 Hello my friends, this is the 80th episode of Patterson in Pursuit, part two of a conversation I had with Thaddeus Russell about postmodernism, and this week we really dive into the philosophy of it. One of, if not the central tenet of postmodernist philosophy is a fundamental relativism, or a rejection of the idea of objective truth. In some ways I appreciate the kind of skepticism and humility which comes with the postmodernist philosophy, but in other ways I think it's fundamentally mistaken. Though we can't know many objective truths, I think we can know some, even if they're extremely limited in scope. So this is what my guest Thaddeus Russell and I are debating on this week's episode. Part two of conversation with Thaddeus Russell. For the listeners, you guys will have listened to this last week, but we just stopped about five minutes ago talking about love. We were going to talk about truth and postmodernism, but we talked about love. That's the same thing. Okay. All right, so this is a natural segue. I'll give a little bit of preface, and then we'll dive right into where I think we will disagree. So where we just ended it is by saying that language seems to be unique to every individual, and our conceptual schemes seem to be unique to every individual. What I mean by the most elementary of things is going to be sometimes slightly different than what you mean, and sometimes radically different. A great example of this is basic objects. So like I have a pen here, and I've done, been doing enough philosophy to know that what I actually mean by a pen, what I'm actually referencing, is probably radically different from what most people understand by that word in the West, because I'm actually talking about my experience. I'm talking about the experience of the color blue in my visual field. I just call it a pen, and most people think that I'm talking about some object out there in the world. So even something elementary that we can have practical discourse about, and we both know what I mean by a pen for all practical purposes, can be radically different in terms of philosophy. So where I think a lot of people who are postmodernists would agree is with this, like, you and I are probably going to agree that language is very vague, it's very imprecise when we're talking about communicating between two people. My concepts are just not going to be your concepts, and if we can make any philosophic progress, you have to understand how imprecise language is. Would you agree? It's not the word I use, right, because imprecise, you know, obviously implies that there is something that is more precise, which implies that there is an external objective standard to which I think can be closer or farther from, right? How about how about imprecision in terms of, like, the intent behind the communication? So if I want to imply something by my words, and I actually imply something else, like in your mind, when you hear the words, couldn't that be a kind of imprecision? Intent, I'm not sure. That's a weird one. I don't think this matters. Well, so how about we just agree that we, that the difference is, is that there simply is a difference, whether it's radical or whether it's about tent or, you know, yeah, I agree with you that there is a difference in the way you and I think of that pen. Okay, so that, that I think is really essential to understanding what I would say is a clear, rational philosophy is how difficult sometimes linguistic differences between us are. Like if you can have a long conversation and not make any headway because you don't realize you're using a different definition for the same word. Let me just slightly clarify again. I guess I believe that most people you're calling postmodernists would say they would prefer simply to say that there is a difference rather than that language is imprecise or vague. Because that's, I think that's, that's how I read Foucault and Derrida. They simply, they point to differences in interpretations, differences in concepts, differences in language rather than they don't, they just don't say something is more vague or less vague or more precise or less precise. That's all, but that's, that's actually important, which we'll probably now unpack. Okay. So the importance of, yeah. So part two of where I would talk about this pin, I'm saying the contents of my experience, like I'm talking about the blueness in my visual field. However, I also have the belief that I think most people do that aren't relativists that would say there is a kind of correspondence with the contents of my experience with the blue pen in my visual field with some kind of external object. There's a thing out there in the world that is constructed in such a way that when my mind interacts with it, it gives me this experience. Yep. So that's what, that's usually like the realm of what we're talking about objective truth. There's this objective reality out there. That's something I'm very partial to. What do you, what's your position? Yeah, no. Well, no, sorry. I take it back. I've evolved on that. Okay. Uh, I don't know if I ever took a hard atheist position. But I think I tended to talk like I was an atheist on that. I'm an agnostic. So what I say now is, um, I don't know. Okay. I don't know. So what is your hesitation to, to, uh, to that kind of idea? Cause when we think about theories of physics, for example, they seem to be based on this idea of the external world that operates in a certain way. We observe it. And so we come up with theories that describe this external world. Would you say that those are all kind of useful and nice, like, uh, physical theories, but they're, we have no way of knowing whether or not they're true. Yeah. Uh, which is what Einstein said, you know, so he said that, you know, two things cannot occupy the same point in space or time. And so therefore no two things can, can perfectly correspond. And therefore we never know whether our thoughts, our ideas, our words, our concepts perfectly correspond with something else, meaning something outside of consciousness, meaning some objective reality. So, and I've heard other physicists say the same thing. In fact, recently, uh, I heard Lawrence Krauss just say this. In fact, on, I think Sam Harris's podcast or something. And he, he said, he said a great thing. I loved it. He said, yeah, you know, I, this idea about truth. That's not what we do. What we do is we disprove things. What scientists do is disprove things. We never prove anything, but, but he said, I couldn't get out of bed in the morning if I didn't believe in objective truth. Um, which I thought it was a great, really honest, um, I don't know, acknowledgement of a conceit, I suppose, that it's at the base of a lot of scientific inquiry. I don't think it's necessary. I think you can still operate as a scientist without that belief. But, um, I do think that has driven a lot of science, what we call scientific work. So what do you think about, um, propositions that make claims about the contents of our consciousness? So if we're not talking about, let's say, the physical external world that we don't really have a direct engagement with, because we're kind of, we engage with what we experience, which is the contents of our consciousness. Can't we say true and false things about what's going on in our minds? Um, we, what do you mean? Can we? I don't, sure. I don't, you can say whatever you want. I don't know if any of our, if, if any of my own claim is about my own consciousness or true, is that what you're asking? Uh, yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Again, an agnostic position. So if, so from my perspective, right? If I'm, if I'm having the blueness experience, but I not say it is the case that I am having the experience of blue. I don't know what's causing it. I mean, it might be a hallucination, but that it is taking place is definitely the case. I, you can, again, you can say whatever you want. I don't know. I just simply do not know whether what you are saying has any relationship to an external truth or reality. Well, but, but it depends on what you mean by external. So, so I, so could you make a claim about kind of your, and I don't mean to can as in, like, do you have permission to make these claims? I mean, from your perspective, is it possible to make an accurate description, an accurate conceptual description of the phenomena that you are experiencing? It might be. Sorry. I