Alex Spiro

Alex Spiro is a partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and one of the most prominent trial lawyers in the United States. A Harvard Law School graduate, he serves as Co-Chair of the firm’s Investigations, Government Enforcement & White Collar Defense Practice. Spiro has represented a wide range of high-profile clients—including Elon Musk and New York City Mayor Eric Adams—and has served as lead counsel in over 50 trials across federal and state courts. A former Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan, he has also contributed to legal education as a faculty member of Harvard’s Trial Advocacy Program, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, and Chairman of the Board for the Fair Punishment Project, a Harvard criminal justice initiative. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Squarespace https://Squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www. AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  In any case or any battle, there's just always a lot of ups and downs. It's like, you know, people say, "Don't watch the stock price." It's hard to find a clear road all the time. It's not as if day one, the truth comes out. It is a battle. It is a war. And unless you keep going and going. But I think ultimately, what I believed, you know, as I'm graduating law school, which is that the truth would come out in a courtroom, if ever. I think that's right.

• 0:53Rick Rubin?

  Does it?

• 0:54Speaker 00

  I think so. If the system works right and the people at battle are doing it the right way, it does. Now, there's parts of this country and this system that are plagued by, maybe all of it, racism and all sorts of other issues that are endemic in the system, maybe in any society. So I don't want to say that it works perfectly, because of course it doesn't. But, you know, if I'm handling a case, there's enough attention on it, and I'm locked in, I think the truth's gonna come out.

• 1:25Rick Rubin?

  When there's attention on a case, where would it come from?

• 1:28Speaker 00

  Natural forces at work, you know. Some people on some issues are more interesting than others, and so people gravitate towards them. And then over time, you know, they'll pay more attention to my cases, because they're my cases.

• 1:39Rick Rubin?

  If a case is a highly publicized case, does it change anything?

• 1:46Speaker 00

  It changes a lot, because everyone is a little bit more on edge, especially if they haven't been there before. So you'll see, I mean, almost always, early on in cases I have, when there's attention on it, a judge makes the wackiest ruling of the judge's career. And I don't think they're doing it on purpose. I tend to-

• 2:04Rick Rubin?

  Just the stress of the situation?

• 2:06Speaker 00

  The stress, the lights, the not knowing how to deal with it. Somebody who used to work with me used to say that any time I would walk into some random courthouse, the judges would either be way too deferentially nice to me, or wanting to start a fight with me the moment I walked in, for no apparent reason. And you would just see a little bit of a dichotomy.

• 2:26Rick Rubin?

  What would cause one versus the other?

• 2:30Speaker 00

  You know, maybe respect and fear are at the same, you know, point and they they don't know how to interact or deal with it, or, you know, maybe the reputation even is one of respect and fear. I don't even mean that in a positive way. I just mean, they don't know what to expect. They don't know how I'm going to interact with them and the system. Am I there to throw my weight around? Am I there to, you know, think that I'm just going to get away with whatever I'm going to get away with because I think I should? And so that tension, you know, causes them to act in different ways, makes it interesting.

• 3:07Rick Rubin?

  Is it adversarial in a friendly way in the courtroom, or is it different than that?

• 3:13Speaker 00

  It's maybe about as friendly it is, you know, on a sports field. Not quite a an actual war where you're trying to make it so that somebody doesn't leave alive. But I think it's, you know, it's a sport with higher stakes. So there's going to be sharp elbows to some degree and people, you know, again, react to those situations in different ways. Some people don't know how to shake hands after a game.

• 3:43Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Can you shake hands after a game?

• 3:46Speaker 00

  I can shake hands after a game, but I've had a lucky run, so I haven't had to, I haven't had to face, you know, I haven't sat in a courtroom with a friend and watched them be taken away.

• 3:57Rick Rubin?

  You say lucky. How much of it do you think is luck versus something else?

• 4:01Speaker 00

  I think you make your own luck. So.

• 4:04Rick Rubin?

  How much of the job is storytelling?

• 4:07Speaker 00

  A lot of it. You know, you're a communicator. You're trying to take information and facts, distill them into a way that makes sense, marry them to the law. I don't get to decide the law. The law is the law. And then package it in a way that you can convince a group of people that you're right, that the truth that you're telling is the correct, is the answer to the puzzle.

• 4:32Rick Rubin?

  What's coming from the other side, how often does it feel disingenuous?

• 4:39Speaker 00

  I think it depends on the arc of the career. I mean, you know, when you're a prosecutor and you're all revved up about whatever the justice is you were seeking and the other side is trying to play trickster, that's how you view it, trickster, not a test on the system.

• 4:57Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  That's how you see the world, or at least I saw the world when I was 25, a little bit, a little bit. I think I grew past that phase very quickly because I think much of my leaning is that people are more complicated than the worst thing they've ever done, that people deserve second chances, that the system needs checks and balances. So because I was leaning that way, that notion at 25 disappeared quickly.

• 5:19Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  On the other side of it, you know, it has not dissipated as quick, the sort of prosecutor looking to, as I say amongst friends, you know, update their LinkedIn profile or whatnot by taking somebody out or by bringing a case that's on the margins of criminal law, you know, some lawyers are trying to get rich, some lawyers are trying to get famous, whatever that, you know, I'm still more jaded, calmer than I would have been at 25 in some respects, but I'm still a little cynical about Paltan.

• 5:47Rick Rubin?

  You think calmer from experience or something else?

• 5:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, some of it's experience, some of it's just age. I've said, you know, if I looked back at 25, cross-examining a witness, it was very breathless. I mean, I had so much energy, so high octane.

• 6:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  I used to be able to go 21 straight hours without, without it be now, no, I mean, and how much of that is hopefully developing some grace and wisdom or whatnot. Some of it is just biological, I think, that just.

• 6:19Rick Rubin?

  Would you say you're better now than you were at 25, even though then you had a little more energy?

• 6:24Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 6:25Rick Rubin?

  So.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 6:26Rick Rubin?

  It works out.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 6:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. How much research do you do before a case?

• 6:33Speaker 00

  Endless, as much as there is to possible.

• 6:35Rick Rubin?

  Tell me how that works. How do you start?

• 6:38Speaker 00

  So if there's a subject matter, I have to learn everything about like the setting, the subject matter. And I do everything. I want to know whether it was hot or cold out. I want to know what the wind is like. I want to know if it's a movie set, how do people interact on a movie set? And if it's an old town, how do people interact in that town? Do people tip? Do they use cash? They use credit cards? How do they interact? Does everybody know each other? Would they have been saying hi to each other? I'm trying to basically visualize like.

• 7:05Rick Rubin?

  The whole world.

• 7:07Speaker 00

  The whole world in which the case exists. And how it would have been if I had been there myself. I remember early when I was a prosecutor, you know, we used to go for drinks after cases. And I used to sort of say, you know, unless you've been drinking in a bar and seen a bar fight, you would never be able to be as good at trying a bar fight case as if you had been watching a bar fight.

