K-Wal Cast
Interview podcast with the people in my life. We'll have some fun, dig deeper, and have some good conversations.
K-Wal Cast
Andrew Goering: From Alaska to Europe to Law School
Andrew Goering takes us on a fascinating journey from the frigid frontiers of Alaska to the complex world of financial crimes compliance. Growing up in a place where schools only closed at -50°F and carrying survival gear was as normal as bringing your wallet, Andrew developed a sense of exploration and adventure that led him across the globe.
Andrew explains why he'd rather face a bear than a moose in the Alaskan wilderness, shares his family's annual ritual of catching an entire year's worth of salmon in a single weekend, and describes what it's like living in countries where English isn't the primary language.
We'll also learn how "Law school is fun, but not in the way that fun is fun." Sounds lovely. Enjoy!
Thanks for listening! Please visit the pod's website at https://kwalcast.buzzsprout.com for more information.
Welcome to the KWALCast. My name is Nick Kowalski and this is a podcast where we get to have fun conversations with fun people. This week we have my friend, andrew Goering. Andrew grew up in Alaska.
Andrew:It's very hard to live there and people take care of each other if something happens. If you pass someone on the road and they're broken down, you might be the only person to pass by that place before they wouldn't have anyone else to help them, so you stop your car and make sure that they're okay.
Nick:It's not as scary as it sounds, although Alaskans have to consider things that you don't have to worry about in the Midwest. Like moose yes, moose, they aren't always as nice as Bullwinkle. We talk about growing up in the last frontier, his sense of exploration and adventure that led him to Germany and France, and what he thought about law school and how to think like a lawyer in France. And what he thought about law school and how to think like a lawyer Not to give anything away, but in this episode you might hear the phrase law school is fun, but not in the way that fun is fun. It's a warning that could be inscribed on every piece of marketing literature for law schools.
Nick:Without further ado, please meet Andrew Goering. Andrew Goering, welcome to the pod, nick, it's awesome to be here. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. You are someone who you and I met in the fall of August or I guess August 2008 when we first went to law school, and we went to law school at the University of Cincinnati only law school to produce a chief justice and also a president, william Howard Taft. But you did not grow up in Cincinnati, you grew up way far away. Tell us about what was life like growing up in Alaska?
Andrew:Growing up in Alaska is a long story and it's kind of hard to explain any weird, like any experience that's really different from your audience. So just for a general audience, alaska is a really large state, much bigger than Texas. I think we always joked that if Alaska split in half it would make Texas the third largest state. It has more coastline than the entire rest of the United States combined. It's also a place of extremes, where it can be very cold. Summers are gorgeous, amazingly gorgeous, and we would spend a lot of time outside during the summers, hiking, fishing. We would pick our berries during the late summer. Outdoor time was a big part of it and I think part of it was those extremes always made you have to think about what would happen if, because things are so far away, what would happen?
Nick:if.
Andrew:Because things are so far away. For a while we lived in a town called Glenallen, which is several hours outside of Anchorage I think the closest stoplight was a several hour drive away and we would go in weekly to pick up groceries because it was a lot cheaper. If the car broke down anywhere on that highway during the winter, you could easily freeze within the time it would take someone to drive by, and so you'd always think about what gear do I have? How much fuel like how much gas do I have in the car? How am I going to plan out my stops? And when I would tell people this they'd say wow, that must have been so amazingly scary to grow up in a place with all those dangers.
Andrew:And I think the strange thing is we accept a lot of danger in our lives with cars. I worry about my kids running anywhere near a street. It's the dangers you get used to and you learn how to mitigate them. You tell your kids don't cross the street without looking both ways, and I think it's the same thing for Alaska. So it's a useful thing to know growing up that the dangers you're used to are different than the ones that other people see but at the same time, like humans, all have that same experience. You adapt to the dangers that are around you yeah, and you can't.
Nick:You probably can't think about everyday life is mortal danger all the time, or you'd be like a nervous wreck, exactly so, like, so, like what. So what would you pack in your car? Just, uh, a lot of warm clothes, or is there other? Is there other like survival gear that you would keep in there?
Andrew:often we'd have sleeping bags, space blankets, but you wouldn't leave the house without a coat and jacket and proper footwear.
Nick:Okay, how cold would it get?
Andrew:there. It depends on where you are. Anchorage is the so-called banana belt, close to the ocean, cold temperatures would be growing up. Minus 20 would have been pretty cold, and it would get that cold for a week or two. In Glen Allen, schools only closed at minus 50, but that was at a temperature measured at the top of a, of a top of a hill, and cold air sinks into the valleys so often. The valleys would be much colder, but the school would still be open oh my gosh.
Nick:Then like so I've heard about this in minnesota. Um, if you're getting that cold, I'm sure you do in alaska like would people in the in the winter have to put some kind of heater in their engine if they went inside a store, or something like that Engine block heaters?
Andrew:and oil heaters are pretty common, and so a lot of people have houses with plug-ins out by the parking spot. If you have a garage, that's amazing, but otherwise you'd have a plug-in for your car to keep it warm enough to keep the oil moving, so you don't destroy your engine every time you start it yeah, so what would you use to heat your house?
Nick:our house was heated with gas, okay, yeah, so nothing like. I guess the gas doesn't go out right. I've never heard of that kind of thing happening. There's no situation where you could lose the ability to heat your house, correct?
Andrew:A lot of people would have firewood stoves as a backup. When we lived in Glen Island, which is a smaller town, I think no one I knew had their heat go out, but if you had, there would be no question that someone would have taken you in immediately and made sure that you were taken care of, and I think that's the other thing about Alaska outside of the big cities is, yes, you have a huge responsibility to watch out for yourself and very dangerous place that humans don't. It's very hard to live there and people take care of each other. If something happens, if you pass someone on the road and they're broken down, you might be the only person to pass by that place before they wouldn't have anyone else to help them, so you stop your car and make sure that they're okay. I think the same thing would have held true for for houses. It created a different sense of community oh, that's really interesting.
