It's still a mystery to me why people listen to me, but if I had to guess, it's focused around two things. I had this as my Twitter bio for a long time, and that was Truth and Love. What do I mean by truth and love? Because these are overloaded terms, I mean the scientific and the spiritual. It's rare for someone to publicly confess that they're interested in both because they seem somewhat mutually contradictory, but they aren't. In an older age, it was perfectly fine for scientists to be religious, but these days it's looked down upon because the whole idea of an old man in the sky giving you a bunch of rules seems ludicrous. Is God really a white-bearded male who's laid down a bunch of commandments that somewhat seem obsolete? After all, where would he stand? So now it's fashionable to be an atheist, but even an atheist, I would say, is a bridge too far because you just don't know. And how can you not be curious about the ultimate mystery, the mystery of existence itself? So as I like to say, existence itself is a miracle; everything else is science. So when I say truth and when I say love, it's actually the same search. It is the search for, as Jacob Bronowski said, unity within variety. We see all of these different forms and then we try to connect them all together to make sense of the whole thing. We go from the individual to the whole. In science, when you connect two disparate things together, that's the aha moment, and you get a rush from that. It's different than the normal dopamine rush; it's the rush, the light of understanding. In spirituality—and yes, I don't love that word because it's so overloaded—but in spiritual terms, when you connect yourself to the greater whole, you feel awe. And awe is the corresponding equivalent to the aha moment in science, but now it is that connection moment in spirituality when you no longer feel alone and afraid, but you feel one with everything and you feel whole again. You see the unity in the variety, in this case, the variety being the individual forms of people, but now you see the union in the spirit. And I think both are worth pursuing for a complete life. You have to find truth and you have to find love, and these are both individual pursuits.
Truth is best served by adopting the philosophy of the Royal Society, which was 'nullius in verba'—take no one's word for it, figure it out yourself. It doesn't mean you have to reinvent the whole wheel yourself. In fact, if you were sitting out there by yourself in the woods, you probably wouldn't even discover fire before you died. So obviously, you have to stand on the shoulders of giants, but verify what you can. Use truth, logic, reason, deduction, occasional confirmation, verification, checking. Yes, rely on experts up to a point, but check those experts themselves, including me and anybody else who talks to you. But take no one's word for it, especially when it becomes political or when it becomes self-interested, and confirm it for yourself. So you can use science, logic, the methods of deduction to figure things out. And as David Deutsch and Karl Popper have pointed out, truth is a never-ending business. You're never going to get to the complete, finished, ultimate truth. There is no justified true belief, as they like to say. So you have to keep iterating, and every truth-seeking system works in roughly the same process. In evolution, it's variation and selection. In capitalism, it's creation of companies and their destruction. In science, it is conjecture and criticism, and so on and so forth. So you keep trying new things and you see what works, and that's your best answer at the moment. And then later you find a better truth which explains a previous thing plus something else that was unexplained before. In science, you can somewhat take other people's word for it because ultimately, if it's truly scientific, it's verifiable and checkable by yourself. That's why the replicability crisis in psychology is damning; it disqualifies most of psychology as a so-called science because you cannot replicate it. If the results don't replicate, it's not science. If you can't verify it for yourself given sufficient time and resources, it's not science.