• 7:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  And from early on, I always thought that some real world experience and the ability for me to picture what actually happened was a special ability, if there was one. And so that's the setting. And then in terms of everybody, I'm trying to figure out, you know, who they are and what makes them tick. And psychology is sort of where it begins for me and the main thrust of it. So what kind of person is this? How are they built? What are they likely, you know, influenced by? And why would they do or say or think the things they were doing and seeing? And then as they retell it, what's intentional, what's motivated, what's unintentional? And trying to sort of piece that together.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  And the more nuanced and I can get, the more gray in terms of the reflection of what I'm watching. The more special the unraveling of what really happened is going to be. And the harder it is to prepare for.

• 8:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  So if I'm asking somebody questions and I'm getting at stuff inside of them that they have not fully grasped.

• 8:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, which is probably often. People don't know themselves very well.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  I think that it is, and it's, it's definitely played out that way, I think, in cases. And, you know, in some of the cases that never got that, that far, frankly, but. That's what I'm trying to do. And it's very hard for a witness to prepare for that or anybody to prepare the witness for that. Because, you know, the witness wouldn't even shared that with the lawyer trying to prepare them for a question that's never been asked in a courtroom since the beginning of time.

• 9:06Rick Rubin?

  Can you think of a time where you took an approach on a case that you're sure no other lawyer would have taken?

• 9:14Speaker 00

  In every case I've ever handled, I think that there are nuances of the psychological approach that I take that no lawyer ever would have done.

• 9:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  Now, I'm not saying that like the macro defense wouldn't have been whatever the same

• 9:27Rick Rubin?

  Understood.

• 9:28Speaker 00

  macro defense. But they would not have thought about the way it all fit together the same way.

• 9:35Rick Rubin?

  So if you have two different people with very different psychological makeups and they both perform the same action, that would be different for you because one of them is doing it for one reason, one's doing it for another reason. So it's a different story. Is that right?

• 9:50Speaker 00

  Right. As long as there's a thread between the two. You know, a person can drop a cup of water.

• 9:54Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 9:55Speaker 00

  And one person could be built one way.

• 9:58Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 9:58Speaker 00

  And be very different in Freudian terms than the other person. But they both still just, you know, humans drop glasses of water. And you have to make sure that you also remember that, that some things are not data points. Some things are just part of existence.

• 10:12Rick Rubin?

  It just happens. Do you think that your little bit of time as a prosecutor helped you as an advocate for your clients?

• 10:20Speaker 00

  For sure. And it's where I got the training wheels off the bike. And so, you know, people always ask me, you know, well, what should I do? How do you become a trial lawyer, all these things? And one of the things is you got to learn the ABCs. And if you're really good at the ABCs, you can spend less time thinking about it, like anything else. So when a great basketball player dribbles a basketball, they're not thinking about it. They're not thinking about anything other than watching everything else.

• 10:47Rick Rubin?

  Being in the moment.

• 10:48Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 10:49Rick Rubin?

  Do you feel like that when you're in the courtroom?

• 10:51Speaker 00

  Like nowhere else I'll ever be.

• 10:52Rick Rubin?

  In the moment.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  Like nothing else, nothing I could even describe to you.

• 10:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:57Rick Rubin?

  When it's less of a human situation, less about place, temperature, nature of the town, and if it's more like a corporate thing where it's on a technical issue, do you have to learn the technical issue?

• 11:14Speaker 00

  Yes, that's the playing field then. Right, but even if it's a technical issue with emails, and everything's really emails, emails can come to life too, if you understand the personalities and the players. There's humans behind it all, you know. Yeah. Do you ever recommend not to go to court? Sure. What would be the situation that would recommend not going to court? There's no story here. And when I say story, there's no tone to that word story. There's no version of events here where I like the way that it packages for you. Yeah, well, you can tell the story in support of your client. Correct, and I won't go into court and, I mean,

• 11:58Speaker 00

  people can scoff at this what they want, but I don't go into court and say things that aren't true. Yeah. It has to be true. It has to be my truth, but it has to be true. And so if the person comes in and wants to, you know, spin up a story that is just, you know, I wasn't in the town that night. Right. Then that's not going to work. And other people have all sorts of other reasons where there are collateral consequences for them going all the way that I just don't think make sense. And people who come to sit with me and meet with me sometimes follow your advice and sometimes they don't. It's just that simple. Are there any that you work with that don't follow your advice? I mean, most don't follow my advice all the time. And to be honest with you, arrogant or not, it surprises me. Yeah.

• 12:41Speaker 00

  Because I give them a speech and I tell them, I'd say pretty much, and there's 200 I can show you that a lot of people know about. There's another 2,000 nobody knows about other than me and the people very close to me. Yeah. And I can show you a data set of 2,000 and 200, and there should be nothing you follow other than what I'm about to tell you. And I know how arrogant it sounds, but I'm like, how many times have I've done this? How many times have you done this? Yeah. And I can be objective and I can play doctor. Yeah. And I'm not as close to it and I'm not emotive about it. Just trust me. And even then. Some of these people are friends, great relationships with, brilliant people. Sometimes they still don't listen, so.

• 13:17Rick Rubin?

  And if they don't listen, will they find someone else? Or will they ask you to do it even though you wouldn't suggest it?

• 13:24Speaker 00

  Some combination and sometimes they will use a straw man to try to get me to. Right, there's one person in particular, one entity in particular, I should say, a company. Whereas if I give them the correct but not wanted advice.

• 13:37Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  They will say, well, you know what? I'm just gonna, you know, I'm sure, you know, Bob, Susan and Tony will come in here and tell me exactly, you know, effectively what they're telling me. I'm saying, okay, go for it.

• 13:46Rick Rubin?

  Because you have to digest so much material for every case, have you found any helpful techniques that just make that easier?

• 13:54Speaker 00

  Well, everyone's memory works a little bit differently. And I'm effectively memorizing a bunch of stuff as I'm preparing. And I know how to make myself memorize things. And I use a disorganized method and an organized method. And I think that disorganization can help memory and organization can help memory. So I will have posted notes all over. If you walked into my room, just they're everywhere. And then I can kind of piece them together. And people would say, well, that's disorganized. How do you make sure that you don't? But by having to keep track of them and seeing how they work together.

• 14:24Rick Rubin?

  Works for you.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  It works for me. And then I will then distill them into my yellow notepad and more coherent, organized, structural thoughts. But I have to kind of break things apart and play with them. I'm experimenting as I go. Just sort of say, well, does this all fit together? And what if the witnesses go in a different order? Will it still work? Will the thing come to life the same way?

• 14:45Rick Rubin?

  How much do you know in advance in terms of who'll be the witnesses? What order they go in? How much of it can you control? How much of it is out of your control?

• 14:55Speaker 00

  I mean, a lot of it's out of your control, but as time goes on, you kind of know certain certainties. Right, you know, of the 15 people that may come into the movie. You know seven of them almost certainly. And you know the order, you know, two thirds of the order, more or less. You could make an educated guess. And then of the other eight, half of them will come, half of them won't. You've got to also make a judgment on the return on your time of preparing for that, which will not come. Or figuring it out. And then if the movie plays out with these 11 characters versus these nine versus these 13, or in a different order, how is that gonna appear?

