- Muhammad Ali

But for most people it’s not enough to simply answer the question. You need to witness someone walking the path and leading by example. Someone who is uninhibited by the social conventions of age, who rejects fear and reluctance, and seizes every opportunity.

That person is my mother, appropriately named Daisy, who turns seventy today.

As I write this she’s somewhere between Zurich and Vienna, but it feels like only yesterday that I was 13 years old and she was traveling across Russia for weeks by herself. On other trips she’s traveled to South and Central America, East Asia, Northern Europe, the Middle East, and pretty much everywhere else on earth. She almost exclusively travels alone, unencumbered by travelers who don’t share her curious and fearless approach to embracing other people and cultures.

Everywhere she goes she makes friends, language barrier be damned. I’ve always been a bit jealous of how naturally that comes to her — it’s a gift. When I ask where that came from she describes a childhood in ravaged post-war Germany: hungry, cold, and with few possessions, but remaining hopeful and positive. The mindset of a truly positive person is as unmistakable as it is unstoppable.

- Thomas Jefferson

I grew up wanting for nothing and sometimes I struggle to be half as open and positive as my mother, who grew up in war-torn Prussia without a father. Her brother, who was her guardian, died at 40 of lung cancer shortly after I was born and her companion of 15 years (The Giant) died recently. Both are dearly missed, but life goes on and begs to be seized. And seized it will be.

Seventy years isn’t old unless you let it be. Because of my mother I face my 30′s, 40′s, 50′s, 60′s, and 70′s with absolute optimism, knowing that the vibrancy of life increases, not diminishes, in the decades to come. I know it because I’ve seen it.

Happy 70th birthday, I love you!

Photo above taken in December 2012 when my mother took time after sailing the Andaman Sea to meet me in Bangkok for my 31st birthday weekend.

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My parents divorced when I was six years old, before I was able to grasp what marriage really meant. After their separation, my mother put every ounce of her energy into raising me and my teenaged sister. She had a handful of suitors over the years, but none really captured her heart until Gene, who was a highly intellectual investor, political conservative, and towering giant at 6’8″ tall. I looked up to him literally and figuratively.

Gene was well-informed and confident. Ever seen a very confident, hyper intelligent, and outspoken 70 year old who’s 6’8″? I’ve seen many surreal sights but Gene ranks among the most memorable. The walls at his house on Queen Street in Old Town Alexandria were completely lined with books, more than I’d ever seen outside of a library. His appetite for knowledge was voracious and after educating himself, he’d make impassioned and convincing arguments that he was right. Right about politics, right about human nature, right about government. Eyes would often roll when Gene would go into long winded rants, often citing 19th century literature or obscure battles in military history that would never fail to disarm anyone who disagreed with him.

Gene had two children who didn’t follow in his footsteps, and that disappointed him. He longed for a family which he could be proud of, and for a decade he instilled his virtues into me and patiently explained complex issues with great care. In my father’s absence, Gene dedicated himself to educating me, and in the absence of Gene’s sons, I was his disciple, grateful to learn from him. We’d exchange emails debating and agreeing on world politics, behavioral genetics, and human nature. Sometimes I’d be up late or thinking for hours about how to carefully construct a rebuttal to Gene that could withstand his incredible scrutiny. It felt like how school should have been: hours spent assembling an impassioned argument that I believed in, to be presented to someone with more knowledge, experience, and passion than I. In each instance, he taught me something.

I’ve read at least a dozen books that Gene either suggested or outright gave to me, including books I’d definitely have never read on my own, like Pat Buchanan’s Death of the West. After reading that and other books, I’d share my thoughts with Gene and he’d sharply correct me where he saw that I was mistaken. Years later, I’d have a bookshelf filled with books that would arouse the suspicion of my houseguests. (Like Kensho and Tenzin, who when seeing Pat Buchanan on my bookshelf jokingly accused me of voting for George W. Bush. To most people, reading the literature of your ideological opposition skirts the boundary of betrayal.) I regularly acquired and read books with the specific intention of discussing them with Gene. I finished reading the most recent one, John Lott’s More Guns Less Crime, last week and purchased the most recent one just two days ago, The Conscience of a Conservative, authored by Barry Goldwater in 1964. Through Gene I developed the skill of confronting ideas and people that you disagree with for the sake of personal growth and the acquisition of knowledge. None of these are books that I would be reading if not for Gene’s influence.

Although I feel terrible about losing a close friend and mentor, I don’t think it’s really hit me yet. I’m glad that I was able to see Gene last summer and give him a hug, and that my mother cooked his last meal. Gene is gone but the ideals that he stood for — of courage and the relentless pursuit of knowledge — will live on through me. I will never be afraid of subjecting the ideas which I hold most closely to the scrutiny of those most capable of revealing their weaknesses.

Thank you Gene.

