The guild is maximum lawyers community of legal entrepreneurs who are taking their businesses and lives to the next level. As a guild member, you'll build relationships, be held accountable, and learn strategies specifically designed to get you unstuck and accelerate your plan for growth. Members are also granted exclusive access to masterminds hosted around the country. Our next event is coming up and we're heading to Scottsdale, Arizona. There's something truly magical about the power of these in-person connections where real-time breakthroughs happen. Picture this, you're surrounded by like-minded law firm owners tackling your business and mindset challenges together. The energy is electric, the insights are transformative, and the results are game-changing. Investing in yourself is the best decision you'll ever make. The knowledge, strategies, and breakthroughs you'll gain are priceless assets that will supercharge your practice and propel you forward. Join the guild and secure your ticket to Scottsdale at the best possible price by visiting max law events dot com. Run your law firm the right way. This is the Maximum Lawyer Podcast. Your hosts, Jim Hacking, and Tyson Nutrips, let's partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, I'm Jim Hacking. I'm Tyson Nutrips. What's up, Jimmy? I sat down the other day to do my immigration answer show and I started off by saying welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer Podcast. One of the downsides of having multiple shows is you got to remember which show you're on. That is pretty funny. For the firm podcast that I do, that's essentially for clients, I've done that with Maximum Law. And I don't even do your part. It's one of the same ways. Yeah, you don't even go first. Yeah, exactly. So, I've done that before, I think it's pretty funny. This is the anniversary episode. It's hard to believe. Pretty exciting. 2016. Eight years. It's absolutely crazy. So I got to tell you this story. You had COVID, so you were unable to come to the mastermind and hopefully you're feeling better. You sound better. I can hear your voices deeper, so hopefully it stays like this. It's still a little scratchy, but it does sound better. Yeah, I'm sure it doesn't feel fantastic, but you sound pretty good. Now, so Charlotte Erman, it was like snack time, so in the breaks, and she kind of pulls me aside. She says, "Do you remember the very first thing you had in St. Louis?" And I said, "Yeah." It was at the law school. She's like, "Yeah, and can you believe what it's grown into?" It's just amazing. And I was like, "Yeah." I was like, "Jim and I talk about that quite a bit. It's pretty cool." And it was funny because she told me how nice the bathrooms were there, and I said, "You know." And I had noticed the same thing, and I go, "Do you know what my favorite part of the bathrooms are?" And I said, "Yes, you know the quality of a bathroom by the quality of the paper towels in the bathroom." But I got a good little chuckle out of that, but it is crazy to think of where we started with just you and me on... Skype. What was that? Skype. Skype's long gone now, I think, but I don't know if they're gone, but no one uses them. But we start on Skype, and now we've got masterminds all over the country. It's crazy. Well, someone came on the immigration answer show this week, and he said, "Jim, I'm an accountant." And I want to tell you that I think that I and everybody else who watches your show have won the lottery. And I'm like, "That's weird. Why do you say that?" He said, "Well, I sat down and did some calculations as an accountant that I am." So you've done 635 episodes of the immigration answer show, each episode is about an hour long. I checked out to see what the lawyer rate for a partner in St. Louis would be, and I think that's like $450 an hour, but you're the founding partner, so we're going to say $500. So $500 times 635 hours of content, plus all your other stuff, let's round it up to $700, and he came up with some crazy number of value to it, and that really made me laugh because he was the first caller of the day, so that was a nice little thing. But yeah, I mean, when you think about a half hour, at least every week for 8 years, that's 4 years worth of hours of content, that's a lot of talk-in. And with you doing the show too, that is a ton of talk-in. No wonder your voice is hoarse. So there's a brief time before I wised up where my office was back-to-back with Amanis, and this was probably 2 or 3 years into maximum lawyer, and she said, "Don't you do any work? All I ever hear you doing is talking on shows in there." That's one of the downsides of bringing Amani into the fold, is that she got to see all the playing around you doing. So now we're far apart, she's upstairs, I'm downstairs, I've got lots of separation. Amani and I are across the office from each other, so I'm on one end, she's on the other end. So I get that you're on completely different areas. How was the mastermind? It was good. It was really good. We were obviously missing you. That part was a bummer, but it was good. Beckett picked amazing places to eat. Always good. Yeah, the dinner just was killer, it