 affirmation of X and negation of X at the same time in the same way and her response was well no they weren't stupid I thought that was hysterical it just still sticks out of my mind it's such a funny moment oh my goodness this is episode 100 of Patterson in pursuit hooray the milestone has been reached I was thinking to myself how to celebrate 100 episodes of Patterson in maybe something like a retrospective so I want to talk kind of about the show a little bit maybe not from the purely intellectual perspective and talking about ideas but rather what it's like to produce something like this this has been an amazing opportunity for me personally it's been an awesome journey and I suppose before I even talk about it I should give a gigantic thanks to everybody who has tuned into the show who's listened enjoyed it shared it with a friend who's left a review on iTunes and especially all of the patrons of the show who have contributed their financial resources in support of what I'm doing I'm just incredibly humbled I'm so surprised that the way that I've decided to to produce a show like this has worked this is my own personal pursuit of truth that I'm doing for myself I'm covering all kinds of abstract and esoteric topics that don't seem connected or related to most people and yet people are tuning in and enjoying the show so and contributing their money so just a huge thank you to everybody that's a fan of Patterson pursuit I've titled this episode trying to solve philosophy let me tell you why so several years ago now I decided all right as I started the intellectual pursuit maybe with politics I guess you could say maybe religious ideas before that but I was interested in political theory realized politics and political theory actually imports a bunch of ideas from economics economics tells you about the world and then I realized when researching economics well there's this fundamental set of presuppositions in economics about economic methodology it's kind of more fundamental than economic conclusions is economic methodology and the question is about how we go about gaining economic knowledge and then well damn this economic methodology stuff is presupposing a bunch of philosophical concepts about how we gain knowledge in general the hell is knowledge what is the world made of how do we know anything about it so I got stuck on philosophy I found my home in philosophy and made a little bit of progress I thought I'm gonna try to do this full-time can I make this a career just writing and you know producing videos and then I got this idea for the podcast just doing philosophy which I think personally is the thing I need to sort out I'm gonna understand the world I got to sort all this stuff out for myself and at when I started I in no way had the expectation that I was going to be able to make the kind of progress that I feel like I've been able to make to the point where now I've seen very clearly that puzzles in philosophy are really hard but they're solvable paradoxes can be really hard but they're solvable and really hard questions about like what are universals what are concepts what are we how what is knowledge how do we figure out anything about anything all of these are hard hard questions but they're solvable and I decided okay well if I can solve some of these problems that seem to have perplexed people for a long time and I have tools available to me that no other intellectual has had pretty much for all of history namely the internet the access to the ultimate library that has ever been created on my cell phone nobody else has been able to have that kind of access to information hell why don't I make the goal I'm just gonna try to solve philosophy so that's my new goal to my satisfaction I'm going to try to solve philosophy I'm gonna go as deep as I feel like I need to go which for me is all the way I think I've gone all the way down to the foundations which you can read about in my book square one the foundations of knowledge which is about logic and the relationship between logic and existence and I'm building from there and my new goal is to solve philosophy it's utterly preposterous but I'm gonna try to give it a go and I figured my audience has enjoyed my own pursuit of truth through this show so why don't I just keep doing what I'm doing and articles and through the podcast and maybe in through future books get as far as I can get and I bet people would appreciate it even though I fall short but I'm totally confused about everything I'm very confident that people will appreciate the attempt so that is why the show has the most preposterous title ever which is that I'm trying to solve philosophy because I am so I want to talk a little bit about some of the stuff I'm doing right now and what I'll be doing in the future and then I want to share some of the crazy experiences that I've I've had producing this especially when I was traveling around so just really cool stories that I don't I don't think I've shared on the show that you guys might enjoy and also I would say the conversation that I consider most impactful for my own personal and philosophical journey I've had all these awesome conversations they you know enriched my understanding of the world and philosophy and I love having them there's one conversation I had a particular that I can look back and say okay that really laid to the foundation for my own personal philosophical breakthrough I have a particular metaphysics I think pretty rigorous and pretty good and some of the foundations were laid or put into place by