• 15:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  And that changes things dramatically. Well, if they call three witnesses in a row that are very Eddie steady, very sort of buttoned up people.

• 15:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 15:41Speaker 00

  Then for the first two or three days of the trial, no one's gonna think, oh, this was a wacky crew of misfits. They're gonna think these are straight up buttoned up people.

• 15:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  Right? Whereas if the first witness they call is flaky or flighty, then it's like, well, maybe they did lose the paperwork.

• 15:56Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  You know, I mean, and so the order of it will change the way that I'm constructing it.

• 16:01Rick Rubin?

  Does it always go prosecution goes first?

• 16:04Speaker 00

  Um, yes, they have the burden of proof, they go, they lay out their case, then it's the defense case. And in civil trials, it's pretty much that way too.

• 16:12Rick Rubin?

  Let's talk about that burden of proof because we've grown up with this idea of burden of proof. Innocent until proven guilty, yet with the media today, it seems like that's not how things work. As soon as somebody gets accused of anything, they're treated as guilty in the public.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm, I'm hopeful that, you know, good advocacy and, and watching some cases go the way that they went. Leaves some imprint in people's mind that maybe I don't have it the right way. But if the allegation coupled with a little bit of corroboration, boy, does the prosecution. And I'm using prosecution to mean basically prosecution and a plaintiff's lawyer, anyone trying to set out to prove something.

• 16:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Boy, are they, are they 90% of the way there.

• 16:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it seems like that. It seems unfair, really.

• 16:57Speaker 00

  It is unfair.

• 16:58Rick Rubin?

  It seems unfair. Do you get to see all of the witnesses for the prosecution in deposition beforehand?

• 17:05Speaker 00

  No, none of them, none of them. And this is, I think, a very interesting point that I don't know that everybody knows and something that I like. I think it works to my advantage, but no, in civil cases, you get to depose the witnesses. In criminal cases, in almost no state in the United States, do you get to depose? The other side.

• 17:28Rick Rubin?

  So the first time you're ever speaking to these people is on the stand?

• 17:33Speaker 00

  Right, which some people might think works to a good questioner's advantage.

• 17:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  They've never seen your pitch. They've never seen. Now, they can study, they can try to prepare, but they can't prepare the same way as if they had spent eight hours in a room with you before.

• 17:49Rick Rubin?

  How much do people change when they're on the stand versus in a room or in deposition even?

• 17:57Speaker 00

  Like in a podcast times three, because they know that people are paying attention. Again, higher profile case, higher stakes. Witnesses are over-prepared, so they get more rigid, they start practicing their answers. People think that it doesn't look like it's practice, it looks practice to me.

• 18:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  And they're just gonna get tighter, and when they get tighter, they look less natural. We arrived at the location at 9:05 a.m.

• 18:19Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 18:21Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, how do you know?

• 18:21Speaker 00

  Okay, okay.

• 18:22Rick Rubin?

  Would you say, "How do you know?" or "No"?

• 18:24Speaker 00

  No, I mean, that's not an important enough.

• 18:26Rick Rubin?

  It just seems ridiculous?

• 18:27Speaker 00

  You can't jump on everybody. No, it sounds like you read that in your memo, not in your mind.

• 18:33Rick Rubin?

  Right.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  Right, and so if I harped on every little thing that I saw with a witness, Yeah. my cases would take years.

• 18:39Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  Okay, so you gotta pick and choose a little bit. Not everything speaks to some higher, you know? But if you wanted to make a point out of that, you know, if I needed to go backwards a little bit to go forward.

• 18:50Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  You could go back and just sort of say, you know, "I just wanna talk to you for a second about what leads you to give your very first answer when you got on the witness stand," right?

• 18:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  You're not sitting here sort of closing your eyes, remembering something, and just trying to do your best for this jury. "I don't, what do you mean?" It's like, no, no, no, you reviewed paperwork, right? And the paperwork told you, 9:05 a.m., right? So all you're doing is, you're the guy reading your own paperwork, ain't that right? You know, and then if you think that that's going to either make a point that matters.

• 19:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  Or rattle them.

• 19:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. How important is it that the jury likes you?

• 19:27Speaker 00

  It's important they respect me. I'm not foolish enough to think, you know, everyone's gonna like me and everyone's gonna take to my personality. But they have to believe that I am credible. They can't hate me so much, they can't believe I'm credible.

• 19:40Rick Rubin?

  Is there ever a fear of going too hard on someone on the stand?

• 19:46Speaker 00

  Yes, you can't be aggressive with a kind of a witness where I'm gonna look aggressive.

• 19:51Rick Rubin?

  It could turn off the jury, even if the person is being flaky.

• 19:57Speaker 00

  You have to be able to change your speed and your pitch and your whatever to the witness. So if there's an 80-year-old grandma who's a lady who is, you know, cooking in the kitchen, you can't, you know, go in there and start screaming at them. Whereas if there's some slick character that seems like he's trying to deceive everybody, even when he's ordering coffee, you can go more aggressively at him. It doesn't mean that the grandma isn't lying. But why would she? And what does she have to gain? And how do you unpeel that? And we have to know the imprint of the psychology on the person viewing it, right? Which is that we are making knee-jerk assessments of people every single day and every single way. And so if that witness is a hero, right? I mean, I've crossed heroes.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  You know, if they're a hero and you start going right at them, you're trying to beat up a hero. You can't do that.

• 20:48Rick Rubin?

  How different are juries?

• 20:51Speaker 00

  They're very different based on location, just like, you know, 12 people in New York City are different from 12 people in Santa Fe with almost no overlap. I will say that when you have 12, the combination of viewpoints, that's why the diversity of viewpoints is so important, hopefully forms a reasonable person based on 12 experiences and 12 viewpoints.

• 21:12Rick Rubin?

  In some way, are you also an advocate for the jury?

• 21:18Speaker 00

  Yes, insofar as, again, I want them to know that I want them to know what really happened.

• 21:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  Right? So if they're there and I'm trying to say, listen, I've been living this movie for nine months. Just come with me.

• 21:30Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 21:31Speaker 00

  And you're gonna learn what happened. So yeah, I am trying to, which is why I don't, you know, I don't think I'm very, I'm not objection heavy. I'm not blocking evidence heavy. I'm not, you know, I'm sort of like, no, no, no, let it in.

• 21:42Rick Rubin?

  Just educational in some way for them.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 21:46Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about when the aha moment comes. You're doing research and you come to, okay, I know my approach. Does that happen early in the process? Does it happen late in the process? Does it ever change?

• 22:00Speaker 00

  All of the above. And again, there's, there's like, you know, 18 different ahas that have to come together to make one of these sort of resounding.

• 22:08Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  victories. You know, the jury's not coming back in 40 minutes in a case you shouldn't have had any chance in. Unless you found like 18 aha moments.