really was. The service was really, really good. It was called church and union, and then the rise up guys, they did golf with a few people, and then they also did brunch. I was doing some other things, so I wasn't able to do brunch, but everyone that talked about brunch said it was amazing. The venue was really good, and Paul, so Paul Yokobaita's chipped in for you. I heard amazing things out of that room, and I know one of the nights me, Paul Yokobaita is in Christopher Nicolais, and we were all just kind of hanging out. It was just cool to talk business with those two. It was really neat. My group was great. We had Ryan Weber, which is Tiffany's husband in there, and he's not a lawyer. He works in the firm, but he does more of the marketing stuff. It was just cool to have that different perspective in the room. He's a character. I called him Jeremy a few times. I don't know, in my head I had him stuck as a Jeremy, but it was good. We missed you, obviously, but it was a lot of fun. This is the first time where we had non-guild members in the mastermind. How was that piece of it? It was good. Was that the first time? I thought we'd had it made once before. Maybe in the old days before we came up with that rule, but it's the first time in a long time. We had a couple people that were non-guild members, and they fit right in. It was cool. For example, Ryan, there was Catarina, there was someone else that had come that was interesting. My concern was that people would be less willing to share. I wasn't super afraid of it, but I was a little concerned. I just started mine this time by saying, "Listen, if you're not going to be honest with yourselves and if you're not going to be honest with the group, there's no point you being here." I think everyone took that to heart, and they were very open and honest. Obviously, we can't discuss the details of what happened in there, but a lot of great sharing. They fit right in. I thought it was a pretty good mix. It's funny, with eight years of podcasts and a couple years of masterminds now, I say this with the immigration clients that we have. We have a lot of people at our firm who go through the same process. If you sit back and pay attention, people really go through the process differently. You can really learn a lot about people and specific people by seeing how they handle the process. You and I have certainly seen some weird people show up at that mastermind and act weird. Obviously, we've had moments of real vulnerability, real honesty. We've seen people have a breakdown or a breakthrough, and then really just take off after the mastermind. I think with the podcast, it's the same way. We've had people, you and I have had people on the show where getting them to answer a question is like pulling teeth. We've had other people where literally in the half hour, I asked one question, you asked one question, and the people talked for 15 minutes straight without taking a breath. It's really funny, if you sit back and watch people, how different people are. When people are really closed off, I think this is me guessing a little bit, but I think this is fairly accurate. The people that are typically the most successful tend to be the ones that share the most and are the most open in the hot seats. I'm not talking about in general, I don't know about in general, but on the show and then on the actual hot seat, when they're on the hot seat, they tend to be the most open. Would you agree with that? And vulnerable. Yeah, because if you're not in touch with what's really going on, if you're not in touch with your body and your mindset, if you're really disconnected and disassociated from yourself, I think it's really hard to make the progress. I was listening to Jim Rowan the other day, and he was like, look, if you're having kids, if you have kids, you might want to spend all this time and energy on making them better. But really, if you want to be a great parent, and I would translate this to a great offer motor, then you really got to focus on making yourself better, and then they by definition will see you doing better, and they'll learn on their own how to be better. Yeah, I think about that with employees too, or the employees, so what you'll do is you'll have a law firm owner talking about how their employees, they don't take initiative, they're afraid to do things, like all these like, it makes it seem like the employees are bad, right? And then it's interesting is that you start to pull back the layers, pull back the layers, pull back the layers, and they're not letting the employees do anything. They're not trusting them with doing things, and so the employees don't feel confident. They don't take initiative, they basically are a bad employee because you've created a bad employee, so I think that the parenting thing is appropriate. The thing that I find the most, or my favorite part of a hot seat is the holding back, the holding back, the holding back, okay, now we've hit somewhere, okay, so someone starts to pull a thread, someone starts to pull a thread, and we start to connect the dots, and then they come in with an issue that they want to talk about, and the real issue is hiding