Rational Security: The “Authentic Flavors, Real Fruit” Edition

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1:01Your personal taste has value. Someone is literally looking for what you're not wearing. Download the D-Pop app and list your first item today. You know, folks, when I started the Law Fair podcast, it was kind of terrifying. You know, I didn't really know how to podcast anything. I had no idea if anybody was going to listen to it. But if people think it's dumb, what if I make an idiot of myself over time? The thing has proven the test of time. It has a listenership, but it was a really scary moment. And I know it is for others, and that it helps when you have a partner like Shopify on your side to help. What is Shopify? Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, and 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, from household names like all birds and Mattel and

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3:08It's the bougie seltzer you could possibly conceive of. It comes from all foods. It surely comes from elsewhere too. It's authentic Asian flavors made with real fruit. Nothing suggests that it's not real fruit, more than authentic Asian flavors. Why? So I'm glad they clarified that. Yeah, not just Asian flavors authentic ones. I need to admit, taste really good. So good. It's so good, but it's somehow they made spin drift even more expensive and even more obnoxious. Give us the product placement. Let's go for it. Maybe we'll get some ad revenue out of this. Throw it out there. What's the name of the brand again? Sanzo. I would love to be sponsored by Sanzo. Sanzo. Hit us up, Sanzo. Save me a lot of money to be given Sanzo for free, let me tell you. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to Rational Security. The show will be invite you to join members of the law fair team as we try to make sense of the week's big national security news stories.

4:09We are getting in the weeds on this week's episodes. We have a couple of stories that have been percolating, few which have just broken literally in the last hour or so that we have been tracking. We think we'll be interesting to talk about, even though they may be a little bit of step beneath the headlines, at least until this news broke this last hour or two, that people may not have been following as closely. We think they're pretty interesting things that we should be paying attention to. But I'm thrilled to have a set of my colleagues here to talk about them with me. First off, joining us for the first time in a while, thrilled to have her back, law fair contributing editor, Renee DeResta. Thank you for coming back on the podcast, Renee. Thank you for having me. And it is, in fact, your segment, the one I'm going to lean most heavily on you for it, that has now broken news. So we have very timely things to discuss. Thank goodness. So we'll all be scrambling and no doubt making many errors as we discuss exactly what just happened in the last hour. So don't hold us to accountable listeners, it literally just happened. We'll get to that in just a minute. Also joining us, law fair managing editor Tyler McBrion, Tyler, I think you for coming back on the podcast. Thank you for having me. And now an old stand by on the podcast, officially, having made more appearances if you're

5:10what six months or so with law fair, then it's fair to come a little more than that six, seven, eight months now, is law fair, senior editor Molly Roberts, Molly, thank you for coming back on the podcast. Thank you. Thank you for calling me old. The old, reliable, stalwart, none of it sounds great when you say it, but they're all good things in this context is how I mean them. So it's just no nice way to say it, but we appreciate you coming back here on the podcast. As we break into a couple of big and now screening news stories, starting with topic one, the metaverse of madness. On Tuesday, a New Mexico jury reached a $375 million verdict against meta after a seven week trial that focused on whether the social media company knowingly harmed children's mental health and facilitated child sexual exploitation through its algorithms. And just before recording, another verdict came down in a jury trial in California about whether Facebook and YouTube are proven too addictive in a way that harms an individual plaintiff in that case. Several other similar civil cases are set to go to trial in the coming months. What do we make of these verdicts? Do they signal a turning tide against social media companies for the algorithms that make

6:14them both profitable and addictive or least potentially addictive? topic two, saving face. President Trump and Republican congressional leaders went back and forth this week over a deal that would put forward a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security or at least big, less controversial parts of it, despite President Trump's threats not to sign any piece of legislation until Congress passes his Save America Act. Trump views the Save America Act as vindication for criticism of the 2020 election for Republicans in the Senate have hedged and resisted his calls so far to blow up the filibuster in order to pass it. Instead, they now appear to have a deal in place that will allow less controversial parts of the funding for DHS to go forward and for the funding for the most controversial parts, particularly ICE and removal operations to go forward through reconciliation on what is likely to be a party line vote along with select chunks of that Save America Act. All this still yet to be finalized, this is the plan as we understand it at the current moment. Why is President Trump so determined to pass the Save America Act and what does the compromise he yet now appears to have reached with Senate Republicans mean for its future?

7:15Polly wants to crack up. Flight monitors, pizza place trackers and Google Earth, the past few years have brought open source intelligence better known as Ocent into Vogue. Counts on X have racked up millions of followers by a quote-unquote monitoring the situation for news events spanning from Russia's invasion of Ukraine to natural disasters, but this explosion of Ocent accounts has brought a wave of disinformation and coincides with the growth of online prediction markets such as Polymark and Kalshi, whose betters use Ocent to gain an advantage and a time to manipulate the results. How is Ocent contributed to the online media landscape and how has it hurt it? So for our first topic, Renee, I want to come to you. So we literally did just, as you can tell from me, stumbling over my effort to adapt the pre-written paragraph to describe instead of the topic, we just got news on this just a little bit that we've been struggling to catch up with. We know two days ago this judgment came down with New Mexico jury trial literally just in the last hour or so, another verdict has come down to the Los Angeles case, both in state court, both advancing somewhat different but related theories of liability under state

8:17law, talked to us about these verdicts and why they represent a potentially significant new avenue or opening for accountability or liability, whether you think it's properly accountable or not, for social media companies that we haven't seen at least as clearly capitalized by plaintiffs in the past. Right. One of the things that we're seeing here is a shift from lawsuits that focused on the content to the dynamics, the product design specifically, right, the conduct, the argument being that the product design and then what the platform chooses to recommend, how the platform chooses to engage people is moving more into the realm of platform conduct as opposed to just adjudicating content disputes. So the case in New Mexico was, for listeners, you're not familiar with it, the state's sort of smoking gun was something that they called Operation Metafile, where undercover agents set up accounts posing as 12 and 13 year old girls and then within a month, one of these fake children had about 7,000 followers, almost all of whom were adult men.

9:18And then the kind of kicker with this particular situation was that instead of metasystems flagging this suspicious adult activity, it instead started to send the child automated tips on how to monetize their account, grow their following, you know, do the sorts of things, put them on the influencer path. So the jury found that that was a kind of a consumer protection issue, right, that platforms were telling parents that these platforms were safe while internal data and they also had a couple of internal whistleblowers who testified internal commentary showing that inappropriate actions, I think something like over half a million inappropriate actions with minors were happening every single day. So that was the scope of the New Mexico case. So this is not a question of, you know, is this a user's speech that needs to be protected? This is the platform nudging people in particular directions. When I worked at Stanford Internet Observatory, we actually did a research project where we got a tip about underage users, real underage users in this case, who were marketing their content on Instagram is illegal.

