¶ Mark Lanier & Rahul Ravipudi join the Chuck ToddCast
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get covered today with life insurance through Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos dot com slash chuck that is e t hos dot com slash chuck. Application times may vary and rates may vary. So in March, and as I talked about at the time, we got two what could be landmark verdicts the big tech companies. One was in New Mexico and another was in law Los Angeles.
And the one in Los Angeles got a lot of attention because this was the first one that talked about that where the where the where the lawsuit was about the product themselves, not the content on social media platforms, but the actual social media platform itself.
So there was no.
Hiding behind Section two thirty, which is essentially all about you know, having no liability.
For what's published on their platforms.
But this was a lawsuit where Meta loss because a
¶ Civil litigation is doing more to rein in big tech than government
jury found them essentially guilty of creating an addictive platform. And many people have described this really as the big Tobacco moment for social media. This will be the first of many. This is this is a was considered a Bellweather case officially. So what this means is that this, along with about seven or eight other cases, once they're all decided, they will be used to help decide thousands
¶ You can't fight big tech without an army of lawyers
of other lawsuits that are potentially brought against, whether it's Meta, snap, TikTok, you name it there. I'm sure I've butchered some of this, But to get into some more details on this, I've got the two lead attorneys from that ground baking decision in Los Angeles, Mark Lanier and Rahul Rapaputi are joining me now to just talk about the cases, talk about the cases are going to be trying in the next few months, maybe years, and find out how long is this going to take?
Right? If you go back into the world of.
Big tobacco, these are lawsuits that started in the eighties. I guess the first one maybe even started before that, but we really didn't get the big settlement and the big regulation that came to be when government finally responded until the nineties. This stuff takes years, possibly decades. And so with that, let me bring up my guests, Rahul Mark, good to see you.
Good to see you too, Chuck, and I'll light Mark to this off because Mark was lead trial counsel on
¶ Meta & Youtube found liable by jury of negligence & punitive conduct
this and Ud.
You're on the next one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Well Mark, go ahead.
And look you heard my little mini intro there.
I just was trying to trying to set the table a little bit, and I guess the question is, you know, look, I've got my own you know, I uh, you know.
Sometimes, you know, why do we have civil litigation?
Because government can't always tackle everything, and sometimes government needs help identifying things they should be regulating. And this is where I think civil litigation comes in. And this is a we've all been demanding some better accountability on big tech, and sometimes you don't get it from government, you get it from lawsuits.
Yeah, and I got to tell you, you do not fight the gargantchewan that is Meta and Google without a substantial army. And so Raoul, it's nice to call me lead counsel. That that's that's a misnomer. That's maybe court language. But the bottom line is is Raoul has been chasing this forever. In a day, he let me do some of the more fun stuff while he kind of helped tell me how to do it. We had other lawyers there, two of my daughters. We had probably thirty or forty
people in this fight. Because this, I think is one of the most important cases that America will see for the first fifty years of the twenty twenties or the two thousands that we're in. This is the tip of a spear. And Raoul can say it better than me
¶ How did you push back on the narrative of "parental challenges"?
because he's been in it much longer than I have. But it was a brutal war we were in.
Chuck, let me describe this one case because I'll tell you why I have connected with it so much. My daughter's twenty two, and in this case of yours, Kayley, who is with It's all the name that is going to be referred to as she's twenty, and I just want to outline some things here because I'm going to be out us with you on the other side of outlining it. So Kaylee begins using YouTube at age six,
begins using Instagram at age nine. She had two hundred and eighty four videos on YouTube that she had posted before. By the end of her time in elementary school, I assume that's fifth grade being designed here. She testified that she stopped engaging with family. She began suffering anxiety and depression at approximately age ten, was later clinically diagnosed for both developed body dysmorphia. She attributed constant exposure to beauty
filters and social comparisons on Instagram. Reported suicidal tendencies as
¶ Parents aren't equipped to control kids social media addiction/use
her struggles deepened. Look, all all of us had had parents of young girls the sort of height of the Instagram, the initial Instagram boom and snap, and I'd watch it with my own daughter, and look, we would intervene every once in a while, get more involved, make sure she was distracted, and all these things. So I've looked at
this because I lived this right. I didn't live I thankfully didn't have a job this addicted in either sense, But I live this because you know where I'm going to go here next mark, which is this debate about? And I'm sure Meta in their pushback, said, hey, you know there should have been more parental involvement here, So let me start there. I just described what it was.
¶ Addiction in children is an irreparable harm, brain is rewired
How did you push back on the idea that this was parental challenges not about Meta and Google.
I've decided there's not a parent on the planet who has the wherewithal to stand up against these algorithms in these powerful social media addiction platforms. There's just not. So you take her mother for example, her mother would not let her download Instagram on her phone, but Katie figured out a way to do it anyway. Because all of her classmates were on it, she wanted to fit in. Her mother put time limits on her phone, but Kaylee figured out a way around it locked her phone up
in the kitchen at night. But Kaylee would wait for her mother to go to sleep and she would go get the phone and she would get back on it. There's not a parent in the world that can handle and do this right. And the sad part is Meta
¶ Meta's own internal research documents were damning
not only knew that, but they took advantage of it because Meta did this study that showed that especially children who come from homes that are broken, where the money's not there, where the resources aren't there, where.