• 22:19Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  Because the evidence would have been so strong that in order to separate yourself from that blinding evidence, you needed to have many different things. It wasn't just simple enough that, you know, one, you know, in the one witness case where there's no corroboration, where there's some, it looks like the guy outside of the motel.

• 22:36Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  Sure. You can have one moment where you just destroy that witness and the thing falls. And I could look at the paperwork and say, wait a second, right? And there are these cases. I mean, a lot of the cases wrongful convictions in this country was one witness. Says the guy that they see cross racial identification outside the motel in 11 seconds in the dark. Was the guy sitting there and they go away. But i- if I see paperwork like that, and I see a case like that, I don't, I don't get so lucky with my cases to have a case that falls apart so, so easily. But then, yeah, then you can have one moment where you say, there's no chance that is going to survive. But those are the cases that to the degree I've had those kinds of cases, they never even get to the verdict.

• 23:18Rick Rubin?

  What's the most witnesses you've had in a case?

• 23:22Speaker 00

  Witnesses, as in people that have been spoken to, well over a hundred. Witnesses that end up coming into the court, more like thirty.

• 23:28Rick Rubin?

  Thirty's a lot.

• 23:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a lot. Some of them break down into less important, less controversial. Right? There could be five that are somewhat, you know, just to get in a piece of evidence. And there could be five that, you know, I mean, there are many witnesses I won't have a single question for. You can't, unless the, the theory of the, of your case is that it's all one big conspiracy. They can't all be lying unless they're all lying for a reason.

• 23:51Rick Rubin?

  Right.

• 23:51Speaker 00

  So you can't also go at everybody the same speed. Right? It has to be that a lot of these people are just good, normal, hardworking people. And the jury can compare. That's what a real witness looks like. And that's what somebody trying to fool you looks like.

• 24:05Rick Rubin?

  Do you look forward to going to court?

• 24:07Speaker 00

  Yes. I mean, I, I wish I didn't, but I do. I do love it.

• 24:11Rick Rubin?

  Well, that's great. I think it's great that you do, that you've found the perfect job. It seems like a high-stress situation. And if you thrive going into that high-stress situation, that seems like a positive.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  It, it is. Having too many problems on one's shoulders at all times for too many decades. I don't know, is a, is a good thing. But the actual moment, as I'm walking into a courtroom, is one of relaxation, joy, intensity, all wrapped up together.

• 24:40Rick Rubin?

  Relaxation is in there.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  Is in there, for sure.

• 24:42Rick Rubin?

  I love that. I wouldn't have guessed that.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's just like, go, because you're finally there. There's nothing left to do.

• 24:48Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  But to go.

• 24:49Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  Right. And so it's like taking a test where you know that.

• 24:54Rick Rubin?

  You've studied, you know all the answers.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  I know. I, it's, it well enough thought through in my head that I, I think I'm coming out ahead.

• 25:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. And in some ways you get to get it over with. You don't have to keep thinking about it.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's part of it too. And just a lot of it's just adrenaline, honestly. I am just as hopped up as I would be for like a sporting event.

• 25:13Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Right. It's just, it's very adrenaline-based.

• 25:16Rick Rubin?

  Can you let go of all the information after the case?

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Yes. In fact, I, I don't let go of the adrenaline, but I, that takes a few weeks. But the facts, yes. I mean, I always remember some stuff about each case. But I think I'm intentionally, frankly, washing my brain of it.

• 25:33Rick Rubin?

  It seems like that would make sense. There's so much volume of information that you're taking in all the time. That if you don't get rid of some, I don't know how there'd be room for new stuff to come in.

• 25:41Speaker 00

  Right. I'm not doing it brick by brick, thinking it through, but I, but I do let it wash, wash away.

• 25:47Rick Rubin?

  How different are judges from case to case?

• 25:51Speaker 00

  They're pretty different. Like I mentioned earlier, I have, or the people around me, I don't want to just put it on me, have noticed the pattern of some of the dichotomy I described. So I see some similar things where even other judges will say to me, oh, you know, so and so never gets like that. But, you know, I think you're making them a little nervous or they don't know which way you're going ever. And, you know, some judges, until the third witness comes, they don't get into their own. I mean, I've had trials that started with a judge interrupting almost every question I asked because they, basically, they wanted to know where I was going before I got there.

• 26:26Rick Rubin?

  How can that be?

• 26:27Speaker 00

  Anxiousness. And how do they know if I'm doing it in a different way? And I'm doing it in a way where I'm not revealing my hand? How do they? They would say, how did they know I was going to get to something relevant? If I'm asking questions about 905 and the memo book, why is that relevant? So if they're very tight and anxious and they haven't seen my pitch before, they start interrupting, interrupting, interrupting. By the third witness, when they go, whoa, I get it. Something is about to happen here. They will then go back to, you know, normal judge school and be closer to each other than they are different.

• 26:59Rick Rubin?

  Are there any judges who are just like adversarial towards you?

• 27:03Speaker 00

  You'd have to ask them.

• 27:04Rick Rubin?

  Okay. That you believe there are any?

• 27:06Speaker 00

  No. And I don't harbor such.

• 27:09Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  I hope that if any of them were ever asked about, you know, when I'm done doing this, they would all say, you know, more positive things than they.

• 27:19Rick Rubin?

  How often is the trial about the actual case versus an excuse to target someone?

• 27:26Speaker 00

  I mean, again, just in my view that everything is pretty gray out there. They're not picking people off the street like a rendition and then coming up with a crime. But some combination of forces allows, on the outskirts of criminal law, you know, a lot of people would come into the vacuum of it. In certain circumstances and situations, make somebody a shinier target. Then if they're a little shinier, then the crime can be a little less bad and still cause them to get caught up in the vacuum. And so I think some of these things are combinations where it takes a bit of a perfect storm to cause it to happen and a perfect. A perfect unraveling for it to unravel.

• 28:08Rick Rubin?

  Do business competitors ever go after their competitors who are extremely successful just to try to take out the competition?

• 28:18Speaker 00

  Every hour of every day, every minute of every day.

• 28:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  So.

• 28:23Rick Rubin?

  That's not about the law, that's about trying to get this guy, finding a way to get this guy.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Listen, jealousy is one of these driving psychological motivations that we probably don't talk about enough.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  And just greed, or whatever that is, to take out the competitor, of course, that is. Now, now, the competitor who is doing the action would say, but he's a bad actor. And the answer then could be, well, maybe from your lens, he's a bad actor, but you want him to be a bad actor.

• 28:53Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about depositions.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  I don't like them as much because I don't want to show my hand. But obviously, as I'm poring through the history of the case and the history of the people, I read every word. But I almost wish that the deposition is not a good deposition, because then they won't know what's coming.

• 29:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 29:11Speaker 00

  If they knew perfectly what was coming, they can sit in a room with a bunch of lawyers in suits on and try to pivot around it, right? But that can work out, too, because then they pivot themselves right back into a wall.

• 29:22Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about law school.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  Feels like a very long time ago.