10:21And so one of the challenges there, we did reach out to the company, obviously, we do responsible disclosure, but one of the things that was challenging about that was once you engage with a few of those accounts, it pushes you more. The users and the others, the dynamics of the recommendation engine are such that the platform is actually actively nudging and making suggestions to users to do certain things. So I think this question now that we're getting into, and then the Los Angeles case was about mental health, right, content that is pushing teenage users in particular to see things that are intentionally addictive as the dynamic, right? So it's an intentionally addictive product, and then the content they are pushing may also be harmful. This is two different facets of the question. So I think what we're seeing here, it may be think a little bit about, they're talking very much now these court cases about defective product features. So almost like a car having bad breaks, right? When an algorithm chooses to push a specific video to a child to keep them addicted, the

11:22platform isn't just a passive conduit anymore. It is actually the designer of the harmful experience. So that's where we're starting to see things. The comparison here, I think you're seeing come up now, actually in metaphor that I think for Stan Harris and others were using almost a decade ago at this point is that they're more like tobacco companies than just public squares. And that's the shift that we're seeing in the decisions, the findings, and also the legal approaches to pursuing in that direction. It is a really, really fascinating development. I mean, we have followed section 230 questions, which is the big set of immunities that has always been the bear barrier for accountability of these companies for a long time. And that's, you know, focuses on providing immunity for the actual underlying content. Right. We've always been interpreted fairly broadly. So here the question becomes, when can you draw the line between the harm is what stems from the content versus the way the content is accessed, packaged, and delivered essentially to the user? Yes. Strike me as the distinction. Yes. It can be a fine line in some of these cases.

12:23So I'm kind of curious about like breaking it down across these three sorts of avenues. One, we have the one that's the Los Angeles case where it's clearly the case where the plaintiff says, you know, I got addicted to this. I don't even think in that case it's necessarily clearly harmful underlying content. But it was because of the mode of delivery, the type of delivery that it was, I think particularly the endless scroll feature that I think was specifically a feature in meta. That at least got picked up in the media coverage. I don't know if I imagine because of YouTube was involved as well, the things were in that case as well. Like that sort of design features what fed to the addiction obsession, kind of compulsive behavior. Then you have in the New Mexico's kind of two, two related theories. One is that you actually had a case where they were either a product design sort of failing like you said about you are actually like or or or a way you're actually contributing the structure of design contributed to these negative outcomes. Another one was actually specifically about the marketing under state law in particular

13:26where essentially they were trying to point out that meta had said they met certain safety standards and were safe in certain words and they didn't quite get there. So for the meta case in particular, I guess my question for you is like both these cases are unique because they at least particularly the New Mexico case unless you're with Los Angeles case seems to have heavily leaned on both the this meta files investigation you described and the fact that you have a lot of whistleblowers who come out about meta specifically. We know for a couple years now that meta has a very messy and complicated record with safety and its relationship to safety despite public statements to the contrary and that we've had whistleblowers bring information to Congress to other venues about this that we saw featured in play here. Is that something that's replicable with other social media companies? Does that make meta uniquely vulnerable to these claims and like do we have a sense about how important that is to the viability of these claims? I don't think that meta is going to be all that unique here. I think a lot of the a lot of them have very similar types of features for you. I think for your point maybe the question is what do they say about them but is the is

14:32the market and copy you know like cleaner for TikTok maybe I don't know but that that dynamic that these are safe places for teenagers these are perfectly fine. There's nothing addictive their research is wrong et cetera et cetera they've spent a lot of time this is where I think the tobacco comparison also comes in right merchants of doubt the idea that oh you know you can't prove that this is bad you can't prove that this is harmful. Now you're starting to see I think Jerry's and others finding that in fact they are there was an interesting case on the CDA 230 thing I was actually trying to see what the latest on it was but there was a it was like the Anderson versus TikTok case which said that TikTok's recommender system might actually constitute the platforms own speech and that could be held liable for content that it promotes as it represents first party speech rather than just hosting third party content so whereas the 230 line there but that is another that that was another one that came to mind as we were you know thinking through what are the shifting dynamics where you're starting to see kind of chips in the wall

15:32so to speak that has held back some of the accountability for a very very long time. Scott you know as you were plaintiff. It's a big plan for better for worse that people hop in there. Yeah I mean that really gets like the fundamental question here is like when does these algorithms become something independent of the underlying content. The metaphor I can't remember I came up with this or was in the or or augment during the Gonzalesum Tom that cases a few years ago or I remember I thought of this in the context of those I almost used it in a piece and didn't but it's kind of the idea of like the serial killer notes you see in movies where people cut individual letters out of magazines and piece them together in a note in theory is that just third party content being packaged a particular way or is actually individual speech and that that line you know while clearly there are opposite ends of that and we can see the two pillars of it where the tradeoff is exactly can be can be hard to draw well that will invariably come up with AI content to exactly 100% that that's why I'm very curious to see how some of those cases come out particularly where you know the AI is actively disaming people and things like this or giving

16:36actually harmful product and you know giving harmful medical advice giving harmful health advice harmful food advice actually I got some pre-remarkable tips on what happens when what do you do with rotten food well you can wash it you know this is like the wrong pieces exactly it's moldy that's okay just scrape it off you know but no I think so that that piece of it is it's kind of unclear I think what is going to happen but I was actually pulling from meadows widely viewed content report for a talk them about to give and one of the things that they put out that's actually very interesting is over time the dynamics around widely viewed content you know what what people are engaging with how they're recommending there's a little there's put in a little pie chart and then a little pie chart it tells you where it's sourcing the content from so as it is creating your feed what percentage roughly people are seeing from their friends their family news organizations things they follow it's at 41% unconnected at this point and I remember last time I um

17:39and connected it means like outside of outside connected so unconnected no no no unconnected content means you don't follow the account you have no relationship creator you're not you haven't opted in essentially you haven't formed you know it's you're not following me and then seeing my content instead 41% now is the platform intuiting what you want to see right it's almost like the TikTok notification of of all feeds because that was TikTok secret sauce the idea that your social graph actually didn't matter all that much recency things other people were engaging with popularity a whole bunch of different ways to wait what it's selected could actually be a much heavier driver of engagement than just saying uh these are the people in this person's social graph let me show them posts from their friends so I think last time I pulled up the widely viewed content report and really delved into that particular stat was when we were writing this paper actually on AI Slop and why the recommender system was because AI Slop was starting to be in the widely viewed content report and I think around that time uh two years ago it was about 26% was unconnected content so

