Julian Dorey Podcast - #31 - Kevin Gallagher

Episode Date: January 20, 2021

Kevin Gallagher is a maritime attorney based in Miami, Florida. In addition to the law, he is also an expert in rap music. ***TIMESTAMPS*** 3:44 - Kevin beating Covid; Covid Era in Florida & how open it is 18:37 - The Tech Movement to Miami, Mayor Francis Suarez, & people’s opinion on Governor DeSantis   23:51 - Miami’s ports; The state of the cruise ship industry; How law works at sea; the maritime law that Gallagher practices 34:57 - China’s $1 Trillion investment in global transportation/ports; The Second Panama Canal; Our country’s lack of understanding of the threat the Chinese Communist People’s Party poses 46:14 - Financial illiteracy in America 52:32 - Miami’s boom; How the politics in Miami work; discussion about Miami’s reach in the wake of the tech and venture capital move to the city during Covid 1:05:35 - Federal government vs. State government decision-making powers in the Covid Era; How Kevin ended up in Florida 1:16:55 - How practicing law in different states works; Public Defenders; Defending yourself in court  1:31:08 - Criminal law and how heavy the stakes are; Bench trials vs. Jury Trials 1:37:39 - Potential Trump pardons/commutations: Edward Snowden & Julian Assange (their cases, the pros & cons, the ramifications, etc.) 1:53:19 - Ross Ulbricht, The Silk Road, & THE FULL CASE BREAKDOWN (what background, what happened, Dread Pirate Roberts, the FBI/DEA/Homeland/IRS Case against him; the controversy over the alleged murders-for-hire; Ross’ current double life sentence; the prospects of commuting his sentence; the ideology that motivated him to create The Silk Road 2:29:19 - Jury Trials in the current climate of constant news and the court of public opinion 2:33:05 - The Grammys Rap Album of the year discussion--and the controversy around the nominees; Revisiting Cardi B’s win in 2018 over Travis Scott 2:42:31 - The hoopla around Cardi B & Megan Thee Stallion’s song, “WAP” ~ YouTube FULL EPISODES: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0A-v_DL-h76F75xik8h03Q  ~ Show Notes: https://www.trendifier.com/podcastnotes  TRENDIFIER Website: https://www.trendifier.com  Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Now the third one. The third one is one I've really, especially over the past three months or so, been looking at extremely closely, and it's a wide open one. Are you familiar with Ross Ulbrich and the Silk Road? Oh, very familiar. Life sentence, man. He got a life sentence. Can you take people through what that whole situation was?

What's cooking, everybody? I am joined in the bunker today by my very good friend, Kevin Gallagher. Gallagher is a maritime attorney down in the beautiful, beautiful city of Miami, Florida. And I might say, the burgeoning potential Silicon Valley 2.0. If you haven't seen what Mayor Francis Suarez, a.k.a. the Twitter King, is doing down in Miami right now to attract Technorati from Silicon Valley along with their venture capital friends, go take a look. It is insane. And we do talk about that today. Besides that topic, though, which, as I said, is discussed,

there is one thing I do want to make a note of ahead of time, and that is about a 50-minute segment, something like that, where we discuss potential pardons and commutations at the end of the Trump presidency. Now, why is this important for me to give a note on? It's important for me to give a note on it because we are releasing this episode on January 20th. So within hours of Trump leaving office at 12 p.m. on that day. And so when we recorded this podcast, we didn't know whether or not he was going to commute or pardon the three individuals we discussed, which were Snowden, Julian Assange, with Ross Ulbrich.

We talked about him for about 35 minutes. So I think that there are things that these are not simple answers. There's a lot of nuance. There are pros and cons to going either way. My personal opinion is that I would strongly want to pardon Snowden and Assange and then also commute Ross Ulbricht. But look, there are upsides and downsides to everything. So I appreciate that part of the conversation. I don't think it's irrelevant at all, given the fact that you're probably listening after Trump already left office and it's all over, but just wanted to make a note of it ahead of time.

Anyway, if you're not subscribed, please subscribe. And if you're watching this on YouTube, please hit the subscribe button, the like button for this video, and the bell so you can get some notifications when I post a video every day. Also, to all the people who have left five-star reviews on Apple with a comment thank you very much they're amazing and if you haven't done that already and can take a minute to do that i would really really appreciate it that said you know what it is i'm julian dory and this is This is one of the great questions in our culture. Where is the nuance? You're giving opinions and calling them facts. You feel me? Everyone understands this, but few seem to do it.

If you don't like the status quo, start asking questions. The COVID kid, what's going on what up how recovered are you i'm recovered man i got covid beat it like a bad child and uh i'm here man i'm here and what it was like four weeks ago something like that um yeah so i live in florida in uh in florida. In Florida, it's wide open. People are catching COVID left and right. People don't believe in COVID in Florida, which is kind of weird to me, a lot of people. But yeah, I got it. Definitely was sick.

I had like a fever. I didn't have a cough. Definitely some aches. I did the whole two-week quarantine. But then I was fine. I lost my sense of taste and smell which was pretty trippy yeah how weird is that um it was definitely weird um it's just like what's weird about it is like if you're eating something you can taste like if you're eating a food that's like fatty or like buttery or like sugary you can like you can your body knows that like all right this is sugar and this is good or like this is like you know like a juice if you

ate like a juicy steak you'd be like all right this is kind of like melting in my mouth this is good but it has no flavor like you can't taste it oh it's so weird it's super weird it's super weird um and did it go with this did your taste go at the same time that your smell did yeah it it went at the same time and i knew it was happening like i knew it was gonna come because i was like reading like what the symptoms are yeah and um so i was like every morning i'd wake up and i'd like you know like smell like my spice cabinet and be like i could still smell it and then like one morning i couldn't smell anything and i was like oh here we go yeah so but yeah i came back i'm good um yeah and my experience with covet is it wasn't that bad yeah yeah and i mean it it feels like a

lot of people are either literally asymptomatic or they get some of the weird ones like that or they're really sick like those are those are the three most common buckets it feels like but did you do you know where you got it from or so i'll be honest um i just moved to florida like a few months ago i've been you know i've moved a new city i'm trying to like meet people make friends go out so i've i've been going out yeah so i'm it's open down there it's wide open so i'm sure i got it at like a bar or a club or something like that um but my whole thing is is like i'm young i live by myself i got covid i knew i had covid early on so the one day i went into the office it was on a monday um and my throat was like kind of scratchy and i was like oh shit like this is kind of not normal um

i don't know maybe i might have something so i left the office at 11 o'clock that day i texted or i emailed my hr lady and was like yo i'm getting tested something something's not right came back positive didn't get anyone infected in the office i stayed home for two weeks tested negative and it was good did you you do the PCR test thing? Yeah, I did the rapid because you get the results like that. Yeah. But yeah, so I don't know. I mean, COVID, it's obviously very serious for a select portion of the population.

But I don't know. A lot of these measures, like being back here and seeing that you can't go to indoor dining in philadelphia and and stuff like that it's it's kind of crazy to me and it's um it's just like it's it's a shock being in florida where it's like it's literally wide open you go to clubs you can go to bars you can go to gym and then come here and it's like you have to eat outside on the sidewalk in like 30 degree weather it's just are people masked up down there so yes and no so if we're talking florida as a whole i mean it's florida's a very red state and you know like central florida and stuff like that um my cousin lives in like central florida they're not they're not masked people up there but i live in miami and miami is very it's um it's a major city. It's liberal. So like for the most part, almost everyone you see like on the sidewalk is masked up.

And at least my opinion is, I don't agree with these anti-maskers, the anti-vaxxers. I think it's such a slight burden and it's such like a very minor infringement on your freedom, whatever you, whatever, however you want to call it, to wear a very minor infringement on your freedom whatever you whatever however you want to call it to wear a mask over your face right you know it's one of those things where it's like we can agree that it's a very contagious disease we can agree that in certain instances it's deadly and we can agree that you know it's mainly spread through your nose and mouth yep so what's the fucking big deal with wearing a mask? I think that people look at it as an amalgamation of a bunch of them. I don't know if I used that properly there, but

a combination, let's use a better word, where when they're told to wear a mask, it's not just that. That's a part of a culture where they're told, oh, you can't have indoor seating at a restaurant. Oh, you have to close down your business because we decided it's not essential. Oh, you need to stay inside in quarantine and not go visit your family on the holidays because COVID's out there. And the problem with it is, if this were something that we're eliminating 10% of the population, hey, I don't really know what to tell you in that scenario. I'm not the guy to talk to, and that's not the scenario is the point. And you have people now who are – who have long been sick of this, who feel like the government is overstepping. an imagery standpoint the ultimate symbol of it so it creates this hysteria around it and yeah i mean you get swept up in it because you're like okay we agree it's contagious like you said we don't want to see it spreading if we can stop it it appears that the data supports that not like

the bandana mess but like actual mess sure a pretty good job um so if we had to do that for a while let's but when people are thinking about all the other side and how much it's dragging out and how every time they're told oh if we do this then this and it changes and the goalposts move you get to a point where people are like no because that's that's their that's the hill they're going to die on and say i don't want to do it and i understand where those people are coming from at this point. I wouldn't have in April or May. At this point, I get it. It doesn't make it right. It's just, I get it. I understand where they're coming from, you know, in the way that you just kind of explained it. I still don't really agree with it at all. I think you just put

a mask, it's a piece of cloth over your face it's spread through your nose nose and mouth just wear it it's such a slight like such a slight burden yeah what i don't get on board with is this whole shutdown in my opinion um you have to you have to allow businesses to operate especially this whole second round of shutdowns. Because you had the first round fine. It's a foreign disease. It's a pandemic. It's deadly.

We're worried about hospitals being overrun. A lot of governments, they reacted in a certain way to protect lives. They looked. They said, okay, what can we do to protect lives? Let's shut it down. This is how it's spreading if we don't have people going to these businesses whatever i just think and now after after you kind of had the uh shutdowns like roll back into like you know opening up and then indoor dining's

coming back and then to have a second round of shutdowns and it's it's also become so hypocritical and so just like arbitrary as like to what you can and can't do. It's like, all right, you can go grocery shopping, but you can't go to dinner with your family. Like I just don't get that. And it's killing businesses. Businesses that would otherwise be successful, profitable businesses are dying because of the government. And frankly, I just disagree with that. Again, I can get on board with the social distancing.

I can get on board with the reduced capacity. I can get on board with, you know, a lot of taking your temperature when you go in there, all this stuff, but let a business operate. Especially when they invested in all that stuff too. Yes. Yeah, you're changing the goalposts. Exactly. You're saying, okay, changing the goalposts. Exactly. You're saying, okay, get plexiglass, do this.

Make sure your employees are safe, do this. And here's the whole, my whole thing is, if I'm going out, so again, I live in Miami, Florida. I'm young. If I go out to a bar or club, I'm consenting. I'm going out there and I'm consenting. Like, all right, I understand there's a risk that I'm going to get COVID and I'm going to get sick, right? And if you are going out and you want to go to a restaurant, you're consenting to getting COVID. And if you protect the employees,

like the plexiglass, the face shield, stuff like that. And I think it is important you protect the employees and have measures in place and things like that. But at the end of the day, if you want, if someone wants to go out and eat in a restaurant with other people who are, don't have masks, who are eating, they're consenting to that. And they know what they're, they know the decision they're making at this point in the whole pandemic. Yeah. I heard an argument too, about the whole point you're making about if you do it one place, why don't you do it another? And then how does it make sense? Somebody said just look at restaurants alone for a second and think about the mask policies there. They were explaining to me, if you have to wear a mask into the restaurant, cool.

But then when you sit down at the table and you take the mask off for the meal, it defeats the whole purpose. It's arbitrary are it's arbitrary it's it's arbitrary exactly exactly so it's like we're doing a lot of things for symbolism and not for the quote-unquote science and it doesn't change the fact that the science appears to say that it's highly contagious and airborne so i mean that would mean that you wear a mask everywhere all the time. But then how do you even have a restaurant in that case open? Because you've got to be able to open your mouth to eat. So it's – the other problem is if you looked at the data out of New York, and I don't – I think this was just out of New York.

But either way, New York City, burgeoning place. Sure. The contact tracing ahead of the second round of shutdowns to restaurants was 1.4%. And I've had that in previous show notes. What does that mean? It means that the cases that they've been registering, 1.4% of them were traced to bars and restaurants in New York City. Whereas, I forget what the exact number was, but it was in like the 60s or 70s, were traced to in-home. In-home gatherings.

That makes sense. I mean that makes perfect sense. If a member of your household gets COVID, you're probably going to get it. You're going to get it. Yeah. So it's like they're shutting these people down and telling them what they can do after they spent all this money to make all these adjustments just to make less money. And they don't have the data behind it to shut them down again and so it's just very sad to me because you're seeing so many people who did absolutely nothing wrong in fact people who are still managing businesses obviously but people who are still okay like still hanging on right now because they were set up so well for a rainy

day scenario but when you turn a rainy day scenario into nine months it's just that that that ain't it it's not gonna work yeah you're just killing businesses and going back to the whole like consenting to to getting covid type situation i like how you said that by the way yeah i mean everyone would agree that sure fine you go to you know me going to a club, like no one's worried about, I'm not worried about getting COVID, whatever that the problem is, if I go into my office building and there's older people and I give it to them. So that, that's kind of the rub. So it's like, sure, fine. I don't care about getting COVID. I can go around and get COVID, whatever. I'm not in a, I'm not elderly. I'm not at risk, you know, I don't pre-existing conditions, but it's when I'm around other people. So in that regard, I just think it's the onus is

on people like me to, to be very, you know, the second I felt a tickle in my throat, I was like, there's a pregnant girl in my office building. And I was like, I literally thought about it. I was like, do I want to be that guy that like, God forbid something happens and like a bunch of people get COVID. Like I just started working here. I don't want to be that guy that infects the whole office, whatever. And I said, nope, I'm dipping, whatever. I'll be that wuss that like, you know, got a COVID test over, you know, a tickle in my throat. It ended up being COVID.

And I'm so thankful that I did that. No one else got infected. It was all good. You know, and I just, you know, obviously that's very hard to, you know, to do on a massive scale because, you know, everyone develops symptoms differently and it's, but I just think, I don't know. I think there's a middle ground between shutting everything down and keeping every, you know, well, I don't think things should be wide open. Again, yeah, I think Florida's doing it pretty good, honestly. Yeah. And that's interesting though, because you

did say, and can you just turn the mic a little bit down like that? So yeah, yeah. Cool. It's interesting how you put it at the very beginning of when we were talking about this, where you're saying that there are people in Florida who think like COVID doesn't exist. And that's the problem. Very true. You have extremes and the more you drive a wedge between them the more extreme they get i can tell who's like a covid psycho online by looking at their profile picture because they got the wear your mask and the mask on and everything and then i can tell who is a covid denier often by their profile picture as well with what they're doing right now because they're out partying or something like that. And that's kind of crazy. And you even said you made a distinction, I don't know, 10 minutes ago or something like that, where you were saying

Miami is more of a liberal city. So they're wearing the mask, whereas Central Florida, red, they're not. It is crazy to me that we've drawn that line where people who lean hard one way or lean hard the other way are literally representative of what precautions you're taking or not taking that's that's nuts is it that crazy though if you really think about it because because we just talked about it the mask is a symbol for the anti-maskers a symbol of oppression a symbol of the government trying to tell you what you can and can't do um and you know that happens to fall along on red lines and then you know i guess the the liberal you know point of view is

you know safety and well-being being of the whole versus the freedoms of of the individual so i i mean i totally get why it's falling along the lines that it's falling upon but it's just one of those things where it's like it's disappointing where it's like we we can't even agree on like you know like health like yeah things and like stuff like this where it shouldn't you know you feel if you look at it you're like wow this is like this is one of those things that probably shouldn't be political but it's become political you know yeah and down in miami right now in the midst of this whole thing, there is a mass movement going on. And you've been there for the dawn of this, which is really over the past three months. What is happening?

