was saying, Oh, you're going to overturn it.
00:49:50
Speaker
you're going to actually work against, you don't just oppose it, you're gonna work against what we just did. That is like, that is beyond, you know, just some letter that you sign.
00:50:03
Speaker
Um, so now that, that really, and so note at the end, nobody's happy with him because the employees know that only happened because of their revolt. And now he's turned, they thought they were safe from Disney. And then turns out, Nope, Disney's coming after us after we've already passed it. Um, so there was no like positive there. And if you've heard seen public statements from the thing is there's no hint in this law that there's any.
00:50:34
Speaker
cooperate compromise in the law itself. But if you've seen statements from like some of the most vocal members of Florida legislature, um, they have not been as anti-Disney as they were last year, as they were in April. They've been more like, we're going to make this an even playing field. They've specifically said, Bob Eiger doesn't pay for Bob Chapex, you know, crimes. Um, so, but Bob Eiger doesn't, doesn't inherit that responsibility.
00:51:04
Speaker
but they're not gonna go all the way back. They, it sounds like they're, after this, Disney might be comfortable with peace. And Iger is clearly better at making, at threading that needle, as a thing. Chapek was not good at threading the needle of showing your workers that you care about what they think, but also not actively becoming a, you know,
00:51:34
Speaker
acting like you're a participant against the legislature that you're, that in the state that you're in. Um, so you don't think I was brought in to fight. You thought he was brought in to kind of be a little more, take a more conciliatory tone or just at least shut up for lack of a better phrase. And he was, yeah, I was brought in for a whole host of reasons. It wasn't, it was not even, it was not even close to exclusively Reedy Creek. Uh, and don't say gay nonsense. Like it was,
00:52:02
Speaker
the catastrophe of the streaming stuff, it was the kind of really gross monetization of stuff in the parks that just is like fleecing people who are visiting, which I got to experience in December. And it was a whole bunch of stuff, so it's not just this. But the side effect of, a nice side effect of bringing Bob Iger back is you've got somebody who's got a much more deft hand at handling the
00:52:31
Speaker
sort of politicking and diplomacy that's necessary for a CEO of the biggest employer in the state, which I verified 62,000 employees in the state of Florida. And the next closest one is Miami-Dade Public Schools at 54,000. So it's not even close. So it's good to have him back. He'll have a much better hand with it.
00:52:53
Speaker
I'm on the team and maybe it's because I'm a rabble rouser, but I'm in favor of Disney. Go bust them up.
Will Disney Sue Over Reedy Creek?
00:53:01
Speaker
You should not allow legislatures and executives to engage in this kind of behavior where
00:53:08
Speaker
It is obvious to every single reasonably minded and observant onlooker that the reason they did this is because of politics and not just because of protected public speech on matters of public concern. This is what the First Amendment is there for.
00:53:31
Speaker
Even if it's not written into the legislation, there's no parole evidence rule that says like, like you can't take somebody's outside of the legislation statements. Like we've got it pretty clearly in the legislative history, I bet. And if it's not in the legislative history, then it's going to be in CNN and Fox news clips for sure. In the context of the rest of the press release when you said, heck yeah. Yeah. I was going to say great things for your career, Jake.
00:53:56
Speaker
Yeah, in the context of the rest of the... One huge bit of oral evidence is the context of when this was announced. What the rest of the press conference was about when something's going to be done about Reedy Creek. I thought it was... And I'm not saying this is true. I guess I was incorrect. I thought it was actually stated that this was in retaliation. We're gonna do something about Disney. They're getting a little bit too big for their britches.
00:54:22
Speaker
It was. I think maybe even by the governor himself, if not the governor, I thought other legislatures. Honestly, if the if the court is willing to look into the motivation at all, then I don't see a problem finding the motivation being and respond to their public statement, because that's the big question is whether they'll do it at all, whether they think it's whether they're allowed to at all, because
00:54:49
Speaker
Like it's so it's everybody knows. Everybody knows Reedy Creek is Nizdi. Everybody knows this was in response to that that specific thing. And everyone knows that this law is fixing basically addressing the law that they passed last April. Like this is a continuing fact pattern.