beneath, we just got to get to it, so you're about two thirds of the way through the hot seat, you finally figure out what the actual issue is, and then you can spend the rest of the time solving that issue, but I find that those where it's like, oh, wait, everyone in the room goes, oh, okay, that's what the problem is, that's my favorite part of the hot seats. If someone were to ask me what have you and Tyson gained the most by having the podcast, I think that that is actually it, to me it's this thing that we both have now where we can listen, and if we're really listening, it's almost like a little alarm goes off in your ear, it's almost like when they do that sound effect of the record scratching, we'll be talking to someone either in a mastermind or one of our hot seats or even on the podcast, and you'll just hear something in your ear goes, and you just know this is where we pause, this is where we stop, this is where we mine for gold, because this is where the really good stuff is. Yeah, there will be times, I love having Marco Brown in the group, because sometimes, okay, so, and I'm saying this in a joking way, but it's true, joking way, sometimes people come in there and they'll just bullshit us, they just bullshit us, right? And it's the same bullshit from three months ago. Exactly, so, but Marco Brown and I will look at each other like, giving us like, giving each other like, okay, we'll wait, and then we're gonna start, we're gonna start prying on the analysis, yeah, it's because that's, sometimes that's what it takes, and you know, you can give us this fluff all you want, but we're gonna dig in, and so, those moments are fun too, that's why Marco's, because it's funny, because Marco will tack from one side of the room, all tack from the other side of the room, and we'll kind of back and forth until we really get to the issue, because that's what we're doing, we're just solving issues, like that's what it is, so that their, Sandy Van is funny, because Sandy Van's like, she wasn't there at this one, but she, we'll resolve it, oh yeah, we're done with that when let's move on to the next thing, it's like, she's very wants to move on to the next thing, but next to the next thing, she wants to solve as many, many problems as possible, but it's just, yeah, it's fun. I remember too, that early on in our career, one of our first masterminds on the guild in the Facebook group, we did pounds, and somebody got really mad at us, and they didn't like that we were pushing back as hard as we did, and so we had to learn, you know, we had to learn how to back off, and how to couch things, I think we've gotten a lot better at that. Yeah, I think that if we did it now, I think that we would have, it would be different, because it's, and I do wonder if we were that hard, or if we just had not gained their trust together, where we were, we did it as a beta group, we call it a beta group, like we had a group of 12 or 12, it was literally the third one we did. Yeah, so we were new to it, so we may have been really, really harsh, and my memory is that we were, we were not harsh, we were just very direct, yeah, very direct, we didn't pull any punches, some people, some people respond well to that, some people don't, like Russ Nesovich was the very first person, and he's crushing it, you know, and he responds well to that, I think, but not everybody does, and so you're a, we did have to learn early on to kind of back off a little bit, sometimes you can't go straight in, sometimes you have to, I was telling, I think I was starting to Chris Nicholson, and I was talking about how you're effective at, like I want to jump right to the answer, because sometimes I can just see it right away, and I wanted, I want to just want to get to the answer, but you're really good about kind of softening them up a little bit, let's massage this a little bit, because you know, we got to kind of, this was, this isn't one we can go straight to, got to kind of let, because part of it is you got to let them come to the conclusion, right? It's not, it's not, like a jury. Yeah, so you can't, we could tell a lot of people what to do, a lot of it is like they've got to come to that conclusion, otherwise they're not going to do it, and so that's part of it. So, so this is funny because when Imani and I first got married, we read this book called Men are From Mars and Women are From Venus, and basically the book posits that for the most part men like to just cut to the chase, figure out the answer. Now this is very stereotypical, right? Men, and so, and women like to talk something through, they like to look at it from all angles, they like to take their time, and sort of think about it, talk about it. And so, Imani and I realized quickly that she was much more like men on that spectrum, and I was much, at least the way he framed it in the book. So, I think where you rest, and this is true with employees, where you have to come down as curiosity, you don't have to beat someone over the head, you don't have to tell them they're so dumb, like Imani is asking me many times, what was like in therapy today? And I was like, well, we just talked about stuff, and we talked