18:41again a pretty significant shift if I'm remembering correctly of that that evolution the 41% actually surprised me how high it is now totally totally but I guess the platforms could say something even when you talk about unconnected content like well we're still not that different from a bookstore that decides to put on the shelves right yeah right and that so that's that's what I wonder with all of this and I'm kind of hard to see that the protections that section 230 provides are not now being interpreted to be as absolute as they were a few years ago but also I'm surprised and a little skeptical and I wonder where this is going to go because again I just see the companies saying well we're still doing content moderation our algorithmic choices our design choices are just contemporary content moderation and that's exactly what section 230 lets us do it says we can't be punished for doing it the whole point of section 230 is that it's a sword and a shield that lets us do moderation without making us be in trouble because we moderate it so that's what I'd

19:42imagine they'd say and I think that's a tough argument when it comes to something like you have endless scroll and people are suffering from the mere fact of being addicted from being online if that can be proven I think it's harder and this is what you were kind of speaking to earlier both of you Scott and Renee I think it's harder if it's well you were online and you saw content that promoted body dysmorphia because then that is speaking to the content the content is just downstream of those algorithmic choices yeah it is really tricky to figure that I totally agree I think that's the spectrum of arguments we're going to see and we should note like New Mexico has another bundle arguments they're going to make which is actually like really directly inspired by the tobacco cases which is the idea of meta being a public nuisance or creating a public nuisance that's going to allow them to pursue I think I think substantially more damages this is a $375 million judgment so like if I I think that's the number big scale judgment but that's because they had a huge number of cases each of which was capped at only $5,000 of damages so it's kind of like a volume thing I think

20:45they can go for much more of a public nuisance and importantly they can do which they've done with tobacco companies pharmaceutical companies things like that and really push for remediation plans and meta to fund programs that aren't just providing damages and particularly like statious fairly nominal statutory damages but in fact actually like have to address the underlying problem or at least that's what they've they've successfully done in those other prior cases how where that fits and I don't know because I don't know exactly what the legal standard of a nuisance is and how much it depends on I think their theory about how much of it ties back to the underlying substance of the content versus your choice to steer it but I do wonder whether like this gets into it was in the Gonzales and Tom that case like there the issue was well look we have fairly with the I think the justice describes fairly neutral or agnostic algorithms that yeah they do favor and push things to certain people but that's based on our assessment of what they're looking for their search from their past history it's not new it's usually agnostic towards anyone particular like

21:45content or interest stream it's just but inevitably it will weight things different ways depending on how people engage with it and there the court ultimately did made its decision based off something like wonky stuff about the annuitarism act but like did seem to suggest and I believe even in the final opinion did suggest like this isn't the sort of stuff that at least in the ATA context maybe any kind and notably the ATA context is like basically imports common law tort standards so it's a good reasonable guidepost for that that's not the sort of thing that you understand to be reach the kind of mens rare requirement of ating and embedding of knowing intentionally doing something but like I think the question becomes if you have evidence and you know evidence of like systematic trends of steering like children's or toward sexual predators right like does that cross a line at some point where it is knowing and involved and there is this harm and you become aware of it they said in that case like they tried to point of evidence that there was knowledge on the part of companies that this did sometimes happen the companies didn't come back and said yeah it did sometimes happen but we actually actively like took measures to counteract it maybe not 100 percent effective all the time but it was still a result of this broader kind of

22:49neutral program not a deliberate steering but like at a certain point that does seem to break down like you can only claim neutrality so far if you know it's steering things toward these particularly harmful outcomes I think but but I don't know it isn't it is an easy line I think those claims are harder certainly than the things that are so intrinsically about the design features like the addiction which really could be addiction to any sort of completely benign underlying content but it's being fed to you in a super super problematic sort of way Renee where do you see the companies responding to this or acting like that they're obviously going to challenge it it's obviously going to go to the court are going to go all the way Supreme Court if people get their druthers about it and the Supreme Court had feelings about this so like maybe maybe maybe the companies don't ultimately want to bring the Supreme Court because they think they're where they may lose but if they don't it's going to go to at least the state probably Supreme Court eventually to resolve some of this stuff and and because there's got the Section 230 hook they they very well may bring it to federal court so how do you think they were responding business wise set aside the appeal question like they're

23:52going to have to live with this at least for the next year or two while these appeals are ongoing maybe longer and a lot of other cases coming down the pike does this affect their business model to affect the how they do things I mean it's an interesting question you know they had actually scaled down trust and safety operations rather significantly it's going to be interesting to see if they scale some of that back up meta made some announcements about using AI to moderate more it's going to be interesting to see how they're going to again is the public going to trust that I think the public sentiment also is a very big deal here people increasingly do not trust them this narrative that they're harmful for kids is very very prevalent and I think that is one of the key challenges that they're also going to face just that that public opinion dynamic is it's going to be heavily influenced by these verdicts as well so what they're going to do to make themselves seem like good faith players when they've actually really swung very very hard in the opposite direction away from content moderation as they allowed that bullshit political campaign that the hard right ran to reframe at all his censorship they're going to have to walk that back in some way and now it's going to be interesting to see how they do it yeah it does seem like they

24:55put themselves in a difficult disadvantageous position especially if you're if you're a defense to your like our algorithms have all these problems is that we have other algorithms embedded in AI that we'll try and fix it and enhance it like it kind of layers back and I think that kind of leads like the the last tissue that's worth talking about here like what does this tell us all about AI liability potentially in my mind this seems like it opens the door to a lot of more this model of liability around AI right eye at its core is kind of repackaging content you've heard people raise well maybe you can make section through 30 defense about this certainly when it's acting like then like like a search engine or research bot you may have stronger arguments there it becomes harder when there's not attribution when it's really actually repackaging reselling and that is ultimately what AI is doing a lot of the time is this the sort of model we're going to see this kind of like product liability I mean it seems like it is it seems like those are the sort of cases we've already started seeing in the AI context but I like I wonder where there's an intersection here maybe even if like the prevalence of AI the fact that how much people talk

25:58about and think about it in the last year or two compared to you know when good's awesome time now we're decided one of these cases where last really heavily debated at the highest levels maybe has people a little more sensitive to that kind of algorithmic harm sort of argument but I'd also add I mean these these the really visceral horrible stories of AI models directing seemingly directing people to self harm or to kill themselves I mean it seems like the like the it's a lot easier to attribute the harms to to an AI model that is like directing you and exactly telling you how and why you should rather than just being kind of fed algorithmically and like it's a it's been grabbing headlines I think for good reason because it's some of these chat transcripts are just so disturbing yeah and like what where does that liability adhere is that when the chatbot like refers you to a manual to like commit self harm in which case you're protected by section 230