Everyone's moving there. So as I understand it, yeah, a lot of tech companies are moving to Miami. They're getting fed up with the skyrocketing real estate prices in Silicon Valley. So a lot of tech companies are moving down there. I'm just adjusting you right here. You're good. All right. Yeah.

This is – I can definitely – There you go. So we'll take that from them. No, you're good. We'll keep that going. All right. You were saying a lot of tech companies are coming down there. Yeah, a lot of tech companies are coming to Miami again.

They're fed up with the real estate prices in Silicon Valley. It's become, I guess, at the dawn of the whole digital revolution, it was very necessary to be there. And you wanted to be in Silicon Valley. You wanted to make your presence known. That's becoming less and less important. The real estate's out of control they're moving to other places like uh florida with more favorable tax rates um a lot of things like that a lot of um like investment firms and and you know like capital firms again i'm not that's not really my area of expertise but um yeah from what i've i read and i see stuff in the news every day that's you know more and more more and more companies and things are moving to Miami.

Yeah, it's more than just real estate prices, though. A lot of it has to do with where people are fleeing with what's going on right now, too. Because they're coming from California. They're coming from New York City. So the people who are coming down who are in the Wall Street space, which is now starting to happen as well on top of the tech, a lot of them are coming down who are in the Wall Street space, which is now starting to happen as well on top of the tech. A lot of them are coming from New York City. The people who are coming down from tech are coming from San Francisco and the West Coast.

And they're basically fed up with being completely locked down because those places have definitely gone the most overboard with it this whole time. And they're also working remote. And a lot of jobs are staying remote forever. So the CEOs of these companies are like are like fuck it you know like let's just do it that's wild to me like that's kind of what scares me is at least for me i i hate the remote work like i need to be in an office i need to like there needs to be like a break room i need to get like coffee i need to be able to like walk and say what's up to the, you know, secretary or whoever. Like I just can't do the work from home, but it's one of those things where it,

my law firm that I currently work for, we have way more lawyers than we do like actual desks and like spots for them. We got rid of an entire like we had, I think I'm not sure the details on this but like i believe we had an office in fort lauderdale i work in the miami's like the headquarters of mine we had like a fort lauderdale office fort lickerdale fort yeah fort lauderdale is a fun city that's three podcasts in a row i've had to correct someone from florida on the

fort lickerdale thing dude i'm disappointed it's fun uh it's fun there um but what was i gonna say yeah we had like an office down there and we got rid of it during covid and like we're probably not gonna get it back and it just makes like it's lower overhead for my firm um but it's one of those things where it's like damn like you know i went to law school i'm a lawyer like like you're gonna tell me i can't have an office like i, I'll fight that. I want the corner office. I was overlooking the city. I need an office. Like, knock on wood, I have an office now.

But, like, they could just be like, nah, you don't get it. You know? Like, a more senior attorney gets it, work from home, which I hope never happens. But, you know, it's one of those things. It's something that people adjusted to right away. And now that it's gone on so long, they're thinking something that people adjusted to right away and and now that it's going on so long they're thinking about the ramifications of like well do i really want this forever i've seen a lot of arguments where people are saying hey let's have a dual kind of situation

where maybe you're in the office two days a week or three days a week and you're home the other two three days a week and you may see that you may see offices in different industries adjust where people share desks because they're on and off at different times or whatever it's i don't know how it will completely end up because the other thing is it's not like i mean in florida we have so you've seen a little bit but across the country it's not like we've had any kind of return to normalcy so we don't know what people have decided the normal is yet you know true very true and the and the governor in florida desantis he's getting a lot of shit for what he's doing down there but

pretty much i guess him and and texas are are the two that are just kind of like hey anything goes right now and what's the what's the vibe down there especially in miami like what do people think of him um desantis so i mean it's like anything that's political it's gonna fall along the political line so if you know if you're more liberal you probably um don't like the guy if you're more conservative you probably do like the guy um simple yeah you know i haven't heard too much discussion about desantis specifically which is kind of surprising but there's not riots against him down there or anything. Certainly, yes.

People freaking out. Certainly not the people that I'm associating with, but, you know, again, if you're liberal, you probably don't like the guys. Yeah, I mean, even though he's got it wide open, though, the other thing we can't forget is that there's still a lot of industries that have been completely put at a standstill. So, yes, you may have more small businesses and restaurants and stuff like that open down in florida than you do here and they may be doing a lot better that's great it's positive but you think about miami miami's a

port city for example it's it's the most active cruise port in the country yeah i think i mean you could pull up the stats i'm not totally. I believe it's like around 7 million cruise passengers a year when it's at full operation. Wow. I don't think a cruise has sailed from the Port of Miami since March, since mid-March. Zero. I know there are cruises sailing internationally. I don't think, at least from the major cruise lines like carnival royal disney um norwegian i don't know that uh a cruise has sailed well disney's they're um like central florida yeah they do like port canaveral yeah cape canaveral yeah um

but yeah to my knowledge there's not been a major cruise line that's had a you know that's had a ship sail with passengers. So it's been totally shut down. I haven't heard anything about that in a while just because they were talking about cruises and airlines for the first three months of this thing every single day. And now I feel like they never talk about it because I know planes are still going. But I've heard nothing on Norwegian or Carnival or any of that since probably the beginning of the summer? Yeah. So the CDC actually issued like a no-sail order saying that cruises couldn't sail. And that, I believe, expired in mid or late October. And basically, they said cruises can sail as long as they put in protocols to keep passengers safe.

So to my knowledge, there still has not been a major cruise line that's had a ship sail out of a U.S. port at least. I believe there's some cruise activity overseas. But it's a good sign, especially now the vaccine is in circulation. I think cruises start sailing within three to six months. I think you'll see cruises start sailing. I think you'll see mandatory vaccines for passengers.

Maybe that's a longer timeline, but I think the only way you realistically have cruises sail in this climate is you have mandatory vaccines for all passengers. Do you think people are going to adopt that quickly, though? I know people are looking to get out of their houses and go on vacation, no doubt about that. But that is the ultimate.

Let me tell you about the average cruise consumer. They are loyal. Cruise consumers are loyal to that form of vacationing. Cruise consumers, and again, you'll have to pull the stats on this later, whatever you do, your show notes. I read something that a lot of these cruise lines were staying afloat because they're selling and keeping the cash flow going because they're selling cruises like in 2021 and 2022 because these cruise consumers are so eager and so loyal that they're keeping them afloat. They're buying these cruises years out now and they're super discounted rates um so yes i think people americans love to

cruise well it's it's worldwide but like the people that like cruising they're not kind of your casual vacation or they live and die by that form of vacation and they love the cruise and i think they're going to continue to cruise and um i mean that's basically i'd say about 90 of what the work i do is uh is cruise ship work so yeah because you're talk about that you're you're in maritime law so what is that it consists of working with companies like cruise ships but are you also working with mariskin companies like that yeah so we do. So my firm does it all. So we do cruise work. We'll do cargo work.

We'll do recreational. Like if you have your boat and you smash into another boat somewhere, we'll do stuff like that. We'll do it all um but what i do in the group the specific that i'm in um i do 90 percent cruise work and then 90 of that is actually only with one cruise line i'm not going to say the name of it it's you know whatever um but yeah so um we deal with you know we'll deal with anything from like personal injury uh things on a cruise ship so like if a passenger gets injured um if a crew member gets injured, we'll deal with sex assaults, which

it's kind of surprising that happens a lot more than people realize on cruise ships. Yeah. There's a lot of... There's federal legislation, actually. I forget when it was enacted. I want to say 2006. It's called the Cruise Vessel... CVSSA.

Cruise Vessel Safety and Security Act. Part of that is these, because there was like a plethora of sexual assaults and there was not kind of this data being tracked on it. And it was kind of like, whoa, this is like, you know, you have all these people getting turnt up on a cruise. Yeah. And like, you know, that's going to happen. And it was happening and there was not a lot of data on this um uh congress enacted this the cvssa that mandates reporting and every time there's one of these incidents you have to report it you have to report it to the fbi um and you have to have like protocols in place to like preserve the evidence

like all this stuff so it gets very complicated there's a lot of like federal legislation at place when when you have like an alleged sex assault on the cruise. What if you're in international waters, though? So, everyone always asks me that. Like, oh, what happens with international waters? Doesn't anything go? And it's pretty easy to explain, basically. So, once a ship is 15 nautical miles to sea, they're in what's considered international waters and when you're in international waters the uh country that the ship is flagged under the law of that country applies so a lot

of ships are flagged in panama or bahamas um so that just means if you're 15 miles to sea uh the law of the bahamas applies or the law of panama applies does that include u.s cruise companies though so it's it's tricky so like that's the like substantive law like on the books like criminal law and like regular regulatory law but when you get into like tort law and lawsuits and stuff like that if it involves a u.s passenger or u.s company you can still bring suit in the u.s under um applied u.s maritime law so i don't know if that answers your question i don't want to lose some of the viewers and get too complicated in talking about like it gets complicated jurisdictional stuff things like that um but it basically just means when you're 15

miles out at sea you know then you can gamble then you can have 18 year olds drink then you can you know it just you know the law that you're applying on that ship at that time so totally changes yeah so you guys do just like a lot of on the books work for them so you're basically like in-house counsel for companies, cruise companies. No. So in-house counsel would be more – the job of an in-house counsel would be more to make sure that they would manage what litigation they have going on. So we work with the in-house counsel all the time. Got it. We do litigation. So we are –

So you're taking those individual cases like the assaults and stuff like that. Yeah, and we're working up the cases. We're getting them ready for trial. We're negotiating with the opposing attorneys. We're managing these cases. But if you want to have a big – this is an important question I got to ask. If you want to have a big maritime practice, do you pretty much have to be in a Florida or a Texas or maybe a California, possibly New York, because there are a lot of big ports there versus anywhere else, just because you're close to the biggest ones?

I'm glad you asked this question, Julian. Yes and no. So Florida is unique for a lot of reasons. Okay. Almost all of these cruise lines, which again again so i'm talking the cruise industry florida as far as just general maritime florida is a huge um it's it's very significant because it has a huge number of boat ownership i think they have the most boat owners in the country it's just like a it's a very boating like state there's a lot of like it's a very boating culture that you know there's you know the city of miami revolves around like boats and boats and like Fort Lauderdale and like Tampa and all that. There's just like – there's so much opportunity where people are on boats and doing dumb stuff that, yes, you're going to have just ample opportunities for work. Gotcha. is based in Florida, I guess, yeah, it's based in Florida. Yeah, the big ones.

It's because a lot of these cruise ships, they have what are called form selection clauses in their passenger contracts. So, again, I don't want to get too legal heavy for the millions of viewers out there. We'll get there. Basically, yeah, we'll get there. We're working on it but basically what it

means is um if i'm a passenger and i buy a ticket and you're royal caribbean you sell me a ticket i've agreed that if i want to sue you i have to sue you within the southern district of florida so that's a federal court in florida and um the the supreme court has upheld those those types of clauses and contracts and it just limits the litigation to the Southern District of Florida. So I could be from Minnesota. I could be from Tennessee. If I'm injured on a cruise, I've got to sue you in Florida. So that's why the cruise industry is specific to Florida, specific to Southern Florida.

And all the main cruise ships have their headquarters there. Royal does. I guess, like, Norwegian's U.s operations are there i'm i'm not totally sure on that i know carnival i know royal and carnival are for sure um msc is another cruise line um again you can i guess you could look that up yeah um but yeah so i i know for sure like royal and carnival do um and yeah it just means you know it's just okay all, okay, all the maritime lawyers are going to have to practice. If they want to practice maritime law in that aspect, they're going to have to practice in Florida. Now, if you want to do, you know, recreational or cargo stuff, yeah, I mean, I guess you go to the more active ports.

I think the Port of Long Beach is the most active port in the country. And then I think its second is bayonne new jersey which is new york new york really so um norfolk's a big one too right in virginia maybe i know houston is big yep yep houston's huge but um yeah so it all depends on what aspect of maritime you're trying to get into and there are maritime lures all over the country. So, you know, it just depends. Yeah. Do you look, like, do you personally check out the international cargo side at all and deal with any cases around that? Or are you interested in that? I haven't done that yet, but our firm absolutely does handle those cases. It just hasn't come across what I've worked on yet.

Right, right. Because it's, first of all, when you look at the full logistics and transportation industry, we just take for granted that it is the biggest industry in the world. You look at trucks. You look at boats. You look at planes. They're getting shit to you. They're traveling all the time. I forget the numbers, but it's like literally in the trillions internationally. Oh, yeah. And yet it's also one of the most old- school industries by and large, especially on the maritime side. It's ancient. It's ancient.

I mean, they deal with like literal paper handoffs and stuff. Yeah, bills of lading. Yeah, they're paper. Yeah. It's crazy to me. And the other thing is, forget the fact that it's so ass backwards in old school we also don't pay attention to the trends that happen with it because again everyone's so focused on the actual end product and what they're buying as the consumer or what this company's doing there

or whatever they're not focusing on the companies that are going between them on the logistics and trying to do this so like right now you and i were talking last week about this. I know you had some thoughts on what China's doing. I mean they're basically trying to rewrite who controls the international waterways by investing in a whole bunch of ports. My question for you is that if they're putting up billions of dollars into partnering with ports in Greece or partnering with ports in Panama or wherever. How does that give them, the obvious is that it gives them more power, but how specifically does that give them more power on the international stage to then be able to get control of countries versus just doing business investments to make money? Does that make sense? Well, I think it's both.

I think China is absolutely investment-minded too. I think they'll do something to purely turn a profit. But I think you hit the nail on the head. China is doing this stuff to exert influence and control. So one of the main things that I've read about, and I don't know all the details of it, I know that, so everyone knows the Panama Canal, and the significance of the Panama Canal is if you're making that trip, you don't have to, so say you're making a trip

from, you know, you want to ship something from Europe to, let's say, California. You don't have to go all the way around South America and do that. You cut through the Panama Canal. Everyone understands that. And didn't we completely build that? We completely built that and we owned it and we gave it back to Panama. When did that happen? I don't know when that happened,

but I know that a lot of people think that that was a mistake. Strategically, it seemed like, okay, maybe we should have kept that now. Because China's now, I know that there's, again, I don't know all the details because it's all murky, but I know China's somehow involved with financing the original Panama Canal, and the Panamanian government's getting tied up with China, and it could be like,

there's a lot of people saying there could be like a kind of trade war sparked from that between the U.S. and China over the control of the Panama Canal. But that's not even, that's just one aspect. They're now trying to build a second Panama Canal in Nicaragua. They're trying to fund it in Nicaragua and it's supposed to be, so now there's these like super tankers that are even, that fit through the Panama they've they've widened and deepened the Panama Canal they did that recently now there's these super tankers that cannot even fit through the Panama Canal that China's now trying to build a canal that's big enough and deep enough to do that in Nicaragua so what do we do now if the only way to get goods is through a chinese-owned canal in nicaragua

that's you know that's that's the point like then does their government exert control over that and it sounds like they can because that's where people draw the line they're thinking themselves all right well if china's just making investments and getting rich like hey as long as we're doing okay here who gives a shit but when you then inject the fact that their government what's the deal their government owns like 50 of all businesses as i understand it as i understand it in china you can't really there's no such thing as like a private business because every business the chinese government is a 51 owner so there's no there's no such thing as private business you know that's pretty much my understanding of it. So then you have to worry about whether or not there's literal governing power that they then have because they have all these countries tied to them via the investments in the ports. I mean I went and looked at some of the Panama stuff because you had sent me – this was a while ago.

