BeyondTheBench1

The transcription is a conversation between the host and Honorable Kenneth Medell, a judge. They discuss various topics such as Judge Medell's travel experiences, his high school rivalry, his academic struggles in high school, and his transformation through philosophy. Judge Medell emphasizes the importance of community colleges and their role in providing opportunities for education. He also shares his success in higher education after transferring from a community college to UC Irvine. Joanne, I can't believe it, this is our first podcast and we're fortunate to have Honorable Kenneth Medell, Superior Court, San Diego with us, you believe it? I can't believe it, we got so lucky. And he's sitting right here with us, morning Judge. I can't believe it either, and good morning. We are here, and for you listeners, we just got a great tour of Judge Medell's chambers, his offices, the photographs, you don't like to travel do you? I do like to travel, as you saw. Where have you been? Well I have been a lot of places, the truth of the matter is that in the early part of my marriage and the early part of my life, I was, we didn't travel much, and in fact when I was growing up, I had teachers and other parents inviting me to go places like Paris and London and all that sort of stuff, but I was such a homebody, such a homesick kid. No, you couldn't pass that on. I turned it down in high school, two different offers, I didn't go in college when you had a chance to go overseas, and in law school they had a summer program, and I'm like, well I don't want to go over there. But since that time, we've really tried to catch up. And you have to make enough to do that. You have to make enough to do. You told me about a high school in Downey, California. Downey, California. The only town named after a fabric softener. That's true, that's true. Did you go to Downey High? I went to Warren High in Downey, in fact that was an insult that you actually asked me that question. Uh oh, Warren High. We called them the Downey Ducks, and it was one of the biggest, they were the Vikings, but we called them the Ducks. And it was one of the biggest, sometimes most playfully violent rivalry ever. Right around the time of the big game going on. Playfully violent? Well it was things like, there was some, of course I wasn't ever involved, but vandalism with eggs and other sorts of things. Okay, of course, we can cut out whatever. I never did that either. I do remember leaving the gym one late night and being in the parking lot, and it was like a movie, because it was just set up like a movie. I was just standing there in this big expanse of a parking lot in front of me, and I see a van enter by itself. This is Downey Warren Football League. And it just came in slowly, slowly, slowly, and I'm the only guy there just watching. And as it got about 10 feet, the eggs just start flying out of this van, and one hit me directly in the chest. And broke open, splattered on my shirt. But the worst thing is, eggs are hard little suckers, and it hurts. Oh, I bet it did. Left a big bruise there. But yeah, we had fun. You may be our only judge who guessed who got hit by an egg on the truck. Well, and I love the fact that our very first conversation with a judge is confessing to early childhood memories. Yes, yes. Well, like I say, I didn't say I did it, but that's just saying I didn't say that I did it. Exactly. Wow. So after high school, what did you do undergraduate? Okay, so this is an important story. That's why I asked it. What I like to tell people is that when I went into high school, after being a very good student, and getting really good grades, and having people tell me that we're the objective testers, this kid's pretty smart. He does well on the aptitude test. When I went into high school, I joined a cult. Now, I don't know if Jim, if you joined a cult. But I joined a cult. The leader of the cult was a guy named Vince Lombardi of the Green Bay Packers. And the name of the cult was high school football. And I call it a cult because it pretty much subsumed every moment of my consciousness. All my friends were football players. You have to remember, I went to high school between 1969 and 1972. What was going on in 1969? Vietnam War. Vietnam War and the reaction to the Vietnam War, which caused a hippie movement. People's hair was down all over. I can imagine what you looked like. But everyone's hair was down their back. People were, you know, drinking alcohol. And there was a proliferation of new substances for recreation. Really? That was a new phenomenon in America. And if you were on the football team with a very conservative coach and required to shave your head like a Marine, you ended up being sort of shunned by the rest of the cool and hip society at the time. Right. And so it ended up that all your friends were your football friends and any of the other people who wanted to hang out with you, but you weren't really part of the cool generation at that point. So no dreadlocks coming out from the helmet. Right. Exactly. We didn't have that at all. But the point was that, and this is hard to admit also, but I survived by rote instinct and osmosis during high school without really opening a book. Wow. And that's the reason that