The mayor's one parent, not two.
Single parent trying to work a job and raise three kids, which was Kaylee's situation. The company Meta knew they were more prone and likely to get addicted and to get hurt by it.
The other thing about it, though, to add to what Mark said, is when you're dealing with addiction and addiction and children, it is an irreparable harm. And so there's a rewiring of the brain that happens, and it happens so much faster and with so much potency in a child's brain than an adult's brain. And the internal research that Meta did, they did studies and they found, hey, once a kid's addicted, if a parent gets involved and tries to intervene, it actually leads to more social media
use for that child. So there's no safety measures that
¶ Without guardrails, tech companies race to the bottom for engagement
can be done once the child's addicted. There's no intervention by the parents that can be done. The damage is already done and it's too late. And that's that's some of the stuff that lights were shined on the internal documents in these cases to show what's really going on inside.
Let's talk about those, because I mean these internal meta documents to me are this is the I mean, this had this was the gold as far as you're concerned, be able to like, hey, don't trust our experts on this. This is not like a case where you had to get your own expert witnesses in your own expert analysis. You just had to say, hey, here's what you did. Is this from all those leaks over the last few years or was this due to discovery that you were able to force them to show this stuff.
This was discovery. The leaks helped us conduct more discovery, got it to kind of pinpoints some issues. But all
¶ Tech companies behaved just like big tobacco, knew harm was real
of this was through countless, countless documents. And this was a true in the technology era. You talk about finding needles and haystacks, exponential on that.
So this is like finding out the tobacco companies found out, you know, did studies noting that nicotine was addicted.
Exactly, except it's not just one study, it's dozens of studies. It's hundreds of studies. And so when you talk about the number of smoking that exist in this case against meta YouTube, TikTok and snap, it's unbelievable. And what it really showed was that these companies, without any guardrails, it's a race to the bottom. Whatever it is they can do to maximize the attention economy and take the largest
market share. If a competitor is doing something that's harmful to kids, they'll do it, and they'll do it with more potency just so that they can maximize their market share.
Uck kids, If I can see Raoul said, he said the smoking guns. He's making a really astute pun there, because these companies actually did have smoking guns in this sense. The company said, you know, we're saying publicly there's no addiction. We're saying publicly there's no problem. We're saying publicly there's no harm, just like tobacco did, when internally our studies
¶ Former tech employees called out safety practices at trial
show that there are. And then these documents say, one day people are going to see this and they're going to know we are big tobacco, we are the tobacco companies. So they are truly smoking guns that we found.
You had some leaks to you know, was there how many times did you have to go back at meta to say no, I think you have this surface this. I mean, how did you have to pull it out of them. Did they eventually just sort of like realize that it's all going to leak if and it's worse if it looks like they're hiding or what was your sense?
Well, everything's under probably the most onerous protective order. And so these hundreds and thousands of documents that we have, we've only been able to scratch the surface of showing them in trials because of the limited time we have for trial presentation. So there's so many more that are
¶ How did you prove addiction at trial?
going to see the light in these next sets of Bellweather trials, which hopefully will have a large impact on how people act and how these social media companies act. The whistleblowers are so unbelievably important because what ends up happening is documents say one thing, and they're crystal clear on what they say. Witnesses come in, they try their
best to whitewash it. But when you have a former company employee, a high level person, somebody like Arturo Behar, who was the probably the most knowledgeable safety expert within Meta or within the tech industry as a whole, coming out and calling out all of the internal practices and really the mindset at Meta of profits at the expense of child safety's that's something that has real impact.
You know, it's interesting.
I think the hardest thing to prove is addiction, especially if it's not an addiction that we're okay, a drug addiction or an alcoholic alcohol addiction.
¶ Proved the companies deliberately made products more addictive
We kind of get that, and.
We're sort of we're sort of accepting the premise that gambling can create an addiction, and we're going to have that that that debate is starting, and I think, you know, the question is going to be same thing, right, there's predatory tactics that the that the these sports gaming mobile things are using, et cetera. What is the definition of addiction you guys used in this trial.
Well, we put on the stand the doctor that I considered the greatest expert in the land on addiction. She heads up the clinic. The section on addiction at Stanford
¶ Endless scroll, autoplay and slot machine science used to trap you
Medical School names doctor Anna Limkey. She wrote Dopamine Nation bestseller Addiction, and she uses what she called the four seas. But what it really boils down to is this is someone compulsively using something where they cannot stop using it, even when it's to the detriment of their health or their relationships. You've got to have those elements in some
way that you define them. Someone cannot stop using something even when it's destroying them their health or their relationships, and that's an addiction.
What could you feel like you could point to mask this, were you able to prove that they actually Instagram at times made things more addictive, not less addictive.