This was a month or two ago, something like that. You're reading Julian and I appreciate that. I like the stuff you sent me because it i never know about it you send me something and it's like i have never heard that story before and then you look at it and you're like wow yeah just because the amount of money flown in but you sent me one i think one it was on greece like the one they're investing in there and then somehow i got into that Panama Canal thing you were talking about, and they were saying that – forget the amount of money that the Chinese companies put up, again, kind of on behalf of the government. But they also just completely took advantage of Panama being in a really bad spot, which is a trend that China has had for a while because – Take advantage of economically distressed countries and buy buy up their ports and buy or buy up their resources and then you kind of uh you have

a lot of power over them in those situations and it's just like it's a scary trend i don't really i'm not going to sit here and pretend like i know what the implications of this are i don't even know but it's something that china's basically trying to just control the, from what I gather, control the shipping industry. And when you control the flow of goods, that's a lot of control to have. It seems to me like their main area, very clearly that they've quadrupled, quintupled, whatever down on, is tech. And then just putting this all together and learning more about this in the context of transportation and their investments there i mean the goal they had was i think one trillion dollars in investment in i forget exactly what it was for g but the number was one trillion dollars over a

certain number of years and it wasn't that many years to go specifically into transportation which i guess is then literally doing what you're showing me they're doing, which is investing in these ports. And so now I'm thinking to myself, okay, they get tech, which is the ultimate battlefield, and now they're going after, to your point, literally how things move to and fro around the world. What more do they need if they have – if the government feels like they have control of those two things and feels like they have all the continents besides ours tied to it well i think china's kind of their their trend is that they're never satisfied so then i mean one of the articles i sent you if you read that article and i sent you a few articles and i i'd forget what even what i sent you but one of the articles

i was saying um the article itself said China could start using these ports in these foreign countries to say, okay, we own this port. We're going to stash our military ships here. Yeah. Strategically. Like, that's a problem, too. So now China has battleships all over Europe and South America. That's a problem. Yeah. And what's a country to

say what's a so okay fine you can have a ship here well now you have a ship here now you have a military presence in this country you know what's you know what's next what are the implications of this i don't know i don't know and is this is that actually going to happen that was theoretical the article i sent you that was theoretical theoretical yeah but but you know it's it's something that's you know it's kind of scary and you're you're you start thinking whoa whoa and the other scary part is that our some of our ally relationships aren't the greatest right now just because trump having been in office went after nato kind of went after the eu in some ways, wasn't exactly friends with some of the other first world countries that we've been longtime friends with. And then you have to

remember, they all respond to the same kind of thing. They need money inflowed to their country. So if they're having tense relationships with the United States on some stuff, well, another buyer is going to come into the marketplace and they're going to go to whoever that buyer is and sell the goods and yeah you've seen china do that and i don't know nearly enough about it i'm i'm trying to learn more but it's complicated it's actually it's not like you just read an article and you understand it oh no it's it's pretty complicated what they're doing but it's and which is probably the reason why it's not so newsworthy because it's not because your average you know your average person is just like i don't know what they're

buying some port in nicaragua like how does that affect me i don't know um but it does and it has a potential to affect our lives significantly yeah and we're also we're hardened to, not hardened, but we're used to a lack of international struggle. We've had a terrible never-ending war in Iraq and Afghanistan for years. But what you've got to remember is it's in these two focused places. None of it comes here. It's very clearly a big dog going against a not big dog, and it's limited to that. And then people get upset because of all the economic implications and how much of it is about oil and shit like that. But when you're talking about our generation and the generation above us and the kids in this country understanding something like a world war two or a world war one

that's a foreign idea oh yeah i also would like to think and this is my hope hat on that because we have so much instantaneous international communication now between countries that we didn't have back then there is and so many different quote unquote multi-country board set up you know most obvious one being like the UN and stuff like that and all these international laws because of all that my thought is hey we could avoid things like that just because there are enough cooks in the kitchen who are completely aware what's going on it doesn't change the fact though that to your point, all this stuff may look complicated, but when you start to add it all together and say like, okay, technology, transportation, buying up other continents around us and everything, that doesn't – oh, wow, they got like a billion, two billion people living over there. That's not the greatest and it's not exactly a free government.

It's a communist government i don't know we take it we miss it in this country because we're not used to looking for it is my point and that's a scary thought yeah i would totally agree with that um we we kind of live in a bubble in a sense um and there's a lot of strings being pulled uh internationally behind closed doors, sometimes in broad daylight. But these are things that we should be aware of and I think they should be discussed and I think people should know about this stuff. You know what though? We don't even educate in – whether it be high school or middle school or college. We don't even educate on financial

literacy and basic things like that and then we and then we sit here we want to educate people on international problems i want to talk about i'm glad you brought that up i have thoughts on that everyone go off this might this might be totally uh side sidebar whatever do it do it let's go everyone talks about oh we don't we're not teaching taxes in school do you know how do you know how expansive the tax code is do you know like you have to in order to just you can't just teach taxes like taxes change year to year it's so complicated the tax the the tax code is like fucking like three volumes and it's it's huge you can't teach taxes.

What you can teach in school is what they are already teaching in school is critical thinking and reasoning and basic math so that you can – Okay, okay, yeah. So you can read your tax filing and figure out, okay, should I do this? Should I do that? You can't – taxes change. It changes so much that it's it's kind of useless to teach taxes now that's the whole taxes thing should you teach you know what a mortgage is should you teach what an asset is what appreciation is what amortization is interest rates sure i

think i think you should like and some of that i'll hedge on a little bit of this if you're in business school and i talked to a lot of different people when a lot of different business schools some of that they do really go through it's like if you're in other majors even if you're an engineer or something they don't go through any of that yeah yeah no I just agree I just this whole I don't know if I hear it a lot it's just like we should teach taxes in school we should teach taxes in school and it's like look you already have the skills to you know if if you teach comprehensive um you teach um reading comprehension you teach critical reasoning critical thinking you have the skills to understand okay what's being asked of me in this you know as far as like a single filer like you know just regular joe schmoe to do their taxes you know the the tax code is just too expansive to teach itself in schools.

You know what? I actually don't totally disagree with this point. At first, when you were starting to go at it, I'm thinking like, all right, I might end up disagreeing with this. But where I would push a little bit on the tax example in particular is that there are some basic things like income brackets and how they work, how marginal taxation and stuff works. I agree with that. Absolutely. Stuff like that. So yes, you could teach the basic things, but you're right. If you look at the legislation we passed in, what was it, like late 2017 compared to the tax legislation before that, night and day, right? So if you were teaching a class based on the 2013 or 2014,

whatever it was, tax legislation, it just totally got flipped on its head. I agree. You make the point about the mortgages, though. You make the point about the basic things. Agree with that. We can do that. But where we really don't teach in any of these school systems is, to put the buzzword on it, the whole time value value of money we don't talk about inflation and how that works we don't talk about the concept of investments versus things like inflation and the

concept of risk versus return on a very basic level i mean i worked in banking and i dealt with some really smart people sometimes who just – they weren't bankers. They did whatever they did. And it would be amazing to me – and some of them. Some people really knew what they were talking about because they put the responsibility on themselves and learned it. But it would be amazing to me when I talk with some people that you would think know everything about this stuff who would ask me some of the most basic questions and then have to be like, oh my god, actually have to answer that you know like give me an example oh my God one time a guy looked at me and goes Julian what is a bond and this guy makes a debt instruments sir this guy makes about five six million dollars a year and probably worth 50 60 million something like that and any dead ass

looked at me and said what is a bond and that's probably not the most obvious one I ever got. I mean, some people, they don't even understand the concept of income brackets, which to me, that's that's that one shocks me. There are a lot of people out there that think they're like, if you're on the cusp of a bracket, they're like, ah, don't take that promotion because your taxes are going to go higher. I got that one. People think like they think they're being smart, but it's like, ah, that's like, that's not how marginal brackets work. I thought that coming out of college. I remember before I started my job, I was having a conversation with the guy who was going to be my boss. And I was

basically learning everything I could just to know. I always wanted to know, what are all the common hit points that people run into? And how do I just make sure I know every single thing about them so it's covered so of course some of the stuff we're going through is taxes and i was explaining to him like yeah you know the income bracket thing is kind of confusing just because i feel like people could avoid it just by not taking them literally like not taking the promotion or saying oh no i'll pass up on that five and he was like oh no that's not how it works yeah no it's but there's a lot of people who don't understand that and you know we're sitting here talking about again trying to go into all right well let's understand the nuances of international implications of

transportation law and you know we're talking about the same general population that doesn't know this stuff yeah and going back to the whole financial literacy thing, you can't teach people to be smart with their money. True. Very true. But you can teach them the basics to know that they're not being smart. So you can never just like, everyone's going to make their own decisions. But basically, we need to get to a point i think i think where if someone's you know leasing a car or they're you know buying you know an expensive purse or whatever they know that they're making what's considered maybe not a financially yep great decision um i think that a lot of people don't realize that i really do i think that a lot of people yeah you know i just i just don't think

that they're as financially like like we said as financially literate as they could be that's a social media era too yeah everyone wants the cool shit the instance yeah the instant gratification it's it's crazy but i mean hey when they're buying boats it's good for you you like that yeah buying boats yeah boats great investment buy a boat it's a great investment terrible investment but boats are fun man boats are fun uh how is it that like do you like it down there i love it down there man it's it's a cool culture it's like uh it's obviously the weather's great down there um i'm into boats i'm a boat lawyer it's. It's just absolute boating culture. It's obviously a very Latino city, very Latin. So I like that culture.

It's cool. I just like being – I was in Philly for five years. So Philly is Philly. I lived there for five years. I got the total vibe of Philly. There's nothing like I felt like I needed to do or accomplish in Philly. And, yeah, I'm just like, just a lot of new stuff down there for me. I'm just like learning a lot of new stuff. Like meeting new people,

doing new experiences. It's a lot of fun. Just like, totally different culture. Totally. Like, Cuban Latin culture is just like... It's so cool. It's cool. It's really cool. It's just like funny. Like, one of the things is like, if you're ordering a cup of coffee, like, you like like cubans have their own way of drinking coffee it's like not that special it's like they you know they they like whip they like whip up sugar and then you like pour like espresso over it's like cuban coffee yeah but like you don't know like for me i'm like a white guy and i'll go into like a shop and i'll be like can i get a coffee and like half the time they'll give me a cuban coffee and then half the time they'll be like, all right, this white guy probably wants this kind of coffee.

You have to say Americano. I don't have to. It's just weird. It's like sometimes they'll just give you, they're like, he probably wants this. He wants this one. Yeah, exactly. And it's like, all right, fine. But it's, you know, it's whatever.

Yeah, I love Miami, man. I went down to Miami one time for five days two years ago. It was like a last-minute trip. My buddy calls me. Dude, I remember, like, seeing that on, like, social media, and I was like, what is Joy doing right now? There is a piece of my soul that died at the Delano, and it's very happy to have that as a final

resting i've never been there but i've i've heard i've heard it in a p diddy song he references what song was that uh the what song is that it's the oh let's do it remix wow i just bought the delano i believe p diddy says wow so all. All right. So he worked it into the line with his own phonetic pronunciation to make it work. I respect that. That's pretty good. That place is wild. We had the group I went down with. So my one friend, he's a personal injury lawyer up here.

Was he the dude that was on the show? No. No, not Spear. Not Spear. Different guy up in North Jersey. injury lawyer up here and was he the dude that was on the show no no not not spear not spear different guy up in north jersey and they are the personal injury crew up in north jersey there's a lot of really really good attorneys up there and a big group of them are all really close friends so they go vacation together do all this shit and these guys are they're all like law-abiding citizens as lawyers i mean they just like to drink the laws don't really apply in miami but well yeah actually

that's a fair point but these guys they're not like they're not insane there's there's not blow everywhere doing anything and everything like that but it was basically this crew i went down with my friend dave was like 29 years old and then the rest of them are like 40, 50, 60. And I'm telling you, dude, it was just five days. They rent Bungalow 8 at the Delano. So literally right next to the bar. The bar just brings in the bar to that bunker. Or bunker, I'm used to saying that here.

To that bungalow right there. And it's five days of just nonstop drinking. And some of the most beautiful women in the world you'll ever see it's yeah it's insane it's heaven sounds like miami it's it's heaven unfortunately i haven't like so i moved there in a pandemic so i mean everything's open but it's not it's not like especially like miami beach it's not well miami beach is still pretty lit like i don't know it's but it's still it still is not what it is and should be are they having the pool party at sls or are they not allowed no they're they're doing that stuff like all like nikki beach sls like all that stuff is still like

open and lit but it's just not as it it's just not as vibrant as it as it as it should be i guess yeah but it's still... Actually, I don't even know if that's true because every time I... I don't spend much time in Miami Beach. I spend most of my time in downtown Miami, the Brickell area. That's where everyone who's from Miami

lives in Brickell. That's where I go out most of the time. I've been out in Miami Beach once or twice. I spend a lot of time in Fort Lauderdale. I have some friends that live there too. Fort Lauderdale is fun. Fort Lickerdale. Fort Lickerdale.

What's the story behind that? Why is it? No, I was laughing because one of my buddies in college is a couple years older than me. He used to always correct me. He has this really cool, like, higher-pitched, raspy voice. And he was from Fort Lauderdale. And every time I'd say Fort Lauderdale and every time i'd say fort lauderdale i'd be like it's for look at dale i'm like all right and it beat into my system

so now i've had two guys in here before you who were i guess like a few episodes ago where they they brought up fort lauderdale because they were both florida guys as well and i had to repeat fort look at dale so my guy who taught me that was texting me like, I love it, I love it, I love it, that's great. You know, you're spreading the word. No, I could definitely see that, man. Fort Lauderdale, the crew I go out with there is just like, so my one buddy's in the Coast Guard there, and he's just like a Coast Guard guy, loves to drink and loves to party.

Yeah, we're just like goons every time we go out there. So I've had a lot of fun nights in Fort Lauderd i've i've had a lot of fun nights in fort lauderdale i've had a lot of fun nights in brickle i've only yeah i haven't really been out too much in miami beach to like those clubs there so yeah that's that's on my list i'll get there what are the big spots in brickle because i i went through when i was down there i went through brickle quickly but i didn't really spend any time there i was in miami beach pretty much the whole time uh i don't know so like i don't know if i'm going to the big spots i guess so i went to this one club la v yeah that was like that that was a blast i went to this um where else the hell did i go um where the fuck where where's where's 11 11's not in brickle that's like it might be in brickle i

think that's just downtown i i haven't been to 11 everyone's like says you got to go to 11 it's like a strip club like bar like combo whatever i'll you know i'll i'm sure i'll go there at some point yeah um yeah i've only been been in miami for like i moved there when i moved there september so i've oh shit i thought you moved back in like june i know right like yeah i've only been there for like three months i guess yeah is it three months yeah like three and a half months at the end of this month i moved i started my job september 14th now is there like a lot of construction going on down there even in the midst of all this like a lot of buildings that are empty that they're still working on right now yes a lot that's

interesting because now with with all these people flocking to miami i was thinking that when i was there because i couldn't really tell but i felt like i saw cranes everywhere yeah there's a lot of a lot of buildings being built there's a building right next to my apartment there's they're throwing one up a huge you know high-rise condos whatever it's all over yeah yes yeah because do you know the size as well like the actual roughly the size of the population no not the population like the geographical size of the miami city limits i've never looked that up no like relative to new york like manhattan is it anything because manhattan's is basically like seven miles. I have no idea.

