Did Someone Say, Mammoth Lakes? A Conversation with Justice Michael L. Douglas (ret.).
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Good evening. You guys. Welcome back to shars Rebel recess. I am so lucky. You guys are so lucky because we have in the studio today, justice, Michael L Douglas. I told you last week that he was coming and that, you know, we're going to put his bio up on the podcast page so you can know as much as you possibly can. But let me just say that he is the first African American Supreme Court Justice for Nevada, and he served quite a few terms as the Chief Justice. So as I said last week, I know that this is a man that had a lot on this plate. He is very esteemed. He is known throughout the community, and I want him to go ahead and introduce himself, so tell us a little bit about you. Good morning, and thank you for having me.
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Like everyone, I have a journey. My journey started in Los Angeles, California, and I am the oldest son of
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a two parent family. My dad was a high school teacher and junior college coach in Los Angeles. I went to LA City College, went to California State University Long Beach and Hastings College at the law in San Francisco.
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It was a different time for minorities. People like to kind of pat us on the head and send us along.
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Things have changed. I've been in Las Vegas since July of 1982
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having come from the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where I was practicing civil law with a friend of mine, high school and college and law school, yeah, kind of my mentor, but a good friend.
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They wanted to relocate to DC area. I didn't want to go that way. The wife and I said, let's come back west, either into Los Angeles or someplace close to home. So we wound up coming to Las Vegas in July of 1982
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I had been sitting in the law library in Pennsylvania, and I looked at this ad and said, lawyers wanted any bar Nevada legal services. And I looked at the ad and said, Gee, I can do that. Yeah. So I filled out a cover letter, sent off a resume and did a phone interview and got the job over a phone interview. Now mind you, I had been in and out of Las Vegas a couple of times when I lived in Los Angeles, and I wasn't a total stranger to Las Vegas, but I didn't know that much about it.
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I'd been a tourist. I had a cousin who was here in Las Vegas. He had been we grew up together in Los Angeles. He was working for a radio station in Los Angeles. They changed ownerships. There when his job, but he saw a job for a radio engineer in Las Vegas. He got the job, packed up his Volkswagen and moved to Las Vegas, and he was living here. And so as things went and he progressed, we would visit him and and also visit the slot machines for nickels and porters, what we could afford, right? So moving here, I wasn't totally alone, which was really nice to have some company. Yes,
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it
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really worked. It really worked.
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Got here, and I'll say that, had I known as much about Las Vegas as I know now, or after I came, I might not have come. Oh, okay, okay, okay, the bar exam or your license to practice law wasn't that friendly for people of color. The passing was very, very low. They were barely nine or 10 licensed black attorneys in the whole state of Nevada. And mind you, Nevada was barely a million people, so right, still, but it was sad that that was a commentary. And what we also found out, or I found out, and a group of others, the best in the.
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Brightest who grew up in Las Vegas would leave, go to school, someplace else, and not come home, oh no, because of the that glass ceiling that they couldn't break, they couldn't get into things, right? So that was a community I came into
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kind of amazed, but came in
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got a conditional license,
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because you could practice for legal service for two years without a Nevada bar if you had any bar license from any other state right. So I was able to practice a year take my bar exam. I passed it and was working for Nevada legal services doing Poverty Law,
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two years of that,
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kind of got itchy, a little bit.
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Wanted to look for other positions, made some inquiries, and of course, when I walked into offices and they saw my color, it was like, Thank you, but no thank you.
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But a friend of mine and now Ninth Circuit Judge, Johnny Rollinson, first black woman on Nevada Supreme Court. Yes, she was a
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deputy district attorney Civil Division. She I said, Well, I'm interested in going to work for the DAs office. So I'm sitting there, I get a call. Understand, you're interested in working for us? I said, Yes, I am. So based on her recommendation, I got an interview, and from the interview, I had a job offer. I didn't take the job offer the first time because I needed to stay at the Legal Services Office for another year.
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A year later, fortunately, they called me back and said, Would you still like to work for us? I said, Yes, very good. And I came over
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in the civil end of the world the first year I worked in
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family support, which was collecting child support.