• 29:26Rick Rubin?

  Good experience, loved it?

• 29:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I did love it, you know, I was always curious and I sort of showed up there a little out of the blue in my own mind. I didn't intend to go to law school and it kind of happened quick. You just go take a test, then you're there, you're thinking, wow, I'm here, you know? But it wasn't natural for me to go be an entry level person on Wall Street or a whatever I could have done in an alternative world.

• 29:53Rick Rubin?

  How did you pick law school if that was not the track you were on?

• 29:58Speaker 00

  People suggested it. People suggested it. I loved A Few Good Men and My Cousin Vinny, right? Yeah, I was gonna ask you about your favorite courtroom movies. I was gonna, well, there has been very, I mean, no offense to those who have made them or been in them in the last 20 years, but I actually think that they very much trailed off, or I understood how it all worked. Yeah. But A Few Good Men and My Cousin Vinny, I think about, and so I think that they predisposed me. And I was always a little bit of a justice seeker, underdog rooter, or, you know, injustice perceiver. And so the combination of those tendencies, you know, I was working in a hospital at the time, and they were like, I mean, you're no scientist and you're very impatient. You're really gonna go seven years ago to medical school?

• 30:40Speaker 00

  Right? And again, the entry level job isn't because, you know, too proud to do an entry level job. Those are some of the most important jobs at the hospital for sure, and in many fields. It's just impatience, probably. I don't know that that would have been the perfect role for me, frankly. So, I mean, it's easy to say now, but if you go from law school to 24, 25, and you're a prosecutor, when you're a prosecutor, sure, you have bosses, but you're very much in charge of your own cases. It is extreme autonomy, extreme. You're always then pushing the curve of what you're doing from the beginning. And if that excites you, and the more important, but some could say mundane roles of an entry level person in any profession would not have excited you, it allows you to push the gas further. Do you think law school now is the same as it was when you went?

• 31:25Speaker 00

  I really have no idea. At the time, you know, it was very Socratic, at least Harvard was. And so I liked that. I liked the debating. I enjoyed class. I enjoyed, you know, super smart fellow students and professors, you know, batting around and thinking through ideas. And, you know, I liked it, and it was fun. I mean, we were all together, living in the dorm room, and life was great.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  ¿Cómo crees que hacer este trabajo te ha cambiado como persona?

• 31:57Speaker 00

  Es una pregunta complicada. Las partes de la búsqueda de justicia, el tiempo en la cárcel, me han hecho evolucionar y profundizar y me han dado algo importante que hacer y principio para hacer que esté feliz con lo que estoy haciendo. Creo que es importante, creo que es algo un poco único, tal vez completamente único. Y eso me ha dado un propósito, y el propósito es una de las cosas más importantes. Y he estado pensando en esto mucho porque, ya sabes, te vuelves mayor y eso te hace reflexionar un poco. Y creo que hay un costo a todo. Hay un costo. ¿El tiempo realmente? Es el tiempo, es el estrés, son lesiones de batalla.

• 32:39Speaker 00

  Si quieres volar alto, tus alas serán constantemente atacadas o singidos o lo que sea. Y no te sentirás en el suelo smellando las rosas si siempre estás allí en las montañas. Y creo que ha habido un costo a eso conmigo y para mí. ¿Cómo dirías que el estrés te afecta?

• 32:58Speaker 00

  Sabes, como describí cuando entré en una cárcel, no me afecta en el momento. Solo creo que puede te enfadar con el tiempo. Y suena corte, pero no sé si es corte. Solo no me gusta separar mis problemas de los de ellos. No voy a decir que estoy en el nivel de tratar de encontrar una manera de resolver algo como la persona cuya vida o negocio está en peligro. Pero es demasiado cerca para la comodidad. Y así he pasado básicamente, ¿verdad? Si ves a alguien en una tribu, en realidad traté un caso de un amigo muy cercano. Y pude verlo y a su familia extensa, a su abuela y a todos los que venían a la corte todos los días.

• 33:38Speaker 00

  Y vi por seis semanas mientras se volvían mayores, de la manera que un presidente lo haría. Y si estoy tan ligado a su destino, físicamente, psicológicamente, quiero decir, incluso espero en el salón de espera como si fuera mi miembro de familia. Lo entiendo. Y diría que una tribu cambia el ADN de alguien por siempre. Y he tenido cien. Y así, sí, creo que es tejido de lesiones.

• 34:09Rick Rubin?

  Does the story change in the courtroom?

• 34:14Speaker 00

  You mean from what I expected to be going in?

• 34:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, you go in with a-

• 34:17Speaker 00

  A lot, I mean, you know, we don't go from the halls of a hospital to outer space, but when something turns differently or witness appears differently, I mean, I will have a plan to go after witness and watch them appear and appear differently. Or watch the other side, you know, I don't know what they're planning. Watch the other side pull or change a door or whatever. And being able to adjust on the fly is one of the most important-

• 34:42Rick Rubin?

  Can you give me an example of an extreme, unexpected, something that happened on the stand that led you to change direction?

• 34:51Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I remember one trial, it was a corporate dispute where they intentionally called the first witness, who was a seven-year-old female, small in personality, small in frame, you know, who was just there, who was the, they called first intentionally so that I would skip over them. So they would get their story out without having to deal with me for the first day.

• 35:17Rick Rubin?

  Wow, very interesting.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  But they coached the witness too much. And I picked up on patterns an hour in. So what would have been, in this particular case, what they expected to be a 30-minute cross-examination, which I would have frankly expected to be a 30-minute, went on for three days. To the point that by the end of the second day, a trial that we should have never been able to even have a chance of winning, was already won. Because the amount of coaching and it just unraveled. They were vulnerable to that very cross, because they were never prepared for that cross. And because they were such a nice person, they were able to feed information through them. And so it just kind of exploded on them.

• 35:57Rick Rubin?

  Because the person was overly scripted. When you went off-script, they didn't know what to do.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  Not only did they not know what to do, they were readily available to me to tell the jury that they had been told exactly what to say.

• 36:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  That not, none of it was true, but that they were putting their finger on the scale. But basically, and that then by the time that was done, you start looking over at the table of lawyers that put this witness up to this. Case was over.

• 36:23Rick Rubin?

  You start with an opening statement?

• 36:24Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 36:26Rick Rubin?

  How scripted is it? Is it an outline or a script?

• 36:31Speaker 00

  It's closer to a script than an outline because an outline suggests like I'm trying to hit these eight points and be done. Yeah. And it's it's a very short script because the jury can't follow too much. Okay. And I don't want to show too much. Is the shorter the better? Would you say? All things equal. Yeah. Do you memorize it? If I didn't have my notebook, it's memorized, but I'm glancing down. Okay. And it's not full memorized. It's it's memorized to the extent that I could do it without without notes, but it wouldn't come out the same way. Is there ever improvisation added? Definitely. In the opening, there hasn't been that much action. Splashes here and there. Right.

