How companies weaponize the terms of service against you

Support for this show comes from Adobe Acrobat. PDF Spaces in Adobe Acrobat is changing the way we're sharing and interacting with files. No more endless follow-ups, no more confusing pings, no more wondering if anyone's even seen your attachment. You can do all that with Acrobat. Keep listening to hear more about PDF Spaces later in this episode, and learn more at adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Brendan Ballew, founder of the Public Integrity Project, and author of the new book, When Companies Run the Courts, which is all about the rise of forced arbitration agreements. Brendan's actually been on the show before. His previous book, Plunder, was all about the rise of private equity in America. And that conversation was among our most popular episodes. Forced arbitration is similarly everywhere in our modern lives. Deep in almost every single terms of service for almost any product you buy or service you use, there's a clause that says, by buying or using the thing, you're giving up your rights to join a class action lawsuit if something goes wrong. Instead, you have to take the company to arbitration, which the company usually pays for. You can see how there's a conflict there. There have been some really high profile cases these past few years highlighting how deeply unfair arbitration clauses can be to consumers. One you'll hear Brendan and I talk about, which we also covered here on The Verge, was the very sad example of a man whose wife died of an allergic reaction after eating at a Disney World restaurant. When the man sued, Disney tried to force him into arbitration instead, arguing that because he had signed up for Disney Plus streaming service, he had waived his right to sue. There was massive public pushback to this, and Disney eventually relented, as you may recall. But there are thousands or maybe millions of other lower profile instances every year where consumers and employees have completely lost their rights to redress if something goes wrong. Brendan's book really delves into how and why we got here. Spoiler, you can blame Antonin Scalia for some of it. But also, most importantly, what we might be able to do about it in the future. One other note, Brendan and the Public Integrity Project are also in the early stages of legal action against Paramount over a possible quid pro quo with the Trump administration and its proposed Warner Brothers acquisition. So we started the conversation by talking about that. This is a really deep episode. It's pretty existential. You'll see what I mean. Okay, Brendan Ballew, When Companies Run the Courts. Here we go. Brendan Ballew, welcome back to Decoder. Good to be here. I'm excited to talk to you. The last time you were on the show, we introduced you as a former DOJ prosecutor in the Antitrust Division. We talked about your book, Plunder, which is about private equity. You've got another cheerful deep dive on the rise of arbitration in America. The book is called When Companies Run the Courts. I really want to talk about the book. I have a lot of thoughts about terms of service agreements and arbitration. But it turns out you're here right after the Public Integrity Project has launched a big new initiative. You filed a lawsuit against Paramount over the Warner Brothers merger. Explain what's going on there. The Public Integrity Project, just to set a baseline, is a new public interest law firm that we're running to raise the legal and reputational cost of corruption in the United States. So in a world where the Department of Justice is not interested in pursuing corruption cases and in some cases may be facilitating corruption, we want to go after the folks inside of government that are being bribed and the folks outside of government that are trying to bribe them. So we brought a number of cases already. We sued the president for approving the illegal sale of TikTok's U.S. assets to various administration allies. We sued the attorney general for failing to disclose fully the Epstein files in violation of the law. And now we are laying the foundation for bringing a suit against Paramount for potentially, at least based on public reporting, the Ellison family discussing with the president and administration officials potentially firing CNN anchors in exchange for regulatory approval of their acquisition of Warner Brothers. You know, that's profoundly troubling, the idea that a company or, you know, billionaires might agree to reshape the media landscape to the president's liking. And so we've made what's called a books and records demand to Paramount to understand what documents the board has about specifically these potential acts of corruption. So they have five calendar days to respond and then potentially we can bring this to litigation in Delaware Chancery Court. Are you the party or are you representing someone who has the right to demand books and records? We are representing two great organizations, the Foundation for Freedom of the Press and Reporters Without Borders, both of whom, you know, represent journalists and, you know, the interest of the free press generally. They're also individually as organizations, shareholders in Paramount and so have the right to demand these books and records. And I should say, this is about a big, you know, huge issue, but the actual thing that's being asked for here is very standard. You know, shareholders ask for this information all the time. So at least on the law, this is a very straightforward request. This strikes me as a very interesting sort of mechanical approach to how to bring corruption to light, right? You're going to find an interested party who is a shareholder. You're going to say, hey, there's these standard practices shareholders have access. Show me the documents