I know that Miami... I could talk about the size of population-wise. Yeah, what is that? I believe Miami is probably... Miami proper is about 600,000, but then Miami-Dade, which includes Miami Beach, Miami Gardens, Hialeah, all like kendall doral like all that stuff is um that's like you know several million so miami-dade is a lot bigger than

miami proper got it okay so comparing the sizes i just pulled it up up. Manhattan itself is around 22.82 square miles, whereas the city of Miami itself, and I just went off that one, so that's not up there, but it was around 35.99 square miles. So it's bigger. It's bigger, but again, New York is definitely going to be bigger once you add in the other boroughs. What's the population of Miami and then Miami-Dade Got it

Yo, so it's kind of isn't in Miami Wade County. Yo, Dwayne Wade Boulevard. I live like a block from Dwayne Wade Boulevard It's pretty cool. He's already got a street name. Yeah, right next to American Airlines. It's cool it's cool when you like when I first moved there and I put it on my Google Maps or whatever it'd be like make a left on duane wade boulevard i'd be like damn that's cool that's pretty legendary all right so population as of 2018 so it's only it's 500 000 yeah and then search miami-dade population and that's the other thing though that may be the population but the tourism there on a daily basis compared yeah so this is miamiDade County.

It's 2.7 million. Yeah, because there's all these little communities. Like Miami Beach is different than Miami. Wait, really? I didn't know that. So they literally count them different. So Miami, the city of Miami is different than the city of Miami Beach. It has a different mayor.

What's crazy, what's weird to me is the city of Miami has a mayor, Suarez, who's Republican. And then this county, Miami-Dade County has their own mayor who's Democrat. And it's like, it's so weird to me. Yeah. And just because we're more polarized than ever too. And then they're like issuing these, like, it gets very complicated with these like stay at home orders. Like for a while,, everything was just wide open.

There was a county stay-at-home order, but Miami City wasn't enforcing it. So it was like – and then they're like, oh, now we're enforcing it. Suarez strikes me from the outside because I've been paying close attention to him over the last month. Before that, I didn't even know who the guy was. I wouldn't have known him if i crossed him in the street but with all the mass movement going to miami all these people moving there i'm like i'm on twitter looking at this can't believe it and this guy's twitter is insane he's like in the meme culture following up on everything i follow him on the gram i don't not on twitter oh my god he's phenomenal on there and he strikes me i'm still

learning more about him. But just based on who he's talking with, because he has, the way he's done this, especially with the tech community. And now he's starting. He's always, like, posting about the tech community. A hundred percent. But he's making it very personal. He's not just posting and saying, like, ooh, come here. He's inviting these guys there.

Like, bringing them to the city to sit down in his office with him and meet with him and then tell him what they want. And when you listen, when you see what he's doing, what the vibe of the city seems to be from the outside there and everything, and then you also see he's been meeting with – when you're looking at some of the people he's meeting with, he's meeting with people on the far left or far – I shouldn't say far, but on the pretty hard conservative or liberal sides all alike and everyone has a high opinion of him which is pretty cool so he kind of strikes me as this pragmatic you know south florida centrist kind of let's just have a nice city and get some good business here and have a good community kind of guy that's what it seems like to me but i don't know i don't have a read on him yet yeah and. And you never, like, I need to live there longer before I can tell you what I think of Suarez. A good lawyerly hedge. Yeah, very true.

But I know for a while the mask thing, it was, like, pretty, pretty, or not the mask things, rather, the curfew thing was pretty lax in Miami where it was, like. What was the curfew thing? So, like, there's still a curfew now they've so it's like midnight is the curfew on all of miami-dade county i believe so clubs have to close at midnight yes so but like for instance this one weekend our friend alexi visited and like we went to this like we went to this club and we were there till like 6am and like there were cops there and we're just like what like it didn't make any sense but then I went to Miami beach like the other weekend and then the place closed at midnight and then like

in Broward county which is like where Fort Lauderdale is it's like probably 2am so it's like it's pretty like that's like you know normal for like Philly, but like. You remember the beginning of COVID with Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lickerdale, where they had the map. No. They had the map of all the spring breakers flying out. Oh yeah, that was a mess. Oh my God, it was hilarious. Yeah, that was a mess.

So on point. But yeah, that's weird. Like, I guess, because the other thing is the cops everywhere forget all the social unrest that's been going on and what that does for their job but they're in a really tough spot because their job is to uphold and enforce the law and a lot of these cops are being forced to uphold and enforce shit that they got to be driving out to do this going what are we doing yeah you know it's legally speaking i i don't know how much um there's a lot of debate on like how much authority these uh these stay-at-home orders and curfews and and the like have but we're kind of just all agreeing like all right we're just

you know it's a pandemic so we'll just you know the mayor will issue this order and we'll just kind of you know enforce it whatever um again i haven't you know again it all depends on these states and like what their constitution's saying what the like you know city of miami like charter says and all like all that stuff um but i i think that think that it's a lot less clear than people realize. Well, actually, I want to ask you about that, because you're an attorney. And this is this is something you look at. Now, it's it's a high level kind of thing. This is something that I know they talk about a lot in in law school, because you have to it's a core tenant in the legal system. But there's been this trade off in the history of our country because you have to it's a core tenant in the legal system but there's been this

trade-off in the history of our country where you have the power of the federal government and the power of the state governments you know who can dual sovereignty correct yeah there's the actual term i didn't know that but when you look at these two things there's been a lot of examples that you could go through in history where they've come to a head and and there's been a lot of examples that you could go through in history where they've come to a head and there's been a massive disagreement and it's not like who controls what. But especially today where everything is so interconnected, I can't help but think that half the mess of the whole COVID pandemic was the fact that you had these 50 states and then the federal government. And there were – i mean it's happening right now we talked about earlier that you have everyone doing their own different way and yet people are moving across border because it's not hard you know they're going to see family

they're going to see friends they're taking a flight here going there and it does make you wonder invokes a slippery slope which a lot of do, but it makes you wonder if there are some things where it's like, well, maybe one should have control. Or maybe if we let all the states have control, we don't, and this is impossible, we don't judge them for making their decisions the way they do if that's within their rights. But do you ever think about that in the context of the last nine, ten months just because it's been such a cluster fuck yeah well i definitely think it varies it varies so widely from state to state so you you you have a california where it's you know it's under lockdown you have a pennsylvania philadelphia where it's under lockdown and then you go to florida and it's you know wide open and it's it's confusing and it's you know it creates problems where if you're trying to look at america as a whole and say what's the best way to stop the spread of this disease or whatever and like say we could all like agree on one one way okay you

got to shut it down or you don't have to shut it down it just makes it difficult when all different states are doing different things um yeah like what's your question sorry yeah it's it's it's complicated it's more a thought than anything and just throwing it out there for for what you think but i guess if i were going to get really specific do you think that for something like this we should have just had a federal quote unquote mandate where the federal government says, all right, here's what we're deciding. Here's what everyone's got to do. Just get on board. Do you think that would have made it better? So I'm going to, I'm going to pick a side here because I don't think that you should have the federal government just have a mandate because if you look at the u.s the u.s is not some homogeneous population it is it is totally different that you know someone who

lives in the dakotas their life is totally different than someone who lives in you know downtown manhattan it's i i don't i just don't think you could have some general mandate and i think that's just the nature of of the United States and our population and our, you know, the geography as well. I think it's just so different. So, no, I completely agree with you. I think that it made this just because of the political lines of this thing. And it was also an election year and all that it made this far worse because you had people making political moves rather than policy moves so to speak but to your point if you had something like this mandated to the federal government where do you draw the line

and what forget the fact that there's different realities which is 100 true well what else do they then have a full mandate on moving forward and then when do you get to a point where to use your example the people in the dakotas are legislated on everything the same way that the people in new york are legislated i mean even think about it like this new york city versus and this is interest states this is a whole other level down, but New York City versus western upstate New York. Very little in common. Just different worlds. I've actually thought about that before.

It's kind of wild. Yeah. So I agree with you. What if we had done this or had done that just because here we are, second round of lockdowns, people still yelling at each other and claiming that you don't value life if you're anti-lockdown or claiming that you're a prisoner of the state if you couldn't even get the states and the federal government or just the states alone themselves on somewhat of a same page as to how to go about handling this whole thing yeah yeah i totally agree and obviously this whole thing has has cost so many people their livelihoods like we said and and it uprooted people from jobs and things like that. But some people adjusted okay or were able to pivot, and, you know, that's great. But that's kind of what you did, right?

Yeah. I mean, I was laid off from my job, like, on my birthday. Holy shit. Yeah. Well, I think it was the day before my birthday, but pretty much on my birthday, which kind of sucked. And I was laid off. I was laid off, and I off and i was like well uh

in philly in philly so i worked for a law firm so i'll explain yeah i worked for a law firm in philly i was doing um i was a car accident lawyer basically i did like trucking defense i hated my job i really hated my job in philly um there were good people it was a good opportunity but like i just didn't i just didn't get fired up about the subject matter and I was always interested in maritime law like in law school I had to take a maritime course at a different law school like I had to ask my law school permission to go to another law school to take a maritime course because they didn't oh wow offer it at my law school I like found like the only maritime law job in philly that i could find um now but i will in law school in law school like as a um you know as a you know externship

internship whatever um i i didn't get a chance to get a job there after law school so then i worked for this law firm in philly and then i kept always like i was always on google like googling maritime law jobs maritime law jobs and they're all in florida all in miami and i was like fuck it let's go yeah i took the florida bar and then you know i had that in my back pocket and then i got laid off and i was just like shit like oh you took that ahead yeah so no it's like it wasn't like a random like you know yeah do it overnight thing i was absolutely eyeing up a florida move um or it's at least it was something that i wanted to have my back pocket and it was something that i was like like this is where the maritime law jobs are and like i also think like i was just kind of drawn to florida for

just like it's florida i mean it's yeah my and my 49 states in florida yeah and dude and miami's like a different a different country like within florida florida is its own country in miami it's fucking own world yeah um but yeah so i got laid off and i was like shit like do i just apply to jobs and i almost did because like i was like you know it's tough it's like you know it's you're comfortable and like you're like this is what i've been doing like i own i own a house in philly like i just ran it but i own a house in philly and i was like shit like you know all my friends are there i have a crib here like like what like you know maybe i should just stay here you know it's easy enough like you know i could get a job whatever but um yeah i just like said it i'm gonna do maritime law in florida and yeah i haven't looked back so yeah i mean good for you and and that

your birthday's what in the march july oh i was totally off there sorry pal so you this is just mid-pandemic you had to think on your feet but you had taken the bar what like a year before something like that yeah i got my result i took it in february um yeah february okay now it happened quick it happened dumb question do you have to fly down to florida yeah i had to fly down i'd stay in like a shitty fucking roadside motel in like tampa i didn't get a fancy hotel yeah there was like for you fucking like people like wasted like fighting the night i'm taking the bar exam like at the fucking pool like i don't know fuck it but what um like how much different i hear people talk about sometimes the delaware bar and the california bar there

and particularly whatever in new york's kind of hard to how much different though is it going commonwealth of pennsylvania versus going state of florida on a bar i like that you refer to pennsylvania as commonwealth yeah um so i'm gonna say uh it's definitely different there's a lot of florida specific stuff you had to learn honestly and like this might get very legal specific. Like you have to learn like the civil procedure, the rules of court. I had to learn that for Florida. I had to learn like certain like the rules of evidence, things like that. But for the most part, the law is the law because, you know, people decide like this makes sense.

So it's not going to be that crazy different from state to state there is certain little specific things and they'll they'll usually test on those differences they'll they'll test on like all right in florida they do um you know they they have uh they'll they have this weird rule about you know you have 21 days to respond to this versus you have 30 days in in this other state and they'll test on that stuff and the bar prep companies will will focus on those areas i'll be honest though there's like certain subjects that i just didn't have time to study entirely that i just like kind of guessed on and i was you know i passed so i was like you know i hope they do wills and trusts the same day as they do in and Florida. And I guess it was close enough because there was a bunch of questions on that.

And yeah, so you can kind of honestly, it's not as crazy as you think. Like you can kind of guess on a lot of stuff, make educated guesses based on like what would how would Florida do this? Yeah. Well, the other thing I always wonder about, which is probably a stupid question, but when you're an attorney and let's say you're a really high-powered attorney in New York. And so you're in the – well, maybe it's not going to be anymore, but the capital of the country pretty much as far as where things happen. I think it's going to be the capital for a long time. I hope to God you're right. And think it is too. I actually can't guarantee that anymore is my point. If I'm an attorney there

and I'm doing all kinds of cases with companies I deal with who have their offices there and whatever. If somebody calls me from Arizona and it's a major corporation and I want to do the case. If I'm not passed in the bar in

Arizona, do I, am I allowed to lead that case in Arizona? So you can, if the case is like involving a court, let's talk litigation. Say like, say it's like a big lawsuit in Arizona, it's in an Arizona court. You can getrizona attorney to sponsor your admission on that like a purely case-by-case basis it's called pro hoc vichay like i'm talking all this latin like terms and yeah but yeah you can get a local attorney to be like yo like i'm gonna you know offer this guy for admission to like to the bar or whatever on a limited case-by-case basis or right you can do that um and it gets tricky if you're talking like can i in new york a new york attorney advise like an arizona corporation on an issue of arizona law probably not but if it's somehow you can

if you can somehow relate it to like new york law then maybe it gets it gets tricky you know what i mean yeah yeah they draw a lot of lines. Yeah. But it's amazing because the legal system, when you look at industries that have to deal with technology and things changing, they constantly have to adjust or they're dead. The legal industry, so to speak, doesn't really have to do that because they run it. You have to get into it. It's got a huge high barrier of entry. It's backed by literally the legal system, which is run by a lot of lawyers. It's run by, well, the courts. Exactly.

So they can go, like, if they wanted to still have judges wearing the powdered wigs and stuff, they could do it. In the Bahamas, so I deal with a lot of Bahamian law and stuff. Really? Yeah. they could do it in the bahamas they so i deal with a lot of like bahamian law and stuff really yeah because one of the major companies i work for were flagged in the bahamas and like our contract i mean basically um yeah one of the first hearings i had was before a bahamian judge it was uh and in a case applying bahamian law but it was in the us because it was an arbitration case it was like but no powder no powdered wigs but like i was googling pictures of like the bahamas bar association because i was curious and like there's all these just dudes wearing wigs it's like it's kind of funny but

yeah i i knew i knew at a young age i couldn't be a lawyer because some some people like i'd make decent arguments to be like oh you should be a lawyer you're a good arguer or whatever but i was like dude i remember watching the movie my cousin vinny and you know no i watched that literally two nights ago i was on that's how classic is that great movie it's one of the best of all time comedy wise but i would watch that movie and you know that guy was obviously a total wild child. But I remember thinking when he would lose his shit in court and just be like, fuck you to the judge. I'm like, I know myself. If some guy is telling me something that doesn't make sense, the whole like your honor thing, that's going to go out the window real fast. I'm going to be spending the night in jail.

You'll be thrown in contempt. It's like it's crazy. And I admire the fact that a lot of lawyers, especially ones who are high-powered lawyers, know when the case is on their side. They deal sometimes with a shitty judge, and they know how. Like, hey, this is where I can press and where I can't. Yeah, you've got to keep your composure for sure. But sometimes you do have to push those boundaries a little. What I do love about the practice of law, which, like, so I'm legally educated.

I went to law school. Yeah. You know, like, 10 years from now, I'll have, like, a lot of experience, like so i'm legally educated i went to law school yeah you know like 10 years from now i'll have like a lot of experience like be arguing cases it's one of those areas where like a citizen can just walk in and like argue their own case and like potentially just like be the best in the courtroom you know what i mean it's one of those things where it's like like it happens rarely and um it's called like when you represent yourself, you're called a pro se litigant. I think in the 1970s, I think it last happened. And you can't do this anymore.

A pro se litigant argued before the Supreme Court. You should find the audio of that. It's pretty cool. This guy won. He won a unanimous decision uh from the united states supreme court it was a very he should have won the issue was absolutely clearly should have been decided in his favor it was an sec it was an sec it was like someone versus the sec securities exchange commission but it's a really cool audio to hear this guy and like

he's kind of like he starts off like messing up a little. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to pull it up here behind you. Search last, last pro se litigant in the U S Supreme court. Pro se litigant winner in the Supreme court. Well, I think it was just the last one.