about this, we talked about that, and she's like, I think that if I was a therapist, I'd be a great therapist, because I would just tell people how to solve all their problems, and they wouldn't need to come after, come back to me after like two weeks, so. That's bad for business, Imani, that's not good for business. That's true. So, curiosity, I think, is where you land. So, it's not that I know everything, it's just, like, you might know everything, but you had to, we, you and I, we had to learn it ourselves, and so, you know, it's great, one of the great benefits of being in the guild, and having the podcast is that people are able to learn from our struggles, and our mistakes, and our wins, and our things that we streamlined, and all that stuff. But when it comes to making fundamental change, people are going to have to decide it on their own. Your thing about curiosity is so true. If you think about just your everyday life, think about how much curiosity changes quite a bit, where if you're not curious, if you're closed off, I'll, like, miserable things are, but if you're curious about things, and you're open to learning, like, just think about boredom, just, just ordinary everyday boredom. If you, instead of viewing things as being bored, instead of being curious about your situation, it does change quite a bit. Like, it, that's something that, it's interesting that we're talking about curiosity, because Joe Rogan, he's someone that talks about this all the time. He's like, "I'm just like this curious guy that just asked questions." That's it. And I, and I, I've always liked that mindset. So, recently, I've been, I've been kind of taking that approach about curiosity, like, "Okay, I'm going to, I just want to be curious. I'm just going to ask questions. I'm, I'm not going to talk in this situation. I'm just going to ask questions." And it is interesting how your everyday life kind of changes where there isn't really boredom. Like, boredom doesn't exist. There is not no being agitated about the situation. It's, it's just being curious about the situation. So, curiosity can solve a lot of problems. Well, and don't forget, people are uncomfortable with boredom these days. Like, we're used to being able to ask any question in the world with this phone. We're able to watch any movie we want in seconds. We can read any book. We can get unlimited content. So, the, the act of being bored and the act of sitting still and the act of thinking about things so as to lead to curiosity, it's, it's becoming a lost art. No, I, I completely, I completely agree. Hey, can we switch gears a little bit? All right. So, I'm, I'm, I'm while you're, we're talking, I'm trying to get to a good, good website. I went to ours, I've gone to a few others, but I would, there's no website that allows you to get like to the older episodes really quickly. So, I've got a Spotify. Spotify does. Oh, Spotify does. Okay. So, I mean, on the phone at least. Okay. Well, what I'm doing is I'm kind of going through all the episodes. Yeah. Because I just want to kind of go some, some of the older ones and just kind of reminisce a little bit. This is the anniversary episode after all. So, right now, so I'm in, I'm in November of 2021. Let's see. Let's look at delegate your way to freedom with Brett Tremblay. That was an interesting one. That was a good one. So, the, what we did one in November of 2021, the six things we know to be true with Jim and Tyson and it's, we have the explicit, explicit thing on there. So, we need to recuss him. That's right. Do you remember any of the six things we know to be true? Um, no, but probably, probably the people are being too scared and they're too slow. That's, yeah. So, I'm looking at, I'm like, I'm not done in episode one and it looks like, huh, do you know who our first guest ever was? Uh, I think I do. Um, was it Jill Hewlett? No. Oh, interesting. Um, oh, actually, no, actually it was. You're right. She was episode 16. I was thinking our first lawyer guest. First, and I'll give you a hint. It's not John Fisher. I thought it was. No, no. I, I knew it wasn't John Fisher. Because what, I remember though, I, we wanted to work our way up to John Fisher. That's what we wanted to do. Nice. Yeah. So, I think I do know this. I just, um, you'd be surprised. I, I, I'm not, I don't think it was this, but I'm going to say Bernard Nomburg. It was Mike Campbell. Oh, I am surprised by that. I didn't know that. We had Lee Rosen, episode 22. Lee Rosie came on. Yeah. I was surprised. That was one of those guests we got early on that I was surprised by the way. Oh, we got Lee Rosen. Um, I, I liked that episode. Lee Rosen is a smart guy. We had Randall Ryder and then Seth Price and then John Fisher. So John was episode 25. So Randall Ryder, that was, that was interesting because I, um, I feel like that was a good episode. He's a, he's an author, right? Yeah. He was like our first, like outside person who we didn't really know other than Lee Rosen, I guess. I, I thought that I, I don't remember. What was the title of that episode or was it, did we just go by names back then? Um, the bad clients you don't take will be the best money you never