 Hello my friends and welcome to the 53rd episode of Patterson in Pursuit. Now, I'm no mathematical genius, but last I checked 53 is one more than 52. And there are 52 weeks in a year, which means Patterson in Pursuit has been around for one year. So instead of interviewing somebody or doing a breakdown episode today, I'm gonna do something completely different and go meta here. I want to talk about my experiences, what I've learned in the past year, and Patterson in Pursuit in general. The journey started in the United States, but in the past year I think we've been to more than 10 countries. Started in New York and then went to Ireland, in Norway, Germany, the Czech Republic, England, back to the States, to the left goes to the United States, up to Canada, then to New Zealand, Australia, now we're currently in Japan, and next week, the final destination of the Asian version of Patterson in Pursuit I will be in Thailand, and then I'll be coming home. And one month after that, I will be going to Panama. So a lot has happened, it's been just an unbelievable experience, and I've tried to learn from this experience, not just in the interviews that I'm having or the conversations with people, just observations. Good philosophy starts with good observation. You have to theorize about something, and that something needs to be the contents of your observation, so I'm gonna give you some of my observations, not just from the countries we've been, but how my perspective has changed about things like academia and politics, how my own world view has changed. The first thing I want to say is that this trip did not start because I got permission from somebody. This didn't start as some sponsored project from a university. This project started for some personal and professional reasons from a lone wolf intellectual. Many years ago, I remember having a conversation with an academic that I respect and I've actually had on the show, and he said, Steve, you can't do lone wolf philosophy. You can't do lone wolf theorizing. It's got to be in the system, essentially, in the academic system. I objected to this notion several years ago that I wasn't producing what I'm producing now, and now I can confidently say, if you are an intellectual out there and you don't like academia, and you've got some good ideas, and you know you've got some good ideas. If you want to follow your passion in the pursuit of truth, in the world of ideas, you have to become an intellectual entrepreneur. You can do it. You don't need permission from anybody, you just got to be smart about it. This show is just one demonstration of the new world that has opened up because of the internet. You simply don't need the formal credentials of academia, the pseudo training that you get as a student wasting $100,000 in college. If you're serious and you're passionate and you've got a good head on your shoulders, new options are open for you, which is perfectly aligned with the product that the sponsor of this show produces. Praxis is a company that's in the business of training young people and employing them in the real world. If you are a young person that has big entrepreneurial plans, you want to create value in the world right away. You don't want to waste your time learning from people in school who don't know what they're talking about. You have too much potential to waste it at a university, then go to steve-patterson.com slash praxis. That will take you to their site where you can learn more about their program, you can learn about how the real world works, and join me building a career without permission from the establishment. So the first meta thing that I want to talk about in the year that the show has been produced is, of course, academia. My beliefs have changed a little bit in the course of having all these conversations and in the following way. Prior to Patterson in pursuit, I was of the suspicion that most academics don't really understand the basics of their subject matter. And as you rise in academia, it's not because you are great intellectual, or you even understand what you're talking about. It's because you're playing a kind of career game. Those esteemed professors at prestigious universities, I thought, have the psychological dispositions, really, to excel in this very weird academic market. It really says little about their own competence. But this belief of mine has changed, or at least there's an addendum here. For the most part, I think it's correct. I really view modern academia as a kind of modern church with all the hierarchy, the incorrect theories. People don't know what they're talking about, but they think they know what they're talking about, the kind of elitist snobbery that's based in bad ideas. However, what did surprise me was a couple of sets of conversations I had at Harvard and Oxford in particular. The people that I spoke with there, I think maybe I had five or six interviews between the two universities. Maybe it was coincidental, but I was very impressed with them. Dr. Gyatso at Harvard, Timothy Williamson at Oxford. I did love the conversation I had at Tufts University with Jody Azuni. Now, I disagree with most of them, but I did get the impression that they did grasp the basics of their subject matter in a way that I could kind of intellectually respect. Now, those are just people that came to mind. I don't mean to imply that nobody else I thought understood what they were talking about, but there was a level of sophistication that I sensed that was really elite. So my expectation was there's virtually going to be no difference based on the conversations I had with tons of academics from tons of universities. You know, just over the past few years of my own life, I hadn't had that many conversations with people from the best of the best universities, the Oxford and Harvard's and Tufts of the world for philosophy. So to my surprise, I was