The United part is pretty good. The States part, I’m not so sure. [laughs]

It’s a formative thing. I wouldn’t say it’s the only way to achieve this higher, more integrated thing, but it’s one of the very valid ways.

We see this kind of sentiments around the world in different periods of history. In pretty much all these types of cultures it has a unifying effect, of course, but it also enable much more sophisticated morality to ensue.

For people who believe in that. There’s very similar things of being chosen people in, also, the Chinese culture.

Or whatever. Anyone who wants to be a example of somebody else, of course, is holding themselves to a integrity standard. It’s a good thing, psychologically speaking.

For people who believe in that.

It’s a useful motivator.

Yeah, and I visited, of course, Palo Alto and Silicon Valley area, San Francisco, but for weeks at a time. I was never a permanent resident there.

I lived in Boston for three months, in San Jose for maybe five months, six months, and Portland for a month at a time for a couple times. That’s pretty much it.

I probably read books about that, but I haven’t talked with people actually in that culture. That’s when I was 12, in Taiwan.

People, because of the successful Berlin Wall thing, talk a lot about non‑zero‑sum games, and things like that. That it’s possible to not forever be antagonistic. That, also, is being enabled by this new thing called the Internet, and academic net, or CPU, or whatever.

Osmosis, perhaps. [laughs] I became aware that there is this open sharing culture. That there is this movement in the world that is generally pushing towards non‑rival goods, and so on.

My German’s not good enough to connect to a local hacker space at the time, is what I’m saying. By reading magazines, the university bulletins, and how my dad and his classmates are talking about, I became aware that there is a hacking scene going on.

I became aware of it. I wasn’t active in it. I write a lot of programs by that time, mainly around Chinese text processing, and so on.

This is Goodnet’s. It’s pretty good.

I do enjoy programming a lot, and I do consider myself, still, a coder and a hacker. I will probably still do that as part of public service, not necessarily for any bottom line of a private sector company.

In any case, I think that I will probably still do consulting, pro bono or not. I’m still active in the open source community, writing more English and Chinese than programming at this moment.

Maybe it does. I haven’t studied it very deeply from a legal perspective. By my personal understanding of these concerns, they’re all addressed by independent laws. It’s, therefore, a little bit silly, but I’m willing to be corrected.

All these concerns have their separate laws now. I don’t really know whether the original motivation of that particular law in the public service law still holds its merits.

It was designed almost a hundred years ago, many, many decades ago, when there is a huge worry that doing consulting work as a public servant, there’s a conflict of interest, or there will be lobbying, or improper handling of confidential information, or whatever.

I do. I still do consulting pro bono according to the current law, in any case.

I think the law’s silly, by the way. [laughs]

The law forbids a public servant from doing consulting work. [laughs]

I wasn’t part of the CICQ team, but Chia-Liang Kao, one of the g0v founders was. Of course, the search engine, also. I wrote a lot of the back‑ends, the basic code infrastructure thing.

For most of the things. The back‑ends for the auction site, the community, social media website.

Each of those four iterations it was a social media, like the Chinese version of ICQ. It was the Messenger kind of thing. It was a auction site, and it was also a search engine. It was also an online community. It was also a lot of other things.

It was called Informationist, [non‑English speech] . It was then renamed to Inforist. It was renamed to Inforian, and then renamed to P‑Asia. It’s a company that likes renaming a lot.

Then became the first C2C auction site, like eBay.

No, not in US dollars.

If you calculate that, I’m never a millionaire, but if you calculate it in Taiwan dollars, then maybe before I was 20.

I wouldn’t say any of these are particularly lucrative, because I’m always paid by the hour. Socialtext did give me some stocks, but I didn’t ask for them. There’s no particularly lucrative job that I participated. I said a arbitrary hourly rate of one Bitcoin per hour for years.

Yeah, but it’s converted to USD at the time of signing. The same happened with Oxford University Press and Socialtext, because none of the three organizations has a ledger that can do Bitcoin.

I worked as independent consultant contractor with Apple. It’s certainly the most lucrative, either as a consultant or as a...I didn’t participate in Apple’s startup days, obviously, but it was a startup.

I don’t even know where the lyrics part came from. It was a general‑purpose search engine. You can certainly do lyrics.

I always encourage, of course, people to try alternative education system, even for the experience, even for a few days a week.

"This is my schedule, my own hand‑designed, handcrafted curriculum." If it pass a review board, it’s entirely legal.

It’s legal now. It’s legal now. For quite a few years Taiwan has the most advanced ‑‑ what we call experimental education laws ‑‑ that allows anywhere from the whole K12, anyone can write a proposal saying, "I want to go to school only two times a week," or three ...

Exactly, but I never participated in a situation where that diploma is required, so it doesn’t really matter.

I still attended the graduate school classes, and work with professors on projects, and so on.

Yeah, that’s where my learning begins, when the schooling ends. I dropped out of junior high school to join a startup, and then to graduate school. It’s just no diploma.

That’s the thing that struck the most about the stories.

The economic disciplines, fields, are a illusion. That’s almost never useful to have.

That’s the main thing, is that disciplines is a illusion. That’s...

That the arbitrary lines that divides those views disappear when you’re in a real movement, because everybody is connecting to everybody, and forced, even, by the contingencies to make one’s self understood as much as possible by people who don’t share the same field or same profession. Which is not ...

Mostly that no matter what your field is ‑‑ because they come from the humanities, the hard science, the soft sciences, all kinds of fields ‑‑ you can have a contribution on the democratization process, on deepening the deliberation or the conversation.

Very formative.

Because of the democratization, there’s a lot of documentaries about Berlin, about the World War, about the Holocaust, and so on. We sometimes watched those things on TV and had a lot of conversations between the exiles.

We would watch TV sometimes. In Germany there is endless TVs about the Berlin Wall, because it was fresh at the time, and the eventual democratization of the East Germany systems, and how would that even go. Will everybody go into deep debt ‑‑ they didn’t ‑‑ and so on.

In the living room.

I will then press Enter. Because it means clear screen, I would take a eraser to erase it here, and so on. Clear enough?