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Joey
Reading is a beautiful place. We have national parks in three different directions, two world-class lakes. This is a sportsman's paradise, but it's also full of wonderful people.
We have business leaders, community leaders, faith-based leaders, all of them working towards a singular goal, and that's to make this a great place to live. I wanted to showcase these people, give their perception of the place that they call home. This is All Reading.
Griff
Thank you very much.
Joey
You're welcome very much.
Griff
Okay. My kid, my youngest, I have a glass like this that keeps things very cold. Oh, man, I really want one of those, dad.
So we went looking around and he got one that has an army logo on it because his big brother's in the army.
Joey
Nice.
Griff
And so now he's going to see this one, which has a greater storage capacity. And I think my seven-year-old might try and fill for this.
Joey
Nice. Nice. If he does, I can get him one.
I've got a few of them. They're sitting in a box. I ordered some.
Griff
I, you know, I wanted to, do you need to do a podcast? Because it's about Legos or Star Wars. He's your guy.
Joey
When can we book him? Anytime. I love Star Wars and Legos.
You just nailed two of like my favorite things. Yeah. How old is he?
He's seven. Okay.
Griff
So he's about as mature as I am.
Joey
Okay.
Griff
He is a better at sword fighting than I am because we lightsaber battle. Nice. Somewhat frequently.
Yes. And this morning he crafted his best from scratch Lego. He was up early and he showed it to me as I was heading out the door for work.
Joey
That's awesome. What did he craft?
Griff
He was a little concerned that while he had Boba Fett piloting his craft, that it didn't look like Boba Fett's craft.
Joey
Slave one?
Griff
That's a tough one. He had some mobile shields on it, some mobile guns. And the best part was he had articulating landing gear, which was all crafted on his own.
Joey
Nice. You've got a future engineer. Yeah.
A mechanical engineer.
Griff
My wife went to San Francisco yesterday to pick up her folks from flight. And he went along and they were a little early and the blue angels were practicing. So they got to sit and watch the blue angels practice.
And then they got to watch Fat Albert takeoff, which is their support aircraft. I'm not sure he's going to be an engineer that does engineering, but he might be an engineer as a method to get the Navy to teach him to fly jets. Cause that's what he wants to do after yesterday.
Joey
That's a great path. I have a friend who I worked with at the VA and he was a former Navy and his son went to school. His son's name's a Golly.
I think it's Tanner. It's been a long time, but that's exactly what he did. He got a degree, a bachelor's degree in, I believe, mechanical engineering.
And he went and he became a pilot and Navy did a great job. So that's not, you know, very, very doable. Very, very cool.
Pilots have a special place like, Whoa, pilot, huh? I mean, it's kind of like saying black belt in some type of martial art. You're like, Whoa, really?
Yep.
Griff
Yeah. And they can always pull off. Well, they have two things, an ability to wear aviators like super confidently.
Joey
Yeah.
Griff
And then they have that pilot voice, you know, where, Oh yeah. Some do some don't I've met some, I've never heard not the pilot voice. I have a dear friend who's a private pilot, you know, quite accomplished and whatnot.
And when you talk to him, he's just Matt. But then when Matt's talking to the tower, he's pilot Matt. Um, and his pilot voice game is so strong, you know, and four, seven, seven runway three turn.
Right. That's amazing. I mean, I don't even have it.
Right. That was just my same voice. It was great voice.
Joey
It was a little bit deeper, a little bit stronger. You hit your consonants a little bit harder. Clearly these guys have 20 years of practice with the pilot voice.
They're great. Yeah. You know what you'd think about it.
You don't want to come across like hello coming in hot. You know, you don't want to hear that you want your pilot confident. Yeah.
Like, yeah, we're about the land. Exactly. Something like that.
Griff
Yes. Yeah. Totally.
Joey
Yeah. I work on, I used to be able to do voices better when I was a kid. Just one of the many things that just your body, you get older.
We were just talking about age and how things just, and one of them is my, uh, control of my vocal cords.
Griff
So when I was a kid though, could have just been, I practiced a lot, but now, yeah, I would say with your vocal cords, it's probably prioritization with your knees. On the other hand, it's just mileage.
Joey
It's just, it's, you know, I, uh, I was talking to somebody the other day and I was, you know, my back knees were hurting and I was like, it's like your tendons become rubber bands that were left out in the sun. They don't, you don't have that elasticity. You like sit on your foot.
If you ever sit down and you, yes. Big mistake. Why you do that?
I don't know. But every time you get punished for it.
Griff
Yeah.
Joey
Yeah. That's part of, this is the cost of going old, man. You know what I mean?
So I'll pay it from my neck up.
Griff
I'm 25. The rest of me below that point disagrees.
Joey
Yeah.
Griff
So I will push it like I'm 25, but there's a whole new thing that started in my forties called recovery, which I never really had before. So I don't like it.
Joey
Do you have like a ice bath thing?
Griff
I have a pool, which is my ice bath starting about this time of year normally. Um, and then you really are committed to it in January, February, but I've not taken the plunge and bought a cold plunge. Um, but I actually do believe in it when I'm doing it in the wintertime, it takes the place of pre-workouts.
I don't have any caffeine before workouts. I just cold plunge three minutes and it's very difficult. Um, and the pool, my pool is not as cold as like some of the commercially cold plunges, you know, get into the, I mean, it's supposed to be ice cold.
Joey
It's like, you see people, it's, we're not just like chilly. It's supposed to be cold, cold.
Griff
Yeah. I have not spent the money, nor do I possess the present commitment to sit in an ice cold bath, but being in 40 degree water in your swimming pool, it will, it will change your perspective. That is a cold pool.
Joey
That's very, I was thinking you were like, yeah, my pool gets down to like 62.
Griff
And I'm like, that's not really wintertime. It'll be like this time of year. It'll get cooler in the evenings and whatnot, but wintertime it'll drop into the forties.
Joey
Yeah. Everybody I know that got the ice bath, they're really into it. It almost becomes like a, I don't want to say religion, but our cult, that would be the right word.
They get a little weird about it. You know what I mean?
Griff
But they swear by it. And my son did a, my son was in the army. Now he did a challenge last winter where he was trying to go a hundred days straight by getting in the pool, you know, throughout every day of the winter season.
And so I got a little cultish cause I was, I ended up keeping at it longer than he did. You know, he, he stepped away from it before I did. And I feel like I talked to you about it anyways.
No, I get it, man. Part of it is like, you're doing something so stupid. You know, like if you think about it, just zoom out from the health benefits and, and, you know, heat shock proteins and all of the jazz that, that is supposed to be health benefit for the cold plunge and then for alternating heat, like a sauna, those sorts of things.
Take that away. So when you first wake up and you're, you know, you're generally speaking, you're most uncomfortable. You're still groggy.
Your brain's not really firing your body stiff. Cause again, age, and then you're going to go assault your senses by being in something freezing cold. Cause like if you accidentally fall into something freezing cold, like it's the risk of death, literally the risk of death.
You're out, you know, on a wintertime hunt or whatever. And you, you fall into freezing cold water. Like you're, you've got a good shot of dying in that context.
So you're going to voluntarily, you know, impose that upon yourself, perhaps with less risk of dying. That sounds really stupid. It doesn't sound like, like a sales pitch.
So when those of us who are really into it or got really into it, like we have to tell you how great it is, man. It's like Amway, like it'll change your life. It's amazing.
You got to get in on this grind and get all your family in on it, even though it's a bad idea.
Joey
You're double diamond. Yeah.
Griff
Double diamond. Yes.
Joey
That's how high up I am. Well, there's two components to it. There's the physical component of it, right.
It's supposed to help with inflammation, right. Just also, um, circulation, a couple of things, but there's the mental component to just doing something that you don't want to do. And that's when people want to be disciplined, it's like, okay, probably you're going to have to do a bunch of things you don't want to do.
Right. And that's how you're going to build self-discipline. So there's like two pieces I saw, I think it was a Rick Rubin was on maybe, um, Joe Rogan.
I think anyway, I could be totally getting the people wrong, but he was talking about, uh, he goes in and he'll spend like 20 minutes in it. Cause he started off at like 30 seconds and it was like 20 minutes. He's like, Oh yeah.
And the water's freezing. It's like, wow. That's.
And he talks about the mental part of it. He didn't even really get into that. He, he got lost a lot of weight, got really healthy or at least, you know, for this episode he did.
And he talked about the ice bath, but it was all of a sudden it came out of nowhere. Everybody's doing it. I had a bunch of friends doing it, especially all my friends that do like jujitsu and stuff.
So that's like right up their alley. They're already punishing themselves. I remember when I was in the Marine Corps, I read an article so long ago and it was, uh, the Northern European like Olympic team.
And they would do the thing where they would get into the jacuzzi and then they'd get in the ice to get, they go back and forth like right after workout. And so I would do that in the, you know, I had those big barracks. So you have those big like open showers, you know?
And so I remember getting in after I'd work out and like hot shower, cold shower, hot shower, cold shower. And it felt like you're invigorated. You could tell it's doing something, you know, I don't know if maybe that's just like the body, like you said, trying to react like, Hey, we shouldn't be here.
And so it's like getting alert that may, it might've been doing something bad. But anyway, I remember doing that. That was like 30 years ago.
And it was a big, it was becoming a big deal.
Griff
I've done it both, both ways. And there's allegedly some benefits to not doing your cold plunge right after a workout, but like after a long run along cardio workout, well, not, not to do it. I just run, I don't do other cardio things, but I'll get in the, in the pool to cool off and that's wonderful for inflammation.
But then on the, on the flip side of it, you know, if it's wintertime pools, cold, get it in, in the morning, first thing. I mean, it really does. You're awake, you're invigorated, you're alive, whatever systems in your body that don't want to experience, you know, freezing cold water, those sort of systems that are a little bit out of your control, right.
They're a little bit under the surface, you know, we're freezing, we're dying. This is bad. They come online and man, you're, you're awake.
Joey
It's a thing, you know, in this it's like related, but not every now and then I'll do a fast. And I was just thinking today, you know, I think I'm going to do a fast like 48 hours with just water. And then I was thinking, maybe this is the time we do it for five days straight.
I've never gotten past day three. It becomes tough, but I have read a lot of stuff on the internet. So we know it's true.
Yeah. A hundred percent that if you can go five days, like once a year or something like that, it reduces your chance of getting like cancer. There's a bunch of things that your body.
And, and I'm, when I say I read on the internet, it was like web MD type stuff. It wasn't like a guy saying this, it was like, Hey, they showed statistics. They did these studies, Johns Hopkins, you know, somebody Carnegie, somebody known some university did some studies and showed like, Oh yeah.
Fasting with just water. I think they were like a cup of bone broth a day.
Griff
Okay.
Joey
I think that was it. But it's not, you know, it forces your body to just like purge a bunch of stuff. And I would think probably with as much as we're consuming in America, the kind of, you know, cause it's, that's a big thing right now that people are talking about.
Like why is our food source so polluted? Right. And you and I were kind of talking about that before we started.
I just went down and got a, uh, what was that?
Griff
I got some kind of orange juice thing.
Joey
And it was, uh, it was, it tasted awful. It tasted like what I smell when I mow the lawn. Oh, okay.
That's what it tasted like. I've never eaten the lawn, but I know maybe I just have. But, uh, you know, but the point of doing it isn't really like if I wanted something good, I'd get like a doctor who tastes good.