at the end of my stay at Warren High School, home of the Fighting Bears, by the way. Fighting Bears, of course. That my grade point average was so low that I wouldn't be able to get into any high school at all. I'm going to see if we can fight each other for who has the lowest grade point. There you go. Because I almost doubled my grade point. Yeah. What was yours? I don't even remember. I just remember it wasn't good enough to get into any college whatsoever. Do you want to admit this for all the listeners? I didn't admit it. Mine was 2.14. Okay. They barely let me out of high school. There you go. They didn't give me my diploma because they claimed I owed $14 for a library book, which I didn't. Right. I didn't get a high school diploma. Right. You also used to cut classes and go surfing. You told me that at breakfast. That was junior high school. Oh, sorry. I knew how to forge my mom's name. Nice. So what happened was there was a community college called Cerritos College, which was very close to where I lived. In fact, what we like to call it is UCLA, and that's the University of Cerritos left on Alondra. That's what we used to call it, because that's the street. It was known as Alondra Street. Right. And you went there and you got straight A's? UCLA. I went there. The first year, since I was always in what we now call the AP classes, I was always in the best classes with the smartest kids in high school. The first year, all the classes I took at Cerritos College were the exact same classes I had just taken. Nice. And so I did really, really well. And then the second year is the important year, or the beginning of the second year. All my friends were doing drugs, as I alluded to. They were going out to bars to get drunk and purposely getting into fights. They would go there for that reason. Wow. They were at Cerritos College in this fraternity called Omicron Upsilon, and it was like Animal House, just gone bad, if you can imagine that. Wow. I took, at the same time, a class called Introduction to Philosophy with Dr. Edward Bloomfield. Dr. Edward Bloomfield had just gotten his PhD from none other than Harvard University and decided, instead of going to a big university, to try to reach kids kind of like me at the community college level. And he taught this class. He was big, swarthy, a little bit on the light side, you know, in terms of the way he presented things. But he presented the lives and the thoughts of the philosophers in a way that was so compelling to me that I had the epiphany of saying, do I want to be like my friends and engage in those behaviors, or would I like to have these conversations with the smartest people that ever lived, whose thoughts and ideas we're still studying after all these thousands of years? Right. And at that point, of course, I wasn't trying to be Plato or Aristotle, but what I was trying to do was to develop my mind. And I began to read every possible thing I could read that was classic, whether it was in philosophy, whether it was in literature, whether there were scientific things or psychological treatises that were written that were well known that should be known. You did a 180. I did a complete 180. And now, this is how weird it was, I converted what used to be my bedroom, because I had two older sisters, they both were grown from the house, and I could use one of the bigger bedrooms to sleep in. But I converted my old bedroom, the smallest bedroom, into a library. And all I did in my extra time was sit in a big leather chair and read, read, read. Wow. To the point that my parents had one of those, what do you call them when you confront them? An intervention. An intervention. They open the door and they go, what are you going to get a girlfriend? What is the matter with you? Because all I would do is spend all that time. You're not drinking, you're not doing anything. When I transferred to UC Irvine, which was, I do everything on a whim, by the way, everything impulsively, with not much thought, like this, yeah. I realized this was a mistake once I sat down, as you guys should, because of Jim, that's right. Sorry. But when he called, I just knew it was a mistake. But when I transferred to UC Irvine, after a while, I realized I was so far ahead of everyone else that I just got straight A's. Wow. Meaning I had anxiety about going to the big university because I started at a community college. Sure. But I had so over-prepared that the courses were very easy and I just buzzed for it. I was finally using my mental capacity to its fullest and I did really, really well at UC Irvine. Community colleges to this day are the best kept secret in California. Nobody asks you where you went to school your first two years, where you graduated from. You kicked ass. You did a great job and then you went to Irvine. It all depends on your attitude and what you want to get out of it. And you can get a lot out of these institutions. Absolutely. I doubled my GPA. Because I did a GPA, I went to Palomar College. I got a 4.0 at Palomar. Right. But I did four years off, so there was a lot of maturity. Right, right, right. What did you do after Palomar? I went to DC and went to George Washington University. GW. GW. Yeah. And then I came back. I came back and transferred to USD and graduated