I wasn't that much of a loner, at least not willingly. I certainly was quite - I was very bookish, I was reading all the time. Generally, sort of the fantasy and sci-fi genre I found most interesting. I read thousands and thousands of books sort of like The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and that kind of thing. A lot of nonfiction as well, in fact I remember when I was just in elementary school I was reading about ion engines and I thought they were super cool, and now we're launching satellites with ion engines.
I had sort of a dark childhood, it wasn't good. I always had sort of a slight existential crisis, trying to figure out 'what does it all mean?' like, what’s the purpose of things?
I was reading various books, like most of the philosophers, and religious texts, and those kind of things trying to figure like what's the meaning of life, cause it all seemed quite meaningless. I got quite sad about it when I was a teenager. Puberty I guess - 13 through 15, probably the most traumatic years. Probably partially brought on by reading some of the philosophers and some of the really boring boring awful books if you ask me, like Dostoevsky ahh.. brutal. We also happened to have some books by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and that sort of thing in the house, which you should not read at age 14, it's bad, it’s really negative. Most of the philosophers they are awful.. - particularly the Germans. They’re depressing, some of the things they say are good ideas but it’s interspersed with so much rubbish.
Anyway I was in my early teen years trying to figure out the meaning of the universe, and all that, and it was very difficult to come up with something that wasn’t some piece of arbitrary claptrap. I eventually came to the conclusion that nobody has any idea what the meaning of the universe is. Then I read Douglas Adams ‘The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’ Douglas Adams is awesome, one of the greatest philosophers of all time, not recognized as such, but he is. I think the most interesting thing he said was: “The question is harder than the answer.” In ‘The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’ the Earth turns out to be a giant computer used to answer the question “What is the meaning of life?” and he comes up with the answer I think ’42’ then it’s like “What the hell is 42?” It turns out that it’s the question that’s the hard part, and it takes a bigger computer than Earth to figure it out. It sort of highlighted the point that often the issue is understanding what questions to ask. If you properly frame the question, the answer is the easy part. I think there’s some truth to that, when we ask questions they come along with all of our biases, there are so many things implied in the question that you should really ask “is that the right question?”
I thought things that expand the scope and scale of consciousness, and human knowledge, and allows us to achieve greater enlightenment those are good things. What can we do that's going to most likely lead to that outcome?
I actually didn't really expect to be involved in creating companies when I was in Pretoria Boys' High School or middle school. I was actually going to pursue sort of physics, and a career in physics and science in general, from the standpoint of trying to understand the nature of reality. What is it all about? That was really my main motivation. Sort of gain greater enlightenment over time that seemed like a good goal. If we can improve our understanding of the universe then eventually we can figure out what right questions to ask.
That's not the meaning of life, but it's something.