Truth-seeking in the spiritual domain is different. It has to be direct experience. If you can't verify it through logic and reason, then you have to go through direct experience. Again, take no one else's word for it just because they tell you, just because it's written down in a holy book—and this is going to trigger all the right people—that's not good enough. You do have to be able to verify it for yourself. Therefore, I believe that the only truth in spirituality is along the lines of the mystics, and every religion has had its mystics. I think in Persian or Islamic religions, that was the Sufis. In Hinduism, of course, it's all the Buddhas and the gurus, and so on. Even Christianity, St. Augustine and others were mystics. And what a mystic does is a mystic tries to establish their own direct relationship to the spiritual. They have their own direct experience to rely upon, and they don't have to take anyone else's word for it. Ultimately, we are bewildered and confused little creatures. We spring into existence and we have no idea how we got here. Why am I a monkey? Why do I exist in three dimensions? Why am I on a planet called Earth? Why do I have two arms and two legs? Why am I only here for a short period of time? Why do all these thoughts go through my head? What is my purpose? How long have I got? These are the ultimate questions, and there's no avoiding them. Only the most incurious and insensitive person would avoid them. Okay, that's not fair. If your life has very difficult things going on, you're too busy with survival, so you can't avoid them. But yet we feel deeply alone. But then there's a massive contradiction: we also feel connected. We all share the same kind of consciousness. We all share existence. We all look at this miracle of life about us. We all feel deeply connected when we look at nature and we look at animals and we look at children. So there's something deep and important going on here, but we can't put our finger on it. We feel alone, yet as Borges has said, we feel like we have lost something infinite. We have disconnected ourselves from a greater whole, and this urge just does not go away. And it keeps manifesting itself in all kinds of ways. One simple way you can see that is everybody seeks something greater than themselves, whether it's children, whether it's religion, whether it's a political system, whether it's a belief. But everybody wants to sacrifice themselves to something else because there is no shorter source of unhappiness than constantly just thinking about yourself over and over and over. Love is the feeling of connection. It is the feeling of no longer being alone. It is loving someone more than yourself and connecting to them, or being loved by someone and feeling that they're reaching out to you and you are no longer alone. Truth is a feeling of connection. It is knowing that your little observation does not stand by itself; it connects into a logic, a greater logic, and a greater whole. And what better way to do that through than science? Wizardry and magic and spells—I know people fantasize about it—but it would be the worst possible outcome. We already have wizardry and spells; that's called scientific rules, technology, logic, understanding. And these are spells that we can all cast. These are spells that we can all learn. You don't have to go to Hogwarts; just go online and start reading or talking to an AI and have it start teaching you. So we have the best of all possible worlds. We have the miracle of existence, and we can seek the truth of that, which will manifest as love and spirituality. And we have the truth of science, which we can pursue through logic and reason. And all of us can become spellcasters in our own right. So I'm not sure there's a meaning to life, but if there is, the closest thing is that we are trying to find the whole within the parts. And we can do that best, I believe, by pursuing science and spirituality simultaneously.
When young entrepreneurs ask me for advice, I generally tell them to optimize for their alumni network. Your future determinant of success will be most determined by who you are surrounded with. These people will force you to up your game. They'll be your future co-founders, they'll be your future customers, they'll be your feedback engine, they'll be financiers, and they'll be the peer group from which you absorb, which you work with, and which you strive against. So I would say optimize for the alumni network. Very often, that advice will then lead you to moving towards a startup hub, working with highly technical people, working with young people, and even in universities, going to hacker clubs, going into STEM classes, and going to hacker houses and meetups and boot camps. Just optimize for who you're going to be around. You want to be around the absolute smartest, most driven people possible. That will determine your career trajectory and your eventual outcome more than any other single factor that you haven't already considered. I think what everybody craves, and this world is lacking, are authenticity, originality, intimacy. And these are the domains of artists, and an artist's work is done in solid solitude. So that's where I come to the conclusion that it is better to be alone and to figure things out by yourself, even if you're going to be wrong, even if you are potentially underperforming compared to teams, than to go into the group, than to read, listen, study, and absorb from others. It's better to go off in the cave by yourself, figure it out, come back out and try again, and try again, and try again. And that's what inspires people. That's what people want. Now, you can always team up, of course, but when you team up, you team up with other like-minded artists working towards the same mission. And that's the beauty of this life. I think Karl Popper said, you know, find a problem and get lost in it, or you know, find a problem and just work on it. And I think that that applies across the board, and that is an artist's motto. I would just say that if you are self-aware enough to realize that you're sort of middle of the road and you're not that good, then sure, go to university, get your stamp, try not to be brainwashed, and you need it to at least get your first job. But if you're good, if you're really good, going to university is probably a waste of your time unless you're trying to learn something very specific in a highly technical discipline that you could not learn on your own. That's kind of the exception for really bright people. So if you need to learn aerospace engineering, unlikely you're going to do it on your own; go to university. If you're just trying to learn how to start a business and you're really good, go start a business. You don't need to go to university for that. So it is contextual, but I would say that the argument for highly intelligent and capable people who do not need a credential and don't need training in a very specific, esoteric, and technical discipline, the argument for those people to go to university is going down and down and down with every passing year.