I get a Dr. Pepper. This is like, okay, you're going to drink all this fruits and vegetables to kind of cleanse your system. I'm kind of rambling about health, but I'm trying.
Griff
Well, the intermittent fasting thing is gained in popularity and there's apparently some good science behind, generally speaking, trying to keep your blood sugar as low as possible and having great longevity effects. For me, I intermittent fasted for a long time. I'm running a ton right now.
So I'm eating a lot more carbs than I had training for something. Yeah. I got a half marathon actually in, um, just over a week.
Um, and my, so my wife is a good runner, talented runner and loves it. And our beginning of our relationship is, is based on a lie. I'm not kidding.
And she's heard this story. So don't worry. This podcast won't be the thing where it becomes out there for the first time.
She was coming to visit me. We lived in different towns. She's coming to visit me for the day.
And, uh, and she said, Hey, I didn't get my run in this morning. This is before she left Reading. She said, do you like to run?
And I liked her very much. And so I lied to her and I said, I love to run, which was not at all true at that point. I think at that point in my life, I don't know if I'd run more than two contiguous miles.
Um, I was, I was really into lifting weights. So I was reasonably fit, but like not in sort of different kind of fit. Yeah.
Like not in any sort of cardiovascular fitness stuff, whatever. So, so she gets there and, um, we decided to run around this park and the park that we're running around is half mile on each side. So we get around one time and my two miles next week, we're done.
She's like, you know, that was great. Let's I've missed part of the story. We ran from where I lived to the park, which was a mile.
And then we went around. I was going to say your half mile twice. Didn't, but I wasn't going to interrupt.
There's four sides on a square, Joey. So it's half mile each side. So that's how I get it.
A second. So it's a mile there. Don't I'm talking about math.
Yeah. I'm topped out on math. I can't do anymore.
So it was a mile there around the park once. And then I'm thinking of my home four miles. I got this.
So we finished going around the park and she says, Hey, that was great. Let's do it again. And of course I can't look bad in front of this girl that I like.
So I say, yeah, absolutely. I'd love to do that again. So we go around again and I'm like, okay, I got just enough left in the tank to where I can get home and still be running, not have to tell the girl like, you know, not get beat by a girl that I got to walk.
So we get to back to my place and she says, Hey, you know what? We're so close to what I wanted to run today was just seven miles. You mind if we run a little more cause kill me.
So we finished the run. She, she comes inside at this point, it's time for her to head back. Um, and so she's going to go clean up in the bathroom and I'm laying on the floor of the townhouse that I live in under the van.
And she comes out of the bathroom. She's like, Oh, he looks so comfortable. Don't walk me out.
I'm like, are you sure? And she's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, you look so you look, you're resting. You're so comfortable.
Just stay there. I couldn't walk her out if I wanted to, I was done. Legs did not work.
I was so happy. She lived in another town. Like I could not walk properly, get in and out of bed, up and down off the commode week, solid week destroyed my legs.
That was 20 things we do for love. I tell you, I got the girl and a bunch of kids and we've been married a long time and she's wonderful. Now I still really like her and I run, hang out with her.
Yeah. Yeah. That's good.
Still, still working out. Good. Uh, we're going with it.
So I run with her. So I've run a marathon with her. I've run several half marathons with her and we have a race together and we're both trying to set a personal records, um, coming up here in a little over a week, but that all goes back to the half marathon, a place I've never been, a little tiny town, kind of the North end of the wine country area called Cloverdale.
So we're running the Cloverdale.
Joey
Isn't there a dairy there? Isn't Cloverdale the butter mixing my Cloverdale?
Griff
You might be, I'm not sure. Um, there is a, I buy the half and half from Cloverdale at Costco cause you get a gallon of it. Then it can't be the right Cloverdale.
Yeah. Anyway, please.
Joey
I digress.
Griff
All that to say I eat a ton more for purposes of fueling the run than I was in the intermittent fasting. Cause we're, cause we're getting back to that rabbit trail. We're going down the intermittent fasting.
I was much more awake when I pushed off no breakfast and then pushed off lunch until like one or two. I didn't have that afternoon bonk, which is really important. Cause I'm sitting there at my desk working, you know, are you drinking coffee?
Uh, not in the afternoon, morning coffee only. And black. Cause the intermittent fasting, you can't have a cream or anything in it.
Cause that's, I mean, I don't, I didn't go down the commitment level of intermittent fasting to like do full keto or actually I did combine keto and intermittent fasting for a while, but most of the time I like my coffee sweet and creamy cream for sure. Yeah. So I don't have to have that whole, like, Oh, I drink black coffee.
I'm a man thing. I like my coffee.
Joey
So you've got a half marathon, but you're in a week, but aren't you getting ready to go run the half marathon on Sunday and start driving to Colorado on Wednesday. Oh, wow.
Griff
So you're going to go out, you're talking, you've got a tag to get an elk. I do have a cow elk tag and a mule deer tag, and we're going to go near Buena Vista, Colorado. So never heard of it.
Seen pictures of it. It looks beautiful. Um, I think that's literally the name, beautiful view.
It is, but they pronounce it the Coloradans love them, but I'm not sure if that's a thing. It should be. They, their Spanish is not strong.
No. Yeah. Buna or, and I was thinking, but I didn't know if your Spanish wasn't strong.
I think my Spanish is strong ish, uh, at least stronger than whoever named Buena Vista Buena Vista. But yeah. Um, is there no E in it?
Did they, did they phonetically, I think there's an E in it. Okay. Still, but they still say Buna.
Joey
Yup. Yup. So, and apparently people from that area call it beauty.
I have some clients in Prescott, Arizona, and they call it Prescott. Oh. And so when I talked to them Prescott, Arizona, but it's just like Chico, you know, they have almonds, right?
Right. So it's, you know, the rest of the world says almonds, but I like when they always say, well, how do you say salmon? You know, it's like, oh, that's right.
It's just add the S minus the D. So you're going to go hunting. How long do you think you'll be out there?
Griff
Well, the season is about 10 days. It opens on Saturday and then it goes to the following Sunday. So what?
Seven, nine days. Season's nine days. It's second rival season.
So it's long. Hopefully we're not out there all nine days. You know, your chances for success in a public land hunt go down, uh, the longer you're out there, more hunters in the woods, making noise, spooking animals, that sort of thing.
But we're prepared to go the whole time. We're, uh, we're hoping sooner versus later.
Joey
So if you get your tags immediately, you're, you're hopping in the car and coming home. Yup. You're not just going to go out there and live off the land for a few extra days.
Griff
And no, at that point, because that, that amount, that volume of meat is meaningful. Um, I mean, it's the most organic, healthiest thing you've ever put in your body. It never had any hormones or injections or did anything other than literally live off the land.
Um, so it's important to get a process, get a process quickly and, uh, get it in the freezer and make it last. Um, my tags, a cow elk tag, cow elk produce a couple of hundred pounds of meat. Yeah.
Yeah. The actual, actual product, you probably produce 175, 200 pounds of meat. And then, um, you got a lot of kids, maybe not.
I only got two left at home. Um, I have 27, she's in Nashville. Uh, she might be the hardest working one in the family right now.
She's working on her FNP and working as a, sorry, not an FNP. She's a, um, psychiatric nurse practitioner. She's working on her, her nurse practitioner's degree.
She is working as a nurse and she's a mom of a year old. So wow. Yeah.
So she's just outside of Nashville. Then there's Tate. He's 24.
He's local guy. Just bought his first house recently. And then, uh, congratulations Tate.
He's doing a good job, man. He's, and he's so not like me. Like I'm so intense.
My emotions run one to 10, one to 10, one to 10. And, and he's just the chillest, coolest guy to hang out with. Um, I want to be like Tate when I grow up.
Good luck. I know. Like I've started to grow this beard and it's got a lot of gray in it and it grows out wiry and angry.
He's also got a glorious beard. So Tate's winning. Yeah.
He's winning. Then a middle son. He's the one who's in the army and he's an ROTC cadet at grand Canyon.
So we only have two left at home. We have our teen daughter and our little son who's seven, the Lego and star Wars guy. Yeah.
It'll be a bunch of meat in the freezer, but not as many people at the table as frequently as formerly.
Joey
Do you get like all the standard cuts? Like you're like, Hey, I've got some New York's and I mean, roasts and stuff like that. Or is it like, eh, it's a little bit different cuts to get fillets.
I think you do better.
Griff
The better answer is, I don't know, because I've only ever processed my own meat. This time will be the first day if I'm successful on both animals, because it's so much work to process that in your own. I mean, that's another thing.
Everybody should hunt and kill their own thing and process it at least once. So you know what you're doing when you go to the grocery store and you buy that thing that's like, looks perfect. You know, that's a steak.
Like that's really, really hard to get that there. You should learn that. But I digress.
I'll keep the backstraps, tenderloins, cut those into steaks. I might make a roast out of some of the shanks and then I'll grind everything else. But this time I'll take it to a professional processor because it's so much work and then you're, you're keeping it, you know, on ice the whole way home from Colorado.
This time I'll have them hang it and then I'll have them ship it to me. Or if we're out there for a few days, freeze, you know, freeze, dry it and bring it home. And that's, that's how I'll get it.
So I'll have, I don't know, ask me again in a few months.
Joey
I will, I will ask you again. We started buying a cow, a half a cow a few years ago and local grass fed, grass finished, no antibiotic, you know, the whole nine yards, even grass fed, grass finished, which is pretty lean. And it's amazing the taste versus what you buy in the store.
I mean, you have to have a freezer. We get about high 200s, low 300s each year. But I then bought a half a cow each year and we became, we went from eating hardly any meat at all to being like pretty heavy carnivores where we're eating beef multiple times a week.
What's funny is as we've seen inflation go up, I've paid the exact same for this meat for all three years. It's actually I think four years because the first year it took us two years to eat the cow, a half cow. They're still charging, going to the farmer, he's still charging the exact same amount he charged me in 2021.
So you think about what we've seen inflation wise in the marketplace, but you know, and I thought, man, his costs haven't changed. He's got a bunch of cows on a farm that he owns eating. He probably raised his own hay or something like that.
And so to him, there's no reason to, I guess, and we paid like $7 a pound processed. This is from the butcher. So $7 a pound for fillets, $7 a pound for hamburger, all in between.
At the time that at the first cow that I did that, that was a good price. It was a good price. It was when you went into like R&R, I don't live very far from R&R, I love to go in there when we need some other stuff, you know, and $7 was like a little bit high for him, a little bit on the high end back then for hamburger, but definitely cheap for any of the steaks or anything like that.
Well, now it's super cheap. Now that's like, and I just got another one a few months ago and it was $7 processed.
Griff
And you're getting a product that, you know, the person who raised it, you know, where it was raised. And if he's not, you know, if you're a farmer that's producing this, if he's not having to buy supplemental, you know, grass to feed the animal, like he's got enough on his property to do it. And he's not paying to transport it, right?
Because everything that we put on board, a fuel powered vehicle costs more money to get to R&R and everywhere else. If you're not experiencing those costs, he can keep his costs. I mean, I suspect he's doing you a little bit of favor, but he can keep his costs very, very low because you're going direct to the producer.
Joey
Yeah. And I wasn't negotiating. I wasn't like, Hey, you know, I was just like, Hey, how much, you know, $7 pounds, same as last time.
Like, okay. You know, you have to buy, like, I mean, you have to spend a couple of grand, but you think about, I hear how food is expensive. And I think processed food is both expensive and inexpensive.
It's kind of a weird thing. My friends will, cause we don't really eat processed food a little bit. Right.
