It’s our pleasure to have a woman of many hats, we have Elena Saris on the podcast for this week’s episode.
Elena has made a name for herself as a public Defence Lawyer in Los Angeles over the last 30 years in and out of the courts. Her experiences in real life have translated to television where she’s acted as a consultant for crime series on major television networks. If that’s not impressive enough Elena has become a force in the e-commerce world via Shopify (after a brief stint as a comic).
We discuss ideas for prison reform in the U.S. based on Elena’s firsthand experience dealing with hundreds of clients over the years and the pressing issues in the criminal justice system today.
Date: September 1, 2020
Episode: 18
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Elena Saris, a Shopify Expert and a Public Defense Lawyer in
Los Angeles, California.
Subtitle: “Tomorrow is not guaranteed; if it is your passion, Do it!”
Final Show Link: https://iknowthisguy.com/episodes/ep-18-elena-saris-i-know-this-guy-podcast/
Norman Farrar introduces Elena Saris, a Shopify Expert and a Public Defense Lawyer in Los Angeles, California. Elena’s experiences in real life have translated to television where she acted as legal consultant for crime series on major television networks. She became a force in the e-commerce world via Shopify.
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Hayden 0:00
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Elena 0:41
I had one client I mean, you just wrote. I met him when he was 20. He’s about to turn 28, the last letter he wrote, he goes , I have to tell you I never thought I’d call an old white lady, my friends. Right? deep down in there. There’s a compliment. Okay.
Norman 1:06
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of I Know This Guy, the podcast where we dive deep into the lives of some of the most interesting people I know. Before we get started, please like and subscribe to I Know This Guy wherever you get your podcasts. by the way, like kids want me to say something about ringing a bell. What the hell’s a bell?
Hayden 1:40
Tell the folks at home what they need to know.
Norman 1:43
Okay, well, I’ll try to do that. Anyways, Hayden, I have a real special guest today. Her name is Elena Sarris, and she’s a public defender. She’s a stand up comedian and she’s a very successful entrepreneur. So anyways, the whole podcast will make you laugh a little bit, and it’ll probably bring a few tears to your eyes.
Hayden 2:11
There’s nothing I love more than a good cry laugh.
Norman 2:14
Yeah, you’re very good at cry laughing.
Hayden 2:15
I am, just before the show.
Norman 2:19
Oh, was it something I said?
Hayden 2:21
It’s always something you said.
Norman 2:25
Alright, let’s get to this. My favorite lady, Elena. How are you?
Elena 2:31
I’m well, I just got to go to the hairdresser before I saw you last. So I’m happy. I just don’t know. It just feels like light and breezy and I feel like I don’t look older and I just, I don’t know. It’s like a little bit of normalcy.
Norman 2:46
I can’t wait to get into this because you’re such an amazing lady. I want you to tell us a little bit about yourself and then let’s get into his backstory.
Elena 2:56
Okay, I grew up in Pasadena, California, where I still live now. I did move out to Chicago for college and realized that my blood and body were not made for a zero degree temperature. So I hightailed it back and I just, I can’t imagine living anywhere else but I’m going to explore some now that I’ve got a little more freedom going on and I just love the weather. I grew up on “the wrong side of the tracks” in Pasadena. There were six of us in a two bedroom house. I shared a room with my folks until I was 13, that was awkward. My sister and I had like the sitting room of their room, which was sort of like this brick cold thing. Somebody there was like a detached garage and then they attached the garage to the house to give this like a sort of poor man’s sitting room and that became the my sister my bedroom and there was no door between our rooms, but we had a pool, oddly enough. So we were, like solidly, upper lower class slash lower middle class, which would have been fine, except for my wonderful mother was very big on education and found a very cutting edge school and the cutting edge school was called Carton at the time Carton into the Foothills and it didn’t believe in homework and it had a completely different way of teaching. We read Shakespeare in the fifth grade. We were fluent in French by the sixth grade, we were not treated as kids, as little babies. We were expected to do really high level things and it was very weak in the science department. I will say science and math are probably not their strong suits. But in terms of everything else, we took the PSAT and we actually as a class of like six or seven people ranked in California, like we were in the top five percentile or top 10 percentile as sixth graders. So it was one room and it had all the grades in one room like Little House on the Prairie. I mean, it was just bizarre in the back of a church. It was somewhat religious, but not terribly religious. I mean, looking back like the plays were, , Christmasy themed, but, and we said prayers, but it wasn’t overly I don’t wanna say overly religious, but what I mean, it was it was part of the curriculum, but we didn’t, mostly in songs and kids stuff, right. But I say that to say when we got out of that the big private schools in the community offered scholarships. It was like everybody wanted one of those. One of those, like, we were some science experiment and I and I was thrust into this world of incredibly ridiculously wealthy people. I mean, not just not just wealthy, like, some Dubai person had their Prince, their daughter, the princess in the fourth grade, and the President of Coca Cola, his daughter was there and the founder of Trader Joe’s daughter was there. I mean, just like people that had real access to things that I had only seen on TV, I would sit in the cul de sac, where the cars would come and drop people off so that we could see the DeLorean doors open. I mean, just the silliest things that the kids took for granted that I just thought were so Amazing, even the uniforms, just being able to afford the uniforms was a real stretch for my family. So it was an interesting experience about have and have not and I think it affected me in two ways. One badly because I didn’t think a lot of the parents were particularly nice. The ones that I met and they weren’t the ones I just listed. Okay, just FYI. I mean, they didn’t treat people well and I thought that’s what being rich meant and so I noticed an arrogance about them, even if they had inherited their money or inherited their business. I noticed that the way they looked down on my family, like I was invited over but like, I just certain things they said like it was our faults that we weren’t. I don’t know, I just noticed a divide that was very bad. The good thing that I noticed was that this was possible that there were a couple people who that generation were the ones that made the money and that was interesting to me like oh, yeah, we can do this. , like it’s a possibility, but it never made me want to make a whole lot of money, it made me want to help the underdog. It made me want to speak up for the downtrodden. But I got incredible education out of it. Incredible. College and everything it was, it was probably some of the best schools in the country to be perfectly honest.
Norman 7:15
Just kind of curious. When you went to your friend’s house. Were there any parents that you kind of went, Wow, these guys are awesome.
Elena 7:22
Most of them? No, I mean, some of them gave us jobs, which was nice, but they didn’t treat us well and they thought that, I just never felt. I didn’t have a lot of experience with the parents at their houses. It was mostly what I saw from them at school. We didn’t really have kids over to the house because there wasn’t a lot of room and we weren’t really allowed to spend the night at houses because my parents were like, East Coast, traditional, you have to reciprocate, and we couldn’t reciprocate, because where would we sleep? So it wasn’t until maybe high school that I really got the impression. When I really was able to sort of form my opinions that Oh, yeah, what you guys normally, like you can, I guess it would just be like walking through a restaurant with them and watching them treat certain people differently. That’s what I noticed and it was subtle. It wasn’t like anyone was overtly racist or mean, it was just the subtlety of I’m above you and I thought, wow, that’s what and then eventually, I started to meet the cooler people and then I was like, Oh, yeah, and then as I got older, I started to meet people whose money allowed them to do really good things with people and I think that was a huge turning point. Because prior to that, I think I had these sort of subconscious psychological things like money makes you greedy money, Dad did very well in law school, and I went to become a public defender. I never ever wanted to do anything else. I went to law school to be a public defender. I didn’t even know what it was. I was actually in the top journalism school in the country at Northwestern and I thought I wanted to be a journalist. I used to work all the time, I would deliver for Domino’s Pizza. I was the only female delivery driver in Cook County at the time, Chicago, and that at night, I worked at our business hotel and I was the one said, Why can I work overnight? They wouldn’t let a woman work the overnight shift at the front desk, because, like, really what’s like a 19 year old guy going to do that, a 19 year old girl, we’re not going to defend your hotel for you. We’re the ones checking somebody in, we’re just going to be held up differently. I don’t know. But I met one of the ladies who was staying there and she asked me what I wanted to do. Because well, if you want to do that, why don’t you go to law school? I said, Why would I go to law school? If I kind of want to change the world by telling people stories, and she said you could be a public defender and I’m like, well, I thought about the ACLU and she’s like the ACLU? So they sit around their computer and they write motions all day, you need to be in front of a jury and I didn’t even know what a public defender was and that was it. I signed up for the LSAT the next week, and I got into not my top law school, not my second law school, but the one that gave me a full scholarship and I said, tell me where to park, I will be there which happened to be back in Los Angeles and I wound up going to law school interning for the public defender’s office, they offered me a job and I stayed those two years while I graduated and 25 years after that never wrote a resume in my life, didn’t have to. I was just there and it was great and I got to the top of my field, I mean, as a public defender, I win 75% of my cases, which means you take every case that walks in the door, so if your clients on camera, which by the way I did have, I had a case where my client was accused of shooting someone that part isn’t funny, but had a Hollywood director come and put an X on the street and said, Listen, if you want to get caught by the neighbor’s video camera, the jeans factory down the street and the 711, you must stand precisely here. You can’t stand up six inches to the left or right or you won’t be on all news and of course that’s exactly where he stood when he did the shooting. Ladies and Gentlemen, you’re not gonna believe me or your eyes, right at the moment. But my point is, that’s the kind of cases we get. So to win any is a big deal.
Normanr 11:06
Now I just want to go on the record and say when I sent you over DA, I did mean defense attorney.
Elena 11:14
Oh see DA really means district attorney and I said, no, I fight for the good guy. But I will say that obviously DA’s are very important. I made this conscious decision a long time into my career because everyone was like, why aren’t you on that side putting bad people in jail? I realized it was because of my ability to connect with people and my ability to connect with jurors and to get and I think this is what’s helped me in business as well. Because if you were to say like one of my main strengths in business, Norman, what would you say it would be?
Norman 12:49
Oh, be your networking.