made. Oh, that's a great time. Yeah, that's, that's, um, you know, this one, my, my favorite, we talk about this many times is Google search roulette where we, we got on, we, we got on, oh my God, we got on Google. We typed in a practice area in a city and we came across some website that looked like it was built, uh, on Netscape navigators. And that was my mere chance though. Like they think about it. That was, that was just by chance. That was you picking a city and me a practice area or vice versa and finding that, that, that website. I, I wish, we, you know, we need to do it. We need to pull up. What, what episode is that? That's, um, 29. So we need to, we need to at some point pull that up and see if that website still exists. Cause that would be awesome if it does. Especially if it was the same. Yes. Uh, do you remember the city or the practice area? It was California. I think it was probably a state planning. We would always default to the state planning back then. Yeah, that was, so, you know, we need to do that sometime. We need to figure that out. I don't think we have time to do it today, but that would be an interesting. I'm going, oh, you know what? This was one. Okay, so you'll remember this one. January 4th of 2022, John Jans marketing legend. I, that was one. It, that was a, I had wanted to interview John Jans for a long time. Uh, just, he's like one of those Mount Rushmore types when it comes to OG marketing. Now, yeah, he's not a big name now, but I just think he's getting a little bit older. Lots of good stuff. Lots of good stuff. We had, Gary Burger, then Craig Goldenfarb, Jason Osterly, Joey Vitaly, Jill Nelson. I don't know who that is. And then the, the episode that was the number one episode for most of maximum lawyer. Do you remember who's it was? Yes, it was Will Norman. Yes, Will Normans. I remember recording that I was at my son, but so that this was April of 2017. I was at one of my kids soccer or softball practices. It was about sunset and I recorded it on my phone while we were talking. I remember we recorded it at night. It went long. We went for an hour because we actually broke that up the first episode's 45 minutes and the second episode's 27 minutes. That's crazy that we went that long. We never, that's like one time ever we've done that. Yeah, that was, that was, we did it twice. There's the guy. I won't let you know who it is. Oh, yeah. They talked. He talked. We were, if I remember correctly, you and I asked one question each on the first part of it. It was so quick. So October 18, 2018, Paul Yokobitis, it was literally day one for his law firm. That was fun. So he and I talked a little bit about that last week or during the week about that and I asked him if he thought he'd have the growth that he's had. It's interesting. He didn't think he'd have the growth that he had so quickly, but he was confident in itself and I think that's the way I think that's the way to do it. So for our one-year anniversary, the listeners took over the show and they gave one big tip on marketing or running their own law firm. So we had Dan Ryan, Doug Biggs, Chris Finney, Gary Burger, Joey Vitaly, John Fisher, Joanne Holmes, Larry Weinstein, Matt Jett, Matt Villanello, and Bertrand. Remember Bertrand from Watsonburg? Yeah, Bertrand. I wonder what Bertrand's up to. That's crazy. It is crazy. So it's funny because I'm scrolling. I'm still back only back to 2018. That's how many episodes there are. So Kelsey was episode 20, 77. Ryan Locke, 76. Chris, it was funny. And I apologize to the people that I don't remember you, but Chris Homer, I don't remember who that is. He was with that. He's a good dude. He's with that agency. It's an SEO agency out of Cincinnati. He's a good dude. Yes, I know who you're talking about. Sorry. I just didn't remember Chris's last name. So there was one, Jason Corner. He's a guy. He's a buddy of mine saying I actually really didn't enjoy that episode. He's a nice guy and we talked a little bit about business. I think that was the first time I'd ever really talked about business with him. He's a good dude. There were a lot of people in here we met through Mitch Jackson, Alicia, Nicole. I think that's how I met Morris. Bill Ellis is a guy. He's a marketing, you're a branding guy in St. Louis. I think I met him through B&I. He's also a Wayne Pollock, really interesting business model. I think Wayne, he's still doing it. And he does, is it co-po marketing or co-po? No, not marketing. Yeah, he does like PR for beer firms and like the ABA kind of. Michael Liner, he's got a machine going. He's got a Cleveland. We have Bob Berg on. That was good. Yeah, Bob Berg was fantastic. We've had him on a couple times now. Really good episode. It's William Eadie, episode 61, "The Ten Things Lawyers Should Say No To." I want to go back and listen to that one. That's good. All right, I'll stop scrolling. Before we start to wrap up, any takeaways from the years, it's crazy to think that we've been going since 2016. Well, how old is Hudson? Hudson is eight years old. So Hudson was born in June of 2016. So then we started the podcast in July. Holy crap, I had not thought about that. So he is, yeah. So the whole