Aout a doubt, without a doubt. And Raoul may have better insight on this than me. But the things that I thought really stuck out to the jurors, or the fact that they developed these features like endless scroll, and they have features here in the US that they don't have overseas, so they'll ignore the age of the user. They will sometimes not even ask for the age. YouTube you can get on YouTube Maine and never be asked what your age is. You can do those shorts until
¶ Platforms make it hard to access or find safety features
you've gone through them all, which we showed would take something on the order of three hundred and sixty eight years of twenty four hours a day, and still you wouldn't get through it all because they're adding millions a day. So they put an endless scroll, they put auto play where it plays automatically. They put a finger swipe because it's like a slot machine where you do something physical and you get a change. You slot machine science. They
sculpted the algorithm to trap you to be sticky. They set any of the features that might stop addiction into a mode where no one can access them reasonably.
So you need an example of it.
Okay, so you've got a chance to turn off an endless scroll feature or where after thirty minutes, it'll say you've been doing this thirty minutes, they're you sure you want to do it? Nobody even knows that feature exists.
¶ Goal of "increasing time spent" is at odds with users well-being
You've got to go navigate all of this stuff to even find it because they don't want you to put it into place. Remember, they only make money the longer time you spend on it. The more time you spend, the more money they make. So they want you. They're an early YouTube document said, quote, our goal is not viewership, it's a addiction close quote.
To think about this, Chuck, And what Mark said is so on point, because why do you have to search for a safety feature and why do you have to search hard for it? And this was a I think a pivotal moment in the trial. Mark asked a witness, can we just get real for a second, when is an addict going to look for a safety feature so
that they can use the product less. So they get you, they get these kids addicted, and then they put this you know, safety feature out there that's unfindable that say, look, we're a safe company, and it really kind of shined a light on who these folks are. But going back to some of the things and the proof, let me just read from you a document from Meta's well being department,
which doesn't exist anymore. Product features that are designed to exploit insecurity or provide a dopamine rush, likes notifications, the pull down to see the infinite scroll, etc. To increase time spent are inherently at odds with well being and take away from people's ability to consciously focus on activities that add value to their lives. That's their internal document talking about all of these design features, and they describe them in two different ways. They call them addictive like
designs and dark patterns. Dark patterns are those things that just manipulate you into doing something you don't even want to do.
Like if a kid is.
¶ Architect for Youtube algorithm was forced to take the stand
Steps off of Meta and Instagram for a bit it's nighttime, and then all of a sudden, their phone lights up and with a notification that's meaningless. Hey, somebody wants to be your friend. Why do you need that notification at one in the morning. Well, once that notification comes, a user then goes back onto the app and then they start using it more for Instead of like ten seconds, now they're thirty minutes to an hour and the sleep
deprivation comes. So an internal document that was used in the trial showed a ven diagram and the dark patterns and the addictive like designs include AutoPlay, end listen roll and all of these notifications. These are their documents talking
¶ Architect proposed changing algorithm for kids, didn't happen
about it.
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¶ TikTok & Snapchat settled, did that clear the way to win in court?
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Go to get sol dot com and use the word podcast that's get sold dot com promo code podcast for thirty percent off. And yes, I too, am a customer. Well, I was at a neighbor party stand.
Outdoor, but it's crawfish boiled. And my neighbor flows all the time.
And I was talking to his father in law, who's I've become friendly with over the years, and he said, you know, I got to stop watching YouTube at night. He goes, I end up, and this is he's in his late seventies, early eighties, and he's he goes, all of a sudden, I'll like about nine thirty, start using YouTube. I look up and it's one in the morning, and he goes and suddenly I'm like, not getting enough sleep.
And he goes and I don't feel right. And this is somebody in there, right, and he's self aware, and yet he said he can't bring himself to turn it off.
And like I said, fully formed human being here.
So, Chuck, that is such a great example because we had on the stand a fellow named Kristos Goudrow, who is one of the principal architects behind that algorithm for YouTube that sucks people in like this. And if it's an adult, it's an adult. But when children who don't have their brain fully developed to understand consequences get onto this, it's even worse because those children who get robbed of sleep now have deficient school performance, they don't learn. As
¶ Plaintiffs had finished discovery before any settlements
Raoul has said, it totally changes their life trajectory. It rewires their brain. Now here's the sad part. Christus Gudrow, who authored that algorithm in a sense, was asked, can't we change some of this for kids? We can get an extra nine thousand hours of sleep for kids just in California alone if we would just make this little alteration. And his answer was, Nah, we're not going to do that.
We're not going to do that. I mean, he's faced with vulnerable children can get nine thousand hours more sleep if you'll make this small tweak and he refuses to do it.
And then just on the mindset of christ Scudrou in particular, he was quoted as saying, it would be great if my kids were on YouTube five to seven hours a day.
¶ Youtube's lawyer argued it's a streaming platform and not social media
And so when you have the lead architect of YouTube with that mindset, you know what's going to happen. Bad things are going to happen. I want to two things happen in your case, guys, and this first one TikTok and snap settled. How no, I mean the jury knows this.
I mean in some ways that settlement you the guilty verdict on Meta and YouTube and medaan Google. I mean, if you're Meta Google, you're probably like, well, thanks for settling, because now you've.
Made it easier.
I mean, am I just am I being too simple minded about this?
I don't think you're being too simple minded, and I'd love to get Rahul's inside into this. But I will say it's a multifaceted diamond because I think it also allows the jury to say, well, we don't need to give all of the damages because they've already gotten some money.