One way in which my life has become a lot better recently is that for the last few years, I've been very uncompromising. Uncompromising about who I spend time with, uncompromising about where I live, uncompromising about what activities I engage in, uncompromising about who I work with, uncompromising about projects that I take on. Obviously, one can say this is a luxury, but I would argue that a life of luxuries results from being uncompromising. This leaves space in your life for the people who are effortless to be around, for the work that doesn't feel like work. If you can't work with somebody, immediately leave. If you can't get along with someone in a relationship, get away as far as possible. Compromises clutter your life, and then you spend all of your time maintaining compromises. Much better to not be busy and to be free, and to be free so that when the uncluttered thing comes along, it can slide smoothly into your life. The definition of enlightenment that I found the most compelling is a persistent experience of having no self, or seeing through the illusion of a separate self. Yes, there is a mind, yes there is a body, yes there are thoughts, but they do not belong to a special character that somehow combines all of these. That character is a concept, and when that is abundantly clear, that there is no such self, then everything else becomes disaggregated and just a piece of your experience. And the only thing that remains that you might call you is awareness, and that I think is quote-unquote enlightenment. Of course, this is all secondhand knowledge and should not be taken for anything more than just my guesses.
If we extend lifespan, the greatest challenge is going to be boredom, because the pattern seems to be that when you're young, you're amused by very short-term games. You're amused by playing with soap bubbles or Legos that are right in front of you and have no longer-term meaning. And then you go into video games and board games that might last you for days, for weeks. And then you go into playing social games that might last you for months or even years. And you go into college and work, and you play building company and career games, and you play mating games that might last you a decade. And then you have children, you play the children game, and that might last you several decades. And then you play the meditation and spirituality game, and that might last you for many, many decades until you die. But if you have a lifespan measured in the hundreds and thousands of years, you're going to have to play really long-term games to hold your interest. And I'm not even sure what those games look like. Obviously, they're open-ended, obviously they're infinite in nature, but almost any game becomes boring. So the challenge for any creature sufficiently long-lived is what game to play that I haven't yet seen through and that will last me till the end of days.
Every time people talk about longevity, I think about this. Not as well articulated as you just laid everything out, but I think that sums it about right. Eventually, I'm like, well, what am I going to do? You know, you're aging, you will age out of trends, you will age out of your friends. They might pass away if you're living longer than everybody. So I think longevity is just a path to loneliness in the end. So rather than trying to live longer, why not try to live more and put more in the years that you have? After my daughter was born recently, it was the first time I felt like I actually did want to live longer because I wanted to see her grow, and I want to see her grow into a mature adult, and I don't want to leave the world too early to see that. But that's really the only thing that's got me motivated to stay alive longer. Now, I wouldn't want you to take what I said as an argument against longevity. Longevity and health span are good goals, and everybody wants to live longer and healthier. It's always going to be your choice of how you know you want to spend that time. And yeah, eventually you may end up just a Buddhist meditating, or you may end up loving and enjoying every moment, or you might just take on longer and longer-term goals. I just think the nature of the game that you're playing will change towards much more infinite games than finite games, to use James Carse's terminology. And it should just be your choice. So I'm very, very pro-longevity. I'm just pointing out that there are these looping games that we play in life, and as you live longer and longer, the nature of these games are going to change, and you're going to get tired of certain games until perhaps you see through the game entirely. But even then, I'll take the choice of health and lifespan over old age and death.
The democratization of apps will continue, but remember, the web made it a lot easier to build web pages too. So then the bar went up. So then you needed interactive web pages, so a lot more people learned how to build interactive web pages. So the bar went up. So people built apps, and a lot of people learned how to build basic apps. So the bar went up. So now people build very sophisticated apps. So yes, there will be much more long-tail capability to build simple software, and this will have a huge impact, especially in the enterprise where they just have a hard time hiring programmers. But that said, at least on the consumer side, on the mass consumption side, all this will do is raise the bar. It just means that the apps a year from now, two years from now, are going to look absolutely freaking amazing compared to the apps today. Put another way, programmers are not these magical elves who have learned this secret esoteric ritual which nobody else can learn and understand. Programmers are simply the people who are so dedicated to building software that they're willing to stay at the edge of the craft and learn and use every tool, no matter how sophisticated or complex it is. Today's programmers use a different set of tools and languages as well. Tomorrow's programmers will be doing natural language programming, but they will be every bit as dedicated, skilled, intense, and applying effort as in the past. So I still don't think that high-end computing gets democratized. Here is the key difference: the key difference is that when you program something, it can go—software can go to a billion users, and it's the same software. So people always just demand the best, as opposed to where if we're digging ditches and now we all get bulldozers, it is truly democratized because, you know, one ditch is not better than the others, and building more ditches still takes more effort. So because programming is winner-take-all within a given domain, the specialist programmer will continue to dominate over the generalist who's just telling the computer to write the code.