time that he has been alive, this podcast has been going, that's... Yeah, pretty much. Wow, I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, and I mean, thinking about, okay, so your kids, like, just think about how not all the pictures. So 2016, yeah, so 2016, my oldest was 14. Now he's living in San Diego. And then, so noor, she would have been what, five? Seven. So seven years old. So it's just like they were tiny. They were all just a little tiny. Emma was a baby. Hudson was a brand new baby. Jackson in 2016 would have been five. How about your firm? How big was your firm in 2016? In 2016, let's see. I had at the time, it was Angie and Kelsey, I think. So it was the three of us. So quite a bit different. Yeah, I think it was, I think it was Marwan, Adele, and I, and I think there were three of us. And I think, I think we were cruising towards a million dollars, if I had to guess. Maybe, maybe, maybe less. Let's see back, 2010. 2012, I was broke. 2016 would be, so then 2020. Yeah, I would say, yeah, we were probably close to a million by then. Interesting. So back, I think in 2016, I was probably around 300, 350 right around there. Yeah, quite a bit different than than today. Today, it's interesting to think, it's cool. Here's what's great. You and I are going to be able to go back. We have all this documented, right? So we'll be able to go back from the very beginning and look and see just the how things have progressed. And I think that that is the greatest gift. One of the greatest gifts for Max and Laura, maybe the greatest gift is that our kids can take all of this and listen to it. And we will live forever for them. And I think that's, yeah, on Apple, as long as we do it, well, we'll have to make sure we keep the, we used to keep it all in a Google drive or something, but now we don't, we don't have all that. And that was just neat. Any final words? I'll just say for the record, you got those noise canceling headphones, but I've heard every car that went by during the podcast. So that's the other noise cancellation didn't work, I guess. All right, let's wrap things up for all of you that have not given us a review and you've been listening for this long. Listen, we've been doing it since 2016. This is, this is my, my plea to you that if you, will you please give us a five star review? We would really, really appreciate it. The, we have put a lot of work into this. This has been a lot of, I won't say bloods, wouldn't use, but a lot of work, a lot of passion gone into this. So it would be helpful. And I'm really pissed off that we, someone gave, a couple of people gave us one star reviews without leaving a comment. And so it dropped us to 4.9. So to those people, they can kiss my ass. But for the rest, yeah, for the rest of you, I would love it if you'd give us a five star review. It really would mean a lot. All right, I'm going to skip the rest of the stuff and just jump right into the, the tip and hack. So Jimmy, what's your hack of the week? So I picked up a book that I didn't think had anything to do with running a business. My, one of my heroes is a guy named Marty Baron. Do you know who that is? You probably have never heard of him. No. So Marty Baron was the editor in chief of the Boston Globe when they broke the story of the Catholic sex abuse scandal in Boston. And there's a movie called Spotlight, which is great. It tells the whole story. It actually won Best Picture. And in the movie, it's played by Liv Schreiber. Well, Marty Baron was the editor in chief who sort of bucked the church and went ahead and published the story. And, and for that, I'll always be grateful. But he also then left to go to the Washington Post. And he was at the Washington Post before Jeff Bezos bought it. He was there when they decided to publish the Edward Snowden stuff. And then he was there during all the fighting with Trump during the first president. So it's his new book. And I'm reading it just more for the historical stuff. But Jeff Bezos just bought the paper. And, you know, it's interesting because newspapers obviously are a legacy media form that was right for disruption. Marty Baron lived through the effects of the disruption at the Boston Globe and the Miami Herald before that. And then of course at the Washington Post. So the chapter where Bezos comes in and talks about how he's going to change the business model from being advertising focused to low subscription costs, high number of subscribers. The chapter on his thinking and the way he does it, it's worth reading the book just for that. You could stop after paragraph after chapter two. But just seeing how Jeff Bezos's mind works and how he's going to take this legacy thing, I think it will it'll pique your interest on ways that you can be disruptive in what we're doing as law firm owners. I've been fascinated by the Jeff Bezos purchase of WAPO. I really have. And I know it takes time, but he's owned it for a few years now and it has not been doing well. So it kind of reminds me and I'm not saying he's not going to turn it around. But because his mind does work a certain way that ours just doesn't. All right. But it almost reminds me though of when a a billionaire