• 37:14Speaker 00

  And I'm also, if I'm playing defense in this, I'm hearing a few new things as they give their opening. Mm hmm. So there'll be splashes, tweaks, read the room kind of stuff. It's not wholesale going to change, unlikely to wholesale change at that time. And closing statements. I think about that as soon as I figure out what happened. Really? And work backwards and work backwards. Before the trial? Way before the trial and way before the opening. Wow. Everything else is a pawn leading towards the summation. That's really interesting. Yeah. So I'm thinking this is how it's going to end because this is what really happened. Yes. How do I get myself there? Yeah, yeah. That's the first thing I'm thinking about once I figure out what happened. Do they teach that in law school? No. Tell me about the element of surprise. The greatest gift against a competitor.

• 37:59Speaker 00

  What are your thoughts on free speech? I'm a proponent of it. It means different things to different people. But, you know, the founders of the United States made it the very first part of the Constitution because it was so important to them. And as you watch society evolve and even, you know, think about all the things that we once thought were true, that then debate taught us were not true. I think it's very dangerous for governments to begin to police it. Because where does that end and how does that work? And it becomes untenable. And so, you know, it's a bit cliched to say I'm a believer in free speech. But I think this is a topic unto itself, something I'm going to write about at some point.

• 38:44Speaker 00

  Because, you know, misinformation, my views on what happened on college campuses. I have a lot of views on a lot of these topics that I would like to, like a trial lawyer, lay out and people can hopefully think about them differently and maybe think about them in a better way.

• 39:02Rick Rubin?

  I would love to read that book.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  I'll send it to you.

• 39:04Rick Rubin?

  Great, please. Tell me about criminal justice reform.

• 39:10Speaker 00

  It's never been successful anywhere. You know, since the dawn of time, and you can go back, you know, forget hundreds of years, thousands of years, every society, pretty much, has a minority population that has been incarcerated at a larger extent.

• 39:29Speaker 00

  And if that's the case, you got to ask yourself, isn't the society using the weapon of the justice system in a negative way? Next thing you have to realize is that the law works backwards. So you don't get to go, okay, what do we want the law to be? The law is an imprint, like a geological imprint of what happened before. So a case comes down and says X, Y, Z. The next case can't say something too different. It has to say, well, we're interpreting X, Y, Z to be X, Y, Z, Q. And so it can't evolve that quickly. And because so much of the population has been incarcerated or disenfranchised, the people that are in charge of the legislature, the judiciary, the people on the mountaintop

• 40:11Speaker 00

  are not from the population being as most harmed. So they're not as likely to be speaking to that constituency. They may want to emotively, they may see what I'm describing, but it doesn't, it can't possibly, you know, I say I can get almost so close to the person who's gonna be incarcerated as their own mother, but I can't get as close. Yeah. I'm not their mother. And so, you know, unless the legislature and the judiciary all had someone who had gone through the system falsely accused, how can they ever get to that same point of reflection? Yeah. And so, you know, there have been things done around the edges, but it's still historically based. And so, if you wanna use America as an example, and the original sin of the Constitution,

• 40:56Speaker 00

  and the incarceration of black and brown people in the country, even if we change the laws, a lot of these folks, their great-great-great-grandparents were slaves. And their great-great-grandparents finally got the chance to even go to a school. And their great-grandparents got to go to a school that looked at least a little bit like the schools I got to go to. You know, and so, that obviously ebbs through the entire lineage and affects everything. Their dads may not have been around, their moms may have had to work two jobs, they weren't buying extra flashcards. And so, we just, the kid has a harder time getting a job, he's gonna be more likely to steal a loaf of bread. And so, what to say other than it's a messed up world?

• 41:41Speaker 00

  And until, and until, unless you gave somebody the same opportunity at the start, you could never even it out, you know? And that's, I'm not a socialist, I just, that is the truth. And so, okay, so then what do you do about that? I mean, we have made some reforms, you know, bail reform was something that I fought for. Very, very large prison sentences, other than in the worst crimes, don't make a lot of sense. People are different at thirty than they are at thirteen. And in most societies, you don't have forty, fifty, sixty-year sentences for drugs, or, you know, childhood burglaries and things like this. If a kid is picked up in the suburbs in some state in the United States, they get a ticket and they go home. They call that a burglary in other parts of the country.

• 42:26Speaker 00

  And depending on the color of your skin, you go away for ten years. So. Another long and complicated topic that has gone on for hundreds and thousands of years.

• 42:35Rick Rubin?

  How is the system different in different parts of the world? Do you know?

• 42:39Speaker 00

  I mean, I know I'm not an expert per se. In some ways, they're similar. In some ways, not every country has jury trials. Right? Most westernized or civilized societies have shorter jail sentences. The United States incarcerates a higher proportion of people, basically by any metric, than any country in the history of the universe. And then there are parts that are the same. The facts are the facts. The laws, frankly, tend to be somewhat uniform. Right? You're not allowed to do things to other people you wouldn't want them to do to you. And again, they're similar from the way I started, which is that we often pick on the minority. Right? And we pick on the person that can't defend themselves. So when you say that even watching, at some level, the cases I've handled or whatnot, the system doesn't seem fair.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  Imagine the person that doesn't even have a legal team effectively. So it's a complicated, messed up part of our world and a sad part of our world.

• 43:37Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the first time you met Elon. First meeting.

• 43:42Speaker 00

  I was told he had considered calling me into a meeting on a couple of cases that they had, that he had been told that there was a kid in New York that, you know, liked to try cases and was okay at it. And I would hear, oh, he was gonna call me in, and then he didn't, or who the hell knows what happens. And eventually, he called me to San Francisco. I went, checked into my hotel, went to Tesla factory. He kept me waiting for nine hours or some ridiculous amount of time. I mean, it was not four hours, I'll tell you that much. And eventually, he came out and he sort of said, "I have got to go to L.A." Just get in the car, basically. And we flew from San Francisco to L.A. And the punchline of the story, I guess, is not that he kept me waiting for so long or that I was such a kid, but that my stuff was in the San Francisco hotel room.

• 44:27Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 44:28Speaker 00

  That's what happened.

• 44:28Rick Rubin?

  And what did you make of the meeting? Was it interesting?

• 44:32Speaker 00

  It's very interesting. I find meeting pretty much all people that are very unique interesting. You know, and there are only so many people that are effectively one of one.

• 44:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  And if you if you have a chance to meet those people, like them, love them, I know people are polarizing, especially when they're one of one. But, you know, whether it's listening to Paul Simon in a concert, or it's watching somebody that, you know, you say yourself, is there ever going to be another? And that makes it interesting in its own right.

• 45:07Rick Rubin?

  Does every case come down to a simple principle everyone can understand?

• 45:14Speaker 00

  I think so, but in order to pull off the ultimate ability to see that, you have to get a lot of other things done along the way.

• 45:25Rick Rubin?

  To get to that point of clarity is a lot of work.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it could be two or three points of clarity that you need to layer upon oneself to reach the ultimate conclusion. Not every accident is a horrific criminal accident. Not every bad person did something bad in that moment. And the truth ultimately is X. But if you don't get past one and two,

• 45:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  the blinders and the fog is so great, no one can ever see the third point.