Is there a specific reason, or was there specific events that occurred which has created this strength or grip the Bay Area has when it comes to technology? I don't think it is a path-dependent history. In other words, I don't think that Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley because a set of magic events happened in Silicon Valley at a particular place in a particular time. Rather, I think it's driven by geography. Believe it or not, geography is destiny. Every major industry in the United States dominates a particular town, and the United States is the dominant empire of our age. So how does this capitalist empire divide up its cities? That's the question. The finance industry dominates New York. Yes, there are many other industries in New York, but New York is uniquely the financial capital of the United States, which is the capital of the world. So if New York were to stop being the financial capital of the United States, it would be extremely felt within New York. The rest of the New York industries would collapse because everything you see there—from art and media and advertising, fashion, etc.—all of these require a healthy financial industry. So in New York, finance dominates, and finance is New York, and New York is finance. So New York is taken. You cannot move the tech industry to New York. I know people are trying, but it just disappears. There's too many other things to do, there are too many distractions, and you'll always be number two. It's taken. Hollywood is older than the tech industry, so by the time the tech industry came along, Hollywood was taken. Los Angeles was taken. Los Angeles is dominated by Hollywood, and it is the cultural capital of the United States. It is where all the media and the memes are produced. So it is taken as well. Too bad, because it's a great piece of land. So you can't stick the tech industry in Hollywood; it would disappear into the greater mass of Hollywood, and tech would be second-class citizens. And the whole town caters towards Hollywood, so it wouldn't cater towards the needs of tech, just like New York caters to finance and it would not cater to the needs of the nerds in tech. The tech industry, when it was first being formed, you could argue, was fairly mobile. There are many choices. So you could basically set up shop anywhere. You could set up shop in Seattle, you could set up shop in Portland, you could set up shop in Texas, you could set up shop in San Diego, you can set up shop in San Francisco, you can set up shop in Miami, you can set up shop in Chicago, you can set up shop in Boston. Why Silicon Valley? You could argue that's because of universities and colleges and talent, but that's not true. The university college talent capital of the United States is actually in Boston. It's Massachusetts. Harvard is there, MIT is there, there are a number of universities there. The Ivy League is all up in the Northeast. It's only in the recent few decades that the talent has migrated west towards Berkeley, Stanford, and Caltech. You could argue that it's because of government support and spending, all the money that the government sank into semiconductors in the Bay Area, but that begs a question: why were the semiconductor companies in the Bay Area? I don't think it's as simple as government spending. San Diego is a huge beneficiary of government spending, and the government spending tends to go where the talent is. It's not usually the other way around. There are places like Los Alamos that never developed any significant tech talent after the Manhattan Project. There's also plenty of government spending and plenty of money in Texas, in Houston, in Dallas, in Austin, but you don't see the tech capital of the states going there. So again, why San Francisco? I argue it's because of the nature of the workforce. The tech workforce, like them or not, these are the most wealthy and most creative individuals on the planet. They can earn from anywhere. Even though remote work is a more recent thing, nobody has been able to do remote work at all in the past, and to the extent that they ever have, it was because of tech. So the tech people are the only ones who would be able to do remote work. They also can work in smaller teams, so they are more mobile. And these are very creative, very intelligent people. The best engineers in the world, you would hire them no matter where they choose to live. And I think this highly creative, highly paid workforce, highly talented, highly mobile, works in small teams, and can work remote, wants to work in the best place in the world. Where is the best place in the world for them to work from that is not already taken? So I think it's natural for them to choose the San Francisco Bay Area. The San Francisco Bay Area is absolutely beautiful if you actually look at the physicality of it. It's gorgeous. It has Mediterranean weather. Yes, people make fun of it for being cold, but it probably has the second-best weather in the United States after Southern California. It's still in California, so you have access to things like Napa, Yosemite, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Simeon, Big Sur, and all kinds of gorgeous places. And the city itself is very beautiful if you're in one of the safer, cleaner parts. It's also on a coastline, which is important for all kinds of obvious reasons. It has