this conversation I had and I guarantee nobody could guess what this conversation was because it's like my least one of my least popular episodes probably very boring to listen to it was just for me at that time though the it just hit all the right buttons put a lot of things into place that I'm like oh damn this this is this is really valuable for me so I'll tell you what that is later all right so so a couple things that I'm working on right now I know I've brought it up a few times in the show and it's kind of as always awkward to talk about in public but I have learned of the past especially eight eight to ten years now that if you want to pursue truth and you want to pursue deep human fulfillment you got to have health I mean oh my gosh it's a long long story but you you can't have a healthy mind you don't have a healthy body in general you can't have fulfillment you can't accomplish the goals you want to accomplish if you don't have health I was reading Arthur Schopenhauer the other day and he's got a line in there where he says something like you know happiness is 90% health it's 10% other things and that might be true I didn't know that prior to losing it we have a my wife and I have a kind of a long story of our health being an issue and then degrading and degrading and degrading and getting to point of emergency where we're out of that now which is good but that's very clear that health it really needs to be number one and probably most people's lives even if they don't realize it fortunately though this journey has been very difficult along that front and my wife Julia has been doing extraordinary research just an incredible amount of research and has is putting together a theory that I find eminently plausible and it has helped us recover our health and or not to the point yet where I am confident in saying this is the way the world works this is what we did and it fixed us this is what you can do it'll help you if you're having health problems I just want to you know I want to have really high epistemic standards but it looks like this is the direction we're heading to hopefully solving some of these problems and whenever that is the case and we both feel like okay we're actually fixed and we have a theory that's attached with it then you know 100% promise that we're talking about on the show and probably gonna be talking about it to our to our friends and our family and bothering people because it's such a big deal but we just want to wait until we're really confident before coming out with it so this is also one of the reasons why you know that this my production has been so sporadic for quite a long time now is just the health stuff goes in waves but think I'm still very optimistic and I'm excited because the episode that I think I've done one episode on health where Julia and I spoke about a little bit of our story and I got a ton of feedback from people saying wow this is really valuable thanks so much for sharing this can you share more information so I know there's a bunch of people out there that are that are hurting that want high quality knowledge in this area and I can't wait to deliver that when it's ready how far can you get in the world of ideas outside of the academy in the modern world and I think I have enough evidence to say you can get pretty damn far and you can you can do you can have a life of the mind that may be even superior to people that are stuck within the academy even way way way superior so this is I've spoken very highly of the internet before internet technology being amazing for independent researchers just total game changer probably more important than the printing press in terms of the access to information that anybody can have just if they have an internet connection and I want to paint a picture for anybody that is interested in doing a project like this either doing a podcast or writing and putting their ideas out there starting YouTube channel where I want to give some encouragement that if you can find a way to communicate effectively and earnestly people people believe that you're being sincere and you have the ability to communicate rather clearly if you put it out there people are going to enjoy it people are going to gain value from it even if you're totally wrong about something but you can clearly write about your wrong ideas and then you change your mind and you can explain exactly why you think your ideas were wrong blah blah blah people are going to find value in that even if you maybe you're a little bit shy or you have some ideas that you think are kind of wonky and way out there if you can communicate it earnestly then people will be able to see your perspective and appreciate that perspective even if they disagree with it and I know from my show I get feedback from people and I know some people don't like when I talk about politics some people I get messages on to talk about Bitcoin why you talking about Bitcoin I thought this was a philosophy show I get plenty of people who say Steve I'm with you on a lot of the philosophy when you dive into the philosophy of mathematics I tune out but you know what those are the edge cases there are the vast majority of people appreciate that this is the pure pursuit of truth that I'm just trying to record and this is not unique to me if you guys are passionate about something or many things or it's a mixture of research and economics the philosophy of math with whatever biology whatever you're interested in package if you can package the content together in a way that's interesting to you