• 45:54Rick Rubin?

  That's interesting, the idea that this guy's maybe done bad things in their lives, but he didn't do this.

• 46:00Speaker 00

  That's a lot of the people I've represented go into a trial very unpopular.

• 46:07Rick Rubin?

  Wild. Is the law static, or does it change?

• 46:11Speaker 00

  It changes, but it moves slow. It's glacial. It relies upon what happened yesterday, and very rarely are there pronouncements that change it in wholesale ways.

• 46:20Rick Rubin?

  If a case is controversial, is it negative to you, or it doesn't matter?

• 46:25Speaker 00

  That is a question that people would have differing views on. For you? Well, it doesn't become negative for me. Meaning if I didn't feel principled and comfortable doing what I was doing, I would do it. But boy, is it complicated because if everybody goes in thinking, wow, what a horrible thing. And if the person's even accused of that, they're a horrible person. And what kind of monster would be their lawyer? You know, you're talking in terms of a complicated deck to start things with. But I like to think that because I believe that I've had a principled career, if I do take on a case that is extra controversial, I'm hoping that the reasonable person, at least the sophisticated reasonable person sees it and says, there's a reason he's taking this on. Yeah.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  He sees something in this case that makes him think that he has to get this truth out or he has to fight against whatever's wrong with the system. Mm hmm. And as long as I have a breath, you know, I just need a little bit of space to operate. But listen, a lot of these cases can start between the anxious judiciary, the opponent who has unlimited resources and has spent six months working up to the moment of trying to kill you and the client. Complicated clients, complicated subject matter. You can start, you know, six touchdowns behind and the first, you know, two quarters of the game, you know, wear your pads and you wouldn't want to watch it live. Wow. Has a client ever let you down?

• 47:53Speaker 00

  Not unforgivably. You know, I try to get them to listen. You try to get them to not repeat mistakes. Try to get them to do the right thing. But, you know, some have tried to put me in positions I wasn't comfortable in. Yeah. I mean, and I'm not let down because I didn't do it. And I don't, I don't sit in judgment of people like that. Meaning I, I see them for what they are, which is complicated and flawed. And they made mistake in that moment and they shouldn't have done that. But I'm not stewing or unforgiving of any of them. Have you ever let a client down? You'd have to ask them. I mean, I'm taking very few cases. I have been for quite some

• 48:34Speaker 00

  time taking a very small percentage of cases that one could take if you had unlimited time.

• 48:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  So 25 people call in a three day period, which is not an unusual situation, you know, and I'm talking real substantive, person knows one person in common with me. I take one out of 25, 24, and then there's other people who, they may not see it the way I see it, but wanted to push an envelope in a way or present in a way that I just don't have enough time. I don't have enough, I don't have enough will. I don't have enough fight in me to take on every fight on the earth.

• 49:06Rick Rubin?

  Would you ever recommend something specific based on something you see that you don't want to do, but you feel like this other guy would be the right person to do this?

• 49:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I refer, yeah, I send cases all the time to people, right? The way I go at these situations is, is so intense that you can't do it. It's like some glow that every time I use it, it burns off.

• 49:25Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it's limited resources. There's only so much time.

• 49:28Speaker 00

  It's only so much time, but it's also like, I don't know how that zone that I'm talking about, I don't know how many times I can get there in my lifetime.

• 49:38Rick Rubin?

  I understand. What is a plea deal?

• 49:42Speaker 00

  It's a negotiated less than what they were going to get if they lost the trial, and worse than they would get if they never, if this situation ever came about. So, you know, you were going to get five months after trial, you can have one month. It's a risk adjusted bargain.

• 49:58Rick Rubin?

  How did it come about?

• 50:01Speaker 00

  I mean, in some level, it's, it's natural to bargain in this way. In some ways, it creates the wrong incentives on the system, because the truth will come out at a trial. The truth doesn't come out in a plea agreement.

• 50:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 50:10Speaker 00

  So if, if there's too many cases on the docket, they start playing them out and playing them out. And, and a lawyer who has too many cases, or not enough inclination to fight, is going to tell their client to take a lot of pleas. And, you know, that then becomes complicated because sometimes clients should take deals. But it's hard to hear that. It's hard to hear that because it's hard to, to admit to wrongdoing in the first place. It's hard to hear that because you know that we live in a system where if you take a deal, that other person has more time back because they don't have to have the trial. So it's a necessary part of the system, but it has become too ever-present, and if it monopolizes the system, it's not a real justice system. It's a system of pleas.

• 50:53Rick Rubin?

  Do you have any opinions on high-profile trials that you weren't part of? Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, Harvey Weinstein, OJ. What's it like watching a public trial, knowing what you know?

• 51:08Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I try to not have opinions on the ultimate reality of what happened because I don't know enough. And I'm trying to tell everybody my entire life. In fact, it's the one time somebody will hear me pipe up a little bit at a dinner party about anything substantive is when I want to remind everybody, you don't know what happened. You don't jump to conclusions.

• 51:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  So since that's the one time you see me pipe up, I don't really want to be in the position where I'm sitting around going, you know what, that person was guilty, that person was not. Not to be an arrogant prick, but it's usually pretty painful to watch, other than F. Lee Bailey. And the only one of those cases you're talking about that I actually saw any part of, of any substance was OJ, and that was 20 years before, you know, I was a full grown lawyer. So I don't have, you know, much in the way of opinions on them.

• 51:57Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about Tiger King.

• 52:00Speaker 00

  I don't know if you know Eric Good. Do you know Eric?

• 52:01Rick Rubin?

  I do.

• 52:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. I just remember when he was an animal lover first.

• 52:06Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 52:07Speaker 00

  And, you know, he had the turtle ball and he would talk about animals. And so he went at this with a different lens. But I was this prosecutor who prosecuted murder cases that he knew. And so, you know, I might ask him questions about turtle conservancies that I don't know anything about. He would ask me questions about the criminal justice system. So eventually they and Netflix asked me, would I look into it? And the family wanted me to look into it. And so they reached out to me and, you know, I reinvestigated and put it together my way. I'm not going to remember every detail.

• 52:38Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 52:39Speaker 00

  I do remember, though, one of the first things that I did was, there was one anecdote or a part of it, which was that she was outside, she meaning Carol Baskin, in the middle of the night, the night he went missing, effectively. Okay, this is, as I recall, the allegation. And it occurred to me that, that's interesting because there was no debate about it, right? What are the facts that I know for sure? She was out in the middle of the night, the night that he went missing. And so I said, I just remember specifically, this was the first instinct I had, was I called somebody that knew her. For, you know, a decade plus and sort of said, is this the kind of person who went out past midnight?

• 53:20Speaker 00

  And the response was, never, ever, ever. And you know, make of that what you will.

• 53:26Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. You worked with mental illness before becoming a lawyer. How thin-

• 53:32Speaker 00

  I worked with mental illness as well. I am a lawyer.