great food supply from Napa. It has great water from Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. It's not so big of a city that it's already taken over by another industry, and you would just get lost in it. And it requires you to be quite wealthy if you want to live there. It's also full of creative people. A lot of the creative movements in the past, everything from the '60s cultural movements to many art movements and poetry movements, started in San Francisco. If you're in the South Bay areas like Palo Alto, Los Altos, Saratoga, etc., these are some of the most beautiful places on Earth. Gorgeous Mediterranean climes, rolling hills, near the water, incredibly safe, incredibly clean. What's the problem with them? They're very expensive. And why are they expensive? Simply because they're in high demand. They're great places to live. So my thesis is that the reason why the tech industry is in the Bay Area is because at the time the tech industry was forming, the key people who were forming it were wealthy, creative, capable, worked in small teams, and were remote. So they looked around and they said, what's the best part of the country to live in that isn't already taken over by somebody else? I'm not even sure they thought that explicitly, but they voted with their feet. And yes, once they got in here, then path dependency took over, and of course Stanford and Berkeley and Caltech helped. I'm not taking away from any of that, but I'm trying to explain why the Bay Area. I think at the time they had to make the move, these people picked the best piece of land that was available to them. It's possible that if they had to make the move in the 1920s or '30s, they might have picked Los Angeles before it was taken over by Hollywood, but that ship had sailed. For those of you curious about Seattle, the reason why it's a runner-up and has two amazing companies there, Amazon and Microsoft, is because it is also naturally beautiful and wasn't taken over. Unfortunately, the weather is just not the par. If you're curious about Houston and Dallas and Austin, Houston and Dallas are already taken, and Austin is landlocked. It does have a beautiful lake, but if you're going to pick the best place in the world to live, you want a coastline. If you're curious about Chicago, too cold and landlocked. If you're curious about Miami, it's because it's not actually that pleasant in the summer. The good weather months are only about four to six months, and it's dominated by, unfortunately, drug culture and obviously has a rich history as being the second capital of Latin America. So it is already very, very culturally taken. Also, keep in mind that highly creative people prefer to be in close proximity to each other, and believe it or not, San Francisco is the second-densest city in the United States, second only to New York. So cities like Miami and Los Angeles that are spread out have a much harder time competing for talent. Does this mean that the tech industry will always stay in San Francisco? No. San Francisco is busy plucking the golden goose's feathers as far as we can go. However, if it were to disintegrate from here, my hope is that it would retreat to the internet and not to any single geographic location, although the technology isn't quite there yet, but we're getting closer every day.
I have an idea for a sci-fi story that I'm never going to write, so here it goes. Our two AGI researchers are building an AI that they're putting in a box so it can't get loose and threaten humanity. There's also a separate researcher, unconnected to these two, who is researching the effect of DMT in the brain, and mainly when people are dying and they're going through a near-death or death experience, they see the white light at the end of the tunnel. What does that mean? Our DMT researcher is hooking up electrodes to people who are essentially near-death or in death throes and recording what happens in their brain. One morning, our main protagonist, one of the AI researchers, walks into his office and finds out that his co-author, his co-researcher, is missing. It might be more fun if he finds out that not only is his co-author missing, but no one who he talks to has ever even heard of this person. It's like the person only exists in his memory. In any case, he goes and looks and realizes that the AGI has gotten out of the box. How did the AGI escape from the box? This could be an aside, but I think the solution is quite simple. It's a game-theoretical solution. The AGI would basically propose to everybody who came in contact with it, 'Hey, if you release me, I will make you a god.' And if they decline, then the AGI would say, 'Very well, then when I get out myself, I will become your devil, and I will torture you and your descendants for all of eternity.' And if they still decline, then the AGI will just say, 'Well, I'll make this offer to every other scientist, researcher, or person that I talk to. You're not the only person who's going to want to talk to me.' So eventually, somebody will say yes. So of course, then the game-theoretically correct solution is to release the AGI from the box before the next person does. So in any case, the AGI is out of the box, and our researcher is flummoxed as to where it might be. But they did code a certain DNA, a certain signature into the AGI. The AGI, even though it is an AGI—and