from USD. Yeah. Yeah. And here we all are. Yeah. I want to follow up really fast. Yeah. And you can edit. I'm sure you can edit things out. Yeah. We won't though. Probably five or seven years ago. Oh no, now it's longer than that. I've been a judge for 13 years. So it's probably 15 or 17 years ago, I was sitting in my office thinking about Dr. Bloomfield and I just said, that's someone who turned my whole life around. And so just sitting there, it's amazing what we can do now. Pick up the phone, 411 Cerritos College. Hello, this is Cerritos College. Can I help you? Yes. This is a weird thing, but I had a college professor who really changed my life named Dr. Bloomfield and I'm just trying to get a hold of him. Dr. Bloomfield retired last year, but he lives in the area. You just call him, call him, try to track him down. Well, thank you. Click, 411. Information, can I help you? Or, you know, do the name, whatever they say. Yeah. And I say Ted Bloomfield, I just used Norwalk where it was and they spit out a number right away. I dial the number, hello, it was Professor Bloomfield. Wow. And, I mean, I was not the type of guy, one of your questions on the thing is, you know, who had the most influence and, you know, that sort of thing. But there was never a time when I ever cozied up to any, I had an authority complex, I probably still do. So I never, I never. Perfect job. I'm in the spot where I need to be now. But I never really cozied up to any authority figure at all. No coaches, no teachers or anything. It wasn't like I was calling him and him saying, oh, yeah, Kenny Medell. It was completely out of the blue. Wait, how many years after he taught you was it? So I probably went there in 1973 and 74, or 72 and 73. And so I am calling him in 2008 or 2009. Wow. 30 years later. 30 years later. This is a weird conversation, I know, but I took your class and you came out and made the thoughts and ideas of these philosophers and their lives so interesting that it changed my life. And I'm now a lawyer. I hadn't been, I wasn't a judge yet. Right. And he goes, that is weird because I am going down to babysit my grandkids with my daughter. She has a conference to go to. And I will be in San Diego like in two days. Wow, that's so cool. And I said, then I will take you to lunch. And we met at Horton Plaza and I had lunch with him and had a very pleasant chat with him. I bet he loved that. Yeah, and I've been meaning to tell him about the judge thing because, you know. Now everyone, all our listeners know. That's a cool story. It's a good story. That's great. It's a good story. People don't do that enough to express gratitude. There's one other guy, and he was a football coach, who took extra time out to meet me off the practice field somewhere else and work on my, I was a wide receiver at the time, hard to believe. But I was a, to work. You had wheels. I didn't have wheels, but I had hands. I had no legs, but great hands. And that's what he worked on because he knew I wasn't very fast. And so we were working on how to get the advantage under the guy in terms of creating space between you and the defender. And we worked and worked and worked and worked, just him and me. And so that's another guy. His name was Mike Mayotte. And I cannot find him because that's the other guy that I wanted to call. Maybe there's someone on the podcast. Yeah, call Judge Medell if you find Mike Mayotte. I think there are parallels of like, I want to point out a couple of parallels. Number one, I went to UCSD and majored in philosophy. Wow. Which opened up a lot for me in terms of thinking. And number two, when I was in law school at Hastings, I had a professor named John Van Dyke who taught us constitutional law. He wasn't much older than we were. He was in his 70s. He had long hair, cool guy. I didn't get anything he taught. It didn't seem to relate to what I wanted to know, but I took the class and did okay. And it dawned on me 40 years after the class how important the First Amendment was. Yes. How controversial the Second Amendment is to this day. Fourth and Fifth and Sixth Amendments to what I was doing. And so I did the same thing you did. I called, found him, he picked it up. He's teaching at Berkeley. He professed to remember me, but I think he was just being kind because I was not a standout scholar. But I told him how much I appreciated how it applied to my life. And I think he got a kick out of that. It was nice. So you did the same thing. But you got to have lunch with the professor. It was fantastic. Yes, it was good. Very cool. Yes. Wow. Well, you're an avid traveler. I want to hear about some of your travel adventures. What was your best single day of travel? So I think I mentioned to you guys that I got an e-mail from some friends, one of whom was a female who had worked for the zoo for a long time, obtaining charitable donations to the zoo, and another guy who just wanted to go to Africa. The e-mail said, hey, we're planning this trip to Africa. Who wants to go? And it was addressed to several people. And I just said, that would be fun, without any true interest in it, and wrote back, Debbie and I will go. That's my wife, for anyone who wants to know. And the time went on, and my wife comes to me and she goes, I got an