that led to whatever deal we're going to get to, and then we can use that to prove that there was some corruption at play. I think that's very clean. Like, I respect the cleverness of it. It strikes me that maybe these guys didn't write down, like, do corruption tomorrow. How do you think that's going to go? Yeah, no, absolutely. And you have the question about, you know, did they write it down? Do the documents still exist? All these sorts of things. I think there really is really interesting public reporting about the actions that Paramount took in its various acquisitions. So when David Ellison was trying to buy Paramount in the first place when he just owned Skydance, there was really interesting public reporting saying that the Ellisons had agreed to a quote unquote side deal with the president to provide millions of dollars in free advertising for causes that he supported to settle a, you know, transparently bogus lawsuit that he had against 60 Minutes and in exchange, you know, potentially get regulatory approval for the Paramount acquisition. So, you know, those are the sorts of decisions that actually a board would have to be involved in. And so it wouldn't be terribly surprising if there actually is some documentation at a high level about this stuff. And, you know, what's really great is this is the stuff that we can surface as private parties. And, you know, what we can get out there in the public record can be enormously important. But the folks who can really get at this information are state attorneys general, you know, because they have what's called pre-complaint discovery. So they can actually demand this information before even filing a lawsuit. And so if we find interesting information, potentially this is the sort of stuff that can empower state AGs to take action here. Let me ask about that a little more in depth because your book is about the court system and how it has generally pushed Americans towards private dispute resolution, private systems of law, and how that's bad. Hopefully you get your books and records and you can move forward with whatever happens next. Is all the emphasis on the states now? Because it doesn't seem like the federal Department of Justice is that interested in it. It doesn't seem like the federal courts are – that seems like chaos in a very specific way. And so just from my perspective, there's the court of public opinion. CBS's ratings are down as they transparently make moves to please Trump. And then maybe a bunch of state AGs are going to say, hey, this is actually against the laws that we are charged with enforcing and that the federal system might have nothing to do with anything. I'd make a distinction there between the federal enforcers and the federal courts. I think you're exactly right that the federal enforcers now controlled by the Trump administration are absolutely indifferent to corporate corruption and in many ways seem to be trying to enable it. You know, you see all these, you know, frankly horrifying examples of, you know, rich people and companies giving money to various Trump allied campaign committees or businesses and so forth and seeing their government investigations dropped, their government lawsuits dropped. In some cases, their criminal prosecutions dropped. Like these are extraordinary, essentially unprecedented actions where people are able to literally buy their way out of the justice system. So I think we live in an era where we absolutely cannot count on federal enforcers to have any interest in going after rich criminals. And in fact, if I can just add to that, you know, there's sort of these individual examples of people buying their way out of the justice system, but at a more programmatic level, the Department of Justice is absolutely dismantling the entire infrastructure for going after rich criminals. You know, they disbanded the tax division, which goes after rich tax cheats. They've kneecapped the antitrust division. They disbanded the klepto capture task force, which goes after Russian oligarchs. So, you know, we're really sort of destroying all the tools that we have for going after rich criminals. Those are the federal enforcers. I will say that there's a difference with federal courts. Now, obviously the Supreme Court is an extraordinarily conservative court that's extremely supportive of this administration. But I can say as a practicing lawyer, you know, the lower courts, I think by and large are appalled by the is bad. And I don't know why they're not more protective of that authority. Yeah, and it's interesting, because when you describe stories of forced arbitration, I think sometimes people often think that you're just making it up because it sounds so lopsided. You know, there are stories of people being compelled into arbitration and then can't escape even when their arbitrator is exhibiting signs of senility or falling asleep during their arbitration and yet their decisions are still confirmed and actually cannot be appealed in court. So why would, you know, quote-unquote real judges sign off on a system like this? Well, by and large, they're taking their cue from the Supreme Court, which beginning in the 1980s really fell in love with forced arbitration. You know, there was this idea that there was this explosion of litigation that was costing big companies millions or billions of dollars, and there needed to be some way to get consumers and employees out of court. And forced arbitration was the way to do that. So the conservative justices, beginning with Warren Burger, but then Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, and so forth, took this little law from 1925 called the Federal Arbitration Act, which was meant to really allow sophisticated companies and merchants to bind themselves into arbitration so they didn't have to go through the headache of going to court. And said, we're actually going to take this law, which is meant for sophisticated parties of roughly equal bargaining power, and we're going to extend it to employees and to consumers, and we're going to extend it to the kinds of contracts that you just mentioned, the sort of click-to-accept, take-it-or-leave-it contracts that we sign every day with companies. That was never the intention of the statute, and it really wasn't supported by the text of the statute either. But I think the conservative justices really saw this as a vehicle to keep certain people and certain kinds of cases out of court, and they were enormously successful in that endeavor. We have to take a quick break. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Adobe Acrobat. The new standard for document sharing is here. With PDF Spaces in Adobe Acrobat, you can land your message every time by bringing together files, ideas, and a personal AI assistant into an interactive experience. What does that mean exactly? It means you can give your clients the full picture with custom intros and audio summaries and give yourself full visibility into who's seen and interacted with your files. It's time to rethink how people interact with your files and give them the visibility they've always needed. You can do that with Acrobat. Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat. Welcome back. I'm talking with Brendan Belup. Before the break, Brendan explained what forced arbitration is and why it's bad. That led us to the rose gallery of conservative Supreme Court justices who have spent decades making it possible. I'm smiling because you devote a chapter each to these judges, these characters who have pushed us towards arbitration in this way. And maybe the most important, and you can disagree, it is a chapter which is Antonin Scalia, who is the most famous textualist in legal history, and he's reading well beyond the law. How did that happen with Scalia specifically? I'm very critical of Scalia, but I always try to give credit, which is, far and away, he is the most fun Supreme Court justice we've had in a long time. Like, he seemed to have a real love of life. There's this very evocative picture, a description of him, typing his opinions on an old computer while drinking black coffee and smoking Marlboro cigarettes and listening to Bach. I mean, it's kind of hard not to be charmed by a guy like that. He's funny. The opinions are funny. There's nothing you can't say anything else about it. They're funny. Exactly. So it's like, I want to both acknowledge that and then also say that the decisions that he had around forced arbitration have had profoundly damaging effects for most consumers and employees. So, you know, one of the key purposes of forced arbitration is to kill class actions. So, you know, a class action is when everybody's hurt in the same kind of way, you can bring one lawsuit instead of hundreds or thousands or millions of lawsuits. And, you know, much if not most of our social progress on the courts has come through class actions. So Roe v. Wade was a class action. Brown v. Board of Education was a class action. And then in the consumer and employee context, you know, you have cases, for instance, of, you know, women who are dying of cancer because of defective birth control. Those are cases brought as class actions or people whose family members all die in a plane crash brought as class actions. Forced arbitration kills this system by requiring people into arbitration and to arbitrate their cases individually. So each person has to bring an individual case. And you can immediately imagine for anything other than the most expensive harms, that makes pursuing a case completely unaffordable. So you think about all those little fees that a bank might have on your bank statement or your cell phone company has. And you're like, why am I getting charged $30 a month for this? This seems like BS. You know, it may well be, but there is no effective way for you to resolve that because you're forced into individual arbitration. You can't join a class action over that $30 fee. All of that is because of Antonin Scalia. So he issued an incredibly important decision in 2011 called Concepcion that said that, you know, however, and this is a legal term, however, quote-unquote, unconscionable a contract like that may seem, so unfair and lopsided to employees and to consumers, federal courts would still enforce those agreements. And there was nothing that a court could do to say, you know, this is so unfair, we're not going to allow this. And that was really because of Scalia. What led him to that result? You know, I don't want to psychologize too much, but I think if you look at his, his judicial work, with the exception of some limited stuff in criminal justice, I think he was always an advocate for the powerful in pretty much any sort of dispute. He was absolutely an advocate for, you know, expansive presidential power, expansive corporate power and so forth. And so oftentimes, you know, he's lauded as this textualist, this idea that somebody whose ultimate fidelity is to the text of the law or to the constitution. And in some cases he was, but when textualism or originalism ran up against, you know, by and large ruling for corporate interests, he almost always dropped the textualism and ruled for the corporations. And I think it's really interesting. Again, one of the things that I really admire about Justice Scalia is I think he is one of the best writers that's ever been on the court. He has very evocative writing. That's very easy to follow. But on a lot of these decisions, the actual legal reasoning is kind of incoherent because he really had an outcome in mind. And so he was trying to figure out a way to get to it. And you see in the, in the