Elena 12:51
There it is. So when I network, what I do is I make a point of number one, never charge them for that. Number two, finding people knowing what people want, and knowing how to connect those two people together. So it’s not just the fact that I throw a really good party, which by the way, I throw the party. It’s connecting people with the people that are coming in because I asked because I say, What is it you want? What is it you need? How can we help? What I found when I was in the criminal justice system was, it really doesn’t take a lot of empathy. It takes a lot of strength to be a prosecutor, to see the inhumanity that people do to one another. Right. But to have the first thought that most people have when they see that in humanity is punishment and the first thought I have is how did this person get this way that they felt compelled to do this and I thought it would be wrong for someone like me with that gift slash curse, to be putting people in jail when I can, like I’ve never had a client that didn’t feel like I loved them, that didn’t feel like I was there for them. But most of my clients I was the first person in their life that cared about them and that to whom they matter, and to this day, some three years after I retired, 10 years after I’ve done cases, I still write to my clients. I mean, I just got a letter from one of my clients in jail yesterday and I write them back every time they write to me, I don’t care how long it’s been, I feel like I showed up for them and I was able to show yours. I did nothing but definitely that defense in the last 10 years and when you do death penalty defense, I mean, by then the odds of someone being completely factually innocent, are not as high because they’ve gone through so many layers of vetting, I did have to the clients that I had, probably that I just 100%, factually innocent. They were devastating cases. But it’s a goal just to get them to not have that. But beyond that, it’s a goal to get them to feel like even if they get life without parole, which is what the guy that was on camera got to sort of change his mindset in the process of making that life livable still, you know what I’m saying? So when you’re able to tell a jury that the person next to you might have done this heinous act, but he really is somebody’s brother, or somebody’s father, or somebody’s sister, and you’re really able to convey that not to say that, I think that’s what made me successful, because when it wasn’t the death penalty, it was all it was like we all know to give someone the benefit of the doubt, you have to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt. But we also know that if someone’s arrested and you walk in the courtroom as a jury, the first thing you say is, what did that guy do? Right? Not exactly to me, you’re presumed innocent, right? I wonder what that guy is, especially if he looks like a Central Casting Hollywood gang member, which I think somehow 90% of my clients look like central casting. So yeah, so I really, that’s what the hardback was the hardest part of leaving my job was. The hardest part was if I leave who’s going to take care of these people,
Norman 14:52
One of the things like when we first met, just what you’re talking about there is just you could tell right away you’re interested and I mean, we ended up just sitting beside each other at dinner and when you were asking questions about what I did, or just wanted to know a bit more, and you really did want to help, that’s one of the things I remember is that you brought it out to me. Okay, who can I connect you with? That’s exactly what you said, Who can I connect you with? We just kind of talked a bit and you were on the phone, waking people up in the middle of the night. Remember that? Oh, you gotta come down. You gotta meet Norm.
Norman 15:33
You really did that.
Elena 15:35
Yeah, that was in fairness, those people were at the conference that I woke up. It wasn’t like they were home sleeping. They were at the conference. They were out in the car, right? Come on with. We’re in Mexico at an all inclusive resort. What are you doing in bed we got networking to do.
Norman 15:51
Exactly. I don’t know what you’d be like, if there was just a real schlump there. You know what I mean by a schlump, just a jerk right. How would you react to that person? Would you have asked them the same questions as you asked me? Would you really try to befriend them and help them along the way?
Elena 16:09
I think it depends. I mean, certainly most of my clients were not nice people when I met them. I mean, they weren’t even nice to me. It’s like, how dumb do you have to be to be mean to the person standing between you in a metal cage for the rest of your life? Right, but it wasn’t dumb. It was just absolutely no social skills, they’ve never had the behavior to model to know how to be. So at an event like that, if someone had been that way, I probably wouldn’t give them the time of day. Right? Because who would I introduce that person to? I have to think about it on that end. I mean, it’s not like I walk up to everybody and meet them and think what kind of transaction I made. It’s just in my nature, to see beyond like, and I also have what I call the client vibe, like my girlfriends used to introduce me to their boyfriends. They’d be like, Hey, I want you to meet this guy. Because after 25 years of dealing with the criminal element, I kind of have a real highly tuned bullshit monitor and I would say, flying by get away, I was pretty much on and so I feel like if someone comes to me, even from a good place, even if they’re kind of tone deaf about how they do it, then I’m going to try and understand them. I read, I think, I don’t know who said this, but it was like, the perfect sort of explanation of it, it’s sometimes being heard and being loved are so similar in how they feel to a person, it’s difficult to tell the difference and so I think if in the environment we were at, it was a networking event, it was that was the goal. I mean, I wouldn’t walk up to somebody in a bar necessarily and say, Hey, who are you? What do you mean, but we were in a professional business environment, and I wanted to know what brought you there? What could we do, and I knew almost everybody at the event, so I was hoping to say, Hey, there’s only three days. Let me hook you up with someone who might help while we’re all here in this mindset, okay and then at work when I was at work, some people just wanted to know the law. It was like that all they wanted and other people just wanted me to visit every week and I had one client. I mean, he just wrote to me. I met him when he was 20 and he is about to turn 28. The last letter he wrote, he goes, I have to tell you I never thought I’d call an old white lady, my friends. Right? Deep down in there, there’s a compliment, okay. But when I first met him, I mean, he didn’t talk to me for eight months, six months, maybe. But I went to see him every week and sometimes he didn’t come out just to test me like she’s still gonna show and then, after our second jury trial, we known each other for five years. Tell me the truth Miss Saris, am I the longest relationship you’ve ever had? But he was making a joke out of his way of saying that to me. So thank you for always doing what you said you were going to do and being where you said you were going to be and that was what was important to him. So that kind of feels that way to me and I think that translates into everything. It doesn’t just make me a good networker, but a lot of people who do networking, they’re not well versed in what people want to need. It’s just throwing everybody in a room and seeing what happens. Right and I try like it when I throw a party in a business setting. I try to invite people like, who can I have in the room for you to meet not just who shows up, right? Like, oh, yeah, I know Norman’s doing, like, for instance, right now if we still had Vegas coming up ASD, and I knew you wanted to do, I have three or four people who teach podcasting who have podcasts. I mean, I know you’re doing it great and your son’s great at this and all but I mean, I would introduce you to somebody with a long term podcast to tell you hey, after three years, this is what happens so that you have that kind of I wouldn’t made that point to bring that person in.
Elena 19:39
You’re kind of a bigwig when it comes to being a defense attorney. You’ve been on tons of magazines. You’ve even been on A&E. It was A&E, wasn’t it?
Elena 19:51
It was 48 hours and I was the cover of one magazine California Lawyer one time okay. Sounds like Dad bragging on me here. But no, I mean, I teach people how to be better lawyers and I and yeah, I’m good at it and it’s funny I’m unabashed about saying that and I think there you need a certain level of arrogance to be a criminal defense defense lawyer and I think a lot of people have the arrogance, but they don’t have to back it up. I don’t think I tried very hard not to carry that into the other aspects of my life. I definitely think I’m just learning in this econ world. I mean, I’m doing seven figures and I still feel like a little kid. Like wait, you want me to get messages by pressing one? Wait, what? Doesn’t work.
Norman 20:38
So we haven’t even touched on the other side and probably people could already tell,
Elena 20:41
Does your son even going to know what this is?
Norman 20:44
Oh, yeah, I had to explain. I asked to play putt putt.
Norman 20:51
Yeah, I remember those days of putt putt, floppy disks. I used to think a hard drive was, you know how they used to have three and a quarter inch discs. Yeah, I thought that was a hard drive because they were hard and they weren’t floppy anymore.
Elena 21:06
I thought it was at the back into the computer. Like I couldn’t believe people were like walk. I was like, I thought that was it. I’m terrible. I didn’t get on Facebook till I started my business.
Norman 21:19
Now you’re dominating it.
Elena 21:22
I’m dominating?
Norman 21:23
You’re not doing bad, right?
Elena 21:25
I’m not doing bad. But I’m doing ads but I still don’t know how to post. I mean, every salon. I mean, I think I went to Africa, I posted pictures of Africa and that was 2015 I haven’t. I don’t know what.
Norman 21:35
Now I want to talk a little bit about the other side of you, which is, people don’t know that you work in comics, which I guess they can probably tell by now. But you were a stand up comedian for a bit were you?
Elena 21:48
Yeah, so it was the weirdest way. I always tell people I got into e-commerce, the normal way going through law school, so I got into comedy by going to law school being a lawyer and then having a severe dental issue.
Elena 22:04
You know the phrase ignore your teeth and they’ll go away.
Elena 22:08
Well, I didn’t really go to the dentist till I was 20 years old. Okay? I was not raised in Appalachia, it’s just the fact I don’t know why it just was and, of course, there were some issues, not a lot of issues, actually, relatively speaking. But when I was 32, I needed to get braces and it was pretty. When you’re 32, and you need to get the braces that you should have had as a 10 year old, things get very complicated. They actually had to split my palate, when you’re 10, your palates are malleable, so it’s no big deal, When you’re 32, it’s a little bit of torture. I mean, you have to put your legs a little key on this thing and anyway, long story is that during the day, I had to wear rubber bands to cut my mouth, I guess. I’m saying because I’ve worked for the county of Los Angeles. They thought what do we do with this person who’s smart but can’t go to jury so they made me a boss. Put me in charge of some of the brand new lawyers were in awe of just being a lawyer, so they didn’t care that they had to listen twice as hard to understand a word I said, but the court was an arraignment court, meaning that it was just people running in and saying guilty or not guilty, and then they moved on to the next court. So it was the first time in at that point, eight or nine years of being a lawyer, where I didn’t have anything to do at night and I just went down to the local community center and took a course on being a comic. I’ve always been interested in it. I always tell jokes and we did the last night of the event where you present and this guy who owned a comedy club was in the house and he said, Hey, I got Thursday nights free. I’d like you to have Thursday nights and I said, what does that mean? You want me to perform on Thursday? He goes no, I want to give you Thursday night. You bring the comics, you do everything and so The Haha cafe in North Hollywood, we had the show called out for laughs for almost two years, I think a year and a half and I brought in a bunch of comics that you’d recognize now that you may not know their names but they had a field specials at the time. You remember the show Last comic? Last Comic Standing was the First reality show about almost all those guys who had been on the stage and I wasn’t, I didn’t have any work, I didn’t have anybody’s life in my hands. It was kind of like, I don’t know what to do with myself, like, all of a sudden, my nights are free, I don’t have to work 12 hours and, and people liked me they liked that I was real. They like that I wasn’t trying to do anything. I didn’t talk, the best comics don’t really have a stick. They just talk right, Jerry signs, I mean, they have a stick in the sense that, you know their kind of their perspective and that’s what comics if you get a perspective and so I sort of caught on to that pretty early and had a great time. It was a blast.