26:58if they pursue pursue the ax in that manual or is it in the kind of coaching leading up to it and here we seem to see a line dividing there which is that it says it's really the latter not the former but you know where that line is in practice could be tricky in a variety of cases I suspect and I do think partly because of AI we've now entered the age where people are kind of afraid of their phones and afraid of the world that is coming where younger people who maybe aren't afraid of their phones are going to be in kind of this virtual reality world all the time talking to AI instead of talking to humans and that's extremely troubling and scary and maybe has made people who are already skeptical of the social media companies get even more serious about the perceived harms well speaking of efforts to save Americans let us go to the safe America act that is now being debated in Congress president Trump has had a bee in his bonnet about the safe America act this is like probably predominantly as far as I can tell that I will not pretend like I

28:00sat down or at through the whole thing a elections reform bill aimed at doing a variety of things many of which are responsive to not very well substantiated claims about 2020 many of which appear to get about certain bugaboos that people have had about elections and things like voter ID for a long time in certain circles combined with a couple of new measures we've seen the president face down primarily against his own senate republican colleagues around this because the filibuster is the big barrier to this particular bill or at least a lot of it although notably very thin margins in the house from terms of republican control as well which could also pose a problem although it can pose a problem both directions really we've now got this compromise solution that looks like parts of it may at least be submitted to majority vote in the reconciliation process which bypasses the filibuster although only if they can get past past the senate parliamentarian and the unitary bird bath process through which all these reconciliation bills have to go through so so moly tell us a little about what the president's broader ambitions are with the save America act

29:03and where they appear to have been winnowed down to and what happens i guess both to the rest of the bill if this reconciliation package is the vehicle by which senate republican say this is all we can do on this yeah so republican say election reform democrats say voter suppression that's generally what's going on with the conversation about the save america act i think that you know president trump has said that the outcome of the midterms hinges on this act whether that's really true whether the particular reforms that they want to push through would very clearly be to republicans benefit everywhere i don't know but that seems to be the perception and it's not that difficult to believe because essentially what this is mostly is a bill that makes it harder to register to vote and then harder to vote by requiring you to show your papers in various ways so there's the showing your papers of proving your citizen and there's the showing your papers of providing photo ID but

30:04super specific types of photo ID that are not possessed by most americans and so the people who be most likely to be effectively disenfranchised by that would be low income people minorities and also particularly harmed would probably be women who have gotten married and changed their names because then you have a mismatch in what your birth certificate says and what your ID says so yeah looks like that would benefit republicans probably that's what trump seems to be saying or what trump is saying but also i think kind of separate from what the act would actually substantively do is the idea that this is a narrative that says elections need to be saved right now elections can get rigged and so even if this doesn't pass you know democrats have rigged the elections if they win because we needed this act to make republicans have a fair shot so i think those are the reasons that he cares so much about it as far as what's happening now it's

31:07a little complicated it ties into the fight to fund the department of homeland security there's a lot more urgency now among the republicans to do that because of the situation the airports that is making the shutdown of the department way more visible to americans now people are actually getting upset at the republicans so they want to fund dhs but the democrats don't want to fund ice so there's a compromised budget deal kind of in the works that would fund all parts of dhs accept ISIS removal operations and the question for that is will enough democrats go for it because they're not really getting all the reforms to ice that they want and there's this sort of weird situation where it's like okay if they're willing to fund more of ice maybe they can get more reforms if they want fund any of ice maybe they get no reforms so that's where that conversation is but trump said i don't want there to be any compromise unless we also get the save america act done and that's what brings us to the reconciliation conversation because what

32:13it's looking like is going to happen is that congress is going to try to pass this compromise bill and then take care of the parts of ice that haven't been funded later in reconciliation okay that's not all that surprising has to do with spending but they're also going to try to get portions of the save america act through reconciliation the problem there of course is that the bird rule says that anything you're doing through reconciliation has to be related to the budget all the stuff i just described about the save america act doesn't have anything to do with the budget so how do you tie it into the budget that's where we get to kind of the winnowing down that you're talking about so i'll stop for now there yeah i mean maybe i can throw another question your way or anyone's i'm curious whether you see this this the save america act more as a last gasp of this so-called election integrity movement of you know i think a big question that people had and the last presidential election is when trump won where all of this energy and this organizing and this

33:14movement like where it would go would it just dissipate because trump won or as it did it actually it had so much momentum that it had to be there had to be some sort of outlet and is this what we're seeing or is this actually like the movement is is picking up strength and this is just the first you know big proposed bill of what's the common i don't know i guess like whether the the election integrity movement even when trump wins it doesn't go away trump is not the election integrity movement just to be clear trump is the fake the election is stolen bullshit movement let's just be really totally candid about that and everything that is happening is him trying to optimize his chances it is transparently political we all know that i just want to point out that he says it he says this is like no one is nobody is hiding the ball here that is not a that is not a partisan statement that is just a recantation of like of what is actually quite plainly said in fact if you go and you look at kato or heritage particularly heritage you can you can look at their database of non citizen voting incidents and i think it was 24 instances that heritage found

34:20between 2003 and 2023 that's what we're dealing with here we're not even in the three digits on on heritage's database there right so the idea that this is an election integrity movement is bullshit and i think that we can't use that frame i think we need to be constantly reinforcing whatever you think about voter about voter ID that is a completely separate question then is there an epidemic of illegal voting in our elections the answer to that is categorically not yeah well i agree with that totally and i think that to me the save america act is kind of frightening for two reasons that go back to the second point of him doing it which is to create all this doubt and create the perception that we have this election integrity crisis which Renee said we don't have you know i think if the act passes it's dangerous not only because it might disenfranchise a lot of people but also because okay yeah this will probably benefit Republicans even if it were a wash the stricter the rules are the more ways you can get someone disqualified the

35:26easier it is to say when you lost that you lost because a bunch of people who should have been disqualified were able to vote so that's something to me that's super scary about it as to whether it is the last gasp of the election integrity not not integrity of the of the so-called election integrity movement the self-proclaimed election integrity movement i don't think so i think they're going to try to do this in a lot of ways i think that if they can't do it through congress and we can go back to whether they'll succeed through reconciliation but i think it's going to be tough to do anything meaningful there states are already doing this on their own some of them at least also it's possible that the president and this is the subject of a piece that Anna Bauer and i wrote for law fair and we did a podcast about it as well but it's possible that the White House would try to achieve at least some of this on its own though that would be almost certainly unconstitutional essentially i think there are various ways they're going to try to get at least pieces of this done some more realistic than others hey this is Adam Grant host of Ted's podcasts