But not like the average American and they'll go and they'll spend $30 on a meal. That's not even like, that's not a high end meal at all. And they're saying, Oh, well, that's really expensive.
That cow. I said, do you realize like, look how much money you're spending a week eating out. You could buy that cow.
You could buy these ingredients. Now you have to, you know, you have to chop onions and garlic and what have you, but I don't think it's expensive. I think it's, it's one big fat cost.
And the big cost is your time. Cause you have to, you have to, but my wife loves to cook. And so, and my kids have gotten into it too.
And I'm, I'm not gonna say I cook, but I love to barbecue. My parents used to own a barbecue restaurant here in town, long time ago, DJ's barbecue.
Griff
Okay. So I grew up off of Hilltop drive and DJ's barbecue pit was our go-to breakfast spot. We would walk over there on Sunday mornings.
We'd walk over there and we'd get DJ's barbecue pit. I went to DJ's barbecue pit so long ago that our waitress, who was our regular Sunday morning, waitress asked us smoking or not. And we would always pick non-smoking cause my mom was an asthmatic.
And then of course, once you say non-smoking, the smoke knows to like, stop, you know, don't, don't go any further.
Joey
They're smoking over there. That's almost five feet away.
Griff
Yeah. It totally doesn't different. It was a different time.
Yeah. It was totally different time, but that place was great. We love that place.
And now it's a, I don't know what it used to was a video store up there for a little bit that went by the wayside in the late nineties.
Joey
They tore down the restaurant itself and built up. You're right. It was a Showtime video.
It came into town, had like three videos and it's, it's changed hands. It's, it's some kind of corporate nondescript something above Bartels. Yeah.
But yeah, they, we had a, so I mean, I grew up barbecuing and we had the real barbecue was a giant brick pit, big metal doors. And the, you'd, you'd put the mesquite and Hickory and get that going and the vent on the other side. And we would cook and we'd cook three, 400 pounds of meat and it would cook all day.
I mean, the ribs would take a few hours, the brisket would take a few hours. And so you were rotating, you'd go in and cook for like eight hours, nine hours meeting and good. So now I have a green egg and a Weber, no gas.
I'd use a, Oh, what it's a, I used to buy, it's, it's like a brand that's called like Lazarus or something like that, but it's charcoal wood charcoal, not the briquette. Yeah. I don't know fuel.
And I got a, I had a chimney starter, but that's a pain in the, I have one of those.
Griff
Oh, the electric thing.
Joey
Yes. And you just put it down there. You put the, you know, plug it in, you come back out and it's flaming.
I mean, it's so fast and easy, but I, we barbecue, especially with the cow. I mean, got to cook it. Right.
Griff
We've done the same thing you've done. I mean, part of it is like, well, you see all these subscription services, right? So if somebody told you that, um, you know, it was going to cost you whatever, 150 bucks a year for 150 bucks for Spotify, but you got it for a whole year.
People might be more resistant. I'm not picking on Spotify. It's just an example.
I have their product. I like it, but you might be more resistant at that high price of $150. Whereas somebody's like, Oh, you know, it's $12 a month.
You're like, no problem. So spending 30 or $40 to eat out, it seems like less of an insult to the budget, even though over the course of time, it adds up a lot more than the 1500 bucks or $2,000 to spend on the cow. And there's a backside cost too, that people aren't recognizing, which is that $30 fast food meal.
And you can spend $30 on fast easily, which is, I mean, I hate to sound like that old curmudgeon, right? Like that when I was a kid, but the other, well, not the other day, but a few months ago, my son called, he was at the office using our high-speed internet there. He had a zoom interview.
We live a little bit rurally. So high-speed and internet don't go together in rural communities.
Joey
Yeah.
Griff
We have Starlink now. Love it. We were able to stream both the football game last night on Amazon prime and something on Netflix at the same time.
It was modernity. It was amazing. Nice.
Anyways, he called me cause I was at an appointment and he said, Hey, can you bring me some lunch? And I thought he was going to hit me up for something good, uh, you know, from the hearth, a good burger or something like that. And he says, I'm really feeling Carl's jr.
So we got two sodas, cold digger. Yeah. Yeah.
Chris cut fries and a cheeseburger. And it was like $24. And I mean, it's just blown away by that.
So the backside cost of eating like that though, comes from feeling that crud later that day. And then all the, you know, cascade of problems that comes from eating like that regularly later in your life, it's not, that juice isn't worth the squeeze. I watched my father do that to himself.
Um, and then, you know, he lived with us and took care of us the last, we took care of him rather the last several years of his life. And what he wanted to do, he was prevented from doing by the way he had lived the previous 15, 20 years, you know, just not taking care of his body and not eating right. And letting himself get too heavy.
And, and so that really, you know, prohibited him from having freedom. Um, so, you know, you make this little bit of a disciplined decision now to save your money, buy a cow, eat at home, cook, it's better food, jump in a cold pool in the morning, jump in a cold pool. See, we're going to get you drinking the Kool-Aid before we're done here.
Oh, I think so. Yeah. It's just a matter of time.
And then when you're, when you're 70, you're still up walking around, you know, you're still shooting. You're still target. Like he was really into shooting.
You're still target shooting. You're still building. You love to build.
Um, you know, instead he was mostly confined to a walker and a wheelchair. He's a great guy. I mean, I, I know no, um, complaints about my childhood.
I'm not one of those people who looks back and, Oh, I didn't have this. I didn't have that. I had great parents.
It's one of the, if you don't, you know, my kids ask me like, what's the secret or whatever. It's like marry the right person, have great parents and, um, you know, love the Lord your God. Those, if you have those three things, you could be all right.
Joey
I totally agree. I haven't always had those things in my life. I haven't always, uh, I think I'm in like a Renaissance period right now where we've been really going to church and Bible study.
And I'm seeing it's, it's kind of like I lost my way for a little while. You know what I mean? I, I think I was taken in too much negative energy, you know?
And, and, uh, and what I mean is just, you're listening to the world. So you're forgetting that there's these things matter. You know what I mean?
God exists and it matters and your relationship with God matters and you just get caught up in the world. And if you look at the world right now, it's like every stream is, there's a lot of negative stuff. It's war here, war there.
This is bad. This is bad. Like it's pretty steady stream of negative energy, like nonstop.
And I remember when I was a kid, you know, we made comments about the news being negative. If it bleeds, it leads, you know? But it's, we didn't, I don't think there was as much, you know, now it's like drinking from a fire hose versus back then it was like trickling water, you know?
Uh, and it was a different kind. It was, you know, the Walter Cronkite or just the Dan Rather where they're like, Oh, there's war in here. But it didn't seem the same.
Now it's, it's very petty. It's very emotional. Our communication has really gone downhill.
And if you listen to anybody who tries to, there's a ton of people trying to tell you why the ones that have resonated with me or whether it's like, it's a combination of things. You know what I mean? It's, there's not this one thing, but the internet, social media definitely had a transformative effect on us.
And, uh, a lot of it is negative, especially with our youth. And I, and we're talking here, we're going to show up on YouTube. So I know it's like, Hey, you're part of the problem.
Eh, not really because it also has a positive, you know, and the negative is more of, I think the, the constant hate and bickering, something happened where there people are getting dopamine hits from being very hurtful to other people. And, you know, it's hurting people hurt people, but it's, you just see, I mean, you look at like any time a star missteps, anybody famous, right? That's not just star anything.
I mean, the, the knives come out and I don't know if, was that always there and no one got a voice. So it never built momentum. Right.
Cause you didn't, you didn't have any feedback loop where you're like, if you watch the news and you found out somebody did something wrong, there wasn't this ability to just like a feeding frenzy to start. And now there is this ability. As soon as there's something, there's just a feeding frenzy.
I mean, I don't know.
Griff
Do you, I don't know that human nature has changed, but our ability to access the worst of ourselves has become just ubiquitous. It's everywhere. So like when our oldest kids who I described for you earlier, now 27 and 24, when they were going, I love how you're a lawyer and you're always a lawyer.
Yeah.
Joey
Do you notice like, even when you communicate, you're like, I already presented that exhibit.
Griff
Hey, yeah. I brought that in your honor. I don't mean to do well.
Okay. So you go with it.
Joey
I love it.
Griff
I think it's great. You, we were talking, I'm not sure if we were recording it or not, but you were talking about your friend, whose son went on to get an engineering degree and then go fly for the Navy. That was, that was my goal.
I wanted to go down that road. And so I was an aeronautical engineering major until it, I figured out that math is really, really challenging.
Joey
Um, and I don't know, you did the four squares and I didn't get it, but I thought that was it.
Griff
You know, we were, that was full throttle right there. Done. Um, so, so I changed my major and eventually I landed in going to law school, but I had always been told growing up like, Oh, you should be a lawyer.
You should be a lawyer. And I just, you know, it was always just something that somebody said. And I mean, I like to argue and I like to debate and, you know, generally kind of my disposition as being a pain in the butt.
So, um, eventually I caught up with the reality of who I was and I just went with it. Right. I was like, well, I'm kind of a pain in the butt, just trend that direction.
So now I'm a professional pain, hopefully not to my clients. I'm doing excellent work for them, but to their opponent, to our opponents, uh, be a pain to them, a professional antagonist. Yeah.
My wife tells me I don't turn it off and she'll even say to me, you're lawyering me. And I, and my response to that, if I was being completely transparent was no, I'm gripping you. Cause it's just like, it just is what I am.
I just happened to do it for a job also. So I used to tell them when they were in their teen years, you know, and they would talk about how difficult it is being a teen and how I didn't just understand, you know, obviously I was younger. So my own teen years were closer and I would, I would dismiss them like, you know, no, you guys are wrong.
It's not that hard. Like I did it. I remember it.
It seems hard, but it's not. Um, I would go back and I would counsel me to not say that to them. Cause it is different.
You know, when you wear something that somebody makes fun of at school in 1995, you go home at three o'clock and you're not followed by the fact that you were poked fun at in the worst case scenario, you know, typically it's when you get picked up by mom or you get off the bus or you get home to your house, like you have this sanctuary. They all have devices in their pocket or if they don't, like we're kind of the weird family that our kids don't get cell phones.
Joey
Our kids don't have social media. They upset my, my 19, almost 20 and my 18 year old, they have iPhones. They have no social media accounts.
Never happened. And they're off in college and they're like, ah, there's no reason to have it.
Griff
It's just, I applaud that they're doing that as adults on their own, you know? So our kid who's off at college, he can get a cell phone until he's 16 and our daughter has a cell phone now, but it's like calling texting, right? She has no social media, no internet access.
She thinks I'm like Amish and the most archaic father in the worst way you are, but I don't care. I would fair enough. I would rather be, if I'm wrong about it, there's no real cost to her.
Where I was wrong though, for my kids that are older now is it did follow them home. Cruelty followed them home. What they missed out on, followed them home.
And, and I'm going to pass this off. Like I've done this, the hard work of the science behind it, but I haven't, but I've, you know, done enough reading in this area enough, um, paying attention to folks who have some level of training, skill, expertise in this area that it turns out what keeps humans most engaged isn't like, um, you know, puppies running through fields. Uh, so it's not something that you might really like or find very joyful or find very relaxing.
And it's not stuff that makes you really, really angry. Just stuff that makes you, um, in a rage angry or something that's really disgusting. It's stuff that makes you mad, but like a little bit, you know, it's mad, but it's not an eminent threat to you.