Nick:So there wasn't an understanding of, like you're all in this together.
Andrew:There's no sense of, whereas like I mean the opposite, I think would be like a big city where there's so many people, it's almost to the point where you become anonymous and you could just walk by people in distress on a daily basis and like kind of not even realize it that's a funny thing because later and I'll skip ahead in the story, if we're going chronologically skip ahead to when we lived in new york and that was the understanding I had too is that it was a very anonymous place where you know you wouldn't be able to count on someone else for help. That may be true if there's no one who feels responsible, like if there's a crowd who sees someone in distress, no single person feels responsible. If there's an emergency and it's real, something kind of triggers. And in New York I met some of the most genuinely kind people. An anecdote I was trying to go into work after I'd been sick for a few days.
Andrew:I hadn't eaten that much and I needed to catch up on work. It was the weekend. I took the train in Somehow. The train got stopped midway across the Brooklyn Bridge or well, the Manhattan Bridge, and I passed out Like I was standing there, got my knees locked, I don't remember. I was like, oh, everything's okay.
Andrew:And then the next second I don't remember anything after that and I just landed on someone who was sitting on the bench, and that person was probably my own age. She was not upset at all. She got off at the next stop to make sure that I got some food and got okay and was able to walk around on my own, which meant she had to leave the station, go get something and come back, and then she had to get on the train and go the other direction. So it wasn't a minor inconvenience and I think that really went against the notion I had when we moved to New York that it would be completely anonymous, that no one would really care about anyone else.
Andrew:There is a moment at which it's an emergency. Someone actually needs your help and you feel responsible for doing it, and I think that was the thing that was amazing for me to see genuine kindness. I think that was true of the people in Alaska. It just you didn't have to get past the point where you knew it was your job or your responsibility. You were the only one there, and if someone was really hurt or was in danger, it was clear that you were the only one. In New York it takes a lot more for that to be clear, but when it is, I think you see the same kind of kindness and genuine human spirit come through.
Nick:Yeah, well, that's very reassuring because I feel like there's a lot of times where you don't hear stories like that and you kind of hear the opposite. I mean, I remember taking Psychology 101 in college by the way, one of my favorite courses like super fascinating. I almost I almost became a psychology major, but I remember they. They talked about like the instance of like or this concept of diffusion of responsibility and this idea, and I think I think the classic example was like some case where some lady was getting mugged on the street and it was like in a big city yelling for help and like it turned out and the robber got away, but it turned out like a dozen people or somebody that heard her yell but no one, no one took the action to actually call the police or something like that, or enter, much less intervene, because they thought someone else was going to help out. But it's not. Yeah, I guess it's not always like that, thank god. Yeah, all right.
Nick:So going back to alaska, I remember, like one of the things I remember, one of the stories I remember you telling me when we met back in law school well, you mentioned fishing was like one of the things you did in the summer how easy it was to like catch salmon up there. So like I say that after having, like I have several family members who just took an alaskan cruise and, like my one, I remember my one uncle. He took one of the fishing excursions that was. It was like 250 or 350 bucks. It was like super expensive and, like you know, with those kind of things you always have to catch like one or two fish. But I remember you saying it was very different.
Andrew:I will tell this story as a person who doesn't really like fishing but really likes eating fish. Fishing in a river takes a lot of time and it can be fun if you really like fishing. The cap that I remember was you could have three fish, or you could catch three fish and have six in possession. And so some people in Anchorage would drive down to the Kenai Peninsula and go fishing in the evening after work, catch three fish before midnight, wait until after midnight, catch three more fish early in the morning During the summer the daylight is really long and then come back with their six fish in possession. That was never me. We occasionally went fishing uh with in the river. What we really wound up doing was subsistence fishing with nets, and there are two places that you could go one was on the copper river and one on the kenai river and for a really limited period of time when the fish are running usually the red run in the kenai Peninsula was the first week of July we would go down to the Kenai Peninsula, camp out, wait till the red salmon were running.
Andrew:You can take your net on a long pole. I think the net is about three feet in diameter, so it's on a hoop and the net is not that large. You slide it into the water and you stand there and you wait. It takes absolutely no skill. You wait until the fish run into it. You feel the net wiggling around and if the run is really strong and all the fish are running at the same time, you might wait until you feel a couple of fish hit the net. Then you haul it out, get the fish out, hand it to, hopefully, a family member who can help process it and get it ready to go. You go back out there and catch some more.
Andrew:We wound up as kids we would catch all of the fish we needed to eat for the whole year. So we would stock the freezer in a year and sometimes we would trade it for other things that our friends or relatives you know, know friends or neighbors were were catching. But that was the thing my family did every year is we would catch all the fish we needed for the year. The idea of buying salmon from the store I don't think I bought salmon from the store until I lived outside of alaska yeah, I believe it.
Nick:It did they have the same quota when you're doing the subsistence fishing like?
Andrew:that it's based on the size of the family, so for each additional child you would have an additional number of fish you could catch. I have four siblings, so we could catch a lot.
Nick:Yeah, so you had two parents, five kids, if I remember correctly. When I think about you telling me this story originally, for some reason, I thought it was like 50 pounds worth of fish or something like that you would catch.
Andrew:Am I misremembering that Filleted the fish that we would take home. I think we would have about 140 pounds.
Nick:Oh my, gosh, yeah, and how long would it take you to hit that?