actually really pleased and I felt like of all the places I have been, all the conversations I've had, if I were to go into something like, if I were to, you know, waste years of my life and decide to get a PhD in philosophy, I felt like I could actually learn something in Oxford or at Tufts, maybe at Harvard, I'm not sure. My observation is now more something like this, academia in general is filled with a bunch of parrots who have no idea what they're talking about. But there are these little specs, maybe they're more concentrated at the super elite level. You know, maybe when you're your tier two or whatever, you still, you're just like the evangelical pastor that has no idea what he's talking about. But once you get to the very, very best universities in the entire world, maybe you do get some confidence there. Another name that just popped in my mind was the conversation I had with Dr. Simon Saunders about quantum physics. You can hear the thunder behind me. It's raining. But I was super impressed with Simon Saunders. And what I also respected is that there was no bullshit in my conversation with him and even afterwards. Like he was clear, he was a working professional who really grasped what he was talking about and he didn't have that much time for me. So he was kind of blunt and into the conversation quickly afterwards. Usually I talk for professors afterwards for a while, but he was like, sorry, but I'm just too busy to paraphrase. Now, if this is true, when I say that, you know, maybe at the, at the top three universities in the world, maybe you get some kind of quality education. Then, of course, this is still like grotesque, extreme damnation of the entire system of academia, because it just so happens that 99.99% of all universities aren't that elite and you don't get that kind of quality. So maybe if you're an intellectual and you have the finances and the personal connections to get yourself at a PhD at Oxford in philosophy, maybe that means something, but it doesn't seem like it's any guarantee if you're going anywhere else. So now that I got the nice thing to say out of the way, let me say the, the, the not so nice thing. I don't know how many professors I've spoken with in my lifetime now, but I am confident in saying almost all of them are clueless. Almost nobody goes down to the fundamentals of their own subject matter. It doesn't really matter if you're talking about economics or you're talking about religion or you're talking about science, whatever it is. Because not many people play the philosophy game, maybe they don't think it's important or something. They really don't have the basics of their own concepts sorted out. This is one of the reasons I find it so incredibly easy to have conversations with really anybody about anything is because if you know how to play the philosophy game and you know how the right questions to ask, you can get down into some really fundamental questions really quickly that these people haven't sorted out either because they haven't thought about them or they think it's too difficult or something like that. It kind of reminds me a little bit when I was in high school. Now I was homeschooled, so I had a very unique perception on this, but I still hung out with obviously a bunch of people around my own age. And there was this transparent phenomena that took place now that I look back on it in hindsight. It had to do with music. Music was this, you know, every teenager identifies himself with music. Music is this big deal. It's cool to know a lot about music, to know your bands and whatever. Those individuals who knew just a little bit more from everybody else, you know, they knew the band member's names or, you know, what year some particular band was founded, they have just some arbitrary information they got from a book or online or whatever. Those people would impress others. Those would be the really cool people. They would know what they're talking about because they had this little sliver of information. But in reality, they didn't understand anything about anything. They didn't understand the history. They didn't understand the people. It was just to get that veneer, that nice glossy veneer of acting like, you know, what you're talking about as a high school student. That, I think, is exactly what's going on with 99% of academics is they have, they do have a sliver of information. And they think because they have that sliver of information, they are experts and they know what they're talking about. But when you just scratch, scratch the patina, I think you'll discover that they have not justified their beliefs. And they're just repeating the stuff that they learned in grad school. They're just repeating what they think are in textbooks, which they assume have some tight connection with the truth. So I don't buy it. I don't buy the expertise of the academics and don't tell me it's because I haven't spoken to enough of them. I certainly have spoken to many. There's this other interesting observation I've noticed, not just from the conversations, but also from interactions with people online, is that one of the sinister kind of systematic problems with academicians. Is a matter of who judges the competence of other people. So it's like if I were to criticize a priest, you know, Christian priest, many, many, many people in the orthodoxy would say, well, you don't have the credentials to criticize a priest. You haven't gone through seminary. You don't know what you're talking about. We are the ones that understand, you know, Christian theology and will be the ones deciding who's competent and incompetent. So there's this kind of exclusion of criticism from people who are outside the system. You see it explicitly and pronounced in religion, but the exact same thing again happens in academia. Somebody like myself who's been coming around for years criticizing the fundamentals of