Yeah, that'll be fine. Just search it. Let's see. Cause if I can get that away, that'd be really cool. I think about this a lot just cause like it's. New York, Samuelloan was the last non-lawyer to do it when he represented himself in 1978 in a lawsuit involving stock trading yep wow so he had no lawyer did he have to have anyone

in there with him no so now that they made a rule and that was 2013 they made a rule that in order to argue before the supreme court you have to be um a lawyer so in theory you could still be pro se you could still be representing yourself but you'd have to be a lawyer so he couldn't do what he did no got it yeah i don't know search thing so actually i'm kind of nerdy with this so if you search the name of the case and you go on this website it's called oye.org how do you spell spell oyea o-y-e-z.org okay and it's samuel sloan yeah oh here we go pro googler go all go all yeah so yeah click that and this may have the audio yeah it will it will never there won't be video there's no video but yeah that works all right let's, this is like 154.

That's not too bad. That's the opinion. Oh, that's when they just gave the result. Yeah. Duh. Click that. The second one? Yeah, that's the first one.

I think that's... All right. Let's just cut to the middle and see if he's there. That's Harvey Pitt. So the guy's name would be Sloan. All right. Let's see where Sloan talked. It might be in the other one. i clicked the other one okay so that was the second oral argument mr sloan yeah

there you go okay let's try this one and he fucks he fucks up at first you can tell he's like continue the arguments in securities and exchange commission against this wild this is here yeah against Sloan. Yeah, it's cool. Is this from the 70s? Yeah. Mr. Sloan, are you ready? Mr. Sloan, you may continue whenever you're ready. Can you imagine being that guy? Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court, I wish to bring the attention of the court to a small factual matter which came to my attention yesterday.

You mentioned 36 trading suspension orders. And the source of this is because on page 122 of the appendix, there is a list of orders. And there was a typographical error in that the SEC, when they copied by a restful position, he talks like a lawyer. He did his homework. Wow. All right, I'll cut it there in 50 seconds.

Wow. But like I've actually I'm kind of nerdy. I've watched or listened to the whole thing. There's points where he'll be like you can tell he's absolutely not a lawyer because he'll be talking about like other stuff. And they'll have to remind him like Mr. Sloan. That's not what is at issue today. That like a trained lawyer wouldn't be, you know, and he'd be like what what, like talking about something and this happened and this happened and be like, no, no, no. The issue is this specific issue. That's why you're here.

Now that is his legal right to represent himself. And, and at that point he could still do it at the Supreme court. So it was his right to do it. If you're a judge though, and you know that he has a constitutional right to that, are you required to be more understanding or more lenient to give him shots to get things right because you know that he doesn't know it no you're not required to but so i've worked so after law school my first job was i clerked for a judge um in montgomery county i clerked for a common please judge so literally like i was you know i'm his right hand man and i would say that 99 percent of maybe 90 percent of judges will give a pro se litigant – if they're not making a mockery of – if they're like taking it seriously, they'll give them a little more leeway.

And they'll help them out and they'll kind of steer them on the right track. Pro se litigant in a criminal case is a mess. Oh, man. Yeah. There was – oh, who did – oh, the big mob boss in New York back in I think like the big trial in maybe like 92 or 86, one of those, because they had a great case against him but he also got the jury kind of rooting for him a little bit because he was hilarious like he was a funny new york italian guy and he would just he'd be like i object and the jury laughing their ass off but it's it's like i can't even imagine having to fight logically, out loud, as a non-lawyer, in a court of law, for my own freedom. That is a crazy concept.

It's stupid. Because you are entitled an attorney under the Constitution. Like, if you can't afford one, you're allowed representation. You should never, ever be your own lawyer in a criminal case are there are the public are the public attorneys though because there's a million are they any good there's some of the best attorneys out there really really and truly they're so they're so well trained there's they yes they have a huge caseload but they they know the law better than almost anyone in that courtroom.

I think they're some of the best attorneys. Like, one of my best friends actually in Miami is a public defender, and some of the people in his office, they're just, they're absolutely, they're superstars. And actually, Miami is one of the, it's probably the premier place to practice as a public defender in the entire country. That's interesting. Yeah, it's actually harder in some places to be a public defender than it is a DA. It's a tough job, but I think they're some of the best attorneys. You're also taking on a whole swath of cases. I mean, you're all over the place.

Yeah, you have to become efficient at doing what you do. So there's this perception that a public defender is, you know, they're overworked. They're certainly overworked, okay? They're certainly working their – they're busting their ass. But there's this perception that they're not on top of things, and that is not true in my experience. Because I think there are some tremendously talented public defenders, and I don't think you make it. I don't think you can make it if you're not talented um and there's also there's a lot of paid or you know private criminal defense attorneys that i just do not think in my experience were that special excuse me and that talented i think a lot i would see a lot of

guys just thrown into the courtroom probably not even having read the case and you know it's it's like i'm not talking about a double homicide here. I'm talking about, you know, like a simple assault type, a minor case. But, like, just go in there and, you know, say, and just like, kind of like, oh, let's talk to the DA. Let's see if we can work out a deal. Yeah. And it's just, you know, when there's really, you know,

I think they could have done a better job. And I think they kind of, and again um there are some great attorneys there are some great private attorneys that i've seen you know win win arguments win motions win cases on what i thought was unwinnable so there's there's a whole spectrum yeah but i don't think just because you know you're a quote-unquote paid attorney you're you're any better than a public defender and i think in most cases the public defender might be one of the best in that courtroom but yeah and you said maybe it depends where you are too sometimes i i know i had a buddy who did it who's a really really good attorney and he stopped doing it i think he did it for like a year and it wasn't

the only thing he did but he was so pissed off because the court system i won't say where he was but he felt it was more a failure the court system or whatever the system is that at the state level that handles handing out the cases to the defender or whatever whatever that system is he felt like it was really fucked up because they just wanted him to do volume all the time so they'd be like oh no you need you need to finish that case right there we we have this next one for you and he'd be like no like this guy's facing three years in jail i'm not just gonna like finish this case i need to i need to finish that case right there we have this next one for you and be like no like this guy's facing three years in jail i'm not just gonna like finish this case i need to i need to do this right and then they would get on him about that and then they wouldn't give him a good case and he was like he was very jaded by it he was like it's very stupid but yeah i mean that's

interesting and you would it does make sense just again because of how many potential things you deal with because you don't know what's coming across with that it's not like i'm gonna focus on this type of crime or that type of whatever you know sure well and they do have that to a certain extent like you'll have you know you'll have um you'll look um public defenders that are focused on you know like sex crimes or um you know like violent felonies stuff like that and like it's the same with the DA's office. Like, you won't just have a guy who's, you know, who's been doing nothing but, you know, like, drug deal cases suddenly handle, like, a homicide case.

Like, you'll have, and it's obviously, like, you know, the longer you work there or whatever. But, yeah, it is somewhat specialized. But there is, a lot of times it's but that there is a lot of times it's not though a lot of times just like whatever case but like the big cases if it's like homicide case you have you'll have a different attorney handle those cases in within the public defender's office have you ever had an interest in criminal law yeah oh i'm super interested in criminal law um i thought that's what i wanted to do for a long time. And, you know, I worked for a criminal judge for a year. Well, he was actually half in civil, half in criminal. But yeah, I'm very interested in criminal law. It's, yeah. year for whatever reason i don't know i'll be looking at something then i will think about this for an hour or two hours but the idea of either side of it whether you are a defense attorney handling a big case where there's a lot of jail time on the line or you are a prosecutor or then

even at the top you're the judge and it's your job to figure out how to create a deterrence and hand out punishment or decide what to do the idea of someone sitting in there and their literal sanctity and freedom being on the line. I mean, look, it's heavy. It's heavy. Yeah. It's heavy. Yeah. And it's, I've observed.

So when I worked for that judge, I observed a lot of criminal trials. And it's just, it's just super interesting to see the things that unfold a trial and the things that like you wouldn't think are important pieces of evidence or like you wouldn't think was important that end up kind of being you know oh wow like you know we thought this evidence was important so um there's two types of trials there's a jury trial versus a bench trial and And we had a couple bench trials. What's a bench trial? A bench trial is when you say, okay, judge, you decide this case. Oh. Yeah. So, I'm the clerk of the judge. So, I'd, you know, I'd, it'd be a couple day trial. And like, after every, you know, after every witness, we go back into the

judge's chambers and we talk about it. Like, we'd say like, I don't know about this guy. I didn't know if i believe this guy's testimony or like yeah this guy was his testimony was totally on point i'm trying to think of some specific cases um and obviously i wouldn't say what my judge and yeah i said behind closed doors but there was a one interesting case where we had the case was um we found well the judge found the guy not guilty at the end of the day. It was a guy, he was a former police officer at the University of Pennsylvania. He was accused of beating the shit out of his ex-girlfriend's, like, new boyfriend. Right?

He just, like, pulled up on her and just, like, beat the shit out of this guy. That was what's alleged. And then he argued self-defense. And what I think self-defense, if you're going to argue self-defense, you got to go bench trial, because it's one of those legal, it's like a legal heavy argument that you want, you want like a learned judge deciding that. And my judge in that moment decided, all right, you know, he's not guilty did personally did did i think the guy was guilty probably did a lot of people in our court staff think the guy was guilty

probably but you it's one of those things where like based on the law and like reasonable force and like reasonable you know you know did he reasonable fear for imminent harm and stuff like that big turn yeah yeah like did technically he fit the you know defense of self-defense probably so can you do that on any kind of case for like a homicide can you say we want to bench trial so i can talk about pennsylvania law um in pennsylvania is one of the only states where the state actually has a right to a jury trial. So, normally, a right to a jury is a right that's reserved for a criminal defendant, right? So, if the state didn't have that right, the state couldn't say, we demand a jury trial.

And if you don't invoke your right to demand a jury trial, then it would probably be a bench trial. But in Pennsylvania, actually, the state can demand a jury trial. But most states and most, I would say most times that a bench trial is requested, they agree. So, yes. That's interesting. Functionally, yes. You can basically say, yeah, I want a bench trial and you'll get a bench trial. So, if you are, well, actually actually here's a question on juries too because this is another thing i think about when you're dealing with cases that happen to involve

invoking you know ahead of time based on what the arguments are going to be they're going to invoke a lot of buzzword terminology self-defense you're talking sure but self-defense at least people understand when when i say self-defense to the average person they know yeah i'm defending myself right when you get to what was the one like the trayvon martin one the stand your ground law i say started self-defense law is super complicated yeah it involves again i might be losing some people out there it involves like a series of presumptions where it's like if you're on another person's property without their permission you're presumed to have like intent to harm them and you're it's presumed this it's presumed that and it gets pretty crazy as to what you can do to justify yourself uh justify using deadly force in florida so wouldn't you want i'm trying to think of both sides my

question is wouldn't if you are a criminal defender or a prosecutor in that scenario wouldn't you both want hypothetically the bench trial so you have a judge who completely understands well or that you hope does i guess it depends on what the demographics of your jury would be it depends on a whole lot of things it depends on what your theme of the case is going to be so what if it's you know i understand what you're saying like if it's just going to be a bunch of legal issues you want you'd rather throw put that in the hands of a judge than a jury but like if you know at the end of the day the judge isn't going to come out and on your favor on that. If the judge is probably going to put together those legal theories and find opposite of you, you're going to want to say,

well, we'll take our chances with the jury. You know, maybe a jury will, you know, kind of, you know, maybe not focus so much on the strict law of it and decide it some other way, but it totally depends on what your theme of the case is is how you want to paint the picture of what happened what the events are so there's more predictability in either direction when it's a judge versus a jury which seems pretty yeah it seems pretty i think so yeah because a judge is one person and typically a judge unless this is a judge's first day of the job record of what exactly yeah you know you know how he tends to decide things so yes i would say yes yeah now have you been paying attention to the end of the trump presidency here with all the pardons and commutations and stuff i saw that he pardoned some people including those guys those um that

killed those people in iraq i don't um i haven't been paying too much attention to that. Well, how does that, so there's two ways you can do it, though, just like on the legal side. So pardon is when you just completely absolve them of the crime. It's basically off their record, never happened. Whereas the other thing, this is my understanding, is called a commutation where they don't remove it from the record, but they say, all right, you're out of jail. Yeah, you've served your sentence, yeah. Got it, okay. where they don't remove it from the record but they say all right you're out yeah you've served your sentence yeah got it okay so so there there's three that i'm that i do want to ask about and if you if you're not fully aware of of the cases no problem we'll move on from them but are you have you paid any attention to like the whole snowden thing vaguely i know i mean I know the facts are Edward Snowden had information from, I mean, he worked for the NSA, right? And he was a whistleblower on this mass surveillance.

And he was then, where is he now? He's basically not by choice, he's in Russia because when he did the whistleblow, he planned it for a long time, went to Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras as well, who was the – he wanted her to document it because she had been trying to document the NSA for a long time. But Glenn Greenwald is like one of the best reporters in the world. he met with them in like hong kong or something got it all on video and then he was trying to get to south america but his plane got stopped in russia at a layover because the us basically threatened whatever country he was trying to go to you cannot let him in so he got stuck there he's been in russia for seven years but the context of the case is by the letter of the law yes based on what he signed before going into government yeah he broke the law however he was a guy who had everything to lose this was not like an angry soldier in that way he had a great life great fiance lived in hawaii paid a lot had been all over the government

and he saw a problem that wasn't getting addressed over and over again and it just got stuck in the chain of command and no one was going to do anything about it and he saw that the problem was clearly a violation of national law to say nothing of international law and so he took precautions to make sure that what he did release was not intelligence that could then put a lot of american lives in danger so as a result zero people died zero americans died as a result of what he did. And he's been living with political asylum I guess in Russia this whole time and now they're really trying to press as Trump's leaving office to get him to pardon him so that he can come home and basically admit through it that, yeah, what he put out there was the law that he saw being broken affected far more people than the law that he had to break just on his own to actually do it i guess that's kind of the concept no i understand that it's it's tricky it's one of those it's tricky it's was he acting in the best interest of probably our country? Yes. I think yes.

I think he thought he was, yes. For argument's sake, let's say that the information he revealed was no doubt beneficial to all Americans. It was good. For argument's sake. Okay. But then the issue is the way he did it was that cool are we cool with that do the ends justify the means yeah you know and that's that's the age-old debate and that's the whole thing um and a slippery slope it's a slippery slope and he did he did what's he being accused of that

would be treason right he betrayed his government yeah For lack of a better way of putting it, I know one of the main charges literally has the word treason in it. I just don't know exactly what it says. It's like some sort of spying, that kind of stuff. Yeah. I don't know. That's one of those questions where it's hard for me to answer um you know logically speaking if what what he did was good and the result is good um is the fact that he had to do a bad thing to get that do we overlook that i i don't know how i feel about that um because you know i i don't i don't think it's a good policy to betray your

government and i think it's um that's the part that sucks yeah what because then what is and this is this is the argument and I've been on record about this I'm very much in support of a part and I'd like to see it happen but I will even admit and I think he would too I don't know, I don't want to speak for him

I'm not sure if he has you could be listening it is the concept that okay, he did that and that one, let's say we agree hypothetically it was the right thing to do then what does the next guy say is the right thing to do and is it less and is it how much less and then do we let him off too that's the part that sucks and that's exactly you hit the nail on the head it's like okay so what are we what are we going to say is um justifies betraying the government like a little tiny little infraction that like okay whatever you know the government

was doing this super minor thing but then you went ahead and like betrayed your government to reveal this that like doesn't you know for sure maybe it makes our lives like one percent better whatever yeah you know you you it's it's tough and there's no there's no right answer to that um well there might be i don't know i think the unique thing on his i'll say this is that he revealed a massive bureaucratic agency or agencies wide betrayal of constitutional rights the ultimate law like he revealed one of the ultimate breakings of the law by an enormous group of people let's say most of them passively because they're just a part of the chain of command they're like all right i guess this is

what we're doing here this is what everyone says but at some point like somebody ordered it we know dick cheney was the original one who kind of signed off on that whole thing it's neither here nor there but you had all these people breaking the law of the citizens and so he's saying to himself do i myself as an individual break one law and it's a big one but i break one law to be able to show that all these people are breaking all these laws that affect the 330 million people that live here that's where he has a little bit of a different argument with his quote-unquote slippery slope thing it's not just like oh here's some dirt on the government you know yeah yeah i guess it's a hard question to answer but i think it's it is good that there are people that are with he was what's admirable about

him is that he was willing to risk it all. And like you said, he didn't need to do that. He could have just been like, oh, that sucks, but I'm going to continue to live in Hawaii and be chilling. But no, he felt so compelled that he did that. And it's remarkable that he did that. And I think it's good that there are people or a person out there that that did that i think that most people can agree that what he did was you know took some took some courage took some you know guts yeah and the other thing was you know some of the people who were most offended by what he did and and viscerally reacted and

i understand this i empathize with it were senior military guys in this country and you look at the military it's all about the chain of command man like that's and that's what makes the military so great so they respect that more than anything and anyone who breaks that it's like nope you're out and i get that but i look at it like again if you let that go and fall into the chain of command what else on the other end what else do you let fall into the chain of command, what else – on the other end, what else do you let fall into the chain of command? Then what's the next constitutional right you violate? Yeah, and it erodes away at what the fabric of the military is, which is – I don't want to say blindly following orders, but you follow orders. That's how it works. And we can kind of bring it back to that whole Navy admiral on that.