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Okay? Now that's a task, collecting child support and also dealing with paternity issues of the paternity of the child. So did that for a year, then went over to the full civil division of the DAs office. They have two sides. They have a criminal division, and they have the Civil Division, right? Everyone knows about the criminal division. Very few people understand the Civil Division. The Civil Division represents county agencies and the clyte Clark County Commission. They are the legal
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Eagle, so to speak, during the commission meetings, advising the commissioners and giving legal advice to the agencies as well as that's one side of the portfolio right. The other side is going to court. You had a full docket of going to court to represent your agencies. So I started with
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Parks and Recs the county Constable,
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tax, things of that nature and I provincially, eventually progressed into social services department, business licensing, which also encompassed the liquor and gaming component for the county,
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and things like
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agreements with cable television, agreements with ambulance service, things of that nature. So like the contracts, the contracts the agreements, letting those things
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worked with one of our special divisions that deal dealt with acquiring property. What is apex, which is now considered North Las Vegas for all the right, the warehouses are but the county acquired that from the federal government and set up the basis of what Apex sits on today that North Las Vegas says we did this. Well, they didn't do it. The county did it. So here we go. There we go, okay, look, look what's happening. We are getting the real deal right here, what happened behind the scenes. And I love that. I love that we get to see what. So I think that most of us are lay people. We don't know that. You know the government, if you will, what we see the judiciary, the law enforcement arm, they need attorneys to represent them in their contracts and their agreements. So it's not just they sign up, they get a job. It's complex. Our ambulatory services are again, the contracts with the sheriff's department, the police department, those things require a legal eye. And given the time that you came in, like you said, tensions were top more high with regards to what we continue to to face.
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Race today, the microaggressions, the racial
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the racial problems, the misunderstandings regarding race,
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I can only imagine what had to happen within you in order to have the fortitude to keep going, to get pushing, keep pushing and get all the way up to the Supreme Court. What did you do to decompress? Because I can't imagine that there were a lot of outlets available to you, because from my understanding, during that era, there were still places where you would feel uncomfortable walking in, even if there wasn't a sign anymore. They said you can't come, you would still feel that energy is what we like to say these days, the energy of the room. How did you deal with it? Well, a couple of things, just a sitting. One is
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at the time I came, the predominant group of black people lived on what is known as traditional West Side. Yeah, and there were a number of people who didn't live on the west side. They lived in other parts of the valley.
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My cousin lived over by Clark High School.
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We came in with a moving truck, looking for a place. Went to some place and said, Okay, we're looking for a house. And they gave us some places. One was out on Sunrise mountain, and
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we went out there, and I said, Gee, the last door we saw was 20 minutes ago. That's too far. Another place was out somewhere West, clean, nice.
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And then we saw two other places, one over by the water district, and then finally, one over by Clark and the middle school over there, off Desert Inn, the one over off the water district. We came. We saw it. We looked at it. We liked it on Charleston, right there, right in that suburbs. And after the man saw my wife and myself, my wife happens to be white,
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he told us it was no longer vacant. Oh, no, it's like, Excuse me, right, hi. So anyway, we obviously didn't get that place, but we saw the other one and we took that place, yeah. And so we were there for about two years, yeah.
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And it was convenient, because Las Vegas was so small. But going back to your question during that time, my first year working, studying for the bar, and
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hanging out with my cousin and the people I work with after hours,
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getting to know each other, listen to music, barbecues, things of that nature. And also during the time I had to study for the bar, because it was once a year, yeah, and if you missed it, you had to wait a whole year. So that was important. So that occupied my time, yeah, and I'm a do it yourselfer, so keeping my own cars running things of that nature,
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I play with little cars. And we had one of we had two cars. One of the cars we got here had no air conditioning kind of important during the summer, yeah, for sure, out here in this Vegas valley. Oh, this, this heat is no joke. And I can only imagine back then what it felt like you'd play a game of parking your car on one side of the building because of the shade, yeah, and then moving it at lunch to be on the other side, if you could. So that was a quick trip, but so the first two years were kind of those things. And as they say, my body was still young and healthy, yeah, so I could play a little tennis with some friends and basketball and things like that. Yeah.
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Fortunate passed the bar the first time through.
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Back to Work legal services before I went to the DAs office. But as I got more comfortable, because we came here with what I called a two year plan, we'd come here two years, if it worked, great. If not, we'd pick up and move right and after two years, like, Gee, this is not bad. It's close enough to home, because my wife and I were the eldest of both of our families, so it allowed us to do things with the families and for the families, but not be in the middle of everyday squabbles.
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So it worked out and being here and working at the time for the county who was the best paying of the government agencies,
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and the pension is like, Gee, this is not too bad. I'm making decent money. I have opportunities, and the cost of living is less than California, right? But it also allowed me to.