dissents from those times sort of pointing out, it's like, this decision doesn't make sense. But time and time again, he was able to rule for the employer, for the company that was being sued by consumers. I mean, I have a lot of sympathy for that. My entire career is masking poor reasoning with jokes. Yeah, don't we all. The reason I bring that up and I ask about it in that way is that, you know, Scalia was writing before pervasive terms of service agreements, right? He was writing before pervasive arbitration. He was writing before a pretty unhappy American public staring at tech companies saying, no, we can just take whatever we want to make AI, right? Something has shifted in the public and the perception of big tech, whatever you want to say, it's an angrier country. It's a more unhappy country. The people feel more exploited. And Scalia would have had to open up his Mac and click 10,000 terms of service agreements. And it just feels like something has changed. Like any justice today, and maybe they're all still in bubbles in the ivory tower and they don't experience what regular people experience. But everyone else feels it. And to just participate in society, you're agreeing to 10,000 contracts every day that you definitely don't read. The legal fiction that anyone has actually read these contracts is like the foundation of the American economy. It feels like we should maybe look at that more thoroughly. No one can negotiate them. And then they change all the time. And all of that, you know, I'm just thinking back to my law school education. I'm like, oh, those are just unconscionable contracts. Like those are contracts of adhesion. Like to literally use my phone, I've entered into some agreement with Apple that no one can negotiate. That seems ridiculous to me. And to participate in society, I must use my phone. So now there's a secondary legal system that is mediating my relationship to the country and the world. And literally no one can look at it. Do you think that that is going to change? Because it doesn't seem that tenable to me. I don't think it's going to change at the Supreme Court, not with a change in personnel. You know, I'm referencing some studies that are a little old now, but you know, if you look at actually how the Supreme Court has ruled for corporations, I believe that this is the most pro-corporate Supreme Court, at least since the 19th century. So I think the Supreme Court rules for the Chamber of Commerce somewhere in the order of 80% of the time or higher. This was before Justice Jackson joined the court. But as I recall, you know, Justice Sotomayor was previously the most anti-corporate justice on the court. act of human existence. And, you know, as profoundly unfair in many ways as our legal system is and probably more unfair than it was a few decades ago, it is vastly better than what we had 60 years ago when we effectively had an apartheid state in the United States or 100 years ago, during the Gilded Age when, you know, we were interpreting our antitrust laws to break up unions, but not corporations and so forth. So, you know, maybe I'm just too captured by my own profession, but I sort of see it as a cost of doing business in any sort of human society where we're all flawed. Yeah. I think I just, I look at it from, I don't know, maybe I just want the system to be more elegant, right? That's your Silicon Valley background. Yeah. Right. That's just, I'm a tech person. I'm like this computer, it makes no sense. Like you should make a different, better computer. You know, I think terms of service agreements should be illegal. Like fundamentally, I think they are unconscionable contracts. I think you can point to forcing people into arbitration is one element of them being unconscionable. You can point to just the fact that no one can negotiate them. And the bald truth that literally no one reads them is a problem. Like, I think it is bad that a huge amount of the American economy is predicated on no one reading the contract at scale. Like you should probably fix that problem in some way. And if you take a step back and you, at least for me, it's like, how, how would you fix that problem? Well, the state, which represents all of us, should negotiate the contract. It should write a privacy law. Yeah. Right. And that should be the foundation of whatever contract comes next. But it should pre-negotiate the floor. And we, as you point out, maybe Congress seems incapable of pre-negotiating the floor. Yeah. You know, and maybe I'm taking this in an odd direction, but I think you're exactly right. And in a lot of ways, our government's made that literally harder to do, like, back in the 90s, Montana passed a law to try to make it, if you had an arbitration agreement in your contract, contractually, you had to put it on the first page. You had to notify people that you had an arbitration agreement. That very straightforward law got struck down by the Supreme Court and said that was actually discriminating, ironically, against arbitration agreements. So, you know, there's a lot of impediments to those sorts of things. And I think you're exactly right that, you know, sort of at a high level, I think this is, these are the responsibilities, as you say, of, you know, democracy to resolve a lot of these issues. I will say, sometimes I think talking sort of at a high level of generality can be paralyzing in its own way, because, you know, when you talk about sort of how everything in its own way is broken, it sort of makes it impossible to fix it. It's like, if you, if you're depressed and you're looking at your apartment, it's in a mess, you're like, I can't do anything about it. Whereas if you think of like, okay, I'm going to focus on the kitchen right now and start doing that, it becomes a much more solvable problem, which is, you