know. Okay. Well, but hang on. So, so how could that be wrong? So for, I'll take from my perspective, I know we're two different minds. We're going to have two different perspectives, but you can imagine if you were doing this yourself, you know, blueness is taking place in my visual field. I'm just reporting on my experience. I don't know that it can be wrong. Well, if so, but if you don't know if it could be right, that would mean it has to, you have to have a possibility of it being wrong. Cause if it didn't have the possibility of being wrong, that means it would definitely be right. Possibility to be wrong. Possibility to be right. Is there a possible, is there a possible truth? Okay. There might be. I don't know. That's all I got for you. See, the thing is, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's I don't know. That's all I got for you. See, the thing is, when you say it might be, it implies it could be this way or it could be that way. So, so I, I think it's fine to say it could be the case that there is indeed blueness in your visual field. That could be the case. But to say it could be that there isn't blueness in your visual field. Well, that's not true because I'm directly experiencing them, whether or not there's blueness in my visual field. I'm, I'm missing, I'm not, I'm missing something here. Um, so when someone says there is a God, I say, maybe, I don't know. And then when an atheist says there is no God, I say, I don't know, maybe, I don't know what, what's wrong there? What am I, what am I, what am I admitting? So the difference is that when you're talking about God, you're talking about some external phenomena, you're like positing some mind independent entity out there. That's, I don't think that's the way to go but I'm, I'm saying I am, all I'm doing is reporting on the contents of my experience. So I'm not saying there is a God, there isn't a God, I'm saying it is the case that experience is happening a particular way. Oh, oh, does your experience exist? Does your consciousness exist? Okay, that's, that's not what I'm saying, but that's a good question. So, so, uh-huh, how would you answer that? Is, does your consciousness exist? Yeah, I mean, man, I'm totally fine answering this and it doesn't, doesn't bother me or challenge me at all. I just think it's not that useful, but whatever. Um, yes, I there, yeah, I guess I'm still an agnostic, like, I don't know, like it could be this thing that I might consider consciousness is, could be something else. It could be. But it is, it is conscious at the very least, even if it's like, if even if you're hallucinating, it still is experiential in nature, right? Oh, I see. So it's consciousness because it's conscious, because we're conscious. Like, that's a tautology, right? But it's, I think people, I think people give tautology is a bad rap. There are a few tautologies that I think are pretty interesting, but this wouldn't be one. This is just a way we use the word consciousness to describe something that's happening. So it's okay, we could use another word, but when you introspect, you understand English, most people mean by the English word experience. I'm guessing we have a shared experience. I don't know. That's the case. But when I introspect, there is perception taking place. There is consciousness. You could call it that there is experience that is going on or there are colors, for example, that are moving in my visual field is the way that I describe it. Right. So to prove that there that consciousness exists, you then use words like introspection and experience. And I'm not proving that consciousness exists by an argument. That would be backwards. That would be, yeah, I'm saying when you meditate on your experience, like if you are aware of your experience, is it the case that you can be aware of something taking place, that there is something? It is not the case that there is only nothing to which I say it's possible that I don't know and to which you say to which I say it when you say it's possible that implies there's a possibility of being A or a possibility of being B. Right. So when you say it's possible, whether or not there's consciousness, you're saying it is a possible case that there is no conscious phenomena taking place. Maybe that's going on. No, you're you're positing the binary. Yes or no, I'm not. Yeah, I'm not positing a binary. I'm just, I don't know. Do you I don't know is not to say that there's an A or B or yes or no. It's just I don't know me. So you're positing if someone were to posit A, God exists or that pen or your consciousness is a thing is is a true thing. And I say I don't know that doesn't posit that there are that there are two or only one alternative. What what is I don't know mean? So would you say I don't know doesn't mean it could be X. It could be not X. I don't know where you're going to. I don't I'm not. I'm having a hard time finding this fruitful or maybe I'm missing something here. I yeah, I don't know. There it could exist. It could not exist. There could be yet another category. There could be no categories, I guess, is what I want to say. Maybe that's what you're driving at or that's what you want. OK, or that's the that's the only real answer to what you're saying. That there are no categories. That's another possibility if there. So let's say there are no categories, because I think you could might even be able to say that like you know, you could come up with a coherent worldview, I think that would say there's no categories, but that doesn't mean existence. There's there still is something, right, even if you're just purely awareness, for example, awareness is a word that describes something that is right. Huh? Yeah. Well, OK, so awareness is a word which and we attach we have attached meanings to it. Those meanings are made up of other words, which are defined by other words, which are all part of the same language. So it's a and when the same so it's all circular, it all circulates within the same language structure. This is Daryodon deconstructionism, OK, and nothing there's nothing outside of that system. You can't ever show that any one word in that system is closer to something outside of it. Well, well, there's there's two things on that one. That implies that words are necessarily about communication. And I don't think that needs to be the case. It could be the case that, for example, the only thing that exists is your awareness. And you just come up with words to talk to yourself. You could do that. We that would be the case. But if that's true, you still have awareness. But and two, is it the case then that at least words exist? That is a something. I don't I don't know. I don't know. Maybe maybe not. I don't know. So. Yeah, I don't I don't know. I guess. Is this I'm trying to get at what you're there's this you're there's a strategy here, which is fine. I'm just wondering what you're driving at like what you're trying to establish something, right? No, this is the strategy is to have this conversation about the objectivity of truth. This is this idea is, I think, what the Jordan Peterson's of the world find sinister. You know, when they when they look at the postmodernist or they look at what they mean by postmodernist, this is what I think they say. This nugget here that can't even say that awareness is happening or that we can't. That's disingenuous or it's not true or it's bad. So I think it's it's it's central. No, no, I know. I know that's the question we're dealing with. It sounds to me like your answer to that is yes, there is truth. And here's here's where it is. It's in something you're calling awareness or consciousness. You know, I'm asking you questions if you admit the existence of the contents of your own consciousness. If that's the case, then, yeah, there are other things we could say. But because it's a natural step to say if it's the case that there is consciousness, then at the very least, that's truth. So the contents of your consciousness taking place, however they're taking place, that is something that is the way that it is. And it isn't some other way. It's truth. No, I really don't know. I could be schizophrenic. So that's one alternative. OK, but that wouldn't invalidate the idea of your awareness. It might just be that your awareness is schizophrenic in nature. You did that I have awareness. Whether I have awareness is the question. Whether I have awareness. Yeah, I don't