Andrew:It was usually a weekend, so it would take a couple of days of fishing and then, if we, laid them there it was easier. Otherwise, we did do it one year where we took the whole fish back and tried to do it at our house and it was a huge mess yeah, you're like no, this isn't worth it.
Andrew:And then I guess you just had like a giant deep freezer that you just put it in, or we had an enormous deep freezer and when things overflowed from the deep freezer we would just take it out to the back porch and put it in a cooler okay yeah, since it was free you ever like smoke it or anything smoking salmon is a huge deal for some people and they have secret recipes and these amazingly weird contraptions that sometimes live in their front yards.
Andrew:We never did that, but we would always eat our friends salmon that they would smoke.
Nick:Yeah, that's funny. I remember the other fish that to you was like just around the middle but for here in the Midwest was a delicacy, was halibut, and I remember you saying something like halibut was like five bucks a pound or something like that back home, whereas here it's like 28, or like 28 or 30 a pound yeah, for people who do go out and they'll charter a boat, or if they have their own boat and catch a halibut. It's a big fish there's a lot of it how big are they?
Andrew:it depends if you're getting the larger ones.
Nick:They're several hundred pounds oh my gosh, I had no idea they're that big.
Andrew:I just pictured them as like a slightly bigger flounder if they're juvenile they might be a slightly bigger flounder, but the large ones uh. Look it up on seward, yeah, they'll have these huge public uh scales and you'll have pictures of people with the giant fish they've come back with uh, and they'll usually mark the weight of the fish on the on the fish so you can see it as it hangs there with the scale yeah, that's awesome.
Nick:So do you eat seafood when you're inland?
Andrew:sometimes I will say I've been pescatarian for several years now, so I've been forced to eat fish most places. If I'm not able to eat something that's completely vegetarian, I mean, is your preference to eat vegetarian? Preference is vegetarian. I found it practically very hard, so the nod to practicality was eating seafood.
Nick:Yeah, for sure. And then so I knew a guy who was vegan when it was convenient, like that was the term he would use. He was like, yeah, if I can't eat vegan, I will, but then he would also. So you would think this is a very fit person. But I think, if I remember, if memory serves, I remember him like crushing, like large cheese pizzas, all by himself too, because we were in a situation where I guess it was not very convenient to be vegan.
Andrew:I suppose there's vegan cheese, but I'm guessing that's not what was happening.
Nick:No, it definitely wasn't. Yeah. So how prevalent was like the wildlife where you were, like, would you have cool sightings all the time?
Andrew:We lived in Anchorage. We lived in a city. We would get moose in our backyard quite regularly and they would jump our fence with ease yeah, are those dangerous? And they would jump our fence with ease yeah, are those dangerous? Moose are very dangerous. Actually, between moose and bear, I would almost always prefer to run into a bear than a moose.
Andrew:Moose are very, very large and in the fall when they're hormonally pumped up, they're not rational at all. They don't telegraph what they're going to do. Bears, with their body language, will usually tell you what they're thinking and, depending on the type of bear, most of the bear in Alaska growing up were pretty wild still. So if you ran into a grizzly way out outside the city, they didn't necessarily associate you with food. They were more curious about who you were, what you were about. Black bears in the city wanted to eat trash and garbage and they could associate you with food, but tend to be fairly skittish.
Andrew:Moose, on the other hand, they give no space whatsoever. You can roll up in a car, you can walk by them. They're not interested in moving. If they decide that you're in their space, they will stomp all over you in moving. If they decide that you're in their space, they will stomp all over you. One of the funniest anecdotes and sad at the same time is I ran into someone who worked for the Alaska Railroad and they were working on a locomotive. They rolled it out into a wooded area. A bull moose came out of the woods, saw a locomotive in his woods and decided it absolutely had to go. He rammed into the locomotive repeatedly until he killed himself trying to move a locomotive out of the way they are not rational creatures and they're very large and even in a car you're not necessarily going to be safe.
Andrew:Some of the worst accidents are cars hitting moose, because you'll hit the legs and the body comes over the top of the car oh my gosh.
Nick:So is there? Is there aggressiveness? Is that tied to territorial, like kind of instincts? It doesn't sound like it's food they can be territorial I guess they don't it doesn't sound like it's food.
Andrew:They can be territorial. I guess they don't think okay, they can be territorial. They can also not want to be bothered.
Nick:Yeah, they're just like.
Andrew:Hey, leave me alone, get out of here and people don't always realize how dangerous they are. One of the professors at university of alaska was stomped by a moose after some students had teased a moose that was on campus repeatedly and then ran back into one of the campus buildings and then the professor just happened to be the next person to leave the building. That is a little bit of an extreme example. Otherwise, I've seen tourists hopefully tourist kids running off into the woods. I was in Kincade Park once hopefully tourist kids running off into the woods. I was in Kincade Park once and heard on the trail ahead of me I'm going to try to touch it and as I got closer saw an absolutely huge bull moose just off the trail and two kids headed off into the woods. I told them they were about to be about to be destroyed by a giant moose and to get away from it. Unfortunately they got away, but I don't think people always realize how dangerous they could be.
Nick:Oh man. So what is the move if you see a moose? Do you run, do you play dead? Or Interesting question, climb a tree if you can.
Andrew:When we cross country skied, we always had at least one lesson every season for the kids about what to do if a moose came, and the answer is run away from it. Get into trees and get something solid between yourself and the moose. Running away from it is usually useless because they're so fast. We've had moose run next to the car on highways and they'll do 35 40 miles an hour, so you're not going to actually get away from it, but you need to get something solid between yourself and the moose, so solid trees, anything like that.