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Be close to friends. So I had some friends in California. They had acquired a boat slip, so to speak, and a trailer down in Havasu. Yeah, so Lake Havasu, and we, on occasion, meet them for three or four days down in Havasu and hang out and be on the water and barbecue and drink a little beer and chill out and tell lies to each other
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about what we were doing or wanted to do,
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and but after I passed the bar, I also looked around and said, I want to see if I can find a house, a better house to rent with a swimming pool because I wanted some water, right? Stay cool. And I'm looking in the paper, and I see this ad for sale, house, VA, reposition, VA, repo, any buyer. I wasn't a veteran, okay, but I looked at three, and I found one, and I said, Okay, what do I have to do to make this happen? Yeah, and I'm not a veteran. Well, it's four veteran properties, but you no longer have to be a veteran to acquire these type so we acquired our first home over off of Decatur,
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the area, yeah, over by Desert Inn, and
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had some some minor damage, which I did, did the painting, and, yeah, some other stuff. And it all worked out. So we were there for a couple of years. And
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during that time,
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my daughter, who lived in California with her mother,
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they disagreed, so she wound up coming to live with us her last year high school over at Clark, yes, and changed my world. I got busy. I was coaching Little League on the side. You talk about, how do you relax after Yes, well, spending time with your friends, yes, whether it's watching football games or just hanging out or kind of official barbecues, right? If you got kids, it takes your time too, so juggling those things right?
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All of a sudden, I'm a dad, a full time dad, not a part time dad,
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helping daughter with homework, things of that nature. Clearly, it changes your mindset. Look
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like I told everyone last week, I have six children, okay, ages 10 to 30. So it's quite spread out to marriages. And when I tell you, you're like, you already know, getting involved with all these different little personalities and making sure that the one that's interested in sports gets to the sports, the ones that now interested in computers and coding, gets to coding and shout out to that Microsoft Store in the fashion fashion show mall, they have this huge screen where they sometimes they offer free classes to kids to code.
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So I would bring my youngest over there. When he was about six, he started coding. And so, of course, I feel like less than because in this generation is all about computers. There's AI generative AI, there's creating these structures. And at six, he was creating these worlds online, and I'm just sitting back in ah, like, okay,
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it's a good way, you know, like you said, to dive into something different than what's happening outside in your career or school or whatever it Is that you have to do your responsibilities. Yeah, it's interesting, because at that time in my life, and being a younger person at that time,
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the word stress wasn't something that was in the back of my head. It was like, Okay, how do I make a living, right? How do I do some of the things that I enjoy doing, having fun, yes, and a family life that was kind of it work. Was something that
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it might have been hard at times, and juggling some balls, but it's like, that's what you do, right? To make your life work. Very few of us have everything is just a perfect fit, right? It's usually okay. There's some broken glass here and some broken glass there, but you live through it, you figure out a way to kind of settle back down and go forward again, yes. But as I got more into the career, it took up more time, right? Understanding that in most professions, and I'll call it a profession, a calling, not just a job,
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you have to be driven,
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which means you go past what people think of as normal by.
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Boundaries. It is not nine to five, eight to five, it is from whatever.
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When you take it home, you wake up in the middle of the night, you think of answers and
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as an aside,
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that's how your whole life goes. It's like I had a conversation the other day with my brother. He was working on my sister's car. It wasn't running. We talked briefly, and he told me what, you know, what was going on. And I'm drove into California for a family event Saturday, and it came to me, Oh, you need to check such and such. So I've been trying to get a hold of my brother, did you check this? That's kind of how life works. You have random thoughts at times about things that are problems you're trying to solve. And work is like that. When you're in the calling, you're always trying to solve a problem, right? And I didn't relate to that as much
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earlier, because when I decided to go to law school, a good friend told me, you'll like law school and you'll like law because you like solving puzzles. Okay, and so life is one big puzzle, and depending on your job, if you have the leeway, you're constantly solving puzzles. True, very true. The thing about law that's very instrumental to the question you ask
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law is something that you have an answer for for just a minute,
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and then we like to say, there's another appeal,
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right? I enjoy working on cars as a hobby,
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because fixing a car
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to do it right, there's only one way, right? So you have a problem, you solve the problem, you move on law, you fix a problem
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you thought,
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and then there's something else, right? It's the same thing, right? So that's kind of the difference. But
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like I said, as I went up and my job got more complex. I'm doing opinions to
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people in departments or department heads or county commissioners.