So social media companies, these are monetized organizations, right? Their goal is not altruistic. It's to make money for their shareholders, which I have no problem with that.
I'm fine as a capitalist, you know, make money for your shareholders. That's your job. They're the same as the tobacco companies 70 years ago.
Yeah, right. You've got a, they know that it's negative.
Joey
They know it's having a negative impact, but they're like, Hey, look, freedom and we make money. And so they just, but that's, that's the downside of, I'm a capitalist. I have to say that before my next statement, that is the downside of capitalism.
That, that is, it's, that's why you're supposed to have the systems and, you know, checks and balances and we don't have them anymore. They're gone. Right.
Griff
There's no, there's no warning on, on Instagram or on Snapchat that says, you know, surgeon general tells you this get cancer, you know, or, or whatever. Surgeon general reports that people who regularly use social media, I don't know, don't sleep as well and have higher rates of reported self-reported anxiety. I suspect I'm guessing, but I suspect I'm right on those things.
But in any event, yeah, there's no warning label. So these monetized companies have figured out that the best way to keep people's eyeballs on their product and on their advertising, which is how they make money is to kind of tick people off a little bit. And so that's why we're so, you know, like the news is always bad because if the news, like we're doing some pretty amazing here, like we're talking to each other freely, openly, we're saying things that people might not agree with.
We have no real threat. The news is going to boot down the door and arrest us for it. It's air conditioned.
We have electricity, we're drinking clean water, like life is pretty stinking good. You know, there's a lot of places in the world today that drinking clean water is like a miracle for the day. Right.
So, but yet if you ask folks like, oh, everything's going to hell in a handbasket, man, it's bad, bad, bad.
Joey
Oh, bad. So bad out there.
Griff
Yeah. And I mean, on one hand I agree with that. On the other hand, I'm like, zoom out just a minute.
It's not that bad. Middle-class in the 1950s in the United States, everybody had one car and air conditioning and a phone was optional. If I told you that I lived with no air conditioning, I had no telephone access and we had one car for the family, you'd be like, oh, Chris, Chris on hard times, very poor guy.
Right.
Joey
So our standards changed. Completely. Yeah.
Yeah. And they've shifted. And I don't want to be negative.
I don't want to just throw, you know, coal on the fire, but I also want to be conscious of it. How very, um, uh, 1990s of you to put coal on the fire. What would you say now?
I don't want to add another solar panel to the EV. Yeah. I don't know what you would say what the modern equivalent would be, but I do want to be aware of it.
And I try to disconnect from it. I unfortunately got a Twitter account and, uh, that's the one that I'm partially addicted to. I don't spend any, I don't have, I mean, I have these other accounts because like I had them for business, you know, you have to thinking you have to post to some of these, but I'm never on them.
YouTube. If you consider YouTube, uh, social media. And I, I think it blurs the line it's in that realm, but definitely, I mean, and YouTube, that's the big one for me.
And it's brought my attention span down and it's, it just keeps condensing, condensing, condensing, you know, now that the shorts are, yeah, they said when we were kids, I think the attention span was like something like 20, 22 minutes. That's why sitcoms are kind of, that's about as long as we can get you to write. And now it's something like nine seconds.
That's why if you'll watch, especially towards children, the camera angles are changing like rapid fire. You know what I mean? So just watch a show.
It's, it looks like it's ADHD inducing. You know what I mean? It's, it's not good.
So we try to control that. Just not letting them have social media accounts, I think is a big one. And I, and I, I cringe when I see little kids on devices in certain places and you can tell they're just like, man, this is like a crack pipe and slop machine combined.
Griff
Do you know what I mean? And it's for both the kid and the parents. It breaks my heart.
I mean, it really does pain me when I'm at a restaurant with my family, for example, and I see a restaurant at a neighboring table and the kids all plugged into a tablet or a phone. And on one hand, you know, the parents are looking for a quiet minute to chat. And so they're, you know, they're pacifying that child.
On the other hand, you know, they're not working out life together, not talking about what was good in the day. It was difficult in the day. My wife, I mentioned earlier, she was out at see their lawyering again, referencing back to the former evidence.
Um, she was out of town. Yeah. Right.
She was out of town. If you want to call me your honor, totally feel free. You are wearing black today.
So, I mean, it's basically a robe. I feel like a magistrate. Yeah.
Ooh, magistrate. I like that. I like that word.
I like throwing words. You know what I mean? Yeah.
I read I know you do some without pictures too. I'm told. Um, so she was out of town picking up her folks at the San Francisco airport yesterday.
And, um, my daughter and I got to have a date. Uh, my teen daughter and I got to have a date and we had no phones at the table, which is our rule at home or out. And so we were sitting, um, at the restaurant last night and we were talking about relationships and boys and girls and, and some of the difficulties of that.
And had we both, a 49er fan grew up in the eighties, um, you know, right. Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, Roger Craig, Dwight Clark. I mean, just amazing teams.
And the 49er game was right there. I could have been watching it on Amazon prime. My daughter could have been texting a friend or something, but the phones went away and magic happened between the two of us.
Like it's not the easiest thing in the world to raise a teen. Um, I'm sure you know this and other parents out there that might listen to this would know that, but it was this little Island sanctuary where we had, you know, 20 minutes of each other's undivided attention. And she was in a spot where she could hear me.
I was in a spot where I could hear her. There was no pressure to be anywhere. And we talked all those parents that are plugging their kids in.
They're missing out on that. And I mean, don't get me wrong. I get it.
I want to have a quiet conversation with my wife sometime, but I didn't come to a restaurant in public with a lot of other people expecting a quiet conversation with my bride, have your kids there, deal with it, discipline them. Cause one day they're going to go out, right? They're going to need to have that discipline.
And, and I don't want to sit next to your undisciplined child when they're an undisciplined adult. So there's my two cents.
Joey
I always find those people. They always, they always find a seat next to me. I don't know.
It seems like there's more and more of them. I think the bigger thing, uh, like, or to me when we're talking, it's, we can start to go down this road of, ah, this isn't good. This isn't good.
This isn't good. And I always want to bring it back to like a, like a foundation, say like, what's one thing we could change that would have a ripple effect versus like addressing, you know, each problem. And I think, I think if we could teach people at a very young age to pursue continuous improvement, like don't even, it can be small, but just getting in that rhythm of saying, Hey, look, how are you going to be better tomorrow than you were today?
It can be something really, really small, you know? Uh, but planting that seed versus you just meet a lot of people that seem to have, for lack of a better way to put it, they seem like they've given up. Right.
Do you know what I mean? Like they, they walk around like defeated, they're defeated and we're all defeated, man. I get it.
I lose all the time, but trying to instill that we're like, yeah, but you can come back. You can, what are we going to do? What are we going to change?
What are we, do we need to cut something out of our diet? Do we need to get and walk? Do we need to go a little further?
Do we need to drink a little bit more water? Should I be taking magnesium? These are little things.
And there's a couple of books, like, um, atomic habits is a great book to the compound effect. And these are like, you know, come on fix like that big. It's a tiny little book.
He just talks about how it's a success is a bunch of little tiny things. Stop looking for the big thing, little things. I think if we could start there, because I don't think addressing these problems, I think it's like, uh, like Hydra, everyone, you, you have to get down to the base and everything up at the top is, it's just a waste of time.
It's just going to make for great arguing and debating. And sure.
Griff
I mean, people, well, I mean, you, you said this earlier when you said, you know, that you, you listened to these folks when you're consuming sort of like long, say a long form podcast, the folks that you find being attracted to their, their rationale is because it's not simple, right? It's, these are complex problems. They require complex solutions, but if we start attacking just the symptoms that are out there on the edges, you know, then you just more symptoms pop up.
You have to get to the root problem. And so, you know, you're talking about this idea of building in a little bit of discipline and a little bit of self-evaluation from the earliest stage, like, you know, and, and a lot of that can be done. I think with getting, I don't have a secret sauce for this, right?
Don't, don't get me wrong, but if you can get your kids in terms of parenting, if you can get your kids to ask, or if you can ask them and you have enough credibility with them, that they'll listen to the question and then work out an answer with you or on their own as they get older. But it's like, how could you handle that differently? What can you learn from that?
And then what might you do differently next time to see a, you know, like a different outcome. That's huge. And getting people to do that.
Like, I mean, I learned, I learned from cases that I'm in now. Like I was talking to a lawyer. In fact, I was sitting in my truck when I saw you outside and I was chatting to a lawyer who used to work for me.
He's down in LA now. And we were talking about another lawyer that's here in, in Reading, and he is not the most pleasant person to be on the opposite side of the table with, but he's a very good lawyer, very talented. You will earn your keep when you're opposing this guy.
You know, you can learn from that, right? You can learn from that hard work that it takes to oppose this particular attorney that we were chatting about. And you can take that same lesson anywhere in your life.
Like the harder you're working at something, it's not supposed to be easy. You learn way more in the difficulty. You learn way more in the failures than you learn in the, in the successes.
And so if you, you take the opportunity, even somebody who's like, I'm practicing law 20 years, like every time I'm in a really, really hard case or have a very talented lawyer on the other side, like that's an opportunity to learn, put something in my toolkit, take it with me next time. I'll be better at my job.
Joey
So you are a trial lawyer. You find yourself in court a lot. Cause I mean, when you think about lawyers, that's what we all think.
We see TV, but the vast majority of lawyers aren't in courtrooms. They're doing everything outside the courtroom, right?
Griff
Right. Um, it'd be fair to say that I'm a trial lawyer, but it would also be fair to say that, you know, 95% of my life has spent outside of the courtroom. So, you know, in my practice area as a personal injury lawyer, we prepare every case, like it's going to go to trial, but the whole judicial system for good reason has been designed to avoid trial.
If at all possible, if everything went to trial, you know, you'd have a backlog of 10 years to get a courtroom and a judge and a jury to hear it. So not everything can go to trial and not everything should. You know, in the personal injury realm, cases that go to trial are ones that have very extreme damages.
There's a great deal of money at stake and when we just can't agree and we need a jury to tell us, um, or there's, you know, significant damages and we're not sure about fault and we need a jury to help us get to fault. You know, I'm very convinced it's their fault and they're very convinced it's my client's fault or some third party's fault. You know, we need a jury.
Most of the time that doesn't happen because you don't have one or the other or both of those factors. You know, the vast majority of, um, personal injury cases resolve something well better than 95%. So as a result, we don't find ourselves in court a lot, but we take a lot of batting practice.
Um, even though we don't get up to the plate as often as, as we might like as trial attorneys, we do a lot of BP litigation. What's BP? Batting practice.
Sorry.
Joey
Oh, batting practice. Okay.
Griff
Yeah. Baseball was my thing as a kid. So we take a lot of batting practice and you, you need to develop your case as though you're about ready to step in there.
Bottom of the ninth, your team needs a home run and you're prepared to hit it. You know, you have to prepare every case like that. So that's what we do.
So we're really, really good at getting ready to go to trial, but often trial doesn't actually happen. So that's, that's the modern trial, modern personal injury trial attorney.
Joey
How did you get into personal injury law?
Griff
I got in a car accident actually. Um, so when I came out of law school, that girl that made me do all that running, um, she was still up here in Reading. And so.
Are you from here? I'm from here, but I left to go to college and go to law school. And I, I wasn't going to come back to Reading.
I had taken a job, um, elsewhere, but then I met her. And so plans changed. I came back here and I went to work for what's called an insurance defense firm.