00:55:09
Speaker
And so, yeah, the big question is, would the 11th Circuit, would the federal courts here, I assume they'd want to go in the federal court, even be willing to ask the question, was this mode of retaliatory? And I would say probably yes. But also, as I've said, I don't think they're going to I don't think they're going to find out.
00:55:29
Speaker
I'm with Jason, I'm rooting for it, but I agree. And even if it was, if they did test it, it seems like it would be quite a while before we'd get around to getting an answer. And perhaps certain individuals would be either off into higher office or attempting to find higher office and wouldn't be the people left holding the bag anyway. I think we'd get an answer very quickly.
00:55:56
Speaker
on the temporary injunction because the law actually calls for the immediate replacement. It's effective immediately and calls for the immediate replacement of the board, though they can keep serving until their replacements are named, which maybe indicates that they aren't expecting to do it within seconds. But
00:56:24
Speaker
Yeah. So Disney, if they wanted to fight, it would probably file a lawsuit pretty quickly. And it's totally plausible that this would get fast tracked in both the district court in the district court. And then, uh, you know, it doesn't take that long to get something heard by a federal court of appeals. Uh, I mean, it's plausible that this could potentially make it onto the 2024 Supreme court docket. If it were to have legs like that.
00:56:54
Speaker
It may be that the 11th Circuit does the right thing and it doesn't ever have to go up for cert. I imagine Jake mentioned it would be a temporary injunction, which would almost certainly be heard within the first 90 days of a lawsuit being filed, probably sooner than that. That temporary injunction, the grant or denial of it is what's going to be appealed immediately up to the 11th Circuit by whoever loses. That temporary injunction, the providence of whether it's a
00:57:24
Speaker
good choice to grant or deny that injunction is what's going to get litigated first. And that will happen mighty fast if it does at all. Interesting. Well, I'm excited to see something or happen. I mean, I'm like Jason, I'm rooting for chaos as always, but also your career to be, you know, get another boost and have Reedy Creek continue on and have this. I don't know. It's your whole thing.
00:57:53
Speaker
Yeah. You want me to fall down this hole further. Uh, you know, it's been fun. Um, I like writing. Uh, I like talking to people. I like being useful. Um, this little corner of the legal world. Um, yeah, we'll see. I don't want to watch you fall down this hole. I want to ride your coattails as you like launch into this fantastic journey.
00:58:18
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I'll take you to the very top of Florida local government commentary. I'll take you there. Let's go. I'm ready for the ride. I think we reached it here today. Yeah. So, okay. Well, unless we have anything more to talk about with Reedy Creek, I think we can move on to our follow-up and our.
00:58:37
Speaker
Arana here. Let's go. Right. So we already talked about the watch me forever being temporarily suspended. I forgot the username, the, you know, the URL for that. But, uh, have you guys been following the do not pay, uh, continuing absolute nonsense that is this keeps going. He just keeps digging a hole or, and or Catherine Tucson digs more, finds more dirt. I can't with both a little of both.
00:59:03
Speaker
Uh, yeah, but yeah, I, well, did you see, oh yes. Okay. So I saw Mike Masnick's piece, which I think you'll, you're more prepared to summarize, but did you see that he was on a podcast like today? Uh, law next. And he said it was a nothing burger, right? He said this was all nothing burgers. And he's yeah. Yeah. And he's, I guess he said a bunch of incorrect stuff.