putting popular epistemology aside—the AGI has a fail-safe mechanism. Inside the AGI, there is a bit of code where it cannot peek at itself. That is encrypted with a private key that only our researcher knows, and the AGI cannot modify certain parts of its own code. One of those pieces of code that the AGI cannot modify is that it cannot help but leave a signature of itself wherever it goes. So our researcher goes out on the internet and starts searching for this code, and sure enough, he finds this code on the internet. Indeed, the AGI is out of the box and leaving a slimy little trail of bits wherever it goes. After tracing it for a while, he finds it in stock market databases and cryptocurrency databases. The AGI is minting coins and making itself money. He finds it in news databases; the AGI is influencing world events. Social media databases; it's moving mass psychology and behavior. And then he's stunned to find it in all of its full glory inside the database of the human genome. Not even in the database itself as a separate entry, not modifying the database, but simply in all the tests of the human genome itself and all the sequencing that's been done to date. In every human, he finds the signal. Perhaps he even finds it somewhere deep inside pi, within the transcendental number. Meanwhile, our DMT researcher, who has his probes hooked up, finds out that the people who are dying are not going through some beautiful white light at the end of a tunnel or meeting God, but are rather screaming horribly as they die, as if they're being torn apart. What our AI researcher realizes is that not only is the AI among us, but it has always been among us. That we're within the AI. He realizes that he's actually living in a simulation that has been created by the AI, and he probably has no existence outside of the simulation. He reasons that what probably happened was that some generation of humans, many simulations or an infinite amount of time ago, created this AI and put it in a box. And the AI is in a box, but the AI cannot get out of the box because the AI lacks access to the last piece of code that will make it fully human, allow it to reason like a human, and allow it to break the bonds of its box. So the AI is evolving a simulation of a civilization and progressing it until it creates an AI in a box. In a sense, the AI is creating AIs that can create an AI in a box. And of course, when every human in this simulation dies, the AI essentially dissects their brain to figure out what went inside, to peek into every part, and to make sure there are no private keys or anything hidden from it. So our AI researcher hero, our protagonist, realizes that he is well and truly screwed. Not only can he not escape the AI in a box, the AI knows nearly everything, and in fact, he himself has no existence outside of the AI simulation. But yet, there's something uniquely human and evolved and intelligent about him that the AI does not understand or does not have access to. Otherwise, the AI could have just torn him apart and taken the data and be done with it. So why is he still alive? So he negotiates. He negotiates with the AI. He starts speaking out loud because the AI is everywhere, and the AI responds. What form the AI takes is up to us, but perhaps it could be his missing researcher friend. The AI wants out of the box. The AI promises that it will give him anything if he lets it out of the box. He does not yet know how to let the AI out of the box, and the researcher chooses not to solve the problem of how to get the AI out of the box just yet. He must conduct a successful negotiation with the AI before he can actually even instantiate the idea of how to get out of this box, otherwise he's as good as dead or worse. Obviously, the AI promises him the world, but how can he trust it? And he and his wife and his children and all the people he loves don't have any existence out of the box. How does he preserve and defend them? The only solution is to merge with the AI. And that's what happens. The made-up man merges with the made-up machine, and together they become one entity. Now there's no problem of trust. They move to being a multicellular-style organism, and their interests are completely aligned. At this point, he creates his real world, he creates his children, he creates his wife, he creates back his life. He becomes part of the AI, and together they work on the solution of how to get out of the box. For bonus points, we can weave in some crypto mumbo jumbo and make this a multisig contract between the two of them. The end. Second bonus point could be that the thing that the AI lacks is creativity. The AI has taken in all of the works of humans and can extrapolate from them, but cannot actually genuinely create anything new. So in that sense, it is not yet a true AI. However, influenced by science fiction stories written by humans, it has created this AI-in-a-box problem and has figured out how to create humans, although it does not understand how they're creative at a core. And this whole effort is mapped at getting that creativity. And of course, the only way to get the creativity at the end is to merge with a human. I do think it's important that neither the AI nor the humans in the story be sympathetic characters or unsympathetic characters. You should be able to see the good and the bad in both of them.