mathematics, at least for the last hundred years. Everybody said, oh, Steve, you're just a crank. You don't know what you're talking about. You don't have the formal training. You know, you don't understand the basic concept. But now that there's conversations recorded with the PhDs, those who have the credentials in mathematics, now it's much more acceptable, of course, to question the fundamentals of mathematics. It's not just some crank on the internet talking about how the theory of infinite sets has not well justified and there's plenty of room for skepticism. Now it's people like Gary McGuire and Dr. Norman Weilberger and the other people that I've spoken with where it's very clear that you can have reasonable, rational skepticism about these fundamental troubles. So that kind of insularity, I think, is totally pernicious and totally shot throughout academia, where they just stick their fingers in their ears when it comes to any external criticism. They're more concerned with the speaker of the criticism than they are the nature of the criticisms. This is, of course, one of the reasons why I'm not in academia. I'm not going to be in academia. I don't believe in that kind of game and I think it leads towards dogmatism. Okay, so here's another observation I've learned about academics, which actually, this is another pleasant thing. Most of them have been very polite and very supportive, even when what's really interesting is though these people, I don't necessarily respect most of their ideas or I don't think they've gone down to the fundamentals of their subject matter. I do respect that they're down for talking and they have been very supportive of my project and they understand a lot of my criticisms of academia and are very sympathetic. It's like, oh yes, I see the problems with academia. Yes, I think you're right. And that's all the other people that are the problems. It's never those academics who are going to say of themselves, oh yeah, you know, I don't know what I'm talking about or oh yeah, the system is flawed or oh yeah, you know, I'm too much of a bureaucrat. They of course always point to everybody else is saying, oh yeah, the system is flawed because of them. But that being said, I mean, most, most people have really been very polite and I've had some of these awesome, really nice experiences where people go out of their way. Like Dr. Gerard in New Zealand, where I went down to his beautiful place in the New Zealand countryside, or I had a couple of conversations when I was in England with academics in their house. They invited me in their house. They've just been really polite. And of course, I tried to return the politeness. I think most of these people are really nice people. I just don't necessarily respect their ideas. Final observation about academia is I now really am totally, totally convinced that what I'm doing is going to be the template for the future. The system of academia has lost so much credibility. People respect, just in the past year it seems like the general public's respect for academics has justifiably gone down to incredibly low levels. And I don't think they're ever going to recover. The egos in academia I think are just far too great to too many people to rescue the system. You know, it's filled with Jason Brennan types that are absolutely convinced of their intellectual superiority and are not going to adjust to the new world that exists online. So they're going to go, they're going to sink like the Titanic. And I'm looking forward to when that happens. There's going to be, there is a radical decentralization of knowledge and expertise that's taking place online right now. And I think in just a few more years you're going to see just this explosion of independent intellectuals who say, look, I'm too good for the university. I don't have time to deal with the small minded bureaucracy. I don't have time to put up with classes that are boring or students that are not interested. I want to learn about the ideas and I have all the resources available I need online to educate myself. And we're going to see, as they say, weeping and gnashing of teeth. As these academics lose their prestige, they lose their general public respect. I mean, most people don't read academic writing anyway, of course, and they shouldn't, because most of it's terribly written and the theories are all wrong. But I think their salaries are going to go down and it's going to be more of a social club, where people are in the system for kind of social hierarchical reasons and not for intellectual reasons, if we're not already at that point now. In the conversations that I've had so far, if you've been able to follow along, then you at least have the potential to be a professional intellectual. All it takes is time, grit, and open mind and some desire to be able to communicate effectively. That doesn't mean you could make it in academia. You might be like me and not have the psychological traits for it, but you can contribute meaningfully to the world of ideas. It ain't easy, but if you've got the passion for it, it's possible. I don't think it's a correct conception of academia to think it's this kind of a path. It's this group of high IQ, brilliant people who understand more clearly how the world works than the general population. The general population can't understand them because they're just not smart enough. I don't think that's what's going on at all. I think it's people who may and in strict sense have higher IQs, though I have much to say about why IQ isn't what people think it is. But it's people who probably know less about how the world works because they're sheltered from it. Their only feedback they accept is feedback from their little insular group. And their theories which they think are impressive and profound. When you actually talk to them, I don't think they're as well founded as they'd like to believe. Okay, but