Norman 24:40
So is there anything the average person wouldn’t put two and two together as a lawyer and a comic?
Elena 24:48
Getting up on stage in front of people for sure. That’s pretty obvious. Right? People sometimes when you’re in a comedy club people are some people want to have a good time and other people are predisposed to dislike you, right. Jurors are predisposed to dislike anyone who’s defending anyone who’s done anything really. So my comedy skills helped me in misdemeanor trials like if someone is accused of stealing we could make jokes during the prelim or during the jury selection right? If someone is accused of child molestation and you can’t make jokes during jury selection, right. So I think that’s part of it. I think there’s also a kind of a loneliness factor to it, which is I don’t think most people would think of. You can make an entire room usually of couples and people who come and friends laugh all night and everybody gets to go home with somebody but you, right and everybody gets to go home and talk about how funny you were and repeat the joke to others and you’re by yourself alone, thinking was I funny? Should I have said that? When you’re doing a jury trial, like let’s say, you want it like for me, there was a trial that was intense, incredibly intense and it went through two jurors. One Jury Hum and I actually had to have protection during the trial because the woman that had been killed I was blaming her husband and his brother and the brother was a gang member and so they didn’t take kindly to that and so we won the trial. It was incredible. Even though the DEA, the sheriff’s, and the LAPD said my client’s fingerprints were on the murder weapon, I was able to go to like a fingerprint school and argue that they were wrong and it was crazy. So when I went, I had to be escorted down to the garage to go home and here I had, free disguise, saved his life. He was off to get out of jail and go to his family, and I couldn’t even go upstairs to my colleagues, and celebrate, and I remember thinking, wow, this is great, but who do I call? I mean, you’re on the phone. It was just, and then if you lose, I mean, the absolute loneliest walk in the world is when you’ve lost the case where you think your client is innocent or guilty of something less and the walk from that room to your car and I think Bryan Stevenson said that in the guy who wrote the book Just Mercy that has been out and so if any of you out there, I guess it’s three more days, Just Mercy is a great book about a defense lawyer in the appellate stages who get people who were previously convicted, who are on death row off. So for my last 10 years, it was making sure people didn’t get beyond death. So the pressure I don’t and I and somebody had said this to me years earlier, you don’t realize how much pressure you were under yourself. Like, it just seems normal. Right? Like, we know, what’s the expression, I never knew how drunk that guy was till I saw him sober. Like, you had no idea like, I had no idea when I quit my job the first time and I got up at 10am to go for a walk and I just had the stupidest grin on my face. I mean, most courthouses you can imagine are not in prime real estate areas. So when you go for a walk at lunch in a courthouse, it’s usually urine smelling, homeless people, your clients walk, and here I am in downtown Old Town Pasadena going for a walk at 10am and I’m walking, like, I just won the lottery and it was like, I’m walking. It’s 10am and people are like, yeah, and I’m walking through what? But, I didn’t have anyone, doesn’t have a motion to write. I didn’t have anyone’s parents calling me, is my child going to die? I didn’t have any of that. That took me a full, like six, eight months to sort of fell into and then once I did, and which happened to correspond with when the business replaced my lawyer income with this freedom, in my mind, creativity, because the how might what’s going to happen to this kid versus holy shoot, I just gave up a lot to sell stuff online. How am I going to pay for this? I’ll tell you where my mindset was. I actually moved out of my Swank condo into a 600 square foot, tiny little bungalow. Just so that my rent could be under 1500 dollars so that if in the worst case scenario, everything bomb, I can make it with my pension.
Elena 29:07
I stayed there for two years, even though I could make it. Just to prove, just in my head that that is something I’m struggling with to this day that sense of it could all be taken away tomorrow? No, because when I was a kid, even though I described like some funny things, I mean, we were not poor by poor standards. We were poor by private school standards, private school kids, you see what I’m saying? So I think there’s a lot of people in this country who would have thought I lived very well as a kid and I absolutely did. I don’t, I’m not trying to say we went to bed hungry. But when you’re juxtaposed to this incredible well, it’s felt. Does that make sense? It does and so I think I am still overcoming that sense of lack, even though it’s all in my head, and I work on that every day.
Norman 29:53
Yeah, that shocks me because I know you as being very confident and for you to pull back, I’m gonna go into a smaller place because I don’t know, if get me I don’t know if this is right or wrong, but you didn’t have the confidence that you were going to succeed is that correct?
Elena 30:13
I remember I was talking about, that sometimes people are jerks because they haven’t seen a good behavior model. I hadn’t seen someone my age with no prior experience. I hadn’t seen that model before, I hadn’t seen anyone succeed that looked like me. So I was surrounded by 26 year old kids who grew up with the internet who were succeeding and who had a safety net because a lot of them lived at home where their parents were there with money. My parents had passed long by then. I was sort of the person in the family that my siblings went to when something happened bad and they needed money. So I felt the responsibility there but I didn’t see it model. I’m seeing it model more and more now. Even now, you don’t see a lot of women in the e-commerce space really crushing it. So I think that I mean, yes, I take responsibility for my subconscious Just sort of mindset lack that was a problem then but I also really didn’t believe that it was going to could not necessarily was going to happen was going to happen soon enough, like timeline enough because I hadn’t seen in a woman over 40 doing any of that.
Norman 31:17
How did you get around that?
Elena 31:20
Ssucceeding?
Elena 31:22
Quite frankly. Yeah, I mean, showing myself I could do it and then just doing a lot of work on the mindset, just doing a lot of work on what, falling back on a lot of greed or where I can charge $600 an hour for my skill. That’s a pretty good plan B, right. It’s not like oh, I gotta go back and clean toilets?
Norman 31:44
Yeah. I remember when you said that you were gonna retire.
Norman 31:48
You’re making how much?
Elena 31:51
I mean, imagine knowing what was available online, being successful online. Imagine the lawyers that were my friends going you are crazy, you are on drugs, and I literally told them, hey, just that just so you know, in the next two months, just the next two months that I’m sitting here in front of you, I’m going to make more with those two months together than I did my last year as a lawyer and they would be like, I hate you. That’s usually the first, but I also in fairness to them, I had the responsibility of like major disaster with my family if something happened to one of my brothers or in terms of money, but I don’t have kids, I didn’t have a spouse. I didn’t own them. I mean, there was nothing on my time and I knew that if I did not leave then, I would stay because the way that the county is structured, you retired here and you get 37% of your income. But you stay five more years, you’ll get 45% of your income and now all of a sudden, you’re five years old, wait? Five more years and you can get six and then it’s just like and a lot of my friends have retired and died. I had three. It died within a year of every time and my parents both passed away in their 70s and I’m like, nope, I’m done. I’m just done and it was the best decision I ever made and then I had to get around what I was telling you about earlier, which was the guilt of, and I noticed this with women more, but I know what happens with men, when you have a profession that is your calling and you think how dare you go off on your own, and just to be somebody or just to make money? Like, because one of the ways that we reassured ourselves when we were poor, young, starving lawyers, I don’t know what it was like 47,000 we didn’t make hardly, I mean to say 47,000 depending on where you live is a big deal, but in LA that was nothing. I remember they wanted to go, my college wanted to go for a drink and a beer with $6 and I just remember thinking, I can eat for the weekend or I can buy, I had Top Ramen noodles in it at that point and you’re telling me that this is what you guys do every night and you had three beer like the idea that you would spend $20, $20 could buy you like two things of like Polly girl or whatever the cheap beer two six pack back then you’re gonna do that on three years like it was insane to me. I digress. But it was just that’s how we reassure ourselves. We’re doing God’s work and I truly I said that all the time and I believe that all the time we were doing something that other people, even if they did it for a paycheck, we were doing it because we were true believers, right and so now I’m just going to go make money. I mean, other people did that other people just made money we were saving the world with and it wasn’t until I was able to make my first real big donation or helping someone that I realized, you know what? I can do this another way. But I distinctly remember I was sitting in church and I was just going crazy over this decision, just before retiring and I saw three of my friends like, about 12 rows up? For the podcast, they’re putting this guy and making talking handsome puppets with their hands and this guy starts walking towards me, and I’ve no idea what the heck is going on and he comes over and goes, your friend says you’re trying to you’re in the midst of making this tough decision and I said, Yeah, like, Who is this dude and why are they sending a stranger to me? In church? I mean, church, the service was over, by the way, we weren’t interrupting anything and he says, I just want you to know, I was called to the priesthood and I served for 20 years and then I had a new calling and he goes, and I left and now I’m doing this and it was some amazing thing that I was totally excited about. He does the whole know the genuflect and he says, I just want you to know what it’s called chapter two, and you’re allowed, and he put his hands up like, I’ve been getting this blessing and I thought, like, God shot Yeah, I am like, what? Yeah, like no one said I had this because it’s that in my career, I was so weary, I’m not saying it’s a young person’s game, but to do it at the level, I did it at the trial court, it was a young person’s game and I was done and I didn’t want to be bitter about my job and I didn’t want to be bitter about anything. So stepping out into this, and now, I’m helping other people saying, Look, I know what you thought, you’re a nurse, you imagine being a nurse now and thinking, I gotta get out of here. But Gosh, who’s going to save these people who’s going to do this? In order to be good at your job, you really have to think you’re the best one at it. So it’s a little bit of arrogance to say, if I leave who’s gonna do it? Well, there’s still 750 public defenders in Los Angeles.
