 I get lots of flack from academics in particular. They say, Steve, you must see yourself as a genius. You think you've found errors and orthodox ways of thinking about things for the last 100 years, the last 2,000 years. It would take genius-level IQ to see errors in a theory that no other thinker has discovered over the last 2,000 years. Clearly, you aren't a genius. Therefore, you're most likely a self-delusional crackpot. They've literally set up this scenario in which there are only two possible outcomes. Either the case that I am a genius and conceive of myself as such, or it's the case that I am self-deluded and somehow essentially stupid. I'm unable to grapple with ideas that have been come up with over the last couple thousand years. Well, this, my friends, is a false dichotomy. My own beliefs are far more bruising to the academic ego. I am saying it doesn't take a genius to see through some of the terrible ideas that have been coming out of academia for the last 120 years in particular. It doesn't take a genius to think, hmm, something funny going on here. I'm going to investigate with my own critical thinking lens and not just accept orthodoxy. It takes a spine, takes common sense, takes a good, a solid reasoning process. It doesn't take genius. So the academic wants to say, Steve, you're lifting yourself up to the level of intellectual giants. And I'm saying, no, I'm seeing your intellectual giants. I don't actually see them as intellectual giants. I see those people, maybe they had above average IQ, but no, I don't see myself as raising myself up. I see a more accurate worldview as tearing people down. These mythological academics that are out there that are supposed to be a different type of human. My way of viewing the intellectual landscape is much more irreverent than virtually every academic, where I don't think these people are unbelievably brilliant. And if I can't comprehend their theories, that's okay. It's because they're smarter than I am, and I could never understand them anyway. If the theory doesn't make sense to me, I'm just going to assume that's because I'm stupid, because these people are brilliant. I reject all of that. But I think it actually reveals a profound arrogance coming from the academics. The reason they view me as some arrogant thing is because they have a perception of themselves as being brilliant, much more brilliant than the average person in the general public. And so if they haven't been able to discover the problems in these particular theories well then, it must the only way that somebody could discover them is if they have a higher level of intelligence, if they're even more brilliant than the participants in academia. That's the arrogance. My position is the opposite of that. I think it is an incorrect way to understand the history of ideas, how the world of ideas operates, to think that people like Einstein were some type of different human. They are geniuses. No, really smart people who come up with brilliant ideas are people that have sound methods for reasoning. That's it. Sound methods are for reasoning. Patience, and if they're lucky they get a little bit higher IQ, which just means that their intellectual processing power is a little bit faster. I have a few theories for why this is the case. One is an interesting psychological trait I've noticed amongst lots of academics. It seems like, by the way they communicate, they are basing their self-worth and self-image off of how other people view themselves as intelligent. That there's a direct relationship between how I feel about myself and what I think other people think about my own intelligence. So if I'm coming along and saying, by the way, I don't think these theories are respectable. In fact, I think the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics is laughably nonsensical, embarrassing, and stupid. I think it's the case that Cantor's supposed infinity of infinities and his argument for the uncountability of the reals is laughable nonsense that a 10-year-old could reasonably say, hmm, there's some funny business going on. I'm not exaggerating. That's how bad it is. So they view that as a bruise to their self-image. If it's the case that my suspicions are correct and these theories are many of them are actually silly and really poorly reasoned, then immediately that means the participants in academia aren't in the intellectual echelon of society. And immediately their self-worth, I think, would go down the tube. So they can't even conceive of the idea that maybe they aren't so intelligent. Maybe the geniuses they look up to, maybe they're just other humans who've spent their time a little bit differently in life. So what does it take in my worldview to discover a flaw in, let's say, the theory of Cantor's uncountability of the reals? This terrible diagonal argument, which if you're interested I'll have linked in the description. Well, it takes a spine, something that very few academics have. It takes intellectual integrity, something I think very few academics have. It takes a measure of common sense, which 95% of academics I think grossly lack. It takes absolute irreverence. It takes the opposite, exact opposite of deference to authority and respect for authority. It takes intellectual independence. I don't give a rip if a theory has been accepted for the last 2,000 years by all the best mathematicians. I don't give one rip, not because I think I'm so smart, because I don't think they're mythological creatures. It's very easy to make foundational mistakes. If you make foundational mistakes, all the theory that you build on your foundational mistakes are likely to be wrong as well. I'll give you one example from a few thousand years ago. In Euclidean geometry, one of the foundational concepts in Euclidean geometry is the notion of a point. That lines, for example, are made up of points. What is a point? Well, it's a zero-dimensional object. It's something which has no extension itself, and yet if you get an infinite amount of them together, you get a line. Does that make sense to you? Does it actually make sense to you? There's lots of academics who just treat this as, well, of course that makes sense. That's the way it's been for thousands of years. That's Euclidean geometry. There's other people, maybe who haven't participated in the academic system, that say, that sounds fishy. How can you have a bunch of non-extended objects create some kind of extended object? Perfectly reasonable commonsensical question, but not one that academics are likely to ask. In terms of the pure intellectual side, I think it takes a measure of time and patience. IQ, I think, is way, way, way, way, way overrated. It has very little correlation to accuracy of worldview. IQ is about your ability to maybe spatially manipulate things in your minds, do some complex calculations, see abstract patterns in particular data sets faster than somebody in the general public if you have a high IQ. Okay, that doesn't mean that you have an accurate worldview. It doesn't mean that you have an accurate way of reasoning. In my view, intelligence is 98% method, method of reasoning, method of rigorous skepticism challenging every single assumption, trying to find the counterargument for every single thought that you have. If you do that and you have enough time, you have enough spine and enough intellectual integrity to potentially reject dogma of the last 2,000 years, well, if you figure out how to write, I think you're going to be a successful intellectual, or maybe you can even have a career in the world of ideas. I hope that's the case if you've got a measure of commonsense and writing ability. It used to be that in order to be a professional intellectual, you had to play the game, accept your colleagues, please the king, please the church, accept the orthodoxy, don't rock the boat too much, don't be too much of a radical thinker. Fortunately, thanks to the internet, these things are changing. My suspicion is there have been really smart people that have come up with really brilliant explanatory theories that aren't nonsensical and silly and contain logical contradictions that have not been recorded in history, either because their writings were lost, they weren't sponsored, access to effective marketing that preserved their writings, or what's probably even more likely, they didn't waste their time in a kind of academic system. They came up with a brilliant theory and they thought, okay, well, this wasn't actually that difficult. Maybe I'm not going to waste my time in the world of ideas. I'm going to do other stuff. I'm going to impact the world in a more positive and direct way than just writing out a bunch of these ideas. I suspect that history is filled with those types of individuals, but now they have access to the internet. So no, my friends, I don't think of myself as a genius because I think geniuses are part of academic mythology. I think that it doesn't take some extraordinary level of brilliance to grapple with the biggest ideas in the world and see errors in the way that other human beings have tried to come up with theories and make sense of the world themselves. Those individuals in the world of ideas whose theories we're all familiar with are humans. As I am a human, as you are a human, their ideas might be wrong. And it is nothing other than dogma to say that you can't criticize them. You can't grapple with them. If you don't understand them, they don't make sense to you. It's because you are stupid. You're a part of the lower class. I reject that idea. This, I hope, should be much more upsetting to the ego of the academics.