comes in and buys a football team and says, oh, I'm going to turn this thing around and throws a bunch of money at it. And the team sucks. Like the thing about the Washington Redskins, which is now though, what is it? What's the name of it now? Commanders. Commanders, right? It's you had that owner and I think bought it in like, oh, one or around that time and just threw money out, threw money out, threw money at it and they were never successful. I hope that's not what happens with with WAPO because WAPO is a it's a historic paper, right? It is an absolutely. Yep. Yep. So historic paper, that's probably not why he bought it. So he'd have his own media company that he can control to some extent. But either way, I still hope that it does succeed and I am curious. And so I'm I am going to read that because I'm I do want to watch, I've been watching what Bezos is doing and I'm curious to see how things are going to turn out. Well, the funny thing is, so in the in the movie spotlight, Liv Schreiber plays Marty Beren and then Liv Schreiber narrates this book. So it's really because you know, he does the hard knock. So he's got a great voice. So it's really sort of strange to hear the character who played him being the narrator. But when Bezos comes in, the first thing he wants is metrics for everybody, like like reporters were appalled at the idea that they would be measured, like, and he measured it, like, are you contributing to the profit of the newspaper? And he he asked these iconoclastic questions like, our big investigative journalism pieces, the things to go. And he came in, this really drove them all crazy. He said, what can we learn from the Huffington Post and business insider that are these news aggregators and the reporters were all just like, so it really reminded me when I was listening to the blowback from the reporters, it was like listening to like old guard lawyers who say, Oh, yeah, we're we're a profession. We don't really do things like that. That's why I really liked it. So you're the I think what I'm about to say is may surprise you quite a bit. I 100% agree with all those reporters. I think that this is a deeper thing with democracy, like this comes for me comes down to democracy. And the the what we've seen over the last couple decades, I think has a lot to do with the the lack of and yeah, the well, and the lack of investigative journalism. The investigative journalism is what has cracked those major stories in history where if the newspapers are broke, that's that's why it's such a great. If the newspapers are broke, they don't have the money to do that stuff. Yeah, and that's what that's what does make this an incredible dilemma. You're right. Where on one end, you've got these defenders of democracy that can't make money. And on the other end, it's just these fluff pieces that people so for clicks kind of like almost like Buzzfeed that it's not doing well. So that you read it. You read it and tell me what you think. I actually think so he spent $250 million on it, which is chum change for him. So I really think he viewed it as a as a I mean, sure, it was a media play sure it puts in in the in the hot seat in DC. Marty Barron pretty much suggests that Bezos stayed out of editorial type stuff, not like Rupert Murdoch coming into the Wall Street Journal trying to put his thumb on the scale. I really think Jeff Bezos viewed it a little bit as like he said, saving that beacon of democracy and seeing if he could make it work. I hope he does. I'll take it. I'll check it out. I'll let you know to think but that's I think that's this is an interesting part of the conversation. I think this is just that's just off of your hack. And now that we know that my my tip is not gonna sound nearly as cool. Mine is shocker has to do with AI. There's a guy I follow on on X that is it's the samurai and the last last two letters are AI. So samurai, I think it's like a really clever name. So it's the samurai. And the actual handle, though, is samurai printer. It's what it is. This guy is this guy. You gotta put your name on everything. Exactly. We're in samurai, apparently. So he he's I like the names, but he's got he always talks about this thing. He just what a I'll tell him, but called chat LLM. And he talks about it being better than GPT and Claude and Gemini and all that. And I tested it out. What it does, it combines all of those essentially. So it is better because it combines everything. And that's that's at least that's what it looks like it does. But it is a it is a really cool tool. So if if you all are used to using chat GPT and all that on your phone, it's a better version of that because you can it just gives you access to far more. You don't you don't just use chat GPT. You're using you can use all the other services too, which is pretty cool. That's what I got brother. You and I are going to be doing the Saturday morning show for the Guild in 17 minutes. So I'll see you in a little bit. I'll see you in a little bit. Good stuff. Thanks for listening to the maximum lawyer podcast. Stay in contact with your host and to access more content go to maximum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.