Elena 36:43
Sort of a ripple, they barely noticed me but in my head, I was doing it at this level that made me feel like it’s not okay and I will say it took me about a year and a half to get past that and once I was past that, and I realized, look, what I can do with disposable income now. I don’t talk about what I do with my money. But there’s a lot of great sites out there happening right now you can buy like random family groceries every week you can donate computers to schools where kids can’t be online right now that I never could have done when I was a public defender. First off, I wouldn’t have the time to explore that sort of thing and second off, I didn’t really have that kind of disposable income.
Norman 37:24
So let’s get into what you’re doing. Because you’ve gone from the law into e-comm. So how did you get there and what are you doing?
Elena 37:36
So it started out wanting to help people become better lawyers, and I started a video series teaching people how to be better at their job and I was trying to figure out how to market it and someone said take a class on advertising on Facebook and of course I said, what’s Facebook? Then when they showed me Facebook I’m like, it looks like people putting up cat videos and taking pictures of doughnuts like why would I? You could advertise on this? There was a class shout out Don Wilson, Facebook Ads Cracked, and a website called Teespring and you could design your own t-shirt with zero skills, Lord knows I have none and it was the website that had the landing page, the way to take a credit card. You told them how many shirts you thought you’re going to sell, they gave you the price that you were going to pay for it, you sold it for whatever you wanted and it was the wild west of Facebook ads, and I put up a shirt and they sent me a check for $10,000. I still have a picture of it. I’m like, Are you kidding me? Like, I just put up a shirt that had some funny text on it and it made $10,000 and all in that month, those four or five months and was declared 30 grand and I thought well, now I know how to advertise. I’ll advertise my law thing. As I was finishing it up, one of the other people in the group is what do you want to do? I said, well, I’ve got this lawyer thing and he goes, Oh, you’re going to help lawyers get clients and they go, No, I don’t know how to help lawyers get clients. I had plenty of clients. If you can’t afford a lawyer one will be appointed to you. Believe me, I had clients lining up the door. That’s me, right? If you ever hear that on TV, so no, Well, you’re gonna help them charge more and I’m like, Well, no, I got paid and he goes, listen, you can’t do that. I can’t do it because you can’t. You can’t. People won’t buy that to be better. I go, What do you mean, people won’t pay to be better because no, you got it. You got to teach something that helps people get laid, get skinny or get paid. That’s it. Those are the only three things online that people are going to pay for, being better at their job is not one of them and it was sort of a rude awakening and then all of a sudden, this ad pops up on my Facebook feed that says or I think it was email, learn how to sell on Amazon. Sell on Amazon, Amazon sells on Amazon and that was it. That’s what started it.
Norman 39:45
How long ago was it?
Elena 39:47
2014.
Norman 39:49
Wow.
Elena 39:50
Yeah and I had the number two supplement on Amazon for a while, it was a probiotic supplement. I didn’t know what a probiotic supplement it was.That’s what the Wild West was. I had to look that puppy up. But I designed a nice little label like that and a friend of mine and I, we were competing and then in and I think it was ASM and as in for open and for those of you who don’t know, ASM is an amazing selling machine and it’s of course, it’s taught regular folks how to sell on Amazon and all of a sudden, I’m like, not number two, I’m number four, and I’m having a giveaway and I’m having to get away and I’m like, and I saw the writing on the wall, and I’m like, I’m getting out of supplements, and then my friend like, skyrocketed up and I’m like, what do you do, and he does hey, we put in 75 grand and I have to tell you, even now 75 grand is a crazy amount of money. If I ever think $75,000 is not a lot of money, you haven’t had permission to just come over and slap me and he was like, not only was he like they were like number two in the business. I think they got picked up by another company. So it was well worth the investment but that was not the level I was playing at. This was a hobby to me this was like, this is kind of cool. There’s this computer thing and it gives you money and then I got a lot more series about it when I went to China for the first time. I went on this trip with this guy who was unorganized and one thing led to another. A year later, I met a guy from China and he wanted to learn how to sell on Amazon and I wanted to recreate this guy’s trip that was really organized and so we got together and we found a source in Asia and that’s when we were taking people to China to teach them how to find things reasonably priced that they could then sell on Amazon. We did that for about two and a half years, I must have gone six or seven times to China and on my last trip, we brought this fellow along who was not selling on Facebook, but wanted to meet his agent and just didn’t want to travel alone. We found that a lot of people wanted to go to China and didn’t really care what we had to offer. They just wanted to have their hand held because it’s a very foreign country. I mean, most European countries you get by, somebody speaks English, you can look at the words and they make sense to you and not China. As you know, you came with us and he got up on stage, and bless his heart. He wasn’t like a guy that walks in the room and you said, oh, there’s Bill Gates. He went to MIT. I mean, he was a regular guy. We need anyone’s tell us he did $8 million on Shopify and I was like, What? I said, what am I doing? Why am I building Amazon’s list? Customer list? Why am I ? I can certainly learn how to drive traffic. So being the arrogant, Top of the World lawyer who had this early, crazy success on Amazon, I’m like, I don’t need to take a course, I don’t need to talk to anybody. I’ll just put up something and I put up this really cool thing and man, sales were coming in and my ad went crazy. Like, I wasn’t making I could see I wasn’t making like great money, but the ad was viral. Like I made a very funny video for this thing. I thought, well, money is going to come. Facebook just has to learn, and my, like three months in I made $48,000 fam, I’m posting that picture in my group and then I realized that Facebook, I owed them 42 thousand dollars in ad spend, which means I lost $16,000 filling the orders because I really didn’t have any idea what I was doing and then I sort of got my head out of my desk and took a few courses, hired a few people that made me understand Facebook is impulse marketing and even though my ad was viral, it was viral because it was fun, but it wasn’t something people wanted in there and it was a decorative item and what sells on Facebook are things that solve the problem. On some level, it could be a very minor problem, but it solves a problem or just have this wow factor that people can’t, like a talking hamster. It doesn’t really solve a problem. I guess it entertains your kid for a minute but something when I’m just wasn’t, it was Wow. But it was not anything and so that was when I sort of got slapped down and thought, well, I am a child in this business. I wait from here all the way down and I just been set okay beginner’s mind what do I got to do and I just dove in and that Christmas just in the fourth quarter I did three quarters a million dollars with profit with 35% profit which by the way if you’re on doing Facebook ads not as easy to do as it was in 2017 but still you can still do it profits are around for me, I’m not speaking for the world but 20 to 25 now and you’ll go lower on the front end now because the back ends are so much more built out. Email marketing things I had no idea about I did that money not knowing anything about email marketing retargeting, I didn’t know any I just had a product that was really good and so then I started opening other stores and that’s just taken off and I slowly got off of Amazon and now I have a buyer’s list of 50,000 people.
Norman 44:48
Yeah, the lawyer who left to sell on e-omm not knowing how to sell on e-omm. Well actually still using a rotary phone.
Elena 45:00
But, I did. I didn’t know marketing. I didn’t know how I figured out the 10 factors that make something really available to sell on Facebook were coming from my lawyer days. What do I need to tell the jury about this kid to get them to feel sorry for him? I’ll tell you one of the things that was the most effective thing I did as a lawyer is when there was a reason to have my client arrested, but he didn’t do it. In other words, my client is walking with a bicycle in the middle of the night, and there’s somebody three or three blocks away, who flagged down the police saying, somebody stole my bike and the police arrest my client, right? The guy said, Yeah, and he took $12 out of my pocket. My client not only has a bike, but he’s got 10 bucks in his pocket and $2 tacos from the truck around the corner and so there’s not a lot I can do in terms of his back, except for his story was the bike was abandoned and he just happened to have $10 in the two things, but the bike was just abandoned. He just thought it on the side of the thing, and he picked it up, and that was the story, but I made everybody the hero of the story and I made the jury the best here like in other words, I want to live in a world where when someone flags the police down and says my bike was stolen, the police drive around looking for someone with a bike and I want to live in a world when the police see someone with a bike, that they arrest that person with a bike or at least detain him to find out what’s going on. I want to live in a world where if that person is arrested and detained 12 people are reasonable and will listen to this without just jumping to a conclusion. So everybody’s a hero in that story. So you’re selling something that solves a problem. You can’t make them feel guilty for their problem, you just have to empathize with their pain and then make them the hero for buying the thing that you’re selling, because then you’re also the hero for offering the thing and then the price is the hero for making it affordable and then the item is the hero for being that perceived value. So it’s just the same idea. Everybody’s a hero. We’re all happy and you don’t you don’t have to call a couple liars to give me a not guilty plead and that’s really huge. Especially when I was practicing right after 9/11, when I was doing serious felonies, that means now, today I could go into court and I could say, ladies and gentlemen, don’t trust this cop and I’m not going to get booed out of the courtroom. 2001, 2,3,4,5 and six, don’t trust this cop, who the hell do you think you are? Do you know they went up the stairs at the top? I mean, different worlds, right? But you say hey, they were here, they did the right thing and the next right thing is for you to analyze the evidence. That’s what we’re here, is this great? This is great. I’m having fun. This is fun.
Norman 47:33
You’ve got to write a book.
Elena 47:35
If I can get a man to fit to understand and give a child molester a fair chance I can help you sell a blue spatula.
Norman 47:47
That’s the book. That’s the title of the book.
Norman 47:50
But you know what, I really don’t want to go off on an Amazon tangent. But Amazon always treats you guilty before innocent and I think I should bring this up, because I think it’s really important. One of the reasons why you left Amazon and you are doing alright on Amazon.
Elena 48:10
Oh, yeah.
Norman 48:12
But both holidays, I remember the one Christmas that there was Black Friday, I’m not sure. But somebody, just anybody called in and said, you’re infringing on my copyright. Wasn’t that right?