• 53:34Rick Rubin?

  How thin is the line between what we label normal and what we label mentally ill?

• 53:41Speaker 00

  There is no line. There is no line.

• 53:44Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 53:44Speaker 00

  We're all psychological beings. We are all very complicated. Some of the most successful people that you know are the most tortured. Some of the most stable looking are the most unstable. I think the DSM would say that the way that you can figure out if somebody's personality issues or a disorder or not is whether it has a profound impact on their everyday life. Does everybody that work with them quit? Does everybody that spends a night alone with them leave? Are they unable to function? Can they not hold down a job? Unable to function would be the disorder of the DSM. But ultimately, it's far, far more complicated than that.

• 54:22Speaker 00

  And people's psychology is a continuum far more profound that goes up and down far more than a person's growth and height and weight and physical traits. Far more complicated.

• 54:37Rick Rubin?

  Describe the home you grew up in.

• 54:41Speaker 00

  I grew up in a small house in a suburb of Boston on a cul-de-sac.

• 54:47Rick Rubin?

  Brothers and sisters?

• 54:49Speaker 00

  Yep. Three siblings.

• 54:51Rick Rubin?

  Older, younger?

• 54:52Speaker 00

  All younger. You know, at one point, we shared rooms. Then, you know, we, we kind of made, made me, as I got, became a teenager, my own little, you know, small room. And, you know, we ran around riding bikes and playing with football and causing trouble.

• 55:09Rick Rubin?

  Do you guys still get along?

• 55:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're very close.

• 55:13Rick Rubin?

  Great. What do you believe now that you didn't believe when you were young?

• 55:19Speaker 00

  Depends what young means, but I remember thinking the world wasn't a just place when I was sixteen. Right, and thinking and believing in second chances and thinking people had to fight for other people and everybody deserved a shot. So a lot of that core stuff that I think led to, you know, this chapter of my career. Has been very constant throughout. I was more achievement oriented when I was a younger adult than I am now. At some level, I just don't give a shit. And at some level, I realized there's a cost. And that is definitely a change because I'm not looking, I don't look at things and it's a recent change as a scoreboard.

• 56:01Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. You still want to win though.

• 56:04Speaker 00

  You're damn right I do.

• 56:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Was there something that happened at sixteen that allowed that revelation of fighting for the underdog, let's say?

• 56:15Speaker 00

  I don't know that there was one revelation. I grew up in a liberal home. I grew up in a home with a single mom at that point. I myself would cause trouble and think it's no big deal.

• 56:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 56:31Speaker 00

  You know?

• 56:32Rick Rubin?

  Kids, you were a kid.

• 56:33Speaker 00

  That, well, sure, easy for you and I to say, not everybody looks at it that way.

• 56:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  I remember my mom taking me to the hospital where she worked. I remember seeing kids with every possible disadvantage you could say.

• 56:46Speaker 00

  I remember thinking that it wasn't really fair the way that so and so got X, Y, and Z, this person got nothing. And how could you ever expect that person to end up in the same place?

• 56:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 56:58Speaker 00

  And I just felt that you got to even out the score a little bit.

• 57:02Rick Rubin?

  That sounds like the answer. The fact that your mom worked for she did and you got to have that experience played a big role.

• 57:09Speaker 00

  It definitely played a big role. It's hard to know, right, which of these things was like an imprint then. Right, and my own, like, listen, I wish, I wish people would stand up for me more.

• 57:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 57:20Speaker 00

  Right, and so as I'm growing up and nobody wants to stand up for me, I'm harboring some of that inside going, you know, if somebody ever tried to do that to somebody I'm watching over, good luck.

• 57:32Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 57:32Speaker 00

  You know, I still always.

• 57:36Speaker 00

  Remark, well, when I'm alone, that how much harder I fight for other people than any of these people would ever fight for. You know, maybe that sounds like pity party. It just.

• 57:46Rick Rubin?

  No, it's just your nature.

• 57:47Speaker 00

  It's just my nature. It's just my nature. Where other people be like, well, we'll put up a little resistance, but you know, they come and take them. You know, it was, it was fun while it lasted.

• 57:55Rick Rubin?

  Would you say you have good days and bad days? Are you pretty even keeled?

• 57:59Speaker 00

  Good days and bad days.

• 58:00Rick Rubin?

  How does that impact things? Or does it?

• 58:05Speaker 00

  It's also, you know, a question of when and in continuums in terms of when that question is being reflected. I've definitely gone through periods where the intensity of what I do has weighed on me. The loneliness of what I do has weighed on me. To the degree that, you know, one day people will think I was good at this. Creating loneliness at the top weighs on me. And, you know, whatever little bit of success I have now. You know, too many people asking for too many things. Weighs on you. Creates loneliness.

• 58:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 58:41Speaker 00

  And so, yeah, I mean, that stuff, but you know, you, you you pop back out of it, you know, and you pop back out of it quickly and you just remember. I mean, and I think this is something that comes from age. There's a Kipling poem, if, you know, that nothing is as good or as bad as it may seem in the moment.

• 58:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 58:59Speaker 00

  And boy, is that true about life.

• 59:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 59:00Speaker 00

  Right? That they, what is the point of sweating the small stuff? And so, yeah, you remind yourself of those things. You find, find your purpose, resettle yourself. Realize that the whole fucking thing is probably stupid. And you pop back up and you go fight.

• 59:15Rick Rubin?

  You mentioned F. Lee Bailey earlier. What was it about him that was impressive?

• 59:22Speaker 00

  There's only a couple of lawyers that I've seen that had the ability to really trap a witness on cross-examination. Right? I mean, I don't want to say that anybody, but a good trial lawyer, which is like nothing, nothing to write home about, can take a witness and look at an index card that says, well, you were 18 feet away and the lighting wasn't good. And there was something obstructing your view, or, you know, some My Cousin Vinny cross-examination about that, right?

• 59:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 59:47Speaker 00

  You know. You know, what's that on the window? Is it a silt? You know, whatever that.

• 59:52Rick Rubin?

  I love that movie.

• 59:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I haven't seen it in a long time, but that's not sort of higher level trial work. And I thought at least a couple of things that I saw Bailey do. We're at another point of complexity. And also, like, listen, being a trial lawyer, you have to have a personality. He had a personality. I hear, I hear good, bad, and ugly, but he had a personality. So it makes it, makes it a little bit more interesting.

• 1:00:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. What do you think about most outside of work?

• 1:00:21Speaker 00

  What I'm gonna do next?

• 1:00:21Rick Rubin?

  Meaning work-wise or in general?

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  I think it's a little bit of both.

• 1:00:28Rick Rubin?

  Are all cases different? Or are there common themes or archetypes that you've come to realize over time that they fit in certain categories?

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  All cases are definitely different, but all cases have, have some of the same threads, which is it's, it's always about people. People doing things that upset other people. People fallible. People suffering from their own psychologies and their own mistakes. Those are the bricks in all of them.

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