know. Because that. Yeah. This has gotten to the level of abstraction that I find actually borders on obscurantism. I don't know if this is even helpful. But it is because there's so many people that there's so many people that will take these ideas and run with them in either direction because there are people are going to say, I can't really answer that question because it's too abstract and I'm not going to deal with questions of truth. There are other people like myself who would say, ah, there is actually truth to be discovered right here. This is where you can discover truth, even if it's obscure, abstract. And then we can build a somewhat of a structure of knowledge based on some things that we can discover about our own awareness. Yeah, so my answer was originally and still is I don't know. And so what am I admitting by saying that? OK, so that's what I was asking you. So when you say, I don't know what I what I think most people mean by that is so let's say I claim proposition X is true. And I ask you, do you think X is true? When people say I don't know, that means it could be the case that X is true or it could not be the case that X is true and I don't have a position. I got it. Is that what you mean? Yeah. OK, so what I'm saying is if that is the dichotomy, it could be or it could not be, then that implies something could not be. So like if I'm talking about consciousness, you're saying, well, whether or not there is awareness is a matter of maybe there is, maybe there isn't, which means maybe it's possible that in some way there isn't awareness. So that's what I'm saying. When you say I don't know if there's awareness, you're saying it might be the case that there isn't. Yeah, yeah. OK, so right. And again, I don't know. And what you can do, I suppose, an answer to this, OK, what a postmodernist would do. What Foucault definitely would do, what Derrida would definitely do is simply trace the genealogy, the history of those words and those concepts that you're using in having this discussion and asking those questions. So awareness, what does that mean? What is its meaning been? And you can actually trace it. You can show how people have thought about it over the years and how it's changed and where it started. People have thought about it, though. I care about, for me, my consciousness or my awareness, my mind having access to correct information and whether or not it's encoded in a particular language, I don't really care. If I could communicate to anybody else, I don't really care. I just want to know for myself. But if it turns out that it's historical, meaning social, meaning created by human beings, right, then it invalidates any truth claim you make about it. But that's not, that wouldn't be the case. So let's say it's the case that awareness is something that's somehow socially constructed wouldn't make a difference of whether or not it exists. It would still exist. OK, I take it back. It doesn't invalidate it, but it certainly challenges it, doesn't it? And more importantly... Not as hard as that. Not its existence, even if it's socially constructed, so what? Right, but again, so, OK, more importantly, I guess for my purposes, it makes it impossible to answer the question satisfactorily because, again, I would ask, what do you mean by awareness? What do you mean by consciousness? Right, and so, and those words have been used in infinite ways. OK, but... So I don't know exactly what you mean. So there is no exact meaning. There's like a... There's a... appeal to the public nature of language here, which is that, well, if we can't really have precise communication, we can't really have precise thought. I disagree with that. I'm saying I don't really care if we can't communicate precisely. I have a meaning in my conceptual scheme, what I mean by perception. And based on my conversations with most people, I think most people mean the same thing. Like if I, let's say, I poke somebody with a needle, they say, oh, that hurts. I have a theory which says, OK, they have an internal experience as well. They generally use the same language. So that's all I'm doing in this conversation, is saying, is it the case that for the individual, you can have some access to truth, the way that things are in the world, simply by being aware that your awareness is happening, that your perception is happening, your consciousness is happening. Even if you can't communicate it to anybody, you can still know that it's taking place. I don't know. I don't know how that advances the ball at all here on the quit. Wouldn't it be truth? I mean, gosh, that would be a discovery of truth. What could be more exciting? Oh, it would if I said, yes, that's true, but I don't, I say I don't know. Yeah, but you said you don't know why it's important or what it gets at. And that's like a goal itself. Wow, true. Well, fine, I'm just still an agnostic on it. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. That's my answer to every question, you know? On this, I don't know. And so you haven't gotten me any farther. Okay, so what if, so what do you think about this idea? Because this is kind of my perspective on it and I want to know your thoughts. I think it's the case that there is experience happening that when I use the words, the contents of my perception, I'm actually talking about things that are, so balloonus in my visual field, actually references something in my mind. And the way that I know that is just through being aware of my experience. Like it is the case because there it is. It's like a self-evident truth, even if I can't encode it in a way that other people understand. This is self-evident truth. And if somebody were to say, as I think you are, that I don't know if self-evident truths exist, essentially, or that if they are self-evident, it's kind of, it's almost like leading a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. It's like my claim is, I'm not trying to persuade you that this is the case. I'm just saying, look, I think you can have an experience, like maybe like love experience. I think you can have the experience of a nature in which you will also conclude, I must have some access to truth because I am aware that something blue exists in my visual field or balloonus is happening. Yeah, is this your riff on Cartesianism, basically? Like I think therefore I am, is it kind of your version of this? Yeah, I guess the necessariness of awareness, sure. I don't like the Cartesian cogito because it implies I exist, and then you have to try to define what I is, but if you just say experience is happening, you don't even have to define that. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't know. It's the honest, so you can know. You can know, though. That's what I'm saying. You can know. I might not be able to persuade you. No, no, Steve, Steve. Yes, here's the thing. You want me to know. No, no, no, no. Why are you bothering with this? Otherwise. Love, my friend. See, that's it. That's it, no, for real. That's it. No, totally, I agree with you on that. It is a kind of human peership that I've discovered something which I found exciting, which is that I do have access to some kind of limited set of truths about the conscience of my consciousness, and so I am freely sharing it with you. I love it. Here's your problem, my friend. Okay. You know, so you're, the apple hasn't fallen too far from the tree, it turns out, I think, which is that, you know, when the missionary went to Peru and stood in the jungle looking at the Indians there and said, God is real. And they said, no, he's not. Our God is real. Yeah. Then they're engaged, right? They're locked in this struggle between this and that. There's this binary opposition going on, which becomes co-constitutive, right? They constitute each other. We are good, which is the opposite of them, right? And then it's a fight, and they're both trying to win over the other, and they're both really worried, and they both are concerned about the other. I don't care. If the Indians had said, I don't know if your God exists, right? Then it's just up to the missionary whether he pulls out the guns, right? Because he can't convince them. The onus is on the person who makes the truth claim. It's not on us. It's not on the relatives. But you're again taking it from a public perspective. I'm not, screw the evangelists, screw the missionaries, good riddance. I'm just saying, hey friend, I have meditated and I've