enough about academia. Let me tell you about what I've also learned in my travels. So it seems like as we've been traveling, we've been following drama in the world. We were in England when the Brexit vote happened. We stayed with Syrian refugees in Germany. We were in Queensland when the hurricane hit Queensland. And now we're in Japan as there's the whole North Korea drama going on. This has been kind of a weird time on several occasions. I thought to myself, hmm, I hope the borders don't close. Like I might be stuck in this country if the borders closed down for some reason. But in traveling so far, I feel like finally this Japan journey has scratched my travel itch. All the places we've been so far, it's not felt very foreign. It's not felt very different. It hasn't really satisfied my desire to do serious traveling as weird as that sounds. But here, Japan, I feel like that hunger has finally been satiated. Interestingly enough, I think it's because on one hand Japan is very foreign compared to all the other places we've been. There's a very pronounced language barrier. But on the other hand, it's also been coupled with a kind of perception about life that even in this very exotic place where I'm in Kyoto right now, human life fundamentally isn't that different. There are these fundamental principles of human life, which I feel like I can confidently say I've bumped into here. And we'll see what happens when I'm in Thailand. I think the same thing will happen in Thailand. But I'm getting a clearer perception of the constants you might say of human existence. One constant is that culture is massively important for how people live their life. It's the thing I've been talking about on my YouTube channel for the past few weeks, that how society is structured, not politically but socially, is going to be arguably the most important thing in terms of how satisfied your life is going to be. If you live in what Americans might call poverty, let's say, you make less than $10,000 a year, but you live in a healthy, accepting community where you feel free, you're valued, you're contributing in a meaningful way to the world, I think you're doing life better than if you are making a million, $10 million a year, but you're stuck in a culture that is toxic. I saw this a little bit when we were in Prague. The culture in Prague I really, really liked, even though the standard of living was lower. Versus you go to the United States and that standard of living is higher, which is more convenient, but there's so much toxic culture in the States. And now we're in Japan and it feels like the culture is great, at least for an outsider. Whenever my wife and I decide to settle down, culture is going to be this huge factor in where we choose to lay down roots. The other thing I've learned, I feel like such an old person for saying this, but oh my goodness, weather is so important. Maybe I've got those genetics, you know, seasonal affective disorder or whatever, where I'm just really sensitive to gray and rain and cold, but it seems like the experience of life is so much better when you have good weather and so much worse when you have shitty weather. When we were in Norway, this is a place that is bitterly cold most of the year, and gray, gray, gray, it would drive me nuts. I think they got a pretty high ratio of people with mental problems from Norway and I think it's probably because they just don't see enough sun. There are chemicals that are released in your brain by sunshine that you're just not going to get if you live the Eskimo life. On the topic of culture, this is an area where my beliefs are still in the process of changing. There's this top word, multiculturalism that people talk about, which is supposed to be one of those areas that separates the enlightened from the bigots. In other words, those who love and embrace all aspects of multiculturalism versus those who are a little skeptical of multiculturalism. Now, I would consider myself very much a liberal in the sense that I like the idea of multiculturalism. I really don't like genuine xenophobia or dogmatic patriotism. I think that's pretty ignorant. However, I've also discovered this in London with my wife. Multiculturalism has a limit. There is a framework in which multiculturalism is practical, acceptable, exciting, wonderful, and it might be a very broad framework, but there's still a framework. And that is, all cultures are great and let's learn from one another and accept one another as long as we agree on some fundamental basics about the respect for human life, the respect for private property, the respect for the values and what we call rights of an individual, and the agreement not to force your personal or social religious beliefs down the throats of other people, especially by force of law. Now, I think most of the world, really, I think most of the world probably agrees on the same fundamental tenets. Very, very, very broad tenets that I've just spoken about. And so I think multiculturalism works for most of the world, but I do think there are exceptions. I just hadn't bumped into them before London. My wife and I were staying in a Muslim Turkish district outside of London and the experiences that we had made me realize, hang on a second, this might actually genuinely be a belief system that is not compatible with the values of nearly everybody else that I've interacted with. I spoke a little bit about this in my recent YouTube video if you guys want to check that out. Now, obviously, Islam is a belief system with more than a billion adherents so there's going to be a lot of variation to what people believe, but the versions that we bumped into in London did not seem to respect women, did not seem to respect a kind of legal system that we're used to, did not seem to have worries about the use of violence to achieve religious ends. That belief system, I don't like. I'm not