Oh.
It just also allows the jury to say, wait a minute, maybe this is Snapchat and TikTok's fault, because we do see she spend a lot of time on those. How on earth are you going to say it's the fault of.
Meta or it could have you think it could have cut both ways.
Yeah, it scares us. We'd rather them not know that, but it was such news that they knew it.
I guess I just think juries aren't going to distinguish between the for between those four entities the way you both think.
But maybe you know on that check.
I don't disagree with you in the sense that if the jury got to see the evidence as to all four defendants, it's indistinguishable, but.
¶ Despite their protests, Youtube is not like Netflix because of features
One of the things.
In the trial, and we don't know how it would play out and if it would play out differently, but Meta and YouTube they were not blaming Snap or TikTok, and I think if they did, that would be an admission of guilt on their part. Right, So they took the calculated decision of saying, we're just going to try and get people to believe that these platforms are safe as designed, which is a very hard lift on their part.
How much discovery did you get out of TikTok and Snap before they settled? It was part of their motivation to settle, not to produce some documents.
The litigation has been going for over three and a half years. Yeah, so at the time of the first Bellweather trial, all of the discovery has been completed against all four defendants.
You have abbat and they just settled in this case or are they settling.
All cases just in this case? Okay, could you use.
Any of the TikTok or Snap in this or you could have the discovery in there or in this case because they settled, you had to keep it just about Meta and Google.
That's corrected just about meta in Google.
I want to get to something that Google's attorney said after the fact, which is interesting. A Google spokesperson stated post verdict, this case misunderstands YouTube, which is responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site. So well, hey, look,
¶ Exhaustive internal documents refer to Youtube as "social media"
you know this is the old divide and conquer strategy right potentially, but Google's basically and this is sort of I think of Google as a friend of mine was active and.
Been involved this here club for.
Decades, and he used to describe BP as sort of the oil company that apologizes for being an oil company, Like they always like want to be the ones that like, we care about climate change and all this stuff. Google strikes me is that they don't like to be the
bad guy. They always are looking and if you told me Google was going to try to find a way to like, hey, we don't want to be lumped in with Instagram and TikTok and snap and maybe they end up pulling away and changing some of their behaviors sooner than others. Are you getting a hint to that with these next trials that are coming up or not?
I don't think so. And I'll say this that reminds me of an Italian restaurant saying, hey, we serve pizza. You misunderstood it. We're a pizzeria. Well, but for the fact you also have salads, you also have pasta, you also have tiramussou, you also have you know, a complete Italian menu. So no, we're not going to just focus on the pizza you serve. Do they have a video streaming surface, yes, but they also have shorts. They also
¶ How was the experience of cross-examining Mark Zuckerberg?
have all sorts of recommendations, They have lights, they have comments, they have dislikes, they send out notifications, they have endless role, they have auto play. They're not Netflix.
Interesting.
And the thing Netflix is not a social media site in your and they don't qualify for this right.
And the thing that drives me crazy about YouTube in particular is what that representative said, is there forward facing misrepresentation. And it's what I believe got them into the schools. They inject themselves into the schools, and now kid that really young ages are getting exposed to screens and YouTube and YouTube which then leads to exposure to the other social media apps. And what they started as and what they've become with the algorithm and infinite scroll is they
become everybody else. So they wedged themselves in early on with kids under a false premise.
And now there candy cigarettes huh, except that.
They are, and then the candy box became cigarette nicotine in there too, so.
Right right, yeah, Well, I only look, I hear where you guys are coming from, and I don't disagree on how you're describing it. But going forward, what does that tell you that they're going out? They're like, hey, hey, hey, don't call us social media site. It's almost like, hey man,
¶ Zuckerberg couldn't handle some very basic questions about kids
we don't want.
To be we don't want to be labeled that, Like that's terrible.
Yeah, it is a It is sort of saying we're not guilty, but maybe they are. And you can go after beta and you can go out. Please go for it, be my guest.
Yeah. Yeah. The side joke that was running with the lawyer for YouTube in this case is he was trying so hard to say that they were not social media. He was calling himself you YouTube instead of YouTube, and that did not work. And the reason it did not work is because there are exhaustive documents from Google and YouTube s files that call them social media, that refer to them as social media, that speak of their social
media platform. They're apt, they are social media. You know, I can tell you that I'm not a human being, that I'm I'm actually a duck. But you're looking and I've got a birth certificate and I've got you know, I'm a mammal. I mean, they can say all they want to say, but the truth is the truth.
Yeah, I'm just from another YouTube document.
This is the vision.
We aspire to create an app that is addictive. And so, you know, you look at these documents and you look at what their their true aspiration is, and they they can't hide from it, and none of these social media companies can. And then it just begs the question, like what's in a name anyways? You know, it's it's it's obviously a bad moniker to have to be called a social media company, but you can't hide from it by calling yourself something else.
Mark, what was what? What did you?
Uh?
How is your experience across examining Mark Zuckerberg?
Were you nervous? Were you what?
Were you just like chomping at the bed, Like what
¶ What makes this case a "bellwether case"?
was your mindset going into it?