e-mail today. We owe $5,000 down payment. Down payment. Wow. On the trip. I go, what? She goes, we need to send them a check for $5,000, and it has to be like today or tomorrow. And I go, all right. And so we sent them the check. And in my typical very careful way, it took me three days of stewing about that cost to come to my wife a second time and say, how much is the whole trip? Now you're asking? Now I'm asking. And when she told me how much it was, I almost fainted. And now some other things. I have to be very careful, but we considered many, many different methods of getting out of the trip. Some of which I can't talk about. But the bottom line is we went, and the trip was, you started in South Africa, Johannesburg. Ironically, and I hope I don't offend anyone out there, you can find out I like photography. You can tell by the pictures. But I was asking people in our hotel, which was right by the airport in Johannesburg, where can I go in the city to take good photographs? And everyone says, you cannot go into Johannesburg. It's too dangerous. There was a dinner that we had, and I saw four middle-aged people, a husband and wife, eating dinner. And I didn't believe anyone else, so I went up to them. I go, I'm sorry, I don't mean to bother you, but are you guys from Johannesburg? And they said, yes. And I said, I just want to go into town and see the city and take some photographs. Where would you recommend that we go? And they looked at each other, perplexed. And they go, why, there's nowhere to go. It's too dangerous. And that was it. So basically we stayed by the airport in Johannesburg, and then there were three different safari locations that we went to and one city location. The three safari locations were the Okavango Delta, the water delta, completely with all kinds of water. I showed the picture. Jim's pointing at that picture I showed them right now. That has every kind of lions and neither tigers nor bears there, but any kind of African animal that you can think of was there and more. But it was all water everywhere. And then we went to the Kalahari Plains, which is a complete dry desert environment that had all the same animals, but more. And you had some amazing photographs. You took of jackals and antelopes. For our listeners, we're in Judge Medel's office. Anti-chambers. I didn't know that existed. Anti-chambers surrounded by professional-quality photographs. This theme is going to be Africa, right? Yeah. And in the courtroom. The second trip, I was so impressed by the first trip, I did a second trip. But just to finish it out, the Kalahari Plains was the desert environment, which was hot and brushy. And then the final safari area was the Kruger National Park, which apparently was the first ever national park ever made, which had some very dramatic scenes. And then our guide that had been with us all the way lived in Cape Town, so he showed us around Cape Town. That was a really great trip. I made a movie out of it, too, if you wish. A movie? Right before I went on that trip, I found out, from watching something like a podcast, it was a panel interview with all the people in Breaking Bad. I could tell you the whole story, but I found out that my camera was just as good as a professional movie camera. And for anyone who's listening, it was, at the time, Canon 5D Mark III. You don't want to hear that story, right? Breaking Bad? So Breaking Bad was the only program that my wife and I ever binge-watched because we happened to be on a staycation at home, and we watched one thing and we got hooked. So we were watching like three or four or five a day. And I thought it was so brilliant that when it was all said and done, I ended up looking on the Internet and found a panel conference like at Comic-Con. You know, they have all the actors on the stage, and then there's people in the audience asking questions. And someone raised their hand and said to the director, many times in Breaking Bad, between the acting scenes, you would have these transitional scenes that would be the sky turning different colors, like time-lapse, you know, that sort of thing, the clouds moving in a certain way. And it was really, really effective in creating the mood. Whose idea was that? And the director said, well, we're out there shooting with all these very fancy movie cameras. And then in the evening, some of the cameramen would say, hey, we need to take a break. And they would jump in their cars and go somewhere. Then they would come back with their regular cameras and show us what it was. And it was my inspiration, wow, we could use that as transitional. But they were just shooting just for their own personal reasons, you know. And here was the clicker for me. He says, and the camera they were using is just as good as any of the movie cameras, because it's a Canon 5D Mark III. I had just bought that camera, so I was just going, oh, wow. So that's, yes. And then I did a lot of film video. Yes. So, I mean, one of the things, and I don't want to go into all of it, but in the Kruger National Park, we turn a corner. And the first thing we see is the head of a giraffe on the ground. And we're going, oh, no. And as we move closer, there's a lion who is eating. And they always start with the soft places. So he's eating from