I dislike modern culture. If I was the only one, then I would assume the fault lies with me. But three of the most intelligent men that I knew have done quite poorly in modern culture. Part of my emotional motivation to start a CoAlpha Brotherhood is to save men like this. Here are their stories:
One was a friend from high school. I didn't know it at the time, but he is the son of a famous mathematician. My friend was great at everything, especially math and chess. Of course we were considered nerds in high school. By 10th grade, he was completely bored with school and insisted on just taking tests, and by doing this, finished the next 2 years of high school in a few weeks. He applied to Princeton, which rejected him on some technicality. So he just sat in on classes there, and of course he was much smarter than the other students and teachers, so it was pretty much high school all over again. Of course none of us nerds had girlfriends. But at Princeton, he tried to date and was badly abused emotionally by the women. In the end, this caused him to crack up. It was incredible how he changed when he snapped, his face looked entirely different, more like a normal happy idiot instead of the intense intelligence that he had before. My old intelligent friend was killed by women for all practical purposes.
James Fell was an artist that I met in New Orleans. But he was interested in everything, not just art. We were part of a group of people that formed around a coffee shop. Everyone there was a drop-out from society. This group was the most intelligent I have seen, certainly brighter than the Nobel Prize winners from my university, or venture capitalists, or successful financial traders. We all had different opinions about most things, but the one shared opinion was that society is a disaster to be avoided. James, like most of us, tried to put women out of his mind. He had strong self-discipline, but he was older than the rest of us, so the accumulated stress must have had more effect. At one point, his parents threw him out, forcing him to find a new place to live. He decided it wasn't worth the trouble and killed himself. I have no doubt that the outcome would have been different if he had had a girlfriend.
The others in this group were also very intelligent. By intelligent, I mean people who without a doubt would get a perfect score on the non-verbal portion of any IQ test. Most of these people just got by doing odd jobs. None of them had girlfriends. Eventually, I moved away, the coffee shop shut down, and I don't know what happened to these people.
Robert Tashbook worked with me at Nextag. He worked in QA but was very creative. Nextag's original business model made no sense. Tashbook found the business model that made Nextag work. He realized that there was an opportunity to treat comparison shopping as an arbitrage business, taking the profit in the difference between the cost of buying ads and price that we could sell ads to merchants. If you look up Nextag, you will see that it was valued at $1.2 billion. What did Tashbook get for making Nextag so valuable? He is currently in federal prison for unlawful sexual conduct. He tried to kidnap a girl using the Internet to be his sex slave. While at Nextag, we never discussed our personal lives, so I didn't know this side of him, but I completely understand where he was coming from since I considered a similar option myself before deciding to try finding a girlfriend Mexico instead. Luckily for me, I had better judgement than he did. This side of Nextag's history is unlikely to make it into the popular media.