Was it an aircraft carrier? What was the Navy ship where he, the whole COVID situation where he disobeyed orders and then was like removed from his post. But then all his superiors were like, yo like yo no he did the right thing so basically as i understand this there was a navy admiral of a of a ship i don't know what kind of ship it was and there was like a covid there was like a covid outbreak or whatever on the ship and the navy the the you know head of the navy was asking him to do something and he was not comfortable doing that given the covet situation so he um he either disobeyed or or went around his back and did something that was like you know no bueno no you know i think i saw this one i'm pulling it up

right now this was this they were saying that he was going to be reinstated because it seemed like it was wrong i'm trying to remember the facts of this case but then he didn't yeah it looks like he didn't he's a captain looks like captain crozier yeah and i guess he was not reinstated i i know it was um i know some military uh people i talked to were kind of had mixed feelings about that. Yeah. So he, this was one again,

didn't follow the chain of command, but it, it was something he didn't want to continue. All right, here it is. He was relieved of duty, April 2nd, following the leak of a letter he wrote to those higher up in his chain of command.

In the, in the letter, he asked for more assistance in dealing with the outbreak of COVID-19 on the ship. Gilday said it is the findings of the more than detailed investigation rather than the existence of the leaked letter that have prevented Crozier from being reinstated as commander of the Roosevelt. So I think if I remember some of the specifics here, what they were trying to say was that he wrote this letter with all these details, which painted the Navy in a bad light by basically saying, you're giving us no help or whatever, which who knows what's true, what's not, but maybe it's true. And so when it got leaked, the Navy felt like he and his people leaked it as if they had written a letter for the eyes of the press which may not be true but they've written the letter for the eyes of the press to get attention on it to be like look at what the navy's doing to us and we're standing up to them versus hey we just want to

send you this letter because we actually have these concerns okay so when the story first broke as i understood it um captain crozier was kind of um some military people were kind of maybe not praising but understanding what he did because it was seen as all right he's putting the interests of his of his ship and his his soul or i guess his sailors um first so they they kind of saw they're like all right he's putting the sailors first, you know, putting the interests of those underneath him first. And they kind of, there was some support, I think, in some military communities. But I guess, no, the facts came back. And it could be an opinion, though. That's the thing.

Like, it could be the Navy erring on the side of, this is what we think he did, so let's not even chance it, because then they don't want to risk having some rogue soldier in charge of something which sucks they're sailors in the navy yeah yeah sorry i always forget like it's like you got the marines you got the army you got the sailors sailors you got soldiers they're different they're different no it's it's true but i was using it more as like the the unhappy soldier sure sure i know i guess like you know but yeah i mean that's that's always the danger with this stuff and that's the thing when you look at these cases and you look at like a snowden which is this quote-unquote controversial high-level case that involves the american people the thing about the law and this is involving the law if you're going to pardon the guy

is that it is then applicable and precedent to things that have nothing to do with it like you could have another situation some random chain of command somewhere that is nothing like this with the NSA and Edward Snowden but in a court of law they go to whatever appellate court or circuit court and say based on the stipulation set by the president's pardon of Edwardward snowden we believe that this case you know good lawyers are going to make that argument yeah it just sets a precedent that when you have something like the military which is which is the framework of the military is you obey you're you're given a discrete task or job and you carry out that task or job you obey commands that's a framework in the military if that if If that evaporates or if that decays in any way, then what is the military? So I understand why the military has to be, there's a zero tolerance

policy for things like that. And I understand that that's the framework and they have to go that way. Yeah. Now, another one that's entirely different, and I know some about this. I have not taken this one on with as much vigor as I have, say, the Snowden one. But the Julian Assange one is interesting because— He was the WikiLeaks guy. Yep. Because he was an American, and he has this international news organization, and his maybe biggest quote-unquote leak of information he got came at the height of a Republican-Democrat presidential election in 2016 where he leaked all this information, mostly I on hillary clinton that was very damaging for her campaign and caused the whole problem and then there was the question of where did he get it

and there is a lot of reasonable evidence to say that it could have come from russia and therefore backed by the russian government which isn't the russia hoax or the russia conspiracy or whatever they call it in washington dc so much as it is like hey russia's still a foreign government they had an interest in doing something and so they went to a guy a rogue guy working in international waters who just wants to report the truth on some dirt and they gave him the information and he did but what he reported was also true i mean they reported on what these people were saying to each other behind the scenes so i don't know i guess they're they're calling for a pardon because he's a political target or something like that but is that is

that an even worse slippery slope because it's it's literally drawn on party lines there? See, I'm not super versed on the Julian Assange situation, but, yeah, I mean, I think... Anytime you... Anytime there's a pardon... Well, I shouldn't say anytime, but anytime there's political parties involved, it's going to get political. Yeah.

So true. You know, it just depends on what your politics are so you know you may support it if you support uh you know those politics and you you're going to oppose it if if your views don't align with that so um it's one of those things that i think is kind of unavoidable yeah and it's it's stuck between a shit or fart i mean just completely like you are fucked either way they're a rock or a fart. I mean, just completely. Like, you are fucked either way there. A rock and a hard place.

Now, the third one. The third one is one I've really, especially over the past three months or so, been looking at extremely closely, and it's a wide open one. Are you familiar with Ross Ulbrich and the Silk Road? Oh, very familiar. The life sentence, man. He got a life sentence. Can you take people through what that whole situation was? Alright, so Ross Ulbricht was the founder of the

Silk Road. Silk Road was a online marketplace accessible only through what's called a Tor browser, which was, it's like a major internet traffic anonymous, so you couldn't be tracked and then you access this uh online marketplace where you could buy all kinds of stuff you could

buy uh drugs you could buy guns guns you could buy like order hits on there although i don't know like most of most of those were government set up talk about that yeah um and it was paid for in bitcoin which again is a an anonymous currency basically you can't trace a bitcoin kind of can't and this was early days of bitcoin too this was 2011 through 2013 when it was active i won't name any names but one of my college roommates was on the silk silk road doing some things um which is how i knew about bitcoin and he was in bitcoin early so but anyway he's doing all right i'm not gonna say no i think he sold all his bitcoin but i'm not i'm not naming names here but either way um yeah so um i forget when he when he got arrested but um he got arrested

and um for operating the silk road it was like a big sting operation. Ulbricht did. Ulbricht did. Ross Ulbricht did. He was, so he was, he actually went to Penn State, I believe, right? He did. He went to do his master's at Penn State.

Yeah. He's from Texas, but he went to Penn State. The government, they arrested him in like Sweden or something. They arrested him overseas somewhere, right? Or did they arrest him in the US?

No, he was in San Fran. They arrested him in San Fran in a library. Yeah. And the way they arrested him was they needed because of all this like debauchery with oh yeah how to have shit encrypted and operating on tort they needed to have the laptop catch him in the act yeah like so they were able to get it yeah i i think there was definitely a documentary i watched documentary on that i've watched like probably a couple. How they caught him. Yeah. They caught him is interesting because they just did a Google search of his name or the Silk Road.

Something. I forget what they did. They somehow found his name and they searched something and they found like the first time it appeared on the internet. And then they got his name from that. And it was just like a really like, wow, this is f the fbi used google to find this guy well yes it's a thousand percent correct there were interesting parts on this case though first of all these agencies usually always all fight like they don't deal with each other it's it's all this intergovernmental rivalry and all that and there was that still existed here definitely especially

with homeland but the people who brought this guy down who were really working closely together at the end were literally an f a a specific team at the fbi headed by chris tarbell who was i think his first name was chris who was a cyber expert and done a lot of big cases like the anonymous guys he had done that one okay and then there was the DEA was involved, but the DEA was a pain. It wasn't Homeland. It was the DEA who was a pain in people's balls. So they basically kept those out. But there was a guy, Jared Der-Yangian or something like that at Homeland Security,

who the FBI team loved. So they worked closely with him. And then there was a guy at the IRS, this guy Gary Alford, who's the one who found that, the Google thing you were talking about, who was basically brought on the team to track the money and try to see if they could tie it to things and really learn the Bitcoin scenario of it and how that works. And then they all worked together and got him that way but the controversy outside of that what you were talking about was he had posted under a pseudonym Altoid on some

online chat during the early days of the Silk Road somewhere else saying oh have you heard of the Silk Road and Gary Alford went and did specific google searches. Like it took him a while, but once he got there, he realized that there was another thing traceable to that name that had posted Ross Ulbrich at gmail.com or something like that. And that's how they got, that's how they got them. They had really no, they had no leads until that point.

But like, then once they got them, they're like, Oh, this, this all makes sense. So he, when he was operating the silk road i remember there was certain points where um there was like a sting

operation i forget how it transpired but basically ross aldrich ended up um ordering a hit on someone and um this hit was he believed the hit was actually carried out um but it was actually just agents faking the whole thing the whole time and so ross like from his perspective he was communicating with this hitman the hitman said okay i'm going to do this i'm going to kill this person take pictures when you're finished send pictures to ross like okay the job's done whatever from ross's perspective he was like all right he killed this person I forget you know that's exactly I forget the details of that hit and like why it transpired or what happened but basically yeah he ordered he ordered a hit now I need to say this because I've recorded a ton of podcasts this week so usually when I do a podcast it's released inside

of 10 days a lot of them are inside of five or six but this one may be released after we know which way this is going to go whether he gets commuted or not either way this is an important thing to talk about so if you're listening and you already know if he was commuted here's some logic behind why and why it makes sense or doesn't based on whatever you're going And if he wasn't commuted, well, the same thing goes. But yes to that scenario as far as like the hit. That did all go down. And again, because they caught him in the act and they were able to get the laptop and then get all the information off of it because he didn't get to hit the kill switch on it. They can go see the chats, the literal instant messages that occurred via what was known as the dread pirate roberts account that was his pseudonym yes now

two things here number one the way the fbi went and got access to the server what happened was when the guy gary alfred the irs agent found that thing that altoid thing online there was something else that had to do with another email that was registered to one of those chat rooms where it was like frosty at frosty.com i i forget something like that that is how they corroborated that it was ross because they had discovered i put that in air quotes the fbi had discovered i really want to bring my guy jim in here to talk about this ex fbi guy because i want to push him on this they discovered the server for the silk road in iceland yes they got lucky they got lucky they were able to like sniff a stray packet yeah and i know i know my shit you know your shit

you know your shit inside and out the second level to it was once they did that though it was encrypted to get in there when they got in there they found that the server was registered under frosty that's how they made the connection oh frosty at frosty.com altoid ross at olbrich dot gmail servers called frosty boom we got them and that's how they knew to then have the warrant to be able to go in but they got into an encrypted server and to make a more complicated situation very simplified the fbi's explanation is that basically Basically, there was a breakdown in the CAPTCHA system. Now, when I say CAPTCHA, all of you listening, you have encountered this online. You will go to some site and a thing, a prompt will show up and it'll say, I'm not a robot.

And it'll say, identify the crosswalk in each of these pictures. How's a robot telling me to say, I'm not a robot. You're the robot. Well, true, but that's neither here nor there. Point is, it's a robot telling me to say i'm not a robot you're the robot well true but that's neither here nor there point is it's a very simple thing you click the fucking crosswalks and then you move on they were basically claiming that there was some kind of hole in the server that allowed them to suddenly have a loophole where it just prompted them for a captcha and poof they were in what most likely happened when you talk to actual forensic computer experts, and I have to hedge and say most likely,

hypothetically, that could have happened, but most computer forensics experts are offended by this explanation and say this makes absolutely no sense. The only way they could have done what they did is if they illegally hacked into it, which is a whole, it's basically like in violate infringing

on your rights as an american citizen for them to do that so that that's one end of it but then if they got a warrant couldn't they hack it and that's what i was wondering but no apparently the way the law works and again like check me on this people but based on what i've read up on this the law is that you cannot allow the government to hack into things because then same thing, where do you draw the line? It's the same thing as just walking into your house without a warrant.

You're right. So it's like, yeah, I understand why. You know what? I probably should be up to date on this case law, but I guess it's why you basically would have a court order saying to Apple, can you unlock this? Actually, that's a perfect example.

Yeah, it's not like we're going to do this from our system. You remember the San Bernardino shooter like four years ago? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And actually, as sad as this is, hats off to Tim Cook at Apple there because Tim Cook said, look, I would like nothing more than to unlock this guy's phone and make sure there are no other killers out there or whatever or see who he was talking to because the government was going to him saying tim unlock the phone and and he said i can't do that though because if i do it here i'm i'm breaking our data privacy laws that we promised

to our customers and where do we draw the line and he just he made a call there and i think he made the right call some people said there's like a big like press release like article about it yeah big like that was he had a lot of lights on him and i thought he knocked that one out of the park handling and it sucks because you would have liked to have all that information and i you know dory i don't know how true that is though because i dealt with a case when i was in um when i was clerking for the judge where we it was a so a suppression issue um basically if you believe evidence was obtained in violation of the constitution you file a motion to suppress which would basically say this evidence can't come in

as evidence obtained a violation of the constitution i'll explain this case so um this is why i got you here i love yeah so there was a case where it was a search of a cell phone so the police have this guy in custody and they say can we search your cell phone and he was like sure you can search my cell phone um and and they made him fill out a cell phone consent search form and he was like all right so item to be searched you know black iphone um what is the password to your phone and he put down the password to his phone whatever and the police are like thanks we're gonna search that and then the police went and did a complete digital forensic download of his of his phone and recovered deleted messages, recovered all this other stuff, like deleted photos, deleted messages, and found incriminating evidence in the deleted digital

forensic download of the phone. The defense attorney argued that that was beyond the scope of the consent, right? Because the consent was, this guy just, you're just searching my cell phone. You're not, I thought you were just going to, searching my cell phone you're not i thought you were just gonna i gave you my passcode i thought you're just gonna go in and look through my phone instead you went and did this digital download and searched all this other stuff i i remember what we ruled we've ruled i wrote the opinion we've ruled it was it expanded the the consent of the search there so we said that the consent of the search was um that you you know it was just limited to a regular customary look through the phone but by way of the fact that he gave the password to the phone the person reasonably thought that his consent meant that

they were just going to look through it was part of that let me ask this was part of that ruling based on coercion by police not in the presence of a lawyer and a reasonable intelligence of someone who is not an attorney representing themselves in that scenario well so that's like that's at play basically in any of those scenarios but that wasn't the key issue there we basically said the consent was good like there was nothing wrong with the consent so that is an issue in any time you have you know anytime the police take statements or things like that without an attorney. And I think he may have, I think he was probably right as Miranda writes. Again, that wasn't the issue.