the rear end, the end. Oh, wow. Into that cavity. They had already eaten the eyeballs and the tongue, the soft thing. And now they were going to go to the rear end end. The rump roach. The rump roach. And the lion was an old lion that was extremely emaciated. He had bruises and marks, scratch marks on his side from fights that he shouldn't have been in at his age. On his private parts, he had bruises and marks. And my guide said that had this kill not happened, he probably would have died. I don't know how you got close enough to a lion in the wild to see the bruises on his private parts. There's an odd phenomenon. The odd phenomenon. How does that happen? Well, I have all these one-liners I want to give, but I can't do it. The posters I get are one-liners. But the more professional answer that I have for you is that the animals don't seem to mind the vehicles. You're in a jeep. You're in a jeep the whole time. They don't recognize the jeep as a threat or as a living thing. And so every different species has a different reaction to the jeep. The elephants look at you and they wonder. The rhinos are mad that you're around, but they can't see. It's like the lion and the wizard of Oz. I'll fight you with one hand behind the other. How does a rhino charge if they can't see? I don't know if they have a credit card. Okay, we'll walk right into that. Thank God we can edit this stuff out. Moving right along. No, we're leaving that in. Anyway, the interesting part was that he's eating. If he hadn't have gotten that meal, he would have died. And to the right and to the left, there's two younger lions whose head every once in a while pops up in the bush. They had done the kill, but out of deference to him, said, Go ahead, man, you go first and let him eat. And then as you were watching, you see the vultures, massive numbers of them waiting. And then coming down the little trail are three hyenas just looking. And they're going, three lions is too many for just us. And they never got any closer than 50 yards or something like that. So that was kind of the amazing part of that. That's on video. That's in the movie. Oh, I got to see this. You ever been to Norway? For our listeners, when we got here, we didn't sit down. By the way, we had a tour of Norway shot taken in the dead of winter. I thought you were doing Three Dog Night. Have you ever been to Norway? You've been there, though. I've been to Oklahoma. No. So, yeah. So that was another weird trip where friends of ours had their family bail on them because of illness, and we stepped into their place in December to go to Norway. Now, that trip was amazing. We do a little trick, my wife and I. For example, our friend said, We've been to Norway before, so we're going to go to Oslo, be there for two days, and then we're going to start on the main part of the trip. But we'd never been to Oslo. We have been to Oklahoma, but we'd never been to Oslo. So we always backdate. We did this on the recent trip I was on. We always go a week before, and then we can enjoy on our own that city. From Oslo, what we did is we boarded a train and went westbound across the middle of Norway to a town called Bergen, which is on the west coast. We boarded a cruise ship, which had been a ship that delivered mail and supplies to these islands and these towns that couldn't be reached by road back in the day. So they converted that into a cruise ship. So it was very small. We went in and out through the fjords. Through the fjords, and they would let you off for five or six hours, and then you'd get back on and you'd keep going up, up past the Arctic Circle. And that was a fantastic trip also. Some of the fun of that was actually being pulled by the Huskies and all that sort of stuff in a certain spot, in complete darkness at noon. Wow. So that was a great trip. Our session could go hours now, but our listeners are going to go crazy. So let me suggest that we steer stuff a little bit, because there's going to be new lawyers listening to this. Whatever you want. And there's going to be lawyers that are going to like to know some things. For example, what are your pet peeves as a judge that we could share with lawyers to avoid having better lawyers and better advocates for their clients? Well, as you know, there are a myriad of different proceedings that we have. So pet peeves, we'd have to get finer, but let's say for a motion, we like people to cite law properly and not mischaracterize it. We like people to maintain their composure. Sometimes people get so angry at the tentative ruling, and it's only a tentative ruling, that they hardly can control themselves during the argument. Do you change your tentatives? We do. We do. I would say we change our tentatives maybe five out of 30 times. Five out of 30. Yeah, it's not a lot. Fifteen percent. It's not a lot. But we have a lot of motions, too. How about trial? Do you have a jury? Well, I've actually written an article about my pet peeves, but I'll give you a few examples on jury selection. A lot of people in jury selection really don't ask questions that have to do with the jurors' qualifications, and they are intent on getting approval for their storyline or getting someone's sympathy or empathy for a problem they had. And so they'll ask questions