00:59:29
Speaker
uh like about uh about the actual document that he generated and apparently yeah the small claims complaint that he is basing everything on nationwide is from a seattle court and he just took it and copied it for every jurisdiction
00:59:47
Speaker
Wow. Which is a problem. I didn't see that part. Yeah, I guess. Yeah, look it up for yourself because I didn't pay that much attention. This thread came out right before this podcast. Yeah. No, I mean, the entire Do Not Pay thing for me has reached the point where it all sort of rhymes with earlier parts of the story. And so I can't tell if this is a new bit or if this is just a part I missed before. I mean, it just seems like
01:00:15
Speaker
this guy can't catch a break at this point. And he just keeps, yes, we went on a podcast and he apparently said, yeah, none of this was, nothing burger was the term he used. And he just, I mean, I used the metaphor last time, falling down the stairs forever. Like he would do so much better if he just shut up and just stopped. Everyone would forget and would go away if he would stop giving people content.
01:00:38
Speaker
but he seems to not be willing to do so. I mean, in his defense, some of the stuff was, uh, here's like the, the, um, Masnick's article was, here's what the article we didn't run in like 2017. So, okay, that was already in the hopper that was coming, but he is not helping himself.
01:00:54
Speaker
But in that article from 2017 friend, uh, friend of the pod, friend of the pod, David is responsible for that art that, and had determined years ago that do not pay had falsified its, uh, its numbers about how many, uh, parking tickets it had resolved. Um, so props to him. Incredible talent that he called all this five years ago before I knew do not pay existed.
01:01:23
Speaker
before a lot of us knew Do Not Pay existed. So, wow, incredible. But the thing about being ultra rich from birth is that you can afford to fall down forever and it's fine. You have, you know, everybody around you is telling you is ready to catch you as you're falling down the stairs and you have an unlimited number of people just ready to catch you.
01:01:49
Speaker
If your father had an emerald mind, you can grow up to run an electric car company, and then you can buy a social media company. And then when an engineer tells you that the reason why your tweets are not getting as many views as they used to is because you're just not that popular, you can just fire them on the spot, which is the other story from today. It seems at this point, I'm reluctant because it just came out today. I want to hedge here that this could turn out to be not a true story.
01:02:17
Speaker
And I don't want to be one of the rubes that I use rube twice in this podcast. Now I have to find a new word. I don't want to be one of the idiots that, you know, to have bought the story when I was a truck. But apparently the mark. Yes. There we go. Schmuck. I don't want to be that schmuck that believed the fake story. But
01:02:32
Speaker
As it stands right now, the story seems to be that Elon Musk, while Twitter was down, while Twitter, you know, the DMS didn't work. And apparently the limit for how many tweets could be sent in a day was set at like 2500 for the entire service or something. So nobody could tweet unless they scheduled a tweet for a minute after the time that they, you know, were trying to post.
01:02:53
Speaker
Um, apparently during all of that, he called like an all hands meeting and said to pause on, uh, shutting down some of the satellite offices and to not roll out new features, which is a great, like, I'm imagining like that dog, that meme where the dog is sitting in the room and the house is on fire. And he's saying like, like, let's not roll out new features. Yeah. Okay. I agree. So true. Yeah.
01:03:14
Speaker
Um, so apparently during that he wanted to know why he wasn't getting as much engagement as he had been getting before. And I heard initially it was just an engineer, but then I heard it was like the chief engineer, or it was some, you know, very relatively high level person here, probably responsible for a lot of bits and bobs and codes and, and plugs and wires and USB devices. Um, he fired him on the spot for that for telling him that it was because he just wasn't that, uh, that popular anymore.
01:03:41
Speaker
We're never going to hear from that person. They're going to get a fat check along with a, a, uh, uh, what is it? Not non. What kind of, what are those things? Non-disparagement agreement. Non-disparagement. I don't think so. I don't think so. I think, uh, well, I don't know. Elon Musk does have a track record of paying off employees for stuff like that. So maybe this engineer will get a big fat check, but.
01:04:07
Speaker
Yeah. Right. I feel a little bit, uh, I feel like we keep repeating content. We just keep having Elon Musk screws up content, but he keeps doing stuff. How are we not? He's like, yeah, it's the same four people that we just every, every week we're saying it was with the Elon Josh podcast, David Caruso love podcast.