and you communicate in a way that you wish other people could communicate then you can find an audience this is not something I knew before going into it right especially when you think about how preposterous it is that I'm just some guy on the internet right I've got some bachelor's degree from you know some nothing school and then talk about really esoteric topics with a ton of people that are in academy at various levels of prestige whole thing works turns out people turns out people that care about ideas fundamentally aren't obsessed with credentials and if you don't have credentials and you're worried people are going to dismiss you because you don't have the credentials well the people that are going to dismiss you aren't really thinking people anyway the thinking people even those stuck inside the academy don't really care about your credentials I have living proof of that being the case so I hope you guys find that encouraging it certainly was encouraging and surprising to me I also want to share a perspective of Patterson pursuit that I know I've shared publicly but I don't think I have specifically on the show which is part of the motivation for this well there's many motivations for doing the show one of them is not so nice it's a little bit mean and it is both to record conversations that I'm having in my own personal pursuit of truth and to record ideas coming from the mouths of academics that are very poor so I want there to be proof that some really really bad ideas are articulated and believed at the highest level of the modern academy I have an explicit goal which is to reveal the truth about the modern academy which I believe we're stuck in something like a dark age largely because of the dogmatism and bad incentive structure of the modern academy so by having some of these conversations with people who say utterly ridiculous things I am trying to make a point to people that are thinking through these ideas that oh maybe not everything that's coming out of the academy is good maybe if you have a PhD it doesn't mean you're even remotely knowledgeable even about your own subject matter because you may have overlooked the fundamentals of your subject matter so I don't want to of course name names but if you go through the list of people that I've interviewed you will find some set of interviews in which the person is making a horrible case for terrible ideas and revealing and or revealing a profound lack of research and thinking about the ideas that they're talking about and so part of what I wanted to do from the beginning with Patterson pursuit is have a record of this which I recognize it's not very nice but so be it I have a particular goal to reveal the state of the modern academy and this is one way of me trying to accomplish that goal okay so before talking about some of the interesting experiences I've been able to have thanks to the show I wanted to discuss just a little bit of the ideas that kind of stuck out in my mind let's say the positive ideas and then I'll share with you this one conversation I had that really set me up for for a for a paradigm shift for me and there's been many just excellent points that have been brought up when I've been able to talk with these people and I mean there's way too many to bring up but I found a handful really stuck out to me that were that were pretty important one of them I thought was a really cool moment was right at the beginning of the show was like episode two or three where I got to talk with Dr. Westacott who was a philosophy professor professor at my alma mater I only took you know a couple of philosophy classes while I was there and he was the instructor for one of them but I actually he and I got along really well he at the time he was just a complete relativist 100% all truth is a relative you can't know anything with certainty and so what I wanted to do to start the Patterson pursuit was to talk with him because I liked him but I knew he and I completely disagreed about the fundamentals of things and I thought it would be great it'd be kind of great in the pursuit of truth to start the pursuit off with a professor saying that you can't have access to truth but I was totally shocked because and when I had that conversation with him he actually had changed his mind from the time that I was there when I went to school to when I interviewed him for the show he changed his mind about some fundamental ideas that my respect for him just went through the roof when we had this conversation where he he was a he was a relativist for I don't know 40 years something like that there to 2040 years and then for some reason decided actually you know I think we can have access to certain truth like the fact of my consciousness existing there is at least consciousness in the universe I know that I have direct certain experience of that that's good then maybe that's a bedrock or a foundation that you can build on and he shared that I was like wow that's so cool I was not expecting that I have such a low opinion of so many academics and especially relativists but he changed his mind so I don't know I just thought right at the beginning that was that was just a really cool moment personally just because I knew him and then you know intellectually it was so cool to see somebody change the mind after decades of believing the same thing about a very fundamental issue there's also this wonderful line that I remember when I went when it's talking to Janet Gyatso I think she was at Harvard I don't quite yeah I believe she was at Harvard she was