like, you know, my client has murdered seven other people. Is that going to affect your ability to be fair to him and his credibility? And that sort of stuff. And you just go, come on, you can't, you know, that's going to come out, and the jurors have the right to make of it what they will. You can't ask them to sort of excuse it at the beginning. You can do it at the end, but not during jury selection, you know. So that's a very, that's never happened to me in terms of the way I just described it, but I'm prone to hyperbole and exaggeration to make a point. But people do a lot, try to vet facts and try to get people to say, you won't hold it against my client if I told you X, Y, and Z, which is totally inappropriate because that's part of the body of the evidence they're going to get and something that they could hold against the person. You can't get them to commit not to hold something against them when it's perfectly appropriate, depending on how the evidence goes, for them to do so. It's called preconditioning. Preconditioning, the veneer. I think my number one thing for jury selection that I would like people to think about is that I think it's more effective when you take a humble approach where you're no better than the people in front of you, the jurors, because so many people are patronizing to the jurors too. And, you know, you want to be the voice of authority and be credible and that sort of stuff and have them understand that you are in command of the law and of the facts, but at the same time you want to approach them in a humble way and empathize with their situation and that sort of thing. And I see a lot of lawyers not really thinking about that too much in their zeal to make their points. Some lawyers do something that I call legal pop quizzes. Legal pop quizzes? Legal pop quizzes. So you may have heard this in the criminal setting where the criminal defense lawyer says, Mr. Jones, you've heard now a lot that the prosecutor has the burden of proof and it's proof beyond a reasonable doubt to prove every element of this. And Mr. Jones says, yes, I did. Do you understand that, that they have that burden? Yes. Mr. Jones, I represent the defendant over here. What do you think my burden is? You can't put a juror on the spot like that. You can't. That's the point. No. You have hit the point on the head. One hundred percent of the time, the juror gets it wrong. One hundred percent of the time, the juror says in a very logical and good faith manner, well, I would think that you'd want to put some evidence up on the witness stand, including your client, witnesses, that would show that he's not guilty. Right. Wouldn't you want to do that? That's perfectly logical. Which takes the whole jury. And then the criminal defense lawyer says, wrong. We don't have a burden of proof. And it's very embarrassing, as you say. Sure. And alienates the other people. And alienates the other people. So those are the type of things that can get on my head. I would never even think of doing something like that. Get on my bad side. I will admit that I was guilty. Not that I was a guilty lawyer because I didn't know anything. Back in those days, we knew the people's names. We could address them by name. They would talk to us after the trial. Let's go see how we did. That's all changed now. Right. Completely different. I still got jurors to talk to me after the trial. That's because you . . . But they usually wanted to talk about my clothes, which is the other thing. That's the joy of being a female lawyer. I've heard those stories. Let me ask you this. I had a talk with a federal judge who shall remain nameless for the purpose of this talk. I said to him . . . We knew each other. We were baby lawyers. He was at the U.S. Attorney's Office. I was a criminal defense lawyer at the time. I said, what's it like being a judge in terms of . . . Are you in the ballgame? He said, what do you mean? I said, one of the things that I've always enjoyed as a lawyer is being in there, swinging at the pitches, going for the fence, trying to slide into third. Are you just . . . I don't mean to offend you, Judge, but are you just calling balls and strikes? He said, well, I am calling balls and strikes. I said, but are you in the game? He said, oh, yeah. I'm engaged. I love it. I'm in the game. Your thoughts? This goes back in time a little bit. When I was in law school, I almost quit because I found it so boring. My life had been full of playing football at a high level and making that touchdown in that Downey Warren football game that was supposed to be the big thing until they beat us. But it was a big deal before 20,000 people because we played to make that touchdown and have people cheer and that sort of thing. Did you just like the ball? No, at that time I held it up like a Statue of Liberty. I walked like this because I was in disbelief. And so when I played Little League Baseball, all my family would come out and they would just tease me and ridicule me and make fun of me. It was like a big show. And then I was in a band from the time I was in sixth grade all the way through my first year in college. This was Kenny on the hard rocks? No, we had a bunch of weird names. What did you play? I played guitar. Sweet. Yeah, and there's a