Public Seminars: Fill & Download for Free

They were friends, staying in touch for many years.Although Armstrong did very few public appearances, I did get the chance to hear him and Buzz Aldrin speak together at a small (non public) seminar at MIT in 1993. One thing that stands out to me was hearing Neil Armstrong describe the final 60 seconds of descent of the Eagle, when he famously had to take manual control from the computer (while Buzz Aldrin navigated) and they nearly ran out of fuel. Armstrong said, “I wasn’t worried. Buzz, here, Buzz was worried, but I was fine.”I got the sense that they were two old friends who had been ribbing each other about their time on the moon for the last 24 years.

Giving a public seminar on a legal topic does not create an attorney-client relationship between the speaker and anyone in attendance, and thus does not create any reason why recusal would be warranted. For recusal to be warranted, the attorney would have to be potentially in possession of confidential information about the party which might harm that party’s interests, which cannot possibly happen in the context of a public seminar.

Poking fun at other people.The first time I heard John Nash complete a full sentence (i.e., after he’d come out of his 48 year mental dormancy owing to mental illness) he was conducting a public seminar in my department at Princeton. It was attended by everyone, including faculty that many of us had always dubbed “brilliantly smart”.One of the latter—a younger generation, wildly successful and highly published game theorist—had been mocking Nash the morning before for his mental illness—behaviour so cruel it seemed only fitting in an academic setting: where there are social morons-a-plenty.(And let’s further pause for a minute to consider something: This guy was a game theorist and John Nash essentially invented non-cooperative game theory. Indeed, in many ways, Nash still IS game theory!)So this ungrateful, arrogant wretch (no other way to describe him) decided he would attend the seminar with the intention (I suppose) to “fry” Nash during his first public appearance in decades. What happened next was something out of a movie…Nash, at least 70 at the time, was explaining his absolutely fascinating theory of power (actually, it was cooperative theory—the man pivoted) and oscillated between verbal discussion with the audience and mathematical derivation on the board. Just as he began to launch into the next phase of his argument, this guy asks him something (I don’t remember what).Nash, pausing, and giving only a slight turn of his head while bending over to finish his proof says, “No, that doesn’t make any sense.”And there was absolute silence.You see, in the nerdy mathematics world, a “That doesn’t make any sense” or an “Of course not,” delivered with the right intonation, is the rough equivalent of a fireman’s carry (body slam) in wrestling or, better yet, a pimp slap on the street. Yes, you read that right: I witnessed John Nash pimp slap another professor—and the latter deserved it, maybe two of it, with the elbow included, for effect.Several of us graduate students wanted to stand up and cheer (but this was Princeton). Our sentiments were so much with Nash we wanted to cry. In that brief comment, he lifted all the doubts we’d ever had about ourselves in the face of a few professors (not all, of course) who enjoyed treating us like second-class citizens.He also showed us the Grand Canyon-sized gulf that exists between a mere smart person and a genius—something I wish 99.999% of people, especially academics and pundits of every field, could recognize. In other words, Nash unintentionally showed us that what stood between most of us students and these tenured faculty was consistently hard work and a bit of luck—little else.Most importantly, however, Nash showed us the ocean-sized difference between the courage and character of someone that has overcome a disability (in his case, mental illness) and the cowardice of many others, including myself, who have never had to do the same and take our cushy existence for granted.So after that I took Nash’s private seminar and became his dumbest student, and I have never regretted it since!For more discussion of my experience learning from John Nash, please sign up The Leap Factor on YouTube!