one of the Harvard interviews and we were talking about Buddhism because you know a running theme in the show has been can you have access to any certain truths and another way of approaching it is are there any real contradictions in the world can you have true contradictions and you know whenever you talk to people about contradictions and this type of thing a lot of times people will invoke ideas in quantum mechanics or vague ideas in the philosophy of mathematics sometimes they'll get into like Buddhism come up with like the Zinn combs sound the contradictory and yet they're true so maybe they're contradictions and anyway there was this wonderful line where we were talking about contradictions in Buddhism and I was trying to say like specifically I know these paradoxes sound contradictory but are they taking them in the literal sense like affirmation of X and negation of X at the same time in the same way and her response was well no they weren't stupid I thought that was hysterical I just still sticks out of my mind is such a funny moment because I was like oh well that will that make sense because I had expected you know there's a lot of mush that you get when people invoke Eastern philosophy let's say I'm a mushy thinking and so to hear somebody who was you know had been researching this was teaching at Harvard some of these concepts to be like oh no of course they didn't think there were true contradictions in the literal sense because they weren't stupid I just thought that was delightful another interesting moment that happened a conversation was at Oxford with Timothy Williamson I'll tell you a funny story about him too after I'm done talking about the ideas where I thought this was really revealing we were talking about logic and I guess a similar topic can you have no anything with certainty we were talking about the law of identity and can you be certain at least in the law of identity that things are the way that they are by extension they aren't the way that they aren't and what's interesting about Williamson he sees this classical logician that you know very strongly makes the case for let's call it a Aristotelian logic it's not the most correct way of putting it but let's let's call it that so I had assumed that he was going to be a defender of the idea that of course you can be certain in the law of identity because I mean he's kind of articulated this just not with regards to certainty but with how fundamental logic is and he he said something along the lines of I don't think it would be a the right disposition for a philosopher to claim certainty even about the law of identity this is a really interesting insight where for me I kind of read between the lines when he's saying yes of course you can be certain in it of it but you can't say it publicly because it's it's a mixture of bad manners and you don't want to sound dogmatic and also it's something like we have a rule of thumb principle for what is dangerous patterns of reasoning unreliable dogmatic patterns of reasoning and what are rigorous and open minded patterns of reasoning and talking about certainty automatically puts you in the camp of dogmatic patterns of reasoning and so even if we have some candidates for certainty we can't really accept that they are certain because that would just be like bad form it's like a bad principle to be certain about anything I just thought that was fascinating and I mean I disagree with him I think it's yeah I definitely disagree with him I think it's a big deal that was another moment that kind of sticks out in my mind is gaining some information not as much about the world of ideas so much as maybe a glimpse into the psychology and reasoning process meta reasoning process social reasoning process of a professional philosopher at a very high level who is taking into consideration things like you know what is what what is essentially good philosophical manners rather than what is true and what is false all right the last set of interviews that I want to talk about before I tell you the one that really affected my thinking is the philosophy of mathematics interviews so I was completely flabbergasted several years ago when diving into foundations of math to see the shoddy reasoning that lay at the heart of the foundations of mathematics that was set there a little bit more than a century ago around the turn of the 20th century you had foundation crisis in mathematics that was never resolved and the working resolution was garbage from a philosophical perspective and it never quite corrected itself this was I could never have believed in million years that would have happened in mathematics of all disciplines but did and those problems have not yet been fixed so it's difficult to be a guy working outside the academy and across multiple disciplines to come to some of these conclusions state them publicly because it sounds like crankery and and there definitely is a correlation between true crankery and really bad mathematical ideas occasionally I'll get emails from people that are definitely cranks and a lot of time I actually had an email from a guy not that long ago and it opened up high Steve next sentence my friends call me the greatest mathematician ever and then he talked about some crappy mathematical ideas that had nothing to do with the stuff that I'm interested in but I Google his name and he's like a well-known genuine math cranky but anyway so it's this dicey thing to talk about especially we talk about the foundations of math because people think oh are you claiming