| What is your most memorable childhood experience? | My most memorable childhood experience was going back to my childhood home a few years after I had moved to a new state. As I grew up in that house for most of my life at that point, the experience brought up deep feelings of nostalgia in a figurative torrent, juxtaposed against the actual torrent of rain that was hitting my former home at the time. As the rainstorm passed, so too did my wistful mood, which was transmuted into catharsis and hopeful optimism for the future - sometimes you must give up something to gain even more. |
| What immediate family member do you closely identify with and why? | I identify a lot with my father. While we are both technically minded individuals, I notice that we share certain patterns in our creative thought and require a certain amount of freedom to experiment and iterate in order to produce new, useful ideas that we are proud of. This is both a feature and a bug, as it allows new ideas to become reality, but, without focus, makes it difficult to deliver on the promise of those ideas with haphazard execution. |
| What character traits do you admire in an individual? | I am a fan of strategic empathy, the ability to connect with and understand various viewpoints while maintaining your own position. It's a quality I believe we should have more of, as it would lead to better conflict resolution. Furthermore, it also fosters humility and respect for others, which I also highly admire. |
| What is the funniest thing ever to happen to you? | One of the funniest (in retrospect) things that happened to me was that someone broke into the back of my house once and was snorting … something in the back of the patio. The cops and an ambulance were called to take care of the intruder, who, as it turned out, was not taking drugs (at least not at that time) but was snorting table salt, apparently thinking that it was a different white powder. Still, salt is not the best thing to be inserting into your lungs, and luckily the mystery visitor was treated and turned out alright. |
| If time and money were not an issue, where would you travel and why? | If money and time were no concern, I would like to travel to the Amazonian rainforest and live among the Piraha people. As a modern-day hunter-gatherer community, the Piraha have a way of life vastly different from that of globalized society, and living among them could lead to different perspectives on life or uncover assumptions about reality that Western civilization makes. In addition, although not a perfect analog, living among the Piraha could serve as a time capsule to better understand how humans lived before the advent of farming. |
| When and if you ever have children, what would you like to pass on to them? | I’m a big fan of Robert Caro’s “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” biography. While LBJ was a problematic figure for a variety of reasons, what shone through the series of books and what I believe is worthy of admiration is Johnson’s unflinching focus on his goal - to become the president of the United States one day - and deliberately structuring his life to achieve it. It seems that many kids today are lost, aimlessly living without purpose, so I would encourage my children to dream big and to flexibly plan for how to achieve those dreams. |