Andrew:And then what we always told the kids and I have no idea if it was actually effective or if it was just something we said because you needed to have something to say if the moose was too close and you couldn't get to a tree, use your ski poles and try to hit it in the nose and they do have very sensitive noses. They're like soft, like velvet. Um, I have no idea if that would be effective and I've never seen it ever be effective and hopefully I never will see anyone try it.
Nick:That has like backfire written all over it. Be like take that moose. This is like oh, now, now you've done it.
Andrew:I think that's the last ditch thing you do before you get stomped by the moose.
Nick:Yeah, instead of going back to the always be prepared motto, like was it pretty common to carry a gun? As a kid, it was very common to carry guns with them.
Andrew:Many places I didn't carry firearms hiking a lot of people did for for bear protection, even in areas that had bear growing up. I never, never did. Some people would carry bear spray again. I never did and I never had a problem with a bear before.
Nick:But a lot of people felt safer if they did yeah, but I could even see with like a gun, like one most of us aren't sharpshooters who are going to be able to maintain our composure and aim accurately. But I would also think with like these bigger animals, like just putting one or two bullets in them might not stop them, you know, like they're big enough. Unless you hit just the right spot, like it's probably again only going to make them mad, and now you really seem like a threat.
Andrew:There that has happened, that bears have been shot and they were not actually stopped before they got to the person who was trying to shoot them.
Nick:So I think it's fair.
Andrew:Anytime you go into bear country or are somewhere with a wild animal you're not familiar with, it's always useful to know what their behaviors are, what the likely interactions might be like and what the best course of action for you is. Likely interactions might be like and what the best course of action for you is. I felt comfortable enough hiking as a kid that I didn't think that was necessary. The protocols are relatively straightforward and I think if you think about it like what you would do with a dog or something else that we're more familiar with, it becomes a little bit more normal to think oh okay, I could know what it was thinking about and what it thinks is weird about me because I'm sort of new in its environment. What are the things that would make me seem less scary to it?
Nick:Yeah, yeah, no, that totally makes sense, like you kind of put yourself in their mind a little bit. So last Alaskan animal question. So my son, henry, seven years old, he has there's. There's apparently a series of these kinds of books. That is like which animal would win if they got into a fight they're a little bit ludicrous because one they often include like animals that would never on earth meet each other. It'd be like what if a great white shark, you know, got in a fight with, like a crocodile from you know the amazon or something? It's like something like something bananas like that. But one of the ones recently that, the only one that he owns and I think it was gifted to him, is a wolverine versus a tasmanian devil. Did you ever see wolverines up there?
Andrew:I have not seen a wolverine in alaska, but I would not bet against a wolverine on any day oh no, apparently they're like crazy vicious.
Nick:They're like really strong. They can do like 80 miles in a day, like through icy terrain. Um, they seem pretty. They seem pretty tough and like the the one, the other comparison that comes up in this book was like a honey badger, which you know, honey badger don't care, honey badger's a badass, so but they they kind of tease that they would have those two like fight. Yeah, so like basically what they would do in the book is like go, go, attribute by attribute, who has bigger claws, who's more aggressive, who has bigger jaws, kind of thing. The spoiler alert according to the book, if a Wolverine got in a fight with a Tasmanian devil, the Wolverine would win. But I kind of got the sense that Wolverine could beat a lot of stuff. That's fair. So you grew up in Alaska. However, by the time that we got to law school, you had also lived in France and Germany for pretty good stints. How did you end up ever in those respective countries?
Andrew:I knew I was going to have to leave Alaska because Alaska and I knew I wanted to go to law school after I'd graduated from college. Alaska is the only state that doesn't have a law school, and so I had always known that the future for me was going to at least have some time out of Alaska. I think it's also part of the question you asked earlier around what was it like to grow up there? It's a huge place, and one of the things that I learned to love the most was that feeling of exploration and finding out kind of what's out there. You can go hiking for days and come onto these like incredibly spectacular areas, these like incredibly spectacular areas. We used to fly small planes into places that maybe a handful of people have seen, and it's breathtaking what it looks like. I think that makes you always curious what else is out there, what else could I see? And that sense of hey, there's got to be something else that I I want to try to try to find out about and be curious about those things. Two together made it really obvious that I wanted to try going somewhere else.
Andrew:So the summer after I graduated from college I spent well, actually when I was in my undergraduate studies, I spent a year in Germany, in Dortmund, and studied my junior year in college there. I think that was a really formative experience. It was the first time living outside the US. Almost everyone that I knew didn't speak English very well, and so I spent a year not really speaking a whole lot of English, which was new German's, not my native language, and so it was a chance to really spend some time actually getting good at it. I spent a lot of time with mostly students who weren't German either, and so we were all speaking a language that was not our first language. That was a great leveling experience for all of us, because it was all an uncomfortable learning experience at the same time, and it was also a really strong sense of community in that group of students that had to kind of go through that year together and learn what it's like to be far away from home and in a place that's so unfamiliar that suddenly becomes much more familiar during the time that you're there, and I missed being there as soon as I left it. It was also a really great year, because it was the year that you're there and I missed being there as soon as I left it. It was also a really great year because it was the year that Germany hosted the World Cup in 2006 and Dortmund was one of the cities that hosted it, and so for the entire summer, which was later sort of titled the Summer Fairy Tale, all of the world seemed to descend on Germany and it was like a huge ongoing festival with different countries coming to Dortmund, all of their fans came in and you'd have a chance to sort of watch the excitement and the festivities around the event, and I watched a lot of soccer, but it was also really fun to see everyone so excited about something all coming together.