arithmetic is broken it's like no I'm not I'm not claiming arithmetic is broken it's the foundations of higher math anyway when I've been researching this I I see that the paradigm in which we live is one which imports a bunch of ideas from the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy physics and science and some of those ideas are wrong and so in the process of creating a new paradigm and a new completely different worldview and coherent philosophy which is my goal for myself and something that I'm going to be doing professionally and for other people I know that a lot of work has to be done in the philosophy of math and I see particular areas that need to be fixed the concepts surrounding infinity need to be fixed and assumptions about Platonism need to be fixed because there are two big ones that cause a whole range of big problems but this was distressing because I'll just without going into detail if it's the case that there are no actualized infinities then it is the case that space is discreet if it's the case that space is discreet well that breaks a lot of math a whole bunch of issues if you think about if space is discreet then suddenly such a simple phenomenon as rotation suddenly becomes very complex it's like what the heck is happening if space is discreet and something is rotating it's like breaking and you need like a new math of discreet space which means you need a kind of a new math because Euclidean geometry is built on the concept of continuous space and it's not that's a big project and something that I know needs to be done and it's not something that I'm I've been it was overly enthusiastic about doing personally I think I thought okay well somebody's gotta do it might as well be me because I don't say anybody else working on this so I made a little bit of progress in this area and then I stumbled somebody shared I think it was just a listener shared the work of Norman Weilberger and I was talking about infinity stuff and I was like who is Norman Weilberger long story short there is a professional mathematician in the University of New South Wales on Australia who is developing mathematics from new sounder foundations and he's brilliant he's unquestionably a genius he's got the most mathematical knowledge by far of anybody I've ever heard across a whole range of issues I got to interview him and that was exciting I went out there to Australia kind of for the purpose of of interviewing him and talking with him and it's brilliant he's done a bunch of brilliant things in math and he wouldn't even himself see it this way but I see it this way he has actually developed a mathematical theory that Einstein was looking for it's you could call it even a theory of finite space he wouldn't put it that way but I see his math in a different way than he sees his math I see what he's doing as being truly revolutionary fundamentally and boy it's well overdue it's overdue by more than a century I say it's what Einstein was looking for because as just another aside Einstein was one of those people who actually seemed to be like a thinking person and there's a lot of people in popular culture that are considered to be you know just unquestionable geniuses and thinking people I don't a lot of them I don't think they were Einstein seemed to be one of them he seemed to be aware of the process of theorizing carefully and there's a line there there's a there's a back and forth he has with I believe Schrodinger who's another popular physicist where they're talking about this idea of continuous space and it's a central concept in his theory of relativity and he says essentially I consider it a real possibility that the whole idea of continuous space is wrong and if that's the case then relativity is essentially a castle in the sky but we don't have the math yet to have a theory of discrete space that's a summarization and uh so they just went with this of course relatively became relatively popular uh relatively popular theory um but I think wild burger has done it and I'm I think it's a huge deal and so to be able to talk to the various people on my show about the philosophy of math having to do with infinities and I got to talk with wild burger and isle burger I am totally convinced that in the next 30 years or so we are going to see a massive shift in the philosophy of mathematics to ideas that are more aligned with dr wild burger and I think it's going to spill over into physics because there's there are other researchers that are working on a theory called loop quantum gravity that have the assumption of space and time being fundamentally discreet which they are and it's going to solve a bunch of problems so this that this whole area of me pursuing the philosophy of math on the show has been awesome just for me developing my own ideas especially at you know they become more and more sophisticated lately but part of the reason I dive deeper and deeper into this is because on the show when I talk to these people it's very clear to me there is room for new thinking here this is not there's so much dogma around mathematics that this is one of those areas where you can you can get a lot of unique fresh contributions um so naturally I'm attracted to that so even if you guys haven't been enjoying the philosophy of math tough I certainly have and and I guarantee it's going to be a gigantic deal for the next the next paradigm shift whenever that takes place okay so I want to tell you about this conversation that I had and in fact I should I should give a special shout out to Bernardo Castro