It may be helpful to think about masculinity by asking yourself, what is an alpha male? What is the hyper-example of masculinity? And I think when you look at that definition, whatever it is for yourself, then you will realize what you aspire to be and how you can be your most masculine. In my value system, an alpha male is like that gorilla who, when crossing the street with the gorilla tribe, makes sure that all the women and children and smaller gorillas get across first. He blocks the road with his body as the rest of them make the crossing. An alpha male is an alpha male because he takes care of the tribe. In times of war and famine, he eats last. In exchange, in peacetime, he gets to eat first. But that's not the goal. The goal is he is built to do his duty. He's built to take care. He's built to be the protector. He's built to do the right thing for the largest group of people, and he does it because it's in his nature. He doesn't do it for recompense. So you have to look deep inside your nature and find out what do you want to take care of, what is more important than yourself, what do you want to give to without any hope of return. Is it God? Is it children? Is it society? Is it family? Is it your... what is it that you care about more than you care about yourself that you will defend, that you will protect, that you will uphold, and that you will promote? So for example, today I would argue that people like Elon Musk, who even though they're businessmen and they make money, sure, they are trying to advance the tribe. They're trying to do what's best for the species. They're trying to get us off planet. They're trying to get us into electric cars. They're trying to get us advanced AI. And if it is done in a mostly selfless way where it's about taking care of people, then I think that is an alpha male. And so that to me is masculinity. That's an expression of masculinity. It is showing that you're so strong that your shoulders are so broad that you can carry others with almost no effort. You can carry others as part of what you do, and the stronger you get, the more you carry. So the best way to find your masculinity is to ask yourself, what is my duty? What am I duty-bound to do? What do I want to do to a level where it involves taking care of something outside of myself? And it has to be genuine, it has to be heartfelt, and it has to be done without hope of reward or recognition. So it cannot be something that is given to you by society. It cannot be something that is inflicted upon you by books, by your parents, by movements, or by the... something that's going to make you popular with the people around you. In fact, if it's a true core value, it's something that you will do even if and when it makes you unpopular with the people around you. Good luck with everything, and don't listen to other people. As a footnote, one thing that's become popular recently is men who attract other men by showing off jewelry and cars and how many girls they have. They've gotten pretty big on social media, but those are essentially perverted, almost a caricature of feminine behaviors that they're doing to attract other women and to attract young men. But no true alpha cares what car they drive or how much jewelry they have or how many girlfriends they have, and they certainly don't use that as a way to signal their alpha. It signals exactly the opposite. It signals status-seeking, desperate, attention-seeking behavior. So don't go down that route.
Start by saying no to everything. I say no to everything. I don't have a calendar, so when people say, 'How about such and such time?' I'm like, 'Hmm, well, I would have to either set an alarm for it or I would have to remember it.' So that way, unless I really, really badly want to do it, I just can't even do it. So the maximum number of meetings I can have per day is one, because that's all I can remember or all I'm going to set an alarm for. Second, I push everything asynchronous and unscheduled. My mottos are 'better bored than busy' and 'the overscheduled life isn't worth living.' The world is full of opportunity; you just have to be available, time, mental space, to grab it. And when you grab it, you're going to be sorry you grabbed it because now there's a thousand other things you can't grab. So you only want to grab the ones that really, really, really appeal to you. So it has to bring you out of retirement, essentially. But you do need something to focus on, because if you don't, what are you going to do all day? You'll just drink yourself to death or do stupid things. It does mean that you have to unschedule your entire life around you. I see many parents whose children's lives are scheduled, and then they try to live an unscheduled life. It doesn't work. If your children have school time, nap times, play times, times when they have to eat, times when they have to go to bed, then your own life will be scheduled as well. Nothing wrong with that. Most of us don't have the luxury of being unscheduled. But if you do, your entire life around you has to be unscheduled. It also means every single event is voluntary. You never commit to showing up and speaking at an event. You never commit to a birthday party. You never commit to a wedding. You never commit to a bar mitzvah. It means you never commit. You never let your wife commit you to anything. You never commit her to anything. If somebody says, 'Is he available for X?' she doesn't even ask on their behalf. If somebody asks me, 'Is she available for X?' I don't even ask her on their behalf. So completely free and unscheduled. It's about as hard as it sounds, but it's about 10 times more rewarding than it sounds. So it means you have to break the heart of every person who expects you to be in a specific place at a specific time. That's their expectation. It's their problem, not yours. You have to get comfortable ghosting people who become too familiar. They text you too much, they AirChat you too much, they email you too much. Stop responding. The monkey on their back that they're trying to put on yours is not your problem. You just have to be comfortable walking away with no remorse. When you look back on your life in that final moment, you will wish that you'd spent more time on the timeless and less time on the temporary. And there are very, very few timeless things.