Andrew:So that was the first experience I had living outside the US and then, after I graduated, I spent a year living in France. I took the year off and taught English in French schools, and my French was comparatively terrible. I was living in Metz. It was fairly close to the German border, and because I had spent so much time in Germany and spoke German, much more easily would actually go back to Germany and sometimes go to Luxembourg. I wound up playing Ultimate Frisbee in Luxembourg regularly and there were a lot of German speakers there, so I actually wound up speaking German a lot more than I really meant to, and it wound up meaning I didn't actually ever learn French, even though I was living in France.
Andrew:It was good and when I came back, went to law school and I remember the first time we met you were wearing your Polska jersey and I think when I moved to Cincinnati I wondered how many people would have a lot of experience from outside of Ohio, and I think when we met I was excited to see people who are also, for sure, interested in the rest of the world. How do things work? How do we explore what's going on outside of this place? And this is just one of the things that we have to learn about. So I think that was the first time I was like oh, this is going to be great.
Nick:Yeah, you mean law school.
Andrew:Yeah, law school is going to be great Law school was fun, but not the way fun is fun. I think that was the funniest quote from when we were in our intro to law class that one of the 3Ls told us.
Nick:Yeah, that's really funny. Yeah, your idea of fun becomes relative. Yeah, it's like that shared, um struggle with other people. It's funny how, like your perspective, like changes on so many different things, one one, you kind of develop a not inside jokes, but kind of like with something like when you're learning something kind of arcane like law, like yeah, as the more you get into it, the more you can start. You can start like cracking jokes about it that like no one else is going to get outside of that building.
Nick:I also remember this like concept of did you remember the concept of law school hot, which is basically like none of us are really lookers in law school, like shocker, like none of us came from like their modeling agency and they're like you know what? I want to be a lawyer now. So there became this like idea of like attractiveness was like relative, all of a sudden be like oh, yeah, they're law school hot, which means to the rest of the world, no, not really, but like inside that, those walls, it's like oh, yeah, like, although, like that said, I don't remember being like that big of a thing. I just remember like a couple people making that kind of comment in passing yeah, um, I like I I liked a lot about law school. I liked learning the law itself. I thought I felt like it really helped explain why the world is the way it is, at least our society. Because, like you know, because a lot of constitutional law is the one that, like really made it sink in. Oh, how does free speech work? Why does it work this way? But there was a lot of other things that were like that too.
Nick:But it was also really hard and there's a lot of things I hated about it. I hated grading everyone on a ranking basis and all of a sudden we were fortunate that our school even though technically we were like a tier one law school at least at the time it wasn't. Really I didn't feel like it was that competitive like you hear. I would hear stories of like other law schools or kids, or kids they're all grown adults them being very competitive to the point where, like, people would like hoard library books or like rip pages out of books in the library to like basically get an edge. Um, do you think our school was pretty competitive? Like, how would you rate? What's your assessment?
Andrew:I think it was less competitive than I was expecting, partly because I'd read 1l before I went, so my expectations were essentially that people would be exactly like you described tearing pages out of books and stealing books from the library. I did find a lot of camaraderie in it, especially in our small group, and I think having that small group and study groups together definitely changed that perception for me that it wasn't going to be that competitive. In hindsight I think it really was that competitive. We put that aside a lot of the time because we're decent human beings.
Nick:in reality, the system was structured to be competitive yeah, and even to this day I don't hear a whole lot of people say what their class rank is. Yeah, you know. So it's like yeah, I mean there. I mean not that you would normally expect people, but like I feel like before law school people would be like, oh, I got B in this class, I got an A in this class. I mean, you might hear that a little bit, but like not really. It seems people kind of keep it close to the vest a lot of times.
Andrew:Yeah, I think the thing that I look back on law school most fondly, or the thing that I think was the most valuable for me, is the way of thinking that it teaches, and I think it was at least as transformative in molding how you think as, say, learning another language. It was completely separate from how, at least, I thought about things and I approached a problem before I went to law school.
Andrew:It's not yeah, yeah, I was gonna say in what way I think it's learning to dissect concepts and ideas down to their absolute granular pieces and then being able to relate them back to each other. I think them. I remember the frustration I had the first series of cases that I read. I read them and I thought these all contradict each other. They all contradict each other. What is this? I can't believe we're actually having to study this after After I went back and actually learned what the lesson was supposed to be realized they are contradicting portions of each other. What is the thing that's still valid? And I think it was.
Andrew:It's easy to generalize, and so I had generalized the first case, generalized the second case and I generalized them to the same thing. It's learning to make your brain go through the steps of right. What were all of the absolutely critical minute pieces of this that made it work, so that I know when the next thing happens. Is it the same or different? Is it changing anything about the first? Because if you're generalizing, it doesn't make any sense.
Nick:Yeah, I, I would say I hear a lot of people say the way they changed their thinking through law schools it. It made them start to consider multiple sides of an issue, which for me that's never been a problem. That's actually kind of my curse is, like I'm always, I can always see multiple sides of things, which leads to a lot of indecision and overthinking. I agree with you that it changed. It made me a more analytical thinker in the sense that, like it's not like I wasn't analytical before, but really nailing it down, like, for example, so primer for non-lawyer folk in the crowd.
Nick:So let's say someone is accused of murder and they're on trial for it. It's not as simple as, like you know, they present the facts and the jury goes yeah, I think he killed him or he didn't. It's like there are elements to the crime. There is like A, b, c, d. They're like did they intentionally commit this? And so so like you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt which I won't get into standards of evidence, but like you have to prove it was intentional. You have to prove, like you know, element two, that they caused, you know, this person to die. And like I mean, you know, or homicide or whatever it was like. It really breaks everything down and it's like that for everything, it's like that for so many different areas of law, so I would agree with that. That. Really, the analytical side of it was like was pretty key. Did you have an idea of what kind of law you wanted to practice when you went into law school?