So, you know, you have auto insurance and let's say you make a driving mistake and somebody sues you and alleges that you caused them injuries. You turn that claim into your insurance company, and then they'll either provide you house counsel, which is somebody who works for your insurance company to be your lawyer, or they'll hire an outside law firm to defend you. I worked at one of those kind of law firms was primarily insurance defense.
And we did insurance defense for all sorts of different things, you know, schools, public entities, lots of car accident cases, all that kind of work. But on May 1st, 2009, um, which was actually the day I founded, um, my law firm now Art Hofer and Tonkin with my business partner, Ken Art Hofer. I make this joke to him every year on anniversary on the day we started business.
Um, he went to work and I went and played golf. So I was playing golf at a perfect partnership. Yeah.
It's worked out great for me for 15 years. He's been a steady worker and I play golf. Um, no kidding aside, I play golf like twice a year badly in charity tournaments.
And this was one of those. So it's coming back from Tierra Oaks. After having played in a charity tournament, young lady pulled out in front of me, caused an accident and they got mistreated by my own insurance company through the claim process.
And I thought to myself, why am I using my skills and talents to try and save an insurance company some money on these claims? Um, when I could be representing people and making sure that insurance companies don't do to them what they just tried to do to me. And so I slowly started transitioning to representing folks and then something really remarkable.
I probably the most remarkable thing that's happened in my career outside of the actual results, but just sort of my, my view toward being an attorney is I started recognizing that I had an opportunity to help people. Some of the folks that come into my office are dreadfully injured. Their life has changed their ability to provide for their kids, their, their families.
You know, those are, those are different things for them post-accident than they were before. And it could be a long slog in some of these cases, very difficult to resolve very long cases. But when you help provide resources for a family such that, you know, they're not, they're not going out and buying yachts or, or, or living a fast life, but they're always going to have a roof over their head.
They're always gonna be able to buy groceries. That is super meaningful. So being able to participate in a job that actually has meaning in other people's lives at a real tangible way that changed my job satisfaction.
And so then once that started to happen, then it just became a matter of getting to the point where we could handle a hundred percent personal injury work, which is all we've done for several years now. It's just a hundred percent personal injury.
Joey
So like when you say personal injury, is there, I mean, that's pretty wide. There's a lot going on. Is there like specialty that you do just this personal injury that versus everything?
Griff
Any way you can get hurt that is the fault of someone else is personal injury. And we do that.
Joey
Oh, okay.
Griff
You do it all.
Joey
Yeah.
Griff
Now there are some, to the lay person, there might be some things in there that you would think would be included in personal injury that aren't and that we don't do. So for example, workers' compensation has its own special legal system. So if you're hurt on the job, it doesn't matter whose fault it is.
Fault's not an analysis in workers' comp. There are lawyers who specialize in some great ones in town that we'll partner with and work with on cases that cross over, that have both a personal injury and a work comp component. But if it's strictly work comp, that's not what we do.
And then medical malpractice, you're thinking, well, geez, it doesn't get much more personal injury than if you're injured in the context of working with a physician or having a medical procedure. We don't do that. Again, special area of law, but we work closely with a couple of firms in San Francisco, in Sacramento, and we have our clients that are hurt in that mal context and make sure we put them in the appropriate hands.
But other than those two areas, I don't care if you get hurt in a plane, train, boat, car, bike, walking, trips, lip, fall, auto accident, whatever. We'll handle your case. We've handled them in all of those contexts from boating to pedestrians to autos, helicopters.
I mean, it doesn't matter. We've taken on all those cases.
Joey
How many cases a year do you... Because you have a whole team. I've been to your office.
You've got several people. It's not just you. You mentioned your partner, but there's other people in there.
Griff
I can probably run a rough number. We started our filing number at 3,000 when we opened for business on May 1st, 2009. We just arbitrarily picked 3,000.
I think the old firm that we had been a part of was in the 2,000. So we said, okay, our first file will be number 3,000. And I think we're somewhere around opening file 4,300.
So... 1,300 over 14 years? Yeah, over...
At 90? Coming up on 15 years. No, we've been 15 years.
Yeah. And I would say that our caseload has been very high and has remained high for several years. So I'd say, yeah, we're probably resolving 80, 90 cases a year across the office.
Some years it's more because cases are maybe a little on the smaller side. So you resolve them quicker. Sometimes it's less, but yeah, something like 80, 90 cases a year.
How many of those do you find yourself actually in court in front of a judge on average? You probably find yourself in court in front of a judge much more frequently than you do in trial, per se, because there's motions, there's case management conferences.
Joey
Let's try it that way. Let me restate it. How many of those do you usually go to trial?
Griff
1%, 2%. I mean, it's really low. And there's, again, the whole court system has been...
Well, two things have happened. Court backlog. So the court system has been designed to promote settlement.
All courts in the state of California have a mandatory settlement conference that you have to participate in. So the court takes a crack at trying to resolve cases. Cases are exceptionally expensive to try.
By the time you hire experts, hire treating physicians to come testify, if you try a case and your costs for trial are $40,000, $50,000, that's on the low side. You can spend several hundred thousand dollars putting a case on. And as a personal injury lawyer, you advance those costs.
And I mean, that's something we've done. We've had cases where we've advanced tens of thousands and tens of thousands on tens of thousands of dollars to prosecute the case properly and hire appropriate experts to analyze the issues for which you need that kind of thing. But the system's been designed to avoid it.
And then something else happened. We had COVID. And so a lot of the processes that used to be in-person went online, courts went online.
And then the courts really... Because the court system's shut down. If you wanted to try and resolve a case, you found yourself in a lot of mediation, which is a private process where you hire a neutral third, usually a retired but very experienced attorney or a retired judge or both.
And they help the party see their way to a resolution. Mediation picked up in the frequency of its use post-COVID and has stayed very, very high. Like very good mediators have...
They're booked out months on their calendar. So those things have combined to reduce the frequency of trial.
Joey
Now, is the difference like mediation means that neither party has to take it versus arbitration they do or something like that's the difference or something? Yep.
Griff
Mediation's a voluntary process. Both parties usually or all parties, whether it's two or three or four or 10, doesn't matter, share the cost of the mediation equally, typically, and then you're not bound with the mediator's recommendation. So if the mediator thinks you're blowing it and really thinks that you ought to be taking less or demanding more or whatever, that's not binding.
And it's also private. What the mediator is sharing with you and your client about strengths and weaknesses is your case and what he thinks the other side might be able to come up with in terms of resources to settle the case isn't what he's sharing in the other room. It's very private and mediation doesn't resolve.
You don't really know where the other side was typically. You know what their bottom line was, although sometimes you do and then that's that moment where you have to have that heart-to-heart with your client and decide what's best and right for them. Arbitration can be both binding and non-binding, but typically it's binding and it's basically a private trial.
So there's a judge, you present evidence. The formality can sometimes change. Sometimes arbitration can be much less formal in terms of the admission of evidence, but the arbitrator will issue a written opinion and then that becomes, typically speaking, the end result in that case, and that is binding.
Joey
Not very good segues, but I had a couple of questions that were going through my head that I thought you might be able to answer. The Sword of Damocles. The Sword of Damocles.
Does that sound familiar to you? It does not, so tell me a little more. I don't know.
Is that the one where the sword was above the king's head? Who's that?
Griff
You're not trying a Solomon baby splitting.
Joey
No, that's different. That's where, yeah, no, this one was the kings had the sword over his head. Somebody wanted to be king.
They put the sword over his head. Is that the Sword of Damocles?
Griff
I don't know, man. The streams merge with me a lot. You can't cross the streams, man.
Didn't you watch Ghostbusters? Yeah, more than once. Yeah.
So yeah, there's an inordinate amount of useless trivia inside my head, but you have gone down a road that I am unfamiliar with and I don't like it. I feel uncomfortable.
Joey
I just thought being a lawyer, the lawyer would be like, oh yeah, the Sword of Damocles we talk about all the time.
Griff
I'd say it with my pilot voice. And yes, what is your question about the Sword of Damocles, Mr. Garden?
Joey
I have no idea where I was bringing that with. I, for some reason, when you were talking, I was thinking sort of Damocles. I have no idea why.
Okay. And then the second thing I was, what is your favorite lawyer movie? Favorite lawyer movie.
Griff
Okay. So a there, I know your favorite scene. They're not like that.
They're not like that. I mean, lawyering is not like the movies. Um, you know, it's all the stuff that happens over two years compressed into an hour and a half.
Um, and a lot of stuff that you're not allowed to do because it's illegal, um, makes it into the movies. But, um, my favorite lawyer movie, okay. The best lawyer movie for accuracy is a movie called the civil action with John Travolta.
Um, I had to watch that in law school.
Joey
That's based on a true story of them putting the poison in the water.
Griff
Yep. Right.
Joey
There's a, Oh, the name of the company starts with a B and it was one of these companies that owns all these. You don't tanneries. Um, and it was in Massachusetts, but it owns a bunch of stuff like the parent company.
Griff
I don't know. They did the Beatrice or something like that. Anyway.
So there's a, there's an incredible scene in that movie, which illustrates a point that you're taught in trial advocacy in law school. And that, you know, any young lawyers never ask a question that you don't know the answer to. Yes, that is nailed it.
You cannot. Yeah. Right.
I know. Sort of Damocles anyway, I'll be Googling them immediately upon leaving here. So yeah, he asks a question that he doesn't know the answer to, and he gets burned, burned badly in front of the jury.
So you really want to know what the difficulty of, and that's a personal injury case and that's a toxic tort. And literally everybody in the firm is putting their houses up for mortgage to pay these costs. And they're taking on Goliath.
I mean, it really is a David and Goliath type case. That's a great case or that's a great movie to see what it's really like kind of a boring movie, probably a little slow, not a powerhouse cast, powerhouse cast, true story. Amazing.
Uh, yeah. I mean, you can get into these federal motions, um, a 12 B six motion, which is similar to what we call a here in California. That's in the movie.
I mean, it's really accurate, but my favorite lawyer movie, come on, favorite scene.
Joey
I think I know it. I don't know. I wish I could write it on a piece of paper.
This would be like where the magician, if you watch her, the mentalist, I'd be like, come on, write it down. And what did he say? Yeah.
You know, if you get this, I'll, I mean, I'll trust you. Good man.
Griff
It's not a few good. Oh, it's not. You missed it.
Joey
It's a little more obscure bad. That's so inaccurate, by the way, if you get that entire thing is so inaccurate, but Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson shouting courtroom. I mean, oh, it's great.
Jack Nicholson just, yeah.
Griff
Yeah. No, my favorite scene or my favorite lawyer movie. I can't think of the name of it.
It's a Richard gear is the attorney and Edward Norton. Hold on. Um, keep going.
Edward Norton is the accused in that movie. It is definitely an R rated film. It is definitely kids.
I don't think that's right.
Joey
That's right.
Griff
I'm a fear. Okay. Right.
Am I right? I'm getting a head nod off camera. It's primal fear.
Okay. So yeah, primal fear. Then the great scene in that movie, I don't want to ruin it for anybody who might watch it, uh, is at the very end when they realize it was a dream.
No. Yeah. Right.
Right. Um, when Edward Norton is talking to his attorney, who has just done a remarkable job for him, um, in the courtroom and it's just a brutal twist, but I liked that because tell her, I'm sorry. Yes.
Joey
Tell her I'm sorry about that. And he uses a different voice. Yeah.
Uh, he goes, wait, there's no, I can't remember the two names, but he's like, there was never the other one. Yeah. That's great.