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38:37yeah and i'll say like this is a lot of these proposals have origins that well predate trump or 2020 election i mean these are things that i remember talking about when i used to do voter protection work like in 2008 and before that even to some extent like their proposals that have always been out there dominated by myths like with some kernels of reality about like whether it's a handful of cases whether it's like there are certain administrative inefficiencies that in theory might lead to situations but that in practice there hasn't really been any evidence of it being any sort of large scale or meaningful or pivotal sort of change and what the trading office a trade office i mean that's the real question here like well how much do you value absolute security of elections if it deters people who can vote but aren't don't have to vote from being able to do so and that's it's a values trade off there's there actually isn't a right answer i know what i think the right answer is uh which is that i think more people should vote who should be able to vote no less there's a real problem of fraud we shouldn't be wasting time

39:39deterring them but it is ultimately like one of these value tradeoffs and i i think we're just gonna exceed continuing cycles of that the one thing is really interesting about this though i think is that 2024 was the election that when it came out of it showed that a lot of voters that are vulnerable to some of these measures older voters Hispanic voters voters that uh with like lower education rates who are on various surveys show they have like less likely or more likely to have limited access to like ID information that they need to be able to vote Donald Trump carried a lot more of that vote than prior republican candidates have and that was a conversation coming out of 2024 uh i remember very vividly because i'd been involved was was was volunteer to live in their election uh and came out rumored coming out of the election people saying this really looks like such a different sort of electric and pattern in this case and i do wonder like whether that is if anything a sign of maybe may not the death now of these claims but a sign that they're maybe getting a different sort of reception or emphasis because the way that they cut is isn't that clear i think a

40:41lot of times the way people assume the political impact would be was actually based upon a lot of broad assumptions about who votes for each party and that the actual reality is and there's i'm i'm look i've been kind of scrolling through and looking through studies from bread and center a few other groups show that like really strongly suggests that the impact is going to be really all over the place depending on like local elections what population is a particular area is how it affects and what the nationwide impact of that be it can be hard to judge so i mean maybe that's one of the things that has people maybe republicans in the senate a little more nervous about this because you don't really know the outcome is maybe it's better to deal with the flawed system you have but you know and that got you elected if you're an incumbent the one that you don't yeah or at least skeptical enough to not want to blow up the fill of us to over it right that's a better way to describe it yes exactly exactly which is really interesting so so where do we think that this leads Donald Trump in his broader 2020 motivated campaign so Molly you've talked about like some of this of my come through executive order we can talk a little about that that's one avenue i don't

41:46think there's a lot of other legislative chances if this doesn't get through because if if they get this dhs built through there's there's doesn't seem like there's anything else that they're going to have if if the president could not persuade them to break the filibuster over this sort of stuff doesn't seem like they're going to get the filibuster broken over other stuff seems like enough senate republicans are still on board with that so if if that's where we are where does each channel is energies and concerns about the south where or does he finally have to accept which something that reportedly a lot of republican advisors and supporters of the president of telling him which is that does a political loser and we need to drop it i don't think he drops it i think that seems unlike at this point it's got a lot of it's got a lot of skin in the game on this one no i mean i think he if the midterm stone go his way blames it on the failure to have the save america act passed and says that we tried to save the elections and they wouldn't let us save the elections and they stole the elections i think i i think that's what happens yeah yeah it's interesting i mean like it is one of these catch 22s of this whole process that because there's

42:47like you know you're trading out these values you can create those arguments no matter what the actual underlying rules are because you can say well these people were able to vote who shouldn't have been able to vote in theory all these other people like you you can say these arguments because it's it's all kind of a relative system but like you know other than brought in the absence of like widespread evidence of you know actual fraud it just seems like you know the availability of this argument doesn't necessarily mean they like should be persuasive it's just something that people are going to be able to make and if people are motivated enough to believe in it that that's kind of the decider i don't i just don't know if we can plan around the ability to make these arguments that much one way or the other before you have on i think i should go on the record and say i don't think this is a bad election integrity good clarification so there's one more part of this which is of course whether all of this is even really feasible and that comes down this question of the bird bath and the reconciliation process and the politics surrounding that so so Molly tells what your sense of this is like is this a compromise that's actually going to go anywhere i guess

43:49either on the dhs front or on the same american front yeah i was pretty amused to see that senator john kennedy of Louisiana earlier this month said that what they have to do is they have to hire a really smart lawyer to figure out how to make this survive a bird bath but i think that was also in a speech or statement where he said that the carren wing of the democratic party is an ascendancy so there were a lot of kind of funny phrases in it but i think you do need a really really really really smart perhaps genius lawyer to do it or at least do it in any meaningful way so basically what you have to do and what it seems like republicans would try to do is incentivize pay states to change their rules to do some of the things in the save act but that's a far cry from the binding national requirements that are really supposed to save our elections it doesn't seem nearly as impressive if that's all that you manage to achieve is to incentivize is to have states do this voluntarily rather than forcing them to and it seems like what's circulating what they're trying to incentivize states to do is implement voter ID laws require proof of citizens

44:55of for voter registration and share some voter data with federal agencies for verification and then post election audits which makes sense because part of the idea is we can say the election was stolen after the election so it seems like that's what they're trying to do but again the only way that they could even possibly do it is to suggest to states hey we'll give you some money you do it on your own and even it's not clear that that would survive the senate parliamentarians scrutiny at which point the question becomes well do the republicans want to just ignore the senate parliamentarian but they haven't shown much interest in that and that's basically if you break the bird rule to that degree it's basically like blowing up the filibuster which they don't want to do also so i think that's where it leaves us i don't think that many republicans would even vote for the reconciliation bill that included these provisions of the save act if they survived the parliamentarians scrutiny Susan Collins doesn't seem super into it Lisa Murkowski doesn't seem into it it's a tough thing to ask them to vote on particularly

45:59because these reconciliation bills tend to have a lot of other stuff added on to them that can often be quite controversial so here it might include social safety net cuts it might include a bunch of money for the Pentagon and so just controversial provisions that many republicans might not want to vote on in this party line bill and that would make it even harder for the save act stuff to get through if it makes it that far yeah and one other tool they seem to be leveraging like like trying to work in save american version three is through the conditioning of different grants and an additional grant money so providing money and then sangria but if you want this money we're gonna have to like make it conditional upon things like documentary proof citizenship for getting voter registration and that's one place where might have some teeth but i know those provisions this is where i wish our colleague Molly Reynolds could be on the podcast so unfortunately is out the other Molly are because she of course has literally written the book on this and that is that is a sort of thing that i know has run into bird bath problems

47:00in the past i can't 100% remember exactly where the line is so i know some cases we've seen change or things like that get through another case is not i don't know how well to find it is or how we know whether that good this gets through and that's why you need not just a lawyer actually don't even really need a lawyer you need a parliamentarian i understand senate practice about this which is i will say something with law school not something you learned about school uh that to any particular extent unless you really go down some odd paths so uh yeah we will have to see uh exactly where this leads um but certainly it is an interesting legislative development to watch in the weeks to come so speaking of watching and predicting things to come let us transition to our third topic which is all about the future predicting the future understanding what's going on around the world uh and then potentially sometimes even making money on that future Tyler you wrote a really phenomenal piece in the bath where that i highly recommend to folks and i don't have the title in front of me which i meant to have and i say close that window but you can tell us in a second why when i end the mic over to you that's worth reading all about the kind of flowering and mass proliferation