Andrew:I was 100 sure that I wanted to do something international. I thought, hey, I just came back from Germany, I'm going to find some way of working with international businesses, international law or something. I think that's why I was excited when we first met, as I knew there were people who were going to share some of those same interests. I had no idea what that looked like and I don't think I found a way to make that real for years after law school. I think there were always pieces of it that were interesting, but I think that was one of the other pieces of law school is. It can be applied in so many different ways and it's not always obvious when you're in law school, because law school isn't necessarily practice.
Nick:Oh yeah, it's a totally different skill set, right? Yeah, I've thought about, if they ever let me go back to law school to talk to people in law school, what would I say? And I would say you don't have to be a lawyer, basically. Or if you become a lawyer, it does not have to be this, what people normally think of like litigation court. I mean, I think a lot of times people think of like fighting and stuff like that. It does not have to be that at all. There are all kinds of different stuff they can do. What advice do you give to people when they tell you they're thinking about law school?
Andrew:I think the answer is a classic lawyer answer it depends. It depends on why they think they want to go to law school. Sometimes there's an altruistic reason and they have an idea of how they want to apply the skills they have already and they want to enhance it to do something else. Something gets intellectually challenging, which it is. In which case, go for it. I think there's a lot of ways to get to different paths. I think you said you don't have to necessarily practice law, and I don't practice law today. I've been admitted to the bar in several states, but I don't actually need a law degree or even a license to do what I'm doing today. It's usually beneficial, but it's not absolutely necessary. I wouldn't be where I am today if I hadn't gone to law school.
Nick:Yeah.
Andrew:So what do you do today?
Andrew:I do compliance work, and as long as I've been doing this, I still have no elevator pitch that would explain exactly what I do. I work on financial crimes compliance systems in financial firms, and right now, I work primarily with fintech businesses. Fintech is an exciting space with a lot of tech, intelligent people working on really interesting problems. Working in a space that has been primarily dominated by legacy institutions, banks, broker dealers and so taking some of the things that are institutions, banks, broker-dealers, and so taking some of the things that are required of banks and broker-dealers and other regulated financial institutions and making the systems and processes that a fintech has to be able to execute in order to meet the regulatory demands of either themselves, if they have a license, or of their licensed partners, is a fun and challenging space. I think it bridges some of the practical model development technology, silicon Valley tech vision with legacy banking requirements that you have to work with in order to work in our current financial system so what kind of financial crimes are you are on your radar?
Nick:are you talking about? Like any money laundering? Know your customer stuff?
Andrew:I do a lot of any money laundering, uh, the models for money laundering detection, your kyc onboarding systems, which are more and more model driven, fraud detection, fraud modeling and sanctions.
Nick:Okay, yeah, it's funny also that you mentioned kind of working with Silicon Valley and kind of like the vision. It is interesting working with creative people because that's one of the things I will speak for the legal industry at least in my opinion, it's not the most creative space out there. Like I mean going back to the whole analytical mind, I think that a lot of us are big on structure, are big on like real kind of analysis. It's like almost like borderline engineering kind of like really, how did all the pieces fit together and how do they apply, kind of a thing. And it's interesting then working with people who have that creativity, have that vision, have that willing to kind of go beyond the what we think are the assumptions and parameters that we just take for granted.
Nick:I think of also, like you know, the artistic space as well. You know I have there, I have a lot of artists in my family and the things that people can come up with Like I love it. I kind of there's a part I'm not a very creative mind. I I appreciate it. I'm not good at it, but like I like that world, um, so that's fun that in your job you're starting, you see that you start to see those kind of different worlds come together. Where you have that vision, you know, know you're from the compliance side, the legal compliance side.
Andrew:You're kind of the one reigning people in, but at least you get to see it in action.
Andrew:It is such an interesting space because you have product and engineering.
Andrew:Imagining a future on the existing structures, sometimes without a lot of experience with how the legacy system works, and finding a way to make that work from a compliance perspective takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of specificity. I think if you're working in compliance where you're in a bank, there are a lot of operational processes that are run with people who are really deeply familiar with what is necessary. The instructions can be a little vague. Here's exactly what the law says, here's what you need to do within a fairly large radius, and the operational process can be imagined and implemented by an operations team With engineering. You have to specify it so carefully that it can actually be coded in something that can be made into reality, that will operate on its own and that you can oversee and make sure that it works and that you can show regulators and have the feedback loops that you need. But it requires you to be a lot more specific about what exactly needs to exist and what the parameters that you need to solve for are.
Nick:Yeah, so what are the big laws that are on your radar?
Andrew:Bank Secrecy Act is the piece that underpins a lot of the AML and KYC regulations. Sanctions would be the other piece which you get new entities and new individuals on the sanctions list. So the, the adaptability of your systems to meet the, the changing requirements, is important yeah.
Nick:So tell me about sanctions, like so how does that work? So are we talking, like you know someone who's like banking, like russia or something like that, who's been hit with a lot of sanctions, the last you know since what 2022? Do you have? Is there like a main agency that you follow to find who are all the sanctioned entities out there? And then, and then do you have to, like, does your work go beyond that?
Andrew:then, like, you have to figure out, like, what kind of sanction may apply to your situation there are comprehensively sanctioned regions, and the most recent sanctions, with portions of ukraine being comprehensively sanctioned, was challenging because it's not a complete country that's identified separately, with a separate code in a lot of databases, and then you have individuals who are sanctioned, and the way that you need to detect them is often similar.
Andrew:So where are you physically located, if you can find out, and who are the owners of the business that's your customer, or who are the individuals that you have as customers? The systems that detect them is, I'll say, straightforward, in the sense that you're trying to detect conditions that are relatively easy to define. After you've detected something, you get into the really interesting questions of what do you actually need to do when you find that that condition exists, that 40% of a business that you have as a customer is owned by a sanctioned individual, and then you then you collaborate closely with your sanctions experts and your that 40% of a business that you have as a customer is owned by a sanctioned individual, and then you collaborate closely with your sanctions experts and your legal counsel.