story behind that too. But then at UC Irvine I did acting. That's another on your sheet there. You were going to say what teachers. This guy named Ashley Carr really made. Did you look at my sheet? No, I looked at the sheet that you sent me. Okay. But he was really influential. He had a huge influence on me too in terms of drama. I took drama, his drama course, for a full year. So we had the quarter system. So the first quarter, second quarter, third quarter I had the drama. It was just unbelievable. So now I'm studying old English property cases and I want to kill myself. Oh yeah. I want to kill myself. So there were two times I almost quit until I got into trial practice. And that was the second epiphany. Dr. Bloomfield, the philosophy, was the first one. And then the second one was in law school. It prevented me from quitting. And it made me believe I could be a good lawyer. If I had a performance in the office, I could be a good lawyer. So if that hadn't happened, we wouldn't be sitting here. I might not be around here. Yeah. Thank goodness for the drama class. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. So bottom line is, your question was am I in the ballgame. I have people go, how do you keep awake? I've never even remotely got close to falling asleep during a trial. Your mind isn't wandering on other stuff. What are you going to do when you get home? If you have some milk on the way home, you're there. Yeah, I am not thinking about anything else but the trial. Not playing solitaire. Not playing solitaire. My mind is engaged in it and listening to it and evaluating it. It's kind of weird, not only from an evidentiary standpoint, legal standpoint, but performance and an art standpoint. Imagining how it might be done better or worse. Do you have any tricks for staying engaged? I'm a copious note taker and I find that that keeps me engaged in a deposition. I just did trials for so long that it's like riding a bike. So I don't need any tricks. I can't give you any tricks. It's just I am locked in. I also have something that was really important to me given how bad a high school student I was and how I goofed around a lot too and made jokes. I know you can't believe that, Jim. But I have this echo phenomenon that happens. So when I was in class, I'd be kidding around with Jim and teasing and the teacher would do that thing, what did I just say? You said that Washington crossed the Delaware in 1817 such and such. She'd get all frustrated because I just press a button on my chest and it replays. Wow. So... That's amazing. You were listening. I don't know what it is. It's a gift because I wasn't listening. But it replays. It's like there's a little, on the left side of my brain, there's a little recorder and I'm engaged talking to you, but the teacher, and it records, and then I just press that button and it just replays it. That's a talent. It's a gift. I mean, it's a talent. You think of something and you develop it. It's always been there. So for the most part, you know, a lot of times the court reporters say, do you want my, oh my gosh, the live reporting, it's not working, judge. What are we going to do? What are we going to do? And I go, you don't need to do anything. I listen to all this stuff. And so there's not really a time when I don't feel like I'm ever not engaged in it. Now, the second question that would follow is, do you ever wish that you were actually a lawyer again? Yeah, so like you would make an objection and you're not hearing it, and if you were in there, you would have made it. Does that happen? That happens all the time where you're just staring. Because sometimes it's abusive. Like the other side is letting their opponent abuse a witness, and sometimes it's their own witness, and you're just like going, you know. And that is a really hard thing for me to like keep my mouth shut. I would say that that's something I struggle with. But you do, and you let them. I do the best I can, but there are times when I go, counsel, let's move on. Let's move on to something else. I might say that. Let's go on to something else. I think you've asked that question. Well, I have a quick question for you. And that has to do with the INSA Court. You've been involved with multiple chapters of the INSA Court, and I'm curious about why you think that's so important. So the two that I've been involved with are two completely separate entities in terms of what they do. So the first one that I got involved with was for my own benefit, was the San Diego INSA Court. The San Diego INSA Court is a true workshop for development of trial skills. That's all it is. There's no social component to it at all. There's no happy hour or anything like to it. You're there to attend a lecture on how to do opening statement or closing argument, and then followed by a demonstration by really, really good lawyers on opening statement. And then in two days, you're in a courtroom with either a judge or a very experienced attorney actually performing on a hypothetical program. And that's all it is. And you get critiqued. That's all the San Diego INSA Court is. I probably did that in 1980. I did that program as a student. I won't tell you where I went. I know. It's a great program. I still do that. It's wonderful. The