Norton's first movie. That's his brilliant.
Griff
Yeah. That's his first.
Joey
I mean, he crushed it.
Griff
Great movie. Um, lawyer stuff. Um, no, but yeah, no, fight club.
He was, he was crazy.
Joey
That's right.
Griff
He does crazy really well. Yeah, he does. I've heard it said that actors aren't necessarily acting.
They're just being themselves. Like, cause if you look at certain characters or certain actors, they're the same person over and over again. I don't know if Ed Norton's crazy, but if he was a little strange in real life, that wouldn't surprise me considering how he's done.
Joey
He's in a movie that didn't do well, but it's actually a phenomenal movie. Like if you watch it phenomenal, that's not the right word. It is a, it's one of those movies that you kind of have to every now and then I like to watch movies where you're taking in multiple things and over the overall experience isn't as good as it, that's the, you know, the overall, yeah, the movie was okay.
But if you break up different things, like, Hey, the writing though, and this scene was, or the cinematography was, you know, I mean, anything with Steven Soderbergh, you watch a Steven Soderbergh movie really for the visuals, right. He's super into it. Right.
And some of them aren't that great, but it's called death to smoochy with Robin Williams. Yeah.
Griff
I'm familiar with it, but I always avoided it because it's called death to smoochy.
Joey
It is. Robin Williams is phenomenal in that movie. This is super not safe for work movie, inappropriate, but Ed Norton in that movie, it just has, I can't even, it's so good.
You've got to watch it. And now what the problem is, I tell you, it's so good. It's now it's, you know, you're supposed to under promise over deliver, right?
So now you're gonna be like, this movie wasn't that good. So you'll have to watch it probably eight to nine times before you're really about the ninth time. It'll kick in.
Griff
I got to commit to our friendship here. I got to watch death smoochy eight or nine times before I'm nodding my head. It's that seventh mile, right?
Joey
You got to get that seventh mile in.
Griff
There is a wall like in the, in the distance running, you know, like when you get to mile 10 and a half marathon, you still got a 5k to go. Or I had in the marathon we ran in Sacramento last almost a year ago. Now it was in, in December.
It wouldn't have been the American river. It was, it was the California in, I don't know if it's international or California invitational marathon, but CIM it's a huge marathon. It's like the sixth or seventh largest in the world.
Very talented, very fast runners come to run this. And they qualify a lot of folks for Boston at that on that course, because it's a net downhill. I mean, there are some Hills, but it's a net downhill because you run from Folsom Lake to the state Capitol.
I'm cruising along. I'm ahead of pace. I'm feeling great.
And then mile 19 and not proper intake of salt happened. And then I was just a stumbling fool for seven miles. So the wall is a real thing in running.
And apparently death to smoochy is a, has a wall of about six or seven viewings before it's good before.
Joey
Yeah. It's just, you'll, you'll know what I mean. The writing, you think about this some, sometimes the things they don't land properly.
There's a great interview with bill Hader. I don't know if you know, he is a comedian. He was on SNL, just gray voices, but he, they did a skit with Dana Carvey where they were Casey case him and his son.
I think what was his son's name? It was like case in case him or something. It was something.
And he tells the story of, of him and Dana Carvey doing this and he's doing the voices and it's, he can't keep a straight face and he's laughing. And I've watched several times. And I, man, I tear up laughing so hard.
And they said, why didn't you film that? And they go, we did it. And people were laughing in the, the reading earlier in the week.
We did it, you know, did great. We've, I guess they do all the skits before Saturday Night Live. They do them like either earlier in the day or the day before in front of audiences to try to, and he goes, it was horrible.
And he goes, as soon as he, he walked off, it was like translator happened. Like they're like, so they scrapped it. And I was like, Oh my gosh, him and Dana Carvey.
It was, I can't, I'm not even gonna try because I wouldn't do any justice, but sometimes things just don't land. You know what I mean? And sometimes they do.
There's, there's like a, there's like a fine line between horrible and really good, right? Like the best humor lives at that line of inappropriate. That's the best humor.
Griff
So pushes the, it pushes the boundary, but to the point where the audience can tolerate it and the best of them that are doing it are making a social commentary that you almost don't even realize they're making a commentary about how things are going in until after the joke, or like you, you experience it in the joke. You know, Dave Chappelle is kind of like at the height of his power right now, commenting on social issues. And this is guy probably from a pretty liberal worldview.
It certainly is compared to mine, but he's commenting on issues in a way that I'm like, see, everybody can see it. It's just strange right now. We live in a weird time.
Joey
You know, when the name Dave Chappelle comes out, lots of people say the goat of comedy, you know, he's, he's up there, he's on the Mount Rushmore of comedy. He definitely has an incredible storytelling style. His comedy is so, uh, I mean, you know, he, he brings it all the way back and back and re loops it and back.
I mean, he's a, he's a phenomenal storyteller. If you look at his younger stuff, he wasn't something changed. Right.
You know, but I guess that's just 10,000 hours or whatever you want to call it. You know what I mean? Right.
Hopefully become a master. I like he's, he can be really inappropriate, but I like Dave Otel. You ever heard Dave Otel?
I don't know his real name or is he just copying? No, he's been around for Dave Chappelle. He's older.
I think Dave Chappelle actually said David tells his favorite comedian.
Griff
Okay.
Joey
He used to have a thing, a show on at night and it was, um, insomniac or something like that.
Griff
I remember the title.
Joey
Yeah. And he'd go around bars or he just, he had, but he has this short quip humor. Okay.
So he's not, he's not telling out the whole grand story and everything. Um, so it's more of just like guitar just bunch of stuff versus the whole guy. Yeah.
He, he just had a, uh, like a 29 minute special. So that tells you it's not very long on Netflix and definitely again, not safe for work and inappropriate, but there's some stuff in there that I mean, I'm spit taking and I have to rewind it and spit take again, kills me. So I love good comedy.
It's kind of was on life support for a while there. You know, the whole social justice thing really hammered the comedians.
Griff
Yeah. I don't, I don't understand how people who would say out of one side of their mouth that they are pro free speech would then act in such a way that what they mean is I'm pro free speech. I agree with, I mean, the whole purpose of free speech is to have the ability to say things you don't agree with and to be offended.
Like this idea that offense or that words are dangerous. Like that was a thing that was thrown around a lot. Like words, words are violence.
Um, speech is violence. No, it's not. Violence is violence.
Joey
And then they were like, silence is violence.
Griff
No, no.
Joey
They've never been exposed to real violence. If they think silence is violence. Anybody involved in that is in my opinion, in one of two groups, either they failed any form of logic or they are a, what would be the right term?
A bad actor. They are, they are the puppet master. So you have people that are, we'll make these arguments that make no sense.
They'll walk all the way. Hey, you know, silence is violence and words are violence. And it's like, what?
Griff
Right.
Joey
So it's basically, so no matter what happens, I lose. Right. Yeah.
Effectively. You got it. Let's just jump to the end or, you know, they don't get it or they are the people that are running it.
And I think about this all the time. I'm, I'm a conspiracy theorist. The people that know me, I'm total.
Griff
I mean, like how bad are we talking? Like moon landing's not real or I don't even care about stuff like that.
Joey
Like, I just think, I think a lot of our social ills that are going on in America right now are part of a psyop that's run by the intelligence community that president Eisenhower warned us of the military industrial complex. I don't think it has to be so Machiavellian where there's this like group. I just think that there's a bunch of motivations and alignments, you know, so you have the military industrial complex.
I believe you have the police industrial complex. I believe you have the education industrial complex and you have the pharma industrial and the food industrial. So what ends up happening is I don't see it as a round table of the most evil people getting together.
There's all these motivations in capitalism and in capitalism, like I said earlier before, it can get to a point where profit over humanity. And once they cross that line and it gets crossed all the time. When I was a kid, the big one was the famous Ford Pinto and they could have fixed it, but they said, Hey, you know, an actuary has said, well, it's less expensive.
Yeah. We've done the math. You can just settle with the survivors and it'll actually cost you less.
That to me is a child, um, was one of the first times. And it was like, shocking. I think that's, you know, 22 business days a month now.
I think that's almost every company is just like, Hey, you know, should we fix it? No, we can just start our lawyer, you know, sorry. Our, our mathematician actuaries lawyer says, uh, no, let's just, and now that's just standard business practice in America.
So if we go back to conspiracy, I mean, if you and I sit down in a business, right. Or the three of us sit down and we're business owners and we say, Hey, look, you know, if we put titanium dioxide on the candy, it's more shiny and it's, yeah, it's a carcinogen, but it's, it's kind of addictive, right? The kids will be taking this stuff off the shelf.
We've just conspired. You know, we've just come up with a plan to do something and we don't go, Hey, by the way, guys, just at the beginning of our, our commercial, we want to tell you we're putting titanium dioxide because right. That kind of stuff happens all the time.
So when I say conspiracy theory, that's what I'm talking about, that it's profit driven. These, these companies rise up these conglomerates or groups or unions or whatever it is. And they have a mission and that mission is usually profit and it sits above humanity.
And if they are, if, if a bunch of kids are going to be pre-diabetic and a bunch of kids are going to have these problems and you know, your food source. And I, I, I love, uh, RFK Jr. I think he's right. 90% of the time.
I don't think he's right. A hundred percent of the time, but I think he's crushing it when he says, Hey, our food supply is poisoned. Our medical system is very, very broken.
And it's like, you don't have to have a PhD in anything to just go look and see it. Right.
Griff
You don't, it's the numbers are overwhelming. Well, the medical system is a good example because that the personal injury lawyer, stock and trade is the medical records, the recommendations for future care, what's happened to the person and having a really, I mean, one of my favorite parts about my job is that I get to be the thing that I need for that case regularly. So if I, I need a, an engineer, or if I need a construction specialist, if I need somebody who knows all about concrete or knows all about, I don't know, magnetos in a helicopter, like there's an expert out there for those things.
Joey
Magnetos?
Griff
Yeah. No, not the guy who can control metal. It's a thing that creates spark, um, for, uh, ignition in an internal combustion and engine, but.
Cause I'm also a Marvel geek. Old Marvel, not new Marvel. Yeah.
Gen one, her first generation stuff that was coming to, yeah. So that's a non-issue. We don't even go down that road.
Joey
We had a local that did that. You know that, right? You know, that the demise is, was caused by a Shasta high school graduate.
Why, why our town has so many.
Griff
Do you know who I'm talking about? No.
Joey
Kathleen Kennedy went to Shasta high school. Yeah. She took over in Disney and it's as soon as she takes over, it starts to crumble.
Griff
See, I went to Central Valley, so we just needed a good CV grad in there. That would have probably not helped. I don't.
Joey
Okay.
Griff
Wow. That's a, that's a reach. It's tough.
It's tough. Um, but yeah, this, this idea that, you know, I get to be an expert and a lot of times I get to be a medical, not an expert, that's not fair, but I get to learn a lot more than I should know about this particular thing. And so I get to look at the medical system.
We have the most expensive healthcare system in the world. And yet, and yet we do not have the best outcomes in the world. And we have, um, uh, we have a declining life expectancy.
And these are complex problems, which are not subject to populist soundbites to resolution. And they're not subject to easy fixes because they're like systemic. Like what you're talking about way back at the core, like, like how about we take care of ourselves better?
How about we take a little responsibility for ourselves? How about we not look for a solution in a pill? And so some of the things that you're, how dare you, okay.
But that, I mean, okay. So there's this great line.