Yeah? I found him rather wooden. You know, he's had media training for hundreds of hours before he testified he had, you know, probably hundreds of hours with his lawyers getting him ready, which really calls out the cross examination question, how many hours of media training do you need to tell the truth? I mean, do you get fifty seventy five hours of media training before you.
Tell your fun? Such a great when did you stop beating your wife? Question?
Yeah?
How many hours of media training doesn't take to tell the truth? Yeah, you know, you're like, there's no answer to that question, thanks a lot.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so it just you know, you don't need media training to tell your kid don't forget your backpack on the way to school. You know, all we need is the truth. And I found that he was prepared for certain questions. What were they?
What did you feel like he was most prepared for? And what were you surprised he wasn't prepared? Or do you not want to No?
No, no, I'm fine saying it. He was clearly prepared for how wealthy he is, because he volunteered an answer that said, you know, but we've set up a corporation to give money to so that it can cure cancer. So we're just really here to cure cancer. But what he couldn't do is he couldn't, you know, for a
¶ Judge used 9 cases to determine facts & conditions for other 3,000
guy who's supposed to be one of the smartest in the world, and certainly in his mind maybe the smartest in the courtroom, he couldn't handle the unusual questions like this, mister Zuckerberg, would you agree with me? There are vulnerable children in the world who don't come from the best homes, whose parents aren't on the top of their game, who don't have all the money, who may have a learning disability, who may not be social misfits. Those vulnerable children are
in the world, right right. They're in America, right right, They're in California, right right, They're in our neighborhoods, right right. And then I said, it seems to me there are three ways we can approach those vulnerable children. One, ignore them outside, out of mind, not not problem. Two, we can help them. We can volunteer at the temples, the churches, the synagogues, the school groups, big brother, big sister, library reading programs. We can go out of our way to
help the vulnerable children. Fair, fair, I said, But there's a third option. We can look at those vulnerable children and see a dollar sign on their back if we trample on them. We can enrich ourselves upon them, we can pray upon them to feed our bank accounts. Now, why didn't met choose option three? And his reaction is, you know, it was, oh, I don't think we did. And I said, well, that's why we've got these documents. Now let's look at them and see if you didn't
do that. And so we started with the documents.
So Raoul bell Weather case. Not everybody understands what this means. So, you know, let me just paint the picture. There's a ton of people filed lawsuits against the big tech companies on some form of this. Right, what is there some twenty three hundred cases, a little over three thousand. Now we're over three thousand cases. So what has happened that put it into a situation where there's a quote bell Weather. So there's three thousand cases. They're not going to hear
all three thousand cases. Correct, Well, I would like to
¶ 8 more trials are upcoming
believe that. But the way the way the court system is set up here in California, thousands of cases are filed, they all end up in front of one courtroom, in front of one judge, and that judge is Carolyn Cole. Here in the Los Angeles Superior Court, and she needs to manage these thousands of cases and try to get them in a position of efficiently getting tried, resolved whatever right. And the way that she wanted to do that is
through a bell Weather trial process. So while all the discovery depositions, documents are being produced, on the other side of it, there's hundreds, if not thousands of plaintiffs with data they're called plaintiffact sheets that are provided so that the judge and the parties can look and go what are the similarities between the claims, the usage, the injuries, et cetera, and then decide what would be maybe representative cases as to what's a a very powerful case and
maybe a little less powerful case and everything in between. And so Judge Cole went through that exercise. The parties then talked about the cases and then selected nine cases that she thought in total would have characteristics that would represent the other two nine hundred and ninety one case.
¶ Companies will likely need to create a settlement fund
And how did she decide in the nine in consultation with defense and plane off here.
Correct, correct, And it's not necessarily by agreement, So.
It's like selection of a jury. You get like no, no, yes, or you.
Know exactly executed. Jury selection is a misnomer. It's just de selection. You're you're left with what's left there.
Yeah, you don't get to pick who you want, but you can eliminate who you really don't want exactly exactly.
And so it's really in the judges call on these cases,
¶ Similarities and differences between big tech & tobacco companies
and that's how she picked up.
And these are all in Los Angeles because the companies are based in California. Correct, So these I believe Kayley was not a Californian.
Right, She was a Californian, she was from she go up north.
Yeah, okay, so she is a Californian. But there are cases where it won't just be California, right.
Like the next trial for Russell is he's a Florida resident, but it's going to be here in La Superior as well.
Yep, this case from start to finish to call long.
January twenty seventh to March twenty seventh, it feels like somewhere right around there. So about two months.
And well that was because you got a trial date.
How long did it take to like when did you know, when did this all get formalized with discovery and all that stuff.
Oh three and a half years, So three almost four years.
But we don't expect you to have to have three years for each each subsequent next case.
All of the cases got worked up together for these bell Weather cases, so the next eight cases they could go back to back to back to back if need be. So we're going to show up in court tomorrow and Judge Cole is going to set the trial date for Russell's case, and it.
Could be this will be by the time this there is probably be later in the month, but we're we're we're taping on four to twenty on April twentieth here, so we'll we'll just to give people a date stamp, yeah on this.
So eight more trials, so the judge need to get the verdicts in all nine before she starts characterizing the rest of the three thousand.