know, sort of why I chose to focus on this seemingly fairly technical issue of forced arbitration, because I thought if I get people to focus on this thing specifically, I thought it would help them understand both sort of how things get broken, but also like, here's how we can fix this one specific thing. And I think that actually can be kind of empowering for people. We're going to pause here for a little short break. We'll be back in just a minute. Support for this show comes from Adobe Acrobat. We all know sending a file is easy. Making sure your clients understand the file is the hard part. But with PDF Spaces and Adobe Acrobat, you can give your clients the full picture with custom intros, audio summaries, and a helpful AI assistant. So if you want to stop the endless follow-ups, do that with Acrobat. Need to make your docs crystal clear? Do that with Acrobat. Want to make sure your clients get everything they need to hear? Do that with Acrobat. Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat. Welcome back. I'm talking to Brendan Ballou about forced arbitration. We've been discussing how, as a system, it's fundamentally unfair for consumers, which is to say, basically, everyone. And that raises an obvious question. What can we do about it? The reason I talked about hacks and magic words is, yeah, we can try to go through the front door and fix it with state laws to tweak arbitration. And then your proposal is, like, we should just break the system. We should just do mass arbitration and cost these companies a lot of money and make that entire operation just untenable. Explain what you mean by breaking arbitration. This was, you know, when you're talking about hacks, this was a fascinating one. So, you know, arbitration, you know, like you said, is meant to kill class actions so that, you know, each person has to bring a case individually. It's too expensive for each person to do it, so nobody ever does it. One thing that the arbitration that the companies who were doing this just messed up on is, in order to make these agreements seem facially a little more fair, they said, we're going to pay for the initial cost of the arbitration. We'll even pay for the arbitrator, you know. You just have to start the arbitration. And some very smart lawyers said, okay, we're going to take you up on your offer, and we are going to initiate thousands of arbitrations all at once. And you have to pay for all of them all at once. It's clear that the companies just never even considered the possibility that a lot of people would arbitrate their cases because as soon as they did, they tried to back out of their own agreements and said, we actually don't think we should pay these tens of millions of dollars that we promised to pay. There were some very funny court decisions where judges who had been watching sort of their power slip away and consumers' power slip away through arbitration say, you know, it is sort of the height of irony that these companies are now trying to escape these things and compelled them to pay these costs. So mass arbitration is really a way to turn arbitration on its head and actually say, okay, companies, if you're going to force us to do this, we're actually going to do it, but you're going to have to pay a bunch of costs, which creates leverage for consumers and employees. I will say, I think that's great. And in some ways, mass arbitration can actually be very helpful for certain kinds of cases. For a year, I was involved in a mass arbitration representing employees who had been illegally sued by Elon Musk at Twitter. And Shannon Liss-Riordan, who's just a fabulous attorney, was leading that whole effort. But companies are trying to get smart and figure out ways to avoid paying any money or moving to even less reputable arbitration providers that have rules that are so skewed, rules that sometimes the companies even helped write to try to kill these mass arbitrations. Tell me the story of suing Elon Musk on Twitter. It was fascinating. And, you know, there are certain limitations on what I can talk about. And, you know, again, Shannon and her team were the real heroes on this. But it was fascinating because Elon Musk summarily fired 2,000 employees and did, you know, had clearly promised severance that he refused to pay. And, you know, these employees had unfortunately signed arbitration agreements, which prohibit, by and large, prohibited them from being class actions. And so Shannon, the team I was part of, decided to say, okay, we're actually going to represent these hundreds of thousands of employees in individually arbitrate. I can't get into the details, but I think that we had enormous success and I hope Elon Musk doesn't make the same mistake twice. Can you not get into the details because the arbitration agreements keep you from talking about the details? I don't know if it's the specific arbitration agreements, but being a lawyer in general, sometimes when you're doing these cases, you have to be kind of cagey about things. It does seem like Elon, you know, he just doesn't want to pay the money. And now he's like rolling up all of his companies. He might, you know, IPO SpaceX in some way. Somehow Twitter is now part of SpaceX. That's all very confusing. Did that all just wrap up because he needed it to go away? You know, it does seem like he's sort of rebuilding the sort of like Korean conglomerates that you see going on where you have, you know, a single family running, you know, 18 different kinds of businesses, often supporting each other, you know, financially or, you know, the Japanese, what is it, koretsu sort of banking conglomerates that you had. Those koretsu, you know, collapsed in the 1990s and, you know, Japan's had a multi-decade recession as a result. So I'm not sure Elon Musk is necessarily going to do better