48:01of osent as a practice on social media um in some ways that have been good uh i know you've taken interest in osent i have relied on osent uh practices and producers at various points at various in various moments but that may have reached a critical tipping point uh in the other direction at least in certain context talk to a little bit about us a little bit about your article the trends you're observing in that and and some of the positive and negative implications we're seeing coming out of it yeah um so i i called it a situational unawareness there we go i can't believe i forgot that i'm embarrassed now okay it grew out of i'm sure many listeners have also seen these these dashboards that have just exploded on mostly on twitter of that are essentially promising this immense surveillance capacity uh that you can just have on your browser they're styled after a bloomberg terminal or they say you know you can have like palantir in your pocket or you can basically promising the capabilities of an intelligence agency but in reality

49:05these are just i think vibe coded a i-slop that just uh frankenstein together of ticker symbols maps different uh like news wires different twitter accounts and it just becomes this this cacophony that's pretty useless unless you have contextual knowledge if you have uh if you know how to just read the signals in the noise um and it just seemed like this really silly thing at first but then kind of a dangerous proliferation because a lot of them look good and therefore seem authoritative and they sort of give this illusion that you know it's happening and then i think it became really dangerous when uh this marriage started to emerge between these osent style dashboards and and prediction markets a lot of prediction markets now have their own dashboards so there's one thinking you have called polyglobe where it grew out of the the pentagon pizza index if some listeners are familiar with that which is this this idea that an increase in traffic among pizza restaurants

50:09around the pentagon is a good proxy for there being a buzzer activity in the pentagon and they're up all night planning military strikes so they got to eat all the pizza at night it's it's i think anyone with with knowledge who follow and understand sometimes you feel like Chinese and that's what you order it on your strike nights you need a chinese restaurant monitor as well to supplement but it has just i mean it was kind of like a little joke on twitter for a while and these tweets would go viral that uh there was an increase in activity before a certain um event but obviously the tweets that that show the an increase in activity when no event happens don't go viral but then it just has been taken to this crazy level and then like i said the the marriage with prediction markets started to really worry me which which gave rise to this this piece but yeah so i i can i can leave it there for now i'm happy to talk about any parts of it but yeah i i encourage listeners to go look at some of these things because there's so many of them out there now and you must be a crazy person to think that you can kind of

51:12clean any insights any actionable intelligence from these this just mess of data i was in a small town in Maine and i walked into this shop and the woman who was middle aged woman at the counter was being really chatty and asked where we were from and we said dc and then she started talking about the pizza index so it just shows exactly how far this thing is spread and she was really sold on it and so it was just kind of funny i mean the the one that i was talking about there's there's one connected to the pizza index and and they have like a tiered threat level and instead of defcon they call it docon and it's like very kitschy but then it just gets very unsavory when it's then you can't they have a disclaimer at the bottom about the use of this data but it was literally when i was scrolling down it was literally blocked by a polymarket banner ad encouraging you to go there to to place bets you know in the prediction markets and the idea obviously is that you can have an edge in these markets because of all the streams of data that

52:15you're monitoring every second and it just seemed like this this mix of doom scrolling and AI slop that just felt very like of the moment and then i'm sure people saw that polymarket had this pop up in dc at a bar where you could monitor their situation in in real life and this is this is like a was a manifestation of a very common type of tweet that i've seen over the past few months which is like bros imagine a bar where but all the screens are like bloomberg and you know et cetera and maps and whatever so they they actually did it and and i think much to a lot of people's delight it was a complete fiasco and a lot of the monitors were not working on the first day and it was this sort of like fire festival ask thing that blew up in the phases of of these often maligned company at least right now i i have today i saw the pictures of the event which some of our colleagues went to i know to do a little on the ground reporting uh i have never seen a less fun looking party it's not entirely fair because of course they're using like photographers

53:19i think knowing the story is going to have a slightly critical bet are using full flash photography what is probably a dark apart room night it's kind of like at the night at 4 a.m. in the club when they turn all the lights on everybody's like uh this is shocking and terrifying in that light yeah exactly but it is it is very entertaining because i look at picture i'm like wow this looks terrible even by my standards and i'm a 42-year-old father of two and i do not get out i would not come to this party which is not a good sign so rena you have spent obviously like you know a huge chunk of your career thinking about disinformation how intersects with the internet and prediction markets yeah and related and related issues like talk to us a little about how you make sense of it like there is obviously some degree of value in the lowering of barriers and treat to oh yeah yeah for sure yeah but law fair is a benefit of that in a lot of ways right law fair gets to do stuff now that you had to be a newspaper to do 15 20 years ago right or law firm we're able to a lot of it cheaper and frankly it's getting cheaper and cheaper by the minute between AI and frankly a lot of osin sources that if you do them you know properly vet them but then you run

54:22to the risk of this information slot how do you manage this as a consumer and and at maybe even as a policy maker like how do you approach differentiating these things so so much of it is incentives right i was in a um back in the day i'm trying to remember the year now it would have been maybe 2017 2017 so almost a decade ago now gosh we had a slack called data for democracy and a lot of it was osin research right because it was sort of the early days then 10 years ago where it was the recognition that you could get really interesting signal from stuff that people were just putting on twitter right and there would be like remember when ice is was a thing even like five years before that you'd have these like jihadis who would like not turn off the like you tagging on their phone pictures post a picture and like boom you've just got a ton of information from that you could do um triangulation of where people were belling cat emerges right and and this is i think like the pinnacle of fantastic osin and and you can start to see how these independent investigators actually can pull together quite a lot of things and some of the work

55:26that we did on russia and the internet research agency was exactly that right it was people thinking like hey i think i've got a signal here anybody anybody here want to look at this with me and then there it's very collaborative process very fun process candidly i love investigations where you're in there just trying to figure out what is the reality of the situation on the ground what can you what can you learn what can you find even prediction markets too even even before that so going like five to eight ten years maybe before that i was part of the sin called the good judgment project which was um i think uh i think it was maybe funded by DARPA or um it was one of these kind of original OG efforts to see if super forecasters and others could actually do a a decent job at predicting world events and there too i think and also there was this question about experts versus crowds there's a whole lot of different things that went into the idea of prediction markets being markets when i was at jane street we would talk a lot about that right how can you get as much information out there people putting their information together i think overall again it can be really fantastic but the question is incentives because what you start to see is