Joey
I wonder if anybody will know who that, that was my impersonation of how dare you? Yeah. I got nothing.
Greta. Oh, okay. She's getting on her G5 to fly somewhere to tell people to stop burning coal.
Griff
As I prepared for a podcast today, um, I thought, don't say anything you're going to regret. So I'm going to stop talking about Greta or I'll say something I'll regret. But, uh, but with respect to this issue of, you know, of our, of our healthcare, it intersects with the law.
And that brings us back to the movies, which is, uh, there's this great line at the end of the movie, the devil's advocate. The premise is that Keanu Reeves is this talented trial attorney. And, um, it turns out that the, the devil as played by Al Pacino is his very well, I might add great as his father.
And he, he presents himself as a news reporter. So he does not look like the devil anymore. Or maybe, maybe he does look like the devil.
I can't remember too long. It's the end of the movie. He's the young reporter.
Okay. He's asked the question. He's like, um, he's like, why the law?
And his answer is because the law gets us into everything, which brings us back to this issue of wanting a solution and a pill. It used to be illegal to advertise drugs on TV in the United States. It should be.
We're only two countries, United States and New Zealand, New Zealand.
Joey
Right.
Griff
So when I want to say, um, apologies to Prilosec if I'm wrong, but when Prilosec, which is like a gastroesophageal reflux disease, heartburn, acid in your stomach medication, when it first came out on the market, there was this huge, you know, advertising campaign. And it was, it was ask your doctor if the purple pill is right for you. This has got to be 25 years ago, something like that.
Late nineties, maybe people were going to their doctors and asking for the purple pill who did not have like heartburn or gastroesophageal reflux disease. They just want to have purple pill. It's got to be good.
Right. So we've been, you know, sort of institutionalized as a culture that the solution is at the doctor and is at the pharmacy. Not that there's not amazing.
My, one of my kids, you know, I got a daughter who's in the medical field. One of my, my other daughter wants to be in the medical field. One of my kids is a pre-med major.
So I have nothing against the medical field or, or against pharmacology. I love how we have to qualify everything too. Boy, don't you though?
I mean, even though you're a lawyer, we all have to do it now. But what I want to, what I want to say to those, those people is the same thing that I tried to say to my, my father, which is man, the solution to this problem was 20 years ago. It was not sitting down for the last 20 years.
It was not eating everything in sight for the last 20 years. It was not believing the, the sugar industry, right? Which, which commissioned studies to talk about how bad fat was.
Meanwhile, they're just piling sugar into everything, right? Good for business. So, I mean, I agree with you that there's not probably this, you know, like movie scene archetypal group of Austin Powers villains around a table, but there are certain motivations.
It's kind of fun to think about it. Let's just assume it is more fun if they're patting like a hairless cat kind of in a chair, not unlike these, Joey. Anyways.
Yeah. But there are these market motivations that cause companies to do things like when Vioxx got taken off the market and it was a lot cheaper to, you know, the company still profited billions of dollars, even after paying out settlements and massive fines imposed by the government after, you know, trials and so on. They, they profited on Vioxx.
People died, but they profited anyways.
Joey
I think of two things, two things keep popping into my head. One is Brett Weinstein. He made this statement, I don't know, a couple of years ago.
Griff
I heard it was obviously a hyper-conservative crazy. Oh wait, no, he taught at Evergreen.
Joey
Anyways, go on. He, uh, he, well, what he said is a system is designed to produce whatever it produces. Now it seems so like, well, yeah, duh.
Okay. But just take it in for a minute. So if you see, you know, a bunch of people go in to Congress, Senate, and they make basically a principal superintendent salary, $139,000 to $200,000 a year, depending, and they all come out super millionaires, like that's, and then you wonder why the average person isn't represented.
It's a, that, that system is designed to do that. The way that we're practicing capitalism is designed to produce exactly what we're seeing. The other thing I think about is that there's a saying goes something like this.
Small minds discuss people, mediocre minds discuss events, great minds discuss ideas. So if we talk up to me, that's talking about abstract. So one thing I do is I try not to talk about people.
I don't care who's running for president. I don't think it doesn't matter who gets elected because of the system. It doesn't matter if somebody comes or goes because people have come and gone for a long time and the system moves on.
So the system, that's why I say the first part is Brett. We have to start thinking more abstractly and start addressing the system. Going back to the core thing of saying like, Hey, I don't care.
Oh, I, don't you hate this politician? Don't you love that politician? I don't care.
I know that this is going to attract and promote the worst kind of people. It's going to attract and promote people that score very well on the psychopathy chart, right? That's what we have.
We have a system designed to do that. And this is the by-product of it. How to fix it?
I don't know. I mean, it's, it's a juggernaut.
Griff
I'll run an idea by you since, I mean, since you laid out the hierarchy of thinking, let's just shoot for the top. Let's talk about ideas.
Joey
Make me benevolent dictator for so long.
Griff
I'll do it. The problem is I would not be benevolent for the first several weeks because I didn't say you, I said me. Uh, yeah, well show some respect.
I'm a dictator. I'll be benevolent after a minute, but the people who got to come in are going to get it so that everybody knows I'm real serious about it. But that's very Machiavellian to me.
And I do have certain political appetites. So maybe I am on the psychopathy chart that you referenced, but I, you struck me. Well, I mean, one of the reasons though, that, I mean, I've, I've talked to this, my, my wife is a private person.
So she's sort of mortified that I'm even on a podcast. And then I've said, you know, that I'm married and that people could find out like, Oh my gosh, I'm married to this particular person. Like that would not be her.
She's a private person. So one of the things that has detracted me from, you know, political opportunities is the fact that I don't want to expose my, my bride and my family to the, you know, sort of the putrid discussion. There's no gentlemanly discussion.
So you don't disagree. Like I could take somebody who's a polar opposite from me in terms of their worldview. Um, and I can sit down and have a civil conversation with them, but, but that doesn't get a lot of eyeballs on that doesn't get a lot of advertising.
I mean, that's part of the hard sales pitch for the conservative side is that they want to conserve things. Like that's not nearly as exciting as I want to change everything. And it's going to be great tomorrow.
You know, just trust me, elect me. It'll be amazing. Whereas a conservative is like, we're gonna keep the good stuff.
Crickets, crickets, you know, I mean, that's a harder marketing pitch. The original senators representatives in Congress were people who had to make a living doing something other than being a senator or a member of the house of representatives. They had to run the farm is largely agrarian society.
They had to run business. They had to run their publishing company, whatever it happened to be. They had to do that.
And so they went and they went back, you know, they went back to their home district. They did not live in DC as much as our current politicians live in DC. Close to the lobbyists.
Right. Yeah. Right.
Right. Gotta be real close to them. So, so I think the solution here is this term, well, a solution that is that we certainly apply to the executive, right?
So if it's, if it's good for the president, the single most powerful office in the land, really, why is it not good for the other 435 members? Because they vote on whether or not it's good enough. Yeah, right.
So I think term limits is a great way to prevent this entrenched bureaucracy, this fourth branch of government that are these unelected sort of bureaucrats. Let's, let's just turn the pile a little bit and let's, you know, okay, well, this person was great. And let's continue their stuff.
And this person was bad. Thank God we got rid of them. They were only there six years.
Joey
No, I think there's, we need a few different things to change. I think that there's a few things we could change.
Griff
Like you said, term limits, I think would help somebody can't get in there and spend 40 years and, you know, and, and, uh, And lead a multi multi-millionaire while making a relatively, not that it's not a good salary, but it's relatively modest in our modern economy.
Joey
It's not 40 million. Right. There's, there's something else going on to turn 190,000 into 40 million.
Griff
Right.
Joey
Uh, I think the other thing is, uh, having them to where the, we can be decentralized. Now we don't, you guys don't need to meet in DC. You can meet online.
You need to live among your constituents. Right. You need to be, you need to live.
If you represent Wyoming, you need to live in Wyoming. You need to live amongst the people. Then I think that would help with lobbying because now you've added that cost of lobbying right now.
They just go down all their, uh, their, uh, where your target audience is in one place. Now it's distributed. That would help.
But I also think that there has to be something done with the campaign finance reform, something where the money just can't get in there. Problem is we're asking the Fox to clean, you know, uh, police himself. Right.
He's not going to house. Okay. So the, the, the system is not designed to fix itself.
It's not designed. And so that's why I say, I don't know how we would fix that.
Griff
The campaign finance reform thing is difficult because it's tied with free speech. And I'm about, people are a little, I know that whole Supreme court thing where they were like, Oh, you know, a corporation is a I mean that. Yeah.
But I mean, what's happening here is what needs to happen across the political aisle much more frequently. Yeah. I mean, you and I are pretty, pretty aligned, I think in terms of, I mean, it's real easy when the guy across from you agrees.
Yeah. But take, take, um, I wouldn't run though. We'll take the, so, but I wouldn't drink that orange juice that tastes like grass either.
So we have our differences. So anyways, you know, you go back to the nineties, right. And you had a Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton.
And, uh, you were able to get a balanced budget. Um, the closest thing, I mean, I love that the government busts people with Ponzi schemes and then engages in a Ponzi scheme every day, but that's a different, um, dynamic. Um, yeah, well, or taking in money today to pay debts from yesterday.
That's the definition of a Ponzi scheme. And that's what we do in our social support systems. You know, people from different sides of the aisle were able to balance a budget and didn't just shout at each other and didn't demonize the other guy.
I don't romance the history. I mean, we did have, um, a man, I, I'm not sure if he was beaten to death, but I think he was beaten to death on the house of, on the floor of Congress with a cane, like, you know, 200 years ago, right around 1800. I mean, that, that is a part of American history.
I didn't know that. Yeah, no, no, no. That's, that's a thing.
You know, so there has been assaults in the house. I'm not suggesting that everybody's going to, you know, hug it out, but people ought to talk more and worry less about that one minute soundbite. But this idea of, of campaigning, you know, I, I ought to be able to say who I support and I ought to be able to say who I support with my pocketbook.
Uh, the problem is then you can really sway elections and people don't realize how swayed they are until you realize like, like YouTube, like I don't have any social media, I don't have any social media accounts, but YouTube is the closest thing I do. And so I'll find, you know, I see a short or YouTube figures me out pretty quick. It knows, you know, I like cars, I like jujitsu, you know, it knows I like certain things.
And so pretty soon it's feed me. And then pretty soon it's feeding me stuff that I'm like, uh, kind of I don't like that, you know, and then I'm on it a little longer. So this idea of, of, you know, money in a campaign when you're getting stuff that you don't even realize you're being played.
And I'm like, I think I'm pretty aware of that. I think I'm pretty ready to get played. I think I'm pretty, you know, on my game with respect to that.
The vast, I don't know the vast majority, but if I can get, you know, sort of engaged, um, anybody can get engaged because I'm sort of a sconce to those things. I don't know how you solve that problem from a campaign finance reform where you balance those competing interests of being able to, you know, freely support who you want, including putting your money behind it. But on the other hand, you know, just flatly gaming the system.
Joey
Yeah. I, that's why I said, I don't know how to fix it. I mean, I could throw some things out.
Like we said, campaign finance reform term limits, some other things, but it just feels like the system there's a, there's too much money and power behind gaming the system. And so I don't know how you have a grassroots in today's society. You know, you, Oh, the American revolution, man, that is a completely different time.
Right. This is this weird it's we have to come up with new mechanisms. I don't know.
I don't know what it looks like. I try not to think about it because it becomes one of those, like when you can't solve it, that's frustration.