afraid to say it. I don't like it. I don't think it's compatible with the values that I hold and I think most other people hold. So that's true. Two things to say on the topic. First of all, a kind of genuine universal multiculturalism. I don't think it's a good thing because you're going to have a few crappy cultures out there that are going to throw a wrench into a peaceful and prosperous society. Number two, I think it also reveals that those people who are most aggressive multiculturalists, one of two things is going on, probably both. One, it's virtue signaling. Of course, they want to say how tolerant they are and how they're accepting of everyone to score social brownie points with other people. I think that's clearly mostly what's going on. Two, I think there's also a group of people, I would have fallen into this category, that simply have not experienced radically different belief systems in person. So there's this underlying belief that, oh really, everybody in the world, all humans hold the same fundamental values about peace and prosperity and respect and love, but you only hold those beliefs because you haven't encountered anything otherwise. Well now I have, and I imagine the farther outside of western culture you get, the more you're going to bump into some of those ideas, especially if you're talking about some radical religious beliefs. So that has really changed my perception about human beings and society, and it changes a little bit my understanding of politics and immigration. I won't go into now because I'm still working through the ideas, but issues with multiculturalism and integration are very easy to solve, I think, in the anarchist society, the society without government, which is my ideal society, I think the one which makes the most philosophic economic sense, but in the real world right now where you have governments and you have country borders, I don't think it's so clear just to say open borders all the time for everybody, no questions asked. Sort of related to this topic, especially if you're listening to this as an American, I'm sure you'll be able to understand what I'm talking about. Growing up in America, if you come from any kind of more right-wing background, there's this notion of American superiority that you just by virtue of the fact of being born on US soil have been endowed with this unfathomable gift and necessarily have a better life than everybody else in the world because of you being American. I don't think this is true. I think there's a little bit of truth to it, but the kind of extreme nationalistic pride and kind of pity for everybody else that isn't born American, I think, is kind of silly. People have a very high quality of life, standard of living, and plenty of other places in the world. I think Japanese culture is very different than American culture, and I think in many ways is superior. I think Japanese technology in many ways is superior. I would not pity the young Japanese man born outside of Tokyo just because he's not with a US citizenship. And also I know from my experiences the American lifestyle is totally completely different based on where you're born. Somebody who's lucky to be born around a city is going to have a million more opportunities in life than somebody that's born out in the rural countryside. I've seen it a million times. I've lived in both the country and the city. And people that are living in rural upstate New York or living in rural Mississippi, they got a pretty damn tough life even though they're Americans. And there's lots of other people all around the globe who have it better off in many ways. I also thought prior to my travels that really the most important thing in the world for human beings is ideas. And I definitely stand by that. I really think that in terms of how people are living their life, they're completely unaware of how outrageously important their ideas, world view, and philosophy is that most of the time they're just unaware of. I think there's this deadening effect of living in a community, living in a culture where some fundamental ideas you just assume are true or self-evident or not worth investigating and as a result you live your life kind of as an automaton because you've not investigated foundational questions like what is the meaning of life? How important is financial success? How much time should I be spending with my family? Should I be giving more of my income away? How important is love in my everyday life? These kind of things, most people just absorb the values of the environment that they're raised in and because of that I think you really do see a huge, huge, huge variation of the human experience based on different cultures and different environments that are going to profoundly affect how your life has lived. The human mind seems like it's kind of a sponge that gets squished and then put into a bucket of water where it just absorbs its surroundings and it can be really hard to take that sponge and ring it out so that you can try to get outside of all of those default assumptions that your culture holds and really examine some of those fundamental beliefs which is of course what I've been trying to do in my own life and with Patterson in Pursuit. Next topic I want to ramble about is the internet and the changes taking place in the world. I really think that you and I are living in remarkable, remarkable times. The fact that right now I have been able to undertake this project and go to 10 countries while I'm still in my mid-20s and do it for fairly cheaply, especially because I'm doing almost all of my travel with airline points, this is utterly absurd and ridiculous from a historical context. I've seen more of the world than 99% of all the royalty and most elite of the elite for all of human existence and I come from a pretty humble background. So the fact that technology has progressed so rapidly that