than that. But speaking personally, I am enormously skeptical of Elon Musk's financial acumen. I feel like I should have you back just so we can talk about weird Korean cabal corruption scandals and including the Samsung family and the whole thing. I think you would grow your audience, not shrink it. But yeah. Mass arbitration, the idea that you can cost these companies an enormous sum of money just by making them enforce their own agreements. They are pushing back against it, right? There's some instances where, I don't We're deep into my own feelings, so just, I apologize, sir, but please go with me for one second. I've always thought that what The Verge sells to people is a sense of hope. Like, we cover people who make things, and we cover companies who build really remarkable things. And then people use those things to build new things. Like, it's just the cycle of what a tech magazine is. Like, fundamentally, we're like, here's some new stuff. Do you like it? And then people say, now I can make a different kind of music than ever existed before. And that is very fun. And lately, I have sensed just an overwhelming kind of nihilism from our audience, particularly our young audience. And I relate it very much to a feeling of powerlessness. And I relate that feeling of powerlessness directly to arbitrary outcomes. Right. We started by talking about corruption, right? And what is corruption except you're rich, so you don't have the justice system won't touch you. Or you can spend enough money to make the DOJ go away. And I, you know, maybe it's a maybe putting it all in forced arbitration is too much. Maybe you can't bear all the weight. But there's some part of it where it's like, where do you begin? How do you escape the sense that everything is arbitrary and actually the system should be more fair? And maybe the system should be more elegant, but maybe we actually just have to do a bunch of hacks to make it more fair. No, that's that's a really deep sentiment. And I, I both understand it and don't agree with it because I taught a class at Stanford last year on January 6th and talking to young students about like the current political moment. And both and it was, you know, very unsettling, both how deeply young students were thinking about so many of these issues. And at the same time, how scared they were to act on them, not just because the problem seemed so large that it was paralyzing, but because they were literally worried about getting doxed or losing their, you know, job out outside of college or law school or whatever it happened to be if they said the wrong thing. And so I completely understand sort of the people's sense of sort of overwhelming despair and nihilism. I will say, you know, I am not particularly despairing. I'm not particularly nihilistic in large part because of the work that I do. So I am fortunate in that I get to talk to a lot of people who have done one specific thing, which is they have chosen a issue that they care about and then they stick with it for several years. And I over and over again, this happens to me about every six to nine months. I'm astounded by the amount of change that one person has had on a specific issue just because they stuck with it for one year or three years or 20 years or whatever it happens to be. You know, I watched a handful of people completely change the prison phone industry. I watched a handful of people like make mobile housing in their communities dramatically more fair. And so, you know, it kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier in our discussion, whereas I think when when your viewers and when your listeners and when your readers sort of see things in the macro, I completely understand how despairing it is. But I will say I remain incredibly hopeful about the power of individual people if they stick with something to make progress because I have seen it happen over and over and over again. Well, Brennan, I think that's as good of a place to end it as I can think of. How should people think about escaping arbitration now? How should people think about taking more control over this one aspect of things? You're not going to escape it by reading your contracts more carefully because most of them aren't negotiable and Verizon's not going to let you negotiate them. So we're not going to ethically consume our way out of this problem. This is, to your earlier point, something we are going to solve collectively. Ultimately, that's going to happen in city councils and state legislatures. I worked with a young, very smart University of Chicago law student to draft some model legislation. I have a personal website, brendanbaloo.com, where you can download it, send it to your legislator and get them starting to pass some laws. So I think, you know, that is the practical way that we're going to make progress here. The book is called When Companies Run the Courts. It's a great read. The previous book was called Plunder about private equity. Still comes up on Decoder all the time. I recommend that one as well. Brendan, we're going to have to have you back and we'll just do more therapy for me personally. Thank you so much for being on Decoder. Thank you. I'd like to thank Brendan Ballou for taking time to join me on Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. Don't let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all. Drop us a line. You can email us at decoder at theverge.com. We really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on Threads or BlueSky. Decoder is on YouTube. It's at DecoderPod. It's also on TikTok and Instagram at the same handle. Those channels are a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statton. Our editor is Ursula Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. 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