56:29the rise of the fake osin to counts on x right the explicitly manipulative ones that are actively trying to put garbage out there to particularly around the time when russia and bays you crane right to mislead people about what's going on there uh you start to see them using even a i generated content at times to kind of flood the zone and that question of how do you differentiate i think is a broader information environment question at this point it's not just the osin to counts that are you know participants in this ecosystem but but their scene is being kind of authoritative right their scene is being synthesis accounts and that is where i think you start to get in some interesting questions around um particularly because they're also often anonymous right beling cat is interesting and that very much is not right really shows its work so i think to to answer your question of how do you know if it's good the question is do they show their work are you racing to get something into the media are you racing to profit from it are you racing to like blast it out or are you going to do a very methodical investigation put it out and like walk people through essentially a replicable a replicable set of steps the ability to kind of gamble on it

57:31is where you do start to get to unethical things like markets uh being placed where then people go and actively try to shift the outcome and that i think is the other thing that we're talking about here yeah i totally agree with Renee that a lot of it comes down to just just kind of fundamental media literacy things but specifically at osin the the show your work thing i think you know anyone trying to figure out if it's a legitimate osin effort or not is they they're often will publish a very lengthy methodology and you can see step by step and so it could be replicable and also this just more of a like humility and just a some recognition of the limitations of what they're doing and corroborating multiple data points instead of just saying like drawing one very authoritative sounding conclusion from a single video like no one who's actually trained in osin would actually do that and then they told that a lot of the more legitimate accounts essentially have their own beat you know there's the guy who tracks shipping and he knows shipping knows which ships there are and he is very knowledgeable and he doesn't really go beyond that lane

58:32because a lot of osin is uh it looks easy or it looks a lot easier than it actually is it takes a lot of technical knowledge um and a lot of like just you know subject matter expertise um that is often not displayed in in you know the end product and when we did investigations um at SIO like we know early on in 2019 we found some pages my colleague Shelby Grossman who teaches a great osin class herself we found some pages that we thought were Wagner group right so you made a progression operating in Africa we did a whole big internal investigation we did reach out to the platforms again responsible disclosure um hey you guys is what we're seeing what do you think this is right so the attribution is done jointly and then before publication I absolutely reached out to Bell and Kat and I was like hey I just want I want another pair of eyes on all of this right and you reach out to a bunch of different as many different people as you can possibly get uh honestly who have the time or bandwidth to look over your work and make sure that you're not going to put out something that's just going to be wrong or embarrassing or if you're going to mention somebody

59:32right if you're going to attribute an account to an operation you're making a real statement there right you're saying this is not what it seems to be this is not authentic sometimes it was a real person attached to that they're using their real name and you're saying this is linked to this other thing and and I think in order to do that right exactly and there's so many risks that go you know you would be so stressed before the night before the report comes out you're just like you read every sentence five thousand times I can't even tell you so watching people just yolo it is kind of remarkable to me the other thing that's been really really bugging me is is these tweets that I'm sure a lot of people have seen from polymarket or mostly it's mostly polymarket sometimes call she I think that there's there they're tweeting like there are newswire with also you know breaking and then some very just one sentence a very simplified version of something that probably actually did happen but it's there's no attribution there's no source there's no further context it's just a single statement and then they follow it up with a reply tweet that's like here are the grand odds for this thing that's related and it's just it

1:00:33seems like very very very toxic and then you look at the numbers that these tweets do and it's like in the thousands and sometimes over a million views and um doesn't seem good yeah I mean it strikes me as kind of like the like a version of mass kind of wave version kind of the inshitification process and the court court I think it's Cory doctoros like term right whereas the whole idea is like you had at least some of these platforms like tick the pizza one that I think you use as a really compelling example Tyler like did note an interesting correlation and documented it and was like maybe a data point like maybe it's not 100% right nobody saying anything is 100% trend but like made it a point then it got popular to the point that people in even a role made her talking about it then it started getting a lot of clicks and then it wanted to make money off this clicks uh and then all of a sudden you start getting banner ads and these polymarket input and it becomes by the way potentially less effective and it's trumpeting its own effectiveness much more probably because it needs more clicks and needs more money that it's this whole incentive structure like you talk about Renee about what actually delivering it is but the the the challenge I do I do feel like there's

1:01:34like fundamentally like a real difficulty that I'm curious about what the era of AI and other things dragging this will actually uh maybe this easier or harder about verifying the the even the methodology like the credibility that you all tied to which is that a lot of people aren't in a position to actually assess the the methodology like effectively right you actually need a level expertise to even do that I'm like reminded of how have you guys ever been to the museum addressing technologies like my favorite place in the world in Los Angeles it's like a museum dedicated to oddities in theory but it's really I think like a big examination of like the structure construction of knowledge and authority and like how they relate because it presents everything as like a museum so it feels very authoritative and it's presenting these completely out of any things like a bat that can fly through a wall and in that particular exhibit about this bat that can omely fly through a wall it gives you this like very old school long dry boring I remember being like a deep German accident I'm not sure that's 100% right like description of the methodologies these naturalists pursued in studying this bat in the details of the bat and then like eight minutes

1:02:35in or something I think I'm exaggerating but like a good way into this recording more than any normal person ever listen to says and then the bat flew through the wall and you're like oh okay okay like I have no way of knowing if that's true it has all the outward indicators of authority right it's in a museum it has this like fancy scientific voice describing this what sounds like a reasonable methodology to a layman but it's a real challenge like do you really like what does AI mean for this environment like does it mean on the one hand it means the how you can gather and synthesize all these things does it also mean we can stress test it a lot more effectively or at scale like is is that actually a spot where AI maybe real virtue in a way that doing things at a scale and effectiveness that like laypeople just can't meaning do mean using AI tools to do the investigations like for one thing that's interesting there's certain aspects like geolocation and other areas where you know I will occasionally ask an AI to tell me like what's happening in this picture where is this what where would you where would you guess this is just again not because I'm going to use it in a professional full follow through thing but I'm just interested in where the

1:03:36capabilities are at a given moment tracking where your children are I understand we all need to know no it's actually it's also you also want to know like which ones are good right who's who's got the best you know the best best technology for doing these sorts of things then there are actually the rise of AI detection companies that are trying to that offer services that will tell you if something is AI or not those are an interesting mix also I think because you have both false positive problems and false negative problems and the resulting challenges confidence I think teaching people that there are that there's sort of like a confidence interval here that these are not actually binary determinations a lot of the time it's giving you a guess right this is how likely we think this is we did a project looking at fake faces on LinkedIn and tracking and tracking a network of inauthentic accounts on LinkedIn they were AI generated accounts and we partnered with a detection company and we're like this is here's our list of profiles we believe to be