allows, that has allowed this project to happen and these experiences for me to happen is totally unprecedented and we are going to get to a point, I don't know when, but in the next few decades where what I'm doing will seem like nothing, it will be like venturing outside of your hometown to the town next door where it's like okay that's nothing to report, there's no big deal. International travel is going to be so easy and so cheap and virtual reality experiences are going to be so ubiquitous where you're going to be able to see and engage with the entire planet in a way that has never happened before. That has gigantic implications for the world of ideas. That has gigantic implications for your life, for your belief system, for your career, for your relationships, for politics, for economics. It's just such a crazy thing that's happening, the emergence of this genuine international culture that's arising because of the internet. I think this is going to be one of those examples of creative destruction where there's going to be lots of establishments and lots of reputation and lots of old traditions and beliefs that are going to be totally destroyed and replaced by something I think new and superior. Academia of course is one of those institutions but governments in general I think you're going to be facing enormous pressures that they didn't used to face. I used to look back at that period of late 19th century to early 20th century as this period of amazing technological upheaval. The world was becoming electrified. You were having planes and cars be developed. I used to kind of romanticize that and think wow that must have been really exciting to live in that time. The era we're in right now is way more dynamic than I think it was then. Everything's being digitized, everything's going online and the world 15 years from now is going to be a totally different place. I suggest we embrace it. Let the old established conservative fogies sink with the Titanic. Let's all hop on the life raft and ride the waves. I definitely use that ocean analogy too much. The last thing I want to talk about briefly is my literal philosophic beliefs how they've changed over the course of this last year. There were a few conversations that I've had, not all of them recorded, that have really been influential for my belief system. One of them is when I was in California I met up with a philosopher there that I really respect and I think very, very advanced philosopher and we after the course of a long conversation talking about the philosophy of mind you know, if you guys have heard my interview breakdowns you know I like to call myself a reluctant dualist. I'm a dualist meaning I believe mind and matter are two fundamentally different types of things but I'm reluctant about it because I don't like some of the implications that follow from dualism. Well after that conversation I, to be honest I am less reluctant. I'm a little bit more comfortable with dualism than I would have been where I really just am convinced that mental phenomena are not themselves physical phenomena or they're not spatiotemporal things that my conscious experience is not identical to a particular arrangement of atoms. So if we want to preserve the existence of an independent physical world then really the reasonable position I think is dualism. I've really enjoyed the conversations I've had about this topic on the show. I remember the conversation I had with Professor Brahm at RPI. I found that one especially interesting because he had these insights about why the mental kind of is more fundamental than the physical and seeing all these things I was agreeing with and then he refused to go to the dualistic perspective and he even recognized what I considered to be a fairly deep insight that what we conceive of as the physical world is really fundamentally a theory that's designed to explain the experiences we're having which of course puts the mental as more fundamental that wow that's a really deep insight and he wanted to preserve the existence of the physical world which seems like the dualistic position but people really don't like that title of dualism. My suspicion is it's just the religious connotations that people have with dualism. Another conversation that really has changed my way of thinking was a conversation I had with T.K. Coleman about race relations part one and two which are both the most popular podcasts that I've released. The way that he was talking about why intentions don't really matter most of the time that was really powerful and I'm still actually working through a lot of it my own ethical theories my political theories my social theories I can't wait to have them back on the show I want to in maybe the next couple of months but that conversation really did challenge me in a more fundamental way than almost any of the other conversations I've had because the ideas were so unique I've not really encountered totally, totally radically different ideas that I've never thought of before but some of those ideas I really had never bumped into and I found them persuasive too. My position has also become clearer in regards to philosophy of mathematics and I'm of two minds of this where I'm very passionate about the philosophy of math I think it's an area that needs a great deal of work to re-found mathematics on sound foundations I'm excited about it I think there are metaphysical and logical insights which I think I'm pretty clearly conceiving of that I have not found a school of thought that is making, that seems to see mathematics the way I see it which makes me think this is an opportunity to really positively impact the world of ideas but I'm also a little bit overwhelmed by the philosophy of mathematics just because I think so much work needs to be done it's analogous in my mind to religious topics where I think there is truth to be found profound truth, explanatory