become aware that there are things taking place in my visual field. And I'm guessing, because I think you're another conscious being, that if you are aware, if you've got a white shirt on, so I would say, if you do this thing with your head, where you look down, you will have an experience of a certain nature. That's all. And to say you don't know, and my response is that, well, I'm not gonna persuade you. I'm just gonna, like, you can know. All you have to do is be aware. Okay, does it give me access, are you claiming that it gives me access to a universal truth? That would be part two. So here's why, here's why. In the most limited of senses. And this is where people go crazy. They become dogmatic rationalists. My position is that the truths that you can get access to immediately are within the contents of your experience. And you can have some extremely abstract truths about the nature of logic by meditating on the nature of your experiences. Something like, for example, the blueness in my visual field is the way that it is. And the blueness in my visual field is not the way that it is not. So there's like a white part here and a blue part here. The blue part is not the white part, the white part is not the blue part. Now that actually gets out a very abstract principle of logic, the idea of identity and non-contradiction. Things are the way they are, and they aren't the way they aren't. So in that sense, I do consider that kind of universal. That's true for everything. It is the way it is, and it isn't the way it isn't. It doesn't get you particularly far, it doesn't get you a religion, but I do think that is something that is universal. Okay, so what is your act of love offering me? Like, what will I get from this? If I were to believe you, agree with you? I think that you would get a new belief and the existence of some very limited form of truth. Actually, I'll tell you, I'll give you the hook and then I'll give you the truth. Okay, so the hook is it's kind of, you may discover truth. If you find that interesting, then great, you found something that's interesting and it may set the stage, there may be other things that you can discover. The way, like I wrote a book called Square One, The Foundations of Knowledge, I tried to build a very limited set of knowledge based on these kind of very elementary truths. So that's the hook. The truth is I think that if people pursue this line of reasoning and they discover some objectivity of truth in their life and maybe even think that it's very important, they go, oh, well, I wanna discover more of these. I think that sets them up for having a love experience. Uh-huh, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah. It all began with your wife. This whole, the pursuit, the pursuit. Patterson's pursuit began with the love of your wife. Did it not? Nope, it didn't. So I had the idea that it was gonna be Patterson and pursuit indefinitely. Like I had this idea, okay, I have some access to truth, but I just gotta, I'm gonna sort this out. I figured it was gonna take a lifetime. I thought there's no, you're not gonna discover truth, the idea like a whole worldview. You just get maybe a little bit and then keep pursuing. And then totally out of the blue, I found love. And I go, okay, well, so now I discover the most important truth kind of upfront, you know, a few years after discovering these very distant abstract truths. And now it's like, and now it's more important than a lot of, it's more important for my life, but this is still all part of the pursuit of truth. Like this is not. Yeah, but I am right that it is, that's the current pursuit of Patterson's pursuit is stems from your love experience. In a very distant way, yes. So if I were to speak highly of myself, I would say something like, yes, this is all a sinister plot to get people to be ready for love experiences. No, it's not sinister. Well, so that would be a way, I would think highly of myself if I thought that. I was like, okay, I'm doing this only for the purpose of having people pride themselves for love. Well, hang on, hang on, but the reality of the matter is that's part of the motivation. And part of the other motivation is my nihilism, that I am just myself really obsessed with the idea of the truth and figuring it out just for pure curiosity's sake. And I know there are other people out there that are very curious. And so I'm also creating content for them. For them? You discovered a truth about yourself or you think you discovered a truth about yourself and you would like to give access to it to other people? If they're interested, but it's not for them. That's what I'm saying, there's selfishness here. This is why I said, it's like a less romantic way of talking about it, that it's also in my interest because in order to do the kind of research I wanna do, I gotta be outside the academy, which means I gotta find my people and create value for them, that kind of thing. Right, so what was the benefit of what you found for yourself? What was the benefit to you of finding this truth? Which truth, the love truth or the abstract truth? Either one. Well, the love truth, I mean, totally reoriented my life in the sense that it answered a lot of nihilistic questions, so why continue existing? Well, the love is good, something like that. So it's kind of, it's very much fundamental in terms of my own personal actions. In terms of discovering the abstract truth, I don't know, it primed me for my own love experience. So I was maybe 17 or so and I was in Florida doing some research, writing in my notepad and I discovered logic. I discovered basic logical laws. A is A type thing, things are things and I thought, huh, this actually, I think this is true and that just set me up for diving into philosophy and then having this love experience on top of it. Yeah, you're just describing your chronology. Like what was good about it? What was, well, what was good is that as somebody who's seeking truth, I found truth. Right, that's like, what is good about achieving your goal, it's achieving your goal. And in terms of love, I would say love is good. I would say for me, love is like the meaning of life. It's like, it's kind of like, it might be a drug, right? If you take a physicalist approach to how the world works, it might be that in falling in love, I discovered like the most extreme meth that is out there and it's so good that I like want to orient my life around it, I think of that too. But so replace love with God and everything you just said and what's the difference? I mean, I don't see how what you're saying is different than what the missionary said. I don't see how it's not also tautological, which is that if you want good, God is good, therefore you should embrace God. Because if you want, and then what you're saying is if you want good, love is good and therefore you should have love. But I'm not saying that at all. I haven't said should at all. All I'm saying is hello, fellow peer, hello, fellow human. I have discovered some things that if you're interested in the pursuit of truth, I've discovered a very limited set of truths and if you want to know what the good life is, that's a pursuit you have to take but let me just tell you about my experiences. Okay, well then I would say you're not answering my question, though. My question is what did you gain from it and you simply said the good and you don't define good. Ah, okay, well it's not really a conceptual. In other words, that is the question, like what is good here, right? And so you're saying love is good, but that's not an answer. Okay, so let me give you the answer as I might understand it then when this experience happened. I would say that as an idealist, nothing is good and then I directly experienced the incorrectness of that belief. Oh, love is good. And it might just be for me. But how did you know it was good? That's what I'm saying. It's part of the nature of the experience. It's like how do you know that an orgasm feels good? I mean, it's just part of it. You're not telling anybody. You're not saying anything about why it's good. It's like you're holding a secret from us. You're like saying, well, it was good but I can't describe it to you. No, no, it's like seeing a color that you've never seen before. It's the most beautiful color you've ever seen and I'm not gonna tell you you have to go out and live this way. No, I'm just saying I've experienced an unbelievably