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I'm going to court right? And when you go to court, and I found this when I was in private practice,
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the day before you go to court, you have to rearrange your brain for court. All the other things you're doing have to come to a stop in your mind, even though they don't really to get prepped for the next day. So if I had court on a Monday, that meant the weekend was shortened, Saturday would be catch up on things I'm supposed to be doing that were on the house, or coaching little league or whatever else, right? Sunday was going to breakfast, quiet time enjoying was but then five or six o'clock in the afternoon, it meant all right, it's time to climb back in this other persona. Yes, yes, and play lawyer, right? So I'd have to set out the cases I was going to deal with Monday and arguments I was going to make and make the brain think about those things for Monday morning,
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right? So that just becomes your life. That's like a part of you, like it's, your characteristic, if you will. So as I said, working on cars
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from an early age, I liked music. Didn't play instruments, even though I tried,
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but I liked
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music very much into jazz, because that was in the house and the family, yes, listening to music of my parents, right? And so I always had music on. I'd wake up in the morning and put music on, yes. So listening to it was very important for just relaxing, right? So whether I was working on cards, doing yard work, doing fixing something. I had music on in the background to just let the mind go. Yeah, and
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having been a sports person most of my life, I enjoyed watching sports, and then, like I said, coaching kids and coaching kids was fun, except for the parents, right? Right? That part, because we get overly involved in what's happening on that field. And I don't, I can't even say that I get overly involved because, I guess it's kind of like a nuance balance. I get overly involved because I used to play when i.
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As a kid, and it's like, Oh, I feel like the coach should be saying this and that, you know, the plays should be going like that. But then I also get over involved, because those are my babies. They're out there, and I'm like, Okay, I need to step up. But
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it's tough as a coach. You got kids and they're 14 babies, of 14 different parents, and every parent wants their kid to be number one, right? It's the truth. It's the truth. And like baseball season would be from like January through July, and my wife would be, when is this going to be over? When are you going to have some B time?
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As things got more convoluted. My wife, when I was fortunate enough to be where people said you ought to become a judge and things like that. And finally, I was got an appointment then Governor Miller, who had been also my boss in the DAs office, the big boss,
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replacing the late Dale guy.
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Life got more complicated. Yeah, you were dealing with a whole lot of work
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that takes a lot of time to prepare for if you're going to do it right, yes, and then, oh, by the way, it's an elected position, you have to campaign. So during those periods,
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you're going to luncheons, you're going to breakfasts, you're going to things after work, right? Whether you plan to or not. It really cuts up your habits. Yeah? It makes it harder to do some of the things that you like, yeah? And, oh, by the way, you have that job, right? And if you are some parts of your job in the criminal aspect you're sentencing people or putting people on probation. Like to say it was easy to put people in jail, but it was hard to decide who was on probation, right, because you didn't want them to hurt people in the community they lived in in many cases, right? But it would get tough. The calls would get tough, the stuff that you had to listen to
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people don't understand. It was easier to listen to a case about a murder because the victim was dead and didn't speak right, opposed to a child or a woman's sexual assault, because they were alive and testified right, but hear the pain, right? And they have to live with it,
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just to cool out, to space out, to enjoy stuff. When I was a younger man in college, I worked for the YMCA in Los Angeles, took a lot of kids to the mountains, organized camps with kids under 12
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kind of dis organized trip, travel camps to kids in junior high and high school up to the Mammoth Lakes area, yes. So I enjoyed the beauty and the serenity and just the nothingness. I was alone. I was free, right? You could take your moment. So that was one of the ways just to get away and then as reverting back to music and cars and friends, right? So it's important to have a tribe, if you will, a tribe and not forgetting who you are, yeah, not necessarily what you've become, but who you are. They're two different people. Okay, yeah, don't get fall in love with this other person that's supposedly all this stuff. Remember what got you here, right? And don't you got to hold on to some of your old friends who will tell you and call you Yes, what you are, right, right? They know you. They're close enough to tell you things that other people won't tell you, right, right, right. You know what? I am so glad that you came on, and I want to have you back again, because you have all the nuggets. And you know, I hope you guys heard that. I hope you got it that you need to be purposeful and intentional about your life. You need to know how you're going to move in that life, but at the same time, you have to know you well enough to know how you're going to breathe. Show us some support. Listen to this podcast. Share it. I am glad to have had justice Douglas here. Thank you for stopping by Justice, Douglas, thank you for having me. You
Transcribed by https://otter.ai