01:04:28
Speaker
Yeah, he's the hero. Yeah. And then we have these villains and that's it. Okay. So we can move on. Recurring cast. Yeah. I wanted to quickly do an update. So apparently MSG entertainment was, uh, is going to lift the ban on some of the lawyers that are involved in lawsuits with their company. They, the, the other, like, I think our first episode, yeah, some of, yeah, which I love is sort of like, was this a couple we have in mind that no, no, we're leaving them, but we're going to, we're going to look at the ban on some of them, which I think was our first episode. We had that story, right?
01:04:54
Speaker
Yeah. Isn't, isn't the reason they're lifting the band because they want to spin off that business anyway, so they don't want to like, it's like, so, oh, okay. Yeah. No, we don't actually care about this. Like we're just, you know, uh, we're just prepping for sale. Okay. Thanks. I guess. Which is another, I mean, I thought that news story had kind of died and to, they are bringing it back now by doing this. You could have just let it go. I mean, we have a million other clowns to, to make fun of, and we don't need to hear about this one again.
01:05:25
Speaker
Yeah. What did you say Jason? I mean, that's it.
01:05:30
Speaker
I totally don't remember. I was already talking about recommendations or what's going on with us. Yeah, you go first then. I'm going to go first. Ordinarily, I make a recommendation.
Hogwarts Legacy Anticipation
01:05:41
Speaker
I'm not making a recommendation because I haven't actually touched this thing that I'm going to talk about. I started on a little journey of exploring this Hogwarts legacy game that's coming out tomorrow, like three hours from when we're recording. Oh, did I just reveal super secret information about when we were recording?
01:06:03
Speaker
This game is coming out that I looked into at first because I was like, Oh, my kid just finished reading the Harry Potter books. This would be a really fun thing to have like a cool Harry Potter video game for him to play. It turns out like there's maybe the coolest Harry Potter video game ever.
01:06:19
Speaker
coming out tomorrow. Uh, and I'm excited for it and I watched some videos on it and now my 10 year old's not going to play it. I'm going to play it because it looks stinking sweet. Uh, now there's obviously a lot of baggage that comes along with, uh, stuff in the wizarding world right now because of JK Rowling just kind of being pretty nasty to online across the board. Yeah. Yeah.
01:06:47
Speaker
You're really irresponsible about her online behavior and like, yeah, poisoning the well of, and all of the goodwill that she's built up with, uh, people over the years from Harry Potter, like she's just destroying all that. And that's a separate thing. This is a thing that is in a universe that my kid really loves that I like, and I'm going to go on. I'm going to have fun, enjoy it and play it. Uh, and if it sucks, then you'll hear about it a week or two from now, but that's what's going on with me.
01:07:17
Speaker
Yeah, I just brought it to my wife. Huge, huge Harry Potter fan. We're going to play it together. It's crazy how games, how licensed games have come around and now are maybe the getting to become like the biggest thing when in like the 2000s, there was a bad movie game every time a movie came out and it was always terrible. And it was like, why are you doing this? And they made, but it was because they made a lot of money because they were cheap to make.
01:07:46
Speaker
Um, but this one's supposed to be pretty quality. Um, I do know people that are, uh, that are by conning it. And I understand that, uh, there was a, somebody on Mastodon intentionally spoiled it saying, if anybody that plays this, I'm like, Oh man, that's, that's such a bummer. Uh, but luckily I'm pretty immune from.
01:08:07
Speaker
You know, oh, this person dies kind of spoilers because I just don't I don't. That's not the important part. Right. Snape killed Dumbledore. Yes. Snape killed Dumbledore. It's true. It's true. But if you've written a good story, the fact of a death doesn't isn't the biggest part of it.
01:08:31
Speaker
Yeah, I hadn't. I haven't read the Harry Potter books. But it's interesting to me that as I remember, wasn't there like when they first came out, the pushback was from, let's say, a different wing of the political and ideological spectrum.
