Teaching

My evidence professor is the best teacher I’ve ever had. Two MBAs, an engineering degree, and half a law degree — she laps the field. She’s a judge. Former prosecutor. Knows the rules of evidence incredibly well. But what she did today had nothing to do with evidence.

She took the whole class to the bar, day before spring break and bought the first round. The only rule: you had to talk to two people in the class you didn’t know. That was it. Honestly, it was more valuable than most of my classes this semester.

Here’s a recent epiphany I had (I like having those) that nobody tells you about the aging process — you become the (a more?) interesting person in the room. You know stuff. Have done stuff. And therefore, people seek you out at conferences. For lunches. To look at their deals (for advice and for capital, usually). You’ve got context, scar tissue, and enough stories to fill a book. Literally, in my case. And then I walked into law school at 48 and became completely, utterly anonymous. Which — I’ll be honest — has been a weird kind of hard.

I keep thinking: why wouldn’t you go talk to the random 48-year-old in your contracts class? Like… why is he here? What did he do? What does he know? That curiosity used to be called being a person. Somewhere it became uncool. Somewhere, it just became easier to look at your phone.

Back to the bar… Throw a beer in people’s hands and a professor’s simple two-person rule, and remembers how to be human again. I talked to a kid (I mean … they are) from Aurora — where my son goes to school — whose dad has one of those career stories that imprint on their kid and inspires them to go to law school. Inspires cynicism. And made me understand “the why” in a lot of his comments in class. Wouldn’t have happened without tonight.

Meanwhile, AI is eating everything. Kind of like Thanos. In a huge ironic twist, tech companies are firing the engineers who built the AI because the AI can write it now. Boom. Now, it’s coming for the legal system (something I witness first hand and causes me deep concern for my peers racking up $200k in debt), medicine, education — it’s all being dismantled in real time. And with a kinetic conflict in Iran using $30,000 drones to draw out million dollar missiles, with no clear endgame in sight, the world is moving faster than anyone’s frameworks can keep up.

And still. STILL. None of it replaces a bar tab and a reason to introduce yourself. Scott Galloway thinks the cultural retreat from alcohol has been brutal for younger generations. Not the drinking. The gathering. Nobody ever built a relationship, landed a job, or met their spouse staring at a LinkedIn notification. Sometimes, you just need to make a bad decision and go have a night!

And I’m reminded that the best AI model on the planet cannot do what my professor did tonight with a two-drink minimum and a simple rule.

So here’s YOUR assignment: go talk to somebody random this weekend. Find out what they’ve built, what they’ve screwed up, what they’re still figuring out.

I invited a second-year named Ron who’s been in 10 of my 16 classes in two years — who I’ve said maybe twelve words — to the Flames-Avalanche game at the end of the month. He’s nothing like me. We’ll probably never hang out again after that. But that’s not the point. Humanity is.

Can’t wait.

Go find your Ron.