I don't know.
That's I think a moving target as to how she sees things and whether there's enough information to start getting the cases out. Her mindset is what she wants to do is get enough rulings on all of the unique issues so that there are essentially no unique issues that
¶ Companies achieved a critical mass of kids using the product
require the knowledge base of the entire Section two thirty work up and everything else, and then it can just get sent to other court rooms in La Superior and have multiple trials going at the same time. Do you expect jury trials for all three thousand I don't.
Yeah, now, I think once there's a pattern established of who's going to win, who's going to lose, and which ones do you win and which ones do you lose. Realistically, the companies that they don't need this media publicity. They need to figure out how to get about making their money, not spending it.
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¶ Are companies pricing in penalties/settlements as "cost of doing business"?
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That's thirty dollars off your first box and free croissants for life. When you visit wildgrain dot com slash podcast, or simply use the promo code podcast at checkout. This is a sponsor I absolutely embrace, so use that code. I guess the question is you look, I mean, we're all just spitfalling here. But if you win the first four,
¶ Settling these cases would be a PR boon for these companies
one would assume they start to think about do we need to create a settlement fund and just settle them all?
No, I certainly agree with that.
Yeah, what's the model? What what is Where is this like tobacco? And where is this not like tobacco?
Well, it's like tobacco in the sense that they created an addictive product by design.
Okay, like the intentionality, So there was it was intentionally addictive and they knew it. You know, it's not something they made and they found out it was addictive after the fact.
And that's that'd be a slight difference here, right.
You guys are contending they they wanted to build it to be addictive and they accomplished their task.
I would just spray with addiction by design.
Yeah, okay, all.
Right, And you know some of it I think is irresponsible deployment of different features as well. So there may be some circumstances where they just blindly launched certain features and then said, hey, we don't know if it's safe or not, but let's just try it out and our test our test sample will be the entire child possible.
That's negligence.
That's it's negligible, yes, exactly. But then getting to the next step, for all of the features that are part of this case, they knew for a very long time,
¶ Preview of the upcoming trials against the tech companies
So they either intentionally launched it knowing it's addictive, or launched it negligently then found out through their internal research that it's addictive and did nothing about it. Either way gets to the same same point, which is intentionality in the way that they did it. Then you've got concealment. And this is to me, the destruction of an entire
generation of kids. And you know, I've got three boys twenty seventeen and fourteen and looked at these things and looked what they were doing and the harm that they could inflict, and it's created irreparable harm. And so what ends up happening is through the concealment, they're allowed to get a critical massive kids using social media. I think it's almost ninety percent of teens are using it now. And then what do you do next. It's like, you
can't just renavigate a battleship. Turning that shit is so hard to do and take so many layers, So now they've got a market share and are profiting off of it and creating this situation where it's very hard to undo the damage and to change the narrative so that kids stopped using it, so that they start using safe practices and are forced to use the safe practices. And so with each passing day, and Chuck you asked about the four trials and whether they'd finally see the writing
on the wall. I don't know, because they're pretty happy lining their pockets with every passing day. And the cost of this litigation is less than the profits that they.
You're describing the Ford, the infamous Ford Pinto really is trial right where Yeah, where the Ford Pinto was. This for some of my younger folks, was this economy car that when it got rear ended, it's had a design flaw and if it got rear ended the wrong way, it basically blew up the gas tank and it just had this explosion. And Ford knew it, and they made a calculation of what it would take to fix it
¶ What are some good guardrails congress can put on the tech companies?
after the fact, and the recall versus settling claims that were filed, and it would be cheaper to settle the settle the file claims.
Yep, yeah, are you sure.
We're not in a situation like that already with with with these social media companies.
I don't think we are. And and I'll give you my reasons, and and.
Well thinks we are. The two of you disagree on this, I guess, well, and we may.
And if so, I think he's probably right and I'm wrong, at least historically. I'll put my my chips on him. But uh uh, so much of these companies depend upon PR m hm and uh. You take Google for example. Google wants YouTube in every classroom. And Google is going to have trouble if they repeatedly go to trial and get hammered with juries saying they've done this maliciously, They've
done this intentionally. They're destroying children. And then Google goes and says to the school district, hey, let us be on all your school computers to enhance learning. That's a that's a left hand and right hand. And the kind of money that these companies make, settling this would be a boon to them. It would send their stock through the roof, it would give them PR pluses, and they care deeply about the PR. I think they care more about the PR than just.
The part what does that tell you you think settlement's coming.
I think it will at some point. I like your
¶ An age limit of would do good, as would scrapping Section 230
try four cases, maybe it's eight, you know, maybe it's fifteen. But somewhere down the road the settlement will.
Now you guys, this happened to I mean it was like back to back days. We had the trial and New Mexico was brought by the state government and you're going to have states and that was a separate thing. With tobacco, right, you had private litigation. I remember to me that I remember the first one on tobacco that really sort of got everybody's attentions. I think it was the flight attendant lawsuit.
Right.