But basically we said, yeah, the consent was good, but the police just expanded what a reasonable person would have thought they were allowing the police to search in that scenario but the reason i'm trying to bring this back and we're probably losing a lot of people right now this is this is compelling i know what you're doing but the reason i think that i think the police can search i think if you get a warrant the police have these forensic download machines that they can just get this download so if in that case the police either had to get clear unequivocal consent to get all this extraneous information or just get a warrant they didn't get one yeah they didn't they didn't get a warrant they went with the consent aspect in that yeah they and well again though this is when they're hunting him so they hadn't approached him yet or

they didn't approach him until they arrested him, but they never got the warrant. And then the whole problem was it was so – I don't even want to say politicized. It wasn't. There were a lot of people who had a visceral reaction to what the Silk Road was, and so it was controversial that way. So it was court of public opinion, which is a whole other thing here. Like how hard is it to get a trial, especially with all the attention in the internet these days? And this was certainly one where social media was a big thing happening in 2014, 2015 when this trial was gearing up to go. hacked in then was was it all a sham yeah now let's let's even go off that let's pretend that doesn't exist let's say the case gets made and and they reasonably determined it was him you brought up the whole point of the hit and here's here's yeah i think ross got a raw deal

but yeah you continue here's the problem they need a boogeyman you're in government you got to make a case right sure and guess what they did get the guy who created the silk road we know ross did that he i believe his attorney admitted that in court that yeah he did he did create the website the silk road that's corroborated by people like the one person in his life his girlfriend who knew about it from day one it's corroborated by everyone so we we know that he did that but ross was to give a little background here he was an ultra libertarian and he's what i call an unrealistic libertarian this is why it's important to say commutation and not pardon there's no doubt raw ross broke the law here

and had to go to jail there's no question about that this is not a pardon situation the question is what you pointed out which is that his sentence that was handed down at the end of this which was double life plus 40 years no parole is quite excessive for somebody who just created a website now the context of the hits is that the government when they arrested him had claims based on undercover operatives they had you pointed out that was exactly what happened on one of them in particularly where they literally had a dea agent on the other end of the chat who was posed undercover as a colombian drug dealer or something who was saying oh do you remember why he was ordering people killed though yes yes so this one guy curtis green was a was somebody who

was one of the personalities on the silk road underneath a name a pseudonym online who was in the know about a lot of stuff and the government caught him and so he was like kind of a weak feebly guy and he started telling the government things i believe and he knew who ross was ross knew who he was because what ross required and i say ross here oh yeah he required the ids and stuff of everyone yeah so he knew who everyone was no one else knew ids and he didn't know there's still like there's some people that like he didn't know who they were but when it came to this guy he knew who it was so he knew this curtis green guy was a problem and i say ross here and this is why i put it in big quotations because ross started the whole Silk Road and for the first year or so he was listed as admin

and then his username changed from admin to Dread Pirate Roberts which was a play on the whole Princess Bride character or whatever it was like a funny whatever the government arrested him and claimed that between that hit I just pointed on and then five others that were similar or whatever where he said on a chat yes let's waste this guy or whatever meaning we're gonna pay you he would say here's the amount of bitcoin we'll pay for it or here's the cost he would admit to wanting to pay people to do it and then they they would do it now the curtis green guy it didn't happen because he didn't know it was the government on the other end. So, they sent him a picture that was tomato soup and it looks, I don't know if you've ever seen it. I've seen it. I've seen it. Yeah. Oh, dude, it looks, there's no way I wouldn't look at that and say, that's not real. Yeah. Where they showed this guy

make it look like he was drowned to death. And so, anyway, it didn't happen, but he still, they had the evidence of him ordering the hit. The problem is when the government arrested him and came out with, oh, these are the charges against him, there was this long period of silence in the year or so, little over a year, building up to his trial, where then right when the trial went to start, they miraculously dropped all the charges. They did not bring the charges of the hits. He was not found guilty of any hits he was not even charged with them and so the question here is the government's also on record with their own logs behind the scenes saying like these guys in the fbi or homeland security saying they believe the dread pirate roberts to be a few different people. There was also an interview done with Andy Greenberg, who's one of the best tech reporters in the country, where he interviewed

Dread Pirate Roberts via chat while it was active for like four hours. And this could be a total lie, right? It could have been Ross on the other end. That Dread Pirate Roberts was saying, no, I didn't create the site. Someone else did, but he didn't want it anymore and he went to hand it off. Ross Holbrook was not a coder. He knew how to do it. He was not a computer programmer by trade, though. This was a very complicated thing to do. And so when you look, not to go in all the details, but when you look at the history of his story and what he was doing over those years, it makes a lot of sense that maybe he would have continued involvement, but he wasn't running it. And so the government didn't even allow discovery on anything substantive until the trial itself.

So the defense was coming in there basically blind. It was a closed courtroom. They put him in front of a judge who was notoriously hard on drug offenders. Notoriously hard. It was a female judge, I believe, right? Yeah, Catherine Forrest, forest what um where was this tried again southern district of new york okay so you know basically in in the in the biggest casino of them all trying it minus the supreme court and they they had dropped all these charges

and then he was found guilty of everything it's like all right you know he's gonna get 10-15 years in prison maybe 5-10 something like that everyone else who was found guilty of shit got like five years everyone else regardless of what they did and the government tried to say he was the only one because the government had no evidence on who the other two could be they they had thoughts on there were a couple guys are like it could definitely be these two guys but they didn't have any hard evidence like they had for ross that he was definitely a guy behind it which he was and so they did not allow for him to be able to say hey yes i started this website yes i still had something to do with it but no i wasn't that guy doing that thing he got caught behind the fact

that he had to be a pseudonym online and so other people most likely also because he wasn't a computer programmer most likely him and so now he's got this long ass sentence and he took things too far but here's the last point of it and this is what i really want you to respond to if you don't know if you're unfamiliar with the saga you're going to be very confused with the last five minutes but it's it if you haven't looked into this case go do it it is insane but the last point is that I mentioned he was a radical libertarian. And so to generalize here, the radical libertarian belief is that everything is based on individual choice and freedom. libertarians say no government right which is not realistic but he wanted to say that the war on drugs in this scenario was an enormous mistake and that people while they shouldn't do drugs have a right to decide what they want to do and because of the war on drugs we created violent communities where drugs then cause a lot of other exterior crimes and pull down entire areas so what

he wanted to do was use the internet to allow a safe place for people who are going to do this to go do it and he even had educational stuff on there like hey you if you do this drug here's how to get help or whatever which isn't to say like that solves the problem but point being he was looking at a utopitarian world and he took it way too far but morally let's even say he did the hits and and it my opinion is he didn't but let's say he did even with those six hits even with some of the people who died as a result of taking drugs that they got on this site sure it has been proven in studies and it's kind of common sense that the net gain here of violence that would have happened or crime that would have happened or community downtroddenness that would have happened and would have spread if these sales had happened on the street and not online it's kind of inarguable but it's a slippery slope again

because then the government has to admit like oh someone went around all the laws and technically they're more right and it's it's impossible to quantify because so you're you're looking at it from the perspective of okay all these drug transactions happened in this safe space but they would have happened like you know in at a trap house in the hood otherwise and like someone could have gotten shot or something but how many people wouldn't have gone to that trap house in the hood and instead just logged on to their tour browser and bought drugs that they otherwise wouldn't have bought so that's another you know it's it's impossible to quantify but but i do think so I actually forgot. I thought that Ross, I thought that he was convicted with respect to the hits. So it was just all drug crimes and he got a life sentence. Yeah, I think most people that like offend something about you.

You're like, look, like he's serving life in prison and he didn't take anyone's life or he's not being charged with that the government needed the boogeyman like i said but at least in the past is on whether we find out about it years later or based on folklore whatever it is the way a lot of these situations go and he would have done this kicking and screaming because he was no fan of the government, no doubt about that. But you get a guy like that, you say, all right, you know, you're going to spend a couple of years in jail, but here's the deal, pal.

You work for us now. And when you come out of jail, you work for us for 10 years. Because the shit he knows and has access to, you're the government, you're like, oh shit, that's some talent. Like we want that working here. All right, let's use it for good. what you said he wasn't a coder so what's his skills besides he just was the first to think well i i and that was generalized he did know how he

did learn how to do that stuff my point is by trade he wasn't an expert hacker he wasn't like that so yes you're right it's a little bit different but he had access to the entire dark web and had been someone who was on record being a part of it for a long time and there's got to be things that you can use that with sure i would agree with that probably yeah i i agree i agree it just i think it offend it offends you know what i think most people think of the criminal justice system that you're like whoa whoa whoa so you're all he's being convicted of is basically it's just like what just like narcotic trafficking like drug trafficking yeah i think that's kind of uh you know that's kind

of crazy that he's going to spend the rest of his life in jail and i remember he appealed it he was denied the circuit level and then he sought um he petitioned for certiorari with the supreme court and was denied they didn't the supreme meaning the supreme court didn't chose not to hear his case so i guess yeah his only option now is um is a commutation or a pardon yeah and it's it's it's a flaming ball of fire to catch if you're any court because some of the – there are a lot of people that support him heavily. But some of the optics around it suck because, look, drugs are a big problem. And people – it's an emotional thing. People lose family members over it.

Addiction is one of the saddest things to ever be around. And so – But he didn't make the drugs and didn't you know force anyone to take him well he technically did make some mushrooms at the beginning but that's not like heroin and stuff you know what i mean like he's not true he was doing the least i i as i understood it for the most part was just connecting buyers and sellers and anonymously and yeah that's wild that's the thing he created he really was i mean what he created regardless of when he gave up control if that's indeed what happened or ceded some of his control the system

he created is crazy as this is to say is essentially on a level of the disruption of things like amazon and oh yeah you know he he had millions of people on there and it's not like it went away the next silk road popped up almost instantly yeah just under a different name and it's gonna keep doing that because people are like you can when you can make your internet traffic anonymous and you can make your payment anonymous you can just have a like underground marketplace and by the way i believe we'll check this after i believe the nsa is who invented tour for what that's worth i think it's their tool that they invented yeah and i mean it makes sense and there's you know i i fully support, like, making your internet traffic anonymous if you want to. Like, why not?

Yeah. And let's not... It helps freedom of speech in, like, other... Like, for instance, other countries. Say you live in a country with, like, an oppressive authoritarian government. And, like, you want to say something. You want to do... Like, you know, like, you can do stuff like that.

Yeah. I think there's a lot of great purposes of that. Two things that are other aftere great purposes of that two things that are other after effects of this number one he's more relevant now because of covid he's more relevant because people there is an enormous movement i wouldn't even call it a political movement i don't know if you call it an awakening i don't know what you call it but there are a lot of people who maybe didn't care about politics or government or cared about it and were on one side or the other who are now just totally strongly anti-government online because they've seen the government handle covid and the lack of

personal freedoms and all that and so ross even though it's an entirely different context his whole idea again was to get around government control on the individual on what he thought the individual should have control of and so there are a lot of people now who are looking at this and and relating the principles because they are related and saying oh this guy saw it before we did and now we just see the worst context of it where it affects everyone because we're locked in our house and we're told our business is shut down and so he's i will say this if he gets commuted he will be the most sought after speaker over the next five years he and snowden between the two of them but snowden has at least spoken publicly already. Ross will be the most sought-after speaker on, I guess, logic and theory issues of government and just in general that we've ever seen.

Do you think Donald Trump is going to commute his sentence? If you would have asked me that two months ago, I would have said no fucking way. And I'll tell you why. Sure. Because Trump campaigns so hard, and Trump is hard anti-drugs. Now, he has been very fair to nonviolent drug offenders. He has commuted a lot of sentences during this. He was convinced by a lot of people, but he ran on the narcotics problem in this country and trying to stem that stem it from the borders and stuff so you'd think he'd be very tough on this but yes the reports right now i think maybe axios

no someone reported it that he's seriously considering it i think ross aldrich's gonna die in jail unfortunately yeah maybe not maybe but i don't think donald trump's gonna do it i don't i mean he may very well not i know know that he's, if this reports anywhere near right. What does he have to gain from it? You want to know my opinion on that? Sure. Like what I think now? What, clout?

No. Pure just like. No. I think, look, we know Trump has one of the biggest egos of all time. Sure. He was the outsider coming in. He feels like a lot of things were going well for a long time then kovat happened which he feels like was his personal

affront to him i think he is more anti-government than he ever has been before and there's some of that i empathize with certainly and so i think he views this as all right maybe i don't at all agree with what this guy did but this was an obama judge who put him in jail for this it's personal with trump an obama judge in the southern district of new york who i fucking hate who put this guy in jail for two life sentences for creating a fucking website fuck you and hits the button that's why i think he's considering which isn't the right reason to do it but well if that i i don't think i don't think that guy should be in prison for life. I think he should definitely be in prison for a long time.

Yeah. Well, maybe. I shouldn't say definitely, but I think it's just like it's – I think it's kind of crazy that he's going to be in jail for life. If you're really concerned about drugs and you're really like okay hard nose like punish drugs whatever i think like you know you could easily like send the same message if he's in there for like 15 years or something like that but like hell yeah look it it seems like especially when you consider the fact he most

likely wasn't the only dread pirate roberts which the government just tried to hide the fact he most likely wasn't the only Dread Pirate Roberts, which the government just tried to hide the fact that that had been their opinion. And they did successfully hide that in court. You look at the other sentences, you look at what he did, creating a website, creating the place to do it. It's, it's a five to 10 year sentence. That's really, that's, that's what the legal opinions seem to be. Yeah. It's kind of crazy because especially – yeah. He's not being prosecuted for killing anyone. So that's something I forgot because, yeah, if those charges weren't on there, he shouldn't be doing life in prison. And if they're not on there, why weren't they on there? If you're the government and you've been working on this guy for three years and you get him and you're like we got the dread pirate roberts why don't you put on the biggest

case you have against them which is that he did these hits there's no there's no logic to that there's there's no it's not maybe i'm thinking could have been an entrapment defense because like the the government like and i forget entrapment but basically what i understand it is if the entrapment is if when the government takes someone who was not otherwise going to commit a crime and like basically and entrapment law gets very confusing in the case law and it's very it's often courts even mess it up when you know it's it's property use. But basically, like, when someone who was otherwise not going to commit a crime, the government creates such a, like, you know, basically, like, makes them commit that crime. You know, and it's not simply the government, like, leading, like, okay, let me leave a bike unchained and then someone steals a bike. It's like, it makes it, like, it's more than that.

It's super obvious. Yeah. and then someone steals a bike it's like it makes it like it's more than that it's super obvious yeah and honestly i remember i studied in trapman in law school and it's it's complicated and it's it's one of those where it's like it's it's it's tough to isn't it very subjective super subjective yeah yeah it's like 100 subjective really and there's different theories on like well if the government supplies the necessary element to commit this crime and I don't know. But there's a test for it. I forget it. Well, the other thing here.

But I think it would be applicable there because it's like if the government comes to this guy and yeah, I don't know. I think there could be an argument for entrapment there. Well, to add to your case there that you make because you have to say this, at least one of the six scenarios, the first one, the Curtis Green guy we talked about, the two government representatives who were on that one, there were two guys. There was a DEA guy named Carl Force, and there was a Secret Service guy who was called in for the situation. I forget his name. But the DEA guy was the guy who was undercover online with the quote-unquote entrapment in this case and that guy is currently in jail for six years because he got so out of control with this thing that he started extracting he he created other

accounts posing as like sources that his fake guy that he was playing connected with these fake sources with ross online to then blackmail ross into paying money to them to give him information that was fake like inside government information about the investigation and stuff so they later caught that guy and had to put him in jail for six years and the secret service guy when the curtis green thing went down stole curtis green's bitcoins didn't tell anyone so he's in jail for six years too so part of it could also be this is a mess yeah yeah i mean it was it was a clusterfuck it was it was it was a clusterfuck but again like the argument here isn't like ross's was innocent and he deserved no like he created this thing even if his net gain happened you can't just break every single law in the united states to say nothing of all the other countries.