Elena 48:26
They said it was fraudulent and it was their copyright and I wasn’t even worried. It was like September, October. I wasn’t worried. I had 50, $60,000 with inventory coming in. I was like, no problem. Here’s pictures of me in the factory. Here’s two years of invoices. This is obviously mine. There’s not copyright. There’s not an issue. It’s not fraudulent and they didn’t resolve it until December 28 and I sold through that stuff, but I sold through it in May. I didn’t have $60,000 cash lying around that I could put into something like that, I had a 401k and I had my investment but I didn’t have that and it happened two years in a row and I’ll tell you now, the thing about my Shopify store, I don’t buy inventory, right. On Amazon, you can test if you have a lot of money, you can test 10 products a year, if most people can test one, maybe two, I test three to four products a week on Shopify, because all I gotta do is put a picture in it, I mean, just imagine if no one buys from the picture then I’m done and I spend 300 bucks here 200 bucks, they’re testing and I know the metrics now well enough to know if this is going to make a little money, make a lot of money or take off and then I did the hybrid which is a private label on Shopify, but I was smart enough and lucky enough I’m not gonna lie lucky enough to get a company to partner with me. So like right now I’m buying fourth quarter inventory. I want to buy 30,000 units of something that costs $11 each, which is, 1,2,3 she’s got a calculator in front of her $330,000. I don’t know how to put this but let me see how do I say this? No and they’re paying the bulk of that, we’re spacing that out it’s going to cost me about 60 grand.
Norman 50:13
So in case people don’t know what you’re doing, and we don’t get usually too involved in business. But what is the difference between the model that you were doing on Amazon and the model that you’re doing on Shopify right now?
Elena 50:29
In Amazon, you have to decide what you’re selling, what you want to sell, and then you have to go and find it and get it manufactured or get it somehow private label to your own self like I didn’t manufacture the probiotic supplement, I just put my label on it. Then you have to buy the inventory from the producer and then store it in Amazon so that when it sells on Amazon, Amazon sends it to the customer. In drop shipping, all that you have to do is market the item, you have to put up a picture of it. You have to tell people what it does, maybe make a little video of it, or just take a still photo of it and then you put it on your website and then you have to drive traffic to your website. That’s the hard part, people go to Amazon to shop. So that is what Amazon offers and no one offers it better. If you’re shopping you go to Amazon and for me, I thought I’m willing to learn how to get people to my store in order to get number one, all of the money and number two, the customers list and the ability to retarget them in the email list in the future. So I interrupt your Facebook experience, so you’re on Facebook stalking your ex or watching a cat video or taking pictures of your doughnuts, or being a world health expert at the moment. An epidemiologist trained in your living room, and all of a sudden there’s this ad that comes up for a sushi roller and you’re like oh my god a sushi roll. I never know in the world. I want a sushi roll. Look at that guy. He’s rolling sushi. It looks so cool. I can’t live without this. I’m getting my credit card. Don’t go away. I’m gonna be right back and that’s our whole goal in life is to stop your experience and put this in front of you and we do that by paying Facebook to let us have ads that runs through your newsfeed and Facebook is creepy, right and as a person in society the amount of information they have about us really bothers me. As a marketer it makes me very happy. So it’s a double edged sword and that’s basically the difference but you have more responsibility because you have to drive the traffic but you have more control once the sale comes in. I mean we literally have a team of I don’t know four or five people that don’t people, asking for reviews, seeing if they’re okay, trying , answering questions, things like that, replacement refund, you can’t do that.
Norman 52:37
No, you’ll be dead.
Elena 52:41
I mean, these are, we have comments on the Facebook post and, so can you imagine if someone is just on Amazon, and they see something you’re signing like, wow, I like that. You don’t know. They’re like in Kansas scenic a bit, but on an ad they hit like, where they comment. This is beautiful and what do we do? I pay somebody to say, Oh, thanks, Norm, so much for liking it, by the way, salestone. Here’s the link and what that does is every single person that has commented on that ad now gets a thing saying, hey, someone else commented on your ad and what do they see when they open that up? The link to my store and if you abandoned cart in my store, and I sent an ad, then I say, hey, Facebook, I want you to send this out only to people who put it in their cart, and then walked away. When the new Norm clicks on the link, it goes back to your cart, if you’re on the same device, which is great. I mean, can you imagine that on Amazon, so that might be in the weeds a little much for people not doing e-commerce, but basically, it’s your asset, but daddy’s not bringing you the traffic. Ain’t nobody knocking on your door I’ve built I get clients, I built the website. I built my store and no one’s coming. It’s the internet. There’s 230 million users. This isn’t like some Kevin Costner film. They are not coming. If you build it, you’ve got to frickin put it in their face, slap him in the head with it.
Hayden 54:00
Hey guys and gals, this is Hayden Farrar, the producer of I Know This Guy. Make sure to tune in next time for part two of our interview with Alina Cyrus, where we dig a bit deeper Elena’s time as a public defender, explains your thoughts on prison reform based on her extensive experience working in the courts of LA. You won’t want to miss this one and as always, make sure to like and share the podcast. Every time you share this with a friend, it really helps us out. I’ll see you next time.
Hayden 0:03
Hey guys and gals, just a reminder that I Know This Guy relies on your support. If you feel so inclined, you can check out our merch, I finally got the dog dibs up, so make sure to check them out. This podcast has taught me anything. So life’s about those small victories. If you have enough dog lives already, you can simply share the podcast with your friends, every little bit helps us grow our audience. That’s enough of me and the crazy jazz music you’re hearing now for the rest of the show.
Elena 0:31
That there are things that I have access to stories and little tidbits that we could put into programs like this not as propaganda but as saying, Hey, I just want you to stop and think and like you might disagree with me after you stop and think but I just want you to stop and think
Norman 0:53
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of I Know This Guy, the podcast where we dive deep into the lives of some of the most interesting people I noticed. Before we get started, please like and subscribe to I Know This Guy wherever you get your podcasts. By the way, my kids want me to say something about ringing a bell. What the hell’s a bell?
Norman 1:27
Let’s talk about your quote. I know you already brought it up. But tell us a bit more about the quote.
Elena 1:34
Certainly in the last three years, and it’s called chapter two, and you’re allowed and I’ve been asked to speak a lot. I mean, I get asked to speak because I’m sort of like the unicorn, right? I’m probably what used to be I was one of the only women on stage, certainly 20 years older than I mean, literally. Do you remember when we were at that one conference and the speaker before me, said that the next speaker was his mother’s age, which was I remember he did a backflip to get on the stage.Just to show how young he was and then I think it was his friend of his girlfriend’s or something and she comes up to me and it’s a big e-commerce comment, but she says, you want to outsource your backflip, I’ll pretend to be you because she had brown curly hair so that we could like maybe running real fast and fool people into thinking that I had in fact, the girl who could not do a cartwheel and the betrayed still to this day will not even attempt one. So I was sort of an anomaly speaking and then I started to get like the side speaking where it’s like, oh, I heard you speak when you come to my church, when you come to my women’s group when you and I think what people what resonated with people is that I had no idea that online world existed when I went to school, right. Number one, because the online world didn’t exist when I went to school. I literally had a guy I was working with. He said, don’t you wish you would discover this when you were 17? He’s like, 24 and I’m like, when I was 17, this was not discovered yet. I’m not even by Al Gore. Who had invented the internet? Right?
Norman 3:02
He invented the internet a few years later, didn’t he? Yeah.
Elena 3:06
So, it was a revelation to me that we were taught. I was the daughter of first generation immigrants, right? Who my father fought in World War Two, my parents were older, even for my age, my parents were older than my set and what you did was you went to grade school, high school, college, and then some professional school and then you work and that was it. There was no or this, the only or this was you wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or something, right? It wasn’t, do you want to learn how to say it wasn’t even like conceived of that there could be this entrepreneurial journey, like maybe when you retired, you could buy a franchise, and that was considered like incredibly entrepreneurial, right? So I wanted to be a voice to tell people that and this is what I think was resonating and why I was going into church and women’s groups was to say look, number one, this is an option and number two, especially for those of you out here, I mean, if I’m in a room full of women and I say how many of you are in a job you believe in your calling, or have a hobby or something that takes the majority of your time that you believe are the calling, I’ll get three fourths of the hands. I’ll say how many of you would have a little bit of guilt just leaving that job? Forget, for whatever reason, like you win the lottery, whatever, just you’d have guilt leaving that job and those same hands stay up, except for maybe one or two, right? Who just had a fight with their boss or something and no one gave us permission. No one gave us permission as women, no one gave us permission as professionals to come into this online world and I sort of want, I don’t want to have the arrogance of saying, I’m giving you permission, because it was very funny that this priest person gave me the permission to leave my lawyer job, which didn’t make any sense. But the idea was, look, God’s not mad at me and he’s going to be fine with you and that’s sort of what I want to convey. Like you can do this and do it the way I did transition. I used to get off work, and go to my wework office to learn. I was getting into this in 2009 and 2010 and really in 2014 and 15, when I was selling on Amazon a lot, and even when I was traveling and going to China, I was still a public defender, I would still would that was my vacation was taking those trips to China, and then it would go to wework and I’d work on it at night and so I sort of transitioned into it. So I got to the point where I believed I could do this and it was really a money making opportunity. This is like a Nigerian insurance scam or kidnapping scam, like we didn’t know and it’s funny because what I sell online now the niche I’m in is aimed at women over 45 and I see a lot of men who want to sell to this niche because those who buy things online, by the way is women over 45 and they’re getting a lot of refunds and arguments. In the end, what you have to understand is they didn’t grow up with the internet, you have to reassure them that this is not a scam, that I’m not taking your credit card and it’s gonna wind up stealing your entire identity and your everything about it. So the same way that we as consumers are wary of that we, as women of that age are wary of, really, you can make money online. I mean, isn’t this kind of like Bitcoin? I mean, like for instance, even Bitcoin I mean, you look at Bitcoin 10 years ago versus now and then in 10 years from now, where will it be in terms of people’s trust factor? So, that’s what I say it’s called chapter two, and it doesn’t have to be selling online. Let’s say you’re a nurse and what you’ve always wanted to do is be a gardener or own a nursery. Do it. tomorrow is not guaranteed. Do it. It’s not even about like, following. It’s like, if that’s your passion, that’s your passion. It’s not just money. It’s like for me, this is not about my passion. My passion is helping people. My passion has always been helping people. This is a means to an end for me. I sell things I’m not passionate about, but I’m passionate about the freedom metaphysics and you may not hear about the freedom or the money because let’s say you might be in a position where, and it may even be that you’re a housewife who volunteers at the church, and who would take over that volunteer thing. If you wanted to go and open a nursery or you wanted to go and learn a language, it’ll happen, it doesn’t diminish your value, but someone else could step into that role and it’s not too late for you to do that. You’re not serving anyone, if you’re not being the most authentic view at the moment. Right and so, that’s what I mean by it’s called chapter and I call it chapter two, because usually it’s people who’ve done something for years at a time.