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As I’ve grown older, I’ve observed myself committing the same compulsive behavior. First it was baseball cards, then video games, then vinyl records. The idea is to horde things with the unconscious belief that “one day I might use this”. The problem I find is that it results in a cluttered mindset in addition to a cluttered living space.

As I reduce my physical possessions, I feel myself getting closer to focus and clarity. There’s less on my mind. I’ve given away all of my books and my Blu-Ray collection is next.

The next step for me is taking the same actions on my digital life. When I open Google Chrome every morning, a dozen tabs are routinely open from the previous day, and I don’t know where to start. I download movies compulsively, never watching many of them. I maintain and expand an iTunes library with 90 days straight of music. This is common among my peers, but I question the benefit and practicality.

Today, I make a pledge toward minimalism.

The first thing I’ve done is removed everything extraneous from this blog.

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Spotify on a 30-day Premium trial, which is ad-free. The service is outstanding but the ads drive me crazy.

A Lifetime of Collecting

Do you remember your first compact disc? I do. It was Flood, by They Might Be Giants, released in 1990 when I was 9 years old.

I grew up the son of an audiophile. My Dad collected vinyl, tapes, and then compact discs, and could speak for an hour about speaker amps. His stereo was a coveted and custom extension of his love of music. I ended up inheriting this attribute, and spent a decade collecting thousands of vinyl records before moving onto a digital collection in 2005. Seven years later and I have a collection that would take decades to fully absorb. But I think we’re reaching the end of this era of music, as our music collections are becoming fully decentralized.

Stream Every Song Ever Recorded

Cut Copy – Zonoscope, from my iTunes library

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPod, he boasted about the number of albums that you could store onto a handheld device. And it was stunning.

No more changing tapes or discs! As capacity increased, it became ordinary to walk around with more music in your pocket than someone 40 years ago would hear in their lifetime. But now we’re reaching the era where we can’t even be bothered with that, because virtually everything ever released is available within a moment using streaming services like Spotify and Pandora.

I visited a friend last week who recently switched to Spotify, opting to pay $16 a month to stream almost anything, anywhere. No more music collecting. “I don’t have interest in the hassle of collecting music, I just want to stream everything”, he says. And why wouldn’t you?

The Streaming DJ

After spending so much of my life collecting music, it’s hard to imagine stopping completely. Even over the last year, my collection has been refined considerably, as I tag and organize everything for accessibility in DJ sets or sampling for music production. There isn’t currently anything like Spotify for DJ’s, but when that is realized, look out because then the end is really near. I can picture it now: it’s a vinyl control system like Serato Scratch Live or Traktor that charges a monthly licensing fee to stream any song and control it with a digital control record. There would be problems to solve (latency, internet accessibility, reliability) but these would be figured out before long.

We’re already said goodbye to collecting music in the form of physical media in many forms, now we collect it digitally. But when the advantages of collecting digital files and organizing them locally competes with an all-knowing, always-accessible cloud of every song ever recorded, it’s no-contest.

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Throughout my time there, meeting people and listening to speeches about the development of Chengdu’s IT infrastructure, I was plagued with a single thought: can Chinese internet culture exist?

In the TED clip above, a Chinese blogger goes into great detail about what the “Chinese internet” entails. Is the formula below accurate?

Chinese internet culture = block each and every international Web 2.0 service, and then clone it for a Chinese audience.

This is something that you will never hear inside China. It takes Chinese people traveling to far-away places like Edinburgh Scotland to make a case such as this, which undermines everything that the Chinese internet claims to be.

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It reminds me of the plotline from the 1995 movie Hackers which was one of my favorite movies when I a teenager. When it was released many critics rightly pointed out that there was a vast divide between what was depicted in the film at what was actually possible. But what the film did was paint a picture of how the digital and physical worlds are inextricable tied together in the Internet age.

With all the talk of China and the United States escalating their own cyber warfare operations, the question I’m wondering is: when will the first cyber attack occur that changes the world for us all?

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Buying illicit drugs was always easy, though. A high school student could get bud, ecstasy, acid, and more through a simple phone call. Drug dealers don’t check ID’s and will sell to anyone who isn’t a cop.

40 years ago (to the day), Nixon initiated the War on Drugs by declaring “illicit drugs the number one public enemy”. Hindsight is always 20/20, but expecting humans to end a tradition of thousands of years of taking drugs for recreational, medicinal, and spiritual reasons is plain crazy. For a while (decades), the establishment plugged it’s ears and ignored the side-effects, which grew to be more dangerous and difficult to manage than the perceived ill.

And finally, it seems that we could be near the tipping point.

The point where the government doesn’t get between doctors and patients, or consenting adults and substances which don’t affect anyone else. If someone wants to do heroin, I say the government shouldn’t stand in their way. We’re surrounded by evidence that the government and it’s never-ending bureaucratic departments of moral policing are ineffectual babysitters.

Here’s a solid NYT article on the issue describing the coalition that stands on the horizon to change the future of international drug policy.

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