because though I wouldn't say the conversations I had with him were so impactful as the one that I'll describe I do think some of the highest level conversations I've I've been able to have on the show are with Castro I think he's brilliant intellectual I just agree with him but um I think the work he's doing is is very high quality and I love that he's doing some of it's inside the academy some of it is outside the academy that is a thinking person so shout out to Bernardo okay so I had this conversation at Tufts University this is episode 37 and uh it is with Dr. Mario Decaro who's a Italian philosopher some of the conversation was boring even for me but there was a little bit in there when we were talking about metaphysical pluralism and he presented a point that I hadn't really thought about that just set things up for my current philosophy and the idea is this that if we're just being honest in our observations about the world then it and we don't try to immediately come up with some theory to put everything all of the objects inside of the theory it seems like there are different categories of existence you have physical things you have things that take up space this is a thing that is spatially extended like this pen here but you also have something like you know experience you have you have the experience of color your consciousness is not something that itself seems to take up space maybe you could be aware of the taking up of space but it itself is not taking up of space I can also talk about abstract things it seems like relations you can talk about spatial relations as existing and the metaphysics let's just not comment on the metaphysics but they it seems to be that there are things you know the right half of the pen is spatially extended the left half of the pen is spatially extended and there's a particular relation between the right half of the pen and the left half of the pen that relation seems to exist I mean if I push down on this part of the pen the other end of the pen lifts up right there's some seems to be some interconnectedness between these two things and yet the relation itself is not spatially extended so that seems like another type of thing you got the physical objects you got maybe abstract objects your consciousness then you can even talk about biological things seems like you've got rocks and then you've got living organisms and they seem to up there seems to be something uniquely different there it's not so clear that you can just reduce living things down to non-living parts there's an interesting question an interesting composition question there so that's the base level observation I think that's true yes there seems to be many many many many many different types of things and he was saying well why not then just acknowledge that that a metaphysical pluralism makes a lot of sense why are we trying to collapse everything down to one ontological category maybe we don't need to do that maybe in the in the biggest picture sense we can say everything exists therefore it's all in the biggest possible category of things that exist but if you're going to get more specific like there are really distinct ontological differences between things it's not just that it appears that way and it's some problem it just it appears that way because it is that way there actually are meaningfully different ontological categories the only problem really with this theory from a from a from a kind of a theoretical metaphysical philosophical perspective is the problem of interaction if it's the case that reality comes in a bunch of different categories you need fundamentally different categories then how do they interrelate with one another because it seems like there's some type of relationship with the blueness and the spatial extension of the pen right they have some relation with one another seems like there is some type of relationship between living things and non-living things so how do they interact obviously the mind the world seemed to interact but how so it comes down to the the problem that Descartes faced in his Cartesian dualism which is okay if we have these ontologically distinct categories how could they even in principle interact and so i'm looking at that so that that was very powerful for me because i'm like hey that's a pretty damn good argument so from the abstract perspective i'm thinking all right well if it were possible to solve this interaction problem boy that would pretty much solve a ton of other metaphysical problems because then you could just be a pluralist he has a bunch of different types of things and they interact we just got to come up with some mechanism of interaction mechanism of interaction if there's any conceivable way that we can come up with a picture of how objects in multiple ontological categories can interact then we've gone off and then we solved a bunch of philosophical issues for good maybe and so at the time i didn't obviously didn't have an answer to the interaction problem right that hasn't been able to be solved by dualists or anybody else that i have seen you know for a few centuries so but that seed was planted if we can get to pluralism ooh that is attractive that seed was planted years ago now whenever i had that interview and sure enough i don't know when it was when i was living in south carolina i was in the bathtub and i was thinking about this discreteness of time and if time is discrete then it's um you know it's like there's an instant and then there's another instant and another instant of reality it's like the