SquaredCast

a.k.a. "Todd's Sweet Little Lies" From the studio that brought you Skyrim, Skyrim: Legendary Edition, Skyrim: Special Edition, Skyrim VR, Skyrim for Nintendo Switch, Skyrim: Very Special Edition for Amazon Alexa, Skyrim: Anniversary Edition, and Skyrim for Switch 2... We bring you a special episode tracing Bethesda's full arc from the golden age of Morrowind through the Fallout 76 dumpster fire, S...

Recently, two juries hit Meta with back-to-back verdicts in 24 hours: $375 million in New Mexico for child exploitation, and $6 million in Los Angeles for engineering addictive products that harmed a minor. While those verdicts landed, a researcher published findings on GitHub tracing Meta's lobbying operation across 45 states, with over $25 million directly confirmed and estimates running as high...

PLEASE NOTE: The audio for this episode was recorded on March 13, 2026. Some stories covered here have developed since then. Updated sourcing and corrections are in the full show notes at squaredcast.com . Recently, the lines between smart devices and corporate surveillance got harder to ignore. Hisense TVs started showing unskippable full-screen ads when owners switched HDMI inputs, pushed silent...

Last week, the lines between AI companies and the U.S. government got a lot harder to ignore. Anthropic refused to strip weapons and surveillance safeguards from its Pentagon contract. The government blacklisted them, then kept using their AI in a live military operation anyway. OpenAI signed the deal Anthropic wouldn't, and the money trail tells its own story. Meanwhile, a Helldivers 2 fan tried...

Discord’s age verification saga is just the visible tip of a much larger shift. Governments, platforms, and identity verification companies are all converging on the same goal: tying your real identity to everything you do online. The framing is child safety. The result is the slow death of anonymous internet use. And the timing of all of it, from Discord’s IPO to California’s new OS-level age ver...