Nick:Oh my gosh. And then are you like, how often does that come up? Is that like really common, or is it once someone's hit with sanctions I'm trying to think of like a hypothetical that. I mean, let's say you just had some like business tycoon from a, from a country that's put under, or they're individually put under, sanctions. They're not going to like try to like open up a bank account with. I'm just going to say like chase bank in america, right, or or do they?
Andrew:I will say that the frequency with which you run across sanctioned individuals has a lot to do with the risk of the population that your business is trying to serve. If you're primarily domestic and most of your customers are in the US, you could come across these cases fairly infrequently. Keep in mind sanctions lists are not static, and so the more common scenario is you have an existing customer who may have new sanctions risk based on a change in your sanction list that Treasury publishes, and so that ongoing monitoring becomes really critical to make sure that you've correctly identified and fortunately, most system alerts are false positives from your sanctioned systems. Most people in the world are not sanctioned, even if they have names that are similar to people who are sanctioned, but when they do happen, it's obviously serious and needs to be addressed.
Nick:Oh my gosh, yeah, like, could you imagine if, like, somehow, there's another Andrew Gehring out there who gets sanctioned and they think it's you?
Andrew:Anyone named Andrew Gehring. Please do not get on a sanctions list for anyone who's listening.
Nick:Oh man, yeah, that's, that's. That's fascinating stuff. That sounds like really difficult too, or like when you do have it come up, it seems like really messy.
Andrew:For me, the interesting part is the system design, when it comes to how do you set up your systems to correctly screen and monitor and how do you find ways of identifying as quickly as possible who you need to review. Same thing is true on the anti-money laundering side. You need to be able to monitor accounts for activity that is unusual and escalate for suspicious activity. What is unusual activity in an account? It's highly contextual, depending on the business and products you have and the customers that you're serving, and so the solutions that you try to find in that space to be efficient and effective are really tailored to the business that you're serving, and so the solutions that you try to find in that space to be efficient and effective are really tailored to the business that you're looking at, and I think that's to me that's the fun and challenging part.
Nick:Are there any like trends in money laundering world? I mean, do you see more certain industries Like drug cartels as opposed to like organized crime, mafia kind of stuff? There are high level trends that are published.
Andrew:The numbers when it comes to amount that's laundered globally is staggering when it's estimated. The thing that's challenging with money laundering compared to, say, fraud is that no one sends you a receipt when they're done laundering money through an account, so the government doesn't get an effective count. That's really easy to classify. Certain industries are much, much higher risk, and that's recognized. With fraud, though, you get pretty decent signal. If you have an account. There's a loss on the account because of fraud, it's relatively easy to come back and say this was a fraud loss. What about this account could have told us that it was likely to be a fraud case? How would I train my system to recognize that in the future? As fraud topology changes With money laundering, you don't get that immediate signal in the same way, and so you're looking at it from a couple of different perspectives to try to understand what's unusual for your population and what would be unusual in a way that would be required to be reviewed.
Nick:So how did you originally get into financial technology fintech?
Andrew:I had been working for much larger companies in New York. Someone reached out and it was an interesting space to join the fintech that I did yeah, what was your first job out of law school?
Nick:oh man not excited.
Andrew:I think I had to do. I did doc review after I finished law school and I think that was not unfamiliar to some people who graduated when we did. We were also moving to new york because of of Ian's residency in New York, so when we first got there I needed a job pretty much as soon as we got there, and so that's what I wound up doing when I first landed in New York, and it was completely brutal and mind numbing.
Andrew:It was interesting what we worked on, but it wasn't a job that had prospects that I wanted to continue on, and so I think that's what made it hard. There were some amazingly interesting people that I worked with. We still keep up today, and I I'm fortunate that almost all of us are doing something else today. Um, but really happened to come into the compliance space completely by accident and people that I'd met during the course of actually a Korean language class that I was taking uh, someone else who was an attorney who said, yep, I'd done doc review as well and wound up doing compliance work.
Andrew:Um, put me on to thinking about it yeah, wow, that's awesome.
Nick:It's funny. I talked to a recruiter recently so about like our generation we we came out, we went into law school, financial crisis hit and then we came out of it. I remember talking to this recruiter recently being like, hey, I don't think my early experience is that great. Do employers look at that now? Is that looked down upon? She made it sound like it was like no big deal, like she's like no, like you got.
Nick:Because I did title work, which was just basically reviewing deeds and documents related to real estate to make sure that people owned the land that they said they owned, which that doesn't like. You know, that comes from a time when I think that was much more of a problem, but today it's like it seems like such a given. Like you buy a house, of course the person who's selling you the house like owns it. Like. Normally, I don't think we would even bat an eye at that. But you know, once upon a time there was, there were people who would claim to have land that they didn't actually own. Uh and I'll go on a brief history tangent on that, I read a book called the frontiersman. It's all about, like the history of Southwest Ohio, northern Kentucky, eastern Indiana, around the time that the pioneers came through and they would talk about how a lot of these early explorers would go around, like Simon Kenton and Daniel Boone and they were the first ones out there from the Europeans and they would just basically claim all the land and they would hatchet their initials into a variety of trees throughout the land and they're like yeah, I own this now.