Norman 7:35
I’ve seen these people too and actually, it disturbs me when I find somebody that has a passion for something very good at something. Literally, oh, I’m 23 years old. I can’t change my life.
Norman 7:49
Go for it.
Elena 7:51
I’ve got jackets older than that. Come on.
Norman 7:53
My gnome.
Norman 7:57
But, people just sometimes don’t go for it. They can’t see that there. Yes, you have a family or maybe you have a young family and you can’t throw all your money at it, but you can start, you can do something.
Elena 8:12
You can do something towards it. Yeah. Until it becomes real in your mind and if they say if your mind can conceive it, you can achieve it. But you have to prove to yourself maybe if you weren’t raised that way at 23, I would have told you to go away. At 23, I knew what I was going to do till I was 65, and the closer I got to 65, the more I realized, I don’t want it and listen, here’s the thing that I also want people to understand. I loved my job. I loved my job for 23 of 25 years. I love my job and I didn’t leave because I was upset because I definitely could have gone back to doing the trials. I left because I realized it was time to move on. I mean, it’s like the house you grew up in at some point you leave right or you raise kids in? I mean, didn’t you guys move recently or? Yeah, There’s an nostalgia to it, to witness you’ve got the little marks on the wall of.
Elena 9:05
They do that in Canada? I didn’t know if that was just that.
Norman 9:07
They do that but it’s with icicles.
Elena 9:12
Great murder weapon by the way. As a defense lawyer let me tell you icicle, okay
Elena 9:18
I’m kidding, I’m kidding, okay.
Norman 9:21
So you mentioned something too that I think is kind of interesting. Bitcoin. Didn’t you have somebody or give you Bitcoin and you lost it?
Elena 3:37
Okay no. First off Bitcoin, I’m cursed when it comes to Bitcoin. I put a great deal of money into it, into a conglomerate by the way of computers that were going to mine it and some guy ran off to Venezuela with all the money. So that was recent, but many years ago, some guy came over from I don’t know that was passed law school or something. Yeah, and he’s just, buy a $100 come on just buy $100 worth of Bitcoin. I’m like, fine and I don’t even know we did it. He did it for me. I got my credit card, which I think had a $100 limit on it and I bought this Bitcoin and I know I had no idea where it was and it was probably 2000 I don’t know when did it start? It was like five or six years after so I know it’s painful. Listen, this is the way my mind works. I lost $100 I didn’t lose whatever it’s worth now
Norman 10:23
10 or 12million.
Elena 10:27
It’s funny because whenever I have a computer, I either take that sledgehammer to the hard drive, or I just keep it like I’m never gonna return like if I’m recycling a computer I’ve never ever given it back with intact so I’ve got all these little bits of computer so I wonder if it’s in one of those at some point.
Norman10:44
You’ve also been a consultant on some TV shows, haven’t you?
Elena 10:47
Yeah, funny thing, when I was 2008 or nine right around there. I got a kid working for me, kid. He came to work for me and he was getting out of TV and into the to be a mitigation expert, wanted to help people who are on death row who didn’t deserve to be on death row will come to find out he had worked in television come to find out he was a major bigwig in television like holy cow major bigwig, I’m not gonna tell you who he is, but shows you with 1,000% recognize. He chose big producers wanting to do a legal show and so he said, Oh, yeah, work with his lawyer. We did eight trials in a row and she won every one of them. No, like any of their like little hook us up. So I actually had a real consulting gig on a TV show, which was a blast. I will tell you this right now, if I had known that television writing was a job when I was in college, I never would have gone to law school. I mean, I know it’s probably really hard. But when you’re the guest in a room of like writers, there’s just like food and everyone listening to you and laughing at your jokes and running down everything. It was so much fun and then you pull into the studio and you have a pass and then there’s like this sign that says reserved for I mean, it was crazy. By the way, I grew up with a bunch of people who are actors and actresses. I am not a star fucker by any chance but I will tell you, that was fun. That was fun.
Norman 12:03
You were smitten by Elliott Gould.
Elena 12:06
Elliott Gould was playing a lawyer and took me out to dinner so that we could talk about it and I will tell you what person my mother had, my mother would have to bless their soul would have loved that he had taken me I was just gonna, and he was like, the biggest gentleman ever in the history of the world with the most entertaining stories and I just thought it was wonderful. I just what I was smitten by was his, he’s this older guy, right? He doesn’t really need me to tell him how to do his job, right. He’s taking the time to take me out to dinner and when we’re at a restaurant, and people recognize him, he made a point of introducing me as if, I mean, it was just so it was so like, flashback 1950s polite guy, I just loved it. But, so that was fun. But anyway, I enjoyed it. Number one, I enjoyed it because it was great. It was great fun. It was a world I had never seen the back end, right. I had just seen the sort of arrogant narcissistic actor part of it and with the people I knew, she was great. I loved being around writers, I love being around creativity but more than anything, I love being able to make something authentic. I recently was called on not for money just paid. I have the show and it’s a cop show. I might play with one of these or anything, but they’re like, we thought we were woke because we have this diverse cast and we have a very general audience. In other words, they’re not like it’s like people that would watch Murder She Wrote versus people who would watch like Hiistory books. Right? Because like my mom would have watched her she wrote but she was not gonna watch history books. So I thought wow, how impressed I am that you want to get it right and with what’s going on in the world right now. Like he was basically saying, and he was doing everything right, this guy’s doing everything right, but he was basically saying how can we put in little things in the show like this that can relay your experience in the system and what’s been going on. Because I will tell you, I don’t care who you voted for. I don’t care whether you’re Democrat or Republican. I have 25 years of experience in Los Angeles in the public defender’s office. If you are a black man in Los Angeles, your punishment will be five to 10 times higher than any white man for the exact same time in Los Angeles. I had a friend. I mean, I lived through when we had the third strike law in California. Third strike means you have two prior felonies and you broke into a garage when you’re 18 years old, two garages that were attached to the home that was considered a residential burglary, even though he didn’t go in the home. So your kid you’re 18 or 19, you steal a bicycle out of one of them and you steal something from inside the car of another one. Now you’re 30 you commit a crime. It’s a felony, you’re looking at 25 years away. The court has the ability to strike the strike to be reasonable, to look at the circumstances, they didn’t notice initially. They did not have that ability. So for like a year and a half, remember how long it was. It felt like 10 years filing a year and a half. If you got convicted, you went to prison for life and I had a guy who had a heroin full of balloon, the balloon heroin, sorry, heroin full of balloon. That’d be weird.
Elena 15:15
He got six year offers and I remember crying with him and a six year offer completely thrilled. We were thrilled at the six year offer because I did not want the pressure of losing a trial because the jury was not allowed to be told that it was a three strike. So they would just be thinking more Yang had the drugs and he would be going to prison for life and I watched over and over again, white people coming in and their strikes restricted. Well, that happened when he was 19. Remember the Stanford swimmer? Well, you’re on it was one mistake, 20 minutes of his wife and he raped a girl and he got six months in jail. Right? I was asked by a lawyer as well after three strikes to help his client just with the Progress Report. In other words, he’d already been convicted. He was coming in. He was a USC student. He was 19 years old and I was representing a guy, he had 30 pills of oxy cotton and he was on the street he was selling. I mean, he was a homeless guy on the street, black guy, homeless guy and they arrested my client. They arrested this kid in his dorm room like a stain with 50 pills or 70 pills and like 10, Roxy, and the rest were like Adderall or whatever the drugs that kids were using to study but still illegal without a prescription. They were the same level of drug. Right, even though one might be for fun and one might be for studying. They’re the same level under the law. He had gotten a year of probation, and like community service, and he was coming back to a fine, I was just going to help my lawyer friend out and represent him and my client was looking at three years in the state prison for 50 pills of Oxycontin and this kid comes up to me, he goes, Hey, Ma’am, you gotta argue to get out of the fine. I want to have a summer job and I don’t want to go in all to the court and it’s like $400 and I looked at him and I’m like, if I could take you back into lack of right now, I would introduce three men who did less than what we did, but who aren’t white privilege, little fox. Pay your damn fine and sit down. I didn’t say that because I was a lawyer. But I argued to the judge and thankfully that the judge said no. But I looked at the lawyer and I said, the lawyer that I had worked in on and I said it was everything I could do not to scream at that kid and this kid believed that he got that because he had a good lawyer and he got that because he was white. In 1992, I lived in the area of Los Angeles that’s known as Hancock Park Adjacent. Hancock Park is very fancy adjacent means you’re too far away to be in that zip code. But the realtor wants to make it look nice. So it was really Koreatown adjacent. I had the National Guard on the street after the Rodney King riots. I had a best friend getting married. There was a very strict curfew. She was getting married in Pasadena some 50 miles away. Every night I had to drive Pasadena and drive home. I had a pickup truck that was a hole in the floorboard. It was an old pickup truck. I bought it for 800 bucks. It looked like a gardener’s truck. I got pulled over three nights in a row. Two nights, I got escorted home. One night I was four blocks away, cops told me just be safe. That week, the Los Angeles courts, the public defender’s office downtown had to open nightforce. Just to process people who had violated curfew, many of whom were not involved in the protest, but were driving home from work.