beautiful color and if that interests you, then let me tell you about how I got there. If you think I'm wrong, don't believe me. I don't see, I don't, in your description, I'm not hearing anything that's beautiful or good. I'm just hearing the words beautiful or good. But I'm not trying to persuade you. I'm not saying you need to go out and have a love experience. I'm not really not. I'm just saying this is about truth. If you care about truth, it's the hook, right? The hook is if you care about truth or you care about these ideas, you can understand a little bit of truth and then I'm guessing that that will lead some people down the path of discovering what is good on their own. But if you don't, that's fine. Their own good or your good? My guess is their own good. Right, so I don't know. I don't know how people are oriented. All I know is that my values shifted. They changed after this experience. And so I have reason to believe that if I'm structured like other people are structured, their values would probably change too. I'm really not trying to cover you. It's like, I was the first person that ever jumped out of a plane. I was like, oh my gosh, this experience was so amazing. Like, wow. And somebody says, well, why was it good? It's just, well, it just was. You gotta experience it for yourself if you care. I know, you gotta give us something more, man. Like, look, Christians have often said, not always, but often they've said things like, oh, it gives you peace. It gives you, you feel agitated all the time. You feel anxious all the time. You feel alone, depressed, worried. You feel alienated. All these things that people can relate to, these feelings, and they say, once you embrace Jesus Christ as your savior, you will feel contentment, peace. You will feel oneness. You will feel connection. You will feel all these things. And they give me more words to describe what I felt before and what I will feel once I have this thing. And same with America and Americanism. If you live like us, you will have a wealthier nation, a more prosperous nation. You will have a more peaceful nation. So I don't hear anything except if you do, if you, you'll just find the truth. No, what I'm saying is there's a pitch. People are pitching you something. I could say some of those things just as a description that is peace part of the mindset, partly. It's also partly terrifying. So part of the being in the love mindset is at least in my experience worrying about losing the love mindset or losing the love that I had or losing Julia in that case. So it wasn't just pure peace. It wasn't pure tranquility. So I certainly wouldn't pitch it that way. But I'm really not looking to pitch anything. This is why I take this as pure philosophy. If it's the case that you can't know, if it's the case that there's no truth, you can't know anything, then that's important. And you can live your life however you want based on the non-existence of objective truth. But if there is something like objective truth, then it might be the case that just like you can discover it in terms of the contents of your experience, you might be able to discover it in terms of what is good. It's just something that just like you have to, you have to be aware of your experience of blue to know that it is happening. You have to be the one that has to experience verb in order to know that it's good. But again, I'm not saying it as a pitch. It's just a description. Which is to acknowledge that or accept that I have consciousness. Okay, okay. Is that it? Don't you feel bliss? Yeah, no. I feel like I'd rather be a Christian, frankly. Is it? Well, of course there's glints here. Like what I'm saying, a lot of Christians, I'm sure would agree with what I have to say and a lot of other religions as well. But is that the case that there is at least some acknowledgement or like, okay, yes. You can't, you don't have to take a religion but consciousness is happening however it is happening. Oh, I didn't acknowledge it. I was just saying that's what you're asking for. You got my hopes up, okay. No, that's what you're asking for. And I'm not. No, I'm not asking for anything. I want to know your thoughts. If I'm wrong, I want to know if I'm wrong and why I'm wrong, that's all. Yeah, and I've said this for how long? An hour now, hour and a half, you know. I don't know, I don't know. It could be something else. It could be none of the above. But mostly I just don't know what on earth I'm going to get from it. So, okay, if I were to accept that as a truth that I have what you call awareness, okay, consciousness, what particular doors does that open? Well, for one, you're going to have to go back on the Joe Rogan show and you're going to say, dude, I was converted. There's this guy. I'm now a card carry truth seeker. That's what this is about, Steve. You want to get on the Rogan show? Okay. That's what it is. So honestly, and I say from the ethical nihilist standpoint, I'm not pitching anything. I don't really, so from my perspective, because it really was nihilism and you say, what do I get from it? I think I don't care. You get whatever you get from it. You adjust your worldview, however you need to adjust your worldview. Hello, you do want me to think that way, don't you? You are trying to convince me of this, aren't you? To be honest, if it were the case that I were wrong. You said it was love. You said it was love. Well, so here's what the love is. The love is me trying to discover truth myself and if I discover it to try to share it with people who care. So if I'm wrong about this, no, I don't want to convince you. I want you to convince me. I want to be in your, I want to be, I want to discover that maybe it's all wrong, if it's all wrong. So my goal is actually genuinely to discover truth if it's out there. And I think it is, which is why I went through the examples that convinced me to see if they would convince you as well. Okay, let me tell you about my happiness. Yeah. So I have been happier since I chose to orient myself toward the world as an agnostic. It grants me the feeling that I have is one that I would call freedom. I feel freer than before. For the reason I was sort of describing in the jungles of Peru with the missionary and the Indian who they're trying to convert. I no longer have a mission to convince you of one thing or another. All I am doing really, and this is what Foucault says he was doing, I think, is trying to stop people or at least get in their way of trying to convert us. Right, because that's really all he's doing. He's not saying this doesn't exist. He's just saying, look, dude, you're claiming that because I have a penis, I'm a man and this means X, Y, and Z because I'm a homosexual, therefore I'm a natural, blah, blah, blah. You're making truth claims about me and my body and what I should do and where I should be and maybe you might even wanna put me in prison because of that, right? And so all I'm gonna do it to you is say, oh, here's this category man and here's the history of it. And I can show you how it changes over time, radically over space, places, people have thought about it really differently over time and it keeps getting added to and blah, blah, blah. So you know what, it's historical, it's contingent, it's created by human beings and therefore your claim about the essence, the natural essence of my body is bullshit. It's historically contingent. There is nothing in nature or God where it's rooted. I'm very partial to a lot of that except it sounds like the purpose of communication is different between us or between the postmodernist and the non-postmodernist because my claims are, I'm presupposing that there may be objective truth and that if there is, that will be what my beliefs will be oriented around because they're true. If we say we choose our beliefs based on them giving me power and freedom, then the whole conversation is very different, right? So then it's like, well, what ideas make me feel better or what ideas make me happier and more fulfilled with my life? But that's a very different, that's a whole different paradigm. So is that what you're saying that whether or not there is truth is not really relevant because it's not something that's practical for your own life? Well, no, it's all tangled together. So I mean, to me, scientific truth claims are just as valid as moral truth claims. They all have a history and you'll see when you write the history, when