Nick:But then, like, eventually people would come in and still sell off their land regardless. You know, because, like you know, daniel Boone comes in, he claims I don't know God knows how many acres, but he never had a deed to it, like he never went through any, through any like legal sources to get it. But then eventually someone would and he was basically out of it. Daniel boone ended up moving like out to missouri, like he just kept getting pushed west because people kept claiming his land after he would claim it himself. He's like you know I'm out of here like forget this kind of stuff. But um, yeah, that's, that's a big tangent to talk about. Like how I wondered if my initial like title work was going to like how does that look nowadays, since I'm not doing anything related to that? And apparently it's fine, apparently it's no big deal, but um well, yeah, yeah, right, yeah, no one's like tell me about this. Uh, doc review you did back in 2012, it's like what yeah it was.
Andrew:It was a hard time. I I know you went through the same time and the same period. It was a difficult time to be right out of law school and I think it was also one of those shocking experiences because when we were one else talking to three else about what their interview experience was like for their summer internships was not anything like what we had, and so we were. The expectations and reality mismatch was pretty huge yeah, it was.
Nick:Yeah.
Nick:For those who haven't been to law school, usually the idea is at the beginning of your second year they have something called on-camp campus interview, which is when a law, all the law firm not all, but like a ton of the law firms from the local area come on to campus and they do just these like mass interviews for everyone, and it was understood at the time that that's how a lot of people got their their summer job for that following summer and I don't remember the numbers, but it would be like, just just for an example in the past, you might have 30 law firms that come on campus.
Nick:There were like five or something like that. It was this huge drop off from the previous year to us took these like public interest kind of jobs, which I always want to put public interest in like quotations, because I think it was kind of like a kind of a catch-all phrase for like anything that was like not in a for-profit kind of thing. So people could be a research assistant at school, they could go work for non-profits, they could, you know, work in various groups like that which, like I think, most people landed with something. So it wasn't like there were a lot of people that didn't have anything to do in the summer but it you know. Kind of going back to what did you want to do when you went to law school. Like I don't think there's many people that were like getting their target industry or jobs.
Andrew:Yeah, it did make us think outside the box. I think in the long run that wound up being beneficial because I didn't tie myself to doing some really specific niche area at the time and after I'd found something that I thought was interesting. I love doing what I'm doing now, but I wouldn't have landed at it if I had had some sort of set up job prospect right out of out of law school and done say, name your niche area of law yeah probably would have just kept doing it?
Nick:yeah, part of my. What advice do I give to people that want to go to law school? It's what you're kind of saying earlier. It's a little bit more nuanced than just like one simple yes, no, maybe. So it's. You know, you kind of have to tease out some factors of the person.
Nick:But when I hear people say like, well, I want to go to law school and I want to do this kind of law, I will always be like you got to keep an open mind Because one those jobs might not be available but also too like to your point, just now you might find something you are really into. I mean, I didn't think I would like to do work for a big company or like, or like view, like business kind of law. But that's what I did my last job and like I really liked it. I liked the variety, I liked kind of like the stability and not having to do like billable hours. So because I was like you, I went into law school.
Nick:I wanted to do something international, like international law, which is kind of an amorphous subject. I won't go on a tangent for that but then I remember like I went in thinking like, oh yeah, I want to do international. Then when I got there I was like, oh well, you know, I could do international or environmental, like yeah, and then yeah, that that really didn't expand my net too much more than it already was. So suffice it to say I did not do either. I did have some environmental internships, though those are interesting.
Andrew:I think it's funny because what I would have wanted to pick going back in time. Knowing what I know now is nothing like what I would have tried to pick going into law school, and I think part of that is the information gap is huge and it's almost unfair to ask someone right out of college exactly what they want to do. What you find challenging or interesting and the lifestyle that you want to have take some time to develop. It is. For me, it took quite a long time to decide what I thought was really valuable about the work that I did and the type of relationship I wanted to have with work and the co -workers that I had. That was nothing that I was prepared to know going into law school. So I think there's an advantage to note to maybe having worked before you go to law school, but at the same time, the doors that I had later because I'd gone to law school might not have opened.
Nick:Yeah, no for for sure. It's so hard to say. It's like you can't connect the dots. Going forward to your point about like having some real world experience. Going into law school, I do remember one of our classmates who was older than us at the time. I want to say she might have been like 40 or like late 30s or something. I can remember like when we would be in class and we'd be talking about some, you know, some concept of like contracts or something like that and be like well, how does it work when you know someone doesn't do what they promise to do and stuff like that? And, like you know, all of us are sitting there like academically, like?
Nick:yeah no, yeah, that makes sense. And then we would have this student who has some real life experience be like well, this is like when a contractor one time was supposed to build a deck on my house but they didn't do a good job and like they built the deck Like it was fun to have that application kind of come up where you're like oh yeah, so that's how it works.
Andrew:I also realized that a lot of challenges in work are not necessarily intellectual challenges. They're organizational. They their coordination challenges. I think when you're giving advice, a lot of the things that are either fun or not fun about that are the relationship you have with the business that you're part of. So finding something that's rewarding in that position of being able to advise or to help build out some new, some new business or product is the thing that makes it fun and interesting. The actual underlying intellectual challenge of it may present itself in a bunch of different ways. That's a really vague concept, but the reaction you get from giving advice probably matters more in the end than to the actual advice you're being asked for yeah, no, I know what you mean.
Nick:Well, hey, andrew. Uh, I want to be respectful of your time. I know you said you had an hour and we have hit the hour mark, so thank you for coming on to the pod thanks, nick.
Andrew:Uh, thanks for me. I was really excited when you asked.
Nick:Law school is fun, but not in the way that fun is fun Seriously, I might get a tattoo of that, andrew. Thank you for coming on to the pod. I'll let you know if I ever see another Andrew Gehring on a sanctions list. And thanks for listening everyone. If you'd like to send feedback, check out the show notes for this episode. There is a link that will let you send a text. Until next time, take care.