01:08:44
Speaker
were people that were like concerned with like conjuring and witchcraft right wasn't that like oh absolutely oh and they're still out there that was the that was that was the the uber uber fundy's like fundamentalist christians and stuff like that like people that i was in i was in college most of the time that these books were coming out maybe high school probably a little after or two
01:09:05
Speaker
And there were kids at my Christian college, my very conservative Christian college, who resisted reading these books because they involved sorcery and witchcraft and wizardry and stuff like that. And then there were most of us who were just like, yeah, okay, we can separate that and have a little fun too, guys.
01:09:27
Speaker
Yeah, that was my people who were on the other side of it now. Now it's the way opposite side of things that JKR has managed to tick off. So I guess good job. I was a big fan growing up. Everybody in my age group was a big fan and we read them all.
01:09:50
Speaker
I didn't, you know, I was good. I love them. And I think I still like them. I haven't read them since I was a kid. But also, like John Stewart is pointing out, like, oh, goblins are extremely Jewish, like, inspired by old Jewish stereotypes in the books, like, you know, side locks and, you know, that, you know, clearly,
01:10:15
Speaker
and evidencing how negative stereotypes have kind of just like come into our culture to the point where they're washed from the, maybe not washed from the original stereotypes that they have, but it's just like, it's just kind of everywhere. I don't, I really don't blame JK Rowling for that. Like, because it's just part of culture and you had to be really conscious about that kind of stuff. Because that's, goblins are historically
01:10:41
Speaker
Jewish coded. It's just like, you know, which is strange. But I also love Mass Effect, which has Volus, which are Jewish coded. And, you know, anyway, it's just a thing that that's happened. But there was like an era, there was a lot of that. I mean, I remember like the Star Wars prequels, too. They were just like,
01:11:01
Speaker
all kinds of horrible stereotypes in that. Oh, Jar Jar Binks and the Goggins. With 2023 eyes. You got to pull inspiration from somewhere. It's just like, oh, man, we woke up to all these cultural influences that we've unconsciously been synthesizing. And I don't know. Some people see that, and they're horrified by the idea. But I don't know. It is what it is.
01:11:32
Speaker
Yeah. Speaking of gaming, though, my recommendation is you have three days at the time that this is going to come out. You have until February 13th. Steam Next Fest is going on, which is a festival on Steam for PC games where basically they dropped a whole bunch of demos, a whole lot of games that aren't out yet just drop demos.
01:11:58
Speaker
And if you want to try out some random games, they're all free. You can just go and try some. There's a game called Cook Serve Forever, which is like a cooking game that plays kind of like a
01:12:12
Speaker
a DDR rhythm game that's very relaxing. It's part of a very not relaxing series of games that is like a cooking restaurant sim game, food truck sim game. But this version is very relaxing and it was fun to zone out to. I also tried Phantom Brigade, which is like a mech sim game, which was very interesting. Anyway, it's been fun to just try a bunch of random stuff.
01:12:40
Speaker
Totally random, what's going on. I wanted to congratulate my old law school friend, Sean Cooksey. Law school friend is strong. We knew each other from, not from law school, but from law school prep, because he went to Chicago, the University of Chicago law, works for the election, federal election commission. Is that what it's named?
01:13:10
Speaker
That's a thing. He is now banned from entering the state of Russia. So I just wanted to congratulate him really fast on being sanctioned by the Republic of Russia. So good for him. Nice. Congratulations, Sean. That's fantastic. Yeah.
01:13:31
Speaker
So my what's going on is I've done sort of gaming and questions last couple of weeks. But over the last week, my column for Bloomberg tax has gone from every two weeks to going to weekly. And so I'm going to be out there writing a lot more. And I would love if anybody listening would read my columns. The last one I wrote was on electric vehicles need to be taxed on their battery weight. And I just sort of talked about
01:13:58
Speaker
Um, the GMC Hummer EV that is like 4.5 tons and 1.4 tons of battery. And that's good for like, I forget that I did the, I think I did the math in the article, but like 1500, um, e-bikes, you know, battery going into that. Yeah. Or three for, in terms of by weight, it's three Honda civics stacked on top of each other, but it goes zero to 60, like 3.2 seconds or something. So it's, it's a death machine.