you study the history of all the truth claims, whether they're scientific or moral, you'll find that there is a history, meaning that there is an origin and the origin is in human minds. What about logical history though? So let's not, I mean, I'm a radical, I got a radical worldview, but there are logical truths dating back, we're talking pre-aristat all about the law of identity and non-contradiction that really haven't changed. No, logic is a language. It's just like English. It's a language with its own internal structure, it's self-referential, it's a closed system. So sure, one plus one equals two within logic, within mathematics, but does that mean that that has some connection to an objective truth outside of mathematics or logic? Logic is a language if you state that it's a language. Logic, I think, is something like a description of the rules of existence is the way that I would put it. But there's actually a more modern idea that I think of logic as a type of language. There was a bunch of, I would say, anti-progress made in the turn of the 20th century with mathematical logic in particular, which is the idea of treating it purely as a language that you can quantify over and make universal claims, like, and then set theory gets involved and I don't even think it's all murky, but historically speaking, I don't think it's the case that the law of identity was something that's seen as like a convention that we hold within a logical system versus other non-logical systems where something could be contradictory, right? It's something that's pretty, it's universal, at least in almost every world, other than the worldviews of the 20th century. It's pretty much universal. Logic is universal in the worldviews of... The idea of... Of all ages, really? Of the idea of the law of identity, yeah. Things are things, they are what they are. Now, there's a few people like the cradleists back in ancient Greece that might say, oh, there are contradictions out there, but the vast majority of thinkers, Western philosophy and Eastern philosophy, agreed that things are what they are, regardless of what they are. Oh, okay. Maybe we're talking about different things here. I thought you were talking about rationality and reason. No? Not necessarily. So like a good example would be an Eastern philosophy. There's this idea that truth has to be experienced. It's not something to be rationally comprehended or rationally understood. So when you try to describe it, you're not actually describing it because you can't describe the experience correctly. But even they would say or would explain that your experience has the nature that it has or it is the way that it is, which is another way of talking about the law of identity. We're talking about ontology here. Is that right? These are ontological claims. The philosophy of being... No, it would be that throughout ontology, any ontological claim that you make is going to presuppose the law of identity, that the thing you're talking about is whatever it is. That I'm saying is universal, nearly universal. Okay. Yeah, I mean, so, I mean, so Muhammad said that Allah is God. Okay. What do you mean? How is that logic? So what I'm saying is more fundamental than that, that if Muhammad said that Allah is God, that is the same thing as saying Allah is God, which would be different than saying Allah is not God. So there's a difference between an affirmation and a negation. If I say X is X, it's different than saying X is not X. So there's actually a modern strain it's called Dialethiasts. Grand priest is the most popular one who says that in some circumstances you can have a logical contradiction. You can have something be true and false at the same time. That is very much the exception to the rule of pretty much all of recorded history. Oh. That I have read. Okay. So yeah, I mean, so I'm a deontologist, right? I mean, so I don't make claims of being, of identity. Other people do, like Muhammad did and you do. I don't. So I wait for them to come to me and say, this is this and that is that. And I say, really? Oh, no, no, no. C, C, C. Okay, so the difference is you're saying X is Y. So Muhammad is God or, you know, this is a pin. That's like an identity relationship. That's what it is. That's that what I'm talking about. I'm saying it is what it is. You can name it however you want. Muhammad is Muhammad, God is God, right? That's what I'm saying is the law of identity. Not like naming things and saying, my name is correct. It's just they are things are what they are, which is why, which is why I say that the, this grand priest idea of dialecticism is saying something is and is not at the same time. So like this sentence is false is true and false at the same time is an example they give. Yeah, that's, that's what you're saying is the counter. That's the exception that you're saying. They try to say that the exception to the universality of identity that things are the way they are is a look at the liar's paradox. This is something that is true and false at the same time. It's a contradiction. So they say, ah, therefore the law of identity is not something universal. And I'm saying, I'm saying that dialectism, that idea that there are true contradictions is like very much the extreme minority. You might find it in ancient Greece. One dude with the cradle. So what is, what does the law of identity have to do with logic? So I would say that logic is the rules of existence, the way that I describe it. Lots of people mean different things by the word, but one of the rules of existence is that things are the way they are. And it's an extent, a corollary is the law of non-contradiction. Things are not the way that they are not. Contradictions don't exist because things are the way they are. Those are both logical laws. Okay. And so you are saying, what, what are you saying is true? That the pen is a pen? The pen? And it can't, well, or sorry, it can't be, it can't be pen and non-pen. Is that what you're saying logic is? To the extent that the pen is, it is the way that it is. Right, yeah. Yeah, this is an absolute identity claim. Is that what you mean? Yes, except I'm not claiming that it is a pen. So there's a difference. No, I know, but I know, but there is something. There is a, yeah, so it's an exclusive claim, right? That it's, to the extent that it's a pen, it can't be not pen. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. They can't be X and not X simultaneously. A thing cannot be two contradictions simultaneously. It can't be something it isn't. Or a contradictions, yeah, yeah, yeah. It cannot be, it cannot have a contradictory identity or two, it can't have contradicting identities, I suppose, what do you mean? But I don't even see why that's logic. That's just an assertion. Well, that is logic. I mean, I would say that would you get down to the bottom of it. Now, there are languages you can build on top of logic, right, so you can have like higher order logics that have different types of rules, but I'd say that logic is a word that means lots of different things. If you talk to an mathematician about logic, he'll tell you something different than a historian will tell you something different, right? Indeed, indeed, yeah, right. Driving out here, yeah, so. But you can hung up on the word. I'm saying that rule that I'm talking about, the identity of everything, doesn't matter what it's called, that is something that really is not like a social construction. Like that's something that everybody in every culture with very few exceptions, all the way back since the Greeks, that's not changed. Well, wait. First of all, according to you, there have been people who have not made that social construction, right? You're saying there's a very small minority, but there are some people who have not constructed that thing in that way, so that means. They were wrong, so all you're saying is they were wrong and everybody else was right? That's right, however, the reason I'm saying that is because you brought up the valid point, which is that unlike theories of science, there's not been radical revision. In science, there's been every generation or two or whatever, every hundred years, radical revision, radical revision, radical revision. Oh, wow. It is not so with the law of identity and non-contradiction. You have the very few people that have said, oh, things aren't the way that they are, but other than that, that's really not been