It was just sort of like, hey, they had no way of avoiding secondhand smoke. They couldn't do it, and look what happened. And then I think blackjack dealers were next. Like it was like those were the two. You couldn't dispute that they were sort of trapped with secondhand smoke
on that front. So is is there a corollary here? Yeah, private versus public And then the state ags came in and then they did it as sort of harmful to their You know, what is the distinction between a private litigation for a class that's harmed in this case teens versus what the state ags are doing.
Well, you ought to answer this because you've got your hands in pies pretty deep.
Yeah, So there's kind of multiple buckets going here. There's going to be a school district trial that's happening very soon. And then you've got the New Mexico ag who brought that case and it was really for statutory damages for violation of a state statute and had a lot to do with grooming, exploitative material and exposure to children, and that led to five thousand dollars per event and ultimately
¶ A nighttime curfew and removing the endless scroll also has benefits
got to three hundred and seventy five million. And so, speaking not as the lawyer, but as a human being, I think it's fantastic that all of these verdicts are coming with different lenses. So you're looking at the conduct related to harming children through exploit child exploitative material, sexual content, grooming pedophiles, awful off full stuff. And then you've got verdicts that are coming through the impact to children directly
through addiction, awful awful stuff. And then you're going to have public nuisance by way of the school districts and how it's negatively impacting education because it's just permeated the school district. That's terrible as well. And I think all of those things, to Mark's point, are going to create a significant negative pr for these companies and at the same time creating awareness where things are just going to get shut down and there's school districts now, and there's
parents in every community that are chuck. I think even you too, right, don't want you know.
My local community, we're starting to see homemade signs that
¶ There's no law mandating 25 years of age to rent car, industry imposed it
say tell Arlington Public schools to get to get iPads out of the class.
Yeah.
Yeah, And that's a grassroots movement that now expanding across the country. And these verdicts have led to that this litigation, which started three and a half plus years ago. After it started, the US Surgeon General came out with his report on how harmful social media is. So it's coming from all angles, which I think is a great thing.
Mark and Rowe play pray regula, pray regulator for me here. Okay, let's assume I have a few members of Congress listening to this interview. I'd like to think I do, and
¶ Companies might self-regulate after losing lawsuits
they want to do something, and they want they've been we've all been dying, Like, what is some good structure that could be put around these tech companies? You know, I could get extreme here. I think that all of this stuff should be banned to twenty five. I believe in that for sports gambling. I believe in that for marijuana usage. I believe that for alcohol usage. That I'm a believer. I believe all of the science that says
the brain, especially among young men versus young women. Even but still, the twenty five is when you know your sort of fully formed brain. So, and I will note rental car companies, insurance companies have made it so there's a reason they don't let anybody under twenty five rent a car without paying through the nose on that front. But let me set that aside actual regulatory ideas. You know, is it the specifics that lawmakers should target to limit social media addiction?
Well, I really like the idea of limiting it. The problem is, I think in America that may be dead on arrival because the power of these companies to influence and lobby is.
¶ These companies won't do the right thing unless forced to do so
Look, we have a drinking age of twenty one, We have tobacco. You know, I'm not saying it's perfect. You know, but we have put age requirements, we have done some things. We usually wait till it's done, all sorts of destructive behavior before we do it, but we do eventually do it. And I guess what could be done without getting it thrown out in court due to the First Amendment.
Well, I think I like your idea of putting age limits on it. Australia is but thirteen and that made
¶ Expectations for the appeals process?
a big deal out of everything. But I'm thinking thirteen mercy, go for twenty one, and go for twenty five. You add to it. You know, if I were a legislator, I would get rid of Section two thirty right now. These companies can put porn on there to anybody at any age and you can't hold them accountable. And I would get rid of two thirty protection for these companies
in a heartbeat. The sad part is these companies have written their own legislation as it's like Protect the Kids Act Kids and it does, Yeah, all it does is give them free get out of jail cards. And so you don't want to hand over police to the industry. You got to do something roll I.
Don't know, so just some real simple things. So I agree one hundred percent with mark. They need to be accountable and responsible and repealing Section two thirty is a part of forcing responsible behavior on the part of these social media companies. But looking at as crazy as it sounds, China, okay, TikTok in China, it's called dough yin And here's what they have. They have age modeling, so there's age verification
to make sure that kids are treated like kids. And as part of that, if you use it for just several minutes, you're forced to rest. You have to get off of it. It won't work anymore. They have a forty minute daily limit. After forty minutes you're done nighttime curfew. You can't use it at night because you need to get your rest at night. All of the things that oh, even in the endless scroll you know this slot machine
¶ What year do you expect all of these cases to be fully resolved?
effect of just keep swipe, swipe, swipe, It has a it has a lag in between each time you swipe it so that your mind actually doesn't get into that slot machine. Endless reward and intermittent reward system. There's already things that exist in other countries that people know to
be safe practices that can be implemented here. But I really think with technology in particular, there has to be a responsibility shifted onto the companies to continue to be vigilant, and their failure to do so and do best practices is something that has to hit them where it hits them the hardest, which is in their in their shareholder price and their in their bank book. No.