Elena 18:15
I was pulled over three times, I was never even ticketed, much less kept overnight on a curfew violation and it was because I was white and I bet you if I was in a Mercedes, I would not have even been stopped and so when these people call me from TV and watch stories, and diverse similitude of being able to say this happens, this is real. So just be able to offer up like, how do we put these little things in these television series? So people stop and think, Oh, yeah, no, what? We’re going through this thing right now in the states where Confederate generals, statues are being torn down, and people are like, we’re racing history and we’re like, no, we’re not erasing a memorial. Statutes aren’t there so that people know history, statutes are there to honor it’s like we have to decide as a country. Who’s going to occupy our public space and who are we going to honor? So Auschwitz still stands in Germany, not as an honor. But as so we’ll never forget and you go there and you pay tribute as a memorial. But you don’t see statutes of Eichmann and Mendel there. You don’t you don’t see Nazi generals lining the streets of Berlin like, and so, there’s a difference like little things like people don’t think that far ahead. Like, how is this gonna look to someone who was violated by this person? How is this gonna look to someone who was tormented by this society? I mean, the whole confederacy was based on the fact that these generals are going to war so that they could have a society completely based on the policy of white supremacy and owning other human beings. I’m not troubled that these are coming down. I wish they had never been put up and it doesn’t mean we don’t have little placards and talk, hey, on this battleground, this is what happened. Or this place where you can go and visit we don’t tear apart history books, we talked about it but every emblem of Nazi, significance was taken out of Berlin for a reason and so that’s wow, that’s really getting political is it to say, though, that there are things that I have access to stories and little tidbits that we could put into programs like this not as propaganda, but as saying, Hey, I just want you to stop and think. You might disagree with me after you stop and think, but I just want you to stop and think, when you see two kids, age 12, walking through a park, one black and one white and a police officer comes up and a white one wants to wave and say hi, and the black one gets on his knees and puts his hands in his air. That’s powerful shit. I mean, that’s saying, look, this is whether you agree with his reaction. That’s his thought, like, we all have different thoughts. You’re a guy, you’re a big guy. You never walk home at night from a bar wondering probably if you’re going to get attacked. That’s your reality. It’s not racist, sexist, anything. It’s just that’s your reality. My reality is different, right? I’m five foot four. I look when I walk out of a bar at night, even when I’m not drunk. I look, obviously I’m not walking home to drive if I’m done, but I look when I’m in the parking structure in the middle of the day. It’s just, that’s my reality. But you may not think that you may not think wow, what I mean? You’re listening to this podcast right now, when was the last time you thought as you walked in a parking structure, you literally stopped in a parking structure and said, this is weird. I’m walking through a parking structure to my car. I’m not looking behind fold and I’m not looking to see if anyone’s hiding in the car and there’s not a parking structure I walk in where I don’t look. Right, and so I just want people to think about it. I just want people to sort of put themselves in someone else’s shoes.
Norman 21:36
Well, that’s great. I didn’t think we’d be going down that road.
Elena 21:39
That was a little much, I’m sorry.
Norman 21:44
So I do have to know. So if you were assigned to schug night, would you be out?
Elena 21:52
No, I pay. I didn’t know.
Elena 21:55
She was funny.
Elena 21:57
Should got a good deal. Let me just put it that way. I think she got a good deal and she had a problem because he had a crime that was a crime of violence that was caught on tape and there was a backstory to it. But he also had three strikes. So even if he had two strikes prior, so had he won the underlying crime, but got convicted of something lesser, he still could have been facing life in prison. So I remember I talked about the guy with the heroin in the balloon. It’s a different scale, but it’s the same idea. I might be able to argue that it wasn’t yours, but man, I’m willing to reflect on it.
Norman 22:32
Now, I’m just kind of curious because you bring up the three strikes, and I was around when all this was happening. When did that go away and the people that were put into prison because of three strikes, what’s happened to that?
Elena 22:46
Okay, I can’t say the dates because it’s been a while, but it’s been at least 10 years. So what happened was originally there was nothing. It’s called the Romero motion. Now we’re initially where you could say you could argue to the court Hey, let’s not consider these strikes. Because the guy was too long ago, they weren’t violent bla bla bla. First couple years, you didn’t have that. It was strict. You did it, you’re gone. Then we have the motion where we could argue, okay, at least you had a shot at arguing. Then we had a law that said, listen, this is ridiculous. The third strike has to be serious or violent. That’s when it changed. So we still have the three strikes law. But the third thing you’ve done is not stealing a piece of pizza off the table from a kid on Santa Monica Pier, which was the big classic case and for the people that had been imprisoned prior to that, we went back to every single one of those cases, and they had the opportunity to have their case reversible and it was pretty easy. Even now there’s new laws that are in. Any that benefits a defendant is retroactive. Any law that punishes a defendant is only forward thinking so like for instance, the reason Charles Manson wasn’t on death row even though he was convicted and given the death penalty is because the death penalty was outlawed in 1976 in California. So at that point, everybody on death row set and spin commuted death penalty has subsequently been reestablished. But you can’t go back and give those folks the death penalty. It’s only people from that day forward. Yeah. So we do have some less than other draconian laws. But yes, so now, if we still do have the free structure, but your last, the last crime has to be violent or serious, it can’t be something as minor.
Norman 24:32
So, I didn’t want to go down this path. I didn’t even think we’d go down it but I’m just kind of curious what your thoughts are regarding prisoners. Now, it could be anything, but if they’re in segregation for 23 hours a day. What are your thoughts on that?
Elena 24:49
I think it’s awful. I don’t see it too often. In terms of full segregation, only because we have overcrowding, we have so much overcrowding. We have prison cells that were built for two but now houses six. We have dorms that were built for 30 that house 100. I mean, COVID is showing us how crowded the jails are. I think that and I’m hoping that we rethink incarceration in general for a lot of offenses. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. I mean, it makes a lot of sense for some very violent offenders. But I will tell you, when I was in law school, my car got stolen, and it was financially devastating for me. It was a car that I paid like 800 bucks for and it got me to and from work, it got me to and from school and I lost it. I couldn’t get to and from work, I had to take a bike to school and if they had caught the guy who did it and they were going to put him in jail for 30 days. How would that have made me hope? No, I would so much rather say Hey, you stole a car. Every Saturday, you’re working until this is paid off. We are so quick to put people in jail, especially people of color. I mean, if you look at the makeup of our prisons versus the makeup of society, it’s absolutely ridiculous and I’ll tell you another scary statistic. The largest overnight houser of mentally ill people in the country is the LA county jail and if we’re not, we’re not pleased.
Norman 26:05
I can’t believe that and you think about addiction?
Elena 26:08
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, we’re getting smarter. We’re getting better with addiction in the courts. I will say this, we are getting better. We’re not perfect, but we have a drug court. We have in house, you’re in a jail, but you’re in a treatment center. We’re learning and I will tell you, you want to know why we’re learning? Because we were getting a lot of people who were opiate addicted and opiate addicted tend to be white people. No one gave a flying rat’s ass when it was crap. I’m happy to see the change. I’m sorry. It came as a result of people that look like the judges that were getting pulled into this, but also socio economically, socio economically addiction, crosses all barriers and I mean, just the punishment for crack versus the punishment of cocaine what is the difference? I mean, what are we? So, to your point about solitary or pseudo solitary confinement? I don’t think it’s healthy. I can think of very, very limited circumstances where it might be necessary. Like if someone were to have committed horrific violent crimes, and then more violent crimes in the jail, maybe we’re going to be talking about limiting contact with other people. But I still, I mean, I don’t believe in the death penalty. I just, who are we to say God has done? I’m just, I don’t, I won’t, I can’t. I’m not, not my choice, not your choice. So, I think we have to start sort of reassessing, people talking about defunding the police which is such a horrible expression for hanging out. What if it’s a mental illness situation? Like if people are posting if you guys have this phenomenon, like parents that are calling the police that on, there’s a black man sitting in the park, he must be bad. You look at these people
Norman 27:49
I haven’t heard of that.
Elena 27:50
Oh, yeah, they call them Karens and, fully 50% are probably just racist people who don’t want to see a black person in their park but fully 50% are mentally ill and you can tell by watching the exchange, they’re mentally ill. I’ve talked to cops to come into court they’re like, I don’t want to be called out for these things. So we just, it’s not a matter of just taking all your money away but it’s like you don’t need a tank and military armor to be a police of any major large city. Why don’t we use those funds to get a mental health worker to go out to you or have a mental health worker on call? I’m on call when I worked at the public defender’s office in case you got arrested in the middle of the night to come to the jail and say, Hey, don’t talk to anybody. So, we can pay mental health workers to be on call and the cop can say listen, I’m talking to this guy, and he’s not understanding me and rather than doing what I normally do, which is just talk louder, maybe you can come and help me de escalate this or find a language of your profession and expertise that can scale this down before it leads to something else and I think that now, like when the dust settles and the pendulum is swinging and things are crazy and, but when it settles, I think we are going to start rethinking incarceration and rethinking solitary confinement.
Norman 29:00
So overdue, so overdue. I would love to have you back on a podcast with a few other people and all different areas, right? So people who believe, anyways, it would be awesome to be able to have another podcast about this because I’m very opinionated when it comes to that side and I’ve never been to jail. I’ve never been to prison. But I do know a lot of people that have.