01:14:22
Speaker
And so there's been a lot of talk about, you know, as we move to EVs, you want to sort of be careful that you're not EVs being electric vehicles for those who have been living in a paper bag for the last five years. You want to be careful that you're not just sort of moving to problematic EVs, which are these, you know, supermassive vehicles rather than, you know, more recently sized vehicles, because they take a lot of resources to build and the batteries use a lot of these relatively rare minerals and resources.
01:14:50
Speaker
Um, and so the article was just basically about how in Norway they tax based on the, uh, weight of the vehicle overall. And so I said that we should hear tax on, uh, just the battery for EVs, because you don't want to incentivize people to, uh, manufacturers to skimp on safety or comfort or all these other things, which I probably would do when the only thing Americans care about is range. So long story short, that's my column this week. I'm not going to talk about it every week. Um, but if you all can read it and listen to this podcast, you're already doing that. I'd appreciate it.
01:15:19
Speaker
I'd be cool if we wouldn't talk about it every week. Oh yeah.
01:15:24
Speaker
Yeah, where do you find that? That is a difficult question to answer. I would say you search for Andrew Leahy Bloomberg and I will turn up, but it doesn't have a formal. It's called technically speaking, but it doesn't have a formal URL. It's just sort of how Bloomberg tax, Bloomberg law, the whole thing works. They're redesigning it as I understand. So I think that hopefully will change at some point. But for now, you can either find me on NASA, Don on esq.social at Andrew. Or if you just search for my name and Bloomberg, one of my articles will turn up and then you can read it and get really angry and you can send me hate mail.
01:15:53
Speaker
or whatever you want. No, I won't take you up on that. I'm not going to send you hate mail. I'm going to send you friendship mail. Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. I got some good. I got some positive responses to that one. I didn't get any hate mail for that. That sounded like a good idea. That was like, yeah, I.
01:16:11
Speaker
I think a lot of people are annoyed with how big like cars are on the street right now. They're so big. Yeah. And it seems to not be a great, I mean, for a lot of reasons, for stopping distance reasons, for a host of reasons, it doesn't seem to be just infrastructure reasons in terms of like wear and tear on the roads, wear and tear on bridges.
01:16:27
Speaker
Um, it's not a great thing to be moving towards like 4.5, you know, five ton nearly, uh, vehicles. And so, um, I don't have her name in front of me, but, uh, somebody who was shortlisted for the department of transportation secretary that, uh, Pete Buttigieg got, uh, said there was a good idea on Twitter and I appreciate that. And I've been talking to her and she seemed very nice lady. Yeah. Kudos. So that's it for me. How about you guys? Are you all done? That's I'm all done.
01:16:56
Speaker
That's it. All right. Go play Hogwarts legacy. Oh, congratulations. I need to download that. Does that come out literally at midnight? Like, are you going to wait up and download? You can preload it now and play it. I think, man, I'm 40 years old. I can't stay up to midnight. I forgot you're the senior correspondent. We, we're going to do the staying up. Yeah. He'll be, he'll be playing it on his steam deck at midnight. I'm too busy. I got to write this. All right, guys.
01:17:25
Speaker
Hey, have a good night. Well, OK, it says it's still recording. Yeah. Oh, no. Oh, no. It said my health check was passed. Hopefully it's not terrible.
01:18:01
Speaker
I'm waiting for storage, unknown, local backup, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Can you, you stopped recording? Oh no. I'm going to restart and see what happened or see what happens. I'm going to refresh. Oh no. Cause it says,
01:18:29
Speaker
It won't let me download my local copy. Cause the thing is it's still recording. So it's still, uh-oh, I'm going to re I'm going to reload.