I mean, and this is sort of why I I sort of I keep using the rental car companies as an interesting example because there's no law that says you have to be twenty five to rent a car. You don't, right, Actually you can be younger. It's the rental car companies that won't ensure you unless you're twenty five and won't
allow it to carry over. And I just wonder, like, is you know this is why I always say in a true free market, free system, you have to have private civil litigation or you'll never get you'll never have, you know, be able to have full accountabilities, right because you have government cap regulatory capture with the government that Mark was just describing right now of how they sort of get to write the legislation for the Protect Kids Act things like that. Is there a is there an
¶ A recommendation algorithm should make a platform a publisher
equivalent here? I mean, you guys think if there's an You know, if you extract enough financial pain, they're just going to change because they're tired of losing these lawsuits.
I think too. I think that's what we see. You used four ginto as an example. Very clearly. The financial analysis of how much we lose in a lawsuit was done by Ford, It's done by everybody. What's our exposure? Insurance companies asked the same question. Car rental companies ask the same question that if car rental companies can make more by renting out a car to a twenty year old or an eighteen year old or a sixteen year old,
they do it in a heartbeat. Well, they know financially they're going to lose money, right, And that's what you've got to do with these companies. That's their language.
And the other problem and part of it, candidly, I think that it's going to require the Congress and send it to do something, because what you're going to see is if somebody makes a move to be engaged in a safer, safer practice for children, nobody else is. So let's just say TikTok does something because it's the right.
Thing to do.
And this hypothetical world I'm offering Okay, you think Instagram, Meta YouTube and Snap are going to follow along or are they going to just reap the market share at the expense of TikTok and so people are not better off for it? And uh and so none of these companies are going to consistently do the right thing unless unless there's somebody forcing.
Them to do it.
And your appeal tatop is always application the appeals.
They're going to appeal what happened? Tell me about the appeal process. Do you expect is this gonna you think they're going to do?
Is this through?
So it's federal court, so it's going to go circuit? Then do you expect have to go all the way to spring?
This is actually a state court? Uh? Trial verdict?
So this is a this is a state court even though it's federal.
It's a federal statute that they're asserting as a defense case.
Okay, so it's a state court case. So you expect this to go through the state Supreme Court.
That's that's their intention. And then if it if it ends in the state Supreme Court being affirmed, and I expect they're going to try and get it to the United States Supreme Court.
What would be the what's there? What what what?
Why would they just access it or what's their appeal or have they not filed? What they're why they say the verdict was wrongly wrongly given.
Yeah, So the process is, it starts with emotion for new trial, which has not yet been filed, and then after that's ruled upon, then the appellate process starts through a notice of appeal, and then once the notice is filed, then I think it's either sixty or ninety days than the appellate briefing gets filed, and then only after it's fully briefed, which could take upwards of a year, and then it gets calendared for argument in the Court of Appeal then and so you're probably about a year and
a half ish in before that's actually heard. And then after the Court of Appeal issues it's ruling, which it has a period of time to do, then they can seek review from the United or from the California Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court then hears it, that takes a period of time, and then after that they have an opportunity, there may be an opportunity for them to seek relief from this United States Supreme Court.
So I'm like doing the math in my head twenty thirty twenty thirty two. Like Mark, there's resolution, some resolution ten years okay, And that look tobacco took That's why I was making that. I think the first tobacco cases were in the seventies. I don't remember from early eighties. Like I said, I remember the early flight attendant one when they just got rid of smoking sections and airplanes.
Any of us that were old enough to remember, those were just the most ridiculous, as if you weren't going to have any smoke in rose one through eighteen, but after you know, you know, smoking nineteen and back luck with that all right, Well by then you're going to be well, we'll all be getting Instagram in our brain, right.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, look, technology is something that, as you know, with the AI coming on the heels of this, it only highlights how much we need to be ahead of ahead of it, as opposed to waiting inside.
There are the regulators.
And by the way, on section two thirty, the minute they create an algorithm, they've become a publisher. I don't think section two thirty applies to any other stuff anymore. They've created way too many things. If they have created an accelerant for me to see somebody's content, they're also a publisher.
Yep.
So well, I don't even know for you for Supreme Court.
I mean I have Look, you know, when you decide if something's above the fold and below the fold, you're a publisher. Well, an algorithm is deciding what's above the fold or below the fold. So I don't even think, like I as much as two thirty is a good boogeyman, I think there's I think there's actually still some arguments to be made that it's just Section two thirties null and void.
The minute you create an algorithm. I like the way you think, go for it.
Yeah, well, if it works, then then can I get a free law degree somewhere.
I don't have to say it if it works. If it works, we will come on your podcast and tell everyone this was the Chuck tod podcast.
There it is, there is we created new law, new legal doctrine. Here, Mark and Rahul, this was great. I think there's here's the thing. We like these products. We just don't want them to be predatory. There are good things about them. Just stop trying to like make it twenty four hours of our life exactly.
I mean, I like a good steak.
I don't want it every hour of the day or I'm gonna have a heart attack.
Yeah, and that was our position with the jury. We were very honest. We said, hey, these can be useful tools. We can enjoy these tools, but it doesn't mean that they're allowed to addict our vulnerable children on purpose.
But the good news is this will appear on YouTube, so let's see how well the algorithm does and making sure we get to see all of this. Gentlemen, I learned a lot.
Thank you so much.
Good luck on these cases.