like a snapshot picture of reality it's a progression of of moments with no time in between them i could think of it like a film reel maybe you're looking at it's like here's an instant here's an instant here's an instant things are in different states across the different points in time there is no it's not continuous in the sense that there are always additional states in between two states you actually have two kind of side by side states so i was thinking about this and then suddenly it just popped popped in my head um my attempt at an answer for the interaction problem which i wrote about if you guys are interested it's called mind body dualism uh i think i think i called it a theory of indirect interaction uh or or maybe solving the interaction problem i forgot the title but you can find it on my website i i wrote it somewhat recently where i was like oh if if reality comes in these discrete states then it here is a possible mechanism whereby you could get mental states affecting physical states physical states affecting mental states at the very least you could you could have an effective interaction between it could be even epiphenomenal where you have one-way interaction from physical states to mental states but they are states in distinct ontological categories and yet you still have a real causal relation between them and uh that for me was just a gigantic breakthrough and maybe for other people we have breakthrough too we'll see i think it's a pretty big deal um and this is something i'm totally convinced of now i'm i'm firmly a metaphysical pluralist because i have at least one um plausible theory of interaction i call it effective interaction or or indirect interaction it's not direct interaction it's indirect interaction so actually that little seed that i had planted um was partly due to this conference this boring ass conversation that i had with uh dr mario dakar episode 37 how about that all right so i want to finish up this podcast by talking about just a couple of experiences that i've had that you guys might think are really funny and especially if you kind of know my background before starting the show let's say it's a somewhat humble background the idea that these experiences took place is hysterical it's just hysterical to be in it's cool maybe it'll be exciting and are encouraging to you so um one of them was just a really amazing moment i'm glad i got to share i got to share with my wife julia too which is when we were in new zealand and i there's a there was a professor there i believe his name is dr patrick giord i forget what episode it was but um he had done some work in uh in logic and he was a guy it was like a diletheus somebody that thought there were logical contradictions it's been a running theme on the show investigating this idea but so i i emailed him i said hey you know would you like to talk about these ideas on the show he said oh yeah but i'm currently on vacation um and with his in-law or whatever so somebody in the family he's like oh we're we're outside of aukland i don't exactly remember where it was it was uh i mean maybe it was farther down anyway he said why don't you come up to our to our farm and we can talk about it up here to our to my you know sister-in-law's estate or whatever it was and i was like okay that sounds like fun so julia and i ended up getting a rental and driving to this unbelievably gorgeous estate in the middle of new zealand from i don't know what his his uh relative or did but they were very well off and they had like it's a gigantic property they had a bunch of farm animals they had an infinity pool and it was this really cool moment i remember this julie has footage of it i don't know if it's on one of the behind-the-scenes footage it might be but there's this really cool moment where um dr jurard and i were having our conversation in this gazebo and there's like there's this visual footage of you know the mountains in the background these beautiful planes there's like a pool there and you can't hear um dr jurard and i talking but you can see us kind of gesturing and talking about philosophy in this gorgeous um residence and about some of some of that in my opinion the most important ideas in the world about logic which is just kind of a beautiful amazing surreal moment that that even happens it's absurd to think that that happened just by sending out some emails and having this project to be invited out to do something like that and actually but that conversation was interesting because we spoke for at least another hour off air about the liar's paradox and i will tell you the conclusions of that conversation but he didn't want it recorded and it was very illustrative so i learned a lot in that it was a cool episode i i recommend everybody check it out but that just the the fact that that happened was shocking okay even the funnier and and more absurd story for this to happen to some guy on the internet who started up a podcast and then wound wound up and oxford this is when i was talking with timothy williamson who's the most prestigious logician in the world after we get done talking it was a great interview he's like oh hey do you want to go to lunch like of course i want to go to lunch so i guess in oxford it turns out there's this uh it's laid out such that have that's like inner sanctum area that's cordoned off to for the very sophisticated people and so we go into it and it's beautiful you know well maintained lawns and everything and we're talking about zenos paradoxes i'm telling him how he's wrong about zenos