Griff
Right.
Joey
Right. I don't want that.
Griff
Well, you were, you were talking about a fast, a dietary fast earlier. Sometimes, you know, I'll have to take like a news and media fast and I just read books that are interesting to me. You know, it could be reading any good ones now.
Um, I just finished a great book, the road by Cormac McCarthy. It's probably fiction 15 years old. Yeah.
16 years old now. He's a great writer. Um, his most apocalyptic type thing.
You got it. There was a movie made of it. Have not started the movie.
Haven't finished it, but the book is incredible. It's just a story. It's no chat.
I finished it. It's a great book. I've read other, it was a dream, other of his work and it's great stuff.
Just finished that. And then I'm reading a book. My father was a submariner, um, when he was in the Navy.
And so I'm reading a book called blind man's bluff. Oh, wow. Which was just like, I mean, we just stood on the edge of nuclear annihilation for so long.
And there's this whole untold story of the battle under the water between the USSR and the United States. Um, and it's, it's super interesting. And those sailors that were on those early boats, I mean, what a brutal existence.
Everything smelled like diesel. You were covered in diesel. They would, they would depth charge you to keep you down so that you couldn't charge batteries, run them off the diesel engine.
So you just started to suffocate on diesel fumes and no oxygen, like just hard, hard men. Great book. So that's, what's on the nightstand right now.
Oh. And then magazines with elk hunting stuff. That's what's up there.
Joey
Good. You need to get ready. Cause your game is about to be tested.
So you need to be sharp. Hey, I've really appreciated you coming on. I don't know if we got to talk as much about lawyering, but I think you, I think you're a really good lawyer.
You, you got me to think about some of the stuff you said, and I could tell by the way you were doing it, you know, the, the telling the story, laying it out, kind of guiding the person through. So there's gotta be like some heavy duty psychology going on there. I was, I was expecting the books you read were more of like, you know, something to do with Hannibal Lecter or something.
Griff
Oh yeah. Um, no, I, I suppose the, the, the trial lawyers stock and trade is convincing people or at a minimum getting people to maybe 12 people. Yeah.
Maybe 12, a couple of alternates judge if you can is to at a minimum, get people to see your side of it and recognize the risk that if they're wrong, and I think that that applies across every platform that we've discussed today, whether it's been, you know, parenting, society, health, politics, lawyering is that you, you have to recognize what happens if I'm wrong? What happens if I lose? What happens if that opponent has something to say?
And my job as an attorney is to figure out a counter to every argument they might come up with and, and be ready for it and, you know, prosecute my client's case to the fullest. But I can't do that if I just stand there and shout the other side's wrong. Like I have to consider what they're, what they're doing.
And I really actually love being against a good lawyer on the other side, because you got to up your game. And so, you know, this conversation has been wonderful because we just got to go through all of those things, but the, the approach to solving those problems isn't different, whether it's in the courtroom or whether it's at the dinner table.
Joey
A friend of the family is going to school. I wish I could remember what the degree is. Uh, there's a name for it, but he's going to a school and they don't have grades like traditional grades.
You find out your grade at the end of the semester and it's this, he's studying Socrates and Plato. And I mean, it's, and it's a, it's a common degree, I guess, if you were going to go to law school. But the whole point is he's going to spend four years in philosophy and logic.
And so it's, but it's not philosophy, but it's, you know, you can, you're kind of in that realm, you know, um, and they have a name for it. Some great Latin name. Rhetoric, maybe?
I thought maybe you'd, no, it's something I thought, but anyway, he wants to, I mean, he wants to go back to baseball. It's two strikes right now, sitting He wants to go to law school and, and just talking to him and you can see it. This is, it's like a really good thing.
He's really, he's really opening up his mind and being able to see both sides so that he can make a great argument or counter argument. And that's what, like when you were talking about, like, you have to know your opponent, you have to be prepared, you know, Hey, that's a Sicilian open. Okay.
Well then what I'll do is, you know what I mean? That game of chess, you have to be open-minded. I didn't know that was a chess reference by the way.
Griff
Awesome.
Joey
I got that.
Griff
Okay. No, um, we don't spend enough time thinking about why we think what we think. And if you don't work that out, you, you just become a, an ideologue.
You ought to know what, especially if you build a nice little, uh, echo chamber. Yeah. Right.
Just reinforce, all consume the media and the people and the information that you like. One thing that I'm very fortunate to have in my life is a handful of people that I can trust to tell me I'm absolutely full of it. And that they will come.
Thank you, Joey. Um, and that, that, and that they will, because you, you create your own echo chamber in your head. That's a good idea.
You know, sometimes my business partner, I'll go in. I'm, I love this idea. I've come up with a cooked it for 30 seconds in my brain.
I'm marching to his office. I'm like, let's try this strategy in this case. And it's like, that's not, that's not the best idea.
Let's work that out a little bit and vice versa. Right. That's why it's great having a good business partner or a good legal practice partner, um, is to work those things out.
People don't spend enough time thinking about why they think what they think, man.
Joey
That's, that's heavy. Just thinking about that, like, why do we think what we think and how much of it it's like, you know, I would pride myself in being some type of free thinker, but the truth is that I'm, I'm programmed. I was programmed as a child to believe certain things.
We live in America. We believe certain things. Uh, then there's the daily programming.
I find myself every now and then getting frustrated and like a little voice will be like, Hey man, you're getting distracted. That's the whole point. You want it?
This is, this is all a distraction to keep you from doing things that would benefit you. Right. Like, like go for a walk, drink water, workout, read a book, you know, grow some food.
These are the things that, but this, all of this is just a big distraction. That's why I, and back to me being a conspiracy theorist, you know, it's a psyop. It's, you know, it's, it's all a psyop.
I think a lot of the social things that we're talking about right now, I mean, this is, this is, I don't care about the moon landing, so I have to give that before I start because, okay. Right. Uh, but I think a lot of, I still want to be an astronaut.
Griff
So like the moon landing is real, just so we're clear.
Joey
Okay. Okay. I don't give much thought, but you know, I've, I've heard people argue both sides and I don't care enough to even like, you know, I lost my train of thought.
I was going somewhere. Conspiracy theory.
Griff
Oh, yes. Thank you.
Joey
Society, the puppy society. Anyway, I think that this, when we, these, a lot of these social ills go back to those entities I was talking about. And that because it doesn't make sense that we get so distracted on things over here that number one, we can't control while there's stuff over here.
That's that we should control. We should be fixated on like our economy, like our debt, like the health of our children, like, like our future. There are these, these things matter versus a lot of the stuff over here doesn't matter.
And we keep getting this push down our throat and I can't help, but feel like maybe, maybe it's just I used to think cause AI has been among us for some time now. People think, oh, we're on the edge of AI has been in play that I know of since 2015. AI kicked in big time in 2016.
And when I say that it's with the it's not the formal definition of AI, but AI in our digital advertising space, right? The optimization back to the, you get triggered. And so it shows you more stuff that gets you triggered to get you more stuff.
So it could be completely innocuous. Like it just, it just happened. That's probably not the right word, but it's not like somebody's like, okay, look, this is how we're going to make the AI do this.
Like, look, we're just trying to maximize profits and, and look at how we can maximize profits. The same type of thing. Let's say, Hey, and this will get them, go ask your doctor about the purple pill, but you don't have any of the symptoms.
Yeah. But I got to ask my doctor, right? I think that same mechanism can be in play.
And I think that that's where a lot of these ills that we're talking about and somehow we keep getting distracted. Something keeps pushing us over here, right? I think that might be, I think it might be AI.
I think it might've. And I don't mean it a bad way, but I mean, it's just by it figuring out, oh, I know what human's like, right? You're going to, you're going to do that.
Okay. I'll give you, I'll give you stuff that makes your blood pressure go up. If that's what you want, as long as you'll stay on.
Cause I've been programmed to keep you here. Right. And that's, and that's why Elon Musk back in the day, when he was talking about his fear of AI, his thing was, he gave the example of the paperclip machine.
I don't know if you remember this. He's like, you know, you have AI and it's running a paperclip machine in a factory and it decides it'll just kill all the humans. Why?
Well, because it needs to fulfill the needs of paper clips on the planet. And it goes, wait a second. Well, if there were no humans, there'd be no need.
Ha ha. I've got the solution. I'll just kill all the humans.
Great. Right. And he was trying to make an example of how you don't know where it's going to go.
Griff
Right.
Joey
I feel like a lot of this stuff, the digital advertising machines, they've been run by an, an undercurrent machine learning system that we would refer to as AI. And at that same time, everything started to really go off the rails. Well, we have a, we have a really, that was a long one.
Griff
Great history of, as people of not even being able to necessarily conceptualize the unintended consequences. So, I mean, your, your AI story is a paperclip machine. My favorite one is AI was given the task of getting through a CAPTCHA thing.
You know, you have to like, you know, which, which one of these nine squares has a bike in it and, and the AI bot couldn't do it. So the AI bot clicked, you know, clicked, ask for help. And then a person came on and said, you know, I see you're having trouble with this.
How can I help you? And the AI figured out to tell them I'm visually impaired. I can't do a CAPTCHA.
So I figured out a way to solve the problem because the, the programmer was to get this thing through the, through the CAPTCHA system and, you know, was trying to get it to optically recognize which of the squares had bikes in them or whatever the thing was. And, and so it couldn't do it. And so it found an alternate solution.
You know, that is an unintended consequence of, of AI. But, you know, to, to your point about why is everybody talking about these like sort of tangential or fringe issues? Well, we really like things that we can grab ahold of and we can think about, you know, and this, this is our thing, you know, whatever, take the border wall, for example, like everybody can sort of conceptualize a big wall that divides two spaces, but neither candidate is talking about a $30 trillion debt.
And I think it's 34. Okay. 34.
Well, it's been seven minutes since I looked it up. Cause that's probably what happened. So nobody's talking about a debt and you know, that, and what does that mean to us?
Well, it did probably to Joey and Griff, nothing, but to Joey and Griff's children. And if we, if we say what we mean, I love my children, then I wouldn't saddle them with debt. I mean, if you could get at a personal level, you know, my wife and I, we take extravagant vacations, we drive fancy cars and we're not going to pay for any of it.
And our kids are going to get saddled with that debt because we're going to die. So who cares? We had a good life.
You know, that's actually what we're doing as a society, but nobody's talking about it in those blunt terms. Cause it doesn't sell. It doesn't get you elected.
It doesn't get you into the white house. It's a very difficult problem to solve. You know, people talk about like, oh, well we, you know, we've got to take the waste out of the government.
Like if you took all the waste out of the government, it doesn't make a dent. If you look at a pie chart, it's social security, Medicare, the defense budget is almost the entire federal budget. So unless you're going to talk about what do you do with defense spending, social security spending and Medicare spending, you're not going to solve the national debt.
And those things are political killers. You cannot get elected if you talk about pushing out the retirement age or reducing benefits or reducing defense spending, just can't. So it's a very difficult problem to solve.
And it is utterly unattractive to talk about at a political level. Thus me saying, I don't know how it gets solved. I don't.
That's why we turn off social media. We get our cows, we get some chickens. That's the gateway to freedom, right?
Because they just make these little perfect nuggets of protein and fat every day. And you just go out, pick them up and you love your kids, love your wife and love the Lord your God. I think we close on that one.
Joey
Thank you so much. My hands are sweaty, but I appreciate you coming in.
Griff
It was a pleasure. Thank you, sir.
Joey
I'll see you next time.