It was an international site and be like, yeah, you know, it's fine. It doesn't work like that. I'm sorry. Like he got out of control with it. But then the argument is, well, what was the punishment for the crime? And if he didn't kill people or order people killed and he just created a site for people to do it and just got a little out of control, it it's not a life sentence i mean yeah straight up it's not yeah i would agree with that and the other question here too that i i want to ask you is i i mentioned this earlier i don't think we really touched it how do you deal with the whole court versus court of public opinion now because

whenever the media comes on the case whether it's a freak out in local media that's very specific to the area where the case is or a freak out nationally how do you even with the internet how do you even get 12 jurors or even a judge who hasn't been reading all these articles they have whatever spin on it whether it's right or wrong that they have so when you um you if you have a jury if you have a jury trial there's a period um during the jury selection process where you uh voir dire the jury you ask the jury certain questions voir dire voir yeah or voir dire as uh uh vincent gambini might say um and you ask them certain questions and they're supposed to answer truthfully.

So how it works is when you're summoned for jury duty, you receive a juror questionnaire in the mail and you're supposed to answer certain questions like you know, where do you live, what's your job, whatever, and then when you get them in the courtroom during the jury selection process, you ask

them a lot of questions like, have you read anything in the news about this case? If so like raise your jury card or whatever um a lot of a lot of different questions like do you you know like are you more inclined to believe someone's testimony because they're a police officer are you less inclined to believe someone's testimony have you ever been the victim of a crime like all these questions that might create a bias or whatever um in theory jury jurors are supposed to answer that truthfully, and you're supposed to weed out those jurors. Now, some cases are just so high profile that that might be almost impossible. For instance, the OJ case is one of those where it kind of

comes to mind. In that case, I feel like there's almost no way that you can't, that no one's heard of that case. So at that point, you just have to, you have to be reasonable. Like, if you want to try that person, you're going to have to figure out some way to get around that. So if everyone's been exposed to it, so at that point, you just want to, like, limit the exposure and limit, you know, limit ongoing exposure. So you can have jurors sequestered, which means they're, like off like you a lot and that happens a lot like they're you know hopefully oj's trial was like year like over a year right yeah that's crazy yeah i mean a lot of trial like a big murder trial or something in like a small community you know whereas you know a very tight-knit community you might sequester the jurors um i think i remember there was like a homicide case somewhere

in in uh like in harrisburg where um you know the jurors were sequester i remember there was like a homicide case somewhere in in uh like in harrisburg where um you know the jurors were sequestered for like a few days it happens like philly it happens everywhere um but yeah so it's still possible i don't vaguely maybe if it's like if it's a really truly high profile case i don't know how possible it is you know but um you you there are there are ways around it and in theory you know some people don't read the news you know but um you you there are there are ways around it and in theory you know some people don't read the news you know you know some people don't watch the news don't read read up on the news so i don't i don't know i i think it's it's harder and harder nowadays with cell phones everything to like you know truly isolate someone but they that's what they'll do they'll take your

phone and they'll put you in a hotel with no TV. You know? Or they'll give you, like, newspaper articles, but they'll take out the ones that are... They take your phone from you? Yeah. That is crazy. But most cases, the jurors are to be trusted. They're treated as, you know, rational adults. And it's like, look, you're not to discuss this case. You're not to Google facts about the case. You're not to go to the location of the crime. You're not to do you before we do, because I always talk about when it comes to especially hip-hop or music in general, you're one of the guys that knows everyone.

You knew all the rappers coming up back in the day before anyone knew who they were. You're very on top of who talks to who, what's going on. But one of the things that I've been really confused about is that when the Grammys came out this year, I'm not even going to lie. I'm not even going to remember some of the names. But I didn't even recognize anyone who was up for these awards. I mean, there were a few, but you're looking at like Rap Album of the Year, Pop Album of the Year, whatever. I'm like, what the fuck? I don't even know who these people are.

What's the process here and how do we go from two years ago where literally rap album of the year i'll remember two of them but you you had the best you had cardi b you had travis scott on there everyone knows astroworld they they know cardi b's album they know this music they're like okay that makes sense and now it's like who the fuck is this guy on there yeah so what's wild so it's wild to think i like cardi b she won grammy for best rap album okay whatever i like cardi b i really do but she won the grammy for best rap album and that to me was seen as like all right the grammys are going to be like we're going to appeal to like mainstream we're just going gonna like you know it's it's the the grammys is supposed to be like this you know high institution whatever but like when car when invasion of privacy that's

a i like that album i legitimately like that album it's a good album is it grammy award-winning worthy not in my opinion no again i love carter b um but at that moment i was like all right the grammys are clearly signaling. We're going to appeal to the masses with this. Now you have, so who's up for Grammy? You have Freddie Gibbs and Alchemist with their album, which I listened to. It's decent. You have Jay Electronica's album.

You have, who to is it's decent you have uh jay electronica's album you have who who else is it there's um i don't even know nasa's nasa's nominated um nasa's album's good they're all great projects but it's like whoa it's like you go from so i fully expected the grammy nominations to be like like little baby dropped an album dub baby dropped an album meg the stallion dropped an album i expected to be all those on there. No mention of that. To me, that's just... That's absolutely... The Grammys are just like, we're going to take a sharp U-turn

and just totally go underground indie, focus on the lyrics and focus on the production. It's just like... It's overthinking it. Well, I honestly think as far as like pure hip-hop pure art form i think that the grammys are doing it better with these most recent nominations than with like you know then with cardi p invasion of privacy and i'm not i'm not trashing cardi b yeah yeah i understand what you're like you know you know i don't think under any circumstances she should have beaten astroworld

on that under any circumstances yeah i forget that was circumstances she should have beaten astroworld on that under any circumstances yeah i forget that was the 2018 grab she beat astroworld astroworld was and i love travis scott like i love him with his music personally i respect all the analysts and all of it because i'm amazed by it his songs for me just like what's my favorite music they're hit or miss so there's some that i'm like oh that's a banger and then there's some where it's like i really respect what he did but i'm not like on my free time gonna listen to that other than like studying it that said the sound he created on that album and then when you saw the behind the scenes come out and he got like features

and stuff like unreal yeah on and they in his documentary is one of my favorite scenes did you ever see that the look mom i can fly documentary no oh my god you would love that he has that it's it's a contextless documentary there's no narrative it's just cameras following him around you just see what happens so he had cameras on him for a year, and he had him backstage waiting on the potential album of the year. And what I liked about it is you expect when someone loses right away, it's like, oh, they're going to say,

oh, they totally deserved it, great job. And it's not like he was ripping Cardi B at all, but he was pissed. He was like... Yeah, because it was like a political decision. I think the... So... The Gram grammys were very at at that time i think there was a lot going on and i think it was there was a like kind of a i

don't want to say like feminist movement but it was like all right like cardi b's definitely representing something that hasn't been represented in music in a in a while she was like you know she's a female rapper who's unabashedly herself. She can relate to the people. That's why, again, I love Cardi B. It was a great album. There were some bangers on there. Yes, it was.

Bodak Yellow is a banger, and then the song Come Through Drippin'. I like that song with Offset. What else? There was a song with Chance on there. I mean, she had some good songs on there, whatever. But I think it was more just like, all right, people love Cardi B, and they love what she stands for.

She's really connecting with people in a way that we haven't seen with artists in a while. And I guess the Grammys tried to ride that wave in a sense. And it just – who won the Gram grammys last year best rap album do you want to look that up yeah let me look that up i don't remember because i think the nomin it wasn't the baby no grammy because that 2019 best rap album he should have won last year best rap album 2019 yeah grammys 2019 it's gonna be oh yeah tyler the creator with igor yeah that was actually i think that was a very good album that was a good win there were some good nominees i know um ybn corday i don't know if you ever heard of him i have heard of him i don't know

his music dropped the ybn but he was nominated last year i think there were some good nominations um and i think so that's i think that's a perfectly like reasonable like all right tyler the creator that's a good album is a very artistic album the production value is had some good features in there um but and i i agree with the grammy nominations this year um although i don't like that jay electronic album that much at all um but i just think it's just like all right grammys what are we doing can we not can we remain somewhat consistent am i gonna get are we are we going for the like you know what's popular at the moment are we going for like what's the artistic you know like like value the lyrics the like you know or what are we doing here can we be consistent yeah because and let's

just let's juxtapose these two to literally put that you put some of them on there some of the names already but for people to just understand like how visceral this is even year to year you look at let's start with 2019 we're already 29 that was actually 29 i guess it's a year behind yeah yeah i got that wrong too so you had B win, and who was she up against? She was up against Mac Miller for Swimming, Nipsey Hussle for Victory Lap, Pusha T for Daytona, and Travis Scott for Astroworld.

All shit that people are like, 99% of people are like, yeah, I get that. Tyler, the creator. I think Mac Miller should have won that year. Yeah, definitely. Tyler, the creator, in 2020, wins for Igor. Who was he up against? He was up against Dreamville, Revenge of the Dreamers, which is J. Cole, duh.

He was up against Meek Mill for Championships. Everyone knew that album. 21 Savage for his album, I Am Greater Than I Was, 100%. And then... Cordae. Yeah, Cordae. That one I'm less familiar with. So I don't think so. But look at 2021.

This is the point. Freddie Gibbs. So I've never heard of D Smoke until the Grammy nomination. D Smoke for Black Habits. You mentioned Jay Electronica. Royce. Oh yeah, Royce the 5'9". That's out of left field to me.

Listen, I'm a huge fan of Nas nas nas is one of the greatest of all times love him love him incredible rapper but it's like oh we're doing we're doing this like nas has been around for like 20 years and we're just like yeah he's been doing the same thing like it's not like nas suddenly changed his style and he didn't have like no disrespect but he he had nothing that bordered on a mainstream or cult hit on that album no this was just i mean he makes a lot of albums yeah you know so like that's the thing i'm the first rap concert i ever saw i saw nas in philly at the electric fan i think it was at the electric factory it was lit

it was dope um how old were you i was still in high school um yeah so probably that's a life changer 17 yeah it was awesome um i love nas he's one of my if i'm talking over the history of like music he's one of my favorites no disrespect to nas but like nas has been clear nas has been consistent yeah and he's like he's about lyrics and bars and like he's not you know i like we're just doing this now in 2021 we're just gonna like what about all the the countless now in 2021. We're just going to like, what about all the, the countless albums that he's dropped like year after year? Like, it's just,

it's just interesting to me that. And that's the one they picked. You know what I mean? Like it wasn't, again, not a bad album. I'm just saying like, it doesn't really,

it doesn't make sense. So yeah. And, and then one other thing too, sorry, I, i forgot this but i i can't let you out of here without asking on this what do you think of the whole hoopla around wop which i think is a great song i enjoy the fuck oh it's the beat is a banger yeah and and like the lyrics are dirty but it's it's great right um i just think it's a gimmicky song so

i have a lot of opinions on this so people people really like meg the stallion people really like she has become like an icon she's people really get behind her for her um i guess she's got very like empowering feminist like you know attitude she's kind of like she's like oh i'm doing this like hot girl shit um which i i don't know you know again i don't really listen to her music all that much but um i understand it's like this persona she's like you know i'm a bad chick like whatever like i do what i want i don't play by the rules like you can't box me in like you know i'm gonna be this hot girl and like i'm gonna you know you know i'm not gonna just be like a like you know a pawn in the rap game i'm a hot girl i'ma own it and like you know she's got it she's got like a badass attitude it's like you know i respect that i

think you guys separate that meg the stallion from the song wop because the song wop in my opinion is just it's just like it's a very it's a gimmicky song it's like all right let's just talk about like very vulgar like sex for you know like three minutes or whatever and i don't think so like you can you can talk about empowerment and meg the stallion and what she's doing and like how she's embracing that bad attitude that like i'm a bad chick that hot girl attitude whatever which i think is legitimate but i don't think she's doing much in the way of that with the song wop in my opinion and that's my opinion um and i've thought about that um but yeah i don't know that she's like really helping women's empowerment by talking

about you know her wet ass pussy although i do think it's a banger of a song but i don't you know again this that's just my opinion when you're back in here again i'll touch that one and we'll we'll go off on it just because i feel like that would turn into an hour conversation but i think closing on well yeah i mean so i will we could talk about this because like i mean you got a minute i'm passionate about this shit okay so um look like i was trying to think like what is so like special about this song wop that it was like that was a that went a number that was a number one hit right when when you get ben shapiro being like the lyrics to this song are there are some whores in this house there are some whores in this house they

are messing with my pee like that shit's gonna go viral it was a very viral song that's one example but you had all the you had these politicians tweeting about and shit it was just made for that yeah i know and i think it was so like there have been female rappers for a long time and they've been talking about sex and vulgar stuff. Like you, you go like little Kim was like talking about all that stuff. I just think, I think it was kind of like,

all right, it was, first of all, it was a banger of a song. Let's, let's be honest. I think in order to go that popular, it has,

in order for a song to be that popular, it has to be a good song. Um, I think it was also kind of the way the way they're they're talking about sex it was like more like you know they're they're they're owning it and they're like from the female perspective of like all right i'm in charge in this scenario i agree and that that's kind of a way that you know it hasn't been uh portrayed in music in a while but i i don't think there's anything that unique about that song. It was just like, alright, it's maybe a little more visceral

when you're like, alright, the name of the song is like, alright, we're really not pulling any punches here, you know what I mean? Yeah, I'll take the feminist route on this one. If you're going to call them out for this, why don't you call out all the men and talk about this well yeah and that's the whole thing it's like men have been objectifying yeah women and i had no problem with this as long men have been objectifying women as long as like men have been able to stand upright like it's but it's the truth it is and it's like it and i understand the popularity of it and i understand it's like all right fine like we're taking back we're like owning it we're gonna own our sexuality we're gonna we're gonna own like you know like we're not just gonna be talked about

like that we're gonna you know we're gonna empower ourselves by by taking charge and we're gonna talk about you know our sex on our term like whatever and in some ways i think that's empowering in some ways though it's just like basically stooping to the level of men who've been doing that for like so i don't know that it's any more empowering it's everywhere in culture too yeah like to your point on that yeah with men yeah so again i think so i do think meg the stallion is a very, like, empowering figure for everyone, but, like, females especially, women. But I think you kind of have to separate that from the song WAP.

I think literally it was like, all right, let's just make something that's like... Like a banger. Let's make something that's going to stir shit up, that's going to create controversy, that's, like, everyone's going to talk about. Memorable. Yes talk about memorable yes yes and like put over dope beat yep so on on that note i think i think that's a good spot to close listen man thanks for coming in thank you bro you did a great job cleared up a lot of my legal questions as well which you know if you ever get any trouble in a boat man hit me up i dude i got you just just be 15 miles at sea. Bro, we didn't even talk about cocaine submarines today.

Cocaine submarines? Dude, you want to know something crazy? My boy is in the Coast Guard. He does... Come on. Yeah, he's like... Yeah, well, I don't know. I don't know what I'm about to say.

That's another segment for another day. But Gallagher, thanks, brother. Thank you, bro you did you enjoy this you like this i did man it's it's cool it's a cool uh you've improved a lot from your first episode you're basically just rambling for two hours yeah i like this format a lot better thank you brother well i appreciate that we're building here so anyway thanks for coming in we'll have you in here again and uh enjoying Miami and everyone else. Give it a thought.

Get back to me. Peace.