1:04:39inauthentic for the following reasons can you run through these run through these these images right and give us back the basically the assessments and they come back as scores that's that's how we're giving that information so when you have these detectors that just say to the public AI or not AI I think it's actually obscuring it's it's trying to make it simple but in making it simple it's actually obscuring some of the information that is actually most useful to people who are doing serious analysis which is how confident are we actually in this and that is a real a real issue because the other problem though is that people do want to know and you're starting to see this phenomenon up you know the at GROC is this true right and their at GROC is this real at GROC is this AI right which is basically trying to use GROC to do again the thing that I was talking about which of these models are adept at detection and the answer is like honestly not very many of them so so they're using the tools that they have available to them but they're not the tools that are right for the job then and you know what else is binary the the outcomes of betting on prediction

1:05:40markets and so that also like throws it in there too like you need to know yes or no did this and that happens so that there can be a payout or not and yeah it's a really fascinating space and one that intersects with our work in all sorts of ways I'm sure we're going to have opportunities to revisit it we are out of time for this week's episode but this would not be rational secret if we did not leave you with some object lessons to ponder over in the weeks to come Tyler what did you bring for us this week I brought a shameless plug I've been working on a podcast series with our friends at goat rodeo and the Atlanta journal constitution that is finally out the third episode came out on Tuesday March 24th it's a series so there's a few more episodes in store it's called who blew up the guide stones yeah you can check it out any podcast platform or a jc.com slash guide stones I could say from personal experience that I saw Tyler take physical ailments in the form of poison ivy infestations I think and bedbugs that assorted other ailments that we mostly docked in here on our absolute security in the travails of recording this podcast so

1:06:43it is well earned and there's a lot of blood sweat and tears going into it on Tyler's behalf if not others and among other friends of the law fair family at goat rodeo so really excited I've just checked out the first episode it's great it's a great lesson I've looked forward to the rest of the series so definitely check that out Molly what did you bring for us this week so yeah the prediction market stuff in the bedding I mean my understanding is that 90% of the volume is sports bedding but obviously a lot of what we've seen that I have found to be distressing and inextremely poor taste is voting on stuff like when we'll be boner on and so I brought this this old like vintage don't ask why I have it strategic air command hat that says nukum till they glow it says more than that too it says and use their asses for runway lights I increasingly think you live in a very esoteric tgi fridays because you have a variety of like weird household objects that you're bringing object lessons and I do it this is why I keep having you on Molly because I'm

1:07:45eventually gonna run out of part of cool household object if lying around unless you're speed ordering these on amazon or something no I am I'm simply going down to the war room and making them and bringing them up like I've done genuinely what I'm doing this is that but anyway I think it captures both the kind of vibe of oh let's bet on the end of the world and let's bet on people's lives and devs and also perhaps the sort of administration attitude toward let's show how big and strong we are by starting a war in Iran yeah fair enough fair enough oh well since we've been talking about gambling I thought I would throw in I'm gonna throw in a more normal recommendation I'll throw in a local one just got in a local one that's not useful for other folks the more normal recommendation although I think this piece has got a lot of play so I feel a little ridiculous making my address mystery this is of course I think a piece of open dog about the mk copins piece about sports gambling which is very a pro of this particular conversation uh suckers the title it's actually not I always thought I got it through my little social media is my years

1:08:47of gender to gender gambler but I guess suckers a former title formal title and I pulled up this in the Atlantic uh it talks about how he spent a year doing sports gambling on the Atlantic's time uh and ultimately came out concluding that he was essentially addicted to sports gambling uh I always said this article by every living person I know because I occasionally dabble in sports gambling for the record very small stakes not that often actually I didn't even do it once this past season but the last few seasons I did a little bit but you know it is uh it is uh you know not a great story about this phenomenon gambling that is now not just about sports but about all sorts of things in our lives I will repeat the joke I told my wife when she emailed us to me which is that what he didn't understand is that year two is where your luck really kicks in uh but uh but not not true not actually true uh it's a really interesting piece worth checking out about the broader phenomenon uh for my local recommendation uh I realized I don't think I've actually said this as well my favorite places in DC so I'm gonna throw it out there just so a local business that I went to five times for some reason last week and a half uh that I really really value and that is the best bakery I've ever been to which is here in Washington DC called Saloo S.E.Y. L.O.U. over on 9th Street it's phenomenal I don't know why I used to live right next to it didn't

1:09:52go nearly off and enough now I live how I run this halfway down the city and I still go there all the time I went five times this past week it's phenomenal it's great for every possible occasion breads pastries whatever you got they got pizza on Wednesday nights that's phenomenal definitely check it out if you're in the DC area uh so I'll throw a little love towards Saloo Saloo uh you know I'm a I'm a I'm a beloved customer uh and you're have a great special place in my heart I feel a little bad I haven't thrown you a recommendation here on the podcast I'm on all my other local haunts here in DC in the past and with that Renee I'll turn it over to you what do you have for us this week? Mine are so late I'm in a hotel room in Portland right now I literally like I could show you a pillow. Nothing important that way. Well it's a very hip city. It is it's very hip I'm gonna go outside and find myself some donuts after this it's lunch time here and I was in that I was in Madison for the last couple days I had a brandy old fashioned for the first time that was very interesting that was my yes I've never had one of those before but um no I feel like I've been um I've been working on work stuff the only the thing that's been dominating in our house that my kids have been texting me about non-stop is like at the New York Times pushed me an entire

1:10:53like six article series on this was like the uh the BTS reunion in Seoul the the giant kpop concert that happened and so I am on the road getting delused with kpop concert clips from my children the stray kids dominate movies and theaters and live streaming the BTS one is coming so yeah between uh work being on the road and um and then this uh little glimpse into family life that's really all I got. Hey we'll take it we'll take it what what lies ahead for any of us with small children perhaps as a big kpop future uh that is fine that is fine these 100s is getting me a base into it. Well regardless that brings us to the end of this week's episode rash security is of course a production of law fair so be sure to visit law fair media.org for our show page for links to fast episodes for our written work and the written work by their law fair contributors and for informational law fairs other phenomenal podcast series while you're at it be sure to follow law fair and social media wherever you socialize your media be sure to leave a rating review wherever you might be listening and be sure to sign up to become a material supporter of law fair on patreon for an ad free version of this podcast among other special benefits

1:11:55for more information visit law for media.org slash support our audio engineer producer this week was me of me and our music as always was performed by Sophia Yann and we were once again edited by the wonderful Jen patia on behalf of my guests Molly Tyler and Renee I am Scott our Andersen and we will talk to you next week until then goodbye with almost half a million customers and over a trillion dollars of secure payments bill isn't new to intelligent finance it's the proven way to simplify bill pay and maximize cash flow want to learn more visit bill dot com slash proven for a special offer