revised. In fact, for a long time, I think it was Kant actually said, logic has essentially made no progress since Aristotle for that reason, because it's kind of a sorted out system. Okay, so when you say people, who do you mean? You actually mean every person who's lived on earth? Since the origin of the hominid? Like, who are the people you're talking about who have not refuted this or challenged this idea of the law of identity? What you're calling the law of identity? Yeah, so I would say, unfortunately, I can only reference the people that made history books because I can't know about all the other people whose ideas weren't recorded, but general public intellectuals going back to when we have recorded history have been saying, essentially the same thing, that this is something that's fundamental. Okay, what about Eastern philosophers? Same thing. Really? You'll see that? Okay. I got an interview on my show with a Buddhist teaching at Harvard, who we were talking specifically about the law of identity, because in the West, a lot of people who try to make the claim that, oh, maybe you could have contradictions will appeal to Eastern mysticism and Eastern philosophy, and she kind of laughed and said, you know, that's, no, they weren't stupid. Like, obviously things are the way they are. They were, that's like either a horrible translation or that's a way, when they speak in paradoxes, you know, they speak in contradictions, that's a way to illustrate a point about language more than it is to make it a claim about, you know, the law of identity. Okay, so that according to you, and I'll just take your word for it for now, 99.9% of philosophers East and West have agreed on this. And any other thinker on any other topic who has thought about these kind of fundamental ideas, so it's not just philosophy. Mathematicians, what also, a lot of them would say the same thing. Philosophy, philosopher broadly defined. Okay, so 99.9%, maybe 99.99% of thinkers, public thinkers, right, have agreed on this thing. Steve, please tell me you're not saying this and therefore it's true? Of course not. Sounded like you were saying that because they all agreed on it, must be true. I only brought that up because you were talking about ideas being radically revised, scientific ideas being radically revised, cultural ideas being radically revised, and I'm in total agreement, but so if it's the case that there are objectively discoverable truths that are abstract and maybe at the fundamental logical level, what you would expect to see is precisely what has happened, that everybody disagrees and revises about all of the contingent theories about how the natural world works or whether it exists. The thing that everybody agrees on is the thing that is actually discoverable just by meditating on your experience that things are the way that they are. Oh, it's the introspection that gets us to the truth. If it's the case, well, yes, of course. If it's the case that the truth is that there's experience taking place, then you have to introspect in order to understand that experience is taking place. So you're a Platonist in this way? I don't think so. I mean, I don't exactly know how that category would apply. Well, that's how we arrived at the truth, right? Was by thinking about, you know, just thinking. That's what he was about. And rather than Aristotle who was like, no, go out into the world and study stuff and observe things and measure it. I don't think that would be a fair position to summarize. I mean, maybe you could call it Platonism. I don't get that. I mean, I'm not a Platonist. I'm like a definitely not a Platonist in my metaphysics, but to the extent that Aristotle and Plato covered the law of identity, they agree that things are the way that they are. And I forget that there's a Muslim philosopher, early, early philosopher who was talking about the law of identity. And he said anybody that claims that there's not, that contradictions are possible should be beaten and burned to the point until they admit that to be beaten and burned is not the same as to not be beaten and burned. In other words, that contradictions aren't possible. No, no, no. I was getting at Patterson's pursuit, like what it is and what, am I right? That it presupposes that introspection looking inward, thinking inward, is the general direction toward which truth will be ascertained. I don't like the term introspection because it comes with a bunch of philosophical baggage. I would say that there is some truth you can discover by being aware of what you're experiencing. But that's what you're trying to get me to do though, right? Look inward and think about my own consciousness. No, don't forget inward. Just look. But look inside myself, right? No, just look. That implies there is a self and all that. Just look to be aware of what is happening. Oh, okay, okay, okay. But it's about my awareness and my awareness alone. Yeah, I would say that because that's what you have direct access to. Yeah, okay, yeah. And so you wanna say that there's something universal about that. No, well, kind of, kind of. In the most limited of sense. It is the case that there is experience of a certain nature taking place, which means I have this amazing ability to take a personal truth or like a conscious experiential truth and turn it into something that's objective. So I can say something, well, of all the things that exist in the world, at least one experience of blue is taking place. So now, so if for anybody that were to claim anywhere in the world at any time that blueness is not taking place, I could say you're actually objectively wrong because blueness is taking place. So that kind of turns the subjective into the objective. Meaning it's taking place in your consciousness. Yes. Yeah, yeah, so you can't write. Well, taking place in my consciousness and my consciousness is something that exists. So if somebody's making a claim about things that exist in the world, at least my consciousness exists in the world. Oh, oh, well, that sounds right there. Like you and I might actually be converging, maybe. I don't think we really are, but at least that sentence or a couple of sentences right there, taken in isolation, converged with my own thinking. Okay, because... Which is this, leave me alone, right? Because that's my whole mission, right? It's like, hey, you wanna make all the, all you Christians, all you Americans, all you absolutists of all sorts, right? You make all these claims about me and my consciousness and who I am and everything about me, right? What my skin color means, what my penis means, like everything about me, right? How do you, first of all, how do you know? Second of all, you're gonna, all you're trying to do is manipulate me and try, I know you're not trying to do this, but that's, you know. So when you say that, that when someone makes a claim that that pen is not blue, to you, your answer is yes, it is, it's blue to me and that's my truth. Kind of, but that's the way that you would phrase it. I would say you're objectively wrong. If you're making a claim that there are no such things as experiences of looking into a computer right now, I'd say you're wrong. I'm certain that there are such things that exist. Yeah, so you become, yeah, you become a, you become an imperialist like right away. You flip it right immediately and start making claims about others. It's not imperialism. I'm just stating what is the case. If somebody is claiming that my mind is not experiencing what my mind is experiencing, they're wrong. No, but you're making claims about my mind and what it's experiencing right now, aren't you? No, I don't know. I don't know that there's any other mind out there. I can't know that. So you're an agnostic on me? I am an agnostic as to whether or not there is another type of consciousness like my own. I have a positive belief that there are lots of them because if I were to go, if I were to have the experience of poking you, I think you would say ow, which makes me think, okay, maybe this is another conscious being but I don't claim any kind of certain knowledge about it. All right, well, I like that too. So what, and if I said that pen in your hand is red, you would say what? Well, I would say if you're having the conscious experience of seeing red, then it is, if we speak the same language, we're having different conscious experiences. If your claim, however, is that it is red in my visual