Elena 29:31
I will tell you this, I have nothing but the utmost respect for most police and I think that sets me a little bit apart in terms of being a true believer as a public defender. I’ve dated a couple, but mostly it’s like look, I get it when the bullets fly, you’re running towards them and and you should want this as much as I want this and I had once it was funny, there’s all the surveillance back in the day of crack where there’d be three undercover police officers down on the street level one in the park doing the control by. Two people in a van in case he ran, and then somebody taking photographs in an apartment window and be like, 10 people to get a homeless guy with five rocks and we’d be like, well, how many rapes happen that day? How many, but this was their thing. They were going to clean up downtown and I remember one time, they got this incredible picture of my client handing the guy money, and the guy handing him the rock and the cop and he goes, isn’t this gonna ruin your day? I’m like, this makes my day. Like, you did what you’re supposed to do. My guy goes, Oh, yeah, I’m like, what are they giving me? I mean, that’s fine. That doesn’t bother me at all. That’s good police work. I do. I think it’s a weird allocation of funds and time. But, think about what’s happening now. I mean, Batman who are unarmed is still getting killed, even though the police know they’re being filmed. It’s like, really, like, you can’t even behave during this, like you know you’re being filmed like, I just think to myself, imagine what it had been like, and I have no way to understand this, don’t get me wrong. But in 1992, there weren’t cell phones. There wasn’t a proliferation of video cams and this guy named George Halliday just happened to have a video camera looking out his window and he catches the beating of Rodney King and I just try and put myself in that position, which again, as a white person with what my job is right now to do is shut up and listen. But to the extent that I can express this to another white person, like, imagine watching that on TV as a black man going finally it’s over. It’s over, they see it now. It’s on frickin tape, it’s on the television, we’re going to be good. It’s not going to happen again and here we are 30 years later and it’s not only happening and happening and happening, it’s happening while we’re protesting and happening. I just think, my God if now is not the time for us to shut up and listen, when is? Even with the experience that I have, I know full well I have no idea what it is like, and I can’t even conceive of it. But I do know it’s different and I do accept my role in not doing more sooner and not raising the alarm sooner even though I feel like I’ve done a lot. Apparently, it wasn’t enough, because if we all had done enough, maybe I wouldn’t be here. I mean, now you sort of get a sense of where my world has been, like, how much relief I have, when my only decision for a day is, am I going to lose $1,000 on this ad? Or am I going to make $1,000 on that. Can I help somebody learn how to make money online? That is when I say I’m so that’s what I mean by it and I do, I still feel a little bit of guilt, like not being at the forefront of this battle.
Norman 32:39
I can see that. I can see you having that guilt, because you’ve had to leave, knowing you.
Elena 32:45
But having the influence now to be able to talk to television producers and that I mean to me, frankly, if I think about it logically, that is going to be more impactful than dealing with that one person and that one port that one day and so that’s what I feel like I have to remember. I’m not doing it instead, I’m doing it as an extension of the journey I’ve always been on.
Norman 33:06
Yeah, absolutely. All right, let’s get off this hardcore.
Elena 33:08
All right. Let’s get back to the good stuff.
Norman 33:10
All right. So tell us, I’m just kind of curious what you would consider to be your biggest success.
Elena 33:19
I think,
Elena 33:22
Well, certainly saving the lives of the people that were wrongfully accused in trial. I have had several of those successes and I will tell you that in my first two years of practicing, I had a guy who was accused of something, it’s a long story again, but he absolutely didn’t do it and it was a misdemeanor, he would have gotten no time in jail and probation, but he would have lost his nursing license and all he ever wanted to do was be a nurse and fully 40% of my clients were doing what I call life on the installment plan. It was a game they’re gonna rob here do their time. I’m going to try and Rob this and do this and do my time and they were robbers. That’s what they did and I end up in the people whose lives are impacted most by some of these crimes or misdemeanors. You lose your job, you lose your right to, you have to put that on your application, sometimes you lose your license, you can lose a nursing license and winning that case to me felt like saving a life, really early on, right? Because obviously, they didn’t give me a murder case in the first year. So I feel like those are my business biggest successes and I think also being sort of a role model for the women in my office, because it doesn’t, I’m not that that old, but I definitely was one of the trailblazers, you can be an aggressive, assertive, confident woman and still care about your clients, like in the nurturing sense and so rather than having like this, oh, I feel like their mom, it’s more like I feel like the mother bear like. I might have that nurturing sense but come near my client with something wrong and I will fuck with you. Like, I will make your life miserable.There was not a DA in the county who wants you to be in trial with me because I was a stone cold bitch on purpose. Like, I don’t want you to have a pleasant experience with me, in this case, that I want you to worry about that, and I want you to make me an offer that will relieve you of that and so I think that’s probably what I’m most proud of is giving that to the younger generation and then certainly, originally it was women and then later on, there was this sort of low of a certain generation where people weren’t passionate and being able to show as a 24 year veteran in the office, you can be passionate about this every day and going into people’s lives and I think Yeah, yeah and I want to bring that to what I do now. Like I want to be as passionate about you can change your life, you can do whatever it was you always thought about doing or you have the hankering to do even though it’s not your current circumstance. You can find a way to do that.
Norman 35:58
Well, I saw you talk on a call the other night and you had a ton of people interested in doing what you’re doing. Some of those people have been involved with a losing struggle. In this and we’re talking Amazon and just listen to you in the way that you were talking with passion and again, you’re the storyteller, but you got so many people excited about what you can do this not just one thing in e-comm, you can do these other things open up your bloody mind.
Elena 36:31
Right? Right. So many people think I can’t go online and teach people how to do something because I don’t know something and I’m like, I guarantee you know something, I guarantee you’re an expert at something that you don’t even think of it is so part of your daily life that you take it for granted, but for me, it’s like, you come to my house and or you’ve cooked dinner. I’d be saying but I put the fire alarm out twice. They get a frozen pizza since the lockdown. All right. I actually my homeowners association called me and they’re like, have you considered food delivery, unlike. So, I mean, just it’s something as silly as that, or somehow you were, I don’t know, there’s 100 million things that you may know, that people are willing to pay you to learn and there’s 100 million skills you have that will translate into something else and we’re so handcuffed by the way, we’ve been raised to think that this is what we’re supposed to do, or this is what we have, but it doesn’t mean we be irresponsible. It just means we like you said open your mind to other possibilities. Right now, we don’t burn the ships right now. But, what’s meant by a mountain in the water?
Norman 37:37
So let’s turn it around. So what are some of your biggest struggles?
Elena 37:43
My biggest struggle was definitely in changing, was the mindset about wealth like I talked about, like just understanding that you can be a responsible, rich person who’s not a jerk, number one. Number two, thinking I knew a lot because I was really successful in one field like not really understanding I had to start all over again. That was an arrogance that I got. Definitely my bank account got slapped for and I think probably work balance, work life balance. I still struggle with that. Yeah, I do. I feel like I have to get this done and then that like I have this sort of, I’m going to do this, I’m going to buy my house and then I’m going to start like really going out on dates,or really going out to parties are really going out rather than you can do a little bit all at the same time. Yeah.
Norman 38:35
So you don’t, you’re not the type of person to sit back at the end of the day and just relax.
Elena 38:41
I do sit back at them. Yes, no. Self care. I have found a very good balance for. I’m talking about, like, your relationships right now, which is as far as I’ll take it with you. That’s it. That’s all we’re talking about. But just relationships like getting, doing that like going out to places where people that are going to have the same interest in meeting those people. I’m far more inclined to get a book. Because I’ll tell my Oh, because I’m busy. I’m going to get up early and place my ads today or something. So that’s that’s a struggle for me right now. People don’t believe this, but I am at heart mostly an introvert. I will get out and I will be the life of the party and the center of attention, but I will need two days. Yes, I will need two days. But I’ll tell you
Norman 39:25
There’s no way that you’re an introvert.
Elena 39:27
I am a little bit of an introvert.
Norman 39:29
Are you serious?
Elena 39:3
A little bit yeah, I mean, here on lockdown. My friends are significantly older, like I just got in with a group of friends when I was in my 30s and 40s, who were in their 50s and 60s and it was fine. Now I’m in my pajamas and they’re in their 80s and so I’m very careful about COVID, I isolate when I go to court, I won’t go out for two weeks so that I can go and see them in the backyard now. I just don’t want to I’m not. If I go to the grocery store, it’s one thing but court places like that like I’m very careful. Because of the older generation of people that I hang out with, I want to be very, very, very careful around that. So I’ve been alone and sort of solitary for a while and I’m thinking now and but yet my remedy for that is, tomorrow, I’m going down to Torrey Pines Lodge, and just being alone in solitude, but in nature, so it’s like, I need something, I need and even just like an interaction with the hotel staff. That’s something I don’t really get right now with what’s going on. We’re loosening it up a little bit. I mean, California is getting hit with COVID. But for me, personally, I take an extra sex, responsibility because of the age group of the people and because I haven’t gone to court so now I don’t have for it. So it’s a real treat for me to go into someone’s backyard and have a glass of wine now. I mean, it’s a big deal because for two full months, I was really strict, really, really strict.
Norman 40:50
Alright Elena, so at the end of every episode, we have one question for our guest and that is do you know a guy?
Elena 41:00
I know a lot of guys, I’ve got a Rolodex here. So if you don’t want to narrow the topic, I’ll just give you the most recent thing, just a fellow I talked to just before getting on to this podcast and that is Todd Snively, who I think you met at the same place you met me. I don’t know if you met him and a very successful entrepreneur, been at the highest highs and the lowest lows and just a fascinating story of loss and redemption and perseverance and a very genuine willingness to help people and a desire to see them successful.
Norman 41:34
Let me remember if we go back about an hour or two ago, okay. We talked about an event that we were at where you were calling people from a bar. Yes. That was tough.
Elena 41:51
There it is. There we go. He was looking for the most successful seller I knew at the event, and he would have been that. Yeah.
Norman 42:00
All right. Well that’s that’s really cool. I’ll reach out to him and see when we can schedule him in. So my friend,
Elena 42:08
It’s been fun. Thank you.
Norman 42:10
It has been a hoot and I really hope that we can get together again and meet at these events and I really can’t wait to get to one of your networking parties again. They are the best.
Elena 42:24
Thank you. I can’t wait to have one again. I missed them.
Norman 42:27
Are you still gonna give me my coke zeros?
Elena 42:29
Oh, absolutely.
Norman 42:31
Oh, thank you.
Elena 42:32
Oh, yeah. On me, Mr. Drinks on me!
Norman 42:36
Fantastic. Anyway, Elena, thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Elena 42:42
Thanks. Take care guys. See you later. Bye.
Hayden 42:48
Well, that’s it for an interview with Elena Saris. Make sure to tune in next time, where we interview Kevin King, aka the King of Amazon. We end up discussing his travels, running with the mob and even a tiger attack story. So make sure you tune in, don’t want to miss this one. As always, make sure to like and share the podcast. It really helps us out. We’re always looking to grow our audience and the best way to do that is by word of mouth. So every time you share it, Angel gets its wings. That’s not true, but it does help us reach a new set of years. Thanks, and I’ll see you next time.