truth about how the world works and yet it's surrounded by 99% fundamental error and to try to extract correct foundations from religion I think is really difficult I feel the same way about mathematics the past hundred years have not been impressive for the philosophy of mathematics and so to go into it from the basics of the metaphysics of what are numbers all the way up to girdles and completeness theorems what do they mean, what do they imply to infinities, Cantor's diagonal argument and the foundations of geometry and topology and calculus there's just every area I think is plagued by errors now that means wow there's a lot of work and revision and positive impact that can be made but it also means holy crap it takes a long time to do so I think it's inevitable at this point I don't think there's any way I can turn down the project I think it's just too important it's got so many big implications but on the other hand I feel like I'm going to be doing this for the next 20 years alright final thing on the intellectual side that I want to talk about that is religion there are interviews that I've had that I have not released and I don't know if I will release them but I have realized in a rather blunt way that I am so wanting to be open minded and listen to what people have to say and learn from them and find the truth in what they have to say that I think I have been a little bit disconnected about religion in practice not religion in theory not talking about trying to treat the Bible as metaphorical and what is it really saying and there's truth to be found but religion in practice what are the religious beliefs that people hold what are the systems that they follow what's the justification for their beliefs in practice oh my gosh I'm about as anti-religious as conceivably possible religion in practice I think is just dogmatism in practice and silliness and so in my pursuit of truth and in my desire to not dismiss true ideas like I obsessively really don't want to dismiss true ideas I think I have maybe given a little bit too much plausibility or respectability to a lot of religion in practice I am scathing about modern academia and I genuinely think it's populated by a bunch of anti-intellectuals and who aren't on the pursuit of truth and who believe a bunch of ridiculous things for stupid reasons and I think I've thought that religion got kind of a bad rap and maybe you know there's plenty of people that are shitting on religion so I don't want to necessarily partake in that but now I'm realizing ooh man I have these beliefs about you know the importance of love the importance of the person of Jesus Christ in history like wow I think it was under truth I think life has meaning I've got these spiritual beliefs but I'm realizing what most people mean by Christian is not what I am what most people mean by capitalist is not what I am most people believe by any of the popular terms that are out there I feel like they've all been bastardized and so I would have liked to say I would consider myself a Christian because of the rational beliefs the philosophic beliefs that I hold that are in accordance with the philosophy of Jesus yes but now I realize calling myself a Christian communicates ideas that are incorrect about my own belief system so I'm not exactly sure what to do about this I don't want to just participate in religion bashing and yet I recognize it's just filled with dogmatism I don't really know what to call myself other than you know a philosopher with theistic or something conclusions even that gosh I think about it I can't even call myself a theist because that means oh omnipotent dominant president dominant benevolent god that's up there and blah blah blah I don't believe any of that either but again this is an area of opportunity for growth and an opportunity to positively impact the world of ideas which is what I'm going to be trying to do so that is my year in review I have learned a lot I have loved the travels they've certainly not been all roses maybe some other point or if you guys want to talk about it or maybe in a Q&A session I'll talk about some of the crap that's happened you know traveling is not all fun experiences but I hope you guys have enjoyed it this has been you know part of my own personal socratic journey and I'm glad you guys have been following along I really hope you've gotten value from it if you'd like to support the show if you think what I'm doing is valuable you think my ideas if you think I'm on to something then go to patreon.com slash Steve Patterson and join the more than 80 other people who also think the same way who have chosen to contribute a dollar or two whenever I release a podcast or an article or a YouTube video you'll also get access to a community of other independent intellectuals who are trying to pursue truth together even if that means they're doing it outside of academia in about a month this phase of Patterson to Pursuit in my own international travels will be winding down after Panama I don't think I'm going to be doing a ton more international travel so we're going to be doing more domestic conversations more Skype conversations be releasing other new content thanks everybody for listening tell your friends about the show if they're interested in big ideas leave a rating and a review on iTunes if you want to help out the show and get these ideas out to more people next week's interview is about religion and science and attention between the two and then this Monday interestingly enough I have an appointment with a Zen Buddhist here in Japan where I'm going to go meet him and we'll talk about Zen Buddhism and maybe I might even get a meditation experience with him no promises about the quality of the English translation we might have a bit of a language barrier but it's going to be a hell of an experience thanks everybody for listening and have a fantastic week