field, I would say you're making an objectively wrong claim about the nature of the world because the blue experience is what's taking place. This is where I get, okay, so it sounds to me like you're, sometimes it sounds like your truth claims are universal and sometimes it sounds like they're particularistic. I call it the objectivity of subjectivity that I can say subjectively true things. I am experiencing blue, but I can make them objective very easily. The blue experience is part of what exists in the world and maybe the ugly part, I don't know. Because you, okay, because you perceive it that way because you, yeah, right? And we're talking about my perception. Yeah, so if you leave it at that, we're good. We're good, I think. I just sounded many times like you weren't leaving at that and I got really nervous, but yeah, no, sure. I don't, I just wouldn't, I wouldn't use terms like objective and truth. So what if I were to say that is not having the experience of looking into a computer right now? Oh, I would say, well, you know, I don't know. And I would disagree. That's what I think that you can know, though, but imagine you were actually having that experience that you described that way. Somebody can be wrong about that. No, I can prove that. I don't know. I don't know how you can prove any of this stuff. You don't have to prove it. You just know it. It's like it's just religious belief, your Christian. It's not religious to say that my experience is of a nature that I know the nature that it is and I describe it with the word blue. And if you use the word red, that means something different to me in my language and it is certainly not the case that the experience is red. I know it. This is why I say it's a big deal because that then that immediately gets you to the laws of logic. It is the way that it is and it isn't the way that it isn't. And suddenly, yeah, we're all Christians now. Let me leave you with something. You may have come across this. Do you know what Nietzsche said about the writing of philosophy? In a concrete sense, like a quote or the general idea. Yeah, yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't. He said that all philosophy is biography. OK. I like that. I like that. So I don't know. I just I'm very I'm taken with this your narrative of, I don't even know exactly what's going on. I'm not trying to say, you know, this explains you or your ideas in any particular way. But I'm just taken. I love this that you that you have a narrative about it about the pursuit Patterson's pursuit, which or Patterson in pursuit, which is that, you know, it kind of began with this sort of general vague idea about there being a truth and that you like that you were attracted to it. Maybe that if it's the case, I know about it. And if it's the case, I don't I want to live my life in a way that is like, oh, there's no such thing as objective truth. Yeah, you were attracted to it. You were moving. So you decided to move forward toward it, toward it, right? And then and then along comes this woman and then you fall in love. And then in that experience, you feel like you have discovered a truth about yourself that you didn't know previously. And then that became much more specifically your pursuit in a way. And you also wanted to give other people access to this thing that might possibly might possibly help them and in various ways. And so that's why you're doing this. And so I just think that that's I think that's really interesting. And I like it. I don't know. Thanks. That's a fair summary. I would say that just as an addendum, I do find truth far more important than the specifics of love. So sure, I might get it. I might be wrong about love being important. And it may very well be totally a hallucination. And it may just I have a brain structure that's susceptible to serotonin in a way. But I wouldn't say that about truth. Whatever the truth is is more if I get unplugged from the matrix and I'm like, hey, Steve, bro, you know, remember that love experience? Yeah, this is what happened. I'd be like, OK, that's more important. I don't know, though. See, because you're saying I see what. So on one level, the overarching mission is the truth, right? OK, cool. But the fact that the love experience confirmed your belief in truth and seemingly accelerated your pursuit of truth. But the love experience didn't concern my belief in truth. I had already logic is the thing that can that that conveys the truth as real. Yeah. And then it was love was totally unexpected. And just like, oh, this is like this is something human. The most important. But my hearing what your own narrative was that it did something to your pursuit, right? It did. There was a moment that was a turning point. It turned me from a nihilist into whatever I am, a love person. But wait, a nihilist does not believe in truth, right? Right. So I say that ethical nihilist and ethical nihilist things that that truth that there is no such thing as like objectively true morality or that statements about morality don't really have meaning to them. But technically, I might be an emotivist, an emotivist, which is like their statements of preference. I think that is the case. Except now I had this love experience is like, OK, this is actually meaningful. Here's here's the meaning. This is what human life can be oriented around, at least my human life. And so that's why it changed me. Yeah. OK. Yeah. And and when I asked you, why are you doing this right now, talking to me this way? You said one word. Love. Yeah. Well, I mean, all right. So I think it's a it's a two-pronged approach for the intellectuals who just want to know about truth. Great. I'm happy to share it. But for those those crazy people that will follow these conclusions wherever they lead, well, they might have a love experience, in which case, I, you know, I would feel pretty good about that. I just want you to think about that. Biography, philosophy, and also one last thing. You know, for Foucault, discourse, all all power is discourse number one. And then number two, he says that discourse, power does not go from top to bottom or even from the bottom to the top of a society. It circulates. It goes laterally. It goes up and down sideways, backwards, diagonally. It goes all the way. It's constantly circulating, right? So that ideas, discourse, concepts, categories, words, claims, truth claims, the color blue, the idea of the color blue, the idea of pens, the idea of Steve, of that, of all these. They're circulating. They have no they have no origin, right? There's no you can't sort of you can't identify a an origin, a Genesis moment to be more apt here. Genesis, right? Inside of a person or anywhere, anywhere, either in the Bible or nature in a person, that it's just all you can see is just these all these things circulating between people among people and back and forth. You say this, I I hear the thing and then I make it into my own concept and I give it back to you. Then it goes back and forth and it goes to your wife and then it goes to my girlfriend. It goes all around the world. You know, all those all those things circulating in your own, what you think of as your consciousness, he would say began elsewhere. Maybe, but one of the benefits of being somewhat anti-social is that like three quarters of that story doesn't apply to me. This is I'm on my own pursuit. I don't really I I'm fortunate to have discovered the love meth crack that is like the best thing ever. And if I persuade people or don't, it's not as important as me discovering truth myself. OK, but I have kept you much longer than we agreed to. This has been a fantastic conversation. I really appreciate it. Yeah, I think it's the love and the and the truth conversation. So that's great. All right. Thank you, man. This was fun. All right. That was part two of my conversation with Darius Russell. What do you guys think after listening? Do you walk away a relativist or are you now a dogmatic zealot like myself? Either way, I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. I'm going to try to get that is back on the show to talk about his project Renegade University. We're going to talk about that at the beginning of our conversation, but we just started right off with post-marinism, so we didn't get around to it. But he's actually doing some interesting work outside the Academy. All right, that's all from me today. I hope you guys enjoy your week.