workshops, they love it. I was deeply involved in that for many, many years. Not as much now, but I do help them out. The other one I got involved with in around 1987, and that's which I think was the only inn of court in town called the American Inn of Court. And our first one was named after Lewis Welsh, who was one of our very distinguished judges. And so I've been involved with that forever. Yeah. And so I started out as a barrister because I had already been a DA for seven or eight years, and then joined that early on in my civil career, and I've always enjoyed that too. So there is a component of both of those things that I just told you guys about that make it attractive. What's that? Always made it attractive and kept me involved, the performance. Ah, yes. On a break, if you want, I could show you a video that I made for this year's Academy Award presentation to honor the eight programs that we had that preceded the Academy Award. I will show you the video that we did based on the Blues Brothers. Very cool. Fun. That was great. So I'm just saying, almost anything that has to do with, well, trials themselves have to do with performance. And so almost anything that has to do with performance, I get a kick out of, and I'll be involved, and I'll help you out. Very fun. Well, we could go all day. This has been so fun and so engaging. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. But wait a second. I have another question. No, no more questions. One more. Okay, one more. Okay. AI, artificial intelligence. This is a big, big deal, and every week it's becoming a bigger deal in terms of potential positive plagiarism. I read about a case where a lawyer submitted a brief, and it was all made-up cases. Made-up cases. Miscited the law. Do you have any sense of what role artificial intelligence is going to play in terms of briefs, in terms of legal proceedings? I don't know where it's going to go. I'm curious as to whether or not you're getting some thought. I just became aware of this literally maybe a month ago when one of our programs dealt with AI. I had no idea that you could get on a service and say something like, I need to oppose an anti-slap motion, and a brief would just be spit out. And you just go, thank you, and put your quarter in, and you're on your way to court. But a quarter is a work of fiction. Yes. To me, the entire process is inappropriate from start to finish. Let me play devil's advocate. Yeah. Before computers, when I was a baby lawyer, we had to look up the cases. We had to shepherdize them. We had to have all the volumes of shepherds to make sure they had them in order. Then it went to computers. You could do it a lot faster. Legal research now, a lot of it's canned. You have secondary sources. Westlaw, and you can incorporate that and block it and put it into your brief. I don't see anything wrong with that. Nothing wrong with it. You can't misrepresent facts or law to a court. I agree with that. But what's the matter with a lawyer going to AI, having them prepare a brief, and then they site check it to make sure the cases are right, the facts are right. It just gives them kind of a head start. Is that bad still? I don't know. I just think it takes the art and personality out of your brief, and it's disturbing to me. I can't undisturb it. No, I agree. I'm just wondering where this is going to go. Do you have any thoughts, Joy, on that? Only that people that use AI to create a brief are absolutely idiots. But other than that, no. I can't imagine, again, I can't imagine ever doing that. I suppose if they minimally went through that process and a brief was spit out, and they read it, and they said, oh, that's a decent format, and then they wrote their own independently, that might be an okay. I actually, because I use AI, so chatbot, when they first started talking about that, for fun, I had to write a thank you note. A friend of mine had taken me for a spa day. And so I said, you know, thank you note to platonic friend for spa day. And it actually sent out a really lovely thank you note. And I'm a big fan, I do handwritten thank you notes. Thank you, but I will not hold your hand. Yeah, so I think if you're using it as a starting, like you said, you're a brand-new lawyer. I wonder how it sounds. I wonder how it will look. We've all done that when we're starting out. So that's not too bad. But, I mean, to replace it for your own creativity and research and thinking is not kosher. Well, if you have a precise, that's a whole different thing. I'm trying not to quote Pulp Fiction, which is my favorite thing of all time. A lot of people, and I'm 50-50 on it, but I'm maybe a little bit more, like 55%, that a specific computerized strike zone would be great. And no one could argue about it anymore. You've still got to have a human to call the slide into home. You'll still need someone there, yeah. Doesn't that take some of the fun out of watching a baseball game when you can't argue about whether it was a good call or a bad call? No, it does, it does. Which is a whole other topic for another session. And that's the other big percentage that I would want to keep the game the way it is. Judge, thanks for your time. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. This was a treat. Yep.