paradoxes because you know infinity and uh so we get there and we get like into the dining hall and this other absurd moment where there's a butler this is a this is a british butler so like they do it right in britain right that's where they have real butlers and he's got a little you know cloth over his arm and he's serving me sauteed mushrooms in the inner sanctum of oxford while i'm having this conversation with timothy williamson he's like would you like some more mushrooms uh i'm like yeah they're tasty that'd be great so i mean you step back and you look at it and how absurd that is and where you know this show started off i don't know i don't know how long i was even into the show that was pretty early on into the even the show is like probably not even a year maybe maybe a year into it and wound up building a good connection with dr. williamson wherever i think the absurd sophisticated thing happened um that i would never in a million years have predicted was in the future just because of the show so i hope you guys hear that i'm not not trying to brag i mean that that's pretty damn cool i'm proud that that happened it's an awesome story but just be aware if you do this in a sincere way and you have a podcast or whatever your project is and people know that you're sincere and you can find a way to communicate effectively you have no idea what doors will be opened and what kind of absurd opportunities will prevent present themselves um as a result of you pursuing your passion i know it's smarmy but uh i could just personally attest to that being the case and now from here on out because i built these connections and and i think it i definitely if i choose to know that i can have a fulfilling and financially successful career indefinitely in the world of ideas outside of the academy that is the case it's just a matter of how i want to do it if i want to do it so so i hope i really hope you guys find that encouraging and of course part that's partly thanks to to you whoever's listening right now you know your support either financial support or you know you sharing this with people that makes these kind of opportunities possible so i'm just deeply grateful for that i should probably also mention what should be obvious that uh there are difficulties in doing a project like this it's definitely not all sunshine and roses i think the hardest part for me especially when i was traveling was trying to commit to a consistent production schedule especially with the health issues because if you have if you're a driven person and you feel like okay i'm going to do this i'm going to produce this and people have the expectation this is going to happen and this is going to happen and then you have a couple bad days and you're behind and you work too much and get stressed out and it's not good for your health it's just a bad circumstance and i know for a fact now after the fact that some of the traveling that we did while it was cool and it was a cool opportunity it 100 clearly harmed our health which you know is probably not a trade-off most most people should be making so i one of the reasons i really have enjoyed being able to have patreon is because early on i changed from a monthly subscription to a kind of per content subscription so that people are only getting charged when i produce things that has just reduced my stress level so much because i don't feel nearly the amount of pressure to produce things because people are giving me money so if i go ahead if i have to wait two months before i produce another piece of content which has happened several times now it sucks i don't like it it still stresses me out a little bit but i don't feel like people are sitting there just you know get to throwing their money away at some content provider that isn't actually providing content so so shout out to patreon for having a cool setup and also a much bigger shout out to my assistant who has been helping me both with the the audio production and with proof writing stuff his name is Justin Pratt he's awesome we've kind of developed a friendship and i really enjoy his company you've had a bunch of great philosophical conversations but especially when i was traveling i really first of some period of time there i was definitely overloaded and uh so i put out i put out the call said hey look if you if anybody wants to work with me on this project let me know and i've got some work for you and Justin emailed me and it's just been an amazing setup um he's just been a reliable dude and you know thanks brother i really appreciate all of your help all right so that's kind of the stuff i wanted to talk about on the the retrospective 100th episode of Patterson of Pursuit i hope you guys enjoyed it i don't intend to self indulge in this way in the future maybe episode 200 i'll do something similar but um yeah i also have some cool interviews coming up in the future i'm just going to have a as a general rule i don't have a production schedule and until health is completely sorted and career stuff is completely sorted i just you know i i put too much pressure on myself to try to consistently produce it's not good for my health and it causes too much stress and i know you guys don't really care i know people that are producing stuff overestimate uh how important things are for their audience so um i'm just going to say you know whenever the episodes get produced that's when they get produced and i hope they continue to create value for you guys all right thanks for listening i hope you guys enjoy the rest of your day